Classical Presences, the North-East, and Vera

I'm speaking next week at the conference ‘Classical Presences in North-East England’, at the University of Durham, the brainchild of Edith Hall. My paper is on Saturday morning, and is entitled ‘“There’s your emperor”. Hadrian’s Wall Country in Vera’. I got very excited when I first came up with this idea, as it is one of the wackier notions for a paper that I’ve had, and yet one I really wanted to do. Fortunately, the conference organisers agreed with me. 

If you want to attend the conference in person, contact Edmund Thomas (e.v.thomas@durham.ac.uk). The conference will also be available for virtual attendees; again, contact Edmund.

Britannia, Season 1, Episode 2

Series created by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth and James Richardson; directed by Sue Tully; screenplay by Tom Butterworth (Sky/Vertigo Films/Neal Street Productions).

Episode 2 of Britannia fills out more about the motivations of the characters. We discover why King Pellenor hates his daughter (her great-grandfather on her mother's side was a Roman). We see more of Zoë Wanamaker's Queen Antedia, who gets a nice joint scenery-chewing moment with David Morrissey's Aulus Plautius. We see more of her tribe, the Regni, and find that they make liberal use of woad and have lots of women warriors, so that's those two obligatory elements ticked off. We also find that she hates the Cantii because Pellenor's daughter castrated her son on their wedding night (which she demonstrates by having her son drop trou in front of Aulus). 

Morrissey as Aulus continues to chew the scenery wherever it is to be found. In this episode he orders crucifixions of prisoners, to show what a nasty man he is (but he doesn't have them nailed into position, so he can't be all that bad), and then traumatises a small child. Ian McDiarmid as Pellenor is starting to chew the scenery a bit himself, though internal political and family machinations at Crugdunon remain not terribly interesting.

Meanwhile, NotArya and NotTheHound have an Expository Walk. He then manages to get rid of her, and she ends up being chased by wolves. (Well, actually, she is chased by huskies, which is exactly the same except when they catch you they lick you to death.)

But some strange things are happening. In this episode Vespasian gets killed. I had assumed that this was the Vespasian, who was, after all, there in historical reality, but survived and nearly forty years later became emperor. So either this isn't the historical figure, but just someone of the same name (which seems odd, as it's a strange name to pick - Antonius, Brutus, I can see, but Vespasian?), or the Butterworths are going full Quentin Tarantino Inglorious Basterds alternate history on us, in which case, all bets are very definitely off. 

And right at the end of the episode, Aulus visits the DruidCave (it's not actually a cave, but it might as well be), and takes a trip (in many senses) to the Underworld. This show may be rather more intriguing and less predictable than I thought.

Link to all reviews of Britannia.

Britannia, Season 1, Episode 1

Series created by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth and James Richardson; directed by Metin Hüseyin; screenplay by Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth (Sky/Amazon Prime Video/Vertigo Films/Neal Street Productions).

Okay, I should have caught up with this ages ago. But with the new season due next week, and my planning on really getting stuck into the 'Screening Britannia' project in November, it's time I did actually watch all this.

The first thing a viewer sees when watching Britannia is a caption that says:

IN 55 BC JULIUS CAESAR INVADED BRITANNIA

Then:

HE CAME FACE TO FACE WITH ANOTHER LEGEND ...

And the next caption says:

THE DRUIDS

Those of us of a certain age and disposition are probably expecting that the next caption will be 'NO-ONE KNOWS WHO THEY WERE OR WHAT THEY WERE DOING', and the dulcid tones of Spinal Tap's 'Stonehenge' will then be heard. But, of course Britannia isn't that sort of show at all - it's a serious drama. And then the titles play out to Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man', and you realise that maybe it is that sort of show after all.

When it was broadcast in early 2018, Britannia was accompanied by a lot of high expectations. After all, this was award-winning playwright Jez Butterworth, author of Jerusalem, wasn't it? Well, yes - but it's also Jez and Tom Butterworth, screenwriters for odd cod-Arthuriana The Last Legion, a movie deeply uncertain about its own identity.

Britannia does one very interesting thing. As Juliette Harrisson and I shall discuss in the book we're writing together, most cinematic and television versions of the Roman invasion of Britain are interested in Julius Caesar's invasion, not that of the emperor Claudius nearly ninety years later. And they are almost without exception, comedies (e.g. Carry on Cleo or Asterix in Britain). Britannia is very definitely about the Claudian invasion - the only other screen example of this I've been able to find is 'Pritain', the first episode of the 1974-1975 BBC series Churchill's People. And Britannia is certainly not sold as a comedy.

There's also something a bit odd going on in terms of diversity. The Romans are clearly the bad guys here - this is not to say that the Britons are necessarily the good guys, as they are too caught up in internecine murder, kidnapping and warfare for that, but the Romans are the imperialist invaders who massacre an entire village that was doing nothing more offensive than getting stoned at a massive Solstice party, so they are definitely bad. Yet it is among the Romans that one finds ethnic diversity, with black and Asian soldiers, and it is from these soldiers that the only significant working class voices emerge. Now, that is quite possibly true to the actual ethnic and class make-up of a Roman army, but one wonders what purpose it serves dramatically. Is the intention to elicit some sympathy for the Roman point of view?

The Britons, on the other hand, whilst beating the Romans in terms of gender diversity - there is a complete absence of female voices on the Roman side - are remarkably white and middle-class, occasional Irish person aside, such that one imagines that when not trying to bump each other off they sit round the hillforts doing Guardian crosswords and forbidding their children from watching ITV. This is epitomised by a somewhat careworn Julian Rhind-Tutt, who is just a bit ... well, a bit too Julian Rhind-Tutt to convince as an Iron Age Man of Kent.

These points of interest aside, Britannia is mostly cliché. There's a neat trick where the character set up to be one of the audience's points-of-view fails to make it out of the first episode, but even that's not all that original. Aside from that, the Romans are all gruff legionaries, the British villagers simple farmers with a close resemblance to the peasants of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the local Druids are like Native American Shamen, and purveyors of New Age Woo, whilst at a higher level they're rather more sinister, led by Mackenzie Crook's Veran, made up to look like a Batman villain.

