Rhinoceros Persecution Ancient & Modern

John Hume, a disgrace to his species

The older I get, the more I am moved by the plight of other fauna on the planet in the face of human rapacity. One of the week's most disgusting news items was the inaugural online auction of rhinoceros horn, held by South African millionaire rhinoceros horn farmer John Hume.

Young Female Siberian Woolly Rhino

Who does not feel atavistic guilt and melancholy looking at the 39,00-year-old woolly rhinoceros found in eastern Siberia in May, one of the many species of megafauna exterminated by our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Only a few millennia later, some of them created thrilling portraits of some of her close relatives in Chauvet, southern France.

Chauvet cave animal paintings

The rhinoceros had lived alongside Neanderthal man in prehistoric Thessaly, but by the classical era the European rhino was long extinct. Aristotle had heard of them, probably through accounts sent by Alexander’s army in the east, and the occasional Egyptian-Greek amulet shaped like a rhinoceros has turned up. But the brutal exploitation of the rhinoceros can clearly be seen in ancient Rome, where it became the star of the amphitheatre.

Ptolemaic Rhino Amulet

The rhinoceros features in accounts of wicked Emperors’ depravity: Commodus liked to slaughter rhinoceroses personally, at no danger to himself. Caracalla revelled in rhinocericidal spectacles as well.  Domitian had been particularly keen, even stamping a rhinoceros on coins to remind his imperial subjects of the lavishness of the games he had provided.

Domitian's Rhinoceros coin boast

The poet Martial’s poems on Domitian’s rhinoceros fetish are heart-breaking. Since this magnificent beast is vegetarian, and temperamentally placid, it proved profoundly disappointing in the shows when animals were meant to tear each other apart to gratify the audience. So the rhino had to be tortured into losing its temper and attacking other animals. But then it could toss two oxen in the air,  terrorise a lion, or vanquish a great brown bear.

Mosaic at the Villa del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

The rhinoceros, all 3,800 lbs of it, can indeed charge an adversary at 30 mph. John Hume’s rhinoceroses can’t toss their assailants, of course, because he has removed and auctioned their horns. But I for one would not be sorry to see him face a herd of them, furious, in an arena. Perhaps a new form of the ancient venationes (hunting spectacles) could be invented specifically to punish humans convicted of cruelty to animals.

Spartacus in Haiti and Lancashire

23 August is the annual International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. UNESCO chose the date because it marks the beginnings of the momentous 1791 slave rebellion on St Domingue (Haiti). 

Black Spartacus

Enslaved Africans spread fire across a thousand plantations. In 1794 the French National Convention voted to abolish slavery throughout all territories of the French Republic. Although Napoleon later repealed this measure, the fact that it had been passed at all was instrumental in the eventual abolition of the European slave trade altogether.

The leader of the rebellion was Toussaint L'Ouverture, known as The Black Spartacus. He had been inspired by the portrait of the ancient rebel gladiator Spartacus in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus.  

L'Ouverture’s importance was brought to its widest English-speaking audience by a biography written by the Reverend John Relly Beard (1853), not coincidentally the Victorian most committed to bringing classical education at the highest level to all working people. A passionate Lancashire Unitarian minister, he was a crucial force behind the movement for popular education.

Beard also wrote the sections on Latin, Greek and English Literature for Cassell’s Popular Educator, Latin Made Easy (1848) Cassell’s Lessons in Greek. 

He proudly addressed this to ‘the uneducated’,  his stated purpose ‘to simplify the study of Greek so as to throw open to all who are earnest in the great work of self-culture. Nor need any industrious person of ordinary capacity despair of acquiring skill to read the New Testament; and if he pleases, and will persevere, he may go on to an intimate acquaintance with Xenophon, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Homer, and the other Greek classics'.

Book downloadable free on http://edithhall.co.uk/books 

An estimated 21 million people, shockingly, are slaves across the planet today, and 13,000 in Britain alone. You can find out more at the Global Slavery Index. Its famous-face patron is none other than gladiator-impersonator Russell Crowe.  

In 2012 there was a French TV serial about L'Ouverture, sadly unavailable with English subtitles. Surely it’s time for a major-budget blockbuster movie, with Crowe as Napoleon.  David Oyelowo, the best Prometheus in Aeschylus I’ve ever seen (see pic), is an obvious candidate for L'Ouverture.

