Septimius Severus

"The contemporaries of Severus, in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign, forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal results of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principle author of the decline of the Roman Empire"
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Gibbon's perception of Septimius Severus was based on his own view of Roman history- he wrote a great longitudinal study of Rome's fall, from the age of the Antonines to the age of the Florentines and in his survey he noted the chronological passing of power. For Gibbon and for many before and after him, Rome's history took an upward turn in the second century AD. The hereditary Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties with their dynastic freaks (Tiberius, Nero, Domitian) gave way to the meritocratic series of adopted emperors- Nerva (96-8), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian (117-38), Antoninus Pius (138-61) and Marcus Aurelius (161-80). After Aurelius though the Empire slipped back- Aurelius's son Commodus was awful and he was succeeded by a period of civil war (193-97), only brought to an end when Septimius Severus seized control and reigned for a period of years until 211. After Septimius there was chaos as well- as challengers for the empire rose and fell and in the end internal chaos led to external danger- with emperors dying on foreign frontiers and various parts of the empire splitting off. The only Emperor who seemed to survive for a great period of time amidst the chaos was Severus, and hence Gibbon blamed him for the later decline.

Severus's biographer Anthony Birley takes a more lateral approach than Gibbon and stresses the ways in which Severus was a creature of his times. Severus was born in Lepcis Magna to a family with strong links to Rome- as part of the Empire's evolution more and more provincial citizens were using power within Rome itself- the great Senatorial aristocracy had been wiped out in the 1st Century AD and was replaced by a new aristocracy from the provinces, particularly Africa. Severus's ancestors- his grandfather in particular- was part of this and probably knew great literary figures such as Tacitus and Pliny. Severus's reign though marked a new turning point: he was the first Emperor not to have been brought up in Rome. He felt no great affection for the city- spending only three years of his reign in Italy (possibly less) and spending most of his time out on campaign. In that sense he marked the beggining of an evolution from an Italian Roman principate- to one which resided at key points on the frontier- as with Diocletian at Nicomedia and Milan, or with Constantine's successors at Constantinople and Ravenna.

Severus himself was part of a rich civilisation. He was a contemporary of Galen, the great doctor, and Tertullian, the Christian saint. Aurelius of course was not merely an Emperor but a philosopher. Severus was lucky in his historian, Cassius Dio, who compiled a pretty extensive history of his reign upon which much of Birley's work is based. But within that civilisation there were debates about strategy- some beleived as with Hadrian in an empire which withdrew to and solidified its boundaries, some like Trajan and Aurelius believed in extending the imperial sway to conquer new territories. Severus stood in the second camp- he looked in particular to Marcus Aurelius as a model for his reign- attempting to extend the Roman empire's sway in the East, where he sought to add Mesopotamian territory to reinforce the exposed province of Syria, in the south he forced the Roman border in Africa further south towards the Garamantes and in Britain, he attempted the conquest of Scotland but died before he could accomplish it. Such advances needed reorganisation. Severus was one of the leaders of a military reorganisation- that again was going to be paralleled later. The early Roman emperors relied upon provincial armies and a small Praetorian Guard in the Capital- Severus called up three legions to become a mobile reserve and attempted to introduce more fluidity into the army. Using it as a fluid weapon of offence and response instead of a passive defensive force- that meant that he spent far more upon the military than his predecessors. The instability of 193-7 also forced him to raise the soldiers' pay at a rate which the sterner predecessors would never have done.

Returning to Gibbon's question then- because it is worth answering, why did these trends lead to a temporary collapse and did they contribute to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Lets instead of answering Gibbon, answer a different question- did Severan reforms lead in part to the problems of the third century? To that question I think we can answer an unambiguous yes- the Severan reforms led to massive inflation throughout the empire, they led to military instability with soldiers desiring increased pay and receiving it from every new contender, Severus and his predecessors contributed to smashing up the old Roman system and the replacement was painful. But equally whilst Severan reforms contributed to the mid third century collapse, they also contributed to the recovery in the late third century. It is no accident that Diocletian and his successors used Severan ideas to reanimate the Empire: the Roman Empire in these years could in part be seen as a society going through the shock of reorganisation- and going through it spectacularly because the symptoms of that shock were civil war and invasion. Severan reforms though- introducing the itinerant, provincial, non-Roman Emperor with a mobile force behind him- shaped the later Roman Empire. Those reforms went back into the reigns of Aurelius and beyond- but they formed the template of what the Empire looked like under Constantine.

Perhaps what this demonstrates is that whereas there was definitely a fall of the Roman Empire in the West- decline isn't always the best way of conveying what happened to Rome. Rome evolved from a Republic to a Principate, from a Principate to an Empire- the changes meant that the form of the state changed- at times those changes could be painful but often they were attempts to respond to actual situations. Of course there were important failures- as you would expect with any system that relied on one individual, selected at times by the random chance of their genes, and Rome seemed to specialise in competent fathers with useless sons (Severus's son Caracalla didn't survive that long after murdering his brother) but there were strategical changes as well- some of which we see in Severus's reign. Severus's change of strategic focus is interesting because it demonstrates the increasing foreignness of Rome from what it had been- and it demonstrates the way that the Empire evolved to meet new challenges- tougher enemies on the frontiers (especially in the East with the rise of Sassanid Persia) and the need to rule by consent in the provinces, and coopt local elites. Severus afterall probably spoke with a Carthaginian accent- (he might well have pronounced his own name Sheptimus Sheverus) Carthage three hundred years before his birth, had been Rome's great rival.

Severus's reign therefore is fascinating- Gibbon was right, though other reigns built towards it, it was a watershed. But 'decline' is the wrong image, rather we should think of a Severan transition- whereby under Marcus and Severus the Empire's nature changed and the old Rome slowly ebbed away to be replaced (after the shock of the mid-third century) with something very different, the empire of Diocletian and Constantine.

The Robbery of Thomas Barnard

In the next place was Try'd a Butcher , against whom it was alledged that he and his Companions rob'd one Thomas Barnard of about five or six pound in money, and afterwards desperately wounded him, with an intention, as was thought, to have kill'd him, to prevent Discovery , being, it seems, known to the said Barnard; But he by providence escaping with his life, declaring the manner of the fact, and naming one of the principal persons concern'd in it, upon a diligent serch it was not longe'r he was apprehended.This Fellony and Robbery was committed a little beyond Islington , between which place and Barnet divers others were robbed that Evening, and as was supposed, by the same gang, but no more of them were taken, neither did any of the persons so robed give Evidence against the Prisoner, but onely the said Thomas Barnard , who knowing him so well, and giving in so plain an Evidence against him, the Jury could do no less then find him Guilty , according to which evidence he now stands Condemned.

I have highlighted this from the Old Bailey records website - because I think it is intrinsically interesting. But before that the website itself is pretty extraordinary and is going straight on my blogroll- as it contains all the published records for the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey from the 17th Century to the early 20th Century when records ceased to be published. I am adding this to my blogroll because its a really wonderful resource for anyone interested in social and criminal history.


I bring up this entry though, about the robbery and attempted murder of Thomas Barnard, for a variety of reasons. One is two important signs of the way that life has changed: the first is that Islington in the 17th Century was a village not part of London as it is now, Barnet too is part of London. Highwaymen do not frequent the roads around Barnet and Islington now: that's partly because there are no highwaymen in the UK (we will move onto the reasons for that later) but those roads on which Thomas Barnard was robbed are today roads through suburban houses, filled with the bustle of city life and the area where he was robbed is now passed through by trains and tubes. That's one major change- another is the amount of money for which he was robbed- five or six pounds isn't that much money today, it will buy you some fruit, a sandwich and a coffee at some places today- in the seventeenth century five or six pounds was a hell of a lot of money. A lease in 1688 for a house with "courtledge [curtilage] orchard, garden, Hempland Meadow and close on West Cheseldon, one and a half acres" was worth roughly 2 pounds a year. So Thomas Barnard, fifteen years before that lease was brought out, was robbed of the equivalent of a two rents for a house with land- that's a hell of a lot of money in anyone's terms.

