Richard Evans strikes again

The New Statesman carries a scathing review of A.N. Wilson's latest biography of Hitler by Richard Evans. Evans notes a number of errors that Wilson makes- I'll leave you to discover them in the review- and scornfully remarks that Wilson knows no more than the casual reader of popular biographies. The Professor sniffily comments that the journalist knows no German. Evans's critique is no doubt accurate: he increasingly sees his role as guarding the preserve of the second world war from charlatans and miscreants and has performed a vital role in doing this.

It is important because the work of charlatans can remain in the public mind- can become a version of truth out there in the real world. Someone out there in the real world will read Wilson's book and believe that this is what there is to say about Hitler. There are uncountable books which have had that kind of effect: every Waterstones for years was festooned with a book called 1421- read a review here and see what you think of that particular marketting decision! Historical untruths have distorting effects politically (is that necessary to even mention now?) and there is an important utility in citizens within a democratic state knowing the truth about the past. Reviews like Evans's though are good things because they show how one can debunk lazy work: they are examples of good reasoning for us to follow in making our own arguments.

Was Democracy originally African?

Was Democracy originally African? That's what Professor Tiky of Connecticut University argues in a recent paper. However his argument has multiple flaws- both in terms of what he writes, he nowhere proposes a definition of what democracy is and in terms of what he says about history- Rome would count as a democracy under most definitions, ancient Egypt under Akhenaten almost certainly not. But the paper is interesting- less for what it says historically- than for what it says about Professor Tiky's own preconceptions. The paper could have only been written by a twentieth century scholar, and possibly by one in the United States: it focusses on Africa rather than on the individual countries within Africa and reveals an interest, less in African societiies in the past, than in present issues today.

Professor Tiky is trying to reverse what he sees as an inherent injustice: Europe and most particularly Greece has traditionally been awarded the palm for inventing democracy but it did not do so. Solon, the Athenian, picked up his ideas about democracy from Ancient Egypt and distributed them in Athens. This historical claim is really the centre of Professor Tiky's attribution- but it rests upon nothing in particular. Solon did claim to have picked up his ideas in Egypt- but then many Greeks did claim to have picked up their ideas in Egypt, just as today one might claim to have absorbed one's ideas in the US. It was a signal of their quality- but not neccessarily a claim to truth. The Pharonic system did not have much in common with Athenian democracy as launched by the great statesman and if he did take something from Egypt, what he did not take was fully formed democracy. Professor Tiky argues that ancient Egypt and pre-colonial Africa demostrated democratic stateforms: but even here his work is suspect. For a start, he implies that Egypt was monotheistic when it was only for a brief period under the Pharoah Akhenaten. More importantly he does describe African forms of hereditary statehood and rebellion as a means of controlling governments: these could have grown into democracy but it seems doubtful to me that they actually were democratic stateforms. He neglects the role of Islam in the institutional development of Africa and his account of Africa itself is deeply flawed- suggesting that there is an inherent African path through history is as ridiculous as suggesting there is an inherent European one!

Not much can be salvaged from Professor Tiky's piece. Even his correct point that nothing is inevitable in history is marred by his consideration of African history as the history of a single family. This article could only have been written in the late twentieth or early twenty first century and is peculiarly American in its continental focus. More importantly though what Professor Tiky shares with those he opposes is the point that history determines politics in a very crude way. Whether Africa invented democracy or not at some point in the past, tells us nothing about the sustainability of current African democracy. Wherever democracy was invented, at some point it was new- and now it spreads over half the globe. That historical process is not owned by one continent- or one nation- it can't be: nor is its rise and fall determined by the origins of the concept itself.

Old Soldiers and women

I noticed in browsing tonight an interesting case at the Old Bailey from 1735. As usual it is interesting for what it doesn't say rather than what it does. The indictment is clear: three men, Charles Hooper, Thomas Baugh and James Farrel robbed a third John Wood. The robbery was performed with masks- though Wood was able to identify Farrel and at gun point. Hooper and Farrell were found guilty when Baugh turned the King's evidence and they were sentenced to die.

That isn't what I found interesting. Two things in particular struck me about the case. The first is this, Farrell was wearing according to Baugh a red waistcoat because he was in the third regiment. Farrell called some witnesses up to the bar to give information about his character. John Postern, Joseph Walker and Francis Patterson all testified that he had had a job, making earthen wear pots but had enlisted recently. Baugh also testified that he, Hooper and Farrel had met that evening to go out to rob. The picture we get from this small fragment of evidence is that Farrel had enlisted in the army following an unsuccesful career and now was on the way out to rob. That tells us a lot about the life of a soldier in the eighteenth century.

The second interesting thing about the case is that there was a dispute between Wood the victim and Baugh the witness. Wood deposed that he had been wandering about on a field near Highbury around 3 or 4 in the morning when he was robbed. Baugh agreed with him but said that there was a woman there with him. Wood states as soon as Baugh gave that evidence that the woman was with the gang not him and the trial leaves the matter unresolved. What's so interesting is the vehemence with which Wood rejects the allegation. All we have here is a fragment and there is no way of saying who that woman was or what she was to the gang or to Wood, but it is an interesting detail none the less.

One might speculate about what more it tells us about Wood and his encounter with the gang on the field near Highbury that the court never heard.

Bismark's ideology

Democracy encourages truth telling by politicians about their priorities. We'll hear a lot in 2012 about flip flopping- especially if Mitt Romney runs for the Republican nomination and a fair number of people on the right in the UK deride David Cameron as a communist, just as I'm sure the knives will be out for Ed Miliband should he win an election. Those perceptions may well be fair- and there are good institutional reasons for wanting politicians who believe what they say before the election and then do it after the election. Often one way of ensuring that is obtaining people with a strong ideology whose ideology frames both their rhetoric and their politics: to use a phrase beloved of a conservative friend of mine, if someone is 'sound' they are more likely to be predictable in their political conduct and if you believe in the ideology that probably will make them more effective too.