Some Classical and presidential Left-Handers

August 13^th is the 28^th International Left-Handers’ Day.  The usual journalistic response is to point out the disproportionate number of US Presidents who have been left-handed, including Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  Few of those succeeded, within 8 months in office, in threatening us with nuclear war and Nazi rallies, so perhaps the Americans’ great mistake last November was to elect a right-hander.

For light relief let’s look at some of the rare indications of left-handers in antiquity. A papyrus in Göttingen contains a letter written by the clearly left-handed  Aurelius Victor, a post office accountant in Oxyrhynchus. The experts can tell this from the contorted way he pens his lambdas.  A vase in the Louvre depicts FOUR mysteriously left-handed lyre-players. This could at a pinch be an artist’s mistake, but I like to think that the artist was left-handed and paying himself a secret compliment.

Left-handedness is often thought to be correlated with high IQ. Aristotle is sometimes said to have been left-handed simply because he was fascinated by the natural differences between left- and right-handed children. Plato said that we are all by nature ambidextrous, but that through ‘the folly of nurses and mothers’ we lose power in one hand: this causes problems in warfare if anyone ends up left-handed. If you think about the hoplite phalanx you can see what he means, so I’m intrigued to find a left-handed hoplite lion on a lovely Greek gemstone in the BM.  Shield on right paw and sword held in left.

A left-handed gladiator, however, was at an advantage if fighting a right-hander, because his opponent might have had little opportunity to train against left-handers. The Emperor Commodus (the one in the movie Gladiator) liked to boast about his left-handed gladiatorial prowess.   Albanus, the figure on the right in this graffito from Pompeii, is a left-hander fighting the right-handed Severus, and the abbreviation SC. after his name represents SCAEVA, ‘left-hander’.

Assyrian kings liked to be portrayed fighting from chariots, but in only one such portrait, a wall-painting from Til-Barsip near Aleppo in Syria, is a left-handed king portrayed. He holds the bow in his right hand, and his sword is sheathed on his right. He is probably the obsessive astrologer Esarhaddon, who reigned from  681 – 669 BCE.

The most famous ancient left-hander was Gaius Mucius, a Roman citizen who volunteered to assassinate the hostile Etruscan king Lars Porsena in 508 BCE. He was not very bright and accidentally killed the wrong man. He was captured. To show how brave Romans were, he shoved his right hand into a sacrificial fire and did not cry out. Porsena was impressed, freed him and sued for peace with Rome.  So our newly one-handed hero was given the honorary cognomen Scaevola or ‘Left-Handed’.

President Garfield brushing up his classical languages

But I can’t finish without pointing out that one ambidextrous U.S. president, Andrew Garfield, could simultaneously write the same sentence in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other. This was impressive because he had risen from abject poverty.  It sadly did not prevent him serving for less than a year; he was assassinated in the September of 1881 only months after entering office.

A pity. Those were the days when U.S. presidents still said things like ‘Next in importance  to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained’. How Times Have Changed.  

How Virgil Framed Dido

It’s been Phoenician-Carthaginian Week for me, culminating last night at the Proms in a BBC debate on ancient mariners with archaeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe.  Earlier I had talked about Carthage, the mesmerising lost civilisation centred in Tunisia, to the cast of the upcoming Royal Shakespeare Company production of Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage, starring the charismatic Chipo Chung.

‘Everyone knows’ that Dido was a Lebanese refugee whose project of founding Carthage (the name means New Town) was jeopardised when she fell for the visiting Trojan Aeneas. She was abandoned by him and committed suicide. Virgil says so in his Aeneid, after all.

Dido costume for Victorian Fancy Dress Party

But Virgil cynically framed Dido. He imposed parallels between the Roman conquest of Carthage and Augustus’ victory over Cleopatra at Actium. The Carthaginians themselves told a different tale. Their Dido, whom they knew as Elissa, was a she-hero who led compatriots to freedom and sacrificed herself for them. No opportunistic Trojan beau in sight.

Dido/Elissa’s original tale, preserved in authors including the Sicilian historian Timaeus, goes like this:

King Mutto of Tyre had a son Pygmalion and a daughter Elissa to whom he bequeathed joint rule of his realm. Pygmalion wanted to be sole tyrant. Coveting the gold in the temple, he killed Elissa’s husband, the high priest. Elissa outwitted her brother by pretending to put the gold into bags which were emptied into the sea (they actually contained sand), made off in a ship with the money and half the Phoenician Senate, picked up some wives for them in Cyprus, and arrived in North Africa.

