Cinema and Ancient Greece and Rome - Course coming soon.

Interested in learning about cinema and Greco-Roman antiquity? Coming in July - an online course on cinema and the ancient world, led by me.

http://mancent.org.uk/?page_id=3142

Command structures of the Roman auxilia in the early Empire

Roman auxiliary infantry crossing a river, from Hadrian's Wall.

I’m currently studying a FutureLearn course on Hadrian’s Wall, brushing up my knowledge in hopeful anticipation of being able to teach Roman Britain again in the Fall semester. This week, however, I haven’t got much done, as I have fallen down a rabbit hole of the Roman auxilia, the auxiliary troops that sat beside the legions in the Roman military. The following essay is the result of that. I should make clear that, though I have taught the Roman army as part of various courses for twenty years now, and read quite a bit on the subject. I do not consider myself an expert in this field, so all of this has to be provisional, pending the arrival of the better-informed.

There are two misconceptions about the auxilia that I have come across over the years. The first is easily dealt with; that the auxiliaries were primarily a light-armed force, providing troops that the legions did not. Whilst the Auxilia undoubtedly included light-armed troops and skirmishers, as well as cavalry and specialist units such as archers, many, if not the majority of auxiliary infantry units, such as the Tungrians and Batavians that won the battle of Mons Graupius for the Romans,[1] fought as close-order heavy infantry.[2] They were equipped in a similar fashion to legionaries, though with some differences, such as the use of the oval, flat clipeus as a shield instead of the semi-cylindrical scutum.[3] This would limit their ability to carry out certain manoeuvres, such as the famous testudo (tortoise) formation. The use of the thrusting hasta (spear) rather than the thrown pilum (javelin) would also impose slightly different tactics. At the siege of Placentia in 69 CE (a prelude to the first Battle of Cremona), Tacitus talks about the ‘legions in a dense line, the auxiliaries spread out’.[4] Again, the use of the clipeus rather than the scutum might prevent the auxiliaries fighting in as close order as the legions, being less able to interlock their shields. But Tacitus is only talking about one battle here, not making a general statement.

It is also possible that the auxiliaries were less intensively trained than the legions, though the evidence here is unclear.[5] It is certain that, as (predominantly, at least until the mid-second century CE) non-citizens, the auxiliaries had less status that the legions.

The other idea that persists in a lot of modern sources is the assumption that somehow the auxiliary units were administratively part of the legions. This idea is particularly embraced by writers of fiction, and is expressed in designations such as ‘Fourth Gaulish Auxiliaries of the Second Legion’ (in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth).[6] I know of no inscription in which an individual auxiliary unit is described in these terms.

There are, however, a few bits of evidence that might suggest links with the legions. Simon James in Rome & the Sword cites two passages of Tacitus.[7] The first comes from Annals 13.35, where Tacitus talks of the movement of a legion from Germany to Armenia with (in James’ translation) ‘its alae of cavalry and cohortes of foot.’[8] Unfortunately, Tacitus’ text is a little more equivocal here than James’ translation makes it. The Latin is ex Germania legio cum equitibus alariis et peditatu cohortium. There is no possessive pronoun in there. This doesn’t make James’ translation wrong – Latin doesn’t use possessive pronouns as much as English, and often prefers to indicate possession through implication. But the ambiguity means that this passage could be translated as ‘a legion from Germany, along with cavalry alae and infantry cohorts’, and nothing is explicit is being said about a link between the legion and the auxiliaries, other than that they have all come from Germany. This makes it difficult to base an argument on this excerpt.

James’ second passage, Tacitus Histories 1.59, is more significant. Here Tacitus speaks of ‘eight Batavian cohorts, the auxilia of XIV Legion, but which had, due to the strife of the time, separated from the legion.’[9] Additionally, in Gaius Caligula’s German campaign of 40 CE, legates (presumably of the legions) had responsibility for summoning auxiliary units.[10] There is also epigraphic evidence in which the formula legio … et auxilia eius appears, ‘x Legion and its auxilia’.[11] To this may be added inscriptions showing legionary centurions in (acting) command of auxiliary units.[12]

It must be noted that this sort of evidence is rare, and on that basis it seems safest to conclude with the likes of George Cheesman, Adrian Goldsworthy and Ian Haynes, that the auxilia were in general independent units.[13] The evidence from Tacitus and inscriptions would suggest that at times some auxiliary units were attached to legions, but it seems better to assume with Cheesman that these were ad hoc and impermanent arrangements, rather than the regular system.[14]