Britannia's biggest weakness, of course, is what got it made in the first place - its potential to be the next Game of Thrones, and therefore its tendency to lean in the direction of HBO's series. So there is much swearing, though in a remarkable act of restraint, no female nudity until fifty-five minutes in (compare Troy: Fall of a City, which had boobies after only five minutes) [on rewatching, I see that there's a flash of bare breasts eighteen minutes in]. The Cantii's 'citadel' (rather than hillfort) of Crugdunon clearly went through several drafts where the designers were asked to make it more Game of Thrones-y, until the result doesn't look exactly like Winterfell, but would feel oddly familiar to any Starks visiting. And Nikolaj Lie Kaas' Outcast Druid and Eleanor Worthington-Cox's Cait, the pubescent girl he rescues from a massacre and is then contemptuous of, are so painfully NotArya and NotTheHound that it's slightly surprising legal action wasn't taken.

The problem that Britannia has which Game of Thrones didn't, of course, is that the audience knows the outcome. Whatever the various Britons may do, the Romans are here to stay, at least for the next four hundred years. The bad guys are going to win. (This may shed light on why the invasion is often treated as a comedy.)

The salvation of Britannia is that every ten or twenty minutes or so, David Morrissey as Roman commander Aulus Plautius turns up and chews every bit of scenery in sight, in a way that you have never seen him do before. This is not the nuanced Morrissey of Sense and Sensibility or The City and the City - this is full-on Alan-Rickman-as-the-Sheriff-of-Nottingham scenery chewing, as he flings his dead-mink [I think it's meant to be a wolf, but looks like a husky] decorated coat around his shoulders, advises legionaries to take a dump on the landscape, or say things like 'let's get on that fucking boat'. I have high hopes that he will be matched by Zoë Wanamaker's Queen Antedia, arriving as she does in a smoke cloud apparently of her own generation and sporting a wig that deserves its own star billing, but we haven't really seen enough of her yet. And Ian McDiarmid, as the improbably-named king Pellenor, seems to be keeping his scenery chewing in reserve for The Rise of Skywalker.

Still, this is only episode 1 - let's see what the next eight deliver.

My collaborator on 'Screening Britannia', Juliette Harrisson, has also reviewed the first episode.

Link to all reviews of Britannia.

Sherlock, 'The Six Thatchers'

(It's impossible to talk about 'The Six Thatchers' without including spoilers. Hence, there are spoilers here, eventually.)

So now we get the other Steven Moffat series that's been off the screens for exactly a year. How did this one fare? Well, it was probably better than Doctor Who; as the first episode of a new season, it is perforce more substantial than the throwaways that Doctor Who Christmas episodes seem to be now. And it was certainly better than the self-indulgent mess that was last year's 'The Abominable Bride'.

Indeed, there are quite a few moments in 'The Six Thatchers' that remind us of why we became fans of Sherlock in the first place. If Mark Gatiss' script tends to assume that the audience likes the characters, rather than giving them reasons for doing so, it nevertheless has a number of good jokes and quite a lot of clever dialogue. Some scenes definitely had me smiling. There's a neat twist on the original 'Adventure of the Six Napoleons', though one might feel Margaret Thatcher is still perhaps too divisive a character to be used in this role - many will relish the smashing up of her image, others will be offended by it.

Benedict Cumberbatch is very much back on form. Other performances, however, with one exception, are a bit muted. There are some other problems - there's an opening scene, largely designed to get the writers out of a hole they shouldn't have got into in the first place, in which Sherlock appears to have been possessed by the spirit of Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor. And, given the reliance of the show on the John Le Carré international espionage aesthetic for a number of sequences, it's unfortunate, if beyond the showrunners' control, that television audiences have in 2016 been exposed to real Le Carré in the form of The Night Manager, which does this sort of thing so much better. (Incidentally, the 2016 edition of Le Carré's novel includes a fascinating afterword on the experience of seeing his book filmed.)

But overall, 'The Six Thatchers' was doing okay. And then it fell at the final hurdle. And here come the spoilers.

The other first rate performance in this episode is, of course, that of Amanda Abbington. Finally, she gets to convince the viewers that Mary Watson really is a superspy and international woman of mystery. But she's only given this leeway because it's her last opportunity.

That Sherlock would eventually fridge Mary was not exactly unexpected, not least because Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his own Mary. I was quite surprised that she made it through Season 3. The moment that the contents of the last Thatcher turns out to be an AGRA data stick rather than the expected pearl, it's clear that she won't be alive by the end of the episode.

But, as with the death of Osgood in the Doctor Who episode 'Death in Heaven', the creators seemed to feel that they had to kill the character off, but couldn't work out how to do it properly. In this case, Mary's death is pretty contrived. I was expecting the villain Norbury instead of shooting Sherlock to shoot the tank in the aquarium, which would have been a surprising, if unrealistic scene - but this was probably beyond the show's budget. More seriously, Mary seems to need some sort of super-speed to actually get in front of the bullet fired at Sherlock, given that she doesn't respond until it's already left the pistol barrel.

The disappointment here is that there was an opportunity here to subvert genre tropes, but instead the creators chose to lazily follow them. They probably take the view that Sherlock is ultimately about the relationship between men, and women get in the way of that (an inherent drawback of a 130-year old franchise, that can be overcome, but only if creators make an effort). And so we will get at least ninety minutes of John Watson's manpain.

Sherlock, 'The Abominable Bride'

[Another review from the archives, of last New Year's Sherlock.]

When I saw the trailer for 'The Abominable Bride', I wondered if this might actually be Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes for once. Of course, that doesn't happen - instead we get the usual much less likeable, much more arrogant and often bullying version that we've seen for three seasons of Sherlock.

