Theology the Viz Way

I came across this a while ago, and having read it to a couple of people, describing each scene as I did, I thought I may as well post it here.

'Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains,' as G.K. Chesterton noted almost a hundred years ago in his copy of Holbrook Jackson's Platitudes in the Making. As such, I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that none of these problems has evaded the consideration of Christian theologians over the years. People have realised that there are certain paradoxes at work.

The efficacy of petitionary prayer, free will and predestination, the purpose of miracles, and overall questions of theodicy -- all these are subjects of debate and theological exercise even today. I'm not saying that they've all been answered, not by a long way -- they'd hardly still be subjects of debate if they were -- just that Christians tend to be aware that their faith isn't always a simple matter. After all, it'd be odd if these issues had entirely slipped the notice of the what GKC described as 'the one intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years.'

So don't worry, it's not as if any of this is news. Contrary to what some people tend to think, being religious doesn't mean being stupid, and shouldn't involve shutting down our intellectual faculties. After all, when Our Lord said he were to be like little children, he was exhorting us towards innocence, not towards ignorance.

A Perfect Sentence

I'm afraid I've not heard much of Goldfrapp's oeuvre, but what I've heard I've liked, especially the incessant pulsating sexiness of their cover version of Baccara's melancholy 1977 dance classic 'Yes Sir, I Can Boogie'.

It seems from today's Guardian that Alison and her sidekick Will Gregory have decided to change direction, a change that the Guardian reckons was inevitable if they weren't to go stale.

When you've appeared on stage playing a theremin with your crotch while dressed as a kind of besequinned Nazi air hostess, as Goldfrapp did after the release of 2005's Supernature, you could reasonably argue that you've explored the possibilities of camply sexualised glam-influenced electro-pop pretty thoroughly.

That may be one of the greatest sentences ever written. It's up there with 'Kat's hamster's called Mouse.'

Mancunian Gargoyles

The trip's gone well so far -- Friday's meeting went about as well as could be hoped for, I think, and I've managed lots of time with my cousins here, and a little with a few friends. I'll be sad to be heading home tomorrow; God alone knows when I'll be back.

Today's been a bit hectic, what with me having tea and catching up with two mates this morning, soup with Jane Petal this afternoon, and in between a long chat with the mysterious figure I euphemistically refer to only as 'The Angel.'

I'm staying out by Manchester's whistling tower this evening, and so making my way here -- post soup -- I lingered a while in Albert Square. No, not that Albert Square. The one in Manchester, you buffoons.

Albert Square is one of the most remarkable places in the city, although I didn't realise how wonderful it was until I was a showing a Canadian friend about and doing so took a stroll through the city almost six years ago.

Albert Square doesn't look English. It looks continental European, far more at more at home in Belgium. A mock-medieval fantasy, this place is Flanders to the core. Go there, and take a look at the great open space with buildings maybe three or four storeys high on three sides, but with one side taken up by the astonishingly disproportionate bulk of Waterhouse's gothic town hall.

Directly in front of the hall's entrance you'll see the Albert Memorial, notable as the only Mancunian statue sheltered from the city's perpetual rain, surely proof in itself of how much Victoria grieved for her dead husband, while off the Cross Street corner of the square you'll see the Victoria Fountain, designed by Thomas Worthington, creator of the Albert Memorial, and erected in 1897 to commemorate the Queen's jubilee. Apparently it had been moved to Heaton Park in the twenties, but after decades of neglect it was restored and returned to its original location in 1997. It's still one of my favourite things in Manchester, not least because of its sneering gargoyles.

I don't talk nearly enough about gargoyles here. I really ought to rectify that.

And what's wrong with the term 'Toast Bitch'?

Having overindulged to a frightening degree last night at Nigella's, I felt that this morning it'd be only prudent in Trof to sample their healthy breakfast; fasting for Lent from eggs, cheese, and butter and its ilk was a factor in my decision, I have to admit, but today being a Sunday it wasn't the decisive one. No, I simply felt some common-or-garden gastronomic virtue was called for, and so had a bowl of yoghurt with honey and fruit, topped with sprinkling of oats, with a glass of orange juice on the side. It was a deliciously healthy start to the day.

For an encore, I spent most of the afternoon drinking water in Solomon's with the Ginger Beast, before being chauffered to St Augustine's for mass, after which I fear I managed to earn nonchalantly the undying hatred of one of our new altar servers.

On then to the Chinese Buffet, there to continue my nostalgic trip through Manchester's culinary establishments, this time in less abstemious fashion than earlier in the day, and then back to the girls' house, there to delight them with some of my favourite Muppet Show scenes ever...


Not quite a top ten, but nonetheless, allow me to introduce 'Ten' Moments of Muppet Genius:

1. There was the infamous 'Muppera' by the Fuzz Brothers -- that's from Season Four, episode Nine, trivia fans, hitherto only featured on the mindbogglingly brilliant Muppet Weird Stuff as presented by The Great Gonzo and available to rent in a video library near you, assuming you live in Frankfurt.

2. Having mentioned everyone's favourite Weirdo, you need to watch him sabotaging Fozzie's attempt at reading Robert Frost's most famous poem and singing the classic 'Act Naturally', not least for apt deployment of the phrase 'ludicrous things'.

3. 'Hugga Wugga' evolved from the Sclrap Flyapp sketch Jim Henson performed on the Today Show in the sixties, but sure -- surely -- it's intended as a comment on repression in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in general? Look at the big red monster with those Brezhnev eyebrows!

4. I don't know if you're a fan of The Thomas Crown Affair whether in its original incarnation or in its more recent Brosnan and Russo version, complete with improbable-sex-on-a cold-marble-stairway sequence, but I'll bet you'll not have seen a better take on 'Windmills of Your Mind' than the Muppets'.

5. Of course, when it comes to upstaging originals, Beaker rather pulled out all the stops with his rendition of what many consider to be the worst song of all time. You should listen to everyone's favourite lab technician attempt 'Feelings' before you rush to the same conclusion. You may just enjoy the funniest two minutes of your life. Hell, it's worth it even for Zoot's sax...

