WHY BACKWARDS IS THE NEW FORWARDS

The British have never been known for their sensitivity to issues of ethnicity or nationality. This week has already seen excruciating blunders by the organisers of the Olympics. 

Joe Allen, a footballer from Wales playing for Britain, suffered the ultimate insult of being described as an Englishman in the programme. He then refused to sing the UK National Anthem (composed by Henry Carey, a paranoid 18th-century songwriter who subsequently committed suicide). The North Korean women’s football team walked off the pitch in Glasgow after the big screens displayed the flag of South Korea, with which nation North Korea is still officially at war, since no treaty was ever signed after the 1953 armistice.

Westfield Shopping Centre

But the most embarrassing debacles have been over security signs and ‘welcome’ signs in Arabic printed backwards. Several important rail stations, including King’s Cross and St Pancras International, displayed notices in this bizarre inverted script warning travellers not to leave baggage unattended. And Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, London, which is at the epicentre of Olympics activity, hailed Arabic speakers with the equivalent of NODNOLOTEMOCLEW (‘Welcome to London’) blazoned across banners and on the T-shirts of the mall staff.

'Jabberwocky' as written by the 2012 Olympics organisers

Some people customarily write or speak backwards, either because they are geniuses (Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart) or because they have a learning difficulty. In the inverted world of Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871), the book in which the ‘Jabberwocky’ poem is inscribed is, of course, in mirror-writing.

Right-to-left inscription, on 'Nestor's Cup (Cumae,8th-c. BCE)

So just for a minute, let us try giving the benefit of the doubt to the administrators responsible for not being able to locate a single Arabic-speaking Briton (there are about a million of them) to check these signs. In archaic Greece, for example, you could write backwards or even backwards and forwards (‘ox-track’ writing, boustrophedon, like cattle ploughing a field). Perhaps the backwards Arabic is a coy reference to the origins of the Olympics?

But the most charitable explanation is that the signs are a covert invitation to all Arabic speakers to try the revolutionary new sport of running backwards, which I am about to take up. 

The world champion is Garret Doherty, 33, from Dublin in Ireland, who, astonishingly, can run a seven-minute mile backwards and has recently won the world championship for the third time in succession.

Garret says: 'Backwards running is like a drug — once you start, you’ll never want to run forwards again. It’s truly liberating, and there are enormous health benefits.'

In preparation for taking up my new sport, I have consulted the website at www.reverserunning.com.  But it advises that the first step is to ‘FIND A PARTNER. If you struggle to find anywhere suitable, then run with a partner and take turns to run backwards.’ 

Is there anyone out there willing to share my new hobby with me?  At next year’s championships we can substitute for the dreadful National Anthem the far superior Goons’ song, “I’m walking backwards for Christmas, across the Irish Sea” (lyrics available at www.thegoonshow.net/songs/im_walking_backwards_for_christmas.asp).

Deaths of Damascene Despots

Djemal Pasha, Butcher of Damascus

Today marks a curious anniversary. It was on 21^st July 1922, exactly ninety years ago, that Djemal Pasha, known as a-Saffah (“The Butcher”), the Damascus-based Ottoman governor of Syria, was assassinated by an Armenian. Djemal had it coming. He had played a leading role in the genocide of Armenians, and brutally liquidated many dissident Christians, Shi’a Muslims and Lebanese. 

On 21^st July 2012, Djemal’s spiritual descendant Bashar al-Assad, who is said still to be lurking in Damascus, must be concerned that the violent deaths this week of four of his closest “senior management team” herald his own.  

       

Antigonus the One-Eyed in Alexander

Al-Assad, who trained as an ophthalmologist, would presumably take a professional interest in my favourite despot of Damascus, “Antigonus the One-Eyed”.  This Macedonian Cyclops was Alexander the Great’s toughest general and very nearly succeeded in uniting the Macedonian empire during the wars of the Successors.   

