The Edithorial

I went to Dorchester on the trail of Thomas Hardy, whose novels often set ancient Greek myths amongst the Victorian rural underclass. In Tess Durbeyfield, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Hardy created his unforgettable peasant girl, abused by a lascivious aristocrat and hypocritically rejected by a husband who claims to be progressive.

Gemma Atherton as BBC Tess (2008)

When faced with the inevitable feminist critics of Hardy, I point out the heartbreaking scene where the unmarried Tess, suffering from post-natal depression as well as acute poverty, tries to feed her dying baby while slaving all day long behind the reaping machine.

Nastassja Kinski in Polanski's 1980 movie

Tess eventually stabs the abusive father of her deceased child, and the blood seeps through the ceiling to the room below.

When she is hanged for the crime, Hardy tells us ‘"Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.’ The title of Zeus actually comes from the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, but the Aeschylean figure who bloodily kills her abusive co-parent is Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra.

Elizabeth Browne's public hanging

Hardy’s unforgettable working-class Clytemnestra was also inspired by Elizabeth Martha Browne, a servant and the last woman to be publicly hanged in the county of Dorset in 1856. She killed her drunken husband (as Clytemnestra is said to have killed Agamemnon) with an axe. Browne’s husband, also a servant, had beaten her with a horse-whip after a fight which started when she found him in bed with his Cassandra.

The Dorset County Chronicle reported that Browne described how she retaliated when her husband bent to tie his shoelaces: ‘much enraged, and in an ungovernable passion at being so abused and struck, I seized a hatchet…and struck him several violent blows on the head…’.

No wonder the young Hardy heard a parallel with Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra. After killing Agamemnon, she reports, ‘I struck him twice. He screamed twice and his limbs went limp. Once he had collapsed I gave him a third and final blow… I don’t think his death was undeserved… he started it, has paid for it and has died violently.’

The Young Hardy

At the age of sixteen, Hardy went along with hundreds of local people to witness Browne’s execution. He was apprentice to the local builder-architect and studying the ancient Greek tragedians with the help of his educated friend, Horace Moule. Hardy stood just beneath the scaffold as Browne struggled at the end of the noose. He later recalled how vivid an impression her death had made on his memory: ‘what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’

In Dorchester I struck up a conversation with a local man because his dog and ours communicated. When I asked why he had chosen his T-shirt, he said, mysteriously, ‘women have been having a hard time lately and people are too narrow-minded.’ I wish I had asked him whether it was living in Hardy country that had engendered in him his own distinctive gesture of solidarity.

Congratulations to James Meredith on the 50th anniversary of his graduation in Political Science from the University of Mississippi on 18th August 1963. A photo of this momentous event illustrated the first newspaper I can remember being shown, by my father. Meredith was the first African American to have succeeded in being enrolled at that institution.

Meredith, with armed bodyguard, enrols

Meredith was incredibly courageous. The grandson of a slave, he served in the Air Force, before having his application to the university twice rejected out of hand. When the Supreme Court ordered that he should be admitted, and he tried to register, war broke out on campus. The U.S. army and the Mississippi National Guard had to quell race riots. Two people died. Over 200 were injured. Throughout his studies, Meredith was persistently harassed and had to be guarded 24/7.

Uni of Mississippi Lyceum

The violent showdown took place at the Lyceum, the university’s oldest building (1848). Its Greek revival columns still show the bullet marks. It was named after the Athenian school founded by Aristotle, whose PoliticsMeredith will have read as part of his degree, including the philosopher’s weasel-worded defence of slavery. The influence of Aristotle’s arguments on pro-slavery campaigners in the 19th century has been shown by Sara Monoson inAncient Slavery and Abolition, a book of which I am co-editor, and which (here I burst with pride) Henry Louis Gates Jr HIMSELF emailed to say was ‘a valuable addition' to his library.

The identification of the Old South with what it took to be ancient Greece, a society where democracy and slavery could co-exist in columned porticoes, is nowhere more apparent than in its universities. It is not only the architecture and the names of the elite fraternities (the oldest and most prestigious, phi beta kappa, was founded in Virginia at the College of William & Mary in 1776: the three Greek alphabet marks stand for Philosophia Biou Kubernetes, ‘philosophy is the helmsman of life’).

Basil Gildersleeve

Classical scholars were embroiled in the grim Civil War: the endowed Chair of Latin at Virginia is still called the ‘Gildersleeve’ after the brilliant Hellenist Basil Gildersleeve. He fought for the Confederate cause both as a soldier and with racist editorials in the Richmond Examiner.[i]

Happy 50th Anniversary!

Meredith is still a controversial figure because he ploughed his own furrow rather than attaching himself to the Civil Rights movement, and has been an active Republican. He lives in Jackson, Mississippi. When he graduated he became a four-year-old’s first hero. I hope he enjoys himself today.

[i] Delicately analysed by Elizabeth Vandiver and David Lupher in Ancient Slavery and Abolition (Oxford University Press). My co-editors are Richard Alston and Justine McConnell.

The Greeks knew a lot more than we do about insanity. If someone has either temporarily or permanently a perception of reality which is seen as markedly different from everyone else's in their community, they are today diagnosed as e.g. bipolar, schizophrenic, paranoid, or suffering from senile dementia.

In the case of US Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who has just been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for murdering 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan in March 2012, his lawyers said he was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Robert Bales, Now Lifer without Parole

But the Greeks would have been quite clear that he had been assailed by Lyssa, the goddess who makes warriors behave like rabid dogs, forget whom they are killing and why, and 'lose it' in crazed fits of violence on the battlefield (or often, like Bales, far away from it in an assault on women and children).

Lyssa was not the inspired madness sent by Apollo which allows the truth and the future to be divined. It is not the mania of the attendants of the wine god, Dionysus, which blurs the line between fantasy and reality. It is not the vengeful bloodlust of the Erinyes or Furies, personifications of the mental changes which people undergo when their loved ones have been murdered. It is not the heightened emotional sensitivity of girls in the early months of achieving fertility, changes overseen by Artemis.

Lyssa only attacks trained killers like Heracles, who in Euripides' tragedy murders his wife and three small sons. In his psychotic delusion he thinks they are the family of his deadliest enemy.

