Neville Morley's Blog, page 32

Every Which Way But Lose

A minor update, ‘cos I’m sitting on a train with nothing to read but student essays, on the ongoing development of Thucydides-related games, this time the card-based rock/paper/scissors variant that’s become known as the Peg Game because players accumulate (or lose) clothes pegs and display them as a sign of their power (or lack of it). I ran a version of this at a student Classics Society games evening tonight – it was supposed to be a debate, but not enough people signed up – and because I didn’t have any pegs to hand I tried using the cards themselves as the tokens of power.

This is quite entertainingly fiendish, as it ensures that successful players have the full range of options while losing players find their choices ever more constrained as they lose cards. I started everyone off with the standard three cards plus one random extra – and of course a couple of players started with an additional advantage. What I could have made clearer is that they should choose which card to hand over (or maybe their victorious opponent should choose one at random), rather than automatically losing the one they’ve just played, if only because that gives extra knowledge to the conqueror of what tactics to follow next time. Though maybe that’s fair enough…

And maybe one could start everyone off with a completely random selection of cards, rather than having the full range of options at the beginning. If we’re simulating classical Greece, should we assume that every polis was equally able to pursue any strategy?

In any case, the game followed the usual pattern: rapid emergence of a limited number of great powers, with defeated subjects in tow, slugging it out inconclusively until everyone gets bored and they start up the Mario Kart tornament instead…

Divide and Rule?

A country divided; politics becoming ever more partisan and extreme; increasingly violent rhetoric, with knee-jerk defence of your own side and a refusal to accept the slightest possibility that your opponents – now branded as ‘enemies’ or ‘traitors’ – might be speaking or acting in good faith. Not (only) Britain in 2019, or 1930s Germany, but ancient Greece.

In 427 BCE, in the early years of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, civil unrest broke out in Corcyra, on modern Corfu. The ruling party there was happy to be allied to the Athenians, but another group – bribed by foreign powers, according to some accounts – claimed this alliance was effectively slavery, and sought to seize power for themselves. Thucydides, in the third book of his account of the war, describes how legal disputes between the two sides escalated into threats and intimidation, and then violence.

This is one of the less familiar sections of Thucydides, who has lately become an unavoidable presence in British political discourse. It lacks resonant quotations like “For the many, not the few” (the fact that the Labour party got this from Shelley, who may or may not have drawn on Thucydides, doesn’t stop people evoking Thucydides anyway), “Freedom is the sure possession of those who have the courage to defend it” (the Bomber Command Memorial version of the line from Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which is why the ‘Spartans’ of the European Research Group like it), or “The strong do what they want, the weak endure what they must” (timeless, especially since there’s already the example of Yanis Varoufakis using it to characterise dealings with the EU27).

The Corcyrean stasis narrative doesn’t offer an analysis of unbalanced power relations like the Melian Dialogue, equally applicable to the UK negotiating with Europe or Johnson dealing with moderates in his own party, nor does it offer a precedent for legitimately reversing a democratic decision (the Mytilene Debate). There is no powerfully-drawn figure to be claimed as a political hero, like Pericles, and none of the powerful examples of manipulative, populist rhetoric from the likes of Pericles, Cleon and Alcibiades that foreshadow 20th-century dictators and the present crisis of western democracies.

But this is arguably the most disturbing section of Thucydides’ work, as it shows how political crisis takes on its own dynamic, beyond any individual’s control. The ‘stasis’ at Corcyra is not a one-off event; Thucydides presents it as a case study, the first example of what would become a recurring pattern as the war continued, with even Athens collapsing into self-destructive factionalism in the aftermath of its disastrous expedition against Syracuse. And the episode transcends its immediate historical context, just as Thucydides claimed people would find his work useful because “the human thing” meant that present and future events would resemble those of the past. Later readers have repeatedly felt that they recognised in Corcyra their own situation, from early modern religious and civil conflicts to the French Revolution to the rise of Hitler.

This is the heart of Thucydides’ method, his claim to have written “a possession for ever”. He does not offer a theory of political fragmentation, just as he never offered a theory of international relations or democratic deliberation or war. There is never a suggestion that the Peloponnesian War will offer perfect analogies that explain the present and predict the past; the past remains past, but he offers powerful, multi-layered descriptions of these things, that invite reflection and comparison between past and present.

There had always been divisions in Corcyra, as in any society; between rich and poor and those who claimed to represent them. The wider war in the Greek world brought these divisions to the surface, as Corcyreans argued over whether to ally with different sides, and sought external aid against their enemies. Their motives were as ever mixed: some were driven by ambition, some by personal feuds; some were bribed by a foreign power, or simply saw an opportunity for profit.

The escalating conflict set families against one another; loyalty to one’s own faction trumped any other social tie, and justified any action so long as it harmed the enemy. Corcyra entered a state of what we would now call ‘post-truth’, in which all common ground was lost and everything was judged in partisan terms; “reckless audacity was now thought of as comradely courage, while far-sighted hesitation became well-disguised cowardice”. Leaders adopted slogans like ‘equality for the masses!’ or ‘government of moderation!’, claiming to be working for the public good, while actually rousing people against their enemies.