What else is interesting in this record? Well there is plenty more obviously but lets start with something I consider very interesting. There are no Highwaymen in England anymore. Why? It might seem like an odd question- afterall the levels of violence have fallen across the centuries- but think again whilst levels of violence have fallen, the types of violence have not disappeared. Violent assault by men on their wives, I would guess is less than it was in 1673, but it has not disappeared. So why did Highwaymen disappear? There is a reason that highwaymen disappeared and it has to do with the fact that their habitat disappeared. So let us look for the moment at what happened to their habitat- the rural roads around Islington and Barnet which once were prayed on and dominated by gangs like those referred to above: well one thing is that they aren't rural any more, but there are rural roads so what has changed about those rural roads?

One word comes to mind, one word that really explains the way that the English countryside has changed: that word is "Enclosure". From 1500 onwards English agriculture changed its ways completely- in your stereotypical medieval village the fields were divided into strips. Each peasant would have a strip and the field of several acres would be managed by the whole group collectively rather than individually. Property rights were subject to what E.P. Thompson called the 'moral economy'- they were not absolute. Common fields existed within people's property and were tilled by all- often for instance people would have rights to take turf for fires from a field whilst the ownership went with someone else. Significantly of course, there were common ways stretching across fields and boundaries between fields were crooked and fields were unfenced and unhedged and only locals might know where a right of passage had evolved across centuries. In this system of local byways and chaotic field organisation, highwaymen could easily evaporate into the landscape, knowing routes unavailable to less local law enforcement officials. Notice what happened within Barnard's case- he only managed to gain a conviction because he recognised his assailant.

That brings me to my last interesting point about what we can tell from this one transcript: Barnard recognised his assailant. Presumably the assailant was someone Barnard knew in his other trade as a butcher- again remember this is a local society. More often than not, people would know their assailant if they were local. Unlike most of us, whose worlds at home scarcely stretch outside our streets- these were people whose main social network were those who lived closely to them. In the Barnard case, this Butcher was unlucky enough to come across someone from the community who used his local knowledge to escape and who could identify the assailant. Of course by the end of the seventeenth century that was changing- by 1700 a tenth of the population of England lived in London- but still as a general truth it holds, this was a much less numerous and much more local society than any any of the readers of this blog lives in.

One thing though doesn't appear to have changed- if we look at the record and assess it on face value (ie assume it tells the truth about whatever happened that night in Islington) then it confirms something all of us are familiar with from the news: that robbers when frightened by the prospect of discovery will often murder rather than pursue their other crime. History is full of these moments of strangeness- when the past seems so far away that we can barely understand it (for a Londoner imagining Islington as a village!) and moments of familiarity where you can understand immediately what is happening. The task of a historian is not to forget when feeling one emotion that the other exists- history is the human past: it happened to people, but not people like us.

Medieval Lesbians

Why do you want your only one to die, who as you know, loves you with soul and body, who sighs for you every hour at every moment, like a hungry little bird... as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly... you are the only woman I have chosen according to my heart.

That text is from a 12th Century letter from a woman to another lamenting their separation. What it bears testimony to is the reality of lesbian relationships going back into the medieval period. It is hard to read that text with its references to exclusivity or indeed to the mate of the turtle dove without thinking that it is, in some sense, a love letter. But it is not alone- Lesbian literature in some form was around during the entire Middle Ages- of course as Lesbianism was prohibited and women were the silent sex during the period, there isn't that much of it but individual examples are there which illustrate what may be a greater silent trend.

The canon lawyers definitely thought that that was true. As Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe, and as its believers became more literate they developed penitentials and other legalistic codes to describe sin and administer penitence. The Penitential of Theodore reccomended that a woman who indulged in vice with another women did penance for three years- more if she were married. The Penitential of Bede stated that a woman who used an instrument in sex with another woman should do an extra four years penitence. Hildegard of Bingen argued that Lesbians usurped the male role, both in sex and in general, Etiene de Fougeres suggested that Lesbians sometimes play the cock, sometimes the hen. The fear of Lesbians was the fear of mannish women.

On the other hand, Lesbianism did not get the attention that either male homosexuality or heterosexual adultery got. Perhaps it was less common. Perhaps as well it threatened the family unit less: adultery could end in a confusion about the legitimacy of children, crucial in a society like that of medieval Europe based around lines of descent. Furthermore contemporaries couldn't quite believe in sex without penetration- women were the passive receivers of sexual attention and aggression, not the instigators of it. Indeed one medieval text argued that a mannish woman turned in either of two ways- if filled with lust she became an active seductress, if totally bereft of human feeling, she became a Lesbian.

Women though were punished for being Lesbians- and practical steps were taken to dissuade Lesbianism. In 1568, a woman was drowned in Geneva for a 'detestable and unnatural' relationship that she had with another woman. In 1405 a French woman called Laurence appealed against a conviction for Lesbianism, insisting that her partner, Jehanne, had been the instigator of the crime. A lawyer in Seville in the 16th Century witnessed the flogging of several female prisoners convicted for making artificial sexual instruments to indulge with each other. In general the courts tended to leave Lesbianism alone though- for the reasons I gave above. Yet in other parts of medieval society we find that practical measures were taken against Lesbianism- with nunneries having strict rules about communal sleeping arrangements, prohibiting nuns (particularly old and young nuns) sharing beds and maintaining a light on at all times in the dormitory.

Such a description shouldn't lead us to think that medieval Lesbianism was in any way similar to modern Lesbianism- the letter I quoted from at the beggining is phrased within the conventions of courtly love poetry. To go further, medieval individuals often thought of themselves in wildly different ways to modern individuals. Take the case of Bernadetta Carlini, an Italian nun, who claimed to have visions and to be possessed by an angelic spirit. Carlini's spirit used her body to have sexual relations with another nun in her convent- she was sentenced to imprisonment. Historians like to quarrell over whether Carlini was what we would think of as a Lesbian- she said at her trial that she had no memory of her sexual escapades- in truth its a false question. The real answer is that she like many medieval men and women thought differently about their lives than we do- instead of as historians like to do, forcing them into modern straight jackets, its worth considering what they experienced.

The difficulty in this field though is that that isn't always that easy. Carlini's case is only there because she was tried and we have the transcript, we don't have much evidence to go on here. Much of what I have written comes from an article by Jacqueline Murray (within this collection), Murray attempts to make up with theory what she lacks with evidence, a parlous proposition for history which is an empirical approach to the world. Having said that, there definitely seem to have been medieval Lesbians- and looking at the way that both the Church and courts approached them reveals the deeply sexist orientation of medieval society. Women just couldn't be evil because they were recipients, not aggressors, in the world.

What it also reveals I think is that something about the subject of human nature- lesbianism is natural to human beings- but the forms, particularly the emotional forms it takes, change with societal change. That movement is a movement between artificial constructs to express a natural reality- Carlini's experience of Lesbianism was a different expression of an underlying emotion that she shares with Jodie Foster. They might say different things and feel different things- but the underlying thing they share is an attraction to women.

Brits abroad

Roy Hodgson and Gary Johnson are not the names that fly off the tip of the tongue whenever we consider managerial jobs at the top level of English football, but they should be. Hodgson is now manager of Fulham, but has managed in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy and Finland- he was also considered to be manager of Germany in the late 90s. Johnson's career is less illustrious: he has managed in England mostly and very successfully at the lower levels (Yeovil and now possibly Premiership bound Bristol City) but also had a great stint as manager of Latvia. The reason I bring these two up though doesn't lie in their exceptional careers- great though they are- but in the fact that they are so often ignored- when the lament comes up that there are no English managers, what does it say that we ignore these two and how does that structure the incentives for managers.

There are very few English managers of class in the Premiership- personally Steve Coppell, Sam Allardyce, Harry Redknapp and maybe one or two others might qualify. But overall most English managers have been left behind over the last ten years by those continental managers interested in diet and uninterested in pure motivation- the failing careers of Kevin Keegan and Peter Reid demonstrate how old methods of up and at em don't work so well any more. The English Premiership has been staffed by foreigners. You might wonder then why English managers don't go abroad?

I think there are two reasons why more don't follow in the footsteps of Hodgson and Johnson- two reasons that demonstrate an unhealthy conservatism in the attitudes of both the managers and the football bosses themselves. The first is that most English managers tend to be happy with where they are- they want to be football managers and learn the group of players that come to England and how they work. They are rigorously logical in their approach to football management- that's why they all use the same limited vocabulary, because that is the vocabulary of management. The interesting thing is that going abroad will not neccessarily teach you things that you didn't know about football but it will teach you things that you didn't know about life. And as soon as you are exposed to more, try more in life, you yourself learn more about yourself and consequently become better able to help other people. This comes in all sorts of ways- it would be interesting to think about the way someone who has never lived in a foreign country helps a 19 year old settle in a new place, it is even more interesting to consider whether knowing more in general actually enables you to think laterally- to go beyond convention and therefore to do better than convention.