Nor do Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss go the whole hog and do an actual Victorian Alternate Universe version of the show - instead, this is all going on in Sherlock's mind, and is therefore of no real consequence. It takes place in the immediate follow-up to the end of Season 3, where Sherlock had committed murder largely because Moffat and Gatiss could find no other way out of the plot corner they had written themselves into, and then used the return of Jim 'Thighs' Moriarty, whom they seem to have turned into a supervillain, as a deus ex machina so that they could continue to make episodes. To be honest, I'd have preferred the AU.

As Dan Hartland observes, in a piece that's well worth reading in full, 'The Abominable Bride' is primarily an exercise in self-referentiality. It's oh-so-clever, down to the final scene that is meant to have you wondering whether it's the 2010s or 1890s Sherlock who is real. This is the same trick that Moffat pulls at the end of the Doctor Who episode 'Last Christmas', where a final tangerine implies that the Doctor and Clara Oswald are still dreaming (which may be a great get-out from the succeeding two years of continuity). The device was frankly old when Buffy the Vampire Slayer did it in 'Normal Again'. These days, I am past caring.

Neither do I care for the overly blokish 'look, we're feminists too' pronouncements with which the episode is littered, about as convincing as David Cameron saying that he really is on the side of the poor (though, as has been pointed out to me, if this is all in Sherlock's head, then the feminism is a priori going to be caricatured). But the biggest problem is that what there is not in this episode is much in the way of story, and what there is is pretty confused.

There are good performances, of course. In particular, Rupert Graves' slightly confused Inspector Lestrade works much more effectively in the Victorian context than in the twenty-first century, where one feels he would be rapidly sidelined from any real work. Martin Freeman as John Watson does well with a set of lines that seem designed to make him look as stupid as possible, the error made by the otherwise admirable Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce versions of Holmes and Watson. If this is what Sherlock actually thinks John Watson is like, and the words are not Watson's but Sherlock's imaginings of Watson's, then it's hard to see how their friendship survives.

But these performances are not enough. In short, 'The Abominable Bride' is a mess. A very pretty and professionally made mess, but, as with recent Doctor Who (though it is better than that), arguably evidence that the showrunners are out of ideas, and continuing to do the show merely out of habit.

Two seminars and a review article

I spent yesterday at Masks, Echoes, Shadows: Locating Classical Receptions in the Cinema.  This was a conference organised by Jo Paul and Anastasia Bakogianni of the Open University, aiming to look at less obvious receptions of Classics in movies, i.e. not things set in the ancient world, like Gladiator or 300, but movies using, or apparently using, classical themes in other settings.  Like Jo, who expressed this opinion in her excellent review article in the 2010 issue of Classical Receptions Journal, I am a little suspicious of identifying similar themes in two separate texts, and saying that one is a reception of the other.  For a start, I think this is territorialising, attempting to suborn other fields of study to the interests of Classics.  We Classicists have a habit of doing this, and I'm not sure it's done us a lot of favours in the past.

I also worry that once one similarity between two texts is identified, it can be too easy to go look for other similarities, and impose them upon the texts.  For instance, there is a clear similarity between Virgil's Aeneid and both versions of Battlestar Galactica  - there is a very long war locked in stalemate, which is won by one side with a ruse, leaving a few survivors from the other to flee for a new home that they have been promised in prophecy.  But not everything in the Aeneid is then repeated in Galactica - people have been looking for a Dido figure in BSG, but I don't believe there is one there.

However, Ricardo Apostol made a very interesting point in his paper on Horace and Black Swan; if readers want to see a link between a Classical text and a modern one, who are we to deny them this?  I can see this point - I have no problem with, say, using Steptoe and Son to help explain Aristophanes' Knights, without implying that I believe that Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were thinking of Attic Old Comedy when they created Albert and Harold. 

It becomes more of a problem when one starts suggesting authorial intent for these receptions on tenuous grounds.  I suspect Apostol's not interested in authorial intent anyway.  I have more regard for it - I've never fully held with 'the death of the author', as creative texts are the products of human beings, who clearly had intentions, though I am sympathetic to the idea that authorial intentions and context shouldn't be the only considerations when responding to a text.

I also am concerned about the solipsism of this a bit.  If a reception is apparent to me personally, does it have any value for anyone else?  Possibly not, but if I am going to write about it, I must believe that it does, otherwise why bother communicating this?

Anyway, an excellent day, enhanced by the fact that the afternoon's papers were all on science fiction.


The second seminar is the online e-seminar of the Classical Receptions Studies Network. This has been put together by Jessica Hughes of the OU and Alastair Blanchard of the University of Sydney. The object of the seminar is to compile a list of resources for Classical Reception scholars in the area in which they wish to study the receptions, to which end a number of experts in those fields (or people like me who straddle disciplinary boundaries) have been asked to contribute some suggestions for initial reading. My contribution is, of course, the page on science fiction. I've always said that reception scholars need to work both in Classics and in the field of the reception, and there's really no way round some solid hard work here. But this seminar should help. Go have a look and make some comments. I've already had some good feedback on my page.


The review article is Brett Rogers and Ben Stevens' 'Classical receptions in science fiction'. I knew this was coming, and had, to be honest, some trepidations - what if I didn't like it, or disagreed radically with their theoretical approach? I have a chapter in their forthcoming Classical Traditions in SF, and that could have been awkward. Fortunately, I liked this piece a lot. They engage with sf scholarship in the form of Adam Roberts and Darko Suvin, and whilst there are some odd gaps in the bibliography (such as citing Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's original 'Seven Beauties' article from Science Fiction Studies, rather than the more recent book), in a field as big as sf studies this is hardly surprising.

Their article ends with seven desiderata for the study of Classical reception in sf. I can see why a survey volume that does for sf what Jon Solomon's The Ancient World in the Cinema did for the movies might appear to be something that is needed, but I'm not sure it's possible - the field is already too diverse (to be honest, I'm not sure an update of Solomon, which is already a decade out of date, is practical now either). I'm certainly not interested in writing such a work. And I think the necessity for such a book is removed by their second desideratum, an online database of Classical receptions in sf.  The other desiderata  all seem sensible, and I certainly strongly agree that people interested in Classical receptions in sf need to get out and go to the sf conferences and conventions and present there, something I've been doing for the last decade or so.

