Neville Morley's Blog, page 3

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th June 2025

Groggy. So groggy. I don’t know if this is the result of a really heavy week of work, or the weather, or the small glass of beer I had last night. Slept deeply with strange dreams that I don’t remember. Vaguely heard electronic noises that could be washing machine or lorry reversing, not sure whether I’m dreaming them. If I’d set my alarm my brain would have recognised it – actually I’d almost certainly have woken five minutes or so earlier – but it’s Glastonbury weekend so despite it being Friday I didn’t see it as A doesn’t have to set off to work at a quarter past seven.

This turns out to be erroneous; it was her alarm clock, she does have to go in this morning, and by the time I wake up again she’s made tea and is heading into the bathroom. I get up and do dishes; after she leaves, I water the chillis and aubergines in the greenhouse, Hoover downstairs and wash the floor, get washed and woozily work through some emails – I am really not up to continuing with the writing of a research proposal I didn’t expect I would be working on today.

Cannot come round at all. I make fried rice for lunch when A comes home, then just got to bed. We agree that today is not a day for a festival; neither of us is that bothered about Alanis Morissette (and while I would have loved to see Lorde, that was never an option as we wouldn’t have got to the site until mid-afternoon). After an hour or so’s doze, we go into town to buy food for an impromptu barbecue; chat to a few people we meet, and admire the flowers being put out around town in preparation for the ‘Britain in Bloom’ competition (or in my case mutter darkly, as I think it’s all very top-down rather than a genuine community effort). Back home to dig potatoes and pick salad, Pardon peppers and courgettes; make mayonnaise, grill courgettes and dress with my homemade cheese, cook dinner. All goes well, and even according to time. A bit of reading, then bed.

This feels like a stupid, pointless day. A.’s line is that “your body is trying to tell you something”; true enough, but from my perspective it’s telling me that I’m incapable of doing a decent amount of work without a fit of the vapours, and that I’m fooling myself if I imagine that I’m really getting properly better. And I am so horribly behind with everything…

Everywhere

In theory, and at least partly in practice, the fact that I’m on a two-year research fellowship means that I can adopt a somewhat laisser-faire, sufficient unto the day, mañana mañana attitude to aspects of the day job about which I’d normally be getting worked up. Curriculum review to transform all programmes into dynamic impactful future-skills-orientedness? By the time I have to teach again, the university might have worked out what, if anything, its buzzwords mean in practice. Use of GenAI in assessment now ubiquitous? Again, in a year’s time the university guidance might have settled down (and the one thing to be said about forward-looking curriculum review is that it surely makes a wholesale reversion to unseen exams a lot less likely), and I can work my way round that; hey, it’s even possible that the GenAI bubble might have burst by then, either because the financial model has collapsed or its limitations have become impossible to ignore. For the moment, I can blithely postpone worrying about it – which of course is one reason why this blog has been quiet recently.

But reality does keep intruding. Announcements of devastating job cuts in the humanities in general and classical studies and ancient history in particular – Cardiff, Macquarie – are horrendous in themselves, for the students and colleagues affected, but it’s also hard not to feel a chill global wind, a spreading international suspicion of forms of knowledge that aren’t immediately practical and vocational (leaving aside the fact that all the young people who were pushed towards Very Future-Orientated computer science suddenly face a much bleaker job market than your typical humanities graduate), that translates into the same consultant-driven senior management groupthink death spiral. It’s difficult not to listen to politicians and media types sorrowfully or gleefully concluding that the majority of young people need to be denied the opportunities they enjoyed – that the value of education needs to be maintained by making it a scarce commodity – and lurch between fury and despair.

And then there’s the GenAI stuff, simply because it is EVERYWHERE. Media stories about widespread ‘cheating’ in universities sit alongside stories about AI being the government’s big idea for economic development – suggesting that it’s a toss-up whether they are more ignorant about universities, students, the economy or the capabilities of LLMs. The injury of how useless and time-consuming Google web searches now are is compounded by the insult of the GenAI summary at the top, which I have to try to ignore because otherwise I get caught up in analysing exactly how and why it’s misleading or unhelpful, rather than spending the time trying to find search results that are less useless. “AI responses may contain mistakes”: indeed. None of this is good for the soul; I was already prone to assume that I know more than most people, and this arrogance is being compounded every time I try to look something up.

Whenever Google is unspeakably crap, Meta can always strive to be worse. Thankfully it seems to have disappeared again this morning, either because it was another of their testing-the-water things (like artificial users) or because I’ve ignored it sufficiently for it to go away, but last week, on the limited occasions I opened the Facebook app, every single post had a GenAI summary or a button underneath encouraging me to ask questions about related topics. This is simply infuriating. Increasingly I stick to my aged iPad, which hasn’t been capable of accepting updates for several years and so remains free of most of this rubbish, plus being by far the best platform for my bat detection gizmo (newer models, like my wife’s, seem to over-render the data in the visual display and then keep freezing) – and can’t manage Facebook at all. But I know that at some point the machine is going to die…

I don’t want to use GenAI, but it’s so pervasive that there’s a constant risk of clicking on the wrong button. I want to ignore it, but it’s everywhere. The corruption must be pervasive, the thing must be ubiquitous, so that people come to take it for granted and start using it enough to make the business model work – and if they don’t want it, it must be shoehorned in regardless (not least by preying on the gullibility of desperate-to-be-relevant politicians and management, and by spending a lot of money).

The big example last week of ‘We can’t have nice things, they must be enshittified’ was the iNaturalist app. This is a wonderful worldwide citizen science project, that allows you to upload geolocated observations of creatures and plants (with photos, or in the case of things like bats recordings of their ultrasound signals), either with your own suggested identification or using tools on the site to find suggestions, and other users then confirm the identification or offer alternatives. I’ve been uploading my bat observations for a few years, so it serves as an ongoing public record of bat life in the neighbourhood (and is the platform for the annual communal Big Bat Count that I organise), and there is a thrill in having an observation upgraded to ‘research quality’ because someone else has confirmed it. This is used as a serious research tool across the globe, as well as by lots of private individuals (including, allegedly, by the Australian mushroom poisoning woman as a means of finding localities with death cap mushrooms, but I don’t think that outweighs the positives).

