Lies, Damned Lies and History E-Book

Graeme Donald

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

From cats, spats and catacombs to the Wall Street shuffle, Lies, Damned Lies and History is an entertaining look at how historical events didn't always unfold as we think they did. Graeme Donald takes the reader on a journey, century-by-century, showing how the truth we take for granted is a far cry from the facts. This is not a book for those who like their history sugar-coated, but for those who truly want to see the past as it was. It is a hilarious lesson that any history lover will delight in.

Leseprobe

For Rhona

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

PRE-HISTORY

Chariots of Ire

Did Boudicca really exist?

Colossus of Rhodes

A statue of limitations

Cats, Spats and Catacombs

Realities of life in the Roman arena

Cleopatra: Drag Queen of the Nile

The truth about Antony and Cleopatra

Face That Launched a Thousand Quips

A Trojan War that never happened

Five Ring Circus

The Olympics as they really were

Holding the Hot Gates

What really happened at Thermopylae

Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

Did Nero burn down Rome or was it all an accident?

Let What People Go?

No Israeli slaves in Egypt

Little-Boots and Saddles

Was Caligula really that bad?

Reverending Story

Messiah myths

Sapphic Lore and Lesbian Rule

It seems the lady was straight!

Spartacus, the Gay Blade

And some have greatness thrust upon them

Up Yours, Pal

Caesar’s real exit-line

THE FIRST 1,500 YEARS

Attila’s Huneymoon

The real architect of Venice

‘Bad’ King John Seals his Own Fate

What did Magna Carta ever do for us?

Bathory Bath Night

A right lady wronged

Bloody Mary and Executions

Another lady wronged

The Dove was a Hawk

Columbus; the original miss-America

Embroidering the Truth

Harold keeps an eye out for the truth at Hastings

Galileo

Author of his own down-fall

A Hot Time in the Old Crown Tonight

Edward II, the worst poker-player in history

Joan – The Auntie-Pope

The myth of the female Pope

London’s Burning

Hardly a capitol offence

A Man for No Treasons 85

Who killed Becket and why

Plague’s Progress

The rats got bad press

The Play that Dare Not Speak its Name

Macbeth, a good and rightful king

Pocahontas – Middlesex Girl

Disney got it wrong

Public Enema No. 1

Martin Luther – a tainted saint who fell between two stools

The Rouen-ation of Joan

No French Maid, she!

What Did You Expect?

The Spanish Inquisition revealed

We’ll Take Manhattan!

Why we never hear of the Pilgrim Mothers

Witches’ Brew

Nothing at stake, here

THE LAST 510 YEARS

All Rhodes Lead to Cliveden

Links from the Cliveden Set to Happy Valley?

Ben Dova’s Rover

What really happened to the Hindenburg?

Blitz Myths

London red in truth and lore

Cook’s Tours

Captain Cook, discoverer of Australia?

The Devil’s Tattoo and Ghosts in the Machines

Nothing glib to say here; just read it

Fire from Heaven?

Don’t blame the O’Leary cow for the Chicago Fire

First Among Sequels

Walpole and Washington were not first to the post

Hanged, Drawn and Quartered

A terrible way to die, even in the nineteenth century

Harry’s Claim

Swiss neutrality?

Hitler’s Superior Race Meeting

How the Germans really treated Jessie Owens

Houghma-Gandhi

An unpleasant little chap with unusual taste inhot-water bottles

How the West was Spun

The realities of the American West

Jammin’ with the Band Aboard the Unthinkable

Titanic myths

John Who?

Will the real John Bull please stand up!

Kate the Great and her Mate

What really killed Catherine the Great?

Liberté, Egalité and Decapité

Revolution, French-style

Long Day’s Journey into Trite

Mao and his imaginary march

Lubbe’s Boob

Hitler’s Reichstag Fire

Making the Maltese Cross

There was no Faith, Hope and Charity

Making up for Lost Time

We never lost eleven days

Monkey Trial of John T. Scopes

The evolution of a lie

Not all it’s Cracked Up to be

The Liberty Bell

Pox, Pox and Pox Again

Who gave who syphilis and how

Pratt’s Great Auntie Thais One On

The King and eye-eye!

Red Coats and Black Hopes

Why the Zulu never heard ‘Men of Harlech’ at Rorke’s Drift

Seig Heil Columbia

The myth of the German-language vote

Turkey-Trots and a Rum Baa-Baa

Who should give thanks for Thanksgiving?

V-J Delay

Why the Americans really dropped the bomb

Wall Street Shuffle

The suicide rate during the Great Crash

Wicked Witch of the Left

The myth of Hitler and the occult

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Henry Ford is famed for saying that ‘history is bunk’, a statement that is something of a curate’s egg in that it is right in parts only. Apart from the biased input from the ‘history is written by the victors’ lobby, the records of our past bear the scars of the interference from others with axes to grind on their spinning agenda. But ‘the truth is still out there’, as Agent Mulder would say; all you have to do is unearth it.

Some historical myths are home-grown, some are invented by outsiders, some are dreamed up by administrations or prominent individuals desperate to hide the truth of their actions from public view and some are invented by the public themselves, either to exaggerate out of all proportion some minor act of heroism or to hide the enormity of their own excesses from themselves. A fine example of that last category is the Londoners’ invention of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ of Nazi-bombed London when the chirpy Cockneys supposedly met each onslaught with a ‘Lorks a-mercy’ and a twang of their braces before breaking into a stirring rendition of Down at the Old Bull andBush. This myth of togetherness was invented to gloss over the fact that Londoners showed what they were really made of under cover of the blackout; incidents of rape, murder, looting, mugging and the robbing of the dead went through the roof while the public howled for accommodation, capitulation, anything to halt the war that 40 per cent believed was ‘all about the bloody Jews’.