The second thing is that management of football clubs is also very very conservative. If I want to employ a manager- I have a selection list normally of those who have managed Premiership clubs and perhaps of those who have managed a little abroad. That culture is so conservative because the environment around football is so conservative- the constant attacks on every foreign manager as though he might be Christian Gross, forgetting that Gross was not actually that bad. The best way to treat a new idea is to mock, the best way to treat intelligence is to imply homosexuality. Whatever your thoughts about football in general and management in particular (whether you agree with me, James and Chris Dillow that management is overrated or not) the idea that a culture could grow up which eschews thinking about problems and concentrates on mocking novelty and discouraging change is a deeply damning one. The environment means that Johnson and Hodgson are ignored, despite their acheivements, because they didn't do them in England- the Welsh manager John Toshack (successful in Spain) similarly has not been acknowledged sufficiently- whilst serial failures like Graeme Souness get reappointed constantly.

As this is an issue which is shaped out of a wider culture, I think it says something about Britain as a whole and the way that the country is still a small c conservative place and a profoundly unintellectual place. The difficulties with management that Dillow highlights so often on his blog are made worse by the fact that Britain doesn't seem to value what Denis Healey called a hinterland- a background which goes beyond the task at hand. Not something that managers think they need, or club chairmen look for...

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Spy movies have always been associated with James Bond. Bond movies are of course perfectly good- they do what they proclaim they will do and some particularly the Sean Connery ones are even very good films- but they don't epitomise the best work that a spy movie can do. That is becuase a Bond movie is about action- its about glamorous sexy women and big explosions, its about corny jokes and martial arts. Bond films are films to relax to, but they don't repay much analysis. Spies though do repay analysis and from Hitchcock thrillers and cheap noirs to the great adaptations made by the BBC in the 80s of John Le Carre's novels, they have produced some great films and television. When I think of a great spy on screen, I think of Richard Widmark fingering Jean Peters's bag in Pickup on South Street, or even more so of Alec Guinness shuffling into the London circus in order to plot the downfall of Moscow Central, with weary and sad resignation.

The Manchurian Candidate is a film that fits neatly within that genre- this is a film that explores the internal world of the spy. From the moment it begins, we are told that the problem with a normal spy is that he will collapse, he will feel guilt, remorse and pain. That when he murders, like Lady Macbeth, he will spot the blood on his hands- or like Macbeth be haunted by ghosts of Banquos that he has disposed of. The premise of the Manchurian candidate is that the most sophisticated spying operation in the world is one which dispenses with the spy, but finds a human that it can divest of his individuality- of his fear- of his memory of committing acts. The most successful spy is hypnotised, turned into a mere instrument in the hands of those who would use him and thus rendered completely without the intelligence to operate in a contrary fashion to their intentions. Of course nobody has achieved this outside of Hollywood films, though George Smilley might at this point knowingly nod his head and argue that all spies to an extent compromise their own personalities- learn to live with dark memories- the key here though is that the Manchurian agent had no volition, did not choose but lived the life his handlers chose for him.

But he symbolises something rather important- a point that Thomas Hobbes (about whom more soon) would have empathised with. The Manchurian Candidate is the most unlikely Communist agent- he is the adopted son of a Republican Senator whose wife is a senior red baiter. He is a war hero and a journalist. He is the soul of the Washington Establishment- a man who has met the President and whom generals salute. Yet he is unknowingly the spy, the assassin, sent to kill the targets of the communist plotters. The only men who see through him are those from his own platoon, who shared in the brainwashing and whose memories return as vile nightmares to stalk their dreams. The centre of this film though is an unsettling notion- that noone can know accurately who other people are- that endless fear is justifiable but ultimately corrosive and picks the wrong targets (McCarthyism is an obvious target in the film) and that the construction of trust is the basis of society. At one point in the film, a central character trusts another central character- indeed the film is built entirely on moments of trust: a girl meets a guy on a train, she trusts him enough to see that he is sick and needs help and she provides him with the stability to turn his life around. Janet Leigh's character is the female version of that stock character in film- the man who sees an attractive woman in trouble and helps her out in order to win her hand- only now the situations are reversed. But the central point is there: trust is what makes the world turn round.

Of course trust opens the way for the Manchurian candidate. But that trust is tempered by understanding, by an effort to sympathetically reach inside someone's brain and understand the logic of what they do and why they do it. The movie rests upon an act of empathy- of logical connection that sees the future in terms of unwinding the logical process that led to the creation of the spy. Essentially the film rests upon a liberal conceit- that reason can persuade anyone to back democracy and the American way and that reason is universal: that there is no such thing as the ultimately anti-rational- there is just the irrational. In that sense, the movie sits at two intersections- describing adequately the response of liberal thinkers to the problmes of the world but also describing the response of modern psychology to the problems of the psyche. Understand and confront are the watchwords here- and the rhetoric of conflict is ridiculed as both ineffective and conniving. Like Shakespeare (and significantly Edward Murrow) the film reminds us that

the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves

Its an important idea. And requires us to investigate ourselves- requires that solipsistic tendency which is the ultimate key legacy of Christian thought to liberal thinking: a concentration on understanding and addressing the inner motivations of the brain so as to understand and deal with their consequences. The point of the Manchurian candidate is about the ways that psychology enable us to analyse and also act upon the world- and there is no surprise that in this film it is in our minds, not on the ground, that the war between America and Russia is conducted. Science not scandal mongering will allow us to capture the high ground.

Its an interesting thesis- and not one that all liberals would agree with (Sir Isaiah Berlin would for example give such a position a sophisticated argumentative drubbing) but it is central to the kind of American liberalism that has prospered in Ivy League campuses and Eastern cities since the war. Within that liberal tradition, the Republicans have are represented as fake spokesmen of hatredn, as pharisees whose attention is misfocussed. Instead of looking inward on themselves, and seeking to empathise with those that oppose them, they look outward to condemn and consequently miss the biggest facts, and fail to deal with what they see. That is the position that this film endorses- I make no comment as to its accuracy. In that sense this is a fascinating historical document of the way that psychologically and politically liberalism links together.

It works because of its performances- there is plenty here to chew on because the actors themselves have got within their characters. In some senses the attitudes of the film are not easy to cope with: there are as I argued above some recognisably ungendered characters here. The men are mostly dependant, the women are mostly strong and resolute. Evil in this film is female, but so interestingly is the ultimate pole of good. Military life is shown in all its decadence: the men on bases whore and drink to cope with a fearful war. Furthermore this is a film about shell shock: its a film about the nightmares that wake you after war. A film about all the men destroyed by war who returned to Europe and America in the forties, fifties and sixties to lean on their wives. Its a film as well about the concept of patriotism, about the idea of service- which sometimes neccessitates great sacrafice. It is a great patriotic movie- its significant in my view that JFK was an important force in getting it made- he persuaded Arthur Krim (then President of United Artists) that the film should go out and contained no threat to the Presidency- for this is a film about Kennedyesque liberalism- America as a rational city on the hill. It is hard to remember now a time before the great conservative upswell of the sixties, seventies and eighties but this film comes from a moment where liberalism seemed triumphant- where reason seemed to have victored.

Its an important film- and remains an important film which embodies an outlook on the world. This is an enlightenment film- it is a film in praise of reason. Lastly it is significant that the key signal in the film comes from a pack of cards- the cards are random, but the signal is not- it is assigned by a man in Russia to be followed by a man in America and once understood, it enables one to perceive all the actions of the film to be logical and follow rationally. Language in the film means something, cards mean something, actions mean something- all that you need to do is read yourself and others accurately and the truth will be revealed. A truth that then allows you to take political actions- rhetoric and ambition cloud the issue, but reason is the key to unlock the universe.

Or at least that's how the world looked in 1962...

Pope's Solitude

ODE ON SOLITUDE.[56]


1 Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.

