Hellenism, the UN and Human Rights

Today is the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, which came into existence on 24th October 1945 at a congress in San Francisco. Three years later the UN General Assembly adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Faisal Trad with Michael Møller

A month ago, the Saudi ambassador to Geneva, Faisal Trad,  was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights Council committee which appoints ‘independent experts’. Saudi Arabia has great expertise in human rights violations to offer. This year it has beheaded more individuals than ISIS, lashed blogger Raif Badawi for ‘apostasy’, and done absolutely nothing to prevent the Female Genital Mutilation rampant there.

I happen to be going to Geneva next week. If I bump into Trad I will be wishing the UN Happy Anniversary and reminding him of two articles in the Universal Declaration:

5      No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

19    Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Edythe Olive, Suffragette Medea in Murray's translation (1907)

I have been focussed on the UN since I was appointed chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, which offers bursaries to support people promoting either the work of the UN or the study of ancient Greece (please do look at website and apply).  Murray was a brilliant academic and Professor of Greek who never forgot that intellectuals have a responsibility to offer their brains to the world outside the academy as well as within it. He was one of the leading figures in the foundation of the UN’s predecessor organisation, the League of Nations, and of Oxfam.

Murray avidly supported the rights of women. He defended conscientious objectors. He collaborated in the first versions of Greek tragedy staged to make political protests, the first being a London production of Trojan Women which denounced the brutal treatment of Boer women and children by the British. The cynical appointment of the Saudi Arabian Faisal Trad to what is obviously seen not as a profoundly important responsibility but a plum position has undoubtedly made Gilbert turn in his Westminster Abbey grave.

Wine, Norwegian Hellenists, and Song

Norwegian Acdemy of Science & Letters

Skol! We intoned it rather too many times over the dinner last night at the Norwegian Classical Association's knees-up in the beautiful building of the Norwegian Academy in Oslo. I have always enjoyed the drinking salutation of the Norwegians. It may be a coincidence, unless an Indo-European shared root explains it (memo to self to research this one), but the ancient Greek word for a popular drinking song was a skolion. This word is to be distinguished from a learned grammarian’s comment on a text, a scholion. An important distinction, although some of the scholia on e.g. the Iliad  are so crass that one wonders whether the grammarians had in fact been drinking when they inscribed them.

The Oslo Musical Papyrs--song from a tragedy

I’d been invited by the Academy’s General Secretary Øivind Andersen, one of the long line of outstanding Greek scholars Norway has produced. I first got to know about them when writing about the vocal techniques of ancient Greek actors, who in tragedy had to sing arias as well as speak dialogue. They wrote these arias on portable scripts they could take with them as they toured the theatres of antiquity. Several have survived on papyrus. The musical notation takes the form of extra letters written over the libretto. They tell us an enormous amount about how ancient tragic melodies actually sounded—large intervals were usually avoided, and the melodies wound sinuously up and down the ancient set scales.

One of the most important of the ‘musical papyri’ is in Oslo. It contains a plangent song sung by an ancient actor in an otherwise lost tragedy about Achilles’ son Neoptolemus.  You can hear a slightly imaginative reconstruction of what it sounded like here.

Leiv Amundsen (right)

I feel a special affinity with this papyrus because it was co-edited by the gifted earlier Norwegian Greek scholars Samuel Eitrem and Leiv  Amundsen (in oil painting I'm pointing at in the picture) along with whom else but Reginald Pepys Winnington-Ingram, Professor at King’s College London.  His office is now mine. This thrills me because as long ago as 1948 he wrote the most significant article on Aeschylus’ Oresteia to appear until the 1970s, a profoundly feminist piece in which he explained that Clytemnestra’s real problem is that she knows she is smarter than her husband. So last night I feel that the Hellenist philological bond between Oslo and my institution was delightfully reaffirmed over Norwegian cod and excellent wine. Skol skol skol!

