Aristotle and his Mississippi Lyceum

Congratulations to James Meredith on the 50th anniversary of his graduation in Political Science from the University of Mississippi on 18th August 1963. A photo of this momentous event illustrated the first newspaper I can remember being shown, by my father. Meredith was the first African American to have succeeded in being enrolled at that institution. 

Meredith, with armed bodyguard, enrols

Meredith was incredibly courageous. The grandson of a slave, he served in the Air Force, before having his application to the university twice rejected out of hand. When the Supreme Court ordered that he should be admitted, and he tried to register, war broke out on campus. The U.S. army and the Mississippi National Guard had to quell race riots. Two people died. Over 200 were injured. Throughout his studies, Meredith was persistently harassed and had to be guarded 24/7. 

Uni of Mississippi Lyceum

The violent showdown took place at the Lyceum, the university’s oldest building (1848). Its Greek revival columns still show the bullet marks. It was named after the Athenian school founded by Aristotle, whose Politics Meredith will have read as part of his degree, including the philosopher’s weasel-worded defence of slavery. The influence of Aristotle’s arguments on pro-slavery campaigners in the 19th century has been shown by Sara Monoson in Ancient Slavery and Abolition, a book of which I am co-editor, and which (here I burst with pride) Henry Louis Gates Jr HIMSELF emailed to say was ‘a valuable addition' to his library.

The identification of the Old South with what it took to be ancient Greece, a society where democracy and slavery could co-exist in columned porticoes, is nowhere more apparent than in its universities. It is not only the architecture and the names of the elite fraternities (the oldest and most prestigious, phi beta kappa, was founded in Virginia at the College of William & Mary in 1776: the three Greek alphabet marks stand for Philosophia Biou Kubernetes, ‘philosophy is the helmsman of life’).  

Basil Gildersleeve

Classical scholars were embroiled in the grim Civil War: the endowed Chair of Latin at Virginia is still called the ‘Gildersleeve’ after the brilliant Hellenist Basil Gildersleeve. He fought for the Confederate cause both as a soldier and with racist editorials in the Richmond Examiner.[i] 

Happy 50th Anniversary!

Meredith is still a controversial figure because he ploughed his own furrow rather than attaching himself to the Civil Rights movement, and has been an active Republican.  He lives in Jackson, Mississippi.  When he graduated he became a four-year-old’s first hero. I hope he enjoys himself today.

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[i] Delicately analysed by Elizabeth Vandiver and David Lupher in Ancient Slavery and Abolition (Oxford University Press). My co-editors are Richard Alston and Justine McConnell.

Clytemnestra Hangs in Dorset

I went to Dorchester on the trail of Thomas Hardy, whose novels often set ancient Greek myths amongst the Victorian rural underclass. In Tess Durbeyfield, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Hardy created his unforgettable peasant girl, abused by a lascivious aristocrat and hypocritically rejected by a husband who claims to be progressive.

Gemma Atherton as BBC Tess (2008)

When faced with the inevitable feminist critics of Hardy, I point out the heartbreaking scene where the unmarried Tess, suffering from post-natal depression as well as acute poverty, tries to feed her dying baby while slaving all day long behind the reaping machine.

Nastassja Kinski in Polanski's 1980 movie

Tess eventually stabs the abusive father of her deceased child, and the blood seeps through the ceiling to the room below. 

When she is hanged for the crime, Hardy tells us ‘"Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.’ The title of Zeus actually comes from the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, but the Aeschylean figure who bloodily kills her abusive co-parent is Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra.

Elizabeth Browne's public hanging

Hardy’s unforgettable  working-class Clytemnestra was also inspired by Elizabeth Martha Browne, a servant and the last woman to be publicly hanged in the county of Dorset in 1856. She killed her drunken husband (as Clytemnestra is said to have killed Agamemnon) with an axe. Browne’s husband, also a servant, had beaten her with a horse-whip after a fight which started when she found him in bed with his Cassandra.

The Dorset County Chronicle reported that Browne described how she retaliated when her husband bent to tie his shoelaces: ‘much enraged, and in an ungovernable passion at being so abused and struck, I seized a hatchet…and struck him several violent blows on the head…’.

No wonder the young Hardy heard a parallel with Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra. After killing Agamemnon, she reports, ‘I struck him twice.  He screamed twice and his limbs went limp. Once he had collapsed I gave him a third and final blow…  I don’t think his death was undeserved…   he started it, has paid for it and has died violently.’

The Young Hardy

At the age of sixteen, Hardy went along with hundreds of local people to witness Browne’s execution. He was apprentice to the local builder-architect and studying the ancient Greek tragedians with the help of his educated friend, Horace Moule. Hardy stood just beneath the scaffold as Browne struggled at the end of the noose. He later recalled how vivid an impression her death had made on his memory: ‘what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’

In Dorchester I struck up a conversation with a local man because his dog and ours communicated. When I asked why he had chosen his T-shirt, he said, mysteriously, ‘women have been having a hard time lately and people are too narrow-minded.’ I wish I had asked him whether it was living in Hardy country that had engendered in him his own distinctive gesture of solidarity.