"Virgil's Aeneid" by David Ross

As Ross notes in his Preface "This is not a book intended for Virgilian scholars, nor on the other hand is it solely for 'the general reader', who, in the area of Latin literature at least, may be as rare as the ivory-billed woodpecker." (p vii) It must therefore be asked whether this book falls between two stools. As a general reader I can asset that the answer is no. This extraordinarily well-written book intrigued and beguiled me. Yes, I have read the Aeneid (in translation) and I think it would be essential to have done so, or at least to be reading the Aeneid in parallel with this. But this book made me realise how much of Virgil's book I had missed; how much richer it was than I had appreciated. It made me want to re-read it with this as my guide. And it made me determined, some day, to tackle Virgil's other poetry, the Eclogues and the Georgics (not to mention rereading the Odyssey and trying Catullus).

This book is full of insights. I had never before appreciated that the Roman 'religion' was in essence a variety of pantheons, including the Olympic, grafted on to primitive animistic shadowy and vague powers such as Mater Matuta, Janus, Concordia, Castor, Fortuna etc; that “The ancestors of the Romans were, as Indo-Europeans. rather odd: they seem to have brought with them into Italy no gods and no mythology.” (p 80)  and one of the traditional invocations began “whether you be god or goddess” (p 63)  Even as late as "Cato's time (the first half of the second century) Mars could still be purely a spirit of the wilderness, though he had also, and for a long time, assumed the armour and the personality of Ares.” (p 65)

Nor had I appreciated that the chronology of Roman history is mainly invented, even regarding the date of the founding of the city. “The date that we view as traditional, 753 BC, was not established and accepted until 47 BC, on the authority of Varro, the greatest antiquarian scholar of his time, but it was entirely his invention.” He calculated that the Republic began in 509 BC and there were seven kings with an average reign of, say, 35 years each. (p 78) This is almost as good as Archbishop Usher's calculation of the date of creation.

Other insights included:

• “Virgil’s poem is a complete inversion of Homer.” (p 1)
• “Poetic meaning cannot be caught in the net of analysis, typified, catalogued, and stored away systemically in its proper drawer of a critical cabinet. The Aeneid does have meaning, but it has no answers.” (p 3)
• “Homeric narrative ... is strikingly different from the sophisticated literary narrative of secondary epic, in this respect: it is realistic, with the realism demanded by children listening to a fairytale. Every detail must be precise and logical.” (p 7) And just the tiny fraction of Homer quoted made me realise the power of the narrative.
• “The mundane experience of ordinary people living their everyday lives can become of literary interest only when given a significance that removes the experience from the everyday, that makes it mean something more.” (p 11)
• “The hero must do great deeds and must excel, but if he is to move us and have meaning, he must also fail, because failure is human, and the most human failing is death.” (p 12)
• “The difference between a Homeric hero at a time of crisis and Aeneas is simply this, that in Homer the hero then acts, decisively and without further hesitation, whereas for Aeneas there is no course of action possible, no way to resolve the conflict.” (p 13)
• “Divine action ... is human action in a pure state, a purity of absolute pettiness, of ambition and greed, of spite and pride; but pure also in that it need have no regard for its consequences” because the gods are immortal.” (p 72)

I even understood (most of) the discussion about the Latin hexameter and the reason for stresses and caesuras. 

Other great moments:

• “What is most obvious often receives the least attention” (p 1)
• “Apollonius’ Jason and Medea are subject to passions and faults all too human. Jason appears often as an incompetent, a bumbler, and a cad, and Medea is both the witch of towering passion and supernatural powers ... and also a naive girl experiencing love for the first time.” (p 6)
• “The traditional hero stands half-way between the gods and men.” (p 11)
• “Ignorance is fundamental to the human condition.” (p 76)
• “Whereas we walk down the road of life looking into the future as we go, the ancients sat in a railroad car facing to the rear, seeing only where they have passed; to see where they were going, they had to look back over their shoulders. This, in fact, is a far more realistic conception of the future than ours.” (p 106)

What a wonderful book. My mate Fred is good at picking books for me. Others he has selected which I recommend are:

• The Feather Thief, a true crime story about a theft from a museum
• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• The Song of Achilles  a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller
• Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis

August 2018; 152 pages

"Mythos" by Stephen Fry

Fry takes us through the earlier Greek myths, including the creation, but not including the labours of Hercules, the siege of Troy and its Oresteian and Odyssean aftermaths, or the story of Theseus etc. Perhaps there was just too much.

But what he has given us is his own retelling of some of the less-well-known stories. The ones that lurk in the corners of the cultural subconscious (or did for those of us with some sort of traditional British education). As such it enlightened many dark pockets of my ignorance. I had heard of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with the statue he had carved, the classical reference underpinning the GBS play that metamorphosed into My Fair Lady, but I had never read the story. I was dimly aware of the story of Hero and Leander, one of whom drowned swimming the Hellespont, but I knew no details. Again and again Fry fleshed out the bare bones of my knowledge. And told me how these stories had passed into our culture by, for example, citing the poems by Byron or Keats or the passages in Shakespeare that had referred to them.