The interesting thing is what this leads us to underrate- political flexibility and nous. The career of Bismark illustrates this perfectly. According to Jonathan Steinberg's recent biography, when Bismark was first selected for a political career he was brought in by the influence of the hardline conservatives in the Prussian state. This influence guarenteed him his first job and guarenteed him his Chancellorship in 1862. Bismark though was never a real conservative: he was in favour of breaking the German states and was capable of appealing over the heads of the pro-Austrian princes to their subjects. In the late 1860, his mentor Leopold von Gerlach wrote to Bismark saying that 'It depresses me that through your bitterness towards Austria you have allowed yourself to be diverted from the simple choice between right and revolution'. Bismark had nothing but contempt for conservative solidarity though: 'The system of solidarity of the conservative interests in all countries is a dangerous fiction' he wrote ' we arrive at a point where we make the whole unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty swindle of the German princes into the darling of the Prussian Conservative party'. The gap between these two writers- the first who wishes to side with anyone who opposes the French Revoluton and the second who sees ideology as unimportant in foreign policy is largely a division between someone for whom ideology is a central principle in foreign policy and someone for whom that central principle is statecraft.

The interesting thing about Bismark's attitude is that whilst he won the battle (surviving in power whereas Von Gerlach did not), he has not won the war. In Bismark's lifetime he never managed to sustain a political party with even a fractional support base. There have not been many Bismarkian politicians since- Henry Kissinger is a possible candidate and there will be others- but they are few. Most politicians today appeal to their electorate's interest or morality overseas- few see statecraft as a species of separate activity. Bismark's politics therefore died possibly when democracy was installed as the governing mode in the West. But its interesting nonetheless because I think his behaviour throws into relief the kind of politician that a democratic society finds difficult to sustain.

Fire in Babylon

Cricket has often become a metaphor for politics- it did so in the 1930s when the famous Bodyline series became part of Australian national identity and Sir Donald Bradman the first Australian icon. Its done so several times on the sub continent- I was at the Oval Test Match this summer to see Tendulkar score 91 and saw a devotion to him that eclipsed the purely sporting. Fire in Babylon is about another such moment- when West Indian cricket came to dominate the sport for a twenty year period. Led by their thoughtful captain Clive Lloyd the West Indies moved from being a team of talented individuals to becoming a team of amazing players who bonded and played together like a team. Having been scarred by Australia in 1976, Lloyd found a group of fast bowlers- famous names that will endure- Holding, Croft, Garner, Marshall, Roberts and the rest who put the world's cricket teams to the sword. Just look at the clip above where Brian Close confronts HOlding at the Oval: you can feel the aggression in Holding's bowling.

Fire in Babylon tells the story of the transition from Calypso Cricket to this new more fiery and determined West Indian side. It puts it into the context of the racial and colonial politics of the late 20th Century. The story suggests that West Indian cricket was partially motivated by a national struggle to put the West Indies on the map. Independence was only managed in the late 1960s so the teams that played England in the seventies and eighties were teams that came from a very new set of countries. Furthermore they were filled with the ethos of the American civil rights movement. Interview after interview- particularly with Viv Richards- proclaims the importance of Luther King and of Bob Marley. These men when they came to England or Australia were racially abused by the crowds who would shout insults at them: some of which stunned a West Indian team brought up in a newly independent world. They knew about South Africa and events happening under Apartheid. They understood themselves in some sense as messengers from the third world, coming to beat the first world English and Australians. Part of the story of the cricket of that generation was as Michael Holding argues, putting their cricket up with English and Australian Cricket: saying to the English and Australians that West Indies Cricket had to be taken seriously. Fire in Babylon is metaphor used by a rastapharian member of the Wailers and friend of Richards to describe what the cricketers were doing. Running through the film are interviews with Richards’s teacher, with the Wailers, with others who were involved at the time.

This part of the story was definitely there- you can see it in the interviews with Roberts and Richards and the rest- they cared and thought about this stuff and were politically motivated. The film neglects though to develop two important angles on the cricket of the time. The first is that it doesn’t show that the West Indies were a clever cricket team. This wasn’t just a matter of getting together four guys who could bowl at 90 m.p.h: that’s happened before and will happen again, it was that these young men were intelligent cricketers. They could think as well as blast batsmen out. That cricket sense is actually not given the attention it should have: consequently you don’t develop during watching the film the admiration you should develop for these guys. They aren’t political philosophers- their political theory is bound to be less developed- but they were amazing cricketers so should be interviewed about how they worked out how to get batsmen out and intimidate bowlers. It wasn’t just brute strength. Secondly the political aspect isn’t allowed the complexity it needs. There are hints during the film that things were not so straight forward. Colin Croft and Clive Lloyd toured South Africa in the early eighties- they aren’t allowed to explain why. There is a political edge that some of the interviews belie. Furthermore lots of the politics comes from those who were hanging around Richards: its not to deny that it was there but equally the multiplicity of experience that went to make up that team has to be appreciated.

Fire in Babylon is ultimately disappointing because it doesn’t focus on the cricketers and the cricket enough. It presents a story whereby West Indian nationhood was remade by cricket- that’s partly true and its important that the West Indian team demonstrated that a third world, black team could play the white first world teams at their own game and win. It was a reminder that its not the colour of your skin, but in this case the content of your cricket character that determines your life. But its also important to note that the team was not a political movement but filled by individuals who had different perspectives on their times. What propelled them to the top wasn’t just their brute strength and speed, it was skill and intelligence. Ultimately these men were phenomenonal- just look at the clip above again, when you see Close duck and dive you are seeing the last of the cricketers of the 1950s dive out of history and when you see Holding bowl, you see the twenty first century. That the twenty first century cricketer was created not in England, nor in Australia or South Africa or India, but in a set of small islands out in the middle of the Caribean is testament to the brilliance of the individuals who performed that task. In that process they overcame the hideous racism of the cricket establishment and also assisted in the creation of nations in the Carribean (and it would be interesting to know how the different islands saw the team- something the film doesn't get into). Ultimately though I wanted more cricket and less politics.