6. Yes, the Muppets had their poignant moments. Take Robin's recitation of A.A. Milne's 'Halfway Down the Stairs', for example. An old girlfriend once asked me whether this was included for all the sensitive boys that used to watch. I could but blush and look abashed.

7. There were a whole subgenre on Muppet songs that were basically crap puns embraced with relish. Of these, my favourite has to be this hilarious version of 'I've Got You Under My Skin'. There are plenty more where that came from...

(I'd especially recommend 'All Of Me', 'I Feel Pretty', and Cole Porter's classic 'You Do Something To Me'.)

8. Believe it or not, not every Muppet Show sketch involved a song. I don't think I need to justify why the Koozebanian Mating Ritual should be on this list. If this really affects you, you can get a dustcatcher to commemorate it. And isn't she a beauty? It's all about the Galley-oh-hoop-hoop, really.

9. Rowlf was always my favourite muppet when I was young, while I always had a soft spot for Fozzie. I'm sad to say that my own sense of humour is sadly what you get when you crossbreed those of said dog and bear. Be that as it may, I've always loved their 'English Country Garden' duet. As for Rowlf himself, it's worth reminding yourselves of his love of Beethoven.

10. And finally, because my own resurgence of interest in Jim Henson's greatest creations largely coincided with the short-lived Muppets Tonight, I think you should really make the time to watch Miss Piggy auditioning with Billy Crystal for a part in When Harry Met Sally. The sequence starts about three minutes in. You'll like the Rob Reiner muppet.

If you don't enjoy those, you might as well sit in a box and scowl.

And with that, goodnight.

Someone Has To Make A Start

I fear my sleep patterns shall never recover from the last few weeks. Wednesday and Thursday nights saw me sleeping two full nights in a row for the first time since mid-January, and I'd hoped to make it three from three when I finally nestled under the covers last night. Alas, it was not to be, as I'd slept barely three hours when my phone woke me, bearing a transatlantic text from NMRBoy, desperate to know how yesterday's meeting had gone.

Unhappy though I was to have slept so little, my Comrade in Arms deserved to know how things had gone, so I texted him, and he called me, and somehow my throat obliged us both as I described yesterday's meeting at length.

I wished him a good night, and shut my eyes afresh, but sleep was not to bless me this time, and after a futile hour I sat up, rooted in my bag, crawled over to the television, stuck in a disc, and settled in to watch Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage, which I'd picked up for a song yesterday afternoon.

To my shame, I'd never heard of Sophie Scholl until just before Christmas when, on the website of The Times, I watched a marvellous short film of Clive James reading from Cultural Amnesia, his astonishing distellation of a lifetime's reading. I've been dumbstruck since.

Not long after the battle of Stalingrad, the key members of the little resistance group called the White Rose were all arrested. One of them was Sophie Scholl. During the showtrial staged at Hitler's order, she said something apparently simple, but its implications go on unfolding, even into our own time.

'Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't dare to express it.'

Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich of February 22, 1943, at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was but twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.

Sophie's brother Hans, the leader of the little resistance group that called itself the White Rose, was already pretty much of a paragon. The Scholl family weren't Jewish and Hans could have had a glittering career as a Nazi. Yet in spite of a standard Third Reich education, including membership of the Hitler Youth, Hans figured out for himself that the regime whose era he had been born into was an abomination.

The only means of resistance open to Hans and his like-minded fellow students was to hold secret meetings, write down their opinions and spread them surreptitiously around. Long before the end, Hans had guessed that even to do so little was bound to mean his death. He died with an unflinching fortitude that would have been exemplary if the Nazis had let anyone except his executioners watch.

You would have thought that to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. he did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind.

Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a choice that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone.

Is that you? No, and it isn't me either.

She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed by a helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn't have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were.

But part of the sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something, the man who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.

Johann Reichardt, the executioner who had testified to Sophie's bravery, had seen more than his fair share of executions. He'd begun working at Stadelheim in 1924, and under the Nazi's twelve year reign he'd executed more than three thousand political prisoners; after their downfall he was reinstated and sent to the war-crimes prison at Landsberg, where he hanged Nazis who had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.

So I learned from Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn's Sophie Scholl & The White Rose, which I read last week, starting it almost as soon as I finished Bleak House. It's a fascinating read which gives full credit to all those other members of the White Rose who are so easily ignored next to Sophie. It reads like a novel, and is packed with all manner of curious observations, such as this remarkable aside about Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, and Willi Graf:

The rather free and casual style of life of these young men during wartime -- attending concerts, taking fencing lessons, and joining Bach choral societies -- is surprising. Nothing like it happened in the United States during the Second World War, and one would expect even less to find that such freedom and informality existed in Nazi Germany.

The book's one serious flaw, I can't help feeling, though, is that it downplays Sophie's Lutheran faith, something which makes no sense in light of the attention paid to Willi Graf's Catholicism. That's not to say that the authors ignore it altogether, as they most certainly don't. They include extracts from diaries and letters where Sophie's Christianity is clear, and they make a point of describing how -- in her last meeting with her parents, just hours before her execution -- her mother asked her to remember Jesus, and she, with her last recorded words, replied 'Yes, but you too.'

So yes, you'd be a fool to read Sophie Scholl & The White Rose and not realise just how important her faith was to her, but you'd be hard-pressed to realise that she was a Lutheran. Granted, she'd rightly have seen her relationship with Christ as far more significant that her Lutheran confession, but that doesn't change the fact that it's odd that her Lutheranism is played down.

25 Miles

Well, thank God that's over.

I had a meeting this morning -- I can't say what about -- which I've been working towards for months. Over the last few weeks I've not managed two nights' sleep in a row because of this; it wasn't that I was stressed by the meeting, simply that there was so much that needed doing!

Needed? Yeah, I know, lots of people think that I've carried this on too long, that things should just be let go, that I need to get my life back.

Perhaps. But I reckon that if there was a time for quitting it was well over a year ago, probably back in October 2006. And besides, there's that whole Burke thing about evil triumphing when good men do nothing.

So I went to my meeting this morning, and opened my briefcase, and took out two folders and two huge files of documents, wryly remarking that I had as much again sitting in a box at home, and then set to work.

