Well. It's been a bloody long while, hasn't it? After our joyous 'Drawing on the Past' conference in late 2018 (about which I see I did not blog - why not?!), much of 2019 was spent rigorously preparing the book proposal for an edited volume in Palgrave's 'Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels' series, which to our collective delight will be finally coming out in September as simply Comics and Archaeology. Massive thanks to our contributor John Swogger for allowing us to use a panel from his chapter 7 chapter-as-a-comic as the beautiful cover image. Between getting the contract and setting a deadline for receiving first drafts of 1 April 2020, so much happened between the pandemic and ill health that I don't even know where to start. In summary, though, thanks to my wonderful co-editors Zena (Kamash, RHUL) and Katy (Soar, Winchester) we managed to carry the volume through to completion, but I wasn't in a position to advance any other projects. Sort of on-the-go or fairly well conceived are:

• I have not yet looked into following up on my text-mining idea (nor checked whether anyone else has advanced this in the mean time) but I'm still really interested in how one could set something up (& the results it would generate). Also still dead chuffed that this post was one of Neville Morley's 'best blog posts of 2017', because I really rate him, and also his wee book Classics: Why it matters (you can get that here and anywhere for under £10).
  
• The journal article draft of my 'War with Words' conference talk is still languishing at about 90% completeness.
• I've not yet worked out whether I want to do anything with my thesis in terms of turning it into a book, or separating some bits of it out as journal articles. Chapter 1 came out as the Wily Wetlands chapter in Landscapes of Dread (ed. D. Felton) in 2018, but I've not taken any of the rest of it forward. The Germania chapter in particular, I think, could end up being something fun if reviewed. Excitingly, though, I had an enjoyable email exchange in 2020 about my discussion of the Ampsivarii passage in Annals 13 with somebody who was setting up a PhD project (no idea whether that ever emerged, but still exciting), and somebody's Master's thesis at Brandeis ('Provincial Identities in the First-Century Roman Empire: Imperial Literature and Discourses of Division and Integration') engaged with my PhD thesis this very year of our Lord 2022. So! People do occasionally read these things, which is heartening.
  
• My investigation of my Flemish maternal grandfather's history textbooks from secondary school, printed in the 1930s as he'd have been in secondary in the early 1940s (born in 1927), and how they frame Roman history with regard to the history and nationhood of Belgium (via Caesar's Belgae), hasn't advanced at all. I would quote from it the bit that piqued my interest, but they're wrapped up in a jiffy bag at the moment and waiting to be despatched to the lovely Dan Smernicki (check out his beautifully handbound notebooks for sale here) who will employ his formidable book-binding skills in shoring up their cheap and crumbling bindings.
  
• My thesis should have had a lot more Caesar in it, as pointed out by my lovely external examiner Diana Spencer at Birmingham (who gave me the best annotated thesis copy back), and indeed a lot of Caesar had to be cut from it before submission. I really want to do something Caesar-based about the Gauls and space and stuff, though whether it's to improve the bits of the thesis that could benefit from Caesaring or whether it would be a standalone thing remains to be seen.
  

I've just opened my 'Ideas' Word doc (last accessed 13 July 2017, for shame) and the rest of what is in there is a bit pants. So I won't pursue any of those. Funny what a bit of distance can do.

Anyhow, that's where we're at. I must see about carving out some time for some of this. I definitely still like thinking, and exploring new ground, but whether I'm up to bouts of Bodleian and commentaries and going down rabbit holes such as Festus as I did for the thesis, on top of the day job, is a bit of a question mark for now. Watch this space...?

Classical reception through comics (2): the Gallo-Belgian past in 'De Nerveuze Nerviërs'

Following on from my last blog post on Lambiorix, I will now discuss a much later instalment in the series. De Nerveuze Nerviërs (The Nervous Nervii), as I said then, was published in De Standaard from the very end of 1963 into mid-1964 and published in album form later that year.

