Karl Galinsky,
Professor of Classics
 |
 |
|
Karl Galinsky did not seem like one headed for a root canal immediately following our interview. Sunny and jovial, he speaks in a high-energy, rapidly rolling stream, blurting out whole paragraphs of complex thought as asides before redirecting himself to the question at hand. Raised Catholic in the south of postwar Germany, he is fluent in Spanish, Italian, and French, bringing his languages to five (all with an accent, he jokes), without counting the Hebrew he took throughout high school and the Latin and Greek that are part and parcel of studying classics. With a bachelor's from Bowdoin College in Maine and a master's and doctorate from Princeton, Galinsky arrived on the UT Austin campus in 1966 and has been a force ever since, as evidenced by his 13-page single-spaced vita: serving on a grueling number of faculty committees and boards in fine arts, business, education, and the graduate school, as well as his native liberal arts, and chairing the Faculty Senate in 1981-82. Since 1991, he has been the Floyd Cailloux Centennial Professor of Classics. His awards include the 1979 Teaching Excellence Award from the American Philological Association. He has taught and lectured throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and New Zealand. As chair of the Classics Department from 1974-90, now ranked No. 3 in the nation among public universities by the National Research Council, he led the drive to endow seven faculty positions. He has edited three books and written seven more, the most recent being Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton University Press, 1996). Galinsky's specialty is Roman art, literature (notably Vergil's Aeneid), and religion, especially in the Augustan Age (27 B.C.-A.D. 14). But as an avowed generalist who bemoans the overspecialization of the modern university, he joyfully escorts an auditorium of undergraduates through the 12 centuries of Roman civilization, sweeping across political history, art, literature, architecture, and religion. In the course syllabus, he calls students to examine "the abiding issues that have made Roman civilization such a fascinating subject for imitation, loathing, and anything in between for subsequent generations, right up to our own times." He asks, "What are some of the . . . parallels between the Roman and the American experience, and what are the limits of such analogies?" We asked him those questions and more in the second-floor gallery of the Harry Ransom Center surrounded by the Blanton Museum of Art's reproductions of statues from classical antiquity. We hope it was better than pulling teeth . . . The president was recently greeted by a heckler with a sign reading "AMERICAN CALIGULA." Does Roman civilization deserve to be so synonymous with decadence? Or has that aspect been exaggerated to make our own society look more moral by comparison? 
You're talking about President Clinton, not UT President Faulkner, right? (Laughs.) No, it depends. The fascinating thing about studying another civilization is that you can find whatever you're looking for. I taught a class here once that incorporated movies in a classical civilization course. See, these Hollywood movies all came out in the late '50s, early '60s, when the movie industry was trying to head off TV at the pass. So of course you've got the film screen, and what better way to fill it than with Roman decadence, armies, and stuff like that? You're looking at a Roman civilization of over 1,200 years basically. And yes, you can find decadence, but you can find a lot of other stuff too. I concentrate on the more positive models. Twelve hundred years is an incredibly long run for any polity. What were the keys to its success? It's the adaptability to change. It's the flexibility. The decadent images come basically from a period of three or four decades in the first century A.D., when you had some emperors that I would say were certifiable. Caligula (the nickname for Gaius) is not the kind of guy you'd want to invite over to your house and have a date with your daughter. (Laughs) But hey, you're talking about a guy who ruled for all of four years (A.D. 37-41). Then they got rid of him. Term limits! That's right! That raises an interesting question because, just to give you an example of the positive models, the framers of our constitution were very impressed with the Roman constitution. They had a research assistant checking on it during the Constitutional Convention. Why Rome? Checks and balances. Term limits. One year for elected officials. See, they came from the same direction we did. They had just gotten rid of the bad kings, so the thinking was, "Don't turn the whole thing over to a monarch." Now in terms of Rome's success, a basic issue is its changeability, its flexibility. As you know, the terms "diversity" and "multiculturalism" today have a lot of political baggage. But let's take it positively, because you had the same situation in Rome. This is a polity that is composed of many different ethnicities, cultures. The Roman slaves--and here I'm talking about the household slaves, not the chain gangs--they would be freed, generally, by the end of a useful life. Within a generation, their kids were Roman citizens, and that goes on from the second century B.C. all the way on through. So you have a constant influx of genes, just like we have in this country. We have people from all over the place. So the notion that all Romans had the aquiline nose and the great profile, those are all the clichés that come