May the Force of Greek Storytelling be With You!

Luke, Han & Leia

A long-lost brother and sister with a father who went to the moral Dark Side are reunited in young adulthood far from home. The youthful hero, on the threshold of initiation into warrior status, has a loyal male friend  who is also in danger. Their lives are threatened by an outlandish Emperor, but all three escape in the end, thus demonstrating the inherent superiority of their culture.

The plot of Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi (1983)? Yes and no. The person who invited the two-guys-and-a-gal-escape-from-an-exotic-location story, where the ‘gal’ has been held captive by a barbarous male ruler, was actually Euripides, tragedian of Athens, in about 414 BC. This is exactly the plot of his adventure drama Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Iphigenia, her newly recognised but long-lost brother Orestes and his best mate Pylades escape from the northern Black Sea after tricking King Thoas of the bloodthirsty Taurians.

Orestes, Pylades, Iphigenia

I have always loved Star Wars since the original 1977 release of the first instalment, which I watched the day I finished my ‘A’ Levels. I was absolutely delighted when my last child decided to be born on May the Fourth, the official 'Star Wars Day', and obligingly grew up to love Science Fiction. But the Greek dramatic ancestry of The Return of the Jedi makes it my favourite example.

'Peru', Trader Horn, and Nina

I am not alleging that George Lucas had studied Euripides in any depth, or at all. The plot type was introduced (demonstrably via a source who knew the Greek tragedy) to Hollywood in 1931, with MGM’s Trader Horn. A white woman (Nina), the longstanding captive of an African tribe, is rescued by her blood-brother and his comrade Peru. Trader Horn received a nomination for an Academy Award.  Today it makes an impact so excruciatingly racist that it is almost impossible to watch. But it was imitated in the Road to... films made by Paramount Pictures, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour, which started with Road to Singapore in 1940. The intermediate step was constituted by the taste Trader Horn created for talkies like Paramount’s Jungle Princess (1936), in which Lamour played the sarong-clad titular heroine, discovered in a remote location by air-crash survivors.

Bing, Dorothy and Bob

I am delighted to have been invited to address the Science Fiction Foundation conference in Liverpool this summer. I haven’t decided yet whether to talk about the first ‘Voyage to the Moon’ story in world literature, Lucian’s True History, or the relationship between Star Trek and the Odyssey. It is too bad that The Myth Makers, a four-part Dr Who story I can dimly remember watching as a child, set during the Trojan Wars and broadcast in 1965, has been wiped from the archives. But while I decide what to talk about, May the Fourth Be with You anyway!

Why Crassus could do Business in Bangladesh

Would YOU buy a second-hand factory from this man?

If Crassus, the shady ‘third man’ of the late Republic along with Pompey and Julius Caesar, were alive today, he would be trying to buy the Rana Plaza factory buildings in Savar, Bangladesh. He became the richest man in Rome not by crucifying Spartacus’ rebellious slave army, which was a one-off stunt, but by speculation in collapsing real estate. 

In ancient Rome, the shoddily erected trading and apartment blocks, insulae, often fell down. Crassus would turn up and make a rock-bottom offer for an insula as it teetered, its residents screaming. He only got his 500-strong private slave fire brigade to rescue the building if the offer was accepted. He would then refurbish the insula and sell it on for many times his outlay.

Rana Plaza building, not renovated

I became disenchanted with life as a trainee businesswoman when in the early 1980s I discovered the files relating to the deaths at work of several tugboat crewmen of Merseyside. My privileged childhood in a household where ‘work’ meant doing things with typewriters had protected me from any real sense that (even discounting the armed forces) most people--builders, miners, manicurists, dry cleaners, machine operatives, removal personnel--routinely face physical danger in the workplace. 

Wakefield Cathedral, being renovated

This does not apply to the middle classes. Bishops do not often fall out of pulpits. Few bankers pay so many checks into their offshore accounts that they get Repetitive Strain Injury. Barristers and Judges only occasionally asphyxiate when their wigs slip. University teachers’ throbbing egos threaten to make them mentally, rather than physically, sick. The most serious threat faced by the chattering classes in the media is bitchy tweets from envious rivals.

A clothing retailer selling clothes made in the Rana Plaza is Primark, behind which lurks the holding company of the Weston family. Their charitable foundation, the Garfield Weston Foundation, makes much-lauded and very visible grants to worthy causes including the UPKEEP OF THE FABRIC OF OLD CHURCHES in Britain.

Today, 28^th April, is the annual International Workers’ Memorial Day. It will commemorate what the International Labour Organization says is the staggering SIX THOUSAND humans who die EVERY DAY across the world as a result of work-derived illness or injury. 

Don’t get me wrong. I do like old churches and would like them to stay

perpendicular. But surely the one day a year formally reserved for thinking about safety in the workplace would be an appropriate moment for the Garfield Weston Foundation to consider supporting a different kind of architectural renovation, just a little less visually obvious in Britain. Perhaps it could donate some money towards the UPKEEP OF THE FABRIC OF THE FACTORIES from which the Weston family’s vast wealth derives.

How Enoch Powell Got Vergil Wrong

Abusing the Aeneid  led to this

45 Years ago today, classical literature was put to its most shameful use in the history of British oratory, when Enoch Powell  MP quoted  lines from the Aeneid to incite racial hatred. At a Conservative Party meeting in Birmingham, he emotively described the alleged plight of the white working-class in the face of immigration, and said that it was bound to end in violence: ‘like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

'So do you want a work permit or an Italian passport?'

If Powell had written this in an essay for me, I would have failed it and pointed out that it was no ‘Roman’ who said this, but the Greek Delphic Apollo, via his priestess at the equally Greek colony of Cumae, near Naples. She told Aeneas (no Roman, either), who was applying for an Italian work permit, ‘I see wars, horrid wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood’ (bella, horrida bella / et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno’ (6.86-7).

