The 'T' stands for Tiberius: models and methodologies of classical reception in science fiction

[The following is a paper I delivered at the 2006 Classical Association Conference in Newcastle. I had to edit it down to fit a twenty-minute slot, and what follows is the full-length version, with some changes as a result of points made in the subsequent discussion. I've also only included those of the illustrations I used in the lecture that are significant for points I'm making. I apologize for the fact the there are no links to the notes - this is beyond the frontier of my HTML expertise. Comments and corrections are warmly invited.]

This paper forms the introduction to a planned larger work looking at a number of different aspect of the way in which sf uses the Greek and Roman Classics. I shall start with two parallel, interrelating introductions.

Introduction number one: Studying the way that Classical antiquity is received in modern works of art and literature changes not only the way we look at those works, but also how we look at the source material. For instance, many of my thoughts on what Athenian dramatists were actually trying to say have been formed or amplified through observation of contemporary interpretations. Sometimes the insights are quite unexpected - it wasn't until I read Ulysses, and saw what Joyce was trying to do, to find the exact combination of English words that conveyed the precise nuance that he desired, that I finally understood what Thucydides was trying to do with Greek. And so it is with science fiction.

Introduction number two: I am aware that in looking at science fiction, I am in danger of being perceived to be engaged in the study of the 'banal and quotidian' that Charles Martindale condemned in the Reception debate at the 2005 Classical Association Conference in Reading. The frivolous response to such a charge would be to say that I'm just using this as an excuse to read all the books and watch all the television and films I would read and watch anyway, and call it 'research'; but that would be rather to denigrate my own work, and potentially that of everyone else working in reception. So instead I shall defend myself from such a charge in two rather more serious ways. First of all, sf is not intrinsically banal and quotidian. (I'm not going to argue this - it just isn't.) Secondly, even if it was, it wouldn't matter. Martindale's objection, in my view, confuses aesthetic value with cultural significance. I have no objection to people making aesthetic judgements, and make plenty of my own. But any such judgement I or others might make is unrelated to whether the piece of work judged is worthy of study in terms of its reception of Classical ideas. Put simply, one can say that Gladiator is a poor film, but it doesn't follow from such an opinion that Gladiator is not important. If most people are getting their experience of the ancient world through the banal and quotidian, then it is the banal and quotidian that must be studied.

Let us start then, as an example of how sf receives the classics, with Tiberius. Not the second Roman emperor, stepson and adopted son of Augustus; but arguably the single most iconic figure in all of science fiction, Star Trek's James Tiberius Kirk.

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

That it is 'Tiberius' was finally established in 1974, in an episode of the animated series of Star Trek that followed the original - 'Bem', written by David Gerrold. Now, almost everything that happened in the animated episodes is considered non-canonical for subsequent Trek productions. That is, they are never referred to, and no attempt is made to avoid contradicting them. But, curiously, the detail of Kirk's middle name does get into the Star Trek canon.[1] This suggests to me that it was series creator Gene Roddenberry's notion, rather than writer Gerrold's.

In the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), there is a preface made out to be by James Kirk himself. (The novelization is credited to Roddenberry, but reportedly is actually by Alan Dean Foster, so what we have here may be Foster pretending to be Roddenberry pretending to be Kirk.) In that preface, Kirk shows his Classical credentials by stating that he has come to be seen as a new Ulysses, and that he is uncomfortable in the role. He also explains his name:

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

Anybody who has read Suetonius' Life of Tiberius, or is familiar with I, Claudius or Tinto Brass' 1979 film Caligula, will know that Tiberius was notorious for the quantity, variety and invention of his sexual perversions. Several questions therefore clearly arise. What exactly was it about Tiberius that so fascinated Samuel Kirk? Do Samuel Kirk's interests, together with James being named after his mother's 'love instructor' (whatever one of those is), explain the voracious heterosexual appetite of the grandson?[2] But above all, what were they thinking?

I'd now like to examine some theoretical models. Greco-Roman elements (or indeed elements from any historical culture) can be used in science fiction in a number of different fashions. What follows is a rough framework for discussion, and is not meant to be a rigid categorization of use of Classical elements, but a broad heuristic tool. It is a model, and like most models, breaks down when subjected to rigorous examination. And I remain firmly in the camp of those who would rather break the model than break the evidence.

Retellings

Straight retellings of mythological tales don't really interest me for the purposes of this paper or for the larger work. These stories, such as Weight (2005), Jeanette Winterson's recent reinterpretation of the Atlas myth, belong in the genre of fantasy rather than sf (where they do not, as David Gemmell's bestselling Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow [2005] does, belong in historical fiction). Of course, the boundaries between sf and fantasy are frequently blurred, as anyone familiar with the works of China Mieville will know. But I don't have time to go into a detailed discussion of the definitions of both genres, which would in any case only be my definitions, and would not necessarily be recognized by everyone. Let me just say that, in my view, science fiction assumes a rational explanation to everything, no matter how fantastic it might seem or how pseudo-scientific that explanation might be, whilst fantasy assumes the irrational. So, gods that are in fact super-powerful aliens are science fiction, gods that are gods belong in fantasy. And to this latter category we must consign, as well as retellings, new tales featuring mythological characters, such as the various different film and television series featuring Hercules, stories featuring new characters in a mythological past, such as Xena: Warrior Princess, tales of the fantastic set in historical antiquity, such as Gene Wolfe's Latro in the Mist novels,[3] or even tales of the gods still walking amongst us, such as the episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, 'Yes Virginia, There is a Hercules' (1998) and 'For Those of You Just Joining Us' (1999), where there is no science fictional element.[4]

What are the truly science fictional uses?

