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Response to Athens Dialogues: Stories and Histories; Buxton and Hunter
One striking point to me in the presentations of Richard Buxton and Richard Hunter concerns our leaders today who dare to wear the ancient trappings of heroism and divinity.
Heroes, we're told, have good childhood stories. Tony Blair in Britain produced an autobiography this year in which he described his standing up to a school bully, aged ten: 'I told him if he didn't stop I'd hit him and he could see I meant it because I did'. No one, as far as I know, has ever heard this story before, but it was well designed to show the early stages of the heroism he would later display, as he saw it, against Saddam Hussein.
Gods have birth stories. In their beginning is their whole existence. Blair strengthened this divine picture by emphasising in his book – even more than he had at the time – that 9-11 was a new beginning, a kind of new birth at which he was present fully formed. Unlike George Bush, he could not use the full-on claim that he was 'born again' in the evangelical Christian sense or even that recognising his alcoholism gave him a new birth. George W. Bush's autobiography this year begins with his last drink. Everything before that was before his birth as a great leader.
Bill Clinton, lest we are tempted to be partisan about this, describes meanwhile how 'early on the morning of August 19, 1946 I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm'.
Clear modern divine birth stories are rare. You have to be a Greek, perhaps, like Nick Papandreou, writing about his grandfather's birth in the Erymanthean mountains. George Papandreou Senior's first task in life was fighting the umbilical coils around his neck, and emerging victorious, just like Hercules against the snakes in his cradle. Was the grandson being ironic? I don't know. The parallel stands regardless.
We are allowed to judge heroes. It's much harder with the would-be divines. Blair's and Bush's struggles had no ends. They were timeless, wars without ends, theses that could never be judged right or wrong (at least not by them). This made them blast-proof – in their own minds.
Damian Sutton's contribution on the role and responsibility of the political photographer strikes chords with any, who as I have, has watched politicians close up for so long. On some days, the preparations for the Iraq War, as I saw it inside Downing Street, was one long application of make-up. Berlusconi wore his all the time.
Last year in Britain we had an election. Next year a royal wedding. In both cases, David Cameron or Kate Middleton, we expect the photographers to tell us all, we trust them more than writers, to get beneath the skin, to see the warts and dig below them. We do that, whether the photographer wants it, seeks it, or tries to avoid it.
Plato has a contribution to make, Damian Sutton describes. But I was also reminded of another Greek, Poplios Papinios Statios, who described the first ever camera in literature, in Silvae 3.4, a magic mirror that would freeze the image of Domitian's beautiful boy slave Earinus. Sensibly the slave asks the gods to freeze the face of his master too in perpetual youth. How much would Blair or Berlusconi give for one of those.
Two final points:
The first on Richard Hunter and the origins of Dodd's The Greeks and the Irrational . On the neuro-scientific aspects: we may get to grips with them at another session, I'd simply note the fascination in London right now with Iain McGilchrist's book, The Master and his Emissary , which traces the supremacy of Greek pre-Socratic observation and thought to the proper balance of right and left sides – and the damage, as he sees it, done by excessive rationalism and idealism as taught by Plato and his successors.
As for the marbles issue itself, the most important thing about that anecdote for me is that the recorded conversation happened – like much else in these debates – in the British Museum, the place where the marbles were seen in their transforming glory for the first time and not here in Athens where they were hardly visible at all. To many of us in Britain that is a core justification for their remaining in the British Museum – in the place where their art has acted as art.