International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant's Day

April 23rd is apparently International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant's Day, in which all those who believe in the value of putting material up for free on the web as a supplement to legitimate professional publication should post something of professional quality. It's more meant to be for those doing fiction or other creative writing, but I've seen quite a bit of non-fiction posted, so here's my contribution, something that will eventually end up in my book on Classics and SF. And yes, I know the referencing style is inconsistent, but I really don't have time to sort that out now. (Some of this material appeared before in this post, but belongs in this section of the book.)

‘T for Tiberius’: the original Star Trek[1]

For more consistently successful use of classical imagery in the 1960s than that achieved by Doctor Who, it is necessary to cross the Atlantic. America’s most influential sf series of the decade was undoubtedly Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry.[2] The central notion of this series was the following of the adventures of the Captain and crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, a combination warship/exploration vessel in the service of the Earth-based United Federation of Planets in what is eventually established to be the 23^rd century.[3] Like Doctor Who, Trek also turned to the ancient Mediterranean for inspiration for episodes. Unlike Doctor Who, it was much more even-handed in terms of taking inspiration from Rome and Greece.

Captain James Kirk’s middle name took a long time to be established. Indeed, when he was first introduced, in the second pilot of Star Trek, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ (1966), his middle initial is shown on a gravestone as ‘R.’ This detail had been forgotten by the next time someone wanted to give Kirk’s middle initial, and so it became ‘T.’ But what this stands for remained unknown throughout the original run of Trek.

That it is ‘Tiberius’ was finally established in 1974, in an episode of the animated series of Star Trek that followed the original – ‘Bem’, written by David Gerrold. Almost everything that happened in the animated episodes is considered non-canonical for subsequent Trek productions. That is, they are never referred to, and no attempt is made to avoid contradicting them. But, curiously, the detail of Kirk’s middle name does get into the Star Trek canon.[4] This suggests that it was series creator Gene Roddenberry’s notion, rather than writer Gerrold’s.

In Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979),[5] there is a preface made out to be by James Kirk himself. In that preface, Kirk shows his Classical credentials by stating that he has come to be seen as a new Ulysses, and that he is uncomfortable in the role. He also explains his name:

My name is James Tiberius Kirk. Kirk because my father and his male forebears followed the old custom of passing on a family identity name. I received James because it was both the name of my father’s beloved brother as well as that of my mother’s first love instructor. Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel.

Anybody who has read Suetonius’ Life of Tiberius, or is familiar with I, Claudius or Tinto Brass’ 1979 film Caligula, will know that Tiberius was notorious for the quantity, variety and invention of his sexual perversions. Several questions therefore clearly arise. What exactly was it about Tiberius that so fascinated Samuel Kirk? Do Samuel Kirk’s interests, together with James being named after his mother’s ‘love instructor’ (whatever one of those is), explain the voracious heterosexual appetite of the grandson?[6] But above all, what was Roddenberry thinking?

The full establishment of that detail, of course, postdates the original series. Looking at the ‘classic’ episodes, and passing over the hyperbolic assertion of Allan Asherman that the second pilot, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’, has ‘all the elements of a Greek tragedy’,[7] the first episode that I will studied comes from the second season. Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon’s ‘Bread and Circuses’ (1968), which of course takes its title from a famous line of the Roman poet Juvenal (Satires 10.80-1: ‘The citizen anxiously wishes for two things only, bread and circuses’).[8]

The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise arrives at a planet which has developed in much the same fashion as Earth (explained in the episode by a pseudoscientific excuse called ‘Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planet Development’), except that the Roman empire never fell. Thus the viewer is presented with a late twentieth-century Earth ruled by a First Citizen and a Proconsul, in which the leading car is called the Jupiter Eight. Slavery still exists, and imperial rule exploits the population and keeps it downtrodden.

What is most interesting about this story is the gladiatorial show which takes place in the episode. It is an often-noted irony that Hollywood epic, from Ben Hur to Gladiator, moralizes about the provision of gladiatorial spectacle or similar bloodthirsty entertainments whilst at the same time indulging in recreations of them, providing the audience with the very circenses Juvenal mentions. By placing the episode’s gladiatorial shows in a television theatre, with canned applause, cheers and boos, Roddenberry and Coon make this irony explicit. ‘Bread and Circuses’ becomes a satire on American television, and its tendency to drop to the lowest common denominator. (Star Trek was constantly battling with the networks.) It also picks up on the use of Rome as a metaphor for America, and a warning of what America could become, that can be found more clearly in Anthony Mann’s film The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

In one further point the story draws inspiration from Hollywood epic. The Enterprise crew escape with their lives, but do not overthrow the Roman tyranny. In the episode’s closing scene, however, it is revealed that the key resistance to Rome, what Kirk, Spock and McCoy thought were the followers of the Sun, are in fact followers of the Son, of God (i.e. Christians). It is made fairly explicit that this religion will bring freedom and justice to this planet. I have already mentioned that such a message is often to be found in Hollywood Roman epics.

The gladiatorial motif is also used in another episode produced almost simultaneously with ‘Bread and Circuses’, ‘The Gamesters of Triskelion’ (1968), [9] written by Margaret Armen. In this aliens abduct Enterprise crew members, force them to fight to the death and gamble on the results.

This is a far more straightforward treatment of the subject matter of bloodthirsty entertainment. The gladiatorial elements are ascribed to aliens, and thus distanced from humanity, whilst Kirk is seen verbally and physically to espouse the human (i.e. American) devotion to freedom and the human (i.e. American) ability to triumph over outstanding odds. It is poorly-written and clichéd, and entirely lacks the satirical edge of ‘Bread and Circuses’.[10]

‘Bread and Circuses’ is an example of interaction with ancient Rome (albeit a rather bizarre one). Star Trek also has a clear example of borrowing from Roman culture (in addition to the gladiatorial motif in ‘The Gamesters of Triskelion’). This is found in a first-season episode, Paul Schneider’s ‘Balance of Terror’ (1966), the plot structure of which is inspired by the 1957 World War II film The Enemy Below, about a US destroyer’s pursuit of a German U-boat. The Enterprise takes the role of the destroyer, and a hostile spaceship capable of hiding itself through a ‘cloaking device’ is the U-Boat.[11] As part of the back story for this episode, viewers are introduced to the Romulan Star Empire. This is based on the twin planets of Romulus and Remus, ruled by a Praetor, and has officers called Centurions (in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it is further revealed that there is a Romulan Senate, presided over by a Proconsul). Mark Lenard’s studied performance as the Romulan Commander in ‘Balance of Terror’ seems deliberately reminiscent of Laurence Olivier in Spartacus (1960).

It’s interesting to quote what a 1988 article on Star Trek has to say about the Romulans:

Like the Klingons, the Romulons [sic] are a warrior-race, but one molded in the shape of the Roman empire. Romulons have Latinate names and dress in toga-like tunics with sashes and ornate helmets similar to those of Roman legionnaires.[12]

There is actually quite a lot to disagree with in that statement. Decius in ‘Balance of Terror’ does have a Roman-sounding (indeed Roman) name. However, he is the only Romulan given a name in any of the original Star Trek episodes in which they appear (‘Balance of Terror’, ‘The Deadly Years’, 1967, and ‘The Enterprise Incident’, 1968). By the time they return in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Romulans are given almost exclusively non-Latinate names, such as Tebok and Tomalak. In fairness, Rick Worland would not have seen any of the relevant episodes when he wrote the paragraph quoted above. What is less easy to accept is the description of the Romulan uniforms as ‘toga-like’ and having Roman-style helmets. This seems to be stretching a point, and the Romulan uniforms seem much more imaginative, and to be drawing on other sources in addition to Roman dress. On the other hand, the Romulan warships are famous for a large bird of prey painted on them, reminiscent of the Roman imperial eagle (and, of course, the American eagle).

Star Trek can make such use of the Roman empire because of the hostile American popular attitude to Rome noted earlier. With the Federation as representative of the American dream, it is natural to base one of the Federation’s enemies on the anti-America, Rome.[13]

Star Trek also deals with the Greeks, in three episodes. Two of these, one from the second season and one from the third, draw from Greek culture in a fairly transparent fashion. The first is Gilbert Ralston’s ‘Who Mourns For Adonais?’[14] (1967), most famous at the time for the costume worn by actress Leslie Parrish (it involved a heavy strip of material drawn up from the waistband, arranged across her breasts and then draped over her left shoulder, but not anchored in any way at the back, relying on the material’s weight to keep it in place). In this episode, the Enterprise arrives at a planet where they find a being claiming to be the Greek god Apollo, and wanting the Enterprise crew to worship him.[15] This is the sort of theme that appealed greatly to Gene Roddenberry; humans encountering god-like beings, and defeating them by their mortal (and moral) qualities, which the quasi-divine beings have forgotten. Kirk theorizes that the Greek gods were powerful alien beings who visited Earth thousands of years ago, and were accepted as divinities.

The choice of Apollo is interesting. Star Trek emerged out of the optimism for space exploration engendered by the NASA programmes of the 1960s, and Starfleet appears a natural successor to NASA. By 1967, at the forefront of NASA’s activities was the Apollo programme to put men on the moon. First aired in September 1967, ‘Who mourns for Adonais?’ was undoubtedly written and filmed with the knowledge of the Apollo 1 fire of January 27^th of that year.[16] This may well have something to do with the sympathetic portrayal of the god.

