Black Sea Archaeologists versus Putin and Theresa May

Performers on Greek pot found in Ukraine

Lesson of the week: NEVER GIVE UP. I have finally achieved something I have wanted to do for thirty years, since I first realised that many ancient Greeks lived not round the Mediterranean but behind the (in 1984) Iron Curtain. With help from fantastic colleagues[i] I managed to get archaeologists from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia and Poland to describe to a lecture theatre at King’s College, London, full of westerners, the thrilling evidence that Black Sea Greeks were just as wine-, song- and theatre-mad as Greeks in the better-researched Med.

Diver Putin 'finds' planted Greek vases

I can hardly believe it has happened. The Cold War made it almost impossible, until 1989, even to communicate with the experts. The project has been rejected by almost every research funding body in existence (Loeb, British Academy etc.). Then Mr Putin, himself a keen investigator of Greek antiquities actually in the Black Sea, ‘annexed’ the place—Crimea—containing some of the most crucial sites.

The last of a thousand obstacles

Next, the incompetence of Theresa May and her Home Office minions meant that two speakers’ visas did not come through until less than 48 hours before the conference was due to open, and then only because of the tenacity of our Events Organiser (the best in the world), Laura Douglas. She should be put in charge of the UK Borders Agency immediately. Even after kick-off, at one tense moment it looked as though the atmosphere might be ruined, when a Pole challenged a Russian to compare historical and contemporary Imperialism.

Fresco from Sevastopol

But everything was perfect. We saw photos of theatre architecture emerging from the soil after centuries of invisibility. We asked why the super-rich of the Taman peninsula liked vases depicting comic actors placed in their tombs. We gasped at staggering Dionysiac scenes on Athenian vases found in Ukraine, Georgian mosaics and at clay marionettes from Kerch.  Mr Staniewski’s dazzling film of Iphigenia in Tauris took us into the heart of human darkness; the most beautiful room in King’s, the chapel, resounded with Ash Mukherjee’s sensational Indian dance interpretation of Medea, and Tony Harrison’s searing live recital of his profound Pontic poetry.

Greek Tragedy for Ukrainian children

In two weeks I am getting a free luxury cruise by lecturing. We were meant to circumnavigate the Black Sea, but Vlad the Annexer has put a stop to that. After Turkey, Georgia and Bulgaria we will now be sailing south-west to the Aegean, Macedonia and Lemnos. Losing the northern Black Sea sites meant that many of those booked on the cruise because they were interested in the Crimean War of the 1850s have pulled out. There are places available at bargain-basement prices. Just in case you’re free and sufficiently solvent, here’s the link: it would be fun to see any humorous Philhellene aboard!

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[i] Professor David Braund and Dr Rosie Wyles

IS SUAREZ A CENTAUR?

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Centaur bites Lapith at Olympia

But does it look like a doughnut?

The biter in the picture on the left is a centaur, and he is biting a human of the Lapith tribe, in the wildest wedding brawl ever. Another centaur bites a Lapith on the temple of Apollo at Bassae (below). That the biters are centaurs shows that the Greeks made a mental connection between the large teeth of horses and human dental aggressors. Teeth were only acceptable when you were fighting for your life and had lost all other weapons—the Spartans did resort to their teeth and fingernails in the last stages of their death-struggle against the Persians at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae.

Centaur bites Lapith on Temple of Apollo

Only deviant heroes and gods in Greek mythology do biting. Tydeus was punished for sucking Melanippus’ brains out through his cranium. Rubens exposes the brutality of the moment when Kronos/Saturn sank his teeth into his own son’s chest. In the most savage of contact sports, the pankration, every conceivable form of assault was acceptable except eye-gouging and biting. This is why that scene showing that only subhumans used biting in combat was displayed on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, home of the original Olympic games. Ir screams at the viewer, Biting and Athletic Fair Play Don't Mix.

