Areopagus Volume XXVII

Welcome one and all to the twenty seventh volume of Areopagus. Although it's not yet true winter, which begins on the 21st, the world has certainly become a wintry place. It's been below zero for a few days where I am, and each morning the fields have been glowing white with frost. A beautiful time of the year. Made me think of a poem by Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush. Here is its opening verse:

And from one prelude to another, on with the Areopagus...

I - Classical Music

Lohengrin Prelude

Richard Wagner (1850)

Why this piece?

Last time it was John Cage's 4'33" - this week it's the complete opposite. From "music" whose purpose was to remove the composer and the performers altogether to music in which the composer looms large and where the performers are handed with a mighty task, perhaps the mightiest task in all of music.

It's hard, when talking about Wagner, not to take his entire ouevre into account. For each excerpt is but one part of a vast and complex tapestry of musical drama. But, even on its own merits, the Lohengrin Prelude is a wonderful piece - less bombastic than much of Wagner's most famous music, but no less emotionally arresting. It was the encroaching darkness of winter that made me think of it, the long nights and the cold mornings, a time of the year when, shrouded in fog and cast in hoarfrost, the world feels a little more magical, a little more mythological. The Lohengrin Prelude is beautifully atmospheric, what with its steady and stirring drama, its soaring strings and the slowly unfolding heroism of its climax - such storytelling is surely suitable for these long and dark nights.

What style is it?

Lohengrin, an opera first performed in 1850, is Romantic to its core. That is partly because of its musical language and partly because of its theming. For the subject of Lohengrin is Medieval German legend. Romanticism (1800-1890) as a cultural force - in art, literature, and music - was intimately tied up both with nascent nationalism, especially in Germany, and a resurgent Medievalism. Artists turned away from the rationality and reason of the Enlightenment and of the Classics, and looked to the Middle Ages for inspiration. That's why I've combined it with Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1820) by Caspar David Friedrich, another of the great German Romantics.

In his 1853 essay Opera and Drama, which serves as the manifesto for Wagner's musical world-view, he theorised that music should always be subservient to emotion and storytelling. Hence he argued that leitmotifs - themes for particular people, places, or feelings - should act as the basic building blocks of opera rather than the traditional mixture of aria and and recitative. You can feel that emotional and dramatic weight here.

I should add that the Lohengrin Prelude is often performed as a standalone orchestral piece. Such is true of many preludes and overtures. They developed in the Baroque Era as the opening for operas and other large-scale works, setting the scene both musically and thematically. But, during the Romantic Era, many preludes and overtures were written as standalone atmospheric and storytelling pieces.

Who was Richard Wagner?

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is a giant of musical history. He took Romantic Music to its limits - and beyond. For Wagner was more of an innovator than a traditionalist, and for a long time German music was defined by him: either you were one of his followers or you were not. For example, Wagner wrote his own librettos - sort of like operatic screenplays - which was fairly unusual. But such was Wagner's unique energy and passion.

He wanted to achieve a total work of art where music, text, story, and performance were all deeply intertwined and inseparable. Hence the magnitude of Wagner's compositions. His masterpiece was the Ring Cycle, which comprises four separate operas with a total runtime of about fifteen hours; it took over two decades to write. Wagner achieved his dream here; a total synthesis of art in which music was the vehicle for storytelling of the highest and most dramatic order.

For some idea of Wagner's fame and popularity, even his own lifetime, it should suffice to know that an entire opera house was built for the debut performance of his Ring Cycle in 1876, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Ever since its opening an annual festival has been held where Wagner's major works are performed. It continues to this day.

II - Historical Figure

Cyrus the Great

King of the Universe

Who was he?

In discussion of ancient history it is the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans who get most of the attention. That is perhaps understandable, given the particular grandeur of the Egyptian Kingdoms and the direct lineage of the Graeco-Roman world to ours, but history's first true empire was, in fact, that of the Persians.

Mesopotamia, which comes from the Greek for "between rivers" is a scythe of fertile land which stretches up from the Persian Gulf, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, toward the Eastern Mediterranean. This was the cradle of humanity's oldest civilisation. First came the Sumerians in about 4,500 B.C., then the Akkadians and the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Medians.

