Scene, a Cave
One line of Virgil’s Aeneid out of a total of around 10,000:
speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem
But the Aeneid is so intricately composed that every single line of it is potentially a miniature masterpiece in itself. This is my current favourite, anyhow.
Actually I’m cheating, because this one is strictly speaking two lines, first used at Aeneid 4.124 and then repeated, unchanged, at 165. The first time, it’s spoken by the goddess Juno as she explains to Venus her plan to unite the Trojan visitors with their Carthaginian hosts and hence neutralise the threat that Aeneas, through his descendants, poses to her beloved Carthage. She will raise a storm as they hunt, she tells Venus, and “Dido and the Trojan leader will take refuge in the same cave,” where Juno, the goddess of marriage, will join them in wedlock: speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem/ deuenient. When the line returns, it is in the voice of the narrator, the only change being the tense of the verb that rounds off the sentence in the following line, a present tense in place of Juno’s future as the goddess’s prediction is realised. The Trojans and Carthaginians gather for the hunt, a storm breaks, and “Dido and Aeneas take refuge in the same cave,” speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem/ deueniunt.
Everything about these six words is exquisite, if I’m honest, but let’s start with the very fact it’s repeated, because that in itself is a powerful narrative device, effortlessly achieved. Virgil likes to manipulate his readers’ sense of human free will. Throughout the Dido story we’re forced to wonder where the agency lies: are Dido and Aeneas falling in love as any humans might, or are they the puppets of higher forces? Here Juno sets out to Venus how she will arrange matters, but after that scene in heaven the narrative shifts back to the human level, and we’re distracted by a sequence of compelling descriptions of human activity, the magnificent preliminaries to the royal hunt, the superlative beauty of Aeneas and Dido especially (Aeneas is equated to the god Apollo), and then the excitement of the hunt itself. It has only been forty lines, but in that time the power of Virgil’s storytelling has made us forget the gods’ role in events, lulling us into accepting a strictly human frame of reference. Then suddenly that line returns, the narrator repeating the precise words of Juno; and we realise that events are happening exactly as Juno had predicted they would. The illusion of mortal freedom and dignity is shattered, and it’s a terrifying moment.
But what about the line itself? Even if there weren’t that wonderful effect in store, we could forgive Virgil for repeating it, since he makes it communicate far more than any line should. For starters, he exploits the flexibility of Latin word order to create a verbal image of the scene: the words for the cave, speluncam … eandem, “in the same cave” or perhaps “in the cave together”, surround “Dido and the Trojan leader” (Dido dux et Troianus) just as the cave encompasses the two lovers: a line of verse is made, as far as a line of verse can be made, to look like the restricted space of a cave. I’ve always felt that this famous image from a fifth-century manuscript of Virgil, the Vergilius Romanus, the lovers squeezed into a very cosy-looking cubicle, was inspired by the structure of Virgil’s line.
But if the cave is evoked by meticulous word placement, so is the relationship between the couple within it. Something that Virgil constantly plays on in the Dido story is the anxiety he knows Romans are bound to feel at the idea of their founding father emotionally entangled with the queen of Carthage. There are levels to this anxiety, none of them reflecting well on the Romans: at the most basic, a Roman male would feel threatened by the very notion of a man surrendering his emotional autonomy to a woman, and Virgil works on this fear expertly here. By pushing apart the words we translate as “Trojan leader”, dux et Troianus, and allowing the word for leader, dux, to sit next to Dido’s name, Dido dux et Troianus, Virgil introduces an ambiguity into the line: momentarily we think that the dominant figure in this relationship, the leader, is Dido, not Aeneas, and we’re more prepared to do so because Dido has been presented by Virgil as a charismatic leader of her people (from a Roman perspective a highly paradoxical, female leader) ever since her first introduction to the poem: Venus, recounting Dido’s achievements to Aeneas when he first arrives at Carthage in Book 1, tells him that dux femina facti, “a woman was the leader of the enterprise.” Here in Book 4, as I say, the effect is momentary: when we get to Troianus we know it’s an adjective and it needs a noun to qualify: the “leader” is the “Trojan” Aeneas. But the idea has been broached that Aeneas is not embodying the masculine dominance that Romans expected of their heroes.
But Dido and Aeneas aren’t just any old woman and man, of course. They are the founder of Carthage and the founder-to-be of Rome, in other words representatives of two cities which would in historical times fight the Punic Wars to decide which of them controlled the Mediterranean basin. To Romans the Carthage founded by Dido could only be the city that produced Hannibal, the city that almost destroyed their own, and which Rome felt had to be destroyed to ensure their own survival (delenda est Carthago, as Cato the Censor used to put it). That struggle was still a strong folk memory in Virgil’s day. Long after Hannibal’s death he was a bogeyman Roman mothers used to get their kids to eat their greens, just as Boney was in England for a long time after the Napoleonic Wars. One of the very strangest things about Virgil’s account of Carthage is how sympathetic and appealing he chose to make a place that his readers were conditioned to regard as irredeemably malevolent. An alliance between the Trojans and Carthaginians, even an amalgamation of the two peoples, is repeatedly mooted, explicitly and implicitly, in Virgil’s Carthage episode, but the poet knows that that the notion of Rome’s ancestors contributing to the gene pool of their sworn enemies is anathema to his Roman readers.
Well, contributing to the Carthaginian gene pool is one way of describing what Aeneas is up to in that cave. What we need to appreciate is how wrong in principle such a relationship would have seemed to Roman eyes.
So Virgil’s intricate word order suggests a man losing control of his destiny, ceding leadership to a woman. But it is a Roman man we are dealing with, and a Carthaginian woman, and that increases the offensiveness of the scene significantly. What occurred to me in the middle of a school talk last week (it was late on a Friday, so forgive me) was that all of this Roman anxiety about Aeneas’ shenanigans in Carthage could be boiled down to a fear of muddying the clear distinction that had to be maintained between Trojans/Romans and Carthaginians, and this is what I think is most troubling about the line: Virgil presents us with characters whose proper roles are confused, but more fundamentally with a couple so intimately involved that they can’t clearly be distinguished.
Now one thing to say is, again, that the sharp differentiation of Roman and Carthaginian was critical to a Roman sense of Romanness to a degree that we can’t any longer appreciate. This is a scene bound to outrage the sensibilities of the male Romans who were Virgil’s primary audience, then. But it also seems to me that this is yet another respect in which Virgil’s line is reflecting in its verbal shape the scene it depicts, in other words that there’s something very suggestive about the intertwining of the (words for the) lovers in this cave-like line. Virgil is notoriously oblique about what does happen in the cave, but I’d say that the word order gives the game away clearly enough.
Of course, Latinists don’t need to be told how sexy the word order of an inflected language can be.
“The Rumi Skandher beg, who is like the vast, open skies…”
“I never saw a more strange man than him. He lives like a hermit among his Tibetan and other works, in the house of the Asiatic Society, which he seldom leaves.”
This post corrects a terrible injustice I committed in my book on Bamiyan, most of which is nevertheless fair and reasoned and even potentially worth a read. On p. 143 I claimed that the “first Europeans to set eyes upon Bamiyan were William Moorcroft and his companions George Trebeck and George Guthrie in August 1824.” I was wrong, as was gently pointed out to me by Edmund Melzl, who knows more about Bamiyan’s history than anyone. In actual fact Bamiyan had received a visit more than two years before Moorcroft from another European, a Hungarian scholar from Transylvania named Alexander Csoma de Kőrös.
I wasn’t the first to overlook Csoma; in fact you could say he was cursed to being overlooked. In March 1822, for example, British agents reporting from Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s capital at Lahore in the Punjab recorded the arrival of three European travellers, two feringhis, the Napoleonic veterans Jean-François Allard and Jean-Baptiste Ventura, looking for employment with the Maharajah’s army, and a ghora, Alexander Csoma. The choice of words is significant, feringhi suggesting status and nobility, ghora a dismissive term for a common-or-garden white man without any distinguishing features.
In a way Csoma asked to be ignored: a naturally reticent man, his “principal trait of character was his regrettable diffidence,” according to his biographer Theodore Duka, “…and his own too modest estimate of himself.” “This has often served as justification for disparaging his unique accomplishments,” Duka adds. He dressed scruffily (“a suit of blue clothes, which he always wore, and in which he died,” according to one witness), and in later life consistently refused any of many offers to supplement his very limited finances. His diet was mainly rice and tea mixed with butter and salt in Tibetan fashion, and his living habits, as the opening quotation indicates, were by his own choice basic in the extreme.
But if Csoma was a peculiar man, it arguably took just that kind of man to achieve what he did achieve.
For starters, no normal person would have walked from Transylvania to Tibet. Everything about Csoma’s education pointed to a comfortable life as an academic quietly employed in his homeland. He was an accomplished scholar, though more by dint of application than natural brilliance: by the end of his life he had mastered somewhere in the vicinity of twenty languages. A successful academic career in Hungary had been rewarded with two years at the prestigious University of Göttingen in Hanover, but as big an influence on Csoma as his formal education was the intensely nationalistic atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Europe, whether in Hanover or Hungary, a nationalism understood in terms of language communities, and thus bound to interest a linguist like Csoma. He later described the motivation for his journey eastwards as “to search for the original seats of the Hungarians, to collect historical data about their deeds, and to observe the analogies which various Oriental languages present with our vernacular.” (A fascinating article by Imre Galambos, ‘“Touched a nation’s heart”: Sir E. Denison Ross and Alexander Csoma de Kőrös’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 21 (2011), 361-75, describes among other things the role played by Csoma in later Hungarian nationalist feeling.)
At any rate, Csoma became determined to apply his academic training to the national interests of Hungary, specifically by pinpointing the Asian origin of the Magyars. “The most ancient homeland of our ancestors,” he declared, lay in “Greater or Little Bokharia,” in other words Bukhara and its environs, north of Afghanistan, and the Tarim Basin to the East, now in the Xinjiang region of China. In November 1819, despite tempting employment opportunities at home, the thirty-five-year-old Csoma set out to test his theory.
Travelling mostly on foot, occasionally by horse or by boat when seas or rivers were available, he made his way to Constantinople, Alexandria, “to Larnica, in Cyprus, thence to Sidon, Beyruth, and then, on another vessel, to Tripoli and Latakia, whence, travelling on foot, on the 13th of April I reached Aleppo in Syria,” Mosul, Baghdad, (on horseback) Hamadan and Tehran. Thence, dressed as an Armenian Christian, and with a miniature Johnson’s Dictionary given him by the British Envoy in Tehran, he headed for Mashad and Bokhara, where he believed the ancestral home of the Hungarians might lie. Here, though, his itinerary took an unanticipated turn: “affrighted by frequent exaggerated reports of the approach of a numerous Russian army,… I left Bokhara… and with a caravan I came to Balk, Kulm, and thence by Bamian; on 6th of January, 1822, I arrived at Kabool.”