And then last Monday they uploaded a blog post (https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/113184-inaturalist-receives-grant-to-improve-species-suggestions):

iNaturalist is excited to announce an award from Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI to help build tools to improve the identification experience for the iNaturalist community… Our nonprofit mission is to connect people to nature through technology and advance science and conservation. We see this new opportunity with Google.org as a clear extension of the work that we’ve been doing for years to build better tools to connect people to nature. By using generative AI (GenAI), we hope to synthesize information about how to distinguish different species and accurately convey that to iNaturalist users.

This was, to say the least, not popular among the sort of serious users who engage with their forum rather than just upload stuff, and the people who run the app have been hastily issuing caveats, insisting that user data is protected and that users will be properly involved in evaluating test projects kept completely separate from the main system and so forth – they’re not handing anything over to Google, just drawing on their expertise, honest.

Even if that’s entirely accurate, it still leaves a nasty taste. Why did anyone who’s an expert in this stuff consider it a good idea to get GenAI involved in discussions that require expertise and judgement – and an imperative, sometimes, to say that “we don’t know” is the most reasonable answer (distinguishing species of Myotis, for example), rather than generating nonsense in order to deliver an answer? Yes, they’ve used machine learning for years to help with identification – so do they not realise that GenAI isn’t the same thing? Is this another case like academia.edu, where something that looks like a public service is actually just collecting users and data until they reach the point where they can start to monetise them? In this case, apparently not, as iNaturalist is a non-profit organisation, but it still creates suspicion, and a feeling of having been much too trusting in imagining that a useful online platform and community might indeed be just what they seemed. How naive.

At the least, it offers a sense of how companies like Google are investing money in grants for organisations to experiment with GenAI, with the aim of identifying uses that are good and positive and not at all undermined by the tool’s innate flaws that can then be deployed to cloak the whole enterprise in virtue (cf. all the ‘AI improves cancer detection rates’ stories as if this has something to do with ChatGPT or Gemini), and to make it as ubiquitous as possible. And perhaps because they can’t bear to have any part of the Internet that hasn’t been touched and corrupted by their values and worldview.

I’m still going to use iNaturalist, at least until things go markedly downhill, because it offers something that isn’t available elsewhere; just as I continue to use Facebook, at least occasionally (regular Sunday chat with a group of friends and friends of friends). But it will now be with a definite edge of suspicion, wondering what the platform may be trying to get out of me or whether the data I’m giving it may be misused, and a sense that, if you go online at all, it’s pretty well impossible to avoid contamination.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th May 2025

The good news is that I slept past half four for first time since we returned from Bulgaria on Friday – having been waking consistently at half six, i.e. half four in British money, for the last few days of the holiday; no inexplicable wakefulness, and no wake-up call from Hector feeling insecure. The less good news is that it’s half past five, and the alarm clock dragged me out of a series of incredibly strange dreams, something to do with swimming in the sea as part of an organised group and then desperately searching for the house where I’d left my coat, which had mysteriously vanished together with all the people I was with, but instead finding a desiccated squid-like creature that then began to move and talk to me. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… Feeling completely dazed and groggy as a result, and it takes a long time to shift.

Nevertheless, up I get to wash last night’s dishes and make tea. It’s the first day of a new morning routine, as A.’s place of work has changed to somewhere another 10-15 minutes’ further on from the old location, so she has to leave the house at quarter past rather than half past seven. It’s going to take some negotiation and experiment to get this right; we embark on a complex two-step between kitchen, sitting room and bathroom, solved primarily by my staying out of the way. We can work out how to get us both into a state of readiness, for example if I need a lift to the station, once we’ve got the basic procedure down. I sort out the cheese – I’m making Bulgarian Sirene again, as it’s illegal to bring it home in luggage – while A.’s in the bathroom, then continue washing up once she’s out of the shower. Olga is being very demanding and constantly underfoot; I pick her up for a cuddle and she digs her claws in through my thin nightshirt. Shower and shave, and it’s still only eight o’clock.

I go out to check the garden; there’s been a bit of rain overnight, so the newly planted borlotti bean plants are looking happy, and various things in the greenhouse that I potted up yesterday have perked up enormously. Three more emperor dragonflies have emerged from the pond overnight; one has already flown off leaving just its exuvia, one is fully emerged and drying off its wings – it really hasn’t chosen the best day for this – and a third is only just pulling itself out of its old body.

I settle down to two hours of emails, catching up after a fortnight’s absence in which I actually managed to ignore the accumulating pile in my inbox. It’s mostly reviews editor stuff, with just a few more urgent departmental tasks, some student references, a bit of social chitchat with people who liked a short review that appeared while I was on holiday, and a growing backlog of requests to review article submissions, funding applications and promotion cases. At least none of this demands much inspiration, just the methodical updating of spreadsheets and sending out formulaic acknowledgements with a promise to send out editorial comments in a week or so.

Break at half ten to go into town to get a haircut – I’ve been going to the establishment long enough for the barber to know not to attempt much conversation, so long as he gets to comment on the intractable nature of my hair – and to buy some fruit. The Co-op continues to have almost empty shelves (I must admit that early William Gibson novels led me to expect that cybercrime would be about daring heists in orbital stations, not sabotaging supermarket stock systems), but the visit is extended by meeting neighbours who wanted to ask about the holiday.