Apollo never falters from his claim that he is a god, except in one scene where he almost admits to Carolyn Palomas (Parrish) that he and his fellows had a non-divine origin.[17] This attitude is conveyed by a marvellous performance by the experienced Shakespearean stage actor Michael Forrest.[18] Forrest had previously starred in Roger Corman’s 1960 Atlas, and so had previous association with the whole sword-and-sandal or peplum genre[19] (the production team originally considered a British actor, but could not find one suitable). As Gideon Nisbet shows in his discussion of Atlas, modern American audiences find it hard to take seriously the notion that a man dressed in an ancient tunic and showing a lot of leg can be a virile male lead, unless they have a reluctant Christian girl to win over. Yet Forrest spends the entire episode dressed in a very short gold lamé tunic, which he apparently disliked, without ever once giving any suggestion of camp (though a ‘blooper’ reel does show him parading effeminately in it). The episode does this by drawing upon the conventions of Roman toga epic, and the central romantic clash between the pagan male and Christian female that often features. In this instance, for ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ read ‘irrational’ and ‘scientific’. Apollo claims divinity; Starfleet officer Carolyn Palomas has been trained to deny such notions (reflecting the rationalist outlook of the series as a whole). Yet despite this, Palomas falls for Apollo, and in an abandoned final sequence (reinstated by James Blish when he novelized the story in Star Trek 7 (1972)), falls pregnant by him.

This is one of the most philosophically interesting episodes of Star Trek. It ends, after the Enterprise crew have caused Apollo to destroy himself, with Kirk musing on whether it would have hurt them so much to gather a few laurels in Apollo’s honour.[20]

The second Greek episode, Meyer Dolinsky’s ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ (1968; originally entitled ‘The Sons of Socrates’), comes from the third season. At the time, this episode was controversial in the United States, because it was reportedly the first television show to feature an interracial kiss (between Kirk and Lt. Uhura, though according to William Shatner the director refused to actually allow their lips to touch); in the UK, the episode was banned for over a decade, presumably because of a scene where two Enterprise women are threatened by Kirk and Spock with a whip and a branding iron.

In ‘Who Mourns For Adonais?’ the Greek elements are integral to the story. In ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’, they seem more like window-dressing. There is no real reason for the Platonians to be followers of Plato, as the real story revolves around their possession of strong psychokinetic powers and their irresponsibility in using them. There is no good evidence from the episode that Dolinsky had actually read any Plato, unless you believe that the central message of Platonism is that the powerful should be self-indulgent hedonists and bully the less powerful.

Finally, there is ‘Elaan of Troyius’, again from the third season of 1968, written by John Meredyth Lucas. A Greek connection for this episode is often overlooked,[21] but is clearly present in some of the names, and the basic premise, drawn from the Trojan War, though Lucas departs from that premise at many points.

The beautiful Elaan is clearly Helen of Troy, who can make any man fall in love with her (given a pseudo-scientific explanation as being due to a biochemical compound in her tears). She is marrying the ruler of Troyius (Troy, of course), in order to bring about the end of a war between Troyius and her own planet, Elas (= Hellas, the Greek name for Greece). This puts in danger of the same lack of imagination identified above for Underworld and The Horns of Nimon, but other names, such as Petri, Kryton, or Dohlman (the position Elaan holds) do not appear to be Greek, or if they are, are not easily found in the Iliad. Nor is the story’s progression; Elaan’s marriage is part of diplomatic manoeuvres between Elas and Troyius, but she herself is vain and spoilt (as has been observed,[22] more Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew than Helen of Troy), and does not want to marry; her bodyguard Kryton is conspiring with the Federation’s enemies, the Klingon Empire, to prevent peace. Elaan manages to make Kirk fall in love with her, but Kirk teaches her the importance of duty, and she proceeds to Troyius and her marriage. This is quite distant from the basic outline of the Trojan War, but one of Homer’s themes, the importance of doing one’s duty, does survive.

---

[1] This chapter concentrates on the original series of 1966-1969. Subsequent spin-off series were the animated series of 1973-1975, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and Enterprise (2001-2005). There were also ten motion pictures made from 1979 to 2002, and a large number of spin-off novels, comics and video games. These will only be touched upon tangentially.

[2] At the time Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space was more popular in the ratings, but it is Star trek that is now iconic.

[3] This is left vague in the original series, with some episodes, such as ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’ (1967), suggesting that it might be the 22nd century. The dates were fixed when Star Trek: The Next Generation was produced in the 1980s.

[4] Technically not until mentioned on-screen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).

[5] Persistent rumour has suggested that this, whilst appearing under Roddenberry’s name, was actually written by Alan Dean Foster. However, though Foster had done the equivalent when he wrote the novelization of Star Wars (1976), which was published as by George Lucas, and though he was undoubtedly involved at an early stage in the screenwriting of what eventually became Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he denies writing the novelization, and David G. Hartwell, who edited the book, insists that it was written by Roddenberry (Ayers 2006).

[6] Writers of ‘slash’ fan fiction featuring the unspoken love between Kirk and Spock (of whose work Roddenberry was presumably aware) might take such a statement as evidence that they were right all along.

[7] Allan Asherman, The Star Trek Compendium (1987), p. 17.

[8] Duas tantum res anxius optat / panem et circenses. Recent translations tend to avoid ‘circuses’ for circenses; so Rudd in the Oxford World’s Classics edition has ‘bread and races’ (1991, 89), whilst Green in the Penguin uses ‘bread and the Games’. These, I feel, lose the cultural resonance of ‘bread and circuses’, which has passed into popular usage.

[9] Recorded after, but broadcast before, ‘Bread and Circuses’.

[10] There is also the first season episode ‘Arena’, in which Kirk has to battle an alien captain at the whim of god-like beings (which are not rare in Star Trek). This would be more a case of allusion than anything else.

[11] Up to a point. The Enemy Below ends with the destruction of both vessels, clearly not an option for an ongoing series like Star Trek.

[12] Rick Worland, ‘Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 16 no. 3 (Fall 1988), p. 110.

[13] There is no doubt some truth in Worland’s assertion (op. cit., p. 112) that, to some degree at least, the Romulans stand in for Red China in an allegory of the Cold War, with the United Federation of Planets as NATO, and the Klingon Empire as the Soviet Union.

[14] The spelling is deliberate, after Shelly’s ‘Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats’ (1821).

[15] On this episode see now Otta Wenskus, “Star Trek: Antike Mythen und moderne Energiewesen,” in PONTES II: Antike im Film Film, ed. Martin Korenjak and Karlheinz Töchterle, Comparanda 5 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2002), 132-133; Winkler 2005, 400-5.

[16] Wenskus 2002, 130, notes that the motto of Starfleet Academy, ex astris scientia, is patterned on that of the Apollo missions, ex luna scientia. The Academy motto, however, was not introduced until an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation broadcast in 1992.

[17] This scene is discussed by Winkler 2005, 402.

[18] His name is spelt this way in the credits for this episode, though he has more often been credited as ‘Michael Forest’.

[19] See Nisbet 2006, 9-20.

[20] Since Kirk has been the prime mover in destroying Apollo, this line actually seems quite odd coming from him. William Shatner was rumoured to have ensured that he got all the best lines in the show, and one wonders whether this one was originally intended for another character, perhaps Dr McCoy, whose role is often to act as the crew’s conscience.

[21] Including by myself in earlier treatments of this topic, and I am grateful to Dr Alexandra Villing of the British Museum for bringing the episode to my attention.

[22] Gerry Turnbull (ed.), A Star Trek Catalog (1979), p. 130.

An iconographical question

I have an issue I'm trying to get to the bottom of, regarding the iconographic attributes of the god Mercury.



The above is Augustin Pajou's Mercure ou le Commerce from 1780. This shows the typical attributes of the god with which we are all familiar. What I am interested in is his winged hat. I'm trying to find when this particular design, a sort of steel helmet, is settled on. I can't find any examples of this exact design predating the Renaissance.

It has similarities to the travelling hat, sometimes winged, sometimes not, which Hermes wears in red-figure vases, such as that depicted in the Sarpedon vase by Euphronios depicted below:



The nearest Greek analogue I can find is on the Hermes Logios now in the Palazzo Altemps, though I can't be sure the head isn't a restoration.



Many Roman examples seem to dispense with any identifiable headpiece beyond the wings, as shown on the Gosbecks Mercury below.



Anyone got any observations, or other examples to present?

Atlantis was not Crete

I'm writing this blog entry as I watch a BBC Timewatch programme on the Minoans and their fate. The programme is pushing a 'new' theory about the destruction of Minoan society, that a volcanic eruption at Thera caused a tidal wave that swept away settlements across the Aegean. So far, so good, though this theory has, quite literally, been around at least since I were a lad, and all that seems actually new is improved scientific understanding of the power of the explosion of Thera and knowledge of the destructive power of tidal waves gained in the wake (if you'll forgive the pun) of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, allied to more and better archaeological evidence.

What is really getting me shouting at the television, however, is that the bloated, rotting, stinking cadaver of Atlantis has been dragged out again. Was Plato's tale of Atlantis a folk memory of the destruction of Minoan civilization, the programme asks.

No.

The tale of Atlantis is only known from Plato's Timaeus and Critias. It is not independently attested in Greek literature, unlike other myths, such as that of the Minotaur. Plutarch mentions it in his Life of Solon, but he explicitly cites Plato, so is not an independent witness. Secondly, the tale is given in great detail. For some, this is evidence that Plato can't have made it up. It is precisely the opposite. Plato wrote the Timaeus in about 360 BC. The conversation that it allegedly reports must have a dramatic date of about 425 BC. The tale of Atantis is told by one of the speakers, Critias, who heard it when he was a boy of ten. We know Critias was born in 460, so that dates Critias getting the tale to 450. He got the tale from his grandfather, who was about 90 at the time - the grandfather allegedly got it from the Athenian statesman Solon, but since he died about 558, one must start to question that detail. Solon himself was told by Egyptian priests. That the story is then told in such clear detail by Plato suggests large-scale embroidery. Without independent evidence, which does not exist, one cannot get anywhere in finding a historical core to the legend.

But why should we look for one in the first place? The trouble with the way Plato's account of Atlantis is used by those who believe in a historical Atlantis is that it ignores the genre that Plato writes it in. Contrary to what this programme has said (and I cannot forgive them for this), Plato was not a historian. He was a philosopher. That difference is very important. He is not interested in recording history or folklore - he is interested in making philosophical points, and uses a number of devices to do so. He is quite prepared to make things up to do so. Atlantis is surely another example of this. It is no more sensible to search for Atlantis than it is to try to find More's Utopia, or Swift's Liliput, or Orwell's Animal Farm.

