The Edithorial

Does a 'proper' tragic hero need a crown?

Christmas Eve brought an email inviting me to write an essay about tragedy and social class. Why did everyone in Greco-Roman antiquity and into the 19^th century think tragic heroes had to ‘fall from high estate’? It was only partly because Aristotle had decreed in his Poetics that heroes should ‘have a big reputation and fortune like Oedipus and Thyestes and distinguished men from families like theirs’ [i.e. royalty].

Modern Misery amidst Money

I have always thought myself that half the pleasure of tragedy was motored by underlying envy--watching very rich and powerful people have a really bad day offers much the same Schadenfreude to us commoners as we derive from reading about billionaires’ botched Botox and miserable divorces in celebrity-watch magazines today.

But I have a problem with this commission which I hope crowd-sourcing can help. There are a few working-class tragic heroes in the cultural repertoire. Jesus of Nazareth, on a secularist account, was the first. Born to loving parents and general applause, he ended up executed by a repressive establishment because he banged on about the poor: theologians agree that the Gospels show the influence of Greek tragedy in their structure and tone. Theatre historians, on the other hand, will tell you that the breakthrough came in 1837 with Karl Georg Büchner’s revolutionary (and unfinished) tragedy Woyzeck, which portrays its soldier-hero’s fall from a very low estate to conviction for murder.

Woyzeck, Deutsches Theater, 2009

In the projected essay I have been asked to discuss media other than theatre, and this is where my problem starts. Fiction is easy—Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Hardy’s Jude—but cinema is giving me problems. The Father Of My Children suggests Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and I have been pondering both Trainspotting and Mike Leigh’s Naked. But inspiration is otherwise lacking.

Fall from Low Estate to ECT

If you have an idea, please do comment or send me an email @kcl.ac.uk. If I use it you will of course be credited by name in the essay although this will certainly not make you rich and famous enough to star in a pre-19th century tragedy or even Hello! magazine. Any proposed artwork will have to fit my own general definition of tragedy: it needs to depict suffering in an aesthetically/emotionally gripping way, without voyeurism, and to enquire into the causes of that suffering. Collateral damage (to innocent people trapped to their cost in the hero’s plot) is, of course, particularly welcome.

Apuleius, tried in a Sabratha court

On the radio news this morning the place-names of the two international tragedies reported as headlines sent shock-waves round my system. Near Sabratha, north-western Libya, a British man and his friend from New Zealand have been found dead. A horrible thing to happen to people who may have been visiting the ruined city there.

Sculptures on the Sabratha Theatre

It was in Sabratha, in 158 AD, that Apuleius, the author of the amazing Golden Ass, the archetypal Latin novel about the man who was turned by magic into an ass, was himself tried for witchcraft. He was accused of casting spells in order to captivate a wealthy older woman. There is little I would not give to time-travel and be present at that trial. The Sabratha theatre itself is a miracle of 3^rd-century architecture, its relief sculptures offering some of the best evidence for ancient ballet dancing—‘pantomime’—in existence.

Battle of Cunaxa, near modern Fallujah

Next up was yesterday’s fall of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, to Al-Qaeda, with at least a hundred fatalities. This retrieves bitter memories of the ferocious second battle of Fallujah in 2004, with heavy losses on both US and Iraqi sides. But Fallujah also reminds any classicist of the bloody battle of nearby Cunaxa in 401, when two Persian royal brothers decimated each other’s armies, leaving Xenophon and his fellow Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries stranded, to march their way up-country (the Anabasis) to freedom.

So what difference is made by knowing the vivid ancient history of places today in the news? It is useful in that I can locate them quickly on my internal mental map. But I’m not at all sure it is useful emotionally. On the one hand it reminds me that humans have been vile to each other for all of documented history, and in some ways little has changed. On the other hand, it reminds me that we are so privileged in modernity at least to have the lost world of the ancient pagan Mediterranean to enrich our thinking about the really long view, the one that matters, into the future.

What I have to miss because of my lager-and-front-crawl habit

Meanwhile, I have just declined an invitation to help make a film based on a Greek tragedy in Iran, specifically at the ancient seat of the Achaemenid monarchs in Persepolis. There is no reason why I should not visit Iran, except that I would last about three days in a country without being rude to someone in power because I could not drink a cold beer or splash in a Speedo! swimming costume in a pool in public. Having to say ‘no’ to such a wonderful project really does make me slightly ashamed and wish I was a better person.

Theodosius I

Everyone interested in history or Classics needs to be able to drop the name ‘Theodosius I.’ It’s the 1,667th anniversary of his birth today, but I’ve been meaning to share my grudge against him for a while. If we want to identify an individual responsible for abolishing pagan antiquity, Theodosius is a prime candidate. His portrait needs to glower at the reader from the last page of any history of the classical world.

Without this bug-eyed emperor’s edicts of 380-91 AD, the Delphic oracle would still be in operation, the Olympics would not have had to be reinvented in the 19^thcentury, you could still hire a diviner to read your sheep’s entrails, and the Vestals would still be preserving their virginity in Rome.

Pagan libraries might still be open, having taken better care than the Byzantines to preserve more than e.g. a miserable seven masterpieces by Sophocles, who wrote ten times that amount. If Theodosius hadn’t banned worship of statues there would be a lot more with complete heads and arms for classical art historians to discuss.

Theodosius also banned conversion from Christianity to paganism, which was still happening---it wasn’t only Julian ‘the Apostate’, the last pagan emperor in the 360s, who was brought up Christian but fell in love with the Olympian gods.

Pagan rites did rumble on for a while. As late as the sixth century, some Greeks were still worshipping their bloodthirsty Artemis on the south coast of Turkey under her resonant title ‘Artemis of Freedom’. But it was Theodosius who ensured that the ‘ancient Greeks’ were now running their last lap. Just to be sure, he invented feudal theocracy by submitting to the orders of Bishop Ambrose rather than insisting that as Emperor he do anything he pleased. The world today might have been very different if Theodosius I had lightened up.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Tsvetelin Iovchev

So wrote Robert Frost in his poem ‘Mending Wall,’ published exactly a century ago, in 1914. One man who could give Frost’s narrator a clear answer is Tsvetelin Iovchev, the Bulgarian Minister of the Interior, who has announced the near-completion of a 33-kilometer-long wall designed to keep Syrian refugees and other migrants from crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

Walls, whether in Bulgaria, on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in Berlin, or prisons and penitentiaries, divide politicians and commentators. Those who put one up routinely insist that it increases security for people on both sides and is therefore an instrument of universal wellbeing. Those whose movements are restricted by the wall—from either side—always respond that it decreases security by exacerbating the underlying conflict which caused the wall to be built in the first place.