Things started awkwardly, with my being taken to task over a poorly chosen phrase, but I rode that out, and further objections soon died up. What few there were sounded forlorn, but that's hardly surprising considering the air of resignation that settled on the other side of the table, the silence barely punctuated by the grim nods every time I proved a point or posed a question that couldn't be denied.

I think the mess is nearly over, and that the right thing will be done. Not because people want to do that -- I'm not so naive as to expect that anymore -- just because it does rather look as though all other options have been exhausted. It's too late in the game for people to throw their bodies on these grenades.

Not that people play games with grenades, but you get my point.

Granted, this could be dragged out for another year if need be, but I've made it clear that I'll go the distance if I have to, and will win then, so the question then becomes: would anyone really gain if justice were to be delayed for another year?

Stuff Matters, even on Valentine's Day

Well, I'm back in Manchester; I arrived yesterday evening, and have spent most of the time since with my cousins. This afternoon, though, I got the Witchway bus up to Nelson in Extreme Lancashire, as I'd a friend to see. It was a good trip, though I'm sorry to say that even going up it was too dark for me to see the wind turbines by Burnley. They're quite a sight. One of my friends says there's no view she prefers to them anywhere in the world, but alas, this time I was to be deprived of that vision.

I'm not long back.


I caught mass while I was in Nelson, and indeed had I been in Dublin I'd have done so too, though at home I'd have made a point out of doing so at the Carmelite Church on Whitefriar Street. It seems that there've been no shortage of saints called Valentine in Roman times, it being a very common name back then, but three stand out as contenders for being the St Valentine we all know and grumble about every 14th February. Pretty much everything we know about the Saint Valentine is pious legend.

So what, you might wonder. Well, it seems that in the early nineteenth century, bones that were identified -- I know, I know, i'm not going there -- as the relics of one of these were exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus on Rome's Via Tiburtina. John Spratt, an Irish Carmelite, dazzled Roman crowds with his preaching in 1835, and as a token of gratitude Pope Gregory XVI presented him with a casket containing purported relics of Saint Valentine. This casket was brought to Dublin in November 1836, being installed in the Carmelite Church at Whitefriar Street.

Interest in the relics lapsed after Spratt's death, and they were put into storage; it was only when major renovations were being conducted at the church about fifty years ago that a permanent shrine to St Valentine was built in the church. An altar was constructed, with a niche for the casket below it, and above the altar was placed a life-sized statue of the saint, cast by Irene Broe, barefoot, clutching a crocus, and garbed in the traditional martyr's red.

On the wall beside the shrine is a bronze plaque, supposedly recording the details of the saint's life. Confusingly it has him being arrested and beaten in 269 AD, but not being executed until 290AD,

St Valentine's Day no longer features in the calendar of saints, but I think Whitefriar Street church, like other places where purported relics of the saint are located, takes exception to this. Every 14th February the relinquary is removed from the shrine and placed in front of the high altar, where it is venerated at the masses.


Venerated, mind, not worshipped. Venerated really just means 'honoured', when you get down to it. It's important to get that clear. Protestant Christians often have difficulty -- understandably enough -- grasping the difference between veneration and worship, thinking that the Catholic and Orthodox practice of venerating the relics of saints is idolatrous.

It has to be admitted that there are times when such practices can border on idolatry, and there certainly have been occasions when that line has been crossed, but the fact of such excesses shouldn't be taken as grounds for believing the whole practice is inherently corrupt. More often than not it is, at worst, simply a way of indirectly worshipping God.

What do relics have to do with this, then? Well, it seems that the veneration of the remains of saints and their possessions dates right back to the beginnings of the Church.

Aspects of it, for starters, can be clearly discerned in the New Testament, in such episodes of the woman with the haemorrage who is cured of her bleeding after she touches the fringe of Jesus' robe (Matt. 9.20-22, Mark 5.25-34) and of how bits of fabric that St Paul had touched were taken to the sick, curing the of their illnesses and driving demons from them (Acts 19.11-12).

It's important to remember that miracles are always caused by God -- Paul didn't perform those miracles, for example. If you can accept that, it's easier to understand the significance of relics.

Remember my somewhat irreverent discussion of the prophet Elisha the other day? Well, the episode of the bears took place very early in Elisha's long career -- he reportedly lived for about sixty more years. Unlike his master Elijah, when his time was up he died and was buried. Some time later, a group of people were carrying someone else out for burial. They were startled by the sight of a marauding band of Moabites and flung the body into Elisha's tomb so they could run away. Apparently no sooner had the body touched the bones of the prophet that it was restored to life (2 Kings 13.20-21).

This is important. It is God who performs miracles, after all, and there's no rule restricting him to only using living saints as his instruments. If the early Christians had already learned of the efficacy of things touched by living saints, is it really so surprising that they should come to respect things that had been associated with dead ones, especially since, as far as they were concerned, they weren't really dead? God was the God of the Living, after all, and the righteous who had died were surrounding us them a great cloud of witnesses (Matt. 22.32, Heb. 12.1). With Saint James assuring them of the efficaciousness of the prayers of the righteous (James 5.16-17), surely it made sense to ask them to intercede for them, joining their prayers, not least because St Paul had said that it was Christian duty to offer prayers for people (1 Tim. 2.1.)?

This started happening very early. The tombs of the apostles were being venerated at the latest by the last decade of the First Century, if the anti-Christian diatribe of the Emperor Julian's Against the Galileans can be trusted as a source. If you think about it, it's not hard to see how and why this practice developed: it seems to be a convergence of the belief that the saints in Heaven can intercede for us with the sheer earthiness of mainstream Christianity, which sees the whole world as sacramentally configured by God and recognises the events of Jesus' life as real historical events, rooted in a specific place and time.

Anyway, the point being that at Whitefriar Street church today people would have gathered together to worship God through the mass, and while doing so would have venerated what they believe to be the relics of a martyr. It would have been -- at the very least -- interesting to have joined in that.

In a Hole in the Ground, there lived a Hobbit...

Yesterday's brief post having been devoted to how some enterprising folk have been inspired by Tolkien's works to recreate his most epic battles with jelly babies, it seems only fair today to gawp at how some people evidently want to live in Hobbiton.