Notably, not one of the experts they have on screen have mentioned Atlantis once - this appears to be entirely the imposition of the narration, presumably the idea of the producer, slipped in to get people to sit up and pay attention. And so more people will be encouraged to take a postivistic view of the Atlantis tale.

In the olden days, programmes like Timewatch and Horizon used to debunk nonsense like this, not contribute to it.

More gladiators

Following on from this post, I notice that Mary Beard, who spoke at the conference, has blogged it. Her report of her own paper is interesting. Perhaps she overreacts in underplaying the importance of gladiatorial combats - lack of frequency, after all, can contribute to the importance of an event rather than detract from it - but we modern westerners, fascinated by the (allegedly) alien concept of men killing each other for popular entertainment, do generally overplay it. The gladiatorial games were not top of the bill when it came to Roman mass entertainment - that was chariot racing. I always tell my students that (depending on which figures you use) the Circus Maximus could hold between two and five times as many people as the Colosseum, that it was riots by chariot racing fans that nearly brought down an emperor (Justinian, in AD 532),* and that there's a reason Juvenal (Satire 10.81) says panem et circenses, not panem et munera.

*Not that there weren't riots in amphitheatres - that in Pompeii that got their amphitheatre closed down for a decade comes to mind.

Gladiators in Chester - apparently really

Alun Salt points his readers at this page from the BBC's website, reporting a conference this weekend that has happened in Chester. To someone who has studied Roman Britain, it seems a quite bizarrely written item. Take the second paragraph:

Experts have unearthed evidence in the remains of Chester Amphitheatre which suggests gladiators appeared there.

Well, yes, of course gladiators appeared in the amphitheatre. That's what happened in amphitheatres. Why should anyone ever think differently?

The next paragraph sheds a little more light - "It was previously thought the arena was only used for ceremonial activities" - but in fact you need to go to other reports to find that what this refers to is the notion that amphitheatres in Britain were only used for military parades and training.

Personally, I've never bought that. The only argument in favour seems to be that amphitheatres in Britain, such as those at Caerleon, Chester, and London, are often associated with forts or fortresses. But for a start, at least one isn't (Silchester). And in any case, an association with a fort doesn't prove that gladiatorial games didn't take place there. If you found a football field in a modern army base, you wouldn't conclude that, because of the military association, no-one actually played football there. I'm more than happy to accept that ceremonial events and military activities did take place in amphitheatres in Britain (after all, modern football stadia are used for activities other than football matches, such as pop concerts), or even that the Roman army paid for those sited next to forts. But I have never seen a convincing argument that these buildings were not used for the same purposes for which amphitheatres around the empire were built.

I wonder, as well, if there isn't a bit of cultural snobbery behind the military theory. It used to be suggested that the Greeks in the East weren't interested in gladiatorial games, because they didn't in general build amphitheatres - the subtext being that the culturally educated Greeks were above such vulgar Roman entertainments. The problem is, they weren't - what happened was that instead of building new specialist amphitheatres, already existing theatres and stadia were converted for gladiators. So I wonder whether in the past, British archaeologists wanted to think that ancient Britons, our noble ancestors, would have no interest in the spectacle of men killing each other. But it's now clear that the Britons loved it as much as anyone else in the empire, and I for one have never believed otherwise.

Antony and Cleopatra

I was going to blog about this news story, and point out that coins with this sort of depiction of Antony and Cleopatra have been around for years (there's one which, if not struck from the same dies as the Newcastle example, is certainly struck from dies made to the same design, illustrated in the Roman history text book I used as an undergraduate in the mid-80s), so the difference between ancient and modern portrayals of Cleopatra is not exactly 'news' - but then Mary Beard beat me to it.

The education of the imaginary aristocracy

In the long-running BBC Radio soap The Archers, there is a character called Nigel Pargetter. I have tended to charitably consider him to be an idiot. Tonight, he surprised me by quoting Ovid from memory. The passage is Heroides 5.21-2, and the rather free translation Nigel quotes is:

The Beeches, faithful guardians of your flame,
Bear in their wounded trunks Oenone's name;
And as the trunks, so still the letters grow.

(I don't know the translator, as the only place I found that exact rendition through a Google search didn't attribute it. I'm guessing it's Victorian, and probably famous. Anyone know?)

It says something quite reassuring about our connection with the Classical past that a character on a soap opera (albeit broadcast on a self-consciously erudite radio station) can still quote Ovid.

2007 KCL Greek Play

Sophocles, Trachiniae
King's College London Greek Play
Performance seen: February 8th 2007

The first Greek tragedy I ever saw in the original language was Sophocles' Trachiniae (Women of Trachis), in Cambridge in 1983. I still remember it vividly. Now the relatively rarely-staged (compared to the Oedipus Rex and Antigone) Trachiniae becomes the first play I've seen two Greek-language productions of (without, incidentally, seeing an English version in the interim).

I've noticed over the years that the King's Greek Play has a tendency to be theatrically experimental. Even when the staging is fairly conventional, they'll choose a leftfield text like Rhesus. 2007 is no different, and director Caroline Fries scatters throughout the play what I can only describe as artifices, seeking to engage the Greekless audience. Perhaps that's appropriate, as Trachiniae sees Sophocles himself experimenting, with a female character, Deianeira, Heracles' wife, who is, as Judith Mossman noted in her pre-performance talk, not bad in herself, but through naivety and a lack of common sense manages to kill her husband, a central conflict between two characters (Heracles and Deianeira) who never meet, and a Messenger whose initial action is to report an offstage messenger's speech.

The question is, do any of the artifices work?

Before tackling that, I have to be fair and point out that playing a role in a Greek-language production is difficult, especially if one is not a native speaker of the modern language (and there are noticeably fewer people in prominent roles with that sort of background than there have been in previous years). Not only does one have to remember lines in a tongue not one's own, but one has to appear as if one knows what the lines mean. I have seen Greek language productions where actors were speaking words when they clearly had no idea of the meaning, and had just learned the text by rote. No-one in this year's King's Greek Play committed that sin. And these are amateur actors and an amateur production. So I cannot set too harsh a standard upon such a show (which is not to say that student productions cannot sometimes reach very high standards indeed).

So, what are some of the artifices? The production makes a point of eschewing surtitles. I think this is a shame, as I was glad to see them appear in 2005. Instead, there are short readings in English. These are usually given at microphones by the sides of the stage, though the dying Heracles remains on his cot. They are translations of lines of the play, summaries of the action, or texts that resonate with the same themes (I recognized Shakespeare and the King James Bible). There are also short filmed sequences projected on to the backdrop (as there had been in a previous KCL version of the Antigone that I saw, and didn't much like). I'm not sure that this helps the audience follow the play's action - I found myself wondering how someone unfamiliar with the work would cope. The film sequences also occasion the odd pause as the cast wait for them to start, which cause the action to drag. (As does the bringing on of Heracles, where the lights are dimmed as his cot is pulled on by stagehands, who then left before the action resumed - far better, surely, to begin the scene as Heracles is brought on.) All this can only be accommodated through what seemed to be the slashing of significant sections of the Greek - this at least is what I surmised from the way those around me following the work with their Oxford Classical Texts flipped their pages over.

The Chorus are clad in Greek-style dresses, and masked, after a fashion - their faces are painted white, with a black domino mask painted across that. The intent here may be to present the Chorus as uniform, but in fact the make up actually highlights the differences in their faces. But there is some attempt at music (though little movement), with the Chorus singing two songs, and a duet with Deianeira.

Deianeira is portrayed confidently by Charlotte Murrie, and it soon becomes clear that her halting delivery is intended to show Deianeira's state of mind, and not because she has forgotten her lines. (Unfortunately, the play began with an English prologue by an actress who had forgotten her lines.) She is clad in a forties cocktail dress, with a large flower in her hair, an echo, as the programme notes reveal, of Billie Holiday's look. Heracles' new bride, Iole, is clad identically, underlining the way in which she is intended as a replacement for Deianeira. It also adds incestuous overtones to Heracles demand that Iole be married after his death to his son Hyllus - like Oedipus, Hyllus is to plough the furrow previously ploughed by his father.

I can't say that there were any particularly bad ideas used in this production. But the artifices seemed to me not to add up to more than the sum of their parts. There was no unifying theme bringing the various devices together - for all that last year's production seems to have somewhat divided people I've spoken to, there was at least a single central idea from which the other ideas flowed. I couldn't see that in this production.

So this version of Trachiniae seems to me to be a failed experiment. But it is a failure produced by people who have talent. To progress one must experiment, and if that exposes one to the risk of failure, that does not invalidate the experiment, for that is how one learns.

Carnivalesque #23 - Ancient/Mediaeval

Welcome to , the blog carnival dedicated to pre-modern history. This month, as every two months, it's the ancient/mediaeval edition.

This has been an interesting experience - I've been behind on reading blogs of late, so did an intense couple of days catching up, partly following links provided by David Meadows' valuable rogueclassicism. And thanks to everyone who made recommendations.

Where to start? Well, why don't I start with the end - specifically Phil Harland in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean examining apocalyptic visions.

Staying with Near Eastern and non-western cultures, Frog in a Well has a post about seventh-century BC guidelines for Chinese students, with some comments about how they inform the attitude of current students (which, having spent a year teaching in China, I can vouch for). Meanwhile, Rich Baker gives a useful ten paragraph guide to Ancient Egypt.

I didn't know much about the mediaeval bloggers out there, so this was a revelation. In the Middle has an interesting post on man-eating animals in mediaeval art (and early Christian literature). Aliamore's Edward II blog is a tremendous resource for the ill-fated Plantagenet - I can't single out one post, as they're all excellent. And, straying out of period, Another Damned Medievalist talks about the role C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien may have played in forming modern views of Islamic peoples.

