Monthly Archives: January 2023

Travels Through Time 218 The Mad Emperor with Harry Sidebottom. Well, there have been plenty of mad leaders over history, but Heliogabalus was right up there with them. In this episode, the producers trample on tradition as well by allowing Harry Sidebottom, historical fiction author whose most recent (non-fiction) book is The Mad Emperor to choose three separate years instead of just one. His first date is 1 May 218 CE when Heliogabalus’ grandmother sneaks him out of Emesa (modern day Homs) in Syria to start the revolt that will elevate him to the position of Emperor of Rome. He is only 14 years of age, and the empire is at the height of its power, but the wheels were starting to fall off when his predecessor Caracella was murdered by Macrinus. Heliogabalus was probably his cousin, but he portrayed himself as Caracella’s illegitimate son. The second date is Midsummer’s Day 220 when Heliogabalus holds a huge parade in Rome to demonstrate his new religion. The Romans enjoyed parades, but the PR with this one was all wrong. It was interpreted as a triumph over a defeated people as the procession headed off to the new temple that he had constructed to his god, Elagabalus. He seemed to delight in trashing convention: he married 5 times, including to a Vestal Virgin; he married men and delighted in taking the ‘lower’ position; he alienated everyone. The third scene is in March 222 when Heliogabalus is murdered on the orders of his grandmother after a controversial four-year reign. His grandmother promptly replaced him with another more tractable grandson, Alexander Severus. Sidebottom doesn’t completely see him as mad; instead he sees him as in the grip of a religious fervour.

The London Review of Books Is Alan Bennett still alive? He must be, because here he narrates his diary for 2022 On Failing to Impress the Queen. He’s been publishing his diary every year in the London Review of Books since 1983. He’ll be 89 this year, and he sounds every bit of it in this rather quotidian but elegiac reading that seems to feature a lot of funerals.

Kerning Cultures Exodus was originally published in Guernica magazine and is written and read by Zahra Hankir. After the disastrous explosion in Lebanon, the author returns to a city that she had left years before, as the economy crumbled around her. She tells the story of other people who tried to immigrate as well, part of the multiple waves of immigration from the 1890s onwards, after the Civil Wars and again with the war with Israel. The economic collapse in 2019 caused another wave, with the explosion just another symptom of economic and social collapse. How awful to watch your country just fall apart through incompetence and corruption, with no political solution in sight.

In Our Time (BBC). It’s only because I’m reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World that I became familiar with Hatshepsut, the second historically confirmed female Pharaoh (the first was Sobekneferu). The episode Hatshepsut features Elizabeth Frood
(Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford- and a New Zealander), Kate Spence (Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge) and Campbell Price (Curator of Egypt and Sudan at The Manchester Museum). It was common enough for women to rule as regents, but as Principal Wife of a Pharaoh and regent for her step-son, she declared herself full King and ruled for at least 15 years in her own right. As time went on, she was depicted as a male complete with false beard and male dress. Her step-son finally took over, and after reigning for about 20 years embarked on a project of erasing her likeness and reputation as Pharaoh, perhaps as a way of clearing the succession rather than as revenge (20 years really is a dish served cold).

You’re Dead to Me (BBC) also had an episode devoted to Hatshepsut featuring again Campbell Price from the Manchester Museum and comedian Kemah Bob- my God, what a grating voice! I don’t know how a serious historian could bear to go onto this program, but needs must, I suppose.

Emperors of Rome. Having dispatched Nero, the Emperors of Rome podcast has a little interlude here where they catch up on some biographical information about people mentioned in passing – namely Cicero, Livia, Seneca and Ovid. Episode XXV Livia looks at Augustus’ wife Livia, so memorably played by Sian Phillips in I Claudius. Livia was of impeccable patrician background, so she experienced the fall of the Republic. She and her first husband backed the wrong side in the Civil War, but she was granted amnesty. In 39BCE Octavian divorced his wife and married Livia while she was pregnant with a child from the first marriage, her husband having been ‘persuaded’ to divorce her. It seems that it was both a love match and a strategic power play on both their parts. They didn’t have any children together, which could have been grounds for divorce, but instead he adopted her children. She was very publicly visible, but there were rumours that she was responsible for a number of murders- a matter that Dr Rhiannon Evans doesn’t buy into. Certainly, her son Tiberius had mother issues. Episode XXVI Seneca the Younger is another stand-alone episode. Seneca the Younger is best known (notorious?) as the the tutor and advisor of Nero, but he was a respected stoic philosopher, a writer of tragedies, and one of the richest men in the Roman empire. He was born c. 4 BCE into a Spanish Equestrian family and his father Seneca the Elder (naturally) was a rhetorician. He didn’t get on with a number of Emperors: Caligula hated him but spared him his life because he was expected to die soon: Seneca had the last laugh here because he outlived Caligula and lived to relative old age. He also clashed with Messelina, Claudius’ wife and he was sent into exile at Corsica on rather spurious ‘adultery’ charges. He was recalled to Rome as Nero’s tutor- a rather bad advertisement for his teaching and philosophy. He was very popular as a writer during the Renaissance, and it is thought that his tragedies influenced Shakespeare’s writing. He decided to retire, but was forced to commit suicide after the Pisonian Conspiracy against Nero, even though he was probably innocent. He did so by bleeding out, but it was a difficult way to die and he advised his wife (who was also required to commit suicide) not to do it- in the end she didn’t have to suicide anyway. He was out of favour as a writer, but there has been a recent rehabilitation of his reputation. Episode XXVII Ovid started me off on a little podcast spree on Ovid. Ovid was born in 43 BCE (i.e. a year before Julius Caesar was assassinated) into a wealthy, but politically negligible, family. His wealth meant that he didn’t need patronage. He began writing while he was young, and achieved almost immediate popularity. His book ‘The Art of Love’ was seen as a subtle attack on Augustus’ marriage legislation, although there was a long time between publication and being forced into exile in Romania on the Black Sea on account of his writing. But exiled he was- and he died in exile, separated from his family. He is best known today for his work The Metamorphoses.