He was enormously tall and scarred as well as monocular (much more scarey than Ian Beattie portrayed him in Oliver Stone's 2004 movie). His mistake was to have the honesty to adopt the title of King (Basileus) when the other Successors were creepily saying that they only wanted to rule vicariously in the deceased Alexander’s name. This frank acknowledgement of his own power meant that Antigonus had to keep on waging war, and he died in battle IN HIS SEVENTIES!

Khālid ibn al-Walīd, Wine-Hygienist

Nor did the far-famed Khālid ibn al-Walīd, Companion of Muhammad, conqueror of Damascus in 634, get the death he wanted. Pockmarked, big-bearded, and a champion wrestler, he only bathed in alcohol (although insisting to other Muslims that he never drank it). He remained undefeated in more than a hundred mighty battles. But his sad last words regretted his tame demise: “I've fought in so many battles seeking martyrdom that there is no spot in my body left without a scar or a wound made by a spear or sword. And yet here I am, dying on my own bed like an old camel.”

 

Until al-Assad lost the plot, however, the prize for most bloodthirsty ruler of Damascus should perhaps have gone to “Timur the Lame” (aka Tamberlaine the Great).  He enslaved half the population, deported the skilled artisans to Samarkand, and murdered all the rest, piling their heads up in a field in the north-east of Damascus. The name of the place is still “Tower of Heads” (Burj al ru'us). Christopher Marlowe imagined what this Turkic megalomaniac looked like when annoyed: 

Timur/Tamberlaine

   Upon his brows was portrayed ugly death,
   And in his eyes the fury of his heart,
   That shine as comets, menacing revenge.

But Tamberlaine was cheated of a glorious exit from this life, freezing to death on a campaign for the Emperor of China which he had rashly undertaken in winter.  

The current Despot of Damascus also sucks up to China. But given the climate of Syria he is unlikely to freeze to death. He is also increasingly unlikely to die anywhere as late as his seventies or at home in peaceful old age. My personal preference would be to have him made to account for the deaths of his people on trial in the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But assassination, the fate which befell his predecessor Djemal Pasha nine decades ago to the very day, can scarcely be off the cards.

On Foul-Mouthed Footballers

England's Finest

In the UK it has been a sad week for models of manhood. The captain of Chelsea Football Team, and erstwhile captain of England, was filmed calling a professional colleague with darker skin than his a “fucking black cunt”. But John Terry’s outburst has this week been officially judged not to count legally as a use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress” in which “the offence was racially aggravated”. Beyond belief.

 

Catullus, Expert at Homosocial Insults

In Regina vs. Terry, the she-monarch whose name rhymes with "vagina" as well as "angina", lost her case. I wonder if she objected, as did all the women I discussed it with yesterday, to the lack of public outcry against Terry’s use of the horribly misogynist word for the elastic fibromuscular tube connecting a woman’s womb with the outside world.  While Lisa Brown was recently banned from addressing the Michigan House of Representatives for using the less ideologically laden term "vagina", it is apparently fine for a world-famous Centre Back, who also happens to be the father of 6-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, to scream "cunt" viciously on TV screens across the world.   

 Lampard coaches Terry in Latin Slang

Why does the birth canal supply the English language with by far its worst swear word? Terry's other term "Knobhead" sounds so wholesome and jolly in comparison.

Perhaps one solution would be for Terry to take more lessons in swearing from his Chelsea vice-captain, Frank Lampard, a talented Latinist who scored an A* in the ancient language at GCSE. How much more fitting for the homosocial world of football for Terry to hurl threats at his colleagues like "pedicabo vos et irrumabo", "I will bugger and facefuck" you, as Catullus threatens two of his male acquaintances in his 16th poem. 

Or if Terry really wants racist abuse, how about St. Jerome’s verbal assault on the British heretic Pelagius, whom he addressed as a "slanty-head" and a "fat mountain hound"  who was "weighed down with Scottish porridge" (Scotiis pultibus pregravatus). [Actually, Pelagius was an ascetic whose worst crime was to believe in free will].