Allusion

First is simple allusion, brief references to ancient history or literature that are not particularly central to the story being presented. This can manifest itself in titles, without carrying any deeper message. Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1934 story 'A Martian Odyssey', that later gave its name to a collection of his stories from 1949, has little in common with Homer's epic poem beyond both being about long journeys. The same appears to be true, at least on the surface, of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.[5]

Such title allusion can sometimes be not to the Graeco-Roman originals, but to other receptions, such as when Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder) entitled their short story 'I, Robot' (Amazing Stories, January 1939), referring to Robert Graves' classic 1935 novel I, Claudius. (The title was later stolen by Isaac Asimov's publisher for the first collection of Asimov's own robot stories in 1950, much to Asimov's annoyance, as he preferred Mind and Iron.)[6]

Allusions may be in the sf work in the form of names,[7] such as James Tiberius Kirk already mentioned; or the use of terms like 'imperium', as in Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium, where the Imperium is the name of the principal state in the story.



In the latter case, as seen above, the name of that state may have inspired cover artist Ed Valigursky to put Roman-style helmets on the figures illustrated.[8]

More substantially, classical allusion may be used to comment on the situation in which the characters find themselves. One such may be found in an episode of the sequel to Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, 'Best of Both Worlds' (1990). Faced with the Borg, an implacable enemy that may destroy the Federation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard muses on whether this was how the emperor Honorius felt in AD 410 as the Goths descended upon Rome. The purpose of the allusion is not always so immediately clear. In Ken MacLeod's novel The Stone Canal (1997), two drunk men sit by the Forth Estuary and talk about how this is where Rome stopped (a reference in keeping with the theme of the Newcastle conference, 'On The Frontier'). The immediate significance of this isn't apparent on first reading, though there does seem to be something of a meme in recent British literary sf of scenes with two blokes drinking and talking about the Roman empire - in an appendix I've included a similar scene from Stephen Baxter's Coalescent (2003), though there it's more obviously relevant, as the story begins in early fourth century AD Roman Britain. This meme may go back to the American author Philip K. Dick, whose characters, as the sf critic Andrew M. Butler has shown,[9] often muse on Rome - even before Dick's (presumably drug-induced) visions of being himself transported back to the late first century AD.

However, MacLeod is a man with interests in classical antiquity - he is well-versed in the Epicureans and Stoics and the works of Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius[10] - so the reference in his case is unlikely to be gratuitous. As one reads The Stone Canal further, it becomes clear that the novel is very interested in the limits of empire, and that may be why MacLeod has included this scene.

These allusions make important points about popular understanding of antiquity. Classicists know that Honorius was actually in his capital Ravenna at the time of the sack of Rome, but the writers of Star Trek clearly don't. Ken MacLeod probably does know that to say that Rome stopped at the Antonine Wall is an oversimplification that ignores the Flavian, Antonine and Severan penetrations further into Scotland; but his characters, two drunk blokes talking shite, can't necessarily be expected to have that knowledge.

Appropriation

A step up from allusion is appropriation, the depiction of a society or individual which has in some method consciously modelled itself upon Greco-Roman (or other historical) precedents. For examples of this I turn once again (but for the last time) to Star Trek. A non-classical instance is the episode 'A Piece of the Action' (1968), in which a planetary culture is encountered that imitates Chicago mobsters of the 1930s. 'Plato's Stepchildren' (1968) provides a classical example. This episode was controversial in the United States because it reportedly featured the first depiction of an interracial kiss on network television, and was banned in the UK, probably because of a sado-masochistic whipping scene that suggests Jim Kirk may know more about his grandfather's fascination with Tiberius than he's letting on. But my interest in it is because it features a society that has allegedly modelled itself upon Plato's ideal state. However, I doubt Plato ever envisaged his philosopher kings as being in addition super-powerful psychokinetics, and I also doubt that the episode's writer, Meyer Dolinsky, had read much Platonic philosophy - certainly there's little sign of it in the episode.[11]

Allusion aside, appropriation is far and away the most plausible form of reception of the Classics in sf, as it is simply imagined societies and individuals doing what real historical cultures, such as Napoleonic France or Fascist Italy, did. However, it is also one of the least common. Nazis seem to be much more popular for this sort of story (q.v. Star Trek, 'Patterns of Force' [1968]).

