John Barton and Thucydides

As part of a busy weekend of culture, that included Ecclesiazusae and Medea, I went on Sunday 12 February to see John Barton's The War That Still Goes On, a synthesis of Thucydides and Plato, performed by the RSC.

I was familiar with the work from a 1991 version, entitled The War That Never Ends, broadcast by the BBC in the immediate run-up to the first Gulf War, and somewhat misleadingly reported in Simon Goldhill's Love, Sex and Tragedy, but the work was apparently originally written and produced in the late 1960s. Thucydides narrates the history of the Great Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC, and other characters act out certain key scenes. Scenery and staging are at a minimum - in 1991 actors spoke their lines in a bare studio, in 2006 they sit around a stage and workshop the play.

It's an interesting work, and I have used it in the past to help bring Thucydides alive to students, though one has to be careful with it. The adaptation is very free. Barton can sometimes be a bit indifferent to chronology, presenting events in an order that seems to him dramatically right, rather than the order in which they actually happened. For instance, the Mytilene debate is placed after Brasidas' expedition to the Thracian Chersonese. And I have always suspected that Thucydides' opening lines, "I doubt this war will be finished in my lifetime ...", indicate a belief on Barton's part that because Thucydides did not complete his history, he did not survive the war (in fact, there are clear references to the end of the war in Thucydides' work, even though his main narrative does not get to the end).

This version differed from that I had seen before in being longer. The 1991 version breaks off after the destruction of the Sicilian expedition. The 2006 performance contains a more complete end, including the trial and execution of Socrates (something Thucydides may well not have lived to see). My suspicion is that this is something restored from the original 1960s version. Also of note is that sections previously narrated by Thucydides have now been give to others in the cast to act out - this may be the result of Barton rethinking. There was a good cast, including Timothy West as Socrates, and Clive Francis as Thucydides - but it could, of course, not match the stellar cast assembled in 1991, which included Ben Kingsley, David Calder, Don Henderson, Andrew Keir, Jonathan Hyde - the cream of the classical theatre of the early 1990s.

And the work remains relevant; indeed, when the Athenian ambassadors speak to the Melians about how Melos should capitulate because Athens has the power to do what she wants, it seems more relevant to 2006 than to 1991. Many other characters articulate issues with contemporary relevance. The Spartan King Archidamus has a speech near the beginning about how war is not a good thing, not to be entered into lightly, and the consequences are often unforeseen - and as I watched it again I wished that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had been exposed to this.

After the performance, there was a debate chaired by John Snow, with Paul Cartledge, Germaine Greer, Helena Kennedy and Haleh Afshar. A few points were raised that I thought interesting.

Germaine Greer had just come back from Bangladesh, where she had been researching the war of 1971. She had discovered that, though stories were spread that many women in Bangladesh who had survived being raped by Pakistani soldiers, the truth was that the vast majority of raped women were murdered. Her point was that the suffering of women is often played down in comparison with what happens to men. Her implication was that, when Thucydides talks of men in a city being killed, and women and children sold into slavery, he is doing the same, and the true fate of those women would be death. Whilst acknowledging some of Greer's point, she overlooks the economic factor. Women in Bangladesh were of no economic value to Pakistani troops - but women in Melos were of economic value to Athenian troops, as they could be sold into slavery. People tend not to destroy what they can make money from.

Paul Cartledge made the point about the Peloponnesian War being shaped by Thucydides, that it was the historian who decided that the conflicts between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 were a single war, not two wars broken by a period of uneasy peace. Again, there's some force to that, but I think it overprivileges Thucydides to say that this was entirely his creation - I have always felt that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, produced in 411 BC, makes more sense if the common perception was of a war that had lasted twenty years rather than one which had lasted less than five.

Haleh Afshar made a point about disinterest in voting, and how in some places people had voted enthusiastically the first time they got the opportunity, but less so on subsequent occasions. This, of course, is something that the Athenians had to contend with - until generous assembly pay was introduced, the democracy had difficulty getting enough people to form a quorum to come to the Assembly. Afshar's point that people often would prefer to get on with their own lives, farming, or doing whatever made them money, than vote, though contested by Helena Kennedy, is recognized in ancient Athens.

The panel ended by saying that the message of Barton's play was that of Socrates, to 'Think straight'. But if the fate of Socrates tells us anything, it's that people don't like to be told to think straight. Socrates, if Plato's dialogues are any indication, went around pointing out to people that believing certain notions necessarily led to accepting other ideas they might find rather less palatable. And in the end, the Athenian people got so fed up of this that they killed him for it.

2006 UCL Classics Play

Euripides, Medea, UCL Classical Drama Society, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 11th February 2006

I have long harboured the view that, on the whole, student and youth theatre doesn't do well with Greek tragedy, a viewed formed by some truly awful stagings of Oedipus Rex I was subjected to around the turn of the century. Recent productions seem determined to strip me of my prejudices. First there was Oxford's excellent Orestes. And now along comes Graham Kirby's self-assured production of Medea, under the auspices of the newly-formed UCL Classical Drama Society.

Kirby's production design is simple, yet subtle and effective. A bare room is suggested with a couple of walls and some minimal furniture. An architrave shows scenes from Jason's legend, such as the battle with the Hydra, or the murder of Pelias. Clever lighting contributes to the mood.

Kirby has provided a new translation of the play. One presumes, given the pedigree of the production, that it is true to the Greek (bar reasonable additions such as including the name of Creon's daughter, Glauke, which does not feature in Euripides' text). More importantly, it is an excellent piece of English writing. The lines flow with poetry, and one hopes that Kirby will be able to make this translation available for others to stage.

But of course a production of Medea must stand and fall on the central performance. Here the there is a pure treat, as Dena Arya is incandescent as Medea. From the moment the play opens, as she stands with her back to the audience, bewailing her fate in Greek (only when she switches to English does she show her face), it is clear that something interesting is about to happen. Clad in black slip, housecoat and boots, she is a classic 1970s bitch, such as the likes of Kate O'Mara, Faye Dunaway and Glenda Jackson have built careers on, the sort of fascinating woman that an audience should abhor, but will find themselves rooting for. This is exactly how Medea should be (it is, after all, this very quality that sucks the Chorus into its complicity with her). Arya is careful never to go over the top - she is passionate, but always believable. And she is always worth watching, even when someone else is involved in a long speech, whether it be the killing looks thrown Jason's way, or the almost sexual enjoyment she takes in hearing the fates of Glauke and Creon. Bar a short clip on The Late Show, I was not fortunate enough to see Diana Rigg's performance in 1993/94, which Kirby takes as the gold standard for the role. But I can say that Arya's is one of the best Medeas that I have seen, and definitely better than Fiona Shaw's boggle-eyed interpretation from 2001. Her final departure (perhaps the only deus ex machina in Euripidean tragedy that makes perfect sense) is presented as apotheosis, a notion I first saw in Phylidda Lloyd's 1991 production at Manchester's Royal Exchange.

It is hardly a slight to say that none of the rest of the cast quite measure up to Arya. But, after taking a while to warm up in the role, Adam Greves as Jason very nearly gives as good as he gets. Certainly, his performance underlines the fact that, for all his apparent reasonableness and rationality, Jason is an arse of the highest order. His arguments that he has chosen to marry again out of a desire to protect Medea and her children are so transparently self-serving and specious that it is almost unnecessary for Medea to tear them to shreds.

The other performance that deserves noting is Laurie Wilks as the Nurse. Kirby warns in his foreword to the programme that "elements of what might be called 'camp' have crept in", and so the audience is presented with a cross-dressing nurse, played by a man in woman's clothing, with the Tutor played by a woman dressed as a man. It shouldn't work. But it does, because Wilks imposes himself on the role with such utter conviction that the audience has no choice but to suspend any disbelief. All trace of camp are utterly banished, along with any inappropriate humour. The cross-dressing is exploited for one joke, but that is left to the curtain call.

The more naturalistic a production of Greek tragedy is, the more problematic the Chorus can be. In this staging, the Chorus are clad in black leotards and strips of white gauze. They enter masked, and periodically over the rest of the play they remove and replace their masks. Presumably there was meant to be a pattern to that, but I'm afraid I couldn't quite work out why. Yet, just when I was about to write off the Chorus as an element of the production that didn't quite work, that they didn't quite react enough to the events they were observing, suddenly the choreography gave real power to the way the actual (offstage) infanticide was played out. And I should add that my partner, whilst thinking that the Chorus could have looked better, was much more impressed by them than I was, considereding their speech and choreography to have been excelelnt throughout.

One might find a few elements to suggest didn't work. It might not have been necessary to underline the Messengers' account of Creon and Glauke's deaths with a mime of it from the actors, though other productions in the past (such as the Royal Exchange one mentioned above) have thought that it was. And the costumes of the Messengers, as typical Cockney barrow boys a la My Fair Lady might be considered a bit odd.

But then one thinks of Arya's performance or Kirby's translation, and nothing much else matters. Perhaps it's only the Oedipus Rex that students can't do. I await being proved wrong on that score with interest.