There was a huge western European culture built around these ideas. Young people today are ignorant of much of it (although the themes are often reprised without their knowledge in computer games, sci-fi serials, and soap operas). It is sad that so much cultural heritage is slipping away although of course it was only available to the public-school educated elite and there is a great deal of wonderful culture that is replacing it. I was ashamed of my ignorance. After all, I am a few months older than him, we had similar educations (although I wasn't expelled) and our times at Cambridge overlapped. But I studied science and that is a huge culture in itself. Life is too short for everything.

The real joy of this book is the way that Fry writes. He retells these stories of Gods and mortals in the most human way possible. For example, Ganymede is such a beautiful youth that both men and women are lovestruck on meeting him. “When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhyme ‘thighs’ with ‘eyes’, ‘hips’ with ‘lips’, ‘youth’ with ‘truth’, ‘boy’ with ‘joy’ and ‘desire’ with ‘fire’.” (p 306) It is the "instantly tore up" that makes the imagery so quotidian, so mundane, and so real you can touch it, poke it, prod it and squish it. These are humans. “A compound of village gossip, nosy neighbour and over-solicitous best friend, Echo found it impossible to hold her tongue.” (p 333) I know Echo. She lives down the street.

And then there is the erudition. Legend, we are told,  “derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning ‘to be read’. Interestingly, the absolute origin of the verb legere and its supine form lectum bears the meaning of ‘gather’ - as in ‘college’ and ‘collect’.” (p 403 & fn) This single example will have to suffice for the learning that is displayed on every single page of this brilliant book.

Selected quotes:

• “Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.” (p 3)
• “In time you will abandon your trousers - not yet, I hope - and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned.” (p 4)
• “It was a sickle. An enormous scythe whose great curved blade had been forged from adamantine, which means ‘ untameable’. (p 16)
• “Our word ‘hearth’ shares its ancestry with ‘heart’, just as in the modern Greek for ‘hearth’ is kardia, which also means ‘heart’.” (p 59)
• “If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground.” (p 67)
• “The blameless majority, whose lives were neither especially virtuous not especially vicious ... were guaranteed a pleasant enough afterlife: before they arrived they drink of the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe so that a blithe and bland eternity could be passed, untroubled by upsetting memories of earthly life.” (p 144)
• “In this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved.” (p 227)
• “Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves.” (p 344)
• “Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.” (p 403)

There is only one thing missing from this book. All the other stories! Please, Mr Fry, let us have the stories of the heroes, Theseus and Hercules and Achilles and Ulysses and Oedipus and Orestes and Antigone and Medea and Jason and ...

And then perhaps you can move to the Viking gods who are just as much fun.

January 2018; 410 pages

I am delighted that the series has been continued with Heroes.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Alexander the Great" by Robin Lane Fox

This is, apparently, the book that inspired Oliver Stone to make the biopic. It was first published in 1973. I found it slightly heavy going.

Interesting things

• It starts with the drama of the assassination of Phillip of Macedon; was it organised by Olympias, the wife from whom he had separated or by her son Alexander, his heir but soon to be supplanted by a new born baby to Phillip’s new wife?
• We learn how Alexander tamed Bucephalos, the horse whose head looked like that of an ox, who would be Alexander’s faithful mount almost to the end of the Earth.
• We discover that the Macedonian court, whilst on the fringes of civilised Greek society, attracted the great people of the day: it was probably in Macedonia that Euripides composed his Bacchae.
• Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor and also probably taught Hephaistion, the fellow pupil with whom Alexander had a homosexual relationship which lasted until Hephaistion, now a general, died.
• “’Sex and sleep’, Alexander is said to have remarked, ‘alone make me conscious that I am mortal.’” (p57). Hmm. Sex is what makes feel divine.
• Cleopatra was the daughter of Olympias who was Alexander’s mother. Does this make Cleopatra his sister or his half/step sister? (91)
• The Suez canal was d]created by the Pharaohs (96)
• Alexander followed the Royal Road into Persia, following the route previously written about by Xenophon (103)
• Persians called their gorgeous gardens paradeisoi (103)
• The Babylonians were compliers, the Greeks analysers: the Babylonians recorded the heavens for nearly 2,000 years but it was only after 330 BC and Alexander’s conquest that the Greeks began to develop a theory of the heavens and calculate a more accurate value for the year (248)
• Alexarchus, son of Antipater, Alexander’s regent in Macedonia, followed a faith healer called Menecrates. Alexarchus called himself the Sun and after Alexander died founded a religious community on Mount Athos (446)
• In Babylon, if an astrologer foretold the death of the king, the king chose a substitute who would reign for 100 days. If the king died in the meantime the substitute, even if he was a gardener, would become king (p459)
• Ice-cold water from the river Styx was believed to be poison although the modern Mavroneri falls suggest this is not so (463)
• Alexander’s coffin was carried in a chariot which resembled “the ritual chariot of the god Mithras” (p478)
• The Greeks were responsible for much technological invention when they came to India. “A simple cell for electroplating silver on to copper has been found in Parthian Babylonia and it is natural to credit its invention to a Greek.” (p491)