Scaliger showed that linguistic and textual scholarship is about far more than mere verbs or adjectives: it is a key to unlock our world. Now, though, his legacy is in danger of being abandoned. Over recent months, academics everywhere have been shocked by the news of cuts to long-established language programmes, including at Leiden. Among other languages, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew may all stop being offered. Arabic could soon vanish too: especially shocking at Leiden, home to the oldest chair of the language on earth. Yet if the decline has many causes, monoglot academic environments and budget cuts among them, the consequences are far from mundane. For if the trend continues, we will lose some of the best tools for cultural and historical understanding we have.

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Don't cancel the Classics

By Daisy Dunn

Modern academia is dominated by the sciences. No one can deny that STEM subjects dominate the public conversation, followed by the more quantitative social sciences. On those rare occasions that the linguistic study of the human past does get a look in, it’s often just because AI is involved — and even then the returns are often dubious. It’s a similar story financially. In the UK, only £70 million of government research funding was allocated to the humanities in 2024-5.

In a sense, meanwhile, this retreat is self-sustaining. Quite apart from the psychological impact on university administrators — the more humanities retreat from the front pages, the harder it is for bean-counters to take them seriously — it’s much easier to irretrievably lose knowledge of rarer languages once the chain of transmission is broken. Let me put it like this: how many experts in Lycian, Palmyrean, Aramaic or Tocharian are there in the world today?

I don’t want to sound defeatist here. There are more than enough people interested to keep these studies alive — if the resources are there. Just one case in point is OxLat. Our Oxford programme teaching Latin to school students, it has twice as many applicants as spaces, despite the Government’s plan to scrap the Latin Excellence Programme for state schools. Yet even within the humanities, the most eye-catching work is often dealing in images rather than words: just think of how much media attention each new fresco in Pompeii gets compared to new finds in manuscripts or inscriptions.

As far as language is concerned, meanwhile, there have surely been spectacular exceptions: yet they only serve to show what we usually miss. Perhaps the last time a historical linguistic discovery truly gripped the public imagination was the decipherment of Linear B in 1953. Yet who really remembers that discovery of the earliest form of Greek in a year that also saw the conquest of Everest and the detection of DNA? More to the point, how many people know anything about the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs, let alone the recent epic advances in the history of early writing?

How things change. As Scaliger so vividly proves, linguistics could once change the world — literally. As the Renaissance bubbled on, scholars on both sides of Europe’s sectarian divide built a new community of scholarship aimed at understanding ancient texts. Encompassing Greek, Latin and Hebrew, among other tongues, the litterae humaniores (“more human letters”) were not a theological project per se, and indeed sought to bring bickering Protestants and Catholics closer together. They did, nonetheless, have a deep moral dimension. As the later German scholar Rudolf Pfeiffer remarked, luminaries like Erasmus linked Europe’s “spiritual decline” to the related deterioration of language. “And so,” he added, “it was with language that spiritual and moral renaissance must begin.” Pfeiffer, one of the refugees from Hitler’s Germany who transformed the study of classics in Britain, was no doubt feeling the same moral urgency himself.

Erasmus and Scaliger were only two names in the wider “republic of letters”, an international community of thought and scholarship in active correspondence across Europe. Mostly writing in Latin, Scaliger was not a lone figure even at Leiden himself. Consider Justus Lipsius, the great editor of the Roman historian Tacitus and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who distilled his learning into bestselling books on political ethics. Another example is Hugo Grotius, the father of international law as we know it. In England, Thomas More with his Utopia was part of the same community.

We shouldn’t idolise these curious Renaissance minds. With modern departments now boasting a far subtler appreciation of Syriac or Aramaic, no scholar today would agree with Scaliger that someone “who knows no Greek knows nothing”. Nor should we resent the integration of visual culture into the study of the ancient world: it is no better to approach another culture by closing your eyes than closing your ears. New quantitative methods, too, have plenty to contribute. We can now understand the living standards, the flow of trade, the size of the population, the impact of disease in the ancient world in ways impossible even half a century ago.