Most alarming is the fate of those caught in between these ever more extreme, fanatical groups, still seeking compromise or just hoping to keep their heads down – the original Centrist Dads. “Moderation,” Thucydides noted, “was seen as a front for unmanliness, and to understand everything was to accomplish nothing”. The most successful were those who pre-empted their opponents in outrageous acts and found a plausible justification for their actions in the eyes of their group. “The citizens who were in the middle fell prey to both parties, either because they would not take sides or because their very survival was resented”.

Peace returned to Corcyra only with the bloody victory of the populist party and the death or exile of its opponents. The example of Athens, which endured similar elite coups in 411 and 404, shows that democracy could be restored without too much bloodshed – but the after-effects of that experience reverberated for decades, arguably including setting the scene for the trial of Socrates, teacher of some of the leading anti-democratic figures from 404.

We don’t usually turn to Thucydides for optimism or reassurance, however, but for a clear-eyed view of the real state of things; a warning of how easily the shared values, civility and basic good faith of a political community can collapse under pressure. Corcyrean themes find their echo today within both major political parties, as the currently dominant factions seek to silence or drive out their less determined or fanatical opponents, as well as at the national level.

But what if Corcyra is taken not as a warning but a playbook? The most alarming aspect of Dominic Cummings’ well-established admiration for the work – “[I] do not think there is a better book to study than Thucydides as training for politics” – is the possibility that he is pursuing, through Boris Johnson, a Corcyrean strategy of accentuating the divisions in British society. Repetition of populist slogans, attacking the opposition as enemies and traitors, refusing to moderate language, rejecting all criticism as mere partisan carping, disseminating obvious untruths that will nevertheless be repeated by allies and opponents alike, heightening tensions – all with the aim of hollowing out the centre and firing up his faction. As W.H. Auden observed at the outbreak of the Second World War, ‘exiled Thucydides knew…’

I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue

One of the new courses I’m doing this year – new to me, rather than to the curriculum – is the big survey course on Greek History: 160 first-and second-year students, forty hours of lectures (plus seminars, which are delegated to minions – I’m equally glad not to be doing an extra six hours every fortnight or even every week and sad not to see this side of the students’ development), starting in the Bronze Age and finishing somewhere yet-to-be-precisely-determined around the expansion of Rome into the eastern Mediterranean. No, the title of this post isn’t actually commenting on my knowledge of archaic Greece and the rise of the hoplite, to pick one of many possible examples – but it could be; I have been learning a lot over the last couple of months, refreshing some very out-of-date knowledge, and this is certainly one of the major reasons why this blog has been quiet of late…

The tricky thing about this course is that the forty hours of lectures are delivered in two-hour chunks. Why anyone has ever thought this is a good idea, I’m really not sure, but it’s the way things are usually done round here, and it’s…interesting. Now, I am entirely capable of talking non-stop for two hours, even about the rise of hoplite warfare and its relation to early constitutional development, and mid-term student feedback indicated that at least one person would be entirely happy if I actually did this – but from every pedagogical point of view, it’s a terrible idea. No one can concentrate continuously for that amount of time, let alone at half nine on a Friday morning; we could probably run an interesting experiment to see whether anyone at all retained any information whatsoever between minutes 12 and 97. And so we break up the information stream with breaks for discussion of key source material in small groups, which works as well as you’d expect in a group this size – a fair amount of talk, which may or may not actually be focused on what it’s supposed to be focused on, and then a fair amount of silence when we move to more general discussion.

Which could become very dull after a while. And so I find myself spending increasing amounts of time thinking of Silly Things To Do to give them – finding the sweet spot between gratuitous silliness and pedagogic validity. Initially I thought I could make use of the Poll Anywhere thing, mucking about with surveys and word clouds – but as yet I can’t persuade the university system to talk to it, which is not what you really want in the first lecture of term. And so I’ve fallen back on things that I know – so far, the Twine tool for creating interactive texts, and Survey Monkey for surveys – as there’s a better chance of me getting them to do what I want rather than being forced into their parameters.

There is of course another sweet spot to be found, between the amount of work needed to make something more or less acceptable (including learning how to use the whatever it is) and the amount of time needed to make it good (and the amount of time and energy I actually have available). So, for example, my ‘What kind of Spartan are you?’ quiz would be enormously improved with a load of appropriate images and a proper Buzzfeed vibe – but that is not something that can be easily done on the train on a Thursday evening with erratic WiFi; the hope is that the questions are sufficiently fun/silly/baffling to get people thinking about what’s involved – and emphasise the basic point that more or less everything we think we know about Sparta may be completely fictional.

Similarly with the ‘How to Become a Greek Tyrant’ game; it’s about setting out the range of different factors which might have been involved, with a limited number of choices (are you Solon? do you then abuse Solon’s authority?), rather than a remotely realistic reconstruction of the actual chances of success (the game offers slightly over 50% chance of becoming a tyrant, if that’s what you decide to do, which is probably not historically accurate. But hey, who knows?).