Csoma would later become an expert in Tibetan language and culture, and hence in Buddhism, at a time when that religion was very poorly understood in the West. He wasn’t yet an expert when he saw the Buddhas of Bamiyan, but later, with hindsight, he understood what he had been looking at:
There is yet in ancient Bactria, at Bamian, on the road between Kabool and Balk, a large colossal statue, with two others of smaller size at a certain distance from the first, hewn in the mountain-rock. It is very probable this was a representation of Buddha, or Shakya, with his disciples represented in painting on both sides of the wall. The painting is in the same style as is usual amongst Tibetans or amongst the Christians of the Greek Church, to represent saints, with the radiant or solar circle round the head.
Csoma was the first of many Europeans to visit Bamiyan in the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was in the process of becoming one of the most famous places on earth, but, odd as it may seem, very few of them recognised the statues as images of the Buddha.
Kabul, Peshawar, then to Lahore with Allard and Ventura. Csoma was trying an alternative route to his mythical Hungarian homeland, and from Lahore he climbed via Kashmir to the high-altitude Buddhist enclave of Ladakh, “Little Tibet,” hoping to cross the Himalaya to Yarkand in the Tarim Basin. But Csoma, at times a strange combination of anxiety and reckless adventurousness, got cold feet in the Himalaya: “I ascertained the road to Yarkand was very difficult, expensive and dangerous for a Christian.”
But on the road back to Lahore, on July 16, 1822, he had an encounter which changed everything. William Moorcroft is one of the most intriguing of the early European explorers of Central Asia, theoretically engaged in a search for fresh bloodstock for the East India Company’s horse stud in Calcutta, but in his own mind at the cutting edge of British efforts to counter Russian designs on Britain’s possessions in India. He persuaded Csoma (in Latin, since one language Csoma didn’t have at this stage was English) to return with him to Leh, the capital of Ladakh, and with Moorcroft’s encouragement Csoma became fascinated by the Tibetan language and culture he encountered there.
To cut a very long story short, after seven years of intense study at a series of Buddhist monasteries in Zanskar and Kinnaur, under the guidance of a Tibetan Lama, Sangye Puntsog, Csoma produced a dictionary and grammar of Tibetan, eventually published in Calcutta in 1834. These publications are considered to be the foundational texts of the academic discipline of Tibetology.
An impression of Csoma’s working conditions in monasteries like the striking Phugtal Gompa in this photo comes from Dr James Gerard, who encountered and befriended Csoma whilst travelling in the Himalaya introducing inoculation against smallpox and indulging his wide-ranging scientific interests. Gerard would later travel with Alexander Burnes to Bokhara, via Bamiyan. Here in the Himalaya he describes finding fossil shells at high altitude, and a deodar tree “29 1/2 feet in girth”, but Alexander Csoma was “far from the least remarkable of the many objects which have passed before me in this journey”, “like one of the sages of antiquity, living in the most frugal manner, and taking no interest in any object around him, except his literary avocations.” During his first period of research, Gerard records, “[Csoma], the Lama, and an attendant, were circumscribed in an apartment nine feet square for three or four months; they durst not stir out, the ground being covered with snow, and the temperature below the zero of the scale. There he sat, enveloped in a sheep-skin cloak, with his arms folded, and in this situation he read from morning till evening without fire, or light after dusk, the ground to sleep upon, and the bare walls of the building for protection against the rigours of the climate.” Later, as the librarian of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, Csoma adopted a lifestyle not much less reclusive.
Csoma had his motivations for his strange journey across Asia, as we have seen (and they are well described in this excellent short biography). Extending the boundaries of the British Empire wasn’t one of them. But there’s no doubt that his patron Moorcroft saw in the study of Tibetan something of political value. Moorcroft was considered a hawk and a maverick by the British authorities, and they kept him at arm’s length, but his perception of the political value of the study of Tibetan was mainstream enough: “This will not only promote the commercial and political prosperity of Great Britain and her Indian possessions,” we hear elsewhere, “but may effect the still more important end of teaching to yet semi-barbarous tribes the advantages of industry and civilisation.” It was an issue Csoma was aware of, and in the preface to his dictionary he insists that “he had not been sent [to Zanskar] by any Government to gather political information.” But there were reasons nevertheless for the British authorities’ enthusiastic reception of his project, and for the resources they provided to ensure its publication.
Alexander Csoma continued to research and write on Tibetan topics after his dictionary was published, and for a number of years he was an eccentric but well-liked librarian of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. But the original ambition that drew him from Hungary remained unsatisfied. In 1842 he left on a third attempt to reach the elusive Hungarian homeland, aiming for Lhasa via Darjeeling, and thence to the land of the Uyghurs (Xinjiang), whom he suspected to be the Hungarians’ Asian kin. But he developed malaria in Darjeeling, characteristically refused treatment, and died on April 11, 1842. A tomb was erected by the Asiatic Society with an epitaph which begins
H. J.
ALEXANDER CSOMA DE KÖRÖSI,
A Native of Hungary,
Who, to follow out Philological Researches,
Resorted to the East;
And after years passed under privations,
Such as have been seldom endured,
And patient labour in the cause of Science,
Compiled a Dictionary and Grammar
Of the Tibetan Language,
His best and real monument.
What always intrigues me about these European travellers in Central Asia is how they cope with the strangeness of the places they find themselves; how they convince themselves they have a right to be there, I suppose. A lot of Europeans saw it as the scene of the exploits of a great European hero, Alexander the Great, and made it theirs that way. For Csoma, “Bokharia” was the original home of his people, a place where he would be able to say, “At last I am among Hungarians.” There may be a hint of this Hungarian yearning for the East in Aurel Stein’s sense of a home-from-home in the barren borderlands of China.
In general Stein was very much of the Alexander persuasion, but he felt a sentimental attachment also to his Hungarian forerunner. In 1899, visiting Darjeeling, Stein described to his brother Ernst an “evening walk to the well-cared for grave of poor Csoma de Kőrös. The lovely cemetery on a mountain slope would please Hetty [Stein’s sister-in-law] very much.” Then in 1913 Stein composed a moving tribute to the Hungarian émigré Theodore Duka, a mentor of Stein earlier in his career as well as the biographer of their fellow-Hungarian Csoma. Whenever possible, Stein liked to retreat to Mohand Marg, a high meadow in Kashmir where he pitched tent and wrote with his dog Dash at his feet:
How often, looking down from my favourite Alpine camp in Kashmir into the verdant Sind Valley, some 5,000 feet below me, have I thought of the poor Hungarian wandering as he passed here in 1822, and again a year later, on his way to Leh, the chief place of Western Tibet!
Even Stein can’t exclude that note of condescension that always seems to accompany “poor Csoma”. Contrast the words of one of Csoma’s Tibetan collaborators:
The Rumi Skandher beg, who is like the vast, open skies in his unshakable fortitude and his insight demonstrated in sciences, undertaking the arduous journey from the large ocean of the Orient to jasmine-covered Upper Tibet in his search for learning…
That’s more like it. Csoma didn’t ask for sympathy. He was pretty anti-social, he was more than slightly odd; but he founded a discipline.
The Fall and Rise of Field Marshal Haig
I think I said my next post was going to be Martial again.
Well, yes and no. I’ve written before on the impact of the First World War on my college, but the most famous Great-War soldier from Brasenose was the British Commander-in-Chief himself, Field-Marshal Douglas Haig, perhaps the most controversial figure the war produced. An undistinguished student at Brasenose from 1880 to 1884, Haig emerged with a Pass degree, despite apparently spending most of his time at Oxford on horseback, but received tutorials from, among others, Walter Pater; at which the mind truly boggles.
Oxford colleges, like every other British institution, were traumatized by the war, and when hostilities were finally over faced the same challenge of creating a memorial equal to the enormity of what had happened. Brasenose’s response should certainly strike us as peculiar, but it clearly made sense to the fellowship at the time.
Within six months of the Armistice the College had decided on a three-part memorial, a monument in the chapel recording the names of 114 men of Brasenose who had died; a portrait of Haig by William Orpen, the war artist and portraitist, and a stone inscription at the entrance to the College reading as follows:
THIS RECORD IS HERE SET THAT THOSE
WHO PASS MAY BE PUT IN MIND OF
FIELD MARSHAL EARL HAIG & ALL
THE OTHER BRASENOSE MEN WHO
DEVOTED THEMSELVES AT HOME OR ABROAD
TO THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY IN THE TIME OF PERIL
1914~1918
This last one went up first, and was in place just inside the main gate by November 1920; the wooden memorial in the chapel followed sometime between then and May 1921; while Orpen’s portrait of Haig, after appearing in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1921, was hung in Brasenose Hall in January 1922. It was placed, significantly, on the east wall of the Hall, where images of the founders and most significant figures in College history are located. The painting had been partly funded by subscriptions from old Brasenose students, each of whom received a “photogravure” copy, a print, of Orpen’s work.
The striking thing, of course, is how unapologetically proud the College was of Haig in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and to what extent he dominated Brasenose’s act of commemoration. This Brasenose man was the hero that had let the country to victory, the thinking seems to have been, and giving him the prominence he got was only appropriate.
Needless to say, the oscillations in Haig’s reputation over the years didn’t leave that confident assessment undisturbed. Stories are told about the portrait in Hall, though I’m not sure how true they are: that at a later stage it was removed from display, and only rehung when a descendant of Haig had happened to arrive as an undergraduate. It was certainly moved from the east wall, and now hangs in another corner of the room, quite easily missed.
As for the stone memorial in the Lodge, that was certainly taken down. When I turned up here a couple of decades ago it was under a tarp around the back of the College, and the College magazine from 1969 explains how it ended up there:
During the past year the Lodge-Entrance has been given a thorough refurbishing. Previously it had the appearance of a neglect dating back to its reconstruction in 1885, and the attention was overdue. (The only casualty in the operation was the plaque commemorating Field Marshal Earl Haig (1880) as the first among Brasenose warriors of 1914-18. Its legend, which may be found in The Brazen Nose of 1920, when it was erected, was often regarded as being not wholly in the happiest of taste. Its removal to make room for the Senior Tutor’s enlarged notice board, may or may not demonstrate superiority of the pen over the sword but is unlikely to cause a widespread sense of loss.)
An urbane account that omits as much as it says. You don’t take down a war memorial just to make space for a noticeboard, but then again you do take down a memorial lionising Field Marshal Haig in 1969. The Sixties had seen the First World War, at its fiftieth anniversary, returning to public attention, and Haig did not emerge well from it: there was a classic TV series, The Great War (1964), books like Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961) and A.J.P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963), and the musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1963). The dominant narrative became the one still familiar to us, lions led by donkeys. The film version of Oh! What a Lovely War was released in 1969, and did more than anything to crystallise the perception of Haig as a callous, upper-class buffoon, who was bound to be an acute embarrassment to his alma mater.
Now, though, another 50 years on, Haig is back on the wall again:
It’s not so much that Haig is back in favour, though it’s true that more recent trends in Great War historiography make him a less toxic old member than he used to be. Really Haig’s back up there because it’s the centenary and it isn’t really acceptable to have a memorial, of any kind, hidden under a tarpaulin. Well, that’s my impression.
