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. 

For a Friend

I've been reading a fair few short stories lately, and reading about them too -- trying to see behind the curtain, if you like, to understand what was in their authors' minds when writing them. It's given me a fine excuse to pore once more over The Habit of Being, that wonderful collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters. Here's one, just as a taster: her very first letter to Betty Hester.

Milledgeville

20 July 1955

Dear Miss A.,

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It's to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call "A Good Man" brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

You were very kind to wrote me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.

Yours sincerely,

The one frustrating thing about O'Connor's letters to Hester The Habit of Being is that it's just half of a conversation. Although the two didn't meet until a year after they first wrote to each other, they became close friends, and Hester wrote O'Connor hundreds of letters. Many of the letters between the two, not included in The Habit of Being, were made public in 2007. I have no idea of Hester's own letters to O'Connor were among them, or have survived in any sense.

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.

They Don't Teach Geography Like This Anymore - Part II

So, as I was saying, Professor J.M.D. Meiklejohn's 1890 A New Geography On The Comparative Method is a work to behold. For those of us, whether cabinet ministers or otherwise, who rave about how much better British education was back in the old days, it's quite the lesson.

About half the book deals with the delights of Europe, as I've described, after which it moves on to explore the wonders of the rest of what was then a red-splattered world.


Asia
India, or Hindustan as the book reminds us it is also known, is rightly marvelled at for its phenomenal diversity, and then commended for its sheer luck in having finally come under British rule. Because this is a Good Thing, remember:

'It has been for ages the object of envy and the prey of different conquerors; until at length it reposes in peace and comparative prosperity under the rule of QUEEN VICTORIA, EMPRESS OF INDIA.' (241)

Yes, she got capital letters. That was Prof M, not me.

North of Hindustan, of course, one can make one's way to Thibet, or the Snowy Kingdom, as Professor Meiklejohn refers to it:

'The inhabitants form a branch of the Mongolian Family. They are gentle, frank, dignified, courageous, fond of music and song. They are Buddhists in religion.' (277)

'When two persons meet,' he explains, 'they salute each other several times by showing the tongue and scratching the right ear.'


You may remember how Professor Meiklejohn believed the Germans to be the best-educated people in the world; well, they may have been the best-educated people, but China, on the other hand, seemingly has the most highly trained mountain ranges, the must erudite deserts, and the most learned cities:

'In some respects, China is still the best educated country in the world; and it possesses the oldest literature.' (276)

What's more, Meiklejohn's Chinese seem a friendly race, if somewhat inclined to odd behaviour.

'The most distinguishing mark of the Chinese is their courtesy and kindliness. "Even strangers have travelled from one end of the land to another without even meeting with a rudeness or incility." Age is reverenced by all. A drunk person is never seen in the streets. Industry is the chief passion; and peace the universally required condition. Most of their customs are the exact opposite of ours. The place of honour is the left; the mourning colour is white; the sign of being puzzled is to scratch the knee. Physicans are paid when their patients are well; their pay stops when they fall ill.' (276)

To which is added what seems to be a proverb:

'In China, "roses have no fragrance; roads no vehicles; ships no hulls; workmen no Sundays; and magistrates no sense of honour,"'

The Chinese do, however, come off second-best to the Japanese, with whom Professor Meiklejohn explicitly compares them:

'In character the Japanese exhibit striking contrasts to the Chinese. The Chinese are dirty, the Japanese scrupulously clean; the Chinese are conceited and despise everything foreign, the Japanese keep an open and receptive mind for everything that is good, no matter from what quarter it comes.' (283)

That Professor Meiklejohn should be such a huge fan of the Japanese is hardly surprising, given its similarities to his own homeland:

'The beautiful land of Japan, or "Country of the Sun," has often been called, and with much justice, the "Great Britain of the Pacific."'(280)

Lest we wonder what these similarities might be, he reels off a baker's dozen of apparent likenesses, my favourite of which is:

