Bad bad beef dis!

I have finally made my peace with The Bafut Beagles. It has taken fifty years, but I have laid the ghost to rest.

As a young teenager — probably a twelve-year-old, I think — I was made to read The Bafut Beagles at school by a terrifying old walrus who went by the name of Mister Porter. It was the prescribed book for Second Year English class.

I did not enjoy the experience.

Not even the charming line drawings by animal-illustrator Ralph Thompson could persuade me to like this book (and the rather creepy cover did not help).

So for half a century, I have avoided thinking about it entirely.

Now we walka good

I recently came across a copy and decided to give it another chance, and — I must admit — I really don’t know why I disliked it so much.

Besides the interspersal of largely unintelligible pidgin English (“If we go meet bad beef how we go kill um if we go lef’ our gun for dis place?” — “I go take gun. Den if beef go kill me it no be your palaver, you hear?”), the story is simple and engaging.

Gerald Durrell arrives in Cameroon in 1949, in order to collect exotic animals to sell to British zoos. He bases his operation in the remote and picturesque setting of Bafut, a traditional kingdom ruled by a Fon, and hires a small team of four local hunters, who are inordinately proud of the new name he gives them (“you no savvay dat I be Bafut Beagle?”).

Naturally, for a book written about Africans by an Englishman in the 1950s, there is an unconsciously racist undercurrent.

The Fon of Bafut, who rules the area, is a caricature of a gin-drinking fogy with several wives who are “all naked except for meagre loin-cloths”; his people are simple-minded folk who mistake western medicine for sorcery. The scene of an old woman berating a Bafutian man for beating a young woman in the road is dismissed as “an ordinary domestic upheaval with the usual ingredients of an erring wife, a hungry husband, an uncooked dinner, and an interfering mother-in-law”.

The “Beagles” get into various scrapes as they attempt to fulfil Durrell’s wish-list of animals, in return for “dash” and cigarettes. And when Durrell finally ships his menagerie home, he doesn’t seem too perturbed that all but one of his pygmy flying squirrels have perished from starvation en route, owing to their specialized diet.

A curious book, all in all. Definitely a product of its times. But quite why the Scottish Education Department of the 1970s thought that this was suitable literature for teenaged children is baffling.

A troublesome diploma

I have been reading Bürokratie und Politik in der römischen Kaiserzeit by Werner Eck, Emeritus Professor at Cologne University. I only just became aware of it, although it appeared in 2012.

It’s a short book. Although supposedly 100 pages long, I calculated that there are actually only 58 pages of text, owing to the positioning of the 21 illustrations and the generous allocation of “white space”. And to my considerable dismay, after I parted with £23.99 for the privilege of reading it, I discovered that the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library has made the book freely available online!

On the plus side, Professor Eck usually has something interesting to say, and he doesn’t usually charge 40 pence per page to say it. However, he is also guilty of that irritating crime, republishing the same material repeatedly under different guises.

A mysterious provincial governor

The bulk of the book, as it turns out, is a discussion of the curious events surrounding the elevation of the emperor Trajan in AD 97/98. It is a fascinating story, but it’s one that Eck already told in 2002, first in more popularizing style in the lavish Traian: Ein Kaiser der Superlative am Beginn einer Umbruchzeit? volume, and second (in English) in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin. And it’s one that he continues to tell, this time in Italian, in Epigraphica Volume 84 (2022). The latter is freely available online.

Research marches on, of course. Although the tale remains the same, I did notice that the Epigraphica version (written 10 years after the book) sports another piece of evidence for the extraordinary honorific title exercitus Germanicus pia fidelis — p. 149 note 49, if you’re interested — and on p. 152, Professor Eck has quietly acknowledged that he jumped the gun in placing Tiberius Julius Candidus Marius Celsus in Lower Moesia in AD 97.

Don’t we deserve an explanation?

To be fair, he never explained this properly in Bürokratie pp. 68–69, where he simply cited CIL XVI 41, a small diploma fragment of January AD 97 naming the governor of “[Moesia inferior]e” as “Julius Mar[--”. It should be plain to everyone that (a) this might not be Lower Moesia, and (b) this might not be Julius Candidus Marius Celsus. However, there was clearly much more going on at the back of Eck’s mind in 2012 than he let on.

When the godfather of diploma studies, Herbert Nesselhauf, published CIL XVI 41 in 1936, he only suggested Lower Moesia because the diploma had been discovered in the territory of that province. But as for Julius Mar[--’s identity, Dr Leiva Petersen, compiling the J fascicule of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani in 1966, invented “Lucius Julius Marinus ..?”, whom she suggested as the father of the homonymous consul of AD 101.