from the movies, like that they were all decadent, whereas the reality, thank God, is a great deal more dynamic. Churchill was very nostalgic and reverent about Roman civilization. Yet to many, it seems horribly cruel and illiberal: slavery, blood sports, dictatorships. Was it just that much better than the alternatives? If you try to project 20th century standards back onto antiquity, you always have a problem. One of the things I always tell my classes is that if you go back before our constitution, you have very little in the way of representative democracies. They experimented with that in Greece; it lasted three decades in Athens, then kind of faded away. The blood sports? Well, we have that too, and the excitement surrounding that phenomenon in Rome, of course, came from the movies. What is ignored is the life of the everyday citizen. I'm glad we're meeting here (the Blanton statue gallery) because when archaeology came in in the last century, the idea was to go for big stuff, go for nice stuff, go for something you can put in museums. So you excavate temples, hippodromes, theaters. What about the other 80, 85 percent of the people out there? These are agricultural societies. We are just beginning to fill in the gap. You may have heard of our excavations in southern Italy and in the Ukraine led by UT Professor Joe Carter. This really is pioneering in opening up that aspect of antiquity to us. When you picture antiquity in that sense, it's a good bit more balanced. In daily life, what would the general population find most surprising? It's not the most exciting stuff, but you do get an idea of the economic subsistence. You get an idea of the various cults, the various religions. That's a very good counterweight to the typical image of the Roman sitting there bored in the theater waiting for someone to kill off a gladiator. Gladiators, that's a very expensive proposition. That's like a franchise in the NFL or something. You won't have those guys killed every time. So the images from Spartacus weren't the norm? That's for the general consumption and makes it very interesting, but when you start probing the realities, it's a different picture. So were slaves not a major part of gladiatorial events? No, I'm not trying to excuse that for one minute. Slavery was all over antiquity. It's all over Egypt. It's all over many nations on this globe before the 20th century. They were not happy, singing in the fields. They clearly were not. But there were big differences with American slavery. They'd save up a little bit of money that they'd ritualistically pay back to their master. That money was called peculium. We get our word "peculiar" from that. Peculium is something you stash up very specifically for yourself. I'm not trying to say everything was happy. Clearly, slavery inhibited inventiveness. It inhibited development of technology. It inhibited efficient industries. How? Let's say you own a factory, and you turn out pots and pans. Well, if you need to produce more, you don't have to come up with technological improvement or efficiencies; you simply buy more slaves. Many liken the perceived moral decline of America to the perceived immorality of the empire, then extrapolate that our civilization will follow Rome's course. But did Rome really fall because of immorality? No, I think that's a very simplistic notion. It really is. I'm glad that our economy at the moment is doing well, because about 10 or 12 years ago, when things did not look this rosy, my main shtick on the lecture circuit was precisely the point of the modern parallels to the fall of the Roman Empire. It was on the radio. It was on TV, and the reason was that Paul Kennedy's book The Decline and Fall of Great Nations had just come out. It didn't specifically mention Rome, but it mentioned the Hapsburgs, the French, and the British Empire, and of course they all came and went. What distinguishes Rome is that there is this moral overlay. It was picked up by the morality brigade who say, "These guys are decadent. Look at Caligula!" "Caligula" was the first half of the first century. You still have four and a half centuries to go until the decline and fall of the empire in the west! In the east, it goes on in Constantinople until 1453! So what's decline? What's fall? And the moral thing, I think, you can turn quite a bit around and say, of all people, the Romans always had a very strong sense of values, not that they always lived by them, but that's very much of the Roman character. What were those values? The first one is, you don't put yourself first. The polity, the commonwealth, the common weal, the common good--whatever you want to call it--that comes first. That's really the code of the republic. You have all these heart-warming stories. One of them is of the soldier at the bridge holding off the entire Etruscan army so his buddies can make it over, with a total risk to his own life. It's a totally improbable story, but hey! It got into all the school books--the McGuffey Reader. I'm not sure if it got into William Bennett's The Book of Virtues, but the success of that book alone shows you there is a yearning for that. There's something just beyond a material well-being. People do look for some kind of guidance, and in fact you can find a lot of that in Rome. So it was not just a totally decadent civilization; it was quite a bit centered on values. What are the most striking similarities between the empire and the United States? We've got the motto E Pluribus Unum, which is really very apropos. The strength of this