The Edithorial

Soma is in the province of Manisa, in ancient times called Magnesia. Drive south for an hour from the mine where so many lost their lives last week and you will come to the province's capital, Manisa City, and the mountains of Spil, ancient Sipylus. It seems horribly appropriate that on Spil you can find the rocky spur formed by Niobe herself, the ancient mother who lost every single one of her grown-up children in a single day. She was turned into rock, her tears forming streams running from the rock face, so she could lament her dead children in perpetuity. “Niobe, all tears” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls her.

"Niobe, all tears" in Manisa (Magnesia)

There have been mines in north-west Turkey for millennia: its gold and silver were famous under the kings of ancient Lydia, including the plutocrat Croesus, before anyone began extracting coal. Minted coins were invented there. And people have been dying down mines all over the world ever since, simply because they have no other source of income and nobody has taken proper care of their safety.

Even the de Re metallica of Georgius Agricola (a.k.a. Georg Bauer), the foundational Renaissance treatise in promotion of mining (1556—an elegant Latin essay which shows an astonishing grasp of every piece of classical evidence on the industry), conceded that mining was impossibly dangerous: “miners are sometimes killed by the pestilential air which they breathe; sometimes their lungs rot away; sometimes the men perish by being crushed in masses of rock; sometimes, falling from the ladders into the shafts, they break their arms, legs, or necks.”

I happened to spend the week before the Soma catastrophe researching the history of British miners. Every pit’s history contains grim documents showing how miners have always died underground in droves. Deep-shaft miners know that every day they go to work they may never see the sun again. After every shift, when they return home, they feel like dust-encrusted revenants.

The famous authors who evoke the reality of mine labour—Zola in Germinal, D.H. Lawrence in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd—all had dead miners in their immediate family or circle. Two British miners whose interest in the Greeks and Romans has led me to excavate their personal careers—the Yorkshire painter Gilbert Daykin and a young Thucydides enthusiast in 1920s Northumbria—both died in underground accidents. The tragic story endlessly repeats.

So on Sipylus in Turkey, a little south of Soma mine, Niobe weeps for all the world’s unnecessarily dead sons and daughters (and it is beginning to emerge that women miners as well as men died in Soma). It would be good to think that one day Niobe could stop weeping—that all people on the planet who do dangerous, difficult and dirty work can receive the safety conditions, respect and high pay that they have always deserved. Call me a naive optimist or even a Bolshevik if you like.

Kathleen Freeman, the Laughter of the Lecturer

Just how good does a female scholar have to be? I am ashamed of my complicity in the under-estimation of an outstanding ‘foremother’ in my field just because I internalised some disparagement of her I heard as an undergraduate.

Like every other student, I used to hide my copy of Kathleen Freeman’s Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1948) under the desk during lectures. Without it we could not understand what Thales, Parmenides, Zeno and Democritus had said, the prescribed text being the terrifying multi-volume German edition of the Greek by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz. This is a legendary work of scholarship but bristles with apparatuses, cross-references and abbreviations. It baffles anglophone teenagers from provincial high schools. But Freeman’s user-friendly, translation into well-sprung English, with lucid discussions, was inspirational. It was also explicitly forbidden as ‘unreliable’ by the official bibliography. (It is not.)

A Version for children of her work on Solon

I have now researched the original sources of all the sexist (and envious) obloquy she attracted. The review by ‘heavyweight’ Hellenist Friedrich Solmsen sounded the first notes of warning that someone without a Y chromosome had dared to essay the Pre-Socratics.

Solmsen grudgingly admits that the Ancilla will have ‘a certain usefulness’ and concludes that it is 'clear, straightforward, and also - generally – accurate’. But in between, his vocabulary reads like a handbook called How To Imply a Dazzling Female Scholar is Inadequate Without Actually Saying So. Her translations are ‘dangerous’, ‘misleading’, ‘stultified,’ ‘over-emphatic’, ‘vague’ and ‘inappropriate’. I could go on.

The daughter of a travelling salesman from Birmingham, Freeman studied Classics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. She was appointed Lecturer in Greek in 1919 and never left Cardiff. In 1926 she published The Work and Life of Solon (still essential reading). It was the first of many erudite and vivid books on a breathtaking range of classical topics and authors, philosophical, historical, legal, rhetorical and literary. She published on Jane Austen and Dylan Thomas. She also knocked off, under the pseuodym of Mary Fitt, several detective novels.

Freeman ploughed her own furrow. She lived with her girl-friend, a G.P. She never got promoted or an honorary doctorate except for one for fiction. She never won any classical honours, fellowship, memberships of academies, prizes, or distinctions. She was never invited to give any prestigious lectures. Instead she worked hard for the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society, the Save the Children Fund and the National Council of Women. She lectured to miners and to soldiers. We await the biography of her by another excellent female classicist, Eleanor Irwin.

Many reviewers, even while patronising her, wondered why Freeman had called her book an Ancilla, the Latin for ‘a little handmaid’. I think that Freeman was having a jolly good laugh at them. We know she was hilarious because of the portrait of a Latin Professor in her first novel, Martin Hanner.She had used her excellent brain to make the Pre-Socratics intelligible and accessible to every man and woman in the English-speaking world. But of course she was not going to get uppity. She was just a little handmaid to the Solmsens after all.

I didn’t expect that investigating one of the anaemic Grecian females sculpted by the 19th-century American Hiram Powers would land me slam in the middle of industrial unrest at Walmart. Starting this weekend, ‘Walmart Moms’, who have previously fought disputes over maternity and health benefits, are striking for full-hours contracts, adequate wages, and the reinstatement of co-workers sacked for activism.

Alice Walton, drunk driver

How are 19th-century neoclassicism and the Walmart Moms connected? Because Powers’ sanitised ‘Proserpine’ is on show at the 3-year-old Crystal Bridges Museum (Bentonville, Arkansas), free of charge to visitors and the pet ‘philanthropic’ (tax-dodging?) project of Walmart heiress Alice Walton. She has purchased costly artworks, often out-bidding others at auctions personally, by phone.

'Rosie the Riveter'

Walton is the third richest woman in the world. Along with five relatives, she controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of all Americans combined. But I can’t find it in my heart to be really nasty about her. Money has not bought happiness. She has been married briefly but divorced twice. She has no children. She has been repeatedly in trouble for drink-driving. She has killed a (middle-aged female) pedestrian while at the wheel.

