Sunday 17 March 2024

Day of Drama in Dublin

 

Green was everywhere. The elation was palpable. Half the people on the flight from Stansted were dressed as leprechauns and the other half in Ireland rugby merch. But I wasn’t going for St Patrick’s Day or the Six Nations showdown. In a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence and treat, two friends of mine of decades-long standing had their plays in performance at the historic Abbey Theatre.



One was Marina Carr’s brand new and brilliant Audrey or Sorrow, directed with pitch-perfect sensitivity and vision by Catriona McLaughlin; the other was Conor Hanratty’s direction of the oldest surviving play in the world, Aeschylus’ Persians. The two plays, written two and a half millennia apart, are linked by ghosts, bereavement, and delusion.



The ghost in Persians is the great King Darius, raised in a thrilling necromantic ritual to explain to his wife and councillors why they have suffered such appalling fatalities in their doomed invasion of Greece. His deluded son Xerxes believed he was entitled to invade and conquer Hellas. It was impossible not to be reminded that, just five minutes away, a large and peaceful Free Palestine demonstration was in full vocal form along the banks of the River Liffey.  As Marina said to me, ‘As a once-colonised, starving nation, the Irish have to speak out’.



I got to know Marina’s exquisite work because, like so many great Irish writers, she has found inspiration in the ancient Greeks—Medea in By the Bog of Cats, the Oresteia in Ariel, and Hippolytus in Phaedra Backwards, just for starters. But Audrey is a modern Irish tragedy with a Beckettian absurdist edge and a noirish psychological detective plot about the ineradicable domestic presence of children who die. Yet it is often hilarious: Marina has a perfect ear for the casual cruelty that members of nuclear families inflict on one another and the lies they tell themselves. I was left speechless by the denouement, even though I half saw it coming.

Marina's Beckettian ghosts


Conor’s production is scintillating for several reasons. One is that the first ever production of Persians at the Abbey has been a long time coming. Edwardian Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray was well aware that the play, in the right context, was political dynamite, for in a letter to Yeats in 1905 he suggested a production in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, ‘with a seditious innuendo’.  In Yeats ‘The Statues’, Easter 1916 became a victory of civilisation over barbarism as the Irish rebels won a spiritual victory over the English. It was men, ‘not the banks of oars/that swam upon the many-headed foam at Salamis’ who ‘put down/All Asiatic vague immensities’,

It is therefore even more appropriate that Conor has realised his long-held conviction that this ancient text would be well served by performance in the ancient tongue of Ireland (I was so proud that my own 1996 translation was used for the surtitles, which I didn't realise until halfway through). And the acoustic effect is a revelation. As the mist swirls over Darius’ tomb and his spectre comes into view, it feels like a metaphor for the entire history of theatre, where we raise the ghosts of the past to speak to us once again in our ancestral languages.



The final quarter of Persians features Xerxes, in despair, singing a long antiphonal lament with his bereaved compatriots. He is the only character in all Greek tragedy who never speaks, but only sings. In a master stroke, Conor cast a young sean nós singer from the Gaeltacht region of South-West Donegal, Naoise Mac CathmhaoilThe sweet, heartrending, melodic phrasing of this ancient dirge idiom was hypnotically beautiful. You know when a performance has spellbound its audience when there is a long silence before they break into applause. At the end of the Irish Persians, the silence was profound.

With Naoise and Conor

 

I first went to Ireland in the early 1990s. It was so different. My car was searched by surly armed soldiers at the border checkpoint driving from Belfast south. In the Republic, divorce was prohibited, women had to travel secretly out of their own nation to obtain an abortion, and I was assured last night by someone who has inside information that the national broadcaster RTÉ refused to allow Father Ted to air. But the sheer energy and merriment palpable in the streets of Dublin this weekend seem down to far more than a victory in the rugby. In a world of so much darkness, watching such an ancient culture grow into its liberal, lively, fun-loving, irreverent, woman-friendly maturity is an absolute joy.

 

Sunday 10 March 2024

Pope Francis on Ukraine: What Has His Holiness been Reading?

 


'You've got to be in it to win it' goes the adage cited by academics working overtime to submit lengthy applications to the lottery for external research grants in order to save their jobs. But Pope Francis is telling Volodymyr Zelensky, 'You've got to be able to win it to justify being in it'.