Interaction

More frequent is what I call, perhaps somewhat misleadingly (and not necessarily in honour of the 2005 Worldcon), interaction. This covers stories actually featuring the cultures or individuals (real or imagined) of the Classical past, or some continuation of the same. The locus classicus for this sort of tale, of course, is the long-running BBC television series Doctor Who, a show based around the concept of travel in time and space (in the unlikely event that there's any one reading this who doesn't know that). And indeed, the Doctor has on his travels visited Rome at the time of Nero, the Trojan War, and the pre-Hellenic Aegean in the age of Atlantis, and encountered displaced Roman soldiers and creatures of Classical mythology; and more such stories are to be found in spin-off novels and audio dramatizations.[12] But interaction can be seen elsewhere. There are two consecutive 1974 stories from ITV's 1970s rival to Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People. In the second, A Rift In Time, the Tomorrow People travel back to the Roman period (and inadvertently interfere in human history by bringing about the Industrial Revolution a thousand years too early, forcing them to go back and put it right). In the first, The Blue and the Green, more unusually, they find themselves up against entities which promoted the rivalry between factions in the Roman circus. For a literary example, Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, already mentioned, concerns a secret society whose origins lie in fifth-century AD Rome. Or one might encounter a Princess who comes from among the Amazons, who have kept themselves sealed off from Man's World for millennia (the origin of William Moulton Marston's superheroine Wonder Woman).

It is in these sorts of stories that I think one can start to see what science fiction can do that other forms of reception perhaps can't as easily.

As an example, I take Helen of Troy. Casting Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, is very difficult for a naturalistic stage, film or television production, since beauty is such a subjective concept. My favourite exemplar of this is Michael Cacoyannis' film of Euripides' Trojan Women (1971). Cacoyannis cast Irene Pappas in the role, who was his wife, and therefore his idea of perfection in female beauty. But she's not mine, especially not when the same film features Vanessa Redgrave at her most radiant in the role of Andromache. When Doctor Who tackled the Trojan War, in a 1965 story called The Myth Makers, writer Donald Cotton solved this problem simply by never bringing Helen on screen, and thus her appearance always remains in the viewers' imaginations. Now, it might well be said that any writer of historical fiction could pull the same trick, but I'm not sure that a non-sf treatment would think to exclude Helen in this way. More likely they would take the approach of Eric Shanower's series of graphic novels Age of Bronze (1998 onwards), where Helen's supreme beauty is a rumour spread by Odysseus to motivate the Greek army. This is a realistic approach, but for me lacks the elegance of Cotton's trick. However, the trick is not unique to sf, as Hector Berlioz in the nineteenth century omitted Helen from the onstage cast of Les Troyens, and it may well have been this which gave Cotton the idea.

If the example of Helen is something that genres other than sf can do, then a convincing portrayal of the Greek gods is much more sf's province. Nick Lowe has observed[13] that almost all recent treatments of the Trojan War have excluded the direct involvement of the gods, either through eliminating them entirely or through segregating them from the principal human characters. This is true not just of Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy (2004), which was much criticised for this aspect (as well as others),[14] but also of Shanower's Age of Bronze and Gemmell's Troy, and (as far as I am aware) of Lindsay Clarke's The War At Troy (2004) and Valerio Massimo Manfredi's The Talisman of Troy (2004). According to Lowe, the only recent treatment of the Trojan War to successfully integrate the gods is Dan Simmons' sf novel Ilium (2003; the sequel, Olympos appeared in 2005). There advanced technology takes the place of the divine power that seems to embarrass other writers interested in writing historical adventures; the gods' Mount Olympos becomes Olympus Mons on Mars.

Into this category I would also put stories dealing with alternate histories (or 'counterfactuals' for authors worried that they might otherwise be accused of writing science fiction), e.g. ones where Rome never fell. The two characters in Baxter's Coalescent are discussing what might have happened had the western Roman empire survived, and such a notion is at the heart of Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna[15] (2003), and of Sophia McDougall's recent Romanitas (2005). In Silverberg's collection of stories, the combined factors of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt ending in disaster, and a different emperor succeeding Septimius Severus, lead to the survival of the Roman empire past the twentieth century.

Alternate history, to my mind, makes us ask new questions of the ancient world. Classicists often look at, for instance, how the Roman empire worked, but less often, I feel, at questions of whether the Roman empire was a good thing or not. Would we want it to survive? Would we want to live in a state which, though it brought order and peace, was a slave-owning military dictatorship where freedom to criticize the government was severely limited? Looking at alternate histories prompt us to ask such questions, even if they were not always in the original authors' minds.

Sometimes the connection between alternate history and scholarship can be even closer, and alternate history can take on the form of academic discourse, as in Neville Morley's brilliant paper to the 1999 Classical Association Conference, subsequently published in 2000 in Greece and Rome - 'Trajan's engines', a scholarly examination of technological feats the Romans never actually achieved.[16] So well done is this that some were fooled, and it still crops up in some online bibliographies of writing on Trajan.

Borrowing

My fourth category, borrowing, is much like appropriation, in that elements of Classical antiquity are used to build an imagined society. The difference is that in this case only the author and audience are aware of the origins of features of the imagined culture - the members of the culture themselves are not, and cannot be, for there is no connection between them and Earth's antiquity.

Sometimes this borrowing can be as minor as simply the use of nomenclature. Greek and Latin can be a reliable source of names that are sufficiently unfamiliar to a readership to be credibly alien, yet retain the ring of something that might actually be spoken, rather than something that an author has made up off the top of his head. This is especially the case where a name does not conjure a particular individual in the popular imagination.[17] M. John Harrison takes the Roman name of Wroxeter, Viriconium, for a fictional city at the centre of a sequence of what are strictly speaking fantasy stories, but ones with a strong sf undercurrent.[18] In the paper that formed the other part of the panel in which the current paper was presented, Amanda Potter commented on the use of names like Apollo, Athena and Cassiopeia in the original Battlestar Galactica (1978);[19] I would also note the use in that series of the Zodiac to denote the Twelve Human Colonies.