Back home for coffee and a slice of my unsuccessful attempt at Portokalopita (orange pie) – at least it is now obvious what I did wrong and how the phrasing of the recipe was unhelpful, so I should do better next time. Another brief excursion down the garden to check on the dragonflies; the wing-drying one is still there, perhaps because of the drizzle, while the other has now fully emerged but not yet extended its wings. They really have picked a terrible day to venture from the water; I’d always assumed that they must have some means of discerning whether conditions will be suitable, but apparently they are determined optimists: we’re past the late May bank holiday so it’s bound to be nice…

Another hour and a half of emails, interrupted by software updates that refuse to be put off. Phone call from A. to rant about her new working conditions and inconsiderate management. Break for lunch – asparagus soup, made using the woodier spears because neighbour didn’t pick them consistently in our absence – and catching up on the Doctor Who episode from three weeks ago. Another one that seems excessively concerned with the show’s own history and mythology, such that it becomes both MacGuffin and deus ex machina, and all the stuff about gods and the power of storytelling felt extremely Neil Gaiman-esque (which may of course mean that he stole it all from Nigerian traditions).

Lunchtime dragonfly update: one has flown off, but the other still hasn’t extended its wings, and the plant to which it’s clinging has bent down dangerously close to the water. I endeavour to prop it up out of harm’s way – if the wings get wet before they’re ready, they can be damaged beyond repair. Half an hour later it starts to rain heavily, and I have to run out with an umbrella to try to rig up some shelter. It would be really good to have half an hour of sunshine this afternoon.

The afternoon passes with yet more emails, but by the end of it I think I’ve answered almost all of them (apart from a high school student who said nice things about one of my books), without having been able to delete as many as I’d like. The aggravating thing is that, because Outlook marks a message as ‘answered’ if there is a reply earlier in the thread, even if the latest message hasn’t actually been answered, I have to keep checking whether or not I’ve actually done it. Pause for a cup of herbal tea – it’s raining too hard to go into the garden again, so I just have to hope the umbrella is holding – and see the news that Cardiff is going ahead with closure of its ancient history programmes, which leads to feelings of anger and despair at the state of British universities and their senior management teams. At least I can feel that I’ve had a decent run, and have a range of homecraft skills (beer, sausages, cured meats, cheese, baking…) that could conceivably from the basis of a second career – but I would miss the teaching.

I finish the last email just as A. gets home; hastily give the cats their tea, which they should have had half an hour earlier, and then get ours going: chilli, as the go-to comfort food. Down to the garden again to pick salad leaves, and can see that the dragonfly is still there, apparently undamaged but no sign of it flying off. A. is shattered and grumpy, so after food I leave her to enjoy peace and quiet (and old Pride and Prejudice episodes) to catch up on the recording of last week’s jazz composition class, focusing on polyrhythms – I’m not going to have time to develop anything for this week’s class, but at least I’ll know what everyone is talking about after my absence.

Final trip to garden; dragonfly still there, so just have to hope it’s gathering its strength before a quick flight away from the pond. Watch the final ten minutes of the penultimate P&P episode while writing up this entry; Hector snuggles up next to me, Olga is on A.’s lap, Buddy is asleep on his cushion. We head up to bed around half past eight – partly due to tiredness, and partly because the cats all indicate that this is their expectation. Read another chapter of R.F. Kuang’s Babel, with which I am making very slow progress, mainly because it keeps giving me nightmares about being in Cambridge, and then a sudoku before lights out.

Next morning, the dragonfly has gone. This may be the first part of an improving tale, in which I am rescued by a helpful dragonfly who explains that in its youth it was saved from drowning by a helpful idiot setting up an umbrella over the pond.

Ghost Town

The first two hundred metres after they turned off the highway were fine. Then Gregor’s head hit the roof of the car as it reached the end of the decent tarmac and lurched down at least five centimetres with a groan from the suspension. The road surface became a dusty white, with darker patches where it had been patched, generally badly. It began to snake up the side of the valley through thick woodland and past rocky outcrops. Gregor was hurled from side to side and up and down, as Petko navigated both the sharp curves and the potholes much faster than seemed necessary, and every so either missed one or decided not to bother avoiding it. Petko laughed good-humouredly at his expression. “This is the good road, for the tourists. You should see it on the other side of town.”

This continued for another eight kilometres or so, interrupted by the occasional near miss with vehicles coming from the other direction: cars, tractors, a horse and cart, and a ferociously whiskered old man on a bicycle fitted with a two-stroke engine and an improvised trailer. Then they passed the sign marking the boundary of Koprivshtitsa, and the road disappeared altogether, replaced with a dusty, rutted track. Piles of rubble, and an apparently abandoned JCB, suggested that the surface had been stripped off deliberately; there was no evidence of any plans to replace it, let alone any efforts in this direction.

Petko was finally forced to slow down, and they juddered along at walking pace towards the centre of town. The river they’d been following ran right through through the middle, north to south, with a green strip of grass, bushes and trees on either side and numerous bridges, most of them too narrow or flimsy for motor vehicles. The buildings were all old, 18th- or 19th- century style houses, with high-walled yards and substantial wooden gates; some had been carefully maintained or restored, others looked on the verge of collapse, with the plaster flaking away to provide case-studies in stone-and-lathe construction techniques. On almost every door, it seemed, was at least one of the familiar notices with photograph and formulaic text that announced a death or six-month anniversary of death.

They pulled off the track onto a paved square, where Petko parked next to a huge grey construction surrounded by dark fir trees that looked like a mausoleum. Next to it, facing the river, was an elegant three-storey building that must be the town hall. On the north side the ground floors of some of the houses had signs declaring them to be a tourist information office, a café and a restaurant respectively, none of which seemed to be open. To the south, beyond the hulking monument, were a group of untenanted souvenir and refreshment stalls, and a huddle of single-storey wooden shacks, outside each of which stood boxes of vegetables and a couple of refrigerated bottle cabinets.

Every part of the square, every street corner, seemed to have a statue: tall men in frock coats and moustaches striking heroic poses with revolvers or sabres; distinguished-looking men with beards, usually just head and shoulders, looking dignified; thick-set men in heavy overcoats exuding authority and obstinacy. None of them appeared at all welcoming.