Piping while Athens gets defortified

Walls create new problems. The water-borne killer plague which decimated the Athenians early in the Peloponnesian War took hold more easily because they had all come in from the countryside to crowd behind their Long Walls. But the walls did protect them and thus prolong the war. When the Athenians were finally defeated, their enemies tore the walls down ‘with jubilation, accompanied by the music of girl pipers’.

Joshua's trumpeteers

Despite having a soft spot for the classical Athenians, I think that walls really are at their best in the process of coming down. ‘Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came Tumbling Down’, especially as sung by Paul Robeson, remains a resounding anthem of Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement. All those trumpets!

The sight of the first East Berliners through the fissure in the wall on 9th November 1989 completely changed my life. I was locked in a miserable marriage to a progressively more controlling individual, but was far too scared to leave. The fear was justified. It transpired that my possessive then-husband liked to throw television sets around. He had also hired a private detective to stare at my window in Magdalen College, Oxford through binoculars from a car parked in—you’ve guessed it—Long Wall Street. The detective reported to him that I was having a passionate affair with my Atari (a Jurassic proto-computer, to those of you under forty-five). Incendiary information!

Inspired thousands to change their lives

But as I watched the TV news that momentous evening, the tears splashing into my gin, I at last found the courage to make The Phone Call. (Then I hid). A tiny personal victory, but one which has made me forever grateful to those brave Berliners and forever fond of the sight of walls in the process of dismantlement.

Burns Night. My children are terrified that they will be forced to endure the whole of Tam o'Shanter before they get their haggis burgers. But just thinking about the many faces of Robert Burns has always cheered me up—ploughman and dandy, dancer and fiddle-player, womanizing partygoer and soul-searching depressive.

A world-class poet, he rose from a two-room clay cottage rented by his gardening father, who was determined to get his children educated even though their mother was illiterate. Just as important to the young Robert’s development was his relative Betty Davidson, who enthralled him with ‘stories and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.’ She would—obviously—head up my list of invitees to my ideal Burns’ Night party.

Carpenter's Son & Greek Prof.

Next would be Professor Andrew Dalziel, the carpenter’s son who rose—as was then possible in the Scottish educational system—to be a leading Edinburgh intellectual. Via parochial school he arrived at Edinburgh University and by 1779 at the Chair of Greek. He was almost single-handedly responsible for saving the reputation of Classics at that university after a long decline, but remained entirely free from snobbery: '... We have got a poet in town just now, whom everybody is taking notice of — a ploughman from Ayrshire — a man of unquestionable genius.’

Esther Knew it Off by Heart

My next invitee would be Esther Easton, the gardener's wife Burns visited in 1787. He recorded that she was ‘a very remarkable woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes making Scotch doggerel herself—she can repeat by heart almost everything she has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end; has studied Euclid by herself; and, in short, is a woman of very extraordinary abilities’ and ‘a great florist.’ Esther could recite Pope's Homer and do the accounts and flower arrangements.

The last, though, would be John Lapraik, a friend to whom Burns showed touching loyalty, supporting him when he was sent to debtors’ prison. It was in his famous Epistle for J. Lapraik, an Old Scots Bard, that Burns set out his own poetic manifesto: education was all very well, but even men like him and Lapraik, who had not studied at university, could write inspirational poetry.

Contrary to popular (prejudiced) interpretation, Burns never eversays that study of the Greek and Latin Classics is prejudicial to poetry. On the contrary, he takes care to show his own immersion in the entire poetic tradition. His point is this: without talent, no amount of education can turn ‘dull, conceited’ students into anything but ‘asses’, who have confused ‘their brains in college classes’. Nobody ever managed ‘to climb Parnassus / By dint of Greek:’

Boring the family 25th Jan 2013

Gie me ae spark o' nature's fire,

That's a' the learning I desire;

Then tho' I drudge thro' dub an' mire

At pleugh or cart,

My muse, tho' hamely in attire,

May touch the heart.

This poem has the added virtue of being short enough to prevent the haggis getting cold. For those of you as mystified by Burns’ dialect as many of his readers were by ancient Greek, you can preface your dinner tonight with this delicious and comprehensible recording of the poem by David Rintoul: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/epistle_to_j_lapraik.

This blog is in honour of my TWO friends who share a birthday with Robert Burns as well as a love of all things Greek, Fiona Macintosh and Pantelis Michelakis.

East End Classics Centre--the Best Audience EVER

The prize for the best audience of my life was awarded last Monday, lecturing to the amazing students from several schools and colleges at BSIX BROOKE HOUSE Sixth Form College in Hackney. Some had never encountered the ancient Mediterraneans AT ALL and yet had the courage to speak up, asking, in front of several academics, penetrating questions about whether BAD LUCK or BAD BEHAVIOUR is the issue in tragedy. Good work Crystal Addey, the Director of the whole enterprise!

So I was already on a high when I got my brain focused on the newly outed five-stanza poem by Sappho, in her delicious Sapphic metre. Although not exactly “new” (a misnomer for a song composed nearly 27 centuries ago), it has probably not been read or heard since the 300 AD. At one hour’s notice I got to recite THE ACTUAL ANCIENT GREEK TEXT, in an embarrassingly amateur-thespian tone, over the closing credits of BBC Newsnight. I have never been so scared, but had to do it. How often does this beautiful language ever get to be heard at all?

It turned that the duty editor of Newsnight that evening, Marc Williams, had studied Classics at university, and had even heard me give a lecture on Sophocles long ago. So he knew precisely what risk he was taking miking me up for live delivery. He was very fortunate that I didn’t take up the hilarious challenge tweeted me by Professor Barbara Graziosi at Durham, an expert on the cult of ancient Olympian gods, to sing the poem instead.

As a woman with an elder and a younger brother myself, I am particularly pleased that the new poem shows the poet most famous for her erotic love of other women in a completely different light—as the responsible sister of two men, one a business traveler and the other still a youngster. Prof. Tim Whitmarsh has with enormous professional courage published the first translation in the Guardian; here’s the freer version I composed for recital on Newsnight before they opted for the Greek itself.

Why the incessant gossip about Charaxus’ arrival,

in a loaded ship? Only Zeus, I think, knows

the truth, along with all the gods—it’s not for you

to have an opinion!

