Georgy Kantor
@GeorgyKantor
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Fellow in Ancient History @StJohnsOx. Mostly Roman history, particularly legal. Asia Minor. Inscriptions. Classics and History teaching. Personal views only.
Joined March 2019
@APHClarkson 'Napoleon: That's nothing. If only I had Soviet press, no one would ever know that I lost at Waterloo.' 2/2.
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A remarkably distressing letter from a student at my university. I should perhaps note here that within the last week (and for a first time in 22 years in Oxford) I experienced antisemitic hate based on my surname.
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@APHClarkson There used to be an old Soviet joke about Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon meeting in the underworld. 'A.: If only I had Soviet planes, I'd have conquered India, and then the world. - H.: If only I had Soviet tanks instead of elephants, I'd have conquered Rome.' 1/2.
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My mother left her walking stick, inherited from her grandmother and sentimentally very dear, in Gatwick North Terminal yesterday, near international arrivals. It has not been returned to the lost property so far. Who knows, maybe social networks help the way they're supposed to.
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There is no exemption for education/research - this means that brightest foreign researchers can no longer be brought to UK as postdocs (average salary 30-36K), presumably? This is unspeakably damaging to UK's standing as a world research centre. @UniversitiesUK @BritishAcademy_.
Salary threshold for skilled worker visas to rise to £38,700 under government plans to cut legal migration levels. Follow live
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This would be an insane policy: arts, book publishing and scholarship are massive strengths of the UK. To allow (mostly California-based. ) AI enterprises to 'scrape' their work is not just immoral and philistine, but an act of monumental economic self-harm.
As widely rumoured, the UK government is considering legalising gen AI training on copyrighted work without a licence. This would be a huge betrayal of the UK’s creators. It would mean letting AI companies use creators’ work to build highly scalable AI models that will directly
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Please consider signing if you think Latin teaching should be accessible to all.
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I'm profoundly sorry to hear of this decision which will do significant harm to the efforts to give students from disadvantaged backgrounds in state schools access to ancient languages. Made worse by being taken mid-programme and mid-year and with no advance notice.
Exclusive: Thousands of secondary pupils face 'significant disruption' after the government scrapped its state school Latin programme mid-year .
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Devastating news that Leiden University, for so long one of the great centres of scholarship in Europe, the university of Grotius and Scaliger, will be stopping or downgrading most of its humanities programmes.
The dying humanities at Leiden University. Arabic has been taught at Leiden since 1586. Leiden holds the oldest continual chair of Arabic in Europe, established in 1613. Budget cuts from central government combined with faculty deficit (over 5million euros) will batter the.
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A doctoral student of mine discovered what (according to Pliny the Elder) was the most frequent topic of senatorial decrees in the first cent. AD. I'd have never ever guessed.
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As today's article in the Telegraph about exams at Oxbridge is generating tons of excitement: there is no examination reform at Oxford currently being implemented or under discussion by the faculties, contrary to the impression you might have got. Literal non-news at the moment.
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A long blog on an extremely fascinating inscription from probably the first month of Tiberius' reign, recently recovered by Spanish police from the art market. May cast important new light on Tacitus' narrative of the first imperial succession.
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Devastated to hear that Barbara Levick has passed away. She was a great Roman historian, a wonderful human being and I owe her more than I can tell. The moment when I was sent to her in my second term at Oxford was one when I understood what it means to be an ancient historian,
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Drum roll: it is, allegedly, the monopoly on hedgehog skins, used as dressing cloth for garments. 'magnum fraus et ibi lucrum monopolio inuenit, de nulla re crebrioribus senatus consultis nulloque non principe adito querimoniis prouincialibus' (Plin. NH 8.135). 1/2.
A doctoral student of mine discovered what (according to Pliny the Elder) was the most frequent topic of senatorial decrees in the first cent. AD. I'd have never ever guessed.
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@charleshymas An incredibly bad set of measures all round; ban on 73% of Britons marrying a foreigner; no plan for sectors where there is a workforce shortage; immensely damaging for British universities.
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@Independent @_SeanOGrady This is borderline fascist (and I say this as someone who's been vaccinated and hopes that everyone who can will be too) and should have no place in civilised conversation. Deeply sorry to see this in The Independent.