Anyway, I may update this post with whatever else I come up with for future classes (yes, let’s think about how an assembly of thousands of people might have worked without any sort of party organisation or formal procedure…), or write further updates in future. For the moment, here are the Silly Things To Do from the last two classes, for anyone who wants to use them or mess about with them…

Game of Throne: how to become a tyrant

Quiz: What sort of Spartan are you?

A Pin in a Forest

As my regular reader (hi, Trev!) will have noticed, this blog has been rather quiet of late, as I’ve been struggling to keep my head above All The Things, but I cannot miss the opportunity to add another entry to the small but striking archive of Thucydides Poetry – not least because I’ll probably forget it almost immediately if I don’t. This one is especially interesting, as it hints at a whole tradition of post-WWII classical reception in Poland of which I knew more or less nothing; I would be rushing off to write emails to colleagues in Poland to ask more, except that they are high on the list of people whose deadlines I have missed…

Zbigniew Herbert, about whom I knew absolutely nothing before this morning; 1924-98, first published as a poet in the 1950s, with an anthology translated into English published in the USA in 1968. His Wikipedia page…reads rather oddly to me; a mass of information, especially about his trips abroad, with little sense of the overall shape of his life, and then a mass of critical commentary with no references. Maybe it’s all just been translated out of Polish, maybe there’s a lot of editing conflict going on behind the scenes, as one might imagine – there’s no obvious hint of this in the current version, which simply treats him as a literary figure – the meaning of this writer and his legacy in early C21 Poland might be a matter of political debate.

There certainly are strong indications of a classical reception element in both Herbert’s poems – a suggestion, if I understand the discussion correctly, that this was one of the reasons why his poetry might not have found favour with the Communist regime, for its lack of social realism – and essays. A late collection of the latter looks like being especially relevant for his take on history, and Thucydides:

Labirynt nad morzem consists mainly of essays devoted to ancient Greek culture and history, as well as in a lesser degree to the Etruscans and the Roman legionnaires from Hadrian’s wall. This time however, the traveler seems not to be seeking his own way – he copes with the monuments of culture – the Acropolis of Athensor Knossos. Yet, when referring to the history of Greece, Herbert draws out the episodes which take up not too many pages in textbooks, and wrecks view patterns. He shows how Pericles’ policy in the case of Samos became the beginning of the end of not only the Greek cities union but also of Athenian democracy. The assessments of history are reviewed in the same way as the one postulated in the poetry – by changing the perspective, rejecting the winners’ point of view.

But I came on here to talk about a specific poem: ‘Why the Classics’, published in the Selected Poems collection in 1968, actual date of writing unclear on the basis of what I’ve gleaned so far. It’s famous enough that one can buy a 44-page study guide on what is only a one-and-a-half page poem, so my main emotion this morning has been faint embarrassment that I haven’t heard of it before.

in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides tells among other things

the story of his unsuccessful expedition

among long speeches of chiefs

battles sieges plague

dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours

the episode is like a pin

in a forest

So far so descriptive, except that I have no idea whether a pin in a forest is analogous to a needle in a haystack. Thucydides is taken to need no introduction; his work offers a mass of information about politics and war, and hidden in the middle of it the bright sharpness of his own experience. As the stanza goes on to explain, Amphipolis fell because Thucydides was late with relief, resulting in his exile; “exiles of all times / know what price that is”.

The second part shifts the focus to the present, contrasting Thucydides’ refusal to make excuses or even discuss the episode in any depth with the likely behaviour of any contemporary general or leader:

generals of the most recent wars

if a similar affair happens to them

whine on their knees before posterity

praise their heroism and innocence

they accuse their subordinates

envious colleagues

unfavourable winds

Thucydides says only

that he had seven ships

it was winter

and he sailed quickly

This is a minor spin on a familiar theme in Thucydidean reception; his down-playing of his own failure, even narrating himself in the third person, as a sign of his noble spirit and historical integrity – no complaints, only the truth. But for Herbert it’s clearly part of the answer to the question posed by the title. Why the Classics? Because they offer a model of behaviour that, even if it is impossible to realise in the present, at least offers a basis for criticism of the present, rather than accepting that the way things are is the only possibility.

if art for its subject

will have a broken jar

a small broken soul

with a great self-pity

what will remain after us

will it be lovers’ weeping

in a small dirty hotel

when wall-paper dawns 

I like this third and final stanza, whereas the previous two really do read just like straightforward prose with the punctuation taken out – which may of course be a function of translating the original into English. Again, I haven’t the foggiest what “when wall-paper dawns” means – maybe I need to buy the study guide – but clearly here Herbert is shifting the past/present contrast from action in the world to artistic engagement with it. Is modern art no more than self-pitying and solipsistic accounts of minutiae, in contrast to Thucydides’ panoply of events? His experience was woven into something much bigger; our poems are no more than fragments of experience, aspiring to universality through the hope that others will have had the same experience of weeping in a sordid hotel. Again, why the classics? Because they tell us that there can, and should be, something more.

