Classic Comics: Thoughts from 1997

Most people think they know what comics are: “crude, poorly drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” in the words of Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking 1993 work Understanding Comics. Recognising this to be a ridiculously narrow, not to mention subjective, definition, McCloud set out to discredit it. Starting from Will Eisner’s description of comics as “sequential art”, McCloud eventually reached a far more precise and comprehensive definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Having seen McCloud demonstrate how things as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry and the Stations of the Cross can thus be regarded as comics, I began to consider whether or not the classical world might have contributed to the artform. When I was fortunate enough to meet McCloud in 1994, he persuaded me that there were probably plenty of examples of comics in classical art and a course in Roman relief sculpture later that year convinced me of this. 

In this article I shall not attempt a comprehensive survey of such examples, as, space restrictions aside, I am hardly qualified to do so. Instead, I shall focus on a very small number of art works that clearly illustrate that the principles of comics were quite evident in Greek art.

Narrative was a vital element in ancient art and by the middle of the seventh century BC Attic vase painters were painting pictures that often continued around vases, separated by bands of decoration. Having an oblong shape, the pictures lent themselves to subjects such as processions, races, and hunts, as, being essentially narrow friezes, they required many figures to fill them. Though these friezes did not always have a chronological element they certainly sometimes did, an excellent example of this being found on the Francois vase, painted by Kleitias around 570BC.

Along with more conventional subjects such as the procession of guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the funeral games of Patroklos, the vase also illustrates the story of the pursuit of Troilos. The frieze extends halfway around the vase and shows a number of distinct scenes, clearly separate from each other in both time and place, on a continuous background. At the far left is a fountain house where a girl stands waiting for her hydra to fill. Next are the figures of Hermes, Thetis, and Troilos. After is Priam receiving the bad news in sorrow, and finally two of Troilos’ brothers can be seen setting out from the city gates to avenge his death. Assuming that the frieze is “read” in this way, its sequential nature is clear.

Greek art was clearly not “photographic” in nature, in that it was not taken for granted that a single image should represent a single moment. A good example of this is evident on the neck of a mid-seventh-century Attic amphora found in Eleusis. It features an illustration of Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops Polyphemos. In the Odyssey the story is clearly related: Odysseus plied Polyphemos with alcohol, the Cyclops then fell asleep, and Odysseus blinded him. Here, however, the Cyclops is depicted sitting up, with one hand trying to push away the heated stake wielded by Odysseus, while clutching his wine cup with the other. Clearly the wine cup, which really belongs to an earlier part of the story, is depicted in order to hint that the Cyclops is drunk rather than still drinking.

Perhaps the most well-known “non-photographic” image in Greek art is a scene showing Achilles and Ajax playing some form of board game on an Attic black-figure amphora made and painted by Exekias between 540 and 530 BC. 

This vase features “speech balloons”, perhaps the most distinctive element of modern comics, a device which through attempting to represent sound in a scene also introduces the concept of time. 

Extracts from Understanding Comics, explaining how in comics speech bubbles can subvert otherwise 'photographic' images.

Achilles says “four” and Ajax responds “three”, possibly referring to dice scores. It is not clear whether Ajax is responding to Achilles, Achilles is responding to Ajax, or both men are speaking at once; what is certain is that this image does not represent a single moment, but rather the length of time it takes the two men to speak.

The two heroes are labelled above their heads: Achilles is on the left, with Ajax on the right.

One black-figure vase, Boston 08.292, is a perfect example of Greek comics. This vase features what McCloud calls an “action to action” transition, probably the most common type of “panel to panel” progression in comics. One side of the vase shows a man in a vineyard courting a young boy. When the vase is turned around, however, the young boy is jumping to embrace the man. Though the background remains continuous, the pictures are clearly intended to represent the same couple, with one scene obviously following the other.

Greek vase painting, therefore, clearly provides examples of what would now be termed comics, but there are also examples to be found in architectural sculpture.

The low-relief metopes on temples offered an obvious opportunity to tell a story in pictures, but it is difficult to tell how often this opportunity was taken. The Parthenon metopes, for instance, seem to have been put in place in such a way that sequence was largely irrelevant, whereas the metopes on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, dating from the second quarter of the fifth century BC, may have been intended to tell a story.

The twelve metopes there represent the twelve labours of Herakles, and are ordered in such a way that Herakles is evidently older in the twelfth metope than the first. The final metope depicts the cleansing of the Augean stables, two places later than conventionally related, with the acquisition of the apples of the Hesperides and the capturing of Cerberus being brought forward to the tenth and eleventh places. This might suggest that the metopes are merely showing scenes for Herakles’ life in no particular order, but as the traditional order postdates the building of the temple at Olympia this seems an unsafe conclusion; it seems more likely that this collection may represent the first attempt to assemble the twelve episodes into one story.

Atlas offering the apples of the Hesperides to Heracles, with Athene watching.

The continuous frieze common to temples built in the Ionic order, however, can be seen to demonstrate principles of comics with remarkable subtlety. The Parthenon offers an excellent example of this.

The Parthenon’s Ionic frieze was about 160 metres long and showed an idealised version of the Panathenaic procession. Though the frieze was continuous and therefore seemed to be one image, there was clearly chronological progression in it. 

The western end, the first to be seen by people coming from the Propylaea, featured horsemen gathering for the procession, which begins at the south-west corner. Continuing along the northern side the procession had many elements –  horsemen,musicians, etc – before reaching the eastern end. Here it culminated with the gods looking on as a group of people held a peoplos, which would have been presented to the sacred olive-wood statue of Athene on the Acropolis. The south side of the frieze, which was not as visible as the other three sides, also had an eastwards direction converging at this scene.

The Parthenon frieze, assembled as one text, read from right to left and top to bottom.

Clearly this was sequential art, the appearance of which would have been heightened by the bright colours in which it was painted. 

The fact that it would have also been seen through gaps between columns would also have given it an added element of timing – the columns would have acted as “gutters” or panel divisions.