Nor can the power of cinema be underestimated for it is from the silver screen that we inherit such false notions as witches being burnt at the stake in ‘Merrie’ England and the indelible image of the American West where it turns out that almost half the of so-called cowboys were non-white and so few could afford sidearms that gunfights were a rarity. You were far more likely to be gunned down in Victorian London than in Dodge City, Tombstone or Abilene.

The power of myth lies in the fact that most invented versions of events present the public with something that is either convenient or simplistic – we wear the white hats and the baddies have black hats, or whatever – or with something that is guaranteed acceptance because it fits with national self-image. While most other nations perceive the British to have been arrogant, self-deluded, rapacious, duplicitous and dictatorial, the British see themselves as stiff upper-lipped defenders of the moral high-ground who meet defeat and victory as the same impostor, to paraphrase Kipling’s ‘If’. This being the case, the British public were psychologically primed to fall hook, line and sinker for the Dunkirk myth, complete with tales of the guards ignoring the Stukas and strafing Messerschmitts to conduct formation drills on the open beaches while awaiting embarkation. The reality was of course much darker and very different. Troops deserted to go looting and raping in the nearby French towns and villages and many of those who still had weapons threw them away. The withdrawal was a terrible betrayal of the French and the Belgians who were left to face the German advance alone; any of their number trying to embark at the beach were met by British guns. And as for the flotilla of plucky civilians popping across the Channel to lend a hand, the Cholmondeley-Warners and Barrington Farquhars of these isles ne’er set sail.

And things are no different in America, where, for example, the Amerindians have been painted as mindless savages to justify the countless broken treaties and massacres and, despite the Hollywood image of the Plains Indians preying on wagon trains, such attacks were few and most often retaliatory with the greatest wagon-train massacre of all time being inflicted not by Indians but by rapacious Mormons. As for Custer’s so-called ‘Last Stand’, this had to be marketed as a perfidious massacre by blood-crazed savages to hide from the public the fact that Custer was a vainglorious idiot who, had he survived, would have been court-marshalled for his stupidity. Ignoring all orders and incoming intelligence, Custer attacked a vastly superior force and had to make a run for it; there was no ‘Last Stand’, only a runaway scrape during which some evidence points to Custer having shot himself. Faced with no other alternative, the US Army did what it always did with dead idiots and rebranded Custer as a hero.

But there are few real heroes, those perceived as such are almost invariably undeserving individuals who either seek such limelight or have it thrust upon them for reasons of national morale. And, on the other side of the coin, many of those painted as demons were not really that bad. Elizabeth Bathory, aka Countess Dracula, never bathed in blood; Vlad the Impaler was in fact a national hero; ‘Bad’ King John was a far better ruler than ‘Good’ King Richard; ‘Bloody’ Mary killed fewer of her subjects than did ‘Good Queen Bess’ and the Spanish Inquisition was in reality remarkably tolerant. It is all a question of who gets to write what.

As for Henry Ford and ‘history is bunk’, well, he never said it, but perhaps he should have.

PRE-HISTORY

CHARIOTS OF IRE

So little is known of Boudicca, Boudicia (d.60 or 61), or whatever you want to call the lady, that it is perhaps not pushing the matter too far to question whether she ever existed outside the minds of a couple of historians writing years after the alleged events. Perhaps they just invented some sort of ferocious bogey-woman under whose umbrella they could cluster a series of events known to have taken place but of which they knew little.

Boudicca – we shall stick with that form for the purposes of this entry – has been so many things to so many people, the first feminist, and so forth, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Always depicted in film as a flame-haired Xena-type with a body like an angry polecat barely contained in leather strappy-bits, the image we all have of her is taken from the over-imaginative statue on Westminster Bridge, this showing a wild-haired battle-vixen clutching her two wronged daughters aboard her scythe-wheeled chariot of war. Let’s take that chariot first; no-one with even half a brain would use a chariot in war; the Romans, who knew a thing or two about the efficiencies of slaughter, never used them for anything other than pomp or racing. Battles did not take place on manicured lawns and the wheel/axel-making technology of the time was laughable. A chariot would not have lasted ten minutes on rough terrain and all aboard would have had to hang on for dear life instead of throwing spears or firing arrows with deadly accuracy. At the end of the day, a chariot is useless without its horsepower and that could be taken out at the drop of a hat by archers. As for wheel-scythes, they are pure fiction.

And so to the lady herself. The standard version of the tale is that she was an Iceni queen who took over after her husband, Prasutagus, either died or was poisoned by her, depending on what you read. Not long after this, the Romans announced that they were to annex the kingdom and, when she objected, they gave her a good flogging and raped her two daughters. This alleged brutality turned her into a whirlwind of revenge which engulfed three cities and countless Roman squaddies. But how do we arrive at this yarn with nothing written of such events at the time? We do not even know this woman’s name; however you spell the term it is a corruption of ‘boudeg’, the Brythonic for ‘victory’ which could instead be a title or a name invented for a fictional character to suit the attributed deeds. It is a bit like the woman in the Bible who supposedly wiped the sweat from Christ’s face as he made his way to the killing-ground only to be left with the image of his face on her cloth; she is referred to as Veronica, a name meaning the true image, yet how could her parents have known she would be doing this in later life and christen her accordingly? (The matador’s drawing of the cape across the bull’s face is also known as a veronica, taken from this same legend).