King's Greek Play 2006

Aristophanes, Women Take Power (Ecclesiazusae), King's College London Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre

Performance seen: February 9th 2006

Last year, as I reported, University College London chose to produce Aristophanes' Knights, one of the comic writer's earlier plays, before he hit the peak of his form. This year, King's have chosen to stage Ecclesiazusae (usually translated as 'Women At The Assembly'), one of his last plays from when he had, to be frank, gone off the boil a bit. It is a play that presents certain challenges. Aristophanes was moving at a brisk trot down the road that led from Old to New Comedy, which creates something that is up to a point neither one genre or the other (hence Ecclesiazusae is sometimes labelled Middle Comedy). And the structure rather falls apart in the second half in the way that some earlier Aristophanes (e.g. Lysistrata) threatens to but never quite does.

In any case, I wasn't sure what to expect of Aristophanes in Greek - up to now all the Athenian drama I've seen in the original language has been tragedy. It's certainly the case that my usual instinct with Aristophanes, that one should throw out the actual text, does not apply when presenting in Greek. But would the whole thing be funny if one can't follow what is actually said, and is reliant upon surtitles?

The King's production's solution to the structural problem is, to a degree, to try to make a virtue of it, by emphasizing the episodic nature, though, in contrast to previous King's Greek plays, there is no interval, perhaps in case this would make the play too disjointed. I am unsure whether this tries the audience's patience a little too much.

In other ways, however, an attempt is made to grant unity to the play. The disappearance of the central character Praxagora in the middle is dealt with by finding ways of reminding the audience that she has created the society in which the later incidents play out, either by hanging her portrait, or by (slightly oddly) having her silently arm-wrestling, or by giving her some of the Chorus' lines in the final scene.

The solution to the language problem is to turn to the heritage of the silent movie. Rather than surtitles that summarize 50-70% of the dialogue, a small number of captions are used, as in pre-sound cinema. The surtitles are integrated into the performance as a whole, rather than being an additional distraction from the action (with one joke where the captions are in Greek and the actor speaks English). Something is of course lost in such an approach, but it would probably be lost anyway. What is gained is an increased emphasis on the visual aspects of the production, with the spoken text becoming like the music score, an accompaniment to what we are seeing, rather than its raison d'etre. Inevitably this pushes the production towards greater use of slapstick comedy. This shows particularly in the choreography of the Chorus, from whose ranks are drawn minor roles such as the Women who discuss with Praxagora how to take over the Athenian Assembly. The captions are also used to distinguish between the more traditional sections of the play, that strongly feature the Chorus, where the captions have visual illustrations and are arranged to look like artworks in their own right, and the more 'modern' parts that eliminate the Chorus, where traditional text-only captions are used, often with the sort of frames familiar from silents.

The silent movie motif is repeated in the costuming, where Chaplin and the Keystone Kops are referenced. This then leads to a 1920s theme in the production design, which seems to have found Dadaism via Art Deco (a style similar to that used by UCL in their very successful Lysistrata from 1999). Thus one sometimes has the feeling with the King's production of watching not only a silent movie, but a Surrealist one, where, for instance, the facial hair sported by the women as they disguise themselves as men (disguises also indicated by the simple device of wearing trousers, removed - offstage - when the disguises are dropped) apparently influenced by Salvador Dali. I should not have been surprised had the production chosen to rearrange the order of the later episodes of the play - the episodic nature certainly permits such an approach.

It might be pushing the 1920s theme a bit too far to see in Praxagora's army uniform and the military march of the Chorus past her a reference to Mussolini, though other more recent fascist dictatorships are surely intended. But clearly the motif is at the forefront of the one moment of utter comic genius, the staging of the Hag scene, where a hag and a young girl, and then later two hags (two completely different hags from the first in the text, but sensibly this is reduced to two hags overall), compete for the sexual favours of a young man (according to Praxagora's new order, the old and ugly must be sexually serviced before the young and beautiful). Brilliantly, the Greek text here is set to the music of George Gershwin, and the whole scene just works.

That is probably the most successful idea that production has. Some other ideas are not quite so effective - for instance, in a play where women disguising themselves as men is central to the plot, it seems to me distracting to have some of the unequivocally male roles played by women. The lack of props weakens the scene where a householder is getting his property ready for communal division - the miming of movement of household objects doesn't quite work. And the problem of how to represent Blepyrus' onstage defecation is never quite solved. But it is better to have ideas and for some of them not to work than to have no ideas at all.

As is ever the way with this sort of production, some of the performances are better than others. I shan't single out the less good, but Nicola McCabe's confident approach to Praxagora deserves mention.

Overall, I should say that this is an interesting staging, which tries to deal innovatively with the problems of presenting comedy in Greek, and of this particular play. It will certainly remain in my mind, even if, on the whole, the production delivered mild amusement rather than belly laughs. At the very least all concerned deserve praise for trying something a little different.

Archiving

Tidying some old posts on another blog, I came across a couple of posts with pictures of objects relevant to this blog, so I thought I'd post them here just for reference.

First of all, something on this picture, now in the Guildhall Art Gallery.



Clytemnestra After the Murder (1882), by Hon. John Collier (1850-1939).

Most reproductions don't quite catch how much blood she has on her - this does become a lot more clear if you see the original. That red isn't part of the dress' pattern.

When I first posted the picture, there was a debate over the femininity, or lack of it, of the model for Clytemnestra. I subsequently come across the following in the Guildhall Art Gallery's booklet on Victorian Pictures:

While this dramatic image generally reflects Collier's interest in the theatre, it may have direct origins in a performance of Aeschylus's Agamemnon given on June 3 1880 by Oxford undergraduates at Balliol ... In this the part of Clytemnestra was played by a man - perhaps the source for Collier's unsettling, muscular figure.

So, there you are.

Then, here is the Great Torc from the Snettisham Hoards, which is on display in Room 50 of the British Museum:



An article on the Hoards from Current Archaeology can be found here, whilst here and here are two pages from the British Museum's website, one on the Hoards and one on the Great Torc.

(Click on the photos for sources and more information.)

A man called Boris

So that was Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome. I've not in the past had a very high opinion of the MP for Henley-on-Thames - he's tended to come across as a bit of a buffoon, and growing up in the years 1979-1997 have left me naturally antagonistic towards the Conservative Party. However, I may need to reassess my judgment of him. I don't agree with everything he says in this interview, but he talks more sense about Higher Education than just about any Education Minister or Shadow in the past twenty-five years.

But what of Boris the television historian? Let's start with the less good. It has been pointed out that Johnson takes quite a traditional view of the Roman empire. But he read Greats in Balliol College Oxford in the early 1980s, and has spent the subsequent time as a journalist and politician rather than at the cutting edge of scholarship, so what do you expect? He does have a good selection of leading academics as talking heads and advisors, but no doubt had the final say.

Of more concern is the way soundbites tend to give an over-simplified impression. Johnson rightly points out that the Roman empire did not have to worry about democracy, but that does not mean, as he goes on to suggest, that the emperor didn't need to worry about the common people of Gaul or elsewhere. No government, be it democracy or military dictatorship, can rule without the overall consent of those ruled. That consent may be obtained by various methods, of which fear is one. But any ruler who thinks that he can ignore public opinion entirely will face the fate of Charles I or Louis XVI.

The canard that the Romans were devoid of racism reappears. You only have to read Juvenal's Third Satire, and the vile racial slurs against the Greeks therein, to realize this is utter nonsense. What was different in the Roman empire was that the dynamic of race operated differently, and it was not such a bar to progress through society as it has been in most European empires. (As Niall Ferguson has shown, some people within the British empire tried to emulate this, and educated Indians, Jamaicans, etc., but were thwarted by the attitudes of ex-pats in the colonies, who imposed a glass ceiling. The result was the worst possible situation, a highly educated native elite with no outlet within the imperial structures for their ambition.) However, as Johnson knows, one had to be careful how much one allowed one's origins to show. One progressed within the empire by being Roman, and too much African-ness or Greekness could be an impediment. Even the African emperor, Septimius Severus, was said to have sent his sister away from Rome because her inability to speak Latin was an embarrassment. (I don't actually believe this story - a daughter of a family with senatorial connections, and therefore potentially a senator's wife, would surely have a decent education in the Latin language - but the important fact is that the story was told.)

Sometimes, Johnson tries to pull a fast one in front of his audience. Much play is made by him that the empire was run by a mere 150 officials in the imperial household. But, as Sander Evans tries to point out to Johnson, this is only a portion of the administrative structure of the empire - to this one needs to add the local elites in the provinces whom the emperor got to do much of the tax-collecting, etc., for him. Undoubtedly the bureaucracy of the Roman empire was smaller than that of modern states, if for no other reason than that it had far less to do, but Johnson has exaggerated to emphasize his point. Similarly he overlooks the subtle but important distinction between worship of a living emperor, which emperors tended to disdain, and sacrifices to the emperor's genius or numen (spirit).