The one illumination I have experienced this week was learning about the application of the term "choc-ice" by some black people to another who colludes with white power—however dark his or her skin, the "choc-ice" is effectively white inside. 

Pelagius, "Scottish porridge-eater"

A classical scholar I know, ostensibly a flirtatious female, was persuaded in the 1980s by some male dons at Oxford University to argue AGAINST the provision of childcare for staff. As Madeleine Albright said, there is a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women in public life. 

What I want is a term which with equal economy and pungency as "choc-ice" describes women who suck up to men and collaborate with them against other women—pink on the outside but blue on the inside. "Feminine cryptophallocrats" doesn’t really roll off the tongue. We need this word to describe the WAGS, the women who fight each other for the right to prostitute themselves with overpaid footballers. Suggestions welcome.

On Repatriation

My Local 'Repatriation Facility'

Every weekend when I visit our nearest Co-op superstore I dread driving past the signs which read ‘REPATRIATION PARKING’.  The store is in Carterton, adjacent to RAF Brize Norton, where the bodies of UK armed forces killed in Afghanistan arrive by military plane all too regularly.

It is difficult to focus on the grocery shopping after driving past these signs. I can never get out of my head the awful lyrics in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon when the chorus express the anger the Greeks felt at the ‘repatriation ceremonies’ held for the ‘fallen’ of the Trojan War:

Ares the war god trades corpses for gold.                            

He holds the scales of battle

and sends the heavy dust                                                                                                         

from the funeral pyres

back to loved ones to lament.

Attractive pots crammed with ash

take the place of men.

Three days ago (5^th July), the cadavers of Warrant Officer Class 2 Leonard Thomas (44), Guardsman Craig Roderick (22), and Guardsman Apete Tuisovurua (28) were received at Brize Norton by their families. They were then driven via the bleak route following barbed-wire perimeter fencing and grey housing estates to the A40 and eastward to the Oxford hospital in which my own children were born and in which the military's post-mortems are conducted.

The corpse of Ajax, the suicidal warrior, grieved over by his family

The pointlessness of the entire Iraq /Afghanistan military misadventure has been recently underlined by the revelation on June 8 that more US combatants are now committing suicide than are being killed on active duty. It is not just the ‘War on Terror’ that makes soldiers kill themselves, either: the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War this year brought to light the horrendous statistic that more British Falklands veterans have committed suicide than there were servicemen killed in action.

Athenian Soldier's Grave, 330BCE

I am not a pacifist. I would use violence to defend my family any day. Even modern states need to protect their borders and airspaces; they need trained personnel to mobilise in case of emergency. But the practicality as well as the morality of maintaining large forces in readiness for inter-state conflict must now be questioned. Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker argue that war as it has been understood for centuries, especially when the motive is conquest or not even comprehended by the inhabitants of the nations in question, is obviously obsolete. War is not even as economically advantageous as in the past since it demonstrably damages more trade than it sustains. 

The suicide rates amongst the armed forces now prove that war also needs to come with a mental health warning. The tragedian Euripides knew what he was doing when he makes his superhero Heracles return from sustained deeds of violent aggression to murder his own wife and children. Heracles' human father, Amphitryon, understood what had gone wrong: ‘My son, what do you intend by this? What dreadful  acts are these? "Can it be that it is the blood of your previous victims which has driven you so frantic?"

Bob the Banker

Bob Diamond: Would you Trust this Man?

Villain of the week for the global chattering classes is Bob Diamond, an American banker with an epic string of titles. He is 'Group Chief Executive of Barclays plc’, ‘CE of Corporate & Investment Banking and Wealth Management’, and ‘Executive Director of the Boards of Barclays plc and Barclays Bank plc’.  It reminds me of the Homeric King (basileus) Agamemnon, King of Kings, Most Kingy (basileutatos) even among the Very Kingy Indeed, and of All Islands King.