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I'm awfully sorry to disappoint but the comparisons between current UK 'shortages' and the late Soviet Union are hysterically funny to anyone who remembers the latter. You all need to try a bit harder.
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This is the reality of what 'cuts' mean at this stage in the cycle. Killing off an immensely successful instrument of British soft power and cultural influence in this way is simply insane.
Radio services the BBC is proposing to stop: Arabic, Persian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil, Urdu. Language services the BBC is proposing to move to digital only are: Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Pidgin, Urdu, Yoruba.
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@JeremyVineOn5 No. I'm double-vaccinated, and all for promoting vaccines, but this crosses an important line, especially as the unvaccinated are primarily poor and/or ethnic minority. It establishes an exceptionally intrusive regime of street policing which will affect those groups.
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@AntigoneJournal I've been saying that for years, but it's an uphill struggle. Journals a particularly endangered category.
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A great loss to the discipline. One could disagree, sometimes fundamentally, but Veyne was a towering figure in Roman history. Le Pain et le cirque is a monument of profound learning and full of brilliant observations, whatever you think of its thesis.
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BBC should be utterly ashamed of this report and its framing. The Council holds the collection in trust for the public benefit (and the framing of this as an 'investigation', when the contents of the museum can be discovered by 2 min browse on Art UK is beyond absurd).
Birmingham City Council owns an artwork collection valued at almost half a billion pounds, a BBC investigation has discovered. The scale of the council-owned art collection has also revealed. Full story -
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@AdinaValean @Ryanair Everyone? What are the measures you'll be taking (once the plane is safely out of the Belorussian airspace) in response to an act of piracy and the kidnapping of Roman Protasevich from an EU flight?.
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A proud day: first book published by a former doctoral student of mine today. Many congratulations, Brad - can't wait to see the published version!
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My own contribution to current discussions in the press on the study ancient and rare languages: originally commissioned on the occasion of language cuts at Leiden, but talking about a couple of things of wider moral and intellectual significance.
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Quite astonishing find of a very late underground pagan shrine at Aphrodisias by my Oxford colleague Ine Jacobs.
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@donshoegaze @giannako @UniWestLondon @officestudents I agree. But it would be nice if the regulator stated this publicly.
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The answer is here:
Drum roll: it is, allegedly, the monopoly on hedgehog skins, used as dressing cloth for garments. 'magnum fraus et ibi lucrum monopolio inuenit, de nulla re crebrioribus senatus consultis nulloque non principe adito querimoniis prouincialibus' (Plin. NH 8.135). 1/2.
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Ten years today since I was offered a fellowship at St John's. It's been a wonderful academic home, and I have met some of the people most important for me here. I can hardly claim to have lived up to anyone's expectations, least of all my own, but hope I've given smth in return.
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For International Women's Day: the handwriting of Anna Comnena identified by Spanish palaeographers.
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Arguably the most famous Roman history chair in the world, in succession to Ronald Syme, Peter Brunt, Fergus Millar, Alan Bowman and Nicholas Purcell.
The Faculty of Classics in Oxford @oxfordclassics has just advertized the Camden chair of ancient history, in succession to Nicholas Purcell
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@GrahamMedley @FraserNelson @doug_no1 @TAH_Sci @juji_gatami In what sense, if any, can policy-makers then 'follow the science'? With 'modelling what you are asked to model' surely a model can be produced to support just about any policy?.
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This is utterly scandalous @blackwelloxford. And so much for Waterstone's promises to run Blackwell's as a separate business. The ongoing self-destruction of the world's best academic bookshop and alienation of your very loyal client base is astonishing. More on Classics shortly.
#Oxford is so nostalgic for the #EuropeanUnion, it is only natural that #Blackwell's no longer stocks foreign language books. "Try #Waterstones". It has five French novels. Rien de #Balzac, #Maupassant, #Proust, #Stendhal. Oxford teaches how to❤️#EU without knowing the lingo.
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@MarinaHyde Worries about the pandemic aren't a good reason to engage in the kind of rhetoric that demonises foreigners.
