UFOs Ancient and (Relatively) Modern

World UFO day, ‘dedicated to the Existence of Unidentified Flying Objects’, is celebrated on July 2, the anniversary of the Roswell Incident. On July 2 1947, unidentifiable debris found by a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, was diagnosed as the remains of an extra-terrestrial flying saucer. Thousands of people remain convinced that there was an alien landing which the Pentagon is covering up. 'Leaked' pictures of the aliens involved still circulate widely in the Internet.

My own childhood interest in UFOs was fostered by short film documentaries suggesting that various archaeological sites in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica served as landing and launch pads for extra-terrestrials. Once I discovered Classics I started collecting references to unexplained objects from outer space recorded in ancient authors. Since the official website of World UFO Day (http://www.worldufoday.com/ ) politely requests that we spend the day  ‘talking with your friends about the possibility of UFOs or alien life’, here’s my contribution: my five favourite classical UFOs in ascending order.

Timoleon's Torch

1.   In  343 BCE, a giant torch was seen moving through the sky by the Greek general Timoleon, defender of the Greeks against the Carthaginians, and showed the route his fleet needed to take to Sicily. The historian Diodorus does not draw the obvious inference that these ETs responsible preferred the Greeks to the Carthaginians.

2.   Cosmic ships were seen sailing across the Italian sky in 214 BCE when the Romans were feeling particularly frightened of—wait for it—the Carthaginians (Livy).

3.   Celestial chariots and armed phalanxes charged through the clouds during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE when the Romans defeated the Jews. Whose side were the ETs responsible for the UFOs on? (Josephus)

4.   An enormous 100-foot ‘beast’ which looked as though it was made of pottery,  emitted darts of fire and had a multioloured upper surface, in company with a Woman in White, was seen on the road between Rome and Capua in about 150 CE (Shepherd of Hermas). The ETs on this occasion were voting for Christianity.

Attempt at Reconstructing Flying Saucer Wine Jar

5.   But the winner for sheer spectacle, and apparent lack of partisan feeling amongst the ETs, is the flame-like wine-jars of silver hue which landed via a suddenly appearing split in the sky between the armies of Lucullus and Mithridates when the Pontic monarch was terrorising the Roman army in Phrygia in 74 BCE. Both armies saw it and its senders did not appear to take sides.

The Unidentified Flying Wine-Jar  wins because it is evidence that Extra-Terrestrials either drink wine or were dropping a hint that they would like to. Which is hardly surprising if you consider the alleged Roswell alien, who certainly looks in severe need of a drink.

What did the Greeks do for Ezra Pound & Should we Care?

I spent half the week in Philadelphia giving a public lecture on that city’s most famous poet at the annual Ezra Pound International Conference. I never actually liked much of Pound’s poetry; his famous Cantos are crammed with allusions to other poets so dense that you need a literary encyclopedia to make sense of them.  And then there were his silly hairdos and the fascination with Fascism.

Questionnable Coiffure

But Pound did almost single-handedly free poetry from the rhetorical verbiage and conventional verse forms of the 19th century, stress the importance of crystalline imagery, and introduce the idea of verse libre and singable verse, verse cantabile. This makes an aural impact by careful handling of vowel sounds. He cannot be written out of the history of aesthetics however hard some, repelled by his politics, have tried.

Pound is Hellenic Maiden Second from Left

I argued that the primary reason he was able to invent a whole new kind of lyric song was his experience performing in the chorus of a Greek tragedy by Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris in 1903, at the age of 17. This meant learning off by heart nearly 300 lines of limpid lyric poetry which sounds, when sung or spoken out loud, very like much of Pound's most beautiful, melodic lines, e.g.  ‘Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes’, or ‘In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it.’

'ecstasies of emotion'

Pound as Hellenic Maiden made an impression which his friend William Carlos Williams regarded as hilarious, ‘in a togalike ensemble topped by a great blond wig at which he tore as he waved his arms about and heaved his massive breasts in ecstasies of emotion’. Hilda Doolittle, however (better known as the poet H.D.), developed a crush on cross-dressed Pound and thenceforward spent most of her life imitating or translating Euripides.

Poster advertising the  Play

I believe that the older Pound was in denial about the importance of Euripides to his own development because Euripides was associated, through his popular translator Gilbert Murray (co-founder of the League of Nations which became the UN), with the liberal and humanitarian causes which Pound came to despise. I also learned on Tuesday that Pound corresponded with fellow-Modernist-of-dodgy-politics T.S. Eliot in an excruciatingly racist parody of what they regarded as the diction of African American people (although they called them by another, less respectful name).

The Messenger spoke Greek skilfully & was talked about for years

Which all goes to show that the Classics lurk beneath stones where nobody has suspected them (like the form and sound of Modernist free verse) and do indeed belong to everyone. This includes august poetic types I personally would rather not hang out with, even at such a monumental performance of my very favourite Greek play.