What the war-weary population of Ukraine, an Orthodox country, do not need is being told to surrender by the head of the largest Christian church on the planet, to which fewer than 3% of them belong. His Holiness made these reckless remarks last month in an interview with Swiss broadcaster RSI. A transcript was made available yesterday to Reuters. It is to be broadcast on March 20.

When asked if he thought Ukraine should surrender to Russia, he apparently responded, ‘I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates’. International Powers could help: ‘The word negotiate is a courageous word. When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate’.

Zelensky meets Pope Francis in 2023


Hmm. Leaving aside the question of why this individual thinks he has the right to demoralise the Ukrainians at such a precarious moment in their history (which I personally think is highly irresponsible of the former bouncer, janitor and food technician), we can ask whether his unsolicited and (I am certain) unwelcome advice to Volodymyr Zelensky has any doctrinal basis in Roman Catholic ‘Just War’ theory.

The answer is ‘well sort of’, but only if you take seriously what Cardinal Thomas de Vio, aka Cajetan (better known as the spokesman for Roman Catholic opposition to the teachings of Martin Luther) decreed in 1540, after a millennium of RC Just War discourse.




In City of God Augustine said that war is a tragic necessity in a sinful world, but that it those waging it need to hold the just intention  of restoring peace, which is surely the Ukrainians’ goal. Perhaps the Pope has been reading the 11th-century Benedictine cardinal Peter Damian, who, in a letter to Bishop Olderic deploring priests making war on each other, reminded his correspondent of Matthew 18.21-2. When asked by Peter ‘How often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?’, Jesus responded that he should forgive ‘seventy times seven’.


Damian then reported an incident in Gaul where an abbot and a nobleman  confronted one another in battle. The abbot ordered his monks to face the opposing cavalry completely unarmed; his opponents were filled with the fear of god, threw down their weapons and begged for forgiveness.  I fervently hope that Pope Francis is not so daft as to expect that Vladimir Putin’s army would respond in the face of Ukrainian submission like those Gallic militiamen.

I heard a religious commentator say on radio this morning that Thomas Aquinas had stipulated that the prosecutor of a just war needed to be able to win that war. But this is not the case. In Summa Theologiae 40, Aquinas actually modifies Augustine’s view, permitting other goals than peace: ‘True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good’. If some Ukrainians are motivated by a desire to punish the Russians, I for one am not bothered.

It was in fact a commentator on the Summa Theologiae, the aforementioned Cardinal Thomas de Vio, who in 1540 was the first to (mis)understand Aquinas as saying that a war is only justly waged if it is won.

'Cajetan' v. Luther

The far more intelligent Roman Catholic who suggested that the suffering caused by the war to one's own side should be proportionate to the advantages the war confers (a subtle point not made by Il Papa) was the Granada-born Aristotelian expert Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). He is to be admired for his questioning in de Indis of the violence of European colonisers, and his argument that the islands of the Indies be viewed as sovereign states legally equal to Spain as members of a worldwide community of autonomous nations. I suspect he would have disapproved of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But in his Disputatio de Bello, Suárez may  have given the Pope the ideological ammunition to underpin his potentially catastrophic comments, if unintentionally:

‘For a war to be just, the sovereign ought to be so sure of the degree of his power, that he is morally certain of victory. The first reason for this conclusion is the fact that otherwise the prince would incur the evident peril of inflicting upon his state losses greater than the advantages involved… Furthermore, he ought to balance the expectation of victory against the risk of loss, and ascertain whether, all things being carefully considered, expectation is preponderant’.

Francisco Suárez

But Suárez was writing about pre-democratic states ruled by monarchs. His point was that the absolute ruler must ask whether a war benefits his subjects. If it harms them, the ruler is behaving like a tyrant. Suárez also sensibly points out that certainty about the outcome of a war is an impossibility. Moreover, thinking about this issue may delay the end of the war. 

Pope Francis would do well to keep his Renaissance scholastic disputations to himself, because they may have the dangerous effect not only of delaying a just outcome to this war, but of altering its course in favour of the unjust party. Where Vladimir Putin’s concerned, you’ve always got to be in it, and supported by the international community, to win it.