The story is this: during a picnic, our usual set of friends Sidonia (renamed from the earlier Sidonie, which was Flemish dialect), Lambik, Suske en Wiske hear a mysterious blast during a picnic in the countryside. Lambik, Suske en Wiske go to check it out and find workmen blowing up rocks in a disused quarry. They return home, but not before Wiske spots movement in the rock opening which has been cleared by the blast. She and Suske sneak back at night to explore the cave, where they spy three poltergeists complaining about having been locked in the cave for 1,500 years and fantasizing about what they would do if they were ever freed. The poltergeists each have their own specialties: Twistorix plays music on a pipe, Pintorix prefers drink, and Zanziorix loves dicing. The three discover our friends and escape from the cave along with them, in the course of which they briefly take Suske prisoner until he is rescued by Jerom. In doing so, Jerom proves completely resistant to the temptations held out by the poltergeists, which mystifies and angers them. When our friends go to Professor Barabas’ house to find out more about the poltergeists, the latter hitchhike along unseen on top of the car. Professor Barabas’ computer (punch cards and all!) connects the poltergeists to the Nervii, and when Lambik doesn’t believe it, the Professor conjures up moving images from the past on the screen of the tele-time machine.

Then the lamp in the machine pops, and while he effects repairs Lambik is entrusted with guarding the lab from the poltergeists. Pintorix gets him drunk, after which Lambik loses the key to the lab to Zanziorix in a game of dice. While Lambik lies tied up in a different room, they force the Professor in the lab to explain the secret of Jerom’s ability to resist temptation, which turns out to be that he is descended from a long line of stable marriages and decent families, the first of whom were a Nervian couple. The poltergeists proclaim their intention to undermine the marriage of Santorix and Kokadildis in order to prevent the long line of morally upright ancestors for Jerom from ever coming into being. In a scuffle with the Professor, who wants to thwart this plan, they manage to transport themselves back to the Nervii.

When Jerom returns from taking the kids home to Sidonia, the Professor explains what’s happened and Jerom decides to return to the past in order to baulk the poltergeists’ plans. There, he deputizes for the Nervii’s sick druid and in doing so gets to know most of the village as well as being in a good position to see the harm the poltergeists are doing to society: men succumb to drink instead of returning to the family hearth after work, women fall into the trap of mindless consumerism wanting furs and jewellery instead of a simple family life, fathers do not know their children anymore, who then run wild by dressing funny, listening to Twistorix’ music and even joy-riding with a hay cart at one point. Though he is in a good position to witness this downward spiral for the village, including his ancestorys, Jerom is not much good at restoring the village to order.

With the help of a forest nymph who falls in love with him, however, the poltergeists get banished and Jerom is flashed back to the present in 1964, which saves him from having to marry her. When they get images of the village back up, though, they see a Roman column advancing on the village and taking Santorix prisoner. Jerom, Lambik, Suske and Wiske are sent back to the Nervii to help free him, which they do, but the Romans follow them back to the Nervian village. Sidonia is then flashed back too with a set of powerful magnets which, mounted throughout the forest, trap the rather metallic Romans. The Nervii and the Romans then make their peace, with Santorix saying they won’t mention this shameful Roman defeat in their national histories if they promise to leave the village alone forever. The Roman commander, Corpus Rondix, agrees and promises to get Caesar to write about the Nervii as the bravest of all the Gauls. Our friends get to home properly this time.

As with Lambiorix, the story is clearly allegorical for describing (deploring) the state of 1960s family life, and indeed when the story was first announced in the paper at the end of 1963, it was dedicated to the ‘Bond der Kroostrijke Gezinnen’ (Alliance of Child-rich [Nuclear] Families -  ‘gezin’ is Dutch for the nuclear family of mum, dad, kids, whereas ‘familie’ is bigger – I don’t think English has separate words for this). Contemporary references which heighten the obviousness of the allegorical dimension are Jerom’s redesign of his Druidic robes into a ‘New Look’ version; Twistorix’s nod to Chubby Checker taking the world by storm in 1960 with the twist, four years before the publication date of the album; repeated reference to the youth of the village as ‘teenagers’ (so in English!) and again re-using the English word ‘joy-riding’. A quick online search suggests the phenomenon was common at the time, as car use for the middle classes had pushed up the total number of cars in circulation, and thus easily available for stealing, and locks were unsophisticated and easily picked.