'The climates of both are addicted to fogs.' (281)

So much for the Far East. What of the parts of Asia nearer to home? Well, with reference to Asiatic Turkey -- that's the Ottoman Empire on the far side of the Bosporus -- we read of Syria:

'Syria is a long strip of high mountain country which stretches in an almost straight line from the Peninsula of Sinai to the Gulf of Scanderoon. Its coast is called the Levant. A small district in the south is called Palestine or the Holy Land -- a district about twice as large as Yorkshire.' (303)

The reference to Yorkshire may not be entirely accidental; there are those, of course, who refer to Yorkshire as 'God's own county' and say that God Himself is a Yorkshireman. No, I have no idea why.

Arabia sounds like a most exciting place:

'It has always been an isolated region -- a land apart. Its hot climate and its barren soil have attracted no settlers, and its waterless deserts have repelled invaders; while it has poured out horde after horde of warriors who carried the religion of Islam with fire and sword into the richest countries of Asia, Africa, and Europe.' (307)

Peppered, it would seem, with most exciting people:

'The Arabs form a branch of the Semitic family. The Arab is a noble-looking man -- tall, spare, muscular, and with brown complexion, dark-eyed, dark-haired. "Independence looks out of his glowing eyes;" he is quick, sharp witted, imaginative, and very fond of poetry. "Courage, temperance, hospitality, and good faith, are his leading virtues."
"The Arab is satisfied with little; but all that he owns must be of the choicest quality. His dates, his perfumes, his coffee, are the best in the world."' (310)

But if the Arabs are exciting, the Iranians, or the Persians as they then were, sound a thoroughly superior sort:

'The Persian presents a striking contrast, in character and manners, to the Turk. The Turk (or Ottoman) is a stock-breeder, a husbandman, and a soldier; the Persian is a trader and, by temperament, an artist. The Turk is a man of few words and of serious speech; the Persian is a fluent talker and a brilliat logician.' (315)

Really, one would hope we'd never cross swords with such splendid fellows.

The Afghans, on the other hand, clearly are mere ruffians, and best avoided. It's difficult to see why the British, Russians, and Americans keep invading and expecting it to work out okay:

'Compared with the Persians, the Afghans are rude, almost coarse, and careless of outward show. But they are skilful artisans, hospitable, generous, and even truthful -- at least in peace; but when their evil passions are stirred up by war, they are cruel, revengeful, treacherous, and greedy. "God shield you from the vengeance of the elephant, the cobra, and the Afghan," is a saying current among the Mahometan Hindus. When any specially atrocious act is done, the Afghans themselves speak of it as "an Afghan job!" "Nothing is finer than their physique, or worse than their morale." They are extremely independent; all are equal, and no clan will obey any one but its chief.' (320)

Africa
Onward, then, to Africa, with the relevant section opening as follows:

'Africa has been called the "Dark Continent." And this for two reasons: first, because it is the least known and almost inaccessible of all the continents; and secondly, because it is inhabited by dark races.' (329)

Professor Meiklejohn classifies the inhabitants of Africa as original natives, old immigrants such as Copts, Berbers, and Arabs, and new immigrants such as Dutch, English, and French. The original natives are the aforementioned 'dark races', and the book takes care to distinguish between Bantus, Negroes proper, and Hottentots and Bushmen. Of these it says:

'The Hottentots have a yellowish complexion, low stature, and weak muscles. The Bushmen belong to the pigmy peoples that are said to be descended from the old aborigines who were deprived of their lands by more powerful races. "If Africa is the continent of the great anthropoid apes (gorillas, etc.), it is also the home of the most ape-like human beings."' (343)

Yes, I'll just let that sit for a while.Victorian schoolchildren must have felt very lucky to be English. British, even. Best in the world, clearly.