The first reference we have to the alleged Boudicca is in the writings of the Roman Tacitus (56–117) but he was about four years old when Boudicca was inflicting the ravages attributed to her. The only other source is Dio Cassius who, not even born until 164, was even more removed from her supposed time of prominence and likely relied on that same Tacitus as a primary source. Both were writing under the watchful eye of their Roman paymasters so you may draw what conclusions you should from that. All that said and done, the year 60 or 61 most certainly did see an uprising against the Romans with the settlements/cities of Colchester, St Albans and London the subjects of significant attack – even the archaeological evidence bears that out. But was there a Boudicca? At the risk of sounding trite, perhaps people simply got the wrong end of the stick after observing the Iceni horde cheering some priestess who, having issued suitably encouraging prophesies of success, was hailed with cries of Boudeg! Boudeg!

COLOSSUS OF RHODES

The notion that this statue once straddled the entrance to the main harbour of Rhodes is a medieval fantasy which, fuelled by countless paintings and etchings, is pretty much the image held today. In fact, the Colossus stood somewhere to the side of the harbour so it gained admittance to the Seven Wonders of the World club under false pretences.

After the death of Alexander the so-called Great in 323 BC, his over-vaunted empire fell apart like the house of straw it was, leaving his generals grabbing whatever fragments they could before falling to war amongst themselves. Ptolemy got Egypt, and, having cemented a pact with Rhodes, found himself at loggerheads with another of Alexander’s heirs, Antigonus Monophthalmus, who, in 305 BC sent his son to lay siege to that island. But junior botched the job and had to flee the next year when Ptolemy turned up to send him packing sans half his fleet and all his siege equipment. The Rhodians gathered up all that had been abandoned and held an auction to raise funds for the building of a massive statue of Helios, their sun-god. Completed in 280 BC and made in the main from the re-forged iron and bronze of the abandoned weapons, the finished statue stood about 30 metres high at an unknown location near the harbour entrance – but not for long. Hardly the most durable of the Seven Wonders, it collapsed in the earthquake of 226 BC, snapped off at the knees by the first tremor, and there it lay in pieces for the next 800 years until the Muslim warlord Muawiyah I captured Rhodes in 654 and sold the shattered bits and pieces as scrap to ‘a Jew from Emesa’.

CATS, SPATS AND CATACOMBS

Despite its name, the Colosseum was not the largest of the Roman arena or stadia; properly called the Flavian Amphitheatre it was not even referred to by that other name until the year 1000, this ‘nickname’ inspired by its proximity to the Colossus of Nero, a 40 metre-high statue that was pulled down in the fourth century so that the bronze could be recycled. Although the Flavian could accommodate crowds of about 50,000 it was dwarfed by the Circus Maximus which, on high-days and holidays, held something in the region of 500,000, and it was the specially structured passageways of these two arenas that enabled such massive crowds to exit quickly that gave birth to the myth that the Romans had special rooms where they could throw up between courses to make room for even more food. The much-misunderstood vomitoria were, in the case of the Colosseum, the eighty passageways and underpasses through which the entire 50,000 audience of a Colosseum full-house could exit in less than fifteen minutes, this giving the impression that the building was regurgitating its contents back into the city. Rome was certainly a place of excess and many did indeed round off the evening’s entertainment doubled up in the shrubbery, but this was never a deliberate ritual in rooms designed for such behaviour. The myth seems to be one of relatively recent origins, first noted in print in Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923), a comic novel making reference to massed hurlings in ‘the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter’. In the relevant entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, the proper definition is put forward before the myth is explored. Using Huxley’s error as illustration, the text imposes a corrective ‘erroneously: A room in which ancient Romans are alleged to have vomited deliberately during feasts’.

And talking of feasts, the Colosseum is best known today as the venue where lions routinely snacked-out on Christians in their thousands. The trouble with that popular image is that it never happened; the whole story was a load of Papal bull calculated to call a halt to the wholesale theft of the masonry, fixtures and fittings by dodgy architects and landscape gardeners who were treating the place like a free-for-all builders’ yard. It is clear that even in the Middle Ages the Colosseum meant nothing to Christians, it by then having been used as everything from a fortress to a quarry. Pope Pius V (1566–1572) seems to have been the one to start the ball rolling by declaring that pilgrims to the city should take away with them handfuls of Colosseum sand which, he proclaimed, was impregnated with the blood of countless Christian martyrs – but still no mention of lions. His was very much a minority view and one not shared by the rest of the Vatican hierarchy who continued to sanction varied and secular use of the place. Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590), a confusing name if ever there was one, was prevented only by his own death from turning large sections of the place into a maze of sweatshops to produce woollen goods to flog to the pilgrims. In 1671, Cardinal Altieri announced his intention to turn the place into a bullfighting area. This proved a step too far in the eyes of some, particularly one Carlo Tomassi, who countered Altieri’s announcement with a pamphlet hailing the Cardinal’s plans a profanation of what should be considered a sanctuary. So successful was the Tomassi campaign that Pope Clement X (1670–1676) eventually had to bow to mounting pressure and order the external arcade to be sealed off and the whole place declared a sanctuary.

The thefts of the Colosseum’s very structure ceased overnight as pinching a few stones now became an act of desecration likely to attract the unwelcome attention of clerics with big piles of firewood – for the time being, the place was safe. However, about a century later, by which time the Church had largely lost the power to reduce transgressors to small piles of ash, the theft problem returned – proof-positive that capital punishment does indeed concentrate the minds of the un-godly. To save the place from further desecration Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) had Stations of the Cross erected throughout the Colosseum and proclaimed it dedicated to the Christians martyred therein. Everyone jumped on the new bandwagon: artists who plied their trade to the visiting pilgrims immediately began churning out depictions of pious Christians standing calm in their faith before salivating lions and baying crowds of suitably surly pagans. And that was that; thenceforth all and sundry were convinced that Christians were fed to the lions in the Colosseum.

