Not Quite Forgotten...

Years ago, I attended a talk entitled something like 'Tedius Scholasticus: Another Forgotten Classic'. As it ended, and we packed up to head off down the corridor to the obligatory wine reception, the lecturer next to me sighed, and remarked that that was a classical author he would have been quite happy to have left forgotten.

That said, there are real gems in the minor league of the Classical canon. While not everyone can be a Thucydides or a Lucretius, there are delights to be found in the lower rungs. Two of my favourites are Publilius Syrus and whatever wag or wags were responsible for To Philogelos.

To Philogelos or 'The Laughter Lover' is a bumper fun joke book from the fourth century AD, supposedly compiled by a comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius. The jokes, I'm afraid, aren't the funniest, but are worth a read for all that. Here are a few:

'An egghead got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine."'

'An Abderite wanted to hang himself, but the rope broke and he bumped his head. He went to the doctor and got some salve. After rubbing it on the wound he hanged himself again.'

'When a wag who was a shopkeeper found a policeman screwing his wife, he said: "I got something I wasn't bargaining for."'

'A Kymean constructed a huge threshing-floor and stationed his wife on the opposite end. He asked her if she could see him. When she replied that it was hard for her to see him, he snapped: "The time will come when I'll build a threshing-floor so big that I won't be able to see you and you won't be able to see me."'

'A rude astrologer cast a sick boy's horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, "Come tomorrow and I'll pay you," he objected: "But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?"'

'A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."'

'While a drunkard was imbibing in a tavern, someone approached and told him: "Your wife is dead." Taking this in, he said to the bartender: "Time, sir, to mix a drink up from your dark stuff."'

'A young actor was loved by two women, one with bad breath and the other with reeking armpits. The first woman said: "Give me a kiss, master." And the second: "Give me a hug, master." But he declaimed: "Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!"'

'A young man invited into his home frisky old women. He said to his servants: "Mix a drink for one, and have sex with the other, if she wants to." The women spoke up as one: "I'm not thirsty."'

'A misogynist was sick, at death's door. When his wife said to him, "If anything bad happens to you, I'll hang myself," he looked up at her and said: "Do me the favor while I'm still alive."'

Oh yes, there's far more where they came from. 255 more, to be precise, albeit with some duplication. Some aren't terrible.

Anyway, we used to be very fond of this collection back in my misspent youth. Not so much for the ancient jokes, of course, as for the endnotes. The edition of To Philogelos in our library had a prodigious quantity of endnotes, all detailing how various German academics speculated about why jokes were funny.

They tended to take the form of 'Moellendorf Willamowitz says that this is a pun on "salve", whereas Kromayer argues that this is a references to the sacking of the city by Philip II in 350 BC. Delbrueck thinks this is an allusion to Democritus, who was a famous citizen of Abdera.'

A German friend of mine -- who habitually borrowed this book to bring to the pub and show bemused friends -- was particularly besotted with the endnotes.

The great Publilius Syrus, on the other hand, is a very different kettle of fish: if the notes on To Philogelos filled us with joy, Publius Syrus filled us with wisdom.

Publilius was a Syrian who wrote Latin plays in the first century BC. His plays became famous for his maxims, such that the plays have all been lost but the maxims remain, with other similarly wise sayings being attributed to him. You can read all thousand or so statements in the Loeb volume Minor Latin Poets, Volume 1. 

Among the sort of things he says are:

'A suspicious mind always looks on the black side of things.'

'An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.'

'Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world.'

'In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.'

'It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.'

'Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.'

'It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.'

'Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.'

'There are some remedies worse than the disease.'

'Hares can gambol over the body of a dead lion.'

And so forth. Profound stuff, you'll surely agree. The kind of thing that folk should absorb before jumping to conclusions, thinking oneself into a circle, and then charging around casting aspersions on people.

Um. Anyway, we used to keep it on the handy shelf back in our postgrad days, thinking he'd be a handy man whenever there was a crisis.

'What should we do?'

'Let's find out what Publilius Syrus would say,' someone would say, reaching for the little red book, opening it and random and treating our ears with his mellodious Syrian wisdom.

Great days.

I'm tempted to start a Publius Syrus Twitter account. Just to help people, you understand. 

The Eucharist in Church history

In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, the American writer Flannery O’Connor described a dinner party she had attended some years earlier.

Conversation had eventually turned to the Eucharist, which O’Connor’s host, who had left the Church in her teens, said that she had come to think of as a symbol, and a fairly good one at that. “Well,” said O’Connor in a shaky voice, breaking the silence that had marked her evening, “if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”


Unfortunately, if last week’s Ipsos MRBI survey for the Irish Times is to be believed, 62 pc of Irish Catholics share O’Connor’s host’s view that the Eucharist merely represents the body and blood of Christ.

Richard Dawkins’ branding of all such Catholics as dishonest should be recognised as the ignorant smear that it is, given that this is less likely to be the fruit of considered dissent than poor catechesis and human weakness, but the fact remains that in this respect it seems the majority of Irish Catholics are out of step with the Church throughout time.

The Eucharist, described by the Second Vatican Council as “the source and summit of Christian life”, has always been central to the Church’s existence.

Acts 2:46 describes how the early Jerusalem Church celebrated the Eucharist daily, meeting at the Temple for preaching and prayer, but breaking bread in their own homes rather than attending the Temple sacrifices.

Poor translations sometimes make it seem as though the phrase “breaking bread” is just another way of saying that the early Christians ate together, but the original Greek text is unambiguous in its distinction between liturgy and lunch.

Early Church
The first Christians’ devotion to the Eucharist shouldn’t surprise us. Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24-5 record how at the Last Supper Jesus commanded them to celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, while at John 6 Jesus repeatedly describes himself as the bread of life, clearly stating “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”

It might be tempting to interpret this passage in a symbolic or spiritual way, but the Greek text simply doesn’t allow this.

The passage describes the listening crowd being horrified at Jesus’ words, and asking him to clarify them; he did so by making his language more graphic, emphasising the reality of what he was asking his followers to do by replacing the word phagein – to eat – with the rather more tactile word trogein – to munch, or gnaw, or chew.

Significantly too, the word the passage uses for “flesh” – sarx – is used on six other occasions in John, each time as something emblematic of the physical rather than the spiritual world, beginning with the declaration that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”.

Intolerable teaching
Many disciples left after this, finding Jesus’ teaching intolerable, while those who remained did so in apparent confusion.

It wasn’t until after the Last Supper that the meaning of Jesus’ words became clear and the Eucharist was embraced as a real participation in the body and blood of Christ, such that, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 10:27, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

The disciples’ own disciples took this to heart, and it seems clear from the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch – a pupil of John, and bishop of the city where Christians first bore that name – that an acceptance of the Eucharist as Christ’s body and blood was the hallmark of orthodox Christianity before the end of the first Christian century.