As Clever as she Was Brave: Dido Maximises her Land Grab

From the locals she bought as much land ‘as could be covered with an oxhide’.  Cleverly, she cut the leather into narrow strips and marked out an enormous perimeter. 

Unfortunately, a neighbouring Libyan leader named Hiarbas sought her hand in marriage. Under pressure from her own people to accept, she chose to kill herself so that they would not become subject to him as their queen’s husband and patriarch. With this self-sacrifice she secured the fierce autonomy of the Carthage of magnificent generals Hamilcar and Hannibal for many centuries to come.

The Great City which Dido Founded

I love Marlowe. This production comes highly recommended. It has an outstanding director in Kimberley Sykes, a charming, plausible, Scottish Aeneas in Sandy Grierson and a moving, empathetic Daniel York as Iarbas. But it’s high time a 21st-century playwright dramatized the Carthaginians’ indigenous story of their exemplary Founding Mother. The Romans need to butt out at last from Dido’s inspiring quest epic.

A Year of Campaigning for Classics Education Begins!

Devoted Current &Would-be Teachers of Class. Civ. at Cambridge 7 July

The last three weeks consisted of serious and exciting work on the project that will occupy much of the next year of my life—advocating the teaching of Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in secondary education nationwide (ACE). I have always been puzzled why teachers in universities have not involved themselves more in the entirety of British Education. In Classics, which has been struggling to survive outside the private sector (where only 7% of our teenagers study), support of the fun and heroic teachers out there at the coalface is a matter of urgency.

So I was delighted that the Arts & Humanities Research Council have had the foresight to make me a Leadership Fellow to campaign to get Classical Civilisation GCSEs and A-Levels into as many state schools as possible, and to fund my inspirational colleague on this initiative, Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson. The award of this grant is the first serious sign that Britons at the highest level care about Classical Civilisation qualifications, historically and ludicrously seen as the poor relation of the Latin and Greek languages.

Arlene at Milton Keynes 17 July

In most parts of the UK Classical Civilisation (or alternatively Ancient History) can be introduced wherever there is a teacher, qualified in any subject, keen and permitted to do so. At ACE we are working with people who currently teach English, Drama, History, Languages, Philosophy & Religion, Sport, Business Studies and Physics. Money is available from educational charities to support the costs of introducing it (further information available on our website).

ACE teachers at KCL launch on 1 July

We have 16 partner institutions across the nation, from Belfast and Glasgow to Swansea, Exeter and Kent, ready and able to support YOU. We will be holding public events in all of them (for dates, times and venues see our website http://aceclassics.org.uk/), with star speakers including some of our patrons, illustrious classicists Mary Beard, Charlotte Higgins, Bettany Hughes, Paul Cartledge, Michael Scott and Natalie Haynes.

We are campaigning to get Classical Civilisation recognised on the English Baccalaureate as of equivalent value to e.g. Ancient History and Geography. This objective is a no-brainer. There will be a large press coverage beginning in September. Arlene and I are writing a book about the history of the subject since its inception in the 1950s and the manifold transferable skills and cultural literacies it bestows. The book will provide an instrument for informing policy-makers, teachers, students, parents and employers about this wonderful subject. It will be available free online.

If you want to help, please turn up to our events, join our Facebook Group, follow us on Twitter at @ClassCivAncHist, lobby your MP (a draft letter for this purpose will soon be available on the website), and above all fill in the questionnaire by pressing the big green button on our website. 

We need to hear from as many people as possible, ever educated at secondary level in Britain, about what Classics they did or did not get access to, and how they feel about it. The book will only be as good as the crowd-sourced information that goes into it. It is your chance to help us write educational history and affect education's future.

After the massive response to my article in the Guardian about People's Classics two years ago, I decided to run ACE because Aristotle says that a mistake of omission—not doing something worthwhile that lies within your power—is as blameworthy as one of commission. In her moving book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, the end-of-life nurse Bronnie Ware says that people regret failure to do things far more than things they have done. 

Talking at the Cotswold School in Bourton-on-the-Water

Giving all British teenagers access to the life-changing opportunity to study some of the most momentous intellectual revolutions in the history of homo sapiens between 1000 BCE and 400 CE does lie within our collective power. Nothing Ventured Nothing Gained! Please help!