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@tnewtondunn @SteveBakerHW @TimesRadio Can you imagine the logistics of this remarkably useless exercise? Who is going to check all these tests? How much effort will it detract from meaningful interventions?.
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Very sad news that the great historian of Roman emotions, David Konstan, has passed away. I didn't know him well, but we once examined a doctorate together and were occasionally in touch - enough to know that he was not only a major scholar but a most kind and lovely man.
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A remarkable graph, very encouraging for Classics, showing the strongest growth in A-level entries after Maths, Physics and Computer Science; pleasant to see good growth in Modern Languages, too, but rather more worrying with History. From here:
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Forty books for quarantine (in honour of the etymology). I've tried to do a very impressionistic list of important books on late Republican / early imperial history (excluding any textbook-type syntheses and source editions). #workingfromhome
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As many of you know, I don't support Boris Johnson. But here he speaks for Britain. Now follow this up with green light to Ukrainian refugees.
This evening I went to Ukrainian church in London to pray snd join them in the Holy Mass. The Mass ended with a prayer for Peace in English and after that what a surprise Boris Johnson come and gave a talk in solidarity with Ukrainian people and lighted a candle.
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Immensely sad news of the death of Peter Parsons. A great scholar and a wonderfully kind man.
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@KirstieMAllsopp The inability of the mainstream Left to offer a coherent narrative against policies that massively increase socio-economic inequality and work in the interest of mega corporations has been depressing - and left the field to some truly bizarre fringe figures.
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Really remarkable results - which should tell us that if we're serious about having higher education (and producing employable graduates) sit-down invigilated exams should be back everywhere asap.
Reminder for the new semester. When researchers secretly added AI-created papers to the exam pool: “We found that 94% of our AI submissions were undetected. The grades awarded to our AI submissions were on average half a grade boundary higher than that achieved by real students.”
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@AndyBurnhamGM That'd be a silly reason. But as someone who respects you as a politician (and once voted for you for Lab leader), saddened by your reaction to good news for a lot of kids. Plenty good reasons to learn Latin, language learning in UK needs a boost, and variety at school is good.
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A useful thread on Sergei Sumlenny, a Putin propagandist who has now re-invented himself as a 'German' ultra-hawk, calling for punishing all Russians w/o exception, nuclear war (it sounds like), and denouncing Russian anti-war opposition. /1.
A sequel thread about @Sumlenny, his past, and possible motives. I didn't plan to write this, but since the original thread went viral I received a lot of information on Sergei that changed my perspective on him. Things may be far worse than I thought.
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@APHClarkson Given the scale of semi-institutionalised brutality by and towards soldiers themselves, cruelty towards the 'enemy' is sadly entirely unsurprising.
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This is most depressing. An entirely wrong and short-sighted decision for Brookes, and a worrying sign for British universities as a whole.
Oxford Brookes has confirmed the closure of its Music and Mathematics courses, and job losses in other departments. It says alternative suggestions from staff could not “achieve the level of savings required by the University in the necessary timeframe”.
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A.E. Housman, the great textual critic and poet, and arguably the most famous classicist to ever study @StJohnsOx was born #otd in 1859. Here is one of his rare portraits (by Francis H. Dodd), still on the wall in our Senior Common Room.
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It is an honour to be re-elected and to continue to represent Congregation members as a Curator of @bodleianlibs for another four years.
It's excellent to see that @GeorgyKantor has been reappointed as a Curator of @bodleianlibs - along with @Helen_Gittos @BalliolHistory. Historians are, of course, excellent custodians of both the past and the future!
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An excellent monograph, recommended to any historian of Asia Minor or of Roman provinces. It was a real pleasure to be one of the examiners for the underlying D.Phil. thesis.
Today’s #BookoftheWeek is Roman Ionia: Constructions of Cultural Identity by Martin Hallmansecker. How did the cities of Ionia construct and express a distinct sense of Ionian identity under Roman rule? Hallmansecker’s tackles this question and more.
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Donald Russell would have turned 104 today. Here is to him and to St John's Classics!
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Back to the class for me: started learning Palmyrene Aramaic with David Taylor today. One of the most enjoyable things I've done in a long while.
