His great-uncle, Julius Caesar, had encouraged him to gain the military experience required for a political career, but Octavian was slow to heed his advice. Even his parents seem to have assumed — and hoped, for his sake — that he would turn down his inheritance when he was named as the late dictator’s adopted son and primary heir. The fact that Octavian accepted it without hesitation was the first sign that there was more to him than met the eye.

There is nothing hagiographical about the late Jochen Bleicken’s monumental and highly readable biography of Rome’s first emperor, now published in an elegant translation by Anthea Bell from the 1998 German original.

Through his early years, Octavian is presented as incredibly lacklustre, not to say spoiled. His father, a politician, came from an upper-class family from Velletri, south-east of Rome. His mother was the daughter of one of Julius Caesar’s sisters, and married handsomely, first Octavian’s father, then a distinguished senator. Perhaps the young Augustus had it too easy. In 45 BC, the year before Caesar died, the 18-year-old future heir had no political or administrative experience to speak of, and no military experience in the field. Mark Antony, who was one of Caesar’s reserve heirs, had all three.

Bleicken has dedicated the first few hundred pages of his 620-page book (excluding the extensive endnotes) to untangling the crisis that arose after the assassination of Caesar. Brutus and Cassius and the other so-called Liberators believed that they had freed Rome from tyranny, but as Cicero realised, their act “was carried out with the courage of men but the understanding of boys . . . The tree was felled, but the roots were not torn out.”

There was always going to be chaos in the wake of Caesar’s death, but things might have been marginally less chaotic had Octavian taken his parents’ advice and rejected the role as heir. Mark Antony would still have faced a considerable struggle to put Rome back on an even keel, but who knows how quickly the situation might have been resolved without the conflict that resulted in the casualty-heavy Battle of Actium between Antony and Octavian.

Although Octavian’s late leap to military prowess was significant in his rise, Bleicken also emphasises the way in which his beneficence presaged his victory. Whereas Antony kept hold of what he had acquired of Caesar’s goods after his death, Octavian handed over much of his inheritance to the citizens of Rome, who were always grateful for gifts.

Then, at the age of 27, he charmingly asked them for their pardon for the chaos of the civil war, before providing the veteran soldiers with new settlements. The loyalty of the military was a sound investment for a man whose life would often be under threat.

Since neither Antony nor Octavian, nor indeed an alliance between them, was about to do the impossible and reestablish the defunct republic, Octavian’s prevailing challenge after his victory at Actium in 31 BC was to shape, almost imperceptibly, a one-man rule that would be acceptable to a population that had grown up innately fearful of monarchy.

As Octavian consolidated his position in this way, he emerges from Bleichen’s bold but detailed biography as rather a remote figure. Tellingly, he ceases to be elusive to us principally when he is unpleasant: “Octavian’s ethical standards were a good deal lower in affairs of the heart than those of most of his contemporaries and equals, and all his life he ruthlessly exploited his position of power to satisfy his sexual needs. He did not stop short at other men’s wives.”

After impregnating his wife Scribonia, Octavian fell passionately in love with the married Livia Drusilla, who was descended from the illustrious Claudii Pulchri family, and herself pregnant at the time with her husband’s child. Surprising though it may be, their marriage proved to be a strong one. Livia’s virtuous reputation to some degree made up for Augustus’ deficiencies, which was important because he liked to present himself as the redeemer of national morality.

Before he died, he wrote the Res Gestae, an immodest account of his own achievements, which included the reconstruction of many of Rome’s temples, and the introduction of laws to reinvigorate family life. One of these laws required the Roman people to marry and have children. Another — which remained in force until the third century AD — rendered adultery illegal.

While it is easy to point to Augustus’s hypocrisy, not least in his failure to have children by Livia, we are discouraged from doing so. The majority of Rome’s senators supported his legislation, Bleichen reminds us, as it professed to revive good old-fashioned morals. In its very willingness to agree to it, however, “society gave up a part of its freedom”. The people led themselves into the principate that Augustus was subtly establishing by combining the flavour of the old with the new.

Bleichen has acknowledged a debt here to the 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen, whom he gushingly called “the foremost historian of the ancient world, and not only in his own time”. While Mommsen attracted criticism from fellow scholars for appearing to play down the monarchical nature of the principate by emphasising its continuity with the early republic, Bleichen has breathed new life into his argument. Augustus’s preoccupation with moral legislation helped him to make radical changes beneath a veil of tradition.

Look at almost any portrait bust of Augustus (there are no plates in this volume so one must look elsewhere) and you will be struck by his serenity. The smooth appearance of the man who believed in his own divinity and championed the Pax Romana, one starts to realise, isn’t mere whitewash.

The first emperor of Rome was perfectly capable, and certainly fixed in his ideas, but by comparison with Julius Caesar he was just a bit bland. Fortunately for Augustus, a bit of blandness wasn’t entirely uncalled for in Rome after the turmoil of the previous decades.

Augustus will always be remembered as the architect of empire, and it is no failure on Bleichen’s part that the architecture is more interesting than its draughtsman.

The post From Octavian To Augustus appeared first on Standpoint.

Snakes, he told me, turn up in the unlikeliest books — dystopian novels, biographies, exotic cookbooks. However prepared he thought he was, the word “snake” would jump off pages at him, triggering the same pulse-racing fear he would have felt had a real snake slithered out of the book’s spine, like a suitably vertebrate bookmark.

I was thinking about Snake Man (I forget his real name) when I saw a recent inflammatory op-ed in the Columbia University student newspaper. Four female undergraduates consider the ways in which texts and other material studied in literature classes make some students uncomfortable.

They put forward a case for “trigger warnings” — advance alerts to potentially “offensive” material such as rape scenes or racial violence (the term has been hanging around US campuses for more than a year now), and caution against marginalisation. They write:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fixture of Lit Hum [Literature Humanities], but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

Sadly, these ill-conceived views are not confined to Columbia. Although trigger warnings are yet to catch on in the UK, students at a number of US universities, including Santa Barbara in California and the University of Michigan, have also requested them. Some professors are already supplying trigger warnings for their courses.

It makes you wonder how students sensitive enough to require a trigger warning would cope with reading the warning itself, where there is little to soften the impact of the description of the very thing they’re trying to avoid. This is prime territory, after all, for encountering a “snake” in the grass.

Beyond that, however, and more disconcerting, is the emphasis here on the offensiveness of the “Western canon”. The term crops up three times in the Columbia Spectator article, a piece of writing no longer than this page, alongside other references to “Western society” and the “Western world”. For this isn’t just about student welfare. What begins as a cry for sensitivity in teaching difficult topics descends quickly into what is in fact a complaint about the dominance of Western thought. Trigger warnings are here revealed for what they really are: tools not merely for censoring febrile material for the few, but for redressing the balance of canonical literature.

Students are kicking back against what they perceive as “a set of universal, venerated, incontestable principles and texts that have founded Western society”. These are texts, they seem to say, which cannot speak to them, at least not without causing offence in the process. What is wanted is something to counterbalance the weight of tradition.  