But just as the original commemorative plan in 1919 tells us fascinating things about how the war could be regarded in its immediate aftermath; and just as measures taken in 1969 characterize very vividly the view of the war and authority in general that prevailed fifty years later: so the recent re-erection of Haig’s memorial is a more complex, and telling, gesture than it may seem. It certainly hasn’t been returned to the College lodge. The place chosen for it might, to the uninitiated, seem equivalent to its original location: by a gate leading out onto High St. But in fact this is a very quiet part of College, and the gate isn’t used by students. In other words, the inscription has been placed in a position that looks like it’s on everyone’s route, “that those who pass may be put in mind of Field Marshal Earl Haig,” but is in fact well off the beaten track.
An entirely appropriate location for Field Marshal Douglas Haig in 2014, in other words.
Help me: is this funny?
The Roman poet Martial was an epigrammatist, meaning that he specialized in very short poems. In total he wrote about 1,500 poems that we still have, and he must have written a lot more. But they don’t come much shorter than the 24th epigram of Martial’s sixth book, published in AD 91:
Nil lasciuius est Carisiano:
Saturnalibus ambulat togatus.
Carisianus is the most mischievous man alive:
He walks about in a toga during the Saturnalia.
This summer I spent a few days working through all of Martial’s epigrams, on the hunt for material to use at an event with Mary Beard at Cheltenham last week. Martial’s poems are superficially simple things, but can belie that appearance, often as intricate as any sophisticated gag; and of course they’re written for the pleasure of readers with a very different set of cultural assumptions. But 6.24 was one I quickly noted down on my piece of paper: an example of a very short poem with a clever but clear point, I thought: seven words, simple but funny, and perfect for our event.
What’s so funny about it? Whatever it is, it’ll certainly be less funny once I’ve tried to explain it. But it all hinges on the Roman festival of the Saturnalia in December. This was the most popular festival of the Roman year, a week in December featuring excessive eating and drinking (“exuberant gorgings and even more excessive drinking bouts,” according to one scholar), gift-giving and role reversal (masters would wait on slaves, for example, and slaves could speak freely to their masters), and special clothes: instead of the toga, the distinctive garment of the Roman citizen, everyone during the Saturnalia dressed in a suit of clothes known as the synthesis or cenatoria. We don’t really know what the synthesis looked like, but it seems to have been looser-fitting than the formal toga, and colourful (a bit like pyjamas), and whatever it was actually like, it symbolized the character of the Saturnalia, a time of uninhibited release.
Are you laughing yet? Probably not. But Martial’s joke is that by breaking the “rules” of the Saturnalia and wearing his toga instead of his synthesis, Carisianus is acting more in the spirit of the Saturnalia than anyone else. The word used of him, lasciuius, suggests uninhibited behaviour, in other words exactly what was expected of Romans at the Saturnalia. Carisianus is the most outrageous of the lot by virtue of acting totally square when everyone else is cutting loose. Geddit?
Well I thought I’d got it, and Mary Beard agreed (and she’s written a book on Roman laughter), and there was at least a ripple of amusement in our audience at Cheltenham as we tried to explain it.
© Marie-Lan Nguyen
But it turns out the Martial specialists don’t agree at all. Farouk Grewing, who’s written a commentary on Book 6, thinks the joke is much more complicated than this. What we’re meant to understand, according to him, is that Carisianus is actually a woman, specifically a woman who has been convicted of adultery and as punishment has to wear the toga. That was indeed a way of stigmatizing “fallen women” in Rome, the toga being, as well as the Roman citizen’s proper clothing, the garment worn by prostitutes (to distinguish them from respectable women, who wore the stola). Martial’s joke, according to Grewing, and Martial is certainly well capable of such viciousness, is that a woman dressed in a toga as punishment is mistaken for a man too uptight to dress down for the Saturnalia.
If so, as another scholar, Andreas Heil, points out,* Martial is being very oblique indeed, since there’s no indication anywhere in 6.24 that the protagonist is a woman, and Latin is meticulous about these things: the -us at the end of Carisianus and togatus indicate clearly that he’s a he. But Heil agrees with Grewing that a simpler reading of the poem is unsatisfactory: “It is hard to understand why wearing the toga at the Saturnalia should be proof of the special lascivia [mischievousness, naughtiness] of Charisianus.” Heil’s solution is that by telling us that Carisianus wears the toga at the Saturnalia, Martial is implying that he wears the synthesis the rest of the year: that is, Carisianus is lasciuus because on every day of the year other than the Saturnalia he dresses louchely, and behaves accordingly. A Roman citizen who habitually dressed in the synthesis would be a very disreputable character indeed.
Now that all seems too complicated for me, but there’s no doubt Martial can be complicated. I’m planning to write another blog soon showing just how much can be going on in a seemingly simple two-line Martial epigram. But I think what matters here is that both Grewing and Heil feel a need to complicate the reading of 6.24 because a simpler reading of the poem doesn’t deliver enough of a punch. Isn’t funny.
But it is funny, right?
(A freer translation:
Carisianus is so shocking:
At the Saturnalia he goes round in a toga!)
*A. Heil, ‘Bemerkungen zu Martial: 6, 24. 6, 61. 6, 75. 9, 35 und 12, 5’, Philologus 146 (2002), 309-17, at 309-10.
A passage to India
This is as good as a guest post, since absolutely all the research for it has been done by my brother. It’s a short one, too, to make a change, and none too cheery. But it offers just a glimpse of Scots in the British Empire, and that seems timely given recent interest in the relationship of the one to the other.
Henry Maxwell was born in 1826 in Edinburgh. His father, also named Henry, probably died in 1831, at the age of 24; his mother Catherine lived until 1880, dying in a poorhouse in Dundee. In 1846, also in Dundee, the younger Henry married Isabella Ferguson/McIntosh (she was an illegitimate child, a fact that was even recorded on her death certificate; her mother Sarah Ferguson was perhaps 16 years old when she bore her, but may have been closer to 13). Henry and Isabella had a lot of children, two at least of whom died young, and Henry found employment in an industry that dominated Dundee at the time: jute.
Dundee was an established centre for whaling, and it had been discovered that whale oil allowed raw jute, a vegetable fibre imported from India, to be machine-spun into hessian on an industrial scale. For a while, driven by entrepreneurs known as Jute Barons, the industry boomed, and Dundee, “Jutopolis,” along with it. Henry Maxwell rose to be an overseer in a jute mill, and may have achieved the promotion by virtue of being literate: it is most unlikely he ever attended school, but his mother was the daughter of a printer, and thus almost certainly literate herself.
Around 1870, Henry moved to India, to Barnagore (Baranagar) in Bengal, on the Hooghly river just north of Calcutta (Kolkata). His relocation was part of a canny attempt by the Jute Barons to get ahead of the competition by establishing jute factories at source. In due course the jute industry in India would eclipse Dundee’s, but there is apparently machinery still in use in Indian jute mills bearing the legend “Made in Dundee.”
For Henry Maxwell, the poor boy from Edinburgh who was now in all likelihood managing part or all of a jute mill in Bengal, this must have marked a significant upturn in his fortunes. His wife and family, back home in Dundee, had moved to a more salubrious part of the city, a further indication of greater prosperity. But their luck didn’t hold. On August 17th 1872 we find Henry dictating his will in Barnagore, and two days later he’s dead. In Bengal in 1872 it’s a reasonable guess that the cause of death was cholera, but there were plenty of other possibilities. Henry left everything to his wife Isabella, including the sizeable sum of £655 he had saved in India. But back in Scotland Isabella herself was terribly ill: she died of TB in December of the same year.
If the Maxwell family had had a chance of achieving respectability, it was abruptly snuffed out. Henry Maxwell had taken out a life assurance policy and owned stocks and shares, quite the model of the middle-class man. But that all changed after his death. We’ve already heard how Henry’s mother died in a Dundee poorhouse in 1880. There were two poorhouses in Dundee, and Isabella’s mother died in the other one in 1887.
A desperate story, to be sure. But in this story of grinding poverty and (frustrated) social aspirations, the role of India is as a land of opportunity. Whatever impact the jute industry had on native Bengalis, for this Scottish family it almost provided the passport to economic security and social advancement. During the referendum debate the notion was widely bandied about that Scotland had somehow been the passive victim of British, or maybe English, imperialism. In reality Scots exploited the opportunities presented by the empire energetically, and were disproportionately represented among that empire’s functionaries. Henry Maxwell and his Jute Baron employers are a case in point.
As you may have guessed by now, my interest in these people is more than academic: Henry Maxwell was my great-great-grandfather.
Update, 18.04.2015. Henry Maxwell’s great-great-great-grandaughter, my niece, Mhairi Campbell, has located Henry’s grave in the Scottish Cemetery, Kolkata. No inscription survives:
A thistle and a rose
I’m doing what I spend a big chunk of the summer doing: staring at the west wall of St Mary’s, Oxford’s University Church.
That’s the view I get as I sit at the computer, waiting for inspiration to hit me: in the photo above, which predates the age of computers just a little, I’m in the curtained window jutting out above the street. Between me and the church is an alleyway, St Mary’s Passage, running from High St into Radcliffe Square, the heart of Oxford University: you can see one side of the circular Radcliffe Camera, a library, that dominates the square, and the Old Bodleian Library behind it.
Needless to say, I’m ridiculously lucky in where I go to work every morning. But I have been known to grumble about the tourists. Twice or three times a day, and in the summer months closer to fifteen times a day, a tour guide will halt his group under my window and explain how C.S. Lewis was inspired to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by what he saw in the alleyway beneath me: a Victorian lamppost, a couple of fauns carved at the top of the main door to the building, and an image of the Green Man on the same door which bears a passing resemblance to a lion with a mane. Hence, the theory goes, Aslan, Mr Tumnus and the mysterious lamppost Lucy sees when she first stumbles into Narnia.
How true that story is, I really don’t know. To be honest, after listening to several thousand retellings of it by now I’m beyond caring. But that isn’t to say I’m not fascinated by my surroundings as I sit in that window. The building, known as St Mary’s Entry, is old, dating back to around 1600, but we know very little about its history: for a long time up until the 1880’s it was a pub, the City Arms, and it only came into full use by the college in 1919. That’s more or less all we know.
But there are some clues, and the best of them happen to be in my office. According to An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of Oxford (1939), it contains a number of features that seem to date to the early seventeenth century.
There is an elaborate Jacobean overmantel:
Two fauns that echo the two around the door downstairs, but are much older: the ones outside seem to be Victorian. Here’s one of the fauns inside:
Most intriguingly of all, there is a design around the door of the room featuring roses in the spandrels at the top:
and at the bottom (the authors of An Inventory missed this), thistles:
I suppose all the recent discussion of Scottish independence has made me pay more attention to the roses and thistles, and I had assumed some connection with the Acts of Union in 1706/7, but when I thought about it (with the Jacobean carvings inside the room in mind, especially), the more obvious link was to James I of England and VI of Scotland, a century before the Act of Union, whose coins carried images rather similar to those around my door. James had wanted a full union of Scotland with England, but the issue was as controversial then as now, and they remained sovereign states under one monarch until the reign of James’ great-granddaughter, Anne.