There's been some debate about the state of Anglo-Saxon studies. It was kicked off by Michael Drout here. A number of the responses are to be seen here, but there have no doubt been others.

I read the ancient blogs after the mediaeval ones, and I was probably a bit tired by then. So the ancients may be a bit neglected. Nevertheless, I did find a new blog I wasn't aware of. Classics Reloaded is the product of an undergraduate Classics Studies major, who shows more intelligence and perception than many graduate students I've come across. They must be a delight to teach. The best post is their discussion of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides. I was recently writing about the Dialogue in another context, and I agree with MJD that Thucydides intends his readers to believe that the Melians are right, both morally and in terms of Athenian self-interest (though part of his message is also that being right doesn't necessarily save you). Their post on Sophocles' Antigone gives me a way to mention the much-blogged (e.g here) book report on the play by a young Britney Spears. She seems to have read the work and understood the plot, which was probably all that was expected of her.

Alun Salt always gives good value. In i-Science, he has a sensible discussion of The Star of Bethlehem, including one of his genius remarks towards the end. Meanwhile, in Archaeoastronomy, he reflects on the second season of HBO's Rome series, just begun in the US, and mentions Mediawatch-UK's qualms. For those of you who don't know, Mediawatch-UK are carrying on the work of Mrs Mary Whitehouse, trying to stop British broadcasters exposing those incapable of turning their televisions off to the merest suggestion of sex. I saw one of their spokesmen recently on a programme about Monty Python's Life of Brian, talking about how Christians were at a disadvantage when dealing with their opponents, because Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek - in a tone of voice that suggested that he really, really wished Jesus had been a bit more hard-nosed about this.

In the more professional end of the blogosphere, I've been meaning to mention Mary Beard's A Don's Life for some time. Beard generates a wide range of reactions. My own view is that, while sometimes she paints a picture of university life that bears little relation to any experience I've had, on other occasions she can cut right to the heart of the issue. A couple of recent posts caught my eye. In one, she compares exam papers from 1902 and 2006, and discovers that the Edwardian papers required more knowledge, but less actual thinking. In another, she discusses ancient racism, in response to a recent controversy on British television. Personally, I find it difficult to read Juvenal's Third Satire and not conclude that Romans could easily hold horrible prejudices based upon someone's ethnic origins - whether you call that racism or xenophobia may be hair-splitting.

A couple of posts dealing with the move from late antiquity into the early mediaeval period. Muhlberger's Early History spends Christmas Eve blogging a couple of articles, one of which reminds us that Egypt was once a centre of Christianity (this connected for me with the first episode of new BBC4 series Art of Eternity). Meanwhile, Carla Nayland discusses what seems to be one of the more sensible books on King Arthur. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one to recognize that Gildas doesn't actually say who commanded at Badon, and certainly not that it was Ambrosius Aurelianus (who personally I believe was dead long before).

A few more Roman links: At Westminster Wisdom, the Gracchi have an in-depth (if occasionally poorly-punctuated) discussion of Fergus Millar's The Roman Republic in Political Thought. Meanwhile, David Parsons on the ARLT blog has a sensible post on teaching Latin. His conclusion: that promoting the language is more important than internecine arguments about which course one uses. And I include Troels Myrup's post on a talk at the Getty Villa purely for the photo of the villa itself, which immediately made me think of villas in the Sabine Hills, such as Hadrian's at Tivoli. (The Getty Museum has, of course, been in the news a lot recently with regard to demands for the return of allegedly-looted antiquities. rogueclassicism carries all the latest news reports.)

Finally, some fun ones. Adrian Murdoch at Bread and Circuses gives some rules for writing about late antiquity. Susan Higginbotham presents a playlet which in one short paragraph expresses all my qualms about Richard III's apologists. And whilst this post has nothing directly related to pre-modern history, Richard Nokes is a professor of mediaeval literature, and the little playlets at the end are hilarious.

Last call

Last reminder that I'll be hosting the next edition of , the pre-modern history blog carnival, the bimonthly Ancent/Mediaeval issue, later this week. There's still time to nominate, either through the submission form at Blog Carnival, or by sending an e-mail to carnivalesque @ earlymodernweb . org . uk, or to me at keentony @ hotmail . com (spaces included to thwart robots).

Upcoming Carnivalesque

Just to remind everyone that the next edition of , the pre-modern history blog carnival, the bimonthly Ancent/Mediaeval issue, will be hosted here, appearing around January 25th. Please nominate any appropriate blog issue for inclusion, either through the submission form at Blog Carnival, or by sending an e-mail to carnivalesque @ earlymodernweb . org . uk, or to me at keentony @ hotmail . com (spaces included to thwart robots).

I'm particularly interested in mediaeval recommendations, as those blogs I don't normally read myself.

A Neapolitan Aphrodite

A couple of months back, one of the memes floating around the blogosphere was The Greek Mythology Personality Test. When I took this test, I came out as Nemesis, but that's not particularly important. What I want to talk about is the illustration chosen for those whose result was Aphrodite. The creator of the test used this:



This is the Aphrodite Kallipygos, "Aphrodite of the Beautiful Arse". I make no apologies for the vulgarity. I'm translating Aristophanes at the moment, and pyge is a good Aristophanic word, for which translations such as 'buttocks' or 'behind' seem too tame.

There are many different 'types' or patterns of Aphrodite statues. You may be familiar with the coy nudity of the Capitoline Venus, or the disinterested self-regard of the Capuan Venus, of which the best-known example is the Venus de Milo. The Aphrodite Kallipygos is less well-known - I'm not aware of any other examples. But the Kallipygos is my favourite piece of ancient sculpture - I have loved it since first encountering it in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples back in 1999.

It is well-named, even if some argue that the statue described as the Aphrodite Kallipygos in antiquity, from the sanctuary of Aphrodite in Syracuse, was not the original of the statue in Naples. Attention is focused on the exposed bottom. If one goes around the other side of the statue, there is less emphasis on nudity, and certainly less than in the Capitoline and Capuan versions. The breasts are largely covered, though one nipple is exposed, and while the pubic area is not concealed, the drapery falls in such a way as to suggest that actually it is. And the tilt of the body is encouraging you to go round behind her. Again, the use of the drapery actually makes the body more erotic than the total nudity of other Aphrodites.

I like this statue because of the humour here, which I think is not to be found in much statuary. And, as anyone who has compared Priscilla Presley in Dallas and Priscilla Presley in The Naked Gun will know, a female who is funny is sexier than one who is not. I love the way that Aphrodite is caught checking out her own lines. She personifies a certain sort of shallow vanity, that can be found in many sitcoms - she is obsessed with ensuring that her body is as perfect as it can be. (The character Lydia Weston in Less Than Perfect is an example.) But of course, as she is divine, her vanity is justified. It is a beautiful arse.

Interestingly, the humour I see in this almost completely derives from the seventeenth-century restoration of the statue by Carlo Albacini. The sculpture was found in the area of Nero's Domus Aurea (and isn't it exactly the sort of statue you would expect that emperor to surround himself with?), and passed into the collection of the Farnese family. In those days, people restored the missing parts of statuary - in this case, including the head and shoulder. So Aphrodite's gaze is directed by Albacini; we really don't know if the original statue was depicted with her looking lovingly at her bottom. But I'd like to think that it was.

But I don't really care. What is important is that this statue delights me, and will continue to delight me, and I wish to introduce her to as many people as I can, so they may share my delight.

Orestes: Blood and Light

Orestes: Blood & Light
By Helen Edmundson, based on Euripides
Shared Experience/Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

Performance seen: November 30th 2006

One of the pleasures of teaching for the Open University is the wide variety of backgrounds from which your students come. So it is entirely possible to be leafing through the programme for a production in a north London community arts theatre, and discover that the costume supervisor is a former student. But enough of that ...

Given how everyone talks about how rarely Euripides' Orestes is performed, it seems a bit of a luxury to be able to see two productions in the space of just over a year. Even more to be appreciated is that both productions have been very good. But there comparisons have to stop, as the two versions are very different. The Oxford Greek Play from last year was, bar a few chops here and there, a faithful performance of Euripides' text. For Helen Edmundson, writer of Shared Experience's version (which has previously been performed in the same venue as the Oxford version), Euripides is merely the starting point. Whole characters and scenes are lost (Pylades, the Chorus, Apollo and the deus ex machina, the Messenger, and to all intents and purposes the Phrygian slave, made into an African woman and with her role much curtailed). Those characters that remain are given things to say that Euripides never wrote. The result is something that is a work in its own right. At one point, as Electra and Orestes carefully and tenderly planned to take their own lives, I actually thought that the play would end here, a long way from Euripides. It is entirely correct that Edmundson's name comes before the Athenian's in the credits. And this is no bad thing.

In place of the removed characters and scenes, Edmundson gives a much expanded role to Electra, that Greek girl with an excessive interest in the male members of her family. This Electra is as complex as ever (and Edmundson includes explicit references to Euripides' other portrayal of the character in his Electra). She can see through the lies of others. She has a scene with Tyndareos in which she shreds his self-righteousness to pieces. But she is in her own way as insane as her brother. Electra takes Pylades' role in driving events forward. It is Orestes' sexual desire for his sister that reignites his desire for life, and Electra that suggests the murder of Helen. (Yet at one point Orestes deserts he to plead his case, feeling that she will be a hindrance - this is perhaps a reference to something similar in Euripides' original, where Electra is excluded from Pylades and Orestes' plotting, and treated as a junior partner.)

Helen is given a larger part. Ironically, this makes her less sympathetic. He defence of her own and Clytemnestra's actions contains a strong element of hypocrisy, and rejection of personal responsibility. She fled with Paris because of lust, and that is her excuse.

