Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Olympic flames (Part Two)

Can you have a successful Olympics if martyr monks get more attention than the athletes?

In the 'everything-has-to-be-perfect' mood of Beijing it seems not.

What happened in 165 AD, a Chinese correspondent asks, when the religious protester, Peregrinus Proteus, burnt himself to death at Olympia? (see previous post)

Did it affect the festival? Was it still a good event?

Passions are running high on this point.

Burn me at the Olympics

Perhaps the Chinese should just chill out at the prospect of Tibetan monks planning to burn themselves to death at the Olympics.

If Olympic torch and yellow scarf get too hotly entwined this summer, the Beijing spokesmen might remind TV viewers how it was just the same in the old bourgeois games.

Publicity-seeking religious zealot threatens to immolate himself between the boxing ring and the race track.

And does so. Whoosh. Just another day's event in 165 AD.

Peregrinus Proteus was the monkish pyromane of his day.

He was a Roman prisoner-of-conscience who for some reason never quite made it to being a martyr.

He had killed his father - which perhaps turned some of the top christians against him.

Anyway, he lit his own funeral pyre - and departed the stadium in his own chosen way.

The Chinese might cheerfully note that, unlike the Buddhists of today, Peregrinus never got a good press for his pains.

The only account of his immolation to have survived comes from a delightfully hostile source, Lucian, the second century Syrian writer who claimed to have been an eywitness to these unofficial Olympic flames.

Peregrinus, it was said, had only became a Christian in the first place so that he could get rich and famous. Doubtless (since we are talking Olympic propaganda here) this was an outrageous slur.

Whatever his motives, he gave four years warning of his intentions, got everybody excited, and did not disappoint.

He said he wanted to put a 'golden tip on a golden life'.

His colour coordination had a sure touch of the Lhasa style.

Anthony Minghella's ice cream

'Gelato for tonsils'.

Ice cream for a tonsil operation.

It's a phrase in the early pages of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, a fine novel made more famous by the multi-Oscar-winning film of Anthony Minghella, the ice-cream seller's son from the Isle of Wight who died from an operation for tonsil cancer today.

The news bulletins in Britain and America show the shock at an early and unexpected death.

Minghella was one of the great British artists of our time, that very rare thing, a writer who set Hollwood records as a director and was still a writer first.

I did not know him. I met him only once.

But we long-time cancer-survivors still get superstitious about this sort of thing.

I'm left tonight with those words which he must have read so long ago when he was well.

'Gelato for tonsils'.

Bizarre? Yes.

Bad loss? Yes too.

Blair, Bush and Iraq: Five more years

March 13, 2013

"What did you do in the war, grandaddy?"

"Well, TEN years ago, I sat in Downing Street and Camp David and Hillsborough Castle watching President Blair (and some not very keen colleagues, right) try to remake the world as he would have liked it to be".

"What exactly did you do yourself?"

"If you read The Times this morning, you will find out."

"Do you always write a piece when there's a birthday for the Iraq War?"

"It seems like it".

"Well, in 2007 I went back to see the Iraqi women who had warned Mr Blair (as he was then) how Baghdad politics wasn't quite like the Westminster kind. He didn't want to know. It was in The Times Magazine. Our friend, Gill Morgan, was the editor and godmother of the project.

Then in 2008, I looked back at my notes and wrote about how everyone in Downing Street as the war came nearer talked about football all the time.

Look it up."

And after that, there were tens of thousands of words in those blue files over there, one for each of my Thirty Days.

It was a long time before newspapers grew tired of remembering Tony Blair and George W. Bush and the things they tried to do.

Was the President of Europe on our side then, grandaddy?

"Tony Blair was only British Prime Minister in 2003. So yes, he was on our side. It's a bit hard to explain."

First blind politico

Before everyone gets too excited about the blindness of David Paterson, the new governor of New York (not a disability first for US politics by any means), we might remember that the first political personality in all of Roman history was also blind.

Appius Claudius Caecus is most famous for overseeing the Appian Way, the first 'Roman road'.

But he made democratic history in 312 BC by promoting slaves' sons over aristocrats to the Roman senate.

Critics point out that he kept the priesthood posh. But he was a worthy forerunner for today's new Democratic man.

He is the first real character who comes to life in the history of Rome.

David Paterson himself comes nicely to life in this on-the-Clinton-stump encounter with The Times.

