Some four decades ago the late Sir Moses Finley, then Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, published a powerful series of lectures entitled Democracy Ancient and Modern (1973, republished in an augmented second edition, 1985). He himself had personally suffered the atrocious deficit of democracy that afflicted his native United States in the 1950s, forcing him into permanent exile, but my chief reason for citing his book here, apart from out of continuing intellectual respect, is that its title could equally well have been Democracy Ancient Versus Modern.
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By Kate Farquhar-Thomson
I look forward to the last week of May every year and 2014 is no exception. To what am I referring? My annual pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye of course.
Every year since I can remember, I find myself in England’s famous book town for the excellent Hay Festival. Now in its 27th year the eponymous book festival can be found nestling under canvass for 11 days in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park. Due to the breadth of our publishing at OUP we are lucky enough to field a great ‘team’ of authors every year at this internationally renowned festival and this year is no exception.
Sharing the Green Room with the likes of Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax, Monty Don, and James Lovelock, this year, will be Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalization and Development and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, who will be speaking about ‘Meeting Global Challenges’. This talk kicks off a series of three talks inspired by the new book Is the Planet Full? Edited by Goldin, the book has 10 contributors and later in the week talks will also pull out some of the books’ major themes such as ‘The End of Population Growth?’ addressed by Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, ‘Can the World Feed 10 Billion People (Sustainably & Equitably)’ discussed by Charles Godfrey and with Yavinder Malhi who will be looking at the question ‘Bigger than the Biosphere? A metabolic perspective on our human-dominated planet’.
The Hay Festival site. Photo by Finn Beales.
A specialist in ancient Greek history, Professor Paul Cartledge will be talking about his latest book After Thermopylae. Illustrating the diversity of the OUP’s contribution to the festival this year and offering something for everyone, the week continues with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones discussing spies and spying; John van Wyhe, who is flying in from Singapore, will talk about Alfred Russell Wallace of whom last year saw the 100 year anniversary of his death; Justin Gregg, who knows a thing or two about dolphins, asks Are Dolphins Really Smart? For the scientists among us Professor Peter Atkins will surely answer the question What is Chemistry? in a fully illustrated talk on the subject.
Frequent visitors to Hay will be familiar with David & Hilary Crystal who have entertained many a festival goer over the years and this year they plan to take us on a literary tour through the UK looking at how the language was shaped by Wordsmiths and Warriors in history.
There is not much Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, doesn’t know about Strategy. And his latest book on the topic gives us a panoramic synthesis of the role of strategy throughout world civilization, from ancient Greece through the nuclear age. He was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997 and more recently, in June 2009, served as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War.
During the final weekend of the festival Thomas Weber will bring insight and detail on Hitler’s formative experiences as a soldier on the Western Front when discussing Hitler’s First War and Julian Thomas will discuss ‘The Dorstone Dig‘ where over the last couple of summers, the archaeological team have uncovered two 6,000-year-old burial mounds and the remains of two huge halls that appear to have been ritually burned down.
I, for one, will be looking forward to being entertained and educated during my week at Hay and I hope you are too!
Kate Farquhar-Thomson is Head of Publicity at OUP in Oxford.
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Image credit: Hay Festival site. Photo by Finn Beales.
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By Paul Cartledge
Let’s be clear of one thing right from the word go: this is not in any useful sense a historical movie. It references a couple of major historical events but is not interested in ‘getting them right’. It uses historical characters but abuses them for its own dramatic, largely techno-visual ends. It wilfully commits the grossest historical blunders. This is in fact a historical fantasy-fiction movie and should be viewed and judged only as such. But in case any classroom teachers of Classical civilization or Classical history should be tempted to use it as a teaching aid: caveant magistri — let the teachers beware! Here are just five ways in which the movie is at best un-historical, at worst anti-historical.
(1) Error sets in with the very title: the ’300′ bit is a nod to Zack Snyder’s infinitely more successful 2006 movie to which this is a kind of sequel, and there is not just allusion to but bodily lifting of a couple of scenes from the predecessor. But which Empire is supposed to be on the rise here? I suppose that it’s meant to be, distantly, the ‘Athenian Empire’, but that didn’t even begin to rise until at least two years after the events the movie focuses on: the sea-battles of Artemisium and Salamis that both took place in 480 BCE.
(2) The movie gets underway with a wondrously unhistorical javelin-throw — cast by Athenian hero Themistokles (note the pseudo-authentic spelling of his name with a Greek ‘k’) on the battlefield of Marathon near Athens in 490 BCE, a cast which kills none other than Persian Great King Darius I, next to whom is standing his son and future successor Xerxes. Actually, though Darius had indeed launched the Persian expedition that came to grief at Marathon, he was not himself present there, nor was Xerxes.
