As always, the BMJ turns frivolous for its Christmas issue. Greek scholars may enjoy an article examining classical Greek attitudes to sensible drinking, based on a fragment from Eubulus' Semele or Dionysus (the fragments seem not to be in the Perseus digital library)
Classically intoxicated: correlations between quantity of alcohol consumed and alcohol related problems in a classical Greek text
Christopher C H Cook, Helen Tarbet, David Ball
BMJ 2007;335:1302-1304, doi:10.1136/bmj.39420.333565.BE
Technorati Tags: drink
I heard Mary Beard speak about her new book the Roman Triumph at the London Review of Books Bookshop on Thursday, in conversation with Christopher Clark, an expert in Prussian nineteenth century history.
She was entertaining and erudite, as I expected, having first heard her on Radio 3 a few years ago talking about her book on the Colosseum.
Christopher started by describing how the book works in three ways, firstly as an account of how triumphs worked, secondly as a study of their contradictory meanings, and thirdly as an investigation of how scholars have understood triumphs since, and thereby what we can and cannot know about the past.
The triumph was, said Mary, a celebration of a significant military victory., The successful general would be conveyed, dressed as the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus, in a chariot through the streets of Rome. Before him went prisoners and the spoils of his campaign, behind the chariot followed his soldiers, signing ribald songs about him. Our best source for descriptions of triumphs is Ovid, but Ovid's mind may not have been entirely on the triumph itself, for he recommends them as a chance for seduction. The route was probably from the Campus Martius, past the Colosseum, through the Arch of Titus, ending at the Capitol.
Triumphs could be ambiguous: there was real danger that the general could be upstaged by the captives, which makes us wonder about the nature of victory. A modern equivalent, Mary suggested, might be the execution of Saddam Hussein. The choreographed nature of the triumph, akin to Bush's 'mission accomplished' television stunt, which in fact took place off the coast of California, though intended to appear as if the aircraft carrier was in the theatre of war, could reach ridiculous lengths, as when Caligula is supposed to have taken Gaulish captives, dyed their hair blonde and taught them a Germanic language, in order that they might be taken for German prisoners.
What was the last triumph? Mary mentioned the triumph of Ras Tafari, later to become Haile Selaisse, as witnessed by Wilfred Thesinger and his father in 1916. It could be said have been in the reign of Constantine, though the tradition did continue in Byzantium. Then again, a renaissance author traced a direct line of triumphs from Romulus to Charles V. The triumph persisted in various forms. Napoleon paraded looted works of art through the streets of Paris, Hitler spent much of his time drawing triumphal arches. Mary reminded us of disagreement about the commemoration of the end of the Falklands/Malvinas war, between the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who had taught classics, and the Thatcher government, which wanted a jingoistic celebration of military success.
The origins of the triumph are obscure. Some tried to attribute the practice to the Etruscans, others to the god Dionysus returning form the Orient.
Someone asked, as I wished to, how triumphs were regulated and granted. Though Roman lawyers tried to lay down criteria, such as the general had to have killed at least 5,000, the Senate had to approve the triumph, and so on, in practice generals might well take a triumph if they thought they could get away with. On the related question of who paid, if the Senate did ratify the triumph, the public purse would then meet the costs. Someone else asked about the similarities with funeral processions, someone who was making a translation of the Aeneid wondered if Helen was going back to a triumph. It was a fascinating evening.
There's a podcast of an interview with Mary here: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/audio/BEAROT.mp3
Technorati Tags: marybeard, romantriumphs
'Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to
stumble through a play'.
Woolf, Virgina Jacob's Room London: Hogarth Press, 1945
It is a considerable achievement to mount a production of a classical Greek tragedy in the original language, and to sell every seat in the house; even more so if the cast, all amateurs, are not exclusively classicists; and, if some of the key roles are given to non-classicists, and if those non-classicists combine understanding of the words and the drama as did Medea, a neuro-scientist, Jason a medical student, and the messenger, an astrophysicist, in the Cambridge Greek Play, Euripides' Medea, which I saw at its Friday matinée performance, then it is something rare.
This was the fortieth Greek play, in a tradition that goes back to the 1880s, but only the second time Medea has been performed. In a long and distinguished history, all sorts of people have been involved: Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the music for the Wasps, Humphrey Jennings, an old boy of my school, designed the set, as once did Gwen Raverat, who, by one of those coincidences that fascinate me, I mentioned to my companion as I showed her round Cambridge before the play and we walked past the house where Period Piece was set.
Annie Casteldine, the director, set the play in 1912. Five years before that, in 1907, Gilbert Murray's translation, produced by Harley Granville-Barker at the Savoy Theatre in London, came just at the time that the struggle for women's suffrage was gathering momentum after the general election of the previous year. For the background, see Emily Hall's article below. So the chorus dress as suffragettes, and smoke cigarettes, Jason, Creon and Aegeus are dressed as naval officers, Creon in a bath-chair evokes Clifford Chatterley, and the nurse and paedagogue as a Edwardian nurse and governess; Medea's and the messenger's costumes are more classical.
Medea was splendid. She is on stage, or heard offstage, throughout the play. The chorus were fantastic, with impeccable diction. The language sounded beautiful, its musicality to my ear so much more emotional than the formal Latin of public oratory, the only time most of use hear either of the languages of the classical era spoken. I am no judge, but an international cast all spoke Greek that sounded far finer than my faltering Anglicized effort. Both my companion and I have been learning Greek for several years, though sporadically, and we would have been sunk without the sur-titles. We could follow well enough to know when the sur-titles compressed the text or when, at one point, they fell behind the actors progress through the lines.
The music, played by an on-stage trio of oboe, harp and percussion, sounded for the most part Greek, but occasionally music from the period of the production intruded, the chorus singing Parry's Jerusalem at one point, and at another something that I think must have been Dame Ethel Smyth's March of the Women. This incongruity caused a few giggles among the young audience.
I last saw a performance at the Arts in the early 1970s. I was disappointed the that the golden masks of tragedy and comedy which used to hang above the stage, and diverted the infant me during the dull passages of many a pantomime, were no longer there but there was no need for distractions, though the performance lasted nearly two hours without an interval.
I left resolved to see as much Greek drama in the original as I can, either in person, or in recordings,.
In the forty performances so far, Aeschylus scores six plays, Aristophanes and Euripides both have had eleven, but the winer with twelve is Sophocles. Clever statisticians among you can adjust these figures to allow for the variations in surviving plays by these dramatists. Top play, with five performances, is Aristophanes' The Birds, with Oedipus Tyrannus in second place and Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' The Bacchae in joint third place.
Hall, Edith Medea and British Legislation before the First World War Greece & Rome, Vol. 46, No. 1. (April 1999), pp. 42-77 (institutional subscription required for electronic version)
Image, a frontispiece from CESAR, the Calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution to an edition of Medée, the opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, with libretto by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of the more famous Pierre.
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