Yet if we doubtless gain by quantitative methods, we also lose something when straightforward knowledge of ancient tongues falls away. That’s true enough for early modern writers: even English authors like Milton or Hobbes can’t truly be appreciated without an intimate understanding of Latin. Not only was it the language in which all of them constantly read, but a large part of their work was simply written in Latin first. For ancient historians or medievalists, meanwhile, a large share of new knowledge still comes from texts in ancient languages, often fragmentary, and which require considerable linguistic expertise to interpret.

To give you a sense of the scale, consider the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, a publication covering newly published ancient inscriptions in Greek. Published annually, the Supplementum contains over 2,000 entries each year. Nor is Greek the only relevant language here. In 2013, for instance, a University of Warwick academic discovered a medieval Arabic translation of long-lost Greek text. Covering the financial management of farm estates, and written by a Greco-Roman philosopher called Bryson, it shows understanding of “need” as the driver of exchange and economy, and represents the earliest attempt to explain the price of things by supply and demand.

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One of my favourite examples here comes from Jane Lightfoot’s edition of the Apotelesmatica, a set of astrological poems ascribed to an Ancient Egyptian priest. Not only is this translation a major source on ancient astrology and astronomy, but also an encyclopaedia of the social world of Roman Egypt. Keen to know under what star sign the craftsmen of “marvellous machines past mortal ken” were born, and whether it was good to be one? Or “speakers of words, in public fora best at mending strife, and aiding the oppressed”? Or, for that matter, vagabonds in foreign lands, or “failures in business”? There’s no better place to start your research.

I appreciate, of course, that in a world enraptured by AI decipherings in places like Herculaneum, texts like the Apotelesmatica can easily be ignored. Yet if that’s a shame in itself — which sane person wouldn’t want to learn about marvellous machines past mortal ken? — the decline of ancient languages matters for a yet more fundamental reason. To quote Mikhail Gasparov, a Russian classicist whose translations introduced me to Greece and Rome as a teenager, the study of ancient languages is “a service of understanding”.

Our own time and our own culture represent only a tiny fraction of what the human mind is capable of. And, unless we get out of that familiar circle, we never get to see ourselves with some detachment, to detect the blind spots of our own time. From decrees of ancient cities offering a reflection on civic virtue, to Mesopotamian moral proverbs on clay tablets, to sermons discovered in medieval manuscripts, different takes on morality and society continue to appear from ancient sources.

And just as we would never be content to rely on ChatGPT, or Google Translate, to understand another human being we truly cared for, why shouldn’t we go back to the original source to study some vanished culture — just as rich, in its way, as any lover or friend? In both cases, learning the language teaches us that they and their thoughts matter, no less than our own. That is more difficult than just making facile claims on behalf of other cultures, but it is still the thing that makes our studies “more human” than most. We may not think, with Scaliger, that “all divisions in religion arise from ignorance of grammar” — but we would understand each other infinitely better if we paid enough attention to language.

Now Boris – who was learning his Latin at a prep school just up the road from mine — has decided that everyone should know what the word pleb means. He has earmarked £4 million for Latin teaching in state schools. Levelling up, Boris calls it. Cynics, however, might question whether this is little more than some culture war distraction from a general asset stripping of the humanities, with university arts subjects, for instance, facing a devastating 50% cut in funding. A paltry £4 million hardly disguises the continual shift in education away from cultural subjects towards market-useful STEM subjects. Arachis hypogaea is the Latin for peanuts.

Now I really should be passionately against all this Latin revivalism, however modest. Not only was Latin the language of regular childhood thrashings, in adult life it has become for me a kind of shorthand for the crucifixion of Jesus. Christianity began life as a small offshoot of Judaism, persecuted by Roman imperialism. In first-century Palestine, Latin was the language of the oppressor. And it was the Romans that crucified Him. The whole logic of the Roman world order was to destroy everyone and everything that posed a threat to its totalising rule. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is not some clever compromise division of all that there is into the earthly and the heavenly.