Sunday 25 February 2024

1772: James Somerset versus Aristotle

 

I’m leading a project exploring the ubiquity of Aristotle outside the Academy. He has often been mobilised in progressive causes, but nothing can be done to rehabilitate the muddled thinking of the first few chapters of his Politics; despite acknowledging that some of his contemporaries regarded slavery as contrary to nature, he justifies it, especially in the case of Greeks enslaving non-Greeks whom they have conquered. These chapters were incessantly cited by apologists for slavery in Europe and North America, as has been superbly analysed by Professor Sara Monoson



With Profs. Patrice Rankine, Sara Monoson, Henry Stead


And in 1772, Aristotle’s argumentation was at the centre of an era-defining case that came before the King’s Bench in London.




James Somerset, born in West Africa, was purchased in Virginia by the merchant Charles Stewart. Stewart moved to London in 1764. He sold or leased his other slaves, but took James, then aged about 23, with him. The young man met London’s thousands-strong free Black community and white Abolitionists and was adopted by two; they became his godparents when he was baptised in Holborn in 1771; shortly afterwards, he left Stewart’s service and refused to return.

Stewart, incandescent, had Somerset kidnapped and imprisoned on board a slave ship to be taken to Jamaica and sold. But Somerset’s godparents made an application for a writ of Habeas Corpus before the King’s Bench; he was released pending the trial. The defendant, the person illegally detaining Somerset, was the ship’s captain, James Knowles.


Somerset’s legal team was financed by inveterate antislavery campaigner Granville Sharpe, one of the earliest and most assiduous Abolitionists. There was great tension in the court when the first of them, John Alleyne, rose to speak at the hearing on May 14th 1772. He introduced Aristotle into his argument almost immediately, in part using Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Law (1748), sensing the importance of refuting the chief authority underpinning the slavers’ apologias: 

          ’Tis well known to your Lordships, that much has been asserted by the ancient philosophers and civilians, in defence of the principles of slavery: Aristotle has particularly enlarged on that subject. An observation still it is, of one of the most able, most ingenious, most convincing writers of modern times, whom I need not hesitate, on this occasion, to prefer to Aristotle, the great Montesquieu, that Aristotle, on this subject, reasoned very unlike the philosopher. He draws his precedents from barbarous ages and nations, and then deduces maxims from them, for the contemplation and practice of civilized times and countries.

Alleyne now subjected Aristotle’s prose to his lawyerly scalpel. First, if a man has spared a man in battle, whatever rule of war ensured that he did so must also make him return his liberty. Secondly, the question of a contract (Locke’s proposal) in this context is absurd, since in all contracts both sides must have full power to agree to it. If a man agrees to dispose of all rights vested in him and his descendants, he effectively stops being a moral agent and has no rights to invalidate those of his descendants. Most importantly, slavery is not natural: it is ‘a municipal relation; an institution therefore confined to certain places, aid necessarily dropt by passage, into a country where such municipal regulations do not subsist’.

A month later, on 22 June 1772, the ruling was made in Somerset’s favour by William Murray, Lord Mansfield of Kenwood and Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench (Murray happened to live with a great-niece, Dido Belle, the daughter of an enslaved African woman and Mansfield’s nephew). 



The public inferred that slavery was now illegal in England. This historic and public refutation of Aristotle made slave-owners across the world shudder. 

England became an attractive destination for people who had escaped slavery anywhere else. And the following Saturday evening, according to the Public Advertiser, ‘near 200 Blacks…had an Entertainment at a Public-house in Westminster, to celebrate the Triumph which their Brother Somerset had obtained over Mr. Stuart his Master. Lord Mansfield’s Health was echoed round the Room; and the evening was concluded with a Ball’. I would like to have been in that pub.


‘Granville Sharp the Abolitionist Rescuing a Slave from the Hands of His Master’ by James Hayllar, 1864, 


Professor Monoson and I are discussing this, and other moments when Aristotle was central to constitutional and Abolitionist debates, at the University of Chicago, on the invitation of Professor Patrice Rankine, on Thursday 4 April: here’s an AI image I generated to publicise it. Aristotle is here getting refuted by Frederick Douglass, who himself visited Britain several times while campaigning for Abolition. I’m sorry Aristotle’s hair came out a bit bouffant, which makes him resemble Karl Marx. Teaching this old lady new AI tricks is proving a little difficult.