But this raises another question, one which isn’t as thoroughly discussed in the literature as might be hoped – to whom were the auxiliary units responsible? Obviously, those units specifically attached to a legion would be commanded by the legate of that legion. But more generally on campaign, the auxiliaries went alongside the legions and under the same commander, rather than be directed by legionary legates. In Britain in 55 BCE Julius Caesar seems to have treated his legates and auxiliary prefects on an equal footing.[15] At the battle of Mons Graupius, Agricola seems to have directed his auxiliary units without reference to any intermediate command structure.[16]

But what of peacetime? To whom did the prefect of a fort on Hadrian’s Wall report? Who decided it was time for I Tungrians to move on from Vindolanda and be replaced by IX Batavians? It has to be said that there is not a great deal of evidence. There are inscriptions that indicate auxiliary units could be brigaded together under a single officer.[17] But these arrangements may, like the attachments to legions, have been uncommon and temporary. It has been suggested that Hadrian’s Wall was controlled from the fort at Stanwix, on the grounds that this was the largest fort on the Wall, and housed the most prestigious auxiliary unit on the wall, the 1,000-strong Ala Petriana, the only ala millaria (‘thousand-strong ala’) in the whole of the province.[18] It is certainly true that the commander of that unit would be the most prestigious commander of an auxiliary unit on the Wall – indeed, in the province. But, as Breeze and Dobson point out, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he had overall command in the area. In any case, that only defers the question – to whom did the brigade commanders report?

Ultimately, of course, the auxiliary commanders were responsible to the governor in the province, who commanded all troops. But was there any intermediate level of command? In a modern army, we would expect so. As a consequence it has been argued, for instance by Laurence Keppie, that even if the auxiliary units were not formally attached to the administrative structure of the legions, nonetheless the legions had a degree of control over the auxiliary units around them.[19] 

The problem is, as Breeze and Dobson point out, there’s precious little evidence for legionary legates exercising such authority. If anything, the evidence is the other way, suggesting that auxiliary commanders communicated with provincial governors directly. A papyrus dated to 103 CE features the governor of Egypt writing directly to the commander of an auxiliary cohort.[20] One might also note an inscription from Rough Castle on the Antonine Wall in Scotland that reveals a legionary centurion in (presumably temporary) command of an auxiliary cohort.[21] The centurion has not come from the closest legion, VI Victrix at York, but from XX Legion at Chester.

In one of the Vindolanda tablets, Flavius Cerialis, commander of IX Batavians, writes to Crispinus to ask the latter to put in a good word for Cerialis with Marcellus, the provincial governor.[22] Unfortunately, apart from his being in a position to do Cerialis a favour, we know nothing more about Crispinus, or the position he held.

It seems likely to me that the command structure of an army on campaign, where the legions and auxiliaries were all independently responsible to the overall army commander, was replicated in peacetime, with the auxiliary prefects directly responsible to the provincial governor, in his role as commander of the army of the province.[23] The governor’s staff must have been considered sufficient for the bureaucratic and administrative needs of the auxiliary units in the province.

This does not mean that the legate of a legion could not order the commander of an auxiliary unit around. The legionary legate was a senator, of a higher social rank to the equestrians from which the auxiliary commanders were drawn, and appointed directly by the emperor.[24] It would be a brave auxiliary prefect who would refuse without very good reason a legionary legate’s reasonable request, e.g. to send a vexillation of troops. But this authority of the legionary legates over the prefects was rather more informal than it has sometimes been conceived as.

Of course, everything changed with the army and provincial reforms of the third and fourth centuries, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.

Works cited

Breeze, David J., and Dobson, Brian (2000), Hadrian’s Wall, 4^th edn, London: Penguin

Cheesman, George Leonard (1914), The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army, Oxford: Clarendon Press (pagination from 2018 edition, Frankfurt am Main: Outlook)

D’Amato, Raffaele (2012), Roman Centurions 31 BC–AD 500, Oxford: Osprey Publishing

Dobson, Brian, and Mann, J.C. (1973), ‘The Roman Army in Britain and Britons in the Roman Army’, Britannia 4, 191–205

Forty, Simon (2018), Hadrian’s Wall: From Construction to World Heritage Site. A Journey Along the Wall, and Back in Time, Yeovil: Haynes.

Goldsworthy, Adrian (2000 [2019]), Roman Warfare, London: Cassell & Co. (pagination from 2019 edn, New York: Basic Books)

Goldsworthy, Adrian (2003), The Complete Roman Army, London: Thames & Hudson

Haynes, Ian (2013), Blood of the Provinces: The Roman Auxilia and the Making of Provincial Society from Augustus to the Severans, Oxford: Oxford University Press

James, Simon (2011), Rome & the Sword: How Warriors & Weapons Shaped Roman History, London: Thames & Hudson

Keppie, Lawrence (1983), The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire, London: Batsford.