2 Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

3 Blest, who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day;

4 Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mix'd; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

5 Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

That Alexander Pope, who was one of the great publicists as poets go, wrote it makes the poem a deeply ironical performance. Pope lived the opposite kind of life- far from being normal he was deformed and a Catholic in a Protestant society, far from being eager to attain rural bliss, Pope lived as close to London as he could be legally permitted to, far from being content with oblivion, the poet endlessly endeavoured to put his name before the public- becoming one of the first poets who could afford to chop and change publishers. Pope did not live a life of rural simplicity- but was rather addicted to complication- to social nuance and to luxury: he is the appropriate beggining to a century which ended with Jane Austen. But whereas Austen can at times seem priggish, looking down through the eyes of Fanny Price on the immoral gaiety of Mary Crawford, Pope looks at society with a mocking glint in his eye, revelling in its absurdity.

So what are we to make of this poem? Firstly lets put something straight- this poem puts a very conventional viewpoint across brilliantly. Most eighteenth century wits would have agreed that the city was evil, the countryside good. The sentiments of Pope's poem sit at ease with the triumph of the pastoral in the previous century, and with the nature poets of the next. Idealising the independence of the rural life, he sits neatly with those republican theorists of his own time who saw true freedom as lying in independence. More so there is a strong Christian influence in the poem- what it describes is a demi Eden, Adam without Eve, growing alone and unconcerned by reputation and by bustle, just to fructify the earth and live in praise of God- live 'blest' by the ignorance that proceeds from solitude. This is a hero who can get everything from his land- his own flocks give him clothes, his trees give him shade. Luxury, the production of capitalism, is eshewed in conventional terms.

Did Pope actually believe this or is the poem ironic? I think it isn't ironic but actually reflects something that Pope himself actually believed in part- and this brings me on to something I think we can see established in the text of the poem. In a sense Pope was the kind of deeply sociable person who should have been most at odds with this Arcadian view- in the Rape of the Lock and in his masterpieces the Dunciad and the Essay on Criticism, he showed a true verve for critiquing others and living in society. But he is drawn back in this poem and others to the vision of the world as one of independence and the beauty of natural loneliness- his disposition draws him in one direction, the conventions of his time in another. Pope was obviously an exceedingly complicated man- and I think this poem reflects that- but if I might make a trite comment, I'd suggest that in this poem what we see is the way that convention can mould even the most resistant of us. Pope ended up praising a lifestyle he wouldn't be able to bear, simply because his age praised it in such reverent terms- whatever his rational mind said, Pope was attracted by the emotional pull of the ideal which is what this poem attests to. Its interesting in that sense because it demonstrates the way that people have a complex interrelationship with their own times- often feeling a yearning to conform even if conformity would strip them of what they were.

Even Pope afterall was willing to write against sophistication!

Caroline O'Day, The Gentlewoman from New York

Caroline O'Day was one of the pioneering women of the last century- who invaded former male preserves and had a large impact. She was the first Congresswoman elected from a large state- New York and had influential ties to the White House, particularly to Eleanor Roosevelt. Her career though is interesting not merely as an exempla but also as a clue to what early 20th Century America was like, how its history interacted with the social change that was sweeping the continent and was symbolised by the growing industrial, cultural and political might of the nascent super power. O'Day was in a sense an emblem of an era- her political career allows us to abstract some characteristics of American society and get closer to the social movements that convulsed her country in her times. Based on a recent article in the New York History Journal by Paul DeForest HIcks, I think we can assess O'Day's career.

First amongst those is the degree of social change. We often forget that a single lifespan could easily bridge the America of Lincoln, the civil war, and the America of Nixon, let alone that of Roosevelt. A single lifespan did bridge those Americas- John Nance Garner 'Cactus Jack' was born when Grant was President and died when Johnson was. O'Day again was affected hugely by her upbringing- born in Georgia in the aftermath of civil war she was affected by a pacifist upbringing, stimulated by parents who had seen the horrors of the civil war, and consequently she was one of the isolationist Democrats who opposed the Second World War. She was associated with other leading Democrat women in New York, including Eleanor Roosevelt, in constructing a charitable foundation to stimulate rural manufacturing of furniture. There is something Arcadian about her description of The Cottage,

When politics is through with us we are retiring to this charming retreat that is now rearing its stone walls against the cedars of a Dutchess County hillside.

Of course that was not the America she lived in. She married the heir of a Standard Oil fortune- Daniel O'Day. His father Daniel O'Day senior was unscrupulous, even by the standards of the robber-barons- but the son was more interested in politics than oil and was a leading supporter of woman's suffrage, a cause which his wife inherited.

That brings me on to the second idea that I think Caroline O'Day's life embodies. America by the time she died was a vast place, stretching from ocean to ocean and holding within it every kind of life. But it was also a place of intimacy. In part that was cultivated intimacy- O'Day as a young woman had exhibited art in Paris and sought to add European sophistication to New World naivete. In part though that intimacy was the reality of any political world- what we constantly see through O'Day's life is that neccessarily politics is the business of intimacy. O'Day was part of a partnership with her husband, both interested in woman's suffrage- according to the New York Times it was he who stimulated her interest in the subject. But he died in 1916 and from then on the central relationship politically of O'Day's life was with the Roosevelts. Eleanor and her were colleagues in the charitable foundation I quoted above, they were also close and Eleanor campaigned for her in New York when she was first elected in 1934. O'Day's personality was a winning one- she increased her plurality in every election, save that of 1940 when she was running despite a debilitating illness. She had an important leglislative record on labour and immigration during the 1930s, through her ability to charm and persuade. In the world of intimate politics, O'Day was a supreme politician.

She is not a famous figure, though she left her mark on America. But she was notable both for her own acheivements and for the way she exemplified some of the important trends and facts about America of her time. Hicks has done a good job in describing her career- and she does not deserve the obscurity that she has found.

In Bruges

In Bruges is a very very good film. It isn't hard to see that it is a very good effort- and numerous people have seen that but it is more difficult to describe why. Basically the story goes that two Irish hitmen have been sent to the Belgian city, Bruges, after a killing that they've performed for Harry, their London boss. Skulking in Bruges, they encounter a wide variety of characters- from sexy Belgian drug dealers, to midget American actors, fat American tourists, a gun salesman who likes talking about alchoves and practising his English and a set of Dutch prostitutes. Also Harry at one point reenters the story giving one of the assassins, Ken, a mission to perform. All of this takes place against the background of church towers, canal trips and art galleries- thinking about death and man's place in the world and copious ammounts of beer.

Putting that out there might make the film seem merely a surrealist piece of work, but it isn't. The reality is provided by the humour- its outrageous and outrageously funny. The younger assassin, Ray, spends most of his time taking the mickey out of people- turning to American tourists and telling them they won't make it round the bends in a spiral staircase because they are so fat, he is offensive, irritating and obnoxious but unbeleivably accurate and funny. There are some truly wonderful moments here where phrase and situation are linked- where say Ray captures something wonderfully and puts it in a line which presents the outrageous thought in all its originality and its accuracy. Take for example his comment on Bruges,

Look, Ken. I grew up in Dublin, and I love Dublin. If I had grown up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn't, so it doesn't.

Could you encapsulate that attitude any better than with that line of dialogue- just think of it, the economy of the way that the words present the sentiment. It is not a nice sentiment- but as language it is almost perfect and perfect lines slip out of the mouths of all of the characters here. This is a movie about words- I listened to an interview with Colin Farrell who is one of the movie's stars and said that he didn't ever feel like changing a line of the film because it was so perfect and I think he was right. To add to it, Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, the main leads, give fantastic performances as do a range of actors, from Ralph Fiennes to Clemence Poesy, in supporting roles.

The film sits obviously in several traditions. Fiennes's character owes a lot to Michael Caine in Get Carter. Indeed the whole persona of the gangster in the film owes a lot to Caine and earlier gangster characters. These men operate violently but seem to disregard the violence that they commit in favour of adherance to a code of honour, of morality. At one point Ken turns to Harry and tells him to do what he likes to him, he (Ken) has done his job and no ammount of torture or violence could make his choice different. In that sense noone is tortured in this film- people are maimed, killed and beaten up but torture is absent. That kind of violence has no meaning. Moral choice is independent of and over and above violence- it stands in another category. I lied slightly, the only torture in this film is the torture of guilt and in a way violence represents an escape for the characters from that torture.