Caecus also made the first political speech in Latin of which we have any decent record - a  prototype of the 'no surrender' rhetoric which is still with us - though not to be heard anymore from former New York governor, Eliot Spitzer, who has had to surrender his office to Mr Paterson for buying expensive prostitution.

Caecus was blinded because of a 'curse' it was said.

His own best known saying - also still with us and expecially so in New York this week, is that "every man is the architect of his own fortune".

Quisque faber fortunae suae - if anyone wants to write it on a subway wall.

So potent was religion in persuading . . .

This year’s Olympics organisers must be inviting only sinophile sinologists, I suppose.

So there’s been no invitation to me yet to discuss the state of life and letters in mysterious parts of China before the drug-fuelled runners, jumpers and strutters do their stuff in Beijing this Summer.

Too bad.  I guess that we TLS classicists have already had our turn.

Four years ago, in the weeks before the Athens Olympics, we had our tour buses to Delphi and our talk of this and that, formally on the theme of why once upon a time Greek literature was the greatest thing and why hardly anyone read what Greek writers wrote today at all.

Seamus Heaney was with us. And another much valued contributor of poems to the TLS, the American poet, Rachel Hadas.

But the poet I remember best from those day was one I didn’t know before at all.

Soho, ring-marked and a little soiled

He once stole Iris Murdoch's typewriter because his need, he said, was greater than hers.

He made most of his money from exploiting his friendship with George Orwell - and he hated the truth of that.

When the poet Paul Potts died in 1990 the Times obituarist noted his Dante Called You Beatrice as 'one of the most truly romantic confessions of the century', noting, however, that 'the prose becomes the poetry he feared he could not write'.

Potts was a disappointed man of Soho in an age when disappointed artists famously filled the places that money-splashing tourists fill now.

Before the days of street pornography - that advance celebrated everywhere  in the obituaries of Paul Raymond who died this week - there were pubs where poets hawked their wares and lived off alcohol and each other.

Such is the accepted version of what went on. And alongside Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas and George Barker at the bar there was Paul Potts.

He is often described as born in Canada but was instead a man of Datchet.

He is most remembered now for poetic failure and being  'irascible and light fingered'. It does not do to steal a lady novelist's typewriter.

His name does appear sometimes when some other Soho bohemian dies -  when those typewriter-and-Orwell stories turn up in the life of a film-director who did not make many films but drank alot and was memorably attractive to women.

Fortunately it is not just the death of Paul Raymond who brings old Soho to mind.

An unusual catalogue has arrived from the bookseller-writer, James Fergusson, offering 'two working manuscript notebooks' by Potts with a 'further archive of typescripts, manuscripts, letters &c [1939-48]. . ring-marked and a little soiled'.

Fergusson describes Dante called you Beatrice as an 'extraordinary hymn to unrequited love' while noting, as is de rigeur for the Soho school of failure, that it 'was intended to be a new Unquiet Grave'.

His short bill of sale is a contribution to literary scholarship in itself - as is the rest of the catalogue in which it appears, a memorial to the Oxford bookseller, Robin Waterfield , whose biographical sketch by Fergusson, not available online as far as I can see, is a thing of bald beauty.

The catalogue is available from jamesfergusson@btinternet.com, price £5.

The price for the Pottsiana?

£1,750.

Which in pre-Paul-Raymond days  would have whiskied-and-watered its author for months.

Edith and the Odyssey

Everyone should have another world.

Everyone should have another  place, imagined, created, recreated, where they feel at home.

I had thought that one of mine was Homer's Odyssey - and that poem's own odyssey into the modern mind.

I enjoyed reading Alberto Manguel's book on this theme - and spent a gentle hour or so saying so last week to the readers of my friends in the excellent literary section of the Toronto Globe and Mail.

And then this weekend I  began another book  which arrived at the TLS last week.

Erica Wagner at The Times had asked me to look at Edith Hall's 'The Return of Ulysses, a cultural history of Homer's Odyssey'' - and today, Spring-cold by The Thames, I have done just that.

Cheerfully too - although I had planned to spend the time on another Roman part of my 'most comfortable ancient worlds'.

And then fine books on the reception of Homer - like those suitably mythical London buses - always coming in packs.

Never mind.

It is sometimes particularly clear to me why I admire so many classical scholars - and why we appraise so much of their work in the TLS.

Edith Hall's book has added to those reasons.

The range of her inquiry - and its detail, from George W. Bush's odysseys to the mystery of the orgasm and back - adds to my sense of knowing what I already saw, quite wrongly and unreasonably,  as already mine.

And, so far, I have read barely a half of it.