POP1
As far as washing, if you're poor, you probably don't bother. So says Ian Mortimer in the BBC History Magazine. If you live in a rented room on the fourth floor of one of those timber-framed tenement houses it's simply too much effort to go to the public water supply conduit and carry the water back in sufficient quantity for a bath on the fourth floor. and then you wouldn't be able to afford the cost of the firewood to heat up the water. So you stay unwashed, and since all your acquaintances don't wash either, you can't tell the difference
Those who are able to wash don't use soap. They rub themselves clean with fresh linen, and you can't afford to buy the fresh linen.
POP2
But how does the water get from the public water conduit to the houses of those who can afford it?
The guild of water-carriers took care of that. They carried two tubs of water either from the River Thames, or from one of the wells, on a yoke across their shoulders.
Around the year 1600, the Company of Water-Tankard Bearers presented a petition to The House of Commons stating that they and their families numbered 4000 persons and complaining that wealthy people were running pipes from the conduits to their houses - the beginning of household water supply.
(from 'Cleanliness and Godliness' by Reginald Reynolds.
In the fourteenth century Fitz Stephen, speaking of London, says of the wells of Holy Well, Clerkenwell and St. Clements Well, "....water, sweet, wholesome and clear, streaming forth among the glistening Pebble Stones".
POP3
The wealthy, according to Ian Mortimer, wash themselves daily by rubbing themselves in clean linen (wet or dry?), they wash their hands and faces daily in clean water, they wash their hands before after and during every meal. Occasionly they take a hot bath. They wash their hair in lye and use tooth powder to clean their teeth.
POP4
Source unknown:
In Elizabethan times sugar was an imported delicacy, and as such, expensive. Only the upper classes could afford it. Too much sugar without appropriate dental care, as we know and they probably did not know or didn't care, damages your teeth. So it follows of course that the upper classes would have had bad and blackened teeth; and since such discolored teeth were, like sugar, exclusive to the upper classes, it became the fashion to re-enforce your status as an aristocrat by blackening your teeth using some kind of cosmetic.
Can this be true? Bad dental hygiene, discolored teeth, and yet still the subject of sonnets?
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
Early America and Portrait Artists
POP1
Itinerant portrait artists roved around the country looking for portrait commissions. There were so many of them that William Dunlap in his 'Lives of the Artists' wrote that Gilbert Stuart remarked of them:
"By and by you will not by chance kick your foot against a dog-kennel but out will start a portrait painter".
Gilbert Stuart was the great American portrait artist who painted the iconic portrait of George Washington.
POP2
Thomas Cole, 1801-1848, was the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement. He was a renowned landscape artist, but first he tried his hand at portraits. He grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, and there he learned the rudiments of his profession from a portrait artist named Stein. In his early twenties he set up as a wandering portrait painter, walking from village to village with his paints and brushes.
He found that others had got there before him and had already reaped the harvest in the towns of southern Ohio such as Zanesville, St Clairsville and Chillicothe. In particular he butted heads with one, Jacob Descombes, who had painted portraits of the most prosperous citizens of these towns. Descombes soon gave up the arts to become a minister.
One might have supposed that the woods were full of painters, for there were portraits all over the walls of the many inns of the area. But there were still villages further off the beaten track where farmers were ready to welcome the work of another itinerant artist. However, Cole had little success painting portraits, and his interest shifted to landscape.
From 'The World of Washington Irving', by Van Wyck Brooks
POP3
Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot and hero of the American Revolutionary War, who oversaw the construction of the fortifications of West Point, was a painter of portraits. He painted Thomas Jefferson in 1798, before returning to spend the latter part of his life in Europe.
Itinerant portrait artists roved around the country looking for portrait commissions. There were so many of them that William Dunlap in his 'Lives of the Artists' wrote that Gilbert Stuart remarked of them:
"By and by you will not by chance kick your foot against a dog-kennel but out will start a portrait painter".
Gilbert Stuart was the great American portrait artist who painted the iconic portrait of George Washington.
POP2
Thomas Cole, 1801-1848, was the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement. He was a renowned landscape artist, but first he tried his hand at portraits. He grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, and there he learned the rudiments of his profession from a portrait artist named Stein. In his early twenties he set up as a wandering portrait painter, walking from village to village with his paints and brushes.
He found that others had got there before him and had already reaped the harvest in the towns of southern Ohio such as Zanesville, St Clairsville and Chillicothe. In particular he butted heads with one, Jacob Descombes, who had painted portraits of the most prosperous citizens of these towns. Descombes soon gave up the arts to become a minister.
One might have supposed that the woods were full of painters, for there were portraits all over the walls of the many inns of the area. But there were still villages further off the beaten track where farmers were ready to welcome the work of another itinerant artist. However, Cole had little success painting portraits, and his interest shifted to landscape.
From 'The World of Washington Irving', by Van Wyck Brooks
POP3
Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot and hero of the American Revolutionary War, who oversaw the construction of the fortifications of West Point, was a painter of portraits. He painted Thomas Jefferson in 1798, before returning to spend the latter part of his life in Europe.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
They freed the slaves. One was Abraham Lincoln.
Of two men in history can it be said, "They freed the slaves". One was Abraham Lincoln. The other was Epaminondas (ca. 418 BC - 362 BC). He was a Theban general and statesman of the 4th century BC. Thebes was a city-state a little north of Athens.