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My grandma Victoria would have been a 100 today. She taught me how to read, taught me numbers, taught me to enjoy libraries, and simply gave me her love. I loved her very much.
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Triumphs of citation metrics, and what it means to deliver academia to commercial automated services. Good on the cat, though.
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Profoundly sad news, which I cannot quite comprehend yet, and an enormous loss to our discipline. Stephen has been a profound influence on how I understand Asia Minor and Roman history and I admired him hugely as a scholar and a human being.
The BIAA is deeply saddened by the passing of Prof Stephen Mitchell FBA, and sends its condolences to his family at this difficult time. Our message of condolence can be read here:
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This is fascinating, and a splendid case of antiquarian research still enriching archaeology.
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Demitted as chair of Ancient History sub-faculty. Phew. !.
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If I were a monk in Umberto Eco, I would hide the Historia Augusta instead of the second book of Poetics.
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Collected articles of Andrew Lintott are out with Brill, assembled and edited by my colleagues Alison Rosenblitt and Ed Bispham - a must for a Roman institutional historian. Proud to contribute an introduction to the legal history section (pp. 287-91).
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Got vaccinated and had a long walk with my best friend. Things are getting better. Happy first day of spring, everyone!.
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@red_loeb @danielwaweru I'm actually reasonably sure that where culprits are identifiable, appropriate disciplinary action is being taken. But broader cultural awareness would be good.
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CUP just sent me a complimentary copy of a book I've reviewed for them. Now I've read the ms. twice and done quite detailed notes, but I was already paid for that. Most civilised, and contrasts extremely favourably with the 'digital first' approach of a certain other uni press.
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A lovely essay by Anthony Grafton on his teacher, Arnaldo Momigliano, postwar erudite scholars, and the milieu of the Warburg Institute. 1/3
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Roman parallels apart, I'm very wary of making predictions of how this will end. Like most observers of the situation with any understanding of history, I expected the growth of Prigozhin's private army to be one of the most dangerous factors, 1/.
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@MaiaDunphy Do you seriously think that releasing tens of Palestinians (some of them violent criminals) for one Israeli is the result of Israeli pressure, not Hamas? Your original post is incomprehensible.
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A fantastic new map resource for the political and administrative geography of the Later Roman Empire at Glasgow:
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@MarinaHyde All of whom, likely, had essential reasons to travel. By comparison, in a normal year in 3 months it would have been 9-10 million international tourists, 30 million Brits returning from abroad, and further mlns of international students, business trips and family visits.
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A story in the Sunday Times on one of our Classics candidates @StJohnsOx. Well done, Milly! We can't wait. @sjc_access @oxfordclassics #OxOutreach
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Fully vaccinated and a pint in the best possible company by the river in lovely weather! Very happy.
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Really pleased to be part of this volume, out today: the most comprehensive discussion of law in Roman provinces ever attempted, with contributions from many brilliant scholars. Many congratulations to the editors!
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This is beyond horrendous. Descent into evil.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev today, at a newly opened exhibition displaying the helmets of Armenian soldiers killed in last year's Second Karabakh War
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My colleague Amin Benaissa has published twelve new slave sale contracts from Roman Oxyrhynchus, massively adding to our evidence for Roman provincial slave trade. Particularly interesting contracts coming from outside Egypt. /1
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@DonaldClark You seem to be oddly exercised about denying other people the resource to learn what they want unless they have money (it's rather gloriously funny to have Earl Russell as your example of a person who could have learnt in a month all he was taught at school).
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One of the most admirable historians, both as a scholar and as a human being, and a true hero. I hope they keep the inscription on his grave, 'dilexit veritatem' (he loved the truth), put their on his own instructions.
Marc Bloch, historien et résistant, va entrer au Panthéon, annonce Emmanuel Macron – via @lemondefr
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Blogging about the last publication by one of my own teachers, on the easternmost Latin inscription known: why we should treat inscriptions as monuments, take topography into account, and read non-Anglophone publications.
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A few very quick thoughts on the newly found epitaph of Venerius Secundio, a freed public slave from Pompeii who put up 'Greek and Latin spectacles for four days'.
