How to speak truth (or a reasonable facsimile) to power

One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”

But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.

So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.

In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.

A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”

More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)

Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.

Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.

^{Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ by Raffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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The young Athenians: America in the age of Trump

“You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” snapped President Trump at Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, in a so-called negotiation at the Oval Office, broadcast globally on Friday, February 28, 2025. Vice-President JD Vance went on to demand that Zelenskyy say thank you and “offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and [Trump] who is trying to save … [Ukraine].” Before the dialogue ended with President Trump asserting “This is going to be great television,” he turned to Zelenskyy and summed it all up: “…You are either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out… But you don’t have the cards…Once we sign that deal [a ceasefire without any guarantees], you’re in a much better position, but you are not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest. That’s not a nice thing.”

Behind all these assertions by the U.S. president and vice president that Ukraine must follow directives—indeed, that Ukraine has no choice but to comply with whatever the U.S. dictates—lies the belief that might makes right. The ancient Athenians made similar arguments in a remarkably analogous dialogue recorded in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, specifically during the conflict between Athens, a state at the height of its power, and the small, weak island of Melos.

In 416 BCE, during a truce between Sparta, Athens, the two states embroiled in the Peloponnesian War (431–405 BCE), Athens, without any clear motive or moral justification, sent a large army to Melos, a neutral state during the war, demanding that Melos join the Athenian alliance. “Right,” they claimed, “is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thuc. 5.89).

The Melians were fully aware that by deciding whether to join the Athenians, they were facing a choice between war (against Athens), should they choose to maintain their neutrality, and slavery (to Athens), if they did not. They contended that they ought to be permitted to remain neutral, but Athens responded to each of their arguments with refusal and points that highlighted their superior power. At the conclusion of this disheartening dialogue, the Athenians told the Melians:

“Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty, as compared with those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious. You will therefore show great blindness of judgment, unless, after allowing us to retire, you can find some counsel more prudent than this … And it is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best. Think over the matter, therefore, after our withdrawal, and reflect once and again that it is for your country that you are consulting, that you have not more than one, and that upon this one deliberation depends its prosperity or ruin.” (Thuc. 5.111)

With us, they said, you will have cards. But you are not acting at all thankful to us, who can guarantee your security.

This notion that might is right is foundational for the realist school of International Relations, which argues that power, often enforced through violence or war, structures the relationships among sovereign nations. However, the apparent rationality of Trump and Vance’s arguments, as well as those of the ancient Athenians, is misleading.

Thucydides’ presentation of the Athenians in this dialogue is not positive. At the end of it, the Athenians besieged the Melians, who surrendered a few months later and faced the harsh penalty of having all the male citizens executed and all the women and children sold to slavery. These were reprehensible acts to Thucydides, most of the ancient Greeks, and probably many of the Athenians. A few months later, the Athenians made an arrogant and disastrous decision to invade the island of Sicily, where they suffered an utter defeat that marked the beginning of their loss to the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, who was writing his history after Athens had been defeated in Sicily, offers the Melian dialogue as an example of how states should not behave toward one another. The events on Melos mark a turning point in Athens’ history, when its excessive use of force and abuse of power eventually came back to bite and destroy the Athenians. In 411 BCE, after the disaster on Sicily, Athens briefly abolished its democracy and instituted an oligarchy, followed just 7 years later by another oligarchic regime that ruled violently, disenfranchised most Athenian citizens, and killed foreigners and citizens alike to get rid of enemies. It took a civil war in Athens to restore democracy and return to a healthy civic community.

Athens’ behavior toward the Melians and the belief that power equates to justice led the Athenians directly into a civil war. As a professional historian, I do not think that history repeats itself. Instead, I believe not knowing history is like driving without rear-view mirrors. The televised negotiations in the Oval Office should make us all cautious about the future for the U.S. and the world. As we rush headlong into the future, we should slow down and consider whether there are alternative ways to structure international relations based not on fear and strength, but on positive values like community and peace. We must reflect on whether our states’ actions, or even our own, align with a good moral code and whether war is genuinely inevitable.

_{Featured image by Constantinos Kollias via Unsplash.}

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From the new Editor-in-Chief of the <em>Oxford Classical Dictionary</em>

It is a real honour—and more than a little daunting—to take over from Tim Whitmarsh as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The first edition of the Dictionary appeared more than three quarters of a century ago, in 1949, offering “an authoritative one-volume guide to all aspects of the ancient world.” A great deal has changed since, including, of course, how we view “the ancient world.” After four editions of the print dictionaries, the shift to a fully digital OCD5, begun in 2015, offered huge opportunities for improving and extending our coverage and our readers’ experience in using the dictionary. 

In March 2016, this digital OCD included all 6,400 entries of OCD4, and only c. 25 new articles; since then, we have continued to build upon this impressive legacy as we continue to commission both entirely new articles and revisions of previously existing articles. (At the time of writing, in April 2025, the total of new and revised entries has reached nearly 700). The digital format allows for a number of advantages: not only does moving beyond the constraints of the printed page allow for more substantial coverage, it also allows for the embedding of links to both ancient source material and other OCD articles, as well as encouraging the use of digital images. 

The revision process has allowed for substantial expansion of our coverage of such important and well-known classical authors as Sappho and Martial, and subjects such as the epithalamium and Latin metre. Our coverage of ancient history continues to include key issues, such as class and class struggle and Greek colonization, plus updated articles on Greek and Roman enslavement. The ability to include images is of great benefit to readers, in particular when it comes to the area of classical art and archaeology—as with the new article on graffiti, and the newly revised articles on Roman portraiture and Greek painting. 

An increase in our coverage of the ancient Near East reflects the growing understanding of Classicists of the interconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean: readers can learn (for example) from a newly expanded articles on Akkadian and Sumerian and a brand-new article on Mesopotamian ghosts. Jewish studies, too, is well-represented, with revised articles on rabbis and on the Sadducees. The importance of late antique and Byzantine studies to the field is increasingly recognised—note, for instance, the expanded articles on the important scholars and authors Priscian and Michael Psellos. Later reception of the classical world continues to be a growing field and our coverage includes the reception of ancient architecture and other forms of visual and material culture (such as the afterlives of the Pantheon and of triumphal arches), as well as of literature. 

While women were traditionally overlooked in classical scholarship, recent articles include a new entry on Iulia Balbilla, who travelled to Egypt with the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina and commemorated her visit by inscribing four poems on the left leg of the Memnon Colossus, as well as an expanded entry on women in philosophy. The experiences of a much wider range of women are commemorated in the article on the female life-course. Science, technology, and mathematics are indeed well represented, such as by new and revised articles on Egyptian mathematics and knowledge about animals. 

As with previous editions of the OCD, we commission state of the art articles on new and evolving areas of classical scholarship, showing the impact of modern approaches. This can be seen across the different fields covered by OCD5, but includes new articles on cognitive science and on pain. In the broad realm of science and technology, we are increasingly aware of the importance of issues relating to the climate, and you will also find a newly revised article on meteorology; meanwhile, the ways in which the boundaries between the human and non-human were also of concern in classical thought are explored in our new article on robots and cyborgs in antiquity. 

The OCD is the product of longstanding international collaboration, and we continue to expand to include an increasingly diverse range of authors and editors. What we have in common is a commitment to the mission of Oxford Classical Dictionary to continue to provide a truly authoritative home for classical scholarship, even as definitions of the “classical” continue to evolve, and digital advances and other changes alike continue to transform the way both scholars and the wider public encounter the ancient world. Please do feel free to get in touch with your own suggestions for what continues to be an exciting and ongoing collaborative project.

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Racialized Commodities

In the mid-sixth century BCE, the Greek mystic Aristeas of Proconessus composed a hexameter poem recounting a journey deep into Eurasia. According to Herodotus, Aristeas set off from his island home in the Sea of Marmara to visit the “one-eyed Arimaspians, and beyond them the griffins which guard the gold, and beyond the griffins the Hyperboreans, whose land comes down to the sea.” Very little is known about Aristeas’ poem, which was already considered obscure in Herodotus’ time. At one time, some critics thought that Aristeas must have been initiated into a shamanic cult. At the very least, we can say that Aristeas’ poem was suffuse with insights about nomadism on the steppe.

One haunting fragment appears to report the first time a steppe nomad laid eyes on a Greek ship:

Now this is a great wonder in our hearts. Men dwell in the water, away from land, in the sea; they are wretched, for they have harsh toils; eyes on the stars, they have a heart in the sea. Often stretching their hands up to the gods, they pray for their turbulent hearts.

Around 700 BCE, Greek speakers fanned out across the Mediterranean in search of work, new land, and trade. In the densely settled eastern Mediterranean, Greek speakers slotted themselves into preexisting political and economic structures, as they would in Late Period Egypt. Greeks practically introduced the art of navigation into the Black Sea, instigating a long period of social upheaval as indigenous populations vied for the opportunity of trade.

Through a wide range of encounters—some exploitative, and others not—Greek newcomers transmitted a disorganized catalog of observations and reflections on foreign peoples into what I call a “racial imaginary.” Up until around 500 BCE, this imaginary was basically unstructured. But in the wake of Persia’s fifth century interventions in the Aegean, the “racial imaginary” would coalesce into the menacing barbarian “Other”—a cultural construct that would be mobilized to endorse conquest, enslavement, and unequal treatment all over Greece. It is in this sense that the otherwise-neutral physiognomic descriptions found in a sixth century author like Xenophanes, who speaks of “dark-skinned Ethiopians and gray-eyed Thracians” would later be repurposed into the buffoonish stereotype of enslaved Thracians that people Attic comedy.

“Race” is a controversial word in the study of premodernity. For most of the last eighty years, premodernists avoided it. The decades prior to World War II represented the highwater mark of racialism, a historiographic school that interpreted the competition between races as the main act of world history. (Aside from a general sense that northern Europeans were innately superior, there was substantial disagreement as to how these races should be defined). During the war, a generation of anti-racist historians including Eric Williams (1911-81) and Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911-2007) debunked the racialist thesis by turning to the social sciences, where revulsion towards Nazi atrocities had discredited previously-ascendent racial theories. According to these scholars, racism (which they tended to assimilate into anti-Blackness) is a discrete, historical development linked to efforts to legitimate the transatlantic slave trade using the language of human biology. To argue that it existed prior to the eighteenth century would be anachronistic.

This perspective on race and racism has dominated the premodern humanities ever since. Open any book and learn that ancient slavery was colorblind; even scholars who recognized the ubiquity of ancestry-based discrimination in Greece or Rome shied away from the language of race and racism, for instance offering circumlocutions like “proto-racism” when pressed. In the 2000-10s, pioneering scholars including Denise McCoskey, Susan Lape, and Geraldine Heng gravitated toward a school of American legal thought known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) in an effort to identify race as a social phenomenon across premodernity. The midcentury anti-racists had approached race from the perspective of science: the concept of race could not exist in societies that lacked a science of biology. But CRT defines race as a practice: to be a racist is to (in Heng’s words) enact “a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment,” regardless whether one has a coherent ideology to justify such treatment or not. Simply put, the practice of racecraft long preceded the emergence of racial pseudo-science in late eighteenth century Europe. In any period of history, people who mistreated other classes of people based on perceived notions of ancestry, physiognomy, or both—even deeply confused ones—can be called racists.