Well, it’s a good excuse to speculate. And whatever I come up with can’t be any less likely than the spiel of the tourist guides.
Once James was in the frame, and a date for the woodwork (independently reached) of the early seventeenth century, what caught my attention was an event I hadn’t previously been aware of, a visit by the king, accompanied by Queen Anne and his eldest son Henry (and the five-year-old Charles, future Charles I), to Oxford at the end of August 1605, two years after his accession to the English throne.
There was nothing low-key about this visit: all Oxford was galvanized to put on the best possible show of itself. We have three extended accounts of it, Rex Platonicus (Oxford, 1607) by the University Orator Isaac Wake, in Latin, which is too busy hymning the king’s praises to provide much in the way of useful detail, but evidently did Wake’s career no harm: he went on to be knighted, an ambassador in Venice and elsewhere, and M.P. for the University of Oxford. What he has to say about James’ arrival will give you a flavour of the whole work: certe ingresso iam Jacobo sensit Civitas quiddam se amplius capere quam quod murorum suorum angustiis comprehendi posset, “For sure, now James had made his entry, the City felt that it held something greater than the narrow compass of its walls could contain.” Flattery will get you everywhere.
Anthony Nixon’s Oxfords Tryumph (London, 1605), is as relentlessly panegyrical as Wake, but a little more concerned with the nitty-gitty of the visit, even though Nixon is seriously confused about Oxford geography. But the real gem of a source for the visit is a document surviving in a manuscript in Cambridge University Library, an anonymous account by a “spy” from Cambridge, The preparacion at Oxford in August 1605 against the comminge thither of King James, with the Queen and young Prince; together with the things then and there done and the maner thereof. This Cambridge witness may, according to John R. Elliott Jr. in The History of the University of Oxford Vol. IV (p.648, n.32), have been one Henry Mowtlowe; but apparently Cambridge sent as many as forty spies “to view in secret and note the whole event” staged by their arch-rivals. For whatever reason, The preparacion at Oxford… provides the kind of realistic detail Wake and Nixon meticulously avoided: the King falling asleep in a long theatrical performance, and waking up to say, testily, “I marvell what they think me to be!”; or the hundred or so “scholars” sent to prison the day before the king’s arrival for some kind of “uncivill” behaviour (apparently involving inappropriate headwear) in St Mary’s church.
The King arrived at Oxford on Tuesday August 27th 1605, riding south from his ramshackle palace at Woodstock. The officials of the University and City of Oxford rode out to welcome him on the Woodstock Road in what was then countryside a mile north of Oxford, and is now the northern suburbs where I live. In a “fair meadow” near Aristotle’s Well (which now lies under a house on the corner of Kingston Rd and Aristotle Lane, but I think what is these days the intersection between Woodstock Rd and Polstead Rd is meant, very near the childhood home of Lawrence of Arabia) there was a bit of timeless town v. gown needle as the city authorities, led by the Mayor, attempted to upstage the University, and were put firmly in their places. It’s great to see that certain things (town v. gown; Oxford v. Cambridge) haven’t changed much in 400 years, and I’ve been enjoying imagining all the houses away as I walk the dog, picturing the Chancellor, Vice-chancellor, “the Doctors, Proctors and certaine Senior Masters … upon their foote-cloath [caparisoned] Horses, verie richlye furnished to meete the King” (Nixon), the speeches to the King from University (in Latin) and City (in English), and the presentation of gifts (the City’s considerably more valuable than the University’s), before James and his entourage continued their progress towards the city.
Just outside the North Gate, James stopped to be entertained by the first of a series of dramatic performances during his four-day stay in Oxford. James was very keen on academic debate, less so (as we’ve already seen) on the theatre. What’s interesting about this short performance is that it bears some kind of relation to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In front of St John’s College, which stood outside the city walls, three “sibyls” recalled the prophecy given to Banquo that his descendants, the Stuarts, would rule Scotland, and added their own prediction of James’ glorious future. The connection has been made with the three witches’ prediction to Banquo at Macbeth 1.3 (“Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none”), and some have even speculated that William Shakespeare might have been in the audience outside St John’s. From there James made his way across the city to Christ Church, where he and the Queen were accommodated: as they rode from north to south of Oxford, according to Nixon, the left side of the street, between Christ Church and St Giles’ church, was lined with academics in precise order of seniority from Doctors of Divinity at the gate of Christ Church to plain old undergraduates up at St Giles’.
Here’s John Speed’s map of Oxford, as it happens dating to around 1605, though much indebted to earlier maps: south is at the top, so James was approaching Oxford from the bottom right. From St Giles’ to Christ Church is about 1,000 metres.
In total, James spent four days in Oxford, from Tuesday August 27th to Friday the 30th. On the last day, after visiting the Bodleian Library, he stopped in at my college, Brasenose, but I don’t think my roses and thistles can have anything to do with that since in 1605 St Mary’s Entry, while owned by Brasenose, was not an integral part of the College proper, and was let out to tenants. A slightly earlier map of this part of Oxford here, by Ralph Agas, illustrates this, “Brasen nose Coll” stopping well short of “Saint Maries”.
But there’s another possibility. James’ and the Queen’s accommodation was at Christ Church, Prince Henry’s at Magdalen College; in the course of his time in Oxford James visited New College, All Souls’ and Magdalen as well as Brasenose, St John’s and the Bodleian Library. But by far the majority of the king’s time was spent in the University Church, St Mary’s, just across the alleyway from here.
On Wednesday and Thurday, August 28 and 29, James attended “disputations” in St Mary’s, Latin speeches delivered in favour or against propositions by academics in five subjects, Theology, Law, Physic (Medicine), Natural Philosophy (roughly, Physics) and Moral Philosophy. The form of the exercise, formal and rhetorically sophisticated speeches in Latin, had its roots in the medieval university, and reflected the importance that continued to be attached to the fluent and persuasive presentation of academic knowledge, but the topics addressed were entirely contemporary. Since we’re in 1605, that still leaves them, for us, interestingly poised between the familiar and the archaic. During the Physic disputation, for example, the question was addressed, An creber suffitus Nicotianae exoticae sit sanis salutaris, “Whether the often taking of Tobacco be wholesome for such as are sound and in health”; whilst when the discipline was Natural Philosophy a topic of debate was, An opera artis possit aurum conflari, “Whether Golde may be made by Arte.”
James was tremendously keen on these exercises, regularly making his own contributions to the learned disputes, and allowing the sessions to continue in St Mary’s without complaint for as long as five hours: hardly surprising that he fell asleep in the play that followed. But King James clearly left the Oxford men convinced that in the new king they had someone who shared their own intellectual appetites.
Now, my room with its peculiar decorations is in the shadow of St Mary’s church. If the roses and thistles have anything to do with James’ visit (which is undoubtedly a very big “if”, but I’m stumped for another explanation), it may just be that they are part of the general beautification of the city that was undertaken in preparation for the royal visit. However, the Cambridge witness talks, as one would expect, of a polishing up of the externals: “Against the King’s coming to Oxford, it was provided, that all rayles, posts, barrs of windows, casements, and pumpes, should be newly paynted, and all armes were newly tricked. The like was done also in all the streets of the City, and at the severell Gates thereof, with dials and such like; the streets were very finely paved and well swept.”
The decorations in my room are quite invisible from the street, and I can’t help wondering whether this building beside St Mary’s church was prepared for the use of the royal entourage during those two days of “disputation”, for rest, refreshment, or, who knows, a lavatory break. I can’t explain the rose/thistle motif except as some kind of reference to James, while the quality of the carved fauns and the fireplace decoration seem to me to bespeak a room that expected some important visitors.
What I’m letting myself wonder, of course, is whether James VI of Scotland and I of England took his ease, one day 409 years ago, in what is now my teaching room.
But perhaps I should settle for Mr Tumnus.
Dunno much about γεωγραφία…
Behold! A map of the city and harbour of Cartagena, in southern Spain, for your delectation. And it may make things easier later on if you note carefully the position of the island of Escombrera or Escombreras, right at the bottom.
To the Romans Cartagena was known as Carthago Nova, New Carthage, and it was celebrated as one of the very finest natural harbours they knew. It’s easy enough to see why: in the sixteenth century the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria was in the habit of saying that the three most secure anchorages in the Mediterranean were “Cartagena and June and July.” Under the settled conditions of the Roman Empire Carthago Nova was best known for its production of the highest quality garum, fermented fish sauce, an evil-smelling staple of Roman cuisine. That island Escombrera was in antiquity Scombraria, named after the scombri or mackerel from which this garum was manufactured.
But Carthago Nova had had an intense and troubled history, the consequence of that splendid harbour. In 228/7BC a Carthaginian general called Hasdrubal (there were quite a few answering that description) established it as a base for Carthaginian operations in Spain: he named it simply “Carthage”, since Qarthadasht in Punic means “New City”; the Romans called it “New Carthage” to distinguish it from the Carthaginian mother city in North Africa.
New Carthage was the key to Spain, and in 209BC, during the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, the 25-year old P. Cornelius Scipio (later and better known as Scipio Africanus the Elder) captured it with a lightning manoeuvre. Henceforth the advantage in Spain, and in the war as a whole, shifted decisively towards the Romans. In 202BC Scipio would crush Hannibal at the battle of Zama: the capture of Carthago Nova was felt to have been a critical step towards that ultimate Roman victory.
My own interest in New Carthage came from thinking about Virgil, not the most obvious route in. But I and Ronnie Shi (remember that name, Classicists, for she will go far) have been writing an article about the harbour in North Africa where Aeneas and his companions find refuge in Aeneid Book 1, after the storm brought about by scheming Juno has blown them off course. Here’s the Latin, and a translation, of Virgil’s description of the place (Aen. 1.159-69):
est in secessu longo locus: insula portum
efficit obiectu laterum, quibus omnis ab alto
frangitur inque sinus scindit sese unda reductos.
Hinc atque hinc uastae rupes geminique minantur
in caelum scopuli, quorum sub uertice late
aequora tuta silent; tum siluis scaena coruscis
desuper horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra.
fronte sub adversa scopulis pendentibus antrum,
intus aquae dulces uiuoque sedilia saxo,
nympharum domus: hic fessas non uincula nauis
ulla tenent, unco non alligat ancora morsu.There is a place in a deep inlet: an island forms a harbour by the barrier of its flanks; all the waves coming from the open sea are broken by it and divide as they flow into the distant recesses of the bay. From this side and that huge cliffs loom skywards, twin headlands, and beneath their peaks the broad waters are safe and still. Above rises a backdrop of shimmering woods, a dark forest with quivering shadows. Under the cliff-face straight ahead there was a cave of hanging rock, and within it fresh water and seats in the living rock, the home of nymphs: here no chains moor the weary ships nor anchor fasten them with its hooked grip.