Criss's 'Day Shift'

Her museum’s catalogue is staggering. She owns Norman Rockwell’s iconic ‘Rosie the Riveter’ and Francis Criss’s ‘Day Shift’. The collection includes paintings of tobacco harvesters, fruit-pickers, gleaners, harvesters and shipbuilders. She has Romare Bearden’s revelation of African-American suffering in ‘Sacrifice’ and Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Ambulance Call’, which portrays the only medical care available to black people in New York City in the 1940s.

So is she unconsciously revealing that deep down she knows that her vast unearned moneybags have come courtesy of exploited workers, especially women? Could she consciously be feeling guilty? Or is she voyeuristically fascinated by pictures of labour which actually involves human muscles engaged with the material environment? Perhaps she is just cynically operating a massive PR exercise to diminish public anger at her obscene fortune? Or just plain stupid and insensitive?

I can’t answer these questions, but I can direct you to a Facebook group where the protesting Walmart workers are gathering support ahead of the shareholders’ meeting next Friday. They will not be wearing the Walmart-brand 'Grecian Goddess' fancy-dress costume, which they can't afford. Most of them would rather be offered a raise than free entrance to an art gallery any day.

The Bacchant Children of the 2nd Earl Gower

Visiting British stately homes is my favourite summer pastime. It is fascinating to see how the source of the money (usually mining, slavery or imperialism in India) was systematically obscured. Financial capital was exchanged for cultural capital in a neoclassical idiom, including Palladian architecture. Having your child painted in an antique fancy-dress costume was a particular obsession of mine-owners, planters and nabobs who fancied themselves as Hellenistic philosopher-kings.

I have amassed a large collection of images of benighted children of plutocrats dressed as Hermes, Diana and Julius Caesar. Here are the top three in my collection, in ascending order.

Future Slayer of Irish Rebels

First, Master Watkin Wynn (1772–1840), fifth Baronet Williams-Wynne, as the infant John the Baptist. I do not know whether his parents had remembered their theology: John may have said cute things about lambs but he ended up beheaded. In the event, Master Watkin grew up to amass a cavalry regiment and play an enthusiastic role in putting down the Irish rebellion of 1798.

Apollo or Ascanius?

Second place goes to the portrait of an unknown boy, said to be dressed as Apollo, at the Treasurer’s House in York. It is not just the Arcadian landscape, the gorgeous tomato-coral silk mantle, the faux-antique boots and the elegantly curving bow. It is the arrogance of the posture and facial expression, the patrician glossy ringlets and that bossily pointing finger. I wonder whether he isn’t intended, rather, to be dressed as Ascanius, the hunting son of Aeneas to whom so many crowned heads of the European Ancien Regime traced their ancestry.

Sex goddess-appropriate role for a toddler?

The winner until this week was this baby girl at Wimpole Hall, Cambridge, dressed as Venus in a chariot drawn by doves. The logistics of getting such a small infant to sit still in that costume make my maternal mind boggle: when our own progeny dressed up as Darth Vader or Cat Girl they instantly became hyper-active.

Taxidermy Junkie

But even the diminutive coy Venus has now been trumped by the costume worn by the Countess of Westmoreland to the Duchess of Devonshire’s ludicrously lavish 1897 ball: she went dressed as Hebe, goddess of youth and Olympian cupbearer, with a REAL STUFFED EAGLE attached to her shoulder to represent Hebe’s father, Zeus. From now on I’m going to extend my brief to toff adults in classical fancy dress as well as those of toff tots.

I have taken to art therapy to cope with the trauma

Imagine a narrow bridleway where even in winter there is only just room for two humans to pass. In a hot June, after spring rain, there is scarcely room between the high banks of stinging nettles for me to walk the dog. We have come half a mile since the last gap in the nettles or other escape route. Large horse ridden by tall man in impeccable riding gear appears from the other direction. Oedipal crisis.

When Oedipus was forced off the road on his way to Delphi, by a horse-drawn carriage, the self-important king it was conveying tried to beat the pedestrian Oedipus with a horsewhip. King Laius ended up dead. I noticed that my Mounted Magnifico was fingering his whip. The dog whimpered. I now knew—really knew—how Oedipus had felt.

PEDESTRIANS BEWARE

I wondered whether the man, who was older than me, could logistically be my father if I had secretly been adopted. He uttered a command in a cut-glass accent: ‘COME CLOSER AND YOU CAN STEP ASIDE WHERE THE NETTLES AREN'T QUITE AS TALL!’ I was expected to walk straight into the face of large animal I had never met, which might rear, kick, or bite at any moment, and plunge into a wall of stinging nettles six foot high. ‘Can’t horses walk backwards?’ I mumbled.

Equestrian Toff gestured behind him. He was followed by a miniature of himself, a boy of about 12 sneering down at me from a glossy skewbald pony. Could he be my son? Had I once had a supercilious boy-child I have forgotten about? The thought made me surrender. I retreated with the dog into the nettles. I am still suffering from the stings.

Laius was the one who ended up in the nettles

My previous equine confrontation was with a police horse charging at me outside Parliament during the demonstration against the privatization of university teaching in 2010. But this Oedipal Face Off occurred near my home. I like horses: it’s the riders I have problems with.

The moneyed people who ride horses round here have a sense of total entitlement. If they want to ride two abreast, and walk at two miles per hour, then you miss the train you are driving to get to earn a living. What is worse, they smirk and wave at you as if to say ‘Isn’t it GREAT that we have enough money to keep these GORGEOUS horses and you are so LUCKY to be delayed by such a CHARMING SPECTACLE?’ Before they return to their lovely mansions, their equids use the public highway as a toilet. It gets stuck in your car wheel hubs.

'blame my rider' (pic cropped by S. Poynder)

I was brought up in a Midlands city. I agreed to live in the countryside out of love. I yearn to return to the wide, horse-free tarmacadam boulevards of my urban Nottingham youth.

And I STILL don’t know whether horses can be made to walk backwards, or whether the Horrid Horseman was my dad.