When Aristeas arrived in what is now Ukraine or Russia in the early sixth century BCE, he did not bring the baggage of racism with him. People in Archaic Greece had a fluid vision of humanity, believing in hybridized beasts, gods in human form, and heroes among one’s ancestors. Some Greeks even believed they descended from Egyptian pharaohs. As Aristeas and his comrades unleashed forces of social transformation on the steppe, they brought with them a jumble of new visions of the human body. In the very first generation of Greek colonization, settlers were depositing Egyptian-style faience seals molded into the shape of human heads into graves. Greeks were learning to catalog, inspect, and curate images of the human body long before human diversity became an index of oppression. (FIGURE)

And an index of oppression it would become. When Classical Athenians imagined the snowy lands to the north of the Black Sea, they saw a forbidding territory inhabited by wild ‘Scythians’ and ‘Thracians,’ names insisted upon despite the region’s multiplicity of cultures. To Athenians, the people of the north were archetypical slaves: light-skinned, prone to flush, dim-witted, and sexually available: evidence for their lives can be found everywhere from the literary sphere to auction records to the funerary markers inscribed not with names, but an expression like “Useful Scythian.” They were subject to ethnographic and medical speculation; they were subject to Athenian laws, but rarely protected by them. Rendered commodities by the slave trade, they were racialized in their everyday experience of Athenian life.

^{Featured image by Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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Migration, colonization, and the shifting narratives of ancient Andean origins

In the Quechua-speaking highlands where the Incas built their empire more than 500 years ago, farmers and herders used the concept of pacha—movement across space and time—to shape local identities. They believed that their ancestors emerged onto wild landscapes in the South American Andes when the universe was created, and that they wandered until they found places they could transform for human habitation and subsistence. The first Cañaris descended from a sacred mountain in the Ecuadorean highlands; the ancestral Chancas of southern Peru followed the water flowing out of a high mountain lake. Daily tasks drew people from the here-and-now of their villages, into an ancestral tableau in which noteworthy landscape features recalled those original migrations.

The Inca nobility traced its origins to a cave located to the south of Cuzco, the imperial capital. During the mid-sixteenth century, Inca men told Spaniards of an ancient journey in which their powerful male ancestors turned to stone to establish Inca dominion over their city and its valley. Their female ancestors conquered and displaced local populations and helped to build the Coricancha, the temple-palace where the last surviving male ancestor founded his imperial house. Most Spaniards considered these dynastic stories to be factual, because Inca nobles used knotted-cord devices, painted boards, praise songs, and other memory aids to preserve oral histories.

Spaniards expressed a very different attitude when it came to the stories of universal creation that set ancestral Andean migrations in motion—they described them as fables or superstitions that were at best laughably misguided, and at worst constituted demonic misinformation that blinded Andean peoples to their true origins. Any account of universal creation that diverged from the stories found in Genesis posed a challenge to Spanish efforts to convert and colonize Andean peoples. Some of the anxiety over repeating Indigenous creation stories came from the lack of clarity regarding the origin of the peoples that Spaniards had come to call “Indians.” European Christians used biblical accounts of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel to help explain the diversity of cultures and languages that they lumped under that racialized rubric, but a fundamental question nagged at them: how did these people get to the Americas before we did?

To displace Andean creation stories and fit Native peoples into their own apocalyptic project of transatlantic colonization, Spanish writers concocted an array of apocryphal speculations. Some said that the first Indians were Phoenician or Carthaginian voyagers, while others claimed that they descended from a lost tribe of Israel or somehow originated in the mysterious lands of the Tatars or the Poles. The royal cosmographer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa wrote in 1572 that the first Indians descended from Noah’s grandson Tubal, who settled in Spain and whose offspring peopled the island of Atlantis before moving into the Americas. In effect, that account leveraged Plato’s philosophical writings to render Native Americans as long-lost Spaniards. (Not to be outdone, the English explorer Walter Raleigh justified his search for El Dorado on the basis that the Incas—or “Ingas” as he called them—came from “Inglatierra” and were thus his own erstwhile countrymen.)

Amidst this cacophony of unfounded speculation, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo hit much closer to the mark in 1653, arguing that “Indians” first crossed into the Americas via a yet-undiscovered land bridge from Asia. Although this speculation has proved prescient, it was built on a racialized argument that no archaeologist today would accept. Cobo devoted several chapters to reducing the vast human diversity native to the Americas into a few general “Indian” features—reddish skin, dark eyes, straight black hair, and pronounced phlegmatic and sanguine humors—that he considered similar to populations in east Asia. Cobo did more than describe phenotypic similarities, however: he claimed that both populations possessed similarly undesirable personalities, being cowardly, unreliable, and easily led astray.

Cobo’s natural history remained unpublished until the late 1800s, but a similar mix of physical stereotyping, medieval humoralism, and ethnocentrism resurfaced in the eighteenth century in the work of Carolus Linnaeus, the father of binomial taxonomy. In his Systema Naturae, Linnaeus distinguished the supposed red skin of Homo americanus rubescens (Indians) from the brownish tone of Homo asiaticus fuscus (Asians), noting supposed differences in their humoral imbalances, which made them choleric and phlegmatic, respectively. Linnaeus characterized the Indian race as governed by “custom,” and Asians as governed by “opinion.” This pseudoscientific classification helped to inspire later writers, such as the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the American physician Samuel Morton, to collect human skulls and measure human bodies to demonstrate racial differences. In the Andes, skull collection and other racialized metrics were entangled with the earliest archaeological research—for example, when Hiram Bingham mounted his second Peruvian expedition to return to the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1912, he brought along an anatomist to measure the bodies of living Quechua people, to determine whence they had originated, and how long their ancestors had lived in Peru.

Archaeologists today reject the racial judgments that run through such work, but they continue to collect evidence about ancient migrations. Researchers now use a battery of geochemical methods to identify the origins of different kinds of pottery and stone tools, and new studies of stable isotopes and DNA from ancient human remains are adding unprecedented new data about the ways that people moved throughout and settled in the Andes. As scientific methods have improved, research practices have become more sensitive to the rights and interests of descendant populations, who continue to make ancestral claims to their local landscapes as a way to maintain identity and defend what is theirs. The increasing commitment to community engagement in Andean archaeology reminds scholars of the enduring power of narratives of origin and migration, whether they come from an oral tradition or laboratory science.

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Rethinking migrations in late prehistoric Eurasia

People move. Whether at an individual or group level, migrations have been a constant and fundamental component of the human journey from its very beginnings to the present. To paraphrase the French scholar Jean-Paul Demoule, the story of humankind is one of three million years of emigration and immigration. While news about migrations have become a daily feature in the media, discussions concerning the regulation of the flow of people across countries and continents represent a key issue in current political discourse. Due to its time depth, archaeology is in an advantageous position to provide long-term insights on the topic. Thus, a deep history approach can counteract isolationist narratives, show the complexity of human mobility in the past and present, and illustrate the challenges and opportunities that can arise.

Over the last few decades, archaeologists have made enormous progress in the study of past migrations. This is largely due to the development of new, and the improvement of existing, biomolecular scientific methods that are revolutionising our knowledge of past mobility. Ancient DNA and stable isotope analyses are particularly important in this regard, although their results need to be interpreted in combination with theoretically-informed approaches and a good understanding of the archaeological record. This requires a truly interdisciplinary approach, incorporating the humanities, and social and natural sciences.

Humans have always been mobile. Even travelling to foreign lands in order to stay there for a long period of time (a more permanent migration) has been part of human existence over the millennia. However, the scales, rhythms, motivations, and characteristics of these migrations can take very different forms. Where bioarchaeological approaches have been applied, they have contributed to identifying previously unimagined scales of mobility, but sometimes also to uncovering subtle nuances at a local, even individual level. A good example is the study carried out by Philipp Stockhammer and Ken Massy in the Lech Valley (southern Germany). Their comprehensive bioarchaeological analysis of graves dating from the 3^rd and early 2^nd millennia BCE has allowed the identification of several female individuals of non-local origin, as well as the determining of the biological relatedness of the people buried in the cemeteries. While this represents an example of a very detailed study of a microregion, on the other end of the spectrum we have Volker Heyd’s contribution analysing several large-scale migratory processes of the 3^rd millennium BCE at a European scale. This was a period of significant population mobility, which the author compares with the historical Migration Period of the 4^th to 6^th centuries AD. Bioarchaeology does not only allow these sorts of prehistoric migrations to be traced, but can also shed light on other aspects such as marriage and motherhood, as Katharina Rebay-Salisbury explores.

When we move into the 1^st millennium BCE, the increasing availability of written sources allows fruitful comparisons between archaeology and texts. While this task is not without challenges, it can offer new perspectives on topics such as the ‘Celtic’ migrations to Italy. The latter are addressed by Peter Wells in a paper that also includes comparisons with later historical population movements, including the Early Medieval Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain and the Early Modern migrations of Puritan English to New England. Demographic fluctuations and migratory processes could sometimes be the result of aggressive policies by expanding imperial powers, illustrated by Nico Roymans and Diederick Habermehl’s work on the impact of Rome on the Lower Rhine frontier region in the period from Caesar to Augustus.

The selection of examples mentioned above clearly demonstrate the potential of archaeology to contribute to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of past migrations. Although looking at the past, in itself, does not necessarily guarantee the right answers to current global challenges, it at least allows us to place debates into perspective, helping to counteract simplistic approaches and modern political misuses.

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Alexander the Great, the Pontic Kingdom, and the rise of Rome

When Alexander the Great died in the summer of 323 BC in Babylon, he left no plans for his succession. He had travelled with an extensive entourage from his home in Macedonia to India and back to Babylon; and brought the Persian empire to an end. A vast area had come under varying degrees of Greek control, but with the king’s death at the age of 32, quarrels and fighting immediately broke out among his potential successors. There were two results: Greek culture penetrated to previously unexposed regions, and for the next 40 years there was constant and deadly competitiveness among those who sought to carry on the traditions of Alexander. As might be expected, Alexander’s empire quickly fragmented into a large number of local rulers, some more important than others.

Remnants of the disposed Persian aristocracy also participated in this chaotic search for territory and power. One such example is a certain Mithridates. He was originally attached to Alexander’s successor Antigonos Monopthalmos but, due to the unforgiving politics of the era, had to retreat to the rugged mountainous region of northern Asia Minor, where by the early third century BC he had carved out a small principality for himself. Mithridates, now generally called Mithridates I the Founder, was typical of the world after Alexander—where dynasts previously unknown could rise to power in remote areas and bring a hybrid Greco-Persian culture to regions on the margins of civilization.

Yet Mithridates I was unusual in that he was able to create a dynasty that lasted for hundreds of years. Over the next several generations his kingdom, today called Pontos, expanded south and east and established marriage alliances with the major powers; these alliances remained for generations. In fact, the most famous woman from classical antiquity, Cleopatra VII, was a descendant of Mithridates I.