Sutcliff, Rosemary (1954 [1977]), The Eagle of the Ninth, Oxford: Oxford University Press (pagination from 1977 edn, London: Puffin)

---

My thanks to Eric Morse for sharing some thoughts with me on this topic.

[1] Tacitus, Agricola 36.1–2.

[2] Goldsworthy 2000 [2019], 113; Haynes 2013, 274.

[3] On auxiliary equipment, see Goldsworthy 2003, 136. I am oversimplifying here – as Haynes 2013, 239–249 argues, there would have been considerable variety in terms of equipment from auxiliary unit to auxiliary unit.

[4] Tacitus, Histories 2.22: densum legionum agmen, spara auxiliorum.

[5] The suggestion is made in Dobson and Mann 1973, 195.

[6] Sutcliff 1954 [1977], 17 (ch. 1: ‘Frontier Fort’).

[7] James 2011, 303 n. 32.

[8] Cavalry units in the auxilia were termed alae (singular ala), which can be translated as ‘wings’, though it’s more common to retain the Latin term. Infantry units were cohorts (singular cohors), usually anglicized as ‘cohorts’.

[9] octo Batavorum cohortes, quartae decimae legionis auxilia, tum discordia temporum a legione digressae.

[10] Suetonius, Life of Caligula 44.

[11] Cheesman 1914 [2018], 40 n. 146, cites three examples – CIL [Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum] 8.2637: legio III Augusta et auxilia eius, Lambaesis, 158 CE: CIL 13.8017: legio I Minervia pia fidelis Severiana Alexandriana cum auxilis, Bonn; CIL 3.3228: vexillationes legionum Germaniciarum et Brittanniciarum cum auxilis earum.

[12] E.g. CIL 3.1918, a centurion of III Legion in command of I Belgae; RIB [Roman Inscriptions of Britain] 2144, a centurion of XX Legion in command of VI Nervians at Rough Castle (to be discussed later). For further examples see D’Amato 2012, 6.

[13] Cheesman 1914 [2018], 29-31; Goldsworthy 2000 [2019], 112; Haynes 2013, 43.

[14] Cheesman 1914 [2018], 29, 30.

[15] Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars 4.22.

[16] Tacitus, Agricola 35–36. See Haynes 2013, 272, on issues with Tacitus’ account of Mons Graupius, which may affect the reliance we can place on it.

[17] E.g. CIL 11.6344, four cohorts under a single officer in Spain.

[18] E.g. Forty 2018, 114.

[19] Keppie 1983, 190.

[20] POxy 7.1022.

[21] RIB 2144.

[22] Vindolanda Tablet 225.

[23] This appears to be the conclusion of Haynes 2013, 325, though he is not explicit.

[24] Goldsworthy 2003, 60, 64.

Good Omens

It's the 30th anniversary of the publication of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. For many of my friends, this is a very important and beloved book. I actually only finally read it this year, though I did listen to the radio version from a few years back - I somehow never quite caught the Pratchett bug in the way many others did. It feels more like Pratchett than Gaiman, particularly with the footnotes, but I think Gaiman had yet to find his own voice as a novelist (his first solo novel, Neverwhere, is heavily influenced by his friend Douglas Adams).

It's a perfectly fine and enjoyable novel. But it didn't quite grab me the way it's evidently grabbed others. I feel that perhaps it has suffered, for me, from the weight of expectations built up from what everyone else had said about it.

I read the novel because the tv series hit the BBC this year. That also came with a lot of baggage in terms of what people who saw it on Amazon last year thought of it - everybody loved it, as the perfect version of the novel that they also loved. Well, I'm pleased to say that I also love the series.  It's mostly a faithful adaptation, but Gaiman, who wrote the screenplay and oversaw the whole project, has at least been prepared to make changes where he felt it was necessary.

Most significantly, the balance of the story has shifted. The novel is fairly well split between the three converging stories of Adam Young and his friends, the demon Crowley and the Angel Aziraphale, and Anathema Device and Newton Pulsifer. Twenty-nine years later, Gaiman has evidently decided that it's actually the Crowley and Aziraphale show. Everyone else still gets their stories, but Crowley and Aziraphale get more. Only they get new scenes, giving their back story, and a new ending to the story.

It helps that both roles are perfectly cast. The radio series did okay, with Mark Heap as Aziraphale and Peter Serafinowicz, but TV gets Michael Sheen and David Tennant. Tennant in particular is on fire, often literally so, and Sheen plays off against him perfectly. There are some good turns in the rest of the cast - an almost unrecognisable Michael McKean as Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, and a non-annoying performance by Jack Whitehall. And making Frances McDormand's voice of God the narrator is a touch of genius. I could do without Benedict Cumberbatch's voice of an unconvincing CGI Satan, but that's the only slight misstep, and I can forgive that for everything else (including the constant Doctor Who jokes). Very much recommended. And you should also seek out the new 'Lockdown' mini-episode.  

