Areopagus Volume LV

Welcome one and all to the fifty fifth instalment of the Areopagus. Mid-July, what joy! Earlier, on what has been an admittedly not-so-glorious English summer's day, I came across a bumble bee, and was reminded of the great Roman poet Virgil. One of his early masterpieces is the Georgics. It is part agricultural manual and part lyrical evocation of the countryside, laced with mythological retellings and subtle political allusions, and just about one of the most delightful things I have ever read.

The fourth book of the Georgics is devoted almost entirely to bees, and in his affectionate description of how they live Virgil seems to be drawing out an analogy for human civilisation. With that Latin bard and his bucolic verse, then, let the tone be set for this week's Areopagus:

Enchanting. And if we are the bees then let the arts be our flowers, so that from the nectar of music, literature, and architecture we might make a little honey...

I - Classical Music

Flow, My Tears

John Dowland (1596)

Performed by Phoebe Jevtovic Rosquist & David Tayler
​Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1852)

The English composer and lutenist John Dowland (1563-1626) was one of the most famous musicians of his age, and Flow, My Tears was his greatest success. So what you are listening to here is, in some sense, the Renaissance equivalent of a chart-topping single. It was originally written as a purely instrumental piece, perhaps a dance, and simply called the Lachrimae — meaning "tears" in Latin. Soon enough the tune made its way around Europe in various arrangements for soloists or ensembles, and at some point English lyrics were written especially for it, possibly even by Dowland himself.

I suppose the first thing that must strike one about this music is its sheer emotional depth. Even if we cannot understand the lyrics it is evidently a melancholy song, and one so masterful that we are helplessly swept along with the flood of Dowland's tears. This marks an important phase in the history of European music: as Medieval became Renaissance and then Baroque, one of the greatest changes (notwithstanding technical developments) was the increasing emotional expressiveness of music. It seems obvious to us that music ought to evoke emotion, but this was not always the case, and nor was it always clear how to make music pluck at our heart strings. Well, Dowland had evidently figured it out. And notice the opening motif: do those descending notes sound, perhaps, like falling tears? He was a master of the form.

Dowland was an itinerant musician who travelled throughout Europe, including stints in service of the King of Denmark and various German courts, and he may have even worked as a spy for Robert Cecil, an important English politician who directed governmental affairs for years. So Dowland journeyed, studied, composed, published, and played his way to fame. But, like most Medieval and Renaissance composers, his celebrity died with him, even if his influence lived on anonymously. That is, at least, until the 20th century. Dowland has since become one of many once-forgotten composers to enjoy a renewed popularity, thanks both to the efforts of musical historians and the possibilities afforded by recording technologies.

II - Historical Figure

Timur

Scourge of Gods

No doubt you have heard of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Genghis Khan. What do these four have in common? They are remembered, by and large, as history's greatest and most fearsome conquerors. But there is another we should add to this list: Timur, also known as Tamerlane.

He was born in modern-day Uzbekistan in 1336 to a Mongol tribe that had settled in the area during the conquests of Genghis Khan. Whether he was essentially a shepherd, as Timur would later have people believe, or a member of minor nobility, we will never know for sure. What's clear, however, is that world dominion was not something to be expected of a man from his background — during the early years of his life Timur was nothing more than a regional bandit raiding sheep and cattle. And yet, by the year 1370, Timur had somehow risen from obscurity to become the leader of his people and declared himself the restorer of the Mongol Empire. He spent the following thirty years expanding his territory, devastating vast swathes of land, and battling his way to supreme power. By 1405 the Timurid Empire was colossal.

The list of those whom Timur faced and defeated is impressive: the Golden Horde in Mongolia, the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans in Turkey, and the Delhi Sultanate in India. He fought with every noteworthy power in or around Central Asia and was victorious every time. In fact, Timur was never once defeated in battle. The speed and ferocity of his conquests is frightening even to think about — one can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to experience, or hear of in real time, the unstoppable advance of this mysterious conqueror. When news spread that Bayezid I, sultan of the mighty Ottomans, had been defeated in battle and thrown in a cage by Timur, it must surely have seemed like no force on earth could stop him.