In fact, it is not known if anyone was ever thrown to lions; the arena was all about spectacle and a man-versus-lion bout would not long entertain the crowd. Common criminals and some prisoners of war were pitted against animals, but most such incidents seem to have involved nothing more exotic than wild dogs. Apart from Nero, who most certainly did persecute Christians in his private gardens to entertain his dinner-guests, there does not seem to be any evidence that Christians were routinely singled out for their entertainment value in any arena – suffer they certainly did, but no more than any other minority group. Christians were by no means unique or the preferred dog’s dinner as the Romans were quite happy to toss anyone to the dogs for a good laugh. Anyway, in 367 the Emperor Valentinianus banned the use of Christians in the arena, although the embargo did not apply to non-Christians who continued to top the bill in all of the city’s arenas. So, far from bearing the main brunt of Roman persecution, Christians in fact got off lightly; the poor old gladiator would have to fight on for another forty years or so.

Since the general concept of the nature and outcome of the gladiatorial games is largely based on films such as Spartacus (1960) and Gladiator (2000) it is perhaps no surprise that there are more than a few misconceptions attached to the tradition, which was not Roman but Etruscan and, initially at least, never intended for the entertainment of the mob. The custom of voluntary mortal combat was an Etruscan funereal rite intended to provide bodyguards for the departed in the afterlife. As the Harpies played some dirge and sang of immortality, three or perhaps four pairs would fight it out to see who got to go on the trip of a lifetime, so to speak. Although distorted in mythology to creatures of foul unpleasantness, the original Harpy was chosen for her beauty and musical talent, appearing at funerals naked save for a feathered cape representative of the vultures that would devour the corpse and transport the soul into the heavens. Their name was taken from the Greek harpazein, to seize or pluck, either in reference to the feeding nature of the birds they represented or for the harps they plucked. Either way, the use of funereal gladiators is first recorded in the Rome of 264 BC when three pairs fought over the grave of Junius Brutus.

Properly called munera, such tributes to the dead began as low-key and very private affairs but, with time, they began to get out of hand as the families of the elite vied to hold increasingly impressive funerals; ‘your dad only had six pairs fighting on his grave, well, we gave my dad eight’ and so forth. Although the numbers inexorably rose, still by the time of the Dictator Julius Caesar (he was never Emperor; Augustus was the first to carry that title) the main focus was on the deceased party with the fights held in their honour. In 65 BC Julius Caesar honoured his father, by then twenty years dead, with a contest between 320 pairs of combatants – he had wanted more, but the Senate, still not over the memory of Spartacus’ all-Italian tour of 73 BC, imposed restrictions on the number of slaves and prisoners of war who could be ‘tooled-up’ at any one time. In 46 BC Caesar again organised such a private function to honour his daughter, Julia, who had died in childbirth eight years before, with protracted and elaborate munera played out to a gory conclusion about her tomb. Far from being enjoyed by howling spectators, Caesar’s munera were criticized for their extravagance and the unacceptable number of deaths involved, and that’s not the kind of sentiment one was likely to hear often in ancient Rome.

Throughout the Republic, munera were always funded and organized by the family concerned, but the aforementioned rivalry, overlaid by lashings of political ambition, began clouding the original purpose of showing respect for the dead. Augustus, the first Roman Emperor from 27 BC until AD 14, decided to curb the excesses and place all such events under the authority of the Praetors who had their orders to limit such shows to two days a year with no more than sixty pairs at any one event. (This would eventually swell to twelve days a year, still far short of the weekly occurrence of popular imagination). Even as late as the turn of the second century, Tertullian (160–220) would lament in his On the Spectacles (?198): ‘this class of entertainment has passed from being a compliment to the dead to being a compliment to the living’.

But human nature is programmed to debase all it creates and so, inevitably, by the rule of Trajan (98–117) military victories and triumphs were celebrated with anything up to 5,000 pairs. By this time munera had become the ‘Games’ and very much the province of the howling mob who sat cheering and jeering at fights every bit as arranged and ‘choreographed’ as WWE bouts. Throughout the day the crowd was worked by hucksters selling wine, snacks and memorabilia; a day at the arena was no different to a day at a modern football match, apart from the fact that one was far less likely to get killed – at the Colosseum, that is. On the plus side, as far as the combatants were concerned, their lot had dramatically improved. While death was the required outcome at all munera this was not so at the Games; top-flight gladiators were far too valuable to be pitted to their death. The top dogs fought no more than a couple of times a year and spent much of the time touring the country putting on shows and inviting the local wannabes to try their hands with wooden swords. Furthermore, not all gladiators were slaves or POWs, many men – and women, for that matter – opted to fight in the arena for the sex and money. Commerce piggy-backing on the reputation of famous sportsmen is nothing new; gladiators ate and drank for free, wherever they went, in establishments happy to offset that cost against the additional trade their celebrity attracted, and clothes, shoe and weapon-makers bid against each other for the honour of kitting out such men for free. And then there was the toga-totty – women of quite elevated status fell over each other in the rush to bed the latest favourite – the gladiators were the football stars of their day.

Sure, some were slaves pressed into such service but if they fought well and survived, for sometimes as little as three years, they were rewarded with their freedom. Many such men, having so won their freedom, opted to stay on in the arena and rack up a fortune. Far from the Hollywood portrayal of gladiatorial contest, these were not undignified mêlées glorifying wholesale butchery, there were seven categories of fighter and only certain styles were pitted against each other. The Retiarius, for example, who fought with a net and a short trident, could only fight the Secutor who was heavily armed and wore a sleek helmet unlikely to become snagged in the net. All gladiators fought in accordance with strict rules enforced by the two referees who had to be present at all times. Much of the training was geared to methods of subduing, not killing, an opponent; defeat through death was far from the norm. A recent study of 200 fights of the first century revealed that only nineteen ended in death and that even in the most violent of these fights simple surrenders outnumbered deaths by 3:1. On average, with a 90 per cent survival rate, the gladiator fared much better then those in the crowd, over half of whom would not, for one reason or another, live to see their twentieth birthday; death was then very much a part of daily life. The only vanquished gladiators who were finished off in the arena had either fought badly or shown signs of cowardice but the notion of thumbs-up signals calling for them to be spared and thumbs down calling for a killing is a very modern invention. Gladiators who had fought well but incurred fatal injuries were removed from the arena to be finished off with a hammer-blow to the head in their quarters so as not to upset the crowd.

