January

John Gannon: A treatise on Sexual Relationships in the style of Aristotle's Poetics
The New Yorker, January 26 2004
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Tom Payne: Sapphic Slanders
The Daily Telegraph, Arts and Books, January 17th 2004
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February

Seamus Heaney: An article for Friends of Classics
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Peter Jones: The Joys of Translating into Latin
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March

Seamus Heaney reflects on 'The Gates of Thebes', his translation of Sophocles' Antigone.
The Sunday Times, March 21 04
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AC Grayling: Marcus Aurelius
The Times 27 March 04
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April

Adi Bloom: An MP's classroom debut
The Times Educational Supplement, April 30 2004
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AQA Latin and Greek AXED
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AQA Latin: House of Lords Debate
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July

Christopher Howse: Ten odd aspects of the real Olympics
The Daily Telegraph, Weekend section, July 24 04
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October

Alasdair Palmer: Herculaneum Today, The Sunday Telegraph, October 3 2004
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November

The Times, November 25 04
Anthony Snodgrass, emeritus professor of archaeology at Cambridge, says that the British Museum Elgin marbles are in far worse condition than those that Elgin did not take. Snodgrass was 'astonised by the extent of the original detail in the Athens sculptures ... The west frieze is in better shape than anything in London, we can now see'. A spokesman for the BM rejected the claim.

The Daily Telegraph, November 23 04
Robin Lane Fox is interviewed about Oliver Stone's 'Alexander', for which he acted as historical adviser and in which he appears in the cavalry. Lane Fox comments 'I have always been dismissive of Greeks as horsemen because they couldn't jump...but now I know what it is like to gallop without a saddle and holding a spear all day long'. The film is an endorsement of his life's work: 'It is like somebody has said "Would you like to see what you have been thinking about in your head all these years?" '

The Daily Telegraph, November 24 04
Another section of the Hiera Hodos (Sacred Way) that linked Athens to Eleusis has been uncovered by mechanical diggers preparing the ground for a new station on the Athens metro system. So important is the site that the station, Egaleo, has been moved to a slightly different location (other stations have actually been scrapped because of finds).

The Times, November 25 and 26 04
Sean Macaulay says Oliver Stone's 'Alexander' is 'all set to go down in flames, not because of its windy sub-plots but because of the raging battles over its hero's sexuality'. The 'Alexander the Gay' debate is sweeping the US, strangely, as gay culture 'has gone so mainstream' in the past decade. Meanwhile Andrew Pierce reports that the New York critics have savaged Oliver Stone's 'Alexander', e.g. 'Dry and academic' (New York Times), 'Full of brilliant highlights, all in Colin Farrell's hair' (Boston Globe), 'Not Great' (Rolling Stone).