Erinys versus Perp

1. I gave a paper by Skype this week to a conference in Israel about modern fiction and Furies, or Erinyes in Greek (singular is Erinys). On the very same day a modern Erinys was behind the headlines in Iraq.

Erinyes v. Orestes

2. Erinyes were fathered by the bloody drops which fell from Ouranos’ groin. His son Kronos castrated him and the drops fertilized their mother Earth. No reason for Kronos’ loathing of his father is given in the text which tells us this (Hesiod’s Birth of the Gods or Theogony). He just hated him arbitrarily from birth. Kronos had an Oedipus complex before Oedipus was around.

ERINYS IRAQ ad

3. A controversial ‘risk management and security services company specialising in complex and high-threat risk mitigation services’ (which in pre-Marketing days would have been called a mercenary army) is used by western oil companies in Iraq. It is called Erinys Iraq.

4.An Erinys spends most of her time asleep. She wakes up when someone with a grudge invites her to avenge them on the person(s) s/he believes have caused them grief. She tortures the alleged felon by chasing her/him with whips and snakes until blood is drawn. Her arrival in your life means that it is PAYBACK TIME.

Erinyes asleep (bottom)

5. According to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in advanced civilisationsAthena takes away the Erinyes’ power. She gets people to sort out their conflicts without bloodshed, confines the Erinyes in caves and renames them Kindly Ones (Eumenides).

6. The best new novel I have read this decade is Natalie Haynes’ The Amber Fury(2014). It contains a moving portrait of a teenage girl with behavioural problems and MISDIRECTED (although not arbitrary) feelings of vengefulness. She finally gets to a place where she may be able to become more like a Eumenis and less like an Erinys. If you don’t know anything about teenagers or about Greek tragedy, or why teenagers and Greek tragedy are an amazing combination, then read this book immediately.

Eastern Front

7. The best new novel I read in the previous decade was Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (originally in French as Les Bienveillantes,2006) in which it is never clear whether the mad and murderous narrator thinks he is an Erinys, or Orestes and/or Electra, in the Oresteia. He hates many people arbitrarily. If you don’t know what happened in Ukraine and Russia during World War II then read this book immediately.

8.In Iraq, the largest oil refinery (in Baiji) fell this week to Islamist extremists whose acronym ISIS coincidentally sounds like another ancient supernatural female associated with death. There were many casualties including some ‘security force personnel.’ This almost certainly means soldiers from Erinys Iraq.

Baiji Refinery: Erinys v. Isis

Not a fact but an opinion: Do their surviving Erinys colleagues know what an Erinys actually is, and have they persuaded themselves that what they are doing in Iraq has anything to do with vengeance or punishment? The whole situation is a ghastly mess created long-term by European imperialism and economic exploitation, and short-term by Bush, Blair and corporations who hire outfits like Erinys Iraq. The anger of people in ISIS may often be misdirected but it is not arbitrary. It really is Payback Time.

Centaur bites Lapith at Olympia

But does it look like a doughnut?

The biter in the picture on the left is a centaur, and he is biting a human of the Lapith tribe, in the wildest wedding brawl ever. Another centaur bites a Lapith on the temple of Apollo at Bassae (below). That the biters are centaurs shows that the Greeks made a mental connection between the large teeth of horses and human dental aggressors. Teeth were only acceptable when you were fighting for your life and had lost all other weapons—the Spartans did resort to their teeth and fingernails in the last stages of their death-struggle against the Persians at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae.

Centaur bites Lapith on Temple of Apollo

Only deviant heroes and gods in Greek mythology do biting. Tydeus was punished for sucking Melanippus’ brains out through his cranium. Rubens exposes the brutality of the moment when Kronos/Saturn sank his teeth into his own son’s chest. In the most savage of contact sports, the pankration, every conceivable form of assault was acceptable except eye-gouging and biting. This is why that scene showing that only subhumans used biting in combat was displayed on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, home of the original Olympic games. Ir screams at the viewer, Biting and Athletic Fair Play Don't Mix.

Ruben's 'Saturn'

Centaurs are often explained as primitive pedestrian humans' response to humans on horseback. When the conquistador cavalrymen arrived in the ‘New’ World, the Aztecs thought they were centaurs, according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s 16th-centuryTrue History of the Conquest of New Spain. Plenty of early Hispanic migrants to the Americas were surnamed Suarez—has the Uruguayan footballer internalized some ancestral tradition of descent from centaurs?

Far be it from me, of course, to suggest that Luis Suarez has huge equine teeth, or even that he may have behaved like an animal. Perish the thought. The name Suarez is probably derived from the Latin for a pigman, suarius, rather than a horseman, eques. But the investigation currently in progress ghoulishly fascinates me—forensic dentistry apparently looks for an injury involving bruising and drag lacerations ‘shaped like a doughnut’.

Tydeus' teeth sunk into Melanippus' skull

Forensic dentists are, moreover, sensibly warned that suspects are often not cooperative in providing plaster casts of their choppers, ‘so the dentist who is requested to assist authorities to collect evidence should see that provisions to ensure their personal security are in place.’ Who on earth would be the hapless FIFA dentist who subjects himself to Suarez’s centauric fangs?

Performers on Greek pot found in Ukraine

Lesson of the week: NEVER GIVE UP. I have finally achieved something I have wanted to do for thirty years, since I first realised that many ancient Greeks lived not round the Mediterranean but behind the (in 1984) Iron Curtain. With help from fantastic colleagues[i] I managed to get archaeologists from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia and Poland to describe to a lecture theatre at King’s College, London, full of westerners, the thrilling evidence that Black Sea Greeks were just as wine-, song- and theatre-mad as Greeks in the better-researched Med.

Diver Putin 'finds' planted Greek vases

I can hardly believe it has happened. The Cold War made it almost impossible, until 1989, even to communicate with the experts. The project has been rejected by almost every research funding body in existence (Loeb, British Academy etc.). Then Mr Putin, himself a keen investigator of Greek antiquities actually in the Black Sea, ‘annexed’ the place—Crimea—containing some of the most crucial sites.

The last of a thousand obstacles

Next, the incompetence of Theresa May and her Home Office minions meant that two speakers’ visas did not come through until less than 48 hours before the conference was due to open, and then only because of the tenacity of our Events Organiser (the best in the world), Laura Douglas. She should be put in charge of the UK Borders Agency immediately. Even after kick-off, at one tense moment it looked as though the atmosphere might be ruined, when a Pole challenged a Russian to compare historical and contemporary Imperialism.

