On Capital Punishment and Psychological Degradation

It is a grim anniversary. A year ago today the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced the addendum to the Execution Protocol which made it possible to resume capital punishment after a 2-decade pause. Eleven days ago, the new era was inaugurated when convicted murderer Daniel Lewis Lee received a lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute. 

Chinonye Chukwu

Two more federal executions have since taken place and more are imminent. They include that of Lezmond Mitchell, even though the Navajo Nation of which he is a member opposes the death penalty, as do the families of his victims.  He has lost an appeal citing evidence of jurors’ racial animus.

Last night I watched Clemency, a film about a prison governor who oversees executions in an unspecified American penitentiary. Written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu, it centres on a prison governor, who routinely oversees executions, during the days in which she tries to prepare herself, her staff, and Anthony Woods, convicted of shooting a police officer, for his execution. The acting of Alfre Woodard as the governor and Aldis Hodge as the doomed man is hair-raising, especially in the scene where she clinically describes execution procedures to him and he reacts in a frenzy of self-harm. Astonishingly, this encounter was filmed in just two takes.

The case of Woods is inspired by that of Troy Davis, executed in 2011 for the murder of a police officer, a crime which he always denied. Yet the film refuses to take the viewer far down the two paths that we are led to expect by the casting of African American leads, and the doubt subtly thrown on the question of Woods’ guilt.

This is not a film about the disgraceful disproportion of ethnic minorities incarcerated in the USA. It is not even a film about the worn-out philosophical arguments pro and contra capital punishment endlessly recycled by debating societies at Liberal Arts Colleges.

Aldis Hodge scintillating as Anthony Woods. 

No, it is a surgical analysis of the moral, emotional and psychological degradation of every single individual involved in putting a human being to untimely death. From the medic who panics when he can’t access a Hispanic convict’s vein, to the journalists supposedly witnessing executions who can’t lift their eyes from their notebooks, to the governor’s husband, emotionally neglected by his burnt-out wife, nobody escapes the dismal drip-feed of dread, depression, and despair.

Chukwu includes a scene in which the governor’s husband, a teacher, reads to his class from Ralph Ellison’s Odyssey-inspired Invisible Man (1952): “I am an invisible man. … I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” This applies not only to the men executed in the film, but to the whole community. A society which requires any of its members to participate in these disgusting rituals brutalises all of them.

This blog has been painful to write because I find it difficult to admit that I once wondered if there weren’t individual cases where the death penalty might be appropriate. After I became a mother I watched a documentary in which a man who had killed a small girl boasted to the British police that he would be able for the rest of his life to get sexual pleasure from the memories of the crime. Why, I thought for some months, should any parent be forced to live with the knowledge that such fantasies were continuing to be enacted in the perpetrator’s imagination? Better, I temporarily believed, to erase that vile consciousness altogether.

But once the perinatal hormones had subsided, I was able to remember that no valid refutation exists of the argument against capital punishment that it is always unjust because irreversible and there are a thousand unexpected ways in which a question mark can arise over the security of the conviction. Clemency shows, just as importantly, that it is also always unjust because it makes inhuman demands on the personnel employed by the Department with, in the USA, the Orwellian title ‘Of Corrections’. Watch it and weep.

Brennus the Contested Conqueror of Rome

July 18 is the anniversary of the momentous Battle of the Allia (c. 390 BCE). The Gallic Senones defeated the Roman Republic as their prelude to sacking Rome itself. The humiliation was compounded when the conquering chief Brennus, having fixed Rome’s ransom at 1000 pounds of gold, added his sword to the scale (either cleverly or treacherously depending on your perspective), and, according to Livy declared, in perfect Latin, VAE VICTIS, or WOE TO THE VANQUISHED. 

Paul Jamin, "Le Brenn et sa part de butin" (1893)

This unlovely sentiment has become proverbial. it has always been quoted by imperialists justifying cynical reprisals against conquered peoples. In an oppositional tone, it is cited by campaigners for just treatment of those defeated in war, from the Elizabethan poet Thomas Fenne ("For Allia brook can witness yet where thousand Romans dide; / The want of justice was the cause, it will not be denide") to a recent discussion of the predicament of Palestinians in the face of what is presented as their victors' settlement colonisation. 

