Stoppard, Sappho and me |
Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study at home when the phone rang and a voice said, “This is Tom Stoppard. David West put me onto you.” David was the professor of Latin at Newcastle University and it emerged that Tom used him when he had queries about Latin, but now had a question about the ancient Greeks. When he couldn’t answer it, David suggested that Tom should call me.
I felt a vast chasm of ignorance opening in front of me and have no memory of what the question was – but my reply must have satisfied him because he continued to throw the odd leg-break my way. To give some idea of his range of interests, on one occasion he became interested in the Greek perfect tense. Don’t ask me why, but that was at least something I could do.
In his play Rock ’n’ Roll, the passion and energy of the Lesbian poetess Sappho are used by the British classicist Eleanor as a parallel to the emotions aroused by rock music. We chatted around ancient and modern attitudes: Greek views of love as bittersweet, violent and unmanageable, and which can be controlled only by turning the experience into a dramatized, witty fantasy, often free of emotions – as against Catullus who put the pain back into the frame, exploring for the first time what love meant in sexual and non-sexual terms, and examining the mind-set of his beloved (Lesbia) as intensely as his own.
Infuriatingly, I missed a trick. There’s a wonderful image........