What’s in an alias? (A post about Doctor Who)

A note for anyone writing about the 1972 Doctor Who story ‘The Time Monster’: The pseudonym adopted by The Master, supposedly the Greek form of his nom du guerre, is ‘Professor Thascalos’, not ‘Professor Thascales’.

Just about every published guide to the show (e.g. Lofficier’s 1981 Programme Guide, Howe and Walker’s 2002 Television Companion, Cornell, Topping and Day’s Discontinuity Guide, Miles and Wood’s About Time) prints the name as ‘Thascales’. But against this there are three important points to be made.

First, the cast in the transmitted episodes consistently say ‘Thascalos’. Well, actually, most of them sound like they’re saying ‘Thascalus’; but that’s presumably a typical English failure to enunciate vowels properly (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, but equally sure that I don’t have time to look it up). Certainly no-one is saying ‘Thascales’.

Secondly, this is the spelling Terrance Dicks adopted in his 1985 novelization. If I remember rightly, novelizers were given copies of the original scripts, so Dicks would have the text by Robert Sloman and the uncredited Barry Letts to work with (and Dicks had in any case been script editor of the show at the time). So the probability is that this was the spelling in the script.

Thirdly, ‘Thascalos’ has the advantage that it is the Greek for ‘master’. ‘Thascales’ sounds Greek, by analogy with such evocative names as ‘Themistocles’ and ‘Pericles’, and indeed, it is a Greek word. But it is a feminine and in the genitive case, so means something like ‘belonging to the mistress’; perhaps not quite the message this particular Time Lord is trying to put across.

The error seems to go back to the episode list in Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks’ The Making of Doctor Who. Certainly it’s there in the second edition of 1976 (perhaps someone reading this with access to the 1972 edition could tell me if the same error is printed there). [Edit 04/09/14: Matthew Kilburn tells me it originates in the 1973 Radio Times Doctor Who Special.] In those days printed material on Who stories was limited, and opportunities to check with the original broadcast all but unknown. So Hulke and Dicks was authoritative, and the mistake repeated in work after work.

There are three other interesting observations to make.

1. When the Brigadier doesn’t spot that thascalos is the Greek for ‘master’, the Doctor berates him for his lack of a classical education, in the same way as he had berated Jo Grant the year before in ‘The Daemons’, when she didn’t realize that magister was the Latin for ‘master’. The thing is, thascalos isn’t Classical Greek; it’s Modern Greek. It’s a contraction of the ancient didaskalos, which form can still sometimes be found. (This makes more sense when one see the two words written out in the Greek alphabet and understanding that the delta has shifted from being pronounced as ‘d’, which is what we think was the case in ancient times - but see James Davidson’s preface to The Greeks and Greek Love, which I’ve cited before - to a softer ‘th’ sound. I can see why Modern Greek has moved away from thithaskalos.)

2. It’s Jo who comes up with the answer to the Doctor’s question, and goes to the top of the class. From this the Discontinuity Guide concludes that Jo knows Greek. This seems unlikely given that only a year before it was established that she doesn’t know Latin. Has she been on an intense ‘Languages of the Mediterranean’ course in the meantime? There isn’t really a need for this conclusion. As the Doctor holds class (in typical Pertwee fashion), Jo is seen thinking, before saying ‘I get it! “Thascalos” is Greek for “Master”.’ To me, it’s plain that, rather than drawing on any linguistic knowledge, Jo has worked it out; she knows that Greek matters are in the air, and that the Master has previously hidden under a classical alias, and that the Doctor thinks that if only the Brigadier knew the classics, he’d know what the name meant. (Of course, if I was in charge of an international intelligence organization and knew that my no. 1 priority threat had an m.o. of using versions of his nom de plume, I’d make very sure that there was a team of analysts translating every name they came across, but that’s another issue.) From these bits of information Jo deduces the answer the Doctor has already reached. In the novelizaton, which may well be working from a script, Jo says ‘I get it! I bet “Thascalos” is the Greek for “Master”’ (emphasis mine), which makes it clearer that she is confidently guessing.

(The Discontinuity Guide has a few odd ideas like this. They are the source of the notion of two Dalek histories, one before the Doctor changed everything in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and one after, about which the authors of About Time are rightly sceptical. But then the Discontinuity Guide is meant to be humorous.)

3. ‘I am the Master. You will obey me.’ Such is the evil Time Lord’s mantra. So you’d think that when he used translations of his name into Latin or Greek, he’d take a name that meant ‘master of slaves’. But he chooses not to be the Reverend Dominus or Professor Thespotes. Instead he takes on names which mean ‘master’ as in schoolmaster. Is this an accident on Sloman’s and Letts’ parts? Once might elicit no further comment – but to choose the same meaning twice? It’s worth noting that Letts and Dicks have explicitly stated that they named the Master by analogy with the Doctor – a Master’s degree is the next qualification down from a doctorate. So I think Letts was having a sly joke with the chosen pseudonym.

2008 University of London Festival of Greek Drama

The University of London’s Festival of Greek Drama has been going on since 1987, and acts as an umbrella for the King’s and UCL Greek plays, as well as lectures and, sometimes, other productions. This year it has afforded the opportunity to see three tragedies in three weeks, representing the three main Athenian tragedians. So I’ve chosen to blog them all in a single entry, rather than separately

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus

2008 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre

Performance seen: 6 February 2008

I had once evolved a theory that student/youth theatre groups couldn’t really do Greek tragedy (and yes, I know I start every discussion of a student production with this theory). Recent productions of Orestes and Medea have persuaded me that this judgement was in error. I realized that it was based on a couple of dreadful productions of the Oedipus Tyrannos (one of which you can read about here), and a couple of ropey Antigones. Against that, I’ve seen some not-too-bad productions of Trachiniae, and one of Ajax which I recall being okay, though it was nearly thirty years ago and I had little to judge it against at the time. So perhaps it is not even that youngsters can’t do Sophocles, but that they can’t do the Theban plays.

Of course, it’s not just students that this affects. The status of the Oedipus as the recognized foremost example of Attic tragedy means it is the first choice of any theatre company wishing to demonstrate that they can tackle the genre, and therefore where many prove they can’t. Not for nothing did the makers of The Band Wagon choose Oedipus Rex when they wanted to poke fun at the dreariest, most portentous production of a play imaginable.

Unfortunately, the 2008 King’s production does little to convince me to change my mind on this point. It’s not that it’s particularly bad, though there are a couple of elements that I really don’t care for. It more that the individual bits of the staging don’t hang together as a whole, and everyone seems to be in a different production to everyone else.

At one end is Bryan Kitch (Oedipus), who gives a nuanced performance. If he is a little muted at times, that’s at least partly because the rest of the cast give him so little to work with, the one exception being Eleanor Hanham as Jocasta, who, after a bit of gurning, finally hits the right emotional note in the last lines before she leaves the stage. Oedipus and Creon are costumed alike, in silk pyjamas and floor-length tunics that are open at the front and expose a lot of bare chest (so nothing slashy there, then), but the difference in tone between Kitch’s performance and Miles Galaska’s as Creon is quite jarring.

At the other extreme is Simon Willshire, as the Priest. His performance is the sort of amateur dramatics that is often parodied, being all about reciting the lines, but with no investment of emotion in the performance.

Then there’s the Chorus. When they first enter, the people sitting next to me are suppressing their giggles. I was at first annoyed at the gigglers, but after a moment I could see their point. The Chorus here are like a parody of the worst excesses of nineteen-seventies arty theatre workshop formalistic interpretive dance expressionism and Significance, all black-clad, Meaningful Looks and exaggerated Expressive Movements. Only Charlotte Murrie, Deianeira in last year’s Women of Trachis, is memorable. She has sufficient stage presence to always draw one’s attention.

But even the worst Oedipus often has some good ideas. The National Youth Theatre ended with a festal scene, reminding the audience that Oedipus’ banishment lifts Apollo’s curse from Thebes. A UCL production concluded with Oedipus crouched at the front of the stage, but lit from the footlights, so that he cast a far larger shadow on the backdrop than the elders of Thebes, symbolizing the shadow Oedipus’ legacy will cast over Thebes’ future.

