osprey_archer | Entries tagged with history: ancient

One of the quotes on the back cover of Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits compares the book to Mary Renault, and this is both accurate and wildly misleading.

It’s accurate in that Glorious Exploits is a book with a tragic sensibility set in an ancient Greece that is unabashedly alien to modern culture in many respects. This is a world where slavery exists and you can stick prisoners of war in a quarry for two years and that’s just the way life is.

It’s misleading in that Glorious Exploits is not particularly gay. It also stars two out-of-work potters who speak like modern-day Dubliners, and it’s hilarious, which with all due respect to Mary Renault is not a word I would apply to any of her work. In fact, I picked up the book because “production of Medea starring the Athenian prisoners in the quarries at Syracuse” sounded like a romp, which it is, although in retrospect it’s curious that the premise seemed so irresistibly funny given that the Athenian prisoners have been slowly starving for two years.

Anyway. Athenians in the quarry. Our hero Lampo’s best friend Gelon is mad for Euripides, so sometimes Lampo and Gelon go down to the quarry with olives, which they’ll give to any prisoners who can trade lines from Medea. One day, after local man Biton comes down to the quarry to kill some prisoners (which he does sometimes to avenge his son who was tortured to death by the Athenians during the invasion, you know how it is), Lampo and Gelon discover that one of the prisoners was an actor back in Athens who knows not only the whole of Medea but also Euripides’ new play The Trojan Women...

Well, says Gelon, for all we know Athens has been burned to the ground by Sparta by now. This may be our only chance to save Euripides latest and greatest work! And Lampo, pleased to see Gelon so excited about anything, because he’s been damn depressed since his son died and his wife left him (unrelated to the invasion, sometimes life is just tough), goes along with this mad scheme, which gets madder and madder as they find a producer (a British merchant who keeps a god in a tub on his boat? Might be magical himself?), and hire a costume designer, and rehearse their cast, and also Lampo has fallen for the slave girl at the local bar, as you do…

And it looks like they’re actually going to do this thing!

( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The first time I attempted Jane McIntosh Snyder’s Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho, I got quite cross at the book for not being the book that I wanted it to be: that is to say, a book about what we can learn about society in sixth-century Lesbos based on Sappho’s poetry, and about the ancient classical world in general based on the fact that Sappho was called the tenth muse and her poems remained so popular that they were quoted in books in rhetoric centuries after her death, which is how we come to have as many snippets of her work as we do.

Unfortunately for me, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho has no interest in being that book. It’s a close reading of Sappho’s works to investigate how she articulates lesbian desire, and also an argument with Ye Commentators of Olde who insisted on reading all of Sappho’s love poems to women as bridal songs, because it’s the done thing to get up at a wedding and sing “The bride is so hot that my knees are shaking and I can’t even speak.” (I mean, maybe it was the done thing on ancient Lesbos! This is where some context would be useful.)

My first introduction to Sappho’s work, so I’m glad the poems were quoted so copiously. And it’s an interesting work on its own terms. But those were not the terms I was hoping for.

After a hiatus, I’ve returned to the 1930s Newberys with Nora Burglon’s Children of the Soil: A Story of Scandinavia, a delightful story about everyday life for a couple of crofter’s children in northern Sweden in the 19th century. This is one of those books that derives most of its interest from the description of everyday life in a certain time and place, which is the sort of thing that I love. (I wonder if one could write a fantasy novel of this type. That would be cozy fantasy, right?)

What I’m Reading Now

In Vanity Fair, Amelia Sedley was PINING AWAY because she was forbidden to marry her beloved George Osbourne. But when Osbourne’s friend Captain Dobbin went to visit Amelia (who of course Captain Dobbin secretly adores) and found her on the POINT OF DEATH because of her THWARTED LOVE, he convinced Osbourne to marry Amelia in the teeth of paternal opposition. (The pater wanted Osbourne to marry a mixed-race West Indian heiress of immense wealth.)

What I Plan to Read Next

At long last, I’m going to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

On January 2nd, National Theater at Home dropped a new version of Coriolanus starring David Oyelowo, and I decided to give it a go. I’ve never read or watched Coriolanus before, and had only the vaguest idea what it was about: “Sounds like it’s set in ancient Rome? Probably?” So I was worried I might have trouble following it, as I often do with Shakespeare’s English history plays, but I think the English history plays assume a deep familiarity with the Wars of the Roses that Shakespeare’s original audience undoubtedly had and I do not, whereas I probably know as much about ancient Rome as ye average London audience of 1592.

As our story begins, Caius Marcius is an amazing Roman soldier, so amazing in fact that he’s just been granted the name Coriolanus in honor of a recent victory over the Volsci. His friends are clamoring for him to to stand for the consulship.

The problem: Coriolanus is notoriously proud, and even more notoriously loathes the plebeians. To become consul, he must secure the plebeian vote. This involves standing in the market and showing off his battle scars to all comers. With ill grace, he agrees to stand in the marketplace and ask for votes. But he doesn’t show his scars, asks for votes through gritted teeth, and generally gives the impression of considering the whole thing beneath him.

The plebeians give him their vote with reluctance, and afterward grumble that he wasn’t respectful. The tribunes whip up their grievances till the plebeians are ready not only to rescind their vote, but drag Coriolanus out of his house and kill him. (Apparently “the lower orders would be FINE if it weren’t for OUTSIDE AGITATORS” is a tale as old as time.)