But to a degree these are quibbles. Johnson's basic argument is that the EU attempts to unite Europe as Rome once did, but is failing. Johnson is not, at heart, a Eurosceptic, despite attempts by both pro- and anti-Europeans to paint him as such. He clearly embraces the ideals of European unity and peace, but is sceptical about whether this can actually be achieved. What he believes is that, in order to understand why the EU is failing, one must understand why Rome succeeded. At the end of his investigation, his conclusion is that Rome is not necessarily the best model for European integration. He also rightly draws attention to the problems of getting nations to buy into a pan-European ideal when they still venerate such nationalist heroes as Arminius, Vercingetorix or Boudicca.

I pretty much agree with this. It is all too easy for modern westerners to be naive about the Roman empire, to cherry-pick the good bits and to overlook the less pleasant aspects, such as the fact that it was a military dictatorship. It is to Johnson's credit that he resists such an approach, and suggests that the Roman empire came as a package, and worked because of the unsavoury aspects as well as the attractive ones.

There are a couple of points that Johnson misses that would strengthen his case. Where the EU attempts to create a 'European' culture that stands apart from any one national unit, Rome exported the culture of one single part of Europe to the rest of the continent. More recent attempts to place one single culture in a hegemonic position in Europe have been vigorously resisted by other nations. (Many still resist the EU on the assumption that it is a cloak for French, or German, control of Europe.) It is also worth noting that Roman citizenship gained much of its appeal from its exclusivity. It was achievable, but, until the emperor Caracalla enfranchised every free adult male in AD 212 (as a tax raising action as much as anything), it was not held by everyone, and so it had prestige. EU citizenship, granted to anyone born in Europe, lacks that.

The plea for Turkish admittance into Europe with which Johnson ends his programme is strictly speaking off topic, and of course is something in which Johnson has a special interest (regrettably I only saw a bit of his programme on the recent Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy). But it's also the best bit of the programme. Though Johnson is more dismissive than I would be of continuity of romanitas in the west after Romulus Augustulus' deposition, he is entirely right to draw attention to the fact that the Roman empire continued in the east for another thousand years, and this section allows Charlotte Roueche to make sound points about the western attempt to dismiss the claims of the eastern empire through the invention of terms like 'Byzantine' - western Europe wanted exclusive claim to the inheritance of Rome. As Johnson highlights, the Ottoman empire also claimed the inheritance of Rome, as almost every European nation has. That in itself is not an argument for admitting Turkey into the EU, but Johnson makes a passionate (and right) case that excluding Turkey is based on racism and ignorance, and a retrograde step for Europe. (One wonders whether Johnson intended any irony by recording his vox pop segments showing prejudices about Turkey being illiberal and barbaric in Germany.)

Overall, I would give this programme a B. Pretty good, but not fantastic. But when many television history programmes struggle to achieve a D, that's not too bad, and I certainly wouldn't object to Johnson doing more programmes like this. Let's hope his political career continues to give him time to do so.

"Is this the face ...?"

I've just caught up with last Thursday's Twenty Minutes from BBC Radio 3. In the performance break of a concert focussing on 'Shostakovich and His Heroes', Bettany Hughes, everybody's first choice these days for Greek history, gets to talk some more on Helen of Troy. Fortunately she is not looking at the evidence for the 'historical' Helen, as she has in her book and recent Channel 4 programme (my thoughts on the programme can be found here), but pursuing what to my mind is the more profitable seam of Helen-as-icon, in this case in the artistic tradition of Britain.

The most interesting bit was David Lan talking about how he had dealt with the problems of bringing Helen on stage in a production of Dr Faustus. As Lan notes, Helen represents an ideal, the most beautiful woman in the world. Represented solely by the written word, the reader can construct her appearance according to their own taste in female beauty. But once you put an actress on stage, you have something concrete and real, that may not accord with the audience's expectations. For me, this is most obvious in Michael Cacoyannis' otherwise excellent The Trojan Women, where Irene Pappas' Helen matches far less well with my idea of what a beautiful woman should look like than Vanessa Redgrave's radiant Andromache.

One interesting way of solving this is actually to be found in a Doctor Who story, 'The Myth Makers', where Helen is spoken of, but never actually appears. Lan's solution in Dr Faustus is ingenious. Instead of bringing Helen on stage, he had Faustus catch sight of his own reflection.

You can still catch the programme for the next twenty-four hours on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3.shtml

Robert Graves - is he all bad?

Browsing the Internet, I came across this piece in the Times Literary Supplement, by my former colleague Nick Lowe. Written with his usual engaging exuberance, it is ostensibly a review of Nigel Spivey's Songs on Bronze: Greek Myths Retold, but spends quite a lot of its time in an attack on Robert Graves' The Greek Myths. A shorter review in The Guardian by Mary Beard also takes a swipe at Graves. I'm grateful for Lowe's observations on Graves' use of assistants, which will make me reassess translations such as the Suetonius he did for Penguin Classics, but I'm not sure I agree with his judgment upon The Greek Myths.

Both Lowe and Beard draw attention to Graves' attempts to explain the myths. These are coloured by being the work of a man who grew up when some people (for the most part males with romantic notions about the 'noble savage') genuinely believed in the idea of a prehistoric matriarchy, swept away by patriarchal structures. They are, of course, nonsense, and even as a schoolboy I knew to give them no credence. However, by focussing on Graves' commentaries, Beard and Lowe give the impression that they represent most people's experience of the work. I'm not at all sure that this is true.

I rather suspect that most non-academics' experience of The Greek Myths centres not on the interpretations of myth, but upon the narratives of the legends. Many readers, indeed, have no choice but to experience the work in this way, as they will be reading one of the condensed versions (e.g. this), where the abridgment is achieved by the simple expedient of leaving out all the explanatory material. Taken on this level, one can see why someone like Margaret Atwood might describe The Greek Myths as 'crucial'. Because there really isn't anything else quite like it for providing a narrative summary of the mythological stories, together with variant versions, unless you go back to the works of the Edwardian A.R. Hope Moncrieff or the Victorian Thomas Bulfinch, both of whom tend to record only one 'canonical' version. Despite certain oddities of presentation, such as the fate of Agamemnon being dealt with before the chapters on the Trojan War, rather than after, as one might expect, Graves has an accessibility the earlier works lack.

For my own part, I would probably these days first consult Cassell's Dictionary of Classical Mythology by Jenny March, or the Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (a translation and abridgment of Pierre Grimal's Dictionnaire de la Mythologie Grecque et Romaine) if I needed to do any mythological research. But both of those, as Lowe notes, are alphabetic reference works. I would soon turn to Graves for narrative, and all three books were within reach as I was writing my review of Gemmell's Troy.

If Graves is ever to be replaced, then it needs to be by a work that matches or improves upon what Graves does well, providing narratives of mythology with all variants, and the original sources (even if Graves lifted those from elsewhere), ideally placed into a historical context, so one knows which sources are earliest, and discards what Graves does badly (i.e. the commentary), and does all this in a mass market edition. I've not read Songs on Bronze, but from the reviews (and a brief browse in the British Museum bookshop) it is apparent that this is not that work. Rather, it is a novelistic retelling of certain stories that does not admit of variation. Nor does it appear from a brief browse of the pages available on Amazon that Timothy Gantz's Early Greek Myth is the Graves replacement classicists hope for, though the compendious collection of references therein suggests that I need a copy on my shelves.

Books with classical themes

The latest issue of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, popped through my letterbox on Friday. In there are a couple of reviews of books that I also have reviewed over recent months, and which are relevant to the themes of this blog.

First up is Susan Peak's review of Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow, by David Gemmell, which I reviewed, at considerably greater length, for Diverse Books. I'd like to quote Peak's penultimate paragraph in toto:

While the book is indeed well-written, and with good characters, it is curiously lacking in plot. Not much actually happens during the story and, although it is set in the time of Troy, it is not at all clear how close to the siege the story is at the end of this volume. It certainly doesn't happen here. So the book is a little slow, and has also a faint sense of pointlessness - why, exactly, are we being told the story of these various people? What is their significance? It might have helped to have a brief summary of the Trojan war and its key characters in some sort of foreword - the historical novel equivalent of a map, perhaps. (And an actual map would also have been useful.) The book failed to evoke any real sense of reading about a very different culture - there is more alienness in Patrick O'Brian's stories of Napoleonic naval warfare than here.

Peak may have a point about the lack of plot, but her comment about the need for a foreword suggests that she's missed the point of what Gemmell is trying to do, perhaps through a lack of familiarity with the mythology. As I noted, Gemmell's is a pretty radical 're-imagining' of the Trojan cycle. Including a summary of how the canonical version of the myth would be pointless, as Gemmell isn't following that script. To include anything else would be to ask him to give his plot developments away. The comment on the map, however, derives from the fact that Peak is reviewing a proof copy, as the published version I received does include a map, albeit one which can be criticized for inadequacy (some locations where crucial events take place are not located on it). As for her final comment, I can see her point, in that the characters do sometimes seem to behave like twenty-first century AD humans -on the other hand, I did think Gemmell did a good job of making the inhabitants of the Bronze Age real human beings rather than archaeological abstractions.

(I should perhaps point out, in case anyone thinks sour grapes may be involved in my reaction to Peak's review, that I was offered this book for Vector, but had to turn it down as I'd already agreed to do the Diverse Books review.)