POP1
His references:
The Roman orator Cicero called him "the first man of Greece" - placing him ahead of Alexander, Pericles, Socrates etc.
Montaigne, 16th Century writer of the famous 'Essays', judged him one of the three "worthiest and most excellent men" that had ever lived".
But today few people have ever heard of him.
POP2
In 371 BC., Sparta sent an invading army into Theban territory. Everyone knows of Sparta's fearsome reputation in war, so it seems like a foregone conclusion that 10,000 Spartans would annihilate 6000 Boeotians (Thebans). Faced with these odds, Epaminondas, the leader of the Thebans, was to display a grasp of tactics hitherto unseen in Greek warfare, and in so doing he would change the face of battle for all time to come.
POP3
Psychology of ancient battle.
The foot soldiers of the phalanx formation used by Greek armies held a shield on their left arm, and a sword in their right hand. There was a distinct tendency to seek the shelter of the shield of the foot soldier on your right during the charge into battle and during the battle "because fear makes each man do his best to shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next to him on the right". (Thucydides)
Traditionally, therefore, a phalanx would line up for battle with the elite troops on the right flank to act as a wall or anchor to counter this tendency, and to keep the line tight. With both sides following the same strategy, it seems that the result would be an indecisive anti-clockwise movement - kind of yin yang turning anti-clockwise.
POP4
The battle of Leuctra. (371 BC)
The Spartan army contained some 10,000 hoplites, of whom only 700 were the elite warriors known as Spartiates, while the rest consisted of allies; which was not untypical of the Spartan way of war. The Boeotians opposite them numbered about 6,000, but were bolstered by a cavalry superior to that of the Spartans.
Based on the traditional tactics, in the Spartan phalanx at Leuctra, Cleombrotus (the spartan general) and the elite 'Spartiates' were on the right, while the less experienced Peloponnesian allies were on the left.
Epaminondas needed to counter the Spartans' numerical advantage. He implemented two tactical innovations. Firstly, he took the best troops in the army, and arranged them 50 ranks deep (as opposed to the normal 8–12 ranks) on the left wing (not the right as was typical), opposite Cleombrotus and the Spartiates
Secondly, recognizing, that he could not match the width of the Peloponnesian phalanx, he abandoned all attempts to do so. Instead, he instructed the weaker troops on his right flank to avoid battle and withdraw gradually during the enemy's attack. This reversing of the position of the elite troops, and an oblique line of attack were innovations never before tried in battle. At the battle of Leuctra, Epaminondas was responsible for the military tactic of 'refusing one's flank'.
The fighting opened with a clash between the cavalry, in which the Thebans were victorious over the inferior Spartan cavalry, driving them back into the ranks of the infantry, thereby disrupting the spartan phalanx. The powerful blockbuster of the Theban left flank now charged into battle while the right flank retreated.
After intense fighting, the Spartan right flank began to give way under the impetus of the mass of Thebans, and Cleombrotus was killed. The Spartans held on for long enough to rescue the body of their king, but the line was soon broken by the sheer force of the Theban assault. The Peloponnesian allies on the left wing, seeing the Spartans put to flight, also broke and ran.
One thousand Peloponnesians were killed, while the Boeotians lost only 300 men. Most importantly, since it constituted a significant proportion of the entire Spartan manpower, 400 of the 700 Spartiates present were killed. When, after the battle, the Spartans asked if they and their Peloponnesian allies could collect the dead, Epaminondas suspected that the Spartans would try to cover-up the scale of their losses. He therefore allowed the Peloponnesians to remove their dead first, so that those remaining would be shown to be Spartiates, thus emphasising the scale of the Theban victory.
POP5
THe spartan society was a slave-based society. Messenians, who were conquered in the Messenian Wars of the 8th century BC, become the slaves known as Helots. They were ritually mistreated, humiliated and even slaughtered. According to Aristotle, the ephors (religious leaders of Sparta) declared war on the Helots every autumn, thereby allowing Spartans to kill them without fear of religious pollution. This task was given to the Kryptes, graduates of the difficult agoge (advanced school system) who took part in the Krypteia. This lack of judicial protection is confirmed by Myron of Priene, who mentions killing as a standard mode of regulation of the Helot population, which was several times greater in number than the pure Spartan population.
The Nazi SS would have felt right at home in Sparta.
POP6
More Nazi stuff:
What was the Krypteia?
Young Spartan men who had completed their training at the agoge with such success that they were marked out as potential future leaders would be given the opportunity to test their skills and prove themselves worthy of the Spartan military through participation in the krypteia.
The kryptes were sent out into the countryside, with only a knife to survive on their skills and cunning, with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered at night and to take any food they needed.
Their mission was to root-out potential sedition. Troublesome Helots could be summarily executed. Such brutal oppression of the Helots permitted the Spartans to control the agrarian population and devote themselves to military practice.
If only night-time killing was allowed, it suggests there was a curfew in place, and that any Helot out after dark would be considered a troublemaker.
Only Spartans who had served in the Krypteia as young men could expect to achieve the highest ranks in Spartan society and army. It was felt that only those Spartans who showed the ability and willingness to kill for the state at a young age were worthy to join the leadership in later years.