Fresco from Sevastopol

But everything was perfect. We saw photos of theatre architecture emerging from the soil after centuries of invisibility. We asked why the super-rich of the Taman peninsula liked vases depicting comic actors placed in their tombs. We gasped at staggering Dionysiac scenes on Athenian vases found in Ukraine, Georgian mosaics and at clay marionettes from Kerch. Mr Staniewski’s dazzling film of Iphigenia in Tauris took us into the heart of human darkness; the most beautiful room in King’s, the chapel, resounded with Ash Mukherjee’s sensational Indian dance interpretation of Medea, and Tony Harrison’s searing live recital of his profound Pontic poetry.

Greek Tragedy for Ukrainian children

In two weeks I am getting a free luxury cruise by lecturing. We were meant to circumnavigate the Black Sea, but Vlad the Annexer has put a stop to that. After Turkey, Georgia and Bulgaria we will now be sailing south-west to the Aegean, Macedonia and Lemnos. Losing the northern Black Sea sites meant that many of those booked on the cruise because they were interested in the Crimean War of the 1850s have pulled out. There are places available at bargain-basement prices. Just in case you’re free and sufficiently solvent, here’s the link:it would be fun to see any humorous Philhellene aboard!

[i]Professor David Braund and Dr Rosie Wyles

"Wheat-crowned Demeter"

In an unusual ancient Greek poem, a peasant farmer called Lysixenos honours ‘Wheat-Crowned Demeter’, goddess of all things arable, by dedicating in her temple the tools of his trade: his sickle, his plough-share, which 'loves the Earth', and his ‘three-pronged wooden pitchforks’ (Greek Anthology 6.104). Lysixenos has become disabled through a life of hard labour, and yet remains grateful to the goddess. But at some point in the 16th century, the pitchfork began to symbolise something less humble: the wrath of the revolutionary peasant.

Cassandra of Seattle Super-Rich

Seattle Venture Capitalist Nick Hanauer, who claims prophetic status in the form of an unusual ‘intuition about what will happen in the future’ has just announced, ‘I SEE PITCHFORKS’. Not merely pitchforks, but ‘revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks’, who will endanger the fortunes and the very lives of the American super-rich.

The ‘pitchfork’ admonition comes in an article (in Politico magazine) addressed to ‘My Fellow Zillionaires’. Not being sure what a zillionaire is, I read on. A zillionaire is a ‘.01%er’, anyone like Hanauer ‘with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc.’

Primed to loathe Hanauer, I found myself intrigued. Maybe he is so clear-sighted because he is a Philosophy graduate (from Washington University, Seattle--critics of the economic utility of Humanities please take note). I have not yet discovered whether Hanauer studied much Plato and Aristotle, whose works on political science would certainly have warned him about the dangers of extreme inequality.

Revolting Peasants with pitchforks, mattocks etc

His article is a non-apologetic capitalist plutocrat’s plea for his class to do something quickly about the rich/poor divide: ‘inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day… Unless our policies change dramatically..we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.’

Julio González'Peasant with large pitchfork'

I am not convinced Hanauer is correct. People can be downtrodden for centuries before they realise there is any alternative, as the pious but disabled Lysixenos proves. It can take more centuries before they do anything about it. Cynically, I also wonder whether Hanauer’s political gestures are not just more shrewd money-making ventures: as if all his investments in Amazon etc. were not lucrative enough, his 2007 The True Patriot, co-authored with Eric Liu, is a bestseller.

Grant Wood, 'American Gothic'

But my real problem is with his anachronistic ‘pitchfork’ image. If and when the poor of the USA do decide that Enough is Enough, they will struggle to find any pitchforks, which have long been rendered obsolete by mechanical harvesting and baling machines. The US poor now work in service industries rather than in producing anything useful like cereal products. Firearms, makeshift gasoline bombs and boiling oil, from deep-fat fryers in fast-food outlets, seem much more likely to me.

Walls of Hissarlik (Troy?) today

I've just spent 2 surreal days in Hissarlik, north-west Turkey, generally believed to be ancient Troy. I was telling a great cameraman where the Wooden Horse, IF historical, MIGHT CONCEIVABLY have been dragged inside, in ABOUT the 13th century BCE.

Star of forthcoming TV Show

Everything in Trojan War Studies depends on the sound represented in our alphabet by the letter "w". Bronze Age Ilium/Ilion is better called Wilion. (W)ilion/Troy was known to its eastern neighbours, the Hittites, as WILUSA. But between 1300 and Homer the Greeks forgot the sound "w". The lost sound is known as digamma and represented by the symbol ϝ.

Cafe at Troy with Hittite Name

When "w" went missing, the word for wine, woinos, started to be pronouned oinos. The word for king, wanax, started to be pronounced anax instead. Etc. We must assume the existence of this sound to make sense of the metre of Homer's epic Iliad (or Wiliad). This means that the poem must include verses composed much earlier than Homer (operating in the 8th century BCE) and possibly composed as early as the 13th century BCE. On this rests almost the entire the argument that the Iliad, or parts of it, put us in direct contact with the reality of Bronze Age Troy.

TURKISH PM REVIVES DIGAMMA!

But my great discovery this week is that the sound "w" has resurfaced in western Turkey after three millennia! The Prime Minister (and aspiring President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has his name pronounced ErdoWAN. He has another strong connection with the Bronze Age,and that is in his attitudes to women. He has recently said that all Turkish women should be producing three children, and that a woman without a headscarf is equivalent to "a house without curtains"

The lost letter of the Greeks--digamma "w"

with producer SARAH DEAN & camera/sound TOM FOWLEY

Controlling my desire to imagine ErdoWAN with Venetian blinds crashing shut across his face, and squashing his nostrils, I took to adding "w" onto the beginning of all place-names in Turkey. Wistanbul etc. ErdoWAN lives in--ahem--Ankara.