Here the neat idea is that every time someone recounts prophecy, they do so in song. That’s certainly an interesting notion. Modern productions always have a problem with the role of music in Greek theatre, because modern musical theatre is not generally associated with tragic themes, unless it’s full-blown opera. So credit to King’s for trying that. But it’s one of a number of ideas that don’t quite come off. Another is casting women as the shepherds - it is a little jarring when the Theban old man is neither aged in appearance nor a man.

On the other hand, the production can’t be blamed for the failure of the stage hangings to collapse as they should have; ending on the distraught Oedipus and cutting the final Chorus is probably the right thing to do (though I doubt King’s are the first to do that); and it’s nice to see surtitles back (even if sometimes moderately lengthy speeches are reduced to a handful of words).

I should emphasize, as I usually do, that I know these are not professional actors and director, so it is unfair to hold them to professional production standards. And I did see this on the first performance, so it may have improved over the next two nights. (And my opinion is not shared by everyone.) But in general, student productions can, and should be, better than this.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

2008 UCL Classical Play, Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 12 February 2008

To demonstrate my point, I need look no further than this year’s UCL play. Again I saw this on the first night, but where King’s had yet to form a coherent whole out of disparate parts, UCL hit the ground running. Well, it’s more like a gentle stroll, but at least they know where they’re going.

I’m slightly surprised that UCL have returned to the Agamemnon so soon. Their last, not too bad, staging of it was in 2002, and in between they have only staged one tragedy, Medea. The corpus of Greek drama isn’t that small.

The first thing one notices, as the Chorus enters whilst the audience settles, is that the production is masked. This is a risky strategy, which can come off, but doesn’t always. The UCL Oedipus in 2000 was masked, and that was awful.

But here the masks work. They give anonymity, and uniformity to the Chorus. Members of the Chorus can play the Watchman in the first half, and Agamemnon in the second, and the switch of the cast can be done invisibly in the interval.

I wonder if the masks also allow the cast to leave their own personas behind, and project themselves into their roles more. Certainly, this production is full of good performances. The Chorus enunciate clearly, and perform well. Minor criticisms can be made - Luke Davies as the Watchman may be a bit quiet, Hugh Viney as Agamemnon a bit wooden, and Sam Smullen’s Herald weakest of all (oddly, as he has the most stage experience). But none of these are bad, and on the other hand, there are two staggeringly good performances. Mimi Kroll as an ebullient Clytemnestra has presence that dominates the whole theatre. And Jessica Lazar as Cassandra gives a portrayal largely lacking the sort of psychobabble that mars many interpretations. She does strip down to her underwear, but at least there’s a justification of that in the text.

Which brings me to Jamal Saleh’s new translation. It’s really quite good. The language owes much to Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and manages to be both comprehensible and bring a nobility to what is said. It does tend to be a bit prolix, which emphasizes that Aeschylus’ individual scenes are a somewhat overlong. This, combined with a hesitancy on the part of some cast members in delivering their lines, drags things out rather, so that it took over two hours, including interval, to get through what is not actually a very long play in relative terms. The credit for a script editor suggests that some judicious cutting took place. A little more wouldn’t have gone amiss.

All this - the masks, the Chorus speaking for the most part one at a time, the language, even the net motif on the stage dressing, foreshadowing Agamemnon’s death - shows a production that is very traditional in its approach. It reminds me strongly of Sir Peter Hall’s 1981 version of Tony Harrison’s translation, almost as if it was influenced by that. The Hall/Harrison version was staged before most of the cast and crew were born, but I wonder if they had access to a recording of it.

Very occasionally the traditionalism doesn’t work. Rolling the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra out on the ekklema was powerful in Hall’s production, because it was in the centre of the stage - here it’s to the side, and easily missed. But overall, there’s nothing wrong with a traditional approach done well, and that is what we have here. It may not be as good as the Medea of 2006, but it’s clearly better than 90% of student/youth productions, and superior to quite a few more lauded professional productions (such as the NT’s Trojan Women).

Since 2006 UCL’s productions have been under the aegis of a Classical Drama Society. I find myself wondering if such a formalized set-up would benefit King’s. Admittedly, last year’s King’s play, though flawed, was better than UCL’s Acharnians. But King’s has never in my experience delivered anything as good as this or the 2006 Medea.

Euripides, Bacchae

Royal Holloway Classics Students, Jane Holloway Hall

Performance seen: 22 February 2008

At the very least one has to admire the Royal Holloway students’ courage in tackling Bacchae so soon after the memorable Alan Cumming production. Wisely, they don’t take the National Theatre of Scotland version on directly. For a start, the pyrotechnics of the latter are wholly impractical for RHUL.

Instead, they apply a series of solutions that are often diametrically opposite to those taken by John Tiffany. This may or may not be deliberate. For a start, instead of visual stimulation they go for an aural approach, with an effective music score underlying the action.

At the centre of the play is the ambiguous figure of Dionysus, existing in a zone of indeterminate gender. The National Theatre of Scotland dealt with this by casting an androgynous man, and have him act effeminately. RHUL cast an androgynous woman and have her act like a man. This is a splendid performance by Madeleine Taylor, the best thing about this production. She is confident and commands the stage.

Emphasizing Dionysus’ masculinity allows Pentheus to be rather more camp, which at least makes more readily explicable his willingness to dress in women’s clothing. My companion on the night felt that the male members of the cast shouted, whilst the women rushed, suggesting a degree of nervousness, though I myself thought that nobody was actually bad, and Mirjam Frank as Agave conveyed her madness without making it seem laughable.

This is the most ‘cheap-and-cheerful’ of the three productions. Royal Holloway do not have the same tradition of mounting Greek plays, and where King’s and UCL play in mostly full theatres, RHUL has a half-empty sports hall. That the hall was half-empty is a shame.

It sounds patronizing to say that this has the feel of a school play, but what I mean by that is the sense of enthusiasm undimmed by a recognition on the players’ part that they aren’t the most professional cast in the world. It would be fair to say that this is quite a conservative production, with the cast in Grecian dress, and a three-person Chorus that stands and recites rather than moves. But there’s nothing wrong with a conservative production done well, as this is. If the humour of the play is rather lost, the deus ex machina is not marred, as Cumming’s was, by divine petulance (and RHUL recognize that Dionysus in his full godhood requires a costume change). This wasn’t the best production of Euripides that I’ve seen, but at least I didn’t come out thinking ‘What was the point of that?’

Arthur C Clarke Award 2008

This is off my usual topic, but I feel entitled sometimes to talk about sf criticism here.

The shortlist for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke shortlist is out. This is usually a sign for collective knicker-twisting by the British sf community, and this year is no exception.

What is interesting is that this year, the controversy is as much about the Administrator's statements to the press as about the choice of novels. Here are a couple of statements from the Awards website that haven't gone down well:

Featuring visions as diverse as a dystopian Cumbria and a future Hackney, time-travel adventures in 1960’s Liverpool and an alternate world British Isles in the throes of terrorist attack, through to tech-noir thrillers and a trawl through subconscious worlds where memories fall prey to metaphysical sharks, the Clarke Award has never been so close to home and relevant to the British literary scene.

and

The Clarke Award has always been about pushing at the speculative edges of its genre. It’s one possible map amongst many, never the whole territory, and this year’s shortlist stands as both the perfect introduction to the state of modern science fiction writing as well as a first tantalising glimpse of possible futures to come.

Over on SF Crowsnest, he says:

In many ways the Award isn't so much about picking the 'best' book of the year (although we are still very good at that too) and is more about pushing at the edges of our genre.

Taken together, this has generated a lot of comments, complaining about the rejection of looking for the 'best' sf novel (though the front page of the website still said until this morning that it was for the best book, and I don't think the jury have turned their back on that), that pushing the boundaries of the genre wasn't what was understood to be part of their remit, that the emphasis on Britishness is insular.

