1 The Need For Verisimilitude in Historical Depictions
In recent weeks, there have been several heated exchanges between famous actors and other high-profile celebrities over the casting of black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’. The argument on one side, at least on the surface, would appear to be that the inhabitants of the Aegean during the 13th century BC, when the Trojan war is most likely to have taken place, were not of African origin, as Ms Nyong’o clearly is. We know this because both archaeologists and geneticists tell us that although, after the last ice age, the hunter-gatherers who then inhabited the Mediterranean’s northern coastal regions were gradually displaced by agrarian peoples from Anatolia – who probably had a somewhat Middle Eastern appearance – they, in turn, were then displaced by Slavic pastoralists from the Ukrainian and Russian steppe, who, by the 13th century BC, more or less dominated all of central and southern Europe, leaving only North Western Europe, principally Britain and France, in the hands of their original, now identifiably Celtic inhabitants.
Admittedly, the Anatolian side of the Aegean was then repeatedly invaded by people from further east, most notably the Hittites who founded the city of Wilusa, better known by its Greek name of Ilium, which we now believe to have been Troy. Native Trojans, therefore, were probably darker skinned than their Achaean counterparts, as the inhabitants of Greece were then called. But Helen of Troy was actually the Queen of Sparta, in Greece, and was very possibly even blond, as many Slavs are. Yes, the people of the Aegean were prolific traders and could have bought black slaves from North Africa, but the King of Sparta is hardly likely to have married one. Historically, therefore, a black Helen of Troy is just not right.
The argument on the other side, however, is that all of this is simply irrelevant, in that we are not talking about real historical people but actors in a cinematic rendition of a story which also contains gods and goddesses and which, in itself, therefore, is not entirely factual. More to the point, we regularly accept performances of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress, with Venetian gentlemen played by black actors, an historical anomaly we regularly overlook.
The problem with this argument, however, is that our acceptance of non-realistically performed Shakespeare plays is part of our history. After all, in Shakespeare’s time, the female characters were played by boys and soldiers died of mortal wounds without spilling a single drop of blood. We learned to accept these things because, as sophisticated theatre goers, we learned to suspend our disbelief, not to the point at which we rush up on stage to stop Othello killing Desdemona, as it is said that one rather unsophisticated theatre goer once did, but at least until we reach the point at which something begins to seem so off or wrong to us that it actually spoils our enjoyment of the play.
Sir Laurence Olivier understood this when he ‘blacked up’ to play Othello in his now infamous film version of the Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. I say ‘infamous’ because today, of course, a white man blacking up to play a black man would be considered one of the greatest sins anyone could commit. In 1965, however, Olivier knew that if a white European appeared in a film portraying a man constantly referred to as ‘the Moor’, it would so lack verisimilitude that the audience would simply walk out. And this is very similar to how many people react today when presented with a black actress playing Helen of Troy.
Nor is this the worst example of the kind of artistic misjudgement producers can make when they pay insufficient consideration to the cultural sensibilities of their audience. A few years ago, for instance, I watched the first ten minutes of the first episode of a television series called ‘Bridgerton’, an historical drama set in Regency London which was produced, one suspects, to capitalise on the popularity of film and television adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen. Unlike Jane Austen, however, who wrote all her novels during this period, the writers of ‘Bridgerton’ seem to have been almost totally unaware of the historical background and social structure of the world they were depicting, with the result that they made the astoundingly egregious error of introducing a black duke into their cast of characters, clearly not realising that, outside of the monarchy, the position and title of ‘Duke’ is the highest in the British aristocracy and that, apart from the decedents of a small band of Norman henchmen who ‘came over with the Conqueror’ – of which there are very few left – there are only two types of duke: royal dukes, who are usually the younger brothers of current or future kings, and dukes who have been awarded the title for some conspicuous service to their country, usually of a military nature, the two most famous examples being the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington. Unless we have had a black king or queen who produced more than one black son, therefore, or a black general who won some famous victory against the French – either of which possibility I think I would have known about – there cannot have been a black duke in Regency London.
Of course, there will be those who will argue that what this actually reveals is a very significant difference between ‘Bridgerton’ and ‘The Odyssey’. For the reason why we find the existence of a black duke in Regency London so jarring is because it is so completely at odds with well known historical facts. In contrast, we know almost nothing about the history of the Trojan war, except that it almost certainly did not come about as a result of the younger son of the King of Wilusa stealing the wife of the King of Sparta. As in the case of even some of Shakespeare’s historically based plays, therefore, both ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ are almost entirely fictional, which is hardly surprising given the fact that they are generally believed to have been written by a blind poet called Homer in the 8th century BC, five hundred years after the Trojan war actually took place.
Even this legendary origin, however, is a fiction. For while a man called Homer may have had something to do with the evolution of the two poems, he certainly wasn’t their author… for the very good reason that they didn’t actually have one.
2 Mythology and Identity
I say this because Homer’s two epic poems almost certainly evolved as part of an oral tradition, which probably began quite simply with the telling of stories over a camp fire but eventually developed into an elaborate and really quite sophisticated form of theatre, in which an early version of the Greek Chorus would have recited the poems while actors very probably mimed the scenes being described.