That's when Cyrus (600-530 BC) came along, from murky origins which have been retold in mythological terms. He was from Persis, a region on the Iranian Plateau to the east of Mesopotamia. And in a few short decades after becoming king of the Persians in 559 BC he had swept through the known world, conquering and uniting all the pre-existing societies and kingdoms of Mesoptamia. But he went further. In the east Cyrus led campaigns against the peoples of Central Asia and reached the Indus Valley. In the south he strayed into Arabia and over to Egypt, while in the west he conquered the rich city-states of Lydia (in modern day Turkey), even crossing over into Europe and the Balkans. Cyrus had formed the largest empire ever seen until then, and the first in the world to be truly intercontinental, multiethnic, and multicultural.

But the achievements of Cyrus go far beyond simple conquest. To manage these vast swathes of land and countless cities and peoples, he installed satraps. These satraps were powerful governors with their own bureaucracies, almost like kings in their own right, who were appointed by Cyrus to govern the far-flung regions of the empire in his name. And, at the same time, Cyrus instituted a political and legal system suitable for the scale of his empire, which included everything from coinage to an advanced postal system. Under Cyrus' reign Mesopotamia, already the most developed urban region in the world, was filled with a vast network of new roads. And it's not without reason that the Persians were known as the "gardeners of Antiquity", for Cyrus and the Achaemenids built great gardens all over their empire. It is from the Old Persian word for garden, corrupted via Greek, that we get our word paradise.

He was also known for respecting the local customs and religions of the places he conquered. It was Cyrus who ended the "Babylonian Exile" of the Israelites. They had been expelled from Jerusalem and their temple destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BC; Cyrus issued an edict allowing and encouraging them to return and rebuild, which they promptly did. For this he is venerated in the Bible, rather unusually for a non-Israelite:

Cyrus had conquered many of the world's oldest and richest cities, and so the Persian Emperors came to be known both as the "King of Kings" - for their conquest of so many different peoples - and as "God Kings" for their extravagant wealth and prestige. We can add to the list of Cyrus' recognised titles King of the World, King of the Four Corners of the World, and even King of the Universe. However, he came to a rather sticky end - by some accounts, at least. Herodotus records that he was killed while fighting the Massagetae tribes of Central Asia, whose leader, the empress Tomyris, had his corpse decapitated and soaked in a vessel of blood...

Cyrus' descendents attempted, unsuccessfully, to invade Greece. It was at the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis that Athenians, Spartans, and other Greeks united to defend their homeland in the early 5th century. But Persia played a vital role in the politics of the region for two centuries afterwards. The satraps of Asia Minor were king-makers in Greece, and the ever-looming threat of another Persian invasion left an indelible mark on the Ancient Greek mindset. That being said, there was plenty of cultural exchange and - beyond Greek stereotypes about the Persians' capriciousness, greed, and lack of sophistication - mutual respect. For example, the soldier and historian Xenophon wrote the Cyropaedia in 370 BC, an account of the life and upbringing and personality of Cyrus the Great. It was intended as an educational text, and served for centuries in the Greek and Roman worlds - and in Renaissance Europe after its rediscovery - as a model for any aspiring ruler. Machiavelli's The Prince was one of its many imitators.

It was when Alexander the Great came storming out of Macedonia that the Persian Empire finally fell. Darius III had been defeated by Alexander at the Battle of Issus in 333 BC; three years later he was was killed and the capital - Persepolis, founded by Cyrus - was sacked. Exactly two hundred years after Cyrus' death, his empire came to an end.

III - Painting

The Game of Chess

Sofonisba Anguissola (1555)

Why this painting?

This is a recognisably Renaissance painting. The modelling and the composition, the mellow colours and the perspective all speak to the world of 16th century Italian art. But there's something else going on here. For while the majority of painters at that time, whether of the graceful High Renaissance or its more dramatic Mannerist followers, stuck to Classical and Biblical themes, this is a family scene. Portrait art was important, of course, for every nobleman, cleric, and scholar needed his likeness capturing. But there's an intimacy and warmth here which you don't often see in Renaissance art.