Barbaric though the Africans themselves might be, the late nineteenth century was clearly a good time for them, with them being lucky enough to have caught the eye of Europe's eligible suitors:

'Africa is at present in the peculiar position of being ardently coveted by the most enterprising states of Europe.' (346)

Of the eight European powers then holding portions of the continent, Germany, we are told, is 'always eager for more,' while Italy 'looks with longing eyes towards Tripoli'. 'The little enterprising country of Belgium,' meanwhile, 'has also on eye upon Africa; and the King of the Belgians is the "Sovereign" of the Free Congo State.'

The 'Race for Africa' is returned to later on, with the book detailing a series of European agreements on how best to carve up the continent, preceding this with the observation that 'For some time past the greater powers of Europe have been engaged in seizing as much of Africa as they could safely lay hands on without embroiling themselves with each other. Germany has been, on the whole, the most active aggressor; but England has always been the most daring and persevering explorer.' (371)


The Americas
I'm sad to say that Professor Meiklejohn isn't nearly as extravagant in his comments on the New World than on the old, but I was struck by his thoughts on Greenland:

'Greenland is probably an archipelago of elevated islands which are almost completely buried under ice, and are joined together by ice.' (387)

None of that pub quiz nonsense of 'what's the largest island in the world?' for Professor Meiklejohn and his protegees, thank you very much. Seemingly there are those who think that view may be right, too, that Greenland may in fact be at least three large islands rather than one huge one, all three bound together by glaciers.

With regard to Canada Professor Meiklejohn raves about its promise and what it might achieve; of the United States he notes with approval how there are 'very few illiterates' in the northern states, and comments on how small its army of only 25,000 men is.

I didn't notice him saying anything about the Falklands. Of course, presuming they're 'as British as Whitehall', as I've been told, I'd expect him to say something of the sort.  


Australia
And there's Australia, of course, a land of oddities...

'Though nearly as large as Europe, it has only one river of any size or importance; and that river does not reach the sea, and sometimes does not flow at all. It is full of other oddities: mammals lay eggs; cherries have their stones outside; trees shed their bark, not their leaves; quadrupeds run on two feet; flowers have no scent; and many birds no song. When the first European settlers visited the country, they found no grain to eat, no domestic animal to give milk or to drawn burdens, and not the smallest trace in the continent of what is called civilisation.' (445)

The book, predictably, has nothing good to say of the Australian aborigines. Brace yourselves:

'The native Australian is of the average European height, has a very lean body -- no calves (as is general with the dark races), nose broad and fleshy, complexion coffee-brown, much hair -- curly but not woolly, and a long narrow head with low brow. He is one of the most degraded of savages -- without house or domestic animals, with no weaving, no pottery, and no religion. His language can count up to five -- and no further. He lives on shell-fish, lizards, snakes, frogs, worms, insects, grubs, etc. He sometimes eats his own children. The chief occupation of the men is hunting and war; of the women, getting food and cooking it.' (454)

I think that's enough, don't you? You should all feel thoroughly well-informed at this point.

They Don't Teach Geography Like This Anymore - Part I

Well, like Frank Baum's Woggle Bug, I now feel Thoroughly Educated.

Having talked about geography classes and my schooldays last night, I was delighted this morning to be shown a nineteenth-century geography book, Professor J.M.D. Meiklejohn's 1890 A New Geography On The Comparative Method. It was clearly a popular tome in its day, as my friends' copy proudly boasts of being the twenty-second edition of the book. 

It is, no doubt, the sort of book with which Michael Gove would think all British students should be acquainted. 

You'll no doubt be pleased to know that the book makes sure to confirm British schoolchildren in the conviction that they are, of course, the world's luckiest children. 'The British Isles,' it announces, 'occupy the best geographical position in the world.' (24)

Where the book really shines are in its sections on national stereotypes, or as it subtitles them, 'Character and Social Condition'. Allow me...