It was only some years later, in 1985, that Karl Strobel (then a 30-year-old researcher, now an Emeritus Professor) suggested that the governor might actually be Tiberius Julius Candidus Marius Celsus. He had reasonably good grounds for this. The word placing on the fragment suggested to him that the scribes had been obliged to squeeze the required information onto the bronze plate. In this case, it seemed reasonable to suppose that the polyonymous governor’s name might have been drastically abbreviated to “Julius Marius”, perhaps with “Candidus” on the next line. Eck tells us none of this.

But which province?

At around the same time, the province was thrown into doubt, as the governor of Lower Moesia in the mid-90s was known to have been Sextus Octavius Fronto, attested there in June AD 92 and in September AD 97. Upper Moesia was then suggested, which would fit “[Moesia superior]e” equally well, and there is a gap in the later AD 90s where the governor remains unknown. However, by 2005, another diploma of Upper Moesia dating from AD 97 had come to light, casting doubt on this new attribution, since it would have been highly irregular, not to say downright impossible, for two diploma issues for the same province within the same year.

As early as 2006, Paul Holder had suggested that our Julius Mar[-- could only have governed Upper or Lower Germany, being the only two alternatives that, in the context of AD 97, would fit the name of a province ending in E: “[Germania superior]e”, for example. And yet, Trajan himself is known to have been governor of Upper Germany in AD 97, while his colleague Lucius Licinius Sura is known to have been in charge of Lower Germany at the same time. The problem seemed intractable.

Currently, the only solution seems to be to return to Upper Moesia and to assume that something unusual had happened, occasioning the granting of privileges to soldiers twice in one year. Perhaps Eck will tell us in a future (hopefully not as expensive) publication.

Odysseus or Ulysses - what’s in a name?

Recent talk of Odysseus and Ralph Fiennes’ The Return brought to mind a book that I purchased as a schoolboy in 1974 from the Scholastic Corporation Book Club.

It was The Adventures of Ulysses, by the American author Bernard Evslin (who evidently adapted quite a few ancient myths for children), and — fifty years on — it still sits on my bookshelf.

Although Homer begins the Odyssey “in medias res” (“in the midst of things”) and incorporates a flashback in which Odysseus narrates the earlier part of the tale, Evslin had decided to tell the story in its correct chronological order.

In this, Evslin was simply following the simplifying technique pioneered by Charles Lamb in his own Adventures of Ulysses in 1808. But Evslin managed to make his version more exciting for Generation X readers.

A new retelling

At the start, where Lamb, following Homer, relates how the Lotus-eaters benignly drugged Odysseus’ men, so that, in order to escape, “Ulysses caused them to be bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches, and set sail with all possible speed from that baneful coast”, Evslin devises an entire storyline of his own.

Under the influence of the lotus drug, Morpheus, god of dreams, interprets the terrible nightmares of the survivors of the Trojan War, and describes Ulysses’ own prophetic visions: “Look at that giant with the single eye in the middle of his forehead, and that terrible spider-woman with all those legs. Ah, the things he dreams, this angry sleeper. What bloody mouths, what masts falling, sails ripping, what rocks and reefs, what shipwrecks ... how many deaths?”

Beautiful illustrations

Part of the charm of Evslin’s book came from the illustrations, attributed to a certain William Hunter. (I would love to think that this was the Glaswegian artist William Hunter, but he would have been aged 79 when Evslin’s book was first published.) Each chapter has its own Aubrey Beardsleyesque pen-and-ink drawing, all of them utterly beguiling, and the book begins with a beautifully decorated map (see above).

But it would be wrong to ignore Evslin’s own genius for storytelling. Take the episode of the giant Laestrygonians, to which Homer devotes some 20-odd lines. Lamb, in a single page, relates how these giants “issued out at the gates and, making for the harbour, tore up huge pieces of rocks and flung them at the ships which lay there, all which they utterly overwhelmed and sank, and the unfortunate bodies of men which the sea did not devour these cannibals bore off to their dire feast”. Ulysses alone escaped to his own ship. But Evslin has a whole chapter entitled “Cannibal Beach” — a delight for a twelve-year-old reader.

Who is the hero?