Such was the lot of the gladiator – that of the condemned men in the arena was quite another matter. The gladiators fought in the afternoon, but the condemned were the warm-up act put on in the morning with the outcome so predictable that few bothered to attend. Seneca (4 BC – AD 65) noted these to be little more than cheap, mass executions of little finesse or interest: ‘The men have no defensive armour. They are exposed to blows at all points, and no one ever strikes in vain… There is no helmet or shield to deflect the weapon. What is the need of defensive armour, or of skill? All these mean delaying death… The spectators demand that the slayer shall face the man who is to slay him in his turn; and they always reserve the latest conqueror for another butchering. The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword. This sort of thing even goes on when the arena is empty.’ In short, those pitted to their deaths were there for that reason and that alone; no-one expected them to be entertaining.

The final myth surrounding the Christians in Rome is their use of the catacombs as a place to worship or hide from their persecutors. Excavated from soft rock, the catacombs were underground burial chambers, and, for economy of labour and strength of structure, present a maze of narrow tunnels and gangways quite unsuited to any religious gathering; besides, the stench of the rotting corpses would hardly be conducive to communal reverie. As for serving as hiding places for hunted Christians, since the location of all the catacombs was common knowledge; what would be the point? No-one used the catacombs for any other purpose than disposal of the dead.

CLEOPATRA: DRAG QUEEN OF THE NILE

There were many Queen Cleopatras of Egypt, and the term, translating from Greek as flame of the father, was actually a title rather than a name – a bit like ‘Caesar’ which, incidentally, infiltrated other languages in forms such as Kaiser and Tsar. As far as the West is concerned, the most famous Cleopatra was Thea Phiopater, again from the Greek and translating as ‘the Goddess who loves her father’, who became Cleopatra VII (69–30 BC) and it must be said that the lady herself was Greek and not Egyptian; she could not even speak the language of the land she ruled.

The dynasty was established by Ptolemy, a general in the army of Alexander, who decided to remain in Egypt and seize power when Alexander died; the tradition of Cleopatra as a title was instituted by Ptolemy V, there being some fifteen Cleopatras in all, ours the daughter of Ptolemy XI. Basically, Thea was as Greek as you can get; she spoke Greek; she dressed in the Greek style and generally favoured all aspects of that culture; only on state occasions did she go native – but dressed as a man; Egyptian queens were perceived as men and had to act the part; Thea even had to wear a stick-on beard. Nor was she the erotic vamp of Western imagination; coins dated to but a few years before her death show a face with a sharp and hooked nose, a rather mean little mouth, narrow forehead and a protruding chin; on top of that, her rotting dentures gave her breath that could, by contemporary accounts, fell an ox. Mark Antony, depicted on the other side of these same coins, presents a bull-necked pin-head of a chap with bulging eyes. Quite a pair; and such portrayal must be considered today to have been a trifle flattering as absolute rulers of such times did not appreciate public ridicule or lampoon. Even Plutarch, writing about a century after the Antony–Thea alliance, tactfully pointed out that her physical charms were ‘not so remarkable that none could be compared with her … but the contact of her presence … was irresistible’. So, while she may not have been drop-dead gorgeous with a body like an angry ferret, she had wit and charm by the bucketful and a fascinating mind; real allure. She was also an extremely astute politician and negotiator, and it was with these attributes that she had first Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony dancing to her tune.

And what of that much-vaunted tender disposition to Mark Antony; this, it seems, is best left on the pages of Shakespeare’s play. Whatever else she was, Cleopatra was shrewd and well aware that rulers on the world stage do not have love affairs but power-plays and alliances cemented in bed. After their joint defeat at Actium (31 BC), Cleopatra was quick to realize that all was lost and readily accepted Octavian’s proposal to do away with Mark Antony as just one of a list of conditions allowing her to remain on the Egyptian throne but answerable to Rome. She summoned Mark Antony to the mausoleum already built for the pair of them, convinced him she had already taken poison, and then watched him commit suicide before continuing negotiations with Octavian for at least a week, so it was nothing like the star-crossed lovers’ death-pact of Shakespeare’s imagination. Reading between the lines, Mark Antony appears to have been brave in battle but an otherwise weak and vacillating man who would have been putty in the hands of someone as clever as Thea.

It was only after she learned that Octavian (who would soon become the Emperor Augustus) had no intention of keeping his side of the mooted deal and really planned to take her back to Rome in chains, that she resolved to kill herself. To achieve this, we are supposed to believe, she clasped to her breast a deadly Naja Haje, or hooded cobra, the royal snake of Egypt. In reality, Cleopatra resorted to a swift-acting poison she habitually carried with her, usually in a bodkin platted into her hair. Those who found her reported the body free of mark, wound or blemish, and the puncture marks and attendant bruising of a snake bite in an area as tender as the female breast could hardly have gone unnoticed. Besides, she was also noted to be calm and serene in her death, not contorted and covered in her own vomit and waste as she would have been had any cobra been involved.

It seems to have been Octavian himself who inadvertently started all the silly snaky tales. A vain and pompous man, he was determined that Thea’s suicide would not rob him of his triumph in Rome and, if he could not parade the real Queen, he would parade her in effigy. For his return to Rome he commissioned a life-size carving of Thea, reclining on a couch, with a cobra coiled about her right bicep and its head and upper body extended across the breast; he was not attempting to indicate the manner of her death, he just wanted to include the most potent symbol of the dynasty he had suppressed.