Lyssa, the Madness of Warriors

In the story of Troy, the trained killers whose anger management issues suddenly explode into 'insane' violence are all members of the army of occupation. Achilles starts sacrificing innocent youths on funeral pyres. Ajax attacks his own generals, or so he thinks: he is deluded and attacks their livestock instead. Odysseus comes home and kills a hundred local islanders because they have helped themselves to his larder.

I am not a pacifist. I think I could probably retain my sanity after shooting someone trying to kill my family. People defending their own have always coped far better with combat trauma than soldiers sent off to distant lands for ill-defined reasons by cynical leaders. This is why all the PTSD in Greek myth happens to men like Bales--invading warriors rather than members of the home team. Such incredible wisdom could usefully be borne in mind today by the creators of foreign policy.

Is our understanding of physiology going backwards? The head of the Education Agency in Prabumlih, South Sumatra, announced in mid-August that female senior high school students would in 2014 be subjected to compulsory virginity tests.

Virginity tests are a physical impossibility. Some women, whales, elephants and chimps have a perceptible elastic membrane at the opening of the tube which connects their wombs to the outside world. Some do not. Whether any object has ever been inserted into this tube CANNOT be discerned by physical examination.

Although the daft proposal has been criticized by other Indonesians, and withdrawn, it is not an isolated phenomenon. Virginity tests have recently been documented by Human Rights Watch in many other places including Egypt, Afghanistan and India.

How can this be? The ancient Greeks, however deplorably sexist, long ago knew that the only proof a woman had experienced penetrative sex with a man was when she produced a baby. One medical writer, Soranus (yes, that really is his name) mentions the hymen, but only to deny its existence.

Being a virgin, parthenos, was a social status meaning that a woman was believed not to be having sex or to have been pregnant and was marriageable. This status could be faked, in which case you were a pseudoparthenos.

Indonesians might just as well adopt the sort of virginity test we do hear about in Greek literature, in a novel by Achilles Tatius.[i]The heroine, Leucippe, is enclosed inside a cave of Pan. If the crowd hears the music of the syrinx (panpipes made of reeds) then she is a virgin. If they hear a scream and she vanishes, then she is not a virgin. Leucippe, a resourceful young woman, passes with flying colours.

The beauty of this test is the ease with which the right result can be furnished. It would not be hard to secrete a small set of panpipes in your flowing robes. I also appreciate the sexiness of the setting. Everyone in ancient myth knows that the place to go for an erotic encounter is a cave. Since Pan is the horniest of deities, if you were a virgin before you entered his cavern, you were unlikely to be one when you left it. And the reeds constituting Pan's pipes had once been the beautiful virgin Syrinx, who was transformed into this plant when pursued by the randy goat-god.

I propose that societies where virginity is an issue implement the Pan-cave test instead. It would be easier to administer and much more enjoyable. Both men and women could undergo it. They could play a tune on their own in a cave, or even flirt there with Pan. The examiners would be relieved of their task and get to listen to some music. The result would be just as reliable. What's not to like?

[i] Brilliantly introduced and translated by Helen Morales and Tim Whitmarsh in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

The laudable surge in new TV documentaries on ancient history has prompted one person too many to ask why I haven’t presented any myself, so here is the answer once and for all. Apologies in advance for it being narcissistically All About Me this week.

Weinberger, Warrior, Warmonger, Helicopter Fan

The first time I failed to get on TV was in the 1980s. I went on a date with a TV journalist who said he could get me to read the news on local TV if I got my teeth fixed. Our date consisted of watching then U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger exiting a helicopter. Since my escort, though charming, was allowed on TV with uneven teeth and a paunch, I didn't think this was fair.

In my thirties, several TV companies played with the idea of having me present their ancient history shows. One complained that I did not ‘look like a plausible Greek scholar,’ I think because I was at the time covered in baby sick. Another (American) outfit wanted me to recycle hawkish Origins of Western Superiority rubbish about antiquity and it was mutually clear that we could not do business.

But I only ever turned down one opportunity unilaterally. It was a history of prostitution and I was to have zero editorial control. Since I still regarded myself in those days as a respectable scholar, the camera close-up on my secondary sexual characteristics during the screen-test alarmed me enough to say no.

Detail of snap of me taken by Mary Beard

My rabbity teeth scuppered another documentary series, appropriately on the history of bone collecting. I actually asked my children's orthodontist what could be done. She said I could Become Perfect provided I had perfectly good teeth extracted ON BOTH top sides first. I'm sorry but I just won't do it. Real Teeth mean more than Fame at my age.

So there it is. I am spared being insulted, like brainy, funny Mary Beard, by morons and misogynists. I admire the regular teeth of gorgeous, spirited Bettany Hughes and dishy AND brainy Michael Scott. I enjoy my right to bad hair days even while delivering occasional rants on radio.

I admit I would have killed for a chance to appear in Father Ted or Taggart, and would still consider Have I Got News for You or Big Bang Theory. But I now accept that presenting serious TV documentaries is for those far braver and/or better dentally endowed.

Backdrop (detail of Hogarth's Southwark Fair)

Next Friday, some young colleagues at a conference in Oxford will revive scenes from a remarkable 300-year old farce on the siege of Troy.

Elkanah Settle’s musical comedy The Siege of Troy began life as a successful opera in 1701. It remained the uncontested hit of the London fairgrounds in both booth theatre and puppet shows from 1707 to at least 1735, when Hogarth portrayed it as the central attraction in his famous engraving 'Southwark Fair'.

Heroic Cobbler Bristle

The hero is an enterprising Trojan cobbler named Tom Bristle. The Trojan working class, who speak earthy prose, elect him their captain. They stay safe during the siege by holding a party, and survive to rebuild the city when the Greeks leave. Meanwhile the Trojan ruling class, who speak pompous heroic rhyming couplets, are either killed or commit spectacular suicide.

Forgotten Masterpiece of the London Fairs

Settle’s subversive The Siege of Troy is what really united John Dryden and Alexander Pope. It wasn’t just their mutual obsession with Trojans and with classical epic (they produced the canonical English verse translations of the Aeneid and the Iliad in 1697 and 1715-20 respectively). It was unremitting envy and hatred of Settle.

