Thursday 01-02-2018 - 09:51

Arved Werner Kirschbaum, Academic Affairs Officer of the Classics Society, summarises the most recent of their bi-weekly talk series: 'Numeracy in Ancient Greece and Rome' by Prof. Cuomo.

The Classics Society kicked off their bi-weekly series of talks' second round with a trip to Ancient Greece and Rome via its numeracy, courtesy of Prof. Cuomo. The aim of these talks is to show off the diversity Classics has to offer and why it can rightly be called the first inter-disciplinary science by recruiting speakers from both the Durham University Classics Department and other institutions. The talks are welcoming and open to all and we encourage our speakers to make them as accessible as possible. Our first series last term proved very popular and received some fantastic feedback from Biology, Chemistry, and English students (amongst others).

But now to last week’s talk. Speaking on ‘Numeracy in Ancient Greece and Rome’,  Prof. Cuomo started her talk with a warning issued by National Numeracy, a UK-based independent charity that monitors the country’s ever-declining numeracy levels. Straight away Prof. Cuomo established her upcoming book’s links to the modern world and why she thinks the study of numeracy is relevant and necessary today. Prof. Cuomo pointed out that the history of numeracy is vastly understudied, particularly in Greece and Rome – an odd phenomenon for these areas of the ancient world, which traditionally gain most attention from classical scholars.

Prof. Cuomo’s talk revolved around a sample of questions and some of the preliminary results gained from research for her book. Throughout she expressed the viewpoint that numeracy, like literacy, is a spectrum, defined as the ability to count, calculate, and measure, and that people tend to be stronger at different skills within the spectrum. Crucially, the level of ability does not interest her as much as how these different skills are affected by their context. Prof. Cuomo demonstrated this effect through the theories pioneered by Jean Lave, who in a 1988 study showed that grocery shoppers had an easier time doing mathematical computations whilst shopping than they had doing those same problems on paper. To underpin this, Prof. Cuomo showed a clip from HBO’s hit show ‘The Wire’. In it one of the main characters, Wallace, is asked by his younger sister for help with a maths problem. He does so by recontextualising the problem into a situation the two of them are faced with every day – the selling of drugs.

With a captive audience, Prof. Cuomo could count on their participation when she demonstrated how an ancient Greek abacus worked.  She drew a simple diagram on the whiteboard and used magnets to simulate counting tokens. She then asked the audience to give her a three-digit plus two-digit addition. By adding 81 to 423 she showed that the abacus made use of something called ‘subitising’. Subitising is a quirk of human brains, which allows for the accurate assessment of a small number of objects, without needing to count them. The abacus was built in a way that harnesses this effect through counting in steps of five. This made the addition of big numbers for tax or trade purposes easier, since the calculation becomes more about the gesture and motion memory than juggling big numbers in one’s head.

Of course, Prof. Cuomo did not only make use of demonstrations and modern evidence but ancient evidence as well. She compared Athenian inscriptions from the fifth century BCE with some from the fourth. The difference was immediately obvious even to those who had never studied Greek symbols before. The fifth century inscriptions bore a marked difference in their layout to those from the fourth. While the latter’s numbers disappeared in more or less a literal wall of text, the fifth century numerical symbols were displayed in orderly columns spaced apart from the other text. The fifth century BCE is well-known among Classicists and Ancient Historians as the height of the Athenian Empire and with it Athenian-style radical democracy. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the prominent placement of the numbers is to facilitate accountability through increased accessibility, allowing a sizeable margin of people to decipher and understand the numbers. This hints that understanding numbers was a more necessary and thus more common skill in the ancient world than it is today, something National Numeracy would no doubt have something to say about.

Now then, whilst I could go on and on about every single detail of Prof. Cuomo’s this article is already long enough. What I hope though is that it showed you what I meant when I called these talks accessible and Classics the first-interdisciplinary science. Below I have put the dates of our upcoming talks and we would love to welcome you there. Questions are always welcome and should you want some more information please check out our Facebook page.

 

01/02/18: Dr. Giusti from Warwick University.
'Virgil’s Dido at the End of Patriarchy' in CG85 (Chemistry department)

12/02/18: Dr. Russell from Durham University.
'The view from the street: 3D modelling as a research tool for Roman architecture'

27/02/18: Dr. Woolmer from Durham University.
'"The king is dead, long live the king": Successor and Succession Narratives on the Sarcophagus of Ahiram'

13/03/18: Dr. Horky from Durham University.
'Cosmos in the Ancient World: Reflections upon a Durham Annual Research Seminar'

All talks will start at 7:30 pm in the Classics Department (unless otherwise stated) and the doors open at 7:15 pm