As for ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’, the pillar of granite standing on London’s Victoria Embankment, it is neither the first monument to bear that name nor is it unique, but one of a pair. Europe’s first such monument was erected in Paris in the Place de la Concorde in 1833 to mark the spot where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793. ‘Acquired’ by the French from the Temple at Luxor, L’Aiguille de Cleopatre thus predates the British ‘acquisition’ of their Needle, erected in 1878, by nearly fifty years. The twin of the London obelisk was likewise ‘acquired’ by William H. Vanderbilt and erected in New York’s Central Park in 1881. None have any connection to Thea; all three predating her by a long chalk as the London and New York statues were first erected at Heliopolis c. 1500 BC by Thotmes III. As one might well expect, there are many in Egypt, who, having no doubt consulted a good thesaurus, are of the firm opinion that ‘stolen’ cannot be considered a synonym for ‘acquired’.

FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND QUIPS

From 1873 until the end of that decade, the world stood agog at a series of finds and announcements from a dodgy archaeologist called Heindrich Schliemann (1822–1890) who claimed to have found the ancient city of Troy in northwest Turkey. Before the world’s press he held aloft what he confidently proclaimed to be the Mask of Agamemnon while his wife swanned around bedecked in what he confidently pronounced to be the Jewels of Helen. More finds soon followed and were collectively recognized as Priam’s Treasure. It was all true; Helen of Troy; Paris; King Priam; the Trojan War; it had all really happened. From that point – right up to the risible film Troy (2004), with assorted hunks and Trojan-totty trying to out-pout each other – interest in the so-called Trojan War stands undiminished as does the general belief that the yarn is actually based on a foundation of truth.

Most of what we know of the Trojan War comes from the writings purported to be those of a chap called Homer who, if he lived at all, flourished some time in the eighth century BC to record in such great detail what had happened in the twelfth century BC. So, given the date of the alleged conflict, the protagonists would not be all togged up in the shiny armour and finery favoured by the costume department on the film set of Troy – most would have been lucky to have a goatskin – and the city besieged would not have looked like a massive stone edifice covering countless acres. Homer’s yarn tells of a Greek army, numbering 110,000, setting out to avenge the kidnapping of Helen, wife of Menelaus, by Paris, a foppish Trojan Prince, and besieging said city for ten years. According to most sources, Helen would have been perhaps twelve or thirteen at the time and with women in general then regarded in Greece as having slightly less value that cattle, such abduction is unlikely to have united all the warring Greek states in her cause. In addition, if every fighting man in Greece had gone off to Turkey for ten years there would have been no Greece left to go home to. As for the fabled ‘Trojan Horse’, which lives on with us in phraseology and computer-speak for a type of invading virus, simple maths disproves the possibility of such a structure.

According to the legend, the horse contained a war-party of forty men who would emerge and throw open the gates once the dumb Trojans had dragged the thing inside. A wooden horse built to accommodate a single man would have to be about twice the size of the real thing, so the Greek version would have to have been 100-fold normal size. And how big the gates of Troy for it to pass through? Some Homer-apologists have ventured to opine that ‘horse’ could be a misunderstanding of some long-lost designation for a siege machine or a giant catapult but all such speculation is unnecessary. All we have is an account of a war that never happened, written by a man who never existed and an archaeological site hailed by a con-man to have been the location of all the action. Those who worked with Schliemann were not shy in telling how most of his ‘finds’ had either been knocked up by local craftsmen, unearthed in sites near to, but not at ‘Troy’ or brought to the dig in packing cases so that they could be ‘found’.

FIVE RING CIRCUS

The modern Olympics were resurrected amidst a shroud of myth that the Ancient Games were the embodiment of noble and sportsman-like spirit with nation competing against nation without fear or favour. Well, we all make mistakes. Also, despite statues of the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin that are dotted about the world, proclaiming him the ‘Father of the Modern Olympics’, de Coubertin borrowed the idea from Dr William Penny Brookes of Much Wenlock in Shropshire whose revival Games began in 1850, forty-six years before the first grand spectacle in Athens in 1896. At first, de Coubertin evaded or fudged his answers to questions as to the part that Brookes had played in the international drive to reinstate the Games but eventually he had to come clean and publicly acknowledge Brookes and his Much Wenlock Games to have been his sole inspiration.

The great focus on the Ancient Olympics has left the impression that these were the only Hellenic Games, whereas they were but one of four and perhaps only the most prominent as their occurrence was used as the marker for the Greek calendar which counted in blocks of four years. Although most now use ‘Olympiad’ to denote the games themselves, that term properly applies only to the span of four years between each meeting. Using the Olympics as the starting point of the cycle, the other years were marked off by the Nemean Games, the Isthmian Games, the Pythian Games and then back to the Olympics. And it was at the Pythian Games where the laurels were handed out, Olympic winners wore crowns of olive; wild celery at the Nemean and pine leaves at the Isthmian. As for any nobility of competitive spirit, the ancient competitors were just as corrupt and riddled with political intrigue as their modern counterparts; bribes, drugs and bogus claims of nationality were all part of the fun.