We cannot know this for certain, of course, because the development of the two poems was no more documented than the poems themselves. There is highly compelling evidence, however, not just that the poems were originally passed on by word of mouth, but that this dramatised oral tradition was what ultimately led to the classical Greek theatre of 6th century BC, in which dialogue was put into the mouths of the actors while the Chorus, instead of telling the story, mostly only commented on it, pointing out the follies of mankind and lamenting their tragic consequences.
One of the biggest clues that the poems were originally recited from memory, rather than read from a script or book, is the fact they were composed in dactylic hexameters, which have six bars to the line, each of which consists of one long and two short beats. Each six bar line can also be divided into two half lines of three bars each, one half line of which is often a ‘filler’. In both ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’, for instance, one regularly comes across often repeated phrases such as ‘the rosy fingers of dawn’: a fairly obvious filler.
More to the point, a regular meter and rhythm is a very powerful aid to memory, especially when set to music. Everyone, for instance, will have suffered the rather annoying experience of having a song go round and round in their head all day without being able to get rid of it. Some of us may even have wondered why this happens. Why were we given this very peculiar ability or curse? For there must be a reason why we have been burdened by something so irritating. The answer, however, is fairly simple. For at some time in our history, this type of mnemonic aid must have had some evolutionary value, the most plausible hypothesis being that those people who could pass on their history and values through stories which they learned and preserved in the form of poems or songs, would have been far more united by a common identity than those who lacked this ability and would therefore have had a much better chance of surviving.
Even today, in fact, a common cultural identity is still very probably a necessary condition for a cohesive and stable society. And it is for this reason that the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy has caused so much controversy. For ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ were not just two of the cornerstones of Greek culture, reminding young Greek men who they were and inspiring them to live up to the values of their heroic ancestors, they are also two of the cornerstones of a wider European culture. Everyone born in Europe knows who Achilles, Odysseus and Helen of Troy were and still are, their characters having been immortalised by their iconic cultural status. Everyone of my generation was taught ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ at school, where it was simply accepted that the two poems constituted the foundation of all European literature. They thus form part of our common European identity, as does da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. And it is for this reason, not its historical inaccuracy, that seeing Helen of Troy, a European cultural icon, being played by a non-European actress is so jarring.
3 The Eradication of European Identity in Three Easy Steps
It is also why those who support the casting of Lupita Nyong’o in this role are so scathing of those who oppose it. For they know that this opposition is not pursued out of mere historical pedantry but is in defense of a European cultural identity which they see as essentially white and racist and which they therefore believe must be eradicated. While casting a black actress as Helen of Troy may seem a rather trivial matter, therefore, it is actually a fairly significant battle in a much larger cultural war, in which those who disapprove of the world our ancestors created have been relentlessly chipping away at Europe’s cultural identity for almost as long as I can remember.
Nor is the reasoning behind this crusade hard to follow. For it starts with the fact that, for most of the last six hundred years, Europeans have been going out into the world and conquering large parts of it. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British all built extensive trading empires which, through their superior military technology, they gradually turned into colonial empires, in which the native populations were not only generally regarded as inferior but commonly mistreated, thereby making us guilty of two interconnected moral offences which both reinforce and amplify each other. For not only did the sense of our superiority lead us to look down on those we ruled, but the power we consequently wielded over them both confirmed us in this sense of superiority and seemed to justify our treatment of those we often regarded as somehow less than fully human.
Was this behaviour something of which we should now be proud? Of course not. But to regard it as something for which we must now not only make amends but forfeit the cultural identity which put us in such a morally hazardous position is not only a masterpiece of self-indulgence but a massive over-estimation of our own importance, not least because it is not just Europeans who, at some point in their history, have behaved in this way; it is simply human nature. For any ethnic group which, through natural advantage or lucky accident, comes to gain dominion over others will naturally regard itself as superior and thus deserving of its position. Indeed, having dominion over others is, in itself, seen as proof of one’s superiority, which, once established, at least in one’s own mind, quite naturally leads one to dismiss those one governs as inferior and treat them accordingly. One may not actually abuse them or treat them cruelly, but our very disregard of those we see as beneath us may, itself, be seen as a lack of moral sensibility and thus as at least mildly reprehensible.
The question, therefore, is why, if we are all equally susceptible to this same moral failing, we Europeans should hold ourselves to a higher moral standard that the Han Chinese, the Ottoman Turks or any of the other builders of great empires, whom we can be fairly sure were just as bad. The answer, however, is again fairly simple. For given that such self-recrimination can have little or no evolutionary value, it must have had it origins in the very culture we have so come to despise: in something, indeed, which makes that culture very different to that of the Han Chinese or the Ottoman Turks. And the answer to what this might be, of course, is Christianity.
Of course, it will be argued that Christianity is currently on the wane in Europe and can thus have little influence on modern thinking. Christian concepts, however, such sin and a consequent need to do penance, are deeply engrained in European culture and can be clearly seen in the three main stages or aspects of our response to our guilty imperial past.