Secularism or how to change the subject

One of the great myths of modernity is that the battle between secularist politics and religion is a battle in which one side roars about evolution and science and the other counters with revelation and faith. To argue this is to frankly misunderstand the nature of both secularism and religion. It is not conclusive but often instructive to look at the origins of discussions. Mark Lilla in his study of the rise of secular politics identifies the important switch as being made, not by those who opposed religion, but by those who wished to ignore it. Lilla's argument is that the seventeenth century thinkers who created modern secular politics- specifically Hobbes and Locke- did so by suggesting that those who discussed the nexus between religion and politics did not offer the wrong answers, they got the questions wrong.

The traditional set of questions about the interrelationship between religion and politics focussed on the divine nature of rule and rules and the roles of church and state within an entity that recognised the authority of God. Calvinists and Lutherans alike wished the realm to be based upon divine law- or as William Sedgewick said for example to create an English or a European Isreal. Hobbes in Leviathan- according to Lilla- said that the problem with this wasn't that it was wrong but that it answered the wrong question. For Hobbes the sixteenth and seventeenth century had shown that polities built upon religion swiftly became polities built upon confessional identity. He argued that the real question for men to understand, if they were to enter politics, was not how religion and politics should relate, but what were the reasons that men believed. He turned the study of the relationship of politics and religion from a question of theory- a question of bringing theology into the world- into a question about anthopology, a question about how religion influenced the world.

Lilla's complication of the secularist narrative is not enough: I reccomend Katznelson et al's recent volume on the subject. However I think it is important because it establishes a feature of secular thinking that is less understood today. Grotius famously argued that his theories were independent of his own religious beliefs. He argued this, and Hobbes argued this, because they believed that conflict over religious belief had rendered European society after the reformation impossible to live within. You may disagree with their point of view- however the historical change caused by their reaction to the English Civil War and Thirty Years War is profound. The profoundity is not caused by either thinker's attack on religion (Hobbes's religion is a fascinating subject) but by the fact that what they were interested in was religion's role in politics. In this sense, they pick up on the interest of Machiavelli centuries earlier who also was interested in asking the question, what does religion do to society, rather than asking the question, what would God ask me to do within politics.

I think Lilla is right to mark this as an important move in the argument. As my citation of Machiavellli suggests- there are antecedents to this train of thinking. But the suggestion that secular politics represents not so much a change of thought as a change of subject is one that I think is interesting and worthy of consideration. Definitely looking at today's politics and seventeenth century politics, the main difference I can see is the refocussing of the subjects that politics talks about. One of the difficulties of working on earlier periods is looking across that chasm- between a politics of economics and society to a politics of confession and godliness.

The Glamour Boy

In the 1930s, Conservative MPs would refer to Anthony Eden and his coterie of friends as glamour boys, good looks but not many accomplishments to back them up. Whether you think that's true or not of Eden, its something that Peter Green argues is true of Alcibiades, the Athenian politician. Green doesn't think much of Alcibiades- the great defector of Athenian politics, the designer of the Sicilian expedition- who seduced everyone in Athenian politics, bar Socrates, and never, according to Green, succeeded in any of his projects. Alcibaides is an interesting figure- he is an important character both in the history of Thucydides and in the philosophy of Plato. What I find fascinating about Green's article though is how the glamour of Alcibiades has lingered down the years, warping the analysis of the historians who have studied the politics of the late fifth century BC.

I find this fascinating because I think its something that effects us all as we look at the past. Strong images and attachments form as you read about actors within history. Anyone who honestly confesses to themselves about how they read or understand history will confess to that attraction to a cause or personality within the past. The personal glamour of someone like Cleopatra for example has warped judgements of Egypt in that period- do you know any other Ptolemaic sovereigns? We see Egypt in the first century BC sometimes through the lens of two relationships- rather than seeing it as a declining power but a power nonetheless. The thing is that glamour is also something that arises from histories- Gibbon acknowledged in his own history of the decline and fall of Rome that he found the histories following Tacitus boring and dull. The primary sources form our judgements particularly of early history: one of the effects of television is perhaps that the glamour of a Blair doesn't have to be transmitted to a future historian through the pen of a Plutarch. One wonders how that direct impact of charisma will affect the judgementsw of future historians.

Gladstone's books

When did you last buy a book? How often do you buy books? How often do you go to libraries- I spent the weekend in the British library thumbing through newly published works about the seventeenth century- when did you last go? How often do you read a book- on the train to work, at dinner, in a captured moment in a lift, for work? I'm not turning into Italo Calvino here but if any of the answers to those questions are yes or I frequently read or buy books, then you fall into a category that Gladstone defines in his essay on books. The nineteenth century statesman stated in an essay that 'I shall assume that the book buyer is a book lover, that his love is a tenacious not a transitory love and that for him the question is how to keep his books'. Gladstone's essay is about how to build a library- what sort of room should it be, how should the shelves be positioned. Its not a thought we all have all the time- but as someone who loves books it might be one you have had. I've definitely wondered about it- all my life- the dream library has filled my imagination. It would be cosy, have plenty of alcoves and niches, an endless supply of tea which would never spill and include plenty of writing materials and be indexed (by magic).