It never occurred to me to ask why the Odysseus of my Penguin Classics Odyssey was here named “Ulysses”. And, down through the years — fifty years! — I have simply accepted that Ulysses was “the Latin form of Odysseus’ name”. So Agamemnon is Agamemnon, Menelaus is Menelaus, Achilles is Achilles, ... but Odysseus is Ulysses? Why?

The true explanation is complicated. It seems that, in the earliest form of his name, the D (Δ in Greek) alternates with L (Λ in Greek), so that the familiar Greek Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus) could appear as Ὀλυσευς (Olyseus) — as in this Greek “Skyphos” vase from the Oxford Beazley collection, showing Olyseus running before the North wind Borias. From Olyseus, it is a short step to Ulyseus or Ulysses.

In fact, the Romans more usually called him Ulixes! Strange but true. Meanwhile, Ajax remained Ajax, Diomedes Diomedes, and Nestor Nestor. But Odysseus became Ulysses.

Returning to Ithaca

I am very much looking forward to seeing Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, a movie based on the last 10 chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, despite the verdict of Deborah Ross (in The Spectator) that “the narrative is so parched and meditative it’s ultimately enervating and seems as depressed as the hero himself”.

According to an interview for The Guardian, Fiennes (who plays the part of Odysseus) remembers his mother reading the adventure story to him when he was a child, but he singled out Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation as having inspired him.

Pasolini, on the other hand, has credited an original screenplay written in the 1990s by the late Edward Bond and subsequently adapted by John Collee (known for, among other movies, Master and Commander and, more recently, Lee).

Homer in translation

I found myself wondering which Odyssey Bond and Collee (and Fiennes, for that matter) had grown up with.

As a schoolboy, my Odyssey was the 1946 Penguin Classics version by classicist (and founder of the Penguin Classics series) E.V. Rieu, which was continuously reprinted throughout the 1960s. His opening stanza — “The hero of the tale which I beg the Muse to help me tell is that resourceful man who roamed the wide world after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy” — is, as Rieu promised, a faithful but easy-to-read prose translation, for Rieu was no poet.

I also owned a childhood copy of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of 1965, which seemed at once more epic and more poetic than Rieu’s. Here is his opening stanza — “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven | far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel” — in which he unobtrusively gave each line six down-beats, to approximate Homer’s dactylic hexameter (itself impossible to reproduce in English).

Sadly, Lattimore’s translation was savagely disparaged by critics who preferred Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version. The essayist and translator Donald Carne-Ross was particularly waspish in his championing of Fitzgerald over Lattimore: Fitzgerald’s was poetry, while all that Lattimore could aspire to was mere verse.

Here is Fitzgerald’s opening stanza: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story | of that man skilled in all ways of contending, | the wanderer, harried for years on end, | after he plundered the stronghold | on the proud height of Troy”.

It’s poetry, but is it Homer? At university in the 1980s, I finally encountered the 1919 Loeb edition by Professor A.T. Murray. Like Rieu, Murray had attempted a prose version that stuck faithfully to the Greek. (What Carne-Ross would probably have called a “student crib”.)

Here is his opening stanza: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy”. Better than Rieu, but I still preferred Lattimore.

Throughout the twentieth century, translations came and went. (I wasn’t even aware of the version by Oliver Taplin, whose Greek Fire I reviewed for The Sunday Times thirty-odd years ago.) I have only recently discovered the version produced in 1932 by T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and was dismayed to see his cavalier treatment of the text. (He omits the opening stanza entirely.)

The zenith seemed to have been reached in 1996 with the poetic translation of Robert Fagles. Here is his first stanza:

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns | driven time and again off course, once he had plundered | the hallowed heights of Troy”. This was surely an Odyssey to end all Odysseys. Surely?

But publishers have their profits to make and new generations to seduce, and new incentives to exploit, too. Which brings us around to Ralph Fiennes and his innocent plug for the latest Odyssey, the version of Emily Wilson published in 2018, “the first translation”, so Norton and Co. inform us, “of the Homeric Greek by a woman into English verse”. Astonishing. “A cultural landmark”, we are informed, “that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem”. So, is it any good?

Here is her first stanza: “Tell me about a complicated man. | Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost | when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy ...”. Wilson actually runs onto the second stanza, which the manuscripts separate with a semi-colon. But, hey-ho. It’s poetry.

Incidentally, the epithet πολύτροπος (polytropos) which Homer uses to identify his protagonist, indeed to introduce him, perhaps to define him — “man of many devices”, “resourceful man”, “the man of many ways” — is probably meant to sum up Odysseus’ cunning. I’m not sure that Fitzgerald’s “man skilled in all ways of contending” quite hits the mark. Or, indeed, Wilson’s “complicated man”. No, that just won’t do.