But the man himself escapes easy categorisation. That he was a brilliant military strategist is evident. Otherwise, however, he has been variously characterised as a brutal nomadic warlord, an enlightened philosopher-king, and a canny geopolitical operator. Which was Timur, truly? All of these and more, perhaps.

Timur's campaigns are estimated by some scholars to have killed something like 5% of the world's population. He was a ruthless general and there was no brutality he feared to enforce; all the horrors and sufferings of war were unleashed by his soldiers on those they conquered. And yet we cannot call him a bloodthirsty tyrant alone. Politically speaking, Timur's greatest success was to balance and blend his own mixed heritage with the multiethnic, multicultural nature of the lands he had conquered, depending on what the situation called for. Turkic, Mongolian, Persian, and Islamic influences were all balanced and cross-bred under his rule to create a single, united political entity. Only a supreme statesman could have achieved that. We also know that he invented a new form of chess, spoke several languages, promoted education, and that the arts and sciences flourished under his rule. For, despite his brutality, Timur always spared the lives of architects, artisans, and poets, and brought them to live in his own lands, where they could enrich his cities and courts with their work.

Timur was, at his zenith, essentially the world's most powerful man. The kings of Spain and France both corresponded with him and sent delegations to the Timurid court, usually as a sign of gratitude for having defeated the Turks, and letters sent by Timur in return have actually survived. This was politically advantageous for both: they shared a common enemy in the Ottoman Empire. But Timur was apparently less friendly with the Yongle Emperor. Like his ancestor and hero, Genghis Khan, Timur wanted to conquer China. But he fell ill in 1405, while preparing for an invasion of China, and so Timur's conquests were halted not by defeat but by the one foe no conqueror has ever beaten: death.

Alas, like Alexander the Great, his empire did not survive him, and the colossal state carved out by Timur fragmented shortly after his death. But the consequences of Timur's reign lived on through the so-called Timurid Dynasty he had established and in the cultural achievements of cities such as Samarqand and Bukhara. Nor should we forget that one of his descendants, Babur, would found the Mughal Empire in 1526, which dominated India until the 19th century. His fame, too, stretched far beyond even the lands he had conquered, both during his life (when the whole world knew of and feared his armies) and afterwards. To give but two examples, in 1705 Handel wrote an opera about him, called Tamerlano, and a century before that the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had written a play entitled Tamberlaine the Great, introduced thusly:

With the death of Timur ended the age of the great conquerors of the Eurasian Steppe. For millennia the plains of Central Asia had been producing, like storm clouds slowly gathering on the horizon, nomadic warriors who would intermittently burst forth and sweep all before them, fast and innumerable, led by some brutal but brilliant warlord, before running out of steam and melding into the peoples they had conquered. Timur was the very last of these. He was buried in the city of Samarqand, his capital, in modern-day Uzbekistan, in a mausoleum known as the Gur-e-Amir, and there he remains to this day.

III - Painting

Portrait of Pope Julius II

Raphael (1512)

The trouble with the most influential artists is that they can seem ordinary precisely because they have been so influential: rather than standing out, their work looks like everything else... because everything else has been made in imitation of it! We might say this about Raphael, whose painting of Pope Julius II perhaps looks to us, by all accounts, like a good but largely unremarkable portrait.