What's interesting about Gladstone's essay isn't his invocation of an ideal library. He talks of a library of 10,000 volumes sorted under the major headings- philosophy, history et al. That might be possible at Hawarden but in crowded central London, Manhatten or Moscow its probably out of the ken of most ordinary mortals. No its not the explicit subject that I loved about Gladstone's essay: its the fact that he loved books and what he writes about he writes with a sense of why he loves books. Firstly take this passage,

books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of comunion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher components of our threefold life. In a room well equipped with them, no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none as friends to the individual, they are first and formost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race onward form that time when they were first written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia Minor and the monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond editions of Mr Pickering and Mr Froude.

There is a lot of hyperbole in this first passage. I'll quite freely admit I have felt alone in a room filled with books. I'll also quite freely admit that there are times when I'd prefer they offered some consolation bar a wall of letters. But in the moments when I truly love books, I think Gladstone is right. My fairly squat Everyman edition of Gibbon for example carries with it real affection. It is the writers of the books, the spirits which live in the pages which I care about and am linked to as I read.

Gladstone gets to this when he talks about the differing characters of books. Some he says can never be stored in the back of a shelf (Gibbon for example) but as he comments 'neither all men nor all books are equally sociable. For my part I find but little sociability in a huge wall of Hansards or (though a great improvement) in the Gentleman's magazine, in the Annual Registers, in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Review or in the vast range of volumes which present pamphlets innumerable'. The point he is making is that we relate to books in different ways- the sign of a true lover of books in a way is the sense that she relates to the books she owns and she reads in a different way. So Hansards or old copies of the Gentleman's Magazine (a serious journal) deserve different treatment from old friends like Austen and Bronte- one is written for ephemera, the other for eternity. You don't have to agree with Gladstone about his library or even be able to maintain it to understand that central point. And ultimately having understood that, it really doesn't matter how or what you read- just that you feel what Gladstone self evidently felt. That the printed page is a door from your mind into other minds, from your world into other worlds.

Blackstone and Oxford: a polemical claim

The continuity of English law is important for Blackstone as it was for most common lawyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its importance is both political and theological. We have covered some of the political angles in some of the articles I wrote back in June about the Commentaries. Early on though Blackstone also introduces religious reasons for seeing that continuity as important. In particular he comments that at William's introduction as a King in England, he was followed by numerous foreign clergy who were 'utter strangers' to the British constitution. These clergy men so Blackstone argues had their heads filled with the papal adoption of Justinian's Analects, attractive as continental law unlike English law had been interrupted by alien conquest, and became the basis of papal canon law. This law, Blackstone argues was rejected by the English Barons at the Parliament of Merton and a century later when he quotes them declaring that 'the realm of England hath never been unto this hour, neither by consent of our Lord the King and the lords of Parliament shall it ever be, ruled or governed by the civil law'. Blackstone argues that as a direct consequence the clergy developed the law of equity and the universities studied civil rather than English law- as they were controlled and in some cases (Trinity Hall, Cambridge) founded by the Church. This accounted for the exile of the common law to the inns of court in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

Blackstone's account is meant to place common law in the inns of court and canon law in the universities. He is trying to explain the reason why the latter ought to embrace the subject of the former. Oxford should in his view admit common lawyers and he argues that there are civic reasons for the university to behave in this way. However he also argues that the reasons for the university to do this are tied up with its Anglican nature. Canon law he seems to be suggesting is the law of Rome, a law rejected equally by all English communities in the past as by good theological scholars. The point of his argument is to assert both the independence of common law- and the imposition of canon law by the Church. It is interesting to read this because of what the argument ellides- there were Englishmen in the courts of Chancery who were content in the seventeenth century at least with canon law- Blackstone's rhetorical ellision places Charles I or even more impressively Francis Bacon and Lord Ellesmere on the side of Roman Catholicism. This should suggest to us the polemical nature of the union that Blackstone is promoting: by linking hte common law to anglicanism, Blackstone like St Germain before him is making a case.

The Roman People

Roman history can often be seen as a progression from monarchy to republic and then to principate- from imperial expansion to imperial contraction. This neglects another way of seeing the development of the Roman state- a crucial way of seeing that state indeed because it focuses on the internal politics of it rather than its external or symbolic politics. This is to see the Roman experience as mediated through the interpretative prism of class. Rome was divided constitutionally into two groups- senators and populares- however we can also see within the later Roman world an economic division that bulked as large- between the rich (generally of the senatorial class but including many equites as well) and the poor. T.P. Wiseman in a recent collection of essays argues this point very strongly. He suggests that we need to see key moments in Roman history- from the murder of the Gracchi brothers in the 100s to the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC- as part of a story of conflict between the classes within Rome. The senate and its supporters from Scipio Nasica to Cicero set themselves up as, and described themselves as, defending the constitution when actually they were really defending a partisan idea of that constitution.

This is important. Firstly it is an old understanding of the history of the Roman world. No less a figure than Machiavelli argued that Rome's politics were about class conflict and that conception that he had, derived from ancient authors, was what he believed was the motor of Roman politics. Machiavelli as much as Wiseman and Fergus Millar thought that Roman politics was essentially democratic- at least when compared with his other archetypes of Republican government- Venice and Sparta. Machiavelli argued that this conflict riven society was impelled towards universal empire by the fact of the conflict taking place within it. Wiseman doesn't make such a generalisation but what he does to is throw a light back on what Machiavelli does not describe and that is the process which culminated in the principate. His description in an essay on political assassination of the role of election in the rise of Caesar to dictator makes it clear that he people supported the General in order that they might balance aristocratic power. In a sense what we see here is the transition from democracy to monarchy: that transition was made possible by a senatorial class who turned to violence to support oligarchic ambition.

