Tom Holland Blog

The Truth is Out There

Wed, 13 May 2009 10:58:05 UTC

What happened to the treasures looted by the Romans from the Temple of Jerusalem? What happened to the Ark of the Covenant? What happened to the Holy Grail?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, and I very much doubt that anyone else does as well. But I can perfectly understand why people want to know - and why they may go to extraordinary lengths, and dream up extraordinary theories, in their efforts to track a particularly fantastical quarry down. The great candelabrum carted through the streets of Rome following the defeat of the Jewish Revolt in AD 70 - and still to be seen on the Arch of Titus - serves as a peculiarly potent symbol of all the treasures that have been lost over the course of the millennia. But not only treasures. So much, even of the most mundane details of life, has been turned into dust - and so, of course, we want to fill in the gaps, we want to believe that we can track down the truth, we want reassurance that the past can indeed be fathomed. This, in its essence, is the fascination of ancient history - and its abiding frustration as well.

Two fascinating books have recently been serving to bring this reflection home to me. One is by Kathy Gere, a wonderful study of the excavations by Arthur Evans in the early 20th century on Crete. The tone and substance of her argument can be gauged from her opening sentence: "Crete's premier tourist attraction, the fabled Bronze Age Palace of Knossos, enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island." Evans did not merely uncover the past; he recreated it as well. That is why the ruins of Knossos are as much a masterpiece of modernism as they are a legacy of the Bronze Age. But this was something a little more complex than a mere fraud - for Evans was conjuring up fantasies that everyone wanted to believe in - he was giving form to universal dreams. Evans himself, despite the odd lurch into racism, was at heart a pacifist - and so he deliberately constructed an image of Bronze Age Crete as an unfortified idyll, a paradise of bare breasted goddesses and well oiled female athletes, a feminist contrast to the militaristic society of Mycenaean Greece across the water. That this involved the systematic suppression of evidence to the contrary has not made the fantasy any the less enduring or influential. We all of us, it seems, want - or perhaps even need - to believe that the origins of European civilisation were peaceable. Our sense of history can be as much about yearning as about brute fact.

And perhaps, although the results can verge on forgery, they are not wholly useless in opening our eyes to something real about the vanished past. Alongside Gere's book, I have also been reading a new book by David Aaronovitch, the Times columnist, on our obsession with conspiracy theories. It is all bracing, sceptical stuff, and Aaronovitch's annihilation of attempts to prove that Marilyn or Diana might have been assassinated, or the Twin Towers brought down by the US government, or Dr David Kelly murdered, leaves nothing standing. For my purposes, however, the most interesting chapter was one on conspiracy theories that reach back in time: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and so on. My guilty secret is that, back in my teenage years, I read virtually all the books that Aaronovitch has set to trashing with such glee - and loved them as well. Indeed, that I became obsessed by ancient Egypt and the Old Testament owed much to my reading of Velikovsky at an impressionable age - with the result that I ended up with a much better knowledge of the Middle Dynasty or the Book of Kings than I would probably ever have had otherwise. But that wasn't its only value - because, in fact, there is a sense in which Velikovsky, and Graham Hancock, and all the other authors who trace in the records of Egyptian history the contours of a massive conspiracy are closer in spirit to the ancients than the sober and scrupulous scholars who are bound by their own professional standards not to indulge in wild speculation. A really lunatic theory can serve to remind us that humanity has always been lunatic.

In Memoriam

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:12:19 UTC

This has been a miserable week. Our beloved cat, Edith - named after the sister of King Harold Godwinsson, and an aptly regal and elegant pet - has vanished. Of course, she may still be alive, but we have reached the stage now where we suspect the worst. Despite all the desperate ringing around local vets and all the pathetic posters we have put up, long since bedraggled with the rain, it looks as though Harold, her brother, is now an only cat.

At least yesterday gave me and Sadie, my wife, the chance to get out and cheer ourselves up a bit. Most evenings this week we have spent slumped miserably in front of the TV, watching thoroughly depressing programmes full of mayhem and calamity - Red Riding, The Wire, the news. Yesterday, however, was the opening of a wonderful new gallery at the British Museum, devoted to the art and culture of medieval Europe. It is small - nothing on the scale of the Musée de Cluny in Paris, or the V&A here in London - but perfectly formed. In fact, I can't imagine a richer or more easily digestible introduction to the subject. Sadie's favourite piece was a 14th century carving of Saint Margaret, a virtuous virgin who was no sooner swallowed by a dragon than she invoked the name of the cross, and was promptly catapulted out through the monster's stomach: she was subsequently installed as the patron saint of midwives (Sadie is training to be a midwife, athough she has never been swallowed by a dragon). My own favorite was a ring worn by Richard Coeur de Lion: partly because it always sends shivers down my spine to see something that actually had contact with the touch of a near-legendary figure, and partly because its seal was a classical image of Mercury, an unexpected blending of the ancient world with the medieval.