Overall, therefore, I think it can be plainly seen that the principles that make comics what they are were quite evident in Classical Art. Though I’ve only dealt with Greek art up to the mid-fifth century BC, the traditions of sequential art continued throughout the Hellenistic period as can be seen in the Telephus frieze surrounding the altar of Zeus at Pergamon and thrived in the Roman world, with Trajan’s column being but the most obvious example.

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Originally published in UCD Classical Society Journal, 1996/1997, and tweaked here merely to amend the most clunky of sentences. I found this in the shed today, and was amused to see how my writing had changed. Glad, too. Mind, it has been a very long time. 

Christmas Trees, and Belgian Waffle

Few things exasperate me quite as much as the perennial ‘War on Christmas’ stories. They’re usually ill-founded, they leave otherwise sensible religious people sounding crazy, and their inevitable correction enables clueless sorts to start spouting anti-Christian nonsense of their own that almost invariably goes unchecked.

I'm not going to link to people about this one, because I'm annoyed with folk on both sides of this argument as I think they've all let themselves down, but today, for instance, we had the spectacle of people muttering darkly about Brussels having decided that instead of having its traditional Nativity Scene and Christmas Tree in the Grand Place, it would replace them with an ‘electronic winter tree’. 

Seemingly, the Brussels councilwoman Bianca Debaets believes that this decision was down to religious sensitivities, saying, ‘For a lot of people who are not Christians, the tree there is offensive to them.’ 

Philippe Close, president of Brussels Tourism is suitably dismissive of this attitude, saying, 

‘Let’s be clear. There’ll be a Christmas tree and a Nativity scene. Christmas traditions will be respected. The theme this year is Winter pleasures, at the huge Christmas market that has a worldwide reputation. We wanted to emphasise culture and modernity, so asked artists to reinvent the Christmas tree, which is actually a pagan symbol.’

So it seems the plan is to have the Nativity scene there as usual, although the tree is indeed to be replaced with a 25m installation with a vague tree shape, made from screens and with a viewing platform at the top. About 12,000 people have signed a petition asking that the traditional tree be restored, but I’m not clear on their reasoning; it may have been aesthetic or environmental as much as anything else, given that this ‘tree’ looks incredibly tacky and surely requires a ludicrous amount of power.

Mmmm. Tasteful, traditional, *and* environmentally-friendly. Go Brussels.

So, the main story here is a storm in a teacup. There’ll still be a crib, there’ll be something vaguely reminiscent of a tree, and this has nothing to do with placating the 25pc or so of Brussels’ population who are Muslims, which isn’t really surprising as Muslims tend to be grand with the whole Christmas thing. 

That said, I find myself wanting to kick furniture whenever I see people wittering about Christmas trees being pagan symbols. This, frankly, is historical ignorance and incompetence at its worst. It always amazes me to see people who shout and scream about evidence and scientific ignorance propagating such shameless rot.

It’s the same kind of claptrap as saying ‘People nowadays insult people by sticking up their fingers at them, and the archers at Agincourt did that, so that must be why people do it now.’ 

Leaving aside the fact that the evidence doesn't even suggest that the archers at Agincourt did any such thing, this is utter gibberish because it fails to demonstrate a connection. All it does is note two similar behaviours and proclaims a link between them. There might be correlation at work, but there’s no evidence of causation. 

People like to bang on about the pagan roots of Christmas, but doing so requires a) ignorance and b) a fair amount of unhistorical thinking. 

Yule live to regret this...

Sometimes they’ll say it’s based on Yule, for instance. The ancient Germanic and Norse festival of Yule, I mean, not the modern made-up form of Yule, which like all Neopaganism is really just a reaction to Christian practices and can’t be dated any further back than the nineteenth century.

The problem with this Yule is that it’s based on very flimsy evidence, which also happens to ridiculously Teutonocentric; it's a version of that Edwardian notion of everything worth talking about being German. Still, the big issue is its flimsiness.

Writing in the eight century, Bede says Yule was the name the Angles and Saxons gave December or sometimes December bleeding into January. Seemingly they had a big celebration on the same night as the Christians celebrated Christmas, calling it the mothers’ night, though Bede doesn’t know why. Even assuming that Bede was right about this festival, which he might not have been, given that Anglo-Saxon paganism was in its death throes when he was writing, this isn’t saying a lot.

Pretty much everything else we ‘know’ about Yule is from thirteenth-century Christian writers, who say that their Viking ancestors had celebrated a Yule feast, involving the mass slaughter of animals and the sprinkling of all present with animals' blood. Our sources say the Norse had shifted the date of Yule to coincide with Christian celebrations, but modern scholars seem to think that it could have fallen almost any time after the middle of November. 

So, given that Yule could have happened at any point between mid-November and January, and may have been shifted to synchronise with Christmas, and was described by our sources in a manner that rather differed from typical Christmas celebrations in certain obvious ways, it’s hard to see how people can credibly argue that Christmas was based on Yule in any meaningful sense.

Of course, if you want to get back to your imagined roots, why not go the whole hog? I’m sure nobody would mind if you massacred your family pets and smeared their blood all over yourselves and the walls of your houses to celebrate the days getting longer. Go for it. Knock yourself out.

I get rather Saturnine about this nonsense...

The other standard modern trope on this is that our dating of Christmas was purely a sanctification of a preexisting pagan feast. This idea seems to have been thought up by the German Paul Ernst Jablonski in the early eighteenth century, when he noticed that in the Julian Calendar the Winter solstice took place on 25 December; assuming that this must have been a pagan Roman festival, he cited this as another instance of the Catholic Church embracing paganism. 

The Benedictine Dom Jean Hardouin, while disagreeing with Jablonski’s interpretation, accepted his basic assumption without analysing whether it was correct, and so a modern myth was born.

Now, it is true that the Romans celebrated a winter festival called the Saturnalia, and it is also true that in 274 AD the emperor Aurelian instituted the feast of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the winter solstice under the guise of the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, the solstice falling on 25 December under the Julian calendar. 