country is its tremendous diversity. Never mind political and ideological notions that diversity has been connected with. I'm talking about it in a real, positive, objective sense. This is a country that is made up of so many different peoples and that is so open to many traditions. Just look at American popular culture. It's nothing homogeneous. Look at UT. This is the largest university in the country, totally supportive of bringing more people from all kinds of backgrounds into the University. Even as it is now, this is not a homogeneous place. Just look at the number of older students we have, a lot of folks with very different life experiences here. One of my favorite sayings is that the Romans were military imperialists, but not cultural imperialists, because they basically left people alone. They did not come in and say, "Okay, you have to build every house like we do. Do this, do that, do the other." In fact, Latin was the official language, it was not the language used by the general population. That was actually the Greek that was used in the New Testament. It goes even into Roman law. Yes, for capital crimes, Roman law applies. But if they see that these people have basically a pretty decent legal system, or for misdemeanors, the Romans didn't come in like gang busters and say, "You've got to change all this." So there was a sort of analogy to states' rights? Absolutely. Unfortunately it never translated into a federal system. That was one of the reasons for the fall, because so much depended on the style of the individual emperor. You've got your Caligula, and that's an aberration. That gets chucked out. You have someone else who is one of my favorites and that's Emperor Hadrian of the second century. He realizes that not everybody can come to Rome. Here you've got the federal system sort of enacted by a person. What does he do? He gets all his cabinet secretaries and staff and says, "Pack up your horses and your mules," and he spends most of his time just traveling around the empire. And he's successful. If you have a boundary dispute with your neighbor, you stop the emperor and hand him a petition. If he's got the time and wants to do this, he'll read it and decide the case right there. That spreads one person pretty thin. The analogies are all there. You had all the bureaucracy that comes with over-centralization. If the roof leaks in some government building out in Syria, you've got to write all these letters. It's just ridiculous. Some emperors handled this very well. Others were really aligned with the bureaucracy. The thing just becomes too unwieldy. But let me give you another salutary caveat here about the fall, because it's not just the hang-up on the moral decadence or whatever. The Roman Empire in the west falls in 476 A.D. I would say that's a non-event, because all that happens is that the new rulers come in and take over exactly the structure that they find, except they happen to be Germans or Goths or whatever. Militarily they just prevail. The other part of the empire, the eastern part, has exactly the same problems. If anything, they're weaker. There are now 215 reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. That's overkill, really, but if you go down the list, they all exist in the east as well. They're just lucky. They didn't have the Germans. The Turks don't march in there until 1453. So I think that's a pretty salutary counterweight, too, before people build up these events with moral and metaphysical trappings. Sometimes it's the other guy who has a bigger gun than you, and that's just too bad. What are the main lessons we should learn from the Roman Empire? When I teach this course, for instance, I generally stay away from the business of lessons. It's always good to study another civilization for the kind of perspectives you get. But it's useful to look at the entire history. There's a famous saying: those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it. But at the same time, history does not exactly repeat itself. I think that is, to some extent, a fallacy. To give you an example, I think after Vietnam, we became very gun-shy in many ways. The moment there is any indication of foreign involvement anywhere, some people, until recently at least, would say, "It's going to be another Vietnam." Well, there are similarities but there are also differences. I think this is very important. The main lesson is to be resourceful enough to respond to the various challenges that come up. One big difference between their time and ours is life expectancy. We're living in a time when we're uniquely blessed, because at that time, the stuff we take for granted, a root canal, whatever, was impossible. You have pneumonia and it's a one-way trip to the underworld. Life expectancy in the Roman Empire was something like 35 years. Just imagine for a moment how this shapes differences in people's mentality, mindset, course of their careers, organization of their private lives, families, stuff like that. What was it that drew you to the study of the Roman Empire? Like so much in life, it was a total accident. My family is actually from a part of Germany that's now back in Poland. I was born during the war in Alsace, France, which at that time was a part of Germany. So I guess I was destined to emigrate. (Laughs) But I went to high school over there. I was 19 and had no idea what I wanted to do. Up came the opportunity to study in the U.S., so I wound up in a small college in Maine. I liked the country and wanted to stay here. It was the time of President