Settle is the Missing Link in the British reception of classical epic. When his Empress of Morocco struck gold in the Restoration theatre, Dryden wrote vicious attacks which reveal the toxic extent of his envy. Dryden knew that Settle’s shows were lucrative: ’The height of his ambition is we know/But to be Master of a Puppet-show./On that one Stage his works may yet appear,/And a month’s Harvest keeps him all the Year.’

Dryden's Aeneid (1697)

Settle’s The Siege of Troy, in response, put two populist fingers up at Dryden’s version of the siege of Troy in his Aeneid book 2, by completing it with ale, fiddles, and scatological humour. I would rather be transported back in time to watch Settle’s droll at Southwark Fair than re-read Dryden any time.

Pope loathed Settle even more than Dryden had. Just when the ambitious young Pope was trying to drum up support from subscribers including royalty to fund his Homer translation project, the same royalty were going to the fairgrounds to laugh with their populace at Settle’s boisterous Trojans, surviving by drinking and fiddling even as Troy burned.

Pope's Iliad (1715-20)

Pope took revenge by launching some of his most vindictive satire ever against Settle in his Dunciad. It closes with the ghost of Settle announcing the inauguration by bad poets of the new cosmic Age of Dullness: 'Thy hand great Dulness! lets the curtain fall,/And universal Darkness covers all'.

The Siege of Troy, Highlight of Southwark Fair according to Hogarth

This was spiteful and unfair: dullness was one thing Settle was never guilty of. He is last heard of in a green costume, acting the dragon in his own fairground play about St. George. It is extraordinary how this impresario has been written out of the cultural history of classical epic. On Friday we are going to put that right.

While suffering from concussion earlier this summer I agreed to be in three places at once this week: introducing the great Orlando Patterson at a conference on slavery in Indiana, co-relating classics and social class in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and interpreting ancient dream interpretation in Poland. So I have chosen according to personal loyalty on the conference front (Poland) and sent video talks to the other two (something I may do more of now, it being nicer to the planet than planes).

Fortunately for my hosts, virtual and actual, and for my own sanity, there is a link between all three talks: our one surviving ancient handbook of dream interpretation, by Artemidorus of Daldis, who recorded the colourful dreams experienced by his customers—mostly Greeks—under the Roman Empire. His book, The Interpretation of Dreams, enthralled Sigmund Freud, who borrowed the title for his own most famous work, Traumdeutung, in 1899/1900.

Freud was struck by the numerous positions in which ancient Greek men told Artemidorus that they had enjoyed dream-sex with their mothers. But the real reason why Artemidorus is important is that his accounts of the dreams experienced by his many slave-class customers provide our best surviving access to the inner, mental and emotional lives of the millions of people in Greek and Roman antiquity who were not free.

Artemidorus tells us that the same dream will mean different things depending on whether you are a slave or not: ‘Olive trees whose fruit has been gathered up means good luck for all but slaves, for whom it means thrashings, since it is by blows that the fruit is taken down’. If a pregnant free woman dreams she gives birth to a snake, it is a good omen, but in a slave woman it can only mean that the child will become a runaway, ‘because a snake does not follow a straight path’.

Slaves' dreams tell desperately sad stories. A house-slave dreamt that one star fell out of the sky while another star ascended into the sky. When his master died, he thought he was free and without any master. But it came to light that his former master had a son, and he was forced to become his slave. The fallen star therefore stood for the man who died, while the one that ascended into the sky signified the one who would control him and be his master.

This slave’s disappointment on discovering that he was legally compelled to serve another man, much younger than his previous owner, can only be imagined. Another slave, whose subconscious clearly could not cope with his subordination, dreamt that he was playing ball with Zeus. He then quarrelled with his master, and, since he took certain liberties in his speech, he antagonised the man. For Zeus signified the master. The ball-playing indicated both the exchange of words on an equal footing and the quarrel itself.

Artemidorus was a man of his time, and often recycles embarrassing prejudices against slaves. He argues, for example that slaves are more physical and less cerebral than the free. Slaves are often represented by animals (e.g. mice) and body parts (feet) in dreams, whereas the free are represented by more abstract symbolism to do with souls.

But Artemidorus’ book also undermines the ancient distinction between slaves and free in ways which are paralleled by no other ancient evidence. It undermines the hierarchies of waking life by his actual practice of taking slave dreams seriously. The egalitarian form of many passages in the amazing ancient dream book implicitly dismantles its hierarchical content. Ancient slaves may have left us few documents in their own voices. But the soul – or psyche - of the ancient slave was of course really there all the time. [A full discussion of Artemidorus' slave dreamers is included in Alston, Hall & Proffitt, Reading Ancient Slavery and can be read free online ninth offprint from the top here].

If you were writing a sitcom about an awful eastern European budget airline, you might easily come up with the name WIZZ AIR. That a Budapest-based airline with such a name really exists should have been warning enough.

In Lublin this morning we were called for boarding and herded into outdoor sheep-pens on a runway with no aeroplane in sight. Babies screamed. Harassed parents became desperate. Old ladies passed out. Old men pleaded to be allowed back inside to go to the toilet.

Nearly two hours later a fuchsia-and-mauve plane landed beside the sheep pens. We desperate passengers charged on board, all safety rules ignored. People were still conducting violent marital tiffs and moving around the cabin during take-off.

I had been bought an Extra Leg Room seat by my Polish hosts, and sat in embarassed solitude on the slightly less confining middle row. Asked by the dismal flight attendant if I would operate the safety exit in the event of an emergency, it being situated on my row, I said that everyone would be safer if someone more confident with machinery and aviation sat by the door.

The dismal attendant went glassy-eyed. She could not sit anyone else there because Nobody Else had Paid the 16-Euros Extra Leg Room supplement. I said, “So what? Plenty of passengers would like that seat and could operate the door.” The three large men crammed into the row behind me all volunteered. Glass-Eyes continued to maintain No Pay No Upgrade. But when I offered to swap with one of the large men, she finally gave up and let reason prevail. Just think! How outrageous! A man who had not paid the supplement got legroom!