It’s therefore understandable that people who can’t be bothered to look up sources might have assumed that the dating of Christmas to 25 December was simply a case of the Christianization of Roman festivals, especially in connection with the notion of Jesus as the Light of the World and the longstanding Christian tradition of having the Day of the Sun as the principal day of worship.

Thing is, though, this is little more than assumption, and there’s at least as much evidence against it as there is for it. 

For example, it seems that St Hippolytus of Rome, writing several decades before Aurelian’s institution of the pagan feast recorded the date of Christ’s birth as 25 December. In his Commentary on Daniel, Hippolytus said that Jesus’ birth took place ‘eight days before the kalends of January’.

(Granted, there's a possibility that this was a later interpolation, but it's hard to see an argument for this having been the case that doesn't depend on the circular argument that 'the date wasn't settled until after this, therefore any evidence for the date before this should be discounted'.)

That’s not to say that Jesus was born on 25 December, but to point out that the tradition of his being born then seems to have existed by 235 AD, when Hippolytus died, whereas the Romans didn't have Winter sun festivals until 274 AD. 

That date could have been roughly established by early Christians counting forward from the claims in Luke 1 that Jesus was conceived six months after John the Baptist, who was himself conceived when his father Zechariah was serving in the Temple at Jerusalem as a member of the priestly division of Abijah. Certainly, this was an argument used by St John Chrysostom, who died in 407 AD, using calculations based on how Rabbinical tradition had frozen the priestly schedule following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

Alternatively, it seems more likely that the date was largely derived from the Jewish tradition that prophets had an ‘integral age’, whereby they were thought to have died on the same date as that on which they were conceived or born. Since some early Christians dated the Crucifixion to 25 March – in connection with the Passover – it followed then that Jesus must have been born or conceived on 25 March. They ran with conception, as commemorated to this day with the feast of the Annunciation, and counted forward nine months to Christmas.

Again, I'm not saying that the early Christians got the date of Christmas right. I'm just saying that it seems they dated it based on Jewish tradition, not pagan ones. This shouldn't really surprise us, given just how Jewish the early Christians were.

So, for the third of my tree points here...

Are Christmas trees pagan symbols, or even more dramatically as I’ve seen them described elsewhere, pagan symbols of winter rebirth?

Well, they’re obviously not the latter. If we’re using evergreen trees, then they don’t die in the first place so by definition can’t be reborn. If we’re using deciduous ones, which I really hope we’re not, then they don’t get reborn in the winter, and indeed don’t show any signs of life till the Spring.

To be fair, this probably uses up a few auld watts too...

Were trees sacred to pagans? Well, yes, they often were. So were rocks, hills, rivers, fires, storms, doorways, you name it. Good luck trying to thinking of things that pagans could have thought of as sacred that pagans never thought of sacred. Frankly, it’d be hard to start any kind of modern tradition without some kind of pagan precedent. That doesn’t mean there’s a link.

Trees appear to have had an important role in the general mytho-religious matrix of the ancient and early medieval Germans, English, and Norse. The World Ash Yggdrasil, for instance, seems to have been utterly central to Norse myth,* and the story of Wessex’s own Saint Boniface shows just how important trees could be for the Germans in the period the less clued-in still call ‘The Dark Ages’. 

According to Willibard’s Life of Boniface, there was a sacred oak tree in Germany, in what is now northern Hesse. Boniface cut it down – the Life claims that he started to do so and a wind finished the job – and the locals were so amazed that they converted to Christianity. Boniface used the timber from this sacred oak to build a chapel, dedicated to Saint Peter, which became the nucleus of his second monastic foundation, which he established at Fritzlar. This was in the early eighth century.

Here’s the thing, though. The Christmas tree, as a phenomenon, seems to date back no earlier than the sixteenth century, and certainly no earlier than the fifteenth. 

Insofar as we can ascertain the origins of the Christmas tree, it seems to have been a development of the late Medieval Paradeisbaum. The Paradise tree featured in morality plays connected with the Garden of Eden, but whenever morality plays were put on in Winter it was necessary to decorate evergreen trees with apples and other props in order to make them look like a semi-credible fruit tree, suitable for the paradise that Adam and Eve lost. 

Tradition ascribes the creation of the Christmas tree to Martin Luther, but the story looks like a pious fiction. There is some evidence of trees being decorated after the fashion of Paradise trees in the guildhalls of late fifteenth-century Riga and Talinn, and it seems that during the sixteenth century Germans took to bringing evergreen trees into their homes, not merely decorating them with fruit but also adding pieces of gingerbread, wax ornaments, and strings of nuts. 

I've heard that they caught on as specifically Protestant counterpoints to Catholic cribs, but while that strikes me as very plausible, I've not seen any evidence on this one. I'd expect it to be out there, but I've no books on that topic, and the internet has a habit of coming up short on serious historical stuff. 

Granted, this phenomenon was a German custom, but there seems to have been an 800-year gap between Boniface hacking down the sacred oak and Germans starting to bring trees into their houses. If you really want to argue that Christmas trees were pagan customs, you need to produce evidence. 

Or, I suppose, you can just make things up.

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* I say 'seems', of course, because pretty much everything we know about Norse myth is drawn from Christian accounts of the myths after they’d ceased to be part of a living religion; they are, in effect, Christian fairy tales based on long-lost legends. Oddly enough, Cracked more or less has it right.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012

Ninjas, Vikings, and Celtic Fancy

Those of you with long memories may recall how last summer I enlightened you both by exploring a remarkable episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in which the viridian foursome visited the Emerald Isle, there to stroll inconspicuously through a Dublin as empty as though the Queen were visiting, before shacking up in a castle that had somehow evaded the tender cares of An Taisce and thwarting an assault on my home city by the denizens of Dublin Zoo's pets corner.

No, really. Go and look.

