Ode on a Grecian Quarry

"Oi, I've invented earthquake-proof masonry!"

The showdown between Athena and Poseidon for the post of Guardian God of Athens took place on top of the Acropolis. Athena won, as she had to. The Athenians may have valued olive trees more than water, but it was more important that they prided themselves on being intelligent and technologically adept: Athena was defined by her strategic planning and wisdom, while Poseidon was in charge of elemental forces--waves, charging horses, the earthquake.

Athena’s temple, the Parthenon, was built so cleverly, on firm foundations and with elastic columns (slight sliding was possible between her column drums), that it was almost immune to earthquakes. Brainpower had defeated cosmological Force majeure.

Alex Rowson and Martin Gorst, Assistant Producer and Director

I thought I knew a lot about the Acropolis until this week. I went to Athens with a wonderful crew from Windfall Films to help make a TV documentary about the labour Pericles’ building project demanded. But I was not prepared for the psychological impact of my first ever visit to the quarries where the inhabitants of Athens (free, resident alien, or slave) sweated blood and tears for more than forty years hacking enormous slabs of marble out of the mountain.

Elias, with mallet, chisel & wedge

17 kilometres north-east of Athens, bitterly cold and wind-battered even though the weather downtown was warm, accessible only by dirt tracks and steep stairs etched into stone terraces, the ancient Pentelikon quarries awaited us. Elias, a local mason employed by Dionysus Marbles (supplier to the Acropolis Restoration Project), demonstrated the dangers of marble mining before the machine age.

With Eleni Phanariotou, TV Fixer Extraordinary

In the 5^th century BCE, tens of thousands of tons were sliced off using only the strength of man and mule. It took days to cut them into roughly the shape needed for the temples. They were somehow slid onto rollers and hoisted onto carts, dragged  that long mountainside down to the plain of Attica, and then, by mysterious means, winched or dragged up onto the Acropolis itself. Most of the work had already been done long before designer Pheidias’ team could get on with the arty bit.

Athena's Olive at the Erechtheion where Athena & Poseidon share power

This seems to me to augment the argument that the bits of the temples crowbarred off by Lord Elgin’s servants ought to return to descendants of the people who did all that work. But it also made me think about the Athenians’ self-definition through mythology.  They were proud of being ‘autochthonous’— ‘sprung from their own earth’; it turns out that this was to echo the birth of the rocks that made their temples, themselves extracted from one Athenian summit and put on another. But since marble is made of compressed and twice-cooked seashells (Mount Penteli was once the bottom of an ocean), the sharing of the temples of the Acropolis between Athena and the Sea-God Poseidon suddenly made perfect sense.

Pheidias shows Parthenon artworks to Aspasia and Pericles, but much of the work had been done already

Californian Rubicon

Having agreed months ago to attend my profession’s biggest annual convention, for the first time since 1993, I've spent most of this week in San Francisco regretting it. Despite knowing hundreds of people, I feel isolated and out place and guilty about flying unnecessarily. I’ve never enjoyed conferences, believing that most of them are attended by men anxious to get away from childcare duties or to have affairs. But this time I have crossed my personal Rubicon. I have promised myself never to agree to attend an overseas conference again. Skype is fine!

Rubicons have been on my mind since I was nearly knocked down by a speeding Rubicon Jeep at the airport the night I arrived.  They shouldn’t be allowed on real roads, since that is not what they are designed for: ‘It's the hammer, and every trail looks like a nail’ is the product strapline; ‘the most off-road oriented jeep of all time’.

For $45,000 you can pick one up at a dealer and pretend to be Julius Caesar himself. You can burn a gallon of gas every 19 miles and plunge the Roman Republic into Civil War; you can ponder the terrifying ramifications for the future of your civilisation.

The reddish shallows of the Rubicon

This manly vehicle would scarcely register the waters or red (ruber) stones of the tiny river which marked the border with Cisalpine Gaul, negotiated jeeplessly by Caesar exactly 2065 years ago on 10 January 49 BCE.  