On his way under armed guard to Rome, where he was to be martyred, he wrote a series of letters to churches including one in which he said that those Gnostics who believed that Jesus’ body was but an illusion were easily identifiable:

“They even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers, because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in his goodness raised up again.”

Worship
St Justin Martyr, writing a few decades later in the middle of the second century, gives us the earliest detailed description of Christian worship: the main Christian ceremony took place on Sundays and had two parts: a liturgy of the word with readings from the scriptures and a sermon, and then a liturgy of the Eucharist, in which bread and wine were offered up, blessed, and distributed.

Explaining mainstream Christianity to the Roman emperor, he describes the Eucharist as follows:

“For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these... the food which is blessed by the power of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

The Eucharist was so central to early Christianity that it was common for the Church’s Roman persecutors, who scorned that which they couldn’t understand, to describe Christians as cannibals – as well as incestuous atheists!

The early Church was so convinced of the reality of the Eucharist, that it wasn’t even deemed necessary to refer to the Eucharist in the Nicene creed; it simply went without saying that during Mass the Eucharistic elements would become the body and blood of Christ.

Of course, it was obvious that they didn’t appear to change, but the Church was unanimous that Christ’s word was to be trusted.

Metaphorical?
It was not until the ninth century that speculation began about how this change took place.

These debates attracted little attention at the time, but almost two hundred years later n archdeacon named Berengar of Tours began to wonder whether the Eucharistic change was merely spiritual or even metaphorical.

Berengar’s theories were recognised as contrary to the historical teaching of the Church, and were condemned, but further speculation continued and so the Church gradually embraced the idea that “transubstantiation” was the best way of explaining the Eucharistic change.

The language of transubstantiation may have been a medieval innovation, but the idea behind it – that the bread and wine literally change to the body and blood of Christ – stretched back to the foundation of the Church.

If it is true that only a quarter of Irish Catholics really believe that this happens at the Mass, it would seem that the International Eucharistic Congress isn’t happening a moment too soon.

We need to be reminded of what unites us with our fellow Christians throughout the world and throughout time.


-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 14 June 2012.

The historical Easter

Gore Vidal tells a story of how he once met the late Sir Moses Finley, one of the twentieth century’s leading ancient historians, and asked him whether a colleague of Finley’s was reliable.

“The best in his field,” replied Finley, his great dentures shifting slightly in his mouth, “Of course he makes most of it up, like the rest of us.”

Finley wasn’t being entirely facetious: much modern analysis of ancient history is necessarily speculative, deductive, and tentative. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Sometimes we have a corner piece and can confidently build outwards, but more often than not our picture is patchy and fragmented.

It always astonishes me when modern historians follow the consensus established in the late eighteenth century and assume that the Gospels were written between 65 and 95 AD. That this is unproven should go without saying, but what’s striking is that this consensus has profoundly ahistorical foundations.

The theory has three important elements: the ancients knew that John was written after the three synoptic gospels; textual analysis suggests that both Matthew and Luke are heavily dependent on Mark; and Mark 13 records Jesus as saying of the Temple that “there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down,” in an apparent reference to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.

Modern writers tend to hold that Mark wrote in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction and anachronistically attributed these words to Jesus, because it would have been impossible for Jesus to have so predicted the fall of the Temple.

Impossible? Yes, as it’s become customary for New Testament historians to approach their texts from an implicitly materialistic or atheistic stance, such that miracles, prophecies, and all intimations of divinity must be discounted as pious or superstitious elaborations.

Fantasies

Even Christian scholars tend all too often to begin their studies from the prejudiced position that their principle sources are fundamentally unreliable in their most important respects.

This doesn’t happen with other branches of ancient history. Thucydides, widely regarded as the greatest of ancient historians, predicted that had they but a few disparate ruins to go by, future historians might be inclined to doubt that Sparta had ever been one of the mightiest Greek powers. Scholars of fifth-century Greece don’t approach Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War by observing that the modern ruins of ancient Sparta are indeed sparse and unspectacular, casting aspersions on Thucydides’ prediction, and dismissing out of hand all accounts of Spartan force projection as Thucydidean fantasies.

If we approach the New Testament from an honestly agnostic position, we have to concede the possibility that perhaps – just perhaps – Jesus could have predicted the destruction of the Temple. Remove this keystone from the modern consensus and the entire hypothesis collapses, forcing us to look at the facts afresh. In particular, it’s worth considering how Acts ends.

Luke and Acts are, to all intents and purposes, two halves of the same document, and the inconclusive ending of Acts, with Paul teaching freely while under house arrest in Rome, strongly suggests that Acts was written before 64 AD. How better can we explain Luke’s failure to mention the outcome of Paul’s trial, the Great Fire of Rome, the Neronian Persecution, or the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem? And if Luke wrote in the mid-sixties, drawing by his own account upon earlier narratives, then does it not seem likely that Mark and perhaps an early version of Matthew must have existed before 60 AD?

Scholars differ on the date of the Crucifixion, but generally date it between 30 and 36 AD. If Mark was written in the mid-50s, as seems likely, then we can’t dismiss this as an unreliable account, written long after the events it describes. It would be no different from somebody today writing about life-changing events in 1990.

Even Luke is no further removed from the events he describes than we are from the Hunger Strikes, the Falklands War, and the wedding of Charles and Diana, but we put the cart before the horse if we assume that Christianity began with the Gospels or is based upon the Bible. It’s not. It’s based upon the reality of Christ, as experienced and witnessed to by the Church, and as reflected in the Gospels and other New Testament writings.

Reality

Popular critics of Christianity tend to forget that the Pauline letters are widely recognised as predating the Gospels, with 1 Thessalonians dating to around 50 AD. Widely regarded as the earliest extant Christian document, it’s a remarkable testimony for Christian belief within two decades of the Resurrection.

Paul describes Jesus as the Son of God who has risen from the dead and will return from Heaven, but he doesn’t describe Jesus’ teaching, or explain how the Crucifixion and Resurrection were the fulfilment of the Old Testament. He doesn’t need to. Paul’s letters were, in the main, designed to fill gaps and clarify points: the main lines of Christian teaching were already present and accepted in the churches he and others had founded.

In 1 Corinthians, written a few years later, Paul declares the importance of accepting the historical reality of the Resurrection:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve... Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

Paul was taught this and more when being catechised in the nascent Church, the Church we see in Acts as having been born in the jaws of persecution.