Good Omens was 2020 Books #3 and 2020 Movies #3.

On suddenly switching to online teaching

Edited on 17/03/20, with a new update at the end

The coronavirus is wreaking havoc across all of our existence at the moment. Events are being cancelled, travel banned, people told to stay at home. Many US universities have already shut down, and it is widely rumoured that UK universities will close down after Easter, leaving students to be taught through online/distance/remote/digital learning.

On Twitter, I wrote a thread with my own thoughts for people preparing to convert at short notice over to online/distance/remote/digital learning, based on eighteen years at the Open University, delivering, and occasionally writing materials, and sometimes being a student, as well as having taken several MOOCs. I thought I'd write it up here, in slightly expanded form.

First of all, it won't work anywhere like as well as it could or should. Doing this properly take a lot of work, and needs time. If there was any slack in the university system, then there might be some scope for people to pull together, go an extra mile and do it a bit better. But there's no slack, no space to absorb the extra workload to do this.* Instead, most academic staff are under intolerable workloads, and getting anywhere close to best practice may well prove impossible. That's not the fault of anyone other than university managers. What universities need right now is more people, and it's too late to take them on.

Secondly, anyone thinking this is a great opportunity to see how digital learning can work is an idiot - the circumstances are not remotely normal. I personally do not believe that online/remote/distance/digital learning will or should replace the traditional face-to-face university, but should be used to support it. Properly-supported distance learning certainly has its place in reaching students who otherwise would have no access to higher education. MOOCs, however, whilst again having their place, cannot replace university teaching, as most of them are simply a more structured way of reading a book - online Teach Yourselfs, in effect.

But let's talk about best practice. You may not be able to achieve it, but it might help if you know what (I think) best practice looks like. Obviously, as in all pedagogy, Your Mileage May Vary, but I hope these suggestions will be of some use.

Your course/module should have a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) - it's been a while since I've taught a module that didn't. You're probably going to be making more use of that than before, for more than just putting up your classroom slides (and if you're not doing that already, why not?). But one small benefit will be that all this material will be there for future teaching.

One of the reasons the OU was, and still is, so successful at distance learning is the quality of their materials, both written and audio-visual. As I say, a lot of work goes into those, but you can at least prepare more written work to distribute to students in advance. (This may actually turn out to be a valuable exercise in actually thinking about what you are trying to get across.) And I hope that there will be sharing of materials across from people teaching similar modules, which may ease the burden.
If you are going to do a lecture via an online medium, I suggest not trying to broadcast it live - rather produce it at your own time and convenience, which will allow students to work with it at their own convenience. (This has the advantage of cutting out unwanted contributions from family or pets - not that those can't sometimes be icebreakers.) You can do this as a written text, or a video, or an audio recording. Audio has the advantage over video that students can listen while doing something that doesn't otherwise engage higher functions, such as housework, or just soaking in the bath. If doing video, find ways if you can of including plenty of visual imagery - I realise not everyone has the skills for this, someone talking about something from behind a desk with nothing to see but their face soon becomes deathly dull. Break your lecture up into smaller units - about 10-15 minutes is the limit before boredom sets in. (This also has advantages if you have to start again - there's nothing like having to redo 55 minutes of recording.)

If you want students to read anything in advance, make sure that they can access it, and if necessary, precirculate and put stuff on the VLE (though unis are getting stricter about doing this with copyright material). Ask some questions about the material that you want the students to consider, and have some answers ready.

Another thought (and this is new material, not on Twitter!) is that you could organise some online audio sessions with some people who are teaching a similar course to you, and have 45 minutes or so talking about a particular issue. This is the sort of thing you'd rarely get to do normally.

You will need to have some live online seminars. In the two years I used online conferencing sessions for the OU I always found these a bit of nightmare - they were frustrating for me, and I suspect for my students. I tended to turn mine into Q&A sessions, as that was the only thing that seemed to work. It's possible others actually manage to make them work better, though one of my former students says not in their experience, and Q&A sessions are the only thing that's effective through that medium. 

Above all, in an online session, TURN YOUR WEBCAM OFF AND GET YOUR STUDENTS TO DO THE SAME. I repeat, DO NOT ATTEMPT VIDEO-CONFERENCING. There are two reasons: (a) No-one looks good over a webcam, and more importantly (b) video uses huge amounts of bandwidth, and potentially will crash whatever app you're using. Videoconferencing is fine if you have industrial-level facilities, but over someone's home broadband, it tends to break up at more than three or four participants. And make sure mics are turned off when not speaking, as the background noise can be terribly distracting.