Of the French:

'The French people consist of a mixture of races -- Celtic, Romanic, and German; and their character gives evidence of the mental habits of all three. The Frenchman is said to be light and frivolous, but in most cases he is a very serious person; brave, when he is succeeding -- but too easily depressed; very clever with his hands, and generally amiable, polite, and urbane. Intellectually, the Frenchman is famous for lucidity of thought and expression, for fine taste and eloquence of style, for suppleness and even subtlety of intelligence, and for rigour and consecutiveness in his reasoning and methods. Few nations in the world have done so much for literature and art. The Frenchman is also a lover of justice, and has a keen feeling of his own dignity and equality. The working classes, more especially the small farmers, possess the virtue of thrift in the highest degree.' (98)

If the French are seen as being something of a curate's egg, the Dutch are clearly people of whom enough good cannot be said. 

'Attacked by the sea from without, and by rivers from within; gaining land from the ocean and saving it from river-floods; daily using the powers of wind and steam against the powers of water; employing the powers of water against hostile armies; gaining land here, losing it there -- but on the whole steadily gaining; wrestling new lands and farms from the depths of the sea and the beds of lakes, and thus making the whole kingdom grow and expland; eternally on the watch against inundations, -- such is the life of the nation called the Netherlanders.' (107)

And what sort of people does such a life of maritime warfare make? 

'The Dutch character has been determined mainly by two things -- the long struggle against the Spaniards, and the perpetual struggle against water. The Dutch love freedom and are very independent; they are hard-working and thrifty; they are brave and self-possessed; and they are generous to those who have been overtaken in disaster. The Dutchman is slow in promising; but he always keeps his promise. He is slow to make up his mind; but, having once made it up, he acts with untiring energy. He has plenty of common sense, and is fond of method. Generally taciturn and thoughtful, he is boisterous in his amusements. He is fond of old customs and old costumes; and quaint distinctive dresses still linger even in the towns. His most remarkable external virtue is cleanliness.' (113)

Yes, cleanliness. This seemingly, is a matter in which the Dutch have little choice.

'Cleanliness is a passion with the Dutch; and it is forced upon them by the moistness of their climate. From morning till night scouring, rubbing, scrubbing and washing goes on. Even the barges shines with polishing, and are "as clean as a new pin". "Stables are kept with the same care as a drawing-room." Houses, barns, gates, and fences are always bright, clean, and in thorough repair.' (114)

Frankly, this is a far cry from what I learned about the Cool Temperate West Coast Climate with a continental influence, but clearly the Victorians felt confident enough to take a more subjective approach to geography. 

If there's anyone the Victorian schoolchild was called upon to admire more than the Dutch, though, is would have to have been the Germans. 

'Germany is the name of the great military power which stands in the middle of Europe, and which is the chief guardian and guarantee for peace between the large and warlike empires that flank it on three of its sides.' (139)

Two of those, it's worth remembering, would have been France and Russia. Given how things played out within a generation, I can't help feeling this has a certain ring of irony. 

Later it informs us that 'Education is compulsory throughout Germany; and the German people are, on the whole, the best-educated people in the world... The Germans, on the whole, are a straightforward, honest, steady, hard-working, brave, and loyal people. The Empire is growing rapidly in population and in wealth; and, as a military power, it is the first in the world... German belongs to the same family of languages as English. The German printed in books is High-German; English is a kind of Low-German. German is a very pure language; English is greatly mixed with Latin and French words.' (145)

The English shouldn't feel too inadequate, of course, as the book had made sure to remind them early on of their essential Germanness, pointing out how the people of England belong to the Teutonic stock of the Aryan or Indo-European family. There was Scandinavian, Celtic, and Norman-French blood in England too, of course, but even so, 'In spite of all these mixtures, the Englishman is and remains a Northern Teuton.' (37)

The Scandinavians, it's worth adding, fall into the same general category of 'people more-or-less like us':

'The Norwegians are a singularly courteous, helpful, and kindly people: they are a nation of gentlemen. They are the "English of Scandinavia," and are famous for their tenacity of will. -- The Swedes are also good-natured, polite, and hospitable -- "cheerful without excess, firm without violence;" and they are also hard-working and thrifty. The vice of both nations is intemperance.' (167)

We later hear of dirty Russian peasants and Greek schoolboys learning their pages of Homer off by heart, but Where the book really comes into its own, of course, is when it turns towards feckless Latin types. We'd had a hint of that in its ambivalence towards the French, but it's once it turns to Italy that things get really interesting. Italy, of course, is raved about, but the Italians? Well, they don't fit their stereotype, says the book, making sure to remind us what that stereotype was...