Deal or No Deal

Not many posts at the moment as I’m struggling to keep on top of the teaching prep with two new modules this term, plus having to catch train before 7 am on both Thursdays and Fridays which then leaves me staring blankly into space by lunchtime. BUT! I am still capable now and again of stringing together a series of thoughts on the Twitter, which quite possibly get a bigger audience there, but if I copy them onto here I will at least have a record…

In the Melian Dialogue (Choose Your Own Adventure version), the discussion eventually ends up going in circles. There’s actually no limit on how long this can continue, but it’s pretty obvious after a while that talking has reached its limit. If you’re playing the Athenians, it’s a matter of when you lose patience and force a decision (and allowing the Melians to blather on does, up to a certain point, increase the chances that they will in the end see sense and accept your terms), or just massacre them already.

f you’re playing the Melians, it’s the eventual acceptance that the situation is as it is: the Athenians have the superior position, there’s no reason for them to change their minds just because you want them to, and so the decision is the same as it was at the beginning. That is, accept their terms and try to make the best of it, or double down on heroic defiance and gamble on the tiny chance that the Spartans might actually turn up to save you.

The Athenian position isn’t really terribly interesting – they have the power, they know they have the power (even if they tend to over-estimate it), and so they can just let the Melians squirm until they get bored – and so it’s a little odd that they’re usually the main focus (e.g. in the International Relations Realist tradition and related discourses). The Melian dilemma is the interesting one: surrender or glory, rational self-preservation or heroic gamble in the name of sovereignty. They don’t have a good option – and which of their options is less bad depends on how you rate different criteria. Is it better to die free etc.?

One interesting aspect – and this is where I start getting to the point – is the effect of the passage of time on this decision. Talking with the Athenians doesn’t change the realities of the situation, nor the Athenian attitude, but does it change Melian thinking? On the one hand, there’s the possibility that they gradually come to see their situation clearly – there *is* no reasonable way out – and capitulate to Athenian demands, trying to make the best of it. This seems like the rational option, certainly from the Athenian perspective. But then there is what actually happened. Is it just a matter of them always having preferred sovereignty over survival (n.b. keep in mind that this is the Melian elite making that decision for their whole people), or is partly a product of the Dialogue – Athenian intransigence makes them more defiant?

Certainly that’s what we see in the actual text, and I have plans for actual experiments to see how often this plays out in practice: does dialogue with an implacable adversary produce reckless defiance more often than demoralised capitulation? What we see in the UK’s case – yes, we’re back with the Brexit thing – is the latter, for all Johnson’s bluster and the cheer-leading of the press: the situation hasn’t changed, the EU hasn’t shifted any of its red lines, but the passage of time and the sense of deadlock – accentuated by internal political issues, has resulted in sudden acceptance of all the things that were declared to be completely unacceptable a few months ago. Rational calculation wins out over ideology. Of course it helps that this choice keeps Johnson in power, whereas Athens would probably have deposed the Melian elite and replaced them with a more democratically-inclined government.

And of course we saw exactly the same pattern in the previous modern Melian Dilemma, the negotiations of the Greek government with the Troika: defiance, but then acceptance of the terms on offer, and marginalisation or sacking of proponents of more drastic/radical choice. Was Thucydides wrong? Or is it that times have changed, the stakes are higher, sovereignty matters less, so modern states are simply far less inclined to follow the Melian route? Perhaps that was the Athenians’ error: if the rulers of Melos had felt confident that they would continue to thrive under Athenian rule, rather than being replaced by a more popular government, they’d have rolled over in the end without much fuss…

Further thought: maybe the problem with the internal UK political situation at the moment is that there aren’t any Athenians – so, no one has the power to dictate terms, but everyone falls into the characteristic mindset of the ‘weaker’ party. Ditto within different political parties; groups like the old One Nation Tories and the Centrist Labour crowd certainly feel beleagured, but it’s not as if their opponents are free from such a defensive mindset either. Melians all the way down…

WAG the Dog

Somewhere on my ever-expanding list of ‘Things it would be really cool to try if I wasn’t already deep into time/energy/sleep deficit’ is the idea of a video series called Thucydides Explains It All, in which the incomparable wisdom of Thucydides would be applied to the analysis of contemporary issues – not just vacuous speculation about China, but things that actually matter to people. Case in point, which is why I thought of this again yesterday: the Rooney-Vardy bust-up. It was the rise of a new generation of WAGs, and the fear of media obsolescence this aroused in the established influencers, that made conflict inevitable… My wife suggested that I ought to buy a false beard and present these videos as Thucydides; I would much rather hire the brilliant animators who did the ‘Heavyweight Champion Historian’ video, so if anyone out there has lots of money and fancies sponsoring this project…

There would be a serious point to the enterprise: not in fact demonstrating the idea that Thucydides can explain everything, but highlighting the emptiness of most attempts at making him do that. Critical analysis by a range of experts hasn’t made the Thucydides Trap go away; maybe now we need recourse to pointing at it and laughing. It highlights admirably the problem with claims about ‘practical history’ and the deployment of analogies; it is laughably easy to represent situations and events in ways that make them resemble one another, and then claim, disingenuously, that you didn’t invent parallels but simply recognised them in reality. Bayern München and Red Bull Leipzig: Thucydides Trap. Snapchat and Instagram: Thucydides Trap. The entire history of hip hop: ever-repeating cycles of Thucydides Trap.