All things belong to God, without remainder. And crucifixion was the Roman’s signature punishment, designed to terrorise those who defied their hegemony. With crucifixion, “the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of God’s naked love”, as NT Wright memorably put it. Amo, Amas, Amat meant something very different now.

Of course, all this came to be obscured when the Latin world hijacked His religion, making Rome itself the capital of Western Christianity. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin and so the language that may have been used by Roman soldiers as they poked him with their spears and taunted Him with insults — or, at least, the language they took their orders in — became the official language of the faith itself. The Roman Catholic church, otherwise known as the Latin church, buried all this. Originally, at least, Latin was the language of the enemy.

So, given that I harbour theological instincts that would make Ian Paisley blush, how come I think Boris is really onto something with this whole Latin experiment? Because, primarily, it represents a small move against the thoroughly depressing idea that education exists simply to serve the needs of employers. What I like about Latin is precisely its relative uselessness, the very thing that its opponents also point to as a reason not to like it. Shouldn’t we be learning Mandarin, or Spanish, they argue? Useful subjects, ones that will help us negotiate new trade deals and induct us into the up-and-coming language of global power.

I know that there are those who insist that Latin is, after all, terribly useful — being the root of so many other languages, useful for doctors etc. But that misses the point. As the Bishop of Worcester recently pointed out, education is like friendship, something that is valuable in and of itself, and not for what else can be gained by it. Education that is designed to meet some specific economic end is not education but training, the instrumentalisation of something that should be loved for its own sake. Latin is perfectly suited for this end.

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Even more surprising, I also find myself in some sympathy with those Roman Catholics who have recently been told that the use of the Latin Mass is to be restricted, with the present Pope seeking to bring what he takes to be dissident congregations more closely under the control of his Bishops. It seems that Latin worship has become a redoubt for all those who would stand against the progressive theology of the Second Vatican Council. And while I do not share this view — and it’s not really my fight — the church should be a broad enough tent to accommodate those who want to worship in the traditional language of the Latin church. Latin confers a kind of dignity to worship that that stands in sharp contrast to the whole direction of modern liturgy that too often just wants to get all chummy with the divine, talking to God in the same way one might talk to your mate. Latin sets God at a distance, which is no bad thing in an age that has consistently prized immanence over transcendence.

Yes, of course, good and brave men died to give us religion in the vernacular. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for daring to translate the Bible into English. I am delighted that within a few years of his martyrdom, the English Bible was officially sanctioned by church and state. But the culture war of the Reformation is over. No one is forcing us to worship in Latin anymore. That fight has been well and truly won.

Latin, then, has always been the location of culture wars and I have many reasons to hate it. But these days, I no longer feel the need to repeat that old schoolboy dictum: “Latin is a language as a dead as dead can be, it killed the ancient Romans and now is killing me.” Latin stands out in the modern curriculum not as a marker of social privilege, nor as the language of imperial authority, but as a refusal to allow education to be co-opted by market-obsessed philistinism. Some languages are all the better for being dead. Which is why, notwithstanding the memory of all those lines on the back of my legs, I too hope that my children will one day learn the language of what I used to call ‘the enemy’.

In 65AD, 11 years into his 14-year rule, Nero’s beautiful and beloved second wife, Poppaea Sabina, died. According to the often hostile historians who transmit most of the ancient written record about Nero — Tacitus and Suetonius in Latin; Dio Cassius in Greek — he fatally kicked his pregnant spouse in the stomach. Reasonably, the British Museum fingers this plot device as a corny literary trope, and instead blames Poppaea’s death on “complications from a miscarriage”. According to two of the “elite” detractors, though, the heartbroken emperor then sought out, and found, a lookalike replacement for his lost wife. Sporus (which coarsely translates as “Spunk”) boasted all the original’s grace and beauty, but had one troublesome drawback. He was male.

Undeterred (“Nobody’s perfect”, as we know from Some Like It Hot), Nero — so the hostiles report — had Sporus castrated. He married his new love, “with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil,” says Suetonius. The pair toured Greece as a royal couple on a triumphal tour that took in stage performances (starring — the one and only Nero!) and a first prize for the emperor in an Olympic chariot race he failed to finish.