Beyond Acts, the Jewish historian Josephus mentions the stoning to death in Jerusalem of James the “brother of the Lord”, and the Romans Tacitus and Suetonius testify to how – scarcely three decades after the Resurrection – huge numbers of Christians went to their deaths in Rome as a witness to the truths they held, being crucified, torn apart by animals, or set alight to serve as human streetlamps.

These were the first generation of Christians, including such eyewitnesses as Stephen and Peter who gave up everything to serve Jesus. It makes no sense to claim they willingly died for something they knew to be false.

People miss the point when they question the likelihood of the Resurrection.

They should instead ask how, if we deny the Resurrection, we can explain the Church.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 5 April 2012.

Almost Three Thousand Years of Self-Justifying Colonial Clichés

The other day's piece on the Parthenon Sculptures, and some reactions it's provoked, have reminded me of an article I read many years ago, whilst doing my master's degree.

We are hard-working, civilised, and responsible, but they are lazy, savage, irresponsible idiots...

Entitled 'Eaters of flesh, drinkers of milk: the ancient Mediterranean ideology of the pastoral nomad' and by one Brent Shaw, it argued that the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey should be understood as an ethnographic text, establishing a dichotomy in European thought that distinguished between barbaric pastoralists and civilized farmers.

It was hardly insignificant that the Odyssey was composed or at any rate came into being during the great age of Greek colonisation; the Cyclops episode is loaded with the rhetoric used by colonisers when seeking to justify why they would be far better stewards of lands than the savages who live there now, squandering their resources.

Here, for instance, is the key passage in the Cyclops episode in Odyssey IX:

'And we came to the land of the Cyclopes, a fierce, lawless people who never lift a hand to plant or plough but just leave everything up to the immortal gods. All the crops they require spring up unsown and untilled, wheat and barley and vines with generous clusters that swell with the rain from heaven to yield wine. The Cyclopes have no assemblies for the making of laws, nor any established legal codes, but live in hollow caverns in the mountain heights, where each man is lawgiver to his own children and women, and nobody has the slightest interest in what his neighbours decide.'

The binary contrast being set up here is pretty obvious: the Cyclops are lazy and lawless, caring neither for the bountiful land in which they live or for any society beyond their own front doors. Greeks, on the other hand, are by implication industrious and law-embracing, the kind of people who would be responsible stewards of their gifts and who would care for their neighbours. If you ever want an idealisation of what the Greeks thought of themselves as a lawful people, have a glance at Pericles' funeral oration, as penned by Thucydides perhaps three hundred years after the Odyssey was written :

'Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.

But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.

[...]

We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it.

Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.'

Note especially that penultimate observation that those who concentrate solely on private matters rather than serving society in general are regarded not so much as unambitious as useless. The Greeks had a word for such people: Idiots.

The Cyclopes, then, would have been regarded by the ancient Greeks as lazy, selfish, lawless idiots, unworthy stewards of the land they inherited.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch...

Let's leap forward two thousand or so years from the Odyssey, taking us to the thirteenth century or thereabouts, when the Saga of Erik the Red was written, describing the Norse discovery of America, the most fertile part of which they referred to as Vinland, the land of wine.

'Karlsefni and his people sailed to the mouth of the river, and called the land Hop. There they found fields of wild wheat wherever there were low grounds; and the vine in all places were there was rough rising ground. Every rivulet there was full of fish. They made holes where the land and water joined and where the tide went highest; and when it ebbed they found halibut in the holes. There was great plenty of wild animals of every form in the wood. They were there half a month, amusing themselves, and not becoming aware of anything. Their cattle they had with them. And early one morning, as they looked around, they beheld nine canoes made of hides, and snout-like staves were being brandished from the boats, and they made a noise like flails, and twisted round in the direction of the sun's motion.

Then Karlsefni said, "What will this betoken?" Snorri answered him, "It may be that it is a token of peace; let us take a white shield and go to meet them." And so they did. Then did they in the canoes row forwards, and showed surprise at them, and came to land. They were short men, ill-looking, with their hair in disorderly fashion on their heads; they were large-eyed, and had broad cheeks. And they stayed there awhile in astonishment. Afterwards they rowed away to the south, off the headland.'

Suffice to say that the Scraelings, for so the native Americans will be called, don't come out of this well; they're described as mere ignorant savages, easily duped, quick to fight, and incapable of taking advantage of the paradise in which they dwell. And what a paradise! Wild animals and fish in abundance, wheat springing up from the soil unsown and untilled, and grape-bearing vines growing everywhere without even needing a hint of human effort. These Scraelings live in a land as bountiful as the land of the Cyclopes, and are as incapable or as disinclined to take care of their land, to use it as it should be used; why, of course the Vikings should settle there. Sure wouldn't they use it better? Wouldn't they prove far more responsible stewards of these wonderful gifts from heaven?

And there's the little matter of home...

A hundred or so years earlier, the Anglo-Normans and Cambro-Normans who'd begun settling Ireland had played the same game. Here, for example, are some passages from Distinction III Chapter X of Gerald of Wales' History and Topography of Ireland:

'As if to prove that what [nature] is able to form, she does not cease to shape also, she gives growth and proportions to these people, until they arrive at perfect vigour, tall and handsome in person, and with agreeable and ruddy countenances. But although they are richly endowed with the gifts of nature, their want of civilisation, shown both in their dress and mental culture makes them a barbarous people. For they wear but little woollen, and nearly all they use is black, that being the colour of the sheep in all this country. Their clothes are also made after a barbarous fashion...

The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts - a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life. In the common course of things, mankind progresses from the forest to the field, from the field to the town and to the social conditions of citizens; but this nation, holding agricultural labour in contempt, and little coveting the wealth of towns, as well as being exceedingly averse to civil institutions - lead the same life their fathers did in the woods and open pastures, neither willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new. They, therefore, only make patches of tillage; their pastures are short of herbage; cultivation is very rare and there is scarcely any land sown. This want of tilled fields arises from the neglect of those who should cultivate them; for theirs are large tracts which are naturally fertile and productive. The whole habits of the people are contrary to agricultural pursuits, so that the rich glebe is barren for want of husbandmen, the fields demanding labour which is not forthcoming.

Very few sorts of fruit-trees are found in this country, a defect arising not from the nature of the soil, but from want of industry of planting them; for the lazy husbandman does not take the trouble to plant the foreign sorts which would grow very well here. Two of them are fruit-bearing trees, the chestnut and the beech; the other two, the arulus (or alarus - unsure of variety) and the box, though they bear no fruit, are serviceable for making cups and handles. Yews, with their bitter sap, are more frequently to be found in this country than in any other I have visited, but you will see them principally in old cemeteries and sacred places, where they were planted in ancient times by the hands of holy men to give them what ornament and beauty they could. The forests of Ireland also abound with fir-trees, producing frankincense and incense.