The tribunes manage to pull things back to the point that Coriolanus is put on trial instead of murdered out of hand. Coriolanus’s friends beg him to speak gently. Coriolanus accedes with bad grace, barely tries to leash his temper, and after about two questions launches a tirade about how much he hates the common people and their stinking breath and they shouldn’t even have a vote to begin with. As a result, Coriolanus is exiled from Rome.

Intermission!

Part two: The Wrath of Coriolanus. He’s big mad. He’s SO mad that he goes directly to Rome’s enemy the Volsci and offers his services to his hitherto-enemy Aufidius. Let’s conquer Rome! Aufidius cheers that this union with his erstwhile enemy is even better than his marriage day, and the Volsci set out on the warpath.

However, at the gates of Rome, they are met by a series of delegations. First one of Coriolanus’s fellow generals, then his friend Menenius, and last of all his mother Volumnia

Volumnia also brings Coriolanus’s wife and son and some women from Roman, but Volumnia herself is the powerhouse of this scene, and indeed possibly the whole show, dominating even Coriolanus, who became a great soldier at least in part because of her uncompromising demand for soldierly valor. (There’s a scene where she coos dotingly over her grandson’s latest game: capturing butterflies and tearing their wings off.)

The actress is Pamela Nomvete, who is fantastic in all her scenes, but particularly in this one, where she sympathizes with his anger (how DARE the plebes treat her baby boy that way), chides him to display more love of country (leading an army against ROME, though?), and at last kneels down and begs him to spare Rome in a ringing voice that breaks his resolve. We’ve got enough plunder, he tells the Volscians. Let’s go home.

At this point he has such authority in the Volscian army that they do, indeed, spare Rome. But Aufidius is pissed. Coriolanus has stolen his army right out from under him and denied him the sack of Rome while he’s at it! So once they’re back in the Volscian city of Antium, Aufidius charges Coriolanus with treason, reminds his fellow Volscians how many of their fathers and brothers and sons Coriolanus killed before he betrayed Rome, and steps back to watch as the citizens stab Coriolanus to death a la Julius Caesar.

But unlike Caesar, Coriolanus in his pride has built no powerbase, befriended no Marc Antony. His power dies with him.

***

A couple of notes: large parts of this production take place in what appears to be a museum of Roman antiquities. (In the first scene, the hungry plebeians start spray-painting on the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus.) I thought this was an interesting way to foreground the iconography of Rome in what was otherwise a modern-dress production, and because the iconography of Rome remains in many ways the basis of our iconography of state/imperial power, it draws attention to those themes in the production.

I personally felt that the plebeians were right to reject Coriolanus as consul: even if you don’t mind the whole “I hate plebeians and their stinking breath” thing, surely his subsequent actions show he’s not fit! Not sure Shakespeare is on my side on this one, though.

There is apparently a recent Hiddleston production of Coriolanus, which I know because every time I told someone I was watching Coriolanus, they asked, “The one with Tom Hiddleston?” I’d like to watch that one too in order to compare, but I think David Oyelowo was a great first Coriolanus.

My history with Antigone began lo these many years ago, when the fourth-grade class across the hall put on the play. Well, presumably a much foreshortened retelling of the story with the incest bits taken out, but otherwise it kept all the main ingredients: brother dead, King Creon decrees he will not be buried, sister Antigone buries him, King Creon argues with Antigone about duty to the state versus duty to the gods, Antigone kicks his ass in argument but he buries her alive, and then Antigone hangs herself and the king’s son who was Antigone’s fiance kills himself too and TOO LATE Creon realizes that he was WRONG.

For some reason people always think Antigone is a strange choice for a fourth grade class play, but my little fourth grade self was electrified. Defying the state for a higher morality! Speaking truth to power even at the cost of one’s own life! Burying her brother because love and duty are more powerful than fear… Strong meat for babes, but only on such meat do babes go strong.

From that day to this I’ve neither read nor watched the play, but I never forgot the story either, so of course when I saw that it was on National Theater I had to watch it. The clothes and furniture gesture at the 1940s – a good decade for a story about the conflict between state authority and a higher morality.

We set our scene in Thebes, where people are afraid to speak openly, where Antigone must meet her sister Ismene beyond the city gates to tell her that she means to bury their brother Polycleites, who died in a traitorous attack on Thebes. For this, Creon has decreed Polycleites will lie unburied for the dogs to eat, and anyone who buries him will be stoned to death.

Ismene is too frightened to help, but Antigone goes through with her plan regardless. She is duly arrested, and brought before the king (who is, incidentally, her uncle), who also has Ismene arrested, at which point the sisters argue about whether or not Ismene should die too. Ismene is on team “let me die with you” and Antigone is on team “you refused to help bury Polycleites so you don’t DESERVE to die, in both senses of the word deserve!”

“These women are neurotic,” King Creon declares, which got a big laugh from the audience. (Side note, but one benefit of watching with an audience – either in a cinema/theater or in a filmed play – is that the rest of the audience will pick up on funny bits I miss on my own. I first watched Winter’s Bone on my own and loved it so much I watched it again when it was shown in the college cinema and was astonished that people found parts of it funny.)

King Creon decides to let Ismene go, but remains inflexible on his original decree: Antigone buried Polycleites, so Antigone must die. Antigone tells him that she obeyed the law of the gods, which is higher and more ancient than his laws. Creon tries to convince her of the necessity of obeying the state at all times, especially for women for whom obedience is so important.

This is the first National Theater play I’ve seen where all the usually male parts are in fact played by men, which may simply reflect a change in their practice between 2012 (when this play was put on) and today. But it’s the right choice here, given the fact that Antigone, in Creon’s view, has sinned doubly, as a subject of the Theban king but also as a woman. It matters that the face of power is male, that all but one of Creon’s counselors/office workers are male – that the male counselors/office workers are the chorus, while the one woman does not speak.