Now, I’m writing this at half past three in the morning, as the cats have decided to exact their revenge for my frequent absences over the last couple of weeks, leaving them alone with nothing but enormous piles of food, toys, one another and Radio 4 for company. Yes, maybe they’ve joined the legions annoyed beyond measure by the Today programme… So, yes, it’s possible that I am having dark thoughts about the pointlessness of my research into Thucydidean reception over the last few years; it’s all just a bit trivial really.

But actually I continue to find the construction of Thucydides as an authoritative figure fascinating (while emphasising that he’s not the only one; cf. this fascinating blog by Helen King on the way Hippocrates has become a medical guru for the internet age); illustrated, among other things, by the sheer pleasure I get from teaching my Thucydides course to final-year students again, and the fact that in Week 3 I’m already failing to keep up with the schedule because there’s so much to talk about. And I continue to believe that, read in a better way, Thucydides can help us think usefully about contemporary political issues, or I wouldn’t have signed up to write a book on the subject (though if the cats keep this sort of behaviour up, I am never going to be capable of writing more than a few disjointed paragraphs ever again).

There has to be a workable compromise position somewhere between preserving Thucydides as a complex, expensive-classical-education-only work to be name-dropped rather than explained, and rendering Thucydides down into a slogan that can be applied to more or less any situation without it actually illuminating anything. In the case of Rooney/Vardy, it’s a matter of going beyond the trite “conflict was inevitable” reading to explore the intersection of contingent personal relations and broader trends, including the changing media landscape that creates the conditions within which this conflict has played out – a quick sketch of changing tabloid behaviour, the rise of social media and the impact of money in Premier League football as the equivalent of the Archaeology in establishing key themes and an incipient socio-historical theory…

Do What You Must

I have sometimes reflected that my epitaph should probably be ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ – especially when, as seems all too likely, I perish from a surfeit of missed deadlines. What I’ve always thought of as a boundless intellectual curiosity, able to get excited by and imagine my own contribution to any number of different projects, could equally well be described as a butterfly mind or a puppy-like lack of discrimination, randomly chasing cars and shiny things. The net result is the same, an excessive ‘to do’ list and regular bursts of apology-writing when the time and energy just run out.

Which isn’t to say that the original ideas weren’t good – and the feeling of “Oh gods, what have I said I’ll do?” shouldn’t obscure the fact that – cue fanfare! – I’ve been awarded the money to do it. Yes, my past speculative comments about a collaborative project with theatrical people to explore the dramatic potential of the Melian Dialogue will be made reality, thanks to an AHRC follow-on funding award! Dates to be confirmed, but I am going to be working with the wonderful Rebecca Atkinson-Lord (former Bristol ancient history student, now director and performer) and her Arch 468 team to develop the Melian Dialogue as a dramatic piece in multiple stagings (I’m hoping for mime, among others), leading to a filmed performance and panel discussion in London, and then handing things over to ‘recovering theatre company’ fanSHEN, who will be developing it into an interactive experience, along the lines of their fascinating project The Justice Syndicate (highly recommended if you get the chance).

The title of this post, Do What You Must, is actually the title of this second part of the project, rather than just me moaning about being over-committed. Having been up at five after a night of the cats being bloody awful, part of me is simply trying not to think negative thoughts about how on earth I’m going to fit this in alongside everything else. But mostly I’m in a state of slightly dazed self-satisfaction, that what I thought was a good idea has persuaded other people – and growing excitement that, yes, this is really happening, and I’m going to get to spend a week seeing what creative people can make of Thucydides and then see how others respond to it. Watch this space for dates and details!

Wagner’s Nightmare

What do you do with, or about, the inconvenient bits of the past, the bits that simply don’t fit with the present and its values or that create an uncomfortable tension? At least for its first two acts, Barrie Kosky’s Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg seems to adopt Nietzsche’s idea of critical history, holding up the past as something to be judged and overcome, and indeed presenting the past in a way that demands judgement (at the expense, as Nietzsche notes, of anything that could claim to be the ‘real’, complex and ambiguous past). What Kosky holds up for judgement, however, is not the past of late medieval Nürnberg, whose citizens (insofar as they’re supposed to be real, rather than figments of the imagination) are presented on stage as cheerful, simple, well-meaning, semi-anarchic folk, but the past represented by Richard Wagner, and the antisemitic ideas that are taken to taint his work.