There's no way that I can describe the Shire of Bend, in Oregon, so all I can really do is suggest that you grit your teeth, wince, and click on the link. Really, it's terrifying.

On the other hand, the Low Impact Woodland Home pictured here, while looking more than a little reminiscent of Bag End nonetheless appears to be motivated by a sense of environmental responsibility and financial thrift rather than a pathologically twee obsession with an England that never was.

This sustainability is a good thing; next time I'm in Brighton I'd be very tempted to go and have a gawk at Earthship Brighton in Stanmer Park. Seemingly, it's a solar-powered eco-friendly building built from used tires. It's got to be worth a look at any rate.

Could a Confectionary Cannae be Coordinated?

There are people out there who think I have too much time, although they're obviously not the same people who realise that I've been escewing sleep every second night for the last few weeks; it's not that I've been worrying or anything, just that Friday's going to be a big day, and I need to get everything ready, well, basically by tomorrow morning.

But anyway, even if I did have too much time on my hands, I'm glad to say that I'd probably not use it building enormous models of the battle of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers or of the battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King.

Or if I did, I probably wouldn't make them from cake and sweets. Look at the cute lickle jelly orks.

I have to admit, this has a certain charm, and this shot of Gandalf and the boys charging down the cliff doesn't look much more ludicrous when rendered in confectionary than it did rendered in computer-generated imagery.

It's got to be cheaper than buying models. Part of me is tempted to try this sometime with some historical battles, like Thermopylae, say, or the battles of Cannae, or Zama, or Lake Trasimene. That last one could be great, actually, like the castle and cabin cakes of my childhood, but on a colossal confectionary theme.

Bear With Me

I was delighted to read a Crooked Timber post a couple of months back that sang the praises of the Cracked list of 'The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses', not least for how Scott McLemee at CT insists that the tale of Elisha and the Bears should be far higher up the list than a lowly eighth place. I don't know if you know the story, but in case you don't, here's the tale according to the King James Bible, just to give it a bit of gravitas. The reference, in case you don't believe me, is 2 Kings 2.23-25.

And he went up from thence unto Bethel, and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

And he went from thence to mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria.

Cracked, I'm sure you'll be glad to read, sees this as a solution to many of our current social ills.

Christians are constantly asking for prayer in schools to help get today’s kids in line, but we beg to differ. We need bears in schools. If every teacher had the power to summon a pair of child-maiming grizzly avengers, you can bet that schoolchildren nowadays would be the most well-behaved, polite children, ever. It’s a simple choice: listen to the biology lesson, or get first-hand knowledge of the digestive system of Ursus horribilis.

It should be pointed out that even after his death, Elisha continued to kick ass. 2 Kings 13.20-21 tells us that when a dead body was thrown into his tomb and touched Elisha’s bones, it sprang back to life. It’s unknown whether Elisha had this power in life, as well as death, but we like to think he did and that he had the habit of killing his victims with bears, resurrecting them, and then promptly re-summoning the bears to kill them, again. He’d just repeat the whole thing over and over until he got bored.

I first came across this story years ago, in a beautifully graphic one-page adaptation by Brian Bolland in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, a book that introduced me to quite a few of the Old Testament passages that tend not to be read at mass.

 I have to admit that it amused me massively at the time, and even now it rather bemuses me. For starters, this is almost the only reference to bears in the entire Bible; they're referred to in a proverbial sense on two or three occasions, but other than that they only figure when David is telling Saul that it's worth giving him a shot against Goliath, as he's had plenty of practice defending his sheep against lions and bears. That's 1 Samuel 17.34-6, if you're interested.

It certainly seems odd to have bears appearing out of nowhere to slaughter children, even by the standards of the Old Testament. What's this about? Surely there's more going on in this passage than meets the eye? Does the old notion of the Four Senses of Scripture help here?


Well, oddly, yes, even on the literal level, on which the three 'spiritual' senses depend.

For starters, the passage can't be taken out of context. Perhaps fifty years earlier, Jeroboam, the ruler of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, had established Golden Calf cuts at Bethel and Dan, the two extremities of his kingdom, and had encouraged his subjects to sacrifice to these idols rather than to Yahweh at the Temple in Jerusalem. Bethel, then, needs to be seen as the headquarters of a heretical cult in opposition to Yahweh, whose prophet Elisha was, as had been his master Elijah.

Read properly, then, Elisha was walking to Bethel and was accosted on the road by a large crowd of youths. Yes, youths, not 'little children'. It seems that the Hebrew term neurim qetannim means 'young men', rather than 'young boys', and throughout the Old Testament is used to refer to males aged anything from twelve to thirty years old. Actually, I'm not even convinced that Elisha would have been much older than them, despite the 'bald head' reference: he'd been adopted as a son by Elijah only seven or eight years earlier, and appears to have lived for another sixty years or so.

So what we've got then is the newly anointed prophet of Yahweh heading towards the headquarters of a rival cult, getting approached by a huge gang of young males, all shouting at him and jeering him. It's difficult to tell whether their jeers should be regarded as threatening or contemptuous, but they seem to relate to how they'd surely have heard stories of Elisha's master Elijah having been 'taken up' to Heaven. Were they challenging Elisha to emulate his master? Or did they simply think that Elijah had died and that this story was made up, in which case they were basically telling Elisha he might as well kill himself? Who knows? Still, whatever they meant, they were surely insulting not just Elisha but Yahweh too, and so Elisha curses them, in the name of Yahweh, and two bear suddenly appear from the forest and lay into the youths, savaging forty-two of them -- we have no idea how big the crowd supposedly was, but it's telling that we're not told the bears savaged all of them, or whether the youths that were savaged died of their wounds.


Right, so even on the literal level it seems the story's a little bit more sophisticated than it appears at first glance.

With that in mind, it's not too different to see how it can be interpreted in a moral sense in terms of the dignity of prophets and the respect due to those who act on behalf of God, and I'm also inclined to see in the jeers of the youths a foreshadowing of how Christ himself will later be mocked. If they're to be understood as challenging Elisha to emulate Elijah in being taken up to Heaven, they surely point towards those who mocked Jesus on the cross, and even towards Satan's tempting of Our Lord in the wilderness.