Powell’s speech roused the more ignorant amongst the white British working class to anger against the proposed 1968 Race Relations Bill, which at last made it illegal to refuse housing or work to anyone on the ground of their ethnicity. He was heard by racists as legitimising their abuse of citizens with Indian or African ancestry, especially the Sikhs whom Powell’s speech singled out for criticism. There was an instant rise in race-hate crimes. He helped the Conservatives win the 1970 election.

'I think I will stare at my cornucopia rather than foam with blood today'

Powell was himself from an upwardly mobile family of petit-bourgeois aspirations only two generations out of the Welsh coal fields. He never got over the fact that he was frightfully good at Latin and Ancient Greek. After grammar school in Birmingham and a glittering student career, he had been appointed Professor of Greek in Sydney at the age of only 25. But he did not exactly help Classical scholars look like desirable members of the community.

And he got the Aeneid so wrong. Of course Aeneas was going to have a few spats with the prejudiced and xenophobic indigenous Italians, but he brought Trojan style and enterprise, accepted that his people needed to learn the indigenous language if they were to stay, and helped found the alliance of peoples which constituted the Roman Republic. If the sophisticated Trojans hadn’t come to Italy, it would have remained the narrow-minded provincial backwater they discovered there. Instead, they (along with the locals and immigrants from Greece who had already got there) helped create the economic miracle that was ancient Rome.

Powell’s lauded high IQ did not help him understand economics any better than he understood Vergil. He was not bright enough to understand the benefits that immigration has always brought to Britain. In a series of important research projects conducted at UCL’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, it has been proved that an immigrant is 60 per cent less likely to claim benefits than a British national, and 58 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Immigrants are mostly young, strong, healthy, enterprising, and at work. They have children in British hospitals and the children go to school. But immigrants work and demonstrably pay in more to the economy than they take out. 

'WHY CAN'T I BE VICEROY?!!!'

Powell himself made the British Tiber foam with some blood. His influence can be still be felt every time a black person is mugged. The image of Classics is still suffering from the ill-treatment of one of the world’s greatest poets by this deluded scholar-demagogue. He had never recovered his sanity after Indian Independence in 1947 forced him to realise that he couldn’t achieve his lunatic dream of becoming Viceroy of India. I still don’t know why anyone could ever have taken him seriously. But I am planning a trip to Birmingham today and a table near the hotel where Powell spoke, in an excellent restaurant specialising in Punjabi cuisine. I foresee a Tiber foaming with much lager.

A Marxoid on Thatcher and the Miners' Strike

Tony Benn and the Brilliant Mick McGahey

Until Thursday, when I was accused on BBC Radio of being a ‘Marxoid’, whatever that is, by a well-known conservative thinker,  I had no intention of commenting on the death of the Conservative P.M. of Britain 1979-90. I have actually always admired some of her personal characteristics. Her ballsy determination to join the ruling class was apparent when, as a teenager at Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, she refused to go to Nottingham University, as she was advised, correctly perceiving that from outside Oxbridge she would be unlikely to rise in the Conservative Party.  

Because she needed Latin to matriculate at Oxford, she used some of her dad’s profits from his grocery  to hire a private tutor. Having discovered that one of the least competitive routes into Oxford for a female was Chemistry, she applied to Somerville College in that subject but still only made the reserve list.  It was because someone else withdrew that she joined the Public School boys by the Isis and fought her way into Parliament. All this took amazing shrewdness, research, guts, stamina, and self-belief.

If Thatcher had not been elected, someone else would have done the dirty work for the rich in the UK and declared war on the Trade Unions. The ways in which she has been vilified recently have been outrageously personal and gendered. By centring the entire discussion on ‘her’ legacy over the last few days, the media have successfully OBSCURED how their own collusion with the government during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-5 really changed British political culture. The idea that humans have a right to a work, in safety, for a wage sufficient to support themselves and their dependents, an idea which since World War II had seemed as self-evident as the right to healthcare or schooling, disappeared once and for all from the national debate.

Many branches of the National Union of Mineworkers, including almost all those in Scotland led by the wonderful Mick McGahey, campaigned not to keep the mines open but for the principle that the miners were entitled, if the pits were closed, to another job. This has been entirely forgotten.

During the strike I was living in Oxford and just beginning my doctorate.  Because I was campaigning for the miners, who were universally denigrated in the mainstream media as dangerous thugs, I often manned the food collection point on Cornmarket which supplied the strikers at Maerdy Colliery in South Wales. Such was my moral cowardice that I kept ducking under the table when either of the two more Jurassic right-wing figures still running Classical Literature at Oxford walked past, which happened on at least a daily basis. But despite my cowardice, I am proud to say that Maerdy was the very last pit to give up and go back to work.

My strongest memory is the ‘spot the police infiltrator’ game which the miners and their student supporters played on the picket lines. The men who shouted most violently, the agents provocateurs, had hideous haircuts which the police costume and make-up department deemed suitable to working-class men from Wales and Yorkshire, waved lager cans, and yelled death threats in fake regional accents.

I could go on.  For me and many other privileged people of my age, the strike was an absolute revelation of the speed at which such principles as objective news reporting and civil liberties go out of the window when ruling class interests are really on the line. My own phone strangely stopped working whenever the flying pickets were due in my digs for lunch in Oxford en route to Nottinghamshire.

Margaret Thatcher’s corpse will pass my office at King’s College, London, on its way to her funeral next Wednesday.  Fortunately I will be away, lecturing in Leiden. It seems somehow appropriate that the topic is ‘Tragedy and War.’