POP6
In the immediate aftermath of Leuctra, the Peloponnesian cities, formerly under Spartan dominance, became independent. The Mantineans decided to unify their settlements into a single city, and to fortify it. This greatly angered the Spartans who declared war on Mantinea, whereupon the majority of Arcadian cities grouped together to oppose the Spartans and requested assistance from the Thebans. The new Theban army arrived late in 370 BC, led by Epaminondas and Pelopidas. It consisted of some 50-70,000 men. In Arcadia Epaminondas encouraged the Arcadians to form a league, and to build another new city named Megalopolis as a center of power opposed to Sparta.
POP7
The Theban army moved south, crossing the Evrotas River, the frontier of Sparta, which no hostile army had breached in memory. The Spartans were unwilling to engage the massive army in battle. They stayed within their city simply defended it, and the Thebans did not attempt to capture it. The Thebans and their allies ravaged Laconia, down to the port of Gythium, freeing some of the Lacedaemonian perioeci from their allegiance to Sparta.
POP8
Now comes one of those transcendental moments in the history of the world. Instead of marching his army home, Epaminondas continued on to Messenia, the home of the Helots. He freed the Helots and then, after obtaining omens from the gods, making sacrifices and inviting the spirits of past rulers and heroes to live in Messene, Epaminondas invited construction engineers and artisans from everywhere to join him.
In 85 days the combined armies and exiles guided by the engineers and artisans completed the walled city of Messene over the site of the previous Ithome. The new city included within its walls Mt. Ithome and enough agricultural land and spring water to withstand a siege indefinitely. The massive new walls and fortifications were among the strongest in Greece. Epaminondas then issued a call to Messenian exiles from other parts of Greece from Italy, Sicily and Africa to return and rebuild their homeland
Did he do it out of expediency? For the loss of Messenia was particularly damaging to the Spartans, since the territory comprised one-third of Sparta's territory and contained half of their Helot population. It was the Helots' labor that had allowed the Spartans to be a constant "full-time" army.
Epaminondas' campaign of 370/369 has been described as an example of "the grand strategy of indirect approach", which was aimed at severing "the economic roots of Sparta's military supremacy." In mere months, Epaminondas had created two new enemy states that opposed Sparta, shaken the foundations of Sparta's economy, and all but devastated Sparta's prestige. Having accomplished this, he led his army back home, victorious. After the departure of the Theban army the Spartans attempted unsuccessfully to retake Messenia.
POP9
Abraham Lincoln likewise had strategic reasons for emancipating the slaves; but whatever their reasons, Lincoln and Epaminondas are the only two leaders in history of whom it can be said, "They freed the slaves".
POP10
How ironic that he walls that Epaminondas built to free the slaves still stand to this day, whereas little remains of the architecture of Sparta to show that it ever existed, for unlike other cities of Ancient Greece, Sparta did not have any walls surrounding it. In part the walls weren’t needed because the Spartans had little to steal; in part it was Sparta’s remote location, deep in the mountains and far from the sea. Mostly, it was the reputation of the warriors of Sparta.
When one Athenian questioned the Spartan king about the lack of walls, the king responded "Our shields are our walls." The Athenian asked how many warriors they had and the response was "Enough". Another Spartan King replied to the same question saying that "The bodies of our young men are our walls and their spear points are our borders".
POP11
Aftermath.
Upon his return home, Epaminondas was greeted not with a hero's welcome but with a trial arranged by his political enemies. According to Cornelius Nepos, in his defense Epaminondas merely requested that, if he be executed, the inscription regarding the verdict read:
"Epaminondas was punished by the Thebans with death, because he obliged them to overthrow the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) at Leuctra, whom, before he was general, none of the Boeotians (Thebans) durst look upon in the field; and because not only, by one battle, did he rescue Thebes from destruction, but also secured liberty for all Greece..."
The jury broke into laughter, the charges were dropped, and Epaminondas was re-elected as Boeotarch for the next year.
POP1
His references:
The Roman orator Cicero called him "the first man of Greece" - placing him ahead of Alexander, Pericles, Socrates etc.
Montaigne, 16th Century writer of the famous 'Essays', judged him one of the three "worthiest and most excellent men" that had ever lived".
But today few people have ever heard of him.
POP2
In 371 BC., Sparta sent an invading army into Theban territory. Everyone knows of Sparta's fearsome reputation in war, so it seems like a foregone conclusion that 10,000 Spartans would annihilate 6000 Boeotians (Thebans). Faced with these odds, Epaminondas, the leader of the Thebans, was to display a grasp of tactics hitherto unseen in Greek warfare, and in so doing he would change the face of battle for all time to come.
POP3
Psychology of ancient battle.
The foot soldiers of the phalanx formation used by Greek armies held a shield on their left arm, and a sword in their right hand. There was a distinct tendency to seek the shelter of the shield of the foot soldier on your right during the charge into battle and during the battle "because fear makes each man do his best to shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next to him on the right". (Thucydides)
Traditionally, therefore, a phalanx would line up for battle with the elite troops on the right flank to act as a wall or anchor to counter this tendency, and to keep the line tight. With both sides following the same strategy, it seems that the result would be an indecisive anti-clockwise movement - kind of yin yang turning anti-clockwise.