The Guardian G2, November 22 04
John Hooper reports on an exhibition of coloured statuary
For hundreds of years, Caligula's handsome, marble face has stared out at a fascinated world. Now situated at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen, the celebrated first-century bust of this cruel young Roman emperor is made repellent, yet intriguing, not so much by his petulantly down-turned mouth as by the blank, staring eyes chiselled from marble by an unknown sculptor. It comes as a shock to be confronted with an exact replica with unthreatening hazel eyes. Add garish pink skin and glossy brown hair, and the new painted version of Caligula's bust looks as if it might once have been used to model hats in the window of a men's outfitters. Yet, according to the curators of a new exhibition at the Vatican museums, this is a lot closer to what the sculptor intended we see than the white marble to which we are accustomed. It has long been known that classical statues were painted. Indeed, their creators sometimes chose different kinds of stone for different parts of their statues according to the way they reacted to paint and wax, using types that could be highly polished for the fleshy parts and coarser varieties that would absorb paint for the drapery. Some art history books have included coloured photographs to give an idea of how the statues of the Greeks and Romans would have looked to contemporaries. But 'I Colori del Bianco' (The Colours of White) is the first show to confront us with three-dimensional copies created with the help of meticulous scientific investigation. Alongside Caligula, there is an Athena who looks more like a central American goddess than a Greek one, and a Trojan archer wearing multi- coloured matching top and leggings that could easily have been designed by Missoni. "This exhibition reminds me of Wim Wenders' film 'Wings of Desire', where the angels saw in black and white but the human beings saw in colour," says the shows curator, Paolo Liverani. "We are in an 'angelic' situation with respect to classical statues; we are used to seeing them and appreciating them in immaculate white. Now we're trying to 'humanise' ourselves a bit and rediscover them in their original colours." Ever since they became the object of scholarly interest, classical statues have been trapped in an aesthetic cage erected by the German scholar and father of modern archaeology, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. It was he who laid down the rule that white is right. "Colour," Winckelmann declared, "ought to have a minor part in the consideration of beauty." Whenever statues carved by the ancients came to light, they were left unadorned. Telltale streaks and smudges clearly showed the marble had once been painted. But no one wanted to risk damaging the 2000-year old originals. And in any case, who was to say how exactly they had been painted? However, modern techniques have enabled investigators to determine from minute, usually ingrained, traces of the precise types and colours of the paints used. The Vatican museums' researchers have carried out a rigorous examination of one of the most famous classical figures, the so-called Prima Porta Augustus, which revealed the statue was once like the replica on display in the exhibition. It had a scarlet toga, a red and blue tunic and a breastplate decorated with coloured figures. Other copies in the show were created with the help of research at the Glyptothek in Munich and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. "I think it's a valiant attempt to discover what went on,' says Susan Walker, keeper of antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum in oxford. "The question is whether the People who have researched the exhibition have got the recipes right both with respect to what kind of paint was used and how the paint adhered to the sculptures." "The show is an experiment", said Franecsco Buranelli, the Vatican museums director. It has won enthusiastic, if bewildered, reviews in Rome. Il Messagero found the exhibition "disorientating shocking, but often splendid"; Corriere della Sera's critic felt that "suddenly, a world we had been used to regarding as austere and reflective has been turned on its head to become as jolly as a circus". And that was without anyone mentioning the Venus de Milo's nostrils. Walker said they were almost certainly painted too to reflect the prevailing fashion in ancient Greece. "It was done to intensify the effect of shadow," she said. "They were just touched up. In red." The Colours of White is at the Vatican museums, Rome, until January 31 05.