(I would love to know how much of this focus on gender in Antigone is in Sophocles and how much is drawn out by Don Taylor, the translator of this version.)

I must confess that this version did not rock my world like the fourth grade class play, simply because you can only see a Greek tragedy for the first time once. Further viewing just can’t kick you in the gut the same way. But this is an excellent version nonetheless. Highly recommended if you need more Greek tragedy in your life.

I’m afraid you’re going to get a prologue about My History with this Play about every single National Theater play that I review. Sorry, but not sorry enough to restrain myself!

With Medea this history is at least fairly short: two years ago in Zoom theater, we did the translation by Michael Collier & Georgia Machemer, and it knocked my socks off to such an extent that ever since I’ve been seeking out not only Medeas but also any and all Greek tragedies. I saw Oedipus at the Indiana Repertory theater! I’ve faithfully voted for Greek tragedies in every Zoom theater poll, and we did indeed do Bakkhai! (More commonly spelled Bacchae, and I was sorry to see this one isn’t on National Theater, because I’d love a chance to see it. National Theater does have Antigone though, which I haven’t seen since the fourth grade class across the hall put it on, which knocked my socks off too come to think of it…)

Most of all, however, I’ve been seeking out Medeas. Pasolini’s film version also blew my tiny mind, in a different way than the play - it retells not just the play but the whole Medea story, starring Maria Callas the famous opera singer, who does not sing here but remains a mesmerizing presence throughout with her large dark always-watchful eyes.

It’s also a movie with a thesis statement, not merely telling a story but making an argument, which I intended to post about at more length back when I saw the movie… and then did not, and now I can’t remember the details, a meditation on the place of myth in human life, the eruption of violence from beneath the veneer of rationality, the culture clash of Medea the high priestess from a land where the king in his death time is sacrificed to bring fertility to the fields with her new home in ancient Corinth.

I also saw a college performance of Medea last spring, about which one might kindly say that the actors were giving it their all. And it had some interesting staging: when Euripides has something recounted secondhand because it happened off-stage, or before the play began, etc., the actors enacted it behind a screen so you saw it in shadow as the story was recounted. Very effective, especially for the bit where Medea kills her children.

And at last we come to the National Theater Medea, starring Helen McCrory as a powerhouse Medea: ranting, furious with Jason for leaving her for the princess of Corinth, possibly just a little bit unhinged. But she’s still hinged enough to play nice when King Creon comes to tell her that she has been exiled. “Why?” she demands, and the king tells her, “Because I fear you.”

Everyone in this play fears Medea, but no one fears her enough. When Medea begs on her knees for one more night in Corinth, the king grants her request. Then he leaves, and she stands up with a glitter in his eyes: this will give her enough time to enact her revenge

You can sort of understand it for King Creon’s impulse toward mercy here, as he’s never seen her in action, but Medea’s ex-husband Jason who saw Medea cut her own brother into pieces surely ought to know better. Clearly, however, he does not. He’s all, Babe, I abandoned you to marry the hot young princess… but listen, I did it for US! Because this will make our sons the relatives of royalty, thus ensuring their advancement in life!

(Awkwardly, at this point these sons have been banished with Medea, which means they may well starve to death by the roadside, but no matter.)

And when Medea pretends that she’s finally seen the wisdom of his plan, the chump actually falls for it. He lets their sons deliver a wedding present right to his new bride. It’s a beautiful robe, imbued with poison, which burns up the girl and then her father the king when he embraces his dead only child.

I didn’t like the translation by Ben Power as much as the Collier & Machemer we used in Zoom theater - it didn’t seem as graceful to me, and there are times when it seemed too modernized (like the bit where Medea laments that women give up their “agency” to their husbands). And as usual when a production is set in modern times, I felt that it would have been more interesting in its original setting, really engaging with the alienness of that setting as Pasolini’s production did.

(I think modern adaptations are often an attempt to highlight what is universal in a story, but unless you go full Clueless, often they end up drawing attention to the parts that are in fact historically specific. Surely in modern times, someone from Medea’s homeland would be trying to get her extradited to be tried for stealing the Golden Fleece and murdering her brother, for instance.)

And I’m not entirely sure where I stand on the chorus, all dressed up in flowered dresses like the world’s creepiest 1950s housewives, dancing in a manner that suggests someone gave them the stage direction “Dance like a broken automaton who keeps getting subjected to electric shocks.” On the one hand, it’s very effectively creepy! On the other hand, they felt pitying rather than sympathetic to Medea’s plight, which may be a reflection of the translation as much as anything else, but I think it weakens the play.

All that said - what amazing performances all around! The children were excellent: they don’t speak, but they spend a lot of time on stage, and you begin to hope against hope that they won’t meet their inevitable deaths. (They do, of course, as always happens in tragedies.) King Creon brought an excellent gravitas to his role, sternness mixed with that kingly magnanimity that proves his undoing. I preferred our Zoom theater Jason (a smarmy slimeball), but one suspects that Jason would see himself in this production’s Jason, who seems to genuinely believe his protestations that ditching Medea was all part of a wise and noble plan to advance the whole family!

And Medea of course is the standout, heartbroken, furious, the epitome of “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” acting sweet and docile if it will get her what she wants but boiling with rage underneath - yet still with a genuine softness toward her children, which makes it all the more terrifying when she works herself up to the point of killing them. The impact is all the more painful because she does love them and it does not stop her.