The thing is, I think there's confusion here. It's easy to assume, that because Hunter is the Administrator of the Award, that these are the criteria that have been set for the jury, or that the jury have set for themselves. I don't think that's the case. As I understand it, the Administrator's job is to handle the paperwork for the award, including press releases. I don't think it's part of the role to set narrow criteria for the jury, beyond the obvious (published in Britain in the preceding calendar year, submitted by the publisher for the award). And what the jury decide amongst themselves is meant to be confidential - so I don't think we can assume that Hunter is passing such information on. In the end, I read Hunter's comments as his personal views, rather than official ACCA policy - they are a reaction to the shortlist, not an explanation for it.

So, the comment on the Britishness of the novels should not be taken as meaning that novels not set in the UK were automatically rejected. Rather, it's Hunter trying to find something that ties the novels together in order to make them an attractive package.

And the remarks about genre-pushing are merely putting into words what everyone has always assumed was the Hidden Agenda of the Clarke Award anyway. It is true that the juries have never felt themselves constrained by what is published as science fiction (though that they deliberately avoid works that are published as sf is a canard disproved by study of the shortlists over the years). And it is also true that members of the sf community have been complaining about this since the Award began (except last year, when people complained about mainstream books that were left off).

And there's another point. People always talk about the Clarke juries as if they are somehow Outside the Community, as if people that we otherwise consider sensible upstanding sf fans degenerate into demented maniacs the moment that they go into that jury room. I think they deserve a bit more respect than that.

As for the shortlist itself, I've known (but have had to keep secret) what was on the list for a few weeks now, as I'm on this year's Not the Clarke Award panel at Eastercon, so maybe I've had a bit more time to consider the whole thing. Certainly, when I saw the list, I was gobsmacked by the absence of Ian McDonald's Brasyl. And there are three novels there which I simply hadn't heard of. But such is always the way with the Clarke. And I assume that the jury had their reasons.

Oh, and of the two novels I've read so far, the MacLeod is glorious, constantly reinventing itself as it goes on. And whilst there has been a bit of fuss about the YA label applied to the Baxter, this seems to be obscuring the fact that it's better than anything else I've read of his since Voyage.

I'll have more to say about this at Eastercon.

The Greek Myths

Last month left-of-centre broadsheet The Guardian issued a series of booklets retelling the Greek myths. These were written by James Davidson, author of the much-fêted The Greeks and Greek Love. I don’t get the paper regularly (for economic, rather than ideological reasons). But friends do, and I collected a full set a couple of weekends ago, and read them all on the train. You don’t need to do this, as they are online here.

It’s a slightly curious collection. For a start, Davidson has an individual prose style, often ready to abandon the tones of academe. Sometimes this works and is funny: ‘Deianeira wondered what it was about her that monstrous creatures found so attractive’ (No. 3: Thebes, p. 18). On other occasions, such as when Helen, reunited with Menelaus, says ‘Tell me, how are the children?’ (No. 5: The Trojan War, p. 22), it’s just a bit banal.

But it’s his choice of myths to retell that most had me raising my eyebrows. True, Davidson only has ninety pages for a topic that could easily fill out a book-length study (and often has), so some selectivity is inevitable. I’m not surprised that Bellerophon is gone completely, the only exploit of Theseus is that with the Minotaur, Achilles’ concealment amongst the women of Scyrus is overlooked, and there’s no place for more than a brief allusion to any homecoming from Troy other than that of Odysseus.

But it does seem odd that all reference to Jason’s father Aeson, and the usurpation of his kingdom by his brother Pelias, is gone. Removing this requires Davidson to devote space to another motivation for Pelias’ murder, one different from that most commonly known (and one I have as yet not tracked down in my mythology text books, though I’m sure Davidson has an authentic source). Why not keep the version familiar through the likes of the 1963 film?

When it comes to No. 5: The Trojan War, ‘odd’ no longer seems adequate. In Davidson’s version, the Iliad is missing. There is not a word about the wrath of Achilles, his dispute with Agamemnon, or about Patroclus. Hector’s death is there, but not the immediate lead up to it or the ransoming of his body. In the Iliad’s place is a tale of Achilles’ lust for Troilus, drawn from late Latin sources. It’s almost as if Davidson is deliberately choosing little-known variants. That may help him set his own stamp on the stories, but may not have been in the mind of whoever in The Guardian commissioned the booklets.

The danger in such a work as this, as Mary Beard noted when reviewing Nigel Spivey’s Songs on Bronze, is that it creates the impression that the way the stories are presented in the work concerned is in some way canonical, and the ‘true’ version, something which, in Beard’s words, ‘amounts to reconstructing a narrative which never really existed, directly against the grain of the mythic culture of Greece’. A common question students in myth courses ask, when presented with variant accounts, is ‘which one is right?’ It takes a long time to get to grips with the idea that, as Beard notes in her introduction to No. 6: The Odyssey, these are constantly evolving stories, and no one version should take precedence over the others.

So it’s particularly odd that what is ostensibly an introduction to Greek mythology (though some of it us possibly actually Roman - for instance, there’s a strong case for saying that the legends of Echo and Narcissus were first linked by Ovid) should choose in some places such outré versions. There are plenty of forewords by luminaries such as Michael Wood or Neil MacGregor, but what is missing is an afterword where Davidson explains his rationale. Some of it is obvious - Eros is a driving force throughout the stories Davidson chooses, and no doubt the chapter on Achilles from The Greeks and Greek Love will shine light on his motivation for selecting Troilus - but some of it remains obscure.

I don’t want to come across as being too negative about this. Anything that gets people reading Greek mythology is good, and it’s an interesting idea for the Guardian to do this. I just find it curious in its selection.

Katie Mitchell's Trojan Women

Euripides, Women of Troy

National Theatre
Performance seen: 12th January 2008

Katie Mitchell's new production of Don Taylor's version of Women of Troy (I avoid the term 'translation', as Taylor did not work from the original Greek) has received a number of very favourable reviews (e.g. in The Independent, Time Out, and the Evening Standard). So why didn't I like it?

The production begins with the Chorus (all given individual names in the programme) already on stage. Immediately the prologue, featuring Poseidon and Athena (a rare case of a deus ex machina at the beginning of a play), is cut. I wasn't too surprised by this - Michael Cacoyannis' film version does it, and modern productions can be uncomfortable with actually seeing the gods. But it changes the tone of the piece. Euripides' play is a warning against hubris - the destruction the Greeks have visited upon Troy will be visited on them in turn. This was an important subject of debate in fifth century Athens - Thucydides says the same in the context of the fate of the island of Melos in 416 BC, the event that is often thought to be the allegorical inspiration for Euripides' play. Removing the prologue makes the play an examination of the fate of women in a defeated city, with the Trojan women as victims whose abusers have no signalled comeuppance.

That's not where my problem comes, though. The women are in 1930s ballgowns, looking for all the world as if Hercule Poirot is about to summon them and expose the murderer. I don't have an issue with such modern dress productions, and putting aside the Balkans/Afghanistan/Iraq contemporary war setting that is often found in modern productions of Greek tragedy is refreshing. But these people have had their city and families destroyed around them, so I would expect that the ballgowns would at least be ripped and dirty. But, whilst a couple of the Chorus have bruised arms, their ballgowns are pristine, their make-up perfect, not a hair out of place. This undercuts the play's horror - I felt that, even in the pyrotechnic destruction of the set at the end, Mitchell's production never quite conveys the calamity that has happened to its subjects. As Michael Billington notes in The Guardian, there's something missing from the emotional landscape of the production - only towards the end did I feel it starts to connect with the heart of the text.

I agree with Billington that the words are key. So it is a shame that the dialogue is often difficult to hear. The cast don't project as well as they might, and they have to compete with a constant low hum that is meant to represent the sounds of the docks where the production is set. The action takes place inside a two-level warehouse. The Chorus are at stage level, but above are the offices where Helen is imprisoned. She is constantly seen prowling to and fro, a device which keeps her in mind, but it often distracting.

Though I can be enthusiastic for Anastasia Hille's Andromache, who shows the appropriate level of panic, I'm much less so about some of the other performances. Kate Duchêne's Hecuba seems anodyne in comparison to, say, Katherine Hepburn in Caccoyanis' version. Talthybius' role is split between two actors, both of whom seem quite muted.