He had just been declared Enemy of the State by the Senate. Plutarch tells us that after a night in which he dreamt that he slept with his own mother (a dream many ancient Greek and Roman men experienced), J.C. set out in the evening for the Rubicon. Plutarch is charitable enough to grant him a psychological crisis at the last minute, fearing that this irretrievable step would mean ‘evil for all mankind’. 

But he finally plunged in, declaring ‘the die is cast!’ The Rubicon has ever since been a metaphor for what pilots call the PNR (point of no return), when the amount of fuel consumed means a plane is no longer capable of returning to the airfield from which it took off--the moment when you leave your other half, hand in your notice, or finally tell someone who misuses their power over you what you really think of them.  

I'm in the Tower (11th Floor)

Outside Hilton Fantasyland

Will you cross a 2016 Personal Rubicon? The vast impersonal spaces, overwhelming din, exorbitant food prices and bizarre academic life forms in the San Francisco Hilton, along with the desperate poverty and homelessness in the streets outside, have brought mine on much earlier than expected.  

Four Daft 2015 Events & A Resolution

Am I turning into a Luddite? My four daftest 2015 moments were all caused by modern inventions supposed to enhance 'progress'.

1. The Head Hunter. Last June a dim but snooty person from what she said was an ‘exclusive head hunter' rang me up and asked if I wanted to be considered for the post of Director of the British Museum. I cackled, assuming she was a friend playing a prank. She wasn’t. So I asked if she had actually researched my views on e.g. colonial rapine of the archaeology of the British Empire, the Parthenon Marbles etc., views publicly identifiable through my blog, website and broadcasts. She acknowledged that she had not done any such research yet. She did not call me back.

I think it was for reciting a speech of Alcestis

2. The Spell Checker. I won a ‘Goodwin Award’ from the august American Society of Classical Studies for a book I wrote. The prize certificate, written in Latin, said NOSTRIL instead of NOSTRI (‘our’) because of an illiterate spell checker. The certificate’s other mistake (not technologically caused) was to refer to me with a masculine pronoun. This reminded me of my teenage prize book label (left) for reciting Greek which assumed that as victor I must be a pupil at Nottingham High School for Boys. (I wrought revenge by using the W.H. Smith token to buy a cookery book). 

Autumn Term Garbage (poster not included)

3. The Health and Safety Ruling. The nice man who used to empty my work rubbish bin has been sacked or moved. Fear of rodents means No More Office Bins at King’s College London. Instead I now work alongside a cardboard box with THREE MONTHS’ (not three days’) worth of rat-friendly prawn baguette crusts and gin bottles, since I never seem to have time to get to Recycling.

4. The Data Ownership Obsessive (aka IP MAXIMALIST). A top academic press has gone bonkers. I co-submitted the typescript of a contracted volume last summer, and the editor demanded letters on file granting someone’s—it seems anyone’s—permission to reproduce every single quotation, image and epigraph, regardless of their antiquity, out-of-copyright or ‘orphan’ status, or claim to

Anyone got Milton's agent's email?

Fair Use (yes, I do know the laws). S/he wants me to get permission (from whom, I ask?) to quote a Sappho poem, an anonymous 16th-century tomb inscription no longer in material existence and lines from Paradise Lost. How to get permission cleared for Online Use from John Milton? Bring back Gutenberg and Caxton say I!

My new Aristotle Hoodie!

Aristotle's sad demise

Resolution. I have signed a contract (NOT with crazed IP Maximalist at said academic press) to write a book about Aristotle's 12 best ideas, which I hope can be Cleared for Digital Use and Electronic Reproduction (World Rights) since he jumped into the waves at Chalcis, Euboea in 322 BC and inconsiderately left no forwarding address. I have donned my best Xmas gift (right) and am about to jump into the Metaphysics! Wish me a less daft 2016!