There are also veins of various kinds of metals ramifying in the bowels of the earth, which, from the same idle habits, are not worked and turned to account. Even gold, which the people require in large quantities and still covet in a way that speaks their Spanish origin, is brought here by the merchants who traverse the ocean for the purposes of commerce. They neither employ themselves in the manufacture of flax or wool or in any kind of trade or mechanical art; but abandoning themselves to idleness, and immersed, in sloth, their greatest delight is to be exempt from toil, their richest possession, the enjoyment of liberty.'

It's getting kind of familiar now, isn't it? The Irish are handsome, vigorous, and agreeable -- well, so far so accurate -- but are chronically lazy, and with no drive whatsoever to husband their country's marvellous resources in a responsible way. Okay, that bit might be true too, but I think we can accept that just because Gerald was right doesn't mean he wasn't also engaging in a frenzy of self-serving rhetoric.

Gerald goes on at great length here and elsewhere about the fertility of Ireland's soil, the multitude of fish and birds and animals to be caught, and the crops that grow as though unbidden, and is utterly scathing about the Irish disinclination to do anything that might impinge on their liberty and the time that is their own. Rude pastoralists, they didn't engage in agriculture let alone build towns -- most of Ireland's towns were Viking settlements.

In short, from the point of view of the twelfth-century interlopers, the Irish were savages who didn't deserve the marvellous land they'd inherited from their ancestors. Of course the Normans of England and Wales would be far more worthy stewards of such a beautiful and bountiful country. Of course. Why it was their duty to look after it as God would have wanted. The Irish couldn't be trusted. They were squandering God's gifts.

And it goes on...

You'll find exactly the same kind of rhetoric used by the Europeans who drove the natives on north and south America from their land time and time again from the sixteenth century on, and most egregiously by those engaged in the Scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century. It's the same line, whether used of Irish, Incas, Indians, or Africans: they're brutes who are wasting what they've got, so it's our obligation to go there and use those resources properly.

Yesterday one commenter observed of the Parthenon Sculptures that the main initial complaints about the Ottoman sale of things they did not own came from people who had treated the Acropolis as a quarry, and that Christian Athenians had damaged the Acropolis long before the Turks had come, while another said:

'To be perfectly blunt, if Greece can't even be bothered to preserve the Altar of the Twelve Gods, why on earth should we give them more antiquities to damage, destroy or otherwise fail to steward properly?

Rightful ownership is all well and good, but if the rightful owner is incapable or unwilling to adequately look after the property... '

Sound familiar?

The Parthenon Sculptures: A Reflection

The internet being the internet, Stephen Fry having added his voice to those calling for the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum to be returned to Athens will doubtless lead to a great clamour in his wake, largely from people who've hitherto not given the subject more than two minutes' thought.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It is, at any rate, not an unusual thing. 

Remember the invasion of the Falklands? Sue Townsend got it right in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾:

'10am. Woke my father up to tell him Argentina has invaded the Falklands. He shot out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland. When I pointed out that they were eight thousand miles away he got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head.'

Fiction, sure, but one that reflected something all too true; despite all those nowadays who claim that the Falklands are as British as Whitehall, back in 1982 huge numbers of Britons had no idea where they were.* Still, in no time at all Mrs Thatcher had Britain crying out for their return, for reasons of national pride and strategic sheep purposes.

Having won her glorious victory over a few thousand ill-equipped Argentinian youths, she went back to the polls in 1983 and was rewarded by having her share of the vote drop to 42.4%, while the two main opposition parties garnered 53% of the vote between them. Of course, the British electoral system being a model of democracy and known for how it so accurately reflects the will of the people, this translated to a massive victory for the Conservatives.

If burglars sold your most treasured possessions...

But I digress. The important thing, at any rate, is that huge numbers of Britons knew nothing about the Falklands when they were invaded, but brushed up quickly. 

Likewise, even those who've never given the Parthenon Sculptures a moment's thought before Stephen Fry piped up will have been able to think quickly about this, do some research, and quickly realise that there's not really any good reason why they're in London rather than Athens.

No, it won't do to claim that they were bought fair and square from the legitimate rulers of Greece two hundred years ago. Greece was occupied by the Ottomans at the time, and the Greeks were far from happy about being under imposed foreign rule -- so unhappy, in fact, that within nine years of the Parthenon Sculptures being shipped overseas, the Greeks began a successful revolution that won them their independence.

The Parthenon Sculptures weren't the Ottomans' to sell. That so many of the Parthenon Sculptures are in London now is a simple case of receipt of stolen goods.

Yes, we all know they'd probably have gotten damaged had they been still on the Acropolis during the War of Independence, with the Turks using the Erechtheion as a munitions store, just as they'd so disastrously used the Parthenon a century and a half earlier during a war with the Venetians. That most of the sculptures were away safely in London at the time surely preserved them. That's great. The Greeks are genuinely grateful for this. And as a reward, the British people have had two hundred years to admire them. It's time to give them back.

It is, frankly, dishonourable to try to pretend that they belong in London. It's the kind of thing that utterly gives to lie to any supposed sense of 'British fair play'.

That said, it's important to understand that we shouldn't be talking about returning them to Greece. We should be talking about returning them to Athens. There'd not be much point in sending them back if they were to end up in Corinth or Thessaloniki.

Pull up your seats. This bit matters. I'll simplify, but not by much.

An Education to Greece

The Acropolis -- the 'high city' -- was the ancient historical heart of Athens, a safe hilltop settlement. As time went on, more and more people began living around the base of it and on nearby hills, such that it became the religious and ritual centre of the city, the city's temple precinct. During the Persian invasion of 480-479 BC, the Persians occupied the city and destroyed the temples on the Acropolis as an act of revenge for their humiliation at Athenian hands in the battle of Marathon a decade earlier. Having eventually driven off the Persians, the Athenians resolved to leave the Acropolis as it was, as a permanent memento of what they'd experienced and triumphed over.

A few decades later they had second thoughts, and under Pericles embarked on building programme that -- in tandem with much else -- was destined to make Athens not merely, as Pericles put it in his famous Funeral Oration, 'an education to Greece', but an education to the whole world.

On the Acropolis this led to the construction of the huge monumental gateway called the Propylaia, the small Temple of Athena Nike which stood beside it, the rather ornate Erechtheion -- one important part of which is also in the British Museum, a series of smaller shrines, and above all the Parthenon, the great temple to Athena the Virgin.

Designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, who factored in a couple of marvellously subtle optical illusions that made the building even look more elegantly regular than it actually is, and with the whole project supervised by the sculptor Pheidias, later to become known as the creator of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia -- one of the seven wonders of the ancient world -- the Temple was an architectural and artistic eulogy to Athens.