POP4
The battle of Leuctra. (371 BC)
The Spartan army contained some 10,000 hoplites, of whom only 700 were the elite warriors known as Spartiates, while the rest consisted of allies; which was not untypical of the Spartan way of war. The Boeotians opposite them numbered about 6,000, but were bolstered by a cavalry superior to that of the Spartans.
Based on the traditional tactics, in the Spartan phalanx at Leuctra, Cleombrotus (the spartan general) and the elite 'Spartiates' were on the right, while the less experienced Peloponnesian allies were on the left.
Epaminondas needed to counter the Spartans' numerical advantage. He implemented two tactical innovations. Firstly, he took the best troops in the army, and arranged them 50 ranks deep (as opposed to the normal 8–12 ranks) on the left wing (not the right as was typical), opposite Cleombrotus and the Spartiates
Secondly, recognizing, that he could not match the width of the Peloponnesian phalanx, he abandoned all attempts to do so. Instead, he instructed the weaker troops on his right flank to avoid battle and withdraw gradually during the enemy's attack. This reversing of the position of the elite troops, and an oblique line of attack were innovations never before tried in battle. At the battle of Leuctra, Epaminondas was responsible for the military tactic of 'refusing one's flank'.
The fighting opened with a clash between the cavalry, in which the Thebans were victorious over the inferior Spartan cavalry, driving them back into the ranks of the infantry, thereby disrupting the spartan phalanx. The powerful blockbuster of the Theban left flank now charged into battle while the right flank retreated.
After intense fighting, the Spartan right flank began to give way under the impetus of the mass of Thebans, and Cleombrotus was killed. The Spartans held on for long enough to rescue the body of their king, but the line was soon broken by the sheer force of the Theban assault. The Peloponnesian allies on the left wing, seeing the Spartans put to flight, also broke and ran.
One thousand Peloponnesians were killed, while the Boeotians lost only 300 men. Most importantly, since it constituted a significant proportion of the entire Spartan manpower, 400 of the 700 Spartiates present were killed. When, after the battle, the Spartans asked if they and their Peloponnesian allies could collect the dead, Epaminondas suspected that the Spartans would try to cover-up the scale of their losses. He therefore allowed the Peloponnesians to remove their dead first, so that those remaining would be shown to be Spartiates, thus emphasising the scale of the Theban victory.
POP5
THe spartan society was a slave-based society. Messenians, who were conquered in the Messenian Wars of the 8th century BC, become the slaves known as Helots. They were ritually mistreated, humiliated and even slaughtered. According to Aristotle, the ephors (religious leaders of Sparta) declared war on the Helots every autumn, thereby allowing Spartans to kill them without fear of religious pollution. This task was given to the Kryptes, graduates of the difficult agoge (advanced school system) who took part in the Krypteia. This lack of judicial protection is confirmed by Myron of Priene, who mentions killing as a standard mode of regulation of the Helot population, which was several times greater in number than the pure Spartan population.
The Nazi SS would have felt right at home in Sparta.
POP6
More Nazi stuff:
What was the Krypteia?
Young Spartan men who had completed their training at the agoge with such success that they were marked out as potential future leaders would be given the opportunity to test their skills and prove themselves worthy of the Spartan military through participation in the krypteia.
The kryptes were sent out into the countryside, with only a knife to survive on their skills and cunning, with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered at night and to take any food they needed.
Their mission was to root-out potential sedition. Troublesome Helots could be summarily executed. Such brutal oppression of the Helots permitted the Spartans to control the agrarian population and devote themselves to military practice.
If only night-time killing was allowed, it suggests there was a curfew in place, and that any Helot out after dark would be considered a troublemaker.
Only Spartans who had served in the Krypteia as young men could expect to achieve the highest ranks in Spartan society and army. It was felt that only those Spartans who showed the ability and willingness to kill for the state at a young age were worthy to join the leadership in later years.
POP6
In the immediate aftermath of Leuctra, the Peloponnesian cities, formerly under Spartan dominance, became independent. The Mantineans decided to unify their settlements into a single city, and to fortify it. This greatly angered the Spartans who declared war on Mantinea, whereupon the majority of Arcadian cities grouped together to oppose the Spartans and requested assistance from the Thebans. The new Theban army arrived late in 370 BC, led by Epaminondas and Pelopidas. It consisted of some 50-70,000 men. In Arcadia Epaminondas encouraged the Arcadians to form a league, and to build another new city named Megalopolis as a center of power opposed to Sparta.
POP7
The Theban army moved south, crossing the Evrotas River, the frontier of Sparta, which no hostile army had breached in memory. The Spartans were unwilling to engage the massive army in battle. They stayed within their city simply defended it, and the Thebans did not attempt to capture it. The Thebans and their allies ravaged Laconia, down to the port of Gythium, freeing some of the Lacedaemonian perioeci from their allegiance to Sparta.
POP8
Now comes one of those transcendental moments in the history of the world. Instead of marching his army home, Epaminondas continued on to Messenia, the home of the Helots. He freed the Helots and then, after obtaining omens from the gods, making sacrifices and inviting the spirits of past rulers and heroes to live in Messene, Epaminondas invited construction engineers and artisans from everywhere to join him.