Turbulence was terrible and the flight-attendants looked terrified all the time, as if they knew something we didn't about a defective engine. The first thing I did when I finally got home was look up W(H)IZZ in the dictionary. Since the 1600s, as a verb it has denoted the movement of lethal missiles such as bullets and cannon balls. In the Depression a Whizz meant a pickpocket or petty thief. In the 1970s ‘going for a whizz’ meant urinating. In the 1980s and 1990s ‘whizz’ meant ‘recreational’ amphetamines.

It was only in September 2003, exactlya decade ago, that the term became associated not only with lethal danger, being ripped off, taking a/the p**s and psychotropic chemicals (all of which seem appropriate to my experience this morning), but an airline so abysmal that I would very much rather have hitchhiked all the way. You have been warned.

The funniest film ever?

Last week I upset some devout Poles. I recalled in a platform discussion of pagan myth that it was occasionally tricky growing up in a household shared by what I insensitively referred to as my ordained dad’s ‘imaginary friend’ (the Anglican god). I think this may have sounded more offensive in Polish, since the grim faces belonged to members of the audience with headphones, listening to the simultaneous translation. While I apologise to them (and to him) for any offence caused, the incident reminded me of the ancient sources of Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).

He's not the Messiah, he's a character in Lucian

The Pythons got the detail that Brian’s father was not God but a Roman soldier from a fragment of the Egyptian-Greek pagan Celsus’ The True Word. But the idea of the charlatan who rather accidentally gets identified as the Messiah by a gullible public comes straight out of a satire by the Syrian Lucian, Death of Peregrinus. This tells the life story of a philosopher called Peregrinus Proteus from Asia Minor, who, says Lucian, had in his youth temporarily converted to Christianity.

Unlike Brian, Lucian’s Peregrinus is difficult to love. He joins some Christians after strangling his father and two sexual misdemeanours force him to seek refuge in Palestine. The Christians are so gullible that he can convince them that he is a prophet. He becomes their leader, interprets and writes Christian books, and is honoured by them second only to the man ‘whom they still worship, the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world.’

The local authorities arrest Peregrinus as a fraud, but his Christian flock still believe in him and camp outside the prison. They bring food, read out their ‘sacred writings’, and invite supporters from all over Asia, ‘sent by the Christians at their common expense’. The speaker in Lucian’s text presents Christians as unintelligent ascetics who volunteer for self-deprivation and even prison. They ludicrously believe they are immortal, that they are all brothers, and that material possessions are of no account.

Paul IV: a Laugh a Minute

Life of Brian caused outrage when it was first released, and was refused screening in Ireland and Norway. It was not permitted to be publicly screened in Torbay, Devon until 2008. Lucian’s Peregrinus has faced a far longer history of proscription, being banned by Pope Paul IV’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum as early as 1559.

But the text which really horrified early Christians, and which might have led to a far more biting Life of Brian, was too scandalous to survive to modernity. The neo-Platonist Porphyry had himself once been a Christian, and after abandoning the faith became its most brilliant critic.

Comedy Screenplay Writer?

At the time of Diocletian’s persecutions (which the atheist ancient historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix once described as ‘too little, too late’), Porphyry wrote a treatise Against the Christians. Its exposure of what he perceived as their intellectual confusion was so deadly that it was later banned by the Christian emperors from Constantine onwards and has been almost totally lost. If a copy is ever rediscovered, I doubt if anyone in Hollywood would today dare purchase the film rights.

Pericles always protected his head

Some big construction companies in the UK, notably Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, have this week issued an apology to the thousands of building workers who, for at some point raising a single health and safety issue, were each named on a secret and wholly illegal blacklist shared by the corporations.

The apology and proposal to implement a voluntary compensation scheme are but cynical and self-interested preemptive measures against hundreds of potential legal challenges and huge enforced payouts to men who haven't got work for years.

The blacklist systematically excluded from building sites the very people with the sense to identify danger and the guts to speak up. Their presence might have helped diminish the horrific number of fatalities on British sites: 48 in 2011-12, 39 in 2012-13 but ALREADY up 60 % on that so far this year.

Concrete Bob

The founder of Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd (a major Conservative Party donor and contractor of the Olympic Stadium) was a Scot sent down the mine at the age of 10. He should have known a thing or two about lethal danger in the workplace. Referred to in the trade as "Concrete Bob", he is also believed to lie behind Bob the Builder.

Hard-Hatted Bob

But that would be unfair to the fictional Bob, who insists on observing safety rules and would weep at the terrible injuries sustained by Michael O'Donovan (while labouring for McAlpine's macho multi-millionare descendants on the Arsenal Stadium), or the electrocution of a worker on The City of Glasgow College campus earlier this year.

Propylaea from which Pericles' workman fell

Even the ancient Greeks were aware that building work was dangerous and that bosses needed to behave responsibly. According to Plutarch, when Pericles (who famously himself wore a hard hat round the clock) wanted to rebuild the Athenian Acropolis, he hired the voluntary labour of free poor citizens rather than coercing slaves.

When one--an energetic and committed employee--fell from the top of the Propylaea, incurring horrible wounds, Pericles was devastated. The doctors gave up on the patient, but Pericles received medical instructions from Athena in a dream. He personally saw to it that her instructions were implemented. The man recovered fully and Pericles set up a beautiful statue to Athena the Healer on the Acropolis itself.

Cullum McAlpine, Blacklist Operator

I am sure Plutarch's picture of the powerful man personally concerned with the safety of manual labourers contains elements of fantasy. Many thousands of workers--mostly slaves--must have been killed in the ancient construction industries. But the very existence of the narrative, and of that statue symbolising the duty of bosses to look after the health of workers in their employment, shows an understanding of basic human decency conspicuously lacking from the companies who compiled that cynical blacklist. I will be sending a copy of Plutarch's Life of Pericles, together with a hoplite helmet, to Cullum McAlpine, charisma-free current Director of the company, later today.

PS Would the unknown individual who hacked into this blog this week and deleted it entirely, from a location in Plymouth, Massachusetts, please explain the reason?