Another example came be drawn from the Planet of the Apes franchise. There the characters played by Roddy McDowall are called 'Cornelius' in Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) (though there the character was played by David Watson), and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), 'Caesar' in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and 'Galen' in the Planet of the Apes television series (1974). This is, it must be admitted, a slightly problematic case. Caesar appears in two films that take place in what was then the near future, when there would still presumably be access to Roman history. Though in the others knowledge of human history has been lost by the apes, it remains possible that some names might survive. However, this example does illustrate the way genuine Latin names can then be supplemented by ones with a pseudo-Latin feel, such as the orang-utan Dr Zaius in Planet ... and Beneath ....[20]

For an example where Classical sources have been used to help imagine an entire culture that can have no connection with those sources, we can go a long, long time ago to a galaxy far, far away. I am, of course, talking about Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence's classic comic, The Trigan Empire, which has been described by Neil Gaiman as 'the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet'.[21] It is in fact a great deal more, and Butterworth and Lawrence used popular views of the Greeks, Mongols and Saharan nomads to populate the planet of Elekton. But it is the sf Augustus, Trigo himself, and the Roman trappings of his empire, that are always remembered.

It is also the case that George Lucas' Star Wars films (commencing in 1977 with Star Wars) take much of their political terminology (Republic, Empire, Senate, etc.) from Rome, and even the broad outline of the galaxy's political history (the change from Republic to Empire). Some of this has come via the influential Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov, which helped establish the popular space opera trope of the Galactic Empire, and themselves draw upon two Classically-related sources, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.[22] But not all of the Roman elements in Lucas' work have come from Asimov. Lucas may not have consulted any Classical sources or works on Roman history himself, but he is clearly familiar with cinematic interpretations of Rome's past.

This is shown if we move from the sublime to the ridiculous, which in this case means moving from Episodes IV-VI of the Star Wars series to the more recently made Episodes I-III. In The Phantom Menace (1999), not only does the capital of the planet of Naboo draw its appearance partly from many reconstructions of ancient Rome, as well as being reminiscent of the modern city (and other cities such as Istanbul); but a triumphal sequence at the end is stolen shot-for-shot from Commodus' arrival in Rome from Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).[23]





Above: Naboo, from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).
Below: Reconstruction of the Roman Forum.

This sort of reception in sf through a previous reception can also be seen in the Doctor Who story The Robots of Death (1976).



The robot face illustrated here derives ultimately from a Greek comic mask[24] (itself presumably influenced by the archaic kouros). But the production designer for Doctor Who has gone not to Greek originals, but to the appropriation of Greek objects by the Art Deco movement.

Stealing

My next category is one step up from borrowing - stealing. Here not just elements of the background or foreground have been taken from an ancient culture, but the story itself derives from a Classical original. This approach is, of course, not unique to sf. Two non-sf examples are James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and the Coen Brothers' movie O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), both of which take Homer's Odyssey as their source text (though both depart from it considerably).[25]

In sf there is Brian Stableford's Dies Irae trilogy (The Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts and Day of Wrath, all 1971), which draws heavily upon the Iliad in its first volume and upon the Odyssey in its second. The Odyssey is again used in R.A. Lafferty's novel Space Chantey (1968).[26] Robert Silverberg's The Man in the Maze (1968) is a retelling of Sophocles' play Philoctetes, even retaining Lemnos as the name of the planet to which his Philoctetes-equivalent has been exiled.

The use of the term 'stealing' is not necessarily meant to pass any judgement on the merit of works that take this approach. Some, such as Joyce's novel, are high art. However, sometimes stealing (or indeed borrowing) seems to encourage a laziness in writing, a sense that all the work has already been done for the writer, so they needn't bother. There are two Doctor Who stories from the late 1970s that exemplify this. One, Underworld (1978), is a reworking of the Jason and the Argonauts myth; the other, The Horns of Nimon (1979), retells Theseus' adventure in the Cretan Labyrinth. Neither is very good, and through the use of anagrams for names (for instance, Herick and Tala for Heracles and Atalanta in the first, and Aneth and Skonnos for Athens and Knossos in the second) come close to insulting the intelligence.[27] (I said earlier that reception studies allows one to revisit favourite works of art and media, but sometimes you have to watch The Horns of Nimon again.)

Ghosting

At Nick Lowe's suggestion, I have added a final category, ghosting. This covers stories where no direct influence of classical originals can be established, but where nevertheless there are strong hints of themes derived from antiquity. Once could in this category talk of the possible influence of the Jason myth upon 2001 - both are stories in which an adventurer goes beyond the limits of the known universe in order to recover wondrous artefacts. However, this category is inherently nebulous, and such connections can be difficult to establish. Moreover, one can start to see them everywhere, especially since, as most recently demonstrated by Simon Goldhill in Love, Sex and Tragedy (2004), western civilization is deeply rooted in the Classics.


That concludes my tentative framework. It oversimplifies, breaks down when applied to examples that cross the boundaries, and may be of little use to anyone else - but I find it useful for myself and for my work.