Tuesday 19 December 2023

Nine Questions for the British Library's Chief Executive

 

Seven weeks after the British Library was afflicted by a ransomware cyber-attack, its chief executive, Sir Roly Keating, has belatedly issued a substantial statement. While it is indisputable that the attack has been perpetrated by a dastardly criminal group, in my opinion Keating’s statement strikes discordant notes and leaves us with more questions than answers.


First, although Keating claims this kind of attack ‘was something we had prepared for and rehearsed, and had taken steps to guard against’, the protective systems of which he was in charge failed. It would be good to hear him concede this. It would also be good to know exactly what plan the library had in place for such an event?

Second, the best way to protect against Ransomware is to have a clean backup of data. If the library had backed it all up, why can't it be reinstalled straightaway and we can all get back to normal? Or did the hackers encrypt a backup too? That might suggest negligence on the part of the library.

Third, the British Library is publicly funded. Assuming no public money has been paid to hackers, that still leaves the costs of remediation: are these coming out of the public purse, and if so, what sums are involved?

Fourth, BL employees have had their personal details including bank accounts hacked. Users like myself have also had personal data hacked. Might a public apology be appropriate?

Fifth, why does it remain impossible to order on-site materials to the Reading Rooms so many weeks after the attack? I do not understand why a book or manuscript cannot be ordered using a piece of paper and a pencil, and then be collected from the stacks by one of the many members of staff currently sitting around in the Reading Rooms looking miserable. Such a blindingly obvious resilience measure should have been in place ever since the process by which books are ordered was first computerised.

It was simpler getting books off shelves in Alexandria


Sixth, why has the information about what is available been desperately misleading? Users were sent an email stating that materials ordered before 28th October would be delivered to Reading Rooms. I was victim to this misinformation myself when on 1st December I visited to read materials I had ordered in early October. The (non-tragic) result was a comically incomplete paper at my own conference on the Aeneid last week; it consisted of a string of research questions rather than an argument. The Reading Room staff were deeply apologetic, but not so Sir Roly, it transpires.

Seventh, is Sir Roly aware that this particular piece of misinformation has cost Readers a lot of money? My futile trip to London cost me less than £100, which (unlike my students) I can grudgingly afford. But Rachel Mann (Uni Texas Rio Grande Valley) and Rebecca Long (University of Louisville), two American Professors of Music beside whom I sat in the otherwise deserted Rare Books Room, had spent thousands of dollars on transatlantic flights to consult papers they assumed from the Library’s email communication would be available. Other overseas individuals have got in touch with me, after I spoke on BBC Radio 4’s ‘PM’ programme about the issue, with similar stories of frustration and financial loss. Yet another Reason to be Embarrassed to be British.



Eighth, students, especially those writing dissertations on rare materials and postgraduate researchers, are in serious trouble over deadlines. Not a word of acknowledgement of their problems is said by the Chief Executive, let alone an apology. I met a PhD candidate who is travelling to Paris to the Bibliothèque Nationale to get hold of rare materials to meet their submission date. More advanced academics who need to publish to secure tenure or promotion face serious consequences for their careers.

And, ninth, Keating’s statement is still desperately vague over when specific services will be restored: ‘From early in the new year you will begin to see a phased return of certain key services’ is not particularly helpful. Nor is ‘Other interim services will include increased on-site access to our manuscripts and special collections’. So no specific plans can be laid for the New Year. The backlog will also mean that the library will be mobbed by frustrated users; queues for seats in Reading Rooms, which already get crowded in the lead-up to Final Examinations, will be inevitable for weeks. What plans are in place to ameliorate this?



The overarching tone of the statement is one of high-minded rage (with which we can all sympathise) combined with a curious sense of helplessness. But anger doesn’t submit dissertations in time for deadlines, write books, pay for what turns out to be pointless travel, secure promotions or enable planning for research trips in the new year. Readers are in pain. A certain amount of humility and contrition, as well as far more detailed information about what happened and is going to happen, would have gone a long way to alleviate it.

Thursday 8 June 2023

Goodbye to My Father, Man of God

 

Like Shakespeare, Raphael and Ingrid Bergman, my father, the Reverend Professor Stuart George Hall, died yesterday on his birthday, 7 June. He had just completed 95 years alive. Given his age, his visible deterioration over the last few months and our troubled relationship, I am amazed at how winded I feel.