Hardly! You should be telling me to go and make

repeated appeals to Queen Hera

that Charaxos can make his return here,

ship and all,

finding us safe and sound. Let us place

everything else in the lap of the gods.

Sudden spells of fine weather often emerge

from heavy gales.

Some people are lucky enough to have

their problems averted by the King of Olympus.

They are blessed

and enormously fortunate.

In our case, if Larichos can just grow up

to be a man of leisure and status,

then from our heavy cargo of sorrows

we may very soon be freed!

Ralph Fiennes' movie Coriolanus

When Shakespeare retold the story of Coriolanus, the general in the Roman republic who alienated the plebeians, he did so with added hunger. The play was probably written in 1608. The previous three years had seen famine and food riots—the so-called Midland Revolt.

Coriolanus Snow

Shakespeare adapted Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus to make the crisis it portrays resemble the recent English experience. As the citizen says in the opening scene, the rich ‘ne’er cared for us / yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses / crammed with grain.’ Not for nothing has Suzanne Collins called the President of Panem, where the poor starve and freeze in The Hunger Games, Coriolanus Snow.

The Bard for our 100th Milestone!

In the ongoing research project ‘Classics & Class’, we have just chosen the hungry plebeians’ confrontation with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as our hundredth permanent online ‘Encounter’ between ancient Greece/Rome and the British class system. We would like to thank the first classical scholar we can find pointing out the significance of Shakespeare’s response to the Midland riot in this ‘Roman play’. It is Chris Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, in his Plutarch and History (2002). Prof. Pelling has always insisted that our Mediterranean cultural ancestors belong to everyone, Jacobean groundlings quite as much as university dons.

Professor Christopher Pelling

This is what makes his appointment this week by the Department of Education as ‘Classics Czar,’ leader of a project focusing on the enhancement and growth of the teaching of Classics in state schools, so important. Pelling, himself a product of the state educational system in Wales, is a humorous and approachable man without a shred of class or intellectual snobbery. He is also a true democrat. He will take this mission with the seriousness it deserves and undoubtedly get results. Be sure not to miss what he writes in tomorrow’s Sunday Times.Good news all round.

Not that his mission is going to be easy. The whole policy as framed by Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, looks dangerously like ‘telling’ state schools and their teachers what they really, really need. This risks rubbing salt into longstanding wounds. It would help if Gove would stop talking about ‘bog-standard’ state schools, ‘Berlin Walls’ between the state and private sector, and how state schools are going to be ‘helped’ (they are always referred to in the passive voice) to raise their standards. Putting serious money behind expanding the pitifully small number of places available for enthusiastic Classics graduates to take a PGCE and actually qualify to teach in state schools would be a useful start.

But the real elephant in this room is Classical Civilization. Gove does not like talking about the very subject—neither Latin nor Greek—which now draws most state school pupils and Open University applicants towards Classics. Class. Civ. at GCSE and A Level involves studying ancient writings in translation and material culture widely and critically. It makes a fine preparation for entering university to study any subject, including the Greek and Roman worlds and their languages.

THREE TIMES as many A Levels are taken in Classical Civilization as in Latin. Still not that many—a few thousand--and I would like to see more. Many talented students arrive in British universities to study for Classics-related degrees with qualifications in Class. Civ. and e.g. English, German or History. Gove’s rhetoric overlooks and risks sounding disrespectful towards these pupils and their dedicated teachers and perpetuates the real ‘Berlin Wall’—the completely erroneous view that learning about classical civilization at school or anywhere else is inherently inferior to learning classical languages.

I have personally had my whole life immeasurably enriched by reading ancient Greek, and I revel in really fancy metres, refined prose styles, and arcane dialects. I teach it to anyone who will put up with me. I am miserable that this exquisite ancestral birthright and Latin are not available free of charge to every single person in this country.

Some of the 1000s of UK Class Civ. students

But researching the history of classics across class boundaries is revealing that some of the most important pedagogical effects of the Classics have been via individuals’ encounters with the ancient world through media other than ancient tongues. Several of my most brilliant colleagues, who have changed how we think about ancient art, philosophy, history, theatre, cities and religion, confess privately that they really didn't excel at or enjoy the linguistic side of Classics. As another enlightened Oxford Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray, said over a century ago, ‘Greece, not Greek, is the object of our study.’ I just don’t see why linguistic study is inherently more intellectually rigorous or how it produces a better informed, indeed more civilized citizen, than analysing the whole Odyssey, understanding Pericles’ building project on the Athenian Acropolis or arguing about Aristotle’s Ethics. Please could Mr Gove enlighten me?

With Bruce Springsteen celebrating Obama's Inauguration

Lecturing yesterday in Berlin, on Plato, Aristotle and the transformative power of music, prompts my belated obituary for Pete Seeger, great American and folk singer whose views on race and the environment were decades ahead of his time. Convinced that getting people to sing together could play a crucial role in promoting peace and economic equality, he stressed often, as here on youtube, ‘I usually quote Plato, who said, It is very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music in the Republic.’

He spent two years at Harvard as a Sociology major, but dropped out when his professor told him, ‘Don’t think you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it.’ In Seeger’s interviews the ancient Greeks are more prominent than any Sociologists.

Anaphora and Civil Rights

On Thistle Radio in 2008 he explained the power of ‘poetry in what the Greeks called anaphora, which means that the beginning of each line has the same word, or same phrase. The line may not rhyme at all, but it's poetry because it has this regular form… look at Dr King's great speeches, "I have a dream, da-da-da, I have a dream, da-da-da-da, I have a dream." Or "Give us the Vote, da-da-da, Give us the Vote, da-da-da-da, Give us the Vote!"’ Seeger advised using anaphora ‘whenever people get pessimistic about the world,’ as in his version of Ecclesiastes:

A time to be born, a time to die

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to laugh, a time to weep

A time to kill, a time to heal

The anaphoric people’s anthem We Shall Overcome will forever be associated with Seeger on the 1965 march from Alabama to Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr, but Seeger said his sole contribution to the anthem was to change the second word from ‘will’ to ‘shall,’ because it ‘opens up the mouth better.’ He encouraged everyone to sing with their heads tilted upwards, pouring out their open vowels together to the heavens. He preferred to sing out of doors and on the road: some of his most influential appearances were in the enormous outdoor Greek theater of Los Angeles in summer 1969.

The Greek Theater, Los Angeles

Perhaps there is a book to be written about American Agit-Folk and the Greek and Roman Classics. No doubt Seeger did not just learn how to jump between train roofs from his mentor Woody Guthrie, but sang with him (back in the days when popular songs had not yet pointlessly confined themselves to the narrow topic of romantic love), the hilarious and moving lyrics to Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done:

ALTOGETHER NOW!:

I'm just a lonesome traveler, The Great Historical Bum.