The obvious tradition that this film sits with is the films of Quentin Tarrantino- but In Bruges demonstrates how poor Tarrantino's films actually are. I've expounded before on how much I dislike the philosophical outlook of Reservoir Dogs- and I have similar views about Pulp Fiction and his other movies. But I think this is what Tarrantino's fans often claims he does- this combines the gangster severity of Scorsese and a whole line of films going back to Jimmy Cagney along with the theatrical imagination of wit of a Beckett. This film obviously owes something to Waiting for Godot. But its violence is much more serious and it has a wider purpose than just making a reference- violence in this film is very serious, it ends lives and goes through lives. Humour here is not adolescent but is bitter- based on the deep sorrows. Ray almost seems to be psychologically falling apart as the film goes on- his life is slowly eroded by an act of violence, accidental violence perpetrated before the start of the movie.

Away from such paltry traditions leading onwards from Tarrantino: the film's consideration of violence is deeply embedded in Christianity. The graphic fantasy of what violence might look like- what torture is- is abandoned. What we have here is the development of two ethoses- a pagan ethos- noble warriors whose roots lie in an honour cult which comes up against the idea of forgiveness, the idea of a second chance. On the one side, we have a symbolic act of suicide- once you have failed for whatever reason you take the hemlock- as Thrasea did under Nero- and in suicide become a hero, on the other side, there is the Christian view of suicide: that there is no sin that kills you, that suicide is an abandonment of life and the opportunity of doing something to repair your sin, that redemption is possible and proceeds through forgiveness. In that sense- with those two oppositions, the film seeks to understand some of the fundamental conflicts within western civilisation (conflicts that interestingly for instance often demonstrate how little Christianity works as a label): at the end of the film some of the characters conform to their pagan stereotypes and that is where the last and perhaps most theological vista is opened up.

In the midst of the film, the two main characters go to an art gallery and look at some of those wonderful portraits of hell done by medieval artists- it strikes me that this is the twentieth century equivalent of a 14th Century depiction of the day of judgement. Two of Ray's comments expose this, working around historical Bruges is an analogy for him for dwelling in his own hellish past, towards the end of the movie he realises that Bruges itself is hell- this film is the navigation, the description of that hell- and its vital to understand how the pagan ethic of the protagonists, shorn of forgiveness, leaves them all stuck in Bruges for all eternity!

Phoning through the past

This video is incredible- because it illustrates how quickly the world has changed in the 20th Century. Dial tone phones are of course now a thing of the past. In the 1930s when this video was made, in the UK there were still single numbers- London 1 etc- telephones had just exploded to becoming a consumer product, like the internet of today. Phones have of course become a standard consumer product- about possibly to be replaced by Skype and other things like it.

But they have done so incredibly quickly- the pace of technological development means that the lives that we live today in so many aspects- including the one I'm typing on to you now and the fact you are reading this online- would have been unrecognisable to our parents, let alone our grandparents when they were growing up. Someone who was born in 1920 will have lived through the rise of the car, the rise of the washing machine, the rise of the computer and the rise of the internet. Just think about that for a moment- and one of the central differences between our century and the past becomes clear. A medieval peasant could say between 1200 and 1400 be pretty confident that though there were changes in the way he farmed, his grandparents would understand them. For us though, how would you explain to your great grandparents (who as mine did died at some point before the second world war) how the internet works. Just imagine for a second how much change, if the girl in the video is still alive (and probably in her late seventies, early eighties now) she has seen.

Its an interesting thing to think about: because coping with technological change has suddenly become so much more important. Kids do because they are born to an era with the current systems: but for the rest of us, the fact that we learn so much when we are children is no longer adequate. We have to keep learning as adults just in order to keep up with the ways that communication and life are changing- that produces the stress of adults who have to learn how to program Sky Plus (Tivo for Americans) and work out HTML.

The world is changing and that means that we have to change the way that we learn- its no longer ok just to learn as a kid, welcome to the world which changes so fast that even adults are ignorant.

Page 123

Paulie has just tagged me with this meme, the rules are

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Ok the nearest book I picked up was Sarah Barber's Regicide and Republicanism (its about the English Republicans in the seventeenth century who campaigned for the King's death). On page 123

A formal charge was issued on 20 January 1649 and sentence passed a week later.

Charles was found guilty of High Treason and executed outside the banquetting hall in Whitehall on 30 January 1649.

Kingship and the Lords were abolished on 17 and 19 March, and England was finally declared a Republic a month later.

They are pretty cool sentences, but then you find them in books about the English Civil War. I challenge Matt Sinclair, Vino Sangripillai, James Hamilton, James Higham and Welshcakes Limoncello to find some better ones.

Humphrey Lyttleton

Humphrey Lyttleton died today. For those who don't know, Lyttleton was a number of things- he was a superb comic with wonderful bumbling timing, he was a wit with an extensive repertoire of conversational gambits, he was a trumpetter who brought jazz to BBC radio and ultimately was responsible for much of the fame of the genre of music in the UK. He didn't take himself seriously but came across as a phenomenally intelligent and talented man- the 'elder statesman of British jazz', he was a cartoonist as well with a superb talent not to mention a radio presenter. The thing I always liked about him was that though his jokes belonged in some cases to an earlier era- full of double entendres, it was a gentle comedy, an absurdist comedy but one confident enough of its own intelligence not to need to flaunt it. He had many of the virtues that I described here, and in a sense his comedy lived in the spirit of Wallace and Gromit- in a thread that spreads back to classics like Dad's Army. The comedies are very different- but the one thing that they have in common are that they are gentle, they don't mock people to upset, they mock affectionately- the laughter is a tone of a shared love. Lyttleton I always thought got that- his tone was warm, he was always chortling and his trumpetting was divine. You could tell he did what he did because he loved it- not merely because he continued working till he died at the age of 86- but because his comedy for instance wasn't selfish but was merry. If there are higher ambitions, I don't know what they are.

What is a Public Intellectual?

Polls of the most important public intellectual come out all the time at the moment- the American journal Foreign Policy is doing one at the moment (no prizes for guessing the main subject of that journal) and has a list out of which you can vote the top twenty. Fair enough you might say- accept really what they seem to be talking about here is political polemecists, not intellectuals and that the idea that a vote reflects any kind of intellectual merit is a bit like the idea that a vote could determine the best scientific or mathematical theory, its stupidity is only matched by its inanity.

What do I mean by the first thing I said? Well take a look at the list. At first sight you might see names like Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, Richard Dawkins, the British Biologist and so on and think aha- this is about a spread of thinkers over a wide area. You would be wrong though. Take Chomsky, I doubt he is there for his linguistic work which has been dominant in that field- I'd suggest his presence there is actually because of his jeremaids against American power. Likewise I'm not sure Dawkins makes the list for his biology, rather than his ability to upset religious people. At least the three I quote above and others like Benedict XVI are distinguished intellectuals (whatever you think of their political thinking- and in some cases (Chomsky comes to mind) their policy ideas are inferior to their other work). But Christopher Hitchens, great polemecist and writer he may be, has contributed very little of intellectual value to the world. His recent biography of Tom Paine is an absolute joke, which would be hilarious if it weren't meant seriously. Likewise Al Gore, good politician no doubt, but I doubt he had anything to do with the intellectual foundations of political theory.

Yes there are some names on the list that I had not come across- Hu Shuli for example the Chinese journalist. But equally there are names which astonished me- as a historian I can name many more intellectually exciting people than Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson (off the top of my head, Quentin Skinner, Sir Keith Thomas and Ira Katznelson all make me think far more than Ferguson with his Telegraph pieties has ever done.) All lists will have names that you don't see- but the difference between the two sets of people is that Ferguson say is a great self-publicist (the man has an ego the size of Olympus to go by his TV appearances and lectures- only exceeded by David Starkey) whereas Skinner, Thomas and Katznelson have made some very original contributions to their periods and to their studies. In a sense this isn't so much a set of interesting people who can provoke and make you think, as a collection of great self-publicists- the list produced by Foreign Policy is about marketting not mastering a leading subject.

The same thing goes for their method of choosing the top twenty- again what does the fact that x wins a vote tell you about the ideas that the winner has expressed? It tells you nothing! To take an example, I am not qualified to tell you how good a physicist Richard Feynman was and how he compared to Enrico Fermi- I have no idea because I don't know about higher physics. I do have an idea about historians but that's because I have a PhD in the subject- and even then with history outside my own specialism, I don't know who has the best knowledge of the sources. To say that I can judge the most original and thoughtful intellectual on all these subjects is crap! And it reinforces something that I think we should be very careful about- to understand the best idea as the most popular idea is not a sensible thing. Subjects are complicated and they require a lot of patience and learning- becoming an intellectual is not writing a blog, its not writing for a newspaper, its learning facts, understanding arguments and thinking deeply. The list from Foreign Affairs includes trivial people and is based on trivial grounds- that is a pity- I want to know who are the most interesting people in other subjects because then I can go and read them- a list that contains Christopher Hitchens is unlikely to give me that.