It's crucial to understand this. The Parthenon wasn't just in Athens. It was of Athens. It was about Athens. Its whole purpose was to celebrate and glorify Athens. It makes no sense save in the context of Athens. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Parthenon Sculptures a special case.

A City Immortalised in Marble

The first phase in the sculptural project was the carving of 92 metopes in high relief; the metopes were square marble slabs, just over five foot high, depicting battle scenes, placed high up around the exterior of the Parthenon. The first ones visitors to the temple precinct would see were a series of metopes showing Greeks fighting Amazons, but as they followed the images around the long northern side they'd see a series of fights and duels from the Trojan War, then an array of depictions of the Greek Gods fighting giants, and finally, along the long southern side they'd see episodes of combat between Greeks and Centaurs. 

Every single set of metopes is designed to convey the same message: Greeks are not barbarians -- strange and sometimes savage people who make weird 'Bar bar' noises when they speak --  and when Greeks fight barbarians, they win. The Greeks, the Parthenon was saying in none too subtle a way, are the best.

Why would visitors experience the metopes in that order? Well, that's because the order in which they followed the imagery was largely dictated by the inner Ionic frieze, carved in low relief around the main body of the building, and visible from a distance between the Doric columns. It's represented in blue in the following diagrams, with the metopes being in red.

More than five hundred feet long and more than three feet high, the frieze, carved after the metopes were complete, focuses sharply on Athens itself rather than Greece in general. Depicting an idealised version of the annual Panathenaic Procession, the main narrative of the frieze heads north from the south west corner and turn east along the temple's long northern flank, the procession culminating at the eastern end with a depiction of the Gods, and what seems to have been the presentation of the peplos -- or woman's robe -- to Athena; every four years the highlight of the procession was the decoration of Athens' main cult statue of Athena with a newly-woven peplos.

Of the 378 figures that were on the frieze, 192 were cavalrymen. This is no accident: they represent the 192 Athenians who fell defending Greece in the Athenian victory at Marathon, that victory that John Stuart Mill said was a more important event in British history than the Battle of Hastings. 

Those 192 Athenians were buried just twenty-six miles from the Parthenon, graced with the rare honour by the Athenians of having been buried where they'd fought and died, rather than being brought home. It's impossible to downplay how much Marathon meant to the Athenians; when Aeschylus, arguably the greatest of ancient dramatists, died, his epitaph said nothing about his many artistic achievements. Instead it said just one thing: that he had fought at Marathon.

If the Doric metopes had celebrated Greece and Greece's superiority over barbarians, using legendary victories to celebrate such recent triumphs as Salamis and Plataea, so the Ionic Frieze celebrates Athens, Athena, and the immeasurably great Athenian achievement in having defeated the Persians at Marathon. 

Don't think for a moment, by the way, that it would have been difficult to have seen the frieze, tucked away as it was high up behind the columns and under the shadow of the roof. Greek sculptures in Antiquity weren't the understated  white marble beauties we see today; they were painted in the most vibrant of colours and were designed to catch the eye. Here, for instance, is a reconstruction of part of a pediment from the temple of Aphaia on Aigina:

The Parthenon sculptures would have been just as brightly painted, and would have been quite clear from some distance.

At either end of the Parthenon were its own pedimental sculptures, rendered in green in the diagrams; carved in the round after the Ionic frieze was complete, these were among the supreme sculptural achievements of classical Greece. At the western end, visitors would see the famous conflict between Athena and Poseidon over who would have patronage of Athens -- and can you imagine a better visual boast for a city than a depiction of the Gods themselves competing to see who would have the honour of being associated with it? 

Supposedly it was the legendary King Cecrops who chose between the Gods, picking the one who gave the greatest gift. Poseidon drew forth sea water from the ground, offering the Athenians that mastery of the sea they would later use to beat the Persians at Salamis, but Athena simply planted an olive tree, giving the Athenians the plant that would be the source of much of their wealth from then on.

Pediment on top, Doric metopes below, Ionic frieze within, all facing out. Simples.

 The eastern pediment depicted the birth of Athena, fully armed and fully aware, from the head of her father Zeus. A war goddess, she was prudent with it, unlike the bloodthirsty Ares, and so it was that the Athenians were to see themselves as people who could and would fight with courage and skill, but would not dedicate their lives to combat. As Thucydides records Pericles as saying in his funeral oration:

'... we rely, not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty... There are certain advantages, I think, in our way of meeting danger voluntarily, with an easy mind, instead of with a laborious training, with natural rather than state-induced courage.'

Inside, of course, was the giant chryselephantine statue of Athena herself, a wooden core plated with gold and ivory, just like Pheidias' later masterpiece at Olympia; alas, it has been lost to us for many centuries.

As it should be...

In the summer of 2010 I visited Athens for my fourth time, and on a memorable day that saw me twice giving directions to a flustered Dylan Moran and later walking into a lingering cloud of tear gas, I made my way to the new Acropolis Museum.

Situated just a few minutes walk from the Acropolis, with just the Theatre of Dionysus** between the two and with the Acropolis itself clearly visible from inside the museum, it's pretty much a model of what a museum should be.

Visitors to the museum walk in at ground level, looking down onto archaeological excavations of the classical city that's below nearly every footstep in central Athens, and work their way upwards through the museum, each floor representing and featuring artifacts from a later period, culminating, as you'd expect, with the Parthenon Gallery on the third floor. 

A few pieces of sculpture are all that's original there; otherwise plaster casts take the place of missing pieces, the vast majority of which are  in Bloomsbury but which are also scattered in the Louvre and elsewhere. Not merely do massive windows on all sides give a clear view of the Acropolis itself and the Athens guarded over by the Acropolis, but the gallery is arranged in such a way that the pieces -- or their replicas -- are placed in such a way that they can viewed in the same order that they were always meant to be viewed, seen in the same Greek light by which they were always meant to be seen.

Spaced out as they'd have been on the Parthenon itself, the pieces in the Acropolis Museum are organised in the correct order, facing outwards in glorious natural light, telling the same story they first told almost 2,500 years ago.

They're not crammed into a dimly-lit room, with the metopes huddled around the pedimental sculptures at the ends, and the frieze facing inwards in the centre.

Yes, I know people get to see them for free in London. That's wonderful. I'll genuinely miss them if they go back home, as they're something I make a point of visiting almost every time I'm in London. But I've seen them lots of times, and the British Museum will hardly be impoverished without them. No museum housing the Sutton Hoo or Mildenhall treasures -- or indeed the Lewis Chessmen -- could ever fall from the first rank of the world's museums; and I don't think there's any danger of the Rosetta Stone being credibly summoned back to Egypt.