Overall, this article has spurred me to get on with my own books in the field, the forthcoming Martial's Martians and Other Stories, which will collect a number of papers I've written on various aspect of this, and a follow-up, tentatively entitled From Constantine to Palpatine, which will be a more theoretical approach.


While I'm here, I should plug a few other events.  The BFI is running a short season of television versions of Greek drama.This has been curated by Amanda Wrigley. I've been peripherally involved - Amanda was kind enough to invite me to be her viewing buddy in the BFI archives on a couple of occasions. And I shall be speaking at the associated symposium, on the sf aesthetic in The Serpent Son. And I can't go to this event (because I shall be teaching an earlier iteration of this course), but it looks really good, and I encourage others to go and tell me what I've missed.

Some liberties have been taken with Cleopatra

One of my friends likened Neil Oliver to Michael Wood. Both have that same handsome (dare I say, sexy) archaeologist vibe going on. But there is one crucial difference. Wood almost always writes his own material. Oliver very often doesn't. This is important. If you speak your own words, you can ensure that what you say is what you want to say (Marc Morris, who lives just round the corner from me, wrote a very sensible article about this). Act as a mouthpiece, and you are at the mercy of a script concocted by a committee of researchers, producers and executives, some or all of whom may put sensationalism, not confusing the viewer and 'telling a good story' before actual adherence to facts and rules of evidence.

Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer (and yes, I know you've got less than twelve hours to watch this - I should have posted this last week - but if you have HD it's on again on April 6th) was, I regret to say, a particularly bad example. Towards the end, the programme was full of assertions such as "experts are now convinced", "archaeologists believe", and "beyond doubt", with reference to their theory that the bones of Cleopatra VII's sister Arsinoë have been found in Ephesus. But one has to point out that not all experts are convinced. And I would hope that anyone who was trained in evaluating evidence would see how tissue-thin was the argument presented here.

The programme had two threads. One looked at the relations of Cleopatra with her siblings, portraying her as a murderer. I don't have much to say about this, which didn't have anything significantly new. Anyone who's seen the 1963 Liz Taylor Cleopatra will know that Cleopatra didn't get on with her older brother. The only point worth commenting on is the programme's assertion that Cleopatra's actions resulted in the wiping out of her father's line. In fact, Cleopatra had a daughter by Mark Antony who grew to adulthood. She did not rule in Egypt, but was married to a king a Mauretania, and her son ruled in Mauretania until AD 40, when he was killed by another descendant of Antony, the emperor Gaius.

I will address here the issue of the identification of a body buried in Ephesus with Cleopatra's younger sister Arsinoë. This suggestion was first made by Hilke Thür in 1990, in an article which I have not read and is not online ("Arsinoë IV, eine Schwester Kleopatras VII, Grabinhaberin des Oktogons von Ephesos? Ein Vorschlag", Jahreshefte des Österreichischen Archäologischen Instituts, vol. 60, 1990, pp.43–56). At this point the argument was presumably based entirely around the Octagon tomb from Ephesus, so I will tackle that first.

The tomb dates to the middle of the first century BC. It is ornate, and, unusually, positioned within the city boundaries. This indicates that whoever was buried there was an important figure. The most prominent person known to have died in Ephesus at this period was Arsinoë, killed in 41 BC in Ephesus on the orders of Antony, at the request of Cleopatra. The tomb is decorated with carved papyrus leaves, indicating Egyptian influence on the iconography. It was in octagonal, which is interpreted as a reference to the octagonal Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria. All these are taken as further support of the identification of the tomb's occupant with Arsinoë.

As I said, I haven't read the article, so I don't know how Thür addresses the questions I'm going to raise now. I can only speak about the original programme, which overlooked them.

First of all, why should the occupant of the tomb be someone otherwise known to us? It's a very antiquarian approach to link archaeological evidence with names from the historical record, but it's not often sound unless the archaeological evidence is unequivocal. There are cases where that applies. The tomb of Gaius Julius Classicianus from London, for instance, is almost certainly that of the man mentioned in Tacitus' Annals (but even that was only true once the part of the inscription that named him as Procurator of Britain was found). But the Octagon tomb itself (leaving aside the evidence from the body, which I will get to later) provides no such firm evidence. The presence of clearly Egyptian iconography on the tomb, in the form of papyrus leaves, proves nothing about the ethnicity of the occupant. Egyptian iconography is found on tombs all over the Mediterranean (for example, in a tomb from the early second century BC from Thugga in Numidia). In the latter part of the first century BC there was a particular trend for Egyptianizing monuments, such as the pyramid-shaped tomb of Gaius Cestius in Rome.

As for the alleged reference to the Pharos in the tomb, the programme never addresses the basic question of 'why?' The Pharos is stated to be both symbol of Arsinoë's greatest victory, when she drove Caesar's forces out of the Pharos, and of her greatest humiliation, when a model of the Pharos was carried in Caesar's triumph at Rome, where Arsinoë was exhibited as a prisoner of war. Which is it supposed to be for the Octagon? If an emblem of her humiliation, thus indicating that the tomb was created by her enemies, why allow her to have a rich ornate tomb at all? If the tomb was the work of Arsinoë's friends, would they be allowed to have such an overt reference to her triumph over Roman forces in a city in a Roman province, ruled over by the man who had ordered her death?

Of course, if the forensic evidence can prove that this is Arsinoë, these questions become curiosities. But can it? Let's look at this passage from The Times:

Fabian Kanz, an anthropologist, was sceptical when he began this task two years ago. “We tried to exclude her from being Arsinöe [sic],” he said. “We used all the methods we have to find anything that can say, ‘Okay, this can’t be Arsinöe because of this and this.’”

After using carbon dating, which dated the skeleton from 200 BC-20 BC, Kanz, who had examined more than 500 other skeletons taken from the ruins of Ephesus, found Thür’s theory gained credibility.

He said he was certain the bones were female and placed the age of the woman at 15-18. Although Arsinöe’s date of birth is not known, she was certainly younger than Cleopatra, who was about 27 at the time of her sister’s demise.