   

What interests me the most is that, 15 years apart (between 1949 and 1964), the Gallo-Roman past is being put to exactly the same kind of use in both Lambiorix and De Nerveuze Nerviërs. The ties to historical details are loose in both, though they are looser in NN than they are in Lambiorix, where the general model provided by Ambiorix’ resistance against a foreign oppressor was at least thematically suitable. Less than on specific historical events, both stories rely on a representation of the impeccable morality of the Belgae, the supposed ancestors of the modern Belgians if they are left to their own devices. In Lambiorix, it is only during Lambik’s temporary reign as caretaker for Lambiorix that the Eburones come to harm. In NN it is only after the poltergeists are re-released that the Nervian youth goes down the drain and their parents forget their proper roles within the family and within society; moreover, the poltergeists were re-released in the first place from the exile the Nervian druid had imposed upon them by Nieuwe Belgen: first the workmen who blast away the rock and then by Suske & Wiske, without whose interference, it is implied, the poltergeists would have had no reason to believe they could now be free. And restoration only occurs when everyone has left the Nervii alone again: when the poltergeists are magicked away by the forest nymph, when our friends are transported back to their own time, and when the Romans have been taught a lesson, and taught it so well that they promise never to return.

In both stories, it is made clear how far modern Belgians have deteriorated from this supposedly primeval goodness: our friends do much in these stories, as we have seen, but they don’t often make an impact for the better. No particular reason is given for the workmen’s activity in the quarry, but in any case it is they who blow away the rock which has sealed in the poltergeists. (I’m wondering whether we might perhaps read it as a swipe at the building for building’s sake development craze of the 1960s. Though there is lots of regret about Belgian/Flemish past zoning policy nowadays, I’m not sure how keen or otherwise popular opinion was when it was going on.) Even if I’m seeing ghosts where none exist, it is certainly the case that Wiske’s uncontrolled curiosity, arguably another moral failing, is responsible for their ultimate release from the cave. After that, it is Lambik’s inability to resist free drinks and know his limits, followed by his gambling away the key to the lab, which further the poltergeists’ dastardly schemes by allowing them access to the tele-time machine. In Lambiorix, the real hero is the Vrijschutter aka Lambiorix instead of any of our friends from 1949. In NN it’s Jerommeke, and this is precisely because his ancestry is uncorrupted, making him essentially a Nervian, still, instead of an outsider.

This raises the interesting question of ‘true Belgitude’. There is a fluidity to what constitutes it within the albums, as well as ambivalence about some of the traditional markers of it. In Lambiorix, two of the four ‘markers’ of an Oude Belg were love of a good pint and love of playing dice (alongside arguing lots and being fearless). But in the story Lambiorix himself only ever conformed to the latter two; it is his descendant Lambik who displays the former. So, if we can discern anything in this apparent inconsistency between these being aspects of ‘true Belgitude’ yet being frowned upon, it is, I think, that the King can rise above these human weaknesses of his people himself and is able to moderate them in others, whereas Lambik allows himself to be incapacitated by them, to a point where he can no longer lead his people. In NN, the stereotype of the Belgae which introduced Lambiorix is present as well as undermined. It is re-deployed when Lambik does not believe the poltergeists are really connected to the Nervii (as opposed to coming from elsewhere) but accepts it when he is shown an image of a Nervian village on the tele-time machine, and then a close-up of a hand draining a stein of beer in one go.

And just as he did in Lambiorix, Lambik in NN drunkenly gambles away the valuable charge with which he has been entrusted by a figure of authority. But at the same time the identification of two of the three poltergeists with beer and dice makes them vices alien to the innate goodness of the Nervii. So the needs of the different stories and their very different allegorical dimensions to an extent, dictate, that even the basic representation of essentially the same people (Eburones and Nervii are both called Belgae in the stories) from which the stories depart must differ to an extent. Though the characters do not age, the series as a whole does acknowledge the passing of time, and the stories show how Lambik in particular, in 15 years, has not changed. Does his sticking, despite the passing of time, to his embodiment of one kind of Belgitude, that of beer and dice and essentially a good heart, make him just as ‘proper’ Belgian, according to the framework of Lambiorix, as the alternative version propounded by Jerom in NN?

Despite their very different allegorical loads (the WWII allegory is stronger than the ‘youth of today’ one both in the weight of its theme and the force with which it is hammered home and shapes the story), there is, therefore, a strong conservatism at the heart of both stories, which labels change as bad. Apart from the light-hearted reference to the New Look, Pintorix’ pub is represented as an intrusion into village life which will inevitably – given the men’s powerlessness against such temptation – disrupt it, as detrimental as the consumerist lifestyle is to parental responsibility, which in turn gives free rein to innocent teenagers’ fascination with the radical departures in dress and music and leisure activity which the 1960s brought with them and so further disrupts society.