How I imagine my mysterious email critics

John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera, said that the person ‘who deals in slander, lives in strife.’ I am amidst strife caused by emails from self-important individuals protesting against something I said, live, on the BBC on 24th September 2012. I was talking about the Conservative MP (and then Government Chief Whip) Andrew Mitchell. I rashly said that I ‘KNEW’, rather than merely BELIEVED IT PLAUSIBLE GIVEN HIS SCHOOLING AND PERSONALITY, that Mitchell had used the word ‘pleb(s)’ when abusing members of the police force.

Can YOU read the lips of anyone in this?

I made a mistake. Nobody knows whether Mitchell said it or not. The CCTV footage is inconclusive. Other characters and factors have emerged, some of them shady. Mitchell may be lying, but so may the police. Both politicians and police, I BELIEVE, tell lies all the time.

I am therefore very sorry indeed that, like an incompetent Socratic interlocutor, I claimed to be in possession of knowledge, rather than a biased opinion, about Mitchell’s choice of words. I hope that saying so will persuade the reactionary tosspots who are crowding my Inbox to go away and Get A Life.

Slander is a real issue in any democracy: over-policing what people say extempore leads directly to suppression of freedom of speech and insidious, invisible censorship and self-silencing. But slander is also perniciously powerful, as every good spin-doctor knows.

Ben Jonson, genius political analyst

Slander in the political arena is expertly dissected in the tragedy Catiline: His Conspiracy by Ben Jonson (1611). One of Jonson’s chief interests, writing in the paranoid Jacobean world after the union of the crowns of England and Scotland and the Gunpowder Plot, was false accusations. He found a rich source in the Roman historian Sallust’s account of the conspiracy of Catiline and his disaffected followers to take Rome in 63 BC. Cicero saves the day, but only by judicious use of defamation, rumour and unprovable or false allegations.

Everyone involved in the Mitchell fiasco could now meditate on the wise words Jonson gives, paradoxically, to the ‘bad guy.’ Catiline refuses to get upset at false allegations: ‘Where it concernes himself, / Who's angrie at a slander, makes it true.’ This has a double meaning. If you get angry at something which someone is saying about you, you EITHER prove that that there is truth in the allegation, OR concede that fiction has the mysterious power to damage you.

Why exactly are the Tories so angry that anyone imagines one of their leaders might suffer from class snobbery? Regardless of what Andrew Mitchell did or did not say, ‘Where it concernes himselfe, / Who's angrie at a slander, makes it true.’

Sengenhydd Mortuary, 100 years ago

Aberfan school buried under coal slag

‘I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.’ So said the comedian Peter Cook. In my teens I was taken down a Nottinghamshire mineshaft by an enlightened history teacher, and it changed me forever.

The last fortnight has seen the anniversaries of two terrible Welsh mine-community disasters: the centenary of the death of 439 miners at the Senghenydd Colliery and the anniversary of the collapse of the slag heap on the school in Aberfan (Wales) on 21^st October 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults.

In his 1938 painting ‘Symbolic: miner enslaved,’ Gilbert Daykin, himself a miner, implicitly alluded to the historic iconography of the technological Titan Prometheus. But this week I was aghast to discover that the year after he painted his South Yorkshire Prometheus, Daykin was among six men killed when the roof of Warsop Main Colliery collapsed on them.

Daykin: Painter and Pitman

The ancient Greek historian from Sicily, Diodorus, thought that life for the slaves sent down the Spanish goldmines was actually worse than death. We have no subjective account from the mouths of any ancient miners, but Diodorus’ text, from his fifth book, provides us with a rare and precious glimpse into the suffering of so many in antiquity to line the pockets of so few:

‘The slaves produce, for their masters, revenues in sums defying belief, but they themselves wear out their bodies both by day and by night in the diggings under the earth, dying in large numbers because of the exceptional hardships they endure. For no respite or pause is granted them in their labours, but compelled beneath blows of the overseers to endure the severity of their plight.’

A Rare Self-Portrait by Ancient Miners? (Corinth 6th-C. BC)

I still don’t know how I got through my entire BA without any lecturer ever pointing out this ancient text to me. I stumbled upon it as a PhD student. But I do know that I would very much rather work, as Peter Cook put it, in the absence of falling coal.

Sophocles directs sympathy to the wounded Philoctetes

This week further chaos has struck the Department of Work and Pensions’ replacement of the Disability Living Allowance with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP—a euphemism some Whitehall spin artist was paid a salary from my taxes to think up). But PIP also requires the applicant to face the humiliation behind closed medical doors which passes as an assessment process. The same ordeal is faced by disabled soldiers on incapacity benefit.

Although the decision about which applicant “deserves” help is still made by a “DWP Decision Maker,” the DWP has outsourced the actual assessment of the injured/ill to businesses, primarily one called ATOS, which claims on its website to have “extensive expertise in delivering healthcare solutions.”

Mark Dryden, denied incapacity benefit

They were presumably Delivering a Healthcare Solution to former Lance-Corporal Mark Dryden, who earlier this year had his incapacity benefit withdrawn by the DWP Decision Maker after assessment by an ATOS-hired doctor. Dryden lost one arm to a bomb in Iraq and has little function in the other. The doctor had the insensitivity to ask him if he was left or right-handed! Dryden has no index finger at all and yet was asked to pick up a one-pound coin.

Scroungers?

Nor is he alone: the Royal British Legion published figures at the end of May showing a scandalous 72 % RISE in the number of wounded war veterans denied benefits in the past year after an ATOS assessment.

Does this man look fit to work?

Two crucial texts give us complementary views on how the disabled were treated in classical Athens late in the fifth century, after more than two decades of war. In his tragedy Philoctetes, Sophocles portrays in the most negative moral light a leader (Odysseus) who had no sympathy for the wounded archer Philoctetes, the ancient Mark Dryden, and dumped him alone on a desert island, screaming in pain.