This is far too schematic- and many a historian of Rome will turn in repugnance from what I've just written and how I have mis-characterised a great scholar. However there is something interesting here in the process of Rome's movement to the principate. Our conventional accounts from Cicero or Tacitus present a aristocratic point of view: there were, Wiseman argues, more plebeian accounts but they have not survived. What we see as the development of corruption and downfall of freedom, and those whom we see as supporters of law and right against tyranny, may have been more complicated. Class conflict introduces into Roman history a dynamic that probably explains more of the popular support of the principate but also gives clues as to why the system of the Republic broke down. If Greek historians like Cassius Dio were right that the essence of Roman politics until the death of the Gracchi was compromise, then it suggests that aristocratic extremism conjured up a popular reaction which swept away the traditional republican system and replaced it with something else. If so then the rhetoric of Tiberius and Augustus focusing on a return to normality becomes explicable as a way of attempting to reconcile class as well as political warfare.

Thermopylae

Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae!

These lines from Byron's Don Juan are justifiably famous. They conjur up how Byron and others saw the cause of Greek independence in the 1820s, the chance to reawake the soul of European civilisation and to vindicate in its homeland the cause of freedom. The moment that they commemorate is equally famous. Thermopylae has been remembered again and again in story and in song and probably will be remembered long after everyone who reads this will be forgotten. Part of the reason for this is that the story itself is so evocative: 300 Spartans facing, according to Herodotus, several thousand Persians. The world could be seen to take a different turn on those days when the Greeks through a glorious defeat helped cement a future victory. Paul Cartledge's book about Thermopylae is an interesting guide to the battle and its importance and I think its worth reading- if like me your Persian and Greek history are rusty. Most of what Cartledge argues is based upon the ancient historian Herodotus: Herodotus wrote about 50 years after the events of the Persian war that he chronicled and wrote them by talking to people in Athens who knew about the war. Cartledge tells a conventional story: the Spartans were outnumbered, but assisted- the world forgets Thespians and others who fought with Leonides and his men. The battle was significant because it helped to inspire the Greeks to fight back against Persia.

Lets think about those points. The presence of others on the battlefield, particularly the greater proportional effort of some cities who dispatched their entire army to the field (not as in Sparta's case 300 alone) means that many popular accounts of the battle miss something important. What they miss isn't important in the sense that it should change our judgement of the Spartans, its important in that history in part functions as Herodotus tells us in the first lines of his history, we must remember great deeds because that is what is due to those deeds. We have an obligation not to forget. But this points us on to something that is very important. Herodotus on whom Cartledge bases his account is one of our only sources for events at Thermopylae, we have the odd scrap of poetry (which I'll come on to) but we must remember the fragile nature of the thread that binds us to our past.

Secondly the battle inspired the Greeks to fight against the Persians and victor at the battles of Salamis and more importantly at Plataea. Its tempting to suggest that therefore Thermopylae is a crucial moment in the history of the world: and it is probably so. But its worth also considering whether actually it did matter as much as we argue. The problem with history is that we can never replay the tape with an item altered. Greek history may have been very different- but Greek intellectual life survived Alexander's empire and it may have survived a Persian empire. Though Cartledge assumes that Thermopylae helped the Greeks later- it reinforced a Spartan theology of suicide- there is no evidence to suggest it was decisive. Nor is there neccessarily evidence to suggest the Persians were the evil freedom hating monsters of films like 300, the Bible sees Cyrus in Palestine as the refounder of Israel!

Thirdly there is Thermopylae as an idea. Here the poetry left at the monument to the dead is fascinating- 'Go tell the Spartans, passerby/ That here obedient to her laws we lie' is the wonderful epitaph composed by Simonides. Perhaps most importantly, the epitaph says all the things that we would want it to reaffirm for ourselves and Byron- it restates the Stoic suicide commited by the 300. Its worth reading again though- if one is ever tempted to consider the Spartans or Greeks fought just for freedom then that line should be an answer. Spartan law was unique and the Spartan command to fight was unique- the principle of the line though, and the principle in part of Plato's Crito are the same: Greek politics was based on obligation as well as freedom, duty to law as well as freedom from law.

Why lawyers make good MPs

How should MPs be trained? That sounds an odd question does it not. An MP, according to Jim Hacker, is a job for which you need no qualifications, there are no hours of service etc. Modern MPs are selceted on the basis of their ideology, their adherance to their party and their experience. All of these things are relevant and they are legitimate bases to chose a modern MP upon: I do not want to question them here- just to suggest that the job of an MP has changed down the years. For evidence I want to consider something that Blackstone made clear in his lectures in Oxford in the 1750s- when you read this think to yourself about how far Blackstone's idea of an MP differs from ours. Whereas we think of our MPs as servants of their constituents and partakers in a public debate: Blackstone seems to have had something else in mind. MPs for him were partakers in public reason- that reason being defined as public law and the task of an MP, for him, was that of a superior magistrate.

He described the privilege of being an MP thus:

They are not thus honourably distinguished from the rest of their fellow-subjects, merely that they may privilege their persons, their estates or their domestics; that they may list under party banners; may grant or with hold supplies; may vote with or against a popular or unpopular administration; but upon considerations far more interesting and important. They are the guardians of the English constitution; the makers, repealers and interpreters of English laws, dedicated to watch, to check and to avert every dangerous innovation, to propose, to adapt and to cherish any solid and well weighed improvement.

Pause for a second before you assent to the wonderful prose and just think about what Blackstone means here: what he is saying is completely at odds with what almost every one of us believes today. His argument is that the central duty of an MP is not to be a loyal member of a party, not to vote on budgets (supplies is the archaic English Parliamentary word- still in use for budgetry measures) nor even to bring down governments: their job is to make or rather consider making law. Note as well that in this action of making law what they are doing is repealing or adding to an existing body of law- not creating new measures but refining old measures. The function of an MP is, for Blackstone, not as a representative (no words about the people here), nor as a creator of an executive, but as a leglislator and one that would choose to do very little.