Figurehead of Brennus in Maritime Museum 

Ezra Pound, with typical facetiousness, claimed in Canto 96 that Brennus came to Rome only "for the wine, liking its quality". But Brennus, whose story also survives in Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, provides an outstanding example of the contestation of ancient history. Many extreme but contradictory positions have been defended by citing the defeat of the mighty soon-to-be-world-empire of Rome and the northern European tribesmen. French nationalists obviously love Brennus. Thinking about his Roman spoils allowed salon painters to imagine their bizarrely helmeted forefather reviewing his allocation of five naked Italian women. 

The first pre-dreadnought battleship built for the Marine Nationale was named Brenn and a spectacular portrait sculpture planted atop it. But British imperialists have also adopted him as exemplar ever since Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in his twelfth-century Breviary exaggeratedly calls Brennus conqueror of "Romans, the Grekes, and almost all the nations of the worlde". 

By the time of Robert Montgomery Bird's popular abolitionist drama The Gladiator (1831), however, Brennus was associated with Spartacus as symbol of brave resistance to Rome by peoples of lands from which they drew their slaves. He was adopted as an ancestor of early trade union activists in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), where the factory owners awaiting a delegation of ragged workers resemble "the Roman senators who awaited the irruption of Brennus and his Gauls". The Celtic Revival poets identified themselves as "of the race of Brennus and Vercingetorix, of Cuchullain and Maeve...of the breed of the warriors who had shaken all empires although they had founded none". 

"My sword is heavier than yours"

But for admirers of Italy, ancient Roman civilisation, and indeed "law and order", Brennus has always represented anarchy, vandalism (after all, the Vandals themselves sacked Rome in 455 CE) and perfidy. In these versions, the hero is Camillus, who in Livy's patriotic account responded by putting his own sword in the scale, saying Non auro, sed ferro, recuperanda est patria (Not with gold but with iron will the fatherland be recovered). He is alleged to have routed the Gauls the next day. 

The sword-and-scales face-off was painted by Sebastiano Ricci and appallingly dramatised in the 1963 sword-and-sandals movie Brenno il nemico di Roma, starring the thoroughly decent Denver-born wieghtlifter Gordon Mitchell. He utterly failed to make Brenno as cruel and brutal a barbarian as the execrable screenplay required. Livy, frankly, had already done much better. 

Scarily Aryan "Celtic Rock" band VAE VICTIS

Ancient Theatre for the 21st Century: E-Books for All

The lockdown has made many of us experiment with new ways of accessing information and scholarship. I recommend these new multimedia ebooks, which are completely free to the public, created by my colleagues of nearly 25 years at the Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama. I co-founded it in 1996 with Oliver Taplin, and remain Consultant Director, these days by ZOOM rather than the dreaded X5 Cambridge-Oxford bus.

They are the brainchild of Fiona Macintosh, Claire Kenward and Tom Wrobel. They offer a magical way to start exploring the wonderful world of ancient drama. The first one is devoted to Euripides’ Medea and is packed with materials from the APGRD's research and collections---illustrations, photographs, video and audio clips and compelling interviews with creative practitioners and academics. They tell the story of this seminal play onstage and onscreen, in dance, drama, and opera, across the globe from antiquity to the present day. There are stunning new visuals by Thom Cushieri as well.

The second play to get this lavish treatment is Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The first instalment, Beginnings & Whose Play? ​can be downloaded from Apple Books at https://apple.co/2WrZcYa. An EPUB version for android and PC will follow. So will the other two instalments,  including ‘Endings’, in which one of the interviews is with yours truly. I discuss the uniquely tense and terrifying closure of the play when Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, after seeing off a violent protest from the citizens of Argos, formally inaugurate their joint tyranny.