SOPHIST RECEIVES SAFETY BRIEFING

For the past week I’ve been enjoying a free summer holiday in the form of a luxury cruise. I’ve never felt so like an ancient Wandering Sophist. I’m literally speechifying for my supper. The cruise is a cashless reward for delivering homilies about the history of the sites we are visiting. I love emitting 50 minutes’ worth of opinions on matters which I personally find so exciting. The audience, who are not young, often seem asleep. But I refuse to be disheartened.

Xenophon WOZ HERE

In TRABZON, ancient TRAPEZOS, we relived the route taken by Xenophon and his surviving Ten Thousand when they first caught sight of the waves and yelled “The sea, the sea!” Docking in Georgia, as Jason and the Argonauts did in about 1275 BC, I was stunned by the trees and fresh breezes of Medea’s homeland; looming over the horizon is the Caucasian ridge where Prometheus was chained.

OVID DIDN'T LIKE IT HERE

In Constanta, Romania, we admired the statue of the poet Ovid, exiled there in 8 AD for mysterious crimes including poetry glamorizing adultery; now in northern Greece, besides the super-ostentatious tombs of Macedonian aristocrats, we shall be visiting Philippi. It was on this battlefield that the Roman Republic effectively met its shambolic end in 42 BC.

OCTAVIAN's MEN v. BRUTUS

The army of Mark Antony and Octavian (who pulled a cynical sickie and avoided combat) decimated Brutus’ legions. Brutus provided William Shakespeare with some of his best rhetorical opportunities in Julius Caesar, the most politically complex play in world literature. I may have to do some declaiming in the ancient theatre of Philippi.

Our last port of call will be the island of Lemnos, scene of Jason’s first romantic liaison with Queen Hypsipyle, and, more grimly, a sizable slave market. But I shall be looking for the cave where the archer Philoctetes,horrifically wounded in the leg, spent most of the Trojan War in solitary agony. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the most morally complex play in world literature. I am about to visit the place of its actual setting. This is as good as it gets.

Hannibal's finest hour

The carnage in Libya, Syria and Gaza makes today’s classical anniversary seem disgustingly appropriate. August 2nd 216 BC was the date of the Battle of Cannae, in which Hannibal’s Carthaginians slaughtered 50,000Roman legionnaires, at a rate of 600 per minute, on the back of the ankle of the Italian ‘boot’.

CANNAE: 600 killed a minute

Cannae always makes it into prurient shortlists of the Bloodiest Battles in Human History, alongside Gettysburg, Stalingrad and the Somme. Hannibal won, despite numerical inferiority, because he and his cavalry ‘enveloped’ the enemy on both flanks, depriving them of any escape route.

Schlieffen

This stratagem has been revered by military commanders as ‘a Platonic ideal of victory, an archetype possessing timeless and absolute validity’.[i] The architect of the German offensive strategy in World War I, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, described Cannae as ‘the perfect battle of annihilation.’ Schlieffen argued that every great commander aimed to achieve ‘more or less’ the same as Hannibal: they had all repeated ‘the age-old programme of that battle,’ demonstrating the significance of ‘the decisive attack.’

Schlieffen died in 1913, before Germany actually declared war on France on 3rd August 1914 (this equally painful centenary is tomorrow). But Schlieffen’s treatise Cannae kept his influence strong. Although tanks and aerial bombardment have replaced the Carthaginian cavalry, Schlieffen’s advocacy of the Hannibalic bold military sweep, an attack of disorientating violence and rapidity, had its supporters on both sides in WWII.

Norman advocates Total Annihilation

The Schlieffen version of Hannibal’s tactic has also been seen as the forerunner of Blitzkrieg and ‘Shock and Awe’ operations. It was fetishized by the late ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, US Commander in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, who was, disturbingly, impressed that even the pile of jewellery taken by Carthage from the Roman corpses was mountain-high.

The Loser Long-Term

Cannae has also been discussed with approval by Israeli advocates of the annihilation of Hamas. But admirers of any ‘perfect war of annihilation’, in imitation of Cannae, are forgetting the most important point. Although Hannibal won that particular battle, and waded knee-deep in blood he had let, he lost the Second Punic War as a whole. It ended in his crushing defeat by the Romans, at Zama near Carthage in Africa, fourteen years later.

What does this suggest that the Middle East will look like by 2028?

[i] T. M. Holmes, ‘Classical Blitzkrieg’, Journal of Military History, 67 (2003).

Headwear by www.NemeanLion.com

The New Paramount/ MGM Hercules is given only a 12A rating with good reason. Hercules is a trained killer. But not one, as the ancients held, so disturbed by his isolated ordeals of violent combat that he became incapable of civilian life and killed his wife and children.

Far from it. Sophistication in public storytelling has moved steadily backwards. This 21st-century Hercules instead has his family destroyed by A Bad Guy.

Heracles slaughters wife and sons

Where the audience of Euripides' extraordinary tragedy Heracles watched the mighty warrior come round from a psychotic fit to learn that he was a domestic killer, the audience in Gloucester Cineworld is reassured that the world consists only of Good Guys Who Love their Families and Bad Guys Out to Get Them. There is no such thing as Moral Complexity.

In the fifth century BC, the citizen audience could digest the advanced ethical philosophy of a scene in which the bereaved father and husband is physically restrained, by two men who love him, from suicide, discusses whether lack of intent affects culpability, and agrees to accept help in a survival plan despite what he has done. In 2014, however, Hercules gets to slay the gratuitously camp Bad Guy before flexing his depilated pectorals at good-looking individuals of both sexes.

Beware Greeks Bearing Screenplays?

The screenwriter responsible is Evan Spiliotopoulos, a Greek American whose previous credits include Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. When asked in interview which was his favourite Herculean labour, he answered, “The Belt of Hippolyta. Amazons. Bondage. ’Nuff said.”

It is not that I am a killjoy. I like mass market entertainment and outrageous adaptations of classics. I quite enjoyed the film, especially Ian McShane’s louche and mordant prophet Amphiaraus.But there is something about Hercules/Heracles, the archetypal Hero who allowed the ancients to think through their contradictory ideas about masculinity, violence, friendship, fatherhood, social alienation and psychopathology, that makes him resemble many disturbed ex-servicemen and deserve so much more than comic-strip ethical reductivism.

Would you trust this prophet? McShane Nearly Saves the Movie

The elementary level of our era's social morality was summed up in a line from one of Hercules' comrades just before the showdown: "What are you standing there for? KILL SOMEBODY!" If only it were that easy. Even the warlike ancient Greeks knew better. ’Nuff said.