So, what do you make of it? What do you see? First of all, I suspect, a very lifelike picture. As the 16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari said, it was "so real that it made the onlooker shrink from it in fear, as if the pope were truly alive." But this is much more than merely lifelike. It is the expressiveness of the portrait that truly strikes us. This was not easy. The human face is incredibly complex and our emotions are conveyed through an almost innumerable array of muscles and the slightest subtleties of form and movement, of skin over bone, of eyelids and lips and nostrils. But Raphael has done it all, somehow, and we find a face not only lifelike but truly alive, whose downcast eyes and knotted brow we can read. Such were the achievements of the Italian Renaissance in art. And that is impressive enough before we consider that papal portraits, before Raphael, looked like this:

So Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius II was an artistic revelation and it heralded a new era of lifelike, intimate, personally expressive papal portrature. Consider two more, of Paul III and Innocent X, by Titian (1543) and Diego Velazquez (1650) respectively, which are probably more famous and arguably better. Neither could have existed without Raphael's revolutionary decision to paint the sunken eyes and tired face of Julius. Even the fact that his portrait was at three-quarters, rather than side-on, as had been the precedent until then, cannot be understated.

And there's even more going on here. Because Raphael's genius was also to convince us entirely of the innocence and piety of Pope Julius II. Here, deep in thought and seeming mournful, if not rather repentant, the truth about Julius and his real personality has been entirely transformed. One would not know that this man chose his papal name not because of his predecessor but because of Julius Caesar, and nor would we know that his beard had been grown not in imitation of the ancient Church Fathers, like Jerome or Augustine, but as a mark of mourning because the city of Bologna had been conquered by the French and taken away from the Papal States. It is not without reason that Julius was known as the Warrior Pope; the great scholar Erasmus was shocked, upon first visiting Italy, to find him at the head of a military procession, surrounded by knights and infantry, rather than attending to the duties one might usually expect from the Vicar of Christ. Of course, in geopolitical and historical terms Julius was an effective and highly successful pope. My point here, simply, is to note the power of portraiture and of art more generally to belie the truth if we do not look beyond what we see. In Raphael's masterful portrait Julius evokes our pity and respect; in real life he would have inspired rather different feelings, though whether of admiration or condemnation I shall leave you to decide.

IV - Architecture

Hinde Street Methodist Church

The Classical Language of Architecture is the name of a book written by John Summerson in the 1960s, as adapted from a series of radio lectures he had given for the BBC. It is only a slim volume and eminently readable — there's hardly a better introduction to classical architecture. The theme of the book, I suppose, though only gently pursued, is that classical architecture is like a language. And so here, briefly, I want to show you exactly what Summerson meant by this.

The other day I was wandering around rather aimlessly and stumbled across this charming but far from spectactular building. It is the Hinde Street Methodist Church in London, designed by James Weir and buit in 1887. There is nothing obviously remarkable about it; this is an altogether standard work of 19th century neoclassical architecture. What do you make of it?

For some reason I was struck by this church and passed a few minutes more than I had intended looking at it. And, so I surmised, there's much more going on than a brief glance would suggest. James Weir evidently thought very carefully about his work and, playing with the language of classical architecture, put together for us a minor architectural delight. Consider, again, the façade of the church. I have added numbers to the elements on which I pass comment:

1 & 2: You may remember that there are Five Classical Orders. These are five different types of columns, each with differing proportions and decorative elements. The portico of this church has two tiers, each supported by four sets of paired columns. In the lower tier we see a Tuscan Order, which is the simplest of the five. Its shafts are smooth and its capital (the part at the top) is essentially undecorated. The upper tier features a Composite Order; this is the most complex of the five, combining the volutes of the Ionic with the carved acanthus leaves of the Corinthian. These columns are fluted and their capitals are richly decorated. Notice also that they are actually slightly slimmer than the Tuscan columns below. So what has been established here is a theme of simplicity and bulkiness below, complexity and elegance above.

3 & 4: This theme of simplicity leading to complexity is carried through to the windows. Those of the ground floor are relatively simple: they have unornamented sills and jambs, and their slightly projecting lintels are supported by minorly decorative, relatively small corbels. Square, plain, and straightforward. Those of the first floor, however, are far grander. They have pediments (the triangular part on top) and pilasters (columns reduced to rectangular, two-dimensional, purely decorative elements) and balustrades.