I can’t recommend these materials enough. I was involved heavily in the creation of the APGRD’s materials on both plays, and can vouch for their vividness and the fascination of the stories they tell. Anybody out there thinking of studying, performing or watching Greek tragedy should enjoy them—they are funded by taxpayers’ money via the Arts & Humanities Research Council and so are rightfully the intellectual property of every single one of us. -

Update from One Classicist's Lockdown

Blogging has not come naturally over the last few weeks. I’m not cracking many jokes and those I do are so saturnine as to be in bad taste, e.g. talking about the death+incest count in Oedipus' family on twitter on UN International Day of Families. I'm writing this more for myself so I can later remember May 2020 than in the expectation anyone else would be interested.

There have been severe downs. My siblings and I got our ailing father safely into a (mercifully still!) Covid-free nursing home just in time before lockdown. But my husband’s stepmother of 60 years died in Guernsey and it is wretched that he has been unable to be with his 95-year-old bereaved father.

R.I.P. Best Kitten Ever

Our youngest child, who had returned to university in January after depressing health issues forced a deferral, can’t now go for the year abroad in Japan she was so excited about. Her kitten, the adorable Captain Pugwash, got killed by a car speeding through our estate. At least we could all attend his funeral. Now top management at my employer is sending out universal emails about imminent pay cuts and retirement packages. But others have it SO MUCH WORSE.

My Brilliant PhD

Aristotle’s ethics have been a support in all this. Opportunities to follow his basic recommendations that we nurture our primary relationships, constantly review our life’s trajectory, and cultivate constructive uses of leisure, are all facilitated by lockdown. I have been reminded why I like my gutsy close family so much. I’ve realised that I’m quite proud of two of the things I’ve done and identified some more I want to do, especially in the area of free public education. I’ve added several new skills/items to my cooking repertoire including lactose-free chocolate cake and home-made pizza dough.

My Favourite Picture of Aesop

There has been some excitement. My former PhD student, the remarkable Oliver Baldwin, who despite looking like a large Viking is effectively Spanish, has won 1st prize from the Association of Hispanists of Britain and Ireland for his outstanding dissertation on Seneca in the Second Spanish republic. 

I’ve finished my 31st (I think) book, on the poet Tony Harrison’s radical classicism. I’ve had some lovely face time with close friends and realised that some estrangements have been petty and fixed them. I’ve been interviewed by my friend the the wondrous Natalie Haynes on ancient heroines (first instalment tomorrow, on Helen of Troy, BBC Radio 4 at 1630). I recorded a radio programme on Aesop with esteemed colleagues Vaios Liapis (Cyprus) and Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton) which will be broadcast on BBC World Service on 28th May. 

One of the Two Work Things I'm Proud Of

I’m also about to record a Start the Week on my new book with Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics, to be broadcast on 25th May. I wrote a Gresham Lecture on Hippocrates and ancient Greek medicine to be live-streamed at 1300 on May 28th if I can manage to stop my hair looking like an electrocuted bobcat and my husband and I can stop giggling while recording it in front of the dog. I've enjoyed doing new podcasts on Disney's Hercules and on Virtue Ethics. 

With Nat Haynes pre-social distancing

But what worries me is my shrinking horizons. Reading international news makes me go boss-eyed. I don’t seem to have opinions on important issues any more. I don’t enjoy shouting at Tories on the TV and just turn it off. I keep losing my phone without ever taking it out of the house and finding it in strange places like  my underwear drawer. I have begun to get obsessive when I can't find dried mushrooms in the local supermarket. I have wept because I couldn't get the microwave to work and because I heard a melodious songbird. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. 

As I read this I can barely recognise myself. When on earth did I become so earnest, narrow, inward, self-centred and self-pre-occupied? I've never used such a dense cluster of first-person singular pronouns in my life. Let’s hope we all get let out soon or I  fear I’ll forget what I’m on the planet for, at least other than making home-made pasta.

When it's a 1960s Sunday Every Day

John Everett Millais "My First Sermon"

We're fortunate that we have no small children at home, that everyone has their own space/loo, that we have a garden, pets and access to countryside. I simply could not have coped with this situation when our children, one of whom possesses legendary restlessness and curiosity, were of primary-school age. 

Even a weekend was a challenge, and that was in those far-off days when cafes, National Trust properties, swimming pools, swings-and-slides and cinemas were open and friends were visitable. I am lost in admiration for everyone facing round-the-clock childcare for an uncertain period stretching way into the future.