Highly educated from history I have come.

I built the Rock of Ages, 'twas in the Year of One

And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.

I worked in the Garden of Eden, that was the year of two,

Joined the apple pickers union, I always paid my due;

I'm the man that signed the contract to raise the rising sun,

And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.

I was straw boss on the Pyramids, the Tower of Babel, too;

I opened up the ocean let the migrant children through,

I fought a million battles and I never lost a one,

And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.

I beat the daring Roman, I beat the daring Turk,

Defeated Nero's army with thirty minutes work,

I fought the greatest leaders and I licked them everyone

And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.

I stopped old Caesar's Romans, etc…

A senior academic at London University has advised me that it would be ‘strategic’, in terms of my ‘career development’, to remove from my personal website a comment by a former student questioning the role of capitalist market forces in Higher Education.

McCarthy, Tough on the Causes of Equality

However tempted to ask this professor if s/he realises that s/he sounds like Senator Joseph McCarthy, I instead asked myself whether we have all forgotten how to visualise a better world in which financial markets did not rule us. For if we stop trying to visualise utopia - a good community with mutual respect, state-funded edifying entertainment, and universal education and healthcare, for example - we really are in trouble. Imagining how wonderful life could be for homines sapientes is a prerequisite of actually achieving social progress.

Emmet Brickowski, hero of the Lego Movie

What makes today’s absence of utopian thinking so sad is that people are not stupid. There is a widespread, heartfelt understanding of what our problems are. Three popular movies I have recently seen (Hunger Games, the Lego Movie, and Elysium) all portray imagined future dystopias. In all three, no-holds-barred capitalism has trashed the environment beyond repair, created a cynical, gated ruling class, desperate to hang onto its privileges, and reduced everyone else to abject poverty.

In all three movies, inspirational working-class heroes stand up against the tyrannical über-rich and bring down their evil governments. But then the film ends. Not one has the remotest concept of a fairer economic system and happier society to put in place of persecutory rule by capitalist Bad Guys.

Fighting for Healthcare, Hollywood-style

The gated community in Elysium is called after the ancient Greek islands where the fortunate deceased spent a blissful eternity. The repeated experience of founding new colonies made the Greeks think hard about the circumstances conducive to human flourishing. From Hesiod’s Golden Race, and comedies in which all the slaves were liberated, to the philosophers’ ideal polities (Plato’s Republic was just one of several), the Greeks were constantly debating the nature of the ideal community.

My favourite ancient utopia is Iambulus’ Islands of the Sun, where work, government and intellectual life are fairly shared by everyone: ‘They alternately serve one another, some of them fishing, others working at the crafts, others occupying themselves in other useful matters, and still others—except for the very aged—performing public duties in cyclic rotation… Every branch of learning is diligently pursued by them.’

The best thing about being a Sun Islander is that everyone had a tongue with two tips, which meant s/he could carry on two conversations simultaneously with two people, ‘responding to the questions of one with one prong of the tongue, while conversing familiarly about current events with the other.’

Such a tongue would allow me to talk to university Management in a ‘strategic’ way and ‘develop my career,’ while still engaging with everybody else in optimistic discussion about how we might one day, just possibly, manage things better. On the other hand, perhaps I’ll continue talking utopia to everyone indiscriminately and to hell with ‘career development’.

Leda, raped in her sleep by the Zeus-swan

Please be assured that I am not an advocate of zoophilia, which I find disgusting. I am surprised that in many countries it is not illegal (it is a felony in only 17 USA states). My point is that our thinking about zoophilia is muddled.

The free newspapers on the London Underground are obsessed with it. This week’s story featured a Nigerian named Malam Kamisu Baranda, arrested for having sex with his goat. He argues in his own defence that he asked her for her permission first. A heartbreaking tale two weeks ago featured a British vagrant caught on camcorder apparently copulating with his dog inside the sleeping bag they shared. She was taken into care and he has been banned from dog ownership for three years.

Ancient art captures the brutality

The issue raised in both articles is NOT whether zoophilia is unhealthy or degrading to humans, or a moral threat to society, but the animal’s welfare and ability to make a decision. Can an animal consent to sex with a human? I would like to know how Baranda put the question to his goat, and how she replied. I would like to ask the vagrant’s dog whether she wanted to be separated from him (probably not?)

My problem is that people legally do all kinds of (arguably much worse) things to animals without seeking their consent—coerced hard labour and lactation, artificial insemination, castration, experiments in laboratories; undermining their dignity with stupid costumes and circus tricks, riding, caging, electrocuting and eating them.

'Love Will Find a Way'

Sex between humans and animals was explored more intelligently in Greek narratives. When gods raped women in the form of fauna, as Zeus raped Leda in the form of a swan, his animalization is an implicit acknowledgement that forcibly penetrating another human is an act of subhuman violence.

'You look so like your father'

Greek poetry and art is remarkably sympathetic to Pasiphae. In her cold husband’s long absences she fell in love with her handsome bull. One Greek vase shows her tenderly burping the resulting baby Minotaur, a fulfilled mother at last. Pasiphae’s emotional bond reminds me of my (long deceased) childhood piano teacher, a lonely childless widow who treated her Old English Sheepdog like a husband, embracing him on her sofa, including him in all conversations, asking him whether he preferred Mozart to Brahms, getting jealous if he paid other human women attention, and sharing her bed (although I do doubt her body) with him.

Lucian's Ass Consents

Best of all are the closing scenes in an ancient Greek version of the traditional story of the man turned into an ass, the Ass attributed to Lucian. These contrast two scenes in which the Ass-hero accepts and declines sex with a woman. In the first, he tells us that he enthusiastically made love to a lovely rich lady who plied him with delicious food in her luxurious boudoir. In the second, he is exploitatively required to penetrate a female convict publicly outdoors, as an amphitheatre spectacle, and manages to escape in the nick of time. Perhaps the moral is that when speculating about animals’ attitudes to sex with humans, we shouldn't make blanket generalisations.

I am going to email Metro newspaper to offer a series ‘Greek zoophiliac myth of the week’ so commuters can satisfy their voyeuristic hunger for such stories while perhaps thinking harder about what they might signify. I will let you know how the editors respond to the offer in due course.