Kennedy and Camelot and all this kind of thing. There were PhD programs and jobs available, and that's how I wound up in classics. It was a means to an end of staying over here. But the Romans have always fascinated me. To my mind, one of the big similarities between the U.S. and Rome is that they're very pragmatic people. They're not hung up on ideology. They want to see what works. One huge example is our constitution. See, the Roman constitution was not even written down. The English constitution isn't either. The Roman constitution was a piece of tradition. We all know the veto power. That's from Rome. There, anyone could paralyze things within five seconds. If you want to shut this thing down, it's ridiculously easy to do. Consequently, you need to get together with people and work things out. You need to cooperate. You need to compromise. The empire (as opposed to the republic) is a slightly different story. The Roman's weren't cultural overlords. They were a military threat. America is accused of cultural imperialism. We do have a lot of movies being exported and things like that. But look at this conversely. We are incorporating so many things from other countries into our culture. Just in this area, take a look at Tejano music, incorporating so much from south of the border. We are open to so many influences from England, from Asia. So what is American culture? I would say it's a global culture. American culture is not a nationalistic culture; I think it's more cosmopolitan. You mentioned Hollywood. Everyone knows the Romans had English accents. Is that the effect Shakespeare had on our perception of the empire? In class we just covered the 1954 Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando, whom the students did not recognize! Even when Brando gives that speech, "Friends, Romans, countrymen," he's got a British accent. You're absolutely right! Of course, Britain was one of the citadels of classical learning. So there's been a great deal of interchange. Then you had I, Claudius, which was all filmed in Britain [13-part BBC series, 1976]. Did Shakespeare have it right with respect to the empire? Shakespeare intuitively has a lot of things right. He didn't have access to the same kind of scholarship that we have today, but the thing with Shakespeare is, he picks up on these themes and universalizes them. He gives it just a more human dimension. That is precisely why we have the big Shakespeare revival. Do educated people need a knowledge of mythology? Well, you can ask [UT English professor] Betty Sue Flowers. What do they need? What don't they need? Let's put it this way. We haven't had to push it on people; they've come to it naturally. We've done so well in the Classics department for various reasons. We haven't had to go up there and say, "You need this, you need that." Take the Joseph Campbell book The Power of Myth, which sold like hotcakes. I can see why. Mythology, first, is something for the imagination. It is really creativity. Secondly, people want to look there for some kind of solution, for some kind of playing out. What happens to us after death? How did the world begin? Or whatever. With mythology, you see all these things sort of walk across a stage. But at the same time you also can look to it for certain values. It sounds very corny, but this is what it comes down to: the things that give meaning to life. You can go with this as far as you want with mythology. The Jungian Society in Austin studies Carl Jung's analysis of mythology in terms of archetypes and so forth. I think this is why mythology has so much appeal. The funny thing about it is that so many hard-core academics are flabbergasted by people responding to it, you know--"If so many people respond to it, how can it be right?" (Laughs) But 100 years ago, if you didn't know your mythology, you couldn't read anything and get it. Whereas today, you can get by without it. So is popular knowledge of it going to keep attenuating? We've had a whole slate of books on that. Who Killed Homer? and books like that. Of course you can't compare with 200 years ago. This even comes out in things like curriculum planning, where some people want very specific courses. I'm against it. I'm for keeping it as open as can be. Yes, I think there should be some general requirements. But past that, we should let the market economy determine what we offer. You can do very well be designing a quality program that will be very appealing. The same applies to mythology. People complain that the general populace is losing interest. But look at popular books and TV programs. People ask for it. NBC, a few years ago during sweeps weeks, aired Ulysses. They're doing Cleopatra in May. There is a fascination. Then there are all the low-brow shows, Hercules, Xena . . . Exactly. There's more of that all the time. There's tremendous fascination out there. I think you can use that as a springboard and do what I would call responsible popularization. Why not? That's what we're here for. We're certainly not here to reproduce ourselves in terms of classics professors. Most of our majors don't do that, they go into business, law, medicine, whatever. Mythology has so much intrinsic appeal, it's hard to kill. With what do you credit the growth of the Classics department during your tenure? Well, it wasn't only under my tenure but also my successors. One of the reasons I have stayed here is that we were able to put together an interdisciplinary department. In other words, classics is everything. It's history, it's art, it's archaeology, it's