All the way without Jose?

Chelsea this season stand on the brink of winning maybe one and possibly even two trophies- they sit in the semi finals of the Champions League and are second in the Premiership behind Manchester United. Other clubs will have something to say about that: obviously Manchester United are favourites to win the Premiership and in the Champion's League, the men from London will have to beat Liverpool over two legs (something they haven't managed so far in that competition) and then confront one of United or Barcelona in the final. But for the moment, Chelsea's season is ending well and given a disastrous start, its possible to even argue that Chelsea haven't done that badly this season at all. So what, you might be tempted to say- well the key thing about that fact is that whilst it has happened Chelsea have lost a manager, Jose Mourinho who almost everyone in football reckons is one of the great coaches of his generation and have brought in a nonentity Avram Grant. What does their continual success say about media perception of managers? What does it say about the cult of the manager?

Lets start with the first question. Its pretty obvious that Mourinho is a very good manager- he won the Champion's League with Porto, has two English Premierships and a couple of the more minor cups in the UK to his name. There is no doubt that he comes across as a very bright guy as well, swatting away the sports reporters of the BBC and Sky with the contempt that they deserve. The real point though is that the press have never taken Grant seriously- he hasn't managed in England or one of the big leagues- but he has got experience in Israel and has won championships with Israeli clubs. He might not come across as impressively as the Portugeese and scowls, but he is someone who has real acheivements and spent quite a considerable time in England as director of football in both Portsmouth and Chelsea. Not merely Roman Abramovich, who didn't get his money by being thick, nor Harry Rednapp, who hasn't got a long success in football management by tolerating fools, are idiots: and someone who both of them like has got to have a presumption of being at least competent.

But even so, Mourinho and Grant are still far apart. Journalists close to the Chelsea camp suggest that Grant hasn't had much of an effect on Chelsea players- some speculate that the backroom staff are having more of an effect. I disagree. And I wonder whether privately many chairmen would disagree- their bank balances would argue that. Cristiano Ronaldo takes home the astonishing 120,000 pounds a week from the Glazers, Alex Ferguson takes home a fraction of that. That suggests that players have more of an effect than managers on results- I wonder whether the Chelsea situation makes that point as well. Chelsea are still playing in exactly the same way as they were under Mourinho- its the same squad too with the addition of Nicolas Anelka- and largely we are seeing the same type of results, grimly grafted out by athletic players. Chelsea's totems are their central midfielders, industrious souls like Michael Essien, Frank Lampard, Obi John Mikel and others sitting in front of a terrifying back four, sternly safeguarded by John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho. The manager Mourinho had to bring them together and see how they would fit, he had to design the training routines that would make them tick- but seemingly since then they have been on automatic pilot. With a good plan they have just got on with it.

Of course that is a mischeivous point of view- but its worth thinking about. Afterall in the Victorian era, players did choose the team and make the decisions- there were reasons why that changed but it also reflected something true about any team game. I wonder whether the situation at Chelsea is more Victorian or Edwardian than we think it is, with figures like Terry and Lampard having more of an influence than their nominal superior. Without being inside the dressing room, we can't know. I wonder also about the margins that managers give teams- would Manchester United be worse off without Ferguson or Ronaldo- the directors pay the two as if that question is resolved in Ronaldo's favour but does that indicate anything real?

The Science of Paracelsus

Paracelsus was an early modern medical chemist- his writings were incredibly influential in the early history of science, in the study of the occult, in the histories of medicine and of chemistry. He wandered through central Europe- Germany and Switzerland mainly though he also went to Scandinavia, Hungary, Russia, France and Asian Turkey. Paracelsus was responsible for the fact that we call zinc, zinc. He was a wandering quack, often despised by contemporary physicians but often also in advance of many of their theories- he beleived in equal proportions things that we would now consider madness and some things which anticipate some of the discoveries of modern medicine. His medicine was not a proper science, as we would see it, based upon evidence and subject to hypothesis- rather as I hope will become clear in this article Paracelsus believed that medicine might be derived from metaphysical and theological views, in much the same way as many ancient philosophers sought to harmonise science and philosophy, testing each by their coherence with each other, rather than their correspondence with what we all see in the world.

I mention Paracelsus, largely because of Cedric Beidatsch's interesting article in Eras, an Australian history journal. Beidatsch is interested in Paracelsus's views on love- and though I don't know much about Paracelsus and therefore cannot vouch for Beidatsch's work, what he has uncovered is, if true, very interesting. He argues that basically Paracelsus's medicine and theology rests upon a pretty unique view of the way that love works. For a moment its worth going back to Plato. In the Symposium, a dialogue about love, one of the speakers argues that originally every human being was a hermaphrodite, and that they were split up by a vengeful God, and that ever since we have been striving to find our other halfs- hence the strength of the emotion of love and its fixation on one object is the fixation of a disunited human upon its other part. Its worth thinking about that, partly because I am sure Paracelsus would have been aware of the doctrine, but also because the idea provides a useful entree to Paracelsus's thought when he like Plato approached the problem of love. You see ultimately we ought to be more promiscuous than we are: this emotion of love which comes across us for one or a couple of objects out of several thousands is something that needs to be explained. Plato, at one point, explained it by reference to this idea of a split human being: Paracelsus argued that we were not split but we were created so as to have a perfect partner. He argued that God had created us and predestined us for one particular partner.

Some interesting implications flowed from this view. Paracelsus believed that we would always meet this partner eventually: providence would direct that we did, unless sin turned that providence aside. He argued that amongst such sins, we should reckon the marriage contract. The marriage contract was an attempt to bind us where no bounds were neccessary: ultimately only a sinner would break from their lover. It was also an attempt to fix us within the bounds of an artificial matrimony- marriage and inheritance could in his view distort our actual mission which was to find the love that God intended for us, in favour of finding property or power or family pride. Paracelsus believed that such love was embedded in our very natures- our chemistry was orientated to this kind of love. He found that his alchemical investigations, not to mention his theological speculations about the nature of God cemented this perspective. The construction of the human body reflected the importance of love to our health. God himself, Paracelsus held, was the product of these forces- and within the depths of the divine nature was concealed a love between God and Mary which had produced the Holy Spirit and the Son, the second and third persons of the Trinity. This structure radiating downwards provided him with some of the theses that he wanted to cure people with, but also with the ways that he understood God and the nature of our obligations to each other.

Obviously most of this is completely mad. But what is interesting about it is what it says about the way that Paracelsus and many of those who followed him, most of which probably did not understand the full ramifications of his doctrine worked. Our science and our metaphysics are actually not often related- we tend to make science empirical and metaphysics philosophical. For Paracelsus consistency between the two was much more important than it is to us- metaphysical conclusions determined things about how one would seek to cure phsyical problems. Furthermore for Paracelsus the explanation had to be complete- he sought completeness and consequently sought consistency all the way up and down the spectrum of knowledge. Every area represented an analogy of every other area- the world worked by consistent rules. Much of modern science rests on the idea that we are actually ignorant and that we have to be sceptical about what we can know. Paracelsus differed from a modern scientist because the basis of his science was not the derivation of theory from empirical matter, or from mathematics (then to be validated by empirical data) but he derived his ideas from the logical extension of metaphysical and ethical principles. He expected nature to conform to the moral world and vice versa and he expected to see a complete system.

In that sense he represents a man very much of his times and from that perspective the way his attitudes work, especially if they are as bizarre as Beidatsch suggests, reflects the different nature of science as he understood it from the way that we understand the same process.

Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)

Two films were made of Ben Hur: this evening I went to see the earlier 1925 version, a silent film accompanied by the London Philarmonic orchestra. There is something amazingly powerful about the musical accompaniment, especially when played by an expert and profficient orchestra live- if you have the chance to see them play this, then go and see it. But turning to the film itself- made in 1925 it relies upon all the conventions of silent cinema. The style of acting is different- with more importance being placed on large gestures. You can see in some of the makeup the influence of theatre- with too much makeup being applied to an actor's face- something you would do in a theatre in order to make the actor's features visible to those sitting at the back of the theatre, but something that with close ups and all the rest is hardly needed in the cinema. These features of the film mark it out as a product of the 1920s and the silent era, in addition to the fact that there is no noise. There are moments of colour in the film- but it looks experimental- its fascinating to see the first contrast in colour in cinema that wasn't black and white, reds and blues in a black and white background.