Adventures in Aeschylus' Argos

Coast where the Danaids arrived from Egypt

I spent two days finding the places where Aeschylus set some tragedies, in the Argolis, around Argos in Greece.  The plays, topically enough, are about the blessings and hazards which immigrants can bring to a community. Over a hundred Egyptians of both sexes, fighting between themselves for power back home, suddenly turn up at a sanctuary by the beach where on Friday morning I celebrated the young British electorate’s courage.

Suppliants just off the boat at Edinburgh Lyceum

There were originally four plays, making a ‘tetralogy’ called Daughters of Danaus. We only have one, Suppliants, and a few fragments. The enterprising Actors Touring Company recently wowed the Edinburgh Lyceum and Manchester Royal Exchange with a new version of Suppliants by David Greig. You can already book tickets for its much-anticipated opening in November at London’s Young Vic.

Daughters of Danaus wreck their Wedding Night

But the ATC has an exciting plan to reconstruct the other plays in the group too. So our tour included several pertinent sites. One episode was the beheading of 49 male Egyptians by their 49 female cousins, on the orders of their father Danaus, who wanted to become Undisputed Top Male. The mass murder took place  at Lerna, just down the coast south-west of Argos and famous for the hundred-headed Hydra.

Ancient Argos reconstructed with market-place centre left

The tetralogy’s climax was the trial in Argos of one Egyptian woman, Hypermnestra, who fell in love with her cousin and refused to kill him. We decided the small theatre in the market-place is an appropriate setting. She got off because (1) the goddess of sex, Aphrodite, turned up and said It's Love that Makes the World Go Round and (2) the Argives decided to Grow Up and Take Responsibility for their Democracy, For The Many (all of them including the cooperative amongst the Egyptians) Not The Few (the tyrant Danaus).

Selfie with John, Sasha and a Satyric Ramin at Amymone's Fountain

The final play was a satyr drama, featuring goat men in the mountains above Argos/Lerna. They wanted to rape another daughter of Danaus, Amymone. Poseidon ‘rescued’ her, and threatened to rape her himself. But when he came and wooed her respectfully she married him. He struck his rock with a trident to make a wonderful spring and named it for her. We found the source of water, today diverted straight into a cistern and irrigation system at the top of the mountain. My colleagues Ramin Gray (Director) and John Browne (Composer) had to be dissuaded by me and Sasha Milavic Davies (Movement Director) from impersonating goat-men too convincingly.

Argive Sanctuary of Hera

It was also inspiring to visit the beautiful sanctuary of Hera where the daughters of Danaus would have prayed for better husband material and fed the sacred peacocks. What a great start to June all round. Let’s hope that Things really can Only Get Better this time.

Amymone not yet too keen on Poseidon

Why Aristotle Would Have Voted for the Green Party

As if the world didn’t have enough problems already, Donald Trump has pulled the USA out of the Paris Climate Agreement which, for all its limitations, represented a multilateral human acknowledgement that greenhouse gas emissions were wrecking our planet. Time for a look at the history of awareness of the damage humans can do to the rest of the natural world, an awareness already developed in the Father of Zoology, Aristotle.

When he is describing shell-fish, we discover that in the lagoon on Lesbos the red scallop has actually been rendered extinct. It has been destroyed partly by droughts but also ‘partly by the dredging-machine used in their capture’. This is probably the earliest reference to overfishing in world  literature. Aristotle also cites the destruction which can be cause by human interference, motivated by financial greed, with naturally occurring animal populations. A Carpathian tried to make money out of hare breeding, and introduced the first pair onto his island. Carpathos was soon over-run with hares, which devastated its crops, vegetable beds and plant ecology.

Aristotle is aware of the destructive potential of farming, as a form of interference in natural processes. He even suggests that kitchen vegetables flourish better if left to the elements than if they are irrigated artificially. He certainly condemns some human practices in the farming of animals as contrary to nature and pernicious. 

Some animal breeders tried to make the young males of certain species breed with their own mothers. This mother-son inbreeding was attempted either because the owners could not afford to hire a stud or because the animals they possessed were regarded as particularly fine specimens with specific attributes they wanted to perpetuate. This practice is not unknown amongst breeders of pedigree dogs today, although it is rightly regarded as genetically risky and abusive; line breeding, where animals mate with distant cousins, is infinitely preferable.  Aristotle is certain that animals do not naturally want to mate  with their mothers, and has collected examples of animal resistance to enforced ‘Oedipalism’: ‘The male camel declines intercourse with its mother; if his keeper tries compulsion, he evinces disinclination.' On one occasion, when intercourse was being declined by the young male, the keeper covered the mother and put the young male to her. But after the intercourse the young male camel bit his keeper to death. In another example, he reports that a young stallion forced to impregnate his own mother committed suicide by hurling himself of a cliff.