Born to a working-class East London couple, a police constable and a seamstress, he ascended via scholarships at UCL School and Oxford to a firm niche in the Middle Class. My feelings about him are complicated. We did not rub along temperamentally, or rather, were not able to discover if we might have done had we not disagreed about many important issues. He was the type of man who was loved by all outside the household--his academic colleagues, students and parishioners--but found it hard to be an emotionally supportive father.



Growing up in a nuclear family where all decisions need to be referred to an invisible Almighty, whose views are relayed by his vicarious male agent on earth, is a weird experience. When I lost all belief in the Christian faith at the age of 13, my father was incandescent.

He was not a supporter of feminism (I recall his opposition to the Equal Pay Act 1970). He found it almost impossible to express any pride in my achievements (I cannot speak for my siblings). He was slow to anger, but his infrequent outbursts of rage were terrifying. He was no domestic democrat, and was absolutely furious when in my teens I began addressing everyone in the family as “Citizen”.

I did have it out with him after our mother died in 2016. Although he did not apologise, he acknowledged that he could have made much more of an effort to be supportive.  Our recent last meeting, attended by his new wife and my husband, entailed real, affectionate communication and was, I am glad to say, unprecedentedly warm and friendly.



And there are many things I owe to him, besides a firm jawline and an absurdist sense of humour.

He never embraced bourgeois values and when tired started to sound a little like the East-End boy he had been. Childhood interactions with his large circle of working-class relatives irrevocably shaped my politics. He hated racism and I was absolutely inspired at about the age of ten when he rebuked some distant relatives from the Texas Bible belt who had used derogatory language about African Americans.

He had a great sense of fun when he allowed himself to express it, and composed hilarious poems to divert his children when things were boring (as they often were in the 1960s). We used to drive all the way to Scotland at least three times a year. I adored his epic about Romans on Hadrian’s Wall, of which, sadly, I can only remember four lines, with deliberately tortuous rhymes:

         Send us the Scots and we will fight 'em.

         We are stationed at CorstopItum.

         Send us the Picts and we will fix 'em.

         We are stationed half a mile from Hexham.

He loved cats and we had long, jokey conversations,  which I remember almost daily, about what different tail shapes and positions might signify. He was the best shoe-shiner in history, and I can polish black leather boots to a radiant gloss.



I learned how to give a decent lecture by comparing his riveting sermons with those by the usual verbose and uncharismatic C of E preachers. Never more than ten minutes, a simple, lucid argument, improvised without any notes; sustained eye contact and clear diction, at least one joke and always a ringing quotation from the best prose in the King James Bible. It is down to him also that I know most of the Old Testament backwards.



He taught me my first steps in Greek by helping me decode the first sentence of John’s gospel and explained why ‘Beginning’ had no definite article. His own academic publications set a lofty bar on clarity, elegance and meticulous scholarship that I have tried hard to emulate.

I am so completely my father’s daughter that I feel intense sadness at the many things that kept us apart emotionally. That is my sincere final message to him, if he can hear me after death, as, in his piety, he was convinced he would be able to forever.






Monday 8 May 2023

Text of TLS Review of 2 Books on 2 Cleopatras

 

CLEOPATRA’S DAUGHTER

Egyptian princess, Roman prisoner, African Queen

Jane Draycott (336pp. Bloomsbury. £27.99).

 

CLEOPATRA

Her history, her myth

Francine Prose (216pp. Yale University Press. £15.99).

 

The name “Cleopatra” conjures images of a seductive siren – sailing in an opulent barge, dissolving a pearl in vinegar to convince Mark Antony of her fabulous wealth, or pressing a phallic asp into her billowing cleavage after Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, defeats her at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE. The picture of Cleopatra as mother-of-four does not quickly spring to mind. But she bore four living children between her mid-twenties and her mid-thirties. The first was her son by Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV, known as Caesarion, “Little Caesar”; he reigned over Egypt jointly with his mother from the age of three. Her other babies were fathered by Mark Antony – the twins Cleopatra “Selene” (Moon-Goddess) and Alexander “Helios” (Sun-God), born in 40 BCE, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, born four years later.

Cleopatra Selene soon lost her father, her mother and all three brothers produced by her famous mother (most of her five half-siblings, the children of Mark Antony, fared better). Caesarion, as Julius Caesar’s son, was killed by Octavian in 30 BCE, to remove a potential rival. The other three children, not yet in their teens, were taken to Rome, at which point both boys mysteriously disappear from the historical record. But their sister, the last known survivor of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, was taken in by Octavian’s older sister Octavia. Octavia had once been married to Mark Antony, and looked after her large “blended” family in the imperial residences on the Palatine Hill.