Artemis Statuette, 500 BC

One day Zeus hurled a wooden statue of the goddess Artemis down from the sky. It landed at Sevastopol, or rather the town which then existed on the site of Sevastopol, which was inhabited by a xenophobic cattle-farming tribe called the Taurians.

Iphigenia steals the statue

The Taurians built a temple for the statue by the sea and installed in it a Greek priestess called Iphigenia who had mysteriously turned up. Artemis dropped her off there after rescuing her from being sacrificed in Greece by her father. Provided she conducted the ritual human sacrifices there, she was welcome to bed and board.

20 years later her dysfunctional little brother Orestes arrived with his friend. The three Greeks tricked the Taurians, stole the statue in a fit of mindless colonial rapine, and ran away with it to Greece. There has been Trouble at Tauris ever since.

Catherine the Great sent Potemkin in to wrest it from the Khans who ruled it for the Ottomans and called him her ‘Prince of Tauride’ because of his glorious victory for Mother Russia. The Charge of the Light Brigade took place up the road. The German invasion of Sevastopol made the Crimean War look like a teddy bears' picnic, as did Stalin’s 'deportation' of the Tartar population.

Greeks plot imperial harm to Tauris

Euripides wrote a play, actually set in Sevastopol/ Tauris, called Iphigenia in Tauris. The northernmost Greek theatre ever excavated is in Sevastopol/Tauris, and Iphigenia in Tauris was probably performed there in antiquity. But Artemis NEVER sanctions the theft of her statue and the tricking of the Taurians by the Greeks.

Would you Go Diving with this Man?

The ancient Greeks built several cities in and round the Crimea, complete with theatres and other antiquities now dug up by Russian AND Ukrainian archaeologists. Vladimir Putin likes to go diving on the other coast just opposite the eastern Crimea and ‘find’ ancient Greek vases on the seabed.

Personal Crimea Fixation

If the endless historical conflicts in the Crimea are ever to be resolved, Artemis must clearly be appeased and the statue returned. An English Classics professor realized this years ago, wrote a book about it and persuaded the poet Tony Harrison to write a new musical play called Iphigenia in Sevastopol. It was to be acted in the ancient theatre in a symbolic handing back of the statue of Artemis to the place where Zeus had originally thrown it.

Tony Harrison in Sevastopol Museum

With massive help from David Braund, Black Sea Greek archaeologist without rival, this professor tried to organise a conference at Sevastopol for July 4-5, 2014, where all the Russian and Ukrainian archaeologists would meet their western fans and Mr Harrison’s brilliant new play would be performed in the ancient theatre. To her disappointment, she failed to get funding, and so organized the conference to take place at King’s College London instead (registration opens next week). But Artemis will not now be restored to her ancient altar.

Theatre at Tauris

So the world watches the Crimea, terrified that World War III will break out, and the prof. selfishly frets that her Russian and Ukrainian invitees may not get to London in July. Tony Harrison’s play will probably never be performed in Sevastopol. Artemis will remain angry. What is to be done?

This week two pillars of the British Left died. One, Tony Benn, was in his 80s. The other was Bob Crow, a 52-year-old active Trade Unionist of exceptional effectiveness. Because the refined Benn gets lots of praise and the rough Crow doesn't, here, in the spirit of obituary, are 10 facts about crows.

• Crows are intelligent, the equal of all apes in tool creation, visual recognition and abstract thought.

• Unusually for birds, crows play and enjoy sporting activities.

• Crows are strong, stout and possess what are perceived as raucous voices. The first ancient Greek barracking barrister was nicknamed Korax, or ‘Crow.’

• The old English collective noun for a flock of crows is a ‘murder’ of crows.

• Crows are loyal, marry for life, and defend their own families and ‘murder’ members to the death.

• Crows are cooperative, travel in groups, and congregate for daily parliaments and to roost together.

• Crows are not territorial as individuals or couples; nests are only temporary shelters for rearing young.

• Crows sun themselves.

• Crows are vilified by humans in many languages, cultures, and myth systems as dirty, ugly, ill-mannered, threatening, noisy, pushy and greedy. A favourite ancient Greek way of being rude to someone was to tell them to “Go To The Crows.”

Bob Crow as a Crow, copyright G. Poynder 2014

• The brilliant General Secretary of the British Rail, Maritime &Transport Union, who died suddenly this week, was called Bob Crow. He was highly intelligent, loved sport, was strong, stout and possessed of a stentorian voice. His union was not described as a ‘murder’ but usually as ‘a gang of mindless thugs’ or ‘set of dinosaurs.’ He was loyal to his class. He was highly collaborative, and congregated for daily parliaments. He lived in a council house, not (as alleged by the mainstream press) because the rent was inexpensive but because he believed in solidarity with the under-privileged and had no territorial desire to feather his own palazzo.

Self-Styled*Greek God* with a Sense of Humour

Crow liked package holidays and sunning himself (once claiming that he didn’t have to use sun cream because he was ‘a Greek god.’ This was a joke at the expense of his own appearance, although the British press claimed it was evidence of megalomania). He liked good food and wine and when photographed in restaurants by the right-wing press said, reasonably enough, that he saw no reason why the working class should not have the same access to them as anyone else. But he was universally vilified by journalists who serve the rich and privileged as diabolically dirty, ugly, ill-mannered, threatening, noisy and pushy etc.

This is an ancient formulaic set of insults levelled at everyone who has questioned social unfairness throughout history: Thersites in the Iliad, Cleon in Thucydides and Aristophanes, just for starters. The polemic, outrageously, seeks to deny people the political rights to campaign for their class on class-based aesthetic grounds.

Finally, not a fact but a subjective opinion. I talked at length with Bob Crow in the 1980s. I didn’t like him personally. I suspect it was mutual. But I would have trusted him to defend my employment rights, and to stand by his word, more than anyone else I have met.I also wonder whether people would have reacted to him differently if his name was Bob Nightingale.

Ancient Audiences were inter-active

Twenty years ago I was thrown out of a performance at the English National Opera of an opera by John Buller based on Euripides’ Bacchae. An aesthete sitting in front of us had complained to the bouncers because my escort, no classicist, whispered occasional questions to me, such as ‘Why is Teiresias wearing coconuts?’ The expulsion was poignant because, unbeknownst to the complainant and the bouncer, I had been a consultant on the show. I had only got to sit amongst the most refined opera aficionados, in expensive seats, as a reward for writing the programme essay.