In 85 days the combined armies and exiles guided by the engineers and artisans completed the walled city of Messene over the site of the previous Ithome. The new city included within its walls Mt. Ithome and enough agricultural land and spring water to withstand a siege indefinitely. The massive new walls and fortifications were among the strongest in Greece. Epaminondas then issued a call to Messenian exiles from other parts of Greece from Italy, Sicily and Africa to return and rebuild their homeland
Did he do it out of expediency? For the loss of Messenia was particularly damaging to the Spartans, since the territory comprised one-third of Sparta's territory and contained half of their Helot population. It was the Helots' labor that had allowed the Spartans to be a constant "full-time" army.
Epaminondas' campaign of 370/369 has been described as an example of "the grand strategy of indirect approach", which was aimed at severing "the economic roots of Sparta's military supremacy." In mere months, Epaminondas had created two new enemy states that opposed Sparta, shaken the foundations of Sparta's economy, and all but devastated Sparta's prestige. Having accomplished this, he led his army back home, victorious. After the departure of the Theban army the Spartans attempted unsuccessfully to retake Messenia.
POP9
Abraham Lincoln likewise had strategic reasons for emancipating the slaves; but whatever their reasons, Lincoln and Epaminondas are the only two leaders in history of whom it can be said, "They freed the slaves".
POP10
How ironic that he walls that Epaminondas built to free the slaves still stand to this day, whereas little remains of the architecture of Sparta to show that it ever existed, for unlike other cities of Ancient Greece, Sparta did not have any walls surrounding it. In part the walls weren’t needed because the Spartans had little to steal; in part it was Sparta’s remote location, deep in the mountains and far from the sea. Mostly, it was the reputation of the warriors of Sparta.
When one Athenian questioned the Spartan king about the lack of walls, the king responded "Our shields are our walls." The Athenian asked how many warriors they had and the response was "Enough". Another Spartan King replied to the same question saying that "The bodies of our young men are our walls and their spear points are our borders".
POP11
Aftermath.
Upon his return home, Epaminondas was greeted not with a hero's welcome but with a trial arranged by his political enemies. According to Cornelius Nepos, in his defense Epaminondas merely requested that, if he be executed, the inscription regarding the verdict read:
"Epaminondas was punished by the Thebans with death, because he obliged them to overthrow the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) at Leuctra, whom, before he was general, none of the Boeotians (Thebans) durst look upon in the field; and because not only, by one battle, did he rescue Thebes from destruction, but also secured liberty for all Greece..."
The jury broke into laughter, the charges were dropped, and Epaminondas was re-elected as Boeotarch for the next year.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Islam and Image Deprivation
Painting of Abu'l Hassan, Persian Ambassador to the Court of St James (England), 1810. Painted by one of the greatest portrait artists of all time, Sir Thomas Lawrence.
POP1
What does aniconism mean? It's the absence of images like paintings and statues in a particular society, such as Islam, where there is a proscription against the creation of images of sentient living beings. Images of Allah are absolutely forbidden, followed by depictions of Muhammad, and then Islamic prophets and the relatives of the Prophet.
However, the depiction of all humans and animals is discouraged by the long tradition of Islamic authorities, especially Sunni ones. This has led to Islamic art being dominated by Islamic geometric patterns, calligraphy and the foliage patterns of the arabesque style.
POP2
The painting above gives an insight into the results of this 'image deprivation'.
It was commissioned by Sir Gore Ouseley during Abu'l Hassan's tenure in London as Persian Ambassador. Later, Sir Gore went to Persia as Ambassador Extraordinary for the purpose of concluding a treaty between England and Persia, and he took the painting with him. He took the painting with him.
The painting was temporarily placed on a sofa, and the Persian Prime Minster, Mirza Shefi, entered the room. He had never seen a European oil painting and he mistook the painting for the real person. He is said to have become outraged and to have shouted at the offending painting:
"I think that when the representative of the King of England does me the honor of standing up to receive me, in due respect to him, you should not be seated."
Only when he had touched the painting did he realize his mistake.
He said, "I could have sworn by the Koran that it was a projecting substance - in truth that it was Abu'l Hassan himself".
Monday, July 23, 2012
Plato and the Olympic Games
The stadium today.
POP1
The Olympic Games were held at four-year intervals, and later the term Olympiad (the period between two Games) was used as a measure for counting years. For example, Diodorus states that there was a solar eclipse in the third year of the 113th Olympiad, which must refer to the eclipse of 316 BC. This would give a date of 765/6 BC for the first year of the first Olympiad.
The Olympic Games were held in Olympia, in a remote area of southwestern Greece, about 200 miles from Athens. To get there most spectators had taken rough mountain roads and a ten-day journey. When they got there they found a venue poorly prepared to accommodate them. "An endless mass of people" is how second-century A.D. author Lucian describes it.
POP2
Whatever facilities Olympia had would have been swamped. At night most of the spectators would have flung their bedding wherever they could find a spot, or they would have put up a tent or paid for a spot in some temporary shelter. Sounds like Woodstock.
Plato himself once slept in a makeshift barracks, head to toe with drunken strangers. An image of Plato as a hippy - probably in his younger years.
Athletes entry into stadium.
POP3
Dried riverbeds used as latrines, and sweat of unwashed multitudes wafting out nose-teasing odors; and everywhere the flies, a plague of them. Priests at Olympia sacrificed animals to "Zeus, the driver-away of flies" probably to little effect.
The spectators stood for up to sixteen hours. Seating was not provided. In fact the Greek word stadion means 'a place to stand'.