Be afraid, Jason.

Helen McCrory sizzles at the National Theatre in Euripides’ Medea. This tiny actress grabs the text, the stage and the audience by the jugular and doesn’t let go until they are emotionally exhausted. When she drags the bags containing her small sons’ cadavers from the stage, the forest quivers and there is a suggestion of an earthquake. Hair-raising.*

Not at the National

All the reviewers have commented on the absence of Medea’s flying chariot of the Sun. But none has asked the far more important question: where is she taking them? What does a Bronze Age divorcee from Georgia want to be the last resting place of her beloved children?

Medea's flight path in white box

I can answer this question, having read the Greek text, and just yesterday visited the site of their graves. It is the temple of Hera near Perachora just across the Gulf of Corinth. This is 90 minutes’ drive from Medea’s house in the Corinthian suburbs, but probably only ten minutes in a flying machine of which the sole previous owner was divine. For an aviator it is en route to Athens—Medea’s final destination.

The land route just takes too long..

Hera, Queen of Heaven

The temple of Hera had two elaborate storeys, a stunning marble floor, and was crammed with votive objects dedicated by both men and women who wanted healthy children. It is located in one of the most beautiful bays in the Mediterranean, lapped by turquoise waters and fringed with pine and cedar trees. The ancient Greeks had no problems in praying to the very children who had been murdered by their mother for the health of their own progeny: UNITY OF OPPOSITES.

Temple-of-Hera-on-Sea

If you can’t get to London for this remarkable production, directed by Carrie Cracknell, you can go to your local Cineworld and enjoy it being relayed live on 4th September 2014. Popcorn may not seem appropriate to an infanticide story, but these days you can get gin and tonic--also enjoyed by McCrory's Medea--at the movies too.
*I'm pleased to be discussing whether Medea was Mad or just Bad at the National on Tuesday 19th with Professor Femi Oyebodi
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/discover/platforms/medea-acts-of-madness

Two years ago I decided to make some money from my pen so I could offer our children help with university fees. One has threatened not to do university at all because she doesn’t want to start adult life encumbered by vast debts. So I wrote Introducing the Ancient Greeks: from Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind.


Sian Thomas: my Audible avatar

The US edition, published by Norton, recently hit the shops. Beautifully read by Sian Thomas, my absolutely favourite classical actress, it has also now come out on Audible.com (not available on Audible.co.uk for UK download until next spring). I have one free hard copy and five codes for free Audible.com downloads to give away to the first five people to write to me on my King’s College London email, findable through the Classics Department webpage. But if you write, please answer the three questions at the end of this blog! Go on, indulge me!First prize gets hard copy too.

and Amelia Bones in Harry Potter

The reviews have all been glowing (e.g. in The Independent), except for James Romm’s in the Wall Street Journal. Romm has a reputation for being a dour reviewer, and people who read WSJ are unlikely to share my worldview anyway. He is also the only person alive who would complain that I don’t write enough in it about the ancient theatre—most people think I've published too much on that already!

What western Turkey looked like then

But even he likes my bit on early Greek thought's connection with the silting up of the Maeander Estuary, which I believe is original and which most reviewers have appreciated. It is this:

Miletus today: landlocked

The Milesian thinkers who began discussing the world's unseen causes were watching that world change every day. In about 1,000 BC, their harbour began to silt up. The winding (‘meandering’) River Maeander disgorged itself into the sea, and the particles of rock and soil, ‘alluvium,’ sank to the bottom of the estuary. Every year, the alluvium extended the shore towards Miletus. By the Christian era, Miletus itself was landlocked. The process must have been about half completed when the first philosophers were alive. The men watching fresh water and stones meet salt water and sand, producing new land on a daily basis, became the first people in recorded history to inquire into the origins of the world exclusively in terms of natural causes.

Thales: Estuary Thinker

The earliest, Thales, thought that the first cosmic principle or element—the one being pushed back by new land—was water. The argument he used to support this view is that inanimate things lose water and dry out. His student Anaximander drew a map of all the physical world the Milesians knew, and suggested that everything they could perceive—both land and sea, which visibly limited each other—must be surrounded by something else that was limitless and immeasurable--apeiron. The third Milesian thinker, Anaximenes, watched land expand and sea shrink, and argued that all the constituents of the world man could see--fire, wind, cloud, water, earth, stones--are created out of air by processes of condensation or sublimation: the differences between them result from their relative density. In Ephesus, another city not far from Miletus which also became steadily cut off from the sea, Heraclitus asserted the principle that the physical universe was constantly changing: panta rhei, he said, ‘everything is in flux’. Quite.

QUIZ

So, if you want an Audible.com code allowing you to listen free to Sian Thomas’ delicious voice purring through my version of Greek history, from Linear B to 391 AD, then email me the answers to these three questions:

1] What is the name of the Turkish village nearest to the (now inland) ruins of Miletus?

2] Which ancient Greek philosopher jumped into a volcano?

3] What was the name of Prometheus' Mother?

The Scottish Independence question is now not about nationalism but economic fairness. I had no view until I was alerted by the viciousness of rich English people's attacks on Alex Salmond. Such abuse has always been a sure indication that the wealthy sense that they may soon be required to give large dollops of money to the poor.

Vilified in Establishment Press

More of Scotland now belongs to non-Scots than to people born and raised there. Such immigrants are wealthy and worried that Salmond’s socialist policies will stop Scotland offering them the quality-of-life nirvana that they currently enjoy.

Glen Avon’s 40,000 acres have been bought by a Kuala Lumpur-based conglomerate. Kjeld Kirk-Christiansen (head of LEGO Interrnational) has bought a large estate. Fashion guru Anders Holch Povlsen’s Scottish property portfolio has swelled to £65m. The Laird of Eigg is Marlin Eckhard Maruma from Stuttgart. Paul van Vlissingen, a Dutch tycoon, owns an 80,000-acre estate on Loch Maree in Wester Ross. "His Excellency” Mahdi Mohammed Al Tajir, from the United Arab Emirates, now owns the Blackford Estate (producing Highland Spring mineral water).

My Future Neighbour?