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the founding texts of Western literature, is an easy target. One student, they report, a survivor of sexual assault, felt “triggered” when studying Ovid’s descriptions of Daphne and Persephone, who are abducted by the gods Apollo and Hades respectively. In the case of the former, Apollo, stung by Cupid’s arrow, pursues the young Daphne because he wants to marry her. As she flees he prays she will not trip and harm herself. He is inspired by divine Love to grab her, but as he does so she changes into a laurel tree. Apollo ravages the tree.

Leaving aside the point that many Western texts have Indo-European roots, the kind of culturally and socially representative approach to literature that the Columbia students seem to desire could never address the problem of sensitivity. It’s not as though rape, war, and racism are any less endemic to life than they are to world literature. The canonical 18th-century Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, contains scenes of pillage. There are violent episodes in Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic not unlike Homer’s Odyssey. It is impossible to create a blanket warning to protect against every anxiety. Not that the problem lies with literature, or even, as the Columbia students seem to believe, with the methods of teaching it. It lies, rather, with the readiness with which some of these young people are imposing themselves upon the material they are given to study.

It is one of the great joys of reading to imagine yourself in another person’s shoes, but when doing so triggers intrusive thoughts the book needs to be read in a different way, rather than not read at all.

Snake Man required hypnosis and cognitive behavioural therapy to recover from his phobia. As part of his therapy, he was encouraged to confront his fear, which entailed reading about snakes and eventually touching one at a children’s petting zoo.

While the same approach would not work for all anxieties, there is something to be said for reading as a means of desensitisation. Given time, studying Ovid’s rape scenes in the context of a mythical world populated by gods and hybrid creatures could have a distancing rather than a triggering effect. What this wouldn’t do, however, is diminish the more damaging idea that rumbles beneath some requests for trigger warnings — the idea that it’s the Western canon, rather than its readers, that is out of touch.

The post Snakes In The Grass appeared first on Standpoint.

This in itself implies that those principles of duty or theological belief must differ in some ways from, or at least go beyond, what ordinary human reasonableness would have come up with. But there is a deeper and sharper problem here. The “liberal” view is that it is wrong to penalise people for failings which are not their own fault; good intentions and best efforts must be accepted as sufficient. Yet a human being who happens not to have been informed about the contents of divine revelation stands — if that revelation really does give the essential and otherwise unavailable key to eternal life — at a stupendous disadvantage. That people who have rejected Christianity should go to Hell may seem, at least to a believing Christian, entirely right and proper. But what about the ones who never even had a chance to accept it?

The problem raised by the idea that good pagans will burn in Hell-fire is more troubling than the other familiar problems that arise over the apparent injustice of God. There is the problem of undeserved pain and suffering in this life, for example, or the fact that we see wicked men prospering. In those cases, at least one part of the answer will be that the afflicted may be compensated in the next life, and the wrongdoers will be punished. By all means, let the wicked fry in Hell — but why should they find themselves frying alongside innocent and virtuous pagans?

The robust answer to all these questions is to say: God is simply not “fair”, if by fairness you mean the paltry and inadequate human version of that concept. God’s justice is absolute, more pure and more perfect than anything we can grasp. And it is bound up with the purpose for which He made us, which is also beyond our comprehension. How can the creature judge the Creator? Hath not the potter power over the clay?

In the Christian tradition, few thinkers have taken the robust line more robustly than Saint Augustine. Only those who believed in Jesus Christ, he declared, could be saved. Like other Fathers of the Church, he assumed that after the coming of Christ on earth the Gospel had rapidly become available to the entire human race, which meant that all post-Christ pagans were somehow guilty of rejecting the truth. For the period before Christ, Augustine allowed that God did grant miraculous prophetic knowledge of the advent of Jesus to some individuals (above all, the leading Jewish figures of the Old Testament). But whereas a more liberal-minded thinker might have used this escape-clause to claim that God had granted salvation to huge numbers of virtuous pre-Christian pagans, Augustine was scornful about the very idea that pagans could, by their own efforts, be morally good at all. Any virtues which are not animated by the love of God are, he argued, not in fact real virtues. They are self-regarding performances, tainted by pride — or, in the words popularised by a later writer in the Augustinian tradition, splendida peccata, shining or splendiferous sins.

John Marenbon’s fascinating new book on what he calls the Problem of Paganism takes Augustine’s position as its historical starting-point, and traces subsequent debates all the way to the end of the 17th century. This is much more than, and quite different from, a chronological survey of well-known arguments. While some of the thinkers discussed here (Boethius, Aquinas, Thomas More, Leibniz) are the subjects of huge modern secondary literatures, Marenbon constantly cuts across the standard discussions at a fresh angle, bringing new connections to light. This book is also no routine exercise in the history of medieval (and post-medieval) philosophy; it focuses on literary texts (Dante, Boccaccio, Langland, Chaucer), and on medieval and Renaissance works describing contacts with actual contemporary pagans. Those who know of Marenbon as a world authority on some dauntingly technical areas of medieval philosophy will be pleasantly surprised to encounter, in these pages, Peter of Dusberg’s description of pagan Prussian funerary practices, or Garcilaso de la Vega’s defence of the monotheism of the Incas, or Jean de Léry’s account of the virtues of the cannibalistic Tupí Indians of Brazil.

The long-running debate about whether pagans can be saved has attracted some historical studies in the past, of course. But Marenbon’s Problem of Paganism goes beyond the story of that theological question, embracing two other, closely related issues: whether pagans can have true virtue, and whether they can acquire true wisdom or philosophical understanding. The most liberal position would be to say “yes” to the second of these, and then, on the basis that true wisdom must include true ethics, “yes” to the first; in which case, with the help of some liberal assumptions about how and why God will grant people salvation, one can also give a “yes” to the theological question about whether pagans can go to Heaven. The relation between these three issues was seldom as straightforward as that, however. Much of the fascination of this book lies in seeing how attitudes and arguments shifted to and fro, as the pieces in this three-cornered puzzle were constantly altered and rearranged.

One thing is very clear: the hardline Augustinian position never went away. There were medieval writers who reasserted it (including some very fierce-sounding Franciscans), and in the 17th century Cornelius Jansenius, founder of the French “Jansenist” movement, would stonily insist that the virtues of the best pagans were “not true virtues, but vices hidden by the name and appearance of virtues”.

In the hands of some writers, the hard-line position became more obdurate even as it became less Augustinian. In a marvellously illuminating chapter on Dante, Marenbon points out that, far from representing a standard medieval view (as generations of readers have assumed), his treatment of the pagans is peculiarly severe. Dante does allow that pagans can have real virtue, yet still he insists that virtue is of no help in enabling pagans to avoid Hell: “I am Virgil,” says his virtuous guide, “and I have lost heaven for no other fault than not having faith.” The whole discussion of Dante here justifies Marenbon’s three-cornered approach to the “Problem of Paganism”; by studying the poet’s attitude to pagan wisdom, and placing him in a tradition of what he calls “limited relativism”, he helps us to see how it was that Dante simultaneously softened the Augustinian criticism of merely human virtue, and strengthened the distinction between the sphere of human wisdom and the sphere of faith.

Augustine’s doctrine was always present, but it was seldom a dominant orthodoxy. There were many ways of countering, evading or adapting its arguments. The great and highly original 12th-century theologian Peter Abelard laid down a path which many would follow later. His idea was that if you studied the works of ancient pagan philosophers (those, at least, that were available in the 12th century — one of whom, “Hermes Trismegistus”, was in fact much less ancient than people imagined), you could find clear hints of Christian theology, including knowledge of the Holy Trinity. To some extent, he thought, sheer unassisted human reason had been able to work out not only that there was one God (omnipotent, Creator, etc), but also that that God must have a threefold or triune identity.