Ruben's 'Saturn'

Centaurs are often explained as primitive pedestrian humans' response to humans on horseback. When the conquistador cavalrymen arrived in the ‘New’ World, the Aztecs thought they were centaurs, according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s 16th-century True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Plenty of early Hispanic migrants to the Americas were surnamed Suarez—has the Uruguayan footballer internalized some ancestral tradition of descent from centaurs?

Far be it from me, of course, to suggest that Luis Suarez has huge equine teeth, or even that he may have behaved like an animal. Perish the thought. The name Suarez is probably derived from the Latin for a pigman, suarius, rather than a horseman, eques.  But the investigation currently in progress ghoulishly fascinates me—forensic dentistry apparently looks for an injury involving bruising and drag lacerations ‘shaped like a doughnut’. 

Tydeus' teeth sunk into Melanippus' skull

Forensic dentists are, moreover, sensibly warned that suspects are often not cooperative in providing plaster casts of their choppers, ‘so the dentist who is requested to assist authorities to collect evidence should see that provisions to ensure their personal security are in place.’ Who on earth would be the hapless FIFA dentist who subjects himself to Suarez’s centauric fangs?

8 Facts about Furies

Erinys versus Perp

1. I gave a paper by Skype this week to a conference in Israel about modern fiction and Furies, or Erinyes in Greek (singular is Erinys). On the very same day a modern Erinys was behind the headlines in Iraq.

Erinyes v. Orestes

  2.  Erinyes were fathered by the bloody drops which fell from Ouranos’ groin. His son Kronos hated him arbitrarily from birth and, given the excuse that his father was abusing not him but his mother Earth, castrated him. The drops fertilized  Earth. The Erinyes are Kronos' sisters and born of a toxic combination of arbitrary hatred, justifiable revenge and inter-generational strife.

ERINYS IRAQ ad

3. Western oil companies in Iraq use a controversial corporation called Erinys Iraq. Its website says it is ‘risk management and security services company specialising in complex and high-threat risk mitigation services’. In the pre-Spin era  it would have been called a mercenary army. 

4. An Erinys spends most of her time asleep. She wakes up when someone with a grudge invites her to avenge them on the person(s) s/he believes have caused them grief. Erinyes torture the alleged felon by chasing her/him with whips and snakes until blood is drawn. Their arrival in your life means that it is PAYBACK TIME.

Erinyes asleep (bottom)

5.  According to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in advanced civilisations Athena takes away the Erinyes’ power. She gets people to sort out their conflicts without bloodshed, confines the Erinyes in caves and renames them Kindly Ones (Eumenides).

   

6. The best new novel I have read this decade is Natalie Haynes’ The Amber Fury (2014). It contains a moving portrait of a teenage girl with behavioural problems and MISDIRECTED (although not arbitrary) feelings of vengefulness. She finally gets to a place where she may be able to become more like a Eumenis and less like an Erinys. If you don’t know anything about teenagers or about Greek tragedy, or why teenagers and Greek tragedy are a perfect fit, then read this book immediately.

 Eastern Front

7. The best new novel I read in the previous decade was Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (originally in French as Les Bienveillantes, 2006) in which it is never clear whether the mad and murderous narrator thinks he is an Erinys or a human in the Oresteia. He hates many people arbitrarily. If you don’t know what happened in Ukraine and Russia during World War II then read this book immediately.

8. In Iraq, the largest oil refinery (in Baiji) fell this week to Islamist extremists whose acronym ISIS coincidentally sounds like another ancient supernatural female associated with death. There were many casualties amongst some ‘security force personnel.’ This is likely to include operatives from Erinys Iraq. 

Baiji Refinery: Erinys v. Isis

Not a fact but an opinion: Do mercenaries fighting for Erinys know what an Erinys actually is, and have they persuaded themselves that what they are doing in Iraq has anything to do with legitimate vengeance? The whole situation is a ghastly mess created long-term by European imperialism and economic exploitation, and short-term by Bush, Blair and corporations who hire outfits like Erinys Iraq. The violence of the hate-filled people in ISIS may often be misdirected but it is not arbitrary. It really is Payback Time.