The Times, November 6 04
Benedict Nightingale argues that Greeks understood fanaticism better than anyone.
Who is the most startlingly modern dramatist currently at work in the British theatre? Critic A might put a case for Martin McDonagh, critic B for Mark Ravenhill. But in my role as critic C, I'd like to nominate a contemporary writer who died in 406BC: Euripides. If the 2,400-year-old subversive doesn't have something topical to say about power, war, the visceral human passions and the nature of the universe itself, I don't know why I've spent the past few years reviewing him more often than any playwright bar Shakespeare. Want a fresh take on Bosnia or Somalia or Iraq? Try The Women of Troy, Iphigenia at Aulis, or Hecuba, which is now at the Donmar and will be revived by the RSC in March. Want to know about the limitations of reason as they're being painfully demonstrated by nationalist demagogues, feral children, crazed cults, suicide bombers and assorted other fanatics? Try Kneehigh's revival of The Bacchae, which has just transferred from the West Yorkshire Playhouse to the Lyric, Hammersmith. My predecessor as Times theatre critic, Irving Wardle, described it as the key play of the 20th century, and, as Peter Hall's revival in 2002 suggested, it may well be this century's key play, too. Since it was staged soon after Euripides' death at the age of 74 or so, The Bacchae may also be seen as deathbed testimony, a last-gasp summary of the dramatist's views of so-called civilisation. King Pentheus, smug rationalist and inflexible ruler, tries to destroy the cult of Dionysus that has captivated his realm's women, only to be tom apart by maenads who include his own frenzied mother. It's one of Euripides' many reminders of the ham-fistedness of the iron-fisted; but it's much more than that. Again and again he warns us that we underrate the power of unreason at our peril. Take Medea, his first surviving tragedy. Remember Fiona Shaw rampaging around in the bloodstained plastic mac she wore when killing her and Jason's children in reprisal for his infidelity? To her cultured Greek husband, Medea is a vicious foreigner, a Middle Eastern barbarian and, yes, she is, a tigress who doesn't mind half- destroying herself when hatred has sent her snarling, biting, murdering outside her cage. Suppose a modern dramatist were to treat an atrocity, up to and including 9/11, in a parallel way. Suppose he suggested that wrong breeds greater wrong and injury results in disproportionate retaliation, giving a monstrous destroyer self-justifying speeches, as Euripides does in Medea. I can't see us reviewers giving him a major award. No wonder the judges placed Medea last at the Great Dionysia. No wonder Euripides, who wrote 92 plays, won only five first prizes in Athens's prototype of the Oliviers, far fewer than Aeschylus or Sophocles. When he wrote of naked emotion, he was just too disturbing. Unpopular, too. The portrait of Euripides painted by tradition is of a bloody-minded loner, happy only when he was writing in his cave, and a tempting target for his era's satirists. The comic dramatist Aristophanes was obsessed with him, creating a capsule picture of a rag- and-bone realist who delighted in demythologising heroes, demystifying gods and slandering women so badly that in the play Festival Time, the virtuous ladies of Athens plot to murder him. Yet his quality was undeniable. Some of the Athenians enslaved after their devastating defeat in Sicily in 413 won their freedom by reciting Euripides. Indeed, his plays were still being performed 600 years after they were written. And nowadays we can see that many of the accusations directed at him were absurd. Since Athenian women were supposed neither to be seen nor heard, they may indeed have been embarrassed by his ferocious Medea or besotted Phaedra, his hideously embittered Electra or a Hecuba who blinds the king who killed her son and murders his own children. But surely the point was one that a modern feminist would applaud: a man who tries to suppress female feeling, or denies its intensity, deserves all he gets. But Euripides goes further. Mistreat people, or put them to too severe a test, and they'll behave very badly indeed. There's decency and altruism in his world, often displayed by humble characters, like the peasant whom Electra has been forced to marry; but evil is everywhere, begetting more evil and explaining why Aristotle called Euripides the "most tragic" of dramatists. What do Orestes, Electra and the traditionally noble Pylades do when the Argives vote to execute them for killing Clytemnestra? They take hostage Menelaus' daughter Hermione, who only wants to help them, and shrilly vow to burn her alive if they aren't freed. Think of Baader-Meinhof, Hamas or even al-Qaeda and you have got the number of these archaic terrorists, these scary anti-heroes. But it's when Euripides writes of war, usually taking Troy as a paradigm, that his scepticism, scorn for politicians and horrified mistrust of the human animal really hits home. Odysseus is his favourite example of the malign opportunist, but shifty, ambitious, destructive men throng his plays. As Katie Mitchell's brilliant staging of Iphigenia at Aulis recently showed, neither Agamemnon nor Achilles is what Homeric legend claims. Euripides lets each of them put his case when the sacrifice of the innocent heroine is in the offing. He is, as always, disconcertingly fair-minded. But you can't leave the theatre thinking Agamemnon majestic or Achilles the epitome of valour. They're small fry floundering in a big myth. And Euripides knew what he was talking about. As an Athenian citizen said to have been a fine athlete, he must have experienced battle. Certainly, he grew up feeling that Athens represented all that was great and good in Greece. It's fascinating to see his ideals crumble as the war with Sparta, which began in 431, slowly progressed to its dire denouement. The earlier plays, such Suppliants or Andromache, take a chauvinistic pride in Athens, a free city whose renowned leader, Theseus, likes to fight injustice and help the wronged. And they demonise Spartains ("take your fighting away and you're less than any other race") and their mythic tyrant, the callous Menelaus. But the war went on and on. Bellicose demagogues such as Cleon, who had unsuccessfully prosecuted Euripides for impiety, dominated the Assembly. In 416 the Athenians invaded the tiny island of Melos, whose crime was to remain neutral, killing the men and enslaving everyone else. Are we projecting our own sentiments on Euripides when we see The Trojan Women, a long howl of grief and maybe the greatest of all antiwar plays, as a reaction to that atrocity? Well, he wasn't the only Athenian who thought that the Peloponnesian war had brutalised everybody. His city had turned from the protector of Greece against the Persians into an imperial oppressor. A military power that claimed to espouse Jeffersonian values had become globocop: arrogant aggressive, and, given the disaster of that Sicilian adventure in 413, woefully short-sighted. And where were the gods in all this? Mostly, they come across as whimsical, petty, malicious and cruel. Apollo in Ion, for instance, is a cheat, liar and rapist, but his crimes are slight beside those of deities who gleefully foment the Trojan war in order to cull human-kind. What are we to think of Athene, who helped the Greeks to destroy Troy and then, because Ajax has offended her, vows to ensure that most of them will drown on the way home? You're never sure if Euripides saw the gods as dangerous forces needing to be appeased, figments of people's imaginations, or the names we give to chance and our own impulses; but character after character cries out against their morality and some question their very essence. So what kind of man went into voluntary exile in 408, four years before Athens lost the war? A third-century biographer says Euripides had "lost patience with the ill-will of his fellow-citizens". Was the old patriot disillusioned, cynical, faithless, and full of foreboding, a sort of angry blend of Harold Pinter and Michael Moore? Don't bet against it.