And then there's Sinead Matthews as Cassandra. I generally find depictions of Cassandra unsatisfactory. I think this is because so often they try to explain the character in terms of modern psychoanalysis, and I don't think Cassandra's madness can be explained that way. She is insane because she is cursed by Apollo, so that she sees the future clearly, but cannot get anyone to believe her. Reading that through a diagnosis of 'manic depression' doesn't always help. Matthews is hampered by having to compete with shouting and fire alarms, but even so she could be clearer. And I knew almost immediately that she would demonstrate her madness by ripping all her clothes off (similarly, I was not surprised when Helen ended up in nothing but her knickers).

There's also one oddity. Before each choral ode, there is dancing, which beings with muted music, before being overwhelmed by the sounds of the Jazz Age. For me, this device (which Mitchell apparently also used in her production of Iphigeneia at Aulis) just doesn't work (see the review in The Stage, which characterizes these as a distraction). When most of the production is so naturalistic, impressionist moments like this are confusing (and if the production is prepared to embrace impressionism, why ditch the gods?). Further confusion is added when departed characters such as Cassandra and Andromache come back on stage, though I can see the point of reintroducing Menelaus and Helen, to underline the assumption of most productions that Helen will seduce her husband and escape punishment (though the very best production I ever saw, that of Andrei Serban in 1992, concluded Helen's scene with her being stripped, raped by a bear and executed).

This is far from being the worst production of a Greek tragedy that I've ever seen, but it is one of the weaker versions of Trojan Women. But perhaps I want something different to everyone else when I see a Greek tragedy. And this didn't deliver it.

Women of Troy is on until 27th February.

Seduced

I went to the Barbican's exhibition Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now. I went primarily to see the Graeco-Roman stuff. Actually, there wasn't that much in this section that was new to me, but then I've seen this sort of thing before. And I regret the absence of the funniest Roman erotica I've seen - oil-lamps in the shape of a satyr, where you light the end of the penis.

Although I would have laid out the sleeping hermaphrodite so that it was approached from behind, making the male genitalia a surprise, the exhibition makes good use of the space available. The only thing I could complain about would be the reconstructions of the secret cabinets from Victorian museums. Not only were these dimly lit, making the labels hard to read, but in one most of the objects were described as 'undated'. Fair enough, they can't be tied down to a precise century, but they could at least have said what culture (e.g. 'Roman') they came from.

As for the rest, there were amusing bits, such as the surrealist happening organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel, which involved two models being spanked to 'La Marseillaise' (and I may never look at a leek the same again). I was interested to find a Renaissance painting of Minerva, Lavinia Fontana's Minerva in the Act of Dressing. This is the only example I can immediately think of where this particular goddess is used in an erotic image.

There were signs warning that the room you were about to enter contained images of sexual activity, which we mocked. But then I did find the Mapplethorpe photographs disturbing - not so much the photo with a bullwhip up his bottom (do not click if you are disturbed by such images), but one of a clamped and bleeding penis. I don't particularly like Jeff Koons' erotic work, most of which seems to be an excuse for him to be photographed having sex with an Italian porn star, but his work can't be excluded from an exhibition like this. And I was delighted to find that, when bored with landscapes, J.M.W. Turner would dash off some porn.

Seduced is on until January 27th.

Changing one's mind

Happy 2008 to anyone still actually reading this. I realize it's been over a month since I last posted here. If I was the sort of person who made New Year's resolutions, then I'd probably promise to make more posts this year. But don't hold your breath.

I got pointed to a webpage where 165 people were asked the question, "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" The contributors are mostly scientists of one description or another, though there's a piece by James O'Donnell that explains why he no longer cheers for the Romans, which I recommend. Reading all the contributions, I found myself thinking about what I've changed my mind about over the years. I certainly believe that the ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence, or new interpretations of old evidence, is an important characteristic of an honest thinker.

Like O'Donnell, I have changed my mind about the Romans, and especially about the Empire. Once I believed that Augustus was a great man, who rescued Roman civilization from the chaos of the Late Republic, but no longer. Certainly I still believe that he was a highly effective ruler in terms of what he sought to achieve, and for some people life was better after he came to power - provincials undoubtedly appreciated the end of the licensed extortion and asset-stripping that characterized most provincial administration under the Late Republic. But it shouldn't be forgotten that what Augustus introduced was a military dictatorship, an inherently corrupt form of government. The likes of Caligula, Nero and Commodus were inevitable products of the system, not aberrations. And all emperors, even the 'good' ones like Augustus and Trajan, curtailed individual rights and suppressed, often ruthlessly, freedom of thought and expression. Just ask Ovid.

What else? There was certainly a time when, had you told me that there was a difference between sex and gender, I'd have looked at you as if you were mad. But then I didn't know any people who had refused to allow the sex they were born into to determine how they would behave. This year I wrote a short paper for my students explaining exactly why the two aren't identical, and why biological sex doesn't necessarily dictate gender roles (in which I used Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe, just before I found out that Ali Smith had written a Canongate Myth volume around the same legend); that paper is now going to be available to all the students on the course throughout the country.

One thing I've really come to comprehend better this year, and emphasize more to students, is that there's no such thing as 'Roman attitudes'. Where once I would happily have said 'the Romans believed ...', and at the most pointed out that this meant élite male Romans, now I underline that one would have been every bit as likely to find a range of different opinions if one conducted a straw poll in the Roman Forum as if one did the same on Oxford Street. Take, for instance, Roman attitudes to sex. The HBO/BBC Rome series (of which I got the complete boxed set for Christmas, which means I really ought to get around to watching it some time) presented a Roman society in which people were happily having sex all the time. Just before the series aired Tom Holland wrote in The Times criticizing this - the Romans weren't so liberal at all, but rather prudish. I blogged that at the time, saying that I thought Holland overstated and oversimplified the case, and pointing to Ovid as an example of a different attitude to sex (basically, in the Amores and Ars Amatoria, the message is if the opportunity comes along, take it, and here's how one maximizes those opportunities). Holland's not wrong to say that Romans held the opinions he ascribes to them. What is wrong is the implication that this is how all Romans thought. Ovid and Cicero did not think the same about sex, anymore than Juvenal and Hadrian thought the same about Greeks. All one can do is point to general trends of thought, whilst highlighting that these were not universal. Which is actually quite liberating for a teacher - asked to reconcile two apparently contradictory attitudes found in ancient writers, one can simply respond "those two people didn't think the same on the subject."

But sometimes you have to rethink those prevailing opinions. For about a decade, I have believed, and been telling people, that in the ancient world sex was not generally considered a participatory act between equals, but something done by the powerful to the powerless, e.g. men to women, adults to younger men, free men to slaves. With a single article, James Davidson has blown that out of the water. The key quotation is "the ancient Greeks talked of sex not as an act of aggression, but rather as a 'conjoining' or 'commingling'". That sent me to the dictionaries, and indeed, one common, perhaps the most common, Greek word for sexual activity is συμμείγνυμι (summeignumi). The sun- prefix definitely implies doing something in equal co-operation with someone else, as does the fact that the common form is in the middle voice, rather than the active (doing something) or passive (having something done to one). This immediately put Davidson's book, The Greeks And Greek Love on the list of books I must read soon. So far I've got no further than an introductory "Note on transcription and pronunciation" (which features one brilliant comment: "Anxious readers may be comforted by the fact that pronouncing ancient Greek properly is extremely difficult, so nobody ever bothers"), but I am looking forward to it (there's a favourable review by Oliver Taplin in The Guardian).* I may not be wholly prepared to give up the idea that sex was sometimes in the ancient world an expression of power - after all, it remains so often enough today. But I can no longer say that the Greeks had no concept of sex as an act of equals, since such a concept was hardwired into their language.

You may now all speculate why most of the examples I've used relate to sex.