Methods of raising and feeding horses worry Aristotle. Horses should be allowed to roam freely at pasture, since then they remain free of disease apart from an affliction of the hoof which is in any case self-rectifying. But stables are breeding-grounds for malnutrition and all forms of infection: ‘stall-reared horses are subject to very numerous forms of disease: one which attacks the hind-legs’ (Equine Degenerative Myeloencephalopathy?)  

Aristotle can have known nothing about species resonance. Yet he tells us of an instance in 395 BCE. All the ravens disappeared from southern Greece when a battle much further north resulted in a particularly high death toll. Ravens are opportunistic carrion birds. Aristotle calmly infers from this, that even across vast distances, ‘it would appear that these birds have some means of intercommunicating with one another’. It’s a pity Trump doesn’t have a similar means of inter-human communication.

She-Gods of Justice Ancient & Modern

Protest against the Dhaka Themis

So the angry conservative Sunnis of Bangladesh have won their months-long battle to get the statue of Themis, reported as being ‘the Greek goddess of Justice’, removed from her plinth outside the nation’s Supreme Court in Dhaka. 

Do the Bangladeshis really believe that anyone might start worshipping sculptor Mrinal Haque’s eye-catching creation?* Or is the problem that she is a sign of creeping ‘western’ secularisation in public art as well as law? Or is it that she is a female in a position of authority?

Antelope-fabric-clad Themis in British Museum

Regardless of the reason, her removal is at least aesthetically sad for everyone who is, like me, partial to statues. Ever since my garden gnomes named after philosophers (René, Immanuel, Karl etc.) mysteriously vanished from my (then) East Oxford garden, I have collected (indoors) busts of Greek sages instead.

And the Bangladeshi Themis was a fabulous creation, not least as a product of millennia of intercultural symbol-swapping. Themis was in charge of overseeing right thinking and conduct in the divine sphere, delegating human law to her daughter Dikē, but the Greeks never portrayed her looking static or solemn with a sword, scales or blindfold: on the contrary, she was famed for her good eyesight, liked flashy textiles embroidered with antelopes, escaped riding a bull bareback from the primordial flood, and giggled as she laid the tables at Peleus & Thetis’ wedding.**

Scale-wielding Equity, not Justice, on a Coin of Hadrian

Scales were carried on Roman coins not by Justitia but by Aequitas (Equity) or Moneta (Money).  And the Romans seem to have borrowed them from the Egyptian god Anubis, who used scales to measure a deceased person’s heart against the weight representing Truth. Truth (Ma’at) was herself sometimes imagined with a fetching ostrich feather on her head. The exact process by which personified Justice acquired all her now familiar accoutrements is unclear, but she was certainly imagined with scales by the 13th century.

Anubis and his Scales; Befeathered Ma'at

The Dhaka ‘Themis’ continued this riotous process of intercultural cross-pollination by wearing a distinctly local sari. It would be so nice if she could get re-erected, perhaps with an Egyptian ostrich feather and added Greek antelopes on the outfit. Law is indeed a weighty matter, but perhaps the Bangladeshi authorities, instead of letting the iconoclasts win, need to lighten up?

Mosaic in St. Mark's Venice

[*Although the Qur'an nowhere bans statues, many Muslims have always worried that art representing living forms encourages idolatry--actual worship of the entities represented. One of their most sacred traditions, recorded  in a Sunni prophecy collection, says that when Muhammad conquered Mecca, he immediately removed 360 idols from around the Ka'bah. ‘The Prophet started striking them with a stick he had in his hand and was saying [this is a line from the Qur’an], "Truth has come and Falsehood has Vanished”.']
[**Quintus of Smyrna's Fall of Troy  4.128ff., 13.298ff. and Suda under 'Boucheta'.]

Eurovision's Collective Ethnic Psychosis

Some of Lucie Jones' Personalities

‘This madness we’re running through…/It’s madness, it’s madness’ sang the three fragmented avatars of Britain’s Lucie Jones last night. As well she might. Europe is in Ethnic Denial. I became increasingly perturbed as the Eurovision final wore on at the impression the show would have given to any visiting Martian that all Europeans had light complexions. 

Quite apart from the historic debt owed by popular music to people of non-European descent, especially those with ancestry stretching back to Africa and the Caribbean, more than 15% of all Europeans really are brown or black.

The headcount last night (for which the strapline, astonishingly, was Celebrating Diversity) was shocking. With the single exception of Hungary, every lead singer was white. Otherwise only Sweden managed to put dark-skinned people, even as backing singer-dancers, on stage at all.

Bipolar in Croatia

Europe, quite frankly, is in a denial of psychotic proportions about the identity and appearance of Europeans. And an unconscious acknowledgement of that psychosis leaked out in the lyrics, which suggested delusional experiences in a concentration never before heard on Eurovision. I speak as someone who has had treatment for mental illness and once spent time in mental hospital.

