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| Rameses III: forced to negotiate |
Should a classics prof. publish her
blog when going on strike? Why not? Blogging is not an activity I am contracted to
do. It will have no effect on the speed at which my employers do or do not
decide, finally, to return to the negotiation table. So in honour of my
striking colleagues and our wonderful student supporters across the nation,
here’s my potted retrospect of the relationship between ancient world studies
and strikes.
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| The 'Turin Strike Papyrus' |
The first known strikers were the Deir El-Medina artisans who worked in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings in the twelfth century BCE. Unpaid for six months, they laid down their tools and occupied a royal mortuary temple. A record
of their (ultimately successful! Yay!) strike survives on a papyrus in Turin’s Museo Egizio. This what the strikers said to the bureaucrats in charge of them:
‘The prospect of hunger and thirst has driven us to this; there is no clothing,
there is no fish, there are no vegetables. Send to Pharaoh, our good lord,
about it, and send to the vizier, our superior, that we may be supplied with
provisions.’
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| The 494 BCE Secession of the Plebs |
In ancient Rome, the procedure called
the secessio plebis was invented in
494 BCE, when the plebeians underlined their objections to the ludicrous debt
laws which the patricians refused to reform by organising a sit-in on the Mons
Sacer (Sacred Mountain) just outside Rome. Also successful, the plebs won
representation in the new office of the Tribune of the Plebs. H.G. Wells, an
advocate of equality and human rights, wrote in 1920 of 494 BCE, ‘the plebeians
seem to have invented the strike, which now makes its first appearance in
history.’[1]
One of the landmark strikes in
British Labour History was organised by the London dock workers in 1889. It
resulted in pay concessions and the recognition of trade unions as a
political force to be reckoned with. A peaceful approach to protests,
especially carnivalesque processions, successfully engaged public sympathies.
Dockers dressed up as figures from classical mythology—Neptune, a helmeted
warrior she-god, and Hercules, a hero with whom dock workers, as sellers of their own muscle power, often
identified.
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| Liverpool Dockers=Hercules strangling Capitalism |
Jump forwards to 1890, and the
cartoon published in Punch to comment
on a year of industrial unrest in Bristol. Mr Punch takes Chronos on a tour of the
planets. Saturn says that a new Titanomachy—fight between Zeus/Jove and the
Titans—is taking place. Jove is Capital, sitting on the ramparts of Privilege,
and ‘bastioned by big bags of bullion.’ He wants to treat all the Titans as his
servants. But Labour-Briareus, a son of Gaia
and Uranus with a hundred hands, is not letting Jove/Capital get off lightly:
‘But look at the huge Hundred-Handed One, armed with the scythe and the sickle,
/ The hammer, the spade, and the pick!’ However many hands Capital may succeed
in removing, the Labour movement can sprout more.
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| Workers as Briareus |
The leader of a Roman
slave revolt was the chosen hero of the great novels of ‘Red Clydeside’, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Spartacus (1933). The
way the narrative is framed made it impossible for readers not to draw parallels
between Crassus’ army and the British Ruling Class during the Great Depression.
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| Spartacus in Clydeside Activism |
And in 1980,Triton was imagined
as working-class leader by an anarchist group in London. They used this still
from Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963) to protest against the threat that
containerization posed to traditional dock-workers’ jobs. The fish-tailed god
no longer parts the clashing cliffs for the Argonauts to pass through unharmed,
but instead represents the power of the self-organised and unified dockers.
The predicted cold weather suggests
that I won’t want to dress up as a sea-god, snake-strangler or gladiator on the
picket line tomorrow in defence of reasonable pensions for university teachers
in old age. But I do know that the classical image which has most inspired me
personally is Aesop’s fable of the twig bundle, which often appeared on early
Trade Union banners.
The fable said that a father, worn
out by the quarrels between his sons, asked them each in turn to break a
tightly bound bundle of twigs. Each son failed. Then he asked them to break a
single twig, a feat which they easily accomplished, because strength lies in
unity. So the fable was integrated into the banners of several unions, for
example the 1898 banner of the Watford branches of the Worker’s Union and the
Ashton & Haydon miners’ union. I knew all the research I did with Dr Henry Stead for our Classics & Class project would come in useful one day!
My preferred placard would
reproduce this illustration—complete with the red pileus cap of the ancient freedman and modern revolutionary--from
the beautiful Baby’s Own Aesop by
socialist artist Walter Crane: striking colleagues, UNITY IS STRENGTH!!
[1] H.G. Wells, Outline Of History, page 225