As a good Christian, however, Abelard thought that only belief in the incarnated Christ could bring salvation; so he also supposed that where an ancient pagan thinker had tiptoed towards this threshold of Christian belief, God had then stepped in to bestow, by supernatural means, some prophetic knowledge of Christ’s human existence on earth.

In this way Abelard supplied later writers with not one but two very fertile ideas: the notion that valid theological knowledge did circulate among ancient pagans, and the claim that people could be turned, by a “special inspiration” from God, into Christians, long before the actual coming of Christ. (As a theoretical possibility that last idea had already been put forward by Augustine himself, whose “City of God” existed, interspersed among the human race, in all ages; but Abelard’s argument that wise pagans had reached the very threshold of Christian belief by their own efforts was deeply un-Augustinian.)

The most influential opponent of Augustine was Thomas Aquinas. His answer to the question of whether pagans could acquire real wisdom was a resounding “yes”: the towering philosophical structure which he spent a lifetime building had the teachings of Aristotle as its foundations, and the nature of the construction was meant to demonstrate a seamless transition, above a certain level, from the truths of human philosophy to the ones supplied by divine revelation.

On the issue of pagan virtue, Aquinas respected the theological principle that virtue in the full sense must be animated by the love of God, but he dismissed the Augustinian idea that pagans cannot be virtuous at all: they can indeed do “those good works for which the good of nature suffices”.

As for salvation: on this point Aquinas seems most radical of all, but, as Marenbon shows, he was simply developing a line of thought set out by previous writers. While he supposed that God might use “special inspiration” in exceptional cases (including Kaspar Hauser-like children, brought up among wolves without any human instruction), for his general solution to the problem he turned to a quite different concept: “implicit faith”. Pagan philosophers who had arrived at a basic monotheistic understanding could vow to believe whatever might be known about God by those whose knowledge was greater than theirs. In the ancient world, those superior figures were in fact the Jewish prophets, illuminated by God. But it was not necessary for pagans to meet them, or even to know who they were; a sincere belief that such people must exist was quite sufficient. The flexibility — or, if you prefer, generosity — of this argument is rather breathtaking.

All these positions, pro- and anti-Augustinian, were adopted primarily in order to argue about pagans of the ancient world, especially the most virtuous Greeks and Romans. Any interaction between these debates and discussions of contemporary pagans was quite limited, thanks to the continuing belief that, in the words of St Jerome, “no people remains which does not know the name of Jesus, and, even if they have not had a preacher, they cannot however be unaware of the faith from neighbouring peoples”. The discovery of the New World would shake that assumption to its foundations.

The last part of this book is dominated by the effects of that discovery — not just the jolt it gave to abstract knowledge, but the practical effects of a process of conquest which brought Christian governors, and Christian priests, into close contact with real live pagans. Some parts of the resulting ferment of ideas are fairly well known, such as the great mid-16th-century disputation at Valladolid between the humanist scholar and pro-conquest hardliner Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican defender of the Amerindians, Bartolomé de las Casas. But Marenbon’s account sets them in a longer context of theological argument which few previous writers have considered in such depth. (Even so, Las Casas’s justification of human sacrifice may still take the reader by surprise.)

Marenbon’s survey of the 16th- and 17th-century debates may be a little more schematic than his searching account of the medieval arguments, but it does suffice to make one large point, which he emphasises in his conclusion: while we may think that the shift from medieval mentalities to early modern ones was a move away from rigid religious dogmas towards more human and tolerant positions, the evidence of these debates fails to support that view. There was no clear direction of “progress”, and the anti-pagan positions of some 17th-century Protestants and Jansenists were more uncompromising than those of almost any previous writers in the Augustinian tradition. Marenbon does not speculate about the reasons for this; one, surely, is the fact that “Socinianism”, from the late 16th century, and “Deism”, from the late 17th, were bugbears that genuinely frightened many mainstream theologians. Both were forms of “rational theology” (the former with a strongly biblical basis, at least to begin with, but the latter not even with that), with far-reaching implications about the power of human reason to work out what God would, or would not, do. The danger that the information provided by the Bible might turn out to be quite secondary (or even irrelevant) to human intuitions about the nature of divine justice now seemed very real, as it had never done before.

Which brings us back to revelation, and our liberal understanding of what is reasonable. It would be easy to read the story told in this book as a struggle between, on the one hand, people who were Augustinian because they were illiberal, and, on the other, their opponents, whose essentially liberal impulses drove them to find ways of accommodating virtuous pagans in the divine scheme of things. Such a portrayal would surely have been unrecognisable to the people involved. The idea that human ethical intuitions were primary, and that theological principles were secondary things, to be moulded to fit them, would have bewildered these thinkers. Today we live in a world where the expectations, and hence also the bewilderment, go in the opposite direction. That is, at the very least, another reason why we need an expert such as John Marenbon to guide us through the thinking of such a very different age.

The post The Pagan Problem In Western Thought appeared first on Standpoint.

Born in Bordeaux, Ausonius was a grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. He was made the tutor of Gratian, the son of the Emperor Valentinian, and held a number of court offices, finally becoming consul in 379 when his pupil became emperor. After Gratian’s assassination in 383 Ausonius retired to his estates and amused himself with poetry until his own death some ten years later.

Ausonius’s gift was for centos, a poetic form defined perhaps too pithily by Dr Johnson as a “composition formed by joining scraps from other authors”. A cento is a form of poetic composition in which individual phrases or lines from some great and respected poet of the past are excerpted and stitched together to form a new piece of poetry (the term, which derives ultimately from the Greek verb meaning to plant slips or cuttings of trees, came in time to refer to a patchwork quilt or garment). This “new” poem tended to be on an un-epic or otherwise undignified or common subject; and the most usual source of material for centos was the work of the most respected poets — Homer and Virgil in Greek and Latin respectively.

It was a form which generated its own aesthetic, as Ausonius explained in the dedicatory epistle to his own most notorious cento, the “Cento Nuptialis”, a work commissioned by no less a patron than the Emperor Valentinian himself:

I’ll try to tell you what a cento is. It is a poem neatly constructed out of a variety of passages and diverse meanings, in such a way so that either two half lines are joined together to form one single line, or one line and the following half of the next line. To place two entire lines side by side is poorly done, and three in a row is really disgraceful. . . . And so this little work, the cento, is handled in much the same way as a geometrical puzzle, so as to bring together different meanings, to make pieces which are in fact arbitrarily connected seem to fit in naturally with one another, to let foreign elements let no crack of light slip between them, to prevent the far-fetched from proclaiming the metaphysical force which yokes them together, the densely packed from bursting, the closely knit from gaping.

This sophisticated and demanding poetic form succeeded best, paradoxically, when applied to the most schoolboyish ends. The most notorious part of the “Cento Nuptialis” is the account of the wedding night. In this extract of five lines no fewer than six fragments from different books of the Aeneid and one from the Eclogues have been stitched together:

. . . ramum, qui veste latebat,
sanguineus ebuli bacis minioque rubentem
nudato capite et pedibus per mutua nexis,
monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum,
eripit a femore et trepidanti fervidus instat.