Euripides had to cope with more than tweets

I explained to our accuser that in Euripides’ theatre, the democratic audience (who had not paid ludicrous sums for the right to attend) felt entitled to comment noisily and get bad performers and dramas driven from the stage: really great productions received praise because they had managed, unusually, to spellbind the audience into silence. Unfortunately my line of argument didn’t work and in lieu of the second half I ended up explaining the coconuts in the pub.

Fast-forward two decades to an almost empty theatre at a production of the disastrous musical Stephen Ward, imminently closing, about the Profumo affair. I bought myself a ticket because my children’s great-grandfather (on their father’s side, I hasten to reassure you) was Percy Murray, the owner of the sleazy nightclub at which the main players (Keeler, Ward etc) met one another. Much of Act I is set in this legendary knocking shop, and my children’s great-grand-dad even gets to sing! What an honour! To have a role written for my in-laws by Andrew Lloyd Webber himself!

Advert for my grandpa-in-law's infamous nightclub

Sitting at least five seats from anyone else, dazed by the awfulness of the show, I made my reactions available to my tiny Twitter following. The next day I received in response a stream of outraged tweets from one of the actors, who found it astonishing that I should think it okay to sabotage the creation of Art by tweeting at a live performance. His grounds were that it was bad manners, could disturb other spectators (possibly, but nobody was sitting near me) and was disrespectful to the actors.

Murray's club, rather cleaned up, in Lloyd Webber's Show

How, exactly? I have learned to ignore all the students who live tweet my lectures, regardless of whether their views are positive or critical. That is their right. Now that Higher Education is a commercial transaction, they are paying vast fees, as we all have to pay small fortunes to attend London musicals. Call me a boorish groundling if you will, but shouldn’t the performers of both lectures and musicals, selling their products, have to earn their customers’ respect? I would be interested to hear your opinion.


My sister-in-law's signed copy of Keeler memoir: 'It was wonderful working for your Grandfather--it was a great show'

The news is riddled with heads of state whose power has gone to their heads. What with al-Assad’s helicopters dropping five barrel bombs on Aleppo for every rebel shell, Putin invading Ukraine, Erdogan trying to ban Twitter in Turkey, and the Egyptian ruling militiamen’s judge passing death sentences on 529 people simultaneously, we aren’t lacking candidates for the title of ‘most ruthless tyrant’ in the 21st century.

Emperor Wu of Han

Time for a fast exit—I’m off to China, to lecture at Zhejiang University. I may not be able to post a blog next weekend. But a preparatory peep into Chinese antiquity has revealed that today, 29 March, is the 2,100th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest emperors in world history, Wu of Han.

He was born in 156 BC, at about the time when Macedonian strongmen were beginning to give way to Roman imperialism. But Wu makes men like Alexander the Great (let alone Julius Caesar) look a bit of a patsy. ‘Wu’ means ‘warlike’. He was a military genius whose cavalry vastly expanded the borders of China by ‘annexing’ parts of what are now Vietnam, Korea and Kyrgyzstan.

Horse Statue dated to Cavalryman Wu's reign

He announced that Confucianism was the state religion and killed tens of thousands. On the plus side he opened an Imperial Music School. True to the form of anyone allowed to retain power for more than five or six years, he developed weirdness and paranoia.

"My hat's bigger than yours"

He also reigned for no fewer than 54 years, a length of time unparalleled by any Roman Emperor. So he could be very strange for a very long time. He surrounded himself with magicians and asked them to come up with a pill which would make him immortal. When they disappointed him, he had them executed. He accused his 'barren' wife of witchcraft and had her lady attendants burned to death.

Wu went on expensive imperial tours with a vast entourage and emptied the national treasury. He 'suppressed' several peasant revolts. He had psychotic delusions in which little puppet-figures beat him with sticks; they convinced him that everyone wanted to assassinate him. He drove both his empress and his oldest son to suicide (this is more Tyrants of Thebes in Tragedy than Alexander or Caesar).

So how have I got into my sixth decade without being told that my rather suspect fascination with crazy dictators, at least with dead ones safely confined to history books, could be far better fed by the Han dynasty than anything the Mediterranean has to offer? Overjoyed at discovering Wu, and attempting to avoid TV exposure to the megalomaniacs taking over the contemporary world, I tried to order these two items from various online outlets. The first costs £180 and the other is ‘temporarily unavailable’. Can any of you out there lend me a copy of either to watch before next Friday? Please?

Edith is behind the Great Firewall of China and can't post a blog, a Facebook comment, or even tweet. Even text messages are proving susceptible to disappearance. Perhaps it's the smog.

But she is enjoying some ancestor worship and the exceptional hospitality of the philosophers of Hangzhou, and will be back in time to blog about it next weekend.

Worshipping Ancestor General Yue Fei

Day 1. The People of Hangzhou City and its excellent Zhejiang University are warm, kind and funny. We were brilliantly hosted throughout by Zhiang Bobo (aka ‘Bob’) who has just won a national prize for his translation of Plato’s Philebus into Chinese and is about to embark on the first substantial Chinese commentary on Plato’s Republic book I. We arrived in the middle of the annual festival of the dead and were considerately whisked off in a taxi to honour the spirit of General Yue Fei, Tartar-repeller extraordinary (1103-42 CE).

Don't mention the Tiananmen Tanks

Day 2. Under no circumstances EVER mention the Tiananmen Square incident of June 3-41989. A journalist on a newspaper in Hangzhou told me that although nobody had ever made this prohibition explicit, it was universally understood. She remembered her mother picking her up from school early that day as the government implemented a nationwide curfew. Since the Great Firewall of China cuts off most of the people from information not approved by the government, most young people have no idea what the so-called ‘counter-revolutionary riot’ actually involved.

Aristotelian Ethics; Platonic Censorship?

Day 3. Many educated people trust their government implicitly. They are impressed by what they call the current ‘economic miracle’ and believe they have the government to thank for it. Some young ones, studying ancient Greek philosophy, walked out of my Ethics lecture when I praised the deliberation skills required of ordinary Athenian citizens when serving on the democratic Council. A senior philosopher made a detailed case for the continuing need for Censorship on the lines of the rule of the Guardians in Plato's Republic on the ground that most people 'do not have the ability to understand complex issues.'

Bob, Host and Plato Scholar, with Mannequins in the Tea Museum

Day 4. The smog is almost unbelievable. The sky is never blue (top image has clearly been photo- shopped) but always an opaque grey haze. You can never see the stars at night. When I lectured on the connections between navigation by the stars and the origins of Greek rational science, there was much cynical laughter.