* I have to take issue with Taplin on one point. Criticizing Davidson's reading of a homosexual affair into Homer's portrayal of Achilles and Patroclus, he says, "there is no call to bring sex into it; and to do so Davidson has to turn a blind eye to the night in book nine where they both bed down with women." Taplin may be right about the first point - there's certainly nothing explicit in the Iliad - but, as I wrote in a piece for CA News back in 2005, their sleeping with women is irrelevant unless one assumes that heterosexual activity a priori rules out the same individuals engaging in homosexual relations. Whilst conservative thinkers have believed, and still do believe this, an open-minded glance at the history of human sexuality quickly shows that it's nonsense.

Penguin blog

A few months ago, Penguin had a promotion where they offered free copies of Penguin Classics, providing you agreed to write a review: Blog A Penguin Classic. I was lucky enough to get one, and my review has now appeared.

This is an opportune moment to mention, in case you hadn't noticed, that I've revamped this blog, and added links to all the articles and reviews of mine that can be found online, some of which go back as far as 1993, as well as listing all the tags I use.

Imperium: Augustus

I finally got to see the 2003 Italian mini-series Imperium: Augustus, also known as Augustus: The First Emperor (I have a suspicion that this was meant to be a series of films about different emperors, but never got beyond the first). I didn't really come to it with any expectations. But actually, it's rather good.

There are annoying bits, of course. I could do without Cleopatra's bikini bottoms, which make her look just a bit too much like a porn star. Augustus' narration of his past by slipping into lengthy anecdotes at the end of arguments is clumsy, and makes you think everyone around him must have thought he was really, really boring. And my jaw bounced off the floor when I realized that the incredibly camp individual introduced midway through the first episode is meant to be Augustus' literary-minded friend Maecenas.

There's some whiting of people out of existence. Maecenas disappears after the conquest of Egypt, with no hint that he continued as Augustus' helper for a number of years yet. Gone are Cleopatra's son by Caesar, Octavia's children, Livia's second son Drusus and his sons Germanicus and Claudius, and Julia's daughter Agrippina, and the son with whom she was pregnant when she learnt that her husband Agrippa was dead. Agrippina's absence is particularly curious, as the series ends with Livia ensuring that Tiberius will reign after Augustus, and Augustus saying that 'Your son's blood will run in future emperors, not mine'. Yet by making Tiberius adopt his nephew Germanicus, who was Agrippina's husband, he actually set it up so that his blood would run in future emperors, after a couple of generations (as indeed happened).

But there are so many good bit. Nice little architectural touches, like the ships prows on the rostra, or being able to work out from the shape of the altar that a building is the temple of the Divine Julius before the dialogue tells you. The series remembers that Octavius insisted on being called 'Caesar' after his adoption. It finds space for calling the Senate 'conscript fathers', the reading of Antony's will, declaring war on Cleopatra rather than Antony.

Augustus' life is not easy to dramatize. Much of it is a tale of political reform. Most treatments of him either end with Cleopatra's death (Cleopatra, Rome), or pick up with the dynastic scandals of his later life (I Claudius). Imperium puts both together, running the story of Octavius' rise to power in parallel with the events leading to the Julia scandal. They do succeed in creating a coherent narrative.

Of course, the shadow of I Claudius hangs over this series, but it makes that work for it. Charlotte Rampling's Livia is presented in such a way as to play with perceptions raised by Sian Philips' Livia. The audience expects her to murder everyone between Tiberius and the throne, and the first episode ends with her apparently poisoning Julia's children - but she actually doesn't do it. Though she considers leaving Augustus to be assassinated, in the end she can't do it.

And then there's Peter O'Toole's Augustus. He doesn't get something as meaty as 'Is there anyone in Rome who has not slept with my daughter!', but where Brian Blessed's Augustus was losing his touch, and manipulated by his wife. O'Toole's is a relatively kindly man, but nevertheless, still in control, and aware that sometimes he has to do unpleasant things. I suspect the real Augustus had a touch more of the ruthlessness of Roddy McDowell's Octavian in Cleopatra, but this is one of the most complex portrayals of Augustus that I've seen. It helps that this is a European production, and so, unlike many American films and shows, is able to view the Roman empire as something positive that deserves saving, rather than an inherently corrupt oppressor.

So it's a surprise when the very last line of the film is 'In the twenty-third year of my reign, in the province of Judaea, Jesus of Nazareth was born'. This is exactly the sort of reference to the coming of Christianity that Quo Vadis and Spartacus have. There, it's meant to show that Christianity will sweep aside the corruption of the Roman empire, and make the world good again. What it's doing here I'm really not sure.

Guardian Weekend

It was a bit of a Classics-fest in the Guardian Review on Saturday.

First of all, James Davidson introduces his new book, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece.

Then there's profile of Mary Beard.

Both pieces are worth reading, and stimulating me to thinking about various stuff, but I don't have time to write them up in detail.

Lost literature

Last week there were a couple of reports about planned new excavations on the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. This site has in the past produced scrolls from the villa's library, preserved when Vesuvius covered the site in volcanic mud. Most of those so far found have been in Greek, and it has long been suspected that there is a counterpart 'Latin library' to be found elsewhere in the villa. There is much excitement, and talk of new discoveries from the likes of Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides and Catullus.

Fortunately, Mary Beard commendably pours some common-sense cold water on this. Quite rightly, she points out that what has come out so far is almost entirely works of Epicurean philosophy, most of one particular writer, Philodemus. As some of the works survive in multiple copies, it has been suggested that this may be his own library - which makes me think of Philodemus like a particularly unfortunate vanity-published author, surrounded by remaindered copies of his books that he can't get rid of. In any case, regardless of what one thinks of the quality of Philodemus' work, it is undeniable that his rediscovery has hardly set the Classical world alight. And I think Beard is right to suggest that if new material does emerge from the villa, it's most likely to be more of the same, relatively minor works of Epicurean philosophy. If the 'Latin library' exists, it's likely to be philosophical in nature. [ETA 21/01/15: Actually, some Latin texts, e.g. portions of Ennius and Caecilius Statius, have been found, so my scepticism about the 'Latin Library' is a little unfounded. Though whether the 'library' in the villa was so rigorously organised is another question.] That still leaves some scope for interesting discoveries - there are some lost Ciceronian philosophical works, such as the Hortensius, which moved St Augustine of Hippo and inspired him to study philosophy. But not too much hope for lost works of Catullus, not least because there aren't, as far as I know, any lost works of Catullus - though the text we have is in a mess, with a number of poems missing lines, traditionally because the one manuscript that survived was found propping up a wine barrel, and had been damaged, so another earlier manuscript would please Catullan scholars no end. (Though it might be even more useful to find texts of his friends and contemporaries Calvus or Cinna, the latter victim of one of the most famous cases of mistaken identity in history.) [ETA 03/01/15: Actually, I'm just plain wrong here - there are Catullan poems cited in other ancient sources that are not preserved in the manuscript tradition.]

But there are no a priori reasons for believing that there must have been a 'Latin library'. It's entirely possible that all the works there are Greek. A philosophical library might just possibly produce unknown works of Aristotle - just one of his dialogues, the works that made Aristotle's reputation, would be a sensational find. But the chances of Euripides or Sophocles are slim, I'm afraid. Indeed, it's possible that the new floors of the villa that have been found and not yet properly explored were never part of a library, and will produce no new literature.

It's much more likely that major new discoveries will emerge from the still incompletely studied Oxyrhynchus Papyri. These have produced, as well as the Menander Beard mentions, parts of lost plays by Euripides and Sophocles, poems of Sappho, and the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. There is undoubtedly more to be found.

Nevertheless, it is fun to play the game Beard does, of naming what one would most like to see come out of the library (though I'm not going to follow her in sticking to Latin works). Of course, the closing of the archive in AD 79 means that it can't possibly include the lost Latin works I'd most like to see, the missing parts of Tacitus' Annals and Histories. We don't have those parts of the Annals that give his account of Caligula's reign, or the beginning of Claudius' or the end of Nero's, and have to fall back on other sources. But what I'd most like is the Histories. We get some of Tacitus' attitude to the emperor Domitian in the Agricola and elsewhere, but it would be marvellous to have his full account of Domitian's reign. I'd also like to see his account of the destruction of Pompeii, since we have two letters that Pliny the Younger wrote to him when asked for research materials, and I'd like to see how Tacitus used those.