Ronnie and I were intrigued by a detail in Servius’ late-antique commentary on the Aeneid, where he records that some readers wanted to see Carthago Nova, in Spain, behind this description of a harbour near the original Carthage, in Africa. This struck us as quite an exciting idea: a hint of New Carthage at this point of the poem would introduce lots of interesting associations with Scipio and the Second Punic War, the life-and-death struggle between Carthage and Rome that is very much in the air as the ancestral founders of the two cities, Dido and Aeneas, meet and fall in love.
I won’t inflict the details of our argument on you. That pleasure can be reserved until we persuade a journal to accept it, crossed fingers. But I will share just one of the details that persuaded us Servius might have a point–that ancient readers could have picked up a hint of Carthago Nova in Virgil’s African harbour.
At the heart of our argument are resemblances between Virgil’s poetic harbour and descriptions of Carthago Nova in the historians Polybius and Livy. Their accounts are very similar, Livy imitating Polybius, so I’ll just quote Polybius (10.10.1-3). But one clear point of similarity between Polybius’ Carthago Nova and Virgil’s Carthage should be the island that sits in the mouth of the harbour and protects it from the effects of the open sea:
(New Carthage) lies halfway down the coast of Spain in an inlet facing the southwest wind. The inlet is about twenty stades in depth and about ten in breadth at its entrance. The whole inlet serves as a harbour for the following reason. At its mouth lies an island which leaves only a narrow channel on either side into the inlet, and as this stands in the way of the waves from the sea, the whole inlet is calm, except when south-westerlies blow on both channels and raise billows.
It seems clear to us that ancient readers of Virgil would have been reminded of the Spanish port when reading about the African one, although there’s a question where readers of the Aeneid would have got their idea of the layout of Carthago Nova. In Virgil’s great predecessor Q. Ennius, we think, rather than Polybius or Livy, but that’s another story. However, there’s a fascinating wrinkle here that takes us back to the map at the top of this post. At the beginning I called your attention to the island of Escombrera/Scombraria. That’s the island Polybius describes as sitting in the mouth of the harbour at Carthago Nova, and of course it’s that island-in-the-mouth that’s a key point of contact between Virgil and the historical descriptions of Carthago Nova.
But look at the map and it’s as clear as your nose that Escombrera doesn’t sit in the mouth of Carthago Nova harbour, or anywhere near it: in fact it lies a good three miles away.
Now, this isn’t a problem for our argument, because all we need to establish is that Virgil’s harbour looked like (what Virgil’s readers thought) Carthago Nova looked like, and Virgil’s readers would have got their idea of the place not from maps, which in our sense the Romans didn’t really have, but from descriptions in authors like Ennius. But I still think it’s fascinating that Polybius and Livy could have got it so wrong, that the ancient historical record of a location as important as Carthago Nova was so spectacularly inaccurate.
Now the obvious thing this tells us is that the Romans had an extremely limited grasp of geography. It’s clear from elsewhere in Livy’s history, for instance, that readers weren’t interested, and historians made little attempt to interest them, in geographical precision. This isn’t just another example of the practical Romans’ notorious suspicion of the intellect: yes, the Greeks were more into the theory of geography (a Greek word, after all), but both Greeks and Romans lacked some of the basic technical resources that allow the kind of accurate mapmaking we’re familiar with.
Perhaps it’s safer to say, though, that the geographical knowledge on show here is more sketchy than straightforwardly bad. We do, in fact, have an ancient account which places Escombrera in its true position: the Greek writer Strabo, in the course of a survey of the Spanish seaboard, mentions Carthago Nova, “by far the most powerful of all the cities in this country,” and “the Island of Heracles, which they call Scombraria, from the mackerel caught there, from which the best fish-sauce is prepared. It is 24 stadia distant from New Carthage.” A stadion was equivalent to about an eighth of a Roman mile, so that’s about right. In general the ancients knew as much as they needed to know about their physical surroundings: there might even be pockets of quite impressive accuracy, but the pieces were never joined up.
Proving that the Romans were rubbish at geography is quite satisfying, I have to admit. But what I find most interesting, exciting even, about all this is something a bit different. I mentioned earlier the question of which text it was in which Virgil’s readers found what they knew about Carthago Nova. We suspect Ennius’ great national epic the Annales, which will certainly have given space to Scipio’s glorious capture of the city. Reaching that conclusion involves some pretty dry research comparing possible earlier accounts to decide who influenced whom: there’s an appropriately forbidding German word for the exercise, Quellenforschung, sources-research. But in this case, it seems to me, Quellenforschung achieves something remarkable, capturing an individual human experience at a remove of well over two thousand years.
What on earth am I talking about?
Well, it seems clear how the error in the historical record about the position of Escombrera crept in. Because, as a recent Spanish book all about the island explains, “[Viewed] from the innermost part of the bay of Cartagena, the island of Escombreras seems to close off the mouth of the harbour almost completely.” In other words, seen from a vantage point at the southern edge of the city, the island does look like it sits squarely in the mouth of the harbour, and it follows that that is where the original source behind Polybius, Livy, and indirectly Virgil (who for various reasons is most likely someone even earlier than Q. Ennius), must have been standing when they noted down their entirely false eyewitness impression.
So we can tell that someone, sometime sat on the dock of the Carthago Nova bay and shared an optical illusion with posterity. But who was it?
It may at a stretch have been Polybius himself, who certainly visited Carthago Nova in the second century BC. But there’s reason to believe that Polybius was mainly dependent for his account of the city on earlier sources. On whom precisely is a matter of speculation, but there seem to be four contenders: Scipio Africanus himself, who wrote a letter about his campaigns in Spain and at Carthago Nova to king Philip V of Macedon (Polybius 10.9.3); C. Laelius, a close friend of Scipio and an important informant of Polybius (Polybius 10.3.2); or most likely of all, one of two historians of whose work very little survives, but whom we know Polybius used extensively in his own history, Q. Fabius Pictor and Silenus.
Q. Fabius Pictor is an important figure in Roman literature, the very first Roman historian, although his history of Rome was, originally at least, written in Greek, the language of such intellectual pursuits as history writing and geography. Fabius would be a strong candidate for our eyewitness if his history extended down as far as 209BC, the date of the capture of Carthago Nova, and that is far from certain. (To be honest, very little is certain about Q. Fabius Pictor.) Fabius was exceptionally well-connected on the Roman political scene, a member of one of the most prestigious families in a very prestige-obsessed city, and second cousin of one of Hannibal’s most effective opponents, Q. Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, known for his tactics as Cunctator, “the Delayer”. Fabius Pictor had a political career himself, it seems, before turning to writing history with the advantage of his extensive insider knowledge; the section of his history devoted to the Punic Wars adopted a predictably pro-Roman stance.
But my candidate for the man staring out to sea is the Greek historian Silenus. Probably a native of the city of Caleacte in Sicily, Silenus was part of Hannibal’s retinue during his famous fifteen-year campaign in Italy, which started with Hannibal’s departure from Carthago Nova in 218BC, “recording the actions of Hannibal with great diligence,” according to Cicero (Div. 1.49) as he inflicted such catastrophic defeats on the Romans as Trasimene and Cannae. Among other things, the fragments of Fabius and Silenus suggest interesting ways in which the Romans and Carthaginians competed for hearts and minds, both for example keen to associate their side of the war with the hero-god Heracles/Hercules/Melqart, a figure worshipped across the Mediterranean and especially popular among the non-Roman peoples of the Italian peninsula, whose sympathies were of crucial importance in the conflict.
So was it Silenus standing there gazing out at Escombrera in the spring of 218BC? It is the very purest speculation, but one thing that makes me want to believe it is that Strabo (3.5.7) refers to Silenus as “something of an idiotes” on geographical matters, and while the Greek word idiotes doesn’t quite mean “idiot”, it comes pretty close to “hopeless amateur”.
That would be a fair assessment of the original source of the information about the location of Escombrera.
Grave 12, Row D, Plot 1
A couple of blogs ago I wrote about Bob Brandt, a predecessor of mine at Brasenose College who was killed at Ypres in 1915. Back then his story set me pondering questions of anonymity and memorials. From the record of Brandt that his family, led by his mother Florence, had left in The Times, especially, I formed the impression of an unusually passionate determination to preserve his memory, one driven (I speculated) by the peculiar circumstances of his death and burial. A friend, Ralph Furse, wrote in the introduction to a collection of Brandt’s letters in 1920, “The surge of heavy fighting swept back and forward over the spot where he fell, and an unknown grave adds to the grief of some who loved him best,” although (as we shall see) there is reason to believe his place of burial was, in fact, known, at least at the end of the war.
Since I first wrote about Bob Brandt, thanks entirely to Oliver Moody, who picked up the blog for a Times article, I’ve been able to make contact with living members of his family. A couple of days ago I visited Dr. Anne Evans, Bob Brandt’s great-niece, who as luck would have it has researched Brandt and many other members of her family, discovering lots of fascinating things which regrettably aren’t relevant here. (A taster, though: colonial Boston was largely constructed from timber supplied by the Brandt family business.) From Anne I learned that my hunch about the impact of Brandt’s death on his family had been in the right ballpark, but that there was a larger story to tell. That story is still very much one of anonymity and memorials, however.
Dr. Evans showed me a lot of archive material relating to her great-uncle, and a thread running through it was the intense devotion of Bob Brandt’s mother to his memory, an echo of which I’d picked up in her scrupulous commemoration of his death in The Times every July. A particular collection of material relating to Bob, including a grainy photo of him breaking a public schools record for throwing a cricket ball, an achievement I’d read about in his Brasenose obituary, was remembered as forming a kind of shrine on the wall of her bedroom; other material may even have been buried with her. Florence Brandt’s bible also survives, interleaved with memories of her loved ones, often clippings from The Times. Again Bob has a special prominence. This is all impossibly poignant to read today, but Anne will I think forgive me for sharing her grandfather Edmund’s (Bob’s brother’s) experience of his mother’s state of mind, an awareness of being eclipsed by his better-looking, more brilliant, dead younger brother. As I said in my previous blog, what I find most compelling about working with the dry records of The Times or the census are these glimpses one gets of flesh-and-blood family dynamics.