The lack of any sign of illness or malnutrition also indicated a sudden death, said Kanz. Evidence of the skeleton’s north African ethnicity provided the final clue.

We'll leave aside the ethnicity issue, as that's a circular argument (this body has North African ancestry, therefore it's likely to be Arsinoë, therefore Arsinoë's family were of North African ancestry). As for the other arguments: the body is female - so was Arsinoë; the dead woman was young - so was Arsinoë; she was slim - so might have been Arsinoë (tenuously argued on the basis that her sister got herself smuggled into Caesar's quarters in a bag); the body is carbon-dated to a range the lower end of which covers the date of Arsinoë's death; the dead woman had had not had a physically hard life - neither had Arsinoë; the woman died suddenly, and not from any disease - such was Arsinoë's fate.

All these arguments seem to indicate that the body could be Arsinoë. But none of them conclusively prove that the body is Arsinoë - the description could possibly cover dozens of young women from the first century BC.

Moreover, I think that the forensic evidence as presented rather points away from the body being Arsinoë. The age is given in the programme as 15-17, possibly 18. With a death date of 41 BC, that would mean that she was born between 59 and 55 BC. This would mean, at the time of the Alexandrian War in 48 BC, she was between 8 and 11.

Yet Arsinoë played an active role in this war. It's generally considered that she was older than her brother, Ptolemy XIII, who is constantly said to have had all his decisions made for him by his advisors. He is known to have been thirteen in 48 BC. (There's a good summation of the issues here.) Certainly the dramatic reconstruction in the programme takes the line that Arsinoë was, if young, older than her brother, and so at least fourteen in 48 BC. That would make her a minimum of twenty-one when she died, older than the forensic evidence allows. (It's always a bad sign when a programme doesn't notice that it's contradicting itself.)

So, to me, the identification of the body with Arsinoë can only be accepted if one fudges both the forensic evidence for the body, stretching it to the top of the age range, and the historical evidence for Arsinoë's age. This is at least one fudge too much for me, and I must conclude that, whilst it's not completely impossible, the evidence makes it very unlikely that this body belongs to Cleopatra's sister.

Given that, the issue that got highlighted in a lot of the coverage, that this skeleton demonstrated that Cleopatra had North African ancestry, becomes irrelevant. There were a lot of caveats anyway; for a start, the forensic study of the skull, as reconstructed from photos taken in the 1920s, only suggested that there were possible indications of North African ancestry in the body, not that this was definite, and also we don't know who the mother of either Cleopatra or Arsinoë was (complicated by the fact that Cleopatra V, most likely candidate to be mother of both, disappears from the historical record about the time of Cleopatra VII's birth), so they might not have been full sisters (though they probably were). But these become moot points if this body is not Arsinoë.

Lest I be accused of Eurocentrically trying to prove that Cleopatra VII was pure-white European, I should add that none of the above proves that Cleopatra did not have North African ancestry. Given the poor state of the sources about the parentage of various Ptolemaic figures, it's not impossible that there was some local blood in her veins (though I would be very careful about eliding the possibility of North African ancestry into a possibility of ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa, which is a different and less likely issue), even if predominantly they considered themselves as belonging to Macedonian Greek culture (Cleopatra was reputedly the first to actually learn the Egyptian language). But this body from Ephesus is emphatically not the conclusive evidence for this theory that this programme alleges it to be.

Meanwhile, over at BBC4, where they still consider that their audiences can think, Waldemar Januszczak's series Baroque! takes an audience through his material without the need from drama-documentary, and not trying to assert that his view is shared by everyone (indeed, he spends a fair time making oblique by identifiable criticisms of Simon Schama's Power of Art). Of course, I don't know the material so well, and it may be that this programme is as weak as Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer. But I don't think so.

Edit 31/03/09: Rogueclassicism links to an abstract from the forensic team that opens: "Arsinoe IV of Egypt, the younger sister of Cleopatra, was murdered between the ages of 16 and 18 on the order of Marc Antony in 41 BC while living in political asylum at the Artemision in Ephesus (Turkey)." Looks fine, doesn't it? Arsinoë was murdered between 16 and 18, the body is aged between 15 and 18, therefore it all fits. Except that there is nothing in the sources to say how old Arsinoë was when she died. The only reason for assuming that age is because it fits with the age of the skeleton. This is a circular argument.

University Challenge

I've been a fan of University Challenge for ages. It's something of a Monday night ritual, to try to answer the starter questions before the contestants do, to shout at the students as they struggle to come up with an answer that is, to me, blatantly obvious. But this year's competition has something a little extra. Not since the OU won in 1999, prompting accusations from some quarters that it was unfair, because the OU students were so much more experienced, have I known the programme to get so much press coverage.

The reason is the team from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and their captain, Gail Trimble. There's an article in Sunday's Observer all about her.

And she (and her team) are very good. They trounced Exeter in the quarter-finals 350 points to 15, the lowest losing score since 1972, and a lot of that was down to Trimble answering starter questions (it was also partly due to Exeter panicking towards the end, and interrupting with incorrect answers, thus incurring penalties). After that, I expected them to be series winners without much difficulty. (Though this is a view I've slightly revised - I'll return to this later.)

There are noteworthy things about the press and blog coverage. Leaving aside comments on her attractiveness, which really is neither here nor there, I find it interesting that the Observer article focuses on her cleverness and breadth of knowledge. To me, that's not what makes her such a good University Challenge contestant. It isn't just that she knows the right answer so often. I'm sure others on her team and their opponents also know the right answer (even poor Exeter, who after all had beaten two other teams to get to the quarter-finals). What sets Trimble apart is her self-confidence - she doesn't just know the right answer, she knows that she knows the right answer, and so doesn't hesitate to buzz in. She gets her points not so much through knowing things, but through getting in first. I wonder if the reason this isn't played up is because the media is much happier praising women for their cleverness than for their assertiveness. The comments that focus on the latter quality are the negative ones, the ones that label her as 'cocky' (comments often flavoured with a good old dollop of rampant British anti-intellectualism, also manifested in a piece in The Sun where she failed to know the answers to the sort of questions that Sun journalists think are important, such as who won Celebrity Big Brother or who the 13-year old father splashed all over the tabloids was).