So what did such a partaker in public law require. Blackstone had examples before him of what such a person might need. He cites Cicero to that effect. He might have cited Sir Edward Coke who famously derided the lack learning Parliament of the 14th Century for its lack of lawyers and hence of mastery of the law. Blackstone believed that to be an MP you had to have a knowledge of a public reason: he cites the rebuke of Quintus Mutius Scaevola, 'the oracle of Roman law' to Servius Sulpicius to make his point. Blackstone quotes Scaevola as saying that 'it was a shame for a patrician, a nobleman and an orator of causes, to be ignorant of that law in which he was so particularly concerned'. What we see here is a dual movement- on the one hand the assertion that the law was a subject, on the other that it was the political subject into which all others fed. Leglislators require this knowledge: Blackstone goes further and expands on the fact that he believes all bad laws in England during the eighteenth century are the product (not as we might argue of bad government or ideologically incorrect government) but of bad lawmaking:

almost all the perplexed questions, almost all the niceties, intricacies and delays... owe their origin not to the common law itself, but to innovations that have been made in it by Act of Parliament; 'overladen (as sir Edward Coke expresses) with provisoes and additions nad many times on a sudden penned or corrected by men of none or very little judgement in law.

Blackstone's case is antique- after all Parliamentary draughtsmen are supposed to deal with this problem. But it is interesting because it demonstrates quite how different his concept of an eighteenth century MP was from ours. No doubt he did believe in representation and in election and in government- but for him expertise in the law was another facet of what made a good MP. In that sense he and Coke and Cicero stand at odds with our politics. For all of them perhaps something of the aristocratic clung to the notion of an MP: they sensed the role as being an honorific one as well as a representative one- the movement between the 18th Century and the 20th may be a movement from the honorific role of election to the representative.

Geography, Luxury and Empire

Reading Mark Whittow's Making of Byzantium, I was struck by Whittow's observations about the boundaries of the Near Eastern Empires in the Ancient and Medieval World. Whittow proposes a topography of the Near East that identifies agricultural areas (Egypt, the lower Mesopotamian delta, parts of Western Turkey, Thrace, the southern Caspian shore) and plateaus (the Iranian and the Anatolian) that bordered upon vast areas of arid plains. Whether to the south or the north the Arabian desert and the great Central Asian Steppe (from China in the East to the Ukraine and Hungary in the West) were conduits for nomadic tribes to invade the Empires of Persia, Byzantium and later the Arabic Caliphates from. What Whittow observes though is a fundemental issue which I suspect is at the base of any answer to Gibbon's famous question about why Western civilisation will not fall in the same way that the Western Roman Empire did (to barbarians). These areas could never become part of an empire because they were too arid, too poor to be worth conquering. The settled peoples could not conquer the vast steppe- instead they had to live with it- and often via creating negotiating partners, they created the very forces that would later undo them. This geographical, Braudelian perspective on the Empires of the ancient world is reinforced by Whittow's emphasis on the agricultural basis of their fiscal strength: as late as the 17th century between 63% and 94% of Ottoman revenues came from the land tax alone, compared to between 4 and 6% from customs.

What this emphasizes to me is the vast importance of agriculture in understanding these empires and that means the vast importance of land fertility in understanding their location and their extent. What changes in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is the rise of other sources of wealth and the rise in wealth generally within society: Karl Gunnar Persson in his essay on European Economic history gives figures for urbanisation which are interesting in this context. According to Persson roughly 20% of the population of Italy were urban city dwellers in 200 AD: that should be compared with a European figure of around 40% in 1600 and an English and Welsh figure of 50% by 1850. All those figures are approximate- particularly the Italian and the European figures (the later English figure depends on censuses) but they give an indication of what was going on inside these civilisational centres. More and more people lived inside the core towns and cities and more and more of the economy by 1800 was dominated by industrial production. What we see therefore across the 18th and 19th Centuries and into the 20th is an expansion in the resources that states can deploy to influence the arid areas of the Eurasian landmass: the settled peoples have more wealth to lever into dominating the nomadic peoples. So part of the story of industrialisation is a story about evolution to avoid these crises of nomadic invasion. That's not to say that ancient civilisations could not extend their power (see Rome and Gauls, China and numerous peoples) but there are limits to the attractiveness of arid land when your primary source of wealth is agriculture.

Whittow's argument makes sense when bound together with Persson's analysis. Lastly though it makes a mockery of one of the ancient and modern explanations for Rome's decline and critiques of modern civilisation. For it is luxury not virtue that promotes the arts of urban dwellers: luxury creates the improvements in GDP that enable the settled nations to leverage their power outside the natural confines of the agricultural hinterland and the plateaus. Bernard Mandeville would have been delighted to find not only that private vice creates public virtue but that it also extends military power. This paradox may be incorrect for certain periods of time: but as a general principle it is at least interesting to consider.

Unfinished articles 1

Much as it may look like it- I have not gone away. The last month or so has been a rather tiresome time at work because I have been travelling a lot and that's reduced the time I've had to spend with my computer and I just haven't felt inspiration recently. One of the things I find about blogging is that I need an idea to animate a piece- it happens every so often that you read a book or see a film which sparks in you an idea- sometimes though you can feel you are stretching your material or are unsure of what you want to say. M.R. James in his ghost stories once wrote an article about unfinished stories- unfinished ideas that he had had- I'd like to borrow his concept- these are posts which are lurking in my subconscious as I write this piece. They may appear one day- they may never appear- but they are things I have started writing since April and haven't finished.

