What a Difference a Voice Makes: Andy Burnham and Paul Cartledge's Pericles

 

A few weeks into his premiership, and Andy Burnham is already pleasing some and annoying others. But as someone with acoustic hyper-phonosensitivity, I must say that the medium—in addition to the content—of what he says has me turning on the radio in the morning with far more enthusiasm that during Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Starmer, who I believe to be a good and principled man, unfortunately sounds like a terminally depressed dalek (so does Rachel Reeves, as it happens, which may explain their close bond). Ed Miliband, another principled and highly intelligent Labour politician, failed as leader of the Labour Party, as I suggested in a blog in 2012 and remain convinced, mainly on the ground of his laboured, anxious, adenoidal locution. Any theatre professional could have trained this out of him in a week.

Burnham, on the other hand, sounds genial, warmly baritone, authentic and sunny. And he has that resonant northwest-English accent that makes words sing. I checked out recordings of every previous premier since audio-recording began, and, with the exception of the Scotsman Gordon Brown, none has had a regional accent. I hoped for a Welsh accent from David Lloyd George, but it is scarcely perceptible. My husband suggested Harold Wilson, but his vowels were cut-glass Received Pronunciation.

Burnham  is not the first statesman in history whose vocal delivery has been a winning card. Paul Cartledge’s excellent new book Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, on the Athenian aristocrat committed to democracy who was re-elected annually in most years for more than three decades, does full justice to his skills and impact as an orator. This highly accessible account also humanises Pericles, making it the go-to introduction to the great man (and to the Athenian democracy at its height) that I will henceforth be recommending to my students.

Pericles was said by contemporaries to leave all other speakers standing at the metaphorical starting line of the race. His speaking was crafted but sounded natural, and had grandeur and seriousness. His voice could impact you like Zeus’ thunder and lightning, so he was nicknamed ‘the Olympian’ (Zeus was also a Cosmic King of the North, because Mount Olympus is in northern mainland Greece). Pericles was so persuasive that he won over even his enemies.

I’m not sure even Burnham would want to stay around the top echelons of government for three decades. He likes football, Indie music and the poetry of Tony Harrison too much. I know about the last because he spoke—movingly and resonantly—about the socialist poet of radical classicism at the memorial event that Tony's partner Sian Thomas and I also addressed on 26 April. I have no idea whether there are real grounds for the hope that Burnham is encouraging us to embrace. But at least my ears don’t hurt any more when I listen to our leader on the news.

My New Book, Medea: A Life

 

Today marks the publication of my new book, Medea: A Life. When Heather Gold at Yale University Press first invited me to write a biography of Medea, I was sceptical. Medea is a character of myth. But as I pondered the possibility, I was reminded that no less a serious intellectual than Strabo, a first-century CE geographer who, like Medea, came from the Black Sea, had argued that the story of Greeks like the Argonauts visiting her homeland was entirely plausible and that ‘she is a historical figure’.

So I set to work, consulting every single ancient Greek and Latin source in which she is mentioned, and every artefact in which she is depicted, to extract a consistent narrative line. But I found that I couldn’t write it as academic prose; the material sprang to life in my mind like a story with rich dialogue—who can put Euripides’ tragedy out of their mind?  So my book is a word of docufiction.

I’ve been fascinated by Medea since I was a teenager, and saw the brilliant Mary Margaret McCabe, now a distinguished philosopher, take the role in the Cambridge Greek play. She was under the direction of my later mentor, Pat Easterling (on whom see my last blog). I’ve researched forensic psychology to illuminate why a mother might ever be driven to such a heinous crime as filicide, and found that Euripides’ profile is startlingly close to the typical pattern.

These miserable mothers are frequently well-educated immigrants abandoned by husbands who are local and have found another partner.  They are isolated from adults who care about them and their own natal family. The deed is done very soon after the abandonment, and the perpetrators have often been subjected to racist or sexist abuse. They also—always—have ‘form’—a previous display of temper, violence or psychological disturbance.

I had my own dreadful experience of post-partum depression after I gave birth the second time. It was the sole occasion in my entire life when I was delusional. I was convinced that a group of child-abductors were attempting to kidnap our two infant daughters, and started taking extreme measures to protect them. I tried to roll heavy sofas up against the room in which they were sleeping and put heavy padlocks on windows.

My husband and an excellent GP came to my rescue—neither of whom the most talked about current filicidal mother, Lindsay Clancy, seems to have had available. But it is time that the exceptional psychological turmoil and hormonal extremes of new maternity get some proper understanding.

The signal difference between Medea and Lindsay Clancy is that Euripides’ Medea is neither delusional nor psychotic when she kills her children. She states clearly that she knows what she is about to do is wrong, but her rage has overridden her capacity to deliberate. 

This raises all sorts of ancient philosophical and modern legal issues about freewill, responsibility, lack of premeditation and provocation, which I discuss in an essay appended to the main narrative. There’s also an overview of why Medea, despite her villainy, has continued to inspire women for centuries. Now I’ve got a taste for docufiction, I’m moving on to the youngest generation of the Atridae. Watch this space.