Given western civilization's roots in the Classics, it is inevitable that Classical references will be found throughout sf, and no study can hope to cover them all. But I believe that looking at how the two areas interact can be valuable for both. For Classics and science fiction are both areas that can be used to put a comforting distance between subject and audience.[28] It can be easier to comment on modern imperialism if you take as your background the Peloponnesian War or the far future.

It's worth noting the differences, though. Edith Hall has pointed out to me that Joyce in particular, and others, use the Classics as a peg of familiarity in order to allow himself to write a more avant-garde literary work. Derek Walcott does something similar when he uses the Odyssey for his ambitious poem Omeros. Sf, on the other hand, tends not to do this, as the genre can often be conservative in terms of literary form, and is already attempting to get its readership to buy into novel ideas, and cannot always afford to load novel structure upon that.

Nevertheless Classics will continue to be received in science fiction[29] - and indeed my next reading matter is Stephen Baxter's new novel Emperor (2006).

Appendix

He nodded thoughtfully. 'Decline and fall, eh? But there were a few junctions in Rome's history where things might have turned out different.'

'Such as?'

'Such as the loss of Britain. Needn't have happened. Britain wasn't just some kind of border outpost. Britain was protected by the ocean mostly anyhow - from the pressures of the barbarians, and internally it was mostly at peace. For centuries it was a key source of wheat and weapons for the troops in Gaul and Germany, and it had a reserve of troops that could have been used to reverse the setbacks in western Europe. Even after the calamities of the early fifth century - if the emperors had won Britain back - they might have stabilised the whole of the western Empire. Maybe your granny understood some of this.'

'If she ever existed.'

'If she existed. Well, she was the daughter of a citizen, the granddaughter of a soldier. If you're living in great times, decisive times, you know about it, even if you only glimpse a small part of it.'

'Do you think this story of Regina can be true?'

'Well, I read the book. It's plausible. The place names are authentic. Durnovaria is modern Dorchester, Verulamium St Albans, Eboracum York. Some of the detail makes sense too. The old Celtic festival of Samhain eventually mutated into Halloween ... Trouble is, nobody really knows much about how Roman Britain fell apart anyhow. For sure it wasn't like the continent, where the barbarian warlords tried to keep up the old imperial structures, though with themselves on the top. In Britain we got the Saxons - it was an apocalypse, like living through a nuclear war. The history and archaeology are scratchy, ironically, precisely because of that.'

I nodded, and sipped a little more limoncello. The bottle was already getting low. 'And if the Empire had survived ...'

He shrugged. 'Rome would have had to fight off the expansion of Islam in the seventh century, and the Mongols in the thirteenth. But its armies would have handled the Golden Horde better than its medieval successors. It could have endured. Its eastern half did.'

'No Dark Ages.'

'The one thing you get with an empire is stability. A solemn calm, instead of which we got a noisy clash of infant nations.'

Stephen Baxter, Coalescent (2003), pp. 372-3

Notes

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

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

[3] Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1986), both set in the early fifth century BC.

[4] Where there is a science fictional element, however, such as in the Star Trek episode 'Who Mourns for Adonais?' (1967), or the use of gods in superhero comics, which are inherently science fictional milieus, then, of course, I am interested.

[5] I discuss deeper Homeric themes in 2001 in a paper entitled 'Odyssey or Argonautica? Classical themes in the "proverbial good science fiction film"', to be delivered at the 2006 Eastercon.

[6] I agree with the publisher - I, Robot is a much better title.

[7] Since classical names have been given to the planets, constellations and many stars, such names abound in those sections of sf that deal with space exploration (e.g. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels). Similarly Greek and Latin are hardwired into the language of science, and therefore into the language of science fiction. But one cannot cover these in detail as classical receptions in their own right - that way madness lies.

[8] It should be noted that Laumer gives a fin de siecle/Edwardian feel to his descriptions of the Imperium, and Valigursky may actually be referencing c. 1900 imitations of Roman attire. Incidentally, Damon Knight's cover quotation is quite curious, as the novel contains no time travel whatsoever.

[9] See Andrew M. Butler, Philip K. Dick (Pocket Essentials, 2000).

[10] As revealed in MacLeod's 2006 Guest of Honour speech to the sf convention Boskone, available on his weblog: http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_kenmacleod_archive.html.

[11] Rather more knowledge of Plato is shown in the 1972 Doctor Who story The Time Monster, where minor characters have the names of Platonic dialogues.

[12] The stories referred to are The Romans (1964), The Myth Makers (1965), The Time Monster (1972), The War Games (1969) and The Mind Robber (1968). For relevant spin-off stories, see, e.g., Christopher Bulis' novel State of Change (1994), set around the time of Cleopatra, or the Big Finish audio story The Council of Nicaea (2005).

[13] In a paper entitled 'Little Iliads: Dramatising Homer from Rhesus to Troy', delivered at the Greenwood Theatre, 10 February 2005, immediately prior to a performance of the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus.

[14] For my own views on the relationship between Troy and Greek mythology, see 'Troy: a reflection', http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/classtud/troy/keen-troy.htm.

[15] Sic. I assume the corruption of Latin is a publisher's doing rather than Silverberg's.

[16] Neville Morley, 'Trajan's Engines', Greece and Rome 47 (2000), pp. 197-210.

[17] I owe this observation to Dr Eleanor OKell.

