Patrick Comerford
Some of the best street art in Oxford is actually not visible from the streets but is found under the bridges. I came across one work this week that is inspired by a scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film, but that also appeals to everyone with an interest in Latin and the classics or in the history of radical movements and agrarian agitation.
It was a bright sunny afternoon, with clear blue skies, and I went for a long walk through Christ Church Meadow in Oxford, by the banks of the river, before crossing the small footbridge to continue walking along on the north bank at Boathouses Walk, where most of the college boathouses are.
The most famous stretch of river in Oxford is probably the section between Folly Bridge and Iffley Lock. It is part of the River Thames, but at this section it is popularly known as the Isis. The college rowing crews train there and there are two major events each year: Torpids in late February and Eights in mid-May. Scullers and rowers were out on the river, training earnestly, with small tour boats making their way along through them, and there were geese, ducks and a family of swans too.
But my walk came to an abrupt end where the Isis meets the Cherwell, and I decided to retrace my steps, crossed Folly Bridge and returned to the river to walk along the towpath on the south bank, which runs for 1.5 miles past a couple of boathouses, moorings with houseboats, narrowboats and barges, the secluded Longbridges Nature Park and on towards Iffley Lock.
I never got as far as Iffley Lock or Isis Farmhouse, this time, because I was stopped in my tracks along the Thames Path by the goose art under Donnington Bridge. The Oxford Canal Mural Project has organised a series of artworks under bridges along the waterways around Oxfordshire, and the space under Donnington Bridge is frequently updated by street artists, with vibrant nature and animal motifs painted on the concrete pillars.
Donnington Bridge crosses the River Thames or Isis and the Thames Path towpath, between Iffley Lock to the south and Osney to the north, and connects Abingdon Road and Iffley Road. The bridge was opened on 22 October 1962, but there may have been a river crossing at or near this point in Roman times, before Oxford existed, linking to the Roman road from Dorchester to Alchester. There was nothing there after Roman times, and until the mid-20th century it was only possible to cross the river at this point by ferry.
Previous images under the bridge have included one depicting an evil-looking Tony Blair war-mongering and greedy for money and oil in Iraq. A new graffiti mural appeared under Donnington Bridge within the past two or three month and is the creation of a local artist Mani (the Big Orange M). It includes geese and references to the Roman presence here with allusions to The Life of Brian.
The street art there is said to have been started to poke fun at an Oxford scholar from across the river who disliked The Life of Brian, which has inspired a long list of ‘silly goose’ puns. The mural also includes the fourth stanza from a song about agrarian agitation that developed as a response to the Enclosure Acts:
The crime is great, in man or woman,
Who steals a goose from a common;
But surely ’tis a worse abuse,
To steal the common from the goose.
The song or poem is a powerful critique of the Enclosure Acts that privatised shared public lands. It lampoons the hypocrisy of the law and how it severely punishes the poor for stealing a goose, while allowing wealthy landowners to steal the common land itself.
From the 1700s on, wealthy landlords used legislation to fence off traditional, shared village pastures and forests to turn them into private property. Rural people relied on these commons to graze their livestock, to gather firewood, and to survive, but were stripped of their livelihoods while landed families were protected by the law while claiming communal resources for themselves.
The poem about the goose and the common has many variations, and these lines first appeared in the Monthly Magazine in 1810, and later in the London Express in 1848. But the original version is attributed to the Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864). Today, the poem has evolved into a famous anti-capitalist folk song and a rallying cry for activists protecting public spaces.
Other lettering on the mural hint at grievances about mooring rights along this stretch of the river – ‘Honk, Honk, Honk’ and ‘No Moorings’ with its ending crossed out to read ‘No Moor Hens’.
At the north end of the mural, the Latin saying Romanes eunt domus CCCXC BC has been altered purposefully or corrected to read Romani ite domum CCCXC BC.
‘Romanes eunt domus’ is an intentionally incorrect Latin phrase that translates as ‘People called 'Romanes' they go the house?’ It is the famous, grammatically butchered graffiti from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
The sketch draws on John Cleese’s time as a teacher, when he taught Latin to 10-year-olds at Saint Peter’s, a preparatory school in Weston-super-Mare. He said the sketch was inspired by an occasion when he wrote on the blackboard a number of times a word that he as a teacher had misspelled, demonstrating his even-handedness.