Of course, as a Classicist, I find it intriguing that Trimble is reading for a D.Phil. in Latin literature, and that one of her colleagues, Lauren Schwartzmann, is reading for a D.Phil. in Ancient History. These are people who I'm quite likely to encounter at conferences in the future.*

The Classics angle leads me to mention a comment of Jeremy Paxman's highlighted in the Observer piece. He said at one point in the quarter-final (and I remember it) "You're laughing because they're so easy". In the Observer this is made out to be a general comment on Trimble's cleverness. But the remark was made in the context of a bonus round, and whilst I can't recall the exact topic, I do know that it was Classics-based. Corpus certainly used to have a reputation for being one of the best Oxford Colleges for Classics, and this team, as well as the D.Phil.s, also has an undergraduate doing Ancient and Modern History. If a Corpus team like that can't sail through a Classics-based bonus round, there's something wrong with the world. Trimble was laughing because her team had just been gifted 15 points (as they were in the semi-final where they had to give the meaning of phrases from Horace), and Paxman knew it.

Finally, in all the focus on Trimble, one thing has been overlooked - their opponents in the final, the University of Manchester. Because they are also very good. They went through the first two rounds with scores of 285 to 70, 280 to 80, and if they wobbled against LSE in the quarter-finals, with a score of 210 to 165, they then beat Lincoln College, Oxford 345 to 30. Corpus only managed 260 to St John's Cambridge's score of 160, and Trimble's own performance was a notch less effective in the semis than in the quarter-final. The assumption of some commentators that Corpus are bound to beat Manchester seems, if not wholly unfounded, at least premature.

I think tonight's final could be very close and hard-fought (or could have been - I believe it's pre-recorded, so presumably Trimble and her teammates already know whether they've won or not). I shall certainly be watching. And, because it is, after all, my old institution, I shall be rooting for Manchester. Sorry, Corpus.

* I'm doubly interested, because she's done a paper on Catullus 64 and C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which sits close to my own research interests.

Edit at 20:47:Corpus 275, Manchester 190. Well, I think I called that about right. I'd said in a comment I'd left on one of the Guardian web pages that I expected a close and hard-fought contest between two well-matched teams, in which Corpus possibly would have a slight edge. and so it proved. It was much closer than many people had predicted, with Manchester still in the lead until after the second picture round.

And despite the way the Guardian is already spinning it, it wasn't Gail Trimble's single-handed victory. Only once they actually got into the lead, did Trimble, in the last five minutes or so, suddenly start performing the way she had in the previous rounds. Up until then, it was her teammates who were getting the starters, and they as much as she deserve the credit for keeping Corpus in the match and the last-quarter overtaking of Manchester's lead.

A history of Scotland

A new year, a new blog post (maybe I'll keep it up this year), and a new documentary series on the BBC.

A couple of years ago, the last broadcast took place on the BBC of an Open University course programme. A few people nostalgically bewailed the loss of those late-night programmes, but the truth is they had long since ceased to meet the needs of students. The spread of video and DVD machines made it more appropriate to supply materials to students directly, which could be tailored to the appropriate length for the material concerned, rather than expecting students to watch the television broadcasts. Most courses had been delivering their material that way for years.

Some people felt that the end of broadcasts meant the loss of tasters for the OU that would pull people into doing their courses. But in fact, this event did not represent the end of the OU's relationship with the BBC - instead the OU has developed this partnership, and is now more visible on prime-time television than ever before. The OU had recognized, and quite rightly, that a better way of pulling in the punters is popular documentary shows that won't just be seen by insomniacs.

The OU has gone into partnership with the BBC on recognized brands such as Timewatch and The Money Programme, and developed new series. Coast is a product of this.

And now, Coast's lead presenter, Neil Oliver, brings us A History of Scotland.* Its title aligns it with common academic practice. It's a history of Scotland - other histories can be told. There are a lot of good signs - Oliver proclaims from the start that he intends to demythologize Scotland's history, and so he does with Calgacus and Saint Columba, both figures we are told about by writers who had their own agendas, and are not necessarily to be relied upon. The recognition of academic debate, such as when he acknowledges (though rejects) a recent trend to re-evaluate the Vikings, is also good.

But I worry when he states categorically that Calgacus survived the battle of Mons Graupius (actually, we just aren't told one way or the other, and I've seen it just as confidently asserted that he died), suggests that the Caledonians/Picts "helped drive the Romans out of Britain" as mythologized an interpretation of the end of Roman Britain as anything he rejects, or whitewashes the Antonine Wall out of the story of Roman Scotland altogether. And on the periods I don't really know, he asserts that the battle of Brunanburh took place on the Wirral - yet this is only one possibility for a vaguely located battle, and other suggestions, such as Bamburgh in Northumberland, have been made, and may be more plausible (other suggestions, such as Axminster in Devon, seem less plausible).

So sometimes this programme does oversimplify, as all historical programmes do, and perhaps must, to a degree. Still, overall this looks like a good thing, and I will watch future episodes, if not necessarily believing all the hype.

* It's not entirely clear who wrote the programme. Oliver is listed as presenter, and there are then various consultants in the credits.

Camelot! Camelot! (It's only a CGI effect.)

Yes, I watched the BBC's new fantasy series, Merlin.

Good things about Merlin:

Unlike the last two screen examples of Arthuriana, I've seen, King Arthur and The Last Legion, there is no attempt here to do a 'historical Arthur'. Instead, it's all set in a timeless quasi-mediaeval fantasy world (seemingly using leftover sets and costumes from Robin Hood). In general, I approve. When Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes wrote down these stories, the main fonts from which all subsequent versions come, they set them in a timeless mediaeval fantasy world. Doing a historical Arthur strikes me as slightly missing the point.

Gwen from Torchwood! Actually showing more acting skills than she's ever displayed in that role.

Bad things:

Richard Wilson's frightwig is rather unsettling.