Ridley Scott & Aristotle on Mars & Entertainment

It was on 4 May 357 BCE that Aristotle got to grips with the planet Mars. May 4th is of course Star Wars Day, as in ‘May the Fourth/Force be With You’. One of my children was born on that date and once got free Star Wars minifigures in the Cardiff Lego shop simply by waving a copy of her birth certificate. Now my political party's leader, wonderfully, has a May 4 connection simply by looking like Star Wars’ Obi Wan Kenobi.

The View from Athens Pub, 357 BCE

Back in 357, at about 2000 in the evening Athens time, Aristotle (then in his mid-thirties and studying with Plato) watched the moon move in front of the planet Mars. He was the first known person in history to observe, I like to think from a tavern near the Academy, the distinctive planet re-emerging from behind the dark side of the moon on its other, ‘brilliant and shining side’ (On the Heavens, aka de Caelo book 2 chapter 12, 292a).

'The War-God Planet is further away than the Moon'

From this empirical observation Aristotle was able to infer that the moon was nearer to planet Earth than Mars, even though he still thought that the centre of the whole system was Earth. Aristotle, however, called the planet Mars by its Greek name ‘Ares’. (He can't be held responsible for the fact that this was the name of my warlike first husband, whom I left the night the Berlin wall came down).

I went on a family outing to see Ridley Scott’s dazzling movie Martian  yesterday. That is, we booked tickets once I had got over the fact that Teenagers Today are not told at school that Mars is further out from the centre of the solar system than Earth (they do know what happens in intergalactic computer games, just not in physical reality). I was also encouraged because the name ARISTOTLE can be coerced out of the letters forming the three words RIDLEY SCOTT MARS, although do not know what to do with the spare letters DYCMRS. (Suggestions from crossworders please in COMMENTS below).

What I have always loved about Ridley Scott is not that he comes from Teesside, although that has clearly made him grounded and funny and will be an advantage when dealing with the monster egos and morons he must meet in Planet Hollywood. His movies—Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma and Louise, 1492, and Gladiator are my favourites—have ALL managed to be educational and morally edifying as well as enthralling entertainment.

Scott not only seems to think that females are intelligent (the commander of the Mars mission is a woman). He just ‘gets’ that art can be both useful and pleasurable, as Aristotle keenly argued it must be in his Poetics; you should have heard the cheers in (Witney) Cineworld when rational science and transnational human brainpower, to the tune of ABBA’s Waterloo, got the highly resourceful Astronaut (Watney), a Botanist like Aristotle's best friend Theophrastus, off the Red Planet and back to family Homo Sapiens. More, please, Ridley. Aristotle would have approved.

How to Succeed as an Undergraduate: 9 things not to do

In UK academia, teaching staff are now sent almost daily directives telling us how to make our students feel at home and Enhance The Student Customer Experience. Many more management emails list things we may not do or say to them. While I have always been very pro-student, because so many of them are impoverished, anxious about their futures,  lonely,  and easily exploited, the beginning of teaching term seems an appropriate time to remind everyone that pedagogical relationships, like any others, are two-way.

There are several sure-fire ways of alienating your lecturer.  I am not bothered about texting on silent mobile phones, packed lunches, or anything else which does not disturb me or fellow students. But in the name of cordial entente I do recommend that students do NOT do the following (all examples, in ascending order of obnoxiousness, drawn directly from my personal lecturing experience).

 1  Write emails to her opening ‘Hey, Prof.’, ‘Hey Ms.’ or simply ‘Can you pop along all the materials for last week’s lecture and tell me the gist?  I can’t remember whether I attended it or not.’

   2  Snog your girlfriend/boyfriend noisily while she is lecturing. The Greeks may be exciting stuff, but there are limits.

   3  When she has spent several hours reading your thesis draft and annotating it with constructive criticism and suggestions, belligerently defend every point and demand to know what her academic qualifications are.

   4  Fail to wash and don clean clothes before tutorials in small offices with poor ventilation.

   5  Ask her the following: ‘I am paying the same fees for this course as Emily Klopstock von Metterhausen. Why has she got a First for that essay and I have only got a 2:2?’

  6     Say to her after a lecture on Greek tragedy, ‘It’s really strange: there’s a famous woman who’s written this great book on Greek tragedy with the same name as you, Miss.’