5 & 6: Beside and just behind the columns of the portico are some more projecting elements. On the upper floor we have Composite pilasters, but on the ground floor we only have unornamented blocks of masonry. The simplicity to complexity theme is once again present. And, in both cases, this slight projection away from the brickwork of the walls establishes a growing sense of articulation — that is, of varying surfaces, materials, depths, and shapes. One could quite easily have reverted straight to the brick wall, but these instead provide a sense of evolution and variation across the façade, while also relieving the potential tedium of a completely flat wall.

7 & 8: On the ground floor we find quoins. This is the word for blocks of masonry at the corners of a building. Notice that whereas the walls are made of brick these quoins are made from stone, and furthermore that they project slightly from the plane of the walls. This is another subtle attempt at articulation, and one which frames the whole façade, almost like a picture, and creates a naturally pleasing termination to it. What makes this aesthetically appealing is the same thing that makes all decorative borders pleasing to the eye. But notice that the first floor features a pair of Composite pilasters instead. This serves much the same purpose as the quoins — it is stone rather than brick, and projected so as to create a border — but does so in a finer, less robust, more complex way. If the direct of the quoins if horizontal, the direction of the pilasters is vertical. Another theme is emerging here.

9 & 10: Entablature is the name given to what rests on top of the columns, comprising the cornice, frieze, and architrave. Notice how the first floor entablature is more complex than that of the ground floor: its corbels are larger and more ornamented, and it also has dentils (the miniature, tooth-like elements). It is also rather taller, and the cornice actually sticks out further than the cornice of the lower entablature.

11: The walls of the ground floor, including the quoins, are scored with horizontal lines. This is part of the second theme Weir has chosen. Not only is the lower half of the building simpler, its orientation is also horizontal, whereas that of the upper is vertical.

12: If we pay attention to the semi-circular bay of three windows inside the portico on the first floor (which matches the three doors on the ground) then we will notice that the central window has a curved pediment, whereas the two flanking windows have triangular pediments. This is a subtle way of indicating centrality.

There is more I might have mentioned — we haven't even considered the tower yet, nor the other side of the building — but this should suffice for now. The result of all these details, taken together, is of a much simpler, almost rudimentary, horizontally-aligned lower level supporting a more complex, more decorative, vertically-aligned upper level. In very simple terms it is like a triangle resting on an oblong. This makes sense for some intuitive reason. And, to see what I mean, we need only think of an oblong resting on a triangle. Were the two storeys of James Weir's façade reversed then it would not be quite so intuitively aesthetically pleasing. A better analogy might be that of a tree, where the rather robust and rudimentary trunk supports the elaborate beauty of the canopy.

Perhaps you can see how the various principles and motifs of classical and neoclassical architecture really are somewhat like a language, and that any given architect can essentially write their own sentences with this language — in brick and stone and stucco, rather than with words. What Weir has chosen to do here is far from the only option; pay attention to any neoclassical building, to its details and how they vary, and you will see that the possibilities are essentially endless.

The only question which remains to be answered, and perhaps the most important of all, is whether any of this actually matters. Well, the beauty of much (though not all) good design is that it seems effortless; indeed, we hardly notice the very best design. Think back to how Raphael created for us a portrait of Pope Julius II so lifelike and evocative that we almost forget to admire what a brilliant artist he was and find ourselves lost in reading the expression on Julius' face rather than admiring Raphael's technical skill. All these details of Weir's work, and his chosen theme of horizontal simplicity supporting complex verticality, are somewhat similar: we do not notice them whatsoever and yet, even if we only glance at the Hinde Street Methodist Church, they together contribute to the sudden, intuitive impression of a charming building, and one which enhances rather than detracts from the street. Such is the classical language of architecture.