Emperors of Rome Episode XIX Nero the Youngest Emperor introduces Nero, the 17 year old adopted son of Claudius, grandson of Germanicus, and great-grandson of Mark Antony and Octavia so he had a peerless pedigree on both sides. Yet he was not groomed for power because his mother Agrippina was exiled for plotting to overthrow Caligula until they were both brought back when Agrippina married Claudius. Claudius made both Nero and his step-brother Brittanicus co-heirs, which was pretty much a death sentence for Brittanicus who mysterious died the day before he came of age. Nero’s reign started off well for the first five years. During this time he conducted a proxy war with Parthia over Armenia but it backfired badly as a PR exercise when he insisted that the client king of Armenia come to pay obeisance to him in Rome at great financial expense. Episode XX Agrippina looks at this woman so thoroughly enmeshed in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. She was the daughter of Germanicus, Caligula’s sister and her mother Agrippina the Elder was seen as the perfect wife. The grew up surrounded by strong women and a stable empire. She was married off twice, before marrying her uncle Claudius, which even the Romans saw as a bit ‘off’. Even though she was a victim of Nero, she has been viewed as a malign influence by association because Nero was bad. Nero tried to drown her and eventually had her stabbed. Interlude Q and A is a special session where Matt and Rhiannon answer questions about themselves- who they are, how they became interested in Rome etc. Episode XXI The Great Fire of Rome in 64CE distinguishes Nero’s fire from the ones that preceded and followed it. Rome was always a fire hazard, but in this case, Nero himself was blamed FOR the fire, and not just playing his lyre during it. It’s not clear that he was really responsible, but he was happy enough to blame the Christians (although this might just be a throw-away line from Tacitus, because the Christians weren’t particularly important or visible at that time). The fire burned for 6 days and destroyed 10 of the 14 zones of Rome. Nero did put a lot of money and effort into rebuilding housing for the poor, but he also took the opportunity to build his golden house across three of the seven hills of Rome (the Colosseum is now on the site).

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC) Season 7 In Episode 4: Undersea sabotage? The mysterious pipe blasts Matt Bevan asks who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on the bottom of the Baltic Sea on 26 September. Was it Germany? They had a long history of trade with Russia, and Germany gambled that if both countries remained mutually dependent there would be peace between them. Was it Ukraine? Ukraine was no fan of Nordstream because it went directly between Russia and Germany, thus depriving Ukraine of transit fees and political influence. Was it America? The US has long been fearful of Russia’s influence – in fact, Reagan imposed sanctions on anyone who was involved in building the pipe lines. Biden threatened that the US would bring Nordstream to an end. Was it Russia? Gazprom is under the direct control of the Kremlin, who told it to cut back. Russia had already turned off the gas in Pipe 1. All in all, the whole thing has been a disaster

Boyer Lectures (ABC) I am no great fan of Noel Pearson. I dislike his biblical, stentorian tones when speaking, his conservative worldview, his Western Canon name-dropping and his dripping contempt for ‘progressives’. However, I recognize that if the Recognition Referendum is to succeed, then it needs support from both conservatives and the Labor Party. When Pearson came out so strongly against Senator Jacinta Price and her rejection of the Voice to Parliament, I decided that I would listen to these Boyer lectures after all. Episode 1: Who we were, who we are and who we can be was very good. In many ways it encapsulated Pearson’s view of Australia as being a mixture of Aboriginal, British and multicultural elements. Episode 2 A Rightful but not Separate Place went through the history of the journey that has led to the Uluru Statement, crediting John Howard with starting the 15 year process by declaring his support for constitutional recognition if he won the 2007 election (although note that he only did this the night before the election). Pearson does, however, point out where his path and that of Howard diverged, and he comes out very strongly for the Voice to Parliament. Episode 3: A Job Guarantee for the Bottom Million revealed more of the Pearson I expected, railing against ‘progressives’ and welfare dependency, and valorizing the family as the means for improvement. In Episode 4: Transformational School Education he displays his enthusiasm for Direct Instruction, and has another dig at ‘progressives’ who have qualms about Direct Instruction as a pedagogy (Disclaimer here: I have used Direct Instruction, complete with the chanting and hand-movements. It is very effective with some children, but I would not want to build a whole curriculum on it). By this time I had had almost as much as I could stomach. Fortunately Episode 5: We the Australian People was more inclusive – arguing that we are more united by similarities than our differences. He had a bit of a rail against identity politics (although it seems to me that the right is just as guilty of this as ‘progressives’) and the dangers of constant campaigning in politics that never leaves space for governing, just campaigning. He then goes through a roll call of the dead, and asks rhetorically how they would vote in the upcoming Referendum.