Anyway, early in the lads' adventures Splinter takes them through Fusiliers' Arch -- that's Traitors' Gate to the more unreconstructedly nationalist among you -- into Stephen's Green, there to tell them of Ireland's history, with the aid of the many statues in the park. He homes in straight onto a statue of Ireland's principle patron saint, there to tell the boys that Ireland is a land of magical legends, including that of Saint Patrick, who drove all the snakes and other reptiles out of Ireland.

No, really, that's what Splinter says. 

Now, there are at least four things wrong with this. First, although there's legendary accretion around the character of Patrick, he was a real historical figure, rather than a magical legend. Second, Patrick supposedly drove the snakes -- and only the snakes -- out of Ireland, with the few lizards we have being left to roam freely. Third, there is no statue of Patrick in St Stephen's Green. Fourth, if there were, it probably wouldn't look like this:

So, anyway, I was reminded of this recently after reading a letter in the Irish Times a few weeks back.

I would have loved this when I was in primary school...

Seemingly the American O'Brien Clan Foundation has decided that there ought to be a statue to Brian Boru, the victor of Clontarf, in Dublin; in principle this is a nice idea, and one that I espoused myself in school when I was eleven years old. The letter begins:

'The Victorian ambiance of St Stephen’s Green seems perfect for a classical equestrian statue of Ireland’s greatest High King, Brian Boru, the millennium of whose death is fast approaching. 

We believe Brian Boru deserves the place at the centre of the park, where the statue of King George once stood. Once in place, it would appear to visitors as though the park was designed around the likeness of an Irish leader, rather than a foreign colonial ruler, or bed of flowers. 

In his address to the assembled troops before the Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru spoke of Irishmen fighting for their country, surely the first ever mention of the notion of Irish nationality? Brian Boru was the first and only High King to unite the warring tribes of Irish into a nation. His was the greatest Irish life ever lived. Were the Office of Public Works to permit a monument to be erected, people would have the chance to pause and reflect about the sublime achievements of Brian Boru, and drawing inspiration from it, enrich their own lives.'

And it concludes:

'Texas Pastor Terrell O’Brien, who is also an accomplished monumental sculptor, famous for his statue of Rev Billy Graham, in front of the university he founded, has been chosen by the O’Briens to carry out the project. 

A photograph of a rough model he is working on is viewable at obrienclan.com/raising-a-monument-to-brian-boru. The scheme is simple: We will pay for the statue, and its erection, and hopefully the Office of Public Works, and the art adviser can help with the proper permits and approvals.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but remarkably aquiline features aside, isn't this statue of Brian just a bit similar to the fictitious statue of Patrick in the Ninja Turtles cartoon? I'm not suggesting for even one moment that Terrell O'Brien copied his maquette from the cartoon's take on our patron saint, but it seems to me that it might be a bad idea to have a statue so similar to the cartoon Patrick in the very spot where the cartoon Patrick is supposedly located. It could confuse tourists, after all. Especially the sort who like to wear Hawaiian shirts and play frisbee in cities so desolate that Cillian Murphy could show up any minute.

Seriously, look how similar the statues are: you'll note that Brian appears to have inherited Patrick's clothes, and is brandishing two cruciform shapes just as Britain's greatest son is portrayed as doing. The horses are a mirror image of each other, once you correct for the fact that only a miracle could explain how Patrick's horse is balancing so elegantly on its left legs.

What might have inspired this pose, you might ask, other than that mounted Prima Porta rip off we know as the Marcus Aurelius statue on the Capitoline? 

Ah, folklore...

Well, the centrepiece of the Irish Times letter reads as follows, quoting, it says, from the Annals of Innisfallen to describe the 73-year-old High King engaging in a fine piece of battlefield exhortation:

'Their ranks had been formed before daylight, and as the sun rose, Brian rode through the lines of his soldiers with a crucifix in one hand, and a drawn sword in the other; he reminded them of the day selected by the pagan invader to offer battle, and exhorted them to conquer or die. Standing in the centre of his army, and raising his powerful voice, his speech was worthy of so great a king and so good a man:  

"Be not dismayed my soldiers, because my son Donough is avenging our wrongs in Leinster; he will return victorious, and in the glory of his conquests you shall share. 

On your valor rests the hopes of your country today; and what surer grounds can they rest upon? Oppression now attempts to bend you down to servility; will you burst its chains and rise to the independence of Irish freemen? Your cause is one approved by Heaven. You seek not the oppression of others; you fight for your country and sacred altars. It is a cause that claims heavenly protection. In this day’s battle the interposition of that God who can give victory will be singly manifested in your favour. 

Let every heart, then, be the throne of confidence and courage. You know that the Danes are strangers to religion and humanity; they are inflamed with the desire of violating the fairest daughters of this land of beauty, and enriching themselves with the spoils of sacrilege and plunder. The barbarians have impiously fixed, for their struggle, to enslave us, upon the very day on which the Redeemer of the world was crucified. Victory they shall not have! from such brave soldiers as you they can never wrest it; for you fight in defence of honor, liberty and religion – in defence of the sacred temples of the true God, and of your sisters, wives and daughters. 

Such a holy cause must be the cause of God, who will deliver your enemies this day into your hands. Onward, then, for your country and your sacred altars!".'

Stirring stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, without wanting to be a party pooper, I think it mightn't be a bad idea to inject some reality into this narrative.

A touch of history...

Firstly, I'm far from convinced this is from the Annals of Innisfallen. It might be from the eighteenth-century farrago of fact, folklore, and full-blown mythologising that's known as the Dublin Annals of Innisfallen, but if you look at the year 1014 in the actual Annals of Innisfallen, you'll find the following passage:

'Great warfare between Brian and the foreigners of Áth Cliath, and Brian then brought a great muster of the men of Ireland to Áth Cliath. After that the foreigners of Áth Cliath gave battle to Brian, son of Cennétig, and he was slain, with his son Murchad, royal heir of Ireland, and Murchad's son, namely, Tairdelbach, as also the princes of Mumu round Conaing, son of Donn Cúán, and round Domnall son of Diarmait, king of Corcu Bascinn, and round Mac Bethad son of Muiredach, king of Ciarraige Luachra, and also Tadc Ua Cellaig, king of Uí Maine, and many others. There were also slain in that battle Mael Mórda son of Murchad, king of Laigin, together with the princes of the Laigin round him, and the foreigners of the western world were slaughtered in the same battle.'