religion, and it covers the whole thing from 3000 B.C. to wherever you want to put the fall of the Roman Empire. So in this sense we have counteracted something that is endemic to the modern university: disciplines getting smaller and smaller and smaller. People will study a 50-year period, and when you ask them to teach another course, they won't do it. Here, they gave us the opportunity to redesign the study from a broader, more diverse perspective, to give students the sense of the entire civilization. Yes, you still have specialists, but the sum is still bigger than the total of the parts. What do you remember most about your chairing of the Faculty Senate? It was a wonderful time. It was the early '80s. [UT President] Peter Flawn had declared his war on mediocrity. Some people may say mediocrity won. (Laughs) I don't think so. Bill Clements was governor of Texas, the money was there, and it was going into higher education. These were heady days. Today, economically, Texas couldn't do any better, but for us to make that final jump to get up in the league with Berkeley and Michigan, the will doesn't seem to be there. At that time it was "Let's move forward." We did for the first time a study of the Available University Fund. Up until this time it was a big mystery. We had a very good committee and made some very reasonable recommendations that Peter Flawn implemented to a great extent. He was putting a great deal of money at that point into the Graduate School and faculty research. Those were the good old days. Is the Faculty Council a valuable institution? What does it have the power to do? Yes, it is. It depends on the initiative of the faculty. It really is an advisory body; the president has the ultimate say. I would compare this again to ancient Rome. The senate was not a legislative body. The senate was advisory, but over the course of time, it accumulated so much clout, people would listen. Legislatively they could be overruled, but since they had the authority, they were listened to. And it's the same here. Some years ago, there was still the old-time rhetoric from the blowhards, which to my mind is just not the way to get business done. Every administration likes to see that sort of thing because it's totally harmless to deal with: "Let them strut around and give their speeches. See what happens." But the council can very responsibly deal with some issues, offer guidance, make proposals. To give you an example, I spent one hellish year on this post-tenure review thing. That was 16- 18-hour days, but we came out very, very well. To some extent, I think that whole issue was pretty hyped. This spring we'll be meeting about athletics. To say that the faculty is over here, and athletics is over here--I think that's an old style. But what's the proper balance? Well, the money is certainly separate, so someone might say, why shouldn't the decision-making be separate? It's not that simple when it comes to the Texas Legislature. If you saw [UT Vice President for Administration and Legal Affairs] Patti Ohlendorf's piece in the paper the other day, she makes the point that athletics is only 4 percent of the total budget of UT. That's fine. That's a good, legalistic answer. But in terms of public perception, it's 80 percent out there. If the Legislature is in town, don't just flaunt your big building program right in their faces, because they will say, "UT's got lots of money. That's all they care about. What are you coming to us for, whining for more money?" Or you don't announce the very same day you go to a budget hearing that [Longhorn football coach] Mack Brown is going to be making a million dollars. Wait until summer when everybody's out of town! See? It's that sort of thing. We're all in this together. My irreverent take on this is that universities are theme parks. You've got all kinds of enterprises going on, but you need to have some kind of overall guidance so that one does not impact negatively on another. The roller coaster doesn't fall over on the Ferris wheel? That's right. That kind of thing, so we have a sense that whatever we do won't have an impact on the other sectors; it's like an environmental impact statement. I think the whole publicity management aspect of the athletics department here could use some finessing, so that people won't have the impression that UT is awash in money. Because as [UT System Chancellor] Bill Cunningham has said, we have gone from a state-supported university to a state-assisted university. I would do anything not to give them any fodder. It's in this sense that the Faculty Council can offer some guidance and be constructive. In your 32 years, what jumps out as the main difference at UT? Well, at that time it was a good regional university. At this point it's definitely a national player, and as I said, we would really like to get into that last tier up there, with Michigan and Berkeley. That's why I don't like the rhetoric of "world class." I don't know what that means. I'd say, let's first get into the first tier of U.S. public institutions, then we'll talk about "world class." There have been tremendous improvements, and at the same time I think the general atmosphere here just in terms of friendliness and the ability--here we come back to my Roman model--of people to work together has been tremendous. It goes back to the Roman constitution; they were very smart not to write it down in books and statutes and so on. The way things really get done is that you know somebody, and you phone them up. By Avrel Seale,
|
||
 |
 |