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This is a catastrophic and disgraceful decision @RoehamptonUni - a remarkable Classics department having an international reputation well beyond the meagre resources allocated to it. A blow to the world of learning and to humane education in this country.
An update @FriendsClassics @ClassicsAtRisk - Council has signed off all the original proposals for systematic restructuring, including the closure of Classics and other programmes. VRs are being finalised. Next stage = “appointment roles to roles” process 😢.
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@girlnamedgil @JoshEakle 'The Romans' who did the 'Roman salute' were Italian Fascists under Mussolini, not the actual ancient Romans; no evidence whatsoever for this gesture in antiquity.
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RIP Fergus Millar. It was a great inspiration and privilege to know him.
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Russian Supreme Court has ordered closure of Memorial International, Russia's oldest and best civil rights group, which was also doing decades of crucial historical work on Soviet repressions and their victims. A decision that will live on infamy. /1.
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Me in the @guardian writing about one of the gems of our art collection @StJohnsOx for the excellent Great British Art Tour series with @artukdotorg.
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It was great fun to give a lecture about Mommsen to graduate students in our 'Modern Approaches to Ancient History' series, but still rather terrifying to have Oswyn Murray (my old college tutor) in the audience.
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Come and teach Ancient Greek History at Oxford! A permanent post (tutorial fellowship) at University College just advertised. As usual, don't be put off by 'Associate Professorship' lingo: applications from early career scholars more than welcome! FPs:
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Putin's address is utterly unhinged. It's terrifying from a person in charge of the nuclear arsenal.
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I agree; will try to write a longer blog about it, but the usual 'in real life I'll look things up' is no answer at all: in the era of Google and ChatGPT, if you don't have knowledge in your head that allows you to add value to the search, there will be no reason to employ you. .
Bring back traditional exams. Three hours; four essays; closed book. You, your pen, and your mind staring the examiner down. I don't accept the ridiculous argument that "in real life you can look things up". In real life you'd look like an idiot if you looked basic things up.
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A most touching afternoon of memories at Stephen Mitchell's memorial @StJohnsOx today. A life that is an example to all of us.
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Quite phenomenal news from the Bodleian. I was hugely privileged to see the manuscript up close as one of the Bodleian Curators a couple of weeks ago.
🎵 We are delighted to announce a spectacular, new acquisition: the autograph manuscript of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata ‘Auf Christi, Himmelfahrt allein’!. The piece was written by Bach for performance in Leipzig on the feast of #AscensionDay, 10 May 1725.
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It is a tremendous disappointment that the new Global Talent Visa will be limited to STEM subjects, and that press releases from UK universities ignore that.
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We should of course wait for a proper publication of the results, but if this is reported correctly, we might have another third-century Roman 'usurper' just confirmed (from a couple of rather peculiar gold coins dismissed as forgeries for three centuries).
Coins long dismissed as crude and eccentric forgeries are genuine and prove the existence of a forgotten #Roman 'emperor' Sponsian who ruled a breakaway state in the province of Dacia during the 260s, according to a study
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Cassius Dio (Roman History 73.9) for today day in the news: 'Perennis, who commanded the Praetorians after Paternus, met his death as the result of a mutiny of the soldiers. For, inasmuch as Commodus had given himself up to chariot-racing and licentiousness and. 1/8.
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Even while just recovering from a serious illness, couldn't have spent today better than speaking to fantastically engaged and clever students about studying ancient world at Oxford and the application process @oxfordclassics, and meeting so many individually there and @StJohnsOx.
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Have written a bit of advice for my students on digital resources in Classics, and some elementary things on study skills: hardly any revelations, but in case it's useful for someone else, or will save someone time producing similar. #workingfromhome
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Finally got my author's copy of this. An article I find less cringeworthy in retrospect than some others I have written.
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@andrewsillett I don't particularly blame the city - indeed everyone in the position of authority has been excellent. But these things are happening, and need to be taken with seriousness they deserve.
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@calvinrobinson @OxfordRoyale It's a private summer school for foreign language students aged 13-18. Nothing to do with the University, and certainly not 'academia'.
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