The opera opens in a nice reproduction of the Villa Wahnfried, the Wagner residence in Bayreuth, in 1873. Wagner comes in with a pair of dogs, looking like a caricature of Wagner; Cosima strikes dramatic languishing poses; Franz Liszt drinks tea; servants fuss round the place. A more awkward figure, identified as visiting conductor Hermann Levi, gets all the cues wrong during an impromptu service during the first chorale. Really? As Mark Berry has noted, in one of his as-ever-indispensable reviews, there’s no evidence in Cosima’s copious diaries for such an incident with Levi, although the specificity of the setting seems to imply documentary status; it seems unlikely both that the Wagner household would do such a thing and that an assimilated Jewish musician would not long since have learnt to navigate such a situation. But the incident establishes the character of Wagner as something of a bully, domestic autocrat and bigot – and offers a way of incorporating the choral music into the chosen setting.

Then the scene is gradually invaded by characters from Die Meistersinger. Berry suggests that Kosky implies the bullying of Levi was the inspiration for the opera, but the ostentatious display of the supposed date of this setting, some years after the actual date of its composition, surely rules that out. Rather, this must be either a domestic performance, or a dream (suggested by the fact that so many people emerge from the piano…), or some sort of time-slip (as the clock does some funny things at various points, and the very precision of the original setting is surely drawing attention to the backwards and forwards movement of time. Maybe the faint of resemblance of Wagner to Pertwee-era Doctor Who is no coincidence…). It starts to feel symptomatic that the production doesn’t bother to explain its conceit, or doesn’t really have an idea either.

At any rate, the room fills up with a crowd of medieval burghers, and the original household joins in: Liszt takes the role of Veit Pogner, offering his daughter Cosima to the winner of the singing competition; the handsome young visitor (tutor? I really didn’t work out who Walther was supposed to be at the beginning) is savagely criticised by Levi as the pedantic Beckmesser; and Wagner is Hans Sachs, largely holding back from the action – until suddenly, at the end of the act, he is spot-lit alone at the centre of the stage, behind an upturned table, as the Villa Wahnfried fades into the background and the four flags of the Allies appear behind him. Bayreuth 2019 has become Bayreuth 1873 has become Nürnberg 1499 has become Nürnberg 1945/6…

Wagner is Sachs; Sachs is Wagner. Well, yes – though surely you could say the same about Walther, and even Beckmesser cannot be wholly free from his creator’s spirit. (I have as a result been imagining a production with multiple Wagners, in which Old Wagner and Young Wagner discuss the creation of a perfect Lied, or free-creative-spirit Wagner goes head-to-head with dogmatic-laying-down-the-law Wagner – perhaps watched in horror by Actual Historical Wagner, as the contradictory elements of his psyche confront one another…). But for Kosky, Sachs-Wagner is the only parallel that counts, and only in his interactions with Beckmesser – the relationship with Eva is rendered completely irrelevant, which does at least skip round the question of whether Wagner is contending with his other selves for the hand of his own wife. If this were more clearly his dream or nightmare, that might work better…

Sachs-as-Wagner is motivated to humiliate Beckmesser-as-Levi not through romantic or artistic rivalry but through pure antisemitic hatred – it may not be obvious in the libretto or music, but Kosky reads everything through the antisemitic remarks in Wagner’s essays. Wagner-as-Sachs doesn’t merely make some antisemitic remarks in his essays, fairly conventional for the time but expressed with his typical overheated rhetoric, he places a vicious antisemitic caricature at the heart of his opera, as its whole point and message. It’s a neat little two-step: Sachs must be an antisemitic bully because Wagner is; Wagner must be, because that’s how we see Sachs behave.

There is something undeniably powerful about the idea of a Jewish director confronting and challenging Wagner by putting him on trial for his musical promotion of antisemitism – if you accept that this is actually a reasonable interpretation of Die Meistersinger. But that is very much up for debate. Kosky’s ‘argument’ (and I felt more and more as if I were assessing a bit of student work with some interesting ideas that were insufficiently developed or supported) rests largely on assertion – Wagner was antisemitic therefore his opera is antisemitic therefore the humiliation of Beckmesser is essentially a pogrom – coupled with some powerful images that seek to determine the audience’s response: Villa Wahnfried (so this is all about Wagner, and we’re shown him being casually antisemitic); Wagner on trial (which can only be for the antisemitism), and the mockery of Beckmesser culminates with him having Hasidic side-curls put onto his head beneath a giant inflatable Völkischer Beobachter caricature (showing what the scene was *really* all about).

Kosky doesn’t appear to have much interest in the bits in between these dramatic visual moments; he doesn’t develop his interpretation out of the music and drama, but simply imposes it on them, and nor does he offer an interesting new take on the opera through this lens. Act 2 barely has a setting – a pile of furniture from Wahnfried in the middle of the courtroom – and in retrospect simply seems to be marking time until he can release the giant inflatable. This does have the advantage of leaving the magnificent singers and musicians to get on with things, with only a limited amount of pointless messing about, but it’s deeply frustrating if you’re actually trying to engage with his claims. The idea that Wagner’s work is permeated by, if not indeed motivated by, antisemitism, is presented as indisputable fact, as if the audience know this without any case having to be made.