Sat at a table outside one of the shacks, three men, of the thick-set persuasion, stared without any attempt at subtlety at the new arrivals. From the river came the sound of the querulous mating calls of bullfrogs. The only movement came from the shrieking swifts above, and a thin grey tabby cat hunting something in the grass.

It’s the Wild West, thought Gregor. The Wild East, rather. Badlands. We’re beyond the rule of law, waiting for a man in a black hat to appear at the other side of the square for a show-down.

My grasp of Bulgarian is not yet remotely at the level where I can embark on my standard approach to learning a language, namely reading detective stories. I can’t even be sure if they have Krimis in Bulgaria, let alone if one has ever been set in Koprivshtitsa, the ‘museum town’ in the hills above The Valley of the Roses in the centre of the country. If not, they really should have done, which is why I found myself writing my own – even after we’d found that our guesthouse was perfectly decent, and that one restaurant was not only open but really quite nice inside, with a friendly teenage waitress who wanted to practise her English for an exam next month, and superb homemade bread. First impressions are hard to shake.

A big-city cop, fish out of water in the depths of rural Bulgaria – maybe even a foreigner, a German with Bulgarian roots following a trail that leads from West to East. A sidekick with local knowledge and connections, even if he got the hell out of there to Sofia or Plovdiv at the earliest opportunity, as I imagine any young Koprivshtitsa person with a bit of gumption aims to do. The road to the south really is much, much worse…

Koprivshtitsa was where the first shots were fired in the 1876 uprising against the Ottomans – two weeks earlier than planned, which must be the first and only time the town was ever ahead of time – hence a lot of the statues (others commemorate local poets and intellectuals and Communist martyrs from the 1940s). It enjoyed a special status and a fair amount of prosperity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, resulting in a lot of impressive (for the time, and in the local idiom) house-building. Since the early 20th century it’s been under a general preservation order, with over 350 houses considered to be historic monuments (which doesn’t seem to prohibit PVC double-glazing, at least when the owner has the money to spare – and perhaps knows the right people). One assumes that it’s still a significant tourist attraction, at least for Bulgarians who like their national folk traditions – and to be fair, perhaps May is a bit early in the year, and the road will be fixed and more establishments open by the time the season properly starts.

Two things in particular continue to strike me as strange, even somewhat haunting – and so fertile material for the Krimi. The first is demography. Koprivshtitsa has shrunk by over a third in a couple of decades, from well over three thousand inhabitants to just over two thousand. Many houses were padlocked from the outside. There were death notices everywhere – it would be quite hard to find more than a handful of houses that didn’t have at least one. Every communal noticeboard, and plenty of walls, were plastered with them. Everywhere you go, dead people are looking at you. This may be the natural consequences of an aging population, but I can imagine a detailed analysis of the patterns of mortality yielding an important clue for the fictional mystery. And the competition for space in the public eye is clearly serious – we saw notices that had been posted on top of other notices and then torn away, presumably by rival mourners.

The other really bizarre thing was the aforementioned huddle of shacks near the memorial to the martyrs of 1876. Each of these was a small general store, offering everything from cured meats, bread and the ubiquitous cheese to laundry supplies, pet food and wine. Each was cramped and cluttered; in each, with only minor variations, the service – at least to visitors – was such that they might as well have put up ‘Местен магазин за местните хора‘ signs.*

I can appreciate that, while it would have been both convenient and comforting, a nice modern supermarket would not be in keeping with the village’s rustic and historical aesthetic. But why four (actually five – there was another just down the street) more or less identical little shops? It’s not really like five different peasants selling the same range of homegrown/homemade products in the market – it seems most likely that they’re all being supplied by the same wholesaler. Do locals patronise one over another on the basis of specific small variations in stock, or long-standing personal relationships or feuds? Or do they go from shop to shop to identify minor price variations? How is it that none of these enterprises has ever established a comparative advantage – maybe by appealing to tourists in the season – to leverage out any of the others? Are they actually competing with one another at all? Am I, like a big-city detective, completely failing to grasp the different nature of society out in the sticks, back in the past that continues to cling to existence in this rather strange little town…**

*’A local shop for local people’.

**Weird as it was, Koprivshtitsa was an excellent base for visiting the fantastic Thracian temple site at Starosel, seeing fields of roses (albeit only just starting to bloom), storks, incredibly loud frogs, swallowtail butterflies, huge green lizards, and absurd numbers of eagles. And a visit to neighbouring Panagyurishte to see a replica of the astonishing eponymous Hoard showed that we dodged a bullet in not staying there instead, as we had considered.

Our House

In Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, one of my favourite novels of recent years, a mysterious and rather shady acquaintance of the narrator establishes a clinic for people suffering from Alzheimer’s, in which different rooms perfectly recreate the living conditions of previous decades; finding themselves; finding themselves in circumstances that feel natural and familiar, rather than the bewildering and alienating present, visitors come out of themselves and interact as they used to. It’s when the principle is extended to the national level, and the different countries of Europe hold referenda on which decade they’d prefer to return to, that things go wrong…

The Red Flat in Sofia, which recreates the apartment of an ordinary Bulgarian family from the 1980s, isn’t likely to have such a powerful impact. That’s not to say it isn’t extremely well done – the audio commentary in particular is excellent, based (they say) on interviews with people who lived through the period (the organisation behind the enterprise seems to be entirely staffed with twenty- and thirty-somethings for whom this is an era of family stories and history books).

But this is manifestly a collection of vintage stuff, rather than a collection of relatively new stuff dating from a different era. Yes, it’s entirely plausible that the toys would be battered, and the small collection of Western (or ersatz Western) LPs – but the newspapers should look just a few days old, not forty years old (I can’t remember how they did it, but Gospodinov’s protagonists expended a lot of effort in getting hold of pristine copies of newspapers and periodicals). Only the multiple volumes of Marx and Lenin looked suitably smart; everything else was much too tatty. And as my wife observed, the kitchen would not have been so grubby, even f the wife is working as a journalist while the husband is away in Libya working as an engineer.