For actual discussions of topics, you may find asynchronous online forums are better. Online forums are something universities get terribly keen on, and sometimes they can work - but sometimes they can be utterly toxic, so beware. The toxicity tends to be much lower in smaller groups, where there's less chance for some arrogant individual to throw their weight around. But even when non-toxic, it's not always easy for everyone to get involved, and it's harder to notice when someone is being quiet. 

Be prepared to deal with a lot more student emails than you would normally get, and I would say, be prepared to do 1-2-1 sessions through Skype. You probably do need office hours, when students know you'll be available on a first-come-first served basis. But you may not be able to deal with them all in that period, so be flexible about dealing with students outside office hours. In the OU we used to give out phone numbers, though occasionally that got abused. There's probably no need for that now.

Anyway, I hope this has been useful.

There's another good thread from Jess Perriam of the OU here: https://twitter.com/jessyp/status/1237633585475174400?s=20

Helen King, who knows of which she speaks, has a thread here: https://twitter.com/fluff35/status/1237682924771782656?s=20, and a blogpost on how OU course materials are prepared here: https://theretiringacademic.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/am-i-a-teacher-apparently-not/

Thanks to Becca Sarna-Alexander and Juliette Harrisson, from whom I stole a couple of points here. 

ETA I forgot to talk about assignments! These should be one of the easiest aspects - most universities already have online electronic marking, so this should be business as usual, though you may have to give more feedback.

* This, incidentally, is also why railways in the UK cope so badly with anything out of the ordinary - no spare trains, no spare drivers, no spare routes.

17/03/20 Update:

Here are some new thoughts I've had, and some new links I've found. First of all, I point you to Alison Yang's 'Online Teaching @ KIS' chart, which I'm now using to illustrate the post. It's very, very good advice.

I think the three things I'd really emphasise are:

(1) Do not attempt videoconferencing. The extra data video uses will slow everything down very badly.

(2) My inclination, particularly if you're inexperienced in online teaching, is to do as much as possible in asynchronous format. Asynchronous is much easier for everyone. If things get a bit chaotic with asynchronous materials, it's fairly easy to bring things back on track. It's a lot harder for everyone with synchronous sessions; even in the best of times it can descend into chaos, and it’s not easy to pull it back when this happens. Plus I'm already seeing reports that the servers for synchronous tools are breaking down under the extra traffic.

(3) Do not attempt anything in a synchronous session other than Q & A on pre-circulated materials - despite what proponents tell you, my experience, and that of colleagues and students, is that any attempt at a seminar-style discussion will fail. Asynchronous online forums are much better than live conferencing for discussions. And don't do a full hour's synchronous session - and certainly not the two hours the OU used to advise. No-one's concentration can cope.

(4) Break everything up into smaller chunks - 10-15 minutes seems to work best. Students are much more likely to engage with smaller chunks.

For those considering using ordinary chat platforms, the problem with them is that you end up with the issue that everyone has where you’re typing and the person you're speaking to is typing, only multiplied. You can end up with a multiplicity of threads, and it can get very confusing. For synchronous sessions, I actually prefer some form of audio conferencing tool where students can indicate that they want to ask a question, and you can then address them one at a time.

I didn't talk much about specific tools and platforms. This is because I'm not sure that specific tools matter that much. Go with whatever your local IT dept can advise on and support. I used Blackboard conferencing for the OU, did online supervisions through Skype, and my current institution has Teams in the Office package. I wouldn't say that Blackboard necessarily 'worked'. It was pretty clunky, and the OU was moving away from it when I left. In any case, I think methodological approach is more important than choice of platforms, which tend to be much of a muchness.

Remember that it's all online teaching, and you are under no obligation to do big online sessions because you think that's closest to your normal method of working.

Virtual whiteboards are good, if you have them.

It is all very time-consuming. Don't try to replicate the full classroom effect. (a) You can't, & (b) even if you could, you can't in the time available. Rather, approach it from the direction of what you can achieve in the time you've got. It's going to be awful, whatever you do - you just don't have enough time to prepare properly. Don't beat yourself up about that.

Students, you'll have fewer resources with which to write your assignments, but your markers will understand the conditions under which you're preparing the work, and make allowances accordingly.