But to be honest I am mentally in far more pain than I would have anticipated after just a week of semi-confinement. It’s not that these days I go out that much when I’m not commuting to work. It seems that what my psyche can’t cope with is simply that there’s nowhere to go because everything is shut.

After drinking far too much wine last night and vivid flashback dreams I had a realisation. It’s like the dreaded Sundays of my 1960s childhood EVERY SINGLE DAY. Outings were out of the question, except for compulsory church services where I had to sit in a pew being told I was a sinner while my brothers sang in the choir. Girls were not allowed because our voices were deemed impure.

It used to be hard to revive memories of a world where all cafes, pubs, restaurants, shops, museums and theatres were closed all day. I can’t remember whether cinemas were, but my Sabbatarian father would not have let us go to one anyway. He genuinely believed (and still believes, for all I know, but I can’t ask him because his nursing home’s under lockdown) that Sundays should be reserved for Communing With God. I was even rebuked once for baking a cake, but won the battle over watching TV by bloody-minded attrition.

The good bit was that we were allowed a boiled egg for breakfast and a glass of orange squash at lunch. These were out of the question the other six days a week. But I remember a particular sinking feeling every Saturday evening as Sunday approached, and often burst into tears when I woke up on a Sunday morning facing only boredom (God sadly didn’t choose to communicate with me personally) and a long sermon  by a patriarch opposed to the ordination of women.

John Everett Millais, "My Second Sermon"

Now I’ve diagnosed my mental malaise, which is caused by memories of a world before the Equal Pay Act 1970, let alone the Sunday Trading Act 1994, I hope to be able to cure it. I need to get researching and writing something obsessively and lock up the wine in the garage. And thank my lucky stars that my children are adult and safe. I can also drink as much orange squash as I like, and eat a boiled egg every single day that one can be sourced from our local Morrison’s. Freedom is always relative.

Plea to Priti Patel to Deport the Parthenon Sculptures

Deport these Unskilled Ancient Athenians Immediately!

It’s rumoured that what are wrongly known as the Elgin Marbles may feature in EU/UK post-Brexit trade deals. More to the point, Priti Patel’s new immigration bill would disqualify almost all the Greeks portrayed on the temples of the Athenian Acropolis from working in Britain.

Patel: Can't Define "Unskilled" 

Given the new determination to deport even long-term resident foreigners from Our Glorious Isles, every Athenian, hero, and divinity may soon find themselves sent packing on dawn flights from Heathrow detention centres.

The professions portrayed on the Parthenon are these: warrior (with a specialism in combat with centaurs), cavalry officer, groom, chariot-driver, cow-herd, porter (mostly female: carrying incense burners, jugs, clothes), priest, being divine, hair-dresser (Iris), bride (Hera), metalworker (Hephaestus), metereologist/cosmic supremo (Zeus).

Walnut Carrying Not A Skill

According to the official Shortage Occupation List, only Hephaestus and Zeus might squeeze in as a Mechanical Engineer (code 2122) or High Integrity Pipe Welder (5215) and Hydrogeologist (2113) respectively.  The poor lonely Caryatid from the Erechtheion, who is carrying a basket of walnuts on her head, would not get a look in.

Nat Haynes reads amongst Pheidias' sculptures

But if we apply some other criteria implicit in the Points-Based eligibility system, even Zeus and Hephaestus would be deported. Although they may have experience of their jobs ‘at appropriate skill level’ (20 points) and certainly have the equivalent of a ‘PhD in subject relevant to the job’ (10 points), they do not speak English, which is mandatory. English was not invented until 1500 years after the Acropolis buildings were completed.

Classical Athens has dominated my week.* Yesterday I was involved in an astonishing feminist rendition of all the women’s voices in my friend Natalie Haynes’ novel A Thousand Ships across three galleries at the British Museum, two of the directors being former PhD students of mine, Magdalena Zira and Helen Eastman.

With Lucy Bilson and Kitty Cooke. Photo by Sarah Poynder

In an unconnected event, just two minutes after the applause died down in the packed Parthenon Gallery, I pointed out that the exquisite sculptures should, in my view, as a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, be reunited in Athens with the rest of the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the Parthenon. I was aided by  Marlen Taffarello Godwin from the Committee and two wonderful UCL classics undergraduates, Lucy Bilson and Kitty Cooke.