Free for Citizens who Swipe Identity Cards

Day 5. Chinese people operate under a degree of surveillance which I would find absolutely intolerable. You can’t buy a ticket to ride on a domestic Intercity train without having your identity recorded. You can’t move residence and employment between cities without applying for and receiving permission. You can’t even take a short ride on one of the free public bikes [a system Boris Johnson did NOT invent] without swiping your identity card.

Day 6. The one-child policy is deeply sexist. It's not just that there are visibly more little boys than girls. Women may only bear one child; men can have serial babies with different women provided each one has not given birth before. If a woman wants to have more than one, she needs to move to Shanghai, which has an aging population so its officials turn a blind eye to mothers-of-more-than-one. But it may take her five years to get permission to move to Shanghai.

Day 7. The Chinese love the myth of Circe turning Odysseus’ men into swine.

Pig-Man and Circe: Top of Chinese Greek Classical Pops

I think this may have something to do with the Chinese calendar, according to which those born in the year of the pig are regarded as happy and successful. By far my most enthusiastic audience response occurred when I discussed Plutarch’s dialogue Gryllus, in which one of Odysseus’ men, in porcine form and called ‘Grunter’ (which is what 'Gryllus' means), explains why pigs are morally and politically superior to human beings.

Jiaoran discovering Enlightenment via Tea

Enlightenment via Beer

Day 8. Tea is, for Chinese scholars, the certain way to Philosophical Enlightenment. This was first discovered by the Buddhist monk Jiaoran. His first cup awakened him from worldly illusions; the second offered catharsis to his spirit; the third cup led to enlightenment and freedom from mental suffering very like the Greek Stoic-Epicurean ideal of ataraxia (‘no-hassles’). I admit that I tried this and got nowhere, so located three cups of excellent Rice Beer in the depicted bottle instead. Cultural Relativism has its limits. 

PM chooses 'plebby' holiday to try to counteract posh boy image

What would Aesop or Ovid have made of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, being stung by a jellyfish in the Canary Islands? The ancient Greek zoological name for round blobby aquatic creatures with tentacles is suggestive: they are Medusae.

Every Medusa is a replica of the head of the mythical Medusa, the Gorgon with poisonous snaky hair who could turn people into stone. The sting of the most dangerous species of jellyfish can cause instant loss of consciousness and even cardiac arrest (both of which might lend a human body a rigid, stone-like appearance).

Jellyfish are MEDUSAS

Ancient storytellers might have said that the Medusa who stung Cameron was repaying him for his serial failures to support womankind. Medusa’s hostility towards men began because she had been raped and impregnated by Poseidon and beheaded by Perseus. She did not like males who mistreated females.

Angela Eagle MP, copyright G. Poynder

Cameron hopes that we have all forgotten that in 2011 he called on an ancient misogynist stereotype in telling Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear’ when she was putting him under pressure at Question Time. But even his staunchest public-school cronies now privately acknowledge that the Conservative leader has alienated a sizable proportion of the female voting population.

Financially speaking, women have been hurt twice as badly as men since Cameron became PM—they are now at much greater risk of unemployment and have been sent reeling by major cuts to childcare support. The latest changes to pensions and benefits hit women FOUR TIMES as badly as men. The Chancellor’s 3-year freeze in child benefit took £1.26 BILLION from women but only £26 million from men.

Rich white men only on Cameron's front bench

Only 16% of Conservative Party members are female, and fewer than one in six of Cameron’s MPs. Of the three women in the cabinet NOT A SINGLE ONE IS A MOTHER. The ‘Minister for Women’, Nicky Morgan, is effectively only Minister for Straight Women because she is opposed to lesbians like Angela Eagle being allowed to marry.

In 1971 the feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote an influential essay called ‘The laughter of Medusa’ in which she argued that this ancient victim of male thuggery could help us reclaim respect for women. It was Jurassic Republican misogynists who effectively won Obama the last US election. If Cameron does not heed the jellyfish heralding the stinging Medusan laughter of angry British women, Adenoidal Ed (Miliband), whose Shadow Cabinet contains TEN women and several mothers, will at last begin to look like an electable rival.

I felt excitement when the Director of Excavations at the Vindolanda Fort on Hadrian’s Wall told the press this week of his optimismthat new Latin texts may be discovered there during this summer’s dig.

But no Latin text found in Britain could make me as happy as the texts which must be amongst the very oldest written here in ancient Greek. I recently came across a reference to these,[i] and begged Dr Emma Bridges, who lives in York, to take this photo (right). They are two silvered bronze plaques with letters inscribed by boring little holes through the metal surface.

Ocean &Tethys, mosaic in Gaziantep, Turkey

They were both dedicated by a man called Demetrius. One is dedicated ‘to the gods of the governor’s residence’ and the other reads ‘To Okeanos and Tethys Demetrius [set this up].’

The Ocean and Tethys dedication made me absurdly happy. Here, in ancient Greek, a man two millennia ago prayed to two Greek sea-divinities either to thank them for a safe voyage to Britain or to request a safe return sailing. My longstanding intuition that almost everything important about the ancient Greeks was a consequence of their intense relationship with the sea here receives vivid confirmation.

red points to Demetrius' home town

Even more excitingly, this Demetrius is very likely to be the Demetrius of Tarsus invited to dinner near Delphi by the biographer Plutarch in 84 AD and a star of the biographer’s dialogue On the Cessation of Oracles. A native of a sophisticated Greek port city in Turkey, this Demetrius is a grammarian (and he is indeed portrayed as slightly pedantic) who can quote Homer, Plato and Euripides at length, and is an expert on the cult of Apollo in his native city.

Demetrius' destination

Demetrius tells Plutarch’s philosophical party that he was sent from Tarsus to Britain by the Emperor Trajan, asked to conduct research into druidism on an island, almost certainly Anglesey. He describes the druids’ theological interpretations of various natural phenomena including lousy weather and a meteorite shower. But on his British travels he may have visited the Romans’ York HQ and made the dedications to his host’s household gods and to his own pagan divinities.

Druids still meet on Anglesey

I have visited York and Anglesey. This summer, on a journey via Turkey, I hope to visit Tarsus, where Antony met Cleopatra. It was where Saul/St. Paul the Apostle was born, into a Jewish family, two or three decades before the pagan Demetrius. I shall probably be travelling by air and will need to pray to a winged god like Hermes, or Iris the Rainbow, rather than Ocean and Tethys.

But in the Turkish sunshine I will think of Demetrius, and his researches into comparative religion on the sheep-rearing, partly Welsh-speaking island. It will almost certainly be raining there.

