Is that a slightly drunken, violence-and-boar-fuelled Gaulish-style cheer of delight I hear? No? Oh well, please yourselves. The film’s on YouTube, though, freely viewable in its entirety. Unfortunately, along with the rest of my Asterix books it’s far away at home in Manchester and I’m too lazy to visit the UL West Room or (bizarrely) the library of the Judge Business School to consult the University’s copies.
I had the book of Asterix and Cleopatra as a kid and liked it very much.
This is all dodgy post-hoc rationalisation.
Here is a drawing of two Frenchmen beating up some foreigners. And what could be more obvious as a childhood route into Classics than Asterix? There are, of course, many many Asterix books and films (though anything produced from 1990 onwards DID NOT HAPPEN and DOES NOT COUNT) So where to start? If I do more of these I intend to take them to some pretty tangential places, but to begin with something obvious is probably best. I don’t anticipate having anything particularly scholarly to say – this isn’t meant to be any kind of Reception-Lite – but I hope maybe it’ll be fun. No, instead I’m going to embark on the probably equally self-indulgent but possibly more interesting pursuit of revisiting some film, TV and perhaps books from my childhood that (vaguely) relate to Classics and seeing what I make of them with the benefit of fifteen years or so’s study under my belt. No hilarious reminiscences of school Latin lessons (thanks, Mr Bird!) or of the Faculty circa 2002 (What would be the point? I witter on about that often enough in the common room anyway, and at the end of the day this is Cambridge – besides a few changes to beard lengths and architectural alterations, things haven’t changed much in ten years). Don’t worry though, I’ve got no intention of posting my Classics memoirs. Having now passed my viva, as I languish in that peculiar limbo-period of corrections and waiting for final PhD approval, I’m confronted by the rapidly-approaching end my time as a classics student and a final, enforced transition into the scary world of Real Academia or The Back-up Plan. It’s not like the world hasn’t been visited by prodigies and natural disasters in recent times.īut I’m not here to talk about the apocalypse (though mental note: there probably would be a fun blog post to be written on classical views of the end of the world). Maybe I’m being overly dismissive of the latter, though. The end of term the end of the year even, if we follow the interpretation of Mayan chronology and belief systems offered by that always-enlightening source of academic discussion that is the Internet, the end of the very world itself.
We’re getting to that time of year when people start to think about endings.
0 kommentar(er)