[18] The sequence began with The Pastel City (1971). The stories are collected in Viriconium (2000, reissued in 2005 with an introduction by Neil Gaiman).

[19] 'Pandora and the Pythia: Classics meets 9/11 in the current US TV Series Battlestar Galactica'.

[20] The Roman references are continued in Tim Burton's 're-imagining' of Planet of the Apes (2001), where the ape city is ruled by a Senate.

[21] In 2003: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/archive/2003_12_01_archive.html.

[22] Foundation (1950, fixup of stories originally published in Astounding Science Fiction 1942-44), Foundation and Empire (1952, stories in ASF 1945), and Second Foundation (1952, stories in ASF 1945). For the classical roots of the series, see Martin M. Winkler, 'Star Wars and the Roman empire', in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (2001), pp. 272-90, with further references therein.

[23] It's known that during the making of Star Wars, before the special effects sequences had been filmed, Lucas used footage from WWII air combat films cut with what he had shot to illustrate how the final film would appear. I suspect the same technique was used for the triumphal scene in Phantom Menace, with Lucas recutting Mann's film to show Industrial Light and Magic what he wanted from this CGI sequence.

[24] This observation is also owed to Eleanor OKell.

[25] One could also mention poetic reworkings of classical authors, such as the anthology After Ovid (1995, ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun), or Maureen Almond's transpositions of Horace into twentieth century Teesside (in The Works, 2004).

[26] Brian Stableford, in the entry on 'Proto Science Fiction' from John Clute and Peter Nichols, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, corrected edition 1999) notes at least five sf versions of the Odyssey (p. 966).

[27] Compare also Asimov's transparent lifting of Belisarius as 'Bel Riose' in Foundation and Empire (1952).

[28] For the use of Classics in this way, see Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (2003), especially Chapter VI.

[29] Not least because of those sf and fantasy writers who have Classical backgrounds - e.g. Adam Roberts has a degree in English and Classics, Juliet McKenna one in Classics, and Harry Turtledove wrote a Ph.D. in Byzantine history.

Revisiting the past

In order to refresh my memory about Aristotle's theory of Natural Slavery (relevant to some work I'm doing on robots), I spent a bit of time rereading the chapter on slavery from Paul Cartledge's The Greeks, a book I reviewed for Bryn Mawr Classical Review back in 1994. This is the first time for ages I've gone back to some serious reading of Greek history, which used to be at the core of my research and teaching. It's a slightly odd experience.

And while we're on the subject, rogueclassicism brought to my attention the 2005 report from the Roman Gask Project. I worked on this project when it started, and had worked with the directors for some years before that. So it's nice to see how they're getting on.

My fame spreads ...

The ARLT has noticed me.

(Not sure if 'recently started' is accurate for a blog that's been going for over a year now, but that's mere nitpicking.)

Claudius and Nero revision

I've done some revisions to this article, restoring the notes that were in the original publication, and adding illustrations and source passages.

Baigent & Leigh vs Random House

You may have heard that Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the writers of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, are taking to court Random House, publishers of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (and, incidentally, their own publishers), for alleged breach of copyright in Brown's work. As Ian Hislop said of the Mohamed al-Fayed vs. Neil Hamilton libel action, one rather wishes they could both lose.

I don't intend reading Brown's novel. By all accounts, it's not very well written. I'm disappointed that so many people seem to be taking it as historical fact, but not exactly surprised.

Baigent and Leigh's case, however, seems totally specious. One can protect the actual text of a piece of historical scholarship. One can, up to a point, protect the argument. If I were to write an article with new analyses and conclusions, and someone then wrote an article that followed the same train of thought, but used different words, that might be a breach of copyright.

What Baigent and Leigh are arguing, however, is that Brown appropriated the 'fruits' of their research. This, it seems to me, is not protected under law, because the fruits of Baigent and Leigh's work is what they claim actually happened, and you can't copyright historical fact. If they admitted that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is fiction, they would be on rather firmer grounds as far as the case is concerned - but would shred their general credibility, which is not what they want.

If they win, it will be a major change to UK copyright law, and a disaster for all writers of historical fiction, who potentially could get sued by any non-fiction writer who had published on the same subject. But I don't think they will. This piece from theBookseller.com, better informed on the niceties of copyright law than me, thinks that they're on dubious ground. (And note the explanation of the successful case brought involving James Herbert's The Spear and Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny, which shows that it's not as relevant to the present case as some reports have implied.) Moreover, Baigent is not performing well on the stand under cross-examination from Random House's lawyer John Baldwin. And Mr Justice Peter Smith, who has read both books (which, as a friend with some legal training said "by all accounts will spoil his weekend nicely"), seems pretty clued up.

Oresteia

Trawling Radio 4's website (actually looking for Bettany Hughes' series about the Medici), I came across the archive for Melvyn Bragg's series In Our Time. There's quite a few programmes there related to Classical antiquity.

I listened this morning to Bragg, Edith Hall, Simon Goldhill, and Tom Healy on Aeschylus' Oresteia. The most interesting bit was where they talked about the final play, the Eumenides. Hall talked about how the Furies are bought off at the end, but how the play admits that they cannot be got rid of, that victim's feelings need to be taken account of in any system of justice. Goldhill made the sensible point that the Furies' power is suborned to the interests of the state.