If anything, it almost seems like a modern painting in the style of the Renaissance. That might have something to with its creator, Sofonisba Anguissola, who despite being no less educated than her male contemporaries surely had a slightly different perspective on things. Alas, none of that matters too much, for this is a wonderful painting in its own right, full of the life and love often lacking in the cool and graceful art of the Renaissance.

Who was Sofonisba Anguissola?

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) was born to an aristocratic family in the northern Italian city of Cremona. Her father was a learned man. He had absorbed Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortigiano, a philosophical treatise on the ideal lady, and thus ensured that his daughters received a proper education, while encouraging them to practice the fine arts above all.

And, of all his children, it was Sofonisba who proved most talented. She first studied with Bernardino Campi and in 1544, at just twenty two years of age, she travelled to Rome. There Anguissola was introduced to Michelangelo - by then the preeminent artist of the age. She showed him a drawing of a laughing girl. He was unimpressed and asked her to draw a boy in pain. So Anguissola drew this:

Michelangelo was thoroughly impressed,and gave her a mixture of advice and informal tutorship over the next two years. But we must remember that as a female artist Anguissola's career was seen as the means to make her a better lady rather than to seek the artistic sublimity of her male counterparts. This limited her opportunities somewhat. For example, ladies were not allowed to see or paint nudes, which feature so heavily in Renaissance art. But she took her limitation and ran with it: Anguissola became one of the most prominent portrait artists of her day.

After she had made a portrait for the Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, he recommended her to King Philip II of Spain. Anguissola was appointed by the king as an official court painter and as a tutor to his wife, Elisabeth of Valois. Anguissola's style changed when she was in Spain, for as an official court painter her royal and noble portraits asked for something other than that familial intimacy of her early works. Still, she made the leap and enjoyed a long, succesful, and enriching career in Spain. Pope Pius IV had heard of Anguissola, and wrote to her with a request to paint and send him a portrait of the Queen of Spain. She did so, and the Pope was grateful - their correspondence has survived.

She also has the distinction of being featured by the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari in his landmark Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Here is an excerpt from Vasari's Lives:

After her career in Spain Anguissola returned to Italy. By that point she had achieved the vaunted status of a living master and she was paid many visits by young artists seeking to learn from her, among them Anthony van Dyck, who would later became the official court painter of Charles I in England. She died at the age of 93 after a long and storied life. This is the inscription on her gravestone, left by her second husband:

IV - Architectural Masterpiece

Plovdiv

Palimpsest City

Fact File

In the year 342 BC Philip II, King of Macedon, founded a city in modern-day Bulgaria called Philippopolis. He had picked a naturally advantageous site, what with seven steep hills (just like Rome) rising up around the Maritsa River. The Thracians were already living there, but it was Philip who established the first proper town and settled a mix of Thracians, Macedonians, and Greeks within it.

Over the next two thousand years Plovdiv (which has had many names) was fought over, captured, sacked, and rebuilt several times. Thracians, Macedonians, Persians, Romans (including Marcus Aurelius!), Huns, Bulgars, Byzantines, Crusaders, Ottomans, and Russians have all fought or found their way to this old and storied city.

And what has survived is an architectural and cultural delight. Plovdiv is scattered with ancient ruins, from the tumbled masonry of Thracian and Byzantine walls on Nebet Tepe (one of the seven hills, known as tepes, from Turkish) to the Roman theatre - one of the most complete in Europe, which regularly hosts musical performances - and the great stadium which once held 30,000 spectators. Medieval fortifications have survived too, such asthe Hisar Kapia Gate, and as with many Balkan cities Plovdiv has places of worship belonging to Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Muslims. The Dzhumaya Mosque, built by the Ottomans when they conquered Plovdiv in the 14th century, is the oldest mosque in Europe outside of Iberia.

Its Old Town, which stands on ancient and Medieval foundations, was further developed in the mid-19th century during the Bulgarian National Revival, hence its profusion of traditional architecture. The timber-framed houses, with their jettied stories and oriel windows, are typical of Medieval Bulgarian architecture and were revived in the 1850s as national consciousness awakened and the desire for independence from the Ottomans grew ever stronger. The result is a labyrinth of brightly coloured houses and churches built along the cobbled lanes of a Medieval street plan, all raised several hundred feet above the surrounding land on the three hills of Nebet Tepe, Dzhambaz Tepe and Taksim Tepe.