On the other hand, in the 24^th speech of the legal adviser Lysias, a real, historical Athenian man on a state disability pension defends his entitlement to financial support of one obol a day. A personal enemy has challenged the entitlement, saying that he has been seen on horseback—the speaker reasonably asks if it is so surprising that a man in his condition occasionally uses this means of transport. But his major argument is an appeal to the common sense of the jurors based on his actual physical appearance.

Athenian one-obol coin

Unlike our sick and disabled citizens' ordeals behind closed doors, this Athenian got to make his case publicly, with expert legal advice, in front of 500 democratically selected members of the Athenian Council. We do not know whether he won his case, but we do know when, where and to whom he was allowed to make it, and it wasn’t a tactless rent-a-doc who has lost all contact with the real world working for a profit-making organisation.

Aesop's Twig Fable Shows that Unity is Strength

A visit to the People’s History Museum in Manchester this week reminded me that, once upon a time, artistic representations of twig bundles were inspiring and wholesome.[i] This was when illustrations of Aesop’s ancient Greek fable of the twig bundle appeared on early Trade Union banners.

Aesop's Fable the Workers' Centrepiece

The fable said that a father, worn out by the quarrels between his sons, asked them each in turn to break a tightly bound bundle of twigs. Each son failed. Then he asked them to break a single twig, a feat which they easily accomplished. The moral the father drew was that STRENGTH LIES IN UNITY.

When 19^th-century workers without legal rights banded together against their employers and the state legislation to form Trade Unions, Aesop was one of the few ancient authors most of them had met. His fables were used to teach elementary literacy. Integrating an illustration of the fable into a banner was visual shorthand for ‘Unity is Strength’ and widespread, for example in these details from the 1898 banner of the Watford branches of the Worker’s Union and the Ashton & Haydon miners’ union.

Mussolini's Fascist Twig Bundle (Left)

But in 1919, the quite different—Roman—twig bundle was appropriated by Benito Mussolini’s new Partito nazionale fascista. Ancient Roman magistrates called lictors had carried their ceremonial twig bundles (fasces), bound by red tapes and with an axe protruding, to symbolise state authority and the power to punish. They had inherited the fasces from the Etruscans; many non-Fascist nations such as the US subsequently borrowed the Roman fasceslong before Mussolini arrived on the scene.

The Power to Punish: Roman Fasces

So the peacable, Aesopic twigs of the British unions, who were standing up againstthe state, were abandoned after World War I because of the antipathy felt by members of the Trade Union movement, uniting the workers of the world, to the racism and nationalism of Fascism. Next time you see a twig-bundle in any political iconography, ancient or modern, ask yourself whether it is a reformist bundle, derived from Aesop’s Greek fable, or an authoritarian bundle whose ancestor was once borne by a Roman magistrate.

Table where Tom Paine wrote Rights of Man, People's History Museum

[i] My mind was on organisations set up for self-improvement since I had been invited to address the venerable ManchesterLiterary and Philosophical Society, founded in 1781 and the oldest such group in Britain, on the question of whether Classics is inherently elitist. You can read more about this visit to Manchester on Henry Stead’s blog here.

Katniss: what took her so long?

I wish I was as brave as Katniss Everdeen, the reluctant protagonist of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy. As a mother of adolescent girls, I welcome this bow-wielding young adult female role model. Next Friday is our long-awaited family date for the premiere of the second movie. I have already ordered the popcorn.

The significance of the Stoical Katniss, played with conviction by Jennifer Lawrence, cannot be over-estimated. Quest she-heroes just did not happen in the western imagination until Alice fell down the rabbit-hole to Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, followed by the more radical Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Dorothy: Quest Hero

Dorothy explicitly left Kansas to search for something other than a man to marry--her totemic pet dog. Baum supported Women’s Suffrage and his mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage, a prominent feminist. Yet both Alice and Dorothy were portrayed as pre-adolescent. A biologicalwoman with a mission that had nothing to do with catching a man-for-babies took many more decades to appear.

None of this is my idea. It was in an incendiary 1985 lecture, entitled "What was Penelope unweaving?" that American scholar Carolyn Heilbrun identified the absence of female quest heroes as preventing women from escaping the single narrative line in which they have been configured. Heilbrun showed how few narratives prepared women for entry into public life rather than the marriage market, kitchen or nursery. She identified Homer’s Penelope—static on Ithaca, bored and unfulfilled—as the figure who defines, by what she was not allowed to do, the dreadful plotline plight of womankind.

Iphigenia saves Two Big Strong Men

The ancient candidates for the status of female action- / quest-hero are few, but two exist and are both associated with the archer-goddess Artemis. One is the never-to-be-wed, intelligent and altruistic Iphigenia who in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris rescues her brother Orestes, his male chum, and the “holy grail” of the cult image of Artemis. The other is Saint Thecla, who (in by far the most exciting of the apocryphal apostolic Christian Acts)tames animals in the amphitheatre, heals the sick, and dies a virgin in her nineties, successfully evading gang-rape.

Thecla Laughs off the Lions

Sadly, who now reads that obscure tragedy by Euripides, or Acts which never made the New Testament? Perhaps the patriarchal Byzantine monks who put the finishing touches to the selection of our Classical Curriculum strategically marginalized the Artemisian Iphigenia and Thecla.

But it is in the company of the spirits of these ancient she-heroes that I will certainly be getting inspired by Katniss at Cheltenham Cineworld next Friday.

Aberdeen, Land of the Ancient Taezali

The Alexandrian scientist Claudius Ptolemy mentioned Aberdeen (which he called 'Devonia,' from its River Dee) in about 146 BC. He said Aberdeen was inhabited by a people named the Taezalians. This week I visited their descendants. The Aberdeen University Department of Classics, founded in 1495, was abolished in 1989, just before its 500th anniversary. But enthusiasm for ancient Greece remains in The Granite City.

This was proved by the many members of Aberdeen Scottish Hellenic Society who turned out last Tuesday, despite their first winter snowfall, to hear me lecture on Ancient Greek Minds and The Sea.

Central Court, Aberdeen Art Gallery, in 1905

The Aberdonians have always liked Greece. In 1905 the new central court hall of the public Art Gallery was opened to display casts of ancient statues. Its inner walls were (and remain) adorned by a splendid reproduction of the Parthenon frieze, around which the building was designed. The frieze was paid for by a local philanthropist, Sir George Reid. He had made his fortune by his paintings, despite being born poor and receiving little formal education. An intellectual Leveller, he wanted everyone in Aberdeen to have access to classical sculpture.