New links:

https://cucdeducation.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/emergency-online-teaching-help-and-suggestions-classics-edition/ -
- from a Classics perspective, but valuable for other disciplines. Includes lots of links, and will be updated.

https://www.amypistone.com/resources-for-teaching-remotely/

https://insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/11/ensuring-online-teaching-engages-students-and-maintains-community-opinion

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/education/take-your-teaching-online/content-section-overview

An excellent thread on helping students prepare: https://twitter.com/katesymons2/status/1239490473556877312

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/preparing-to-learn-online-at-university

This is a good idea for keeping student morale up: https://twitter.com/duxfeminafacti9/status/1238457528842883074/photo/1

This is a brilliant idea: https://twitter.com/Project_V_S/status/1239551165827776513
(And I'll add, if any one wants to have a multi-teacher online chat for their students about a subject on which I have expertise (classical reception, ancient history, film, science fiction, comics, The Beatles, WWII military aircraft), I'm available. DM me.)

Two dramatic productions

Remember when I used to write theatre reviews here? Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to get down to see the UCL Frogs or KCL's Dionysus in the Underworld, but I did see a couple of things in January.

I felt a bit of an interloper at Fragments of Divine Ecstasy - almost everyone else in the audience was a student. I really only went along because my friend and colleague Lottie Parkyn was interviewing another friend, David Bullen, at the end of the event (you can see some snippets from the interview on the King's Greek Play Twitter account). But I was very glad I went.

I've had variable experiences with student productions - some have been quite poor. But when they get it right, they can be really on fire. Through a series of vignettes, some adapted from ancient or modern sources, some written by the cast, the production examined aspects of Dionysus. They succeeded in presenting the god in all his forms - intoxicated, ambiguous, sexy, dangerous. A good evening, and I hope those involved go on to do more in this vein.

The other thing I saw was George Eugeniou's production of Oedipus the King at Theatro Technis in Camden. I've seen quite a few productions of Greek drama there, and this was one of the best. Small in scale, it punches well above its weight in emotional terms. The audience are involved from the start as part of the Chorus - when the Chorus is addressed, people turn to the audience. Leigh Hughes' Oedipus conveys all the unnecessary arrogance of the character, and the production is clearly not sympathetic towards him. He is ably supported by the rest of the cast. At the end, the production remembers, as not every one does, that the fall of Oedipus means the lifting of the curse from Thebes.

2020 books #1-2

A couple of books reread in preparation for teaching Roman Britain.

Peter Salway, Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2015

Does what it says on the tin - basically condenses Salway's History of Roman down to just over a hundred pages. There are aspects of Salway's approach that don't appeal - he's quite positivist in the way he approaches the evidence, and post-colonial readings of Britain as a province are clearly not for him. But I don't know of any other work that can give students an overview in an afternoon.

Richard Hobbs and Ralph Jackson, Roman Britain: Life at the edge of empire, London: British Museum Press, 2010

A nice introduction to the province. This is particularly good at using objects from the British Museum's collection to illustrate various points about the ways people lived.

2020 Movies #2: Boadicea

Boadicea. UK; dir. Sinclair Hill; scr. Anthony Asquith and Sinclair Hill; starring Phyllis Neilson-Terry, Lillian Hall-Davis and Clifford McLaglen; British Instructional Films; 1927

This is, at the moment, the earliest screen depiction of Roman Britain of which I am aware. It very much presents itself as 'authentic' - an opening caption proclaims that '[M]any incidents in this story were reconstructed in the neighbourhood where they actually occurred.' But this is misleading. Many incidents presented in this short movie have been invented for dramatic purposes, and sometimes flatly contradict the sources - so, for instance, Colchester is depicted with walls and gates, which Tacitus explicitly says it did not have.

It's still interesting (though clearly done on a shoestring budget). Phyllis Neilson-Terry, niece of the famous Ellen Terry, plays a more matronly Boadicea than some later portrayals. As is often the case with Boadicea/Boudicca narratives, the Druids are closely associated with the Queen. And clearly the viewer is meant to sympathise with the defeated Queen of the Iceni, even at the time when the identification of the British empire with the Roman was a major cultural theme. But because this is an 'educational' movie, the rapes of Boadicea's daughters are very much underplayed, to the point where no rape actually takes place - instead a daughter is roughly manhandled, causing Boadicea to strike the Roman. The Queen's flogging then follows.

2020 Movies #1: 1917

1917. UK; dir. Sam Mendes; scr. Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns; starring George Mackay and Dean-Charles Chapman; DreamWorks Pictures/Reliance Entertainment; 2019

Unsurprisingly, 1917 has been compared with all the great First World War movies of the past - All Quiet on the Western Front, La Grande Illusion, etc. But the movie it reminded me of most is the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou? It has the same sense of a picaresque, episodic journey through the landscape, with encounters that can border on the surreal and transitions that can sometimes seem dreamlike.

There's a lot in 1917 that's very good indeed. There are two strong performances at its heart from Mackay and Chapman, even if individual episodes are sometimes over-burdened with celebrity cameos - look, it's Andrew Scott! And there's Mark Strong! Can Benedict Cumberbatch be far behind? (Spoiler: he doesn't turn up until quite near the end.)