How much of this really happened? Certainly, the relationship with Sporus — which this exhibition largely glosses over — has as much or little grounding in the sources as other Neronian yarns that the exhibition takes pains to debunk or revise: from fiddling while Rome burned (he was out of town for the Great Fire of 64) to the execution of scapegoated Christians by public burning in its aftermath. Tacitus writes (according to the translation Edward Gibbon uses in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) that they were “smeared over with combustible materials” and “used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night”. The British Museum’s guide doesn’t quite rebut that legend but drily comments that “their punishment seems to have followed standard practice in that it mirrored the nature of the crime”. So that’s alright, then?

With Sporus, historians have recently suggested that the scandalous liaison stemmed not from nostalgic attachment to the dead Poppaea, still less the conventional lust of an upper-class Roman male for a puer delicatus (“boy toy”), but the need to control a potential rival whom Nero believed to be of imperial descent. Hence, in the succession-obsessed Roman governing class, the insistence on castration. Given that Suetonius mentions that Sporus stuck by Nero to the bitter end during his overthrow in 68, might the couple have actually grown fond of each other? Now there’s a truly heretical idea. And, sadly, an unlikely one: Sporus declined to commit suicide alongside Nero and quickly partnered — whether by choice or force — with two of the warlords who succeeded him.

As with much to do with Nero, legend, fiction and historical memory have fused into an inextricably tangled mass — like the warped iron window-grating you can see in the BM, striking proof of the Great Fire’s ferocity. But the Sporus story hints at a layered complexity to Nero and his narratives that goes beyond the binary model currently on offer in Bloomsbury. Nero: the man behind the myth seems to belong to a class of revisionist historical argument you might dub “reverse cancellation”. Emperor X, King Y or President Z — from Genghis Khan to Joseph Stalin — has suffered too long from the lies and libels of partisan chroniclers with skewed agendas. Now, we will unmask the fake news and reveal (as the British Museum puts it here) a “much less clear-cut” story. Occasionally, the rescue of a tarnished reputation can surpass scholarly score-settling and touch the heights of art. Consider all that Hilary Mantel has done for Thomas Cromwell, once a byword for state thuggery.

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For sure, the Great Man theory of history that Thomas Carlyle propounded has always required, on the other side of its mirror, a Bad Man theory. To the extent that it replaces such cartoon thinking with an open and sceptical scrutiny of Nero’s reign, curator Thorsten Opper’s exhibition does an admirable job — and does it against a splendid backdrop. The show throngs with evocative examples of first-century statuary, reliefs, frescos, artefacts, coinage and even luxury tableware, drawn not only from the museum’s collections but European lenders ranging from the Louvre in Paris to collections in Rome and Naples.

We experience Rome and its empire high and low, splendid and squalid — from the fine bronze head of Nero recovered from the River Alde in Suffolk to the terrifying iron chains that shackled slave work-gangs in Anglesey. Whoever wore the robes of the princeps, the poor and powerless languished. To its credit, the show never forgets that. The text that accompanies a cute little statue of a lantern-carrying slave-boy reminds us that in 61 AD Nero endorsed the reprisal execution of 400 slaves from a single household after one of them killed his master, a leading senator. Whoever stood at its apex — be they saint, sage or ogre — the empire rested permanently on its bloodstained base of slavery, cruelty and conquest.

Against this brutal backdrop, Nero: the man behind the myth doesn’t exactly whitewash the showbiz-mad emperor, but it does extenuate. It tends to claim either that Nero did not commit many misdeeds on his charge-sheet; or, if he did, then so did many of his peers. Few of them, however, eliminated their own mothers, as Nero did with the forceful and scheming Agrippina. True, he may not have sabotaged a fancy yacht with Mater on board and then — when she pluckily swam ashore — sent swordsmen to finish the job. But the exhibition’s bland acknowledgement that the emperor merely “made a decision to remove” Agrippina sounds more than a trifle mealy-mouthed. Besides, he almost certainly had his first wife Claudia Octavia liquidated in order to wed Poppaea. On the British Museum’s own website, Mary Beard discusses the family mayhem he unleashed and accepts that “There is no letting Nero off the hook for all of these crimes.”

