It's a Don's Life (18 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
Let’s Get Rid of the Fascist Olympic Torch
26 March 2008
I don’t quite understand how we have forgotten that the ‘Olympic Torch’ ceremony was invented by Hitler and his chums.
If ever there was an ‘invented tradition’ well worth stamping out, it is this ridiculous, fascist-inspired waste of money
– which sends a Bunsen burner around the world at tremendous cost for several months before the Games, manned (and womanned)
by people dressed up in pseudoancient Greek costume, no doubt feeling very silly.
In London, we are now told, it will soon be doing a mini tour, carried by a London bus, Docklands Light Railway and Dame Kelly
Holmes (
inter alios
).
I can’t quite work out whether most of the press reports are pleased at the pro-Tibetan protests which dented the hi-tech-assisted,
sunbeam lighting ceremonial (plucky little Tibet poking the Chinese dragon where it, for once, might hurt); or whether they
are a touch censorious at this upsetting of the peaceful, non-political programme of the Olympic Games that we have inherited
from the ancient Greeks; or whether they are wondering what might happen to the UK in the ceremonies to come in 2012 (don’t
forget Iraq, Mr Blair/Brown ...)
Hardly any commentator stops to mention that this silly torch ceremony has nothing to do with the ancient Greeks, and was
really invented to be a magnificent shot in Leni Riefenstahl’s movie
Olympia
(choreographed by Carl Diem). This is one of Hitler’s most pervasive legacies.
They also don’t stop to mention that the ancient Olympics – far from being that sweet haven of peace – were pretty political
anyway. Even in their heyday, they were often interrupted by the rough hand of Politics.
The classic case is the eligibility of Alexander the Great’s ancestor, Alexander I of Macedon. When he turned up to compete
in the early fifth century BC, the other Greeks said that he was a foreigner and so wasn’t eligible. Eventually the gatekeepers
allowed him to take part, but – although he finished first (equal) – he didn’t get his name written into the official list
of winners. (Hence, he is an awkward example on both sides for the modern argument about whether ‘Macedonia’ is ‘Greek’. Does
Alexander I prove the Greekness of the Macedonians, or
vice versa
?)
But there were plenty more political controversies. The worst was in 364 BC when the Games happened while Olympia was under
enemy occupation, or more accurately in the middle of a war zone. In fact, the Arcadians (Olympia’s neighbours in the Peloponnese)
invaded during the pentathlon event and some of their soldiers looted the sacred treasures. So much for the ‘Sacred Truce’.
That was only the tip of the iceberg. In the 380s Lysias, the Athenian orator and democratic hero, harangued his fellow countrymen,
urging them more or less to wreck the Olympic village. Four and a half centuries later, the Olympic officials appear to have
turned a blind eye and let the emperor Nero win whatever competition he wanted – in return for some rather generous investment
at the Olympic site.
We may not like the politicisation of the Olympic Games, but let’s not pretend that this is a modern invention.
Comments
Can’t we just get rid of the modern Olympics altogether, and replace them with the Nemean Games?
DOROTHY KING
Feminism now: should boys play harps?
17 April 2008
Last week the main BBC news (plus the
Today
programme) was full of a piece of research which demonstrated a gender bias in choice of musical instruments. Whereas 90%
of young harpists are (apparently) female, almost 80% of young tuba players are (apparently) male – and even more electric
guitarists. Indeed, kids are encouraged in those choices by friends, teachers, society ... you name it.
While parts of the planet were in meltdown, while Zimbabwe tottered, Kenya simmered and too few people were killed in Iraq
to be newsworthy ...THIS was transmitted as a piece of gender discrimination akin to the revelation (the sort of news we faced
when I was a kid) that more girls than boys were encouraged to become nurses than doctors and
vice versa
.
After a short time, feeling a bit bad about this, as I was obviously supposed to, I found myself reflecting ... do I care
really if tuba players are largely male?
OK, I’ve seen
Billy Elliot
, and I know that it is rotten to be looked on as a wimp if you’re a boy and you want to do ballet. I also know (from even
more personal experience) that it can be rotten to be a girl and want to do blokeish things.
But this didn’t seem to me to have much to do with the old doctors and nurses argument. The point about that was that girls
chose to be nurses and got lower pay, less prestige and a lifetime of emptying bed-pans; boys chose to be doctors and got
more money, more prestige, while prancing round in a white coat/suit and marrying a nurse. The gender choices cashed out into
economic and status disadvantage.
