Free It's a Don's Life by Mary Beard Page B

as I know, they hadn’t
     invented spirits – for drinking, that is. With uncharacteristic innocence, the only use the ancients found for distillation
     was industrial cleaning.
    But it’s the colour of cocktails that would most have appealed to those (bad) emperors who put such efforts into dining. The
     emperor Domitian hosted a marvellous ‘black dinner’ in the 80s ad – with not just the food colour-coded, but the skin of the
     waiters, too. Even better were the excesses of my own particular favourite Elagabalus, emperor between 218 and 222 ad. He
     did all you could hope a bad emperor would do (he is even said to have had a surgical sex change). But one of his specialities
     was banqueting. Apart from the famous trick with the rose petals (they were sprinkled so profusely that they smothered the
     guests), he was said to be especially keen on the ‘themed’ dinner party. Every day of the summer he gave a banquet in a different
     colour, now a green one, the next an ‘iridescent’ one, then blue.
    Just think what fun he could have had complementing all this with Blue Lagoons, or a glorious green St Patrick’s Day – a daring
     concoction of crème de menthe, Chartreuse, whiskey and Angostura bitters.
    (By the way, if you were drawn to read this blog by its title, I guess you will now realise that I was referring to the cocktail,
     Sex on the Beach: 1 oz. peach schnapps,oz. vodka, topped with cranberry and orange juice ...)

Exams are getting harder – shock
    16 January 2007
    Yesterday I was sent an intriguing present. It was the exam papers taken by a Newnham Classics student in 1901–1902. I’d seen
     these before, in their pristine, bound volumes in the University Library. But actually fingering the ones that come direct
     from the exam room, still marked with the blood, sweat and tears of the poor student (well, almost) makes a more powerful
     impression.
    It’s hard not to ask yourself the obvious question: are these degree exams really more difficult than what our students do,
     like the gloomy commentators claim?
    Well, put aside any romantic nostalgia for the glory days of rigorous classical education at the turn of the nineteenth and
     twentieth centuries. The good news is that what our undergraduates face at the beginning of the twenty-first is actually rather
     more challenging.
    True, these papers look a bit more formidable (something to do with the close set typeface, I think), and there was a gruelling run of two three-hour
     papers per day (our students take only one a day). And you certainly had to know a lot. But there isn’t much evidence that a lot of thinking was required. Imagine the brightest and best classicists sitting down after three years at Cambridge to: ‘Mention the chief
     works of Zeuxis, Timanthes, Nikias and Timomachos’ (a question about ancient painting, for which you just need to know the
     relevant passage of the elder Pliny). Or ‘Describe with a sketch-plan the Circus Maximus at Rome’.
    My favourite is the one that asked for ‘a short description, showing where possible its evolution in classical times’ of the
     ‘lock and key’.
    Now maybe it’s charming to think of generations of students mugging up the workings of the ancient equivalent of a Yale lock.
     But our kids have more thinking to do. The question from last year’s paper ‘What role did religion play in policing sexual
     practice?’ would have floored most of the class of 1901–1902 for more than the obvious reason. So too the tricky: ‘Did physical
     beauty have moral value in classical Greece?’
    But, you might be wondering, what about the more specialist linguistic tests? It’s one thing to deal with this modern style
     of ‘think question’, but surely the students of a hundred years ago were asked to undertake much more difficult exercises
     translating from Latin and Greek.
    Again, I’m not so sure. There was certainly a lot of it in the old papers, and they must have had to work