But I’m still looking forward to The Return, for, as Fagles observed in his book, the Odyssey stops but never really ends.

The other Melsonby hoard

The Melsonby Hoard has hit the news.

The find was unveiled this week, having undergone years of cleaning, conservation, and analysis following its excavation in 2022.

It apparently comprises Iron Age feasting equipment (a large decorated cauldron is mentioned) and copious quantities of harness fittings and vehicle parts, which the archaeologists have attributed to four-wheeled wagons, rather than the expected two-wheeled chariots.

We are informed that the material “could rewrite Iron Age Britain”. Sensational stuff! A statement from Historic England explains that the find “alters our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.” And one science journal claims that it “challenges centuries-old ideas about wealth, power, and identity in ancient northern Britain”. Quite significant, then.

Oddly, the BBC relegated the story to its Newsround web site for children, but other news outlets seem to have taken the discovery more seriously, even if equally melodramatically, with liberal use of superlatives.

Surprising?

The find is undoubtedly exciting, and some of the metalwork seems awe-inspiring. But is it about to “rewrite Iron Age Britain”?

Forty-odd years ago, I was fortunate to be in on the ground floor, when the real rewriting began. As an archaeology undergraduate at Glasgow University searching for a suitable subject for a dissertation (and keen to avoid Agricolan Scotland, which was flavour of the day in the 1980s), I selected the pre-Agricolan period, when the emperor Vespasian’s governors were coming to grips with northern England, the rich lands of the Brigantes, in the early to mid AD 70s.

Royal capital of a wealthy nation

We have always known something of the Roman interactions with the Brigantes during the AD 70s. The historian Tacitus chronicled the internecine squabbling that necessitated Roman intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Queen Cartimandua. Archaeologists and historians had sought Cartimandua’s capital around York (site of the future Roman fortress) or further south on a low hilltop at Barwick-in-Elmet. (See map, above, from my 1983 dissertation.)

As I embarked on my undergraduate research, the sprawling archaeological site of Stanwick immediately caught my attention — a massive earthwork complex extending across 350ha, which had been selectively excavated in the 1950s by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (amongst whose assistants was a certain Leslie Alcock, who became Professor of Archaeology at Glasgow University in 1973).

Here is the plan I drew for my dissertation (with Barwick inset at top-left for comparison). Incidentally, Melsonby lies barely 1km beyond the bottom righthand corner of the earthworks.

Stanwick was then generally accepted as the headquarters of Cartimandua’s rebel consort Venutius, who (so the story went) fled north to avoid the Romans. Amongst the rich material already found there was a hoard, mainly of harness fittings but including a sword and scabbard, the so-called “Stanwick Hoard”, uncovered in 1843 at — did you guess where? — Melsonby. But it seemed to me, particularly after discussions with the Durham archaeologist Perce Turnbull (now deceased), that the enormous, apparently wealthy site (around which Perce generously drove me at sometimes alarming speed, with the gearbox of his Morris Minor grinding and screaming atrociously) was not Venutius’ base, but could only be the royal capital of Queen Cartimandua herself.

Quite apart from the contents of the original Melsonby hoard (the “Stanwick Hoard”), the imported Roman material discovered on the site by Turnbull in 1981 surely hinted at this conclusion. (I well remember that my one and only conversation with Professor Leslie Alcock, during the five or six years I spent in his Department of Archaeology — the only time I ever entered his spacious office — concerned his disagreement with my reinterpretation of the site, which he took to be disrespectful to the work of Wheeler.)

It amuses me to reflect that, in my unpublished 1983 dissertation, I was probably the first to identify Stanwick as Queen Cartimandua’s capital. It is true that Turnbull, in 1982, had described Stanwick as “a major social and economic centre, which probably owed its success, if not its very existence, to the enormously increased opportunities for external trade which must have been afforded by the proximity of an expanding Roman world”. But it took several years before archaeologist Colin Haselgrove (if memory serves me correctly) started to talk in terms of Cartimandua’s royal seat. Even in his 2016 book, The late Iron Age royal site at Stanwick, North Yorkshire, he still defended Wheeler’s interpretation — Wheeler had “valid enough geographical reasons for placing Venutius at Stanwick” — while acknowledging that “there is no site in northern England more obviously qualified than Stanwick to be the seat of a ruler who had a treaty with Rome”. (I still wonder why he balks at naming Cartimandua.)