But is that the same with musical instruments? Is there a built in advantage in learning the harp over the tuba, or
vice versa
? If not, shouldn’t we just let the kids be gendered and just be pleased that they are learning any musical instrument at
all? If it takes a tuba or a Fender to get boys interested in learning an instrument, well, phew ... And if girls are inspired
to go on with the cello by the sight of those old (and, of course, now sad) images of Jacqueline du Pré making love to her
instrument, it’s a small price to pay.
I thought it might have been more interesting if the survey (and no, I haven’t read the original) had taken that other
Billy Elliot
theme and looked at class. How many working-class kids now learn to play any instrument at all?
Isn’t that more of a worry?
Comments
It’s wonky in a different way at the top, anyway – orchestras are full of men, on any/every instrument. I don’t really think
it matters much, so long as
everyone
is given a chance at possibly becoming a good musician.
The real gender problem in music is with the conductors ... where are all the women?
NEWN1
I’m a woman and a musician – and I play what men still see as a ‘male’ instrument (the bass). I’ve been playing professionally
for 20 years and, while meeting prejudice isn’t now a 100 per cent experience, it can still be a weekly one. It can be tiresome
and upsetting, impacting not only on my income, but on creative opportunities. At times, I have considered giving up music
because of it, but being brought up in feminism’s halcyon days when trying to become what I wanted to be as a woman was nearly
as much a duty as a right, I have always dragged myself from my bed the next day to ... Face the music. Besides, playing the
bass is what I do.
I would say to Mary: Don’t swap concern for one prejudice for a pet or preferred one. They are all important. Of course there
is no contest between people starving in Zimbabwe or the mass rape and murder happening in the Congo, but thinking that sexism
in British schools isn’t important means we cannot demonstrate beautiful, healthy equality to the rest of the world either.
KLIMT
Dr Bowdler was ahead of us all.
Othello famously raged against the supposed infidelity of Desdemona:
‘and shall she play the strumpet in my bed?’
The good doctor preserved the metre while making the line appropriate for family reading simply by deleting the initial ‘s’
from the sixth word.
OLIVER NICHOLSON
Personally, I would far rather hear any half-decent ensemble composed of males and/or females on instruments they can actually
play than be subjected to any more videos of vacuous sex objects flashing their flesh and surviving only due to the sophistication
of studio electronics.
STEVE KIMBERLEY
5 May 2008
A tricky issue has just hit the Greek courts. Some residents of the island of Lesbos have just decided to resort to the law
to prevent the ‘Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece’ from using the word Lesbian in its title.
The idea is that the heterosexual female denizens of the island don’t much like the idea that when they claim they are Lesbian
everyone assumes that they are gay. (It’s a claim that might be stronger, I think, if the appellants in this case were women,
not men representing their sisters ...) But if they are successful in their suit against the Greek organisation, the plan
is to try to outlaw ‘Lesbians’ (as a word) worldwide.
The problem here is the sixth-century BC Greek poetess Sappho: born and bred in Lesbos, she addressed some of the most passionate
erotic poetry the world has known to fellow women. An achievement which in the ancient world earned her the title ‘10th Muse’.
Almost ever since Lesbos has been synonymous with lesbianism (in fact since the eighteenth century in British English).
This idea of decoupling Sappho, female homoeroticism and the island of Lesbos seems to me about as mad as trying to white
out William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon.
In fact, Sappho is the sexiest thing to have come from the island in 3,000 years. Why on earth jack in the commercial possibilities?
The competition for most famous islander is not great. Alcaeus was also a Lesbian, another early poet, who famously claimed
to throw away his shield on the battlefield and walk (?run) away – so giving rise to a whole tradition of ancient poetic military
refuseniks.
You might also think of Theophrastus, fourth/third-century BC scientist, who wrote a wonderful analysis of different character
types called
The Characters
.
In the modern world you might go for the poet Odysseas Elytis who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. But that’s not
quite the 10th Muse and, though his family came from Lesbos, he was actually born in Crete anyway.
So why on earth aren’t the Lesbians (islanders, that is)
celebrating
Sappho and doing all they can to resurrect her poetry? Out of 9 volumes, only a handful of stuff survives. But more may be
found. Only a few years ago another poem was discovered on an Egyptian papyrus. A nice middle-aged lyric about not having
the knees to dance any more.