Bob's Hair Colourant

When I was young, Barclay’s made profits from the oppressive regimes of a cabal of South American military dictators. But the bank is now dodgily fixing LIBOR. The process of secretly manipulating something that sounds like a mixture of LIQUOR, LIVER and LIBERTINE (actually the London Interbank Offered Rate) is (bizarrely) perceived as Going Too Far even by the totally amoral community of high financiers. 

'The Death of Crassus' by Pierre Cousteau (1555)

I don’t myself understand the casuistic distinctions which self-styled ‘virtuous’ bankers draw between themselves and Diamond. Surely all financially creamed-off ‘property’ is theft? But Diamond really is under pressure to resign. David Cameron, whose personal fortune derives partly from his ancestors’ profession of helping rich people evade taxes, is on one of his hypocritical high horses. He is demanding that Diamond’s head rolls.

I personally would like to see Bob force-fed molten gold, the retribution which Cassius Dio says the Parthians devised for the avaricious Roman General Crassus who thirsted for their wealth. Somewhere in Turkmenistan there is a golden replica of Crassus’ oesophagus. 

But perhaps for Bob Diamond we need a punishment that has to do with diamonds instead. I would also enjoy sentencing him to hard labour, with the status of illegal immigrant, in a dangerous diamond mine where trade unions were banned.  

The Very Fishy Alex Salmond

It is fun to associate prominent people’s names with their trades or physiognomy:  the piscine First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, could not look more like a salmon if he tried. Bob Diamond could have been called ‘Gold’, or ‘Proffitt’, but ‘Diamond’, appropriately, implies unparalleled hardness as well as financial excess.  Bob Diamond is also a sponger on the rest of us. A cartoonist like Georgia Poynder (age 12) might draw him as SpongeBob DiamondPants (see fig. below).

SpongeBob Diamondpants

Even conservative estimates of Bob’s  annual salary vary between £1.3-million-plus-17-million-bonuses, and about three times that much. But speaking as a girl who knows a lot about artificial hair colorants, my question to Bob Diamond is actually this: given the enormity of your income, why don’t you invest in a better quality of hair-dye?  Don’t you agree with L’Oreal that you are self-evidently ‘worth it’?

SpongeBob Squarepants

The Promethean Politics of Education

Prometheus Chained in Sheffield yesterday

Last night in the open-air Greek theatre looming over the railway station in Sheffield, the historic heart of the British steel industry, Prometheus was chained to his crag as a punishment for supporting the advancement of the human race and daring to speak truth to Zeus, the self-appointed new Dictator of the Universe. 

The production of Henry Stead's beautiful new version of the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound was mounted by citizens of Sheffield and current and former Classics PhDs at London, Oxford and the Open Universities, led by my own PhD students Lottie Parkyn and Matt Shipton. Lottie graduated from Birmingham University (see below) and Matt, who comes from Sheffield himself, is studying the suppression of the authentic voices of young people in Athenian drama. The production was an inspiring example of what such young people can do for culture and community in the 21st century if given even half a chance.

Abolitionist Prometheus & Heracles (1807)

This great play was adopted in the late 18th and 19th centuries as the manifesto of the campaign to abolish slavery. It  forces its audiences to think about the potential of humans to create the world they deserve as well as their eternal vulnerability to sabotage by self-interested ploutocrats, politicians, careerists and "managers".

The parallels between the crisis in the play and those afflicting international Higher Education are striking. At the University of Virginia, a heroic President has been ousted for supporting the life of the mind, the culture of the State of Virginia, teachers and students against her finance-fixated executive board. At Birmingham in England, a cabal of middle-aged white men (and they are all men)--the Vice-Chancellor David Eastwood, the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Ancient History Professor Michael Whitby, and a couple of other senior academics--proposes to carve up the available power, salaries and pensions between themselves, while threatening their juniors with destitution. 