Again, there’s hypothetical potential here, for a Publikumsbeschimpfung (in Peter Handke’s phrase), confronting the audience with their love of the music despite their knowledge of the problematic views and associations of its creator. But Kosky doesn’t seem to be especially interested in this either; apart from his chosen moments of confrontation, he is content to let everyone enjoy the opera more or less straight without any uncomfortable feelings. Perhaps there is also a feeling of reassurance that he’s going to resolve everything at the end…

The one thing that can be said for the set-piece images in acts 1 and 2 is that their message is clear; crude, and highly arguable, but unmistakable. This isn’t the case in act 3. First, for the singing contest and Sachs’ call for a witness to prove he wasn’t responsible for writing the song Beckmesser has just murdered – a line that’s heavily emphasised, as it’s the best the libretto offers for justifying the whole ‘Wagner on trial’ thing – the Nürnberg courtroom is invaded by the medieval townsfolk, apart from a single military policeman. Are they standing in for the judges (people’s justice?), or overthrowing them and rejecting their right to judge the past? Is the suggestion that Wagner’s source material explains and justifies the alleged antisemitism? (There certainly doesn’t appear to be any attempt at the bigger and more intelligible project of contextualising Wagner’s opinions in broader European traditions). Or just mockery of the seriousness of proceedings, when actually it’s all just carnivalesque fun? Or maybe it’s just a striking image for the sake of it. Heaven knows.

And at the end, the courtroom disappears – no explicit judgement or punishment, so either the verdict was ‘not guilty’, or this closing scene is itself the verdict – and the chorus reappears as an orchestra which Sachs/Wagner enthusiastically conducts. So, the music justifies everything? (Presumably it’s what a fair number of fans would think, or hope). Or, Wagner just wanted to make music, not hurt anyone? The conclusion to an interpretation based entirely on ideas from the essays is that we can simply ignore those ideas if they spoil our enjoyment?

Nietzsche’s analysis of critical history focuses on the psychology of the critical historian: the feeling of being oppressed by the past, and hence the desperate need to free oneself from it. But he also notes the danger of a critical historian without need; transplanting such a practice into the wrong soil brings forth weeds. My sense of this production is that the problem of Wagner’s music, ideas, personality and reception does not in the end matter very much to Kosky; he is not oppressed by it, he has no desperate need (beyond the paycheck) to unpick its complexities and contradictions and reach judgement. He adopts the pose of the critical in order to titillate and shock, without any depth or coherence of thought, and so the production ends up being vacuous and annoying. Actually it reminded me of the sillier elements of punk, with its pseudo-intellectual justifications for wearing swastikas to shock people. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

But the music was magnificent…

In Praise of Famous Men

The Thucydides virus continues to spread through British political culture, and has inevitably made the jump from the naturally-susceptible Conservatives (cf. the statistics on the number of MPs with classical degrees) to the wider population. On Monday, Ian Blackford of the SNP came out with a bit of Pericles in the House of Commons: “Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it” – no, not the most exciting or original quote, but it’s normally the preserve of the E”R”G Sparts, not least because of its association with the Bomber Command Memorial, and a few years ago any sort of classical reference in the House of Commons would have been greeted with mockery. And yesterday Nick Clegg read a substantial portion of the same Funeral Oration as part of the memorial service for Paddy Ashdown in Westminster Abbey. I fear that my new paper for History & Policy on the use and abuse of Thucydides in political commentary has come too late to serve as any sort of vaccine…

The obvious reason for including Pericles in Ashdown’s commemoration is his own fondness for it; he included it as one of his choices for With Great Pleasure in 2015 (programme not currently available, but here’s the link for completeness’ sake) and it also appears in a blog post of his favourite quotations from 2016. Interestingly, he read it at the memorial service for the Lib Dem politician Lord Holme of Cheltenham back in 2008. Google hasn’t thrown up an older reference yet, but the jury’s out on whether that is where Ashdown first encountered the text, or whether it was actually his suggestion. It is notable that the version read by Clegg yesterday, an edited version of Rex Warner’s 1954 translation, is identical in every respect to the version from Paddy Ashdown’s Quote Book, except that Ashdown listed it as ‘Pericles’ Funeral Oration’ under ‘Thucydides’, whereas the order of service has it as ‘Funeral oration attributed to Pericles (c 495–29 BC)’ with no mention of Thucydides, simultaneously raising doubt as to whether these really are the words of Pericles and obscuring the identity of the alternative author. Odd.

Of course, it’s not just that Ashdown was fond of the piece; it is also, clearly, a suitable text for a memorial service, prompting listeners to associate Pericles’ praise of Athens with the political values of the man being commemorated: democracy, liberality and tolerance, generosity, public service. It’s entirely understandable also that the text should be edited, to reduce it to a manageable length for the purpose, and to remove the bits that are irrelevant (discussion of Athenian empire isn’t really to the point) or potentially disturbing (the whole ‘lovers of the city’ thing). As you’ll see below, I’ve added the missing text (in bold) to the version as delivered; the first paragraph is a decent example of how to extract a usable personal eulogy out of a historical document produced in a very different context.