Look, I'm not saying that makes it easy to swallow, just that there's more going on here than initially meets the eye.

Brawling in the Ivory Towers

Having mentioned the other week Martin Amis's cushy number at the University of Manchester, it seems only fitting that I follow up that story with the big Mancunian news of this week, which is that Terry Eagleton's future at the university appears to be in doubt.

It seems that England's leading Marxist critic is hitting official retirement age in July, and while Eagleton apparently wants to stay on, the University's official comment on the matter has been a tight-lipped observation that 'July marks Prof Eagleton's normal contractual retirement date at 65 and discussions are continuing regarding his future role'.

That doesn't sound too optimistic, does it?

Eagleton and Amis have collectively been drawing some attention to the University over the last while, though possibly not the kind of attention such 'iconic scholars' might be hoped to draw, through their very public disagreements over Islam.

You know the story? Well, basically, in September 2006 Amis was interviewed by Ginny Dougary for The Times , and was far from complementary towards Islam.

You can’t put [the Israelis] anywhere else now. They can’t have another country, another Homeland. It’s a very chilling thought because the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.

The one built-in element that works in our favour is that it’s so vile and poisonous, so preposterously disgusting that it must burn itself out. They have managed to fix on a real paradigm shift – earlier, people would die for causes and for tiny religious reasons, but to convert it into this luscious, sensual paradise that you go straight to, while the rest of the poor sods have to moulder in the earth for centuries until they’re kicked awake by furious angels and interrogated about their sins. The suicide bomber doesn’t do any of that shit. He goes straight to the ripe wine and women . . .

What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?

I think they’re hugely hypocritical in their hearts. Their big beef against the West is that it’s tempting them. That’s just impossible. I mean, ‘Sorry. We didn’t know that what we were doing was creating a society for the tantalisation of good Muslims.’ When Khomeini called America the Great Tempter, that’s what he meant, the Great Satan. In the Koran, Satan is a tempter. So they want it, you know'

'The Age of Horrorism', an essay in the following day's Observer made related points, to which Eagleton responded in an introduction to a new edition of Ideology: An Introduction, picking out sentiments expressed by Amis and remarking that these were not 'the ramblings of a British National Party thug' but were in fact the reflections of his colleague Martin Amis, a 'leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world'.

Amis responded, and Eagleton replied, and others waded in and it all got very messy, and probably didn't raise Manchester's profile in quite the way the current regime had hoped when they recruited Amis.

Interestingly, Eagleton hasn't just leapt into the fray in defence of Islam, or even sheer contrariness. Rather, it seems, he's fighting for Civilization in a broader sense, and especially for the place of religion in civilization.

The implication from Amis and McEwan - and from Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - is that civilisation and atheist rationalism go together, and I think that is a very dangerous argument to make. The debate over God - Muslim or Christian - is for them increasingly becoming code for a debate on civilisation versus barbarism. I think one needs to intervene and show the limitations of that . . .

They buy their atheism on the cheap, because they have never been presented with an interesting version of faith. One of the impulses of my writing - and the new book - has been to try to differentiate a version of Christianity worth having. With people like Dawkins there is a kind of inverted evangelism; I find it extraordinary that not once does he question the terms of his science.

Whatever you think of Eagleton's take on Jesus in particular and on Christianity in general, that point has serious weight, and its central to his scathing LRB review of The God Delusion, which begins with the following piece of advice: 'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.'

That rather sets the tone for the rest of the review. I rather wonder what Dawkins' response was.

Exploding Goats!

Having mentioned a couple of weeks back Herodotus' improbable tale of mice thwarting an Assyrian invasion, it strikes me that it's been far too long since I've regaled you with tales of animals being enlisted in the wars of men. After all, it was October that I recited Cornelius Nepos' description of Hannibal's snake bombs!

And so, I'm sure you'll be glad to know that the Royal Navy has stopped blowing up goats, perhaps as a sop their allies over the ocean, seeing as Bill the Goat is the official mascot of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

The British military said Feb. 6 it will no longer use goats in experiments to gauge the risks of evacuating a submerged submarine.

The tests, conducted for years by the Ministry of Defense, involved herding the animals into a special chamber and then drastically changing the air pressure. . .

The tests were meant to simulate what sailors would experience should they need to evacuate a submerged submarine. The difference in pressure between the deep sea and the surface can cause fatal decompression sickness, often referred to as the bends.

Goats were chosen because of their physiological similarities to human beings.

It seems that the tests were carried out somewhere on the south coast, and that 128 goats heroically gave up their lives for their country between 2000 and 2006, six of them dying in the actual experiments, and the other 122 being slaughtered afterwards, presumably to stop them from talking.

I can only presume these weren't Myotonic Goats.

The 39th Step

I find it extraordinary that almost all the hot air being blown around in response to the proposed 'international round' of Premier League games is with reference to how this won't be fair on fans who mightn't be able to travel to Tokyo or Los Angeles to watch their teams play.

That doesn't work, really, not with a dozen or so teams being international brands that are hugely and obviously dependent on foreign revenue to make ends meet; it could be argued that exporting the Premier League as a live experience, rather than a merely televised one, is only fair to the legions around the world who contribute to the club coffers.

A far more serious objection, which I've seen raised but not really brandished with any force, is that a thirty-ninth game will corrupt the integrity of the competition as it stands.

It doesn't work to claim, with Richard Scudamore, that 'These fixtures will not decide who wins the league and who is relegated. That is decided over the course of the season. There is already an inherent unfairness in our fixture programme.'

I'm not entirely sure what he means by his concession that the fixture list is inherently unfair, but it's nonsense of him to disregard concerns that this kind of thing could vitiate any semblance of fairness in the League. Think of what the proposal involves:

The idea would be that one weekend in January ten matches would be played in five cities around the world, thereby giving foreign fans in each city and environs the opportunity to see two matches, or four Premier League teams, over the course of the weekend. It's not clear whether there'd be any seeding, but reports so far suggest that it'd be arranged that the top five teams wouldn't have to face each other; I presume the thinking is to spread out the celebrity factor.