In time Pontos was the most powerful kingdom in Asia Minor. A royal capital had been established at Sinope on the coast of the Black Sea, whose remains are still prominent today. Its territories covered most of the region, extending as far as the Armenians on the east (whose dynasty was related to that of Pontos), the Greek Syrians on the south, and on the west the historic Greek cities on the Aegean coast.

In the late second century BC, Pontos’ most famous dynast came to rule: Mithridates VI, called the Great, whose career is well documented as one of the major players of the era. He expanded the kingdom to circle almost the entire Black Sea, thus bringing Greek culture to regions where it had been previously unknown. Mithridates VI was an educated man—he allegedly knew 22 languages, more than anyone else in classical antiquity—and brought scholars to his court, which became the notable center of various disciplines, especially botany and pharmacology (the king was a master gardener in the scientific sense and identified several plants). The lush gardens associated with the villas of the Roman aristocracy owe their origins to Mithridates’ gardening techniques. He was also an architectural and technological innovator, most notably inventing the water mill.

The world of Mithridates the Great came to an end in 63 BC. For some time, the Mediterranean world had been coping with the rise of the Roman Republic, whose sudden ascent to power, beginning in the second century BC, provided a new dynamic to the historic relationships of the region. Mithridates the Great spent much of his career tangling with the Romans in a succession of territorial wars. Eventually the Roman presence became so powerful that the king had to abandon his kingdom and retreat to the northern limits of the Black Sea into the region of the modern Crimea. Pursued by the Roman commander Sulla, the king eventually committed suicide and left the kingdom to his son Pharnakes II, who came to a brief accommodation with the Romans. But the great days of the Pontic Kingdom were over, and the Romans represented the new direction of political power.

A number of the scholars at the court of Mithridates the Great migrated to Alexandria in Egypt and became associated with Cleopatra, who was born just about the same time as the king died; the queen well understood her debt to him as powerful dynast and opponent of Rome, and adopted many of his concepts about dynastic rule. And even today the legacy of Mithridates continues; he has been commemorated in the arts, both visual and performing, and in linguistics.

The kingdom of Pontos and its rulers were powerful players in the world between Alexander and the rise of the Romans. They exemplify the changing environment of that era and the spread of Greek culture that laid the groundwork for the domination of Rome. But in the end resistance was futile for Mithridates the Great, and Rome won out, as it did everywhere else. Nevertheless, Mithridates VI is remembered as one of the three great opponents of the late Roman Republic: he saw a predecessor in Hannibal, whose career he imitated, and a successor in Cleopatra, whom he influenced.

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Why Migrants Matter

“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live here,” said Donald Trump during ABC’s presidential debate on September 10, 2024. His comments amplified false rumors spread by J.D. Vance, the vice-presidential nominee, who claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating the pets of longtime residents. Dehumanizing and vilifying immigrants has been a mainstay in xenophobic rhetoric mobilized during elections in the US and Europe by mainstream and alt-right-wing parties alike.

Fabricated and baseless rumors about immigrants is nothing new. Like the Haitians of Springfield, the ancient Phoenicians—a Semitic population that had an extensive trade network that spanned from Assyria to Iberia—often faced negative stereotyping and prejudice. Ancient Greek sources describe the Phoenicians as wily traders and deceitful moneylenders. Even famous Phoenician immigrants suffered from such prejudice. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, one of antiquity’s most influential philosophical schools, was a Phoenician immigrant in fourth-century BCE Athens, originally from Kition on Cyprus. Although Zeno was a preeminent thinker in Athens, he was subjected to disparaging comments because of his migrant status and his Phoenician ethnicity. His teacher called him “little Phoenician,” a demeaning term. One of his biographers described him as stingy because he was a foreigner. A rival philosopher accused him of plagiarism, saying that Zeno would sneak in to listen to his lectures, steal his ideas, dress them in Phoenician style, and pass them as his own. Even after his death, one of his students wrote a funerary epigram trying to downplay Zeno’s Phoenician origin, writing: “What reproach is there if your fatherland is Phoenicia?”

If a prominent figure like Zeno experienced such discrimination, what indignities did most immigrants, who belonged to the lower classes, suffer? One political treatise from fifth-century BCE Athens complains that the notion of citizenship was eroding because immigrants and enslaved persons were indistinguishable from citizens in their looks, dress, and rights, when in fact enslaved persons had no rights and immigrants faced many legal constraints. A few decades later, several court cases dealt with similar issues. With flimsy evidence they accused the freedwoman Neaira of illegitimately claiming the rights of Athenian citizenship and alleged that Euboulides had unlawfully removed the plaintiff, a certain Euxitheus, from the citizen register. These and other texts discuss the supposed dangers posed by immigrants revealing the vulnerability of immigrant populations, even in a multiethnic city like Athens.

Such fears expressed by the more conservative parts of the Athenian population were reactions to Athens’ policies of rewarding immigrants with some or all citizen rights. Phoenician immigrants were among the non-Greek foreigners most frequently awarded with monetized gifts of gold wreaths, honorific positions, and a wide assortment of legal awards, such as the right to own property, tax exemptions, the privilege of better seats at the theater at state expense, the right to attend state-sponsored dinners alongside prominent citizens, the right to serve in the military, and even the rare grant of citizenship. Among the Phoenician immigrants who received some or all these awards was a certain Herakleides, who in 330/329 BCE had offered large quantities of wheat to Athens at a lower price and two years later donated money to Athens to help the state purchase grain, during a period of grain shortage. The Athenians eventually honored him with a gold wreath, honorific titles, the right to own property, and the privileges of participating in military service and paying capital taxes, as is recorded on a stele that survives today.

This system of award-giving was employed to attract immigrants, especially wealthy ones, like Herakleides, who could serve the state by carrying out various benefactions. Indeed, in a fourth-century BCE treatise on Athens’ revenue sources, the historian and philosopher Xenophon proposed that more social and legal privileges be given to immigrants because they would inject funds into the Athenian economy and would make Athens great again. All the legal rights Xenophon wanted to give to immigrants would allow “better” men to desire to live in Athens, where “better” stood for more useful to the state or wealthy.

This rhetoric of the good immigrants, immigrants who work hard and benefit the society in which they live, is a familiar trope today, too. Mike DeWine, the Springfield-born governor of Ohio, tried to put an end to the rumors regarding Haitian immigrants and ensuing bomb threats in schools, and hospitals. In an op-ed he wrote: “Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation … [in part] thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants … They are there legally. They are there to work.”

But migrants, documented or undocumented, are not just workers; they are also human beings. They mattered in antiquity, and they matter today, not because they revitalize the economy but because together with citizens they co-create and maintain the diverse societies in which they live. The Phoenician immigrants of the ancient Mediterranean introduced new ideas, such as Zeno’s Stoicism; they benefited Athens in times of need; they broadened what it meant to be a resident of a state; and they helped form multiethnic and diverse communities that thrived. While ancient Greek thought, politics, and society have been idealized, it is unlikely that they would have taken the form they did without the contributions of migrants in general and of Phoenician immigrants in particular.

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An introduction to migration in the ancient world [interactive map]

Migration has played a vital role in shaping human history and continues to have profound effects on the world today. Historically, the movement of people across regions has facilitated the exchange of ideas, technologies, and cultures, leading to significant advancements and the enrichment of societies. The Silk Road, a network of trade routes connecting Asia with Europe, not only enabled the exchange of goods such as silk and spices but also facilitated the spread of religions like Buddhism. Similarly, the spread of the Islamic Empire across North Africa, the Middle East, and into parts of Europe brought about a flourishing of science, philosophy, and architecture, as well as the blending of diverse cultures and knowledge. Migration also occurred through slaverly, and as a result of warfare and oppressive rule.

This autumn, the OUP Classics and Archaeology team will be exploring migration across the classical world, sharing author insights on the OUPblog, and highlighting articles and chapters from our online products, which you can access through your institution. Discover recommended reading on migration in the ancient world with our interactive map.

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A duty of care? Archaeologists, wicked problems, and the future

Archaeology needs to stay relevant. To do so, it will need to change, but that won’t be simple given how much needs to change, and how many of the things that need changing are systemic, firmly embedded both within disciplinary traditions and practice and within society. In many parts of the world, archaeology remains deeply colonial for example. Many consider it to be exclusive and privileged, while others find it meaningless.

Let me focus on the last of these statements: that it is ‘meaningless’. My work confronts this opinion head on, aligning the study of archaeology with contemporary global challenges to not only demonstrate the subject’s relevance, but to proclaim its central position in discussions of planetary health and global security. Archaeologists have a long tradition of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries. However, to take that central position successfully and with credibility, we need to be even more concerted as well as creative in the professional relationships we form, and in the types of work that we do.

Many people still associate archaeology with the study of ancient human societies, investigated usually through excavation. This work remains vital in promoting new knowledge and insight, while giving time-depth to those contemporary debates around, for example, human adaptation to a changing climate. However, archaeology has outgrown this traditional definition. Archaeology also views the world as it exists now and as it will exist in the future, making it a contemporary and future-oriented discipline that is both vibrant, relevant, and necessary.

Archaeologists now view the contemporary world through those same lenses that archaeologists used to study the ancient past, providing both perspective and focus. In terms of perspective, these lenses allow archaeologists to look critically at the evidence they uncover and create interpretations of human behaviours through the traces people have left behind. For the contemporary world, archaeology has the ability to use this evidence to render the supposedly familiar unfamiliar, or to call into question those things that we take for granted. These lenses also allow us to focus on specific topics, themes or places, with the agility to close in on detail at a micro-scale, or to pan out to encompass the bigger picture. Archaeologists (ideally working with scholars from other disciplines) can then relate these different scales of investigation to one another in ways that improve our understanding of global challenges such as climate change.

In my research I refer to ‘wicked problems’, a term created in the 1960s to describe those tough (and possibly, ultimately irresolvable) global challenges that threaten planetary health, human health, and security. CAs well as climate change, environmental pollution, health and wellbeing, social injustice and conflict are examples of such problems which are generally ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, involving decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are incredibly complex. The adjective ‘wicked’ describes the evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptoms.

Yet, I am optimistic due to the novel ways that archaeology can contribute to tackling some of these world’s most wicked problems through adopting what psychologists have referred to as a small-wins framework. Studying the past in ways that are creative, bold, and interdisciplinary, can create significant ‘small wins’.

I referred earlier to the need for archaeology to change. While there are many examples of successful small wins that address wicked problems, such as York Archaeology’s current Archaeology on Prescription project or Rachael Kiddey’s Heritage and Homelessness work, many archaeologists do not see how their work aligns with wicked problems. Some may even question whether it should. I believe that all archaeological work has the potential to align with wicked problems through this small wins framework and, furthermore, that archaeologists have an obligation, a duty of care, to create opportunities for small wins. This isn’t necessarily the same as demonstrating ‘impact’, a term all archaeologists who apply for research funding will be familiar with. Duty of care is a responsibility, and arguably one that all citizens should take, acknowledging that small wins matter while being realistic about what they can achieve.