When the fabulously wealthy English immigrant to Scotland, J.K. Rowling, gave £1K to the “rich people stick together” campaign, I felt ill. I admittedly have a personal reason. She was the only Classicist to whom I wrote in 2011 asking for an endorsement of the campaign to keep Classics open at Royal Holloway University of London whose rejection email was rude. But I do wonder just how much tax she fears Alex Salmond’s planned socialist utopia would expect her to dish out to the people of Scotland from her castle.

Nicola Sturgeon

If the Independence adventure goes ahead, we're moving to near a Scottish airport forthwith. I’ll commute to London by air. It can’t take any longer than the cynically marketed Cotswold “Cathedrals Express” locomotive, which averages 2 m.p.h. Unlike rich people with an investment in the result of the Scottish referendum, I'll pay whatever tax it takes to keep healthcare and university education a right and not a privilege. Rock on, Alex and Nicola, with your fishy surnames. We don’t all believe the Establishment obloquy.

Alex Salmon(d)

On the London train to run a conference on an ancient poet called Palladas, whose witty epigrams include several bitching about women, I chose an empty seating area for ten. I needed to finish my paper. At the next station I was joined by six raucous men returning from a stag night.

They kept up a stream of misogynist ranting for an hour. In ancient Greece there was a genre of invective listing alleged female vices, a genre which I mistakenly believed had become obsolete. The most famous example, by Semonides, compares women with animals. It begins with the pig-woman, “a hairy sow, whose house is like a rolling heap of filth; she lies around, unwashed, on the shit-pile, growing fat.” Semonides advocates violence against the talkative dog-woman and the dense ass-woman who enjoys food.

My Fellow Passengers

My fellow passengers had revived this ancient genre. They went through the Sun, Metro, and other journals, criticising every pictured woman, from teenagers opening exam results to the Home Secretary. Each was labelled a slag, a dog, a bushpig [this one was new on me], a hottie, gagging for it, or a ballbreaker. A vote was taken on whether each woman deserved the honour of “a good seeing to.”

Semonides of Amorgos

I am not easily shocked. I ignored them and continued to write my comments on Palladas’ 1600-year-old epigram, “A woman is only good on two occasions: dead or in bed”. But it became apparent that George, the most hungover stag, was Greek. He earned derision from the stags for saying he had to go home and take turns looking after his three-year old daughter before rejoining the testosteronefest in a Fulham pub. Who, they asked scoffingly, "wore the trousers" in George’s house?

I asked George, in Greek, if he would like either his mother or his daughter to hear him in conversation with his friends. He blushed deeply and told them to cool it. They did not stop, but George did, and looked embarrassed for the rest of the journey.

So what had happened here? Perhaps I am a humourless party-pooper. Perhaps some men just assume it is acceptable to talk like that in public or in front of females. Or is that since I am too old to be in the category of meriting “a good seeing-to”, I am effectively invisible? Or were the stags actually trying to provoke me into a reaction? If so, did they want to be told off by a middle-aged lady—perhaps spanked?—or get into a wrangle?

Being outnumbered one/six may have played a part in the chemistry of the situation. Certainly, once I established an individual relationship with one of them in a language the others couldn’t understand, so they couldn’t collectively combat me, he instantly reverted from Palaeolithic Man to a reasonable modern human.

A Symposium: arena for misogynist ranting

Long ago, when I briefly worked in Cardiff docks managing thirty-six tug-boat crewmen, I persuaded them to take down the topless “page 3” pictures festooning the office by putting photos of naked men on another wall. They said it was disgusting. Women could, I suppose, fight back by forming vigilante groups who roam public transport cackling noisily about all the men in the newspapers. When I retire, I may form a granny-gang to do so. If anyone would like to join me, get in touch in about 2026.

"Who am I? Why am I here?"

This week has brought a flood of enquiries about caryatids resulting from the photos from the tomb near Amphipolis. What are caryatids and why should the relatives of a rich dead Macedonian choose caryatids to hold up a lintel on the tomb?

Persian Bull

Figures of animals and humans had been used earlier by Egyptian and Persian architects to support imperial roofs. I personally would rather have a bull on my tomb, please, like this one from Darius' building project at Susa, than a caryatid. When Persian art used human figures to do load-bearing work, they were people who had been subjected to the Persian empire.

Down-at-heel Caryatids at home in Karyes

Caryatids take their name from the town of Karyai (now Karyes), in the central Peloponnese, which featured a sanctuary and famous statue of Artemis. Karyai means Nuts, or sometimes specifically walnuts or hazelnuts. A Karyatis (plural Karyatides) means 'maiden dancing the nut-tree dance' or a 'nut-tree priestess'. They did a special dance for Artemis with baskets of nuts on their heads, which may have given an architect the idea to put roofs on their heads instead. But you can dance with a basket on your head. A temple roof is a different matter.

The Roman architect Vitruvius said the origin of the caryatids was much more tragic. The people of Karyai had treacherously sided with the Persians when they invaded. So after the war the other Greeks punished them by executing the men and enslaving the women. The Women of Karyai are not dancing maidens but matrons, he says, doomed to perpetual labour and unfreedom.

Artemis is often associated with death rites and mysteries, which might illuminate her priestesses' presence in funerary art. The most famous caryatids are those in the porch of the Athenian Erectheion, the shrine housing the dead hero-king Erechtheus (five are in Athens; one stands in lonely isolation from her sisters far away in the British Museum). They have inspired countless imitations and adaptations the world over from ancient times, often rather uncomfortably expressing pride in imperialist ventures.

Hans Walther's sad Caryatids, Oppressed by Capital, in Erfurt

My own favourite are the saddest of all. Their hunched bodies support the entire weight of the capital accumulated in the Savings Bank in Erfurt, central Germany. They are the work of the sculptor Hans Walther, in the idiom of the ‘New Objectivity’ or ‘New Resignation’ (Neue Sachlichkeit) which had been developed in the Weimar Republic: Erfurt is only a few kilometres from Weimar itself. One well-fed capitalist on the left feeds himself from his well-loaded plate, while the other worker–women and men, young and old, are dejected, worn down, and hungry.

So are the new Amphipolis caryatids joyous maidens performing a dance in celebration of the nut harvest, enslaved traitors of their nation, symbols of Macedonian imperialism, ostentation and greed, or simply conventional stone guardians of the dead available for commission in any ancient funeral parlour? This is what makes antiquity fun: it's up to each one of us to decide.