You might wonder who the 'top five' teams would be, since they'd surely not be the top five at the time the round was played. Presumably they'd be the top five from the previous season, presumably, giving us United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Spurs if we were to look at least year's figure. Yes, Spurs, currently around twelfth on the table.

Leave that aside, though. Is it really credible that this wouldn't distort the League? Perhaps it wouldn't at the very top and the very bottom, though I'd not bet on it, but what about the half-dozen teams that might be hoping for the fourth Champions' League berth or a UEFA Cup spot, or the handful of teams that'll be scrabbling to avoid being the third team to get relegated? Would you want your team to have to play United or Arsenal three times instead of twice in a season? No, didn't think so. You'd be far happier with them facing the likes of Derby or Fulham, wouldn't you?

Putting his House in Order

Well, the first of my New Year's resolutions has been achieved. I have finally finished Bleak House.

It took forever, I'm afraid. I must have spent eight months stuck in the quagmire of the first two hundred pages, somehow making as little progress as any of the book's own cursed Chancery protagonists. Over coffee with a friend of mine back before last summer I asked what she thought I'd finish last, and before I'd finished reeling off the Gordian knots I was having so much difficulty unpicking last year she interrupted with a cry of: 'Bleak House! Nobody's ever finished that!'

I attempted another push over the Christmas, and in doing so made it past the three-hundred page mark. All of a sudden things began to change -- it wasn't so much that the fog of Chancery began to lift as that I got comfortable in it, that I learned to see in the fog, and that the story began to move.

Five weeks and five hundred pages later, and the book Chesterton describes as perhaps Dickens's best novel and the highest point of his intellectual maturity can finally be set aside. And oddly, I'm sad to put it down, because I've been riveted since the plot kicked in, and I'd like to know more of the characters, notably Caddy Jellyby and the wonderful Mr Bucket.

All told, even if it's a slow starter, the book's an absolute masterpiece. Mind, I've been primed to think this for years, ever since I was in my teens and read Death is No Obstacle, Colin Greenland's book-length interview with Michael Moorcock:

CG: I was very impressed when I read Bleak House last year by the way Dickens, writing it as a serial, obviously started by improvising, and then capitalised on his improvisations. In that virtuoso opening about fog and the law, the law and fog -- which starts with three paragraphs, sixteen sentences without a single main verb -- he tosses things out as wonderful queer incidental details: the 'little mad old woman' with her reticule of documents 'rincipally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender'; and the ruined plaintiff from Shropshire. Then later when he needs them, they turn quite unexpectedly into Miss Flite and Mr Gridley, significant characters each with a special function at some crux of the plot.

MM: Structurally, there's no better novel than Bleak House, in my view. Great Expectations may have something extra, but Bleak House is the best book of Dickens's to read to learn about his techniques: characters, moral theme, imagery, everything. All the pleasure of the social novel, what you get out of reading Henry James, say, or Jane Austen, can be found in Bleak House. It's the work of a talent absolutely at its prime, using its full range -- and he was doing it in weekly episodes. You can see it in the first edition. Everything breaks down into units of sixteen and thirty-two pages, because of the way a large sheet of paper is folded into pages when it's been printed. You can divide each episode of Bleak House into sixteen pages, and know that on each page there'll be another incident, a new character, a new revelation about an existing character, whatever -- something that develops what's gone before. Each episode ends perfectly, with a hook to pull you on to the next week's instalment. There's not a dead page in the book.

When he's been writing narrative full-tilt, you can almost see him stopping, catching his breath, with a bit of landscape. Where Dickens rested was on descriptive scenes, very often water: the Fens, or the Thames, the wharfs. He never rested on dialogue. If you rest on dialogue, people discussing the plot, talking to each other about where they are or what's just happened, that sort of bad, space-wasting dialogue, you slow the pace down where it shouldn't be slowed down. When you're writing fast, you need those pauses; but you mustn't stop writing! Stopping and taking a look around, describing space rather than action, is a totally natural rest. It ads to the illusion of reality. It gives the reader a breather too, and you're still filling the pages to get to your required weekly output.

I used to compare writing commercial fictions to flying a very ramshackle aeroplane. You got it off the ground. You got it into the sky. You kept it there by whatever tricks you could manage. And at the end of the day you landed it safely, by whatever means. The landing was always the difficult bit!

It's not just a supremely economical book, with astoundingly little dead weight -- Dickens indeed uses everything -- it's also a hell of a cautionary tale. It's hard not to suspect that Chesterton got it right when he described Rick Carstone's slow, obsessive, inexorable self-destruction as 'a truly masculine study of how a man goes wrong' and 'the one and only great tragedy that Dickens wrote . . . Rick is a real tragedy, for he is still alive when the quicksand sucks him down.'

So. One resolution down. It's a start.

Romantic Referenda

I mentioned the other day how Brother the Elder has opined that the Eurovision song contest is 'a much preferable way to learn geography than a World War'.

This got me thinking about the infamous 'Tory Atlas of the World', originally published in the Spitting Image annual, and nicely preserved for posterity over at the wonderful Strange Maps website, well worth exploring if you ever get a chance.

Obviously meant as a joke, in case anyone squints at the small print and then starts accusing me of racism, the map isn't wildly off the chart as a caricature of a certain mindset that I've come across more than a few times in England, both in terms of its arrogance and its ignorance.

It's not an exclusively English phenomenon either, of course, or even an exclusively British one. The next few months are going to be funny ones in Ireland, as we precede a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty with a national debate laced with sturdy doses of arrogance, selfishness, xenophobia, and ignorance. It's already started, the early skirmishes already seeing the air thick with volleys of lies and half-truths; it's only going to get worse.

And of course, all the time the British press will be watching, with the anti-European brigade whining about how it's unfair that the UK isn't having a referendum on the EU Constitution when Ireland is getting one and Blair had promised them one. This is despite the fact that the Treaty isn't the same as the Constitution, despite the fact that Blair's promise had referred to the Constitution rather than the Treaty that's been modelled on it, and despite the fact that we're only having a referendum in Ireland on the topic because our Constitution demands that we do so.

Look, referendums are astoundingly bad ways of approving these things. European treaties are enormous, dense, complex documents. There's no way that the average person has the time or the ability to read even one of them, without getting into their tendency to build on previous treaties. Our democracies are representative rather than direct in nature: we elect people to do this kind of work for us.