Elsewhere in the same issue, Niall Harrison, who in his role as Reviews Editor of Strange Horizons asked me to review Jeffrey M. Ford's The Cosmology of the Wider World , a book where the central character is a minotaur, writes a review of that selfsame work that is far more perceptive and thoughtful that what I have turned in for him.

Sign of the Pagan

Of the many sword-and-sandal epics made after the Second World War, 1954's Sign of the Pagan is one of the maddest. It's not just Jack Palance blacked up to look like a Klingon, or the fictitious daughter Kubra acting as a proto-Xena until she see the Christian light. It's little bits like Attila, who seems to have been talking to someone about the Divine Right of Kings, saying "how could a mere centurion become emperor of Rome?" when centurions had been gaining the purple for two centuries. It's the complete re-arrangement of chronology. It's Jeff Chandler's prematurely grey hair.

There's the eastern bias to the whole thing. The western emperor Valentinian appears briefly, and his general Aetius, who actually defeated Attila at the battle of Chalons, is omitted entirely. Curiously the same year saw another movie, Attila, with Anthony Quinn as the Hun (Hollywood in the 1950s had a real difficult casting Central Asian war leaders, as anyone who's seen John Wayne as Genghis Khan can attest - though Attila was actually an Italo-French production). This version, which I haven't seen, seems from the cast list to take a western approach - Valentinian, his sister Honoria, their mother Galla Placidia, and Aetius all appear, but Theodosius seems not to.

I am particularly amused by the transformation of Pulcheria, elder sister of the eastern emperor Theodosius II and wife of his successor Marcian. Gone is the fifty-something chaste ascetic, and in her place is a picture of Italian voluptuous sensuality (yes, I know Ludmilla Tcherina was Franco-Russian, but the whole film looks Italian, despite hardly any Italian involvement) - I doubt this Marcian will be respecting his new bride's vow of chastity.

Sign of the Pagan in an oddity for a Hollywood Roman epic. In most, the Roman empire (as opposed to the Republic) is depicted as inherently corrupt and corrupting. Even good emperors like Marcus Aurelius cannot stand against the tyrannical nature. However, there is an underlying message that the advent of Christianity will make everything right - this can be found in the voice-overs at the start of Spartacus and Quo Vadis. But Sign of the Pagan depicts a Christianized empire. Valentinian is depicted as a coward, and Theodosius selfish, but at the end Theodosius is deposed, Valentinian runs off, and Marcian marries Pulcheria and becomes ruler of a united empire. What's the message there? Here's to benevolent dictatorship?

Forthcoming TV

Boris Johnson's two part series Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome begins on Sunday, on BBC2 at 8 pm.

I'm going to quote the blurb off the website here, in case it disappears once the programme has been broadcast:

In this two-part series, journalist, editor of The Spectator and MP Boris Johnson asks: how did the Romans run a united Europe? And why does the European Union seem to find the same task so difficult? In this first programme, Boris Johnson talks to leading historians and archaeologists, in Rome, France and Germany, to find out how the Romans actually ruled.

It wasn't all at the point of a sword. Roman government was surprisingly light. But how did the Emperor rule? Where did he get his dosh? What sort of bureaucracy was there? How did he keep the million strong populace of Rome happy and content? The answers to these questions are by turns shocking and depraved.

The Romans ran a vast empire, covering what was then half the known world. How did they control their conquered territories, containing between 50 and 100 million people, of many ethnic groups, so much so that the locals happily threw off their trousers and donned a toga? How did the Roman Empire make these people safer, and better off? How much were they taxed? What can we modern Europeans learn from what Boris Johnson calls the fish paste technique? And what about the barbarians, the Euro-sceptics of their day?

Boris Johnson's journey takes in Rome itself, the ancient harbour city of Ostia, Provence and the Rhineland.

I already have a few thoughts about how this may come out, but I shall reserve judgment at least until I see the first episode.

Additionally, those of you who like mad Roman epics may like to know that Sign of the Pagan (none madder) is on Channel 4 tomorrow at 1.50 in the afternoon.

I, Wiki

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is Claudius. It contains at least one thing I wish I'd known when I wrote this article: that Claudius revived the rumour that his father Drusus was actually the illegitimate son of Augustus (a rumour that started because Augustus married Drusus' mother Livia when she was still pregnant with the boy). I argued in my article that one of Claudius' problems was the lack of a direct blood or adoptive relationship to Augustus, and that this was the most significant factor in his choosing to marry Agrippina the Younger and adopt the future Nero, since both of those had such a relationship (the Wiki article agrees on that point). It fits neatly with that theory that, whilst not officially denying his father's legitimacy, which would have carried with it a whole new series of problems, he might revive a rumour that would suggest that, even though he 'officially' had no blood relationship to Augustus, in reality such did exist.

I don't agree with Wikipedia's poo-pooing of the notion that Claudius might have died of illness or old age. The argument is based on the fact that his uncle Tiberius, grandmother Livia and mother Antonia all lived into their seventies or eighties, whereas Claudius was sixty-three. However, the other three were in generally good health throughout their lives, which Claudius was not. As I've pointed out, he was seriously ill and expected to die a full year before he actually did.

The Four Musketeers

Kari Maund & Phil Nanson, The Four Musketeers: The True Story of D'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis and Athos

A fascinating and clearly-written book on the historical characters behind Alexandre Dumas' romantic heroes, giving what is known about them, and mapping out their fiction after-life. The only unanswered question was how this happened. The real d'Artagnan was a figure of some importance, but the three companions he is given in Dumas were quite obscure (Athos, for instance, we know almost nothing about). They were associated with d'Artagnan by Gatien Courtilz de Sandras, who gets a chapter all to himself, but it's never clear to me why Courtilz chose Armand d'Athos, Isaac de Portau and Henri d'Aramitz to be his characters, nor indeed, given that he seems not to have been a diligent historical researcher, how he even knew about them.

That aside, this is plainly a labour of love, and should be anyone with an interest in the Musketeers or the seventeenth century, or indeed just anyone who liked Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver.

Spielberg and history

There's an article in today's Guardian on Spielberg's forthcoming Munich, and its apparently tenuous relationship to what actually happened. The final quote is: "For a director who delivered such historical works as Schindler's List, his conduct in this case resembles that of a cub journalist who chooses to run a great story rather than confuse us with the facts." I found that interesting, because one could say exactly the same thing about Saving Private Ryan.

The issues about accuracy in historical fiction are also discussed in an interview with E.L. Doctorow on tonight's edition of Front Row, which will be available for a week on the marvellous 'Listen Again' feature for a week from when the broadcast finishes.

Oh, drat!

I completely forgot to watch the second part of Richard Dawkins' The Root of All Evil. Which is probably a shame, because according to this blog the second part was rather better.

The fall of the Roman empire?

I briefly touched in another forum upon my view of the 'fall of the Roman empire'. That view is that this term is rather a misnomer if one is talking about the fifth century AD. Of course, everyone knows the eastern empire continued until the fifteenth century, but the division into 'western' and 'eastern' empires, with one falling and one surviving seems to me a false one. I thought I might set out my view here in more detail.

I should state that Late Antiquity isn't really my period. However, I am told (by Penny Goodman) that my views are close to the modern orthodoxy on the period. I'm not really up with the current orthodoxy in this field. Most of the books on Roman emperors/general Roman history I have on my shelves end at AD 476 (even Averil Cameron's The Later Roman Empire tidies itself up then). About the only book I have consulted that emphasizes continuity in this area is John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium, as fine a work of modern historiography as I know - the description of the final days of Constantinople is suffused with pathos, and very moving. Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire has been receiving good reviews, but I've not yet read it myself. My own views have been developed largely on the basis of reading those works that speak of the fall, and thinking, 'no, that's not right, surely'.

For a long time I was under the impression that Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did what most modern histories of the Roman empire do - end with the deposition of the western emperor Romulus Augustulus in AD 476. But Gibbon doesn't. He takes the story all the way up to the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453.

Good for Gibbon, I say.

As a school child and undergraduate, I was always taught that the Roman empire ended in the fifth century AD. The Byzantine Empire centred on Constantinople was something different, something belonging to the different field of mediaeval history (and an aspect of mediaeval history I learned almost nothing about at school, as the lessons I had were only interested in the history of England). But as I've got older, I've come more and more to the conclusion that this is simply wrong-headed, a distorted western viewpoint. The bottom line is that the Byzantines did not see their empire as anything different. All the emperors up to Constantine XI saw themselves as heirs of Augustus. And they were all addressed as 'emperor of the Romans'. To see the emperors in Constantinople after AD 490 as being different, and to sneeringly describe their rule as a mere 'continuation' of the Roman empire, is a view that privileges the western European experience.

More sophisticated commentators tend to talk of 'the fall of the western Roman empire'. But even that seems to me a misnomer. It implies that the western empire was a separate political state. People talk of the 'formal division of the empire' on the death of Theodosius the Great in AD 395 (Francis Pryor does so in his recent book Britain A.D.).