The Ancient & Modern Woman in the Moon

I gazed at the last Christmas Full Moon, in 1977, from the window of a Swiss hotel where I was becoming radicalised, working a 20-hour shift as a waitress. More deserving of concerted efforts at memory was that mystical Christmas Eve of 1968, when I was as enraptured as all of us humans waiting for Apollo 8 to return from our species’ first ever flight round the dark far side of the moon. 

Ten orbits and a spine-chilling reading from Genesis broadcast to Planet Earth later, as an eight-year-old also waiting for Santa, the moon became associated for me with incredible excitement. Santa welded with the Man in the Moon, and my brain has confused his chariot with a NASA space rocket ever since.

Selene drives her winged horses

After handing in my notice in Switzerland (hard, because they confiscated all Gastarbeiters’ passports) I went to university and discovered one of the biggest cons of all time: the inhabitant of the moon whose face you can sometimes see is not male at all but female. Plutarch (who has had a moon crater named after him as reward) wrote a treatise with the catchy title Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon. It has been very important in the history of science, as an inspiration for Johannes Keppler in his early 17th-century Somnium, the first serious study of lunar astronomy. But Plutarch’s text quotes a Greek poet who saw in the moon ‘a maiden’s face, with moistened cheeks, which blush to meet the gaze.’ 

Selene with Crescent Moon hat

Long before the Greeks merely associated the moon with Artemis, Diana/Cynthia/or Hecate, they actually personified her as Selene, a disturbing, beautiful name of high antiquity stretching back to early Indo-European hunter-gatherer times. Selene, like Santa, had a chariot; sometimes she rode horseback. She had a great love life, since her boyfriend, the good-looking cowherd Endymion, was kept eternally young and asleep in a cave awaiting their next erotic encounter. She had exciting children including the Dew, the Months, and the poet Mousaios as well as the exquisite Narcissus and the dangerous Nemean lion.

"Honey, wake up. I'm ovulating!"

As a Briton I am proud that the idea that the goddess’s train of escorts were in fact green seems to have been the invention of the English showman Elkanah Settle, whose spectacular musical The World in the Moon (1697) included five green men dancing in Cynthia’s lunar court, to music by Daniel Purcell.

Lunar Crater 'HYPATIA'

But as a woman I am more impressed that according to the official Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature maintained by the International Astronomical Union, amongst the tiny proportion of moon craters named after women, the ancient astronomer Hypatia does at least feature alongside Plutarch and Aristarchus etc. 

Elfie begins her Lunar Escapade

And as soon as I have made the mince pies and finished trying to peer behind the clouds atop my wold to see the moon, which will be at its fullest shortly (11.11 GMT), I am going to return to Feminist Adventures in Lunar Lore. I am reading Frances Vescelius Austen’s Elfie's Visit to Cloudland and the Moon, partly based on Lucian’s thrilling moon-travel story in his True Histories. Austen’s novel antedates L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by several years, and thus may lay claim to feature the first female quest heroine in modern literature.

Dawn, Evening Star and Selene on a vase in St. Petersburg

Boxing, Racism & Sports Reportage

Tyson Fury: What's Not to Dislike?

Which character in ancient Greek myth most resembles the British world heavyweight boxing champion, Tyson Fury, ill-famed for his invectives against females and gays? There were plenty of misogynist ranters in ancient Greece. The super-athlete Heracles was prominent amongst them. But he was attracted to beautiful youngsters of both sexes. Homophobia was not amongst Heracles’ vices.

Fury has Irish Traveller blood and has suffered from racism. But, paradoxically, he disgorges anti-immigrant abuse.  He would, I fear, have been urging on the bigoted crowd in the epoch-marking boxing match which took place near East Grinstead exactly 205 years ago, on 18th December 1810.