The screenplay is clever, and doesn't play out the way you anticipate. People you expect to die live, and people you expect to live, at least until much later in the movie, die. Most unexpected, perhaps, is the treatment of the British officers. They are all incredibly reasonable - not a General Melchett or even a Captain Darling among them. Of course, it's good that there's a corrective to the typical Blackadder presentation (Richard Holmes' The Western Front is useful on this topic), but the lack of any venal glory-hunters at all makes 1917 feel a bit like Saving Private Ryan; this is a movie that pays lip-service to the idea that military commanders don't necessarily know what they're doing, but doesn't really tell that story.

It is, of course, a bravura technical achievement. The various long-shots are put together seamlessly to give the impression that this is one take, and it thoroughly deserves the Oscar for Cinematography (and it's a travesty that it wasn't even nominated for Best Editing). I am not in the least surprised that it won the Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Picture, as it is the sort of technically impressive movie that seems to be saying something profound that appeals to those who vote in such awards.

But there's the nub of it. What actually is 1917 saying? What's it about? One might say that it's about comradeship, about taking on a task that you don't really believe in because it's important to someone else. Or it might be about the horrors of war. The trouble for the latter is that the dreamlike nature of parts of the movie distance the viewer from full engagement. Yes, there are dead bodies of men who have been buried by shellfire, or French civilians who have ended up in the river. But these scenes don't feel as affecting as they should. And the transitions from one episode to another, whilst clearly delineated, are sometimes done in such a way as to override logic (Mark Strong's company, for instance, appear out of nowhere, and disappear back into nowhere). A cynic might suggest that the prime motivating factor in making this movie was that Mendes enjoyed shooting the opening sequence of Spectre (the Mendes Bond movie that isn't mentioned in the publicity), and wanted to see if he could do that at full movie length.

In the end, beneath the extremely impressive surface gloss, 1917 feels a little bit hollow.

Britannia, Season 1, Episode 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to all reviews of Britannia.

Britannia, Season 1, Episode 1

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

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

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

IN 55 BC JULIUS CAESAR INVADED BRITANNIA

Then:

HE CAME FACE TO FACE WITH ANOTHER LEGEND ...

And the next caption says:

THE DRUIDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to all reviews of Britannia.

Abbey Road, 50 years on

Today (26 September) marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Abbey Road, the last album they recorded as a group. It doesn't seem that long, but I think that's a product of first becoming aware of the LP when it was less than a decade old.

In January 1969, the band had tried to make an album that they planned on calling Get Back, attempting to record it as they had done at the beginning of their career, with no overdubs, and no edits. It had been a horrible experience for everyone concerned, and the tapes got buried (for a while, anyway). The problem was that, trapped by the public's expectations of them, The Beatles were finding it very difficult to work together. Paul McCartney remained committed to the band, hoping it could last a lot longer. But he mishandled his leadership role, and came across as hectoring and nagging.

Meanwhile his former creative partner, John Lennon, had moved on, being besotted with his new lover Yoko Ono, and wanting to invest all his creative energies with her. Under her influence, he was moving towards writing more personal and confessional material, such that could not easily be accomodated on a Beatles album. George Harrison, after a patchy couple of years, was right back at the peak of his creative form, but was frustrated by only being allowed two tracks per album, and by being still, at 26, treated as the baby of the band. He also seems to have wanted to become more of a rock guitar hero, along the lines of his friend Eric Clapton. Both Harrison and Lennon were completely fed up being told by McCartney what to do. Ringo Starr wasn't happy either with the tensions around the band.

So how did they manage to produce what, in the words of one of the earliest pieces of Beatles journalism I read, is a remarkably together album for a band that was falling apart? A lot of it was surface gloss. The Abbey Road engineers had got their heads around the new eight-track tape machines, and were making records sound like they had never sounded before. Some of it was that, returning to an overdubs and edits approach, they could stay out of each other's way a lot of the time, though there were tensions, between Lennon and McCartney, Harrison and McCartney, Harrison and Ono, and Lennon and Linda Eastman, McCartney's new girlfriend.

But a big part of it was probably the knowledge that they were coming to the end of the band's history. Producer George Martin very much had this feeling, being surprised that they were going back into the studio at all after Get Back. Though Starr doesn't recall this being the notion, both Harrison and McCartney seem to have acknowledged it in song - Harrison in 'Here Comes The Sun', which looks forward to better days ahead, and McCartney with 'The End', a track that explicitly gives the four members an opportunity to shine as musicians. This would explain why Lennon and Harrison seem to have upped their game (though Lennon drew for some of his contributions on songs over a year old, and absented himself from recordings on various occasions). They were evidently more willing to let McCartney have his way, even allowing him to put on the album 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', his silly and lyrically nasty attempt to imitate the style of his brother Michael's band, The Scaffold. (Though they vetoed his attempt to put it out as a single, knowing that novelty singles was the last thing The Beatles should be doing.)