However… De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that, but some of the other excisions are more puzzling, if not revealing; the crucial question, for which further research will be required, is whether this version is the only one that Ashdown knew (having perhaps first encountered it at Lord Holme’s funeral, prepared for the purpose by someone else) or whether he actually produced it himself from the full Warner text. In other words, whose political values are these? I don’t have time to go through the whole thing – as I said, it’s all here for anyone who fancies it – but a couple of things immediately struck me: the removal of all the references to poverty being no bar to serving the state, wealth as something to be properly used rather than boasted about, people staying out of politics regarded as having no business here rather than minding their own business, and the need for prudent thought before action.

Those who will never forgive the Lib Dems for their participation in the coalition government may at this point start muttering about the neoliberal reading of Pericles, with all that social justice and equality stuff removed; and certainly, in the unlikely event of a Labour grandee following through on the ‘for the many not the few’ stuff and choosing to have a bit of Thucydides at their funeral, many of the bits edited out here are precisely those that you’d want to emphasise. But even if you buy that, some of these choices just seem odd; why would a man whose career was devoted to public service, first in the army and then in politics, not want to have a dig at those who just carp from the sidelines? It does incline me to think that this bowdlerisation may not be the work of Ashdown himself…

But given that Thucydides/Pericles is now being quoted with equal fervour by those who want to defend parliamentary sovereignty and those who want to defend parliamentary sovereignty in the abstract so long as parliament doesn’t try to do anything they don’t like, this is perhaps one more bit of evidence for the endless malleability of the work.

***

Pericles’ Funeral Oration (extracts), as read at Lord Ashdown’s memorial service (see https://www.westminster-abbey.org/media/12649/paddy-ashdown-service.pdf):

I have no wish to make a long speech on subjects familiar to you all so I shall say nothing about the warlike deeds by which we acquired our power or the battles in which we or our fathers gallantly resisted our enemies, Greek or foreign. What I want to do is, in the first place, to discuss the spirit in which we faced our trials and also our constitution and the way of life which has made us great. After that I shall speak in praise of the dead, believing that this kind of speech is not inappropriate to the present occasion, and that this whole assembly, of citizens and foreigners, may listen to it with advantage.

Let me say that our system of Government does not copy the institutions of our neighbours. It is more the case of our being a model to others, than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy, because power is in the hands, not of a minority, but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability that a man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbour if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings.  We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs, we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect. We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.

Omits two entire sections, 2.38-9, which continue the theme of the exemplary private lives of the Athenians followed by a eulogy to their open society, and argues that their full strength has never yet been tested.

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.

Omits a substantial amount from this section, including: We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it. Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics – this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all… We do not think there is an incompatibility between words and deeds; the worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated… Others are brave out of ignorance; and, when they stop to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.

Again, in questions of general good feeling there is a great contrast between us and most other people. We make friends by doing good to others, not by receiving good from them. This makes our friendship all the more reliable, since we want to keep alive the gratitude of those who are in our debt by showing continued goodwill to them; whereas the feelings of one who owes us something lack the same enthusiasm, since he knows that, when he repays our kindness, it will be more like paying back a debt than giving something spontaneously. We are unique in this. When we do kindnesses to others, we do not do them out of any calculation of profit or loss; we do them without afterthought, relying on our free liberality. Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece, and I declare that in my opinion, each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.

Stops here, in the middle of 2.41.

Funeral oration attributed to Pericles (c 495–29 BC). Rex Warner’s version

You Don’t Own Me…

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Aarhus, enjoying some fabulous (though eye-wateringly expensive) beer and giving a lecture to students on ‘Who Owns Classics?’ The answer to that is of course some combination of ‘everyone’ and ‘no one’; the following forty-three minutes was taken up with the exploration of why nevertheless some people feel they have a special claim on classical culture and others may feel excluded or even unworthy (heroically avoiding any mention of one B. Johnson as the epitome of an entitled, proprietorial attitude towards antiquity – until someone else raised it in the questions afterwards).

Right at the beginning, I did touch on the issue of people owning specific fragments of classical antiquity – pots, coins, papyri etc – and the issues that this can raise, feeling quite frustrated that I’d encountered the perfect example just ten minutes earlier, too late to properly incorporate it into the lecture (since I was desperately trying to stick to time for a change – and managed it!). Vinnie Nørskov has produced a display for the university’s Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology of black market antiquities: not just the objects themselves (originally confiscated by the Italian police), but the modern packaging in which they were found, and the reconstruction of the history of their discovery and sale (insofar as this is possible).

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Perhaps this isn’t a completely original idea – I don’t go to enough museums or follow the literature closely enough to know – but it’s enormously effective in emphasising the importance of context: the actual context in which the objects were found, their implication in networks of clandestine excavation and sale, the fetishisation that makes this profitable – and the original context that has been lost. It would be interesting to do something similar with the recent controversy about papyri – always with the question of how supposedly disinterested scholarship, focused on what we can learn from these remnants of the past rather than (mostly) obsessed with possessing them, nevertheless contributes to the enterprise, wittingly or not. Anyway, I just wanted to share a few photos…