And then she carries children off in sleeping bags (presumably so she could carry weighted sleeping bags rather than the actual children). The entire final scene, her whole last confrontation with Jason, she’s got these sleeping bags, she hauls them in along the ground and then hoists them up on her shoulders, and they’re heavy, and at last she’s alone onstage and turns her back on us and staggers off on the road to Athens, bent under the weight of the dead children slung across her shoulders…

It’s so effective that I can’t even complain about the fact that ONCE AGAIN Medea doesn’t get her big exit in a chariot pulled by dragons. I’ve never seen a production go full dragon chariot. PLEASE, I’m dying here, if the ancient Greeks could rig up a chariot pulled by dragons for Euripides, then surely a modern theatrical company could manage it!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If you want an entertaining and fast-paced read about the life of Alexander the Great, I would 100% recommend Mary Renault’s The Nature of Alexander. If, however, you want a fair and balanced view of the man, well, listen, Alexander is Mary Renault’s best beloved blorbo (she is probably rising from her grave in wrath over this word choice, but if the shoe fits!), and all the chroniclers who say mean things about him are wrong and biased and probably using him as a vehicle to complain about later Roman tyrants without rousing the ire of the emperors. So THERE.

A fantastic read, but probably worth triangulating with a couple of other biographies if you want to have a clearer view of Alexander.

I also finished Daphne Du Maurier’s The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. The subtitle makes it sound like these stories were dug out of a box in someone’s attic, but in fact they were all previously published, most of them earlier in Du Maurier’s career, so not “lost” so much as “no longer readily available.” The quality is variable, but the good stories are excellent. I quite liked the title story (the first appearance of a hauntingly unavailable woman named Rebecca, although clearly quite a different Rebecca than the Rebecca of the novel) and the two stories about a streetwalker named Maizie.

And I read Agnes Danforth Hewes’ Glory of the Seas. I must confess I groaned when I saw that Hewes had won three Newbery Honors, as I found the first one (Spice and the Devil’s Cave) a real slog, but Glory of the Seas was quite readable even though our hero John did spend a lot of the book carrying the idiot ball. His intensely abolitionist uncle, who resigns the bench rather than enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, keeps sneaking out at night and having meetings at odd hours with his friend Garrison (publisher of The Liberator). Could he possibly be involved in the Underground Railroad!

Okay I realize that this is perhaps far more obvious to me, the reader of a work of historical fiction, than it would be for a person at the time to realize that his uncle the judge is in fact flagrantly breaking the law… but still I think John should at least perhaps suspect it a LITTLE.

(Having said this, I also spent most of the book convinced that John’s friend Benny Paradiso the merry brown-faced Italian boy was in fact a runaway slave pretending to be an Italian, and it turned out that no, he’s just exactly what he says he is. So clearly I can be misled by genre expectations just as well as John can be misled by expectations about behavior expected from his uncle the judge!)

What I’m Reading Now

In Jane Eyre, the awful truth has been revealed. Rochester already has a wife! In his attic! Because she is mad!!!! Rochester tries to convince Jane that Bertha doesn’t count as his wife, so if he and Jane lived together as husband and wife they would be married in SPIRIT. He also reveals to her that he has lived with at least three mistresses over the past decade or so and remembers them all now with horror. Jane, who wasn’t born yesterday, concludes that he would eventually look on her with horror as well, and heads out into the wide world with nothing but twenty shillings in her pocket, preferring to die on the moors rather than live to be loathed by her beloved.

I think that even if Jane did yield to Rochester’s entreaties to live as his mistress, it’s even money whether she or Rochester would grow tired of the arrangement first. I think Rochester would in time grow tired of a Jane who had lost her self-respect (as Jane would do, if she yielded from passion rather than genuine conviction of principle), but perhaps not as fast as Jane would tire of living without self-respect. Then off she’d go, just in the south of France rather than the moors of Yorkshire.

What I Plan to Read Next

Halloween reading! I’ve got a nice set of ghost stories this year. First on my list is Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Ghosts Go Haunting, and then I’m hoping for D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door.

An unusual bulletin of What I’ve Given Up Reading: I stalled out on Rumer Godden’s childhood memoir A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep a couple months ago, and have at last admitted to myself that I have no desire to finish it. I usually love childhood memoirs! But Godden seems to be going through her childhood and recollecting which incidents later gave rise to books, and it’s like she already got the pith out of them in making up the stories and there’s just not a lot left.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Château Saint Barnabé, a short memoir about a month that Brink’s family spent at a dilapidated chateau-turned-boarding-house outside Marseilles in the 1920s. The book is structured around the tale of an American woman they met there, who had married a French sea captain forty years before and remained in Marseilles even after his death, though she longed to return to America – and yet when Brink offers to help her return to America, she refuses. “I am afraid…” she says; “afraid it might not be in America as I had dreamed it. I would rather keep the dream.”

Full of interesting details about daily life, and also interesting in that it confirms Family Sabbatical is indeed drawing on actual sabbaticals the Brink family spent in France. In fact, IIRC the novels includes a similar story about a woman who wants to return to America, I believe with a happier ending, although my memory is not too clear on this point.