There is more than historical curiosity though to this film. One of the most interesting features is the display of Rome as a power: Rome today is often seen as a positive thing- see for example the repeated calls from some for America to become a new Roman empire. This film demonstrates another view- whose antecedents spread back to the early Christian sources (the number of the beast in Revelation adds up to the Jewish numerical code for Nero for example) and some Roman sources (see Calgacus's speech in Tacitus, which as Mary Beard rightly points out is a critique from within the Roman system). Ben Hur embodies these critiques of Roman power- the Roman soldiers are all brutal and strong. They exploit their power over the subject Jewish population with scarcely concealed racial superiority- they are the image of imperial arrogance- and the central Roman character, Marcellus, is their archetype. Arrogant, brutish and powerful, he enjoys the rewards of imperial arrogance- sexual access, bullying condescension and an absolutely secure arrogance. All of these things ultimately doom him to destruction, as they doom in the vision of the film, the wider empire of Rome. We are left in no doubt that Rome's imperium is brutal and violent- the scenes of casual violence from the soldiers to Jews and to galley slaves make it clear, the battle with the pirates is about as violent as you could imagine with humans being spitted on pikes again the impact is profound and makes the point about Roman imperium and piratical brutality.

The other strain of the film concerns Christianity. Ben Hur is a Jewish prince whose life is destroyed by the Marcellus- and the rest of the film concerns his search for revenge against the Roman soldier (who was once his friend). That search dominates his life- but it also is not enough. For Hur hungers after the restitution of justice- in a sense his sense of justice is a mirror image of the Roman sense of entitlement- both base their senses of self on vigour and power. Both are imperial ideologies which claim an ideal of Kingship to be above anything else. But throughout the film, we get hints, sidelights of another story- like a theme of music which slowly matures from a single note to a chorus, of another approach to subjugation and loss- an approach which is deliberately counter to Hur's hunger for vindication from injustice, to Rome's claims of imperial suzereignity and that is the story of Christ. The events of Hur's life take place with the story of Christ- they only meet tangentially- but for Hur Christ is the messiah, the messiah who will restore a real Jerusalem. Throughout the film though, we are shown and eventually Hur is shown that Christ will do no such thing- that military domination, revenge and all the rest is not the mission of a true Christian, instead forbearance and a confidence in eternal justice, not to mention meekness, kindness, forgiveness no matter the slight and turning the other cheek and the emblems of Christianity. My comrades watching the film thought that was overblown- I thought the film made its point rather well- ultimately the ethic of Christianity is very different both to that of Rome but also to that of Hur, the film keeps us identifying with the Christian approach and hence we see Hur's search for revenge as justified within its own terms, but obsolete given the ethical revolution of the Nazarene.

What is interesting though is that the film shies away from making that contrast totally explicit- at the end of the film Ben Hur does indeed become a Christian, as do his family, and they embrace this new ethic. But his quest for revenge has been fulfilled- Marcellus is dead. Furthermore his family are rescued from prison and cured by Christ of their leprosy- again note that they have restitution. One of the things which is interesting here is that the director isn't able to go the whole way- isn't able to have the film finish with Marcellus alive, with Hur's family still ill and yet all having confidence in the Christian message. In a sense therefore the ending of the film surrenders its point. In part though that is too harsh- for a film's viewers the conventions of cinema require that we receive some satisfaction, the challenge of giving us satisfaction without rewarding the pagan virtues of revenge and anger is something that the story fails to acheive. In that sense, cinema would have to wait for Robert Bresson for someone who could acheive the true expression of Christ's actual message.

Overall this film though is excellent- its sequences are amazing. There was said to be a cast of 125,000 people in the film and in some sequences- the chariot race and battles at sea you can well believe it. Actors like Marion Davies and Douglas Fairbanks have uncredited roles in the crowd scenes. The acting is very good- though of its time- there is an interesting message and the music and the film chime wonderfully together. Simply put if this is on again anywhere near you, go and see it- this is one of the jewels of silent cinema and it has to be seen.

The Orphanage

The Orphanage is not an easy film to review- it depends to a large degree on elements of surprise so I'm going to strive not to give away anything in this review which will make it less satisfying. The Orphanage is really really good- its scary and plays with your mind in an interesting way, you never quite know where the story is going- there was one moment in the cinema I was in, where several voices, male and female, shouted out in amazement, surprise and horror. I can't tell you when that was but there are a couple of moments, where everyone I was with screamed or ground their fists. It is really interesting as a film as well- exploring all kinds of things, notions of family life, of the way that kids and parents interract and men and women get along or don't. Essays will be written about what the film means- who knows I might write one myself, but they might give away the ending and I don't want to do that here.

What's the story anyway? Basically our heroine, Laura, pictured above, turns up at an old house with her husband Carlos and her son Simon. Carlos and Laura want to convert the house into a refuge for kids with special needs- seems like down syndrome and the like. The house previously was an orphanage where Laura stayed as a kid before she was taken away and she recalls being very happy there, playing games with the five or six other children she was with at the time (they seem to have been the only occupants) and enjoying life. As you'll expect there is more to this orphanage than that, and more secrets to its past that Laura has repressed and that others are concealing: it all comes back ultimately to questions about disability in this case and how society deals with it- but again I run before my horse to market.

The performances are very good- Belen Rueda as Laura does brilliantly- she conveys excellently the way that a woman can lose control but also her determination in pursuit of her son's good. Fernando Cayo has a thankless task playing the husband but acquits himself very well- he is both reasonable and sensible and irritating. Roger Princep playing Simon, the son, is really cute and he fits into the template of the movie- he isn't required to do anything particularly complicated but he manages to be childlike, cute and angry at the right times. The rest of the cast also does well- there are some wonderfully haunting moments and some terrifying moments which the actors concerned portray well. The centre of the film though is Belen Rueda's performance, without it the film wouldn't work- but she does brilliantly and the film does indeed work.

I have tried not to tell you anything about this movie- beyond the details you'd know from the credits. But it is definitely worth seeing and that's why I have done what I have done. Its a fantastic film, interesting on so many different levels and one that you'll be terrified by at the time but think about for days afterwards. Go out and see the film...

Hobbes's education

Reading Quentin Skinner's Ford lectures, as I am at the moment, its interesting to reflect on the education of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was one of the great philosophers of his or any other age- he was an innovative thinker, reviled in his own time but incredibly influential on a whole range of philosophers, both contemporaries like Spinoza and later individuals like Vico and Rousseau. Hobbes's education was typical of his era and his time- as a predigiously intelligent individual he went through a traditional education, through Oxford University and became eventually secretary to the Duke of Devonshire: as secretary to the Duke, Hobbes was able to take advantage of the library at Chatsworth and furthermore to exploit the contacts that Devonshire could give him, with intellectuals working for other English noblemen (though Skinner does not mention it, other noblemen had intellectuals working for them in similar capacities: Henry Parker for example worked for Lord Saye and Sele, Henry Ireton (a future commander in the New Model Army) worked in some capacity for Lord Wharton). Others had similar commitments- John Rushworth worked for the Fairfaxes for example and continued working for them through the civil war.

That environment brought a young intellectual like Hobbes right into the centre intellectually of the seventeenth century. Through accompanying the Duke's son through Europe, he met Mersenne, Descartes and others. Hobbes's background was incredibly conventional and strains of it were retained when he came to look at his future work: the style of his work was humanist even though its content was not. The style of his work was influenced by the fact that he Hobbes was a Latinist, who had consumed vast ammounts of classical literature. Despite saying that his time in Oxford was wasted (something he shares with that other great English intellect of the early modern period, Edward Gibbon), he learnt a great deal there- gaining a background both in classical history and in classical philosophy. He probably wasn't involved in texts which were definitely produced at Chatsworth, including a translation of Tacitus in the mid-1620s, but it was translation that took his fancy early on. We have his magisterial translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponesian Wars: Thucydides had in analysing the break up of the democracy in Athens and the society of Corcyra (modern Corfu) provided the great classical accounts of social instability- which were to influence Hobbes's later famous account.