One of the comments on Beard's post names the works of the emperor Claudius, and I'd endorse that, particularly the autobiography. I'd also add the autobiography of Augustus (not to be confused with the Res Gestae).

More Greek tragedy would of course be wonderful. I'd particularly like Aeschylus' Myrmidons, at the time better thought of than the plays that now survive. But I'd also like some plays that would give us another complete trilogy - the whole of the Prometheus trilogy would be nice, if only to settle which order they came in. Or perhaps Euripides' Andromeda. This was parodied by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazousae - we know this because Aristophanes tells us as much. But only once in all of Aristophanes' parodies of Euripides do we have both parody and object - a burlesque of the Helen in the same Aristophanes play mentioned. Possessing the Andromeda (or the Telephus) would tell us much not only about Euripides, but about Aristophanes as well.

I'd like Theopompus of Chios' lost Hellenica. This would provide new information about the fourth century BC. Plus, it would answer the vexed question of whether he was the author of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. The latter work is a fourth-century history, known from two quite significant fragments. It is generally felt that such a significant work can't be by an author that we've never heard of. But all the candidates advanced can be objected to on various grounds - my own preferred choice, Cratippus, I advocate merely because he is the least unlikely. Failing Theopompus, I'd like the title page of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, with the author's name on it.

While we're on the subject of fourth century historians, I wouldn't say no to Ctesias' Persica. Like any Greek writing about the Persians, he'd have to be taken with a pinch of salt. But he spent many years at the Persian court, and would be an invaluable source for the later Achaemenid empire.

Finally, I'd like a work in neither Latin or Greek. In his Letters from Pontus 4.13, Ovid reveals that he has written a small book (libellum) in the language of the Getae, the people amongst whom he had been exiled. We might not be able to read it, of course. Indeed, it may not even exist. According to Ovid its contents were praise of the new emperor Tiberius, and his only reason for mentioning of it was to highlight the lengths he would go to, and the depths he would sink to, to praise Caesar, and please can he come home now? So he may have made up the work. But I'd love to have it, and prove that thought wrong.

There's much else as well. Some other tragedians than the Big Three. Any Old Comedy other than Aristophanes. The forensic speeches of Pliny the Younger (post AD 79, but never mind). But before I leave this subject, if you think the loss of creative works like this is something that affects only ancient literature, then talk to some historians of early film or early television. Theda Bara in Cleopatra, or most of the first series of Callan, or much of Doomwatch, are just as gone as Euripides' Palamedes, save that they are better documented, and some of them live on in the memories of those lucky enough to have seen them.

Four legionaries and a funeral

On Tuesday's edition of BBC Radio 4's arts magazine show, Front Row, Sir Ben Kingsley gave an interview about The Last Legion in which no mention was made of Arthur, Merlin or Excalibur, whilst making clear to any listener with the slightest knowledge of the Matter of Britain that this is what the film is about. This is rather symbolic of the film's schizophrenic publicity materials, which at first ignored the Arthurian nature of the narrative, as if it's meant to be a big surprise (which, in fairness, is how the film itself is structured), but eventually came to embrace it (presumably because the magic name of Arthur was felt necessary to draw audiences in, who would otherwise stay away from a sword-and-sandal epic).

It's actually a little bit surprising that Sir Ben can recall anything about the film, or can be bothered promoting it. Filming was done in 2005, and the film is at least a year overdue on release. When it finally came out in the US, there were no press previews, usually a sign that not only is a film a turkey, but the producers know it's a turkey.

But somebody plainly felt that there was a better chance of promoting the film over here. They may have a point. The Last Legion is a terribly British film, with a cast full of the usual UK thesps: Colin Firth, John Hannah, James Cosmo, Kevin McKidd (last seen working the Roman side of the tracks) in a silly beard, as well as Kingsley himself. The nearest to the sort of US star usually felt desirable to make this sort of film work is Deep Space Nine's Alexander Siddig.

Britishness aside, the film defines itself within the first ten minutes, through reference to other, better, movies: Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. That pretty much tells you what you can expect, and the film doesn't deviate much from that, as it throws in further nods, to innumerable Alexandre Dumas and Errol Flynn swashbucklers for the most part, but also to James Bond movies, and, in the most absurd moment of the film, The Great Escape (or was it The Outlaw Josey Wales?). The resolution of the final battle is entirely predictable, and it even cops out of a noble death. And that's the trouble with this film. There is nothing in it you haven't seen before. It never does anything novel and interesting with its materials, nor does it do what Martin Campbell's The Mask of Zorro achieved, and tell a traditional story so well that one is reminded why one liked these sort of films in the first place. Doug Lefler has worked on Hercules and Xena, but brings none of the charm of those series with him.

Historically, it's nonsense, of course. The Last Legion sits in the same tradition of placing the Arthur legend in a historical framework as does 2004's King Arthur. But unlike that film, it makes no claims to historical authenticity, and is therefore less absurd. Indeed the film sets out its attitude very early. In the opening narration Tiberius is described as "the last in Julius Caesar's line", and described as a great emperor. That is so far removed from anyone's perception of the historical reality around the tyrannical old pervert that it's as if the film's creators say at this point "look, we have no intention of allowing historical fact stand in the way of the story we want to tell." And why should they? The Last Legion is no less historically accurate than the 1930s and 1940s swashbucklers it emulates. One might have thought audiences had become more historically sophisticated since, but the BBC's Robin Hood works on the basis that they haven't, so why shouldn't this film? So, for instance, there is a distinctly Islamic tinge to the mis-en-scene of the representatives of the Eastern Roman empire, regardless of Mohammed's birth being a century in the future.

One presumes that Valerio Massimo Manfredi's original novel, which I haven't read, paid more attention to known historical fact. But though Manfredi is credited as "historical consultant", the film is only "based in part" on his novel, and though Manfredi provided the original story treatment for the film, that was reworked by Carlo Carlei & Peter Rader, and then again in Jez and Tom Butterworth's screenplay. It is presumably then that the deviations from Manfredi (such as the replacement of his Italian warrior woman Livia with the Indian Mira, presumably to bring in the Bollywood demographic), from history, and, arguably, from sense, came in.

Nevertheless, real history seeps through, presumably from Manfredi. Through the appearance of the Goth leader Odoacer, and the magister militum Orestes, there's a fair bit of the actual story of the deposition of the last western emperor Romulus Augustulus, though it's been confused by adding the sack of Rome from a half-century before. Other elements, such as the Ninth Legion in Britannia, show more familiarity with Rosemary Sutcliff than anything else. The presence of Hadrian's Wall is just gratuitous, and perhaps unwise in the light of its use in King Arthur. (And which way is is meant to be facing? North or south?)

Manfredi's adult novel causes problems in another area. Is this a film for adults, or, because it centres on a the adventures of a prepubescent boy (though played by then sixteen-year old Thomas Sangster), is it a film for children? This was evidently a problem during filming - so when Aishwarya Rai climbs into bed with Colin Firth, both are fully clothed, and they do nothing but cuddle. It's also a problem for the film's distributors - when I saw it the accompanying trailers veered from violent blockbusters like American Gangster and The Kingdom, to the unashamed kid's fare of Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

This is not a particularly dreadful film; but neither is it very inspiring. It will not be much remembered amongst the ranks of Roman empire movies.

Renault on Alexander

Three weeks ago I posted a shot of my reading material for my week in Barcelona; Mary Renault's four books on Alexander. As it happened, due to a mix up I left The Nature of Alexander behind and took Simon Scarrow's The Eagle's Conquest instead, but that's another story ... In any case, I have now read all four, and should write about them.

I'd actually read very little Renault before this - only her account of the sixth-century BC poet Simonides, The Praise Singer. But she's one of those authors I've always felt I should read more of, especially after last year's rather fine documentary.

