Aesop's Reformist Twigs v. Mussolini's Fasces

Aesop's Twig Fable Shows that Unity is Strength

A visit to the People’s History Museum in Manchester this week reminded me that, once upon a time, artistic representations of twig bundles were inspiring and wholesome.[i]  This was when illustrations of Aesop’s ancient Greek fable of the twig bundle appeared on early Trade Union banners.

Aesop's Fable the Workers' Centrepiece

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. The moral the father drew was that STRENGTH LIES IN UNITY.

When 19^th-century workers without legal rights banded together against their employers and the state legislation to form Trade Unions, Aesop was one of the few ancient authors most of them had met. His fables were used to teach elementary literacy. Integrating an illustration of the fable into a banner was visual shorthand for ‘Unity is Strength’ and widespread, for example in these details from the 1898 banner of the Watford branches of the Worker’s Union and the Ashton & Haydon miners’ union.

Mussolini's Fascist Twig Bundle (Left)

But in 1919, the quite different—Roman—twig bundle was appropriated by Benito Mussolini’s new Partito nazionale fascista. Ancient Roman magistrates called lictors had carried their ceremonial twig bundles (fasces), bound by red tapes and with an axe protruding, to symbolise state authority and the power to punish. They had inherited the fasces from the Etruscans; many non-Fascist nations such as the US subsequently borrowed the Roman fasces long before Mussolini arrived on the scene.

The Power to Punish: Roman Fasces

So the peacable, Aesopic twigs of the British unions, who were standing up against the state, were abandoned after World War I because of the antipathy felt by members of the Trade Union movement, uniting the workers of the world, to the racism and nationalism of Fascism.  Next time you see a twig-bundle in any political iconography, ancient or modern, ask yourself whether it is a reformist bundle, derived from Aesop’s Greek fable, or an authoritarian bundle whose ancestor was once borne by a Roman magistrate. 

Table where Tom Paine wrote Rights of Man, People's History Museum

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[i] My mind was on organisations set up for self-improvement since I had been invited to address the venerable ManchesterLiterary and Philosophical Society, founded in 1781 and the oldest such group in Britain, on the question of whether Classics is inherently elitist. You can read more about this visit to Manchester on Henry Stead’s blog here.

How to Treat the Disabled in 2013 AD and 403 BC

Sophocles directs sympathy to the wounded Philoctetes

This week further chaos has struck the Department of Work and Pensions’ replacement of the Disability Living Allowance with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP—a euphemism some Whitehall spin artist was paid a salary from my taxes to think up). But PIP also requires the applicant to face the humiliation behind closed medical doors which passes as an assessment process.  The same ordeal is faced by disabled soldiers on incapacity benefit.

Although the decision about which applicant “deserves” help is still made by a “DWP Decision Maker,” the DWP has outsourced the actual assessment of the injured/ill to businesses, primarily one called ATOS, which claims on its website to have “extensive expertise in delivering healthcare solutions.”

Mark Dryden, denied incapacity benefit

They were presumably Delivering a Healthcare Solution to former Lance-Corporal Mark Dryden, who earlier this year had his incapacity benefit withdrawn by the DWP Decision Maker after assessment by an ATOS-hired doctor. Dryden lost one arm to a bomb in Iraq and has little function in the other. The doctor had the insensitivity to ask him if he was left or right-handed! Dryden has no index finger at all and yet was asked to pick up a one-pound coin.

Scroungers?

Nor is he alone: the Royal British Legion published figures at the end of May showing a scandalous 72 % RISE in the number of wounded war veterans denied benefits in the past year after an ATOS assessment.

Does this man look fit to work?

Two crucial texts give us complementary views on how the disabled were treated in classical Athens late in the fifth century, after more than two decades of war.  In his tragedy Philoctetes, Sophocles portrays in the most negative moral light a leader (Odysseus) who had no sympathy for the wounded archer Philoctetes, the ancient Mark Dryden, and dumped him alone on a desert island, screaming in pain.

On the other hand, in the 24^th speech of the legal adviser Lysias, a real, historical Athenian man on a state disability pension defends his entitlement to financial support of one obol a day. A personal enemy has challenged the entitlement, saying that he has been seen on horseback—the speaker reasonably asks if it is so surprising that a man in his condition occasionally uses this means of transport.  But his major argument is an appeal to the common sense of the jurors based on his actual physical appearance.

Athenian one-obol coin

Unlike our sick and disabled citizens' ordeals behind closed doors, this Athenian got to make his case publicly, with expert legal advice, in front of 500 democratically selected members of the Athenian Council.  We do not know whether he won his case, but we do know when, where and to whom he was allowed to make it, and it wasn’t a tactless rent-a-doc who has lost all contact with the real world working for a profit-making organisation.

Why Peter Cook and Diodorus agree about mining

Sengenhydd Mortuary, 100 years ago

Aberfan school buried under coal slag

‘I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.’ So said the comedian Peter Cook. In my teens I was taken down a Nottinghamshire mineshaft by an enlightened history teacher, and it changed me forever. 

The last fortnight has seen the anniversaries of two terrible Welsh mine-community disasters: the centenary of the death of 439 miners at the Senghenydd Colliery and the anniversary of the collapse of the slag heap on the school in Aberfan (Wales) on 21^st October 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. 

In his 1938 painting ‘Symbolic: miner enslaved,’ Gilbert Daykin, himself a miner, implicitly alluded to the historic iconography of the technological Titan Prometheus. But this week I was aghast to discover that the year after he painted his South Yorkshire Prometheus, Daykin was among six men killed when the roof of Warsop Main Colliery collapsed on them.  

Daykin: Painter and Pitman

The ancient Greek historian from Sicily, Diodorus, thought that life for the slaves sent down the Spanish goldmines was actually worse than death. We have no subjective account from the mouths of any ancient miners, but Diodorus’ text, from his fifth book, provides us with a rare and precious glimpse into the suffering of so many in antiquity to line the pockets of so few: 

‘The slaves produce, for their masters, revenues in sums defying belief, but they themselves wear out their bodies both by day and by night in the diggings under the earth, dying in large numbers because of the exceptional hardships they endure. For no respite or pause is granted them in their labours, but compelled beneath blows of the overseers to endure the severity of their plight.’

A Rare Self-Portrait by Ancient Miners? (Corinth 6th-C. BC)

I still don’t know how I got through my entire BA without any lecturer ever pointing out this ancient text to me. I stumbled upon it as a PhD student. But I do know that I would very much rather work, as Peter Cook put it, in the absence of falling coal.