Religion and Realism: I am currently in the midst of the Brothers Karamazov. In the book at one point the narrator notes that Alyosha the religious one of the three brothers is the supreme realist. It is an interesting idea I think, particularly given that since Dosteovsky wrote the world has become more and more convinced that religion is separate from the natural world we live in. I think what he was trying to get at was that for Alyosha and for most premodern religious people, religion permeated their everyday perception of events and was not separate from it. This is true probably of many modern religious people and I think it marks out the fallacy of implying that religion is about faith or dreams or the supernatural, it is something that one perceives.

Burnt by the Sun: this film I was shown by a friend of mine over Easter- actually on the Royal Wedding weekend (which I avoided by going to Normandy). Its a very sad examination of Stalinism and I found it incredibly tragic- the kind of film that you cry over. I think its so powerful because it shows you ordinary lives effected by Stalin: the most pathetic character is a little girl who is sweet and curious and naive but over whom hangs a threat that she does not understand. It also perfectly gets who faced danger in Stalin's Russia- the Revolution really did eat its Children.

Hamlet: over Easter I went to the National Theatre's production of Hamlet. Its not a play I know well- I did Othello and Twelfth Night at School- but it was an amazing performance and really made me think both positively and negatively about life itself. I couldn't think of how to say anything new or interesting about Hamlet but I found it a very powerful experience- I'm not sure that this was an idea for an article or simply a platitude in search of a home!

Bloodlands: Tim Snyder's book is one I've been trying to review for ages but have never quite found the key to unlock it. Its about one of the most terrifying periods and places in history- Poland, Belorrussia and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Uncountable numbers of people were killed by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes in that period. What Snyder gives you is both a new reference point for the killings- more from starvation and 'low tech' murder than from gassing- and a new grasp of their horror for individual Jews, Poles and Ukrainians- but also a sense of how these two barbaric tyrannies squared off against each other for being the land based rival to the sea based atlantic imperiums to their west. Its a gruesome story and Snyder brings out elements that I had never understood. It is all the more powerful because for Snyder the individaul deaths are deaths of individuals- fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers. I find this one hard to write because reading it was difficult and writing about it would be worse: that Snyder and others can is something I admire. Thinking about Stalin or Hitler reduces me to depression!

These are just some of the thoughts which haven't quite made it out there over the last month- I apologise for the rambling nature of this post but I wanted to get something down on them all. Thoughts will flee and be replaced by others- what I hope is that some day all of these turn into articles: if not then I hope they can grow in the minds of others!

Review: Contested Will, who wrote Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare's life was like most pre-modern lives: unrecorded. What we know about Shakespeare comes from a handful of legal deeds and reminiscences: we have no personal letters or documents, no diary, no autobiography. Shakespeare the man vanishes into history leaving us alone with his plays and his poetry. For some, since the 19th Century, this has been both frustrating and tantalising. They argue that such a great poet would have left some kind of legacy- maybe it has been obscured because the real poet was the son of Elizabeth I or a political intriguer or some other conspiracy saw fit to conceal the true authorship. Proponents for this view have ranged from great novelists and psychiatrists, right through to the inhabitants of the internet's zanier zones. James Shapiro's 'Contested Will' is an attempt to diagnose why these people think the way they do. Almost all scholars of Shakespeare accept the view that Shakespeare wrote the plays and there is very little, to my seventeenth century historian's mind that would incline me to think otherwise. So why, asks Shapiro have some very intelligent and thoughtful men and women thought otherwise?

This is an interesting topic. We often think of history as the record of what happened: actually though events only matter as people think they happened. Take the Norman Conquest: as an event it is banal, one army was defeated by another but reimagined it became an epochal moment for the conqueror and his conquered people. How people imagine the past matters. Shapiro offers us several factors- mostly personal for people to have taken on the sceptical mantle about Shakespeare. The key factor, he believes, is the idea that any poet or writer draws from his past: this idea, first documented in a footnote on Sonnet 96 by the great 18th Century critic Edward Malone, has become incredibly influential. It has led to great scholars searching in the life of Shakespeare for events which are reflected in his plays. It has led others to speculate about whether the grand subjects of the plays were generated from a grander life. Sigmund Freud argued for example that the Earl of Oxford wrote Hamlet because his father had died before the composition date and because Shakespeare's had not. There are plenty of other cases that Shapiro documents in his book: the key argument against Shakespeare's authorship is that he could not have known what the plays declared he did know, because he could not have experienced it.

This and the absense of evidence (something we will come to in a second) is the key part of the anti-Shakespeare case. It is based on the fact that as the author wrote about the pursuits of the aristocracy and about books, he must have had direct experience of them. Of course this need not be true. He could have observed this on the many trips to aristocratic homes to perform: he would have had access to literature on how to be a gentleman, he would have had access to all sorts of sources for foreign climates- the kind of access that yes might allow to him to make the mistake that Bohemia had a coastline! But that's not really the point. What Shapiro is arguing is that its a mistake to infer from anything in the plays that this was something that happened to Shakespeare himself: he buttresses this with a quote from T.S. Elliot who was bemused by the number of biographical allusions people found in his poems, a poet may not be speaking merely of himself.

So why do we make Shakespeare talk about Shakespeare or Elliot about Elliot? Why can't we leave the Wasteland or Hamlet to speak for themselves? Shapiro's history of the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare supplies us with an answer which I think is interesting and comes back to why we read and how we read. He argues that the reason that so many have wanted to read the poetry in this way is partly a tribute to the poetry itself. We read and from the romantic era on have felt that we have to sympathise with the artist who created the work: we read the work not as exempla but in some sense as a psychological history. We also take that history and examine it- turning it into our own ideas- just as I am doing in this piece. We spin off, as Freud did, from Hamlet to the Oedipus concept or from Richard III to ideas about tyranny (see Delia Bacon) and these arguments, our arguments, from the plays are reinforced by the fact that we deemed the playwright to have seen these things. How much more convincing to say that Hamlet was an effort to get over the death of the Earl of Oxford's father- rather than an imagined father of Shakespeare- how much more convincing does it sound as a proof to a psychological theory.

