In Agamemnon (the first play of three in the Oresteia), Agamemnon is persuaded to walk on peplos garments in this pivotal scene of the drama. From the MacMillan Films production of the Oresteia, 2014
In my university trade, we usually associated “howlers” with exams. My colleagues and I can often be found to shake our heads (with that “gosh how ignorant!” tone) at the most horrendous mistakes of our poor students in exams. So, to take a real example from years back, the question asked about the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus (radical tribune of the second century BCE) and the candidate told us all about the emperor Tiberius (first century CE). Almost nul points. And much tutting follows along the lines of s/he doesn’t even know the difference between the emperor and the radical tribune. (And then there is usually a bit more hand-wringing about the ignorance of undergraduates today.)
But, of course, the undergraduates are not necessarily that ignorant. If you take them out of the exam and question them a little, they know full well that Tiberius Gracchus is quite different from the emperor Tiberius, and that two centuries separate them. But when they get to the exam, that distinction somehow blurs. We should be kinder, as we are all guilty of this.
Last week, in this blog, I did something very similar. I was writing (as an aside) about the Cambridge classicist, Roger Dawe, and his advice about Christmas puds. I had in my mind two things about Dawe. The first was that he had written rather dismissively about the “carpet scene” in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (that’s in the picture): why bother about treading on purple carpets, our own royal family do it every day! The second was that he had written an edition and commentary on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. So, in some way I can’t reconstruct (and some readers kindly and politely pointed out), I mixed all this up, and had Dawe talking about the “carpet scene” in Sophocles.
It was a classic undergraduate howler. But how does it happen. I can’t answer that for sure. But one colleague did once wisely say to me that in writing books you make many more errors in what you know than in what you don’t know. When you don’t know it, you always look it up. When you do think you know it, you are liable to be the victim of all kinds of misprisions.
It’s good advice, but worrying. I spent much of the few months that my book SPQR was in the press thinking that I had wildly mis-dated the crucifixion of Jesus. I knew there was nothing to be done, so I couldn’t bear to go back to the text I had submitted. It was too late.
It was only when the newly printed book arrived that I nerved myself to peek. It was all OK, but it could so easily have been otherwise. There but for the grace of God, you might say …
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