. . . the rod hidden within his clothing
scarlet with elderberries and reddened with dye
its head bare, as their legs entwined,
an horrific monster, huge, shapeless, no sight in its single eye,
he draws forth from his flank and eagerly presses as she quivers.

Prim scholars have responded with outrage to this “desecration” of Virgil, while Gibbon asserted that Ausonius’s poetry “condemns the taste of his age”. It certainly is shallow. But there is real wit and genuine learning in the reapplication of some of the lines. And is it not curiously liberating, once in a while, to see great art treated with something less than reverence? Ausonius himself admitted — perhaps a better word would be “proclaimed” — that the cento was more likely to provoke laughter than praise.

Ausonius, and the cento form in which he excelled, have particularly appealed to young writers who entered their literary majority at a moment when the achievements of their immediate predecessors seemed stifling because unsurpassable. In English poetry one such moment was the decade preceding the death of Pope in 1744, when the possibilities for poetry seemed exhausted. No one could hope to surpass Pope in couplets, and recent attempts to revive a Miltonic grandeur were not encouraging, tending to fall into bathos. At just this moment two young Etonian friends, Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray, went up to Cambridge. A fine copy of Ausonius was one of the few volumes Sir Robert Walpole had allowed Horace to borrow from the library at Houghton and take with him to King’s. This edition highlighted the parodic techniques of the cento by noting the original sources of Ausonius’s fragments in the “Cento Nuptialis”.

The example of Ausonius clearly resonated with the two youths, whose own later work shows its influence. In The Castle of Otranto (1764) Walpole would consciously apply the principles of the cento to the Gothic novel, combining scenic form derived from sentimental drama, characters lifted from Shakespearean tragedy, and décor from the medievalism of the imagination. Gray’s poetry took the technique of classical allusion to a pinnacle of complexity and succeeded in transforming it from a literary game to the expression of a particular kind of moral sensibility.

The cento had this broader application in Ausonius, too. In his “Mosella”, the poem on the river Mosel he wrote after attending the imperial court in Augusta Treverorum (Trier), Ausonius praised the river as “amnis odorifero iuga vitea consite Baccho”, a stream whose banks are overgrown with Bacchus’s fragrant vines. Ausonius depicted nature as itself a kind of cento, in which disparate elements came together to create unexpected new wholes, sometimes beautiful, sometimes bucolic and comic:

laeta operum plebes festinantesque coloni
vertice nunc summo properant, nunc deiuge dorso,
certantes stolidis clamoribus. inde viator
riparum subiecta terens, hinc navita labens,
probra canunt seris cultoribus: adstrepsit ollis
et rupes et silva tremens et concavus amnis.

The people, happy in their work, and the restless husbandman are busy, now on the hilltop, now on the slope, exchanging shouts in boisterous rivalry. Here the wayfarer tramping along the low-lying bank, and there the bargeman floating by, throw their insults at the lazy vine-dressers; and all the hills, and shivering woods, and channelled river, ring with their cries.

Just as the vine has a place in that cento which is a beautiful landscape, so too does wine have its place in the cento of a life well lived.

The post Cento Ground appeared first on Standpoint.

Walking round the statues exhibited at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, you understand that reaction. Many have an uncannily realistic appearance, especially the ones whose eyes are intact. Some of them may even have begun as plaster casts that were created directly from live male bodies. There are no female nudes in the exhibition, although there are a few women, mostly in the shape of goddesses such as Athena, but occasionally appearing as queens or aristocrats. The absence of the naked female form in bronze is the result of chance: there were bronzes depicting female nakedness in antiquity, and some of the marble sculptures that survive of Venus in various stages of undress were copies of bronze statues. But none of those original bronzes have survived.

Very few ancient bronzes have. It is one of the most remarkable achievements of this exhibition to have brought together more than 50 of them in a single space: they are usually scattered in museums ranging from Los Angeles to Tbilisi. By far the majority of antique bronzes have disappeared, although in antiquity, there were more of them than there were marble statues: at the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, for instance, there are almost three times as many works in bronze as there are in marble.

Bronze was the medium of choice for statues not just in private spaces but in public ones too. Different metals, such as copper and silver, could be used to make the lips and teeth of a bronze statue a different colour. Precious stones were used for the eyes. Today, when all bronze statues have lost their golden gleam and become a patchwork of shades of brown, purple and green, it is not easy to realise that it was bronze’s glitter that so attracted the ancients.

The exhibition explicitly restricts itself to bronzes that date from the Hellenistic age: a period which is loosely defined as the era from the fourth to the first century BC, and sometimes more precisely as running from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the Battle of Actium in 31 AD, when Octavian defeated Mark Antony and established himself as sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, having praised extravagantly the work of the classical age in Greece, dismissed the painting and sculpture of the subsequent period with the brusque and damning phrase “and then art stopped”.

Pliny was quite wrong. While there is a lot of derivative work from the Hellenistic Age, there is more original sculpture, and it has a very distinctive style. It is emotionally more intense, more “baroque” than its classical antecedents. Its figures are more individual, less formulaic, less perfect. The strange, twisted pose of The Dancing Satyr is a good example of the sort of novelties Hellenistic artists introduced. The Dancing Satyr is a long way from the cool classicism characteristic of the Parthenon frieze, for example, even when Pheidias and his assistants are depicting centaurs doing battle with people.

So is the strangely moving statue of The Seated Boxer, which was discovered during excavations on the Quirinal Hill in Rome in 1885. For reasons no one understands, this bronze was deliberately buried in antiquity. It was a public statue made to honour an individual athlete, whose identity would have been given by the inscription on its now-lost base. And yet its effect is not to celebrate either the individual or the sport of boxing. To modern eyes, it seems more like a salutary warning against the dangers inherent in a career as a boxer. The fighter is shown as past his prime. He is covered in bruises and wounds, bloodied and exhausted. He evokes pity rather than respect. The artist seems to have been much more interested in evoking the truth of what boxing did to a man’s body, and the effects of a life of constant bludgeoning both on his physique and on his character, than in depicting the sportsman as hero.

Many bronzes made to stand as life-size or larger than life-size figures survive only as heads. Some of these have unusually intense expressions. The power of the gaze in the portrait of Seuthes III is astonishing. With flowing beard and longer hair than would be seen in any classical portrait, he looks more barbarian than regal. But then that’s probably what the Greek sculptor thought he was.

There is also the wonderful Worried Man. He was a citizen, rather than a king, from the island of Delos, and he looks extremely anxious. But his expression, according to R.R.R. Smith’s valuable essay in the show’s readable and erudite catalogue, would have conveyed to its original audience not anxiety but his intense concern for the public good.

Being accorded a bronze statue by a city was a very high honour for an individual citizen, and it was usually the result of a spectacular act of public service, such as the donation of funds for a public building. While the city granted the honour, it did not pay for the statue: the person who was going to be immortalised in bronze was expected to foot the bill for that. And the bill was big: 3,000 drachmas was the standard price in the 3rd century BC, about ten times the annual wage of a labourer and a very substantial sum even for a rich citizen.