"But" said Epictetus, "you put up with it all because it is an unforgettable spectacle."
Lucian writes, "..... you should be there sitting in the middle of the spectators, looking at the men's courage and physical beauty, their marvellous condition, their skill and invincible strength, their enterprise, their emulation, their unconquerable spirit, and their never-wearied pursuit of victory. Oh, I know very well, you would never have been tired of talking about your favourites, cheering them on them with your shouts and hand gestures." He could be writing today not eighteen centuries
The Games were sensationally popular, and were held without fail every four years from about 765 B.C., till they were banned as a pagan festival by Christian emperors in A.D 394.
Like a pilgrimage to Mecca, for the Greeks it was considered a great misfortune to die without having been to Olympia. One Athenian baker boasted on his gravestone that he had attended the Games twelve times.
POP4
Some observations on the Olympic events:
Sprinters would be leaning slightly forward, feet together and arms outstretched. False starts were punished with a thrashing from official whip-handlers.
The pankration was a kind of mixed martial arts contest; differing from today's MMA in that the only thing barred was eye-gouging; whereas snapping opponents' fingers, even tearing out intestines were acceptable and, as one coach noted, "the judges approve of strangling". It is said that Plato [427-347 BC] was a double winner of the pankration, which adds a new dimension to his philosophy.
The long jump was performed with a weight in each hand which would have the effect of "pulling' the jumper forward, and then, jettisoning the weights backward prior to landing would give that final "push" for distance.
A four hundred yard sprint was run in full body armor, emulating the charge of the Greek hoplites into battle.
Boxing became increasingly brutal over the centuries. Initially, soft leather covered the fingers, but eventually, hard leather weighted with metal was sometimes used. The fights had no rest periods and there were no rules against hitting a man while he was down. Bouts continued until one man either surrendered or died. However, killing an opponent was frowned on, and the dead boxer was automatically declared the winner.
POP5
Corruption.
The judges sometimes took bribes. In A.D. 67 they took some pretty heavy bribes from the emperor Nero to award him first prize in the chariot race - notwithstanding that he fell out of his chariot and failed to complete the course. Like Sacha Baron Cohen's movie 'The Dictator' in which he wins the sprint by shooting anyone who threatens to beat him.
From an article in the Smithsonian, August 2004, by Tony Perrottet.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Horrors of War
In his book, "Adventures with The Connaught Rangers 1809 - 1814", William Grattan gives a first hand account of his experiences with Wellington's British army fighting against Napoleon's French forces in the Spanish Peninsula.
POP1
As the French army retreats it leaves horrors in its wake.
"As we approached the town the road leading to it was covered with a number of horses, mules and asses, all maimed. But the most disgusting sight was about fifty of the asses all floundering in the mud, some with their throats half cut, while others were barbarously houghed (crippled or maimed) or otherwise injured. What the object of this proceeding meant I never could guess; the poor brutes could have been of no use to us, or indeed anyone else, as I believe they were unable to have travelled another league. The meagre appearance of these creatures, with their backbones and hips protruding through their hides, and their mangled and bleeding throats, produced a general feeling of disgust and commiseration."
POP2
"Two wounded French soldiers had been abandoned to the fury of the Portuguese peasants who invariably dodged on the flanks or in the rear of our troops. These poor wretches were surrounded by half a dozen Portuguese, who, after having plundered them, were taking that horrible vengeance too common during this contest. On the approach of our men they dispersed, but, as we passed on, we could perceive them returning like vultures that have been scared away from their prey for the moment, but who return to it again with redoubled voraciousness. Both the Frenchmen were alive, and entreated us to put an end to their sufferings. I thought it would have been humane to do so, but Napoleon and Jaffa flashed across, and I turned away from the spot."
(The discredited story is that at Jaffa Napoleon poisoned all his non-transportable wounded during his retreat to Egypt, in order to prevent them being massacred at the hands of the turks.)
POP3
In the Second World War, Japanese troops were instructed to become self sufficient when they found themselves cut off from supplies. This effectively gave them carte blanche to adopt whatever measures, no matter how extreme, were necessary to keep alive. This included cannibalism of both Allied prisoners of war and the local inhabitants. It is not clear whether they killed the prisoners or waited for them to die naturally. This story was suppressed at the end of the war and was not brought up at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal because the authorities did not want the families back home to be left forever wondering if their sons had been cannibalized.
From Antony Beevor's book, The Second World War.
POP1
As the French army retreats it leaves horrors in its wake.
"As we approached the town the road leading to it was covered with a number of horses, mules and asses, all maimed. But the most disgusting sight was about fifty of the asses all floundering in the mud, some with their throats half cut, while others were barbarously houghed (crippled or maimed) or otherwise injured. What the object of this proceeding meant I never could guess; the poor brutes could have been of no use to us, or indeed anyone else, as I believe they were unable to have travelled another league. The meagre appearance of these creatures, with their backbones and hips protruding through their hides, and their mangled and bleeding throats, produced a general feeling of disgust and commiseration."
POP2
"Two wounded French soldiers had been abandoned to the fury of the Portuguese peasants who invariably dodged on the flanks or in the rear of our troops. These poor wretches were surrounded by half a dozen Portuguese, who, after having plundered them, were taking that horrible vengeance too common during this contest. On the approach of our men they dispersed, but, as we passed on, we could perceive them returning like vultures that have been scared away from their prey for the moment, but who return to it again with redoubled voraciousness. Both the Frenchmen were alive, and entreated us to put an end to their sufferings. I thought it would have been humane to do so, but Napoleon and Jaffa flashed across, and I turned away from the spot."