Reconstructions of, say, classical buildings in museums notoriously tend to be too bright and pristine (not just the absence of colour on the sculptures but the absence of dirt anywhere). Whether because of the impossibility of sourcing mint-condition 1980s Bulgarian fridges (probably) or the influence of contemporary ideas about life under Communism (possibly), the Red Flat may be shabbier and flimsier and grubbier than would be authentic. A hypothetical Alzheimer’s sufferer might respond to it with words to the effect of “Why is this such a dump?” But this is what the average 21st-century tourist – especially foreigners – will expect, and the audio commentary works hard to offer a more balanced perspective.

Well worth a visit – and the system they use to manage numbers, with only fifteen visitors allowed in the flat at any time, so one person must return their lanyard before the next can enter is effective. My big question is of course about the chronology of inspiration: Red Flat established 2019, Gospodinov’s novel published 2020 but presumably conceived and written before that. Something about the late 2010s – at least in Bulgaria, but one suspects much more widely – prompted different people to start thinking about the concrete reconstruction of the everyday past as a means of reflecting on the present…

Many Rivers To Cross

Unlike Thucydides, we made it to Amphipolis! Yes, I have been waiting over a year to make this joke.

The view south from the walls of Amphipolis towards Eïon and the Strymonian Gulf.

Overall, a fantastic day. Partly, it must be said, this was because we started at the Lion of Amphipolis monument (allowing me to develop various theories about its original purpose that were then soundly falsified by reading recent research suggesting that it was originally part of the Kasta tomb complex to the north-east of the city, rather than having always occupied its current position to the south-west). We then walked up the quiet(ish) road that followed the river, rather than the main road towards Serres; we saw a fabulous range of bird life – bee-eaters, golden orioles, a pair of eagles with very light undersides that could have been short-toed snake eagles (either that, or Bonelli’s eagles), plus hearing a hoopoe and a cuckoo, and my wife had a lovely time photographing the impressive variety of wildflowers. This is definitely now my go-to method for putting her in a good mood for being dragged round ancient remains and museums.

The most important aspect of Amphipolis itself, for me, was its topography: getting a proper sense of how it dominates the pass from the coast into the wide plains of southern Thrace and the route over to Mount Pangaion – the original name of the place, according to Thucydides, was Nine Roads, and while I couldn’t identify as many as nine it was undoubtedly a major route centre. While the course of the river Strymon has changed substantially since drainage works from the 1930s onwards, it was likewise easy to see how the river once flowed on both sides of the hill on which Amphipolis stood – hence the ‘Amphi’ – and how this was plausibly the first practical crossing point. All in all, even before you think about the resources that inland Thrace could supply so long as you held the pass, it was manifestly a REALLY bad idea to lose control of this strategic location, and one can see why Thucydides was determined to narrate events – very subtly – to show how he really couldn’t have done any more to try to save it…

The site itself also has lots of great things to offer, to the point where I’m a bit surprised to keep encountering colleagues who know northern Greece well who’ve never visited. The walls – enough of which survive to give a clear sense of the circuit – could be used as a case study in changing construction techniques, from perfect late C5 isodromic blocks to the random reuse in late antiquity of bits of column and assorted rubble. There are some nice tombs from different eras; above all, the rock-cut cist tomb in a building complex within the walls (now sheltered by part of the museum building) that contained a silver-plated casket in which was found a gold wreath; the claim that this is the tomb of Brasidas seems as plausible as any hypothesis could be about the identification of the deceased in the absence of epigraphic evidence: “…all the allies attended in arms and buried Brasidas at the public expense in the city, in front of what is now the market-place, and the Amphipolitans having enclosed his tomb, ever afterwards sacrifice to him as a hero and have given to him the honour of games and annual offerings” (Thucydides 5.11.1). Best of all, they’ve found many of the wooden piles from the bridge across what was then the western branch of the river, and there are substantial remains of the post-Brasidas extension of the walls down to defend/control the river crossing.

We didn’t make it down to the gymnasium or the Roman house, unfortunately, as we wanted to leave time for the museum before our pre-booked taxi arrived, but they look pretty good too. The museum has some interesting material beside Brasidas’ burial casket, but more importantly has really made the best of its more domestic, less spectacular artefacts to offer a good introduction to everyday life over the centuries – minor bits of jewellery, pottery, toys, glassware, carved reliefs and so forth. Compared with the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, say, which is really “Here’s some amazing stuff!” “Here’s some more amazing stuff!” “Here’s some stuff we think is amazing but we’re not going to explain it!”, someone has put real thought and effort into the display and descriptions. There is a rather striking contrast with the mezzanine level, outlining the history of the site from the archaic to the Hellenistic period, in a text-heavy manner that *I* found largely unintelligible, even knowing what it ought to be saying, and A. gave up on after about two minutes. It’s almost a palimpsest of different eras of museum curation.

The archaeological park of Amphipolis has clearly had a lot of money spent on it in the relatively recent past; both around the main site and down by the river gate there are (reasonably) well-constructed paths and lots of information boards. Partly, to judge from the couple of ‘In the Footsteps of St Paul’ waymarkers, this seems to be an attempt at grabbing some of the pilgrimage traffic that we saw last year at Philippi – though one fears that Acts 17.1 may not amount to the strongest case that this is a must-visit place for the faithful: “When Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica…” Mostly, though, it focuses on the development of the site in its own right, offering reasonably clear explanations of different buildings; still a bit of a tendency to talk in detail about the early Christian basilica with only a passing mention of the classical building underneath, but so much better than Philippi. Which makes it even more jarring that the information board by the bridge gets things horribly, gratuitously muddled…

The first reference to Amphipolis’ wooden bridge is by the historian Thucydides, who notes that the bridge was a turning point in the Peloponnesian War.