Something I also touched on in that earlier blog was the loss expressed by Bob’s friends, and two items in Anne’s archive stood out for me as good illustrations of that. One is a long, typed appreciation of Brandt written by Cyril Bailey, his undergraduate tutor at Balliol College, and for me the editor of a seminal commentary on Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. It’s actually very honest about Brandt’s strengths and weaknesses as an academic, and helped to clarify in my mind why Brandt didn’t stick with his academic position at Brasenose. Bailey also describes, very movingly, the growing friendship between tutor and undergraduate, and a familiar picture emerges of a man who made friends very easily with a wide range of different people–because his own interests were so uncircumscribed. His career at Oxford and afterwards really speaks of a man open-minded and quite undecided what to do with his life. He was very young, and yet, as I say, someone who was the focus of intense affection:
Yet few people I have known h[a]ve made a more lasting impression: when I meet Balliol men now and we speak of loss[e]s it is almost always Bob who is mentioned first, and many tell of the[i]r deep affection for him. One a little while ago, who did not even know him extraordinarily well, said “I think of him almost every day: I have lost seven of my own people in the war and seem hardly to feel it, but Bob–“. And certainly I can well understand this feeling for I know it well…
He had a talent for friendship, as they say, though, as Anne and I discussed, it was noticeably a talent for exclusively male friendship. The following images confirm that talent in a different way, and I think I’ll be forgiven for not even attempting to introduce them, beyond saying that it is a list, in his own handwriting, of people to whom his personal effects should be offered in the event of his death. The names are worth a google; Brandt moved in some rarified social circles.
Brandt did die, of course, and the name at the top of his list wrote the introduction to his collected letters. Either Fox or Sonnenschein (Stallybrass) of Brasenose wrote his obituary in the College magazine, and Bailey of Balliol wrote an appreciation. From his year of social work in London after leaving Brasenose College come the references to “The Mission” and “Dockhead Boys’ Club” in Bermondsey, well explained in this blog on John Stansfeld, who founded the Mission in Bermondsey: I wonder if anything of Brandt’s did end up on the wall there. For his family, however, my conversation with Anne confirmed how very heavily the matter of Bob Brandt’s burial and commemoration had weighed with them. In fact the issue turned out to be even more complex than I’d appreciated, enough to ensure that it has persisted, as yet without any resolution, ever since.
A sketch of the situation is as follows. At the end of the war, or very shortly afterwards, Bob Brandt’s brother Edmund was taken by an officer of the Rifle Brigade, Brandt’s regiment, to see where he was buried at Talana Farm, a cemetery behind the British lines at Ypres that had been in use by French and then British troops from April 1915 to March 1918. The officer in question had known Brandt. Photographs taken by Edmund, such as the one below, seem to focus on a particular burial, Grave 12, Row D, Plot 1, here marked with a dark wooden cross next to a white cross. The much more recent image below it shows the same scene once the original wooden grave markers had been replaced by the official stone memorials of the Imperial War Graves Commission.
It’s easy enough to see that Grave 12, in the middle, is by now marked as anonymous (“A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God”), and flanked on both sides by named tombstones. The family believe, and Dr Evans has convinced me, that by the time the cemetery came to be restored by the Imperial War Graves Commission, any identifying text on the wooden cross shown to Bob’s brother had been lost, hence both the anonymous tombstone and Bob Brandt’s inclusion on the list of missing at the Menin Gate at Ypres. But Dr Evans is marshalling evidence for an approach to what is now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to secure some recognition at Talana Farm that Bob Brandt is indeed buried there. It is far from the first attempt to do so, but it’s certainly going to be the most carefully researched. The family’s plan is that on July 6, 2015, the centenary of Bob Brandt’s death, they will congregate at the cemetery to inaugurate an inscription, even if all it says is that Bob Brandt’s body is strongly believed to lie in this cemetery.
Bob Brandt has become far too real a character for me in the last few weeks for me not to wish Anne and her family all good luck in that campaign.
An Afghan Evening at Astley’s
Gosh, time flies. Three years ago I was deep in writing The Buddhas of Bamiyan. I’d reached my favourite part of it, the nineteenth century, when a motley bunch of spies, prisoners, missionaries and dreamers brought the giant Afghan buddhas to the attention of the European public for the first time.
It’s a close call, but for me the most charismatic and interesting of all these visitors to Afghanistan was Lady Sale, a tough, opinionated military wife taken to Bamiyan along with her widowed daughter and baby granddaughter as a prisoner of the Afghans in 1842: I’ve blogged here and here about Florentia Sale, her granddaughter, and the enormous celebrity she enjoyed as a result of her captivity. For a period in 1842-4 Lady Sale was the second-most-famous woman in the British Empire, and when her diary of her time in Afghanistan was published in 1843, A Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan, 1841-2 was a bestseller.
Lady Sale encapsulated a lot about the Western encounter with Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. But back in 2011 there was a detail about her I’d seen but ignored, because I didn’t appreciate its significance. In Punch (1845, p.236) a humorous review of the annual exhibition of paintings at the Royal Academy mentioned “No. 33”, “A Portrait of Lady Sale, with whom we had become familiar at ASTLEY’S.” The portrait in question is presumably this one in the Somerset Military Museum in Taunton: it forms a pair with another, by the same artist, of her husband Maj.-Gen. Sir Robert Henry Sale. Astley’s, I knew, was a circus in London, but that was really all I knew.
It was at this moment that I found myself being dragged, not entirely willingly, to a circus performance in a muddy field one Friday evening. It was Gifford’s, and the best night’s entertainment I’d ever had, a “traditional” circus taking its lead from early circuses like Astley’s. Inspired, I did enough reading to establish that, if somebody’s portrait was being exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and that person was also being featured in an Astley’s production, well, they really were a phenomenon. Lady Sale was the toast of the toffs in their salons at one end of Victorian society, and a 24-carat British heroine in the eyes of the very different demographic of the Astley’s audience: Marius Kwint, a scholar of the early circus, describes the “plebeian elite” of “artisans, governesses and small tradespeople” whose domain was Astley’s Amphitheatre (Past & Present 2, p.109).
So Astley’s circus got a sentence in my book. This year, though, my involvement with the circus reached a whole new level. Well, not really, but I did find myself in a rather giggly, star-struck state at Gifford’s HQ discussing circus-friendly classical myths, and how flexible Greco-Roman myth could be (answer: as flexible as you like). Last week the Morgan family went to see the finished product, Gifford’s funny, thrilling and also very beautiful show The Thunders, and I took away a programme containing something like my name for the scrapbook. To cut a long story short, there’s nothing like having a role in a circus production, albeit a vanishingly small one, to reawaken interest in the subject. As I watched the 2014 Gifford’s Circus, my mind turned back to Lady Sale. I needed to find out what Astley’s had made of the heroine of the hour in 1843.
Our most detailed information about this show is in Punch again (Punch felt a strong affinity for circus, and it’s not too hard to see why). I’ll get to that account soon, but some background first. Lady Sale had been taken prisoner by the Afghan leader Akbar Khan in the course of a massacre of British forces retreating from Kabul, during the First Afghan War in early 1842. She and her fellow prisoners, including a daughter widowed in the retreat, and a baby girl born to her daughter in captivity, were finally rescued near Bamiyan in September 1842, but by that time “the Cabul Prisoners” had become a cause célèbre that has been compared to the US Embassy hostages in Tehran in 1979-81, their situation tracked minutely by newspapers, and sometimes illustrated by letters smuggled out from the captives themselves. In the plight of the prisoners the British public seemed to invest its profound anxiety about the Afghan campaign, culminating as it had done in one of the greatest catastrophes British forces ever suffered. When the captives were rescued, in turn, it was felt as a surrogate victory, and the family, Maj.-Gen. and Lady Sale, their daughter Alexandrina Sturt and granddaughter Julia, toured Britain amid great excitement in 1844.
Meanwhile Astley’s Amphitheatre, the venue of this production, was having its own problems. In 1841 it burned to the ground, the third time this had happened since Philip Astley, the father of modern circus (with an unfortunate penchant for wooden construction), first established it beside Westminster Bridge in 1769. (For an interesting history of the building, see here.) On Easter Monday, April 17, 1843, Astley’s reopened under new management, and with a brand-new show. A report in The Times (April 18, 1843) describes the plush new venue, including drop curtains representing “the procession of the competitors and the glorious Olympians as they progress to the Greek city”, and the show that had been chosen to inaugurate it, “a new piece entitled The Affghanistan War.” The incidents depicted in the production, although “enlivened … by a few drolleries and a little love”, would be all-too-familiar to readers of The Times, but “afforded an excellent means of displaying those equestrian performances for which Astley’s has been so long distinguished, and … received the warmest plaudits of an admiring multitude.” The leading character in the show was obviously Lady Sale, who, according to The Era (April 23, 1843), “stormed through the night with irresistible fortitude at the head of her little band of more timid fellow-captives.” Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine (1843, p. 62) was very impressed, and indicates that the show was both spectacular and a big hit:
The grand military and spectacle of the Affghan war, which has been visited by thousands, continues to draw nightly crowds. It is got up in unparalleled grandeur, and the many scenes throughout the spectacle convey an excellent and true idea of the sufferings of the Caubul army, and the retreat to Jellalabad… [T]here can be little doubt that the heads of families will avail themselves of this great treat, for where do we expect to find amusement for juveniles if it is not at the Amphitheatre?
The equestrian scenes in the circle are novel, and the dresses and decorations are magnificent, exciting praise and admiration.
What The Times and Blackwood’s are describing here, the precise plot aside, is a pretty typical production at Astley’s: horsemanship predominates, as it had since the days of Astley himself, but trick-riding was interspersed with fairground acts like acrobatics, clowning, and tumbling, the classic circus recipe. Over time Astley’s had come to specialise in “swashbuckling melodramas on horseback, or ‘hippodramas’” (Kwint p.95), productions that knitted the various individual acts into a narrative, typically of recent events, and since Astley had been a military man, and his circus always retained a slight military flavour, recent military events fitted the bill nicely. Astley’s staged The Death of Tippoo Sahib; or, the Storming of Seringapatam in 1799, the year Seringapatam was captured, for example. One of the images here is of the staging of a battle during the Crimean War about a decade after The Affghanistan War, again more or less contemporaneously with the real events.
Punch‘s description of the Affghanistan War production appears in Punch’s Pocket Book for 1844 (pp. 128, 131), a diary for 1844 combined with humorous pieces on events of the previous year:
(128) THE CAPTIVES AT CABOOL
[We are enabled to extract the following highly interesting details from WIDDICOMBE’s Journal of the Astley’s Affghanistan Campaign; and offer no apology in bringing them before the notice of the reader.]
THE DISASTERS OF THE KHYBER
THEIR situation was exceedingly distressing. No sooner had they traversed the pass, than the dying English were obliged to throw a white tunic over their uniforms and climb up the ladders to the platforms at the back of the set pieces, whence, as Affghan chiefs, they fired blank cartridges upon their fellows: and when the curtain fell on this dismal tableau, the smoke was most overpowering. The paper snow fell without intermission during the whole of the scene, and the cavalry were sadly harassed by the unceasing volleys of oaths from the prostrate supernumeraries who had laid down upon the sawdust to die.
AKBAR KHAN
The behaviour of Akbar Khan, whilst in the green room, surrounded by our officers, was mild and courteous; but the instant he appeared on the stage of his exploits, he became savage and ferocious, offering a fearful example of Affghan treachery.