Menelaos is also a lesser person than Eurpides depicts. In many of the plays that Eurpides wrote about Menelaos, he is either manipulative (Iphigenia at Aulis, Andromache), or foolish (Helen, Trojan Women). In Orestes, however, Menelaos is the most honest character, who never promises more than he can deliver (for which he is condemned by Orestes as a fair-weather friend), and he never allows his temper to affect his judgment (unlike Orestes and Tyndareos). Edmundson's Menelaos on the other hand makes promises to Orestes that he has no intention of keeping. And in that he helps bring about the destruction of his family.

In the end, the theme of Edmundson's play seems to be responsibility, and the avoidance of same. Orestes and Electra claim that they are acting on Apollo's command, Helen blames lust, whilst Menelaos betrays his responsibility to his brother's children. All this leads to an ending that returns to Euripides' apocalyptic vision, shorn of the cop-out of the deus ex machina.

The cast are excellent, though their different ethnic background requires a greater suspension of disbelief to accept that they are all related to one another. The lighting makes effective use of the theatre space. And yes, my student's costumes were good.

I'm not sure whether I agree with Edmundson's reading of Eurpides as an out-and-out anti-warmongering writer (a reading of the play also to be found in Philip Vellacott's introduction to his Penguin translation). But overall, this was a fine piece of work, which I enjoyed rather more than some of the critics seem to have.

November Carnivalesque

The November edition of , the pre-modern history blog carnival, is up at Even in a little thing. This is the bimonthly ancient/mediaeval edition (on alternate months it's early modern).

The next ancient/mediaeval Carnivalesque will be hosted in this very blog, in late January. So drop me a line, to the contact email in my profile, with any ancient/mediaeval blog entries you think particularly memorable. It's a bit like Pick of the Week, really. Only without Chris Serle.

It's a pity that I've got some time now to actually do more entries here, as I would be honour-bound not to include them in the next Carnivalesque.

"I see your point but it's all lies"

Weird comment of the week:

http://tonykeen.blogspot.com/2006/01/fall-of-roman-empire.html (scroll down to the end)

I mean, where does one start in responding to something like this? My first instinct was just to delete it, but it's so out-field that I've decided to keep it.

What year is it?

Last night the BBC carried this news item,* about a Roman cemetery under the Vatican. This particular bit of cemetery was discovered three years ago (though that there was a cemetery under the Vatican has been known for a very long time, and other tombs have been known for years, including one which may be that of Saint Peter). Clearly it's been tarted up for public display (something to do next time I'm in Rome).

However, I'm blogging this because of the text that was given to newsreader Huw Edwards to lead into the item, and which is repeated in the text accompanying the online video version. It's not the implication that this is a new discovery - that's typical hyperbole. It's the age given, 3,000 years old. The report itself says that the tombs date from the time of Christ. Which, unless I'm mistaken about the current date, is rather nearer 2,000. A bit of a failure in basic maths, there, rather like that in Battlefield Britain, where the Battle of Hastings (1066) was described as 'nearly a thousand years' after the Boudiccan revolt (AD 61), or Rageh Omar's slip in his otherwise interesting series on the miracles of Jesus, where he gave the dates of birth (63 BC) and death (AD 14) of the emperor Augustus, and then said that Augustus was dead at the age of forty-nine (he was, of course, seventy-six).

(Note that what is on the website may change, as I am going to drop a line to the BBC.)

* Actually, if you search under 'Rome' on the BBC website, you'll find a link to a rather better quality version.

Lucian, Satirical Sketches

Lucian, Satirical Sketches, translated by Paul Turner

One of the things I do is collect Penguin Classics. I particularly keep an eye out for ones that are currently out of print. Sometimes, I forget what I already have (especially as my library is rather disorganized at present). So when I decided that it was about time I read Lucian's proto-sf story The True History, I forgot that I had actually picked up this 1961 Penguin of Lucian at a recent Classical Association conference. But then I turned it up, and read the whole volume, because, as Adam Roberts says in his recent History of Science Fiction, The True History needs to be read in the context of Lucian's other writings. It's an interesting miscellany. Turner only has room for about a quarter of Lucian's surviving output, and has deliberately selected those of Lucian's works that have a satirical nature, so no place here for the more didactic works such as How to Write History and On Salaried Posts In Great Houses (in this online translation called The Dependent Scholar). Lucian reveals himself in these works as having little time for charlatans, philosophers, and other pseudo-intellectual wasters of other people's time. Those writing about the history of sf often forget that, as Brian Stableford points out in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The True History is a parody of the genre of the fantastic voyage, not an endorsement of it.

I'm currently working through Roberts' History, with a view to writing a blog entry about his chapter on sf in the ancient novel. I've also promised an article on The True History to the sf fanzine Banana Wings, but that won't appear until some time next year. Right now, I have Ben-Hur on DVD out from Blockbuster, which I've actually never watched all the way through, so that will fill out the rest of the evening.

Grooming young Classicists

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I gave a talk to a group of primary school children.

My eldest niece has just started learning about the Romans as part of Key Stage 2. So my brother asked me if I'd be interested in talking to her year, and then talked to the teachers about it.

I had very little idea how to go about this, and how to pitch it. The only seven-year old I've ever tried to talk to about the Romans is my niece, and I'm not sure I did a great job of that. I did look at some material on the BBC website (which I found whilst looking for something else) - but the trouble is, Key Stage 2 covers 7 up to 11, and I got the impression that the BBC material was aimed at the top end of that range.

Still, I had some ideas. Pictures seemed like a good idea. I knew the kids had a visit planned to Verulamium, so I could try to tie what I said into that. (This meant I had an excuse for going to St Albans, which I'd never done, and always wanted to - a possible trip a couple of years ago fell through due to bureaucratic inertia, but I will be leading a trip next year, and experience has shown that I need to go and look at places before I can tell other people what they ought to be looking for. Plus I got to meet up with an old school friend who teaches Classics at St Albans School, whom I hadn't seen for several years, and his family, who I hadn't seen for even longer.)

Kate advised me to talk about people, rather than buildings, and to include as many stories and gory bits as I could. And I also employed a couple of techniques that I use on adult students: I tried to make links between life in Roman times and life today, and I had some replica artefacts - the wax writing tablets seemed especially appropriate, as these were what Roman children would have used for their school exercises.

So, I did some mugging up, I prepared my Powerpoint presentation, and I visited St Albans. At 9:30, I was in front of about forty to fifty children, ready to give a talk on life in Roman Britain, and the changes towns brought, with reference, where possible, to Verulamium.

I'm never wholly at ease when I'm not working from a prepared script. I feel I tend to trail off when making my points, and go 'er' a lot. There seemed to be a lot of fidgeting in the ranks, and I felt I was losing them. This wasn't helped by the fact that I kept looking at the back of the classroom rather than at the kids. But some I noticed seemed to be paying close attention. So I kept going for forty-five minutes, until I was at the end of my slides. Then I answered questions. For another half an hour, and they would have kept going had it not been break time. So that rather shows that they were paying attention.

The questions were a mixed bunch. Some were very broad - 'Are you going to say anything about the gods?' or 'Are you going to tell us about Boudicca?' As one of the teachers said afterwards, 'You'd think we hadn't given them lessons about those subjects, but we have.' But, of course, what the kids were doing was testing their teachers against a real expert, and, more importantly, showing that they had heard about these subjects. I tried to answer appropriately - with Boudicca, rather than rehash what they would already have been told by their teachers, I made points that the teachers might not, such as that we know Nero seriously thought about giving up the province, probably after the Revolt. On the gods, I started talking about the Pantheon, before realizing that I would not remember all twelve - so, in a moment I'm proud of, I threw the question back at the kids, and said 'what gods do you know of?' We didn't get all the Pantheon (poor old Minerva got overlooked), but they felt involved. When the questions were out of left field, I tried to bring them back to telling them something about the Romans - answering a question 'who rules Rome now?', I managed to bring out the continuity of the role of the Pontifex Maximus, appropriate given that this was a Roman Catholic school. I was less successful with the questions about how old Romulus and Remus were, and what Romulus used to kill Remus, saying that I didn't think we know (Livy doesn't seem to say), though I'd guess a spear was Romulus' weapon of choice.

There was one awkward moment at the first question. I'd shown a picture of St. Germain's Block, a surviving portion of the city wall of Verulamium, and pointed out that much of the material from the wall had ended up in buildings like St Albans Cathedral. A girl asked why there was a round hole in the wall, and a teacher told her off for not listening, because she'd just been told. However, I believed that this particular hole was actually the result of mediaeval use of the wall, perhaps as part of a chapel. I agonized about whether to undercut the teacher's authority, but in the end, truth won out. Unfortunately, it turns out that I've misunderstood a guidebook, and the teacher was right after all. Oops.

Overall, though, the adults who were there, two teachers and my brother, who video'd proceedings, were impressed and enjoyed it. My brother said I pitched it exactly right, and also that he ended up learning stuff. Afterwards, he drove me around Amersham looking for a couple of Roman Villa sites.

I very much enjoyed doing this, and I'd certainly do it again.

The end of coursework?

On the BBC this morning there was a report about the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's desire to end GCSE coursework in a number of subjects, including history and Classical subjects. I've thought about this, and I'm agin.

My reason for this is that in my view assessed coursework helps develop and tests skills that otherwise get overlooked. Basically, this means library work, gathering information, the ability for students to produce their work surrounded by notes and books, and the opportunity to give their work a considered revision (yes, I know most don't, but that's not the point). I don't think a controlled assessment (which essentially looks like just another exam) can develop those skills. So one result of this is that school leavers will be even less prepared for university, where such activity is a vital part of their education, than they already are.

Why is the QCA doing this? From the television report you'd get the idea that it's all to do with preventing students downloading their essays off the Internet. But only a minority of teachers are worried about this, and I think the majority are right. I've always felt that students clever enough to plagiarize in such a way that it can't be spotted are clever enough to have no need of such underhand approaches, whilst those who are too lazy to write their own work are generally too stupid to hide their plagiarism.