The first of these is the need to confess our sin and admit our guilt. This we do by rewriting our history such that everything we once believed to be heroic, noble and glorious, we now see as self-serving, mendacious and tawdry. Even the great feats of engineering upon which the British Empire was built are now seen as works of avarice and greed which despoiled the earth and enslaved the working class. At the same time, all historical monuments and cultural icons which extol our former glory have to be destroyed. In particular, the statues of 18th century merchants and Victorian industrialists who contributed to the building of our great cities, have to be torn down, while even the singing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ during the Last Night of the Proms are now condemned.
Once the outward signs and expressions of our old European cultural identity have thus been expunged, the second phase of our atonement then consists of our internalisation of a new set of values and a new identity: one based not on that which divides us, such as our ethnicity or cultural background, but on that which unites us: our common humanity. After all, we are all the children of God and are thus all equal and fundamentally the same. The problem with this laudable and essentially Christian perspective upon the world, however, is that, except for the fact that we all have two arms and two legs, there is very little all human beings have in common that unites us. Merely being human is just too abstract when, in reality, what more commonly binds people together is not only something more tangible but often rather trivial, like coming from the same town, growing up eating the same school dinners, using the same rather odd colloquialisms and knowing the same joys and heartbreaks of supporting a local football team that never wins anything.
It’s why a common British identity, which Tony Blair tried to promote in the early 2000s, never really caught on, not least because we not only define ourselves by what unites us but also by what differentiates us from everyone else. The Scots, for instance, are not just defined by haggis, Iron Bru and deep fried Mars bars but by not being the hated English. Yes, it’s negative and divisive, but it is also part of what it actually is to be human, which means that trying to suppress a local, regional or national identity in favour of something more universal not only denies us our humanity but can actually leave us with no real identity at all, as is already happening to those of us who are currently undergoing the third phase of expurgating our sins: that of doing penance, which, throughout Europe, has entailed opening our doors to all those we once subjugated and to whom we must now make amends by sharing what little is left of our ill-gotten gains, principally by providing them with homes, free healthcare and schools for their children while they gradually replace us. For with declining birth rates among native Europeans and unrestricted immigration from elsewhere, that is what is now happening, making it highly likely that, by the end of this century, the population of Europe will no longer be predominantly European.
4 Rooted and Unrooted Narratives
Of course, it will be said that this is no more than we deserve. As a moral judgment upon an entire culture and civilisation, however, this is not only rather harsh but is not actually rooted in any kind of truth, whether it be historical or cultural. For while the conceptual framework upon which this judgment is based may be essentially Christian, it is a very attenuated or vestigial form of Christianity, lacking the two core beliefs which make most traditional forms of Christianity both redemptive and life affirming. For historically, most Christian Churches did not tell us that we were sinners and irrevocably damned; they taught that, although we may be fallible and imperfect, by following Christ’s teachings as best we could and having faith in God’s love, we would be able to find our way through the moral maze that is any human life and that, ultimately, we would be forgiven for the inevitable wrong turns we occasionally made along the way.
While some European colonialists may have treated those they governed with contempt and cruelty, therefore, and while most would have certainly looked down on them from a position of assumed superiority, most European rulers would have approached their native populations in the way their Christian upbringings had taught them they should, with the result that the most common way in which their assumed superiority manifested itself was in a form of paternalism, which may have been mildly patronising but was not born of any ill will.
Yes, they also thought it their duty to convert their charges to Christianity, which many people today regard as a form of cultural colonialism. But not only did they not do this in order to rob those they ruled of their own culture, they believed that what they were giving them was something of great value, for which many converts were, indeed, grateful. For the way in which traditional Christian communities were taught to live their lives and behave towards others has many benefits, the most valuable of which is that loving and caring for others actually helps us love ourselves, creating a benign circle in which this positive attitude, both towards ourselves and others, constantly reinforces itself. In contrast, loathing the society, culture and civilisation of which one is a part, as this new vestigial form of Christianity has taught us to do, not only makes us loathe ourselves but all those in whom we see ourselves reflected, creating a vicious circle in which those thus trapped must eventually tear themselves apart.
More to the point, this entirely negative view of ourselves teaches us no lessons on how we should actually live our lives, as both the Bible and Homer’s epic poems clearly do. ‘The Iliad’, for instance, is largely focused on three men, one of whom, King Agamemnon, nearly loses a war because, jealous of Achilles’ prowess as a warrior and feeling himself the lesser man, he attempts to assert his authority by publicly disrespecting a man upon whom he actually depends. Achilles, in turn, then loses his best friend by sitting in his tent for ten years, resentfully brooding over his injured pride. It is Odysseus, in contrast, who actually wins the war because he understands political reality and knows that it is sometimes better to fight one’s battles with guile and ingenuity than by going head to head with one’s opponent in an all out confrontation: lessons from which we can all learn because they reveal to us important truths about human nature. The narrative we are spun about European culture and civilisation being a racist and evil blight upon the world, in contrast, teaches us absolutely nothing, not only because, like ‘The Iliad’, it is not actually rooted in historical truth, which is always far more complicated and nuanced than we think, but because it is not rooted in anything true about ourselves.
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