Why don’t the islanders buy into this, instead of complaining about the supposed sexual ‘insult’?
Comments
Why does your list of eminent Lesbians vault lightly (but in a manner not uncharacteristic of classical scholars) over roughly
two thousand years of post-classical history. How about Zacharias of Mytilene, whose not unentertaining early Byzantine chronicle
survives in a Syriac version – there is certainly more of him than there is of Sappho.
I find that
OED
gives no instance of Lesbian or lesbianism in its modern English sense earlier than 1870. It was possible for a respectable
family in Willesden as late as 1898 (presumably admirers of Catullus, ‘tenderest of Roman poets’) to name their daughter Lesbia;
she grew up to be Lesbia Scott, wife of a vicar of Chagford and author of an All Saints Day hymn of great charm, ‘I Sing a
Song of the Saints of God’, more sung in the United States than in her native land. No doubt Alma-Tadema has much to answer
for.
OLIVER NICHOLSON
The Lesbians also have ouzo, which is more palatable than poetry, for some. So, maybe they drink too much, that would explain
this bizarre initiative.
GILLES
I don’t see the problem. There are lesbians who aren’t Lesbians, Lesbians who aren’t lesbians and Lesbians who are lesbians,
which is the same thing as lesbians who are Lesbians. What could be simpler?
MICHAEL BULLEY
Nicholson may be a whizz at looking things up in the
OED
but had he clicked on the link in note 3 of the Wikipedia article ‘Lesbian’ he would have found an interesting discussion
and a reference to a book (Emma Donoghue,
Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801
, London, 1993) which, it is claimed, establishes ‘beyond doubt’ ‘that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
the word “Lesbian” was used in the very same sense as today’.
However, the term’s relation to its geographical referent is worth considering. ‘Lesbian’ bears some superficial analogy to
‘Sodomite’, denoting someone who does what people in a certain place are reputed to do. But it was rarely alleged that all
Lesbians did lesbian things (some of them were men, for a start). The term doubtless gained currency as a periphrasis or euphemism
for ‘Sapphist’, initially more popular in English. (Rather like saying ‘The Stagyrite’ for ‘Aristotle’).
SWF nevertheless feels some sympathy with the Lesbiot cause, as the sexual meaning is an exogenous imposition from a more
powerful culture and developed not only through the attribution of the practices of a single group member to the whole, but
also in the more general context of attributing perversion to the Oriental other. (A comparable term is ‘bugger’, originally
attributed to Bulgars, the alleged ethnic origin of religiously heterodox Cathars in southern France in the Middle Ages. But
this last etymology is now only semantically vestigial so no ethnic offence is given or taken by the use of the term.)
SW FOSKA
I’m not sure about this. If ‘Brit’ were to become synonymous with ‘sado-masochistic state terrorist’, as well it might, I,
as a Brit, might well be reluctant to allow myself to be identified as such.
PAUL POTTS
It’s the people of Kos I feel for. Constantly accused of being lettuces. I wouldn’t like anybody to call
my
sister a lettuce.
I can’t say I find ‘a nice middle-aged lyric about not having the knees to dance any more’ a very enticing description of
the new Sappho: trust me, folks, the arthritic ode is more exciting than this makes it sound ...
Anyway, one of the ancient stories about Sappho’s life (the ancients told lots of anecdotes of dubious or non-existent historicity
about Sappho) had her married to a man called Kerkylas of Andros. Kerkus was a word for penis, and the name of the island
Andros sounds the same as the genitive of the word for ‘man’. One scholar suggested the translation ‘Dick Allcock of the Isle
of Man’. So it looks as if this story expresses the idea ‘we all know what these Lesbians really want to put them right ...’
RICHARD
In the nineteenth century, wasn’t all homosexuality (and especially the male kind) referred to as ‘Greek love’ anyway?
It is presumably by some accident of linguistic development that ‘Lesbian’ became widely adopted, but ‘Greek’ fell by the
wayside in favour of ‘gay’. It could easily have been otherwise. We could be speaking today about ‘Greek rights’ or ‘Greek
pride’ or ‘Greek and Lesbian film festivals’. In which case, the Greeks generally would know how some of these Lesbians are
apparently feeling ...
HERESIARCH