W.'s latest book is dedicated to CIVIBUS ISCANIS, but it is unclear how many Iscani/Exeter natives will appreciate this curious elegy for twentieth-century classical scholarship quite as much as the readers of this learned journal. At the beginning lies a timeline of events and authors referred to, covering no fewer than 27 centuries. This might illustrate Exeter's deep connection to antiquity, but it more obviously signposts this slim volume's celebration of eccentricity. The study of the connection between Exeter and classical antiquity would be a massive book. The subtitle gives us a better clue as to its contents: People and Stories; and as the introduction promises, the book presents a motley cast of people ‘who at different times, and in very different ways, have had things to say about Exeter and the ancient world’ (p. 5). Armed with this elastic theme, W. takes his reader on a whistle-stop tour from Isca Dumnoniorum to Hogwarts in the Tardis, which is the Classics corridor in Exeter University. While we have bold snapshots that take in an ambitiously wide scope, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Gladiator, the real subject of the book is a selection of Exeter's post-war dons.
The introduction treats us to our first handful of entertaining and tantalisingly dense tales of Exeter-based Classicists. First comes Joseph ‘Iscanus’ of Exeter, who in the early twelfth century wrote 3,673 Latin hexameters on the Trojan War, based not on the fictions of Homer and Virgil, but on the ‘true’ account of Dares Phyrgius (!). W., who begins the book by explaining what a Classicist is, presumably for the general reader, does not pause to cushion that reader's perplexity, but simply scatters a couple of footnotes and quickly piles on the mystery with the cryptic suggestion that in this crazy and unread, however brilliant, work might lie the clue as to why Exeter FC are nicknamed the ‘Grecians’ (i.e. after the inhabitants of St Sidwell's, who were potentially so-named because their community lay beyond the walls of the city, Exeter/Troy …?). Next the reader is dandled briefly in front of the idea that W.F. Jackson Knight's blockbuster Penguin translation of the Aeneid (1956) was written with the interpretative support of a mystic professor in Cape Town who believed he could communicate with Virgil, before again (footnote) being flung onward.
This lively book is a handy vehicle for five colourful and disparately printed lectures, obituaries and miscellaneous papers from a scholar who has in his long career consistently conjured vividly the classical world to the enormous benefit of students and scholars alike. Chapter 1 is a breezy public lecture that riffs on the connections between Exeter and a random sample of Roman myths. It is stitched together by such accidents as the fact that Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting ‘Marcus Curtius Leaping into the Gulf’ hangs in an Exeter museum. Haydon, who made his name as the ‘Cockney Raphael’ in Romantic-era London as an eccentric painter of historical scenes, was from Devon's other city, Plymouth. But after speculating that this ancient Roman subject was inspired by the publication of T.B. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and a quick detour on Roman exemplarity, we are teleported on: ‘Now let's come forward a thousand years’ (p. 26). Chapter 2 is a paper on Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). The protagonist of this historical adventure novel for children, Marcus Flavius Aquila, receives a battle wound in Exeter, which fact occasions a virtuoso local-interest source study.
Chapters 3 and 4 introduce four Exeter classicists, including Fred Clayton and Hugh Stubbs, presented as two of the ‘triumvirate’ of Exeter dons alongside the aforementioned Jackson Knight. The other two stories are dedicated to Larry Shenfield, who was awarded his PhD at the age of 87 before writing and publishing a book on the Florence Baptistry in 2008, and Christopher Holdsworth, a Professor of Medieval History with an apparently cheerful gait.
The book harks back to a time before modernisation, when people could just get on with being geniuses, identifying links between things, the more obscure the better. Its highlights are the colourful pen portraits of eccentric men – and the key characters are all men – who worked in the field of Classics in Exeter in the second half of the twentieth century. Those who are more familiar with that academic universe will be better qualified to judge if this celebration of the discipline's former eccentricity and cherished obscurity is a fitting tribute. It will certainly be of interest to historians of the discipline. The last chapter on Joanne [sic] Rowling's experience of the Exeter Classics department feels like a pair with the Sutcliffe chapter. It is another source study, this time of the Harry Potter books, which basically identifies the influence of Exeter Classicists, especially Stubbs, on Rowling, who was a student there. These two best-selling women authors stand therefore at the edge of this book's narrative like the female students in the black-and-white faculty photograph taken in 1956 (p. 65), framing the all-male intellectual cream of Devon classics. They were certainly different times, but were they golden?