The music, overly dependent on Howard Shore, and over-emphasizing the emotional content of each scene, which seems to be the fashion these days.

And there's not much of a sense of otherness about Camelot. Everyone talks, behaves, even to a degree dresses as if this is 2008 London. Roll that up with a bunch of cliches (the bullying prince, the servant who saves everyone but can't tell), and, though this is not bad, it doesn't climb much above most other semi-competent Arthur versions.

They found Boudicca's brain!

Bonekickers is a show that seems to divide people. The division is between those who think it's utter nonsense, and those who think it's utter nonsense but enjoy it anyway.

This week's seemed more nonsensical than usual, but perhaps because I know the history that's being abused more than in previous episodes. But maybe it's the arsenal of live Roman napalm grenades. It's almost not worth listing all the lunacies in this. Mosaics on walls? Well, perhaps. The Life of Marcus Quintanus is, of course, completely made up - but can you really imagine that if they'd been researching this they wouldn't know that there were other more complete copies? And palimpsests made out of printed pages? Do what, guv'nor? And why does Professor Parton wear his hat at night?

It might have been interesting to spin off this into a discussion of the attitudes towards Boudicca that the programme shows, especially Boudicca as British queen, sheltered by villagers in the West Country, when there's no evidence that she cared about them or that they cared about her. But really, this is so bonkers and bears so little relationship to history that it's hardly worth it. (If you want to read what I think about Boudicca, it's all here.)

But yes, I'll be watching next week.

Historical consultants

UK TV History are currently repeating Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, the BBC's 2006 drama-documentary series. On an internet conference I frequent, someone said that it should be all right, because Mary Beard was the historical consultant on some of them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Mary Beard is undoubtedly a fine scholar. But the role of historical consultant in these sort of programmes is an advisory one. They are someone that the programme-makers turn to for ideas, but they do not write the scripts, or dictate how the programme should be made. They do not have the final say, and one suspects that they are often overruled. As a for instance, Mark Horton is the archaeological consultant on Bonekickers. Now, he may well have told the creators that anyone using a magnetometer must ensure that they have no metal about their person. He may even have said that this includes underwiring on bras. But I doubt he explicitly endorsed a scene where students are told by a member of staff to remove their bras, making that instruction in front of another, male, member of staff (something that I would expect to lead to a complaint of sexual harassment in any university I've ever been associated with). The power is with the programme and film-makers. The historians only know how to write books; the directors and producers are (they will argue) the ones who know what will work on the screen. And sometimes they will be right - good history does not always make good drama. Just look at Oliver Stone's Alexander, a film that (in my view) is dramatically weak because it pays too much respect to history. But sometimes decisions seem to me to be symptomatic of a lack of faith in their audience. Beard's post about her involvement with Ancient Rome is interesting. At a seminar, the producers explained that their prime objective was to prevent people changing channel. A lot of careful research has been done into people's viewing habits, and this is used to shape programmes. So complexity is avoided, for fear that people will change channel to something less taxing. If they want to get more of the story, the idea seems to be, they can always buy the accompanying book (I've certainly had that argument put to me, though not by a programme-maker). This seems unethical to me. History programmes should not be in the business of falsifying history. It's not enough to say that the true story is in the book - most viewers won't read the book. And the BBC's reputation as a maker of historical documentaries was not built on catering to the lowest common denominator. Programmes like Civilisation assumed an interested, intelligent audience, who might not know the subject being discussed, but didn't need patronizing. To return to my point about consultants - why do programme-makers make such a play of using consultants, if they will overrule them where necessary? Because consultants lend authority, to give the impression that their programmes are unquestionably historically accurate. This is important to programme-makers - a lack of perceived authenticity will hit their audiences. By hiring Mark Horton, the makers of Bonekickers hope to promote the notion that the show displays an authentic version of life in an archaeology department (which it isn't, of course). The hiring of Mary Beard and others allows the makers of Ancient Rome to back up their opening caption that the programme is dealing with real people and events, based on ancient accounts (as if those weren't problematic), and with the collaboration of modern historians. So what you see is true. Personally, I worry about the pernicious affect of such statements, and the way that the drama-documentary actualizes a particular version as The Way It Happened. Take, for instance, the programme on Tiberius Gracchus. Not only does the version show excise Tiberius' brother Gracchus from the account (too complicated, one presumes), but at the start brings together two pieces of evidence in a way that may not be sustainable. We know that Gracchus was present at the fall of Carthage in 146 BC. We also know that he won acclaim for being the first onto an enemy city's wall in the African campaign. But we don't know what the programme postulates, that the city concerned was Carthage. Indeed, one might suggest that it probably wasn't Carthage, as if it was, our source, Plutarch, might have been expected to tell us. Television drama strips this from the accounts. So, remember, don't consume the packaging. The quality of historical consultant is not necessarily a guide to the historical integrity of a programme. So why do historians still serve as consultants on these programmes? Obviously, I can't speak for anyone. And I shall put aside the notion of sheer ego-boost from being connected to the telly, though were I ever to be offered such a role (which is highly unlikely) it would be an influential factor for my decision. I think many get involved because they see an opportunity to do some good, at the very least to stop some mistakes being made. Bonekickers has its clearly 'educational' moments, such as the mini-lecture on how Bristol, though built on the profits of the slave trade, never actually had slaves in its ports. And Mark Horton has a series of mini-films on the website on the background. So those interested in learning more about the history can be directed. Maybe that's the right attitude, as long as your ambitions aren't too lofty - in which case you'll be disappointed, as Kathleen Coleman was when she worked on Gladiator. But maybe it's appeasing the enemy? Will Bonekickers have the same effect as Time Team, in encouraging a false view of what life in an archaeology department is like? I'm not sure I know the answer to that one. Edit (23/07): There's a good article here by Paul Cartledge, talking about his involvement in The Greeks, why he did it, and why he'd do it again (as indeed he did, for The Spartans).