But even more than that, such studies influenced what Hobbes's works looked like. The Humanist scholars of the17th Century loved to illustrate their work with pictures which denoted their ideas. Hobbes translated humanist texts from 1627 onwards and despite disagreeing with them, he adopted the conventions of humanist presentation in this form at least. Take a look at the frontispeice of Leviathan (1651) shown above- it represents the central idea- that the state is a corporate personality made up of many men in a simple illustrative version. Hobbes in that sense was as in many others typical of his times, his atypicality was a production, a swerve out of what most people were doing but he used the ladder of a humanistic education, in order to demolish humanism as an idea later in life. I'll pass to his ideas and Skinner's lectures on them soon- but I think it is interesting that the relationship between this incredibly influential individual and his times was not that he sprung original from the womb, but that he was a typical educated man of the 17th Century, who had some new and revolutionary ideas.

They drive by night (1940)

They drive by night was made in 1940. It wasn't one of the greatest films ever- but it is a very interesting document of American history or rather of the American depression. Rather than understanding the story, lets understand the situation. George Raft and Humphrey Bogart play the Fabrini brothers- self employed truckers who mainly take fruit up and down the highways of the United States. A film about truckers is a film about those on the borders of society- this isn't about the New Dealbut its interesting in exposing some of the attitudes of 1930s America. The life of the open road is viewed with a kind of nostalgia and also a desire which is fascinating. Raft and Bogart play two brothers but in reality one is a young man, an overgrown adolescent, whereas the other is beggining on family life and the responsibilities that that entails. One is a boy who tempts older women, the other is a husband whose wife desires kids. Of course they are sometimes opposed in those interests: but its also worth remembering that they have an identity too- they are both truckers.

One of the interesting things about them being truckers is that this film in a sense begins an American genre or continues it. The genre is that of the adolescent road movie: more realistic than its modern inheritors, the film still has an aspect of adolescence, it is about the development of two characters through journey. But its about more than that, these two believe in journeying as a hopeful activity, they need no qualities, education or creased trousers- all they need is hope and a truck to take them to their dreams. Of course that's not quite it and constantly both of them are brought up against the limits of their dreams. Destruction and near death dog the drivers at their heels- one of them loses his arm and they both witness the death of one of their friends plunging in his sleep over the curb as he chases yet another load. Hope though provides the fuel with which one of the twins, the adolescent, played by Raft, Joe acquires a business empire which his brother later joins. However again you have the contrast between the younger man who acheives something and the 'elder' brother who retreats to the home and the solidity of family relationships. The dangers to Joe are represented by the presence of a femme fatale who attempts to distract him from the woman he should be marrying and by her wiles to take revenge when he slights her. Joe sits in a more exposed position, but can succeed more because of his innate hopeful stupidity whereas Paul is more realistic and consequently less likely to taste both triumph and disaster.

Women come into this therefore in an interesting way- and in a sense represent the classic masculine tropes. You have the woman as inspiration- driving her man to success. You have the woman as incubus, trying to destroy the man she loves. And lastly of course you have the wife who keeps her husband down through children and the patterns of homely life. All these stereotypes are present in the film- and they are all twisted through the prism of the film to become signifiers of the stages of life of a man- from adolescence to comfortable and boring middle age. Its a film whose female characters are strong but definitely off centre- something I find objectionable is that women here are objects- parts of a thesis that is only about men and only important as they contribute to male lives. Adolescence marks out Joe to be battled over by sweetheart and femme fatale stereotypes and adulthood sees Paul moored to his wife.

That main theme runs like a chord through the entire piece and in that sense it maps out the American life- in the thirties and of course in the military forties. What is interesting though here is that unlike in a film from the fifties the married middle aged man, the bureaucrat, is not held in the same universal respect. You could argue that Joe is a more successful character: you could argue he is the centre of the film. And in that sense the switch between the forties and fifties was a switch in sympathy. The film noir of the forties was a much more critical creature- it sought to expose those who aspired. Even this film, such an establishment effort in terms of its attitudes to women, argues in effect that virtu matters more than perspiration in the creation of a business. In that sense it remains a fascinating document of its time- for it argues both that success is in some sense the result of real merit but that merit is not the same as bourgeois virtue. It is a bridge between a film like the Sweet Smell of Success, where all is corrupt, and the world of the Waltons and as such exposes a lot about attitudes to marriage, employment and the world in the America of the early 1940s.

Away from her

Films about the process of aging, about death itself touch us all very closely. Away from her is a film about the most terrifying proces of them all- the slow loss of the mind that accompanies Alzheimers and the slow loss of relationships. The thing about us all is that we have to as one character says you just have to be happy, to accept what comes your way, because life is uncontrollable- and nothing is stable, nothing lasts forever and nothing endures. We live a life which is unstable and forever changing, forever evolving. Our passions, our loves and hates are all mutable and change slowly with time, they alter and they cannot be forced into a single prism, they cannot be stablised. Learning to live is learning to cope with change- change that can be dramatic and terrible but still needs to be survived- still needs to be enjoyed- to use that great theatre phrase the show must go on.

Away from her is a film that really symbolises that process. For forty four years Fiona and Grant have been married- she is now sixty two and begins to feel the affects of alzheimers disease, her brain is breaking down. Over the course of this slow film, exactly what you know will happen happens. Slowly she loses connection with the outside world, she puts the frying pan in the fridge, she forgets where she lives, she forgets who her husband is, she falls in love with a fellow patient, she slowly loses her sense of reality. A fog descends upon her mind. A blankness replaces the ever present life that once was there, curiosity becomes a conviction that the world outside the four walls of the home doesn't matter. For her husband that process is unbelievably painful: she even forgets that he brought the gifts, he brought for her, she thinks they were left around in the home. She even forgets the man who she was in love with in the home. In a symbolic moment, a girl who used to communicate with her family through her mother, the only person who could understand sign language, is forgotten by her mother- her mother is angry at the interference from this stranger signalling to her in her life, her daughter is distraught.

But he lives with the knowledge that everything has died, and he has to live with that knowledge and care for his wife at the same time. Caring for her, going in every day to the home, he doesn't drive away, he stays, he stays and watches and waits for any sign that she might recover. He waits and is dependable when all else seems lost. But he too evolves. You cannot live as a perpetual nurse, he has to learn how to cope, he has to learn how to enjoy life. He has to go to a dance for example with the wife of the man who his wife is in love with. He has to decide to be happy. He has to wake his soul- to learn how to enjoy the precious moments that are left- to enjoy the few moments of lucidity that his wife has. Its a terrifying glimpse into what the human soul has to do: we all face in a way the same dilemma, life is not so much about avoiding tragedy, its about living with tragedy and living with hope. When Pandora's box opened, that was the Gods' last gift to human kind and as Away from her demonstrates even when the person you most love is going mad, that hope can still be a precious commodity. Hope and endurance.

Carrying off a film like this is hard. It softens some of the worst aspects of Alzheimers- many sufferers berate those who come to see them. The worst thing is to see someone who knows that they are losing their mind, losing it and knowing that that is happening. Knowing that they will wake up tommorrow and cease to be Fred, Stan or Dorothy. Imagine if you can't remember the word for chair, that's not a nice feeling. It does illustrate however the way that homes for the old and sick are often surreal worlds: looking at the dining hall in this film brought back memories for me of seeing my grandmother inside such a place. That same slightly stuffy atmosphere with eighty year olds watching TV and not really understanding it. The performances here are all very good- the two leads, Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent do fantastically well at conveying the process that they are involved with. Also worthy of comment is Kristen Thomas who plays the main nurse in the film, she portrays the mixture of sensitivity and toughness that I came across whenever I met the nurses in the homes. Very kind, very sensible and yet also very strong people who are amazingly gentle to their patients and yet strong enough to bear with the quite incredible strain of looking after people who are so ill.

This is a very good film and very much worth watching, it is very sad of course, and it neglects some of the nastier aspects of the condition but it still captures the essential sadness of it. That slipping out of your mind is a tragedy for you, and also for those left behind. They see every day a body out of which the person that they knew is going, the body is still alive, it moves, speaks, but a different personality inhabits it- a personality which lacks the memories, reference points and often emotions that it had before. Those left behind have to cope with that, those going through it have to cope with the slow death of their own personality and its replacement by something else. What could be worse afterall than knowing that you are losing your mind?