[i] Had I taken the OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation course in the last few years I would have been introduced to them as a matter of course! Yet more proof of what an excellent subject Class Civ. is!

Seriously funny pillar of democracy

Recording a radio documentary on Alexander Pope's debt to Roman satire yesterday with Ian Hislop, the under-celebrated editor of Private Eye, reinforced my determination to write a book about the symbiosis between comedy and democracy. Subjecting people who want power or privilege to routine no-holds-barred ridicule is not just a right but a collective duty.

Don't Mention the Emperor!

The Roman satirists are not themselves the best examples of democratic comedians. Horace never risked offending his bankroller Maecenas, let alone Augustus. Although Juvenalcriticises the ostentatiously rich and their parasites, he says nothing which might get him arrested by the illiberal emperors around in his lifetime (especially Domitian), who executed their critics.

The Greeks knew better. Comedy was invented in tandem with democracy. Democratic Athenian citizens required that comedies featuring scathing attacks on officials and other influential people were financed by the rich at public festivals twice a year. The accountability of leaders to comic appraisal was an inbuilt instrument of citizens’ sovereignty.

The comic poet Aristophanes disliked the policies of the eloquent and successful politician Cleon. So he repeatedly staged plays in which Cleon was hilariously portrayed as a dementedly corrupt bully, tyrant and extortionist. The actors playing Cleon impersonated him screaming his head off, clutching his wilting ithyphallus, dressed as a dog, and being beaten with sausages.

Cleon barks his ludicrous way through Aristophanes'Wasps

Cleon did prosecute Aristophanes, as was his right as fellow-citizen. But he certainly did not succeed in silencing the comedian. The freedom of opinion and its expression, moreover, worked both ways. If Aristophanes had managed to persuade the majority of the Athenians that his portrait of Cleon was accurate, then they would not have voted for him again. Cleon triumphantly survived scrutiny by democratic satire until he died.

Cleon attacked by sausage-seller in Knights

So where today is the brilliant comedy, funded by the rich, designed to subject everyone with privilege or power—elected or unelected—to uncompromising scrutiny? Where are the obscene farces exposing Offshore Financial Centres, the Rich/Poor divide, helicopters falling apart in Kandahar province and the appalling state of public "care" of the elderly? I suspect that in the UK the legal rights of professional satirists are greater than in many other places. Yet our so-called free society has forgotten that laughter can be a political instrument of unparalleled society-building power.

Caradog Tells the Romans How it is in Wales

A research trip to trawl the South Wales Coalfield Collections for evidence of classically autodidactic miners has left me bewildered. Although the archives show that the miners were some of the best-read labourers of all time, I have failed to make sense of how they construed their historical ancestry.

I used to think that the supreme Welsh ancestor was Caradog or Caractacus, king of the Catuvellauni. These tribespeople expanded from Belgium to England and then Wales, where Caractacus led their last stand against Rome, only to be captured. At Rome, after delivering a beautiful oration to the Senate, Caradog was allowed to retire to some sunlit villa.

Coin dated to reign of Magnus Maximus

But some Welsh history books claim that their supreme ancestor was Roman. Caernarvon Castle, originally a Roman fort, ‘proves’ that the Romans chose Wales as the epicentre of their empire. One of the last Roman emperors, Magnus Maximus (who was actually Portuguese), slept with a Welsh woman and founded all the important Welsh dynasties.

Venus & Anchises by Benjamin Haydon

So are the Welsh Belgian or Portuguese? Neither, if you believe the 9th-century Historia Brittonum, which traces them back to Aeneas, via his son Ascanius, his grandson Brutus and his Wales-fixated great-grandson Kamber. Kamber gave Wales its ancient name Cambria. This means that the Welsh descend (as did Augustus) from Aphrodite/Venus and Anchises, one of the most celebrated matings of a god with a human in western mythography. Having Anchises as Ur-ancestor means that the Welsh are Turkish.

Noah, plastered in his vineyard, & Sons

That is unless you believe a variant in which they are Jewish, descended from Ham (or Cham), one of the sons whom Noah begat at the age of 500. Ham saw his father naked and drunk. He may then have castrated Noah, or slept with Noah’s wife, and was cursed. This is a good reason for founding a line which ends up in Beautiful Wales, although some Welsh insist that their ancestor was Ham’s less naughty brother Japheth. The trouble with this genealogy, however, is that it also involves Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, who was an indigenous Italian, from the ancient Sabine tribe in the Apennine hills.

One esoteric Welsh scholar traces his countrymen back to Abaris, a shaman from the Scythian Caucasus who brought the worship of Apollo to Snowdonia and whose name was actually Ap Rhys ('son of Rhys'). But the picture is complicated by Constantine’s mother St. Helena, who some say was a Welsh woman or a visitor to the Welsh town of Nevern, where she installed the True Cross. Helena, according to Byzantine sources, was a Greek from Roman Bithynia. TOO MUCH INFORMATION!

In Swansea I was invited by a taxi driver to accompany him on his soon-to-be son-in-law’s stag party in a hotel on Cyprus, where they will drink & watch the Eurovision final. The penny dropped. The most important event in the Welsh calendar for centuries has been the National Eisteddfod, where experts in music, dance and poetry compete. The Eurovision Song Contest is clearly descended from the Welsh Eisteddfod.

This explains the mystery of why Israel and Turkey are allowed to compete. Perhaps the ancient Welsh invented their unique festival to show off all their ancestral languages--Belgian, Latin, Portuguese, Turkish, Hebrew, Sabine, Caucasian, Scythian and Greek. Perhaps the wonderful Welsh language had to be invented just to make the scoring easier. The Welsh for 'zero points' is 'sero bwyntiau.'

I NEED A (working-class tragic) HERO

What's In an Ancient Place-Name?

The Man Who Abolished Classics

Thoughts on Walls

Burns' Night Guest List for Classicists

Hackney, Sappho, and Bravery

The Classics Czar, Michael Gove, and Civilization

Pete Seeger, Plato, and Greek Rhetoric

Whatever happened to Utopian Thinking?

Zoophilia Ancient and Modern

Iphigenia in Sevastopol: A True Story

Bob Crow, Greek God?

Are Modern Theatre Audiences too Respectful?

Making Alexander the Great look Like a Wimp

Behind the Great Firewall of China

Lessons of 8 Days Teaching Greeks in China

DAVID CAMERON VERSUS MEDUSA

From Tarsus to Wales: the earliest Greek in Britain?

Satire--the Democratic Duty

The Ancient Origins of the Eurovision Song Contest