Just as there was international outcry in 1984 when the UK ‘induced’ the South African Zola Budd to assume UK citizenship in an unseemly hurry so that she could run under the Union Jack – thousands of other would-be British citizens were amazed at the speed with which the Foreign Office could act when it wanted to – countless Greek states are on record as having been fined or excluded from the Games for pulling the same sort of trick. Most states were content to bribe foreign athletes to claim birth in another city but with so much money and prestige at stake, there are even examples of one state invading and annexing another to place irrefutable claim over a handful of competitors. Cheating on an individual basis was also rife. If there was no chance of drugging or poisoning the competition, some resorted to sending highly ‘athletic’ prostitutes to the opposition’s tent to ‘sap their vital fluids’. Not only is this the origin of the notion that sportsmen should refrain from sex before any major competition but, since it is all pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo, the would-be cheats were wasting their money. Betting on the results was heavy so, then as now, competitors would set up ring-deals to prearrange the results and then back themselves accordingly. The most famous such event happened at the 112th Olympics when Callipus of Athens bribed his fellow pentathletes to finish in a certain order – all was uncovered and Athens banned from the Games. As for the ‘amateur’ status of the competitors, that comes down to semantics: competitors and their immediate family were supported by their state throughout their years of training and, while there were no cash prizes per se, the rewards were real enough. Not only were there deals to be done for future events, but once home, winners did extremely well out of advertising and sponsorship arrangements – the pentathlon champion drives one of our chariots, or whatever. Also, many of the victors returned home to free villas and olive groves to keep them in comfort for the rest of their days so, make no mistake, these men were the superstars of their day and lived accordingly. As for any nobility of Olympic ‘to compete is all’ spirit, there were no second prizes; those who let down their team often returned home to be whipped through the streets or even banished.

As for the overall ‘spirituality’ of the meetings, this too was notably lacking. There was no honouring of the gods and many ancient chroniclers recorded their regret that it was ‘that time’ again; Elis, where the Olympics were held, was again to be invaded by a horde of ne’er-do-wells, setting up bars, brothels and sideshows to fleece the drunken crowds. The Games attracted tens of thousands to the site, which did not have latrines or other basic facilities to cope with that number of people. Just think Woodstock with no loos, marshals or cleaners and you will arrive at a pretty accurate image of what the place looked like when all the fun was over. And so to the myth of the founding of the modern charade.

As stated at the beginning of this entry, the Olympic revival began not with de Coubertin and Athens but in Much Wenlock’s Olympian Society as founded by Dr William Penny Brookes who held his first games in 1850. Having resisted all pressures to restrict entrance to the pupils of public schools or their alumni, as did all other athletic events of the day, Brookes’ games were truly egalitarian meetings in which competing was all that mattered; he welcomed Eddie the Eagles before there was an Eddie the Eagle. But this was no penny-ante village affair; it attracted all sort and grades of competitor, including cricket’s W.G. Grace who proved a mean hurdler, despite his bulk. Within fifteen years, Brookes had established the National Olympic Association which held its first meeting at Crystal Palace the same year, attracting substantial crowds and international interest. When Athens got wind of these new Olympics, King George I of Greece sent silver medals for the competitors. It was not until 1890 that Brookes invited de Coubertin to the meetings after which the Frenchman scurried off to form the International Olympic Committee in 1894 and managed to push Brookes into the shade by organising the first modern games in 1896 in Athens.

HOLDING THE HOT GATES

Everyone loves a good ‘David-and-Goliath’ yarn and that telling of a self-sacrificing band of Greeks holding a narrow pass against the might of the Persian horde is a perennial favourite, most recently given a highly camp makeover in the laughably homo-erotic 300 (2006). (Actually, the sword-slash stylization of the numeric title on the posters left this writer puzzled as to why such a film should be called Zoo, but there you go). All things considered, Thermopylae is without doubt one of the most evocative and best-known names from the history books of Ancient Greece and one that translates as hot-gates in reference to the sulphur-springs that once bubbled there – the second element on the name is also seen in ‘pylon’ for their open, gate-like base. Most of what we now hold as the truth of the Greco-Persian confrontation that occurred there in 480 BC comes to us from the writings of Herodotus so it is perhaps little wonder that the present perception is distorted and riddled with exaggeration; after all, this was the ‘Father of History’ who regaled his readers with expansive accounts of how the denizens of India used trained ants the size of dogs to mine for gold, and other such flights of fancy. Be that as it may, we still retain the abiding image of the 300 Spartans as noble goodies, laying down their lives for others, and the Persians as deviant baddies who arrived with an army the like of which the world had never seen, only for the 300 to hold them at bay in a narrow pass. Not quite.

The Spartans are much over-eulogized, for they were in reality the most savage and brutal of all their fellow states; they railed against the slavery that the Persians might impose and yet built their very nation on such an institution; no Spartan lad could claim to be a man until he had hacked up a defenceless slave in an annual ritual involving old or troublesome slaves being driven out into the hills so that they could be hunted down and killed by those aspiring to manhood – naturally, heads had to be brought back as proof of the deed. This, combined with institutionalized pederasty involving grown men and boys as young as seven years old, made Sparta a somewhat less than appealing place. Western admiration for Sparta, which seems to be as boundless as it is ill-founded, is curiously persistent; while far more civilized peoples, such as the Vikings and the Germanic tribes, are routinely vilified, the Spartans are almost deified despite their producing no art, no writings and no architecture – just death. But of course, they were Greek and there is vested academic interest in sustaining the myth that the Greeks were a philosophical bunch of aesthetes who invented maths, democracy and personal hygiene instead of a squabbling clutch of self-interested and small-minded states put well and truly in the intellectual and scientific shade by India and the Middle East, both streets ahead in all fields.

At the time of writing, 300 (2007) is the latest cinematic shot-in-the-arm for the spurious reputation of this bunch of homicidal paedophiles who would not have been sporting plumed helmets, matching cloaks, brandishing nice shiny weapons and generally strutting about half-naked and body-oiled; this was a culture at the beginning of its iron-age and would have gone to war looking the part. Films such as 300 also perpetuate the myth that the Persians were the aggressor, attacking Greece without reason or warning whereas Xerxes was on a payback call for the Athenian-backed sacking of the Persian city of Sardis in 498 BC. And what of the numbers involved; many sources talk of the Persian Army numbering over 2 million while good old Herodotus is quite specific with 5,283,220, either figure well beyond what any nation on earth could then muster; Xerxes might have had a force of about 100,000 at best, divided between a land-army and his navy standing offshore in the Straits of Salamis.