The Parthenon Sculptures are about Athens. They only really make sense in Athens. We've had two hundred years to look at them. I think it's time the Greeks had their own chance.

And let's face it, they could do with the money.

______________________________________________________________________

*Down in the south Atlantic, if you're still wondering. Careful when you spread out your map, as the odd toastlet or biscuit crumb is liable to render them invisible.

** Not to be confused with the Theatre of Herodes Atticus, a mistake memorably made by Indiana Jones' fraudulent father.

Thousands of Words

It's long been a conviction of mine -- and as usual this is based on observation and not upon prejudice -- that academic talks with witty and dramatic titles tend towards tedium, whereas those with more workmanlike names can often surprise. Obviously, this doesn't work across the board, but it's a good rule of thumb, and one that first struck me when I attended a talk entitled 'Oaths, Omens, and Abominations' and found myself learning about Greek grammar.

The tragic aorist, to be particular.

I'm not saying it wasn't a good talk -- it was, and it's one where I really learned stuff -- but it certainly wasn't what I felt I'd signed up for.

In contrast, many's the talk I've attended with a dull title that's turned out to be utterly fascinating. Again, I'm not saying that all talks with uninspiring names prove inspirational; a serious contender for the worst talk I've ever attended had the kind of boring title that trained eyes recognised as promising hidden pleasures, but proved both condescending and deeply flawed, delivered in a ponderous manner and accompanied by an atrocious Powerpoint presentation, the nadir of which was an utterly incomprehensible flowchart.

Afterwards, as my colleagues made sure to take away their handouts lest the speaker notice the scathing comments they'd scrawled upon them, I remarked that I hoped the speaker was to be made pay for her own dinner; a friend who wound up seated opposite her during the meal then spent a tortuous two hours desperately trying to avoid discussing her paper.

Still, the principle holds, I think. Don't trust exciting titles, as they merely raise hopes, while things that seem functional and mundane can have poetic depths.

One of my favourite non-fiction books has perhaps the most soporific name of any book on my shelves, it being Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Dull of title it may be, but the book's a thing of rare beauty, and is one of those things that could change how you look at the world.

Scathing of charts and diagrams that are cluttered with useless or distracting information, and damning of those that mislead, Tufte sings the praises of elegant diagrams that convey large amounts of information in a clear and efficient way, especially those that do so in a narrative fashion. Not every picture's worth a thousand words, but some are worth that and more.

John Snow's cholera map, showing how outbreaks of the disease were distributed in the 1854 London epidemic, is recognised by Tufte as an exemplary instance of quantitative information being displayed visually, but the real highlights of his book are the nineteenth-century creations of the French engineers Ibry and Jean Joseph Minard.

Perhaps Ibry's most ingenious creation is this Paris-Lyons train timetable, as published by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1885. The horizontal axis reflects the time of day, while stations are placed proportionately by distance along the vertical axis. Southward-bound trains descend from left to right, while northward ones ascend from left to right. The table reveals an immense amount of information at a glance, with, for instance, it being immediately obvious that the steepest lines indicate the fastest trains.

There's no denying that this isn't all that clear when reproduced on a small size, but at its original larger scale it would have been admirably clear. Tufte's applied Ibry's methods to other modern timetables with impressive results, which really just leaves one wondering why this system hasn't been commonly adopted by transport authorities around the world.

Minard's historical maps are perhaps even more remarkable than Ibry's timetable. Indeed, Tufte is of the view that this 1869 map, depicting Napoleon's doomed march on Moscow, may well be the greatest statistical graph of all time, defying the pen of the historian, as Marey said, in its brutal eloquence.

The thick upper band depicts the advancing army as it sets out from the Polish-Russian border towards Moscow, the band narrowing along the way as thousands of men deserted and thousands more died through cold, starvation, typhus, and suicide; 422,000-strong at the beginning of the invasion, hardly more than a 100,000 reached Moscow.

The dark lower band -- tied to to temperatures along the route -- represents the broken and shrinking army's desperate retreat through the bleak and deadly Russian winter, harassed along the way by Russian peasants and irregular troops, such that barely 10,000 returned across the Neman.

I was horrified and thrilled when I beheld this map for the first time, as me being me I wondered whether Minard's methods could be applied to a similar map depicting Hannibal's march; surely, I thought, that'd be a boon to any book on his Italian invasion. Well, I discovered as I read on, Minard had beaten me to it and rendered such a map more gracefully than ever I could have done.

Working from Polybius' second-century figures, and following -- it would seem -- the route postulated by Jean-Louis Larauza, Minard showed how Hannibal's army set off from Cartagena with about 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, but after leaving men behind at the Ebro river to protect Punic Spain, continued to decline in numbers as it crossed the Pyrenees, Gaul, the Rhone, and especially the Alps, such that it eventually arrived in Italy reduced to a mere 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry.

Granted, this map takes Polybius' figures at face value, which I wouldn't do -- all else aside, I rather suspect that Polybius' figures exclude Hannibal's skirmishing troops who he regularly refers to as euzdonoi as distinct from pezdoi, his standard word for infantry -- but it nonetheless strikes me as an eloquent and valuable visual aid, and the kind of thing which should feature more often in modern books.

Dry it may look, but Tufte's book is an absolute wonder, and a call to arms. We shouldn't rely on lazy cookie-cutter diagrams or clutter our work up with noise and effects, the kind of sound and fury that signifies absolutely nothing. We can do so much better.

Leaving aside the Question of Whether there were Two Patricks...

Given previous posts arguing that Saint Patrick was a serious contender for the title of the Greatest Ever Briton, commenting on the impact he and other missionaries had on Britain and mainland Europe, pointing out that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn't get his legend quite right, and linking to a painting by the Brother of the mountain most closely linked with our first national saint, I was a bit of a loss as to what to say today.

And then I saw this story. It seems to be everywhere today.

Seemingly a Cambridge academic named Roy Flechner has announced that Patrick almost certainly fled to Ireland to shirk an inherited and unpopular career as a tax collector, and that while in Ireland, far from being a slave, he surely acted as a slave trader.  

It’s impossible to evaluate Flechner’s claims properly based on the various newspaper reports, as while they all say that Dr Flechner's published his research today, not one of them says where Flechner’s research can be found. I have no idea whether it’s in a journal or is a book in its own right. It seems that no journalists have done their job on this one. 

This Year's Fable

As much as it can constructed, Flechner’s thesis seems to be as follows:

Everything we can say with any confidence about Patrick is based on what Patrick himself told us; as such, we can’t take it at face value, not least because of the two extant documents written by Patrick – his Letter to Coroticus and his Confession –  the second seems to have been written in response to allegations of financial impropriety. 