There was also a very effective and amusing speech from David Cameron, who opened the exhibition (the British Museum is clearly taking an educated punt on who is going to win the next election). Amid all the jokes delivered with the fluency and poise that an education at Eton presumably helps to give you, there was also a commitment to reinstate the primacy of narrative history in schools. Hurray! Let's hope he sticks to it. I'm obviously going to have to vote Conservative...

Pagans and Christians

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:26:46 UTC

Last week was half-term, and we spent it Withnail fashion, in a picturesque but slightly 17th Century farmhouse. It was, to put it mildly, decidedly not wifi-enabled - but it is a pleasure, sometimes, just to vanish off the radar of the 21st century - and especially when you have a mammothly long and ridiculously entertaining novel to keep you going through the long February evenings. The book was Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which several people had recommended to me, and reading it I could see why. The premise was one that it took Borges only a couple of pages to explore in his (very) short story, Ragnarok – but then again, a short story would hardly have kept me going for very long, so I did not exactly begrudge Gaiman his prolixity. A man meets with a mysterious one-eyed stranger on a plane – the stranger turns out to be Odin – just one of the many gods brought to the New World by immigrants, and then forgotten – but still these discarded deities live on – shabbily, ingloriously, and yet, as it turns out, with a latent potential for magic and menace. Fantasy, of course, all fantasy – because, in reality, gods do indeed die.

Writing about Greece, writing about Rome, writing about Persia (with apologies to all Zoroastrians), I was dealing with gods that are pretty much extinct. Writing about Christendom in Millennium, however, I was not. The contrast was brought home powerfully to me yesterday, when I chaired an event at the Frontline Club in Paddington, which had as its theme what the journalist Paul Marshall has termed his profession's "blind spot": its failure to get religion. His case, one which he and several others have made with great force and clarity in a fascinating new book, is that journalists are blinded by ignorance and disdain from taking religion seriously, and as a result can miss the point of fundamentally important news stories – whether it be the rise of Islamic terrorism or the course of recent US presidential elections or the politics of aid to Africa. Marshall's paradigm, however, is principally an American one, featuring as it does a liberal, secular elite stood apart from the great mass of a God-fearing population – and I do not think that it applies to Britain. Here, even the religious can often seem embarrassed to admit to anything so un-ironic as sincerity or an interest in the spiritual - and there is a substantial minority (a whole third of the population, according to a poll I heard on the news yesterday), who seem actively to detest everything to do with religion. This – quite apart from serving to boost Richard Dawkins' royalty cheques – means that the task of the historian who wishes to argue for the significance of the Christian origins of our ethical and social presumptions is of a quite different level of difficulty to that which confronts the classicist, say, who has to make the case for the abiding relevance of ancient Greece or Rome. Put simply, the Christian god – and Allah too, of course – are threatening to many people in a way that Zeus or Jupiter are not.

I have had personal reason to appreciate this. Last autumn, to coincide with the publication of Millennium, I wrote an article in the New Statesman arguing for the significance of the Gregorian revolution of the 11th century for the present - exactly the same order of product placement that I had previously done for Rubicon and Persian Fire. Rather to my surprise, however, the reaction of the magazine's readers verged on the outraged - so much so, indeed, that the delighted editor promptly invited me to write a reply. This, of course, did little to make his readers any the less indignant. Still - every cloud has a silver lining - because evidently it was the blowback from these two articles which got me onto the panel at the Blind Spot event – an opportunity I would really not have wanted to miss. To come straight from reading Ibn Ishaq on the sanctuary of Mecca, and meet a Muslim scholar passionately distraught at the fate being meted out to the antiquities of the city, courtesy of the Saudi authorities at their most brutally Cromwellian, was to feel anew the burning relevance of studying ancient history. No longer was it something academic, but something viscerally, passionately felt. What is faith, after all, but an attempt to transcend the diurnal, the contemporary? To feel a sense of communion with all those countless vanished millions of souls who have practised rites, and said prayers, and nurtured beliefs that, it may be, have a continuity across the span of entire millennia? To shrink the centuries - is that not precisely what the historian aims to do as well?