Teresa Sullivan, ousted by ploutocrats

The new gods of the Birmingham Olympus have not yet exiled their victims to aeons of torture in the Caucasus, but they have made it clear that if these terrified young staff break their "Confidentiality Agreements" they will only worsen their own plight. Just like the whole jobless, impoverished international generation born since about 1975, the lecturers are being brutally excluded from any opportunity to participate fully in the institutional dimension of the human project.

But Prometheus knew that Zeus was not invulnerable. His gift of fire enabled humans to arm themselves against poverty, ignorance, joylessness and oppression. The technology of the Internet has now given the world powerful new ways in which to unite in support of a fairer and more humane future, as the use of social networks in major revolutions has resoundingly shown.

David Oyelowo in Aquila Theatre's Prometheus

So did  the very much smaller case of the FaceBook group Save Classics at Royal Holloway, which is to close next Thursday (June 28th 2012) exactly a year after it opened, having achieved its specific goals. It is being replaced by the new group ClassicsInternational (join if you haven't already: non-Classicists are hugely welcome). Prometheus knows things that Zeus does not, and can communicate via the Internet with allies. So tyrants of the academic world--you have been notified!

Birmingham Blues

David Eastwood

The teaching of the ancient Greeks and Romans has now come under fire at Birmingham. It is housed there in the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, which the Vice-Chancellor David Eastwood, a historian with a penchant for football, has opened up to a violent Penalty Shoot-Out (aka the dreaded “90-day review” with which RHUL Classics was threatened fifty weeks ago).

Painting by Alma Tadema

Birmingham University has been the home of some of the most exciting Classics anywhere, ever.  It is the Birmingham Uni Heslop Library that holds Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s photographs of ancient sculpture, architecture, and archaeological sites, so crucial to his famous paintings. 

It was the amazing Edward Sonnenschein who was in 1883 appointed the first professor of Greek and Latin at the newly founded Mason College in Birmingham. He then co-founded the UK Classical Association, and campaigned for the charter for the University of Birmingham (granted in March 1900), which thereafter became a model for other modern universities. He virtually invented the teaching of Classics in translation to a wide range of Humanities undergraduates.

HELLO! BIRMINGHAM CLASSICS IS the FOUNDING DEPARTMENT AND CHARTER INSTITUTION OF THE ENTIRE BRITISH REDBRICK UNIVERSITY PHENOMENON!

 

Edward Sonnenschein

The richness of the history of Birmingham Classics subsequently is humbling. The poet Louis MacNeice’s entire life’s work, including Autumn Journal, was informed by his experiences as a lecturer there,  especially when he faced classrooms of local car factory workers. It was in MacNeice’s social circle that W.H. Auden was inspired to write many of his most famous poems. E.R. Dodds, MacNeice’s patron, Professor of Greek in the University of Birmingham, left an indelible mark on Classics as editor of the Bacchae and author of The Greeks and the Irrational.

 

The most brilliant, if controversial, of Birmingham classicists was George Thomson, whose Marxist studies of ancient Greek society, including Aeschylus and Athens, are still in print after more than six decades. 

It was Birmingham University which gave an honorary degree to Michel Saint-Denis, the epoch-making French theatre director, who directed Laurence Olivier as Oedipus and Peggy Ashcroft as Electra at the Old Vic theatre company. 

Olivier in Saint-Denis' Oedipus

More recently, the exceptionally erudite and distinguished Donald R. Dudley and C.D.N. Costa put their editions and translations of Tacitus, Seneca, Lucian and ancient letter-writers indelibly on the cultural map of the planet. Costa was the sort of quiet hero who unostentatiously, without breathing a word to anyone at work, devoted thousands of hours as a voluntary prison visitor throughout all his decades of service to Birmingham scholarship. 

I fear this may be taken as a sad obituary of Classics at Birmingham. I hope that V-C David Eastwood hears it rather more interrogatively. I very much doubt if he has the slightest idea what treasures he has the power to destroy.