(I'd also point out that the reference in it to spending 28 days crossing uninhabited country is most implausible, but let that go.)

The Letter says that Patrick’s father had been a decurion, an unpopular civil service position largely charged with tax collection, but the Confession refers to him as a deacon. Flechner argues that in Patrick’s lifetime Roman government was collapsing, which would have made it difficult and perhaps dangerous to discharge the duties of a decurion, and so became a deacon instead, passing on his decurial duties to his son.

Flechner takes the view that Patrick’s claim that he was kidnapped from Britain in his adolescence, forced to work as a slave, escaped after six years and returned to his home where he reclaimed his status should be regarded as fiction, an attempt at promoting and perpetuating his own image.

Escaped slaves, says Flechner, existed outside the law and could be killed with impunity or recaptured by anyone. What’s more, he says, ‘the probability Patrick managed to cross from his alleged place of captivity in western Ireland back to Britain undetected, at a time when transportation was extremely complicated, is highly unlikely.'

Instead, he reckons Patrick actually left Britain for Ireland as he wanted to escape the ‘poisoned chalice of his inherited position in Roman Britain’, and that he probably brought family wealth – in the form of slaves – with him to Ireland, becoming a slave trader before becoming a priest and missionary in his own right.

Now, I agree completely with Flechner that his thesis has the advantage of being free from the hagiographic reverence that has often vitiated attempts to retell Patrick’s story over the years, but I can’t help feeling that his thesis doesn’t quite work.

Patrick's Journey Home

The reference to Patrick feeling from his place of captivity in western Ireland leaves me uneasy, for starters. There’s nothing in either of Patrick’s writings that says where he was kept as a slave, barring a reference in the Confession to the journey from his place of captivity to the port from which he set sail from Ireland being about two hundred miles. Tradition, for what it's worth, has always said that Patrick's place of captivity was at Slemish in County Antrim. Yes, that’d be in north-eastern Ireland, not in western Ireland.

Here’s a painting of it by the Brother, if you’re interested. Not a bad spot, eh? I can think of worse places to be forced to work as a shepherd, even in snow, in icy coldness, and in rain.

Look at the Brother's site to look at it in gorgeous colour.

As for the difficulty Flechner envisaged Patrick would have had crossing the country, well, even if we discount the possibility of miraculous assistance, we still have to recognise that much of Ireland at the time was a land of forest and bog; it would have been dangerous to cross, but such inhospitable terrain would have been ideal country for runaways. I'm not saying the journey would have been easy, but it'd have been far from impossible.

He could have made it to the coast, and once there, who would have known he was a runaway slave unless he had somehow been branded to that effect? If he got home, is it really tenable that his own people would have sent him back as he hadn't been redeemed? That, after all, seems to be the implication of Flechner's claim that:

'The traditional story that Patrick was kidnapped from Britain, forced to work as a slave, but managed to escape and reclaim his status, is likely to be fiction: the only way out of slavery in this period was to be redeemed, and Patrick was never redeemed.'

I'm not saying Patrick might not have had to redeem himself to his former owner if he ever found himself in and around Slemish when he returned to Ireland as a mercenary, just that he says nothing either way on that subject; there's no evidence whatsoever to claim that Patrick was never redeemed.

The End of Rome

I’m also troubled by the assumption that in a situation where Roman authority and law was collapsing it would obviously have been the case that Patrick’s father Calpurnius’ decurial duties would have been passed on to Patrick when Calpurnius became a deacon. 

Partly I’m bothered by the improbability of such obligations being passed on to a teenage boy – for Flechner’s thesis to work, I think Patrick would have had had to have been an adult when his father became a deacon. That’s a change to Patrick’s chronology that wouldn’t be without repercussions.

I’m also bothered by the fact that Flechner seems to be glossing over how Patrick claimed in the first lines of his Confession that not merely was his father a deacon, but his grandfather Potitus was a priest:

‘I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age.’

It looks as though the priesthood was very much a family business for Patrick, and I’d be wary of putting too much weight on the reference in the Letter that says ‘by descent I was a freeman, born of a decurion father’.

More troubling still is the fact that Flechner seems to think that Patrick left Britain for Ireland at a time when Roman authority was collapsing. Traditional dating being unreliable, modern historians generally think Patrick was active as a missionary during the second half of the fifth century and so it seems unlikely that he can have been born much before 400 AD. 

So what? Well, Roman rule ended in northern and western Britain in the late fourth century, and ended in Britain as a whole in the early fifth century. Patrick was almost certainly from western Britain, somewhere between the Severn and the Clyde estuaries, so the likelihood is that Roman rule had ended at Bannavem Taburniae before Patrick was even born. 

Think about that. During the late Empire, decurions were tasked with collecting taxes on a local basis on behalf of the imperial government, but if Roman rule didn't apply in Bannavem Taburniae during Patrick's youth, then why on earth would his father have been expected to collect taxes? For whom? And is it even vaguely tenable that Patrick would have inherited such a pointless duty?

The fact is that Flechner has no more data to go on than anybody else, and that he's reading more into the sources than is actually there.

Surely, the most natural reading of the two documents is that Patrick's family were minor local aristocracy – the so-called decurion class – but that, given the collapse of Roman administration, they abandoned their previous decurial duties and took up ecclesiastical roles instead. It's wholly plausible that Patrick was one of the many Romanised Britons who were captured in Irish raids on the British coast, and that he spent years as a slave, before escaping, making his way to the coast and somehow being able to board a ship away from Ireland, eventually returning to Britain.

Don't believe me, though. There are children you can listen to instead.

The Superhero With A Thousand Faces

Few books have ever had as big an impact on me as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell's massively influential study of the archetypal hero's journey in the world's myths, legends, and folklore; since reading that just and a book-length interview with Campbell after I turned twenty-one, I've ploughed through several of Campbell's other books, including his monumental study of comparative mythology in general, The Masks of God. 

Why so many of our stories are similar is an interesting question, and one open to all sorts of answers, whether psychological, sociological, or theological. I'm inclined to favour a theological explanation, following the likes of Chesterton and Tolkien in seeing the legends of the world as prefiguring the Incarnation in which they were fulfilled; it makes sense to think of the story of Jesus as a true myth, where God expresses himself in reality rather than through dreams and poetic images. 

Still, attempted explanations aside, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact of how structurally similar our myths tend to be. Campbell's work has had a huge impact on Hollywood, as is well known -- George Lucas is surely his best known acolyte, but one thinks of George Miller too, and more recently Christopher Vogler, author of a staggeringly influential memo, and whose book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, has proved a potent conduit for Campbell's thinking. David Eddings has said that using mythic archetypes in storytelling is the literary equivalent of peddling dope, and in that sense there's a fair case for calling Vogler a narrative drug-lord.