Themistocles, on the other hand, was indeed present, but rather than carrying and throwing a javelin he was fighting in a dense phalanx formation and wielding a long, heavy pike armed with a fearsome iron tip made for thrusting into the Persian enemy hand-to-hand.
(3) From the Persians’ Marathon defeat, which (historically) accounts for their return revenge expedition under Xerxes, the scene shifts to the Persians’ fleet — in fact, a whole decade later. Connoisseurs of 300 will have been prepared for the digitally-enhanced, multiply-pierced and bangled Rodrigo Santo reprising his role of ‘god-king’ Xerxes. (Actually Persian king-emperors were not regarded or worshipped as gods.) Even they, though, will not necessarily have expected the Persian fleet to be under the command of a woman, and a Greek woman at that: Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), who is represented (in the exceedingly fetching person of Eva Green) as the equal if not superior of Xerxes himself, with her own court of fawning and thuggish male attendants, all hunks of beefcake.
Here the filmmakers are indeed drawing on a properly historical well of evidence: Artemisia — so we learn from Herodotus, her contemporary, fellow-countryman, and historian of the Graeco-Persian Wars — was indeed a Greek queen, who did fight for Xerxes and the Persians at Salamis. She did allegedly earn high praise from Xerxes as well as from Herodotus for the ‘manly’ quality of her personal bravery and her sage tactical and strategic advice.
But she was far from being admiral-in-chief of the entire Persian navy. She contributed a mere handful of warships out of the total of 600 or so, and those ships of hers could have made no decisive difference to the outcome of Salamis one way or the other.
(4) For some reason — perhaps because they were conscious of the extreme sameness of most of their material, a relentless succession of ultra-gory, stylised slayings, to the accompaniment of equally relentless drum’n'bass background thrummings — the filmmakers of this movie, unlike of 300, have felt the desire or even the need to include one rather prolonged and really quite explicit heterosexual sex-encounter. Understandably, perhaps, this is not between say Themistokles and his wife (or a slave-girl), or between Xerxes and a member of his (in historical fact, extensive) harem.
But — utterly and completely fantastically — it is between Themistokles and Artemisia in the interim between the battles of Artemisium (presented as a Greek defeat; actually it was a draw) and Salamis. Cue the baring of Eva Green’s considerable pectoral assets, cue some exceptionally violent and degrading verbal sparring, and cue virtual rape — encouraged by Artemisia at the time but later thrown back by her in Themistocles’s face as having been inadequate on the virility front.
(5) The crowning, climactic historical absurdity, however, is not the deeply unpleasant coupling between Themistokles and Artemisia, but the notion that in order for Themistocles and his Athenians to defeat the Persian fleet at Salamis they absolutely required the critical assistance of the massive Spartan navy which — echoes here of the US cavalry in countless westerns — turned up just in the nick of time, commanded by another Greek woman and indeed queen, Gorgo (widow of Leonidas, the hero of 300), again played by Lena Headey.
Actually, Sparta contributed a mere 16 warships to the united Greek fleet of some 400 ships at Salamis, and like Artemisia’s they made absolutely no difference to the outcome, which was resoundingly and incontestably an Athenian victory. The truly Spartan contribution to the overall defeat of the Persian invasion was made in very different circumstances, on land and by the heavy-infantry Spartan hoplites, at the battle of Plataea in the following summer of 479. But that is quite another story, one in which the un- or anti-historical filmmakers show not even a particle or scintilla of interest.
Paul Cartledge is the A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge and the author of After Thermopylae: the Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars (OUP, 2013). He hastens to make clear that he was not in any way a consultant on ’300: Rise of an Empire’, as he had been, in a minor way, on ’300′.
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Image credit: 300: Rise of An Empire. (c) Warner Bros. via 300themovie.com
The post Five things 300: Rise of an Empire gets wrong appeared first on OUPblog.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His new book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, provides a highly original introduction to ancient Greece that takes the city as its starting point. He uses the history of eleven cities – out of over a thousand – to illuminate the most important and informative aspects of Greek history. In the original post below, Professor Cartledge talks about the recent publicity surrounding his claim that the ancient Greeks introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France.
Recently I have been interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship ‘Today’ programme, on the BBC World Service, on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (my local station), and by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The cause of all this interest? The claim that it was the ancient Greeks who introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France in around 600 BC (E). That was when Greeks from ancient Phocaea, a city that sits today on Turkey’s Aegean shore, founded the city of Massalia – which has ultimately evolved into contemporary Marseille(s).
