Hercules and the Infantilisation of Modern Audiences

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The New Paramount/ MGM Hercules is given only a 12A rating with good reason. Hercules is a trained killer. But not one, as the ancients held, so disturbed by his isolated ordeals of violent combat that he became incapable of civilian life and killed his wife and children.

Far from it. Sophistication in public storytelling has moved steadily backwards. This 21st-century Hercules instead has his family destroyed by A Bad Guy. 

Heracles slaughters wife and sons

Where the audience of Euripides' extraordinary tragedy Heracles watched the mighty warrior come round from a psychotic fit to learn that he was a domestic killer, the audience in Gloucester Cineworld is reassured that the world consists only of Good Guys Who Love their Families and Bad Guys Out to Get Them. There is no such thing as  Moral Complexity.

In the fifth century BC, the citizen audience could digest the advanced ethical philosophy of a scene in which the bereaved father and husband is physically restrained, by two men who love him, from suicide, discusses whether lack of intent affects culpability,  and agrees to accept help in a survival plan despite what he has done. In 2014, however, Hercules gets to slay the gratuitously camp Bad Guy before flexing his depilated pectorals at good-looking individuals of both sexes.

Beware Greeks Bearing Screenplays?

The screenwriter responsible is Evan Spiliotopoulos, a Greek American whose previous credits include Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. When asked in interview which was his favourite Herculean labour, he answered, “The Belt of Hippolyta. Amazons. Bondage. ’Nuff said.”

It is not that I am a killjoy. I like mass market entertainment and outrageous adaptations of classics. I quite enjoyed the film, especially Ian McShane’s louche and mordant prophet Amphiaraus. But there is something about Hercules/Heracles, the archetypal Hero who allowed the ancients to think through their contradictory ideas about masculinity, violence, friendship, fatherhood, social alienation and psychopathology, that makes him resemble many disturbed ex-servicemen and deserve so much more than comic-strip ethical reductivism.

Would you trust this prophet? McShane Nearly Saves the Movie

The elementary level of our era's social morality was summed up in a line from one of Hercules' comrades just before the showdown: "What are you standing there for? KILL SOMEBODY!" If only it were that easy. Even the warlike ancient Greeks knew better. ’Nuff said.

'Perfect annihilation' battles from Hannibal to today

Hannibal's finest hour

The carnage in Libya, Syria and Gaza makes today’s classical anniversary seem disgustingly appropriate. August 2nd 216 BC was the date of the Battle of Cannae, in which Hannibal’s Carthaginians slaughtered 50,000 Roman legionnaires, at a rate of 600 per minute, on the back of the ankle of the Italian ‘boot’. 

CANNAE: 600 killed a minute

Cannae always makes it into prurient shortlists of the Bloodiest Battles in Human History, alongside Gettysburg, Stalingrad and the Somme. Hannibal won, despite numerical inferiority, because he and his cavalry ‘enveloped’ the enemy on both flanks, depriving them of any escape route. 

Schlieffen

This stratagem has been revered by military commanders as ‘a Platonic ideal of victory, an archetype possessing timeless and absolute validity’.[i]   The architect of the German offensive strategy in World War I, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, described Cannae as ‘the perfect battle of annihilation.’  Schlieffen argued that every great commander aimed to achieve ‘more or less’ the same as Hannibal: they had all repeated ‘the age-old programme of that battle,’ demonstrating the significance of ‘the decisive attack.’

Schlieffen died in 1913, before Germany actually declared war on France on 3rd August 1914 (this equally painful centenary is tomorrow). But Schlieffen’s treatise Cannae kept his influence strong. Although tanks and aerial bombardment have replaced the Carthaginian cavalry, Schlieffen’s advocacy of the Hannibalic bold military sweep, an attack of disorientating violence and rapidity, had its supporters on both sides in WWII. 

Norman advocates Total Annihilation

The Schlieffen version of Hannibal’s tactic has also been seen as the forerunner of Blitzkrieg and ‘Shock and Awe’ operations. It was fetishized by the late ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, US Commander in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, who was, disturbingly, impressed that even the pile of jewellery taken by Carthage from the Roman corpses was mountain-high. 

The Loser Long-Term

Cannae has also been discussed with approval by Israeli advocates of the annihilation of Hamas. But admirers of any ‘perfect war of annihilation’, in imitation of Cannae, are forgetting the most important point. Although Hannibal won that particular battle, and waded knee-deep in blood he had let, he lost the Second Punic War as a whole. It ended in his crushing defeat by the Romans, at Zama near Carthage in Africa, fourteen years later. 

What does this suggest that the Middle East will look like by 2028?

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[i] T. M. Holmes, ‘Classical Blitzkrieg’, Journal of Military History, 67 (2003).

My Big Fat New Career in Classical Tourism

 SOPHIST RECEIVES SAFETY BRIEFING

For the past week I’ve been enjoying a free summer holiday in the form of a luxury cruise.  I’ve never felt so like an ancient Wandering Sophist. I’m literally speechifying for my supper.  The cruise is a cashless reward for delivering homilies about the history of the sites we are visiting. I love emitting 50 minutes’ worth of opinions on matters which I personally find so exciting. The audience, who are not young, often seem asleep. But I refuse to be disheartened.

Xenophon WOZ HERE

In TRABZON, ancient TRAPEZOS, we relived the route taken by Xenophon and his surviving Ten Thousand when they first caught sight of the waves and yelled “The sea, the sea!”  Docking in Georgia, as Jason and the Argonauts did in about 1275 BC, I was stunned by the trees and fresh breezes of Medea’s homeland; looming over the horizon is the Caucasian ridge where Prometheus was chained.

OVID DIDN'T LIKE IT HERE

In Constanta, Romania, we admired the statue of the poet Ovid, exiled there in 8 AD for mysterious crimes including poetry glamorizing adultery; now in northern Greece, besides the super-ostentatious tombs of Macedonian aristocrats, we shall be visiting Philippi. It was on this battlefield that the Roman Republic effectively met its shambolic end in 42 BC.

OCTAVIAN's MEN v. BRUTUS

The army of Mark Antony and Octavian (who pulled a cynical sickie and avoided combat) decimated Brutus’ legions. Brutus provided William Shakespeare with some of his best rhetorical opportunities in Julius Caesar, the most politically complex play in world literature. I may have to do some declaiming in the ancient theatre of Philippi. 

Our last port of call will be the island of Lemnos, scene of Jason’s first romantic liaison with Queen Hypsipyle, and, more grimly, a sizable slave market. But I shall be looking for the cave where the archer Philoctetes, horrifically wounded in the leg, spent most of the Trojan War in solitary agony. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the most morally complex play in world literature. I am about to visit the place of its actual setting. This is as good as it gets.