At about fifteen, Cleopatra Junior was married off to King Juba II of Numidia. He, too, had been raised in Rome after his father’s kingdom had been annexed, and he became a loyal henchman of the Roman emperor. The couple moved to Juba’s newly expanded realm, at that point retitled Mauretania. They named their capital Caesarea (now Cherchell, Algeria) to acknowledge Juba’s status as Augustus’ client. Juba was a keen supporter of intellectual, cultural and architectural endeavours; their kingdom prospered. They had two children, a girl and a boy; Cleopatra died in her mid-thirties.

That is virtually all that the surviving written sources have to say about her, but Jane Draycott has wrestled dauntlessly with the little evidence there is about this intriguing figure, producing the only modern full-length biography to stand alongside the dozen or more novels in which Cleopatra Selene appears, from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (1934) onwards.


Draycott is skilled at bringing ancient social environments to life. Her reconstructions of the physical conditions in which the royal offspring lived, and Cleopatra’s emotional responses to her dramatic early life, are plausible and vivid. When only six, Cleopatra sat with her parents and siblings on an elaborate public platform in front of the assembled Alexandrian masses, to be declared queen of Cyrenaica and Libya. After her parents’ suicides, she was forced to march with her twin in Augustus’ Roman triumph in chains of gold, escorting an effigy of their mother holding that asp. She was bombarded with vicious caricatures, produced by the Augustan propaganda machine, of Cleopatra VII as a barbarous whore.

Draycott is writing for the general reader, and needs to make her narrative exciting. She is sometimes seduced by the sensationalism of her sources – Plutarch, Suetonius, Cassius Dio – into presenting their claims without sufficient scepticism. Elsewhere, she is forced, by the nature of her project, to rely on painting imaginative word-pictures or on compiling detailed accounts of the convoluted genealogies and shifting political alliances of her era. Much of the book is written in the subjunctive: Cleopatra Selene “might have” felt sad, or “would probably” have been present at an event. But, with the help of fascinating illustrations, Draycott does an excellent job in recreating the culture and febrile atmosphere of the early years of Augustus’ reign, observing it from the perspective of a politically important pawn in his imperial game. Cleopatra, she reminds us, was also a vulnerable child and teenaged girl. Her gender may have saved her life (in contrast to what very likely happened to her brothers), but it compromised her every freedom. And her complicated ethnic identity – as a member of the Macedonian royal family of the Ptolemies, born in Egypt, partly raised in Rome and reigning as queen in North-West Africa – can, as Draycott shows, illuminate modern debates on immigration, acculturation and citizenship.

Francine Prose’s reappraisal of Cleopatra Selene’s mother, Cleopatra VII, is much shorter and less satisfactory. There have been innumerable studies of this more famous Cleopatra, both as a historical figure and as a cultural icon refashioned by every succeeding age. Prose is not a classical historian, and it shows. The first six chapters consist of an impressionistic historical narrative, divided respectively, and very conventionally, into the Ptolemaic background into which Cleopatra was born around 70 BCE, the politics of Rome in the 50s, Cleopatra’s dealings with Julius Caesar, her relationship with Mark Antony, Actium and the suicide. There is confusion about the intended audience; accounts of complicated diplomacy sit alongside vaguely feminist generalizations; some sources are given precise references, while others are not. The scandal-peddling ancient sources are sometimes treated as hopelessly misogynist and unreliable fictions, sometimes as unassailable truth.

Prose’s real enthusiasm seems to be the more recent reception of Cleopatra. She frequently refers to films about her heroine even in the “historical” chapters, and the second part of the book is entitled “The Afterlife of Cleopatra”. It would better be called “Selected Afterlives of Cleopatra”. It offers a few comments on Renaissance and Early Modern representations of the dissolving pearl anecdote, a sketchy discussion of Shakespeare’s debt to Plutarch in Antony and Cleopatra and Dryden’s All for Love, and a cursory overview of three films about Cleopatra, the main focus inevitably being on the 1963 extravaganza starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – although there have actually been dozens of other films, beginning in the earliest days of silent cinema. 