There are some smaller statues in the show of people who were not kings or aristocrats or very wealthy merchants: there is, for instance, a sculpture of someone who seems to be a humble artisan, complete with notebook and short tunic. Hellenistic artists depicted people who, in the classical age, would never have been the subjects of statues: drunken old women, beggars, and cripples. Today, these statues exist only in marble copies, not in the bronze originals, so they are not in the exhibition, but they raise the question of whether, during the Hellenistic period, there was a “democratisation” of art, a deliberate move away from the aristocratic cult of perfection, perhaps a sort of subconscious attempt to compensate for the extinction of actual democracies by the military dictatorships established by Alexander the Great’s generals and their successors.

The Christians of the Dark Ages detested pagan bronzes. Churchmen suspected them of harbouring diabolical powers. Bronze was valuable for the casting of bells and later for cannon, and medieval Christians had no qualms whatever about consigning what would now be considered great masterpieces to furnaces in order to be able to re-use the metal. When the knights and soldiers of the Crusading army burst into Constantinople in 1204, the Venetians appropriated four ancient Greek bronze horses and took them back to place on the balcony of St Mark’s Basilica. But the mainly Frankish army destroyed many hundreds of bronze statues, including a giant statute of Hercules created by Lysippos, one of the greatest sculptors of all antiquity. Lysippos, who worked only in bronze, was Alexander the Great’s personal artist. He produced 1,500 bronzes in the course of a career that may have lasted more than 50 years. Not one of his bronzes has survived.

Many of the bronzes in this glorious exhibition are the result of chance finds by fishermen whose nets got caught on a statue which was then hauled to the surface. That’s how, just 18 years ago, The Dancing Satyr was discovered. The number of bronzes that have been found in the sea is a testament to the ancient trade in statues: the artists were mostly in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, but from the second century BC, the people with the money to buy them were mostly in Italy. So bronze figures were sent from Greece and Asia Minor to Rome and other Italian cities. Fortunately for us, a few of them were sunk by storms and ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean, thereby escaping destruction in medieval furnaces. It is amazing how little damage has been done to these works by spending 2,000 years or more at the bottom of the Mediterranean: many of them emerge from restoration miraculously intact.

In the Roman world, the demand for “old master” bronzes outstripped the supply. There is at least one surviving example of a bronze statue which was made to look as if it had been cast in the 5th century BC — right down to using old-fashioned casting techniques — but which analysis of the lead content of the bronze shows must have been created several hundred years later, probably in the first century BC. It is hard to resist the conclusion that it was created as a forgery. As Christopher Hallett argues, in one of the most interesting contributions to the catalogue, the huge sums paid by the Romans for original classical sculptures ensured that the incentives for faking works were at least as strong in the ancient world as they are today.

There are two very beautiful statues of Apollo in the “Archaic” style of the 6th century BC in the exhibition: both portray the god in the stiff pose appropriate to the early period. But both were in fact cast in the first century BC or later. Hallett wonders “how many more Hellenic or Roman ‘imposters’ remain undetected amongst our surviving corpus of Archaic and Classical statuary”. He concludes that no one has any idea.

Does it matter that many of the ancient bronzes seem to have been made with the explicit intention of deceiving people as to their age and provenance? Aesthetically, it is hard to believe that it does. Of course, the ancients would not have appreciated the discovery that they had been fooled any more than we do. Realising that a bronze was not the original “old master” work that it appeared to be would have had the same effect on them that finding out that, say, a Rubens drawing is actually one of Eric Hebborn’s fakes has on us. But today, we can appreciate ancient forgeries for what they are: marvellous works of art. That is something which it is more or less impossible for us to do when confronted by something, no matter how beautiful, which we know to be a contemporary fake. The discovery that a drawing, a painting or a sculpture is a recent forgery is enough to destroy not just its financial but its aesthetic value. Why that should be so is an interesting and puzzling question.

The Hellenistic era was the period of Epicureanism, that most modern of ancient philosophies. The world, according to Epicurus, has no purpose: it is nothing more than atoms randomly moving across the void. There are no gods, there is no soul, and pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the highest, if not the only, goods available to human kind. Might some Hellenistic bronzes be seen as an artistic equivalent of Epicureanism, indulging in aesthetic pleasure for its own sake, untroubled by concerns about the vengeance of the gods? Many Hellenistic sculptures are, as this remarkable show demonstrates, celebrations of the pleasures, and the foibles, of earthly life. They are also the result of the most extraordinary virtuoso skill. If you love art and can get to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence before June 21, when this exhibition closes, you certainly should. It is also going to the National Gallery in Washington and to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. But it is not coming to London — and that is a very great pity.

The post A Journey Back To The Golden Age Of Bronze appeared first on Standpoint.

When I do the rounds of this year’s Greek plays, I’ll be taking Virginia Woolf as a guide. We’ll sit tensely in the stalls to “bruise our minds upon” Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the Almeida and the Globe, smile at Sophocles “gliding like a shoal of trout” in the Barbican’s Antigone, and tiptoe into “the world of psychology and doubt” in Euripides’s Bacchae and Medea, also at the Almeida.

And why not? They may not be as celebrated as Mrs Dalloway or Orlando or any other of her dazzling novels, but Woolf’s notes on Greek theatre are not a bit less penetrating.

She liked the sneering manner of it, the choruses which “sing like birds in the pauses of the wind” but stand aloof from us on some middle ground between then and now, teasing, baffling, sublime. She liked the way the tragedians conveyed their characters’ suffering despite the constraints of theatre: “every sentence had to explode on striking the ear.” But it was the feeling that she had never quite grasped what they were trying to say that kept them in her thoughts.

She even blamed the weather for the English inability to understand them. Our climate, she supposed, simply isn’t conducive to imagining the outdoor society of the classical plays and playwrights. A trip to Greece in 1906 — the first of two in her lifetime — gave her occasion to observe something of their “out-of-doors manner”. Greece had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1897, but when she heard a group of noisy Corinthians outside her window she suspected that its people were prone to squeal through joy as often as through sadness:

A band of wailing women are singing beneath my window. Do they lament the nations [sic] fall, or some private woe, or are they merely celebrating the new restaurant which opened with fireworks this evening?

How could this tragic chorus possibly appeal to “the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors”? After all, the audience who watched Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy in the 5th century BC sat in an open-air theatre. Those who watched it in the early 20th century were almost always under full cover as the curtain went up to reveal the forecourt to the palace of Agamemnon, King of Argos. In the opening scene of Agamemnon, the first play, the king’s watchman perches on the palace rooftop, gazing at the stars.

Will Adele Thomas have the upper hand when she stages Rory Mullarkey’s adaption of the Oresteia triology in the open air of the Globe this summer? Or will Robert Icke circumnavigate this gulf between interior and exterior through his modern take on the myths at the Almeida?

It will be a challenge to capture the peculiar continuity in Agamemnon’s journey. The trilogy sees him return from the scorched fields of the East to his wife, Clytemnestra, who has taken a lover in his absence. Seeking to punish him for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia in exchange for a friendly breeze, Clytemnestra plots his murder. Only their son, Orestes, aided by his sister Electra, can avenge his father’s subsequent death. Uncompromisingly domestic though it is, the tragedy is fuelled by emotions born in wartime.