Molineaux, robbed of his victory over Tom Cribb, 205 years ago

Tom Molineaux, a former slave from Carolina, was billed as ‘The Black Ajax’. The Greek hero Ajax was not in fact a boxer, but a champion wrestler; in Iliad 23, his bout with Odysseus is declared a draw because although he is physically stronger, Odysseus is his superior strategically. This makes the rigged defeat of the Black Ajax at the bare-knuckled fists of English heavyweight champion Tom Cribb, a former Bristol docker, even more painful. By the end of the match, wrote the eye-witness Pierce Egan, ‘you never saw two men so dead and yet alive, disfigured so bloody you could only tell ’em apart by their skins’.

  

Cribb was felt to be defending the honour of white men against their black brethren. Britons felt outraged at the ease with which the Black Ajax had that summer demolished two famous English pugilists, 'The Bristol Terror' and 'Tom Tough'.

Black Ajax laid out Cribb decisively in the 28th round. Appalled that the American was about to be declared victor, Cribb’s second accused him of cheating. This created a long delay which allowed Cribb to come round and get back on his feet. Molineaux, flustered by this stratagem, was  finally defeated in the bloodbath of the 35th round.

Yet Egan, the  father of sports journalism (he claimed that Homer was actually the first sports reporter though) and self-advertised expert on ancient athletics (his soubriquet was 'the Plutarch of Boxing'), saw through the racist trickery. In his genre-founding Boxiana: or, Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism (1812), he insisted that underhand means and the crowd’s bias had robbed Black Ajax of a glorious victory: ‘It will not be forgotten, if justice holds the scales, that it was Molineaux’s colour alone that prevented him becoming the hero of that fight.’

Molineaux’s career never recovered. He got drunk before the rematch and lost in 19 minutes. He died of alcoholism in Ireland just eight years later.  Until Tyson Fury began his outrageous public tirade against immigrants, the fixing of the Black Ajax’s defeat by Tom Cribb retained the dubious distinction of being the most shameful event ever in British sporting history.

Travails with the Letter "S" Ancient & Modern

The remainder of the current blog may create an odd effect, but I can’t currently make my mouth and teeth yield what would hit your ear like the alphabetic entity in my title.  I am therefore writing the way I declaim and pledge to avoid the relevant letter (bar the indented material quoted from other people below).

For I have today taken the orthodontic plunge and had metal put within my teeth to de-rabbit them.  The brilliant Dr Clare McNamara, of Cheltenham Orthodontic fame, warned me about the problematic letter.

On returning home I found an email from the British Broadcathting Pronunthiation Unit, which read, unbelievably,

Dear Professor Hall,

One of our broadcasters has asked us to research the correct pronunciation for some of the alternative names of Odysseus and I was hoping you were available to advise us today.

If you do happen to have some time, could you please help us with the pronunciations of the following names?

 Olysseus/ Ὀλυσσεύς

Oulixeus /Οὐλιξεύς

Oulixes/Οὐλίξης

I’d be happy to call you if you send me a contact number and a convenient time to call.

I cannot tell you what a droll phone dialogue that would have been. Try reading the above email but  putting “th” or “f” in for every you-know-what and for every “x” too. I recommended another academic.

Dionythiuth of Halicarnatthuth

Ancient Greek oratory often avoided the letter I cannot currently utter. An expert on putting together language called Dionysius of Halicarnassus deemed the effect of the letter we are talking about “charm-free” and "repellent", but then, with that name, he had probably had enough of it.

Pericleth' Funeral Oration

The Athenian general [dammit! I can’t refer to Greek nomenclature without my alphabetic item!], of whom the name began with "P", a great orator, avoided it. The tragedian beginning with “E” liked the effect it made in the mouth of clever and angry people like Medea, often aurally catlike.

Another, anon. drama, of which we have a fragment, experimented with avoiding the letter altogether. Had the author been having dental work done? In it the Titan beginning with “A”, who held up the firmament on their neck, and the hero beginning with “H”, who performed many a labour, had a quarrel off Gibraltar. The aural effect will have been like hearing me in my current condition.