It's a bit dry, isn't it? It's certainly not the Mel Gibson-esque patriotic fantasy that the O'Brien's are quoting.

Here's the thing. Clontarf, contrary to popular belief, wasn't what we think it was, and it didn't really matter all that much.

The Vikings had been a spent force in Ireland for decades before Clontarf. Under Olaf Sigtryggsson, Dublin had ruled over a big chunk of north Leinster in the mid-tenth century, but at the battle of Tara, fought in 980, Máel Sechnaill II, King of Meath, defeated Olaf, forcing the Dubliners to pay tribute to the Irish henceforth; it was Tara, not Clontarf, that had decisively ensured that Vikings would not rule in Ireland.

Clontarf, on the other hand, is best understood as a battle between rival Irish kings. Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, had rebelled against Brian Boru, the High King of the day, and although Vikings made up a large part of his army, the Vikings of Dublin did not take part in the battle on their doorstep; indeed, although Sigtrygg Silkenbeard, king of Dublin, was Máel Mórda's son-in-law, he remained neutral in the conflict between the two Irish kings. And well he might, for Vikings served in Brian's army too, and Brian had been the third husband of Sigtrygg's mother!

The tale of Clontarf grew with the telling. Vikings remembered it as a heroic encounter between champions, while as time went by Dubliners grew embarrassed about their Viking heritage and recast the battle as a clash of nations. The reality is that the Vikings were an important presence in medieval Ireland following their defeat at Tara. Though they remained an important -- if decreasingly distinctive -- element in Irish life right up to the arrival of the Normans in 1169, after Tara they would never again threaten to be an dominant one; the Irish and Norse nobility were deeply intermingled, and it's schoolboy nonsense to think of Clontarf as a heroic Irish victory against sinister foreigners. 

Then again, schoolboy nonsense has its charms. I suspect Chesterton would have said that there's truth buried there, the kind of truth that academics too often forget. 

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?

Indiana Jones and the Monasteries of the Air

Chatting the other day to a philhellenic friend of an archaeological persuasion, I was pointed in the direction of an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles set in 1910 in which our youthful hero visits Athens, and indeed travels rather further north. I was advised that, although funny, the film is something of a qualified success in terms of its aim to be an educational show.

It's hard not to be impressed by the ship's amphibious capabilities

Their ship sails from Odessa to Constantinople, on to Thessaloniki, and from there makes its way south, apparently cutting across Euboea and overland to Athens, rather than following the traditional route around Cape Sounion and into Pireaus. As their ship approaches Athens, Henry Jones Senior summons his son, points, and says 'See the minarets over there--' just as the camera cuts, rather inexplicably, to a nice shot of the Tholos at Delphi, followed by an even nicer one of Delphi's Athenian Treasury, which had -- interestingly enough -- been reconstructed only a few years before this episode supposedly took place.

You'd need impressive eyesight to see this from Athens

Given that it's two hundred miles from Athens to Delphi, and no part of this story is set there, I'm not quite sure why we're treated to sights none of the Joneses get to revel in, but still, onwards with the tale.

Ascending the Acropolis, Jones Snr starts upon a description of the Parthenon, at which point young Indiana bolts up through the steps of the Propylaea and past the Temple of Athena Nike until he stands looking at the Parthenon itself. They don't stay long, with Mrs Jones needing to hurry back to their hotel, and while there the plot kicks in: Jones Snr and Jnr shall be going north, to Meteora, there to spend a Spartan weekend translating Byzantine transcripts of Aristotle.

As you do.

And no, contrary to too many websites, this is NOT an amphitheatre

Anyway, once they've packed, Indiana and his father head of by horsedrawn carriage to the theatre of Herodes Atticus, where Jones Snr proceeds to give his bemused driver incomprehensible instructions in ancient Greek, delivered with a Conneryesque burr, before trotting off to show the theatre to his son.

'I bet there were lions and gladiators,' exclaims Indiana, swishing his stick.
'Junior,' says his father, 'lions and gladiators were Roman, not Greek,' apparently oblivious to the theatre having been built by a Roman senator.
'Oh, well I'll bet Alexander the Great cut off some poor fool's head right here,' says Indiana, slashing downwards.
'Junior, this was not a barbaric slaughterhouse,' corrects Jones Snr, neglecting to mention that Alexander died almost five centuries before the theatre was built, 'we are standing in a theatre, a temple of great poetry, drama, and philosophy.'

Onwards he warbles about Socrates and Aristotle, somehow winning over his sceptical son, who doesn't seem to realise that his father, the great scholar, is in fact a charlatan who believes a second-century AD theatre had been the site of numerous fifth- and fourth-century BC philosophical debates.

Off they head, then, back to the wrong carriage and off to travel -- it would seem -- by horse and cart to Meteora, burbling about syllogisms in a manner that'd cause Aristotle's corpse to turn like a gyros spit. Even if things had gone smoothly, I can't think this would have worked out for them, given that it's just over 200 miles from Athens to Kalambaka, the main town in Meteora. For what it's worth, it'd be just south of the 'O' in 'Thessalonike' on the map above.

For what it's worth, they could have got the train, as a shiny new line had been built only the previous year.

Well, soon tossed out of their cart -- and they can't have gone more than a mile or so from Athens at this point -- they start to walk, wittering about Cynicism as they stroll through a desolate landscape in the vague hope that a bus might appear. As the day wears on, they sit resting under a tree until they cadge a lift in a passing cart, laden with peasants and chickens, with Jones Snr taking the opportunity to teach his son about Stoicism.