Alex Salmond’s best line in the Independence campaign was to remind those who questioned the Scots’ competence to run an economy that Adam Smith, 'Father of Modern Economics' and author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), was born in Fife. Other influential Scots could be produced as evidence of that nation’s historic contribution in any field of endeavour.

Take the Colossus of Roads. This was the unofficial title bestowed on John Loudon McAdam, who dominated the world of road technology in the late 18th and 19th centuries and is here caricatured in a famous print by Henry Heath. Heath drew both on his viewers’ stereotypes of Scots and on their knowledge of the lost colossal statue of the Sun which the Sun-worshipping Rhodians of the third century BC erected in their harbour to celebrate the defence of their island from Macedonian strongmen.

'Colossus of Rhodes' by Maerten van Heemskerck (1570)

The reason why the road you walk/drive/cycle/sit in a bus on is neither a Pleistocene mud-bath in winter nor a dust-bowl in summer, as in the two roads leading to the left and right of the cartoon, is McAdam. His innovation was to use several layers of very small stones, bound with a cementing agent, to form a crust; provided the road was built above the water table, it did not need to be raised above the pre-existing path nor be given a steep camber.

Road Obsessive

McAdam was born 258 years ago today in an Ayrshire castle. He was incredibly famous and his name became synonymous with inventions of any kind. He was also a monomaniacal obsessive, who spent his entire life and his personal fortune developing his revolutionary technology. In 1827 his efforts and expenditure paid off: he was appointed General Surveyor of Roads and given a government pay-out of £10,000. The 1827 cartoon here, through the word ‘mock’ and the money-bags he clutches, implies that the expenses he claimed were not entirely legitimate.

Worked literally to death

The cartoon's pictured windmill, ‘Breakstone Mill’, is comically threatening to raise his kilt. Beneath him sit two poor labourers, for the small size of the stones McAdam roads used (they had to be small enough to fit in the worker's mouth) had exponentially increased the work required. Road-making swiftly became associated with the legal sentence of Hard Labour. Henry Wallis’ tragic Stonebreaker (1857), in Birmingham City Art Gallery, was sometimes entitled ‘Helotage’, thus comparing the tragic road-labourer to a helot, an abused slave in ancient Sparta. McAdam used his brain and fortune well, but that did not prevent technological progress in the industrial revolution from coming at a terrible human price.

The Welcoming Rio Classics Dept.

Mid-week consisted of a mad dash to Rio de Janeiro to an enormous congress on disputes and face-offs in antiquity. It seemed an unlikely topic for the most well-balanced bunch of people I have encountered for ages: Laughing over Dinner in Antiquity would have been a more apt theme. Not that I didn’t get challenged by a couple of shrewd critics after my lecture. But I love this part of my job—open disagreement, expressed with civility, between people brave enough to attach their identities to their views.

Anonymous Peer Reviewers

Academia’s Sacred Cow is Anonymous Peer Review, or secret reports/ references read behind closed doors. This creaky system means academics are all repeatedly stabbed in the back by masked assassins when their article is rejected by a journal, or their grant/promotion application rubbished. The result is completely unnecessary paranoia and toxic bad feeling when they speculate (often incorrectly) on the identity of the incognito saboteur. In a small subject like Classics it also means that you have inevitably been covertly coshed by a close colleague, a former lover, or someone envious of you.

Prof. Paul Cartledge

My belief that APR is damaging and obsolete was reinforced at the second conference of the week, a celebration of my role model and hero Paul Cartledge, retiring Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge. His successor Tim Whitmarsh gave a dazzling keynote, on an ancient Greek called Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who even 2,000 years ago knew all about Peer Review (although this was NOT what Prof. Whitmarsh was arguing--what follows is my personal response). Dionysius described the five types of professional opponents who criticised his work:

1) Inveterate nit-pickers.

2) People ignorant of the material under discussion.

3) People whose criticisms depended on unverified rumour and assumptions.

4) Malicious personal enemies who want to damage him.

5) People in an opposing ideologicalcamp who will automatically oppose everything he says.

Anonymous Peer Reviewers who today sabotage other academics’ work fall into precisely Dionysius’ categories. I would add only one further: the egomaniac who complains the author hasn’t cited their own scholarship, however irrelevant.

I NEVER write a review or reference I would not be happy to see made public with my name on the bottom. I just don’t see that anonymity is helpful. Why not stick papers, CVs etc. up freely online and invite (non-anonymised) comments? If people are ashamed to have their views made public, in what universe is it professional to express them? My other great discovery this week, for my Classics & Class project, has been Mary Bridges Adams, a working-class classicist turned activist who in July 1915 complained about a critic who signed himself simply N.D. and constantly attacked her in print. She wrote in the Cotton Factory Times,

Let me beg of my opponents to reveal their identity. I hope N.D. will set the others an example, and let me know precisely who he is. Being a Welsh-woman I do not shrink from a fight, but I like to see ‘my foe-man’s face.’

I suspect Bridges Adams got the last phrase from the Iliad, where warriors with integrity like Achilles would not dream of attacking someone like a coward, anonymously, and there is a special term for proper, non-anonymised combat. And although I am not Welsh I couldn’t agree with her more.

Niobe, all tears in Soma

How to Conceal a Female Scholar; or, the Invisible Classicist of Cardiff

Work, Art, Walmart

Toff Tots in Classical Costume

Oedipal Confrontation in Deepest Gloucestershire

Fiction and 8 Facts about Furies

IS SUAREZ A CENTAUR?

Black Sea Archaeologists versus Putin and Theresa May

Seattle Cassandra Foresees PITCHFORKS

Rediscovering Troy and the Letter "W"

My Big Fat New Career in Classical Tourism

'Perfect annihilation' battles from Hannibal to today

Hercules and the Infantilisation of Modern Audiences

Where did Medea Bury her Children?

Estuary Greek Philosophers and an Offer

Giving Scottish Independence a Hearing

Woman-Hating Ranters Ancient & Modern

CARYATIDS IN A (WAL)NUT SHELL

The Scottish Colossus of Roads

Should Anonymous Peer Review be Abolished?