Cambridge Latin Essay competition leads to abolition of slave trade.

Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce are historical heroes of the moment. I was delighted to discover, on the excellent and subversive Mother Jones website, the influence of a Latin essay competition on Clarkson.

On March 18, 1783, the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser carried a short letter to the editor about a case being heard in a London courtroom. The item caught the eye of a former slave living in England, Olaudah Equiano. Horrified, he ran immediately to see an Englishman he knew, Granville Sharp, an eccentric pamphleteer and known opponent of slavery. Sharp recorded in his diary that Equiano “called on me, with an account of one hundred and thirty Negroes being thrown alive into the sea.”

Months earlier, under Captain Luke Collingwood, the ship Zong had sailed from Africa for Jamaica with some 440 slaves, many of whom had already been on board for weeks. Head winds, spells of calm, and bad navigation (Collingwood mistook Jamaica for another island and sailed right past it) stretched the transatlantic voyage to twice the usual length. Packed tightly into a vessel of only 107 tons, slaves began to sicken. Collingwood was worried, for a competent captain was expected to deliver his cargo in reasonable health, and, of course, dead or dying slaves brought no profits. There was a way out, however. If Collingwood could claim that slaves had died for reasons totally beyond his control, insurance-at £30 per slave-would cover the loss.

Collingwood ordered his officers to throw the sickest slaves into the ocean. If ever questioned, he told them, they were to say that due to the unfavorable winds, the ship's water supply was running out. If water had been running out, these murders would be accepted under the principle of “jettison” in maritime law: A captain had a right to throw some cargo-in this case, slaves-overboard to save the remainder. In all, 133 slaves were “jettisoned” in several batches; the last group started to fight back and 26 of them were tossed over the side with their arms still shackled.

When the Zong's owners later filed an insurance claim for the value of the dead slaves, it equaled more than half a million dollars in today's money, and the insurance company disputed the claim. The moment Equiano showed him the newspaper article, Granville Sharp leaped into action. He hired lawyers, went to court, and personally interviewed at least one member of the ship's crew and a passenger. But the shocking thing about the Zong case-as much to Equiano and Sharp then as to us now-is that after more than a hundred human beings had been flung to their deaths, this was not a homicide trial. It was a civil insurance dispute.

Sharp tried and failed to get the Zong's owners prosecuted for murder. But he fired off a passionate salvo of outraged letters about the case to everyone he could think of. One letter apparently reached a prominent clergyman, who, the following year, became vice chancellor-the equivalent of an American university's president-of Cambridge. Disturbed by what he had heard, he put to use one of the most powerful tools at his command: He made the morality of slavery the subject of the annual Cambridge Latin essay contest.

Latin and Greek competitions were a centerpiece of British university life. To win a major one was like winning a Rhodes scholarship or the Heisman trophy today; the honor would be bracketed with your name for a lifetime. One entrant in the Latin contest was a 25-year-old divinity student named Thomas Clarkson. He had no previous interest in slavery whatever, he later wrote, but only “the wish of…obtaining literary honour.” Unexpectedly, however, as he read everything he could find, studied the papers of a slave trader who had recently died, and interviewed officers who had seen slavery firsthand in the Americas, Clarkson found himself overcome: “In the day-time I was uneasy. In the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eye-lids for grief…. I always slept with a candle in my room, that I might rise out of bed and put down such thoughts as might occur to me…conceiving that no arguments…should be lost in so great a cause.”

He won first prize. When it was awarded in June 1785, Clarkson read his essay aloud in Latin to an audience in Cambridge's elegant Senate House; then, his studies finished, already wearing the black garb of a deacon, he headed off toward London and a promising church career. But he found, to his surprise, that it was slavery itself that “wholly engrossed my thoughts…. Coming in sight of Wades Mill in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

Rome’s Good Because It’s Bad

This take on the TV series 'Rome' is different, and your students might like to debate it. I give only the first paragraph. Read the whole piece.

The pre-Christian is not to be missed.
By Gerald J. Russello
The most pro-Christian show on television doesn’t have a single Christian character in it — and it couldn’t have. Rome, the hit series now in its second season on HBO, is a surprising affirmation of the Western tradition. While it is packed with sex and violence, its (probably unintended) message is that Rome was desperate for Christianity.