The technical name for omitting one letter throughout a work = (ha! You thought you would catch me out with conjugating the verb “to be”!) LIPOGRAMMATIC.  I offer you here a very rough Anglophone rendition of the mediocre ancient Greek lipogrammatic dramatic dialogue chunk with A  and H. I am too tired to bother imitating the effect of the lack of the naughty letter here, and drop it in liberally. But I would love to hear from anyone feeling up to the job.

Atlas         I promised to bring apples here. Here they are. Take them. I didn’t promise anything else. I have kept my promise.

Heracles   I have been deceived. Perfidy! Infamy! I call upon heavenly Themis [goddess who protected people who’d had oaths sworn to them] to witness that Atlas has been dishonest with Heracles, although immortal by birth. I shall pursue him, even though I am a human on my mother’s side, since Zeus is my true father.

Atlas         Go and scare others, not me. Mother Earth is proud that she bore me first among the Titans, blood relatives of Cronus. We ruled with him on Mount Olympus.

Heracles   Justice, who supports the gods, has given a fierce look, even though she lives far away. [From Bodmer Papyrus 28]

Democracy vs the Iron Law of Oligarchy (Again)

The most irritating rhetoric spouted in the British parliamentary debate on Wednesday entailed the phrases ‘pinpoint accuracy’ and ‘precision laser targeting’ to produce ‘maximum lethality’ by ‘highly trained professionals’. The MPs getting high on language they found on the RAF website have clearly never been inside the cockpit of a Tornado (I have). 

This model of fighter aircraft needs to be pensioned off. It has been in use for more than four decades. Rather than computer screens, it uses 1980s dials. Compared with the new Typhoon, it is notoriously difficult to manoeuvre, except in a straight line, and contains so many sensors that even crew admit they are hard to operate.

When a democracy decides to go to war, the people making the decision, in my view, should be informed about the military equipment available to them. They should also be prepared to fight, or send their own children to fight, in person.

Athenians had to Walk the War Walk as well as Talk the War Talk

This was the case in the ancient Athenian Direct Democracy, in which the citizen mass (demos) wielded executive power (kratos). Of course each citizen—let’s call him Hilarios Antonides Bennos—could go along to the Pnyx Hill People’s Assembly to a ‘shall we go to war?’ debate, and get excited about ‘Standing Firm with Our Oldest Allies’ or ‘Attic Values’ or ‘Precision Hoplite Combat’. But if Hilarios Antonides did vote  that way he could personally expect to be standing on the front row of the phalanx, with a 50% chance of survival, within weeks.

I was fascinated by Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to bypass the ludicrous limitations of Representative Democracy by asking what his party members thought. He emailed all of us and requested our views.  This is not Rocket, or even Fighter Jet Science. It is a leader taking seriously his responsibilities to the people who elected him .

It was as long ago as 1911 that a German political theorist called Robert Michels pointed out that representative democracies inevitably deteriorate and turn into oligarchies (‘the iron law of oligarchy', das eherne Gesetz der Oligarchie). Those sanctimonious parliamentarians 'representing' us actually constitute an oligarchy or ‘rule by the few’.

Which leads me to the most toxic sentences in the history of British democracy, constantly cited by MPs to justify misrepresenting their electorate. In 1774 Edmund Burke contested the parliamentary seat for Bristol. His opponent had argued that if he were elected he would regard his own opinions as subordinate to those of his constituents. Burke belligerently asserted the opposite—the transcendent right of (self-evidently intellectually and morally superior) MPs to vote any way they goddam liked:

Edmund Burke Still Haranguing on Bristol Quay

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents... But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

The Bristolians, unfathomably, voted for this self-obsessed burk, who was so confident in his own mature judgement, enlightened conscience etc.  But that is any reason why, 239 years later, we should still tolerate such arrogance in our elected representatives?