(The discredited story is that at Jaffa Napoleon poisoned all his non-transportable wounded during his retreat to Egypt, in order to prevent them being massacred at the hands of the turks.)
POP3
In the Second World War, Japanese troops were instructed to become self sufficient when they found themselves cut off from supplies. This effectively gave them carte blanche to adopt whatever measures, no matter how extreme, were necessary to keep alive. This included cannibalism of both Allied prisoners of war and the local inhabitants. It is not clear whether they killed the prisoners or waited for them to die naturally. This story was suppressed at the end of the war and was not brought up at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal because the authorities did not want the families back home to be left forever wondering if their sons had been cannibalized.
From Antony Beevor's book, The Second World War.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
World War II Assassin and Wyatt Earp
In the Smithsonian magazine of September, 1993, is an article by Robert Wernick, on the wartime activities of an amazingly efficient British assassin working in Occupied France from 1941 to 1943. Fascinating reading.
POP1
There was nothing remarkable in the background of Ian (Johnny) Kenneth Hopper. He was born in 1913 of solid East Anglian stock. In 1940 when the French army collapsed, and the Germans suddenly arrived, he was living in a village near Caen in Normandy, happily married to a vivacious girl named Paulette, with a little boy, Jean-Claude.
His reasons for becoming a killer were that, "I don't believe in taking things lying down. It was the Germans who set the rules, don't you see. I did terrible things, things as bad as the Germans did. I was responsible for the death of innocent people. But when you meet an aggressor, you have to aggress back, aggress all the time."
For security reasons, he kept no records. You will not find Hopper's name in the official history of British secret operations in France. His friend Dr. Chanel was convinced to his dying day, as were all the other French who worked with Hopper during the war, that he was an agent of the legendary British Intelligence Service. He was not. Officers of the Special Operations Executive, which was responsible for underground operations in France, only knew of him as an elusive maverick operator.
A priest that Johnny Hopper had known when he was a little boy had drilled two rules into him: 'Never give up. Never complain'.
POP3
For two years before he was caught, he roamed the roads of German-occupied Normandy and the streets of German-occupied Paris. When he needed a German colonel's uniform so that he could walk unimpeded into a local German headquarters and talk his way (he was good at languages, and good at barking out commands) into picking up some documents that interested him, he waylaid and killed a German colonel.
A newspaper from Caen, 1941, wrote of "An Englishman named Hopper who, in defiance of a German ban against celebrating the French national holiday on July 14, had put on a French colonel's uniform and deposited a huge wreath of flowers on the monument to the war dead in Caen, directly in front of the German Army headquarters".
It was Hopper's first act of open resistance against the German occupation of France, and it was in many respects a model for all his future operations. It was a spontaneous individual gesture, boldly conceived, carefully planned, neatly executed. Every detail -- including finding the right French colonel (there were many who would be willing to make a small contribution to the national cause, but where would he find one whose uniform would fit his six-foot-three-inch frame?), the stealthy stealing of a truck to drive up in, preparing a hiding-place known only to himself for afterward - had to be precisely calculated. It was only a symbolic gesture, it was not going to harm a single German soldier or a single stone of the German headquarters [which is today a Holiday Inn]. But as a symbol it resonated, all the way to Vichy, a faint suggestion that there might be a spark of resistance in defeated demoralized shell-shocked France.
POP4
"Nerve, not technique" - compare to Wyatt Earp's thoughts on gunfighting!
"I was quicker."
"The reason I was quicker was, at the moment he started reaching for that gun, I noticed a kind of tightening about his jaw. I saw that tightening many times afterwards, saw it in some of the best killers the Gestapo put on my trail. What it means, don't you see, is that at that moment when their lives are on the line, no matter how professional they are, there is just a moment when they can't help thinking of what might happen, what might happen to them and their careers and their families. It might last only a fraction of a second. But that was the fraction of a second I could use."
"...it was different with me. I knew that as one man against so many I didn't have a chance of surviving in the long run. Betrayal or bad luck, something was bound to catch up with me. "
POP5
First gunfight.
One day he was about to visit one of his garage depots when he heard a suspicious noise - it was a gun being loaded - warning him that he had walked into an ambush mounted by the local chief of police and a dozen underlings who were waiting for him a little further up the street. He strode on nonchalantly, pulled out both his guns and started firing. The police chief fell dead, the others ran for shelter and began firing wildly into the void while Hopper jumped on a bicycle conveniently parked at the curb in front of a cafe and raced downhill (the brakes didn't work) through a crowded market place and out into the open country where the authorities would be looking for him in vain for weeks to come.
POP6
Another gunfight.
He had a midnight rendezvous a street behind the Opera with a man he described as "a Jewish gangster, a man who gained enormous respect because he was the only man in Paris who went around the city through all the years of the occupation with a forty-five stuck into his belt." There was a whole carload of Germans waiting for him instead, and they jumped on him and pulled two guns out of his pockets with squeals of triumph and were jovially kicking him and beating him and describing the joys that awaited him in the dungeons of the Gestapo, when the gangster, who had been hiding in a doorway, began firing at them and they scattered, giving Hopper all the time he needed to reach for the third gun strapped to his leg which had been overlooked by his unskilled captors, and could join in the firefight, from which none of the Germans emerged alive.