The new Melsonby hoard is a wonderful find, without question, but hardly unexpected, hardly surprising, and it won’t lead to a “rewrite” of Iron Age Britain. It is frankly baffling that, in this day and age, archaeologists should talk in terms of “challenging the idea that ancient northern Britain was a backwater”. That idea died forty years ago.

Gallienus and his battle cavalry

The emperor Gallienus ruled the Roman empire for fifteen years, from AD 253 until his murder in AD 268, and yet he is hardly known outside academic circles. To put his achievement into context, both Claudius and Nero each ruled for thirteen-and-a-half years, Commodus only twelve.

Admittedly, Septimius Severus reigned for eighteen years, Trajan managed eighteen-and-a-half, Hadrian almost twenty-one, and Antoninus Pius nearly twenty-three.

But the emperors of the third century were generally more ephemeral. Elagabalus reigned for four years; Gordian III, five-and-a-half; Philip the Arab, four-and-a-half; Decius, barely two. In this company, fifteen years is an impressive tally. And yet, for a long time, Gallienus was belittled by scholars.

A good or a bad emperor?

From Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776) until Theodor Mommsen’s Die Provinzen von Caesar bis Diocletian (1885), Gallienus was berated as “chaotic and dissolute”. But then, quite abruptly at the outset of the twentieth century, he was suddenly hailed as a brilliant military reformer who had created a rapid action unit of “battle cavalry” to defend the hard-pressed frontiers. So, was this new characterization of Gallienus justified?

Careful sifting of the ancient Greek sources by Léon Homo in a 1903 essay had certainly rehabilitated the emperor’s besmirched reputation to a large degree, but for Alfred von Domaszewski, author of the influential Rangordnung der römischen Heeres in 1908, Gallienus became “that most wondrous of emperors”.

From that time onwards, scholars were convinced that Gallienus was a military genius who had overhauled the Roman army system. This was the gist of the 1976 dissertation by Lukas de Blois, which remained for a long time everyone’s go-to book about Gallienus. Even into the new millennium, we still read about Gallienus’ sweeping military reforms. One writer has been so bold as to subtitle his book “the apogee of Roman cavalry” in a reference to the emperor’s newly created “battle cavalry”.

How had this happened? And — more importantly — was it true? These are the questions that I address in my forthcoming book Phantom Horsemen.

More Roman military diplomas

I have just received my copy of Roman Military Diplomas VI, hot off the University of London press, in which another 179 diplomas are catalogued (nos. 477–655), continuing the series begun in 1978 by the late Margaret Roxan (Roman Military Diplomas 1954–1977, nos. 1–78). (In a break from tradition, the pagination has not been continued from previous volumes, and begins at p. 1.)

Margaret passed the baton to Paul Holder in 2002, owing to her failing health, when Roman Military Diplomas IV was imminent. It is hard to believe that the previous volume of the series, Roman Military Diplomas V (nos. 323–476), appeared as long ago as 2006, but I understand that there were difficulties in arranging publication of the new volume.

Besides a description and transcription of each individual diploma, the usual additional material has been included.

First, a table of “Diplomas in RMD VI”, in which the diplomas are arranged in date order and run from 7 March AD 70 (no. 477, a complete sealed example of a Legio II Adiutrix diploma, pictured below but currently lost) to 7 January AD 252/253 (no. 655, a corner fragment of tabella I of a Praetorian diploma).

Next, the “Revised chronology of the diplomas published up to RMD VI”, integrating nos. 477–655 in their proper places. (Holder says there are 840 listed; I haven’t counted them.) As before, RMD numbers are prefixed with a † symbol, to differentiate from the original CIL XVI diplomas.

There are 14 pages of “Further Notes on the Chronology”, highlighting any issues raised in the interim regarding previously published diplomas. In particular, Holder notes that there is a new “last positive date” for an auxiliary diploma; namely, AD 206, from AE 2012, 1960 (not included in this volume, which catalogues only those diplomas reported up to 2007).

The end matter includes the usual indices, and a complete concordance with AE (and with the diplomas of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, already published by Barbara Pferdehirt in 2004) has been added. Unfortunately, only four diplomas are illustrated, one of which also appears as the cover image (no. 639, damaged witness list on tabella II).

I very much look forward to perusing this volume at my leisure, and sincerely hope that a suitable publisher can be found for Roman Military Diplomas VII.