Also Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, which alas cannot quite live up to its fabulous title, which seems to promise that here we are going to examine the works of Roman women writers. We no longer have enough of their works to support a whole book, it seems. But the book is strongest when we do examine women’s own words: an early Christian martyr’s jail diary, a sequence of four poems carved on an Egyptian statue by a court poetess during Hadrian’s reign (one of them, endearingly, is about how beautiful Hadrian’s wife is, presumably to cheer her up while he’s weeping about the recently deceased Antinous), and—this is my favorite—some letters written by the wife of one military commander in Britain to the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, including an invitation to an upcoming birthday party. It’s so incredibly Mrs. Tim of the Regiment! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Another Newbery Honor winner! Jeanette Eaton’s A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland. Embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Madame Roland was until I read this book.

And I finished Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Lady of the Linden Tree. All in all an undistinguished collection of original fairy tales, but all the same I’m glad I gave it a try.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, and Other Stories, which begins with “The Birds” (still one of the scariest stories in existence; imagine if the birds ever did decide they wanted to kill all humans), and continues with “Monte Verità,” which is best enjoyed unspoiled but concerns an unearthly mountain. You will be unsurprised to learn that Du Maurier is just as good at suspense in short stories as in novel form.

What I Plan to Read Next

My favorite Purdue library is closing for renovation over the summer! I have a bad feeling they are going to purge the children’s section, so I’ve checked out the books on my list: a couple of Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collections of Scottish ghost stories, two books by Susan Fletcher of Dragon’s Milk fame, Susan Cooper’s Victory, and a children’s history of Thermopylae by Mary Renault.

As with Mary Stolz, so with Rosemary Sutcliff: another prolific mid-twentieth-century writer whose books are now unevenly available in public libraries. Of course I had to raid the Indianapolis Public Library for her works, too.

I started with Beowulf, which is - wait for it - a retelling of Beowulf. It’s a straight-up retelling, without twists, simply an attempt to render the story into modern prose. And what beautiful prose it is - like this passage about a man, the last of his once-mighty kin, hiding away in a sea cave the treasures that they gathered in happier days.

And there, little by little, he carried all his treasures and hid them within sounding of the sea, and made a death-song over them as over slain warriors, lamenting for the thanes who would drink from the golden cups and wield the mighty swords no more, for the hearths grown cold and the harps fallen silent and the halls abandoned to the foxes and the ravens.

Then I continued with more retellings! Black Ships Before Troy is a retelling not just of the Iliad, but of a number of stories around the Iliad, including the tale (which I had never heard before) that before the war, Achilles’ mother tried to keep him away from the fighting by disguising him as one of the daughters of King Lycomedes.

I had also never before heard the tale about how Paris died before the end of the Trojan War, and the Trojans STILL didn’t give Helen back to the Greeks. You guys! You guys! WHY. Why not at least TRY to give her back and end the whole thing? It’s inexplicable enough when Paris is still alive to say “But Daddy I love her!”, but once he’s dead you’d think SURELY… But no. Every time I read any version of this story I hope against hope that maybe THIS TIME someone will send Helen right back to Menelaus and avert the whole damn tragedy, but they never do.

Then onward with The Wanderings of Odysseus! This is a pretty straight-up retelling of the Odyssey, so no surprises like cross-dressing Achilles (fascinated that Achilles went along with his mother’s plan on that, to be honest), but a good solid retelling if you feel the need for a bit more Odyssey in your life, as who among us does not at times? (This reminds me that I still haven’t gotten around to Emily Wilson’s Odyssey.) Sutcliff leaves out the bit where Odysseus hangs the twelve maids.

Moving on from retellings, at long last I’ve read Warrior Scarlet. I really enjoyed the Bronze Age setting and Drem’s blood brotherhood with Vortrix (“My brother - oh, my brother - we have hunted the same trails and eaten from the same bowl and slept in the same bed when the hunting was over. How shall I go on or you turn back alone?”), but damn, this book also has one of Sutcliff’s least convincing heterosexual romances.

After an entire book of near-total indifference to Blai, his foster-sister, who is obviously secretly in love with Drem, “Suddenly he was aware of her as he had been only once before, but more strongly and clearly now, out of a new compassion… For a moment it was only compassion, and then quite suddenly and simply he understood that he and Blai belonged together, like to like.”

This is such a Mary Renault move, this movement from compassion to “we belong together,” and here is in Mary Renault it’s the beloved realizing the strength of the lover’s feelings and basically acquiescing to this state of affairs: you adore me, and I love you I guess. I’m not mad keen on this dynamic ever, and I like it even less when the lover is the woman in a heterosexual romance: she’s already so disadvantaged by society, she ought at least to have the advantage of a husband who adores her rather than one who allows himself to be adored.

AND FINALLY we have Heroes and History, a collection of short biographies of heroes in British history, including King Arthur and Robin Hood, notwithstanding that the historical evidence that these two heroes ever existed is a bit rickety. Sutcliff argues that Arthur shows up in enough chronicles to have some basis in historical fact (even if the legends that have accreted around him are largely embroidery), whereas Robin Hood seems far more doubtful… “But in any case, no Book of British Heroes could possibly be complete without Robin Hood.”

This is so delightfully characteristic of an older way of doing history - shades of James Ford Rhodes, who kicked off his 1899 inaugural address to the newly founded American Historical Association by saying, “let us at once agree that it were better that all the histories ever written were burned than for the world to lose Homer and Shakespeare,” then follows with an impassioned paean to Shakespeare-as-historian. Yes, Shakespeare absolutely made up the speeches, but like Thucydides, he captures “the essential—not the literal—truth” of the times!

I first read this speech in my history-of-history class in grad school. Later on, when we got to the postmodernists grumping away about the shackles of attempting “objectivity” in history, I wondered if they realized that they were merely retreading the paths set down by James Ford Rhodes, only tiptoeing timidly where he strode brashly forth. Objectivity shmobjectivity! Burn all the histories and keep your Shakespeare!

Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up starts out with about four chapters that might be summarized as “Can we really know anything about laughter in ancient Rome?”, and, like, okay, The Ultimate Unknowability of the Past and all that - indeed, the ultimate unknowability of the present! As Beard comments, it can be hard to tell the difference between witty repartee and vicious personal invective even in one’s own culture. Do these two MPs hate each other’s guts, or are they going to be laughing over drinks at the Commons Bar in an hour? Truly who can say.

But also we are sitting here holding a whole entire book about Laughter in Ancient Rome, so can we just get on with it?

Then the book does get on with it, and the chapters about Roman wit and political repartee are fascinating. I was delighted to learn that Cicero had a reputation as the funniest man in Rome, an orator so addicted to getting a laugh that his enemies complained he was little better than a clown. Beard notes that modern commentators often portray Cicero as viciously attacking a fellow politician named Vatinius, but in some of the sources, it seems like Cicero and Vatinius had a Gladstone-and-Disraeli kind of repartee going on.

In the final chapter, Beard tosses caution to the wind and advances a bold thesis: did ancient Romans invent the templates that still shape many modern jokes? She carefully notes that she doesn’t mean ancient Romans invented joking, but rather, the scripted joke as what you might call a genre: we have ancient Roman joke books, and they’re chock full of “man from Abdera” jokes (in which a man from Abdera misunderstands something in an Amelia-Bedelia-ish way; the city has changed, but the punchline hasn’t) and even an early version of “three men walk into a bar” jokes.

I found this fascinating, and I’d love to see some sort of cross-cultural comparison study of the thesis. Did Romans invent Amelia Bedelia jokes, or do they show up independently in lots of different cultures?

This is, as Beard intended, a book that raises as many questions as it answers: good material for thinking with. You’ll be disappointed if you were hoping for much information about tickling, though. Although the subtitle seems to promise plenty of tickling tidbits, we learn that the Romans thought the lips were a particularly ticklish part of the body, and little more.

Ancient Rome is one of my forever-interests, which often lies fallow for ages until a new book catches my eye. Thus, Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which focuses on the first thousand years of Rome’s history, started with the mythological founding by Romulus and Remus (and the alternative mythological founder Aeneas), up through the reign of Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus.

It’s very interesting! Beard argues that, despite the traditional historiographic focus on the individual character of each emperor, in fact the emperor’s personality didn’t much matter for most residents of the Roman empire. For Ye Average Farmer out in Gaul, life may be disrupted if there’s a power struggle in between emperors (particularly if the legions get involved), but who is actually in charge is mostly a matter of a new statue in the market town and a new head on the coins.

This is not true of 20th century tyrants - it matters a lot whether Stalin or Khrushchev is in charge! - so I’m still chewing this over. Beard argues that the reason ancient Romans tend to focus on the emperor’s character is that the chroniclers tend to come from the very highest echelon of Roman society, where the emperor might be inviting you to dinner and/or putting your name on a hit list, in which case it very much does matter whether he’s a capricious bully. She recounts the story of one emperor who puckishly invited his guest to a dinner where all the food was black, served by black-robed attendants, and each place marked with a tombstone carved with the guest’s name…

The guests all went home quivering in terror. But the next morning, they received a nice present from the emperor: their tombstone from the dinner, plus the slave attendant who had served them the night before! Happy end, sort of. You can see why you’d be praying every day for that emperor to hurry up and kick it.

(Side note, people keep attempting to recruit me for DnD games, and I have a nascent character idea for a Petty Tyrant Deposed by Underlings Who Just Can’t Take One More Themed Dinner Party.)

The book is mostly focused on Roman high politics, but there is one chapter about the daily life of common people, which is full of fascinating tidbits. For instance, it was common for trades to have a sort of proto-guild that acted as a social club and rudimentary insurance company (if you die, your trade association will make sure you’re buried); these associations usually had both free and slave members, when at least one guild had the regulation that upon manumission, a newly-freed slave had to provide the guild with a cask of wine. Beard suggests this is for the “Yay! You’re free now!” party, which certainly sounds nice.

Also, Beard spends some time discussing gravestones, including “One peculiarly loquacious stone [that] commemorates a woman with white skin, lovely eyes and small nipples who was the center of a menage a trois that split up after her death.”

I mean, that’s a Rosemary Sutcliff novel right there.

I liked SPQR so much that I’ve decided to read more Mary Beard.

sovay suggested Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, a slender volume which is not so much a biography of Jane Harrison (controversial Cambridge classicist, who left Cambridge in 1922 to live in Paris with the much younger Hope Mirlees) as an extended meditation about the nature of biography and the inevitability with which whole swathes of a life get left out.

In particular, Beard considers Harrison’s friendship (perhaps romance?) in the 1880s with Eugenie Sellers (later Strong), who later became an eminent classicist in Rome. In 1891 relations between the two women broke down completely, for reasons that are no longer recoverable, in part because Mirlees made no attempt to recover it when some of the principle actors (notably Sellers herself) were still alive.

After Harrison’s death, Mirlees appointed herself keeper of Harrison’s memory. She spent the fifty years after Harrison’s death intending to write a biography, which she never wrote, although she gathered an enormous amount of material for it. Beard suggests that this material is shaped around Mirlees’ preferred story of Harrison’s life: a series of disastrous involvements with men, ending in a few years of sapphic bliss with Mirlees. Sellers, a female rival, muddies the waters, and so she has to go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Anne Lindbergh’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare, which I’m almost certain I somehow confused with Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, because a children’s portal fantasy is definitely the kind of book I expected Travel Light to be. This is not a promising expectation with which to begin Travel Light, but it’s exactly right for Travel Far, Pay No Fare, which is a frolic. Owen’s soon-to-be-stepsister Parsley (what a name!) has a magic bookmark that will take you into a book, and soon the two are bopping in and out of Alice in Wonderland and Little Women (Parsley has a crush on Laurie! Oh my God) and The Yearling.