The QCA report, on the other hand, seems to have decided that coursework is an inappropriate method of testing learning outcomes. I'm not impressed with this as a reason. I have always felt that coursework and exams test different skills, and an exam-only assessment, which is the way the QCA are heading, discriminates against students who are good in coursework but less good at exams. Since I can't imagine that students will no longer be required to write essays, it's only fair that those essays contribute towards their final mark - otherwise students may feel that essays are a waste of time, and not work too hard on them, with the result that they won't be as well-prepared for the exams as they should be. If, as the QCA suggests, assessed coursework is unfit for purpose in a culture of league tables, perhaps it's the culture that is wrong.

Arthur Marwick

To my shame, I've never actually read The Study of History by Arthur Marwick, though I do own a copy. However, the way I do history has almost certainly been influenced, at one remove or more, by the way Marwick did history. And he was an important figure in the early years of the Open University, an insititution for which I have the highest regard, and which has given me opportunites I might not otherwise have had. And now he's dead.

Another Big Series

I have seen the trailer for the first of the BBC's new drama-documentary series Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. This first episode deals with Nero, and Michael Sheen has been cast in the role. I note that this is one of those occasions, which are not too common, when someone close to the right age has been cast. Nero was thirty when he died, but looked older; Sheen is thirty-seven, but looks younger. Often someone significantly older is cast - Derek Francis was forty-one in the Romans story in Doctor Who, Patrick Cargill was fifty-two in Up Pompeii! (mind you, that's set in AD 79, so Nero would have been forty-two, had he been alive then - which he wasn't - Up Pompeii!'s no particular respecter of chronology), and Christopher Biggins twenty-eight when playing Nero at sixteen. On the other hand, two of the most famous portrayals are exceptions; Peter Ustinov was thirty-one when he made Quo Vadis?, and Charles Laughton thirty-two in Sign of the Cross. I note without comment that Sheen can also be seen on our screens playing Tony Blair in The Queen.

Fifty years ago this story would have been written with a clear reference to Aristophanes' Lysistrata (which was picked up by both the immediate sources that brought it to my attention). Sadly, this either is thought too highbrow for the readerships concerned, or the journalists themselves don't know - so kudos to The Washington Post.

I, unreliable

There's a very interesting article by Barry Unsworth about Robert Graves' Claudius novels in yesterday's Guardian. I am particularly drawn by the section where Unsworth talks about how Claudius is an unreliable witness. I have been telling people for several years how important it is that the first novel is I, Claudius, that Graves presents the material as an autobiography. I don't believe Graves intends the reader to believe every word Claudius says. I don't mean that Claudius lies to us, but that his interpretations of motivations, and accounts of events he was not present at, are inevitably partial. It's nice to see I'm not alone in this view.

And Unsworth is correct in his final point, that one must remember that these works are fiction, however well-researched. One must be careful not to take Graves' version, or the television adaptation, which as Mary Beard has reminded us, is as much Jack Pulman's work as Graves' - it's clear that Pulman went back to the original sources - as what actually happened.

At a study weekend I taught recently, after my well-received lecture on Rome in films, I was asked which Roman character I'd put on film if I had the chance. I avoided the question, but now I have to say, hubristic though it would be, I'd like to do Claudius again. My Claudius would be a skillful politician, one who marries his niece and adopts her son not because he has been enticed by her sexual wiles (Tacitus' version) or to discredit the empire (Graves and Pulman), but to avert civil war and ensure a smooth succession (you can see why I think this here). I might even be mischievous, and pick up the suggestion that some have made that Claudius was the one pulling the the strings behind the assassination of Caligula, or my own speculation that, on his deathbed, he commissioned Seneca to rubbish him in the Apocolocyntosis, to boost Nero's reputation (and yes, I know that one's wacky). But however much I believed it was plausible, it would still, like Graves, be fiction.

Shell shock

So it appears that the British government is to seek a pardon for soldiers shot for cowardice in WWI. Parliament's granting of that pardon will presumably be a formality.

Professor Garry Sheffield of KCL has his doubts, though. He points out that a blanket pardon was refused in 1998 because it was now impossible to distinguish those who had been suffering from shell-shock from the genuine cowards and deserters, the paperwork having been long since lost. "That struck me as being true in 1998 and equally true today," he adds. I agree with that judgement. Where I do not agree is with the implication that because one cannot tell which cases are worthy of a pardon and which aren't, pardons should be granted to none of them. British legal precedent, and the presumption of innocence unless guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt would rather weigh on the side of pardoning them all, even if we know that some were guilty as charged. Defence Secretary Des Browne said "We can't be in a situation morally where we cannot redress injustices because we don't have paperwork in relation to an individual case." And he is entirely correct. Now, if he could just explain this principle to his colleague in the Home Office ...

For UK-based digital television owners

Tonight (August 4th), BBC Four begins showing all of I Claudius nightly for two weeks. Essential viewing for those of you who don't have it on VHS or DVD.

Perhaps even more importantly, each episode will be followed by an episode of Up Pompeii, smutty '70s British comedy at its very best.

There's also a documentary on Togas on TV, to be shown before tonight's episode, and tomorrow at 23:25. Tomorrow it's just before an excellent documentary on Edward Gibbon.

Hadrian's Wall

Mile Castle 42
Originally uploaded by drtonykeen.

Castle Nick Milecastle (MC42)

Catch-up reviews

[Here's a couple of reviews I've had written for ages, but not had time to post. I'm off now, for two weeks on Hadrian's Wall, in which I won't be posting, though I may send the occasional photograph. Captions will have to wait until I get back.]

La Belle Helene, 6 May 2006

The last time I saw a performance of Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène, I described it as "moderately funny". I wouldn't be so dismissive of the English National Opera's witty and sexy production.

To elaborate ... Tone can be difficult to get right with something that effectively is making light comedy out of the start of a war that killed thousands - it's a bit like a frothy musical about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But the ENO manage it pretty well, by more-or-less ignoring the consequences of Helen's abduction. Offenbach pretty much does this himself (though he could trust his audience to be familiar with the tale anyway) - he concentrates on applying to the story of Helen and Paris the mores of Second Empire France, where to be a cuckolded husband was not so much a shame as an occupational hazard.

Kit Hesketh-Harvey provides an English book and libretto that is full of the sort of with that will appeal to Radio Four listeners, and that's no bad thing. I was particularly amused by Agamemnon asserting his superiority through song because he is 'polysyllabic', whilst the two Ajaxes proclaim how full of 'vim' they are (a joke that will probably pass by anyone under thirty). There are, however, some truly terrible puns.

On the sexiness side, Orestes' two courtesans, Leona and Parthenis, are suitably lithe and underdressed. Orestes being played by a woman allows the Sapphic frisson that cross-dressing usually brings. This is not to say that the production appeals on this level only to heterosexual males. Paris appears with his shirt off quite a lot, and at one point quite gratuitously wearing nothing but a towel. When the dancers dressed in swimsuits introduce the third act, it's not clear if the wolf-whistles are male or female.

Helen herself is played by Dame Felicity Lott. I confess I don't usually think of Helen as in her late fifties, though one can still see why Paris should want to bed this Helen. But it's actually a solution to the perpetual problem of casting the role, which I've gone on about in this blog before. By casting someone like Lott, who looks good for her years, the production can suggest that in her prime this truly was the most beautiful woman in the world. And it lends Helen's quest for love an air of quiet desperation. This is a woman who has been ground down by decades in a loveless marriage to a man who has grown old, fat and bald. And no doubt snores.

The costume designer certainly had fun. This staging opens in Helen's bedroom, and so costuming through much of the first two acts has a nightwear theme - not just Helen's negligee, but the Greek kings' armour on top of pyjamas. Calchas, meanwhile, is dressed in half civil service suit (literally - it has been divided lengthways) and half priestly robes. In the final Act, set at the resort of Nauplia, a variety of beachwear is seen.

What struck me most about this production is how well sung it is. This is especially true of the large Chorus, who have clearly worked hard on their harmonies. Most of the solo performances are also top class.

Finally, a word in praise of the programme - one of the better ones I've seen, with a number of interesting articles in it....

Storytelling the Odyssey, 20 May 2006

Just before this show started I realized that Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden, performers of the version of the Odyssey staged as part of the Brighton Festival, were the people who had received the 2006 Classical Association Prize, and whose interpretation of the Iliad I had seen at the CA Conference in Newcastle (which I meant to blog but didn't). I should have realized this before, but I don't have my wits much about me these days.

A review of the Conference in the latest issue of CA News has the following complaint about Lupton and Morden, "why, oh why, did they have to 'improve' Homer?", followed by a list of points at which their version differs from Homer. This strikes me as a bit of a silly complaint. I'm sure that Lupton and Morden weren't setting out to improve Homer, but like any artists, they want to do their own version of the story. Othewise, what is the point - they might just as well stand up and read out Lattimore's translation. As I've said before, Classicists do themselves no favours if they act as if these stories must be frozen in aspic in the manner in which Homer told them, thus denying modern writers the creative freedom that brought the Iliad and Odyssey into existence in the first place. No Greek would have thought like that.

In The Odyssey, as with The Iliad, Lupton and Morden present a simply staged retelling of the story,with just one or the other one speaking at length to the audience - in this redition Morden takes the role of Odysseus as he relates his wanderings to the Phaeacians, whilst Lupton narrates ther hero's arrival on Phaeacia's shores and his return to Ithaca. In the X-Box age something this stark is held to be beyond our attention spans, especially those of children. But Lupton and Morden show that this is not true. They achieve this partly through some of the effects Homer himself used - the use of key repeated phrases, and attention-concentrating details.

If you get the chance to see them, take it.

Reading Material for my visit to Hadrian's Wall

A book
Originally uploaded by drtonykeen.

Stephen Baxter, Emperor

If only Classics was really like this

Currently on the television is Boy on a Dolphin. It appears to exist not simply for the purpose of having a very young Sophia Loren get soaking wet in a thin shirt, though clearly that was one of the objects. It also, somewhat preposterously, has Alan Ladd as an archaeologist. Still, there's some pretty shots of the remains of Delos and Athens.