George Reid, Beauty for Everyone

The new court was opened at a magnificent reception in April 1905. A special train arrived from Euston containing 62 guests. Among them was the writer Thomas Hardy, who, unable to attend university, had studied Greek and mythology as an apprentice stonemason. He was delighted to receive from Aberdeen University, at last, an honorary degree.

Granite Meets the North Sea in the Land of Taezalians

But Aberdeen sends out conflicting messages. In the Maritime Museum, I was appalled to learn from a display that, in 1961, 39% of Aberdonians still had no access to a household toilet. The display is intended to prove how much progress has been made, since it is paired with the news that there are now more multimillionaires in Aberdeen per head of population even than in London (it must be the oil).

Lies & Damned Statistics. There are more Poor in Aberdeen than in 1905.

Struck by these facts, by the homeless on the streets, and endless 'Pound Stores' and charity shops, I checked out the poverty statistics. The official child poverty rate in Aberdeen is today a disgraceful 23%. In 1905-6 fewer children were being raised in acute poverty--18%.

George Reid, 'Buchanhaven Fisherman'

I don’t regard this as progress, notwithstanding the oil tycoons among the modern Taezalians. I don’t even like to speculate what the Victorian philanthropist George Reid, or Thomas Hardy, would have made of the widening gap between the rich and poor of Aberdeen in the 21st century.

M. Aurelius. Roman Emperor as Emotional Role Model?

This week I faced attacks by social media from some (un-Stoically angry) self- styled Stoics. I was invited by the producer of Radio 3’s Nightwaves to consider whether the practices advocated by the organisers of ‘Stoic Week 2013’ had anything to do with what I, as a classicist, understand by ‘Stoicism.’ Also present were the Stoic Week ‘team member’ Jules Evans, who has written a book he was keen to promote, and the unfailingly sensible philosophy journalist Mark Vernon.

I dutifully read the ‘Stoic Week Handbook’, which recommends a programme of meditation and mindfulness exercises requiring me-time which, frankly, is the stuff of dreams for any working mother. I also read many other texts by the ‘Team,’ which is dominated by psychotherapists but also includes two reputable experts in ancient philosophy and their PhD students. Most of the reflective practices they recommend, including cognitive behavioural therapy, would benefit any stressed-out individual in the 21st-century, were she or he child- and work-free enough to find the time (the elite Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Seneca enjoyed leisure). But they simply are not Stoic philosophy.

The brilliant translator of Epictetus, Elizabeth Carter, was very concerned that some Stoic ideas were too harsh to be of much use to her 18th-century audience. I believe the Stoic Week team have not addressed the contradictions involved in transposing into modern experience the ideology favoured by the ruling class of the ancient Roman Empire, a slaveholding, patriarchal, centralized dictatorship. I said so.

I do think that authentic ancient Stoicism still has one crucial idea to offer: some anxiety is constructive, because it energises you to change things, and some anxiety is unconstructive, because it concerns things over which you have no control.

But most of ancient Stoicism was addressed to suppressing animal instincts and emotions, rather than addressing and dealing with them without shame. This hasn’t been acknowledged by our neo-Stoic brethren.

I am myself involved in researching the ways that ancient Greek and Roman ideas have really inspired people to improve their emotional, social and political positions in my Classics & Class project. I therefore feel queasy when radically distorted information about antiquity is put into the market-place. I was funded by British taxpayers to become an expert on ancient Greece and Rome. I would be betraying them if I didn’t honestly say what my acquired knowledge leads me to think about any ancient topic, including Stoicism. Neither retreat nor surrender, just yet.

Compare two scenes.

1. Cristina Odone, Telegraph blogger, no stranger to affluence, sits with her ten-year-old daughter Izzy and her stepson Johnny in a luxurious home and skypes with a reactionary 71-year-old Latin tutor from Ireland. He has recently published a traditional grammar textbook which Odone seems keen to promote.

2. A group of largely under-privileged children age 9-11 are introduced by the inspirational Bob Lister (teacher trainer) and Liz Lloyd (teacher) to the Iliad Project at the William Ford Junior School in Dagenham. They listen, spellbound, as they collectively harness the power of storytelling, perform scenes from the epic and demonstrably improve their listening and speaking skills to the magical rhythms of the ancient poem.

QUESTION: Would you rather be in Odone’s sitting room or that hushed state school in Essex? I have no doubts myself, having been reduced to tears by a video of the Iliad project shown at a conference run by Classics in Communities, an initiative devoted to bringing the Greeks and Romans to children across wider social strata, and hosted with delicious sandwiches at Oxford University last Saturday.

I would be able better to tolerate Odone’s domestic narcissism, even her ignorance about what is at stake in pedagogy, if she didn’t launch such moronic attacks on teacher training colleges: “Don’t go near them!” we are told, approvingly, her Irishman “thundered over Skype”, since “they teach only the worst habits and will psychologically scar you forever.”

Oh dear. I have seen personally the inspirational effect of committed and thoughtful teaching of great ancient literature to disadvantaged children. This requires skills Odone seems unable to bear contemplating. Her intervention is so disheartening for the tiny handful of people still helping others to learn how best to energise such children through Classics. There are only two institutions left in Britain where you can qualify to teach Classics in State Schools, Cambridge and King's College London.

Steve Hunt Brings Classics Teaching Skills to the Nation's Teachers

More particularly, Odone is attacking the extraordinary band of teacher trainers at these two institutions now running ‘crash’ courses to other teachers on how to get Latin or Classical Civilisation up and running outside the private sector in Britain. These teacher-trainers are heroes. With grants from e.g. the Roman Society, they are training (sorry if that is a dirty word, Cristina) even teachers inexperienced in Classics to introduce ancient thought and language to ALL the nation’s children. Not just to Izzy and Johnny.