As teachers, archaeologists can ensure that students are prepared for a career in which duty of care is both encouraged and embraced. One example of this might be a familiarity amongst archaeologists with the language of policymakers, an understanding of how practice informs policy, and where and how archaeology can contribute to policy-making. As archaeologists we can also learn to work more effectively with communities to co-produce projects and facilitate community-led programmes, while finding new ways to promote the valuable collaborative work that we do, and its social relevance, to new audiences.

Of course, archaeologists cannot change the world on their own. But with this unique set of lenses at our disposal, and using the small wins framework, we can make a difference.

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Charles Darwin the geologist

Who was Charles Darwin the geologist? Was he a nephew, or maybe a cousin, of the illustrious naturalist, who first published the theory of evolution by natural selection? I know they had big families… But no, this is the one and the same. It is often forgotten that, early in his career, Charles Darwin was a ‘card-carrying’ geologist.

It did not start well. Aged 17, he assessed the Edinburgh University geology lectures he dropped in on, while studying Medicine, so ‘incredibly dull’, that he would ‘never attend to the subject of geology’.

His lecturer was Robert Jameson, who was on the wrong side in the dispute about the origin of dolerite. As dolerite could be found as a layer among strata of sandstone and limestone, he believed it had somehow precipitated out of water. It turned out a sill could be intruded between the layers as red-hot basaltic magma.

In the spirit of student rebellion Charles also assessed all but one of his lecturers in medicine as ‘intolerably dull’. Squeamish about anatomy, he ostensibly switched to the University of Cambridge to study theology. By the summer of 1831 he needed to prove some rapid geological acumen in applying to become the geologist/naturalist on a round-the-world voyage on the survey ship HMS Beagle.

Charles convinced Cambridge Professor Adam Sedgwick to allow him to spend a few weeks as a field assistant while the professor mapped the geology of North Wales. The learning was intensive, but it worked.

While on the Beagle, Darwin’s notes on geology were four times longer than those reporting natural history. He wrote to his sister that ’the pleasure of the first day’s partridge shooting …. cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones’—there were some great bones to be found in Patagonia.

On returning after almost five years away on the Beagle, Darwin became the society secretary to the Geological Society of London where he remained for three years. He published four scientific papers on geology, including how coral reefs formed above sinking volcanoes.

Less known was Darwin’s solo expedition to investigate the ‘parallel roads’ contouring Glen Roy in the Scottish Highlands. This was a real adventure. From London one could only get as far as Liverpool by train. Like the raised beach deposits he had mapped on the coast of Chile, he visited Glen Roy to record former sea levels.

Another facet of Darwin’s geology emerged on the long walks he took around his wife’s family’s house at Maer near Stoke on Trent. (His own family life was hectic, with ten children.) On one of these walks he discovered an igneous dyke, now named Butterton Dyke, which intruded around the time of the Hebridean volcanoes (one date gives 54 million years ago) but which chemically and by orientation is of mystery origin. To commemorate Darwin, again as a geologist, a fragment of the dyke was sent into orbit on the Mir space station and then flown to a last resting place on the Moon.

Although no longer collecting bones, or dolerite samples, after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, he summoned geological evidence to manifest the time needed to allow for evolution. He proposed sluggish rates of erosion of 500-foot-tall Sussex cliffs, such as an inch per century, to explain how much geological time had passed to enable evolution. His estimates for erosion have proved to be perhaps a hundred times too slow and he came under much criticism from physicists who calculated the age of the habitable earth from simple thermal decay. However, by the beginning of a new century, twenty years after his death, the discovery of heating accompanying radioactive decay vindicated his projection of the duration of geological time.

If you were scoring Charles Darwin as a geologist the results would be mixed. Always concocting hypotheses, he was ready to change his theories as new evidence arrived. He admitted there was only one such area of theorizing (the explanation for coral reefs) where he hadn’t had to change his mind. And it was Darwin the geologist who could give Darwin the evolutionist the eons of time required to realise his theory of natural selection.

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Diary of a dead man

This blog post introduces readers to the well-traveled remains of an Egyptian mummy now residing in Houston, Texas. If old Ankh-Hap still had his original hands and an endless supply of papyrus, he might have made entries like these in a diary of his afterlife.

29 July 1987

Dear Diary,

I traded coffins today. I left behind the comfortable wooden box that had cradled my remains for the past twenty-three centuries. I feel a bit lost without it. Ancient mourners had listed upon its lid the essentials of my being, including my name (Ankh-Hap, son of Ma’at Djehuty) and my eternal needs (bread, beer, wine, milk, meat, oil, and incense). In brilliant colors, it pictured the gods who have guarded my afterlife and the rituals of my resurrection. It recorded all that I was and would ever be: a transitory man and then a mummy.

My new coffin is larger but less personal, the product of another time and place that worships Science instead of Osiris. Its priests have sealed me inside a casket they call a CT-Scanner. This modern metalloid coffin promises me no food or drink; it does not even know my name. Yet, I sense it searching my deepest self, probing for secrets my wooden one has refused to share. What lies hidden beneath my linen wrappings? The whole world is about to know.

I am a physical wreck. The priests see in the shiny coffin that I have wasp nests in my skull. There are seven wooden slats rammed through my body from head to ankles. I have partial limbs and fake ones too. Most of me is missing between my head and my hips, an inexplicable void filled by just a few ribs and vertebrae. No one yet knows how, when, or why this happened. Was I the victim of a crocodile attack or perhaps a chariot crash? Did tomb raiders despoil my body in search of loot and then leave me to be pieced together and reburied? Could my condition be the result of a modern crime? Am I even Ankh-Hap at all, or just a Franken-mummy who was stuffed into a stolen coffin? Is one casket calling the other a liar? This has been an unsettling day.

29 July 2024

Dear Diary,

Many Wep Renpets have passed since my week-long sojourn inside that second coffin. It was an experience that changed my afterlife. Resting again in the one of wood, I peep out at throngs of modern admirers—or should I call them mourners? They do not seem sure how to respond to my updated obituary. I was a man of some means but not of high status; neither of my coffins support old rumors that I was a tax collector or a prince of royal blood. I was about forty when I died, with signs of osteoarthritis and episodes of stress-related anemia. I most certainly did not go to my grave with wasps in my head or with sticks where my bones should have been.

When carbon-dated, the wooden braces inside me proved to be modern, showing that my body was ravaged and then repaired during the mummy craze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That’s when an American entrepreneur dredged me from the infamous mummy-pits of Egypt. His company openly trafficked in mummies and mummy parts, selling assorted arms, legs, heads, and whole bodies at bargain prices to all and sundry. That’s how my wooden coffin and I (yes, I am its rightful inhabitant) came to Texas, where I spent some time in a traveling show, a university lecture hall, and an abandoned campus bathroom. Sadly, people forgot I was there, allowing those worrisome wasps to colonize my cranium. Fortunately, I was rescued and now repose in a marvelous temple called the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Its priests and patrons keep me and my coffin safe within a shrine that now links the religions of Science and Osiris.

All of these details and more appear in a new book about my life and afterlife, titled A Mystery from the Mummy-Pits: The Amazing Journey of Ankh-Hap (Oxford University Press, 2024). In its pages, author Frank L. Holt makes the most of what my two coffins reveal about me. I just love being buried in a good book.

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Classical allusions in Owen and Rosenberg’s war poems

Wilfred Owen is one of the most studied of the war poets, and his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is undoubtedly the best-known example of classical reception in First World War poetry. The poem ends with seven Latin words from Horace Odes 3.2: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. Owen bitterly denounces these words as ‘the old Lie’.

Modern readers are now more likely to identify the words dulce et decorum est pro patria mori with Owen rather than with Horace, but Owen himself was never fully proficient in Latin. He studied Latin at his first school, the Birkenhead Institute. But his family moved to Shrewsbury when he was 14 and this put an end to his formal study of Latin. His continued attempts to master the language on his own were never fully successful.

Most Owen scholars have not focused on the question of how he came to know the Latin phrase dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. This Latin ‘tag’ appears frequently in anthologies of famous quotations. It was also very popular as an inscription on gravestones and memorials, so Owen’s use of the Latin words is not direct evidence that he had actually read Horace Odes 3.2. In my previous work on Owen, I had assumed that he probably knew only dulce et decorum at second hand. But working on this commentary has changed my thinking on this question.

As I read and re-read Owen’s poems and concentrated on tracing any and all classical elements in them, it became evident to me that ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is not an outlier in Owen’s work. At least eight of Owen’s poems include Horatian connections, ranging from structural parallels to quotations, allusions, and echoes. Owen may not have progressed far enough in his formal Latin study to read Horace at school, but clearly he did indeed read at least some of the Odes at some point, and he engaged with Horace across a wide range of his own work.

As with Horace, so with other classical authors and with classical culture. Classics forms a crucial substratum for many of Owen’s works. This is evident in the published versions of some of his best-known poems. In addition, our commentary’s examination of Owen’s manuscript variants, discarded versions, and fragments reveals the importance of classics even for some poems where the printed versions retain no classical references at all. The manuscripts show that Owen considered incorporating a reference to the abduction of Persephone into ‘Exposure’, for instance. ‘Apologia pro poemate meo’ at one point contained a reference to Homeric gods watching human battles. One iteration of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ referred to the Homeric flowers asphodels among its imagery of mourning and remembrance. Among Owen’s juvenilia, ‘To Poesy’ (probably his earliest extant poem), directly states that thorough knowledge of classical culture, myth, and languages is crucial for a poet’s craft. Our commentary elucidates the extent to which Owen cleaved to this belief throughout his own poetic career. [Elizabeth Vandiver]

Isaac Rosenberg’s Trench poems offer poetic reworkings of images and motifs from antiquity that both complement and differ from the work of Brooke, Sorley, and Owen. Rosenberg was born in Bristol and killed in action in France 1918. He came from a poor immigrant family and his early education gave no opportunities for studying classical material. After leaving school, he was able to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, and he benefitted from contacts made at the Whitechapel Public library and via tutors at Birkbeck College, who lent him copies of the poetry of Donne, Blake, and Shelley. He was familiar with the Iliadic episodes of the Trojan War and probably also read Aeschylus in translation. His rabbinic cultural heritage had embedded knowledge of the episodes, figures, and imagery of the Hebrew Bible and he was sensitive to the language of the well-known English translation of the Old Testament, the King James Bible.