Determined to unravel the clever metaphors Aeschylus used to describe the legacy of Troy, Woolf armed herself with the Greek she had learned in private lessons at King’s College, London, and sallied forth. While she found that Sophocles’s Greek “is really not hard”, Aeschylus proved another story entirely.

“Have bought two wild duck and six snipe just shot,” she wrote in her diary on November 13, 1922, “and now I must try to make out what Aeschylus wrote.” Two weeks later: “I need not say that my wild duck stank like old sea weed and had to be buried. But I cannot dally over this incident, which in tamer days might have provided some fun, because I have such a congeries of affairs to relate, and have to steal time from the Agamemnon.” December 3: “I should be at Aeschylus.”

In the process of translating the play, she obsessed over a particularly difficult line in the Greek, in which Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus views the sculptures in his hall. “Without eyes, their every Aphrodite goes to waste,” the Chorus of elders utters. Did they mean that the sculptures’ beauty was wasted because they lacked eyes? Or were the eyes those of Helen of Troy? Or could Menelaus simply not appreciate beauty after the casualties of war? “The meaning is just on the far side of language,” Woolf wrote. His dialogues were lightning-quick, but Aeschylus was also very much the master of suggestion — and all the more vulnerable to misinterpretation as a result.

This worried Woolf more than it does many playwrights today, who favour “versions” as well as translations of ancient plays. Robert Icke is to offer a modern version of Aeschylus’s trilogy, rolled into one play; Anne Carson has produced a new translation of Euripides’s Bacchae. If they are to work, both must retain the lustre of the original dialogue, but render it in such a way that it still resonates. In the wild outdoor environment of Euripides’s play, this will be a particular challenge.

Woolf was stunned by the cruelty of this play, in which Dionysus (Bacchus), that most androgynous of gods, returns to his native Thebes, where King Pentheus has banned worship of his godhead. Pentheus succumbs to the temptation to watch the Bacchic rites in all their ecstasy, but falls prey to their spirit. Raving in fury across the mountains, his own mother rips his body asunder, while Dionysus is victorious. For Woolf, Pentheus was “that highly respectable man, made ridiculous”. For today’s audience, he is more likely to be seen as a pompous hypocrite.

While every age imposes its own sensibilities upon the past, Woolf was decidedly ahead of her time when it came to assessing Antigone. The eponymous heroine of Sophocles’s play stood up against her resolute uncle in order to secure the burial of her brother. Discerning the irony in the fact that, in ancient theatre, forthright women were played by men, and for men, Woolf found herself in awe of Antigone’s heroism and fidelity. Antigone, like Ajax and Electra, she wrote in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek”, behaves as we all should in such situations. No doubt Woolf would have been more at home watching Juliette Binoche at the Barbican than parleying with Sophocles’s first audience.

As these productions sweep London, Woolf herself will also be taking to the stage. At the Royal Opera House this month, Wayne McGregor is to present a ballet inspired by the highs and lows of her life, as well as by her novels.

In these vicissitudes, too, Greece played its part. While her first trip there ended with her brother Thoby fatally contracting typhoid, her second trip decades later was “far the best holiday we’ve had for years”. Accompanied by her husband Leonard and friend Roger Fry and his sister, she toured the sites and museums until she was convinced that she should leave London and pitch up in Crete instead.

Greek literature remained a more convenient means of escapism. Woolf thrilled to realise that her mind was not so very unlike those of the ancient authors, even if she did despair at how quickly those little sparks of recognition faded, leaving her feeling, once more, a world away from them. After suffering a breakdown, she confessed she had been prone to believing “that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas”. Was the Greek so haunting, so unwilling to leave her at the end of each day? Was the dialogue in her mind as braying and ambiguous as a choral ode? Her nightmare could just be every Greek theatre director’s dream.

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I’ve always wanted to live abroad, and earlier this year hit upon the idea of Athens as the perfect place. It’s cheaper than Paris or Florence, sunny, near the sea and has a cosmopolitan gritty-glamorous atmosphere that I think will suit me. It’s a melting-pot of different cultures, it’s where democracy began, and it’s full of wonderful Greeks and their delicious food.

I handed in my notice at the glossy magazine where I worked and started to daydream about griddled octopus under jasmine trellises and white curtains billowing through the blue-painted windows of charming neo-palladian villas. But as my departure approaches, I’ve become increasingly nervous. “I did know a lot of people there,” international friends say doubtfully when I ask for introductions, “but they’re all looking to move away.” And such is the prevailing theme.

Athens is a place where things begin, the origin of civilisation. Philosophy, learning, architecture, poetry, music, all emanate from Greece before the translatio studii towards the West. I’m going in the opposite direction. London, having sailed through the doldrums of financial crisis and into the calm waters of recovery, welcomes Greek bankers, shipping fortunes and diplomats. I face going against the tide, to a “brain-drained” Athens where the streets are either deserted or full of protesters with placards.

Even more frightening is the prospect of missing a British summer, than which there is no more precious jewel. Peppery radishes straight from the garden, long evenings chatting on sun-warmed pavements, the joyous vibrant lime-green of the London plane trees: these are the things that run through my mind when I picture myself, lonely and alone, friendless and fearful, in the simmering cauldron of Syriza-led Greece.

But I have no doubt that Athens will welcome me. The Greek sense of hospitality is legendary and ancient—think of Eumaeus in the Odyssey—and has been undimmed by the country’s recent political and economical turbulence. There is still the smell of pine and salt and oregano in the air, still the Parthenon looming above the postcard shops and chestnut stalls, still the Greek pride and passion. Athens is a place where things begin—and I hope it will be a new beginning for me.

The post An Odyssey To Athens appeared first on Standpoint.

Hegel thought the play one of the most challenging in the canon, because both sides are right, according to their interpretation of morality, and both take their conviction to extremes. Antigone’s desire to bury her brother Polyneices at the cost of her life is the logical consequence of love and duty. But Creon, once defied, cannot easily give ground without creating yet more schisms in a bloodied and disputed Thebes.

Today’s productions, more tamely, tend to focus on the thwarted proto-feminism of Antigone, as she fights a doomed contest with the autocratic Creon. Two contrasting productions on the London stage emphasise the elasticity of the play and how readily it adapts itself to shifting moods and preoccupations. The Barbican (whose production will be screened on BBC4 later this spring) serves up Juliet Binoche, the French screen siren, who gamely keeps trying to conquer the acreage of stage at the Barbican, without so far succeeding. Here, as in the flat-footed Miss Julie, Binoche comes across as a film actor who has not yet conquered the transition to theatre. Even the fluent direction of Ivo van Hove, Europe’s in-demand Belgian, whose A View From The Bridge is justly garnering plaudits in the West End, cannot fend off an unmoving performance. Binoche’s face is lovely: a big, square, impassive canvas of pain as she confronts Patrick O’Kane’s bullet-headed Creon, but she mutters sulkily one moment and shouts like a harpy the next. It’s all a bit too much like histrionic Racine and we never settle into an empathetic relationship with her.