I also finished John D. Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, Or, The Unwritten Story of Army Life, a memoir about life in the Union Army during the Civil War. An excellent research resource! Loads of fascinating, detailed information, sprinkled with amusing anecdotes and plentiful illustrations (over 200 sketches by Charles W. Reed!), and I love that he included chapters about mule drivers and wagon trains, vital parts of army life that often get glossed over.

And James Herriot’s The Lord God Made Them All. All of Herriot’s books are like a warm bath, which is a bit ironic when Herriot spends so much time in each book delivering lambs shirtless in snow-flecked early-spring fields. It gives the books that delicious “reading by the fire while bad weather rages on the other side of the window” feel.

What I’m Reading Now

James Herriot’s Every Living Thing. Herriot has just acquired an assistant vet who goes everywhere with his pet badger riding on his shoulder! Oh to reach such a level of eccentricity.

Also Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which is not so much a history of ancient Rome but a dissection of the historical sources we have to try to figure out how trustworthy any particular bit of information is. Absolutely delighted to learn that ancient Romans were just as apt as modern retellers to massage awkward bits of myth or history: Cicero, for instance, was so uncomfortable with the whole fratricidal business in the tale of Romulus and Remus that he just kind of lets Remus fade out of the story after the twins are suckled by the wolf. No need for Romulus to kill him if he just fades away!

She also tells a story during the Social War (that is, the war between the Romans and their Italian allies who felt they were being treated as possessions rather than allies), where a comedian makes anti-Roman jokes on stage, and the Romans in the crowd are SO mad that they murder him then and there - and then the next comedian comes on! No other choice! If he runs, they’ll probably hunt him down and kill him, and if he makes jokes they don’t like they’ll also kill him!

So on stage he goes, and he says, “I travel through Italy searching for favours by making people laugh and giving pleasure. So spare the swallow, which the gods allow to nest safely in all your houses!” And the crowd (part Roman, part non-Roman) is touched by this appeal, and he lives to tell jokes another day.

What I Plan to Read Next

One more Anne Lindbergh! I just couldn’t resist The People in Pineapple Place, in which a boy makes friends with children from another time. Possibly a bevy of other times? I’m not sure, but either way you know I’m weak for stories about children frolicking across the timeline.

Also might delve deeper in Mary Beard’s work. Does anyone have a favorite, or conversely one that you anti-rec?

At the beginning of the year I decided to make a concerted effort to spend more time with my friends, and as a result we’ve been going to see a lot of shows together. As it turns out, Indianapolis has MANY theatrical venues, and we’ve been systematically working our way through them all.

At Beef and Boards, a dinner theater, we saw Clue, which was a lot of fun! I have no deeper thoughts about it. The roast beef and horseradish was tasty, as were the pretzel rolls.

For some reason no one wanted to see the incest-’n’-eye-gouging in Oedipus with me, so I hit up the Indianapolis Repertory Theater on my own. The theater is gorgeous, so ornate! And the play is An Experience, as ancient Greek plays are wont to be.

I wish I knew more about how ancient Greek plays were staged back then, and are generally staged now, because I have no idea if the production I saw was avant-garde or a throwback to the original staging. (Everything old is new again if you wait long enough.) Except for Oedipus, who is always Oedipus, the other characters were all chorus members, who sometimes spoke as part of the chorus and sometimes as their particular character. This was sometimes confusing, but I also felt that it contributed to the atmosphere of the play - the sense that we were watching something from a very different cultural milieu than our own.

I actually saw Something Rotten in Bloomington, so technically perhaps it doesn’t belong in a post about Indianapolis theater, but I have to mention it because I loved it - maybe my favorite show of all the shows I’ve seen this spring - and I’d never even heard of it before I saw it. My friend asked “Want to see Something Rotten? It’s a musical about Shakespeare” and I said “Sure!”

Specifically, it’s about two brothers who are trying to make it as London playwrights, only it’s so hard when all anyone cares about is that rockstar Shakespeare! Finally the older brother consults a soothsayer, demanding to know the details about Shakespeare’s greatest play, and the with great verve and enthusiasm the soothsayer tells him all about… Omelet! And also musicals, which are going to be an amazing artform in three hundred years or so, so why not jump on the bandwagon early!

(The soothsayer was cross-cast, and having a girl play such a zany part really shows how limited so many female theatrical roles are.)

Just fantastic. So much fun.

The theater in the art museum is the home for the Indianapolis Ballet Company, and we saw two ballets there. The Sleeping Beauty is a classic Tchaikovsky ballet, with two acts of plot and one act of divertissements, like the second act of the Nutcracker which is just a bunch of dances to entertain Clara. Embarrassed to admit I found this boring.

However, I really liked the other ballet, George Ballanchine’s Midsummer Night’s Dream! It’s a ballet retelling of the Shakespeare play, and of course it helps that I know the original play, but I thought the ballet did a fantastic job translating all the action of the play into gesture - and it’s paced for an impatient twentieth-century audience.