As a result, this is very much McCartney's album, and it often seems like a blueprint for his subsequent solo career. It was McCartney who, along with Martin, assembled the 'Long Medley' that takes up much of Side Two and is one of the album's more memorable moments. Such is the shadow cast by McCartney on this record that early critics thought three of Lennon's songs, 'Because', 'Sun King', and 'Mean Mr Mustard', were composed by his songwriting partner.

And yet, unquestionably the best songs on the album are those of George Harrison, 'Here Comes The Sun' and 'Something' - his best compositions to that point, and pretty much the best Beatles tracks of 1969. Indeed, when Allen Klein was choosing numbers from Abbey Road for the compilation album 1967-1970, none of McCartney's contributions made the cut - Klein selected Harrison's two tracks, Lennon's 'Come Together' (which had been issued with 'Something' as a single), and Starr's 'Octopus's Garden'.

Abbey Road is a strange album - it almost seems to capture the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s, and anticipates that The Beatles, either as a group or as individuals, will no longer be as central to pop music as they had been. Harrison looks to the future with his new Moog synthesizer, which he uses on 'Here Comes the Sun' and lent to Lennon for 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'. Both he and Lennon had obviously been listening to Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, as shown by Lennon's 'Sun King' and Harrison's guitar solo on 'I Want You'. The result, in some aspects, doesn't sound that much like The Beatles.

For me, Abbey Road is more evocative of summer than any other record The Beatles ever made. It might not always be my absolute favourite Beatles album all the time - I also have a lot of time for Rubber Soul, Revolver and Pepper. But it may well be the one I have listened to more than any other.

You be my Hercules, I'll be your Athena.

So, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he wants to help Johnson with the Herculean task of getting a Brexit deal, to be Athena to Johnson's Hercules. A number of commentators have taken this as a subtle jibe against Johnson, intended as a reference to Athena's intervention after Hercules went mad and killed his wife and children (or, according to the BBC, when she prevented him killing his family).

I love this image - Athena is so casual. 'Here I am, nothing to see here, just holding up the sky ...'

I actually don't think Varadkar's reference to being Athena to Johnson's Hercules is quite the dig some people are making it out to be, or at least not in the way they're taking it. 'Herculean tasks' refers to the Twelve Labours of Hercules, and there's a strong tradition in which Hercules was aided in his Labours by Athena (it's all over metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, for instance - see the image above). That's surely what Varadkar means, rather than any reference to the less pleasant sides of Hercules' personality (e.g. his tendency to drunkenness, gluttony, public urination, and yes, going mad and killing his children).

But there is a dig is in the power dynamic implied. Ireland Athena to Britain's Hercules? Vardakar Athena to Johnson's Hercules? Ireland's goddess to the UK's demi-god? To judge from how Brexiters and government ministers have recently spoken about Ireland, they would conceive of it as being the other way round; they see Ireland as the weak neighbour, to be helped, patronised and pushed around by the UK. And that is Varadkar's subtle jibe at the UK, a reminder that, with the rest of the EU27 behind them, Ireland is in the best position its been in a thousand years to tell the other island to go fuck itself, and yes, they're going to have some fun with that.

Also, as Liz Gloyn says, if anyone ever offers to be your Athena, seriously consider running.

Terrance Dicks, 1935-2019

I grew up with Terrance Dicks' version of Doctor Who. Though I have a couple of fleeting memories of the Troughton era, it was in Jon Pertwee's tenure that I grew to love the show, and that remains my favourite era, for all its flaws. And Terrance is amongst the first writers of science fiction that I read, in the many novelizations of Doctor Who stories that I read. Though he became a bit formulaic when there was basically only him doing them and he was expected to churn them out month in, month out, the early ones, and to be fair, the later ones where he was concentrating on the era he'd script-edited, are excellent, and sometimes rather better than the original episodes. Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks in particular is transformative.

I find it hard to mourn overmuch for a life lived long and well. But I did know Terrance Dicks a bit - we corresponded over an invitation to be a guest at a British Science Fiction Association London meeting, where he was charming, informative and very funny. I got him to sign my battered, well-read copy of Day of The Daleks. When his friend and collaborator Barrie Letts died, I sent Terrance a note of condolence, which he was gracious enough to reply to. Now he's died, and I don't know who to write to. So I'm writing to you all.