These elements came together in the poems that he composed during the war, often in extreme conditions in France—some surviving manuscripts are written in pencil on mud-stained scraps of paper. Rosenberg was a private soldier and only volunteered in the hope of obtaining an allowance for his mother. His letters contain harrowing details of the arduous conditions, compounded by the antisemitism that he encountered. However, he hoped that the experience of the war would enrich his poetry and was convinced that the task of the poet was to be ‘perverse’. His Trench poems rarely comment directly on the rights and wrongs of the war or on his own suffering. Instead, they focus on episodes in conflict, exploring and communicating these through images from Homer, the Hebrew Bible, and poetry in English. Our commentary maps these interactions and analyses their resonance for Rosenberg and for subsequent readers and poets. Key examples include the metaphor in ‘August 1914’ of slaughter in war as a desecration of harvest, bringing together Homer and motifs from the cultures of the ancient near-East. Its image of ‘A burnt space through ripe fields / A fair mouth’s broken tooth’ anticipates the post-war poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Rosenberg’s poetic ‘perversity’ underpins his variations on the motif of the poppy, notably in ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’. In Homer, the fragility of the poppy was the metaphor for the death of Gorgythion in Iliad 8. In WWI Flanders, the poppy was not only a feature of the ecology but, according to Siegfried Sassoon, was, with the larks, a reassuring cliche favoured by journalists and the unknowing public back in Britain (for whom it later became an emblem of remembrance). In Rosenberg, the poppy is a symbol both of bloodshed and of nuanced sensibility. His capacity for creating images that were both tangible and ironic also opened the way for eco-critical readings of human agency and the environment. The commentaries explore connections between this thread and the ancient texts. [Lorna Hardwick]

Check out part one of this blog post from the authors of Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen: Classical Connections and Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry: Making Connections

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Finding the classics in World War I poetry

It is a paradox that interest in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome has increased at the same time that the extent of detailed knowledge about Greece, Rome, and the associated languages has declined. This affects perceptions about antiquity in the public imagination and among creative writers. Readers and new writers have many different starting points that shape how they first encounter the ancient texts and their receptions. Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries focus on the interactions between ancient texts and how they have been read and reworked across time, place, and language. We the editors have started from the premise that analysis of close textual relationships both enriches and is enriched by further ways of creating and describing connections—for example, through perceptions about figures such as Achilles; through associations generated by mediating literature and art; through the intense pressures of contexts and the lived experience of writers, readers, and scholars. All these can turn a low-level generalised awareness into a heightened perception of the continuing creative force of ancient cultures in the modern world.

The pivotal role of classical connections in World War I poetry shaped our choice for the first phase of OCRC, which will be in print and online. The poetry that emerged from the battlefields of the First World War influenced how that war was regarded at the time and subsequently. The commentaries offer insights into the many-faceted poetry of unease associated with WWI, an unease that ranged from fear of fear itself to challenges to the political and ethical rationales associated with the war. The poetics of unease co-existed with the poetry of survival, which was also multi-faceted, encoding strategies for living in the moment as well as for coping with trauma.

We have chosen to focus on four poets, all of whom died in the war: Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg. All produced fine and memorable poems that continue to be read and appreciated today. All made distinctive use of classical material. They differed considerably in education and class background. Brooke and Sorley received a classical education in the elite schools of the time. Owen received a ‘middling’ education and tried to acquire some Latin. Rosenberg, the only non-officer among the four, was from a poor family, had limited education, and did not read Latin or Greek, but as an autodidact acquired an extensive knowledge of literature in English. Mapping how their poems interacted with classical material therefore entails a considerable range of connections. The commentaries also discuss how the chosen poets engaged with earlier texts in English and how their work in turn influenced other writers (e.g., Brooke and W. B. Yeats; Rosenberg, Pound and Douglas; Owen and Longley). In the commentaries on individual poems, we have not hesitated to experiment with a range of approaches and to ‘stretch’ the boundaries of conventional analysis of classical receptions.

Rupert Brooke’s small war output includes one of the most cited poems of WWI. His sonnet ‘The Soldier’, which begins ‘If I should die, think only this of me’, is still studied in schools and universities; this is despite its young author’s naïve enthusiasm for the combat which he was never really to experience (he died of an infected insect bite en route to the Gallipoli campaign in northwest Turkey), much criticised in later commentary. It was published in The Times and read aloud in St Paul’s Cathedral as a public promotion of positivity about the war and the new front opening up in the East.

Our commentary shows for the first time that this famous poem draws on a rich range of classical texts for its key content and even its form: the idea of fighting and being buried in a ‘foreign field’ evokes the Greek expedition to Troy and its fatal consequences for many of them, as narrated in Greek epic (Homer) and tragedy (Aeschylus), while its length and theme fit those of the brief Greek epitaphic epigram. Such echoes of the Trojan War are very fitting for a poem which imagines the author’s death in a campaign which was about to take place at Gallipoli in Turkey, very close to the site of ancient Troy where Homer’s heroes had fought each other in the Iliad, a proximity of which Brooke and his similarly educated fellow officers were fully aware.

Brooke’s sonnet had immediate impact on other war writers. There is a strong case that it influenced another famous poem of WWI, W. B. Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’ (1919). Yeats had met Brooke before the war and admired his good looks, and both poems present in the first-person ideas about dying in war—idealistic for Brooke, more fatalistic for Yeats. In particular, the opening words of Yeats’ airman (representing a real friend who was lost in the air for the then Royal Flying Corps, the future RAF ), ‘I know that I will meet my fate’, looks like a firm response to Brooke’s opening, ‘If I should die’, and the overall view of Yeats’ airman, that he has no patriotic stake in the war himself, looks like a reaction to Brooke’s nationalistic claim that his future grave will be ‘a corner of a foreign field / that is forever England’.

In a future post, we shall look at how Wilfred Owen drew on classical material to add a critical edge to his poetry. We also outline how Isaac Rosenberg’s Trench poems relate Greek and Hebrew sources to the environment of war-time Flanders.

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The Alexander Mosaic: Greek history and Roman memories

Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community. Specificity of visual imagery (e.g., identifiable protagonists, carefully rendered details, and inscriptions) combined with commemorative intent differentiates historical subjects from scenes conceived generically or drawn from daily life. In celebrating events meaningful to those holding power, historical subjects are propagandistic in that they foster a supremely favorable conception of those responsible for their creation. Yet no matter how carefully makers try to control the message, artworks can acquire an autonomy that permits audiences to construct “memories” of those events never intended.

Properly speaking, the Alexander Mosaic’s manufacture comprises Roman work, but most scholars believe it reflects a lost painting described by Pliny the Elder: “Philoxenos of Eretria painted a picture for King Cassander which must be considered second to none, which represented the battle of Alexander against Darius” (NH 35.110). This would date to ca. 330-310 BC, when memories of the battle were still fresh, and its propaganda value would be most effective. That painting may have been brought to Italy as plunder after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC. The fact that the mosaic reproduces an earlier work for a later audience forces us to consider the discrepancies between historical narrative and artistic tradition.

All of the surviving accounts of Alexander’s conquests were written against the background of Roman imperialism, and ancient readers necessarily interpreted what they read in the light of the social and political structures that characterized their age. Alexander “the Great” was a Roman creation: the title first appears in a Roman comedy by Plautus in the early second century BC. Because historical representations are distinctive and clearly recognizable to contemporary viewers, since its discovery in the House of the Faun at Pompeii in 1831, scholars have had to reckon with how the mosaic’s imagery functioned in two very different contexts: first as a fourth-century Greek painting and then as a first-century Roman mosaic. A painting celebrating a Macedonian victory meant something quite distinct when originally displayed in a Hellenistic palace than when it was possibly displayed as war booty in a Roman temple; and the mosaic copy in a Roman private house would carry still different significance. For a Roman audience, the commemorative specificity of the battle scene was probably less important than celebrating the qualities of Alexander’s personality that spoke to them: his ferocity in battle, his charisma, and his military genius. Alexander was as much a part of the cultural memory of Rome as Homeric epic was for Greece, providing a paradigm for their own military triumphs.

Heinrich Fuhrmann first suggested that the Roman patron of the artwork had participated in the Macedonian Wars, and that this mosaic copy of a spoil of war functioned as both a sign of his admiration for the “greatest” general and perpetuated the memory of his own role in overthrowing the dynasty that Alexander founded. A Roman viewer might have imagined a broader reenactment of the paradigmatic conflict between East and West, a conflict he may have participated in or merely appreciated through the lens of Roman ideology. Given the Roman taste for the allusive, a history become anachronistic could have also been appropriated and meaningfully reused through a cognitive metaphor whereby in place of Alexander’s empire, Roman viewers could have understood their own (since Rome had conquered the territories formerly occupied by Macedonia). Roman sources repeatedly compare Roman campaigns on the eastern frontier with earlier Greek struggles. Given that Parthia, which had fought on the Persian side against Alexander, was now Rome’s enemy in the east and Alexander’s legacy was now Roman, a Roman viewer could have easily identified with the Greeks. Furthermore, the patron who commissioned the mosaic copy belonged to the new Roman ruling class, which appropriated older Greek artworks—the fruits of their conquest—to express social status. It was prominently featured in a luxury dwelling, of a type also of Greek origin, whose colonnaded courtyards and receptions rooms were sumptuously decorated with other paintings and sculptures meant to impress visitors. Its Roman owner may even have appreciated the Alexander Mosaic as a “work of art”: an image divorced from its original context by its new role in a Roman social performance.

When artworks reconstruct a past in order to explain the present, their makers determine which events are remembered and rearrange them to conform to the required social narrative. Their display provides visible manifestations of collective memories. More than merely passive reflections, monuments with historical subjects reinforce those memories and confer them prestige. Divergent motivations were again in evidence after the Alexander Mosaic’s discovery when various European leaders such as the Prussian King Fredrick Wilhelm IV ordered copies of the copy: was the motivation for such modern commissions the desire for prestige achieved through association with a masterpiece from antiquity or with the political symbolism of its historical subject?

_{Featured image: Alexander Mosaic (ca. 100 BCE), Naples, Museo archeologico nazionale. Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons.}

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The first women’s shelter in Europe? Radegund’s Holy Cross

‘With the passion of a focused mind, I considered how to advance other women so that—the Lord willing—my own desires might prove beneficial for others. […] I established a monastery for girls in the city of Poitiers. After its foundation, I endowed the monastery with however much wealth I had received from the generosity of the king.’

– Radegund, Letter to the Bishops

Radegund wrote these words while reflecting on her greatest achievement: the foundation of the convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. She had every reason to be proud of this monastic house, which represented a triumph over the adversity she had faced previously in life—a manifestation of her personal resilience in stone. But was it something more? Had Radegund intended to create a sanctuary for women like herself, who had suffered everything that early medieval politics might inflict on highborn girls, to find refuge and peace? If Holy Cross was in fact a women’s shelter, then it was the first of its kind.

Born a princess to the Thuringian royal house, almost 1500 years ago, the young Radegund endured a series of tragedies: orphaned in her earliest years, she then witnessed the invasion of her homeland by the Frankish king, Chlothar, who slaughtered most of her remaining family and took her as his war captive. The king placed her in one of his rural villas, where she was guarded, raised, and in some ways treated like a slave. While still very young, she was forced to marry him, despite her efforts to run away. Radegund endured her marriage until Chlothar ordered the murder of her brother, her only surviving close kin.

After Radegund escaped her miserable marriage, but before she founded Holy Cross, she created her first institution for women in need: a hospital in a villa in Saix, which offered beds specifically for infirm women. ‘She herself washed them in warm baths, treating the putrid flesh of their diseases’, wrote one of her biographers. Radegund also provided treatment for men in Saix, but separately and without beds. This foundation can be fairly described as the first women’s hospital in Europe.