'The common notion is that they are extortioners, uncivil, given to revenge, assassination, lying, treachery, and dirt. This is a mistake. The most impartial travellers speak warmly of "the disinterested couresy, the unselfish kindness with which they have been universally treated." The genuine Italian is kind and courteous to all -- high and low, rich and poor; and his courtesy is enhanced by a wonderfully gracious, charming, and attractive manner. He is sober and thrifty, and an ardent lover -- as he cannot help being -- of his country.' (199)

And then we come to the Spaniards. 

'The peoples of Spain differ from each other as much as the climates. The Catalan is hard-working, strong-willed, sober, and thrifty; the Murcian is lazy, sleepy, and given to reverie; the Valancian is industrious, gay, and easily induced to use his knife; the Arragonese so stubborn that he "drives in nails with his head"; the Andalucian graceful, eloquent, charming in manner, fond of song and dance and colour, lazy, poor -- and content to remain so. The Galicians and Asturians are the hewers of wood and the drawers of water both for Spain and Portugal. -- The "noble science of bull-fighting" still, unhappily, continues to brutalise the emotions of the otherwise noble Spaniard. 

The siesta or afternoon sleep, is an institution in Spain. Then, every city is like a city of the dead.' (211)

So much for the highlights of Europe. If I have time, I'll tell you tomorrow all about the rest of the world.

Terry Pratchett and the Right-to-Die Debate

A.S. Byatt caused a stir some years back when she publicly disparaged the phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, describing them as little more than a comfortable patchwork of clichés, unworthy of comparison with the writings of such fantasists as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, or Terry Pratchett. Pratchett, she felt, was an author unfairly neglected, notable for – among other things – his amazing sentences, his metaphysical wit, and the startling originality with which he dealt with death.

I’ve long agreed with her. Pratchett’s books fill a shelf at home, many if not most of them graced with his signature, mementos of all the times in Dublin and Manchester I’d queued for hours to thank him for the joy he’d given me, to describe playing a parade of characters in an amateur production based on his Wyrd Sisters, and to talk of another of Beaconsfield’s great authors, G.K. Chesterton.

Pratchett had largely been responsible for leading me to Chesterton, whose writings had in turn been instrumental in drawing me back to the Faith, so I’ve always felt I owe him a great debt.

Pratchett’s books regularly strike a Chestertonian note. We might think of the clear debt Monstrous Regiment owes to The Man Who Was Thursday, the philosophical outlook that sees the most tired of preconceptions turned on their head, or snippets of wisdom that recognise that life is a gift, with human life being perhaps the most precious gift of all, and that there can be no true standard by which things can be judged moral in a wholly material universe.

The profundity of Pratchett’s writing demonstrates how right Chesterton was when he explained how foolish it is to assume funniness and seriousness are incompatible.

In 1998’s Carpe Jugulam, for instance, right after dismissing the question of how many angels could dance on the end of a pin by airily saying that if the pin in question is a typical household pin then the answer is ‘sixteen’, Pratchett’s hard-headed witch Granny Weatherwax addresses her priestly travelling companion in a far more pointed fashion:

‘And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than that--’

‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.’

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better working definition of sin.

I was horrified to learn in December 2007 that Pratchett was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, though I applauded how he subsequently used his plight to campaign for increased research into Alzheimer’s and to help people understand the condition, all the while continuing to write books to delight and enrich us.