A controversy has been raging about the casting of the Israeli movie star Gal Gadot, rather than an actress with some Arabic or African ancestry, as Cleopatra in a biopic to be directed by Kari Skogland. The latest such debate is over the casting of Adele James as Cleopatra in a Netflix docudrama, African Queens: Queen Cleopatra, produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, whose maternal ancestors are Jamaican and Bajan (from Barbados) and African-American in her paternal line. James is British and mixed-race, but understandably private about her precise heritage. 


Yet, after a trailer for the four-part programme, an Egyptian lawyer has filed a request that the public prosecutor take steps to prevent access to it in Egypt, claiming without any evidence (because there is none) that Cleopatra was light-skinned.

This is where Draycott shows a sensitivity unknown to Prose towards by far the most important aspect of the reception of Cleopatra over more than a century: her ethnicity. Despite some harshly worded disputes, in which eminent classicists have unwisely expressed uncompromising views, we have absolutely no idea of Cleopatra’s precise genetic make-up: she was descended from Macedonians (whose claim to be Greeks was disputed), but in the course of the Ptolemies’ 260 years’ residence in Egypt, it is difficult to believe that no local genes entered the bloodline. The important point is that to people of African and Arabic heritage worldwide it matters that Cleopatra was “Egyptian”, culturally and/or biologically.

In 1927, for example, the Egyptian author Ahmad Shawqi’s play The Death of Cleopatra challenged the classical sources in arguing that Cleopatra had been falsely maligned, a victim of European imperial propaganda.


 A vast sculpture of “The Death of Cleopatra” by Edmonia Lewis was the sole major work of art by an African American at the  Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876: Nathaniel Hawthorne had already drawn satirical attention to the eroticization by white men of Cleopatra as a smouldering Nubian in The Marble Faun (1860). More recently the Philadelphian artist Barbara Chase-Riboud, who is African American, has returned over twenty times to depictions of Cleopatra in sculpture, wall art and poetry. Ever since abolition, “Cleopatra” has in the USA been a “speaking name”, bestowed by Civil Rights campaigners on their daughters and on the action heroine of the blaxploitation movies Cleopatra Jones (1973) and its sequel. Prose’s attempt to chart the significance of Cleopatra’s afterlife, without properly exploring this aspect, is a missed opportunity indeed.



 

Saturday 18 March 2023

The Mystery of Greek Theatre's Use in Ancient Medicine

 

The Ancient Theatre of Epidauros


One of the reasons I’m so thrilled to be leading a retreat, with an initiative called Travelgems, in the north-eastern Greek Peloponnese in July,[i] is that I can revisit the ancient health centre at Epidauros, the most important ancient cult centre of the healing god Asclepius. All his sanctuaries were built in the most healthful locations, where trees, fresh water springs, medicinal herbs and restful views promoted the wellbeing of all who visited them, whether their malady was bodily or psychic.

Reconstruction of Asclepius' Temple at Epidauros


Available treatments included dream interpretation, a precursor of modern psychotherapy.  Rituals, bathing and daily prayer and meditation promoted optimism and positivity. But a great mystery surrounds one aspect of most sites where the arts of the therapeutic doctor-god were practised: Epidauros and others have beautiful ancient theatres, and performance arts seem to have been cultivated at many of his other sanctuaries.



We just do not know exactly what form these performative cures actually took. But the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the son of a distinguished medical physician, who claimed descent from a doctor given his medicine chest by the doctor-centaur Cheiron, speaks of the role of music, as experienced in certain religious rites, in the treatment of emotional distress. There were special ‘sacred melodies’, both ecstatic and calming, which could help groups of people suffering from the same psychological problem find relief. 


This is probably related to Aristotle’s theory that tragic theatre helps people deal with painful emotions through ‘catharsis’ by watching tragedy—which was a musical medium similar to opera—in a form of emotional homeopathy.



There are other links between tragic theatre and medicine. Sophocles was said to have introduced the cult of the healing hero Asclepius into his own household.



The retreat I am leading, with stunning guest lecturer Natalie Haynes,  will culminate in a performance of tragedy at the great Epidauros theatre itself. The experience will allow participants to undergo the healing power of the medical god himself as well as discuss the therapeutic psychological aspects of tragedy.




[i] https://travelgems.com/edith-hall-retreat/. A few places still available.