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.

Many in China, it seems, think that western reporters are whipping up Tibetan protests and exaggerating the risk so that the games will be judged  a failure.

If the Beijing Olympics are a flop then the British ones in 2012 will be a hit - despite the almost inevitability that the British Airways T5 fiasco this week will set the standard for movements in people and polevaults around London.

So, it is said, that we want them to fail. We want Beijing to be remembered for death-embracing buddhists rather than death-defying feats in the synchronised swimming centre.

Thus all the more does China want its games not just to be successful but to be reported as a success. According to a remarkable report in The Times this morning, some adverse coverage of Tibetan matters has already led to its correspondent being dubbed the most hated woman in the country.

Oh dear. It doesn't seem to me that  are going much to improve. Most British TV viewers may still think that the Dalai Lama is a Disney zoo animal. But, when it comes to the summer, they'll find the women's small-bore a bigger bore.

I said last week that the Chinese should read their Lucian, the second-century satirist who watched the immolation of the cynic-christian Peregrinus Proteus at the 165 AD games.

His account  is very encouraging for those with a dim view of protesters trying to distract attention from honest athletics.

Some in the Olympic audience that year took Peregrinus's side. But most did not.

And Lucian's verdict on the games themselves?

They were wonderful.

Like many who will be in Beijing this summer, he was a veteran Olympics attender.

The ones where Peregrinus Proteus set fire to himself were the finest he had ever witnessed.

Comments

[Susan Balée]

In Lucian's day, they obviously liked their meat strong and their spectacles bloody. Did anyone back then ever get Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, I wonder? Or is that a modern concept they'd have found risible?

History fascinates me, because even when we know certain verifiable facts (Peregrinus' immolation), we are still trapped in our own time. We can never really inhabit the mindset of the people in that past moment and so remain on our side of the great divide of time, sundered from our forebears by their alien sensibilities.

I believe that's why ancient texts resonate in some eras but not others. Or certain texts in some eras, not others. It's because history is always about now, never about then. For me, a resonant text is Marguerite of Navarre's "Heptameron." Those tales about the behavior of men and women sound surprisingly modern. Perhaps love is the one arena where we haven't changed much for hundreds of years.