SUPPLIES
Amongst the auxiliaries provisions generally ran short and a penny was frequently given in exchange for a meat-pie brought by a camp-follower, who proved to be the emissary of a Feringhee confectioner, and was allowed the entry of the stage door and Khoord Cabool fort, between the acts, upon parole. Higher-priced luxuries were beyond the reach of the supers, who never got beyond the pies, for few could command the necessary sixpence to arrive (131) at Jelly-le-bad–from its indifferent composition very properly named.
CAPTURE OF GHUZNEE
The taking of Ghuznee was not that severe struggle that has been imagined. It was chiefly owing to the tact of General Broadfoot, who, whilst the Affghans were defending only the front ramparts of the first set piece, directed our troops to a ladder placed behind the side-scene at the left second entrance, by scaling which they gained the platform leading through the Canvas Tower direct to the Capital. At the conclusion of the contest, it was pleasing to see the English sharing their accommodations in their dressing-rooms with the Affghans, and drinking together.
RETURN OF THE CAPTIVES
The meeting between Lady Sale and her husband, for the first time after her imprisonment, took place in the prompter’s box, through the exertions of the call-boy. The interview is described as remarkably affective; but as there is a two-and-sixpenny fine for loitering in the first entrance, it was not seen by many. The heroic manner in which she fought the double sword combat with six Affghans, whom she put to flight, drew down the loudest praise; and her beautiful sentiment, that “the heart of the Briton, even amid the snows of India’s icy clime, still beats warmly for his native home upon the sea-bound isle,” threw an enthusiasm into the auxiliaries never before equalled.
This is Punch and satirical, so obviously a very distorted picture of the production. The basic joke is to present the difficulties of staging this ambitious theatrical production as if it were the Afghan War itself: the audience are turned into “auxiliaries”, and the whole account imitates the form of reports, based on letters or diaries of captives, Lady Sale especially, that had appeared in newspapers during and after the First Afghan War, often headlined “The Cabul Prisoners” or “The Cabul Captivity”. The role of Lady Sale, author of the definitive eyewitness account of events, is given to John Esdaile Widdicombe, the ringmaster at Astley’s and a well-known London figure in the first half of the nineteenth century. Dickens recalls Widdicombe in the eleventh of the Scenes in Sketches by Boz, “Astley’s”:
Everybody knows the man, and everybody remembers his polished boots, his graceful demeanour, stiff, as some misjudging persons have in their jealousy considered it, and the splendid head of black hair, parted high on the forehead, to impart to the countenance an appearance of deep thought and poetic melancholy. His soft and pleasing voice, too, is in perfect unison with his noble bearing, as he humours the clown by indulging in a little badinage…
The episodes of the First Afghan War spoofed here are the retreat from Kabul towards Jelalabad through the Khurd Kabul pass in January 1842 (confused, as it often was, with the more famous Khyber Pass); the capture of Ghazni by the British “Army of Retribution” led by General Nott in August 1842 (W.D. Broadfoot was the name of the “Acting and Stage Manager” at Astley’s); and the rescue of the prisoners and reunion of Lady Sale with Maj.-Gen. Sir Robert Sale in September. The references to the prompter’s box and the call-boy seem to suggest that the performers playing Lady Sale and her husband missed their cues, and the description of the transformation of (the actor playing) Akbar Khan from friendly to savage plays off descriptions of the real Akbar Khan’s perceived hypocrisy, at times charming and hospitable, at others bloodthirsty. Lady Sale described an encounter in her Journal: “Mohammed Akbar Khan passed us; bowed, and smiled– ‘he can smile, and smile, and be a villain.'” The London and Paris Ladies’ Magazine of Fashion (1843, p. 48) offers an intriguingly conflicted take on the representation of Akbar Khan, very much the villain in the dominant British narrative of the war and the massacre:
Akhbar [sic] Khan is the very beau ideal of a savage hero, and we could not but feel an agreeable self-congratulation that there is no attempt to represent him in a mean and degraded point of view. We very much doubt, small step as this may seem in liberality, if it would be the case on any other than an English stage.
Two things strike me as particularly interesting about this circus production and Punch‘s reaction to it. The first is what we learn about how the events of the First Afghan War were realised in a circus performance. One of the things I discovered in that meeting at Gifford’s was that, no matter how elaborate the plot of a production, circus is circus, and the individual acts always have priority over the wider narrative. At Astley’s the Afghan War, as The Times report tells us, provided lots of scope for the specialist skills of the circus performers: trick-riding, in particular, but we also get hints of acrobatics and maybe highwire acts. Lady Sale and her husband furnished a handy love motive. It’s harder to see where clowning might come in, but The Era talks of “two or three comic characters … introduced with good effect,” and they may have included that perennial butt of humour, the Welshman (see below). A review in the London and Paris Ladies’ Magazine gives an impression of the elaborate scenery: “The Hall of Audience is a very splendid and gorgeous piece of grouping [the impressive tableau, or posed scene, was a stock-in-trade of Astley’s]… The Khyber pass with its rocks heaped on rocks, its snowy summits, and horrid rugged masses and its narrow defile brought forcibly before us the grandeur and romance of the place.” But the most vivid insight into how recent events became circus entertainment is Lady Sale herself, played (according to Theatrical Times 1848, p. 480) by Mrs H. Campbell: given her “double sword combat with six Affghans, whom she put to flight”, it’s clear that her role was acted by a performer specialising in spectacular sword play. I would love to have seen that.
The second thing that intrigues me is how rapidly, on this evidence, the British public processed and came to terms with a catastrophe on the scale of the massacre of 1842, often considered the greatest reverse ever suffered by British arms. Barely a year after the ghastly scenes in the Khurd Kabul pass they were the subject of a popular circus, complete with “drolleries”, making excellent amusement for juveniles. A year on again and Punch is getting a food pun out of the name Jelalabad, the destination of the ill-fated retreat, to which only one man from the whole army, Dr Brydon, succeeded in making it. The appalling privations suffered by the soldiers and camp followers during the retreat, struggling through snow and under withering fire from the heights above them, are turned into a circus audience’s quest for affordable refreshments in the interval. In this version of events, of course, the First Afghan campaign was not ultimately a disaster, because the British are vindicated: the full title of the show was apparently The Affghanistan War! or, the Revolt of Cabul! and British Triumphs in India. “Of course, the British arms are not suffered to be degraded in this national piece,” the London and Paris Ladies’ Magazine explains. “Everything is done to maintain the honour of the nation, alike by a Welshman who fights with his toastingfork, and by Lady Sale, who cannot be affrighted into ignominious terror.”
Certainly, if by 1843 Britain was well on the way to converting humiliating defeat in Afghanistan into moral victory, what comes across clearly from the production at Astley’s (and Punch‘s satirical take on it) is the crucial role that Lady Sale played in that psychological process.
I’ve read some extremely interesting material on early circus in the last few days. I recommend anything by Marius Kwint, for example this, and for the images especially, M. Rendell, Astley’s Circus. Nell Gifford writes movingly about her life in the circus here, the director Cal McCrystal is interviewed about the current show here, and if you are anywhere near the Cotswolds, do please go and watch Gifford’s Circus, this year or someday. Tracy Chevalier’s novel Burning Bright recreates Astley’s circus at the end of the eighteenth century. There are still quite a few copies of The Buddhas of Bamiyan available, too, and they’re going increasingly cheap…
POSTSCRIPT
A nice surprise in my email inbox yesterday (July 29th). I had found a reference to an original playbill, or programme, of The Afghanistan War in the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library, the special collections library of Harvard University, and I wrote to them, speculatively, to ask if they would send me a scan. An outrageous request, to be honest, but they did, bless them. It’s so well preserved, and the printed text still so vibrantly colourful, that suddenly the whole event seemed to me rather modern and familiar, rather than late-Georgian and strange.
The playbill gives the cast, a sketch of the plot, and some hints as to how the events of the Afghan War were realized by circus acts. My suspicion that a Welshman provided laughs is confirmed by “Taffy a Tap”, played by Mr Robert Power, and it looks like the same applied with an Irish character Mahoney McHard, and three Afghan women Leola, Kela and Balascha. I’m intrigued by the “Captain Vincent” played by the producer/director of the show, W.M. Broadfoot, since one of Lady Sale’s fellow-captives, also the author of a bestselling journal of his captivity, was an officer called Vincent Eyre, an amateur artist who captured the portrait of Lady Sale above and this image of Bamiyan:
Naturally Widdicombe, the ringmaster, was cast as Lord Ellenborough, the Governor General of India.
The circus had three acts, and the playbill advertises, in BIG, COLOURFUL LETTERING, a string of visually impressive set-pieces, including “Interior of the Royal Citadel of Shah Soojah, the DEAN KHANEH, or SPLENDID HALL OF AUDIENCE”, “The CITY OF CABUL!!!“, “The SNOW STORM!” The uprising against the British occupiers was shown in Act 1, the retreat through the passes in Act 2, and Act 3 presented the reconquest of Afghanistan by the British in 1842, culminating in “Lady Sale the Heroine of Cabul with Fame guarding the Sovereign of Great Britain and Watching over her protectors forming a Last Tableaux of ENGLAND’S GLORY!” Needless to say, a very positive spin on a notoriously disastrous campaign, with the character and story of Lady Sale very crucial to that spin.
Astley’s introduces itself on the playbill as “This Established Temple of Equitation”, and there was obviously great scope in all this for performances with horses. The Afghanistan War was also followed on the programme by other acts. But the playbill offers more information as to how circus performers other than trick riders and clowns found a place in a historical hippodrama. A festival in the city of Kabul in Act 1, apparently staged by Kabulis to distract the British from the uprising, featured the “first appearance of the Belechee Tribe, in their Wonderful Jeux Gymnastiques and Incredible Feats, Messrs. Nunn, Honey, Walker, and Felix,” “Kyberee Tribe in their Extraordinary Wonders–Messrs. Twist, Steward, Baker and Boswell,” and (my favourites) “The Dancers of Bameean in their Bell Dance–Principal Dancers, Mdlle. Cromini and Mr. Lake.”
A Mods Don at Ypres
I am a “Mods don”, or at least that’s one, rather old-fashioned way of describing me. What it means is that I’m a tutor at an Oxford college, Brasenose, who’s particularly concerned with preparing the Classics students for their first examinations, Honour Moderations (or Mods), in their second year.
That may all sound like the very definition of an ivory tower, and if so, on this occasion, good. Because this is the story of how deep into the charmed cloisters of academia the Great War penetrated, a story very relevant to the Mods don at Brasenose a hundred years later, but entirely unknown to me until ten days ago.
Mods dons at Brasenose, it’s heartening to learn, tend to have a good innings. My predecessor started here in 1957, his predecessor in 1922. Before him a man named Herbert Fox (remember that name) had held the job since 1889, having himself succeeded to Charles Heberden, who started in 1872. If I can only make it to 2022 I’m having a party, and you’re all invited, since it’ll then be a century since my predecessor-but-one took up his Fellowship, and 150 years since the arrival of my predecessor-but-three.