The confrontation between Athena and the Furies is something that has long fascinated me. Thwarted of their vengeance upon Orestes, the Furies threaten destruction upon Attica. Athena talks calmly and reasonably to them, treating them with respect, offering to ensure that they are honoured, that justice demanded Orestes' acquittal, and asking that they not visit war upon Athens. I have always seen a subtext here. Athena is trying to bribe the Furies not to resort to violence, but behind her words is a message that says, "I don't want this fight, but if you force me to it, there will only be one side standing at the end, and it won't be you." And the Furies know this - that is why they blink first. (Is Athena meant to represent Athens here? Perhaps an expression of how Athens - and every other state with pretensions to liberality ever since - wanted its foreign policy to be seen: "We do not want war, and will do everything we can to avoid it, but if you force us then we'll give you a war you won't forget.")

I must check out the programme on the fall of the Roman empire. And I'm looking forward to Lord Bragg's Presidential Address at the Classical Association this year.

Barton follow-up

Rogueclassicism has put me on to a BMCR review of John Barton's The War That Still Goes On, which I wrote about here.

On being reviewed

Last year I had a piece published (which I'd actually written in 1996) in Lost Dramas of Classical Athens: Greek Tragic Fragments. I think it's not too bad a little piece, though I was a little out of my depth in writing textual criticism.

I recently got put onto a review of the volume, by Martin Cropp in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. This is what Cropp says about my chapter:

In 'Lycians in the Cares of Aeschylus', Anthony Keen reviews what has been drawn (much of it speculatively) from the sparse evidence for Aeschylus' Carians or Europa, a play featuring Sarpedon's death at Troy and the return of his body to his home for burial. (The list of fragments on pp. 81-2 hardly needed to include Aeschylus F 315, whose attribution to this play by Hartung is ignored by Radt.) The discussion includes three vase-paintings thought by some to have been influenced by the play, two of them remotely at best, the third - an early 4th C. Apulian vase (New York, Metropolitan Museum 16.140) - perhaps a little more closely. It should be noted, however, that the interpretation of this vase's second side as showing Europa visiting Zeus on Olympus to beg for her son's body is more implausible than K. suggests (the winged figure on this side is not at all like the winged figure of Hypnos on the other side; and how would the mortal Europa have reached Olympus?), and was firmly rejected by A. Kossatz-Deissmann, Dramen des Aischylos auf westgriechischen Vasen (1978), 72. K. then debates at length the question whether the play was set in Lycia (traditionally Sarpedon's homeland) or in Caria as the title Carians and the reference to Mylasa in F 101 suggest. He interprets the evidence for a mythistorical connection between Carians and Lycians as allowing the conclusion "that Aeschylus did set the action of Cares in Lycia, probably at Xanthus, and that the chorus is composed of leading local citizens, whom Aeschylus calls Carians rather than Lycians since, as far as he is concerned, the two are much the same" (78).

That I missed a piece of bibliography is regrettable, and I take the rap for that. And I've got used to the inability of people to spell my full name correctly, even though it is so done throughout the work reviewed (I spell my name without an 'h', which is the correct original anglicization of Antonius). But what bemuses me most is the remark, "The list of fragments on pp. 81-2 hardly needed to include Aeschylus F 315, whose attribution to this play by Hartung is ignored by Radt." Did Cropp perhaps miss the footnote where I say "This list aims to be comprehensive rather than critical"? My aim was to collect all the fragments that had, at one time or another, been thought to be part of the lost work. That other scholars have disregarded the attribution of some of these is irrelevant. The duty of any catalogue of this type is to assemble all possibly relevant material, and leave it to the people who use the catalogue to decide. If a catalogue of all the fragments of Aeschylus was assembled, I should want all the fragments to be there, including those some scholars considered dubious. (Though in fairness, whilst I do note that it is far from clear that the fragment belongs to the Cares, I could have indicated which collections attribute it to the play and which don't.)

Cosmology of the Wider World

My review of Jeffrey M. Ford's The Cosmology of the Wider World, a novel where the central character is a minotaur, has appeared in Strange Horizons. The same week also saw Dan Hartland's review of the first two of Canongate's retellings of Greek myths, Jeanette Winterson's Weight and Margaret Attwood's The Penelopiad. I have to say these are books I wouldn't have minded reviewing myself, but you can't have everything.

A feminist archaeology

A couple of weeks ago I got myself involved in a discussion on feminist archaeology over on Alun Salt's Archaeoastronomy. As March is Women's History Month, I thought it worth revisiting here.

Alun had written an article around some quotations from Paul Bahn's Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction. I'd like to repeat here the sections he quoted in that and a follow up the next day.

The explicit emphasis now being placed on gender studies is therefore welcome not only for its attempt to create a much greater awareness of the need to extend gender equality into all aspects of contemporary life, including academia, but also for the substantial contribution that it is making to our understanding of how ancient societies may have worked. However, what is called 'Gender Archaeology' is actually feminist archaeology - sisters are doing it for themselves.

