Jacques-Louis David & the Human Tragedy of the Iliad

 

Jacques-Louis David must long ago have won the distinction of having his paintings on the cover of more Classics books than any other artist: think ‘The Death of Socrates’ (1787), ‘The Intervention of the Sabine Women’ (1799) and ‘Leonidas at Thermopylae’ (completed 1814) alone.

But my favourite is his early 'Funeral of Patroclus' (1778), because it shows what he included, and what he omitted, from the source text in the Iliad book 23 (part of the text is translated below). The painting went missing until 1972, when the National Gallery of Ireland acquired it; everyone was surprised how much David’s concept had changed between the final painting and his preparatory sketch in the Louvre that had never disappeared.

 

David’s changes focussed the viewer’s attention far more intensely on the human emotional drama—the three spot-lit male cadavers and the faces of the captive women, especially Briseis who will deliver her own lament for Patroclus shortly. He left out all the dead bodies of animals which Homer has Achilles pile on the pyre, but by the time he finalised the painting he had taken the more momentous step of eliminating the gods.

In the sketch he had followed Homer in portraying gods intervening to protect Hector’s corpse, which Achilles had wanted to be devoured by dogs: Aphrodite hovers above the corpse, anointing it, and the chariot of Apollo arrives from the left, drawing a dark cloud to shield the dead flesh from the sun. 

David may have been attracted to the theme by the subject set for the Prix de Rome back in 1769, ‘Achilles, after dragging Hector’s corpse, places it at the foot of the bier where Patroclus’ corpse is lying’. But he did not complete the painting until nine years later, apparently wrestling with its complexity.

The funeral of Patroclus brings out the very worst in Achilles, who breaks every rule of ‘civilised’ warfare in sacrificing those poor Trojan men on Patroclus’ pyre. The Homeric narrator hardly ever passes moral judgement on actions in the poem, but here he makes an exception: Achilles ‘conceived an evil plan in his mind.’ ‘Great-souled’ Achilles, David says with great clarity, has far more victims than persecutors.

 

23.163-77

Patroclus' loved ones ‘heaped up the wood and made a pyre a hundred feet in both directions, and they put the corpse on the top of the pyre, broken-hearted. In front of the pyre they skinned and dressed many fine sheep and horned cattle of rolling gait. Great-hearted Achilles took the fat from all of them and covered the corpse with it from head to toe, and piled up the flayed bodies around it. And he leaned two-handled jars of honey and oil against the bier.  Swiftly, groaning intensely, he threw on the pyre four horses with arching necks. Patroclus had nine dogs that ate beneath his table, and Achilles cut the throats of two to place on the pyre. And he slaughtered with the bronze twelve valiant sons of the great-hearted Trojans, conceiving an evil plan in his mind. And then he set the pyre alight with the iron might of fire.

κηδεμόνες δὲ παρ᾽ αὖθι μένον καὶ νήεον ὕλην,
ποίησαν δὲ πυρὴν ἑκατόμπεδον ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα,
165ἐν δὲ πυρῇ ὑπάτῃ νεκρὸν θέσαν ἀχνύμενοι κῆρ.
πολλὰ δὲ ἴφια μῆλα καὶ εἰλίποδας ἕλικας βοῦς
πρόσθε πυρῆς ἔδερόν τε καὶ ἄμφεπον: ἐκ δ᾽ ἄρα πάντων
δημὸν ἑλὼν ἐκάλυψε νέκυν μεγάθυμος Ἀχιλλεὺς
ἐς πόδας ἐκ κεφαλῆς, περὶ δὲ δρατὰ σώματα νήει.
170ἐν δ᾽ ἐτίθει μέλιτος καὶ ἀλείφατος ἀμφιφορῆας
πρὸς λέχεα κλίνων: πίσυρας δ᾽ ἐριαύχενας ἵππους
ἐσσυμένως ἐνέβαλλε πυρῇ μεγάλα στεναχίζων.
ἐννέα τῷ γε ἄνακτι τραπεζῆες κύνες ἦσαν,
καὶ μὲν τῶν ἐνέβαλλε πυρῇ δύο δειροτομήσας,
175δώδεκα δὲ Τρώων μεγαθύμων υἱέας ἐσθλοὺς
χαλκῷ δηϊόων: κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα:
ἐν δὲ πυρὸς μένος ἧκε σιδήρεον ὄφρα νέμοιτο.

Nine-Year-Old Girl Finds Roman Treasure in 1735

 

I was going to write a blog supporting public pressure for our glorious leaders to rethink their catastrophic policy re A-Level results. Even after the U-turn, I remain enraged that the psychological health of our most precious youngsters transitioning to adulthood has been jeopardised by a five-day ordeal. But something wonderful happened this morning and if you have a few minutes to spare, you might be cheered up by what made me so happy.

 

Nearly every day I come across someone who should have been discussed in A People’s History of Classics, which I published with Henry Stead earlier this year. But there are not many small children in it and I am devastated that nine-year-old Isabel Cutler, a working-class Geordie whom I discovered this morning, will have to wait for the second edition.

 

We devote several pages in ch. 7 to all the farm-workers, navvies, gardeners, miners and grave-diggers who discovered most of the Roman-era antiquities in British and Irish collections. But this little girl managed to escape our notice, despite finding one of the most important Romano-British objects in existence while playing on the banks of the Tyne.

 

The ‘Corbridge Lanx’, a tray for distributing food and drinks at banquets, is a stunning example of late-Roman decorated silver plate, made in Asia Minor or North Africa in the 4^th century CE. Apollo stands at the entrance to his shrine on Delos, with Athena, Artemis his sister and his mother Leto seated. Athena is also beautifully depicted; the other female may be Leto’s sister Ortygia. The detail stands out even better in the 1736 engraving.

 

A local court record for May 1735 states that  “Isabel Cutter, daughter of Thomas Cutter of Corbridge, blacksmith, aged nine years… did on or about the tenth day of February last past find an ancient silver piece of plate in a great measure covered with the earth, one end sticking out of the ground, at a certain place within this manor near the north bank of the river Tyne by the water edge.”

Lucky Isabel! Finding treasure is every child’s fantasy. I wonder what she made of those gorgeous pagan goddesses—children of her age usually love Greek myths. And I hope her blacksmith father was nice to her—he sold it to the local goldsmith, making more than £30 for it (now worth about £8,000, which may have felt like a lot of money, but I suspect he was ripped off). The loaded Duke of Northumberland subsequently acquired it and his descendant bestowed it on the British Museum in 1993. If anyone can tell me more about Isabel Cotter—incorrectly said on Wikipedia to be a cobbler’s child—I would be eternally grateful.

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