His book, it's worth saying, is well worth reading, no matter what one thinks of it: his influence on the craft of storytelling has been such such that it needs to be understood. One thing I'm left wondering, though, is whether he had any influence on Disney's 1997  film Hercules, because that follows a very clearly beaten path and it's most definitely not the path beaten by the Heracles of ancient myth -- in any variant.

I'm not saying it doesn't owe a lot to Greek mythology -- it does, in that its loaded with characters and references from ancient Greece, but these ingredients are used in a recipe which is far from Classical. In fact, the story of Hercules seems to be not so much ancient Greek as modern American, in that as far as I can tell it draws from the template most firmly laid-out in 1978's Superman: The Movie.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. I've reeled this comparison off enough times over the years that it shouldn't take long here...

A Heavenly Child raised in Obscurity...

Both films start with a little baby boy being cherished by his parents in a place far from our own, a place where mere lesser mortals like ourselves don't belong. All, however, is not blissful in these paradises; Krypton is doomed, while Hades makes it known that his exclusion from Olympus does not please him...

Like Moses in his basket, the infant Kal-El is sent away from Krypton by his parents in a small spaceship destined for Earth, while Hades' henchmen kidnap young Hercules and take him away from Olympus where they attempt to turn him mortal. Each infant is found by a childless couple who resolve to adopt him as their own...

And all the adults are astonished by the little boy's prodigious strength. By this point, in case you're wondering, the Hercules story has already strayed some way from the myth; in the legends, he is indeed the son of Zeus and the strangling of serpents is an important tale of his infancy, but it's not quite like this. Rather, Heracles is the child of Zeus and Alcmene -- a mortal, and not Zeus's sister-wife Hera; consumed by anger and jealousy it was Hera who sent serpents to kill the baby in his cradle. I'll not point out any further differences, unless it's seems really obvious. You can look them up for yourself.

Anyway, the boys grow up and never quite fit in. Young Kal-El goes by the name of Clark Kent, and doesn't play football with the other teenagers in Smallville, while Hercules isn't allowed to play discus with other Greek lads of his age. Neither boy had any idea of his real identity, until he comes unto the possession of a mysterious amulet found with him as a child.

Taking the amulets with them, the boys leave home and set out on foot on a long journey, crossing the most barren of wildernesses...

Until they eventually reach great white temples...

Where they can finally speak to their real fathers, who tell them everything about who they really are and how it is their destiny to become heroes.

Clark's eighteen when he arrives at the Fortress of Solitude and begins his training, whereas Hercules isn't so young -- he'll fly off on Pegasus, who features in the Belleraphon myth, to meet and be trained by Philoctetes, who in Classical myth is someone who only shows up as Heracles dies, but will be eighteen by the time the crucial events in the story play out.

From Obscurity to the Big City

Anyway, once they're ready, they set out for the big city. Clark Kent, who we'll henceforth know as Superman, arrives in Metropolis, while Hercules goes to Thebes, 'the Big Olive' as it's known. The two heroes meet a sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued brunettes who comment on his innocent farmboy routine. Lois Lane will bestow the name Superman on Clark, while Megara refers to Hercules as Wonderboy.

Lois and Megara both fly with the heroes, much to the girls' consternation...

You've got me? Who's got you?

And both girls press the heroes for information about themselves, including potential weaknesses.

Do you like... pink?

Time goes by, and the heroes make great names for themselves, doing all manner of wonderful deeds and saving countless lives, but all is not well, because while they can soar through the skies, great dangers lies beneath their feet.

Deep under the ground live people who are determined to destroy our heroes, supervillains, for want of a better word, who have huge plans for real estate deals -- yes, both Lex Luthor and Hades both refer to their apocalyptic plans as real estate ventures -- that they realise Superman and Hercules could thwart.

Each of these villains is notionally aided by two none-too-bright henchmen...

And each does most of his scheming in a large round room, built around a large round map.

Triumph, Death, and Resurrection

Well, the villains eventually put their plans in motion and capture the heroes, removing their powers.

But though the heroes lie impotent, eventually they are enabled to get back on their feet so they can thwart the villain's plans and save the world.

Unfortunately, even then victory comes at a cost, as in both cases the price of the world being saved was the life of the girl. 

'There's some things,' says Phil to Hercules, 'you just can't change,' but Hercules refuses to accept that and instead sets out to change things by defying the law of death itself, bringing Meg back from the dead by going to the underworld and diving into the swirling waters of the Styx to save her. Likewise, Superman resolves to restore Lois to life by breaking the laws of time, despite the admonitions of his father; he will turn back time if that will restore the one he loves to life. 

Both men drive onwards, circling as fast as they can to save the ones they love. It takes all their effort -- just look at Hercules who's clearly dying or Clark who is bearing the strain of someone who loves absolutely and who would do anything to save someone who has no idea how much he loves her, someone who will never be able to understand how much he has done for her.

And how do the two stories end? Well, Lois and Megara are both restored to life....

While as for the villains, let's just say that they both meet their just desserts, with Lex Luthor being locked away and Hades being himself dragged into the Styx. Both villains, curiously, end up bald as coots.

I've been banging on about this for years, and whenever I say to people that the plot of Hercules is obviously based on the plot of Superman they invariably laugh and say that surely I've got it the wrong way round. If anything, isn't it more likely that the plot of Superman is based on the ancient legends of Hercules. And then I sigh, and point out that the plot of Hercules owes very little to the Greek myths. Sure, the ingredients are ancient, but the recipe is rather more modern.

Though of course, there are those who'd point out that it's anything but modern, as the Superman story in the broadest sense is the story of a profoundly Jewish hero, and that the film owes more than a little to the story of Christ. Jor-El's words to his son, saying 'The Son becomes the Father... and the Father the Son.' The name, Kal-El, supposedly meaning 'Star Child', but clearly a theophoric Hebrew name like Emmanuel. The childhood rescue from certain death -- itself an echo of the Moses story -- followed by a life in obscurity. The emergence after thirty years in obscurity to perform all manner of wondrous deeds and save life after life. The transformation of death so that it becomes a path to resurrection, triumph over evil, and the salvation of the world...

I've come to disagree with Joseph Campbell pretty profoundly in some respects, but he's taught me an immense amount, not least how to look at stories, and to think about where they came from. If you've not read anything by him, you should give it a shot. The Way of Myth, his book-length interview with Fraser Boa, was my introduction to him, but I think Bill Moyer's The Power of Myth might make an even better starter.

Stick your toe into the water. You might end up walking on it.