As for the so-called 300, this was only the number of Spartans who turned out for the battle, the overall force numbered a great deal more and, for once, Herodotus is down among the more conservative estimates with a figure of 5,200 – Diodorus Siculus puts their number at 7,400 while Pausanias tops the bill with 11,200. Whatever the real total, the home team was made up of soldiers from about a dozen other nation-states, such as Thebes, and a goodly contingent of Thespians, always keen to act in any theatre of war. Although Leonidas and his Spartans did indeed stay until the bitter end, with the total force by then depleted by casualties, desertions and others dismissed by Leonidas at the eleventh hour, those who made the last stand numbered in the region of 1,400 so it is something of a mystery how the Spartans managed to grab all the glory. Naturally, the story is given additional poignancy with the invention of the evil goatherd, Ephialtes, a sly mutant, of course, who sells the heroes out by telling the enemy of a secret path through the rocks which will allow the Persians to out-flank and destroy the men blocking their way. No good yarn is complete without a Judas and this one carried the additional tang of the suggestion that, without such betrayal, the ‘300’ could have held back the ‘millions’ indefinitely. Actually, there was no secret path; both sides were well aware of the Anopaia track which is why Leonidas had stationed over 1,000 Phokians there to prevent any encircling movement; when the Persians did try that route the Phokians were quickly overwhelmed but at least managed to send a runner to Leonidas to let him know that he had been out-flanked. At this point Leonidas dismissed the bulk of his force and elected to remain with about 1,400 to give the others time to get clear; whether he actually knew that this was suicide or simply overestimated his chances is down to conjecture but, either way, it was still a brave act.

That the Persians invaded Greece is beyond dispute but exactly what happened and where it happened is less than clear. The Persians are supposed to have lost countless ships in the naval battles at Salamis yet no wrecks can be found in those very diver-friendly waters. At Thermopylae, we are supposed to believe that upwards of 20,000 Persians and over 2,000 Greeks died, the former being buried in mass graves by Xerxes, the rest left to rot. Strange then is it not that archaeologists have not been able to find anything more than arrowheads and spear-tips in numbers suggesting something less than such a concerted military action spanning several days. As for the mass graves of so many men, these too have so far eluded detection. But Thermopylae has been the scene of several conflicts so it is perhaps not that easy to determine which weapon fragments came from which confrontation and who was firing at whom – there were quite a few Greek-on-Greek conflicts at Thermopylae so all involved would have been using similar weapons and arrows. In 353 BC, Philip II of Macedon was denied the pass and in 279 BC a coalition of Greeks – Aetolians, Boeotians and Athenians – re-grouped to hold the pass against a Gallic army under Brennus who also knew of the so-called ‘secret path’ and used it to outflank the defenders of the pass who only just managed to escape in boats waiting in the nearby sea. In 191 BC, Antiochus III tried in vain to hold the pass against the Romans and, in more recent times, the Greeks yet again found themselves at Thermopylae, this time trying to hold back 8,000 Turks marching down from Thessaly. The last battle of Thermopylae happened in 1941 with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) forces holding back the Germans long enough for the British to evacuate their forces to Crete.

Finally, the modern geography of the place must be addressed, as tourists visiting the site expecting to seek a narrow and rocky stricture are going to be disappointed. Since the 480 BC stand, nature has been at work for 2,500 years leaving the site so dramatically altered by marine erosion and alluvial fan deposit that the sea is 4 miles further out than it was in Leonidas’ day. All the modern visitor can see are some rather unimpressive hills with a vast expanse of scrubland stretching from their feet out to the sea. In Leonidas’ day there was a coastal road abutting the foot of those hills, running in a narrow cut between the hills and a strip of land before the shore. The hills and that coastal strip did indeed then present a narrow pass which, in several places, was only wide enough to allow the passage of a single cart.

HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN TONIGHT

The Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 was certainly a major event and one for which some hold Nero responsible. His plans to remodel the city, with a sumptuous new palace for himself, had been baulked at by the Senate, so the popular conception was that he burned the city to the ground to scotch any further objection. He was certainly mad enough to have done such a thing but all the indications run to the contrary. If not an accident waiting to happen in the prevailing conditions at the time of hot, dry weather and strong winds, then it could indeed have been the Christians, as alleged by Nero.

The fire is known to have started in the shops lining the Circus Maximus and, from there took off like a startled gazelle, moving swiftly through the city to destroy ten of the fourteen districts in its six-day rampage. The first hint of Nero’s involvement in any arson comes from the writings of Tacitus who would have been nine years old at the time and had been born into the Roman elite, a stratum of society which not only hated Nero but also lost the most in the fire. Tacitus concentrates on what he claims to have been the implausibility of the fire spreading unaided from the wooden hovels of the poor to the stone-built homes of the rich and razing them so efficiently; gangs of arsonists simply had to have been involved, he reasoned. Leading Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini, related to the British horror-actor Christopher (Carandini) Lee, tends to agree: ‘Everything was destroyed. There was not a single house standing. All the houses [of the aristocracy] were destroyed so they didn’t have a proper place to live.’ Only the mall in the middle of the Forum remained but that was quickly taken over as a commercial market: ‘built on top of aristocratic Rome … so it was, in a way, the end of the power of the aristocracy in Rome.’ While all that is undoubtedly true, this only leaves us with a bunch of disgruntled aristos with a grievance but no proof of who started the fire that burned them out.