If we want to reclaim some of that power, fine, that's laudable, but we need to remember that ill-informed opinions aren't worth crap, and opinions informed purely by polemical claims fall into that category. In other words, before people go demanding referenda on these things, they should ask themselves whether they're willing to actually read the things on which they'll be passing judgment.

There can be a tendency in England to romanticize referendums, which makes sense considering how exotic they must seem to a population reared on a crude first-past-the-post competition every few years. I think they've got a vital role to play in any vibrant democracy, but it has to be admitted that they're very blunt implements, spectacularly ill-suited to the dissection and evaluation of treaties.

That's a job for a scalpel, not an axe.

It's Time to Light the Lights

Speaking of puppets, as I was yesterday, Brother the Younger has been badgering me for ages to look up 'Muppet Pulp Fiction' online. Well. I've done so, and you should too. It's hilarious, with some absolutely inspired casting: Dr Teeth as Marcellus Wallace? Bunsen as Winston Wolfe? Sam the Eagle as Captain Koons? Gonzo and Camilla the chicken as Tim Roth's and Amanda Plummer's characters? And then there's Eric Stoltz...

Rob Paul and Eric Myles , the authors of this little gem, have also put online two versions of a CNN piece about the short. It's worth watching to see how and why they made the film before putting it on the internet, there to gather dust for six months before becoming a phenomenon.

I say 'phenomenon' though I should again point out that it's a phenomenon that eluded me until this week.

If that's not enough Muppetational oddness for you, you should check out Overtime. A short film by two French students, it's funny, poignant, a bit disturbing, and really rather beautiful.

I think it's one of the best animations I've ever seen.

Now Nostalgia Is Past Its Prime

Meeting a friend in Manchester for coffee back in May, I was greeted with a wry smile and the rueful suggestion that it would probably be best if we didn't discuss the Eurovision. Ireland had come last, with John Water's mawkish 'They Can't Stop the Spring' having won a mere five points; the United Kingdom hadn't done much better, the uebercamp 'Flying the Flag (For You)' having come second-last with a dismal nineteen points, despite having been awarded an inexplicable maximum twelve points from Malta.

My prudent friend needn't have worried; I'd had no intention of discussing our national fiascos, as unlike Brother the Elder, I've never seen the charm of the Eurovision Song Contest. I'll concede that the Brother's right when he says it's 'a much preferable way to learn geography than a World War', but, well, so are atlases, travel books, and holidays.

(I enjoy the scoring, I must admit, but that's the part of the show that concentrates on international dynamics rather than bad songs. Many have been the years when that's been the only part of the contest I've watched. indeed, one of my favourite Mancunian days during my domicile there featured just that, having been preceded by my Fairy Blogmother and I exploring the secret stairway, watching a play in the Royal Exchange Theatre, dining in the marvellous Gurkha Grill, and having a drink in Fuel, and followed by our eventually settling in to enjoy Run Lola Run. Good times.)

Following last year's humiliation, the Brother remarked that this year 'Ireland will have to qualify for the final because they finished outside the top 10 [...], but short of a strategic population plantation of Irish people to smaller countries where their vote would make a difference like FYR Macedonia, Slovenia, and the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, it’s hard to see Ireland ever winning again.'

I happen to think that might not be a bad thing, but one way or another it seems that the powers that be at our national broadcaster think that the entire formula needs a vigorous shake. It seems that RTÉ received 150 or so submissions this year of would-be entries, and they've winnowed down this mass to just six. The six will be broadcast as 'Eurosong' on 23 February, with voting lines opening after the six performances to allow people to vote for our 2008 Eurovision Song.

So far so ordinary, until you realise that among the six entrants is a song called 'Irelande Douze Pointe', to be performed by Dustin the Turkey, one-time comrade in arms of Zig and Zag, from when they were funny. Dustin's had quite a musical career over the years, with highlights including 'Born Greasy', 'Funky Ford Cortina', and his observations of Bob Geldof's shaving practices when duetting with him on 'Rat Trap', while surely his finest moment was running for the Irish Presidency back in 1990, apparently getting more votes than the Fine Gael candidate in my constituency. Assuming that's not just a bit of suburban folklore, it's pretty good going, seeing as Dustin Hoffman -- for so he was originally billed -- is a puppet.

So anyway, it seems that 'Irlande Douze Pointe' is a send-up of all things Eurovision, complete with references to Terry Wogan and an apology for Riverdance. RTÉ's Liveline earlier today featured a song featuring all the promised ingredients, but even if you listen to the show you should make a point of disregarding the alternative 'Irland Douze Pointe'. The show was a heated affair anyway, with Shay Healy and Frank McNamara ranting about RTÉ's decision being a disgrace and a 'two fingers' to the contest, claiming this was an insult to Irish songwriters and asking how could a turkey represent the Irish people.

There are far too many answers to that last point, so I'll say nothing except to point out that the song might not get picked -- it won't be RTÉ's decision, after all, as it'll be a national phone-ballot with five alternatives on offer on 23 February. And we all know that he'll definitely be picked then. Whether this is an example of the wisdom of crowds or the madness of crowds is a different matter altogether...

Whether Dustin will make it through the semi-final on 20 May is a different matter altogether, though. Me, I'm hoping that next year we can get Ardal O'Hanlon and Neil Hannon to perform 'My Lovely Horse'.

A Double Turncoat?

I found it deeply unsettling watching Lesley Vainikolo storming about in an England shirt yesterday, though his efforts hardly saved his adopted country's blushes. I just kept wondering what he was doing there. In what sense is he English?

After all, he's Tongan by birth, but a New Zealander by parentage, and has played Rugby League twelve times at international level for New Zealand. It seems he's allowed to play for England through the 'residency rule', but I'm at a loss to figure out the thinking behind this qualification. Granted, he's been playing Rugby League in England since 2002, but it's not as if he's been thinking of himself as English for the last six years -- it seems that he only failed to play for New Zealand in the 2005 and 2006 Tri-Nations tournaments because of his knee troubles! Or at least, that was the official line; was he secretly eating marmite and drinking warm beer while planning to abandon both New Zealand and Rugby League?