History Hit Germany’s Extreme Monarchists. Good grief- what happened? Over 3000 police officers raided the ‘Reichsburger’ group comprising a celebrity chef, former police officers and serving army officers as part of an extremist coup to overthrow the government. They planned to reinstate the German monarchy with a 71 year descendent of the Hohenzollern dynasty, Henrich XIII. The world is going mad. This episode features historian Katja Hoyer who speaks about the deposing of the German monarchy after World War I, and the influence of conspiracy thinking among right-wing groups in Germany.

New Books Network: Latin America This episode features Sarah Zukerman Daly, author of Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections Based on her studies of various Latin American countries, she explores the question of how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. She argues that in post-war societies, people are likely to vote for whichever party will bring peace and security, even if the party is deeply implicated in violence and atrocities. Often it’s the party that won the conflict that is rewarded, and by purging a few people, it offers security although often at the expense of justice, liberal democracy, and social welfare. This is real social science, using interviews, court transcripts, polls and statistics and at times it gets very technical. But great question, though.

Gone Medieval It’s coming up to Christmas, so a bit of seasonal listening to The Real ‘Good King Wenceslas’ – not one of my favourite carols. Who is King Wenceslas, anyway? And when IS St Stephen’s day ?( Answer: the 27th December in the Eastern calendar- the second day of Christmas) Well, he was born around 905 CE and died in 935CE when he was murdered by his brother. He wasn’t actually a King, although he was a Duke or a Prince of a Bohemian noble family. Bohemia at that time was in the western region of the Czech republic, with its capital in Prague. Europe at this time was riven by dynastic rivalries, including the Magyars, the Franks and the Saxons. It’s not really clear why his brother killed him. He was made a saint quite soon after his death, as part of the shift to the idea of the Holy King. St Wenceslas’ Square in Prague is named after him, but his reputation suffered when the Nazis issued Medals of St Wenceslas to reward their supporters. He was embraced by both German speaking and Czech speaking Bohemians, and later kings drew on his reputation in their iconography. Dr. Cat Jarman is joined by Czech historian Dr. David Kalhous.

History This Week A bit more Christmas in my ears! The Surprising History of Christmas Gifts gives a very American-centric history of Christmas at it takes us back to New York in December 1913 when shoppers are being exhorted to ‘Shop Early’. In fact, newspapers had been exhorting them to do so since May 30th. Although the Puritans had banned Christmas, the people had been celebrating mid-winter anyway out in the streets, and in the early 19th century it was domesticated by people being encouraged to bring it inside. This, alongside the conceptualisation of childhood, led to New York becoming the centre of toy manufacture and department stores. You might think that it was avaricious department store owners who might have encouraged the ‘shop early’ theme, but it was instead Florence Kelly, a labour organizer, who wanted to protect factory and shop workers from the loophole in their labour agreements which limited the hours of work for women and children except between December 15-31, without overtime payments. Later, wealthy women patrons supported the SPUG movement- The Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving- which criticized the practice where pressure was placed on working women (in particular) to chip in to buy a present for their bosses! In recognition of the gift giving qualities of Christmas, FDR moved Thanksgiving a week forward in 1939 to give more time for Christmas Sales. Features Jennifer Le Zotte, professor of history and material culture at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington; Ellen Litwicki, Professor Emerita at the State University of New York at Fredonia; and Paul Ringel, professor of history at High Point University and author of Commercializing Childhood.

Soul Search (ABC) The Gospel of John and the poetry of belief. To be honest, I always found the Gospel of John a bit flakey, with all it’s “beginning was the word and the word was God” stuff. This episode, features Meredith Lake and Dorothy Lee and Bob Derrenback, editors of The Enduring Impact of the Gospel of John . Chronologically, Mark was the source text for Matthew and Luke, but you can find things in John that don’t appear in the other synoptic gospels. They don’t really know who the author who identified himself as “disciple that Jesus love” was. By the 2nd century CE it was assumed that it was Apostle John, but it could be John the Elder. Mark was probably written around 70AD, and Mark and Luke in 80AD. John was probably written in the 90s. Literacy rates were about 5% in the Roman Empire at that time, so while there were eyewitnesses around, there was no urgency to put in on paper. As far as Christmas is concerned, we don’t get any at all in John. In fact, Christmas is a bit of a mash-up, with the shepherds in one gospel and the wise men in the other. The interviewees then go on to talk about John as a devotional text, at which point I lost interest.