But Does the Shoe Fit?

Do you know the English saying "If the shoe fits, wear it"? But how are we to decide if a shoe fits? As reported in the BBC News article "Viewpoint: Does Caligula deserve his bad reputation?", it isn't always easy to decide whether a shoe really does fit, especially not if your name is Caligula, meaning "little boot" in Latin, and you have been forced to fit into a certain shoe for many centuries of received tradition.

According to the article, historian Mary Beard argues that although there is likely some truth in the traditional perception of the Roman emperor Caligula as a mad, sex crazed monster with megalomania, the truth is probably much less dramatic ("Viewpoint: Does Caligula," 2013). The problem, according to Beard, is that most of the information we have about Caligula comes from later writers who wanted to make him seem as evil as possible to justify having killed him in a military coup, with most ancient Roman writers reporting not what they saw or heard themselves, but what other people told someone else they saw or heard, or what their uncle's boy friend said he saw or heard.

Cambridge University classicist Mary
Beard, with a Roman soldier's caliga. 

This story interested me for a few reasons. First, I'm interested in the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, which are the foundation of Western civilisation, which is now fast becoming the global civilisation we all share, and I think that a better understanding of the origins can help us to understand the present. In particular, studying our ancestors awful, often evil, mistakes, can help us to avoid repeating them, and the power play in Rome between competing elites, and the peasants, might have much to teach us, perhaps also some useful lessons for Thailand these past few years.

Another reason this article interested me is that it shows us how very difficult it can be to acquire solid knowledge on many topics. And this seems to me at the heart of academic work, which is why we are all in a class called Academic Reading and Writing 5. For most of the past 2,000 years, at least since the time of Roman historian Seutonius, who is a great writer, but, as Beard points out, perhaps not a very reliable writer, Caligula has been notorious as the most bloody, corrupt, selfish, and generally immoral of all the Roman emperors - not a very noble title. But more cautious modern scholarship is, as in so many other areas, re-examining and correcting earlier, traditional opinions, and showing in many cases that the traditional beliefs are either completely wrong, or not at all well founded. This is why academics are always arguing: arguing is what academics do all the time. And this arguing is essential to make progress in discovering new knowledge and correcting the wrong ideas we might have inherited from parents, teachers, tradition or whatever. As is so often the case, better modern scholarship tells us that his traditional shoes might not fit the real Caligula very well at all.

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Reference

Viewpoint: Does Caligula deserve his bad reputation? (2013, July 29). BBC News Magazine. Retrieved July 29, 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23455774