This is just one illustration of two major points. First, that ‘ancient Greece’ was not any one country or nation-state but a cultural conglomerate – ‘Hellas’ in ancient Greek – stretching from Spain in the West to Georgia in the East and unified not by politics but by commerce and custom, especially religious custom. Second, that this enlarged Ancient Greece had – and still has – such an impact on our modern western world partly precisely because it was so enlarged.
Altogether ancient ‘Hellas’ – a cultural concept like medieval ‘Christendom’ or ‘the Arab world’ today – comprised around 1000 different Hellenic communities at any one time between say 600 BC(E) and AD (or CE) 300. Besides Massalia, there are Cnossos (where the earliest examples of Greek writing are attested, datable about 1400 BCE), Mycenae (’rich in gold’, as Homer calls it), Argos, Miletus, Sparta, Athens, Syracuse, Thebes, Alexandria, and Byzantion (which in CE 324 became Constantinople, and later, much later, after both the Ottoman conquest and the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, Istanbul).
The ultimate origins of Cotes du Rhone is not perhaps the most earth-shattering issue for most of us today, though for the ancient Greeks it was not just what wine you drank, a matter of taste, but how you drank it (with what admixture of water) that counted – a matter of civilisation that divided Greeks from all non-Greeks. But the role of ancient Alexandria (the one in Egypt) as allegedly the ‘birthplace of the modern world’, as one recent book on the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 would have it, is no trivial issue at all. For if you consider its outbreaks of (pagan) antisemitism (or judeophobia) and of Christian fundamentalist fanaticism (that resulted in the murder of Hypatia in AD 415, say), you would have reluctantly to answer ‘yes’. On the other hand, much more cheeringly, you would give the same answer if you were looking for the birthplace of scholarship (in the Museum and Library) and were considering numerous astonishing pioneering achievements in science, literary criticism and technology (the polymath Eratosthenes, the maths genius Archimedes, and the geographer Claudius Ptolemy all worked here, and it was here too that the steepling multistorey Pharos lighthouse was constructed in the 3rd century BCE, a genuine Wonder of the Ancient World).
Massalia, though, did not only merit inclusion because it was through there that the grapevine was first introduced to the south of France. It was also the birthplace of the man who ‘discovered’ Britain (and a great deal besides) in about 300 BCE, one Pytheas. And similarly horizon-expanding feats with major contemporary resonance and relevance can be identified in every one of the eleven ancient cities selected to represent ‘Ancient Greece’. It is a privilege as well as a pleasure for me as Cambridge’s endowed A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture to investigate and celebrate critically our ancient cultural ancestors in this and other ways. There is no peace for wicked Cambridge Classics dons.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, and has written and edited many books on the Ancient Greek world. He also served as chief historical consultant for the BBC television series The Greeks. His new book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, takes the city as its starting point, revealing just how central the polis (’city-state’ or ‘citizen-state’) was to Hellenic cultural achievements. He tells us more about the book in the video below, made by the nice people at Meet the Author.
Click here to view the embedded video.
A new spoof/parody of the movie "300" hits theaters today. "Meet the Spartans" was written by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the brains behind "Epic Movie" and "Scary Movie," and features Sean Maguire as King Leonides, Carmen Electra as Queen Margo, and Ken Davitian as Xerxes.
For those interested in the real story behind the battle of Thermopylae and the history of the Spartans, Professor Paul Cartledge from the University of Cambridge has written the definitive works: Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World and Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, both available from Overlook.
Paul Cartledge's masterful Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World is the subject of an excellent review ("East v. West: The First Round) by Jasper Griffin in the December 6 issue of The New York Review of Books: "Paul Cartledge, professor of ancient history at Cambridge, gives a good account of this memorable expedition and its unforgettable failure . . . Cartledge does full justice to these events, which even the most pacific or unmilitary reader must find soul-shaking."
Remember when you left your local cineplex after your third screening of the mega-blockbuster "300" promising yourself that you were gonna find out everything there is to know about the Battle of Thermopylae? Well, now while you're waiting for Netflix to deliver the dvd (releasing Tuesday 7/31) you can still get your hands on *the* definitive book on the battle, Paul Cartledge's Thermopylae. Pop some popcorn! And get ready to dive back into the gory & glory as only our esteemed and beloved Dr. Cartledge can muster. No dvd extras can stand up to the mighty Spartan coverage that only this book supplies! Enjoy! Reading, too, is glorious! You will enjoy this book! Or you'll have to answer to all those Spartan dudes.
USA TODAY runs an interview with Overlook's Paul Cartledge about the forthcoming release of "300" which brings the battle of Thermopylae once more to the big screen. Paul has written *the* book on the subject and we have had to once again go back to the printers to make more copies. See the movie, read the book. For Glory & Sparta! And read the interview...
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