Within two years of disclosing his condition, however, Pratchett announced that he had no intention of dying naturally and hoped to be helped to end his life when he felt the time was right; since then he has become Britain’s most prominent advocate of assisted suicide, despite the fact that he believes that his wife would like to look after him through his illness until the very end.

This advocacy bore fruit some weeks ago with the publication in Britain of the findings of the privately-appointed ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’, which argued that adults diagnosed with less than a year to live should be allowed to request and receive medication to help end their lives, and which scorned the current status of assisted suicide in British law as inadequate and incoherent.

Wrongly and all-too-frequently presented as an independent body, the Commission was independent only in the sense that a lynch mob could be described as an independent jury; unofficial but by no means impartial, it was proposed by the lobby group known until 2005 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and was largely funded by Terry Pratchett.

While it may be too easy to sneer that whoever pays the piper calls the tune, it can hardly be accidental that the Commission’s chair, Lord Falconer, and nine of the eleven other commissioners began their work as known supporters of assisted suicide.

More than fifty organizations boycotted the Commission in response to its blatant bias; the British Medical Association publicly questioned the Commission’s independence and impartiality. This had not been the case with the House of Lords’ 1994 Select Committee on Medical Ethics or its comprehensive and wide-ranging 2004-5 Select Committee on Assisted Dying, which received more than 14,000 submissions from the public and took evidence from more than 140 expert witnesses in four countries before recommending that there should be no change in the law on this matter.

None of Ireland’s national broadsheets saw fit to mention any of this in their scant coverage of the private commission’s findings, just as they neglected to report that the vast majority of Britain’s healthcare professionals are opposed to assisted suicide, and that among the most prominent opponents of assisted suicide are all the UK’s major disability rights organizations.

That such bodies should oppose the legalisation of assisted suicide shouldn’t surprise us; they recognise that a right to die, once enshrined in law, could all too easily become a duty to die, especially for the most vulnerable and least obviously productive among us.

We should remember how the hugely influential Baroness Warnock, Britain’s leading moral philosopher, argued in 2008 that dementia sufferers should consider taking their own lives rather than inconveniencing others and wasting taxpayers’ money, an argument that was roundly condemned by, among others, leading figures in the Alzheimer’s Society and the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

Tragic though cases such as Terry Pratchett’s are, it’s worth keeping in mind how it has been at least a decade -- perhaps longer -- since anyone has been prosecuted for helping a loved one take their own life. Hard cases make bad law, and as Peter Smith, Archbishop of Southwark, has said, we cannot change laws that are there to protect the vulnerable without grave long term consequences. Campaigns to legalise assisted suicide distract from our need to put our efforts into improving palliative care, so that when we die, we can do so with real dignity.

In his controversial 2011 documentary, Choosing to Die, Pratchett said that ‘When I can no longer write my books, I'm not sure that I will want to go on living’.

The idea that some lives aren’t worth living ran through the programme, but we are more than our abilities. We matter because of our humanity; only things have value merely because of what they can do.

People as things, that’s where it starts.

-- from The Irish Catholic, 26 January 2012

Midnight Mass

It being Christmas Eve, and with Christians imperilled in the most ancient heartlands of the Faith, this seems as good a time as any to type this up....

 'The 24th of December 1099 was the first Christmas Eve for more than 450 years on which free, armed Christians might celebrate the Nativity in Bethlehem. The great marble basilica built by the great Constantine was packed to overflowing. Many of the congregation had been there all day, to make sure of getting in; but places had been kept for the distinguished lords come down from the north, Bohemond of Antioch and Baldwin of Edessa, and tall Tancred had pushed his way in to kneel beside his uncle.

The Midnight Mass of Christmas, after the Latin rite which was now the only use in Bethlehem, was to be offered by Daimbert, Archbishop of Pisa, the newly arrived papal legate with the pilgrimage. The new legate was evidently as tough as his predecessor; for he proposed, after offering the Midnight and Dawn Masses in the Church of the Nativity, to ride to Jerusalem and sing the Morning Mass of Christmas within the Holy Sepulchre. Of course he had been fasting throughout the Vigil of Christmas, and he must continue the fast until dinner on Christmas Day.