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O come, all ye faithless

By Boyd Tonkin

When waves of righteous fury can suddenly topple not just contemporary celebrities but grandees from the distant past, you can see why this exhibition wants to make us think again about Nero the beast of fable (indeed, the Number of the Beast — 666 — supposedly encodes his name). The problems arise when the reverse-cancellation process goes beyond a scrupulous reckoning with biased sources, and starts to make a polemical defence of the target of these antique slurs. So the swipes at Tacitus et al as a “senatorial elite” of character-assassins resonates with the anti-authority clamour of our time; you half-expect the BM to brand the anti-Nero authors as agents of the Mainstream Media. The British Museum’s presentation insists on the anti-Nero malice of the “elite” historians. But it won’t tell you, for instance, that Suetonius carefully enumerates all the good deeds Nero performed. “During his reign many abuses were severely punished and put down,” we learn, while court reforms meant that clients only paid “a fixed and reasonable fee”. Perhaps those snooty senatorial backbiters were not quite so manipulative as this show’s headline argument suggests.

Along with this downgrading of traditional historiography goes a familiar elevation of the people’s will — or rather, one interpretation of it. Beyond doubt, Nero cannily appealed to the masses; Tom Holland’s Dynasty emphasises his “command of fantasy and spectacle”. The exhibition showcases the games, pageants, gladiatorial jamborees and dramatic extravaganzas that marked his reign, from the amphitheatre built on the Campus Martius to his own taboo-busting performances in roles such as Oedipus and Orestes. When, in 59, a gladiator derby between Pompeii and Nuceria triggered a riot among fans, he shortened a ten-year ban handed out to the Pompeii squad after a Senate-led enquiry.

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The curators never deny that Nero pioneered a sort of theatrical populism. Questionably, they then take his power-boosting stunts as evidence of profound popularity. The show makes much of pro-Nero graffiti scrawled on Roman walls. On that basis, historians should be investigating the ubiquity of Kilroy in the London of my youth. And do mirror-compacts that bear his image really prove that Nero “was adored by the people”, or just that he enjoyed, and cultivated, a personal fan-base? Above all, the exhibition’s refusal to treat the anti-Nero case as more than the elite spin of hindsight means that when serious challenges to his rule come along — first the Pisonian conspiracy in 65 AD, then the spiral of insurrections that toppled him in 68 AD — they appear only as selfish mischief perpetrated by “groups of disaffected individuals”. So we learn little (say) about the post-Fire economic downturn, popular resentment at the confiscation of public land for the emperor’s grandiose Golden House estate, or taxation policies that spared his adored Greece but stirred unrest in more onerously levied regions such as Gaul, Africa or Judaea.

None of which quite justifies the damnatio memoriae, the cursing of his name, that followed Nero’s enforced suicide and prepared the ground for the dark picture painted later by those “senatorial authors”. In any case, the best answer to a historical hatchet-job may not be a snow-job. Especially at the British Museum, there should be no need to frame ancient history as a moralistic cabaret in which the only alternative to a bloody, hiss-able butcher is a public-spirited Keynesian in a toga, musing over fire regulations and infrastructure projects. Whatever their apocryphal elements, the tales of Nero’s marriage to Sporus, with their weird amalgam of mourning, eroticism, realpolitik and pure showbiz, open a window onto the sheer otherness of Rome. So don’t be distracted, or deterred, by the revisionist acrobatics intermittently on show in the British Museum’s commentaries. Nero: the man behind the myth lets visitors pass through that window and enter the material world that hosted all that strangeness — from exquisite sets of silverware found near Pompeii, to those dismal chains that bound the slaves of Wales.

‘Nero: the man behind the myth’ continues in the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery at the British Museum until 24 October.