I am not sure how this statement relates to the one at the end of the paragraph that “We have further references to the bridge by Euripides, Charon, and Herodotus”. Not having read the relevant passage in Herodotus for a while, let alone considered what I believe is a fragmentary play by Euripides, I can’t say if this is making a subtle and contentious point about the precise chronology of publication of different texts, or is just confused. Turning point? It could be argued, I suppose, through a counterfactual scenario in which Athens remained in its strong post-Sphacteria position vis-à-vis Sparta and either extracted much better terms in a peace settlement or pressed on with the war, having the advantage of all the timber and metal resources of Thrace – the loss of Amphipolis, then, as the last point where they could have won a decisive victory overall. But Thucydides doesn’t actually say this. A better case would be that the bridge was decisive for the history of the Pel War, since it freed up Thucydides to write it…

Specifically, he notes that in 422 BC the Spartan general Brasidas, as victor in the battle with Cleon, took possession of the bridge, which connected the city of Amphipolis with its harbor.

No. Nope. Definitely not. NO.

Where to start with this? In 422, Brasidas already had possession of the bridge, which he’d seized in 424. If by the ‘harbor’ of Amphipolis they mean the city of Eion, that is on the east bank of the river that this bridge is crossing, the same side as Amphipolis. There is a case to be made that the bridge did play a role in the Battle of Amphipolis, given that Brasidas’ strategem (Thuc. 5.6.3 onwards) was to take a load of troops up onto the heights of Cerdylion on the western side of the river (giving him a good view of everything), implying that he crossed the bridge to get there, and then to rush back down to take the Athenians by surprise, again using the bridge – but the bridge isn’t mentioned specifically. Most importantly, Brasidas couldn’t take possession of the bridge after the battle, BECAUSE HE WAS DEAD. You’ve got what is plausibly his funeral casket in the museum, with the whole story. Don’t you read your own labels?

What is completely ridiculous is that Thucydides’ actual first mention of the bridge, in his narrative of events in the winter of 424/423, is not just (1) specific, (2) clear and (3) exciting, but gives a really good sense of the importance of the bridge, which is surely the whole point of this display.

Thucydides 4.103.4-104.2 (apologies for using the Crawley translation, but we’re travelling light and so I don’t have a better version with me. Yes, I now regret this packing decision):

…and that same night [the Argilians] took [Brasidas] on to the bridge over the river; where he found only a small guard to oppose him, the town being at some distance from the passage, and the walls not reaching down to it as at present. This guard he easily drove in, partly through there being treason in their ranks, partly from the stormy state of the weather and the suddenness of his attack, and so got across the bridge, and immediately became master of all the property outside; the Amphipolitans having houses all over the quarter. The passage of Brasidas was a complete surprise to the people in the town; and the capture of many of those outside, and the flight of the rest within the wall, combined to produce great confusion among the citizens, especially as they did not trust one another. It is even said that if Brasidas, instead of stopping to pillage, had advanced straight against the town, he would probably have taken it.

You don’t have to worry about the question of whether Thucydides is over-egging the “No one could possibly have anticipated this daring attack” self-exculpatory stuff; just from the perspective of explaining and presenting the archaeological material, this gives you the importance of the bridge and an indication of the stages of development – walls didn’t yet extend all the way down (but clearly were extended in Thucydides’ lifetime). Even if you are an archaeologist who really, really hates the traditional dominance of literary sources in the interpretation of classical sites, would it really be so bad to make use of this material?

Okay, I’m a Thucydides obsessive; I know this information is completely wrong (and almost wonder if I’m being trolled – that they know some visitors to Amphipolis will be there because of Thucydides, and want to wind them up). Everyone else is being presented with statements that look plausible, if rather dull, and are simply false. I’m reasonably sure that the information pre-dates Generative AI – actually I’m pretty confident that ChatGPT would have done a far better job. Was the display in fact put together with no academic input or oversight?

Clearly it’s not enough that Amphipolis should be Thucydides’ Waterloo, do to speak; now they want to inflict a crushing defeat on his historiography…

Note: I have a load of other nice photos, but either the WiFi in this Sofia flat or my iPad are struggling, so I may have to update this later.

Metal Guru

It’s always interesting to realise how much I’ve unconsciously and unquestionably absorbed a set of assumptions. To judge from this week’s visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with my wife, the solitary pre-Hellenic archaeology course I took as an undergraduate – lamentably unsuccessfully – had a much greater impact than I noticed at the time. Walking through the Early Cycladic gallery, I was entirely unperturbed at seeing some ceramic objects labelled as ‘frying pans’. She, however, adopted a tone worthy of Lady Bracknell – albeit appropriately quieter: “A frying pan? Why on earth do they call it a frying pan? And why has it got a symbolic vagina on it?”

My attempts at explaining what I took to be the basic party line – it’s a pragmatic label for identifying a particular type of object for which we don’t have a more authentic term – fell on deaf ears. “They don’t have any hesitation at calling that thing over there a ‘multi-chambered circular ceramic vessel of uncertain purpose’, so why call this a frying pan?” I’m not sure that the more developed answer I could have offered after consulting with Dimitri Nakissis as the first specialist who came to mind with whom I’m sufficiently familiar to hassle via social media, namely that this is what Christos Tsountas called them in the 1880s so we just go with that, would have gone down any better.

What’s striking is how far I’d been perfectly happy to accept the convention – recognising it is a convention, but then just taking it for granted because that’s what a (rather unhelpfully opaque) museum label told me. My wife’s approach instead offers the combination, in unknown proportions, of blunt common sense and the fact that she was briefly lectured by both Shanks and Tilley, the Dioscuri of post-processual archaeology and the questioning of archaeologists’ claims to offer an authoritative account of the past.