There's something about the life of Alexander the Great that, though it makes for glorious biography, resists dramatization. I think it's because it's essentially anti-climactic. His life story builds to a crescendo through the great battles of the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, to which the occupation of Babylon should be a coda. But then he lived, and continued to campaign, for another eight years. These years are filled with episodic incidents, that it's hard to sew a dramatic thread through that. Alter the order of events, and a writer will be castigated for inaccuracy. But try as hard as possible to be accurate, and the writer ends up with a sprawling shapeless account, and the harder one adheres to history, the less dramatic the story becomes. Such issues plagued Robert Rossen's 1956 film, and Oliver Stone's 2004 version (which I discussed here, and a little bit here).* I haven't read the trilogy by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (of whom more in my next post), but Paul Cartledge puts the boot into it in his Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, calling it "unimaginative" (p. 240) and complaining of its "dullness" (p. 312), so perhaps the same problems afflict that work.

How does Renault deal with this problem? Essentially, she sidesteps it, by not really telling Alexander's story. Indeed, to describe the three Alexander novels as a 'trilogy' is misleading, as they do not really link up into a single narrative.

The first time she wrote about Alexander,** in The Mask of Apollo (1966), he is a walk-on, as a fourteen-year old, at the end; this novel is not his story at all. Four years later came her next novel, Fire from Heaven. This is Alexander's story, but it is the story of his youth. It climaxes at a logical point for a climax, at the death of Alexander's father Philip, and his acclamation as king. In her 'Author's note' at the end, she explicitly directs the reader to Plutarch's Life of Alexander or Arrian's Expedition of Alexander for what happened next. The implication is that she had no intention of tackling the later events of Alexander's life herself.

Nevertheless, two years later (and interestingly, at the exact moment that Robin Lane Fox was preparing what remains the best-known academic account of Alexander's life),*** Renault published The Persian Boy, which takes events up to Alexander's death in 323 BC. But it is not Alexander's story. It is that of Bagoas, the eponymous Persian Boy, who narrates the novel. Alexander is a supporting character, albeit the most important one by far. Over a hundred pages pass before Alexander is brought on stage, though his actions influence Bagoas' life long before. In that offstage period are all of the climactic actions of the first part of Alexander's life - the battles, the visit to Egypt, the conquest of Babylon. Alexander is brought on at the beginning of the episodic eight years mentioned above. But it is still not Alexander's story. The dramatic thread is presented by Bagoas' progression, from a novelty at Alexander's court, to his sexual partner, and to eventually becoming Alexander's partner is almost every aspect of his life, accompanying him on his harshest campaigns. Conveniently for Renault, Bagoas' life story is under-reported in the sources, allowing the dramatist considerable scope.

The key crisis of Alexander's later years was the difference between him and his Macedonians over his orientalizing. I have always felt that Alexander saw that he had become the new Great King of Persia, and it was necessary for him to act the role. The Macedonians, on the other hand, saw Persia as conquered territory, and viewed with suspicion Alexander's use of Persians in his administration, army, and his adoption of Persian practices and dress. Renault evidently shares that view. And having a Persian narrator allows her to dramatize that conflict from a Persian perspective, to show how Persians thought it humiliating for Alexander to be addressed in the rough comradely manner his Macedonians used; most historians tend to view this to one degree or another from the Macedonian side, if with more understanding of Alexander's position. (I also think that, wanting to pick up Alexander after Babylon, Renault was more-or-less forced into choosing a Persian central character.)

I also find that it is in The Persian Boy that Renault made the suggestion that has always appealed to me, that when asked to whom he left his empire, Alexander may have said not to kratisto ('to the strongest'), but to kratero ('to Krateros').

Renault clearly found she had more to say about Alexander, but had left herself little room to produce more fiction. So, for the first and only time, she wrote a book of adult non-fiction, The Nature of Alexander,**** which was published in 1975. It is more of a defence of Alexander than anything else - she had already railed against some modern scholars (and the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus) in the 'Author's note' for The Persian Boy. It's a minor work in terms of Alexander scholarship, and blighted by her somewhat blinkered view of Alexander, who for Renault is largely shorn of any possibility of being seriously flawed (though she may well be right about the implausibility of Alexander as alcoholic). But as a means of understanding Renault's attitude towards Alexander, and the way the shadow of William Tarn falls across her, it's a fascinating document.

She put Alexander aside for a while, writing The Praise Singer, before returning to the theme in her final novel, Funeral Games. Again, this is not Alexander's story, though his shadow falls on everything that happens. The novel begins where The Persian Boy ends (indeed slightly before, so that some events are featured in both books), at the deathbed of Alexander. He has already slipped into a coma, and is dead within a few pages. Renault then tells the story of the next fourteen years of struggle for Alexander's legacy. It is a bitty story, due to the nature of the events it describes (and indeed, the struggle for Alexander's empire was not really resolved for another decade after the point at which Renault ends, with the murder of Alexander's son and wife). But there are a number of points of interest. Renault follows the sources in making Krateros a rather shadowy figure, whose actions all seem to take place offstage. And she seems to relish the opportunity of presenting what other people thought of Bagoas, suggesting he is not perhaps as meek and insignificant as he sees himself.

Again, I find myself agreeing with Renault, in this case in her interpretation of the actions of Ptolemy. As the Successors prepared to fight over Alexander's legacy, Ptolemy got himself assigned as satrap to Egypt. Renault gives him what I have always believed to have been his motive; when all the others wanted to take over the whole empire, Ptolemy recognized that none of those with ambitions to rule would accept one of their fellows as their ruler, and without Alexander, to whom they had all deferred, the empire could not hold together. So he identified that part of the empire that could most successfully maintain its independence from the rest (as Egypt often had from Persia in the past), and set about making it his own kingdom.

At the heart of Funeral Games, however, is Alexander's cousin Eurydike. She clearly appeals enormously to Renault. Trained in hunting, accustomed to wearing man's clothes, Eurydike is someone who prefers the company of men, though not for sex, and wishes she were a man. One suspects that Renault herself shared many of those qualities, though she recognizes that Eurydike's failure to conform to what is expected of her is a factor in her downfall.

One last point is to say how much Oliver Stone's film is influenced by Renault, as recognized in an unpublished paper by Shaun Tougher, and emphasized by Stone's participation in the 2006 documentary. He could not have the rights to Renault's novels (HBO and Mel Gibson's Ikon were contemplating a mini-series based on them), but a number of Renault scenes get into Stone's script. Alexander being in his mother's bedroom when his father enters to rape her, is out of Fire from Heaven, and the decision to use Ptolemy's history as a framing device may have been derived from Renault's coda to Funeral Games (though it may also have been a spoiling tactic against the Baz Luhrmann/Dino de Laurentiis Alexander, which was to use Manfredi's trilogy, which purports to be Ptolemy's History). And would Stone have given the limited prominence to Bagoas that he does had the eunuch not featured in Renault's novel?

I'm glad I've read these novels.*****

* There's a typically entertaining discussion of screen Alexanders in Gideon Nisbet, Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, pp. 87-135.

** According to the abstract for a paper given by Shaun Tougher, 'Images of Alexander: the case of Mary Renault', he appears in her 1956 novel The Last of the Wine. He is not included in this list of the novel's dramatis personae, but he may be mentioned in the novel's postscript, set a couple of generations after the main action. I don't have the book to hand to check.

*** For all that other academics can sometimes be sniffy about it.

**** She had written a children's non-fiction work in 1964, The Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae.

***** There's another review of the trilogy by Jeanne Reames here: http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~mreames/Beyond_Renault/renault.html (you'll have to cut and past the link, because something sucks like a sucky thing, and I can't get the HTML to work). She makes some interesting points, but I think she misreads what Renault is trying to do with The Persian Boy.

Edited 23/10/07: A correspondent tells me that the mention of Alexnader in The last of the Wine is that the manuscript that the novel purports to be is being sent to Alexander; so he doesn't actually appear as a character.

Facebook and academia

There's an article in the Independent about students' use of Facebook and other social networking sites. Go away and read it before continuing. [Unfortunately you can't any more, as the Indy has either moved it or deleted it.]

A few observations occur to me:

1) There seems to be an awful lot of "OMG! The students are doing something that we don't control!" Yes, of course they are. They have their own lives, and universities do not own them 24/7. Get over it.