So sneer away, Cristina, about how delightfully one eccentric communicates with your children. Most of the children reached by ‘Classics in Communities’ are not given private skype coaching by Latin teachers when (or if) they finish their official homework. Some have no computer, broadband, or mother. It is one thing to enjoy class privilege. It is quite another to gloat about in print, publicly.

Some strange goings-on in my work-world have brought out my cynical side. I identify with Diogenes, the founder of Cynicism, who carried a lantern in the daytime because he found it so difficult to find an honest man. (The Cynics’ lantern has been on my mind since Seamus Heaney died, because he was perhaps thinking of the impossibility of finding honesty in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles when he called his 1987 collection The Haw Lantern).

Statue of Diogenes in his Turkish birthplace

After pretending to be Diogenes for a week. I feel much better, and have improved my relationships with colleagues and my dog. Nobody knows why the Cynics were called ‘canine ones’: it may be because they were thought to behave like dogs, to look and sound like barking dogs when they laughed, to live in the streets with dogs, or because they met in a place in Athens which had the word ‘dog’ in its name—Cynosarges, ‘White-Dog.’

Since it is trendy to name weeks after ancient philosophical schools (see my blog on STOIC WEEK last month), I am naming this coming week CYNIC WEEK and would encourage everyone to practise the following 7- step programme to Cynical nirvana:

1. Ask to be addressed as Diogenes, or Diogeneia, and cultivate a Turkish accent (Diogenes’ native city was Sinope, in the middle of the Turkish Black Sea coast).

2. Locate a large barrel or other vessel in a public place and spend at least twenty minutes a day in it, dressed in rags, looking intense and intelligent.

3. You do not actually need to urinate or play with yourself in public, as Diogenes did, since these are illegal in most jurisdictions. But you do need to discover your Inner Hound, wolf food from off the floor, use your hands as a cup, and scratch yourself a lot instead.

Thomas Christian Wink, 'Alexander and Diogenes'

4. Answer all questions with rude and humorously pithy epigrams which stress that humans are fauna and that wealth, power, conventions, and intellectual pretension are ridiculous. Here is a Cynic response to emulate: when Plato said that Socrates had defined men as ‘featherless bipeds’, Diogenes ridiculed the notion by taking a plucked chicken into the Academy and announcing ‘Behold! I bring you a Man!’

5. Cut down to size at least one person who prides themselves on being richer or more powerful than you, as Diogenes told Alexander the Great, who was pestering him with idiotic questions, to get out of his sunlight.

Landseer's Priceless 'Alexander and Diogenes'

6. Cheer yourself up with the best History Painting of all time, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer’s 'Alexander and Diogenes' (1848), in which dog breeds replace social classes. The arrogant white Alexander-dog looks like a member of UKIP, while Diogenes resembles Finlay, our own canny canine.

7. Consult the collection of very funny quips in The Cynics’ Word Book (1906), available freely online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43951/43951-h/43951-h.htm. Given my current experiences, the very first entry is my favourite:

ABASEMENT, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer.

Finlay Poynder-Hall

Druids at Stonehenge Solstice Rite

The winter solstice today means that it is getting ever so slightly less dark from now on. Last week was Think Like a Cynic Week but I am chewing over the idea of a Think Like a Druid week after receiving a lovely invitation.

The Rollright Stones

The tall and articulate woman who works in our village Co-op is a druidical white witch. She told me the local solstice rite, the Gorsedd, will take place after sunset at the nearby stone circle, the Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire border.

I shouldn’t go, because it would be voyeuristic. I am not actually a pagan. My own attraction to the ancient Greeks and Romans is of the 18^th-century rationalist/ Enlightenment variety. In fact, it was a terrible shock to me, at the very first class I held in my first real university job, to discover how many people like Classics just because they are witches and wizards.

Jason on the Argo Looking Pale

It was Reading University in October 1990. The class was on the Argonaut epic by Apollonius. The discussion became fixed on the spells which Medea casts in the final two books of the poem. A row erupted over the potion she has concocted from the plant growing from the blood dripping out of Prometheus’ eagle-ravaged flank. Medea had collected the sap from this plant after bathing in seven streams, putting on dark robes, and calling seven times on the Queen of the Dead.

Medea's Salve is now available online

One student said it was black magic. He could be sure because it was a spell he used personally in his capacity as Warlock of Newbury Coven. Another, hilariously called Jason, was furious: no, this was white magic, since Medea was making a protective ointment not a damaging one. He could be sure as Arch-Druid of the Reading Grove. These two youths nearly came to blows, and were only silenced by a mature student, who with righteous wrath announced she was a born-again Christian and that they were Meddling with the Works of Satan. We managed to avoid either a Manichean duel or a witch-burning session, but I was too shaken to see the funny side for weeks.

Druids in Oak Grove

White or Black Magic?

I am just old enough to have avoided compulsory Higher Education Teacher Training, which my younger colleagues now undergo. I am sure they learn useful skills. But no amount of training could ever have prepared me for that terrifying first seminar. I have tried to avoid teaching ancient magic ever since. But the Druidical lady in the Co-op is such an excellent person (she is extraordinarily well-informed on environmental issues and has bullied the whole village into bringing their own reusable shopping bags) that I must admit that the winter solstice 2013 tempts me sorely to Think Like a Druid for a while.

Clytemnestra Hangs in Dorset

Aristotle and his Mississippi Lyceum

What the Greeks knew about Combat Trauma

What the Greeks knew about Virginity Testing

How Not to be a TV Academic

Fiddling while Troy Burns

What the Ancient Greeks Knew about Slaves' Dream-Lives

The World's Worst Airline

The Ancient Sources of Monty Python's Life of Brian

What Pericles Knew about Health and Safety

Plebgate and the Wisdom of Catiline

Why Peter Cook and Diodorus agree about mining

How to Treat the Disabled in 2013 AD and 403 BC

Aesop's Reformist Twigs v. Mussolini's Fasces

What the Greeks Foresaw about The Hunger Games

Classics & Poverty in the Furthest North

Rebranding Psychotherapy as Classical Stoic Philosophy

Extra Early Post Because I am Annoyed

ANNOUNCEMENT: IT'S THINK LIKE A CYNIC WEEK

Think Like a Druid Week, Anyone?