In the absence of any archaeologists or curators to harangue, we moved on to the Mycenaean gallery, and a perfect illustration of the benefits of the experiential/experimental approach, or at any rate the use of modern technical knowledge in archaeological interpretation. To be precise: my wife has had some training and practice in working with precious metals, and this was remarkably illuminating in looking at Mycenaean gold work. On the one hand, it gives a sense of what’s involved in the process, sometimes counter-intuitively. For example, I’d always assumed that the jewellery made with gold wire – whether coiled into earrings or made into a sort of fringe – must be less valuable and impressive than the more solid stuff. Not so; once you have some gold wire it’s easy to work, but actually making the wire by hand is a difficult, highly skilled craft, which must then have been reflected in the prestige and value of the objects.

On the other hand, this sort of technical knowledge raises questions that would never have occurred to me. What did the Mycenaeans use for flux – a substance necessary for successful soldering? Wikipedia indicates that certain resins can work for this purpose, but not whether its use has been ascertained for the Greek Bronze Age; other substances can also be used. In many if not most cases – so I am informed – fluxes are either so volatile that they disappear in the process of soldering, or they have to be carefully cleaned away, which might make it hard to identify them 3000+ years later. But at least we know that there’s stuff we don’t know – and it is always useful for me to be reminded of how little I know, even when going round an archaeological museum.

I Get The Sweetest Feeling

Thucydides of course anticipated the dynamics of social media.* On the one hand, there is the democratisation of opinion, with every Athenian citizen having not just a right but a duty to contribute to deliberation in the assembly, with the idea that collective disagreement would produce better results than a few self-appointed experts on the traditional oligarchic model later beloved of Plato. On the other hand, there is how this worked in practice, with his depiction of debates as dominated by a few especially loud individuals whose opinions are scarcely challenged (Pericles) or, more regularly, whose competitions for prominence lead to polarisation of debate and the resultant failure to think through all the aspects (Kleon – the original session – v Diodotus, Nicias v Alcibiades). As seen especially in the Sicilian debate, everyone else becomes at best a spectator of the rhetorical set-to, and at worst entirely sucked into the conflict, falling prey to all the different kinds of cognitive traps – group-think, over-estimation of own knowledge, poor grasp of probability etc. The result is a state of opinion that’s not actually of much use of anyone.

I feel that this becomes especially obvious in the case of Tripadvisor reviews. In theory, if everyone just gives an honest account of their experience at a particular restaurant or hotel, the outliers (people with absurd expectations or preferences, friends of the proprietor, impact of one-off exceptional circumstances) will be filtered out by the majority view to give a sense both of overall quality but also key attributes. In practice? There seem to be a disproportionate number of people with absurd expectations or preferences – Plato’s views on democracy certainly seem to apply to Tripadvisor – but also many reviewers apparently approach the task as an opportunity for performance or venting, and opinions tend increasingly towards the extremes – and this then escalates, as in the absence of a graphe paranomon later reviewers become irate about being misled by previous reviews and start arguing with them as much as with the establishment itself.

This is especially prompted by a visit to Krinos, a bakery on the edge of the Athens Central Market that’s famous for its loukoumades, fried yeast-raised doughnuts served with honey (and nuts and cinnamon, if you’re not my wife). We didn’t know it was famous, we just thought it looked interesting and were ready for a break. The cafe area inside is utterly unpretentious; counter rather than table service, where you get your tin plate of freshly-cooked loukoumades and your tea in a metal teapot. A great, albeit slightly sticky experience.

And if we’d read Tripadvisor, we might well not have gone; reasonable average score, but many of the recent comments – which of course are displayed most prominently – complain vehemently that it’s not what it was when they went there as students, that the loukoumades were cold, that the service was impersonal, that it could be so much better if they modernised the decor and smartened things up a bit. Half of them seem to be driven by a nostalgic vision of how the loukoumades used to taste before all this modernity, the other half by a desire for a trendy café with artisan espresso; neither perspective has much relevance for an enterprise that, if it was the sort of place to start doing marketing in the first place, would want a slogan like ‘We started making loukoumades in 1923. We still make loukoumades. We’ve got quite good at it’, or simply ‘It is what it is’. One gets a powerful sense that the reviews are only partly about Krinos at all, and mostly about the reviewer – which doesn’t lead to productive deliberate.

*I am on holiday; detailed justification of sweeping claims can wait until I’m back on the clock. But obviously Thucydides plausibly anticipated pretty well any political or social issue you can think of.

We Don’t Need No (Professional Military) Education

You can’t spend a lot of time thinking about the modern reception of Thucydides without engaging with his place in Professional Military Education in the United States, which is plausibly responsible for much of his continuing reputation and the frequency of citation on social media. Starting with his introduction into the curriculum of the Naval War College in the 1970s – full-blown intensive but open-ended immersion in the whole work, rather than the very selective pre-determined readings of a few key episodes that characterises his appearances in, say, International Relations courses – T. acquired a reputation as THE historical work that serious strategic types needed to know and ambitious students wanted to study (even if this created a paradox, as the whole point of the original USNWC seminar was that this would be a completely unfamiliar text).

So, while I’ve never had any connection whatsoever with the American military colleges (and have entirely failed to interest any European staff colleges, which tend to be much more practical and less academic, in the topic), I do feel a bit invested in what’s happening there now, as the current regime’s campaigns against wokeness in the military and universities in general converge. Books are being banned, professors are being censored and disciplined for suspected deviations from the party line, in the name, heaven help us, of a ‘warrior ethos’.

How might Thucydides fare in future, if these trends continue? On the one hand, there’s his association – entirely the product of this USAnian PME tradition – with the idea of the ‘scholar warrior’; he’s unimpeachably male, wholly focussed on military things rather than any wish-washy diversity stuff or gender theory, and easily (within conventional classical tradition perspectives) perceived as white. Set him up against Maya Angelou, and there’s really no contest. To judge from military quotations websites and various Ex-Twitter accounts, he’s packed full of muscular military aphorisms, lauding strength, masculinity and patriotism.