  7      Tell her you are the warlock of the coven of witches in Newbury and send her a mysterious wand inscribed with a spell naming her as Hera and yourself as Ixion.  (The latter sexually harassed the former).

   8   When she tells your class that she is shaken up because she feels bad about accidentally killing a badger driving to the station that morning, go onto Wikipedia immediately after the lecture and insert ‘Notorious Badger Murderer’ into the first paragraph of the entry under her name.

  9  Ask her when you have been introduced to her at the end of term departmental party if she would do a personal pole dance display for you and your mates in the rugby club.

 

Note to any former students who read this and recognise themselves: I am currently out of the country and not readily available to correspond.

Gorillas from Carthage to Illinois

Welcome to Planet Earth, Zach

Diversionary topic this week, the first of full-on university term, has been gorillas. Kamba’s new baby Zachary was born at Brookfield Zoo, Illinois (video here), just in time to help us celebrate our firstborn’s birthday. 17 years ago really did see one of the two best moments of my life, even if wildly enhanced by an opium-based painkiller.

"Gorilla" by Henrik Gronvold in Natural History Museum

I am a fan of gorilla dads.  They are fiercely protective, spend a great deal of time with their young, settle disputes between rival siblings, and always make sure their females get enough to eat.

There is a greater dimorphism (disparity between the size and weight) of male and female gorillas than in any other ape: males are 1.5 times the size. This contrasts with only 1.1 on average in homo sapiens. This means that human females have always preferred to select mates for reasons other than being enormous, which is interesting in itself, although I’m not sure what to make of the father of my own children being about 1.5 times my size.

Hanno and his Phoenician crew

Gorillas are first named in an ancient Greek text, which purports to be a translation of a treatise from 500 BC in Phoenician, A Report of the Voyage of Hanno. This Navigator King of the Carthaginians says that he sailed to Africa (Pliny the Elder later claims Hanno went all the way round to Arabia). Hanno reports that he encountered extremely hairy savages, mostly female, whom his interpreters named gorillai.  Hanno’s men abducted three of them, killed them, flayed them, and later dedicated the skins in a temple at Carthage.

'Gorille (femelle) enlevant une négresse’

The 19^th-century rediscovery of the gorilla involved a vogue for artworks depicting gorillas abducting human women. In 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species,  French artist Emmanuel Frémiet outraged the  jury of the Paris Salon. Inspired by the publicity surrounding the first ever whole gorilla bodies (preserved in alcohol) to be seen in Paris, he reconstructed a gorilla in 3-D action in ‘Gorille enlevant une négresse’.

'Gorilla abducting woman' mark 2

Frémiet was sufficiently racist to think that nobody would mind because the victim was ‘just’ an African woman; he thought he had avoided any suggestion of sex by labelling the gorilla femelle. But the work was, in fact, banned as an offence to public morality. Baudelaire said it certainly was sexual and simply ‘sordid’.

The work was destroyed, but the world moved on. In 1887, Frémiet won the Medal of Honour for a new, life-size (male) Gorilla carrying off a (Caucasian) woman. The critics couldn’t decide whether it supported or subverted Darwin’s theory, and worried about the tool-like rock held by the gorilla: was he developing higher intelligence? But the public loved it. Bronze casts and prints proliferated. It became a defining image in French culture of the day. And I bet it lies somewhere behind the invention of King Kong in the 1930s. I could always waste some time next week investigating the links. 

Women, Classics, & the Labour Party

Emma Reynolds MP, Sneerer of the Year

The low point of the week for me was watching the sneer on Emma Reynolds’ face when Jeremy Corbyn’s election result was announced. Reynolds is MP for Wolverhampton North East and until recently Shadow Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government.  I used to have a lot of time for her. Now she refuses to sit on the front bench with Corbyn.

I can’t find the clip online. But Reynolds’ bile was palpable. How can people elected to represent us display their contempt in this sickening way for the decisions made by ordinary voters in political parties?

My indignation was fuelled by researching women who were active in the Labour Party—then the Independent Labour Party—in its earliest days. They would all have been cheering rather than sneering at this week's focus on poverty, mental illness, and union freedom. Some had developed their radicalism while studying the Greek and Latin Classics. In my latest book, co-edited with Henry Stead, Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform, I have a whole essay about them available online here.