The city was host to a new wave of architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Bulgaria had revolted from the Ottomans and become an independent Kingdom. Then, influenced by the Central European architecture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Plovdiv's streets were filled with the colourful stucco and eclectic historicism of cities like Vienna. After that came the USSR and a host of Communist-era edifices. It's an architectural palimpsest of the highest order.

Why is it a masterpiece?

Some things do not need explaining; Plovdiv is an aesthetic delight, a city of colour and shape, of narrow alleys and bright squares, of temples and fortresses and of a vibrant, living culture. But, more than that, it is a prime example of architecture's power to tell the whole story of a city. Each street is lined with thousands of years of war, religion, politics, cultural exchange, revolution, technological progress, and artistic evolution. And this is one of the reasons why I believe architecture to be so important; it's like a language which brings the world to life, a language which allows you to see the world in much greater depth.

Plovdiv's Old Town also speaks to the profound cultural importance of architecture. Those traditional houses were about a reawakening of Bulgarian identity after five centuries of enforced sleep under Ottoman rule. And this, if anything, is architecture's greatest significance: that the way things are built and how they look matters to people, that in buildings can be manifest identity, meaning, place, and purpose.

The final thing to mention is that Plovdiv only has six hills now. Markovo Tepe was destroyed at the beginning of the 20th century, and many of Plovdiv's streets are paved with stones quarried from it.

V - Rhetoric

Facilitas

Much of what I write about rhetoric focusses on its devices. These are, after all, its most interesting and exciting features. To talk about the wit of apophasia, the beauty of polyptoton, or the danger of kolakeia is fascinating and rather good fun.

But rhetoric in the Ancient World - and ever since, for that matter - was about much more than mastering these linguistic tools. Effective and important though they are, the real purpose of rhetoric was more holistic. Our old friend Quintilian (35-100 AD), the greatest ancient scholar of rhetoric, called it facilitas. An effective but unglamorous translation of the word would be improvisation - the ability to speak at a moment's notice, without preparation, and to speak well. That's the practical purpose of all this rhetorical study.

In his Institutio Oratoria Quintilian describes the significance of facilitas - and the difficulty of achieving it:

So that is the highest form of rhetoric, according to Quintilian, the skill to which all this study surely aims. Those devices and details are but steps on the path towards such a state of being, where an individual can harness the power of words in any given situation and at any given moment. Quite the force, whomsoever can do that.

And, just in case these Roman rhetorical recollections sound irrelevant, consider the internet. It is filled with videos of people speaking, whether on YouTube or anywhere else, and in innumerable different contexts. Think of the millions of views these videos get, and the vast influence concurrently wielded by those speakers over the people who watch or listen to these videos. How many YouTube videos have you watched, whether interviews with or speeches by journalists, commentators, politicians, experts, pundits, or content creators? There are more orators now than ever before, and a bigger audience too. Those who have facilitas - as some of them do - are important, powerful people indeed.

Quintilian's relevance endures...

VI - Writing

Your Worst Enemy.

Writing is little different from the rest of our lives; we are creatures of habit. Just as you fall into a similar morning routine - the order of your ablutions, say - you fall into routines of writing. Most of us have specific, highly idiosyncratic ways of doing just about everything, like how we make our tea: the order of teabag, milk, boiling water, and sugar (if at all). We probably even stir the spoon in a particular way and open the fridge by placing our hand in precisely the same spot we always do.

This crystallisation of habit is fine for most things. More than fine - it’s useful. If our brains can create these routines then it makes the world (a place of deep uncertainty) more stable, comprehensible, and simpler to navigate. It optimises; it’s efficient.

But, for writing, it can be disastrous. To find a particular way of expressing something and then sticking to it can do two things. In the first place it can stop you from getting better. Just because we've found one way of writing something relatively well doesn't mean we've found the best way. So it inhibits progress. Secondly, it can make our work stale.

Very rarely do we write a golden sequence of words. Any given sentence can be rewritten a thousand times - and nine hundred of them are probably better. But we become trapped by our own words. I'm guilty of this and I try to avoid it.