Read the rest.

Why the Greeks could hear plays from the back row

A fuller account of the Greek and Roman theatre acoustics that I noted the other day. This account still confounds theatres and amphitheatres. From Nature.

Published online: 23 March 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070319-16

Why the Greeks could hear plays from the back row

An ancient theatre filters out low-frequency background noise.

Philip Ball

Modern actors can be heard clearly 60 metres away on a windless day.

The wonderful acoustics for which the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus is renowned may come from exploiting complex acoustic physics, new research shows.

The theatre, discovered under a layer of earth on the Peloponnese peninsula in 1881 and excavated, has the classic semicircular shape of a Greek amphitheatre, with 34 rows of stone seats (to which the Romans added a further 21).

Its acoustics are extraordinary: a performer standing on the open-air stage can be heard in the back rows almost 60 metres away. Architects and archaeologists have long speculated about what makes the sound transmit so well.

Now Nico Declercq and Cindy Dekeyser of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta say that the key is the arrangement of the stepped rows of seats. They calculate that this structure is perfectly shaped to act as an acoustic filter, suppressing low-frequency sound — the major component of background noise — while passing on the high frequencies of performers' voices1.

It's not clear whether this property comes from chance or design, Declercq says. But either way, he thinks that the Greeks and Romans appreciated that the acoustics at Epidaurus were something special, and copied them elsewhere.

Sound steps

In the first century BC the Roman authority on architecture, Vitruvius, implied that his predecessors knew very well how to design a theatre to emphasize the human voice. “By the rules of mathematics and the method of music,” he wrote, “they sought to make the voices from the stage rise more clearly and sweetly to the spectators' ears… by the arrangement of theatres in accordance with the science of harmony, the ancients increased the power of the voice.”

Later writers have speculated that the excellent acoustics of Epidaurus, built in the fourth century BC, might be due to the prevailing direction of the wind (which blows mainly from the stage to the audience), or might be a general effect of Greek theatre owing to the speech rhythms or the use of masks acting as loudspeakers. But none of this explains why a modern performer at Epidaurus, which is still sometimes used for performances, can be heard so well even on a windless day.

The acoustic cut-off frequency is right where you would want it

Declercq and Dekeyser suspected that the answer might be connected to the way sound reflects off corrugated surfaces. It has been known for several years now that these can filter sound waves to emphasize certain frequencies, just as microscopic corrugations on a butterfly wing reflect particular wavelengths of light. The sound-suppressing pads of ridged foam that can plastered on the walls of noisy rooms also take advantage of this effect.

Declercq has shown previously that the stepped surface of a Mayan ziggurat in Mexico can make handclaps or footsteps sound like bird chirps or rainfall (see 'Mystery of 'chirping' pyramid decoded'). Now he and Dekeyser have calculated how the rows of stone benches at Epidaurus affect sound bouncing off them, and find that frequencies lower than 500 hertz are more damped than higher ones.

Murmur murmur

“Most of the noise produced in and around the theatre was probably low-frequency noise,” the researchers say: rustling trees and murmuring theatre-goers, for instance. So filtering out the low frequencies improves the audibility of the performers' voices, which are rich in higher frequencies, at the expense of the noise. “The cut-off frequency is right where you would want it if you wanted to remove noise coming from sources that were there in ancient times,” says Declercq.

Declercq cautions that the presence of a seated audience would alter the effect, however, in ways that are hard to gauge. “For human beings the calculations would be very difficult because the human body is not homogeneous and has a very complicated shape,” he says.

Filtering out the low frequencies means that these are less audible in the spoken voice as well as in background noise. But that needn't be a problem, because the human auditory system can 'put back' some of the missing low frequencies in high-frequency sound.

“There is a neurological phenomenon called virtual pitch that enables the human brain to reconstruct a sound source even in the absence of the lower tones,” Declercq says. “This effect causes small loudspeakers to produce apparently better sound quality than you'd expect.”

Although many modern theatres improve audibility with loudspeakers, Declercq says that the filtering idea might still be relevant: “In certain situations such as sports stadiums or open-air theatres, I believe the right choice of the seat row periodicity or of the steps underneath the chairs may be important.”