The centurion is concerned not with Brian’s act of vandalism, but with his inept Latin grammar. Once Brian has arrived at the correct answer, the centurion imposes a grammar school punishment – writing lines – instead of the punishment a vandal or rebel might expect. Instead of punishing Brian for writing the graffito, the centurion instructs him to repeat the act 100 times, using good grammar.
In the film, Brian is an anti-Roman agitator who is caught painting ‘Romans go home’ on the palace walls. Instead of punishing him, a pedantic Roman centurion forces him to conjugate his verbs and decline his nouns – treating a public execution like a strict classroom lesson in Latin.
Romani ite domum is the corrected Latin phrase for the graffito Romanes eunt domus. The scene features John Cleese as a centurion and Graham Chapman as Brian, at that point a would-be member of the revolutionary People’s Front of Judea. To prove himself a worthy candidate for membership, Brian has to daub the anti-Roman slogan ‘Romans go home’ on the walls of Pontius Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem, under cover of darkness, written in Latin for the Romans to read.
He completes the phrase Romanes eunt domus when he is caught by the centurion. Brian is terrified and expects to be killed on the spot. Instead, the centurion corrects Brian’s grammatical errors like traditional Latin teacher, for he has written ‘People called Romanes they go the house’.
John Cleese’s centurion forces Brian to use the proper imperative verb form and accusative case and to write the correct phrase, Romani ite domum, 100 times, threatening to ‘cut [his] balls off’ if he has not done so by sunrise.
Brian does so, covering nearly every surface of the plaza with the graffiti while he is supervised by two guards. When he finishes the task the following morning, one soldier says ‘don’t do it again’ and leaves with his comrade. Just as they leave, three other soldiers come round the corner and see the graffiti. Brian realises his position and races off, chased by the soldiers. In subsequent scenes, various Roman soldiers can be seen erasing the seditious graffiti.
A tutorial in Latin in onty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
The exchange on the case of domus is worth repeating:
Centurion: ‘Domus’? Nominative? ‘Go home’? This is motion towards. Isn’t it, boy?
Brian: Dative, sir!
[The centurion draws his sword and holds it to Brian’s throat]
Brian: Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! Oh, the ... accusative! Accusative! ‘Domum’, sir! ‘Ad domum’!
Centurion: Except that ‘domus’ takes the ...?
Brian: The locative, sir!
Centurion: Which is ...?!
Brian: ‘Domum’.
Some Latin scholars may point out that the centurion is mistaken in accepting Brian’s answer of the locative case, although the result was correct. The locative case indicates presence at or in a particular place, such as a city, town, or small island. The locative of domus, meaning a house or home, would be domi. But motion toward a place or thing was indicated using the accusative of motion towards, domum being the allative construction correctly used in the final formulation of the graffito.
This confusion over the use of the locative case is an example of how even people who are well-educated in Latin occasionally err when it comes to grammatical details. But the sketch may be incomprehensible to many today, as Latin is no longer taught in schools in the way my generation learned it.
Beneath the Latin ‘homework’, tucked into a discreet corner of the assemblage is the date ‘CCCXC BC’. Not that the Romans would have used the date ‘CCCXC BC’ for the year 390 BC, but what happened that year? What did the Romans do for us then? 390 BC is four centuries or more before the supposed setting for The Life of Brian, and the Romans certainly did not have their eyes set on Jerusalem – nor were they contemplating the road from Dorchester to Alchester almost 2,500 years.
In the year 390 BC, the Roman Republic suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of the Allia against the Senones, a Gallic tribe led by chieftain Brennus. The Gauls subsequently captured and sacked Rome, profoundly shaping the trajectory of the Roman military and state.
Winston Churchill once said, ‘I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.’ I did Latin at school from 12 to 17 in my secondary schools, sat an honours paper in Latin at the Leaving Certificate (the Irish equivalent of A Levels) in 1969, and I still remember reading Caesar, Ovid, Pliny and Horace, as well as the difficulty of wrestling with the finer points of Latin grammar.
Many, many years later, I went on to do some post-graduate work in liturgical Latin in the Institutum Liturgicum at Ealing Abbey in 2012 in association with the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven.
But I never thought I would have my most amusing tutorial in Latin in Oxford, under a bridge, on the town path along the Isis, surrounded by geese, house boats, rowers and sculls, thanks to John Cleese and Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
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