At some unidentifiable spot they have to get off and Indiana suggests they go back to the hotel; his father refuses, saying that they weren't to know that the cart wouldn't go the whole way -- two hundred miles, remember -- and they'd just get another ride. Feeling that as dusty as they are they're unlikely to get a lift, so they resolve to wash their clothes, bathe, and continue.

Next we see them swimming, nakedly, in the sea, having presumably washed their clothes in sea water and left them to dry, salt-encrusted, on bushes along the shore. Given that they should be heading inland, in a generally north-westerly way, this seems to be rather off-course for them, but such geographical inconvenience is as nothing compared to what happens next, with a flock of sheep stealing their clothes.

This whole episode looks plotted by someone with too many Joseph Campbell books, and no maps

With nothing but a slight briefcase -- itself containing pens, paper, and it would seem everything young Henry had been told to pack back at the hotel -- and some branches to hide their nudity, they approach an ancient yaya, whose startled shrieks summon her daughter and granddaughter, thus creating a wonderfully archetypal scene whereby our heroes are transformed into Cretan shepherds by a Classic representation of the three-fold Goddess, maiden, mother, and hag.

Off they trot in their new clothes, being shunned by passing tourists in a car but soon being given a third lift since leaving Athens, this time by a man called Aristotle with a donkey called Plato. Cue much comic misunderstanding and a discussion of Plato's Republic. In the course of the confusion, Jones Snr gets out in a huff and Jones Jnr stays in the cart, as they continue their journey to Kalambaka and what Patrick Leigh Fermor, in Roumeli, calls the Monasteries of the Air.

Pictures really don't do justice to how astonishing Meteora is. You have to go there.

Approaching a monk as he comes out of an elaborate cage, Jones Snr addresses him in contemporary -- rather than ancient -- Greek. Like Odysseus, I suspect he'd learned a lot from the three women he'd met, though rather peculiarly he begins his conversation with 'Kalispera,' meaning 'Good evening,' and then bids the gentleman farewell by saying 'Kalimera,' which means 'Good morning.' I think we can take this as further evidence of his deep mastery of an esoteric pseudo-Hellenism.

Still, up they're winched to the monastery, where the monks greet them, with one -- presumably the abbot -- saying 'We waited for you all morning.'

'We got delayed,' replies Jones Snr, looking embarrassed as he adds, 'It's a long story'. My guess is that he just that moment remembered that there was a train he could have caught, but I really don't think he had any reason to feel sheepish. After all, the two of them had covered more than two hundred miles by donkey and on foot in just one day, even finding time to swim, wash their clothes, chase some sheep, and get transformed into authentic Greeks by a mysteriously iconic trio of Greek women.

Why, Sean Connery himself, first and greatest avatar of Henry Jones Snr, could tell of just how valuable eventful Greek journeys can be.

Dinner follows and a night's rest, and then, after morning prayer, they settle in the library, where Jones Snr sends young Indiana off to banish his boredom by immersing himself in a study of Aristotelian causality; he's helped in this by Nikos Kazantzakis, who makes some good teleological points about oranges but doesn't give any real indication of what he's doing in the monastery.

Further shenanigans of decreasing probabilty follow when the lads try to leave, but I don't want to spoil the story for you. You should seek it out. It's a rather better introduction to Greek philosophy than it is to Greek geography or to how time and space relate to each other in the Mediterranean world.

Mancunian Myths and the Futility of Fidelity

Lots of the sporting talk in Britain lately has been of the retirement of the football legend that is Paul Scholes, the revelation that Scholes' fellow legend Giggs has feet of clay, and Manchester United's having decisively dethroned Liverpool as the most consistently successful football club in English history.

There's no denying the fact that United's achievement is impressive, and that Giggs and Scholes have been among the most successful players the English game has ever seen, but the praise heaped upon Ferguson's United is sheer hyperbole; they may be legends, but we should be careful how we build our mythologies.


The Myth of the Perch
To take one example, a few weeks back I kept hearing talk on how United had knocked Liverpool off their perch, and how Ferguson had announced back in 1986 on his taking the job of managing United that his ambition was to knock Liverpool off their perch.

Nonsense. Ferguson said nothing of the sort back in '86. Indeed, he has admitted as much, saying just a few weeks ago in the Telegraph that:

'That thing about knocking Liverpool off their perch, I don’t think I actually said that but it’s more important that United are the best team in the country in terms of winning titles.'

What actually happened is that when interviewed by the Guardian back in September 2002, on the day of his 400th game, years after United had supplanted Liverpool as England's preeminent team, Ferguson said that his toughest task as United manager up to that point had been taking Liverpool's place at the pinnacle of the domestic game:

'Ferguson does not seem like a man in a corner. "I don't get paid to panic," Ferguson said. "We have had plenty of stuttering starts." Neither the topics of Juan Sebastian Veron nor Diego Forlan could stir Ferguson into a crimson caricature of his legendary wrath. But Hansen's analysis did. "My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment," Ferguson countered, "my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that."'

This, of course, should make perfect sense to anyone who thinks for a minute instead of unthinkingly repeating lazy journalistic claptrap. After all, when Ferguson became manager in 1986, United had just seven League titles to their name, and hadn't won the League since 1967. They were widely regarded as a cup team, unlike Liverpool, which by that point had won the League sixteen times, seven of those victories being in the previous ten seasons. If Ferguson had said that he planned on overtaking Liverpool's record he'd have been locked away.


The Myth of Honest Home-Grown Success
Nobody in 1986 could have predicted what would happen over the next few years, with the development of the Premier League and the Champions' League -- oiled and fed by Sky money -- transforming English football from being a broad competition where a host of teams could plausibly compete for the title, into, in practice, an oligarchic system where a handful of rich teams were guaranteed to hold the top four slots year after year, so that each season began with most clubs knowing that the best they could hope for would be the glorious position of also-rans.