For UK readers

If you've not yet seen the BBC4 Mary Renault documentary I wrote about in April, it's on BBC2 tonight at 11:20. Very worth seeing, as an all-too-rare example of what happens when documentary makers get it right.

Pompeii ... Live!

Five, a television channel in the UK, has just shown a live broadcast from Pompeii and Herculaneum (though many of the sections were pre-recorded).

Overall: I don't think the gimmick of the live framework adds anything at all, and for a programme called Pompeii ... Live! they spend an awful lot of time at Herculaneum. But then Herculaneum's a fascinating site, perhaps more so than the over-familiar Pompeii. There's an awful lot of interesting stuff in these two hours (well, just over an hour and a half when you take the adverts out), and I learnt stuff I didn't know before. I hardly found myself shouting at the television at all (except at the very silly bit where the horizon of Vesuvius was used to illustrate the rise and fall of the Roman empire).

See, it is possible to make television programmes about the ancient world that aren't one-sided, sensationalist, or just plain ignorant.

War of the World

From some of what I'd read, I had got the impression that Niall Ferguson's new tv series War of the World would see the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History acting as an apologist for imperialism. Well, not exactly. If anything, the direction of this series is anti-racist rather than pro-imperialist. Ferguson puts the blame for some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century firmly upon racial tensions created by the forming of nation states out of nineteenth-century empires. But understanding that doesn't necessarily mean that he thinks that empires are a good idea. He's certainly scathing about the habit of the western empires to sit back and do nothing whilst ethnic cleansing takes place.

I wonder if there isn't some confusion here in the criticism of Ferguson, a simple-minded assumption that pointing out what happened as a consequence of imperial fall means a wish that imperial fall did not take place. I think it is actually quite difficult to argue against the proposition that the way in which the old empires of (in particular) Ottoman Turkey and Austria-Hungary were carved up into nation states (by the other empires that were still prospering at the time) caused the creation of ethnic enclaves within those nation states that contributed to subsequent conflicts, in the Second World War, the Yugoslav wars, and Iraq, to name but three. Denying that means that we are ill-equipped to stop it happening again.

I may not agree with all of Ferguson's views (he was for the invasion of Iraq and I wasn't). But I'm going to listen to what he has to say.

Terry Jones' Barbarians

[Revised on 30/06/2006.]

For the last four weeks, Terry Jones has been giving television viewers a revisionist view of the peoples who lived outside the Roman empire. Traditionally, we have been taught the Roman version of these 'barbarians' - that they were uncivilized savages who needed to be brought the values of Rome. As Jones says in an article in The Sunday Times, "It is a familiar story, and it's codswallop."

Now up to this point, I'm in some sympathy, though it's hardly as ground-breaking as press releases suggest. Yes, the Celts and Germans and Persians achieved a great deal, and we should not denigrate those achievements just because sources from the Roman empire condemn these people. To that extent, some of the criticism levelled against him has missed the point. I'm talking about that along the lines of "if the barbarians were so great, how is it that we have the Roman culture to admire, not theirs?" This simply shows that those individuals have bought into the Roman propaganda that Jones rails against.

But Jones goes further. In order to drive home his point, he ends up demonizing the Romans, portraying them as nothing but destroyers and conquerors. As a result, he ends up giving a picture which is just as much codswallop as the story he is railing against.

I don't want to go through everything I objected to in this series, but here's a representative sample:

The first programme looked at the Celts. Well, for a start, a lot of modern archaeological thought disputes the notion that there was such a people as the 'Celts' - it's seen as an artificial view imposed by the Romans. But Jones is happy to talk of a "Celtic empire". Differences between individual tribes within the Celtic world, differences which, according to our sources, were important to the invasion of Britain, are overlooked. Instead, Jones' Celts do nothing but trade with each other, and acknowledge the wise leadership of the Druids.

I often wonder about the Druids. According to Caesar's account, the Druids were independent of the political structures within the tribes. Anyone familiar with the reigns of Henry II and Henry VIII of England should know that enormous problems could be caused by a religious establishment whose first loyalty lay outside the political unit they were operating in. Perhaps many of the elites of Britain, those that had chosen to adopt the trappings of Roman culture (and they did exist, even before the conquest of AD 43), weren't too sad to see the back of the Druids.

Not so in Jones' view. For him the Druids were heroes of nationalism. The stories of human sacrifices found in Tacitus are dismissed as Roman propaganda. Now, I'm open to the possibility that Druidic human sacrifice is an exaggeration of the sources. Aldhouse-Green does say it was hypocritical of Roman writers to moralize about Druidical sacrifice whilst overlooking gladiatorial games, and there's some truth to that (though here and elsewhere in the series the degree to which Roman writers criticized the Games was somewhat elided). One can describe the execution of prisoners as part of the gladiatorial games as 'killing in a ritual context'.*

It's not the same, however, as suggesting that the Roman writers made it up. And one needs to note that other Tacitean stories, such as the presence of wild women amongst the Druids as the Roman army advanced on Mona, are accepted quite happily by Jones. My point is not to dismiss the notion that Roman sources exaggerate, but to argue that one can't pick and choose what one considers exaggeration and propaganda simply on the basis of what one would like to be true. This review of Jones' book points out that Jones states that Caesar's motivations for attacking Gaul are distorted (almost certainly true), but accepts Caesar's figures for how many Gauls he killed or enslaved (which are almost certainly inflated to reflect well on Caesar).

This is an attitude to Roman sources I've seen before in pro-Celtic treatments - there is an understanding that the ancient writers cannot be taken on trust, but that becomes a justification for indiscriminate cherry-picking from them. If the evidence suits the picture wanted, it is accepted; if it doesn't, it's propaganda, or just overlooked entirely. Approaches to Boudicca provide good examples of this. Cassius Dio tells us that when her army burnt London and Colchester, captured women were hung up by their breasts. That's unpleasant, so sometimes gets dismissed, but Dio's description of Boudicca, as a tall, fair-haired woman with a harsh voice, is often repeated without question, because in 2006 such a woman is not a frightening prospect, but someone we might quite admire. But for Dio this appearance makes her as much a monster as atrocities in London. Meanwhile, the burning of Verulamium, a city of Romanized Britons rather than a Roman creation such as Colchester or London, often gets overlooked (Jones does so).

This cherry-picking seems to extend to the talking heads used. Quite a lot of archaeologists and historians are talked to. But not many of them are scholars working on Rome, as opposed to mediaeval or Celtic scholars. Jon Coulston and Peter Heather turn up in the second programme, and Heather's in the fourth a lot - but there are none in the first and second. This results in an unbalanced story. I'd like to have seen someone with good knowledge of Roman society asked to comment, some who could point out, when Miranda Aldhouse-Green states that you'd never find in the Roman world a woman with as much wealth as the woman buried at Vix in the Bourgogne, that this simply isn't true.

For a start, there are the imperial women like Livia Augusta and Agrippina the Younger. These women were influential in their lifetimes, and in Livia's case, honoured after her death. Lower down the social scale, there is the Pompeian priestess Eumachia, who paid for a portico on the forum at Pompeii out of funds she controlled, and had a monumental tomb. There wouldn't have been many women like this, but I doubt there were many rich Gallic women like the Vix 'princess' either. What Jones and Aldhouse Green are doing is comparing exceptions in the Celtic world with the norm in the Roman. But if one wants to prove that the condition of women was better in the Celtic world than in the Roman, it is necessary to compare norms.

The position of women in Roman society was rather more complex than the picture of automatic subordination to men put forward in the programme (it is notable that the programme uses up-to-date research on the Celtic world to attack an outdated view of the Roman empire that goes back to the 1950s). For the Celtic norm, we are poorly informed. Jones' programme adduced evidence from Irish laws of the seventh century AD to tell us about the position of women in Celtic society in the first century BC. I am not altogether convinced. Early mediaeval Irish society was not the same as first century BC Gallic or British society, and whilst it might be possible to postulate some continuity, any not supported by contemporary evidence must be conjectural. A friend who knows these sources rather better than me concurs, and suggests that selective reading of the Irish evidence is necessary to justify 'feminist' views of what that society was like.

There's a lot of wishful thinking employed by a certain type of feminist scholar, that seizes on anything that might suggest a certain society had a far more enlightened attitude to women than previously thought. Bettany Hughes, in many ways a first rate television historian, has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to this, and is always searching for the strong powerful woman. So she presented ancient Sparta as a liberated society in that respect, whereas I feel that if you actually look at the 'freedoms' enjoyed by Spartan women, they were almost all geared towards making them more efficient baby factories.

I don't, of course, have anything against feminism - in fact it's an idea of which I wholeheartedly approve. Nor do I object to feminist scholarship - I think it's important to illuminate the lives of women, especially as many male scholars would still rather look at something else. I have argued elsewhere that we still need a feminist archaeology. What I object to is reading in to the evidence attitudes that simply aren't there. I don't think it empowers women to represent ancient societies as less patriarchal than they actually were.

Unfortunately, this sort of special pleading is found throughout the series. The third programme looked at the Greeks and Persians. Well, for a start, the Greeks weren't barbarians. They were part of the same culture as Rome, and the Romans knew this. Jones is happy to describe the Greek historian Polybius as Roman, but the Antikythera mechanism, found in a Roman ship in an area of the Aegean that at the time of sinking (c. 80 BC) was part of the Roman empire, is 'barbarian'. Jones aligns the Greeks with other eastern barbarians such as the Persians and Parthians - but no Greek would have accepted such an alignment.

Jones further over-simplifies by comparing the Roman empire with the Achaemenid Persian empire of the sixth to fourth centuries BC. Why? Because he wants to imply that Achaemenid institutions and attitudes to government persisted in Rome's enemy Parthia.