On the other hand, someone might actually read his work… This is a book about failure and defeat, military disasters and the inescapable role of chance; it’s about the dangers of over-confidence and arrogance, and of demagogic politicians convinced of their own very stable genius. It tells you that the world is complex and unpredictable, that attempts at domination lead to ruin, and that power does not in fact trump ethics. Thucydides was given a key role in the USNWC curriculum as a means of preparing officers to deal with unfamiliar and ambiguous situations, to teach them to think for themselves rather than simply obeying orders. Leave him on the library shelves, and there is an obvious risk that cadets might start thinking too much. But the great advantage is that many of those who praise his work have probably never read it properly.

It’s Not Unusual

Thucydides may not be a wholly uncelebrated author, but it is rare that his name occurs in contexts outside politics and history – let alone in poetry or song; and so one of the rarer but not less important missions of this blog is to record such occurrences as do appear from time to time. In this case, in no less a publication than the Times Literary Supplement, by a poet that I’ve actually heard of previously, and furthermore someone who, though long since domiciled in the United States of America, offers clear European (specifically, Irish) antecedents. This calls for even more meticulous analysis than usual…

Litotes (Paul Muldoon)

TLS 2nd May 2025; at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/original-poems-literature/litotes-paul-muldoon

Though it wasn’t until 411 BC (1) he took up the oar
in the Peloponnesian War
against “man-loosening” (2) Lysander (3),

our hero was not unknown (4)
to Thucydides (5), who’d evenhandedly (6) intone
“What’s sauce for Aegeus is sauce for the gander.” (7)

Despite his background
being less than sound (8),
he nonetheless managed to drive a phaeton (9)

through the Spartan ranks
or, on more than one occasion, an oar-bank (10).
If his circumstances were quite often straitened (11)

he couldn’t say no
to manning up and having a go
at the slightest hint of an old school oligarchy. (12)

No scanty there, then?
Faced with the very same problem time and again
he would resort to being snide or snarky

and immediately made a dent
in it. It was no small accomplishment (13)
that he somehow managed to claim kin with Nestor (14)

and, since he was far
from the sharpest ray in the earthstar,
was quite likely an ancestor (15)

of the not exactly inspiring (16) Greek (17)
who would eke
out an existence in the precincts of the Abbey (18)

where he’d been married sword in hand, ye Gads,
turning out to be not half bad (19)
or, as Thucydides would have it, “None too shabby.” (20)

(1) This immediately raises interesting questions – not least given the reference to oligarchy in stanza 5, since 411 is most memorable for the short-lived oligarchic coup in Athens, which led to conflict between the 400 in the city and the Athenian fleet stationed at Samos. Did the title character – whom we might surmise to have been born around 431, the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, given that citizens became eligible for military service from 18 – join the navy before the temporary overthrow of the democracy, in which case he was probably in Samos, or afterwards?

(2) A literal translation of androlusios, a term found only in Thucydides (and only once there), suggesting Lysander’s role as liberator of the Greek cities under Athenian domination. Scholars have often suggested the emendation androkmhs, man-slaughtering, which is also found in Aeschylus.

(3) Of course, Lysander doesn’t actually appear in Thucydides’ text, as he did not come to prominence until 408, the period of the war covered by Xenophon’s Hellenica instead.

(4) ‘A hero not unknown’: Litotes is defined by litotes.

(5) He is not in fact mentioned by Thucydides.

(6) One of the most familiar commonplaces in Thucydidean commentary is to praise his lack of bias against either the Athenians who exiled him or the Spartans who defeated his home city.

(7) If Thucydides had indeed said this, it would raise the number of supposed jokes in his text to three. But he didn’t.

(8) A description reminiscent of Kleon, who was likewise looked down upon by aristocratic commentators who deplored his lack of class and decorum.

(9) Although the vehicle in question was named (originally in French) after the son of Helios who took over the driving of the sun-god’s chariot for a day with a certain lack of success that proved ultimately fatal, the Greeks did not develop any such open-topped carriage.

(10) Nor has any version of the phaéton since the late 18th century been amphibious.

(11) Litotes’ material circumstances are left somewhat ambiguous; was he periodically faced with food crisis or even malnutrition because of harvest failure, or is this the aristocratic sort of poverty that means you can’t afford to return invitations to dinner? See Theophrastus’ Characters for a series of vignettes of such characters.

(12) Was he for or against oligarchy? This seems to be left undetermined – perhaps echoing the career of Alcibiades.

(13) Litotes’ career is periodically marked by litotes.

(14) Curious, given that Nestor’s domain had been Pylos in the western Peloponnese, making him a Dorian; again, this suggests aristocratic origins, since old Athenian noble families had long-standing kinship ties with other Greeks (cf. Thucydides’ links to Thracian royalty), rather than the supposedly autochthonous and certainly very locally circumscribed social circles of ordinary Athenians.

(15) Plausibly, he was an ancestor of all of us, just as Adam Rutherford has noted that everyone with European ancestry is a direct descendent of Charlemagne.

(16) Litotes again. There’s a theme here.

(17) I have no idea who this is supposed to be. Who gets married sword in hand in church? Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham? The late Duke of Edinburgh?

(18) Westminster, Bath or Cluny? Or is this just setting up the rhyme in the final line?

(19) You guessed it…

(20) Oddly enough, Thucydides did not say this. But clearly the whole poem is a set-up for some humourless pedant to complain that “There’s no Litotes in Thucydides!”, whereupon it can be pointed out that Thucydides’ narrative regularly resorts to litotes; see for example 3.81.5, where the account of the stasis at Corcyra refers to ‘nothing that did not happen’ (cf. e.g. W.R. Connor, ’Scale matters: compression, expansion, and vividness in Thucydides’, in Balot, Forsdyke & Foster, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, p.216).

Update 7/5

Re (2): on reflection, it may not be completely obvious that the stuff about androlusios is completely made up. I expect this to start appearing in ChatGPT-generated essays within the next six months. The term in Aeschylus is genuine, however.

Re (20): worth noting how far Thucydides is presented here in his familiar role as someone whose pronouncements are to be taken very seriously, even if this is deployed for humourous effect.