In her next effort to support her stated goal—the advancement of other women—Radegund founded Holy Cross in Poitiers. She accepted other highborn women into what became a religious house of considerable size, with around 200 nuns. Although the circumstances of entry are usually obscured from the historian, the example of Basina is both evidenced and instructive. The daughter of the Frankish king Chilperic I, Basina lost her mother, who was murdered at the hands of a rival—Queen Fredegund, who became Basina’s stepmother. Fredegund next turned her malevolent intentions to Basina, who was, according to the Histories of Gregory of Tours, ‘dishonoured by the slaves of the queen and sent into a monastery’. While most translators have interpreted the word deludere (rendered here as ‘dishonoured’) to mean something like ‘tricked’, it is much more likely that the word functioned as a euphemism for sexual assault, as suggested by Bruno Dumézil and explained in greater detail by Rachel Singer. Thus, historians have mistakenly thought that Radegund conspired in Fredegund’s trickery, when in fact she had offered refuge to a victim of sexual violence.

Radegund ensured that Holy Cross served as a protective environment for Basina, who was sheltered from the consequences of political life outside its walls. When Chilperic tried to reclaim Basina and marry her to a Visigothic prince, for example, Radegund resolutely refused. This was a fear that Radegund herself knew all too well: she had long worried that her former husband Chlothar, might try to reclaim her. This possibility was, according to one of her biographers, a fate she feared worse than death. History records one occasion, when a terrified Radegund successfully implored a high-ranking bishop to urge Chlothar to change his mind. Legend records another instance, in which nature herself protected the former queen. In an incident known as the ‘Miracle of the Oats’, Radegund fled into a field to escape Chlothar’s grasp. Recognising the vulnerability of the holy woman, the oats quickly grew so high that Radegund was concealed from Chlothar’s view. When the king saw that he had no hope of finding his former wife, he abandoned his pursuit.

Whether or not she was assisted by miraculous plants, Radegund ensured, just as she wrote in her Letter to the Bishops, that her efforts were beneficial not only for herself, but also for other women.

_{Featured image by Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Antonina: a sixth-century military wife

In our modern world, the spouses of major political figures may sometimes themselves spend quite a bit of time in the limelight, and be significant assets to the careers of their politician partners. In the sixth century, the wife of the most famous and successful Roman general of the day became nearly as powerful and famous as he was. Belisarius was the preferred general of Emperor Justinian (r. 527-565), and served his emperor by leading his armies to defeat the Persians, and to recover North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths. Antonina, his wife, was more than a smiling face dragged along for the ride. She was a serious political operative in her own right, and her partnership with Belisarius enabled both of them to reach astounding heights of power in the middle of the century.

Belisarius and Antonina worked together to secure most of their greatest achievements. Antonina was famous in her own day for accompanying Belisarius on his military campaigns. The historian Procopius of Caesarea exclaimed, “she made a point of accompanying him to the ends of the earth!” Antonina traveled with Belisarius to Italy in 535 and was at his side when the general and his army triumphantly (and peacefully) entered Rome on 9 December 536. It had been 60 years since the Eternal City was ruled by a Roman Emperor. 

The restoration of Roman authority did not come without some growing pains, however. Within a few months, Belisarius and Antonina began to suspect that Pope Silverius, resident within the city, secretly favored the recently departed Ostrogoths. This was not an unreasonable suspicion, as Silverius owed his papacy to an irregular appointment by the Ostrogothic King Theodahad. So, late in March 537, Antonina and Belisarius together schemed to depose the pope and replace him with someone more loyal to the Roman cause. The anonymously authored Liber Pontificalis provides a vivid depiction of the deposition, suggesting that the couple received the pope in audience while Antonina was reclining on a couch and Belisarius was sitting at her feet. It was Antonina who then spoke, saying, “Tell us, lord Pope Silverius, what have we done to you and the Romans to make you want to betray us into the hands of the Goths?” The pope was then stripped of his vestments and hurried out of the room. A short time later, Belisarius and Antonina appointed Vigilius to be pope.

This is a remarkable story that shows the power of Belisarius and Antonina when they worked together. More than this, the deposition of a pope by these two figures is essentially unprecedented. Before this moment, the last time a pope had been deposed and replaced was in 355, when Emperor Constantius II (r. 337-361) deposed Pope Liberius. A pope would not be deposed again until Emperor Constans II (r. 641-668) deposed Pope Martin I in 654. The deposition of a pope was perhaps a once-in-a-century event, and the other successful depositions were made possible only via the extraordinary pressure of the emperor. That Belisarius and Antonina could together depose Silverius, seemingly without much resistance, speaks to their authority and power.

Beyond the restoration of Rome and deposition of Pope Silverius, Antonina was with Belisarius for most of his other signature victories. In 533, Belisarius led a Roman army from Constantinople to North Africa. The Romans romped through what is today Tunisia, defeating the Vandal army twice and securing control of the entire Vandal kingdom and its capital, the ancient city of Carthage. Antonina traveled with Belisarius and his army every step of the way. In 540, Belisarius and the Roman army victoriously entered Ravenna, the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, after accepting the submission of the Ostrogothic King Vittigis. Antonina was right there as well.

While Antonina was present for most of Belisarius’ greatest victories, it is perhaps just as significant that she seems not to have been with him for his greatest failures. On 19 April 531, Belisarius suffered a serious setback to his military career by losing to the Persians at the Battle of Callinicum. According to Procopius, the officers of the Roman army had pressured the general into offering battle when he thought it was not propitious. Antonina was not present with Belisarius for this campaign or battle, and one wonders whether she might have steeled him to resist the pressure from his subordinates. Similarly, in Summer 542, Belisarius made a serious political faux pas by speculating on who should take the throne next if Justinian, at that time lying sick with the plague, should die. The report of Belisarius’ musing was forwarded to the emperor, who recalled and disgraced his general. Once again, it seems that Antonina was not present at the time. With her political acumen, she might have helped Belisarius to manage the rumor mill and avoid this precipitous fall from favor.

Antonina was the wife of a famous Roman general but stopping the description of her with that sells her short. She was a seasoned traveler and a wily political operative in her own right. It was the partnership of Antonina and Belisarius and their shared experiences that helped to propel them to the heights of success and power in the sixth century.

_{Featured image: Basilica of San Vitale, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.}

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The heavy burden of the past: the history of the conquest of México and the politics of today

The history of the conquest of Mexico by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century remains a complex topic of discussion. Various interpretations have emerged throughout the years, each offering unique insights into this pivotal moment in Mexican history. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president, has taken up the issue and uses it to promote his populist policy. What are López Obrador’s views on this historical event, considering his emphasis on indigenous rights, historical context, and the importance of reconciliation in Mexico?

Indigenous rights and empathy

According to the supporters of the government, one crucial aspect of President López Obrador’s view on the Conquest revolves around his concern for the rights of Mexico’s indigenous populations. He acknowledges the suffering and displacement inflicted upon indigenous communities during the Conquest. López Obrador emphasizes the need to respect the rights, culture, and dignity of indigenous peoples today, highlighting the importance of rectifying historical injustices through governmental policies.

His followers appreciate that President López Obrador often emphasizes the significance of understanding the historical context surrounding the Conquest of Mexico and stresses the deep-rooted impact of Spanish colonialism on Mexico’s social, economic, and political structures, which persist to this day. By examining the broader historical context, he claims to foster a critical dialogue about the long-lasting consequences of the Conquest.

Reconciliation and nation-building

Another key aspect of López Obrador’s views on the Conquest is the importance of reconciliation and nation-building in Mexico. According to the president, healing historical wounds is crucial for fostering unity in the country. López Obrador promotes acknowledgment of the past, aiming to create a more inclusive society. He encourages an open examination of Mexico’s history, recognizing both its triumphs and its darker moments, such as the Conquest, in order to move forward as a nation.

Efforts towards reconciliation

President López Obrador has implemented various initiatives aimed at fostering reconciliation and addressing the historical consequences of the Conquest. One such effort is the campaign to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. By highlighting the achievements of pre-Hispanic civilizations and acknowledging the resilience of indigenous communities, López Obrador seeks to honor their contributions and restore a sense of pride in Mexico’s rich cultural heritage. 

Furthermore, his administration has taken steps to provide reparations to indigenous groups affected by historical injustices. These initiatives include financial compensation, land restoration, and the promotion of indigenous languages and cultures. López Obrador’s government has also prioritized infrastructure development in marginalized communities, aiming to address historical inequalities and improve the living conditions of indigenous populations.

Oversimplification of history

One of the primary criticisms leveled against President López Obrador’s views is the oversimplification of complex historical events. His narrative often presents the conquest of Mexico as a morally clear-cut clash between indigenous peoples and Spanish conquistadors, neglecting the diverse dynamics and complex interactions that shaped this pivotal period in Mexican history. By reducing the conquest to a simplistic dichotomy of good versus evil, López Obrador overlooks the nuanced political, social, and cultural realities of the time.

Historical anachronism

Another significant criticism of López Obrador’s perspective is the application of contemporary standards to judge historical events. It is important to acknowledge that the values, norms, and perspectives of the sixteenth-century differ greatly from those of the present day. While recognizing the atrocities committed during the conquest, it is crucial to avoid projecting contemporary moral judgments onto historical actors. President López Obrador’s approach risks disregarding the historical context and complexities that influenced the actions of both indigenous peoples and the Spanish.

Exacerbation of social divisions

President López Obrador’s views on the conquest of Mexico have also faced criticism for their potential to exacerbate social divisions within the country. By emphasizing a simplistic narrative of victimhood, he risks perpetuating a sense of grievance and fostering resentment between different ethnic and cultural groups. While it is crucial to acknowledge historical injustices, a balanced approach that promotes understanding, reconciliation, and national unity is necessary to address the complexities of Mexico’s history and the multicultural nature of its society.

Marginalization of indigenous agency

Critics argue that López Obrador’s narrative of victimhood often marginalizes indigenous agency and undermines the rich history of indigenous resistance, adaptation, and cultural preservation during and after the conquest. By portraying indigenous peoples solely as victims, he fails to acknowledge their resilience, cultural contributions, and role in shaping the Mexican nation. Such a one-sided portrayal overlooks the complexity of indigenous societies and their interaction with European colonizers, ultimately perpetuating a distorted understanding of Mexico’s history.

Diminished focus on contemporary challenges

By directing excessive attention to the conquest of Mexico, President López Obrador’s views risk diverting focus from pressing contemporary issues that require urgent attention, such as poverty, corruption, inequality, and violence. While historical reckoning is important, an excessive emphasis on the past can distract from addressing current socio-economic challenges. Critics argue that López Obrador’s approach to history risks neglecting the pressing needs of the Mexican people and hampering progress in areas that demand immediate attention.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s views on the Conquest of Mexico reflect his emphasis on indigenous rights and national reconciliation. By acknowledging the atrocities committed during the Conquest, he seeks to rectify historical injustices and build a more inclusive Mexico. Through his initiatives and policies, López Obrador aims to honor the contributions of indigenous communities, promote dialogue, and foster a sense of national identity that is rooted in both the pre-Hispanic past and the multicultural present. However, his policies also give rise to criticism which revolves around concerns of oversimplification, historical anachronism, the exacerbation of social divisions, the marginalization of indigenous agency, and the potential neglect of contemporary challenges.