When the clergy entered Bohemond had been kneeling on the marble pavement for some hours. This was the very place, the very time, of the Incarnation; the manger in which God had become Man was only a few feet away. To be free to kneel here at this hour the best knights in Christendom had left their homes; for three years they had marched and fought, until the greater part of them were dead; but the survivors had accomplished all they set out to do. Tears streamed down Bohemond's cheeks as he tried to thank God for the Incarnation. Then he began to pray for the souls of dead comrades. But they were martyrs who had gone straight to Heaven. they would not need his prayers.

He was accustomed to long hours in church, to kneeling on bare stone pavements. But it was difficult, tonight of all nights, to keep secular thoughts out of his head. Our Lady had lain on this spot of earth in the agony of childbirth, while St Joseph cleared up the droppings of the ass and the ox. But it had been a tricky moment when Tancred pushed in to kneel on his right, within arm's length of Count Baldwin kneeling on his left. Luckily the two had smiled at one another; this was not a place for enmity.

The bell tinkled for the Consecration. God was present again in body as He had been for the first time more than a thousand years ago. Peals thundered from the tower in token of rejoicing. That brought a comforting memory. Only a few months ago Tancred had hung those loud bells. The infidels who had ruled here so long did not tolerate bells in Christian churches.

Here was the Pax coming round. They had brought it to him gratifyingly early, probably the first among the laity. but politics could not be ignored even on this sacred occasion. He motioned to the subdeacon to present the little olive-wood carving first to Baldwin and then to Tancred. As he himself kissed it in third place he knew with joy that those two had once again exchanged the Kiss of Peace. In a few moments they would receive Communion side by side. In Cilicia Baldwin had compassed the deaths of many Apulians, and the injury was still unavenged; but after such a reconciliation in such a place the blood-feud could never be revived.

As he received Communion the love of God entirely filled his mind. But he was not a mystic, and he could not keep his soul at full stretch for very long. As often happens, the Devil began to tempt him while he was making his thanksgiving. Was he worthy to receive the Body of God? Was he truly in a state of grace? Was he genuinely a pilgrim?

Such thoughts must be faced, and dismissed. No Christian was worthy of anything, but in receiving Communion he was obeying the Will of God. If there was such a thing as a Church, he was in a state of grace; he had been absolved by a priest who had received the power of absolution in unbroken descent from the Apostles. Was he also a pilgrim, entitled to the Great Pardon promised by Pope Urban?'

And so on.

That's from Count Bohemond, a 1964 historical novel by Alfred Duggan, a good friend of Evelyn Waugh, and a man whose sense of the grittiness of Christianity seems to have been just as clear as Waugh's. I first read that passage on a now-defunct blog some years ago, and intrigued by it I sought the book out.

In the main the book's not nearly so explicitly theological as in the passage above, and concentrates on the characters, the violence, the rivalries, and the intrigues that marked the First Crusade. It doesn't go into the historical roots of the conflict, which it presents -- as in some ways it must have seemed to those first crusaders -- as being in many ways just another stage in the Norman expansion that had in previous decades seen them conquering England, southern Italy, and Sicily. They were warriors; fighting was what they did.

Still, good though it's been to revisit Duggan's book this evening, it's left me feeling somewhat maudlin. I don't know why it is that I didn't visit Bethlehem when I was in the Holy Land years ago. I wish it were practical to go to Midnight Mass this evening, as I've never been before. And far more important than my own petty regrets, it strikes me as a tragedy that throughout the world this evening and tomorrow there'll be Christians who'll be unable freely to celebrate the Incarnation. 

But this has always been the way. We shouldn't leave Herod out of our Nativity plays. The Church was born in the jaws of the wolf.

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.