I dunno, part of me is just bothered to see England, the country with the world's largest Rugby Union player base, fielding people who are at best marginally English. I mean, the current system favours countries with big player pools anyway. Surely the likes of England don't need to hammer home their advantage?

It's just not cricket.

'A Coach Not a Idiot'

The Magazine supplement of today's Irish Times features a very peculiar question in big red letters bang in the middle of page 48, dealing with the TV schedule for Wednesday: 'Can the boys in green manage their first ever win against the boys from Brazil?'

Seeing as this is in reference to Wednesday's soccer match between Brazil and the Republic of Ireland, I think the answer really has to be 'No'. Not because Ireland aren't good enough to win -- that's a separate issue -- but because if they did win, this would in fact be their second ever victory over the greatest footballing nation in the world.

Ireland beat Brazil back on 23 May 1987, with Liam Brady scoring the only goal of the match.

Speaking of Liam Brady, emblazoned on the front page of the Sports supplement is the declaration 'FAI to get Trapattoni and Brady'. It seems that more than a hundred days since Steve Staunton released the Irish managerial reins, the FAI are on the brink of acquiring a replacement. Not just any replacement either, rather the kind of manager that they claimed they had in mind back in October 2005, when they arrogantly rid themselves of Brian Kerr. After all, while Trapattoni may be getting on a bit, at 68 years old, he's got a ridiculous number of trophies under his belt, surely slowing him down rather more than his age: nine league triumphs in various countries, two Italian cups, three UEFA Cups, a European Cup-Winners' Cup, a European Cup, and more besides.

The idea this time, apparently, is that Trapattoni will be the coach, with Liam Brady, who worked with him at Juventus in the early eighties, as his assistant. Brady could well become a crucial hinge between coach and team, considering that Trapattoni apparently has hardly any English, though if his English is nearly as idiosyncratic as his German we could be in for an entertaining few years.

Of course, his first job shall be to master the art of the football cliche.

The Good and the Bad Dying Indiscriminately

The point about the Popes wasn't the only thing that bothered me about yesterday's talk, fascinating though it was. As part of a general description of plagues, the speaker mentioned the plague that struck Athens during the early years of the Peloponnesian War in the Fifth Century BC.

In case you're not familiar with what happened, here's our one contemporary description of the plague's symptoms, as recorded by Thucydides, an Athenian general who had himself suffered from but survived the epidemic.

People in perfect health suddenly began to have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became red and inflamed; inside their mouths there was bleeding from the throat and tongue, and the breath became unnatural and unpleasant. The next symptoms were sneezing and hoarseness of voice, and before long the pain settled on the chest nd was accompanied by coughing. Next the stomach was affected with stonach-aches and with vomiting of every kind of bile that has been given a name by the medical profession, all this being accompanied by great pain and difficulty. In most cases there were attacks of ineffectual retching, producing violent spasms; this sometimes ended with this stage of the disease, but sometimes continued long afterwards.

Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor was there any pallour: the skin was rather reddish and livid, breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. But inside there was a feeling of burning, so that people could not bear the touch even of the lightest linen clothing, but wanted to be completely naked, and indeed most of all would have liked to plunge into cold water. many of the sick who were uncared for actually did so, plunging into the water-tanks in an effort to relieve a thirst which was unquenchable; for it was just the same with them whether they drank much or little. Then all the time they were afflicted with insomnia and the desperate feeling of not being able to keep still.

In the period when the disease was at its height, the body, so far from wasting away, showed surprising powers of resistance to all the agony, so that there was still some strength left on the seventh or eighth day, which was the time when, in most cases, death came from the internal fever. But if people survived this critical period, then the disease descended to the bowels, so that most of them died later as a result of the weakness caused by this.

For the disease, first settling in the head, went on to affect every part of the body in turn, and even when people escaped its worst effects, it still left its traces on them by fastening upon the extremities of the body. It affected the genitals, the fingers, and the toes, and many of those who recovered lost the use of these members; some, too, went blind. There were some also who, when they first began to get better, suffered from a total loss of memory, not knowing who they were themselves and being unable to recognize their friends. [Thuc. 2.49]

Powerful stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Thucydides describes the plague as hitting Athens early in the second year of the war with Sparta, with previous attacks having been reported from Lemnos and elsewhere. Supposedly it first appeared in southern Egypt, spreading through North Africa and the Persian Empire, reaching Athens through its port at Piraeus. It devastated the city, spreading rapidly among the population, especially amongst those who looked after those already infected, the entire situation being exacerbated by the terrible overcrowding within the city, the population of which had swollen in response to the Spartan pillaging of the surrounding countryside.

A factor which made matters much worse than they were already was the removal of people from the country into the city, and this particularly effected the incomers. There were no houses for them, and, living as they did during the hot season in badly ventilated huts, they died like flies. The bodies of the dying were heaped on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them. For the catstrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law. [Thuc. 2.52]

Our speaker, talking about this last night, remarked that this was all we had to go on in attempting to establish just what the plague actually was: there's no archaeological evidence.

The thing is, that's not quite true, as I learned a couple of years back thanks to a brilliant friend of mine.

During the construction of Athenian metro lines in the mid-nineties, a large mass grave was found and excavated north-west of the Kerameikos cemetery. The grave contained at least 150 bodies, with the bodies apparently being layered on top of each other in increasingly haphazard fashion. Vases within the pit can be confidently dated to about 430 BC, the year the plague first hit Athens, and the careless and apparently impious method of burial points towards a city desperately trying to rid itself of large numbers of corpses.

Recent genetic analysis of dental pulp extracted from the remains within the pit has strongly suggested that the deceased had succumbed to a variety of Typhus fever -- microbial DNA shared a 93 per cent similarity with Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi. While this identification is far from certain, the symptoms of modern Typhoid certainly resemble many of those cited by Thucydides, and it would seem likely that some Typhoid variant -- perhaps in conjunction with another virus -- was responsible for the Athenian Plague.

Even if our speaker didn't believe that the grave in question had anything to do with the Plague, I'm surprised that he didn't mention it. Hmmm.