The Rest is History Lord Byron: Scandal, Sex and Celebrity Part 2 Byron’s first big hit was “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage” which is in effect an autobiographical account of his travels during the Napoleonic War in Europe. He had first proposed writing a research project called “Sodomy Simplified” but he was talked out of it- good advice, I reckon. He escaped into the gay underworld, and sailed to Greece which was then under Turkish occupation, then on to Albania where he was fascinated by Ali Pasha. He saw himself as a future saviour of Athens, where Elgin was busy collecting his marbles. At the time, Athens was in ruins, and only 10,000 people lived there. Elgin’s plan at first was to make casts of the sculptures in order to conserve them, but once he’d had the scaffolding built etc, he decided to take them. No one objected. It took Elgin 10 years to remove them, and Byron’s friend Hobhouse saw it as an act of rescue. Byron, however, was outraged and mocked Elgin – he’d be horrified to think that they were still in the British Museum today! He finally returned home to England at the age of 23. His mother and several friends had died in the meantime, and he was restless.
Emperors of Rome. I haven’t listened to this for ages. I’m never going to catch up on all the episodes I’ve missed, so I’ll just catch their most recent series of podcasts on the Catiline conspiracy. It seems an apposite time to think about conspiracies, because our world is full of them today. Episode CCXX: A Disordered Mind, the Catiline Conspiracy I starts by pointing out that our sources for the Catiline Conspiracy mainly spring from the pen of Cicero, his enemy and Sallust who wrote twenty years after the event. Catiline was from a very patrician and aristocratic family, but they weren’t particularly wealthy. He had grown up during the Social Wars and the Sulla/Marius civil war, and there are suggestions that he and his family benefitted from the property confiscations that took part as part of these. But that wasn’t the worst thing he was accused of: instead there were a string of putative murders of two brothers-in-law and his son, accusations of incest with the daughter of his mistress, marrying for looks instead of money and having sex with a vestal virgin. In the end, the only one he faced court for was on a charge of extortion, and he bribed his way out of it. It’s interesting though- in 65BC Cicero actually contemplated being on his defence team, so even though he ended up Catiline’s sworn enemy, it wasn’t black and white at the time.
Rear Vision (ABC) U.S. Presidential Elections: Are They Democratic? This was actually broadcast on 4 February 2024, but it seemed to be pretty relevant at the moment, too. The Electoral College, devised in 1787 was intended to replicate Congress in terms of state representation, as a way of getting all the states on board. ( I’ve never heard it mentioned, but ‘colleges’ were in use in British Guiana in the early 1800s as well, drawing on a Dutch model, even though British Guiana was by then a British colony.) The Electoral College in US was not democratic, because it could over-ride the elections of its representatives if they were deemed unsuitable. In the 1960s there were calls for more representation, so conventions and caucuses became more important. Caucuses are party-controlled events, but the Constitution did not foresee the involvement of parties at all. The primaries are run by the parties in conjunction with the state government, and delegates are only bound in the first round of voting. You can see where Trump was getting his wriggle-room last election- and scope for him to do the same thing again.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 