That much I knew, but it turns out I have another predecessor I was entirely unaware of. I owe this information to David Walsh, author (with Anthony Seldon) of Public Schools and the Great War, who has very generously written an article for the college magazine (which I edit) on the impact of the First World War on Brasenose College. An important theme, in the book and the article, is the disproportionate losses suffered by the privileged elite that attended public schools and Oxbridge in the early twentieth century, precisely because they were a privileged elite, and hence fed the junior officer ranks that found themselves most exposed to danger, and suffered predictably appalling casualties. The fatality rate for all British combatants was one in ten, Walsh and Seldon remind us, for products of public schools one in five.
Druce Robert (“Bob”) Brandt was one such product of a privileged education: Harrow (there’s an image of him at school here) and Balliol College, Oxford. He was a very talented Classicist and, something that seemed to count as much in Oxford in those days, a fine cricketer, too. After an operation for appendicitis almost killed him as he was about to sit Finals at Oxford in 1910, he took an aegrotat (a degree awarded when illness has prevented a candidate sitting the exams: Brandt features in a spoof of a Class List in Punch) and that was enough to secure a fellowship in Classics offered him by Brasenose. It’s slightly harder to get a fellowship here nowadays, but the whole game of academia was very different then. Brandt’s obituary in the college magazine acknowledges that “he would, perhaps, have never made a great contribution to written learning,” but argues that this isn’t the best way to evaluate an Oxford scholar, whose legacy lay, not in massive Germanic works of research, but in his influence on the students he taught: “That is the tradition of Oxford–her way with her biggest men: their work lives for posterity in their disciples: vitai lampada tradunt [‘They hand on the torch of life’, from Lucretius, cf. Sir Henry Newbolt].”
Why Brasenose felt it needed another Classicist in 1910 is quite hard to say. My guess is that it had something to do with the health of Herbert Fox, Fellow in Classics at Brasenose from 1889 to 1921. Fox was another cricketing Classicist, in fact his Wikipedia article gives half a sentence to his thirty years at Brasenose, and almost all the rest to cricket. But he seems to have suffered recurrent ill-health, and spent extended periods recuperating away from Oxford. Eventually in 1921 he took early retirement. I suspect Bob Brandt was brought in to support Fox, with a view, in the longer term, to taking over the role of Mods don fully.
If that was indeed the plan, it wasn’t to be. Brandt found the life of an Oxford academic too tame. “Under all,” he wrote to the Principal of Brasenose, “there lies the conviction that my proper place is not in the educational but in the industrial or political world–the feeling that I must be up and doing, not sitting and talking.” This was in his resignation letter, and in 1913 he left Oxford (though he remained a Fellow of Brasenose until the end of his life) and, according to his obituary, “plunged into social work in Bermondsey.” In other words, Brandt became involved in the Settlement Movement, an effort by university-based social reformers to break down the cultural barriers and massive economic discrepancies between social classes. Middle-class colonies like Toynbee Hall were established as centres for social work in the slums of Tower Hamlets and Bermondsey and elsewhere, desperately deprived areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then again, I’ve just been sitting in a meeting discussing how to reconnect Oxford and the inner city, so plus ça change. Maybe Teach First is the reincarnation of the Settlement Movement.
Brandt was privileged but idealistic, then. It’s hard not to warm to this young man impatient to make a positive difference. He had also been in the Officers’ Training Corps at Oxford, which we should also consider a sign of idealism in its time, and in 1913 he joined the Special Reserve, something like the Territorial Army. When war broke out in August 1914, Special Reservists were mobilised immediately; Brandt was posted to the training depot at Sheerness, his deployment to France apparently delayed by a foot injury. For a while he was engaged in training up “Kitchener’s New Army”, men who had responded to the call for volunteers at the start of hostilities. Then, in May 1915, Brandt crossed to France with the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. (The details of his service I owe to Christopher Stray and the Balliol College Register; and there is a moving letter to his young godson as he prepared to set out for France here.) Near Ypres on July 6th 1915, at 27 years old, and leading a company all of whose officers “had been knocked out the day before,” Lieutenant Brandt was killed.
The Great War memorial in Brasenose Chapel: 1914 and 1915 (photo: Andrew Sillett)
His commanding officer wrote to his parents:
“Your son fell, wounded in two places, about 6.30 a.m. … during the successful assault on a line of German trenches. The attack had been gallantly led by your son with his company on this section of the front assaulted, and he had reached the German parapet and was engaged in cheering on his men to renewed efforts when he fell, and, it seems, died almost immediately.”
This particular assault may have achieved its aims, but the Ypres Salient was a focus of conflict from the beginning to the end of the war (Alan Palmer’s The Salient is a very readable history), and they were still fighting over Pilckem and Boesinghe, the location of Brandt’s death, in 1918. Officially, by July 1915, the Second Battle of Ypres was over, but “local actions took place from time to time without any appreciable result,” although still at immense cost in casualties, and this was one such essentially pointless action.
The official history of the Rifle Brigade makes depressing reading here. The attack was originally planned as part of a larger action, but was undertaken on July 6th even though the wider plan had been shelved. (A letter to this effect was sent by the Divisional Commander General Wilson to his superiors, but “there seems to have been no reply.”) The impression is strong of a date in the diary that a bureaucratic command structure was determined to honour, no matter the human consequences. “Within five minutes of zero all the officers were out of action,” including “Lieutenant Brandt of ‘B’ Company” “shot through the heart on the German parapet.” The action gained “some seventy-five yards of ground on a frontage of three hundred yards.” The fact that Brandt’s name is inscribed on the Menin Gate at Ypres indicates that he has no known grave.
Obituaries in general, and I suppose especially obituaries written in war time, accentuate the positive. Bob Brandt’s obituary in the college magazine stands out nonetheless. He seems to embody for the writer (Herbert Fox, I presume, although it isn’t attributed) an ideal of Edwardian Oxford, and the epitome of the disaster visited upon Oxford by the Great War:
“All the gifts of the gods were his. It is given to but few to combine intellectual brilliance with sanity of judgement; both were his in pre-eminent degree. It is given to fewer still, whilst maintaining an exacting standard of self-criticism, to enjoy life to the full. No one tried himself by higher ideals than Brandt, yet the grace and charm which sprang from the joyousness of his inner life made him the most delightful of companions and the most lovable of friends… He always looked straight into the heart of a question, and it was a real help to others to know what he saw. But in spite of this very unusual maturity of judgement, he retained to the end the most wonderful, the most seductive, boyishness. It never left him… When with the insight of a master of language he hit upon the exact rendering for some difficult phrase, or detected some spark of hidden fire in an unpromising scholarship candidate, the same thrill of boyish expectancy ran through him as when, with the enthusiasm of a novice, he went in search of an Irish trout, or for the first time opened a Basque grammar, or started in the freshness of the early morning to raid the Oxfordshire fritillaries.”
“He loved life, but he gave it,” the obituary concludes. “For many of us the simple old Greek line has gained a new meaning and a new beauty: Ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνήσκει νέος [‘Whom the gods love dies young’].”
Bob Brandt was missed. In 1926, W. T. S. Stallybrass, the future Principal of Brasenose, had an obituary to write for the college magazine of Herbert Fox, his colleague in Classics. Stallybrass reminisces about his early years as a Law Fellow (he joined Brasenose in 1911) in company with his closest friends Fox and Brandt: “Those were halcyon days, for Bob Brandt was still with us,” and he quotes from a letter Fox had sent him when his poor health forced him to retire: “The jolliest time I had at B.N.C. was when you and Bob and I were together.” Fox had taken the death of his colleague especially hard, even amid the tide of Brasenose casualties that faced him in the newspaper every morning: “I have just heard about Bob. It is the worst of all,” and later: “Bob’s death becomes more awful every day.” To men like Fox, it seemed the war would leave nothing left of Oxford. Harold Macmillan, wounded at the Somme, never completed his Oxford degree after the war: “I could not face going back to Oxford. Whenever I went there, it seemed to be “a city of ghosts.””
Others outside Oxford mourned Brandt, of course. I’ve spent a bit of time in the census and the Times Archive trying to fill out a picture of him, but he really died too young to leave much of a record. What I did find in The Times was a notice which appeared for many years in the In Memoriam section on the anniversary of his death, July 6. The details vary slightly from year to year, sometimes giving more detail of Brandt’s rank or affiliation (“LIEUT. DRUCE ROBERT BRANDT, The Rifle Brigade, 6th Batt. (attached 1st Batt.)”) or specifying the location of his death (“Pilckem, near Ypres”). A few early notices identify him as “our son” or “our dear son”. There’s a pattern if you look hard enough: notices for a few years immediately after his death in 1915, then a pause until 1925, but then until 1947 a notice every single year, on the 5th or the 7th if July 6th was a Sunday. After that, it becomes more unpredictable again.
I went to death records to shed some light, and reminded myself how evocative of real lives, and intensely moving, the dry facts of deaths and census records can be. It transpired that Brandt’s father died early in 1925, and his mother, Florence, in 1949: it was clearly a mother’s devotion that had ensured his name appeared in the newspaper every year without fail from 1925 to 1947, after which time, I fear, Florence (who died in February ’49) was too frail to make the arrangements. Thereafter the notices appear more fitfully, but it’s clear that Brandt’s surviving siblings, Edmund (d. 1965) and Florence Winifred (d. 1971) continued to honour their mother’s determination to commemorate Bob’s death, albeit less punctiliously with the passing of time.
Bob Brandt, as we’ve seen, was one of “The Missing”, men whose bodies were never found, or never identified, a fact which tempers rather the solicitous words of his commanding officer to his parents. The huge number of missing in this war was a trauma which exercised the post-war world greatly, and called forth some remarkable responses from creative minds: tombs of the Unknown Warrior, like the one in Westminster Abbey; Kipling’s exquisite formulation for their tombstones, “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” (Kipling’s own son was among the missing); Lutyens’ Cenotaph in Whitehall, and his architectural masterpiece at Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme composed of interlocking arches in such a way as to create the wall space for 73,357 names. One grieving father mentioned by Seldon and Walsh bought some land on the Somme battlefield where his son, Lt. Val Braithwaite, had died, and erected a cross inscribed, “God buried him and no man knoweth his sepulchre.” The urge to commemorate is all the stronger when the dead have no known grave. It feels intrusive even to speculate, but that Florence Brandt’s son had no known place of burial makes her act of commemoration in print all the more explicable, and all the more poignant. (16.06.2014: in Ralph Furse’s introduction to D. R. Brandt: Some of his Letters, published in 1920, I have subsequently found the following: “The surge of heavy fighting swept back and forward over the spot where he fell, and an unknown grave adds to the grief of some who loved him best.”)
1961 saw Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, with its settings of Wilfred Owen’s poetry; Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War was first staged in 1963, while in 1964 the BBC broadcast its Great War TV series. The First World War was returning to the public consciousness in the early Sixties. The very last notice I could find in The Times, coincidentally or not, appeared on July 6, 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of Bob Brandt’s death.