The Times, November 16 04
Atlantis Found (again)
In the child's imagination or in the whimsical plots of the cult 1970s television series, Atlantis exists, variously, on the tip of a Bolivian volcano, beneath the sands of the Arabian desert or in the Fourth Dimension somewhere off the coast of Bermuda. Now the Utopian civilisation described in 400BC by Plato and supposedly submerged in a deluge 11,600 years ago, has been "definitively located", for the 47th time in recent years. Robert Sarmast, an American researcher. is "absolutely convinced that he has discovered the lost city after finding what he claims is evidence of man-made structures submerged in the sea between Cyprus and Syria. Mr Sarmast, who has nurtured an obsession with Atlantis since he was a young boy, said that the dimensions and configuration of straight walls and a canal on a hillside above a rectangular plain on the sea-bed "perfectly" matched Plato's description of the fabled city consigned to the deep by earthquakes and flooding. "We have proven this is a match that cannot be coincidental," he said. The self-proclaimed scientist from California is the latest maverick explorer to have disregarded prevailing academic wisdom that Plato's Atlantis was allegorical and not based on historical fact. Instead, interpreting clues from Plato's Critias and Timaeus dialogues, Mr Sarmast, 38, manned a secret expedition last week in which he dragged a three-mile cable over the sea bed 50 miles off the southeast coast of Cyprus. The "walled hillside" was located about a mile beneath the surface of the sea and Mr Sarmast intends to publish findings after he has processed the detailed computer imaging data into a three dimensional model. His findings have been greeted with scepticism by reputable students of ancient mythology, who say that it goes against Plato's most fundamental belief, that reality was not to be found in this world. Alan F. Alford, one of the world's leading experts in the field, has long contended that the philosopher invented the Atlantis myth (wherein the city's inhabitants are punished for their decadence) by floods as a metaphor for the ancient version of the "Big Bang" theory. Sofronis Sofroniou, a professor of Greek philosophy in Cyprus, said yesterday "It's not possible that through the ages nobody mentioned Cyprus in connection with Atlantis. It's incredible really. My intuition is there is nothing in it, but fantastic things have turned out true before." Repeated alleged sitings of that "great and wonderful empire" and more than 800 books written on the subject have so far failed to turn up any reliable evidence. So far the city as been "found" in different locations from Sweden to Palestine, Central Asia, Antartica and Ireland. In the 1970s, a Soviet Institute of Oceanography survey ship claimed to have discovered the ruins of an immense sunken city on a deep plateau in the Atlantic, 450 miles west of Gibraltar. Two decades later, Jim Allen, a former RAF cartographer, convinced that he had found the city 300km south of La Paz, Bolivia, proclaimed: "South Americans shouldn't call themselves South Americans but rather Atlantans." The inhabitants of that continent decided against following Mr Allen's advice. In 1998 another British team delighted tour operators in the West Country when they said that they had located Atlantis lying off the Cornish Coast. It is a theory strongly denied by those who contend that Atlantans were extra-terrestrial beings who destroyed themselves with nuclear bombs. In Plato's discussion of Utopian societies, he describes how an Egyptian priest told Solon, an Athenian statesman, about Atlantis. Speaking yesterday, Mr Sarmast argued that Plato's detailed account is far more than an allegorical tale of hubris and human corruption. Priests in Ancient Egypt were not myth-makers, but "keepers of history", Mr Sarmast said. "We're verifying this story they've handed on to us."