None of this is to say that we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again; many of the best writers have found a rhythm and they stick to it. And, in the world of art, Claude Monet made over two hundred and fifty paintings of his famous garden in Giverny. But one feels that Monet wasn’t obliged to paint the same lilies again in almost the exact same way; one feels that he sat down each morning and chose to do so with fresh eyes and fresh intent.

As writers we wrap webs of words around ourselves; there are particular things that we've grown used to saying in particular ways (perhaps because it worked well, perhaps because we are lazy and can’t be bothered to find a new formulation) and we find ourselves forced to trot out these words time and time again, even when we don't really want to. When this happens we're not really writing at all. Rather, it's a sort of automated, machine-like process. The best writing is laid out with a vividity by which every word has been placed with fresh intention and purpose every time we put pen to paper or fingertip to key. It's a hard ask to keep this in mind - but it's worth the effort.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

The Socratic Method

What's all the fuss about Ancient Greece? This is an important question. People (myself included, of course) talk about the importance of Antiquity all the time. But just because people say it doesn't make it true. So, do the Ancient Greeks really matter?

They were excellent at mathematics and geometry. Their architecture and art, via Rome, are now all over the world. Their politics have proven important, too, if not slightly less important than those of the Romans. And yet much they believed was wrong, not least about medicine and the laws of nature, of physics, biology, and chemistry.

But none of this really matters. Because we must ask: what is the Greeks' greatest legacy? It's a way of thinking rather than any specific achievement, discovery, or set of beliefs about the world.

Socrates, the tutor of Plato and the philosopher against whom all Greek philosophy is dated (pre-Socratic versus post-Socratic) developed a way of arriving at the truth. Believing there is a truth to be discovered by rational inquiry may seem like a given to us, but that was Socrates' first intuition, and revolutionary one it was. And, after that, he figured that an inquiring dialogue between two people might be one way of arriving at it.

This is the Socratic Method, in which one person makes a claim and the other asks a question which exposes a flaw in the original statement. The first person corrects their statement for that flaw, and the process repeats itself. In such a scenario neither person is personally committed to a particular idea. Rather, they are together moving closer to the truth by improving the logical rigour of the statements. It was for this reason that Socrates famously said he knew nothing; asking questions was what he did. And it was for asking too many questions that the Athenians put Socrates to death. He was accused of corrupting the youth, turning them away from the gods, and undermining the fabric of Athenian society. Plato would use this method in his dialogues - philosophical discussions between real or fictional people - and they would go on to form the basis of Western philosophy.

This isn't to say that the Socratic Method is without flaws, and nor that to it alone may we attribute all the many ideas and achievements of philosophy. But as a symbol for the Greek way of thinking it more than suffices. For Hellenistic philosophy - epitomised by the idea of rational inquiry into the universe - has made its way around the world, even fusing with Christianity in the early years of the Church and, during the Renaissance, springing free of religion and serving as the foundation for the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. That is to say, the modern world as we know it has been shaped not so much by Greek mathematics, geometry, art, architecture, science, technology, religion, or medicine, but by Socrates' incessant questioning, by the Ancient Greek way of thinking.

Question of the Week

Last week's question to test your critical thinking was:

Does the end justify the means?

Gabrielle C unpacked the complexities of the question:

While Robert M argued that the means and the ends aren't separable:

And Alexander R framed this ethical dilemma within a specific context:

Every week somebody notices an assumption implicit in the question. It was Deborah G this time:

Here Ogagaoghene O rather succinctly explained his preference for means over ends:

Now, for this week's question to test your critical thinking:

Is it best to approach every problem rationally, or is emotion sometimes the better option?

And that's all

This instalment of the Areopagus is, I think, the longest yet. They've been getting gradually longer ever since I started. But I'd like to ask you all if this is a good or not-so-good development. Some people have written to me and suggested that, given the length of the Areopagus, it might be worth making it fortnightly. Alternatively, I could cut back on the content. I'd love to know what you think.

So ends the twenty seventh volume of the Areopagus. And today is Beethoven's birthday! No better time, then, to listen to his 9th Symphony and enjoy the rapid onset of another frozen night. Adieu...

Yours,

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