V - Rhetoric

Rhetorica ad Herennium

Rhetorica ad Herennium (meaning "Rhetoric for Herennius") is a rhetorical textbook written in the 1st century BC which was long attributed to Cicero. This attribution has since been rescinded and we now accept that the name of the original author has been lost. The fact that it was for so long regarded as the work of Cicero, who has been for two thousand years the most important and highly regarded of all Roman writers and orators, is much to the credit of Rhetorica ad Herennium. It has been an immensely influential text for centuries and we can hardly begin to count the number of great speakers and writers who have studied its pages and drawn from them valuable lessons.

Consider this a recommendation, then, for those who wish to pursue further rhetorical study. And, to give you some sense of what the text is like, I share with you here an excerpt from Book IV of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, as translated by Harry Caplan. Four rhetorical devices — epanaphora, antistrophe, interlacement, and transplacement — are here defined and explained with wonderful succinctness:

You can see why Rhetorica ad Herennium has been a foundational rhetorical textbook for so long. It is extremely clear and overtly technical, as opposed to being theoretical, and therefore a splendid resource for anybody who wants to grasp the rudiments of rhetoric. Devices and ideas are explained in plain terms and supplied with extremely helpful examples. At times it is perhaps too systematic, treating rhetoric like a science more than an art, but this appears to have been the author's aim, and so as a technical manual for oratory Rhetorica ad Herennium remains essentially unmatched.

VI - Writing

Conversations with Heroes

We often imagine meeting our heroes. And, though I cannot speak for anybody else, the impression I get is that most of us would be bursting with questions for them. How did you do such and such? What do you think about this or that? And so on. This is very well, but rather than thinking about what we might say to our heroes, perhaps we should consider what they might say to us. To put it another way, there is a famous saying that we should never meet our heroes because they will inevitably disappoint us. Far more galling is the alternative scenario in which we disappoint them.

Such is the principle expounded by the anonymous author of On the Sublime, that glorious work of anonymous literary criticism written in the 1st century AD which I have so often quoted in the Areopagus. As writers we must set ourselves the highest of standards, and rather than retreating from the greats look them right in the eyes and believe, even foolishly, that we might challenge them — or, at the very least, not shy away from letting their greatness stimulate us to write better:

The author of On the Sublime encourages a taxing but highly rewarding approach to writing. I have applied it myself, and though it is for you rather than me to say whether this has made my writing any better, I can certainly say that it has encouraged me to try much harder, and raise my own bar, when I imagine not only myself, nor a friend, nor a generic member of the public, but some of the greatest writers and thinkers who ever lived, reading over my work. We can easily fool ourselves, but it is far harder to fool Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, or whomsoever we happened to admire.

So, next time you write something, imagine handing it over to your authorial hero to read. You will, I dare say, find it within yourself to write just that little bit better, edit just that little bit more harshly, and think just that little bit harder, with such an ominous (though also rather exciting!) prospect in mind.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Last week I asked you:

What's the point of reading poetry?

And it prompted a veritable cornucopia of responses. Your passion for poetry, and the eloquence with which you expressed it, was incredibly moving. May you learn as much from reading these answers as I have done:

João V

Mohammad A

Sydney B

JD

Yazan T

Deborah G

Rupert S

Haleemah T

Tom W

Question of the Week

This week's question to test your critical thinking is...

What's so good about democracy?

Email me your answers and I'll share them in next week's newsletter.

And that's all

When all is said and done, and words have run their course, and we look for some peace amidst the rubble and rumble of the world... well, few have described it better than the poet Matthew Arnold, in whose verse I hope we find a vindication of your answers to last week's question, through which you expressed an overwhelming support for the notion that there is purpose in reading poetry, and who perhaps imagines for us better than we can ourselves that strange and strangely welcome feeling which comes upon us in sudden solitude, wherever we are, in those rare moments of true peace.

With all the distant fondness that I, writing, can offer to you, reading, yours,

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