Bonekickers

There was a time when, whenever Time Team started, I'd turn the sound down and hum the theme to The Avengers, because I thought sometimes that this was the feel Time Team was going for. For Bonekickers, the new BBC1 action-drama about a team of dedicated archaeologists, I guess it should be the music from Torchwood (if it was more memorable). And that's basically what Bonekickers is - Time Team meets Torchwood. There are plenty of visual references to both shows. In terms of archaeology, there are a few authentic touches - points are scored early for telling people not to stand at the edge of the trench. This and other similar moments are no doubt down to archaeological adviser Mark Horton, who has lent the show the authority of his name, and apparently his wardrobe, to judge from how Hugh Bonneville is dressed. But anyone whose had any contact with real archaeology departments will soon notice the differences. For a start, the show promulgates the Time Team myth that all archaeologists have limitless supplies of top-of-the-range equipment. And I've never been to a black tie do-cum-book signing-cum-professorial welcome do. And certainly archaeologists, even on rescue digs, don't work round the clock unless there's a really good reason to do so, and never have their labs open all night. And they don't have silly adventures either. But then Bonekickers wouldn't be much of a drama otherwise, I suppose. It's not that it's particularly bad - it's no worse than Torchwood. It's just not particularly good. And there is a problem with shows like this, or Channel 4's unlamented Extreme Archaeology, that try to make archaeology breathlessly exciting. Archaeology's excitement is not of the adrenaline-rush variety; it's much more cerebral. You can communicate this through television - just ask Mortimer Wheeler, or (since Sir Mortimer's dead) Julian Richards. But I can't see Bonekickers succeeding, or getting a second season.

Ahem!

This entry is approved of by Mary Beard.

Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'

It's been forty-three years since a broadcast story of Doctor Who was set in the period of the Roman empire. The length of time between 'The Romans' and 'The Fires of Pompeii' has got a lot to do with the show's abandonment in the mid-sixties of the original plan to feature stories set in Earth's history. Part of the problem was, as Kim Newman has observed, the issue that Donna confronts the Doctor with in this episode. The Doctor saves people - that's what he does. But place him among well-known historical events, and his freedom to save people on a global scale, as opposed to on a personal one, is very much circumscribed. He can defeat the Daleks every time he encounters them, but he cannot, to take three examples from the show's first four years, prevent the Great Fire of Rome, stop the Greeks sacking Troy, or prevent Cumberland's butchers hunting down fugitive Highlanders. As a result, between 1966 and 1989, on the occasions when the Doctor did venture into the past (and they were relatively rare: Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee's Doctors only did so twice each, Tom Baker's five times), the stories were what has become known as 'pseudo-historicals', sf stories set in the past (usually some alien invasion). Often these stories took place against a historical background, rather than interacting directly with major historical events - if major events were used, they were often presented as being necessary evils to protect the planet as a whole (e.g. the Great Fire of London being presented in 'The Visitation' as a result of the Doctor defeating the Terileptils).

Under Russell T Davies' revamp of the programme, there has been a deliberate avoidance of stories set on far-off alien worlds. Inevitably, this leads to an increase of stories set in Earth's history. So it's no surprise that they finally got around to the Romans again.

All the stories set in the past since the revamp have been pseudo-historicals, and 'The Fires of Pompeii' is no different. There is an alien invasion, and in order to save the planet, the Doctor has not just to allow Pompeii to be destroyed, but to cause it to happen. In the end, this is actually a cheat as far as answering Donna's question goes. But the show's never really found a better answer to 'why can't the Doctor change history?' over the past forty-five years.

On the subject of cheating, the episode chooses to take a particularly apocalyptic view of Pompeii's destruction. This is probably the way most people think it happened, but the evidence actually suggests that the eruption of Vesuvius took the best part of a day, and, whilst accurate figures are impossible to calculate, a portion of the population will have escaped. It wasn't quite the complete extermination of a whole city that this episode implies. And as for the Romans not having a word for a volcano - well, strictly speaking that's true, but only because what they had was a three-word phrase. They were certainly aware of volcanoes - Etna was active at the time, and there are suggestions in some writers that Vesuvius was suspected to have had a volcanic past.

But this episode isn't a history lesson. Rather, it's a very knowing manipulation of lots of things that people know about the Romans, stuffed full of jokes. It won me over right at the beginning with a comment on how long it's been since the show went into Roman times, and then a direct reference to that particular story. It followed that up with a joke about Mary Beard's dormouse test, and then the best Spartacus joke since Life of Brian. And that's before we point out (as Davies freely confesses in Doctor Who Confidential) that all the character names for Peter Capaldi's family are lifted from the Cambridge Latin Course.

Another point at which I suspect the script is being deliberately knowing is in the opening scene. The Doctor thinks he has arrived in Rome, and only after seeing Vesuvius does he realize he's in Pompeii (why doesn't he consider the possibility that he might be in Herculaneum?). But of course, the sets he has been walking around are Rome, in a way. These are the sets that were originally built for the HBO/BBC series Rome. Credit must go to the production designers and director, who have dressed and shot these sets so that it's isn't immediately obvious that they are the same sets (this becomes plain when you watch Doctor Who Confidential, where the more obvious buildings are not hidden). Production values are high, and it certainly doesn't look like they only actually had 48 hours to film in Cinecitta.

It's interesting to compare this story with the audio adventure 'The Fires of Vulcan', produced in 2000, which was also set in Pompeii at the time of the eruption. It's not unknown for the new series to borrow from audios (Rise of the Cybermen' takes elements from 'Spare Parts', for instance), and the title of the later story is almost certainly an acknowledgment of the earlier one. But beyond that and the setting, the two stories share little. 'The Fires of Vulcan' is an actual historical, and uses historical characters (if sometimes anachronistically). It owes a great deal in terms of structure and scenes to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii. In 'The Fires of Vulcan', the Doctor again can do nothing for Pompeii - but he does not try himself to escape, instead believing that he himself is fated to die in the eruption.

Overall, 'The Fires of Pompeii' is an extremely interesting piece of classical reception, and a pretty good episode of Doctor Who to boot. Though I could have done without the stunt casting of Phil Cornwell. And the last shot is utter nonsense.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.