_{Featured image by Diego Rivera, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)}

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Xenophon’s kinder Socrates

“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1819, comparing Xenophon’s work favourably with the “mysticisms” and “whimsies” of Plato’s dialogues. More recently, many philosophers have taken the opposite view; a typical verdict is that of Terence Irwin in 1974, who described Xenophon as a “retired general” who presented “ordinary conversations.” The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics.

Both Jefferson and Irwin were right in identifying the characteristics of Xenophon’s depiction of his teacher—his overwhelming concern with providing practical advice for living a good life, and for managing relationships with family and friends. But both missed Xenophon’s lively wit, and his use of the dialogue form to put Socrates in conversation with Athenians, both friends and family and more public figures whose identity adds some spice to the discussion. Xenophon depicts a Socrates who offers pragmatic solutions to the difficulties his Athenian friends face, from Socrates’ own son’s rows with his mother to his friend Crito’s difficulties with vexatious lawsuits targeting his wealth. Where Plato shows Socrates leaving his conversation partners numbed and distressed by their recognition of their ignorance, as if attacked by a stingray, Xenophon takes more care to show how Socrates moved friends and students on from the discomfort of that initial learning moment. He offers practical solutions and friendly encouragement, whether persuading warring brothers to support each other or finding a way in which a friend can support the extended family taking refuge in his home. His advice is underpinned by an ethical commitment to creating and maintaining community.

It is not that Xenophon’s Socrates is afraid to show the over-confident the limits of their capabilities; while he offers encouragement and practical advice on personal and business matters, he rebukes those who want power and prestige without first doing their homework. His Socrates demonstrates to the young Glaucon that he needs to be much better informed about the facts and figures of Athenian civic and military resources before he proposes policy to his fellow citizens in Athens or seeks elected office. Socrates’ forensic uncovering of the young man’s ignorance of practical matters is sharpened for readers who recognise that this is Plato’s brother, depicted in his Republic as an acute interlocutor, able to follow Socrates’ most intellectually demanding arguments. In the conversation Xenophon presents, Glaucon is reduced to mumbling one excuse after another:

“Then first tell us,” said Socrates, “what the city’s land and naval forces are, and then those of our enemies.”

“Frankly,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that just off the top of my head.”

“Well, if you have some notes of it, please fetch them,” said Socrates. “I would be really glad to hear what they say.”

“Frankly,” he said, “I haven’t yet made any notes either.”

(Memorabilia 3.6.9)

Xenophon might be making a very ordinary claim here, that good leadership decision-making rests on a firm grasp of practical detail. But it gains depth when read against Plato’s argument in the Republic for handing over political leadership to philosopher kings, trained in theoretical disciplines. Xenophon argues that rule should be grounded from the bottom up; he is a firm believer in transferable skills, and that the ability to manage a household might equip someone to lead an army or their city.

Xenophon does not leave Glaucon quite as discomfited as Socrates’ interlocutors in Platonic dialogues become, such as the Euthyphro where the titular character hurries away rather than go through another round of being disabused of his opinions. He shows how Socrates moves on from the low point of the realisation of ignorance and starts to rebuild his interlocutors’ self-confidence, now underpinned by knowledge and self-awareness. Socrates offers Glaucon a careful recommendation for developing his management skills and gaining credibility before returning to public debates as a more impressive contributor. With another student, Euthydemus, Socrates switches from the argumentative mode familiar from Plato’s work—the Socratic “elenchus” or refutation—to exhortation and encouragement, as teacher and student become more familiar with each other and learn together cooperatively.

One reason that Xenophon was motivated to show a Socrates who encouraged his students to make useful contributions to public life was to rebut critics who presented him—not entirely without cause—as the teacher of some of the leaders of the brutal regime of the Thirty, which briefly overthrew Athens’ democracy after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon insists that these former students had abandoned Socrates’ teaching in favour of an aggressive pursuit of power.

Xenophon recognised the usefulness of a wide range of practical experience. A businessman might well make a useful general. But he makes Socrates insist that leaders must show practical knowledge and analytical skills in order to persuade others to follow them and to deliver successful outcomes, whether in business or in battle. The combination of knowledge and skill, which his students label basilikē technē, the “royal art”,” is an essential attribute of leadership. By responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust. In a contemporary context where trust in leaders and educators alike is low, perhaps there is a powerful and accessible case for the role of expertise in government and society, which Xenophon makes through his memories of Socrates’ conversations.

_{Featured image: “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David via The Met (public domain)}

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How long can the historical associations of places be remembered?

In Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth, I discuss a first-century building in Nazareth probably believed by the end of the seventh century to be where Jesus was brought up. Earlier, Egeria—the Western Roman woman writing in the 380s—says that the house of Mary, mother of Jesus, was on what may be the same site. This raises the question—of much wider applicability than just to first-century Nazareth—of whether local memory of an association between a place and the people who lived there could really be preserved for more than three centuries.

The answer to this question once seemed clearcut. Sociologists, historians, and social anthropologists such as Maurice Halbwachs and David Henige, working in the late twentieth century, stressed the ways in which the communal recollection of memories could be adapted and altered to fit the current concerns of people in changing circumstances. They doubted that anything historically reliable could persist purely in the shared memories of non-literate people for more than about 200 years. 

In terms of religious history, although this has no significant implications for the reliability of the Gospels as historical texts—they were all written well within that c.200-year bracket—it has major implications for the authenticity of those places associated with Gospel passages by fourth-century Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. When these pilgrims claimed that specific places were the exact locations of particular events in the Gospels, without any written evidence later than the Gospels themselves, one would, according to this “200-year rule,” be inclined to disbelieve these identifications. No association between places and events, it was said, could reliably be remembered simply by word-of-month testimony from the early first to the fourth centuries. 

However, twenty-first century studies challenge this twentieth-century scholarly consensus. Several striking instances of correlation between archaeological discoveries and topographical traditions have cast doubt on the existence of a 200-year “historical horizon.” There are so many examples of this that here I can give just a few examples. 

Only this year, for instance, a rescue excavation at Leicester cathedral in England confirmed the local story that a Roman temple formerly stood on its site. The present cathedral originated as an eleventh-century church, and no Roman temple in Britain can be shown to have been in use after the early fifth century—so there was an approximately an 700-year gap between the temple and church. Even assuming that Roman ruins discovered during construction of the church in the eleventh century most likely led to the post-medieval legend, the memory of this would have had to have been preserved by the people of Leicester in unwritten form for centuries.

This is nowhere near the longest time that unwritten knowledge seems to have preserved the historical associations of a place. The anthropologists Frances and Howard Morphy have recently drawn attention to scores of inland indigenous Yolngu place-names in Arnhem Land, in the north of Australia, which give details of an earlier coastline identified by twenty-first century geological research and otherwise invisible for about 3000 years. Consequently, there seems no other possible conclusion than that local people, living in the same—but geomorphologically altered—landscape, preserved detailed topographical knowledge of the former coastline over three millennia through their unwritten names for these places alone.

Returning to the Nazareth, a local story recorded in 1881 by the nuns of the Sisters of Nazareth convent said that a big church had once stood on the present Sisters of Nazareth convent site. This place had indeed been the site of a large church, probably razed to the ground by fire in the capture of Nazareth in 1187—694 years earlier. Yet the existence of that church was only discovered during the nun’s subsequent excavations, when they found its ruins buried metres deep below ground-level.

Of course, by no means all such topographical legends and traditional stories have a basis in fact. Many are certainly no more than fabrication and others contain embellishment or “editing” in later centuries. But judging from archaeological and anthropological cases of this sort of correlation—and the list of them is growing constantly—there seems no doubt that the 200-year rule cannot be taken as the sort of cultural law that it once seemed. While it is impossible to use this to say that the legendary associations of a place always have some basis in historical fact, it may show that they can.

This brings us back to the “house of Jesus.” It is plausible on this basis that the historical associations of a place—even a place in Nazareth—could have been remembered between the early first century and the 380s, or even 670s. But we cannot tell for sure that it was.

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Civil war and the end of the Roman Empire

In AD 400, the Roman Empire encircled the entire Mediterranean and looked, for all the world, as if it would continue to do so indefinitely. By AD 500, the Western portion of that Empire was no more. In its place stood some half dozen new kingdoms whose names—the kingdoms of the Franks, the Burgundians, the Vandals, the Saxons, the Goths—linked them not to the old Empire but to the world beyond its frontiers, the world of Germanic Europe. Given this, and given the images of wars and violence that colour almost every narrative of the period, ancient and modern, it has always been hard to escape the conclusion that the blame for Rome’s fall lies squarely with the ravening barbarians at the gates.

Barbarians there were, of course, but the truth of how they came to be at the gates is a little more complex. Since the second century BC, with the defeat of its greatest rival, Carthage, Rome had been the only show in town. For some six hundred years no power had existed that could rival Rome’s economic and military might. The Romans, however, faced a different military problem. Their Empire was simply too big: 1,500 miles north to south, 2,500 miles east to west, broken by mountain ranges, and spread across three of the world’s seven continents. As Augustine lamented in the early fifth century in his vast magnum opus, The City of God “the very breadth of the Empire has brought forth wars of a worse sort—social or rather civil wars” (19.7).

Since the end of the second century AD, competition to dominate the vast apparatus of the Roman state had created conditions of almost endemic civil war. Of the 29 decades between the year 190 AD and the year 480 (the year in which the last man claiming the title of Roman emperor in the West died), only two passed unmarked by Roman civil war. The third century, particularly during the so called “third century crisis” of 235-284 AD, is often seen as the high point of this trend, a period in which more than 80 emperors claimed power in short, bloody reigns, all but four of which ended with the emperor dying violently at Roman hands. Yet if in the fourth century the frequency of civil war declined, its intensity, if anything, increased. Five times between 300 and 400 AD, wars were fought that pitted the entire military manpower of the Eastern Empire against that of the West, wars settled in terrifyingly bloody pitched battles at which tens of thousands of Roman soldiers died. In 357, the emperor Julian led a small Roman army of 12,000 men against a coalition of Alemannic kings at Strasbourg, at which battle—a crushing Roman victory—Julian lost only 243 men. Six years before, when the emperors Constantius and Magnentius met in battle at Mursa, so says the historian Zonaras, 54,000 Roman soldiers died.

The entire military architecture of the Roman Empire was built around the fact that the greatest danger a Roman emperor faced was other Romans. Faced with a war on two fronts—one civil, one foreign—emperors invariably abandoned their foreign campaign (provincials in the threatened regions be damned)! and marched to fight their Roman enemy. Nor were Germanic “barbarians” merely spectators to these civil wars. Across the fourth century, Germanic tribesmen were recruited more and more actively to serve as foot soldiers in the armies that rival emperors would fling at one another. From the reign of the emperor Constantine (306-37 AD), men of Germanic extraction were, for the first time, granted access not only to service in Rome’s armies, but to command of them. By the late fourth century, senior military posts across the Empire were increasingly filled by men who—like Bauto, Richomer, Arbogast, Stilicho, Gainas, and others—had been born outside the Empire or were the children of people who had. Alaric, the “Goth” who sacked Rome in 410, spoke Latin, had lived his life within the Roman Empire, and led his soldiers in two bloody campaigns that the Eastern Empire waged upon the West, in 388 and 394. The line separating a barbarian king from a Roman general in the fourth and fifth century was frequently not a matter of culture, language, or ethnicity but merely a question of whether or not they were in imperial employ.