The avowed aim is to focus on gender (in the sense of social and cultural, rather than biological, distinctions between the sexes) in the archaeological record. But despite assurances to the contrary it is clear that the major aim is not so much to reclaim women and men in non-sexist ways in prehistory, as to make women visible in the past. A perfectly laudable aim, and one that is highly fashionable at present, with books proliferating on Women in Prehistory, in Ancient Egypt, in the Roman period, in the Viking period, or any other era. Part of the 'feminist' approach to the past, whose goal is to shed new light on hitherto neglected aspects of the archaeological record, this phenomenon is accompanied by an ever-increasing number of conferences around the world, usually organized by or starring the same cast of characters. Although billed as concerning 'gender in archaeology', these events concentrate overwhelmingly on the female gender, and are attended by a host of female archaeologists, plus a few brave males who perhaps aspire to political correctness. The very word 'gender', therefore, is in serious danger of being hijacked, like the word 'gay' before it.

...

It is utterly laudable to wish to do away with the sexism inherent in much traditional archaeology, to make people more aware of the presence and importance of women in past societies, and to produce studies focusing on women in different periods. However, in swinging away from past androcentrism, the pendulum is in danger of going to the other extreme; sexism rubs both ways. As Albert Camus once wrote, 'the slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.'

...

The proper antidote to male chauvinism about the past is an egalitarian and neutral archaeology, not a feminist archaeology. If, as the proponents claim, they are not simply trying to make women visible in the archaeological record, is a 'feminist archaeology' needed at all? There is still a long way to go, but the real way forward is a balanced, non-sexist archaeology rather than a feminist kind, which is just the flip-side of the traditional coin.

Paul Bahn, Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 83-5, 87

As is often the case, there is a germ of truth behind what Bahn says. There is no point in eliminating male chauvinism only to replace it with a new inequality of the sexes. Unfortunately, there are some people who call themselves feminists who seem to believe that's exactly what they should be doing. Personally, I feel that they do the movement more harm than good, by antagonizing men and women who are otherwise sympathetic towards the aims of feminism. I have no more time for someone who disregards my opinion simply because I am a man than I have for someone who disregards someone's opinion simply because they are a woman.

Nevertheless, despite the existence of such people, they are not the be-all and end-all of feminism (though the more patriarchal corners of the media like to imply that this is the case, in order to discredit feminism through equation with its more extreme elements). The wider movement is about equality and freedom for women, or so I have always taken it. So, I am forced to point out, as I did in comment to Alun, that Bahn's argument depends on the acceptance of a very narrow definition of feminism, and when he says "a feminist [archaeology]... is just the flip-side of the traditional coin," the only sensible response is to say "no, it isn't". Where Bahn sees a feminist archaeology as incompatible with a "balanced, non-sexist" approach, I would argue that the former is an essential step towards the latter. After all, how can women be made visible in the archaeological record, an aim Bahn considers laudable, without a feminist archaeology that looks for them where they have not been sought before?

I also am in general agreement with Sharon Howard's comment on Alun's first post, that the idea of balance is often brought up by those whose agenda is actually to hang on to their privileges before they are wholly eroded. This is, for instance, exactly what the opponents of affirmative action do - they argue that something was necessary, but now it has gone too far, as if the careers of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice prove that racism has been eliminated from the American workplace.

I'm not necessarily saying that Bahn is deliberately distorting in order to prop up patriarchy in archaeology (though there is something dubious about his lauding of the aims of feminist archaeology whilst disparaging feminist archaeology itself). I think it more likely that he has simply bought into common prejudices, and not examined them with enough rigour. As Alun shows in his second post, it's very easy for male academics not to see instances of sexism, and to assume that this means that such instances don't exist, rather than being invisible to them.

A few days after these posts, I was listening to the Today programme, and an item about how most men don't take the paternity leave they're entitled to (prompted by David Cameron's new child and the leave he has taken). Journalist Toby Young said that men these days are being forced to make the same choice between a family and a career that women used to have to make, as if somehow women no longer have to make those choices. As long as there are people with opinions like Young's, then there will always be a need for feminism. And as long as we need feminism, we'll need a feminist archaeology.

John Barton and Thucydides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2006 UCL Classics Play

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

Performance seen: 11th February 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King's Greek Play 2006

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

Performance seen: February 9th 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archiving

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

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



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

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

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

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

So, there you are.

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



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

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

A man called Boris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is this the face ...?"

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

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

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

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

Robert Graves - is he all bad?

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

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

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

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

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

Books with classical themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sign of the Pagan

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

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

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

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

Forthcoming TV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, Wiki

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

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

The Four Musketeers

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

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

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

Spielberg and history

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

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

Oh, drat!

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

The fall of the Roman empire?

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

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

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

Good for Gibbon, I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aide memoire

Upcoming classical theatre in London over the next few months:

Greek theatre:

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

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

September-December, Oedipus (Actors of Dionysus)

Modern theatre:

Until February 6: Paul, National Theatre Cottesloe

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

April 6 - June 3: Phaedra, Donmar Warehouse

Opera:

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

April 3 - May 19: La Belle Helene, Coliseum

April 15-28: Orfeo, Coliseum

Dance:

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

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

Children's shows:

February 24 - April 21: The Odyssey, Lyric Hammersmith

February 25: The Legend of Perseus, Lyric Studio

March 14-18: Jason and the Argonauts, Greenwich

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

Richard Dawkins on religion

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

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

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

Root of All Evil

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

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

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

The abuse of history, part whatever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh dear, I expected better

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