One of the great ironies of modern British sporting analysis is that people too often and too lazily repeat cliches about Blackburn having bought short-lived success, about Chelsea having bought more sustainable success, and about Manchester city trying to buy success; United, it is generally held, did it properly, training up youngsters and earning success the hard way. The conceit, basically, is that United are an honest team, and that the others have merely tried to lie and buy their way to the title.

Obviously, it's blatantly clear that the current United team isn't a home-grown one. We can all see that. Indeed, if we look at the teams that faced off in the Champions' League final on Saturday, we can see that of the thirteen players in the defeated United side, only two came through their youth system, both of them progressing to the senior team almost twenty years ago; even with the club's most expensive ever signing not making the bench, the eleven imported players that took the field cost the club about £130 million. Against that, it's interesting that the Barcelona team that beat United fielded fourteen players, half of whom had come through their own system...

Still, I don't think it's ever been true that United's success in the Ferguson era has been home-grown. There's a figment of truth in this, but when you get down to it it's as nonsensical as the Myth of the Perch. Back in the early nineties United did indeed have a clutch of gifted young players they'd reared from scratch -- the Nevilles, Giggs, Scholes, Butt, and Beckham, but this shouldn't blind us to the fact that United's success was largely bought, and it was bought at exactly the right time.

Ferguson's first years with United were bleak ones, but in the summer of 1989, armed with a uniquely wealthy war-chest, and desperate to turn things around after having come eleventh in the League, without a trophy of any sort in four years and without having won the League since 1967, Alex Ferguson embarked on what was then an unprecedentedly spectacular spending spree. He spent £8 million on five players, the £2.3 million spent on Gary Pallister in August 1989 breaking the national transfer fee, and a further £2.4 million being spent on Paul Ince. The money proved well-spent: United won the FA Cup in 1990, their first trophy since 1985, and Ince and Pallister formed the backbone of the team for the next few years.

With the addition of Denis Irwin to the squad, bought for £625,000 in June 1990, United won the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1991, thereby becoming the first English team to win a European trophy since Everton's victory in the same competition in 1985, just before the Heysel Stadium disaster had led to Mrs Thatcher pressuring the FA to withdraw English clubs  from European competition.

June 1991 saw Manchester United being the first football club floated on the Stock Exchange, raising £6.7 million. The following year, with the squad bolstered by Andrei Kancheskis who had been bought for £650,000 in March 1991 and by Peter Schmeichel who had been bought for £500,000 in August 1991, Manchester United won its first ever League Cup. In August 1992 the club bought Dion Dublin for £1 million and in November 1992, when they were lagging behind Aston Villa and Blackburn, the club also bought Eric Cantona for £1.2 million from League champions Leeds; United went on to win the inaugural Premier League.

Hardly had the Premier League been won that United broke the national transfer record again, buying Roy Keane for £3.75 million from Nottingham Forest, and with him in the team they again won the Premier League and also won the FA Cup, thus earning their first ever Double. Indeed, in the first seven years of the newly lucrative Premier League, Manchester United won the title five times along with three FA Cups and the European Cup, in the popular mindset having done so with the kids Alan Hansen so famously disparaged.

It's true that the likes of  Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, Butt, and the Nevilles all became stars during the 1990s, but the thing is, it's not as if United weren't continuing to buy at the same time. With the money they had from being a PLC, and with the Sky money flowing into them from the Premier League, they bought David May for £1.2 million in 1994, and broke the national transfer record for the second time in less than two years when they bought Andy Cole for £7 million in January 1995. Solskjaer was bought for £1.5 million in July 1996 and in summer 1997, United added Teddy Sheringham to the squad for £3.5 million and broke the national transfer record for a defender by spending £5 million on Henning Berg. The following summer saw even more being spent, with £4.4 million being spent on Jesper Blomqvist, the national transfer record for a defender again being broken when £10.6 million was spent on Jaap Stam, and a further £12.6 million being spent on Dwight Yorke.

And thus the Treble was won. Nine of the thirteen players who played in the UEFA Champions' League final -- including both injury-time goalscorers -- had been bought by United. They hadn't been bought cheaply either: the team that won the FA Cup that year included two players whose transfer fees had broken the national record, and other players who were even more costly but who'd been bought in more expensive seasons.

Since then, of course, the Champions' League has become an absolute goldmine and with the money United made from that they were able to break the national transfer record three times running, spending £19 million on Van Nistelrooy, £28.1 million on Veron, and £29 million on Ferdinand, since going on to spend £25.6 million on Rooney, £14 million on Carrick, £17 million on Hargreaves, £14.7 million on Nani, £17.3 million on Anderson, and £30.75m spent on Berbatov.

Those figures are difficult to substantiate, unfortunately -- this very interesting site gives different figures though reveals the same trend -- but it seems clear that even under the Glazers, despite their fans' refusal to believe otherwise, they've bought six of their ten most expensive ever players. Granted, City and Chelsea have bought, respectively, 14 and 19 players in the price range of United's top ten, but that's largely because they've bought them in the last ten minutes or so, with prices being higher nowadays than even three or four years back. To put this into context, Liverpool have bought seven players in this price range, Spurs have bought five, Arsenal have bought only two, and Everton and Villa have bought just one apiece.

Anyway, it's with such a pricey brigade of players that United have won the the League a further seven times since winning the Treble, along with an FA Cup, three League Cups, and another European trophy.

And none of this gets into the issue of wages, with almost a third of the total Premier League wage bill being accounted for by just three clubs, one of which is United, the others -- predictably -- being Chelsea and City, who are really just spending to try to catch up, just as with their ultra-expensive squads. It's like watching people turning up late at a party when everybody else is already tipsy, and then hammering back the drink to try to match them.

I'm not criticising, as United have been very fortunate in coming good just as football became big business; any other team would envy their luck, their brand name, and how well Ferguson et al have built well on the success they've had. All I'm saying is that the notion that United haven't bought their success is claptrap. They have. They've bought in spades, and they keep buying, and they're going to keep buying, and though some of their purchases haven't paid off, many have.

What does all of this mean?