Which leaves me reflecting how sad it is that Gaiman's novel was indeed just a work of fantasy, and that I will most likely not be bumping into Athena in the British Library. The ache to believe can sometimes come as such a surprise that it serves to jolt. Last week, when I was in the Lakes, I climbed Helvellyn - a lunatic project as it turned out - because the peak, which could only be approached along a razor sharp ridge of rock, was covered in ice and snow, and lashed by gale-force winds. Everyone else I meet with had crampons and ice-picks and compasses - whereas I had nothing except a gnawing feeling that I had been a tit, and was most likely going to die. Fortunately, however, after what seemed a very long half hour scrabbling through snow on my hands and knees, I made it to the opposite end of the ridge. There I found a memorial stone which had been raised to a Victorian climber: falling to his death, it seemed, his dog had stood loyally over his corpse for three whole months, until finally the body was found. In ancient Greece, perhaps, he would have been worshipped as a hero; in medieval times, as a saint. Either way, standing there before the memorial stone, I found myself wishing that it had been a shrine of some kind: something that I could pray to, just to set my racing heart at rest. But, of course, it was nothing of the kind - and so there was just me, the memorial stone, the wind, the mountain, and nothing else.

"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" as they like to say in Cumbria. "Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" Hey hey, where indeed?

Sloughs for fat pigs

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:36:19 UTC

"Love and History" is the title of an event I am attending tomorrow in Kensington Library. It is suddenly starting to bear down on me like a lorry on a hedgehog. Months ago, when I was asked to do the event, I cheerfully said yes - then barely gave it a second thought. Since then, the time has slipped by - and now the event is almost here. Eeek!

What the hell am I going to talk about? The presumption is, I think - presumably because we are all seen as being whores at heart - that authors should always talk about the book they are keenest to flog - which is invariably their most recent one. But that is precisely why I am stuck. For all its fascination, about which I can usually drone on for hours and hours and hours and hours, even I have to admit that the period of the Millennium was not exactly a GREAT one for romantic love. Of course, had I only eked out my narrative to cover Heloise and Abelard, then I would have had no problems - but alas, I did not. So what am I left me with? Well - there is always Fulk Nerra, the terrifying Count of Anjou, who discovered that his wife Elizabeth had been having an affair behind his back, wasted the entire city in which she had had her love-nest, and burnt Elizabeth herself at the stake. Or there is Edward the Confessor, who was subsequently canonised for - among other things - having stayed a virgin all his life - despite the fact that he had been married for much of it. Coming in at number one, however, in the most-romantic-man-of-the-First-Millennium hit parade, must be Peter Damian, a hermit whose writings would serve to spice up any Valentine's Day card. Women who slept with priests, he declared, were "titbits of the devil, refused of paradise, slime that fouls minds, blade that slays souls, wolfsbane of drinkers, poison of table companions, the stuff of sin, the occasion of death... harem of the ancient enemy, hoopoes, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, horse leeches... whores, harlots, kissing-mouths, sloughs for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, nymphs, sirens, blood-sucking witches."

The old smoothie! I particularly like "sloughs for fat pigs." Maybe I will talk about him...

Off to see the Wizard

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:07:23 UTC

Yesterday, I went for a top-level meeting with assorted power-brokers from Google.

Wow!

That's the kind of sentence that most blogs can only dream of hosting. In fact, it's not as glamorous as it sounds - I went along in a humble role as a representative of the Society of Authors [working on YOUR behalf, authors! Join now!]. The meeting had been called by various Google plenipotentiaries, some of whom had swept in specially from California, all as part of their mission to spread the good news to their outlying European satrapies that they were fully committed to taking over the world, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. Or as they expressed it - they are continuing with their project of digitising millions upon millions of books, and this is good news for authors, because we will stand to make a bit of pocket-money too. Put like that, it's fair to say, their manifesto sounded thoroughly convincing. Mind you, I expect lawyers tend to be employed by Google because they have a certain talent for sounding convincing.

I am so habituated to using Google now that meeting people who are actually responsible for it was a bit like meeting people who are responsible for the weather. All the same, it was the kind of working environment that I had wanted to see ever since reading Microserfs, Douglas Coupland's wonderful portrait of life in Silicon Valley. I didn't actually see anybody on a space-hopper or throwing bean bags about, but there were brightly coloured chairs everywhere, and even a yellow sun hanging from the ceiling, all of which looked as though they had been lifted from the Teletubbies. There was also a lot of Diet Coke. No sign of any books, though...