The chorus and Ismene (Kirsty Bushell), Antigone’s sinewy and adaptable sister, lounge around on leather chairs as if trapped in a luxurious but chilly oligarch’s pad. This is a play that can bear transfer to a contemporary Anyplace—the National’s recent version placed Christopher Eccleston in a file-lined office somewhere between the Stasi and an anonymous Whitehall ministry. Jan Versweyveld’s set makes the most of the cavernous stage, a huge white circle acting as sun and later eclipsing to crescent moon as the inevitable unfolds. Being the Barbican in 2015, some whale-like looping sounds accompany the story, for no obvious reason. Cheesy home-made footage of the young Antigone and Polyneices (one assumes) are projected on to the back wall. Having acquired computer-generated imagery, directors feel obliged to use it.

None of this would fatally damage the production, but Binoche’s swings from sulkiness to screeching rage are so unlovable that energy and empathy leech out of the proceedings. Some moments of fire ignite, memorably her anger at Ismene’s attempt to intercede on her behalf—“This is not your death”—but by the time a remorseful Creon rushes to (not quite) save her, half of the audience were surely hoping he did not make it in time. Anne Carson’s translation lollops along with some cheeky colloquialisms— “Bingo!” interjects Antigone—but some absolute clunkers: “It’s public policy,” explains one of the chorus after a hideous turn of events. Whatever word the Greeks found for that, let us hope it was more euphonious.

Language and its power to oppress or elevate is also at the heart of Roy Williams’s cheeky street-smart version at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Williams makes Thebes a gangland, presided over by Creo (Mark Monero), a blustering, bullying but sporadically winsome boss. Tig (Savannah Gordon-Liburd)  is the sort of stroppy female you dread bumping into with your shopping trolley—awkward and uncompromising, with a tongue all too ready to lash.

The street argot is surprisingly bracing: “We is Thebes. We is crew,” chant the chorus. Williams ventures where Sophocles never dared to tread by creating love scenes between Haimon and Tig.  You can only stretch credibility so far before veering close to a Greek-EastEnders’ “Ah luv ya, Tig” and a discussion about his sudden impotence. Yet other innovations work brilliantly: Teiresias lumbers on, wheeling a vagrant’s  cart, his impudent premonitions of doom blamed on too many hits of the crack pipe. The world at the end of this Antigone is a shattered place of overlapping unhappiness. The one at the end of van Hove’s productions goes back to servants of the state, automatically typing reports of events to continue the business of power—a more austere version of the same horror.

Tragedy is to be taken seriously  most of the time but let’s end with a valiant exception. The Shakespeare Schools Festival helps state schools mount productions with professional guidance, engaging pupils who might otherwise never see a Shakespeare play. It has  also come up with a nifty fundraising ruse I was thrilled to join (since all critics should be forced by law to make a West End debut). It is a mock trial of some of Big Will’s villains, and this year Macbeth was in the dock at the Noel Coward Theatre. Warring teams of London’s loftiest QCs tried to pin the blame or get the rascal off. (One of them had defended Julian Assange, another Rebekah Brooks, so the Macbeths must have seemed like relatively unchallenging clients.) Christopher Eccleston and Haydn Gwynne played the unhappy Scottish couple; Sir Michael Burton, the High Court judge, played—you’ve got it—a High Court judge.

Treating the great dramas to a courtroom filleting makes us all think about their brilliance and puzzle at their inconsistencies. One minute Lady Macbeth receives a letter from the battlefield, the next she’s inviting us to unsex her and take her milk for gall. Her husband is goaded by the prophecy, but why put so much effort into killing Duncan, then let his heir, the thoroughly boring Malcolm, get away? The jury found Macbeth not guilty, by a margin of 5-2. As for Lady M, I still believe she was just a hard-done-by corporate wife who went a bit too far.

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The fact that Latin is commonly referred to as a “dead language” doesn’t help its case. One suspects that exasperation with popular misconceptions of its status today has been a driving force behind Jürgen Leonhardt’s book, Latin: Story of a World Language, which opens with a debate about how dead Latin actually is. True, it is no longer anyone’s mother tongue. But for as long as there are people who use it, Leonhardt counters, Latin will live.

Here lies the Classicist’s problem. Latin, and indeed Classical Greek, must be nursed like heirlooms for our children to inherit or (Jupiter forbid!) trade in for something new. Classicists may speak defensively of them, but there is no disguising the fact that heirlooms are burdensome responsibilities, which few willingly take on with any pleasure.

One solution is to release Latin from its status as a strange relic, which Leonhardt makes a valiant attempt at doing. His book is a highly readable tour of the language, from antiquity, through the Renaissance, to its use in reports for the Council of the European Union in 2006. If that sounds like just another affirmation of Latin’s heritage, then the psychology of the book is quite different. Some of what Leonhardt advocates is, frankly, bizarre, such as the re-establishment of Latin as a spoken language to bring history to life, as if in historical re-enactment. But he does a good job of attaching meaning to the heirloom. He knows that we struggle to throw something away when we understand precisely what has been invested in it, what it means, and most importantly, what might yet come out of it. If Latin is to be a living language, it needs to be treated as such. Which is an excellent attitude towards Classics and historical subjects more generally.

People who love history and ancient languages do so not because they feel responsibility towards them, but because they feel emotionally invested in the stories, objects, and words of different cultures. The main risk that accompanies years of close study is to their ability to communicate the excitement they felt at the very beginning of their careers. One of the joys of passing a subject such as Latin on to the next generation is that young people, particularly schoolchildren, are struck at once by the strangeness of it, the myths, the sounds the words make. They see things the expert forgets, and bring new life to it in that way.

Not to say that it is childlike, but Richard Jenkyns’s new book offers so fresh and enchanted an overview of Classical Literature that one could be forgiven for thinking that he has only just stumbled upon it like a schoolboy. Jenkyns is, in fact, an eminent Professor of Classics at Oxford. His book is lively, combining authority with a readily discernible awe for the wonders of the ancient world. It is an excellent blueprint for what Classicists must do if they are to keep their subject alive today by making it appeal to a fresh audience.

As he moves chronologically down the centuries of literature, from Homer and Hesiod to the Latin writers of the early second century AD, Jenkyns delights in the fine details. Achilles is an unexpected aesthete, he reminds us, the only musician in Homer’s Iliad to be shown rehearsing songs. Elegy was never just intended for poetry; the Athenian statesman Solon employed it for his political statements in the sixth century BC. In the same period, an elegist named Xenophanes noted wryly that the Germans’ gods must be blond, because the Germans were blond. By the same logic, he followed, if horses had gods, their gods would naturally be horses.

Jenkyns is quick to point out firsts: the first association of sex with death, in a seventh-century BC Spartan poem; the first attempt to give an accurate representation of childhood in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, a biography of the Persian king; the first playwright—Sophocles—to use three actors on stage at once.

His tastes are for fast and dramatic episodes. He seeks drama in practically everything. Xenophon’s portrait of King Cyrus is, as far as he is concerned, rather flat because, “truth to tell, the boy Cyrus is too purely virtuous for the depiction to get far, and the adult Cyrus is so perfect a pattern of kingship that he cannot interest us much.” Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the most influential Latin poems ever written, “can be overrated”, because, in Jenkyns’s view, his passages of natural description lack imagination, and there is less variety of tone than there might have been. In truth, Ovid’s descriptions of nature, all weathered rocks, crumbling arches, and streams which ripple with sexual tension, seem to me to be rather more imaginative than Jenkyns remembers.
 