The most influential was Katharine Glasier, a rebellious Newnhamite classics teacher. She worked at Redlands, a private girls’ school in Bristol, until an encounter with demonstrating women cotton workers.  She resigned, became a full-time activist,  and married ‘down’ several social classes in choosing John Bruce Glasier, who succeeded Keir Hardie as Chairman of the ILP.  She was one of the 15 founding members of the ILP in 1893 and the only woman elected to its first national administrative council. A highly successful editor of the Labour Leader, she ran campaigns for the provision of baths at the pit-heads for miners, free school meals for the poor, nursery education, and the Save the Children fund.

Katharine Bruce Glasier

Her most brilliant pupil was Enid Stacy, who when not studying classics campaigned for striking Bristol workers. She often arrived home at midnight ‘with draggled skirt and swollen feet after hours of patient standing about in the effort to win laundrywomen to a trade union’. Enid annoyed the Bristol police and was sacked from her job as schoolteacher. So she devoted herself to the ILP’s campaign for the rights and suffrage of women.

Hamilton

Glasier was ecstatic when Mary Agnes Hamilton, another Newnham classicist and author of several books on classical topics, was swept to victory for Labour in Blackburn in 1929, having won the trust of the Trade Unions. She gained more votes as MP than any other woman Labour candidate. Against stiff odds, the ILP woman, so many of whom were classically educated, had finally taken up their rightful place in parliamentary politics. I bet they would have served in Corbyn’s team.

Adventures with Aristotle in Germany and Greece

Stressout of the week was delivering the annual Erasmus Lecture, the venue being the Technological University of Darmstadt. The stress was exacerbated by the red-faced pilot who arrived late from his hotel to the Heathrow gate. This meant I arrived at the lecture hall only half an hour before kickoff.  

Then the event’s host, the local Professor of Computer Science, refused for a while to accept my powerpoint demo because he did not believe that I was actually the person giving the lecture. (This happens a lot: I don’t look very intelligent and people—or rather men—who have only read my work are invariably disappointed when they meet me in middle-aged maternal person).

Aristotle, Scientist-Philosopher

Prof.  was punished by the she-gods, however. His computer broke down at the precise moment when he told the European Academy that his institution was At The Apex of World Computational Science. Someone had put a vase of flowers on the platform in a place which made it inevitable that the technician would kick it over. The water zapped the electricity. Prof. was at a loss how to mop up the puddle. I reached into my mumsy handbag and offered him a packet of tissues, explaining that Lo-Tech Is Sometimes Best. He never spoke to me again.

Aristotle inventing Zoology on Lesbos

But I ploughed on. Having been asked to ensure that my lecture could be enjoyed by the 90% of the audience who are scientists, I hit them hard with Aristotle.  He is a tough read at the best of times, despite a few laboured Stageirite puns. But he did after all invent systematic Zoology, statistical analysis of volcanoes, self-conscious use of logical syllogisms, the concepts of Collective Intelligence, theory, and above all of potentiality and its actualisation—teleology.

Greek Science made statues seem to move

I explained what I like best about Aristotle—his application of everyday experience to elevated theorisation. When illustrating the moment that biological reproduction instils potentiality (what we would call the fixing of the genetic code or DNA transfer) the man from Stageira draws an analogy from temple cult. He has seen gadgets in the form of ‘wonderful puppets’ (automata) which trick people into thinking that gods’ statues are alive. They use hidden wheels that transmit movement to gears, edge-to-edge, through friction.  The potential for the statues to move is created when the first wheel of the series is set in slow, grinding motion, some time before the potentiality is actualised. 

You can go to see reconstructions of such wonder-inducing mechanisms, reconstructed by Kostas Kotsanas at his Museum of Ancient Greek Technology and Inventions in Katakolo, western Peloponnese. The museum, charmingly, is free of charge. So remember, when not marvelling at the ingenuity of the ancient Greeks in this ordinary seaside town, to eat out a lot and inject some money into the modern ones’ economy.