Chester nine months on
I was in Chester on Friday; my first visit since MMC culminated with the festival on the August bank holiday weekend last year. I’ve had little time to work on Lucian recently, so it was exciting to be able to the return to the city he described so lovingly. What struck me, along with a crash of brightly-painted rhinos, was how my memory of the city’s topography and Lucian’s text had distorted the reality of the city itself. My sense of the relative size of different buildings and areas was all wrong.
Early in De laude Cestrie, Lucian casually remarks plerumque quod nec civis attendit, peregrinus appendit (‘often a stranger ponders what a citizen does not even consider’). And so it was with this visit. I was lucky enough to be showing a visitor round the city, and her fresh eyes discerned new questions.
Naturally my Lucian-lite tour took in the churches (St Peter’s, St Michael’s, St Werburgh’s, St John’s) and the walls. My obdurate visitor persisted in asking at every stage “so what was in the space between them?”. This is what I usually call a ‘difficult’ question (i. e. one I can’t answer), but the fact that I couldn’t answer it satisfactorily was itself revelatory. I’d become so attuned to Lucian’s ecclesiastical topography that I’d forgotten, to a certain extent, that Chester was not just a religious space, but also a commercial, residential and social environment.
A further surprise was how big the intra-mural area of Chester is. I wrote an article last summer that discussed a day Lucian describes in which he walked from St Werburgh’s to St Michael’s to hear mass, to St John’s to pray, then on to the castle to conduct some abbey business. The factor I now recognise I neglected to consider is the time this would have taken Lucian; these locations are a significant distance apart. Lucian’s progress between them could have taken two or three hours, a rate of progress any nineteenth-century flâneur would regard with pride.
My experience, and Lucian’s remark, contain a broader lesson, I think; the lesson that we, as academic citizens, must look to share our work with anyone interested. Strangers can pose and answer important questions which are all to easy to neglect. Those hostile to the idea of ‘impact’ would do well to ask not what they can do for the public, but what the public can do for them.
Fecunde unum debriat quod alteri de facili profluebat (‘What readily flows forth from one, completely intoxicates another’). So Lucian remarks just before the words I have been discussing here. This remark seems just as true, and for that reason I must thank all the peregrini who came to the Festival last August, and particularly the peregrina who accompanied me on Friday. I am ‘completely intoxicated’ (or as we would now say, extremely grateful).
Tags: Lucian