But no such formal division ever took place. What happened was that Theodosius left the empire jointly to his sons Arcadius and Honorius. Arcadius' sphere of responsibility was in the east, and Honorius' in the west. But they were joint rulers of the empire, and legislation promulgated by one applied in the other's territory. It had been the case for much of the previous century that there had been more than one Augustus (the term used by then to designate the emperor), and that each Augustus had certain geographical responsibilities. But the empire remained one, and could in theory be reunited at any point. For the eighty years after Theodosius' death it wasn't, and each eastern and western emperor was replaced by another emperor whose responsibilities were only in half of the empire. Yet there remained co-operation, and each emperor took an interest in the appointment of his colleague. In particular, the eastern emperor, clearly the senior, took close concern over the appointment of the western Augustus, and anyone wishing to be western emperor who couldn't get Constantinople's approval wouldn't last long (I don't know of any evidence of the reverse taking place - when the eastern emperor Theodosius II died in AD 450, no-one seems to have been much concerned about any theoretical claims that Valentinian III in the west might have had, and Valentinian himself doesn't seem to have pressed them). So, there were two emperors, but the empire remained one.

What happened in the twenty years after the assassination of Valentinian III in AD 455 was that various Germanic warlords in the west tried to get their puppets appointed western Augustus, sometimes succeeding, but sometimes having to accept the eastern appointee. None of these lasted very long, because of a military crisis in the west. Sometimes, there were a few months when wasn't a western Augustus. But this wasn't considered a desperate problem, because there still was an emperor ruling the empire, and he would appoint a colleague when it became necessary.

This chaotic period is generally considered the 'fall of the west'. Clearly, there was fragmentation and loss of control in the western provinces, to the extent that by AD 476 the empire's authority in the west extended little beyond Italy. However, it seems to me that seeing the processes of the collapse of the Roman way of life in the western provinces as the fall of a separate western empire is a misleading way of looking at it. What was happening was not the fall of the western empire, but the empire losing control of the western provinces, being unable to sustain itself at its current size, and contracting until it stabilized around what had by then become the centre of imperial gravity. Many of the problems associated with understanding the fifth century go away if looked at from this perspective.

It has been noted by scholars that any explanation of why the western empire fell has also to explain why the east survived. But look at the empire as a unity, and ask the question, 'why did the empire lose control of the west?' and it becomes easier, I think. As the political centre of the empire moved east to Constantinople, so control of the western provinces became ever more problematic, until finally it collapsed altogether. As Richard Baker has reminded me, Constantinople would have been more concerned with the Persian frontier. A collapse in Gaul posed no immediate threat to Constantinople. A collapse in Mesopotamia and Armenia, on the other hand, would raise the spectre of Persians rolling up Anatolia (and a collapse on the Danube would similarly be a more immediate problem than anything in Germany or Gaul). Of course, the western Augustus would have had a different view, but, as noted, the western Augustus was the junior imperial partner.

Roman control in the western provinces did eventually end. But not in AD 476. That year did not mark the end of Roman control over Italy (never mind that Justinian would reconquer the peninsula in the next century). Yes, the 'last emperor', Romulus Augustulus, had been deposed, and the man who did it, Odoacer, did not seek to get a replacement appointed. But he still acknowledged the sovereignty of the eastern emperor, Zeno, who even forced Odoacer to issue coinage in the name of Julius Nepos, Augustulus' predecessor, who lived on in exile in the Balkans. So really Nepos was the last western emperor.

I don't want to minimize the importance of what happened in AD 476 (or AD 480, when Nepos was murdered). It was a significant change in the way Roman rule was exercised in the west, a transformation from direct rule to vassal kings and one which was largely forced upon the empire rather than being of its choosing. But it was a change, and not the end. Roman rule was flexible enough to accommodate vassal kings, and this had been a method used throughout Roman history (so, maps of the extent of Roman rule at the empire's height ought to - but rarely do - include the Crimea, where Roman emperors determined the rulers of the Bosporan kingdom). That this had now happened to the metropolitan territory of the empire must have been a psychological blow, but I think it shows the strength of the empire that it could survive such a blow. No western emperor was appointed after Nepos' death, presumably because Zeno felt that the new system and the collapse of Roman control through much of the western provinces meant that one was no longer needed (and I daresay even he thought 'for now', and was open to restoring the post should the need arise). Odoacer, and then Theoderic the Ostrogoth, acted as Constantinople's servants, in much the same way as the western Augustus had, save that these men were clearly not the emperor's equal. One can certainly argue that the acknowledgement of Roman authority by these Germanic kings was somewhat nominal, and that largely they did what they wanted to - certainly Justinian felt that the situation wasn't acceptable, and re-established direct rule. But one shouldn't completely ignore the lip-service paid, and the fact that clearly Odoacer and Theoderic felt that they had, or indeed needed, to be seen to act in the emperor's name.

So, the Roman empire did not fall in AD 476, but changed. The emperors continued to have authority in Rome - when the Pantheon was given to the Pope in the early seventh century, it was the emperor Phocas did so, on a visit to Rome. Roman authority in the city was not really ended until the eighth century, and a Byzantine presence in southern Italy lasted until the Normans drove them out in the eleventh century. The Roman empire's fall came in AD 1453. When Charlemagne was crowned Augustus by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day AD 800, from which event the Holy Roman Empire began (something else about which I was shamefully not taught in history classes at school), it was not the revival of a title and empire long departed, but a direct challenge to an empire that still existed. (In fact, the throne at Constantinople was occupied at the time by the Empress Irene, which in Leo's eyes meant that it was empty, so he elevated the Frankish king in order that there should be an emperor. The Byzantines told him to get stuffed.) William the Conqueror, Robert the Bruce and Geoffrey Chaucer all lived in a world where the Roman empire still existed. Richard the Lionheart even went there, and Harald Hardrada, loser at Stamford Bridge, worked for the Romans for a time. Remember that, when you next think about the Romans, and how remote they seem.

It's amazing what you find when you Google your own name

Remember this post? Well, I found it picked up on this blog.

Helpfully, Alun links to a couple of news items that provide more information, most importantly naming the Somerset Museum in question. It's the Cheddar Man & The Cannibals museum in the Cheddar Caves & Gorge. As I suspected, it's a museum concerned principally with prehistory. It is simply easier to present to a visitor the notion that Cheddar Man is from approximately 9,000 years Before the Present than to date him to approximately 7050 BC, and leave it to the visitor to add the extra 2,000 years.

Unfortunately, of course, the labels were read by some idiot who didn't understand what they meant, and couldn't be bothered to find out, but leapt to conclusions that fitted with a particular bee in their bonnet, complained to the museum, and then couldn't wait for the museum to explain itself before writing an angry letter to the local paper (or however it was that they got the press involved). As is often the case, people are complaining about what they think is being said, rather than what is actually being said. Remember the controversial 'gay' sketch in The Eleven O'Clock Show, in which a TV director is making a sensitive documentary until he storms out on discovering that his subject is living with another man? That produced a storm of complaints for being anti-gay, but if you actually saw the sketch, the gay characters were portrayed with dignity, and the target was actually the homophobic director. But people weren't watching properly, so they sounded off. The Cheddar case appears to me to be a similar one. It then got picked up by a Tory politician. Well, you expect them to use evidence partially to support whatever molehill they want to turn into a newsworthy mountain, without getting the whole story (see Michael Howard's election campaign, passim).

Finding Alun's post inspired me to go looking for other references to Memorabilia Antonina, and I found a that quite a few people are reading this, including David Meadows, who I remember from my days when I used to frequent Classics mailing lists. That gives me quite a warm feeling.

Aide memoire

Upcoming classical theatre in London over the next few months:

Greek theatre:

February 7-11: Euripides' Medea, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre (UCL Greek Play)

February 8-10: Ecclesiazusae, or Assemblywomen, by Aristophanes, Greenwood Theatre (King's College Greek Play)

September-December, Oedipus (Actors of Dionysus)

Modern theatre:

Until February 6: Paul, National Theatre Cottesloe

January 18-28: Sejanus: His Fall, Trafalgar Studios 1

April 6 - June 3: Phaedra, Donmar Warehouse

Opera:

March 15-18: Hercules - Handel / Les Arts Florissants, Barbican Theatre

April 3 - May 19: La Belle Helene, Coliseum

April 15-28: Orfeo, Coliseum

Dance:

February 1-11: Metamorphoses & Electra - Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices, Barbican: The Pit Theatre

June 27-July 1: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Barbican Theatre

Children's shows:

February 24 - April 21: The Odyssey, Lyric Hammersmith

February 25: The Legend of Perseus, Lyric Studio

March 14-18: Jason and the Argonauts, Greenwich

Of these I shall certainly be at the Medea and Ecclesiazusae, and Sejanus is very tempting. The rest I shall decide about later.

Richard Dawkins on religion

Well, I've watched part one of Root of All Evil?