2) "[M]ost [sixth-formers hoping to go to university] ... resented the idea that [social networking sites] might be invaded by academics." This is hardly a surprise. Most sixth-formers think of academics as being just like school teachers. Ask the same question to a bunch of first-year undergraduates, who have had time to learn that there's a difference, and you might well get a different answer.

That said, of course certain spaces within social networks are student spaces (though not, of course, Facebook itself - students have no more right to ownership of that than any other section of the population), and tutors should not barge in there uninvited. There are a couple of online student fora I read, and occasionally contribute to - but I'm very careful what I do or do not say, and not to assert any authority. And there are some areas within those fora into which I won't go. (As a result, I have apparently acquired a reputation as someone who is terribly helpful. But then these are OU students, who are different from the normal run of 18-22 year old undergraduates.)

3) "Because students are going on to Facebook and using it with their friends, there is informal learning occurring and students may be blocking certain people out of this." Yes. So what? If a subset of students go down the pub and talk about their lecture, there's informal learning going on, excluding those who aren't there. Should universities be insisting that students only go in the pub as a full group? (Difficult in a course with 100 + students, I'd have thought.) If a student reads a book not on the reading list, there's informal learning going on, from which all their fellows are excluded. An individual learning experience cannot be micro-managed in this way. Again, get over it.

4) "Facebook owns the material on the site, including teaching notes and, potentially, research, says Lawrie Phipps, manager of the users and innovation programme at JISC." Yeah, this just isn't true. Looking at the terms of use, by putting User Content on the site, you grant Facebook a license to distribute that content. You do not give them ownership, and should you choose to remove your content, the distribution license expires immediately (this is explicitly stated). That seems to me to place the ownership and control of the User Content fairly firmly in the hands of the person who created that content. I have, for instance, more control over content in Facebook than I have over some articles I've published in academic journals.

5) "I'm on Facebook and I have a laugh with friends ... But, if it comes to academic work on Facebook, it's totally inappropriate." Twaddle. You can make academic use of Facebook, as I do, to network with other academics - academic networks are social networks too, you know.

6) "Students are using these social-networking sites, and they often appear less keen on using the virtual learning environment. In fact, [Jo Fox] suspected, the popularity of one was leading to her increasing lack of success in getting interactions going in the other." Again, is this a surprise? Students who are unresponsive in seminars may become very animated once down the pub. Worrying about what students are doing outside of class isn't a productive use of time.

The people who really wish this wasn't the case, of course, are the university administrators pushing Virtual Learning Environments, in the hope that it will enable them to stop worrying about scruffy lecture halls that eat all that maintenance budget. They don't want to be told why this will not work, and think that if only the students weren't distracted by Facebook, students would put all their energies into the university-approved VLE. It doesn't work like that. Don't get me wrong, I think the VLE can bring much (particularly in an institution like the OU). But it isn't a magic solution to all problems, and needs to be treated as a supplement to other parts of the learning experience, not a substitute.

2007 Cambridge Greek Play

Euripides, Medea
2007 Cambridge Greek Play, Cambridge Arts Theatre
Performance seen: Saturday 13th October 2007 (2.30 pm)

There was a time when the Medea was not amongst the most renowned of Euripides' plays. But the combined effects of Sir Denys Page's classic 1938 edition for schoolchildren, and the rise of the feminist movement, which saw themes in the play with which it sympathized, has brought it to prominence. It is now the most performed of all Euripides' works. Still, the chance of seeing three productions in the same year is rare, but that is what has happened in 2007. All three that I've seen have set the play in different types of patriarchal backgrounds, where male dominance is being challenged. In March London Ensemble Productions produced a Medea with a strong preponderance of Scottish accents, conjuring up the assertive masculinity of hard men in Glasgow tenements. Last month, Lazarus Theatre Company set the play against the background of an Afghanistan where Muslim are trying to emerge from the repression of the Taleban.

The Cambridge Greek Play chose to avoid the Muslim country background that is now common in modern settings of Greek tragedy, not least because they were one of the pioneers of it in the 1998 production of Trojan Women, set in the Balkans. Instead, Annie Castledine and Clive Mendus' production takes place in 1912 England. The background is the challenge to male patriarchy that the suffragette movement represented, and the Chorus are clothed as suffragettes. This presents a different dynamic between Medea and Chorus to that normally seen. In most cases, the Chorus are Medea's friends, and their support for her is initially offered out of friendship, until they are repelled by what she plans. By then, of course, she has trapped them into silence, and they can do nothing. This Chorus, on the other hand, supports Medea on ideological principle, because she is a woman. But at the same time, they are frightened of her, and retreat before her rages in terror.

The historical setting has another link back to the original performance. In 1912, England, and the rest of Europe, stood on the brink of a devastating war. That was also the case for Athens in 431 BC - Sparta's ultimatum had been rejected in the previous months, and as the City Dionysia took place in March, Theban troops were attacking Plataea.

Less successful are the occasional brief Edwardian song-and-dance routines performed by the Chorus. I appreciate that movement and music should be part of any Chorus, and approve of all attempts to convey that. But it doesn't always work, and these examples are too reminiscent of Half A Sixpence for my liking.

A more successful injection of music, perhaps, is the sing-song delivery of Holly Strickland's Tutor - never quite an aria, but not quite normal speech either. Of the other secondary characters, Frances Stevenson's Nurse is seemingly costumed in oriental dress, which looks a little odd juxtaposed with the 1912 setting for everything else. Robert Lloyd-Parry, being older than many of the undergraduate cast, brings a gravitas to Aegeus that might otherwise be missing, though he is still portrayed as a slightly buffoonish figure, as is common (it is possible to bring more depth to the character, as the Lazarus production showed). All these are wholly competent. All the actors deliver the Greek in such a way as to indicate that they know the meaning of what they are saying, not just the sounds, though some, such as Matthew Hiscock's wheelchair-bound Creon, cannot conceal that this is not their first language.

The only wrong note is sounded by Virginia Corless' Messenger. Clad in modern dress, when she arrives on stage she leaps over one Chorus member, and kicks another up the bum. This portrayal of the messenger as a trickster figure, for me, drains the pathos from what she has to say - the full horror of what she is reporting is not conveyed, because really, she doesn't seem all that bothered by it herself.

The key relationship in the play is that between Jason and Medea. All three productions I have seen this year have chosen to present that relationship as one which retains a great passion and desire, especially on Jason's part. Marta Zlatic, an impressive Hekabe in 1998, plays Medea as a monster, but a compelling one. She has an excellent foil in Misha Verkerk's Jason. Not only does he deliver the Greek convincingly, he is extremely handsome; one can see why any Greek woman should want him, and why none would want to give him up.

Castledine is quoted in the programme as telling her cast never to judge Jason too harshly. At first this seems odd. Doesn't Euripides himself judge Jason harshly? In the debate between them both, it seems obvious that Medea is the winner, and the Chorus as much as tell him that they are not going to be taken in by his sophistry. But some of the things Jason says would have been heard differently by the original audience. When he tells Medea that she is privileged to have lived amongst Greeks instead of barbarians, a modern audience laughs at such blatant chauvinism. But an Athenian audience would have agreed with Jason. They would probably have done so again when he says that it is better for wives to be sensible when their husbands find new bedmates. So perhaps Castledine has a point.

She certainly gives Jason the last word, after an impressive deus ex machina scene (as with Bacchae, the deus ex machina is also the protagonist of the action). Euripides' text ends with five lines for the Chorus. This is cut here, making the last utterance the despairing curse upon Medea of the devastated Jason.

A last noteworthy point is that there is an element of performance in the round in this staging. There is seating at the back of the stage. I presume the intent is to recapture some of the intimacy and sense of community of an Athenian staging, but for those in the stalls, like me, then the performers addressed the seats on stage, they often had their backs to us, and it became a distancing element. More successful was the musicians, not only placed on stage, but reacting to the action as if they were part of it.

Overall, this version is a success. If it is the least of the three Medeas I have seen this year, and definitely not as enjoyable as UCL's stunning 2006 production, this should be taken as an indication of the high standards set by those productions, not an indication of any failing by this.