POP7
A gunfight gone wrong.
"I was determined that they would not get me alive. It was understood among whoever went into action with me that if there were any wounded who could not be taken safely away, they were not to be left to be tortured by the Gestapo, they were to be finished off then and there."
"I didn't know at first how badly I was wounded. I ducked back through a door next to our table, to take stock and to get a fresh gun unstrapped from my leg. It was only a sort of closet back there, but the Germans must have assumed it was a rear door to the alley. I had hit all of them more or less badly, and when I kicked my door open, they were all running out the front door to get help. All the customers and the bartender were still on the floor. I looked around to the table where we had been sitting, and there was my wife with her head on the table."
Blood was gushing from her mouth. In a single instant Hopper judged that the wound was fatal, but that she might live long enough to be tortured by the Gestapo and to tell them all she knew. He did what he would have expected her to do to him in the same situation: he put the muzzle of his gun to her right eye and pulled the trigger.
"I have relived that moment every day of my life," he told the reporter 48 years later''
POP8
A perfectionist
"I have never seen anything like Hopper preparing for action," said Dr. Chanel. "He was a perfectionist; he had to be sure that everything and everybody would be in the right place at the right time."
Sometimes these plans worked out beautifully. Once he assigned himself the job of liquidating a high-ranking SS officer, a "nasty piece of goods" who knew altogether too much, who had made a specialty of infiltrating Resistance groups and getting them liquidated. His base of operations was a fashionable Paris hotel, where he would check in as a prosperous German businessman looking for contacts and contracts, and where the staff was too well trained to ask why he would disappear without notice for days or weeks at a time and then come back looking pleased with himself. Apprised of these comings and goings, and of the tastes and habits of this businessman by the night clerk, who was in touch with the friend of a friend, Hopper could set up a quietly efficient operation demanding exact timing and of course total discretion. The German was an orderly man who always had some brandy sent up to his room before he went to sleep between eleven and eleven thirty. One night Hopper slipped in through a side door a few minutes before eleven o'clock with a gun and a bottle of brandy in his coat pockets, borrowed a waiter's jacket and a tray and a glass and a napkin and a small pillow from the night clerk, waited till the expected call came down for room service, went upstairs and with the quiet dignity of a well-trained servant, poured out a drink, put it on the night table, put the pillow over the man's face and emptied his gun into it. He dragged the body to the big old-fashioned fireplace, and signaled with a cigarette lighter to a pair of confederates - Robert le Kid and another man - who had just taken up positions on the roof in the blacked-out Paris night. They lowered a rope attached to a sack into which he stuffed the body, the brandy bottle and the pillow, and while they were raising it, he phoned the desk clerk to come up and remake the bed, clean up any spare feathers that might be lying around, and take down the tray, and also the room key which would be put in its proper cubbyhole as the room's occupant did every time he left the building. The rope came down again and hauled Hopper up, and he and his friends quietly went through the well-rehearsed routine of tossing the sack on to the roof of the adjoining building, to which they had acquired the necessary keys. They took it down the stairway and out into the blacked-out street, tossed it into the trunk of a stolen car with German license plates and drove on to a house in the suburbs where a pit in the garden was ready, half filled with quick-lime. . .
POP9
An old man reminisces.
For the details of what he did in Paris, we have to rely mostly on the stories of Johnny Hopper himself, and by the time he told them to the reporter, they were an old man's memories. When he had come back, broken in health, from Dachau in 1945, the last thing he wanted to do was talk about what he had been through. Later on, when he was ready to talk, people were beginning to be tired of war stories, "The things we did every day then, people simply can't believe now. Sometimes I start talking, and they listen politely, and after a while their eyes begin to glaze over.."
Sounds like Wyatt Earp in his later years speaking of his legacy.
POP10
Bad luck.
He was captured and spent the last two year in the camps. Despite the dehumanization of the camps, he discovered that in the most atrocious circumstances there could be spontaneous gestures of human solidarity: a man standing in one of the hours-long roll-calls who could take the coat off his own back to cover the shoulders of the man next to him who was shivering in his thin tattered pajama-striped prisoner uniform and save him from pneumonia (as a French West Indian did for another prisoner one day during a blizzard in Buchenwald). The smithsonian article gives many details of his life in the concentration camps.
One day when they moved him from his cell, they sewed on his jacket the letters "NN," for Nacht-und-Nebel, the "night and fog" into which Goethe had seen the ancient Germanic gods disappear and into which a Nazi law commanded dangerous enemies of the Third Reich to be sent.
So that's where 'Night and Fog' comes from.
But he survived. ("They had knocked out all his teeth, and his whole body was covered with cigarette burns".)
POP11
An imposing figure.
"When he came down the street, every one was aware of him; when he came into the pub every pair of eyes swivelled to look at him. Close to 80 and suffering from the cancer which would kill him a few months later, he was still an imposing figure, tall and gaunt, with a confident stride, piercing gunmetal eyes, and a deep voice which would not inflect whether he was talking to Jack the Plumber or Lord Whoever."
- could be a description of Wyatt Earp.
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