Pace Wikipedia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream the ballet usually has a second act of divertissements to celebrate the various weddings, but instead the Indianapolis Ballet Company finished up with a pas de deux and an extremely athletic rendition of “Bolero,” which I suspect was better adjusted to the attention span of the twenty-first century audience.

Classic Murder was a trio of one-act murder mystery plays, which were fine, but the venue was amazing: each play took place in a different room of the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Mansion, a house in the highest 1880s style, and the audience cycled between the rooms. I’d love to go back some time for a tour.

AND FINALLY, speaking of fantastic venues, Christina and I went to the gorgeous Scottish Rite Cathedral to see the Taylor Swift Candlelight Concert, in which a string quartet plays Taylor Swift songs on a stage covered in candles. (Sadly, LED candles. I’m sure real candles would have been a fire hazard, but WHAT an aesthetic.) I often struggle with orchestral music, but because I knew most of the original songs well, I quite enjoyed this concert! For the last couple of songs they invited the audience to sing along, which for the most part the audience did rather modestly, although people really belted it out when we got to the “You belong with me”s.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Despite my quibbles last week, I enjoyed Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome so much that I instantly went on to her earlier book Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. Despite that perhaps rather bombastic subtitle, I enjoyed it even more.

I especially appreciated the way that the book unpacks the primary sources. Southon points out that all the extant sources were written decades or centuries after Agrippina’s death (so they’re not really primary sources at all - you wouldn’t call something written today a primary source about Watergate) and also often lays the different accounts side by side so you can see how they differ, and it’s really interesting to see how divergent the different histories often are - and also it feels very telling on the few occasions they all converge on a single story, like Agrippina’s assassination of Claudius.

(This is an interesting moment because Southon doesn’t really want Agrippina to have assassinated her uncle/husband Claudius, as it seems to contradict the picture she’s built up of Agrippina, Able Administrator, Not as Murdery as She’s Painted. However, the rare moment of agreement between all the sources forces her to say, okay, Agrippina probably did it.)

Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, however, remained a struggle all the way through. Maybe it really lost something in translation? It’s disappointing because I had really looked forward to this book, but such is life.

I also zoomed through volumes one to four of Fence, which is delightful, and you will be UNSURPRISED to learn that Ice Prince Seiji has stolen my heart. But it’s also frustrating, because the first four volumes are really just the beginning of the story, the set-up, and it’s not at all clear when the next graphic novel will come out!

There are two tie-in novels by Sarah Rees Brennan, which of course I will read, but I’m not sure if these are direct continuations of the story (as in, you read the first four graphic novels, then you read the two tie-in novels, then you read the next graphic novel whenever it comes out…) or are more along the lines of optional extras.

What I’m Reading Now

I found Nancy Farmer's House of the Scorpion a grim slog, and expected to have the same reaction to A Girl Named Disaster, but actually it’s great! Strong My Side of the Mountain “child surviving in the wilderness” vibes, except instead of a boy in the Catskills it’s about a girl on the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Right now she’s sort of accidentally started observing a baboon troop and I’m eating it up with a spoon.

What I Plan to Read Next

Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. A Girl Named Disaster has made me much more hopeful about this book!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A profitable week in the Newbery department. I finished Russell Freedman’s Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, a 1994 Newbery Honor book. I mention the year because the book is very tactful about Eleanor Roosevelt’s possible romantic involvements with women. If you are primed to see romantic potential in her series of very close woman friends who sometimes lived with her, the evidence is certainly here. But if I had read this in the 90s, the possible implications would absolutely have flown over my head.

This struck me particularly hard because in the 2021 winner (When You Trap a Tiger), the narrator’s older sister gets a girlfriend, who is expressly referred to as such in the text. That just would not have been possible in a 1994 book; the world has changed so much and so quickly.

I also read Jean Fritz’s Homesick: My Own Story, a childhood memoir about the author’s life in China in the late 1920s, when her father directed the YMCA in Hankow (which later merged with two other cities to become modern-day Wuhan). On a scale of happiness to misery ranging from Cheaper by the Dozen to Angela’s Ashes, this one is solidly in the middle: the political situation is tense (the family ultimately flees Hankow on an armored gunboat) and the family faces personal tragedy when Jean’s baby sister dies, but the overall focus is much more on Jean’s everyday life and friendships.

Oddly, given the title, the book doesn’t deal with homesickness at all. Perhaps it’s a retrospective title? Given the subsequent history of China, I suspect that Fritz could never revisit her childhood home.

What I’m Reading Now

Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, which I expected to love but am actually finding something of a slog. I first read about in the context of a ludicrously rich fish pie and therefore expected it to be about luxury and opulence and instead it’s mostly about slums.

Also Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, which I’m enjoying, although I wish the author would stop apologizing for non-murder digressions about Roman history. I submit that anyone geeky enough to read a book about Roman murder is also interested in other things Roman and will not go “God, why do we gotta talk about political intrigue? Ugh.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I am creeping toward the top of the hold list for Fugitive Telemetry. Any day now!

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Book Review: Glorious Exploits
Wednesday Reading Meme
Coriolanus
Antigone
Medea
Wednesday Reading Meme
Wednesday Reading Meme
Some Rosemary Sutcliff Novels
Book Review: Laughter in Ancient Rome
Book Review: SPQR & The Invention of Jane Harrison
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Theater!
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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with history: ancient

Book Review: Glorious Exploits

Wednesday Reading Meme

Coriolanus

Antigone

Medea

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

Some Rosemary Sutcliff Novels

Book Review: Laughter in Ancient Rome

Book Review: SPQR & The Invention of Jane Harrison

Wednesday Reading Meme

Theater!

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

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July 2025

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