As military crisis on Rome’s borders worsened in the fifth century, prompted in part by the creation of a Hunnic Empire in middle Europe, competing Roman courts continued to worry, above all, about how to manage their Roman rivals. The Goths who sacked Rome under Alaric were not defeated in battle; they were rewarded by the emperor Honorius with lands in the south of Gaul in the beautiful and fertile valley of the Garonne river, in order to help protect the Italian court from Roman usurpers in Spain and Gaul. The Vandals, who crossed into Africa in 427 and founded there a kingdom that, at a stroke, deprived the Western Empire of its agricultural heartlands and the breadbasket of the city of Rome, were invited into the province by a disgruntled Roman commander who expected to use them to wage war upon his rivals in Italy. The Romans hated barbarians with a visceral passion, but in that hatred lay a contempt that led the Romans to treat them—as Varro once famously said of slaves—as “speaking tools.” Germanic barbarians, it is true, began to shear land and wealth from the Romans as the fifth century progressed. But they had been trained how to do it by the Romans themselves.

_{Feature image: “Constantine the Great” from Flickr (CC BY 2.0)}

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Exploring Ancient Egypt with Carter, Reisner, and Co. [interactive map]

The Ancient Egyptian civilization is regarded as one of the most iconic civilizations in history. It lasted for over 3,000 years, with the Nile River serving as a lifeline for small, independent city states to bloom along the river due to its agricultural predictability. As the fertile valley produced surplus crops, large populations thrived, leading to greater social development and culture.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign in 1798 inspired a burst of Egyptomania in Europe. Ever since then, many world scholars have attempted to discover the riches of the land, including American George Reisner, Egypt’s premier archaeologist of his era, and British Howard Carter, who discovered the Boy King Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Travel back in time to Ancient Egypt and explore pyramids with hidden burial chambers, colossal royal statue, miniscule gold jewelry, and much more. Explore the interactive map below.

_{Featured image: Figure 14.3 from Walking Among Pharaohs by Peter der Manuelian. Excavations at Nuri Pyramid 6, looking local west, November 11, 1916. HU-MFA B2859 NS; Mohammedani Ibrahim.} 

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Egyptology at the turn of the century [podcast]

On 1 November 1922, Egyptologist Howard Carter and his team of excavators began digging in a previously undisturbed plot of land in the Valley of the Kings. For decades, archaeologists had searched for the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun with no success, and that November was to be Carter’s final attempt to locate the lost treasures. What Carter ultimately discovered—the iconic sarcophagus, the mummy that inspired whispers of a curse, and the thousands of precious artifacts—would shape Egyptian politics, the field of archaeology, and how museums honor the past for years to come.

On today’s episode, we discuss the legacy of early twentieth-century Egyptology to coincide with the 100^th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

First, we welcomed Bob Brier—one of the world’s foremost Egyptologist, and an expert in mummies who is one of a few scholars who have had the opportunity to investigate Tutankhamun’s mummy—as he discusses his new book Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World and the 100 years of research that have taken place since the tomb’s discovery. We then spoke with Peter Der Manuelian, the author of Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology, to discuss Reisner’s life, the rise of American Archaeology in Egypt, and the archeological field’s involvement in nationalism and colonialism.

Check out Episode 77 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

To learn more about the themes raised in this podcast, we’re pleased to share a selection of free-to-read chapters and articles:

Earlier on the OUPblog, we shared an interactive map showing some of Reisner’s and Carter’s key discoveries. Included in the map are photos of some of the amazing artefacts as well as excerpts from Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World and Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology.

From The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology, read about the nature of history and Egyptology.

You can read about the exploration of the Valley of the King’s prior to the late Twentieth Century in The Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings.

To learn more about the phenomenon of Egyptomania that has spread through the 20^th and 21^st centuries, you can read a chapter from Ian Shaw’s book Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction.

Learn more about the discovery of Howard Carter’s letters confirming the theft of artefacts in this recent piece from The Guardian.

The greywacke statue of King Menkaura and the painted coffin of Djehutynakht, two of George Reisner’s discoveries mentioned by Peter Der Manuelian, can be viewed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Lastly, Bob Brier mentioned one of the most famous Saturday Night Live skits, Steve Martin’s “King Tut” song from 1978:

_{Featured image: “Howard Carter in the King Tutankhamen’s tomb, circa 1925” by Harry Burton, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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How well do you know these spooky Oxford World’s Classics?

Whether you’re accompanying children door-to-door as they scream “trick o’ treat!?” or donning a scary costume just to sit on the couch and eat candy in front of your favourite horror flick, Halloween is a spooky and fun time for all!

To help get you in the mood for Halloween this year, we have created a quiz to test your knowledge on some of Oxford World’s Classics scariest tales. Are you up for the challenge?

The books in the quiz are:

• Dracula by Bram Stoker, available here
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, available here
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, available here
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, available here
• The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen, available here
• The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, available here
• The Monk by Matthew Lewis, available here
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson, available here
• Zofloya; or The Moor by Charlotte Dacre, available here
• The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories by Henry James, available here

_{Featured image by Nika Benedictova on Unsplash, public domain}

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The radical reinterpretation of the fasces in Mussolini’s Italy

In November 1914, when Benito Mussolini, then prominent as a revolutionary socialist, tried to mobilize popular opinion for Italy to intervene in World War I, he gave the name “Autonomous Fasci of Revolutionary Action” to his disparate supporters. The term “fascio” (plural “fasci”) was then common in Italy’s political lexicon, in its core meaning of “bundle”, to denote a loosely-organized group grounded in a common ideology. It was the workers’ movement in Sicily of the mid-1890s that firmly cemented the word “fascio” into everyday use. At the time, the press even sometimes tagged members of the Sicilian fasci as “fascisti.” 

Two decades later, especially after Italy entered the War in May 1915, there were dozens of activist groups of all stripes with “fascio’ in their name. Yet it was only after the conclusion of World War I that one of the political fasci used the old Roman symbol of the fasces—a bundle of wooden rods and a single-bladed axe with leather straps—to express its identity, and had its members proudly lay claim to the somewhat pejorative moniker “fascisti.” The take off point was Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro on 23 March 1919, when Mussolini relaunched his war movement as a paramilitary group, the “Italian Fasci of Combat.” 

The fasces in historical tradition

It is said that the charismatic “poet-soldier” Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) had urged Mussolini to adopt as the emblem of his new party the Roman fasces: in essence, a mobile kit for punishment, one intended to induce feelings of respect for the state’s highest authorities as well as fear. Ancient tradition is unanimous that the emblem had come from the Etruscans to archaic Rome, where 12 attendants known as “lictors” each carried these fasces in procession before the king, to mark his full civil and military power and with it, his capacity to inflict either corporal or capital punishment. What is certain is that the institution had a run of at least 1,800 years, through Rome’s Republican and Imperial periods, and then (in an attenuated form) to probably the end of the Byzantine empire.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, authors and artists offered a new twist in the understanding of the fasces. We now find representations of the rods with axe regularly evoking memories not just of Roman rule, but also of a popular but decidedly non-pertinent Aesop fable featuring an old man, his quarrelsome sons, and a bundle of sticks. The point of the tale is that one can break rods easily one at a time, but not when bound together—a visual lesson of the power of unity. This learned conflation was responsible for promoting the emphatically non-Roman idea that the fasces represented unity, and good government in general, which later powerfully informed political iconography in both the young United States and revolutionary France.

The fasces as fascist iconography

Some months after San Sepolcro, we find Mussolini vigorously promoting the symbol of the fasces, first to brand his “Fascist Bloc” in the Italian general election of 16 November 1919. In late October his campaign proclaimed that “the Fascist emblem signifies unity, force and justice!”, and showed Roman fasces with cords loosened at the base of the bundle, evidently in the process of being readied for punitive use. Starting in 1920 the fasces adorned the membership cards of the movement—initially with loose cords, later without. Use of the historical Roman emblem to a stunning degree helped valorize Mussolini’s violent methods, which intensified especially from spring 1920. It also helped grow his movement. By the end of the next year, Mussolini’s group had swelled reportedly to more than 300,000 members and was reconstituted as the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF).

After his movement’s largely bloodless “March on Rome” (28-30 October 1922) that felled the elected government, Mussolini—now as prime minister—set out immediately to force the fasces into every crevice of Italian daily life, from coinage and postage stamps to cigarette packaging. In the first half of 1923, the Fascist-led government tasked Italy’s most prominent archaeologist, Giacomo Boni (1859-1925), with divining the most “authentic” form of the Roman fasces—not so much out of genuine academic curiosity, but surely to set a single official form as the basis for a visual identity system. Amazingly, one fringe group of occultists sought to counter this effort by creating what they regarded as a spiritually supercharged fasces, topped allegedly by an Etruscan axe-head, which one of its members managed to present to Mussolini in Rome during the May 1923 International Woman Suffrage Congress. The ploy didn’t work, and Italy’s new nickel coinage with an antiquarian-derived Roman fasces went into mass production in summer 1923.

All that proved to be just the first strides of a 20-year program to makes the fasces ubiquitous in Italy and the territories it colonized in Africa. Mussolini’s regime’s relentless focus on the fasces, and propagation of the image on a massive scale (with individual items ranging in size from lapel pins to entire structures, including Florence’s train station) had no close parallel in world history—not in the Roman empire, where we never find the frightening image of a free-standing fasces on a coin, nor even in the feverish production of French Revolutionary iconography. Plus, Mussolini seems to have been the first statesperson ever to interpret the fasces as an instrument for imposing political unity by means of authority. (Everyone else had it the other way around.) It also was a special innovation of Mussolini to idealize the humble lictor who lugged the fasces and raise him to prominence. The not so subtle suggestion here was that all elements of Italian society should model their behavior on that of the lictor, and selflessly and energetically carry forward the standard of fascismo.

Post-war legacy of the fasces

The defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 sent the image of the fasces sharply in retreat—even in the United States, where soon after war’s end it was dropped from the long-established (since 1916) ten cent piece. However, Italy developed no master plan to address its now-ubiquitous Fascist symbols. Indeed, by 1953, its national Olympic committee was touting Rome’s ex-Foro Mussolini as an ideal site for the 1960 Summer Games. And once it won its bid, it made only a belated and feeble effort (quickly abandoned) to mitigate the effect of the hundreds of fasces embedded in the mosaic walkway that led to the principal stadium, which are still intact today. That said, in the post-World War II era—with the exception of a provocative twinned public sculpture by Scotland’s Alexander Stoddart (2001) on university campuses in Paisley and Princeton—no one has been putting up new fasces in public art.

_{Feature image: “Fascist parade: Benito Mussolini reviewing a military parade in Rome, December 3, 1940.” From Encyclopædia Britannica}

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