The case for and against Shakespeare as the author of his plays is interesting but as Shapiro argues through his book, what is almost more interesting is the history of how people have responded to the plays. We look into the past for legitimations of our own ideas- Hobbes called this practice prudence, the utilisation of experience to suggest what will happen in the future. We do this with literature as well as with history and the other arts. We have preferred since the 19th Century to base this sense of legitimation on a connection between art and reality: this actually happened, he actually saw this, that's why his account is correct. But that is precisely not what history gives us. Many artists simply imagined what happened: Homer was not present at Troy, Virgil imagined the world of Aeneas. Even worse the past is incomplete. A jobbing actor and playwright (see Shakespeare, Marlow, Johnson, Dekker, Fletcher et al) did not leave much more than invoices behind them: if they did, even that evidence is fragmentary. Reading Shapiro it struck me how much evidence there is for Shakespeare: he has a missing twenty years but then so do senior politicians during the period (Henry Ireton for example). Several figures from the seventeenth century- from the civil war fifty years after Shakespeare- appear, are prominent for a moment and vanish again. The point is that the past has left small traces of itself behind- but the evidence is always incomplete and always fragmentary.

Shapiro's book is very interesting. I would reccomend it and it touches on things I haven't touched on here yet- the lives of the sceptics are fascinating- in particular the tragic figure of Delia Bacon. But his central point is the one discussed above: Shakespeare ultimately would not do for Bacon or Freud or any of the others here listed, they had to find someone better who had the experience to write the plays. That little revelation tells us a lot about the sceptics but also about ourselves.

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog is one of those film makers who I think presides over our era. We may dislike or like what he has done- but he has penetrated deeply into the mysteries of modernity. His newest film- Cave of Forgotten Dreams- is one of the most powerful explorations of what time means that I have ever seen. Time is something we all confront across our lives. Humans are creatures who forget. We forget loved ones who have died, we forget instances which happen. One of my favourite scenes in film captures the ambivalence of memory: Bernstein in Citizen Kane captures a moment he remembers, a girl in a white dress with a parasol that he keeps in his memory for fifty or sixty years. Bernstein's image is so powerful because its one he remembers: but just think of everything he has forgotten. Just pause for a moment and think of everything that you have forgotten. Your first walking and talking, your first idea, the mundanity of life as you passed through it. Like Bernstein our past lives are flickers in the movie camera of our minds. But what about all the lives before yours? Living memory extends only so far back into the past: I spoke to my grandmother who was born during the first world war, I have had no contact in my life with anyone who was older than that. Before 1914 I have only history, and yet even history gives out at some point- history which Hobbes tells us is a different kind of memory- even that gives out- its with Thucydides or Herodotus or with a Chinese scholar or with the tales of the Bible- but history gives out, somewhere in the 1st Millenium BC. And then we have?

Werner Herzog takes us into that realm. He takes us to paintings made in a cave in southern France at some time 33000 years ago. Just to put that in context- the creators of Stonehenge are closer to us in time than the painters in this cave in the Ardeche river valley, in the Chauvet Cave. The paintings are amazing. Herzog uses all the powers of his camera to show us how amazing they are. You can see the hoofs of horses as they run with the camera: hoofs drawn superimposed, like a picturebook that the early pioneers of cinema spun to make motion appear. You can see bison and men and women. These works of art are incredible in themselves. But then you realise with Herzog that we have no idea why they were created: we have no idea why these things were drawn. What made a person 27000 years ago complete a drawing that had been started 6000 years before. We do not know and what's more interesting: we cannot know. All our senses of time and history are useless before the mystery of the past. As Herzog argues in the film (supported by a number of archeologists) we are left in awe: we can only appreciate, we cannot understand.

This makes this film an incredibly moving production. It is moving because Herzog understands the fact that we cannot know the past. We can speculate as to why there is a print of a boy next to the print of a wolf in the cave- but whether one chased the other, one walked with the other or they walked thousands of years apart through the cave, we will never know. Herzog fills the film with the educated speculations of archaeologists: we see ancient flutes and spears being put to use, we start to understand what we can understand of our ancient ancestors, but we can never understand what made them tick. We can only wonder at what they produced. The feeling the film produced in me was almost religious- awe and wonder at the world of these ancient peoples and at the distance from our own world. For they lived without any sense of history themselves: a point Herzog makes: these were the people before writing was invented. We move beyond our histories into the darkness of the past and yet somewhere someone in that darkness was my thirty thousandth grandfather and grandmother. This is a humanist film in that Herzog is interested in human beings- whether its someone trying to smell a new Chauvet cave or the archaeologists speculating on life in the year 33000 BC- he cares about elucidating his subjects. The film reminds us of human uniqueness thus whilst reminding us of our distance: we know that in the past people were eccentric but we have no means of discovering this eccentricity.

This film was very personal for me. Memory is something I think of a lot and think Hobbes was right about- it is the foundation of history- but then Hobbes had another point that the other foundation of history is authority. We believe because we are told by someone we trust: historians develop reasons to trust a particular authority- its confirmed by others or by other facts we know. But always you have that nagging feeling or I do that whatever we know about the past misses more than it captures: we are like Bernstein peering back into his teenage years and seeing only a girl on a ship that he glimpsed for a second. It is when we confront the mysteries that Herzog brings us that we realise how fragile that glimpse can be. We can see in the cave a painter with a crooked finger, but we have no way of knowing what part of the crooked timber of humanity that painter represented.