Calliope: Not Applying to Work in UK

My own role in A Thousand Ships had been Calliope, Muse of Epic, and it occurs to me that she, however, just might be eligible to work in Britain. She certainly has more than a PhD-equivalent in Ancient Greek Literature, having authored much of it herself by inspiring mortal bards. And she clearly speaks English beautifully, having inspired Nat’s eloquent novel.

Duveen Roof Disgrace

But Calliope told me yesterday that she would never consider leaving her gorgeous homeland for the dingy Duveen gallery with its leaking roof. And once Britons have Done the Right Thing, as cogently argued by my fellow KCL Professor and BCRPM member John Tasioulas in the Telegraph this week, and returned the sculptures like the international grown-ups we want to be seen as, she won’t even be missing her abducted compatriots any more.

* On Friday I helped my esteemed Exeter colleague Neville Morley by appearing on a panel after a dramatic experiment with the Athenians’ dialogue with the Melians, as reported by Thucydides. The show brought to stage life in the Diorama Theatre an event just 15 years after the completion of the Parthenon.

Poussin's Disabled Divinities: Orion and the Rising Sun

I’m writing up an article for a volume edited by my wonderful KCL colleague, Dr Ellen Adams, entitled The Forgotten Other: Disability Studies and the Classical Body. A myth hardly anyone has ever paid attention to, besides the French painter Nicolas Poussin, is my theme.

 It tells a heart-warming story about the cooperation between three disabled ancient divinities: the blind Orion, the dwarf Cedalion, and the lame Hephaestus. Orion receives advice about the way to find and face the rising sun, and thus be healed, from Hephaestus on the island of Lemnos. The blinded giant is guided by Cedalion, tiny enough to perch easily on his shoulders. Diana, Orion’s erstwhile enemy, looks on impassively.

Poussin painted the superb landscape (now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York), for his Parisian patron Michel Passart, in 1658. He was then succumbing to the acute tremors—perhaps caused by Parkinson’s disease—that were cruelly to sabotage his ability to control his brush-strokes. I like to think that the emotional power of the picture partly stems from his identification with these physically challenged classical deities.

Poussin found the story in Natalis Comes’ 1567 compendium of mythology and in the ancient satirist Lucian, who described an ancient painting in his The Hall as follows: ‘Orion, who is blind, is carrying Cedalion. Cedalion is showing him the way to the sunlight. The rising sun is healing the blindness of Orion, and Hephaestus views the incident from Lemnos’.

The only other painter to have been drawn to this theme may have been George Frederic Watts, but I can find no trace of his 1895 ‘Orion’. Poussin’s painting has had many admirers. Joshua Reynolds once owned it, and the essayist William Hazlitt wrote a panegyric on it:

Dwarf, perhaps Cedalion, looks after Hephaestus' wine

He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and falters in his gait, as if just awakened out of sleep, or uncertain of his way;—you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh with dews, the 'gray dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,' and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. 

Thetis requests arms for Achilles from Hephaestus

Of these disabled gods, although I have written a study of Hephaestus’ lameness,* it is Cedalion I find most fascinating. His rare appearances in ancient art and literature usually depict him assisting Hephaestus in his smithy. He is probably the dwarf beneath Hephaestus’ donkey during drunken processions. The most beautiful example is a Pompeii mural, where he wears the freedman’s cap.

Lemnos was associated with certain medical practices and healing cults in antiquity, and the myth of the three friends who met there—disabled in different ways but mutually supporting one another—may reflect some aspect of the reality of the lives of disabled individuals in antiquity. But even if it is entirely fictional, it offers a picture unique in classical sources of the mutual affection and cooperation that is possible between people dealing with different physical disadvantages. 

Cedalion, master metal-worker

Physical disability was routinely mocked in the ancient world, but this story offers a fascinating exception. The Classics never cease to surprise.

*Happy to send a pdf to anyone who writes to my email consisting of my two names split by a full stop @kcl.ac.uk.