Firstly, the Parthians were not the Persians. They invaded Iran, conquering it from the Macedonian Seleucid kingdom. When the Parthian empire fell, it fell to Persian nationalism, as personified by the Sassanids. Secondly, whilst it is true that the Achaemenid empire had great tolerance for local customs, they were not tolerant of revolt, and were an expansionist empire. The Cyrus Cylinder, which Jones makes great play of as an early 'human rights charter', does, one must not forget, result from Persian military conquest of Babylon. And political power was confined to an Iranian elite, to which outsiders could not gain entry. Greeks or Egyptians could make some progress, but as with most empires, they would soon hit a glass ceiling. There was one empire in the ancient world that didn't act like this, where elites of conquered territories were incorporated into the overall ruling elite, and were granted access to high ranking positions, perhaps even the throne itself. What was that empire? Oh, yes. Rome.

Jones has an agenda, of course, one some right-wing commentators predicted early on, and which emerges most strongly in the programme on the 'barbarians' of the east. That agenda is the equation of ancient Rome with the modern United States. So, the Roman occupation of north-west Europe is a 'war on the Celts', and he talks of how the Romans came a cropper in the Middle East, just as the Americans are now doing (Jones doesn't say this out loud - he doesn't have to). (Here, Jones has his cake and eats it - the Parthians beat the Romans because their values were utterly different from Rome's, whilst the Sassanians prevailed through being exactly the same as the Romans, only more so.) As it happens, I tend to agree with Jones' opinion of the foreign policy of the Bush administration. But this simplistic equation helps us understand neither Rome nor America.

A number of people, such as A.A. Gill in The Sunday Times (again) have compared Barbarians to Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome; so I will too. First of all, most of these commentators seem to have missed the point of Johnson's series - it seems to be assumed that Johnson was, in Gill's words, using "Rome ... as a symbol and argument for European union". That's not my reading at all. Johnson admires ancient Rome, and is an enthusiast for the idea of European union - but the thrust of Dream of Rome was to show that Rome is actually not a good model for a united Europe, and the problems that have arisen when it has been so taken. Be that as it may, for all his admiration of Rome, Johnson is never sentimental about it. Jones, on the other hand, is sentimental about the barbarians. And so he falls into the trap that awaits many a sentimental scholar, of attributing to barbarian societies qualities - being peace-loving, non-sexist, socially-responsible, etc. - that they think make up a society they would want to live in. It's remaking ancient society in our own image, and we should be much more wary about this than people often are.

I should say that I've not much patience with apologists for the Roman empire either, people who tolerate and argue away aspects of Rome that they wouldn't accept in more modern imperial states. We can't reach a fair assessment of the Roman empire if we distort the facts, from whichever direction.

As a result of his attraction towards the barbarians, Jones ends up being unfair to the Romans. It's right to emphasize the brutality of the final settlement of Dacia, but it's unfair to reduce the Dacian Wars to a single campaign, overlooking that the Dacian king Decebalus came to terms with Rome, which he immediately repudiated, prompting the brutality of Trajan's Second War. It's right to emphasize that the Arabs preserved much of the scientific learning of Greece, but unfair to pretend that the Romans did nothing but try to destroy knowledge, overlooking the contributions made by the great libraries of the Roman world. It's unfair to portray the Romans as fundamentally against knowledge and learning for its own sake, or to overlook the contributions of the Latin poets.

The irony at the heart of this series** is that, for all his rejection of Roman values, Jones is locked in a model of historiography created by the Romans. The model is one in which we define ourselves in relation to the Other, the people who are everything we are not and would never want to be. The Romans put the barbarians into the role of the Other, demonized them, and romanticized themselves. Jones simply swaps the model round, demonizes the Romans, and romanticizes the barbarians. But if we're ever to truly understand the so-called 'barbarians', we need to reject the model altogether. We need to understand that Alaric the Goth's sack of Rome may not have been the act of utter destruction that tradition asserts, but nor was it quite the polite sightseeing tour that Jones implies.

I don't want to suggest that Jones' programme is entirely without value. It's certainly useful for alerting people to evidence about the various barbarian cultures that they may not otherwise know about. But it is very, very one-sided. One might say that it's being 'revisionist', but I don't think being revisionist should allow programme-makers to get away with being one-sided and wrong-headed, and manipulating the evidence. Those involved, such as Jones, who is usually a reasonable scholar, and advisor Barry Cunliffe, who is a great archaeologist (if wrong about the first Roman landing in Britain), really ought to have known better.

* I'm going to hedge my bets on the archaeological evidence for killing in a ritual context in Celtic society that might be derived from, for instance, the well-known bog bodies. Human sacrifice is one possible explanation of what happened to Lindow Man et al., but I'm not sure the evidence is clear enough to say it's the only explanation.

** Another, lesser, irony, is the way Jones' words get undercut, for anyone with their own knowledge, by the images on the screen. Trajan built most of the Rome we see today, he says, as the camera pans over the Forum Romanum, an area entirely devoid of Trajanic building. When Jones is talking of how the Roman Catholic church took on the Latin language from the Roman empire, a Catholic priest is shown holding up a book emblazoned with an Alpha and an Omega.

Aeschylus, Persians

The Persians by Aeschylus
Adapted and directed by George Eugeniou
Theatro Technis, London

Performance seen: 31st May 2006

The play is not a celebration of Athens's greatness but a great warning to all empires ever since.

So states Theatro Technis' press release for this new production of the oldest surviving piece of western drama, Aeschylus' Persians. I have to disagree, at least partially. I think Persians is a celebration of Athenian greatness, and praises the virtues of democracy over an empire led by an autocrat. It appeals to Athenian prejudice by portraying the naval battle of Salamis as the decisive event in the repelling of Xerxes' invasion of Greece, rather than the later battle of Plataea, in which Athens' rival Sparta took the leading role; in this it has been agenda-setting right down to the present day.* And, I believe, it was meant as a reminder to the Athenians of the achievements of Themistocles, architect of Athenian victory, and, in my view, recently exiled from his home city.**

None of which, of course, means that Persians cannot also be "a great warning to all empires ever since". Great art functions on more than one level, and at a time when imperialism, armies of occupation, and overstretch, have become terms regularly debated, to focus on this aspect of Aeschylus' play it is exactly the right line for a modern audience.

Much of this production is quite traditional, the way I remember Greek plays being presented from the 1980s, with everyone dressed in long shifts from some indeterminate ancient period. There's nothing wrong with that of course, if done well, which it is here, with clear diction.

But Eugeniou reminds us from time to time that what we are watching is not just a slightly older version of Shakespeare and Marlowe. His first device for this is to cast two actresses to play the central role of Darius' queen Atossa. One (played, according to the programme on alternate nights by Josephine Short and Jessica Martenson) speaks her lines in English. The other, Tania Batzoglou, speaks in Greek (and a beautifully enunciated Greek at that, but then she's clearly a native speaker). Batzoglou takes the role twice. Once at the very beginning, when she recites Atossa's dream as three masked actors, who are in position when the audience takes their seats, enact it before us. It might not be clear what is going on at first, but it sticks in the mind sufficiently that when the English Atossa (Short the night I saw it) tells the same story at its proper place in the text, everything falls into place. The second occasion is when Atossa speaks to the ghost of her husband. Here, Darius' answers are in English, and this, and the fact that we have heard much of what Atossa will report already, enables the audience to understand what the queen is saying.

On both occasions Atossa is masked, as is the ghost of Darius, a device that otherwise Eugeniou does not use. Additional devices that take us away from a cosy play are: the performance of Felipe Cura as the Messenger, exhausted, physically broken and driven half-mad by his journey and the terrible news he brings; and the summoning of Darius, an orgiastic scene of shamanic ritual that will appeal to the anthropologically-minded.

In the Chorus Eugeniou has added Persian Women to Aeschylus' Persian Councillors, perhaps under the influence of other Choruses, such as in Euripides' Trojan Women. The Chorus begins by being quite static, lit only by tea light candles (the lighting throughout is muted, which suits Theatro Technis' stage area best). They stand still, though the words flow from one member to another in a skilful fashion that is no doubt difficult to master. (It is not quite clear if the moments when they cut across each other are deliberate or mistakes.) Gradually, they start to move more, and are circling the stage by the end.

One can raise small criticisms. Whether played by Short or Martenson, Atossa is too young (though Short is very good in the role). The device of having members of the Chorus depart to play other roles works best when they return masked, but is often too obvious, especially when Short rejoins. On the other hand, the device also gives Batzoglou one of the best moments -– as the Chorus enthusiastically chant the names of lands, cities and islands over which Darius held sway, she returns to them, having shed the mask of Atossa, and stops them dead with 'Salamis', next in the list of Cypriot towns, but namesake of the island where Persia has been defeated.

Any criticisms are quibbles. This is not the best production of Greek drama I've seen, but it's still pretty good, and very intense. If you're in London, the run has been extended until June 10th, and apparently will be on in Oxford in July. It's worth a look.

You can see another review here.

* My own view is that, despite the loss of the Persian fleet at Salamis, Persian land forces could still prevent the Athenians from returning to their city, and so potentially bring about Athens' surrender. Only with the defeat of Persia on land was the threat to Greece ended. (Wikipedia suggests that Plataea was the subject of one of the other plays produced with Persians, Glaucus Potnieus, but I don't think that's generally accepted, and I certainly don't believe it.)

** This, I will admit, is a minority opinion. Themistocles' ostracism and subsequent exile is not in doubt, but the date is. Usually it is placed in the late 460s BC. This is because Thucydides states that Themistocles fled to the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes, whose reign began in 465 BC. However, other sources state that Themistocles arrived in the Persian empire in the reign of Xerxes. Personally, I've always felt that the late chronology for Themistocles' exile is problematic, cramming too many events into too short a time period, and that this is one of the rare occasions when Thucydides is wrong and other sources correct. That would put Themistocles' ostracism and exile into the late 470s BC, coinciding with the first production of Persians, known to have been in 472 BC - and perhaps providing an explanation why Themistocles' name is not mentioned (though the theme of collective Athens against individualist Persia could also explain that).