The trouble with Richard Dawkins is something that the Evangelical Pastor he met put his finger on - he is arrogant. He's not conducting an investigation of faith - he's searching for evidence to demonstrate how bad religion is. He is constantly stacking the deck in his favour. Science is true, religion is based on nonsense. These are conclusions he has already drawn before he enters into any investigation. Dawkins is right to be concerned about the dangers of fundamentalism in all religions (though note how he has a tendency of speaking as if the Judaic-derived religions are the only ones that exist). But he goes wrong when he implies that any belief in faith fosters such extremism. He goes wrong, because it renders science open to the same criticism. It's all very well to say that a pilgrimage to Lourdes is the slippery slope that leads to suicide bombers, but one could just as easily argue that children with chemistry sets is the slippery slope that leads to the Nazis' eugenics experiments. Dawkins claims he wants people to think for themselves, but evidently only within the confines of the scientific method. And eliminating religion will not stop people wanting to see the world in black-and-white terms and denying the world's complexity.

The Root of All Evil? is a passionate piece, but one that is as vulnerable to criticism as the positions Dawkins attacks. Compare the rather more productive approach of Robert Beckford in Who Wrote The Bible? In the end, I don't think that science and reason are advanced by scientists being unreasonable.

Root of All Evil

As a pretty convinced atheist, I'm rather worried by Richard Dawkins' upcoming Channel 4 series, The Root Of All Evil?, at least to judge from the trails. He is heard saying that religion alone causes good people to do evil things - without it good people would continue to do good things, and evil people would still do evil things, but good people would not do evil.

There's just one problem with that - it's twaddle. Good people have done evil in the name of other things than religion. Nationalism springs to mind, and racism. The latter is particularly pertinent, as some of the racist theory that caused such suffering in the imperial colonies of the European parties was evolved by the sort of secular humanists of the Enlightenment that Dawkins, I suspect, would like us all to model ourselves upon.

It is undeniably true that many religious people these days are enemies of science and reason. But that does not mean that religion itself is an enemy of science and reason, and it is a betrayal of enlightened thinking for Dawkins to suggest otherwise.

The abuse of history, part whatever

The Open University Student Association's conference for the AA309 Roman Empire course has been full of discussion inspired by the following article about the notion of a 'political correctness eradicator', discussion which has centred around whether one should use BC/AD or BCE/CE:

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4558668.stm

What no-one seems to have noticed is that Philip Davies, the Tory MP whose idea this is (and despite the way it's been written up by the BBC journalist, it appears to be his idea alone, with, as yet, no support from Central Office), has got his facts wrong.

He cites an (unnamed) Somerset museum, and says: "Somebody decided that BC - Before Christ - was going to be offensive to other religions, so they changed BC to BP, which was Before the Present, I think it stood for."

The trouble is, 'BP' is not a politically-correct alternative for 'BC' - it's a shorthand way of saying 'x years ago', and it is used of archaeological material from a prehistoric context, e.g. 10,000 BP, 50,000 BP, 100,000 BP, etc. It actually originates from carbon dating practices, where of course the data comes out without the Christian era taken into account, but it is also true that the bigger these numbers get, the less sense it makes to lop two thousand years off. (Plus, for me at least, c. 8000 BC implies a greater level of precision than c. 10000 BP.) Conversely, the closer one gets to the start of that era, the less useful and more confusing it is to use the seemingly movable BP. In fact it's not movable, as the 'Present' is fixed on 1950, but that's not obvious to most people.

Nevertheless, some archaeologists do, for consistency's sake, use BP right down into the Iron Age. But only for archaeological material of imprecise date, where the margin of error could be fifty or a hundred years. One would never replace say, 54 BC, with 2003 BP, not least because one might at first assume that AD 2 was meant.

Obviously, without going to the museum concerned, I can't check, but I would expect that the use of BP was confined to prehistoric material that could not be precisely dated, and was done for reasons of archaeological practice rather than of ideology. Mr Davies, who has clearly received this information at second- or third-hand, either was told by someone at a party, or has got the story from some newspaper more concerned with sensation than accuracy.

On the wider question that has been vexing students, well, personally, I use BC/AD, but more out of habit and a feeling that it is more commonly understood than any conviction that it is right. I can see that there is force in the argument that those who do not accept Jesus as their Lord might well prefer the compromise of the Common Era. I certainly wouldn't resent being told to use it in publications, or dismiss it as silly.

This is rather emblematic of what I find in many stories of 'political correctness'. Certainly there are some examples of silliness, but if you dig deeper you'll often find, as in this case, that it's less unreasonable than the anti-PC brigade have suggested. At the heart of the notion of 'politically correct language' is the notion that one should try to use language that does not automatically offend. Often, those most vociferously anti-PC are those who don't see the need to be polite to everyone, and behind their campaign against 'silliness' one often suspects a desire to return Britain to a society where white male Protestants could do what they liked without having to apologize to anyone. From the sort of pronouncements Mr Davies makes, I do rather fancy that he is such a person.

Frankly, I don't think I want to return to those old days. And I do think it behooves those who condemn 'nonsense' to themselves have a clue.

Oh dear, I expected better

Brian Sewell has just rather blotted his copy book by suggesting that the Pantheon in Rome was built in the lifetime of Christ. This is true neither of Marcus Agrippa's original Pantheon, which date to 27 BC, and so is about a quarter century before Christ's birth, nor of Hadrian's replacement, the building that survives today, which was constructed in AD 125. Now, I expect to disagree with Sewell's views at times (like his preference for the dubious charms of Naples over the fantastic Rome), but I never expected him to slip up on basic facts.

Boudicca yet again

Given that I've written before about Boudicca, some comment on Five's Boudica's Treasures might be expected. Well, it was no better nor worse than I expected. There were some sensible points made - the fact that 'Britain' as a concept wouldn't really be acknowledged by Boudicca. But as ever there was a tendency to over-romanticize the Celts, who were 'in touch with the natural world as no other people have been'. The Romans, of course, are brutal conquerors, taking British young men off to the army (which I'm not sure there is evidence for,* plus service in the army was actually a relatively cushy job and a good way of improving one's status), and pursuing a campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' (I'll grant Tacitus does say that British tribes that had been disloyal were treated with fire and sword, but the same writer also says that more damage was done by famine, due to men being pulled off agricultural duties). London was 'a city of vile moneylenders', and Boudicca's own atrocities are passed over and granted a sheen of legitimacy - destroying the Romanized British city of Verulamium is acceptable because the city was run by a 'Quisling aristocracy'.

The main thing that was different with this programme was tying the account in with Neil Faulkner's archeological excavation in northern Norfolk. This is a site which is in the right area, and dates to the middle of the first century AD, and so it of the right period. But there was nothing presented in the programme to directly tie the site in with Boudicca. What this actually served to demonstrate was the way in which archaeological material and historical material tend to answer different questions. The study of the site, interesting though it was, didn't really help tell the story of Boudicca.

Not as bad as the Battlefield Britain programme on the subject, but not as good as Michael Wood's from nearly twenty-five years ago.

Edit 19/07/2007: Okay, yes there is - Tacitus, Agricola 15.

David Gemmell's Troy reviewed

http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/187225 [Edited 05/11/07: This is now a dead link.]

David Gemmell has apparently wanted to retell the story of Troy for a long time. Now, finally, he has got his wish, and has begun a three-volume epic. Lord of the Silver Bow is the scene-setter, describing the escalating tensions between Greeks and Trojans that will lead to the catastrophic Trojan War. It is not a tale any ancient Greek would have attempted in this form. To them, the Trojan War was not a story in its own right, but, as the Second World War is to us today, a background against which to set smaller tales - there is a reason Homer sings of the wrath of Achilles and not of the war at Troy.

But the compression caused by the passing millennia makes the task seem less daunting. First things first. Gemmell's Troy is not, at least on the evidence of the first volume, a fantasy novel such as one might have expected from the author, but quite unequivocally historical fiction, merely set in a period that predates the recording of history. There are no gods in Lord of the Silver Bow (which is in fact the usual approach of moderns retelling the ancient stories), no magic, and no monsters (save in the tall tales spun by Odysseus). The closest one gets to a fantastical element is the fact that some characters (most notably Cassandra) have accurate premonitions of the future. But this is a device historical fiction has employed many a time, from Shakespeare onwards, and does not in itself a fantasy make.

The second point is that this is far from being a standard retelling of the Homeric legends, fleshed out with further details from later sources. Some of what Gemmell does has been seen in recent adaptations. As in Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy, the root cause of conflict between Greeks and Trojans, is not the abduction of a queen, but the ambitions for power of King Agamemnon of Mykene and his desire for control of the lucrative trade routes through the Hellespont. As in Eric Shanower's graphic novel Age of Bronze, the story is placed in the context of the political geography of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, a political geography absent from Homer. Priam's Troy is a vassal of the Hittite empire. This also couches the war in terms of an east-west conflict, something also not to be found in Homer, but which colours classical Greek and subsequent versions, and may have some foundation in historical events of the time. (Though the shadow of modern politics lies over much of Gemmell's narrative.) Gemmell even manages to get in the battle of Kadesh, the great clash between the Egyptians and the Hittites.