The Myth of a Competitive League
Well, I said the other day, prior to the Barcelona match, that I hoped United would lose. Not because I take pleasure in my friends' disappointment, as I don't and I would have liked them to be happy, but because I didn't believe it'd do the English game any good for any member of English football's dominant cartel to receive a cash injection of £109 million in order further to enhance its dominance in the English game.

The Premier League, quite simply, isn't as good, as interesting, or as meaningful a competition as the old First Division was. I don't dispute for a moment that the football is better -- I think it probably is, especially given the sheer quality of foreign players that now play in England, albeit at a clear cost to the quality of the English national side. However, if you look back at the last fifty years or so of English football, it's quite clear that over the past fifteen years the English top flight has become a stitch-up.

Don't believe me?

Well, think of what I'm saying, that back in the day pretty much any team could rise to win or at least challenge for the title, but that in recent years the competition has been predictable and stale, with the same teams forming the same hierachy year-in year-out. This is easy to test. All we have to do is look at the top four teams in any given year, and see how many of them had been in the top four the previous year, tracking this back over the decades. I'd pick the top four as I think the Champions' League formalises a top four elite nowadays, and since the difference between fourth and fifth place nowadays can effectively be twenty million pounds or so, which buys you a top-notch player.

Look at the chart.

Interesting, eh? Before 1997 it was typical for two teams from the previous year's top four to make it into the top four; the odd year three teams would make it, and sometimes only one made it, but on balance two would typically retain top-tier positions. Since 1997, though, there hasn't been a year when fewer than three top-four teams from one year made it into the top four spots the following year, and there've been four years when the same four teams had retained their collective position at the pinnacle of English football.

It's worse, though. Only nine teams have won places in the 60 top-four spots that have been available over the past fifteen years, with just four teams having held 52 of those places. To put that into context, eighteen teams -- twice as many -- won places in the previous fifteen years' 60 top-four spots, with the top four teams overall having held just 35 of those places.

What's my point?

English football's top flight has become a rigged game, where victory is pretty much guaranteed to one of a handful of foreign-owned superwealthy clubs, those clubs that feed at the Golden Trough of the Champions' League. Victory in the Football League had long been dependent on cash, but even so that cash was more evenly spread about than it's been since the rise of the Premier League. The prize money -- especially from the Champions' League -- is such as to enable teams that do well to guarantee that they'll do well henceforth, so that success is rewarded with cash and cash buys further success.

United have won their nineteenth title. They'll win their twentieth in a year or two. It won't mean much, though. It'll be a victory in an unofficial mini-league, informally nestling at the top of a bigger and messier one. I hate to say it, but Liverpool's eighteen titles all mattered more. The League was a real competition then. Winning was more romantic, and being beaten didn't mean being vanquished: teams could lose, and regroup, and come back in the real hope of triumph. That doesn't happen anymore.


On Love and Loyalty
I still support Everton, of course, even though I do not believe she will ever win the League again, unless she's bought as a rich man's toy, as Chelsea and Manchester City have been.

That's the nature of love and of loyalty: we may admire things and people for what they can do, but we love them for who and what they are, for that royal blue strip, that church in the corner of the ground and pillars we've to crane around, that statue of Bill Dean, that fleeting moment when I was a little boy and Everton might have been the best team in Europe, my brother being at the other semi-final and a city mourning together, a battered schoolbag bearing the badge and the teasing it brought, a sense of secret fellowship with those few Dubliners I'd meet who supported a team that didn't wear red, years of squandered promise and too frequent a survival by the skin of our teeth, the occasional magnificent performance, too much mediocre dross to mention, going to my first match on the day I was persuaded to move to England, bitterness boiling over when playing our offshoot and oldest rival, quiet calm appraisal from the stands in match after match, wry head-shaking with family and friends and people who could be either in the pub afterwards, a friend trying to hide her pleasure at her first top-flight game as her team demolished mine, a cousin grabbing and shaking my shoulders in a frenzy of delight as Everton turned the tables with rare style, the smug pleasure in establishing that Everton are my local team with their ground being the closest Premier League ground to my home in Dublin, and decade after decade of family fidelity.

I don't support Everton because she's good. I support her because she's Everton. My blood's blue.

Chesterton nailed this idea of attachment, talking once of Kipling's lack of true patriotism:

'The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of patriotism -- that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for all finality must be tragic. He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.'

I like Arsenal because they play more creative football than any other team in England and because even when their rivals at the top splash money around like there's no bubble waiting to burst tomorrow they spend sensibly; but while I admire their elegance and their prudence, I don't love them. I freely recognise that United are the best team in England, though I'm suspicious of their fans, as there are too many of them who have never known anything but success; I often wonder how deep their loyalty runs, and whether they'd fly to another team if United's sun were to set. Certainly, I suspect the future may belong to Manchester City, who are only too frank in admitting that they'll soon be acquiring their own legions of gloryhunters, all too keen to contribute to City's coffers, and I'll doubt their new fans too. I'm highly dubious about Chelsea ones too, not least because so many of them are recent converts, lured by cash-fuelled success.

While I wouldn't go so far as to embrace claims that the followers of the most successful English football teams are more likely to be unfaithful to their partners and spouses than those who follow less successful teams, I do wonder whether if a person's loyal in one aspect of his or her life, he or she's likely to be loyal in other areas. Terry Leahy, Tesco's erstwhile CEO, had a mantra that said he believed in 'one religion, one football team, one wife, one firm'. Taken at face value, that's obviously facile and trite, but I suspect he had a point. Certainly, people who support teams that look destined never to succeed must be the sort of people who stick by those they love through thick and thin.

If there's a moral to this story, it's that United's success is real but not as glorious as it might look, and that you should never marry a Chelsea fan.  Against that, a friend of mine married a Blackburn fan a couple of years back. I tend to think that'll prove a wise move in the long run, as a man who's supported Blackburn over the last decade is  clearly a man of unshakeable faith. I think theirs shall prove a long and happy marriage.