Belgian Stockholm Syndrome

Croatia’s Jacques Houdek made Eurovision history as two of his split selves, one a countertenor and the other a bass, sang a bipolar duet about Being Friends and The Force of Destiny. Belgium’s Blanche had been abducted by a mysterious stranger when ‘all alone in the danger zone’ and was suffering, dilated-pupils and all, from Stockholm Syndrome.

Sectioned in Norway

Greece’s Demy complained she can’t get rid of the ‘echo in my head’. Azerbaijan’s Dihaj is ‘deep into high extremes’ of ‘fantasy’. In Israel, Imri Ziv is feeling ‘a bit fragile’.  Meanwhile, in Moldova, SunStroke Project are worried about their mother’s mental health (Mamma, mamma, don’t be so mad/Mamma, mamma, ma…)

Jowst of Norway have simply given up and seem already to have been been sectioned:

   They read me like a book that is open

   While punching on a bag and I’m choking

   I’m looking for a sign while they’re stepping on my mind

   Try to keep myself calm while my head was getting bombed…

   I’m gonna kill that voice in my head

Thankfully, our visiting Martian, if she/he/it understood Hungarian, would have had the collective psychosis explained by Hungary’s brilliant, brown, Romany Rapper Joci Pápai. Along with a beautiful brown woman dancer, he explicitly addressed everyone else’s ethnic denial :

Total Exception: Brown and Proud in Hungary

Why did you lie to me
That the colour of my skin doesn’t matter?
You knew that my eyes are brown
It never changes

I don’t need you anymore
Get out of here, leave me alone
I don’t want to see you
You’ll be cursed forever, forever.

Rather how I feel about the white people of European descent who run the global media right now.

On Seeing the Wood despite the Tory Trees

When Small I thought Tory was short for Conservatory

Times are tough for the British Left.   For four long years, since UKIP broke into the mainstream by returning 147 elected councillors in the 2013 local elections, the news media have been obsessed with issues of national identity. The debates leading up to the referendum were dominated by immigration rather than sovereignty or socio-economic wellbeing. I voted Remain, but there are other things that matter besides our relationship with Europe, which in general worries the mobile, professional-class elite far more than the poor. But you would not know it from the news coverage on offer.

When I was a child I thought that the name ‘Tory’ was short for ‘Conservatory’ and that it meant rich people with big enough properties (i.e. not back-to-back terraces and council flats) to support greenhouses full of exotic blooms tended by obedient gardeners. The Conservatory Party, I believed, existed to stop less rich people upgrading their accommodation.

It was only when got interested in the English Civil War that I discovered the real, original meaning of ‘Tory’.  This may seem baffling in the light of the Tories’ historic attitude to Irish independence, but it comes from an Irish word tóraidhe (modern tóraí), which means ‘pursuer.’

Tory Pin-Up Boy James II

In the 17th century it was an insulting term applied by promoters of English imperialism to Irish outlaws, equivalent, according to one historian in 1693, to ‘Robbers, Thieves, and Bogg-trotters’. This was transferred in 1679 to the ‘Abhorrers’—the Cavalier, pro-Stuart, often Roman Catholic devotees of James, Duke of York, later James II, who had support in France and Ireland. After James was deposed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, the Tories became one of the two big political parties and took to their historic missions of (1) conserving limits to parliamentary representation; (2) conserving economic inequality; and (3) conserving the privileges of the established Church.

It wasn’t until the early 1830s, when the Tories hit an all-time low in popularity, that they tried to abandon the name Tory and turned themselves into ‘Conservatives’. This was described in Hansard Commons for 25th May 1832 as ‘the fashionable term, the new fangled phrase now used in polite Society to designate the Tory ascendancy’ and by John Stuart Mill in 1861 as ‘by the law of their existence the stupidest party’.

Pimenta, Hero of People's Health

They may be the stupidest in the grand scheme of things, but they have been canny in keeping so many current emergencies off our collective radar. The NHS can’t last much longer unless we pay attention: see this brilliant short video explaining why by junior doctor Dominic Pimenta.

Even the Tory Chair of the Education Select Committee, Neil Carmichael, admits that by 2020 there will be such a shortage of teachers that the quality of secondary education will be under severe threat. The serial reductions in benefits, especially to young adults, and austerity cuts hitting local councils, charities and mental health services have made thousands more people homeless even than a year ago.

All of which means I’ve stayed in the Labour Party despite everything which the BBC, especially their snide, irresponsible Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, has done undemocratically to belittle it and its leader. And I would start calling the Tories ‘bogg-trotters’ as well as ‘Abhorrers’ and ‘thieves and robbers’ if it weren’t offensive to our free Irish neighbours.