But if you thought Petersen's Troy took liberties with the original myths, you may be shocked when you see what Gemmell has done. From the very beginning he twists ands turns the mythological material, fictionalizing with the sort of gay abandon employed by the creators of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. The individuals named on the dust flap, Helikaon, Andromache and Argurios, are hardly those an audience would expect to lead them through a Trojan epic. The last seems to be entirely Gemmell's own invention (it's a common modern Greek name, but seems not to crop up in myth). The central character, the heroic Helikaon, is a very minor figure in the Trojan myth cycle, though one whom Odysseus saves in the sack of Troy, a scene that one suspects will recur, given the friendship shown between the two in this novel. But then Gemmell reveals that Helikaon is actually someone more familiar. Individuals who in legend survived past the end of the Trojan War are already dead before Gemmell's novel opens. Odysseus recounts around a fire the story of the Cyclops and other mariner's tales that The Odyssey places after the war. The 'Trojan Horse' is the name of Priam's elite cavalry.

An example of what Gemmell does can be seen in his treatment of Laodike. In myth the most beautiful daughter of Priam, she falls in love with Akamas, a Greek herald sent to demand the return of Helen; later she is married to Helikaon. In Lord of the Silver Bow she is plain, but with a winning smile, carries a torch for Helikaon, and then falls for the Mykene warrior Argurios.

On the whole, Gemmell's attitude to his mythological material, that he considers it a source of elements to be used in a tapestry of his own design, is a good thing. These myths were never immutable, right from the first retelling, and Gemmell's imaginative approach appeals as much as, if not more than, the highly reverential take of Shanower. After all, the true historical events that lie behind the Trojan War are all-but irrecoverable now, and Gemmell cannot be shown to contradict what actually happened. As long as he does not miss the point of the original stories and characters, or makes a convincing case for changing the point, it is churlish to object.

So what is Gemmell's point? Pretty much that war corrupts, and that total war corrupts totally. Helikaon is essentially virtuous and wants to live in peace, as long as his people are protected. But as a warning to his Mykene enemies, he allegedly commits what is perceived by them as an atrocity, one he certainly does not deny, though the reader is only given other people's reports of what happened. This leads to acts of revenge on the Mykene's part, which ignite an ever-growing cycle of retaliation, with worse and worse atrocities on both sides. Gemmell's novel catches the sense of inescapable doom that characterizes a Greek tragedy. This is a tale of well-intentioned individuals who weave their destructions through their own errors (hamartia is Aristotle's term for this). This Greekness of Gemmell's text is complemented by John Bolton's part-title illustrations, that echo classical vase paintings.

Gemmell's authorial sympathies are with the Trojans, as is common (see Petersen's Troy again). Nevertheless, the Mykene are not portrayed as blacker than black villains. The best of them have a warrior code they live by, and the worst of them, though they commit morally reprehensible acts, are portrayed by Gemmell in such a way that the reader can understand what motivates them, why they believe that they are doing the right, or at least the necessary, thing, and how they live with their consciences. This is not a morally black-and-white story; Gemmell seems to be asking if it is truly more morally acceptable to be vicious and sadistic towards those who deserve it, because of their own sadistic actions, than to treat innocents in such a way.

I must confess that I had come to this novel with no direct experience of Gemmell's writing, but expecting turgid fantasy-novel prose. Instead I found that, whilst Gemmell is no great stylist, he is certainly readable, and pulls the reader in as the story progresses. What he is particularly good at is populating his world; this is not a dry Bronze Age of scanty historical facts, but a lived-in Mycenaean age that the reader can connect with.

This is not to say that Lord of the Silver Bow is free of cliche. Early on in the novel a new crewman on Helikaon's ship says some frank things about his captain without realizing that it is Helikaon to whom he is speaking. Helikaon's oarsman Epeus is a typical doomsayer, who always assumes that his leader's plans will go wrong. Helikaon's ship-designer, Kalkheus, doesn't like being called 'the madman of Miletos', because ... he's not from Miletos.

To counter what is now perceived as the sexist treatment of women in myth, there is the usual strong fighting woman making her way in a male-dominated society. In this case, Andromache is made into an ersatz Amazon and a dab hand with a bow (this reminds me of the transformation wrought upon Guinevere in the 2004 film King Arthur). Now it is true that women in Greek myth have little to do other than be wives, mothers or whores. But is anachronistic to try to pretend that it was otherwise. (It also provides Gemmell an opportunity for some unnecessary - and coy - lesbianism.)

One might also question some of Gemmell's odd linguistic formulations. Why 'Egypte' instead of the more recognizable 'Egypt' or the correct Greek 'Aigyptos'? Why 'Kretos' rather than 'Krete' or 'Kreta'? Why 'Kios' in place of 'Khios'? His fictional characters often have slightly odd names. One is called Skyros, actually the name of an island, and another is Xander, a modern diminutive of the more ancient 'Alexander', another name for the Trojan prince Paris (indeed I thought this might be Paris until Gemmell introduced the latter).

Nevertheless, I find myself wanting to know what Gemmell will do in the next two novels. Given what he has done in Lord of the Silver Bow, nothing can be taken for granted. Clearly the destruction of Troy will feature, but the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for all concerned. I would guess that Aeneas and his band of refugees will escape to Italy. I would not be surprised if Gemmell ties the fall of Troy in with the collapse of the Bronze Age societies that seems to have followed within a generation of the Trojan War's traditional date. But Gemmell's willingness to make changes provides one of the more interesting retellings of the myth. Not a great novel, but by no means a bad one either.

Hannibal the Cannibal - oh no, the other one

Five's Hannibal of the Alps is one of the worst history programmes it has been my misfortune to sit through in quite a long while.

On the good side, the programme did at least point out that in strategic terms Hannibal's elephants were a non-event. They all died as a result of crossing the Alps, and played no significant part in any of his victories over the Romans. But that was about the only good point.

The film compressed the events of the Second Punic War, which took sixteen years, into sixty minutes. Inevitably there would be some details passed over rapidly. But that is no excuse for the utter distortions. Hannibal was betrayed by his fellow Carthaginians not immediately after Zama, but six years later. The younger Scipio did not get his extraordinary command in the immediate aftermath of Cannae, as the programme implied - it came six years later. Scipio did not lead an army to Spain after Cannae, and the Roman invasion of Spain was not launched across the sea. The truth is that the Romans were already there even before Cannae.

The elder Publius Cornelius Scipio was consul, and at the beginning of the war had been sent to fight Hannibal in Spain (this was not, as the programme suggested, him being picked for command, but as elected consul it was his responsibility to lead Rome's forces). As his army advanced through Provence, he learnt that Hannibal had slipped behind him into northern Italy. He could have decided at this point to turn his army round and chase Hannibal, and this indeed is what the programme implied he did. What he actually did instead was to decide that his duty as consul meant he must return to face the Carthaginian invasion, but that, despite the fact that Hannibal was no longer there, the Roman invasion of Spain should still go ahead. So he handed the bulk of army over to his brother Gnaeus Scipio. This was undoubtedly the correct decision. Hannibal had invaded Italy in order to seize the strategic initiative, and prevent the Romans fighting the war the way they wanted to. By carrying on with the invasion of Spain, the Scipios ensured that Hannibal was only partially successful. The Spanish campaign tied down Carthaginian troops that might have reinforced Hannibal from that direction. And this fighting sucked in further troops from Africa. Because the Iberian peninsula had to be fought for. Spain was the basis of Carthaginian power, just as Italy was Rome's, so each enemy was striking at the other's heart. And in the end, the Romans did so more successfully, for the Second Punic War was decided in Spain, not Italy. Effectively, even before Hannibal had won a single victory, Scipio had taken the step that would win the war.

The programme was a pretty conservative look at Hannibal's career, as one could tell from the selection of talking heads, that favoured authors of popular history over university academics. It presented a viewpoint that Hannibal was foolish not to march on Rome after the victory at Cannae. But many scholars believe, and I think rightly, that Hannibal knew he did not have the siege equipment to take Rome, and could only succeed if the Romans surrendered in shock. There was a possibility that might have happened, but it was equally, if not more likely, that the Romans would defy him, and then his essential powerlessness against Rome's fortifications would be exposed. All the propaganda gained from the victories of Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae would have been undone. This view was given no screen time. In fact, though a stunning tactical victory, Cannae was a strategic failure. Some areas in southern Italy did desert Rome, but not enough to break Rome's power. To bring more desertions, Hannibal needed more set-piece victories, and Cannae had persuaded the Romans that engaging Hannibal in set-piece battles was the worst thing they could do. Instead they retreated behind the walls of their colonies, a network of fortified cities throughout Italy, about which Hannibal could do nothing.

One view that was given screen time was that the Carthaginian state betrayed Hannibal, that after Cannae they decided that Hannibal should be deniable, and that the war was his own affair. This was propounded by Professor Barry Strauss of Cornell University. The trouble is, the theory doesn't hold up. For a start, a mere two years previously, the Carthaginians had gone to war with Rome rather than give up Hannibal. Why not decide then that he was deniable?