Not everyone will share Jenkyns’s likes and dislikes. I, for one, rather enjoy finding the more mundane details in ancient history books. On a dull day of errands, it is comforting to be reminded that life wasn’t just one great flurry of adventure then, either. I found Jenkyns a likeable guide nonetheless.

Echoing Jenkyns and Leonhardt, Edith Hall has concerns about Classics today. She opens her marvellous book, Introducing the Ancient Greeks, by looking at a recent trend among scholars for undervaluing Hellenic achievements. Did the Greeks invent anything at all? Or have generations of scholars simply been celebrating the “Oldest Dead White European Males” at the expense of the real innovators?

Many Greek achievements have parallels in other cultures, including Pythagoras’s Theorem, which was known to the Babylonians hundreds of years before Pythagoras was born. But there was something special about the Greeks. Hall pinpoints ten characteristics which she believes informed the ancient Greek mindset, including inquisitiveness and suspicion of authority. Characteristics associated with their openness were perhaps the most important. The Greeks’ eagerness to soak up the ideas of other peoples made them particularly enamoured of the sea, their conduit. 

Wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating, Hall’s book navigates across the sea-loving Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age, the Ionians, Classical Athenians (the Greekest Greeks, according to Hall’s recipe for Greekness), and beyond. It is a fitting tribute to history that ought to be preserved, not for the sake of doing so, because it would, at the very least, enrich our conversation and range of comparison with events today. It would be nice, for example, if Boris Johnson weren’t the only public figure who made a habit of quoting Pericles, the great Athenian statesman. Pericles’s famous words, which Hall quotes in her book, could certainly lend themselves well to current debates on immigration: “We [Athenians] throw open our city to the world, and never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything.”

We must not be too pessimistic. Although there is work to be done, the ancient world is more fashionable today than it has been for half a century or more. As Leonhardt says of Latin in his book, the ancient past can live so long as people are willing to keep writing or talking about it, releasing it from its status as a relic of the past. If it is the pleasure of teachers and writers to set the process in motion, then it should be the pleasure of students and readers to welcome their words with all the open-mindedness that characterised the ancient Greeks. It was their inquisitiveness that made them great.  

The post The Case For The Classics appeared first on Standpoint.

Horace is one of the great poets of wine. The famous opening to Odes I.37—”Nunc est bibendum”, “now is the time to drink”—supplied the name to a London wine merchant and is familiar to many who perhaps have never read in its entirety the poem in which it occurs. In fact, Horace’s poetic use of wine is more varied than at first glance it seems. Wine, and Bacchus the god of wine, make frequent appearances in his poetry—but not always with the positively affable connotations one might expect.

One emphasis to which Horace returns is that wine gives human beings consolation for the transience of their lives, and even that their mortality can be construed as an invitation to enjoy the pleasure of wine. The addressee of Odes II.3, Dellius, is advised to keep an even mind (“aequam . . . mentem”) and not to allow either adversity to depress him or success to elate him, since he is doomed to die (“moriture”) whether he is morose or cheerful:

seu maestus omni tempore vixeris,
seu te in remoto gramine per dies
                  festos reclinatum bearis
                              interiore nota Falerni.

(Whether you live always sad, or reclining in some hidden grassy spot take pleasure on holidays with some choice Falernian.)

Similarly in Odes II.11 the passing of the capacity for strength and joy and the pressingness of business combine to make relaxed drinking in the shade of a tree the choice of a wise man:

cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu iacentes sic temere et rosa
               canos odorati capillos,
                      dum licet, Assyriaque nardo
potamus uncti?

(Why not rather drink wine while we still can, reclining under this tall plane or pine in careless ease, our grey hair decked with roses and perfumed with Syrian nard?)

A further incitement to drink which is connected to our mortality is the galling thought (as Odes II.14 explains) of who will drink our carefully-cellared wine after we are gone, and also perhaps how it will be drunk—that poem ends by imagining a worthier (“dignior”) heir who breaks open the cellar of the dead Postumus and floods the pavement with wine more glorious than that drunk at the feasts of the pontiffs (“pontificum potiore cenis”). The only way to guard against that miserable prospect is, of course, to leave no wine behind.

Is Horace then simply a cheery old soak? That there is more to his appreciation of wine than mere hedonism is suggested by poems in which a certain simple directness towards wine is associated with the quality of Roman-ness.

For instance, Odes I.20 begins by inviting Horace’s patron Maecenas to join him in drinking cheap Sabine wine served in common tankards (“Vile potabis modicis Sabinum / cantharis”), but which is at least wine of his own making, sealed on a day of giddy triumph for Maecenas when he was acclaimed in the theatre. This short, enigmatic poem ends by contrasting the choice contents of Maecenas’s cellar—Caecuban from Southern Latium and wine from the famous presses of Cales (“prelo . . . Caleno”), a town in Campania.

Might Horace not be whispering to his patron, rather in the manner of the slave in the chariot of a triumphing Roman general, that he should allow his current glory neither to make him forget his common humanity, nor to prevent him from enjoying rough but healthy Sabine home-brew?

To be too picky about wine, to crave unusual liquors, is for Horace to be un-Roman. The great ode on the fall of Cleopatra (I.37), that which begins “Nunc est bibendum”, invokes wine not just as a way of celebrating victory, but also as a way of discriminating between national characters. Horace begins by inviting his fellow Romans to celebrate Augustus’s success at Actium with drink and dancing—now is the time to sacrifice that fine Caecuban you have been keeping for a special day:

antehac nefas depromere Caecubum
cellis avitis, dum Capitolio
        regina dementis ruinas,
            funus et imperio parabat.

(Before today it would have been wrong to bring out our Caecuban from its ancient bins, while a demented queen was plotting to ruin the Capitol and destroy the empire.)

But what has made Cleopatra mad (“dementis”)? Horace goes on to say that she is drunk with Fortune’s favours (“fortunaque dulci / ebria”), and figures the aftermath of Actium for Cleopatra as like waking up after binge-drinking on exotic but dangerous beverages:

mentemque lymphatam Mareotico
        redegit in veros timores
            Caesar, . . .

(Caesar made a mind maddened by Mareotic wine focus on fearful actuality.)

Mareotic was a rarity of the ancient world, wine which had undergone a secondary fermentation in the heat of the city of Marea in Lower Egypt. Caesar’s victory at Actium is a more brutal version of the bowls of rough Sabine that Horace offers to sober up the similarly intoxicated Maecenas.

For wine is a gift from the gods, and as such its enjoyment must not preclude respect, and even reverence. When Bacchus appears in Horace’s odes, it is not as some riotous boon companion, but as a lover of what is seemly, and as a remote and even strangely austere figure, glimpsed from afar on distant crags (“in remotis . . . rupibus”).Nor is he a figure of self-indulgence, but rather of justice and resolve. In Odes III.3 Horace praised the just man who adheres to his purpose (“Iustum et tenacem propositi virum”) but then—perhaps to our surprise—offers Bacchus as the divine pattern of just such a man:

hac te merentem, Bacche pater, tuae
vexere tigres, indocili iugum
        collo trahentes; . . .

(It was for these merits, Father Bacchus, that your tigers drew you, bearing the yoke on their wild neck . . .)

Although Horace could at times say that he loved to get wildly drunk (“insanire iuvat”), his poetry in general points away from that, and associates wine more with a kind of informal ceremoniousness.

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