Draco of Athens v. the Tolpuddle Martyrs

Not Big Enough for modern teenagers

I escaped to Rome and met a daughter backpacking with two friends. Two out of three expressed surprise at the size of the Colosseum. They had expected it to be bigger. Too many digitally enhanced super-cities have beamed from their millennial screens.

Corbyn at 2016  Tolpuddle Festival

Rome jaunt means, sadly, that I'm missing the Sunday climax of the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset, where Jeremy Corbyn is due to speak this afternoon. It celebrates the early days of British Trade Unionism when in 1834 farm workers in west Dorset faced punitive wage cuts and lawfully formed a trade union. 

The "Draco of Dorset"

Their deadly enemy was rich local landowner and magistrate James Frampton, who masterminded the ruling-class plot to smash the union. He framed them with a charge of taking an illegal oath of secrecy. This law was meant to apply to mutinies in the navy, not workers’ unions. But Frampton was a clever lawyer and on a mission.

The Edict Framing Union Members

Six Tolpuddle men were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Tasmania.  One of them, George Loveless, later wrote a pamphlet in dazzling prose which remains one of the most important sources on the dire experience of deported felons in the colonies.  

Loveless' Pamphlet

The national outcry from other workers eventually meant that the Tolpuddle martyrs were pardoned. They returned to play a key role in the Chartist Movement. But I'm interested in the hatred between Loveless and Frampton. Loveless’ pamphlet says, ‘I shall not soon forget’ Frampton’s name.

George Loveless is depicted bottom

Frampton was popularly known as the ‘Draco of Dorset’, after the Athenian legislator of the 7th century BCE who had established laws punishing even minor offences with death. The working men knew Draco, whose laws were said to have been inscribed in human blood, through their reading of English translations of Plutarch’s Life of Solon. Solon repealed Draco’s laws and passed laws favourable to the poor.

DRACO of ATHENS

The dastardly Draco of Dorset will have understood his nickname. As a wealthy young gentleman, Frampton studied Classics at Winchester and St John’s College, Cambridge, before going on the Grand Tour. Come to think of it, he will certainly have visited the Colosseum. 

A shame that his classical education led him to side forever with the Dracos and Domitians of antiquity rather than with Prometheus and Spartacus.

Mother-Daughter Separation Blues

Bacchae: Mum/Daughter-Free Tragedy

Some inspiring developments this week, but I’m feeling too dyspeptic to do them justice and am postponing that blog for a few days.  I’ve also seen three great shows, two of them classical. But I’ve just said goodbye to both teenagers, from neither of whom I’ve ever been parted for more than a week, as they go off to see the world this summer.

Donna says Good-Bye toSophie in Mama Mia

Mother-daughter separation anxiety has been exacerbated by the first anniversary of my mother’s death and the imminent marriage of my widowed father to an old friend of his. This plan was announced less than three months after mum’s funeral. The consequence has been that she visits me almost nightly in my dreams to complain she has been forgotten.

Show 1 was Mama Mia. I sobbed miserably through “Slipping through my Fingers”, the big ABBA ballad as daughter leaves home. 

Show 2, Pericles Prince of Tyre, was even worse. This strange Shakespearean play is ultimately based, via an ancient prose novel found in many medieval Latin versions,** on Euripides’ lost tragedy Alcmaeon in Corinth. It features Pericles’ teenaged daughter being joyously reunited with her mother, long believed dead.

The new Cameron Mackintosh 

All this meant that Euripides’ bloodthirsty Bacchae in the gardens of New College, Oxford, came (to me at least) as light relief. It was produced by that great gardener and classicist Robin Lane Fox, now embarking on a new career as impresario, and beautifully directed by my friend Yana Sistovari.  As I said in my talk introducing the Thursday performance, this example of proto-Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty features psychosis, corpse dismemberment and infanticide. But there’s no mother-daughter bond in sight.

That was then: Heseltine in my Youth

Incidentally, the bacchants confirmed my hunch that Tories can’t understand democratic Athenian tragedy. Michael Heseltine was in the front row, but looked completely baffled throughout. People my age will remember him all too well (he was Deputy PM more than once): neither of my far-flung daughters is old enough to recognise his name.

** Apollonius Prince of Tyre, the Latin versions probably stemming from an original ancient Greek romance which drew on the plot of Euripides' tragedy. Coincidentally, Alcmaeon in Corinth was produced in the same group as Iphigenia in Aulis and Bacchae in 405 BCE, so the same actor who played the Prince of Tyre figure would have played Dionysus in Bacchae.