And it really is a misrepresentation of the strategic situation facing Carthage after Hannibal's victory at Cannae. For one thing, Hannibal had got himself in a position where he was very different to reinforce. He was bottled up with his Greek allies in the southern part of the Italian peninsula. The obvious route to reinforce him was by sea from Africa - but this was blocked by Roman naval power. That left the land route from Spain. Making the journey across the Alps had cost Hannibal nearly half his army, and any reinforcements would have to traverse Roman-controlled Italy. The Romans were scared of Hannibal, but they were not afraid of any other Carthaginian forces, judging correctly that Hannibal was a one-off.

And reinforcements from Spain could only come if they could disengage from the Roman forces there. This was not easy, and the one serious attempt to take troops from Spain to Italy was an act of desperation after Iberia had been effectively lost. Those troops did manage to cross into northern Italy - where the Romans annihilated them.

There were other demands on Carthage's resources than Hannibal. These other campaigns are often presented as sideshows, and this is very likely the way Hannibal himself felt. But that is not fair. As already noted, Spain could not be abandoned without effectively losing the war. The Carthaginians also sent troops to Sicily. This, to my mind, demonstrates a commitment to Hannibal that is not always acknowledged. Yes, there was an issue of pride concerned; the Carthaginians wanted to regain control of the island they had lost at the end of the First Punic War. But if they succeeded, it would then become much easier to reinforce Hannibal, sending troops across the relatively short sea-crossings from North Africa to Sicily and from Sicily to Italy, reducing their exposure to Roman sea-power.

The one area that could be seen as a 'sideshow' was the campaign in Macedonia and Greece. There was no particular strategic value to Carthage in this. But by bringing Macedon into the war against Rome, the Carthaginians could drag in far more Roman forces to face Macedonian manpower than they would have to commit. So the Macedonian campaign reduced Rome's ability to fight Carthage effectively. The Romans realized this, which is why the First Macedonian War was ended in 205 BC with a peace that was favourable towards Macedon.

The truth is that after Cannae, Hannibal became the sideshow. He stayed in Italy for another thirteen years, but achieved very little. The war was won and lost on other fronts, principally, as I say, Spain.

One last point. Five's publicity talks about the programme "Exploring the latest archaeological discoveries, ancient historical sources and cutting-edge DNA technology" - but of the first and last there was no evidence. As the Sunday Times preview suggested, stick with Channel 4's two programmes on Carthage from 2004, which, though not without their faults, were much better than this.

This entry is dedicated to the memory of Geoffrey Lewis, from whom, twenty years ago, I learnt much of what I know about Hannibal.

Rome in the papers

A couple of articles from the weekend papers about Rome.

First off, a news article from the Sunday Times, which reveals that Michael Apted, director of the first three episodes, was not consulted about the BBC's decision to edit those down into two. He seems pretty pissed off, and rightly so. Personally, I don't believe this nonsense about the Beeb deciding that British audiences didn't need so much background information. I reckon that some idiot executive watched the first couple of episodes, decided that they were too slow, and ordered the trims. If the driving factor was to cut out what's unnecessary, then Octavia's disrobing scene could easily have gone. It's already obvious that Atia is prostituting out her daughter to Pompey, and we don't need to see the lecherous old general watching her undress to get that. But that scene had some tit and arse in it, so can't be cut. All the sex and violence has been kept (because it sells), and as a result what gets cut is the story. As Apted says, the end product is something that is quite hard to follow. Let us hope that the British audience really are as educated as the BBC assume, as I can't imagine anyone without some basic knowledge of the fall of the Roman Republic being able to understand what is going on. A.A. Gill's complaint about the programme elsewhere in the same paper, that it was "a mess of confusing storylines. Almost every utterance had to move great marble slabs of plot. It looked like a case of too many producers re-writing editing and patching up," is partly the result of this editing.

It is difficult to imagine something this crass being done with I, Claudius. But that was in the days when producers made decisions about programmes. Now, in the post-Birtian BBC, all power lies in the hands of administrators, such as Roly Keating, controller of BBC2, who has defended the series against claims of prurience by saying "Ancient Rome was a very violent society with utterly different moral values from ours. The series has been written to give the audience an authentic and unsparing portrayal of life in that era at all social levels." Unfortunately, this defence does not work when some of the scenes are made up and never happened. Which leads us to ...

Robert Harris, writing in the Telegraph, delivers a historical critique of the programme, and explanation why that matters, with which I am pretty much in agreement. If a programme puts so much effort into saying how 'authentic' it is, then it's legitimate to point out that this is undone by including scenes that simply didn't happen, especially when such scenes have no purpose other than to get in a bit of gratuitous nudity. Atia is portrayed as she is in Rome not because there is any evidence that she was actually like that, but because Livia and Messalina were memorable characters from I, Claudius, and the writers of Rome wanted a someone to fill that role. Cato becomes a doddering old codger presumably because some one in casting has heard the term 'Cato the Elder' (though this Cato is actually Cato the Younger). The danger is that all the guff about authenticity will lead people to think that this is how it actually happened, and thus educational standards are set back even further.

Rome - not the whole story

One thing I didn't realize when writing my previous two entries on Rome was that the BBC, in its infinite wisdom, have chosen to edit the first three episodes into two. The excuse - I hesitate to call it a reason - is that we Brits are sufficiently clued up about Roman history that we don't need to have all the background information. Passing over the implicit cultural arrogance of that assertion (and it did occur to me that if you don't have any background in Roman history, it might be rather difficult to understand Caesar's motivation), I would like to know if the editing was done by people involved in the original production, or whether it was some junior bloke who was told "edit it into two episodes, don't cut any of the sex".

Essentially this means I can't give a decent judgment on the first couple of episodes, because they are not as originally intended. This sort of editing can play merry hell with the structure of a show, and it may well be that some (though I doubt all) of my criticisms would evaporate if I actually saw the full-length episodes.

Great care will have to be taken when DVDs become available, to ensure that I end up with the proper version.

Sex and the ancient city

Yes, I know everyone will be using that gag, but I'm afraid I'm not used to anything else but the Sex In The City theme tune following the HBO placecard.

In another forum, some comments have been left on my opinion of Rome. It's interesting to note that there's often an implicit assumption that my objection is on historical grounds. Now it is true that, as a historian, I do tend to spot historical inaccuracies, and sometimes point them out, especially if a production is trumpeting itself as 'the way it really was'. As a result, I guess I give the impression that this is what is most important to me, and why I have problems enjoying films and television series set in historical periods. But if you look at what I've written about historical films, such as about Troy or Kingdom of Heaven I think you'll find that I am often more exercised by poor dramatic structure than by poor history. And so it is with Rome.

This is what I wrote in response to one comment:

I should make clear that my main problem with the series is not that it's bad history. Hell, I like Gladiator, and Rome is much more historically accurate than that. My problem with it is that it seems to me to be bad drama, that it can't make up it's mind whether it's I, Claudius for the 21st-century or a Roman Upstairs, Downstairs. As a result we keep being pulled away from the main story to these two characters who not even the writers seem terribly interested in, and I'm certainly not.

'Speed bumps' only throw me when they don't make sense in context. Take, for instance, the invented husband of Octavia. Now it is entirely true that on the death of Julia, Caesar proposed a marriage alliance between Pompey and Octavia, which would have involved he divorcing her husband. But Pompey refused the alliance and the divorce never took place. By having the divorce take place before making the marriage proposal, an entirely fictional husband has to be invented. More importantly, the scheming cunning Atia ends up looking stupid, someone who acts before she needs to. And we have to believe that the fictional Glabius is a person of no importance, because Atia would be even more stupid to dissolve a marriage alliance with one family if she did not have another better one securely in place. Which contradicts what has already been established, that female relatives of important men are used as political pawns - they don't get to marry for love. Again, my problem here is not that it's bad history (though it is), but that it's bad, incoherent writing. The main object of the sequence appears to be to get Kerry Condon to take her clothes off. (Almost all the nudity in Rome fails the 'dramatically necessary' test.)

My other problem (and it's really more of a comment than a problem) is the 'Emperor's New Clothes' syndrome, that the programme has been sold as something it isn't. It's the same issue I have with Saving Private Ryan, which was sold as something Big and Important rather than the updated John Wayne war movie that it actually is. Your comment 'I'm ravished by the show. Lots of gratuitous sex and violence, by ROMANS!!!!' is illuminating, It shows that you're enjoying this as a Roman romp, in the full excessive tradition of Spartacus, Cleopatra, etc. Which is what it is. But the publicity has tried to sell it as something different, something serious, something that hasn't been seen before. And it's none of these.

I will still watch the series, and doubtless still have fun watching it. It's certainly not boring, or completely unwatchable. But it's not genuinely serious drama either - more The Cleopatras than I, Claudius.

And to another:

I got the feeling that the writing perks up when dealing with the historical individuals as opposed to the fictional ones, but that may just be me not being particularly interested in Vorenus and Pullo. But yes, it's the indecision that causes problems for me. Either there should be more Vorenus and Pullo, to make it their story, or none at all, and stick to the historical principals. As it is, Vorenus and Pullo are in it enough to be distracting, but not enough to make me care about them.