And in this moral conservatism, we find ourselves unexpectedly returned to classical antiquity. Tacitus’ Germania, an ethnographical work by this Roman author of the late 1^st century AD, is an account of the German tribes [known to Rome] across the Rhine with their customs, habits, history (though not all are accorded one), location, material culture, etc. In this, he is no stranger to feelings of cultural superiority. But at the same time, he attributes to the Germans a morality, especially in man-wife relationships, which the work implies far exceeds that of late first century Rome in both ideal and practice:

Quamquam severa illic matrimonia, nec ullam morum partem magis laudaveris […] Sic vivendum, sic pereundum: accipere se, quae liberis inviolata ac digna reddat, quae nurus accipiant, rursusque ad nepotes referantur. Ergo saepta pudicitia agunt, nullis spectaculorum inlecebris, nullis conviviorum inritationibus corruptae.

(Ger. 18)

‘Their marriage code, however, is strict, and indeed no part of their manners is more praiseworthy […] She must live and die with the feeling that she is receiving what she must hand down to her children neither tarnished nor depreciated, what future daughters-in-law may receive, and may be so passed on to her grand-children. Thus with their virtue protected they [the women] live uncorrupted by the allurements of public shows or the stimulant of feastings.’ (again fairly archaic translation translation: Perseus)

Setting aside for a minute the implication that most of the responsibility for upholding this ideal is placed with the woman, the Germans of Tacitus are the ancestors of Suske & Wiske’s Jerommeke.

A second link is provided by Caesar’s Gallic Wars, whose claim that the Belgae were the most courageous of all the Gauls is referred to at the very beginning of Lambiorix and at the very end of NN, where it is applied most specifically to the Nervii. It is here that I see the clearest engagement with classical literature, to such an extent that I wonder whether these works would have been consulted prior to writing. About the Belgae as a whole, Caesar wrote this at the very beginning of his account:

Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, propterea quod a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt, minimeque ad eos mercatores saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important (DBG 1.1.3)

‘Of all these, the Belgae are the grittiest, because they are furthest away from the way of life and civilization of Provence [before Caesar’s conquests, the only Gallic province, and so really quite close to Italy], and because merchants, who bring with them the sorts of goods most conducive to effeminizing fighting spirits, travel to them least of all’

He repeats these arguments, in an elaborated form, for the Nervii in particular, in book 2:

Eorum fines Nervii attingebant. Quorum de natura moribusque Caesar cum quaereret, sic reperiebat: nullum esse aditum ad eos mercatoribus; nihil pati vini reliquarumque rerum ad luxuriam pertinentium inferri, quod his rebus relanguescere animos eorum et remitti virtutem existimarent; esse homines feros magnaeque virtutis; increpitare atque incusare reliquos Belgas, qui se populo Romano dedidissent patriamque virtutem proiecissent

(DBG 2.15.3-5)

‘Beyond the borders of their [the Ambiani’s] territory live the Nervii. Of their nature and customs Caesar, after enquiry, found out the following: that there was no access to them for merchants; that they do not allow wine and other items which promote luxury to be imported, because they judge that by means of such commodities their spirits weaken and their strength decreases; that they are fierce men of great strength; and that they despise and knock the other Belgae, who have surrendered themselves to the Roman people and by doing so have thrown off their loyalty to the fatherland as well as their strength’

Schadee (2008) noted that the theme of corruption through contact runs through the entire account, as Caesar’s campaigns proceed and he goes further and further north. The function of this repeatedly emphasized ‘information’ about these tribes is to build up Caesar’s enemies into formidable candidates, which sets him up for increased glory if he defeats them, and will mitigate his shame if he does not defeat them. Within NN, the theme of corruption through contact is at the heart of the story in two senses. First, in the intrusion of supposed ‘civilisation’ disrupting a simple yet upright lifestyle: beer takes the place of Caesar’s wine; poltergeists take the place of Caesar’s merchants; and rock ‘n’ roll music (even if from a flute! I’ll leave you to imagine that) and dice arguably stand in for the other refinements of Roman living left unspecified by Tacitus (certainly Trimalchio’s dinner, the most hyperbolized example of this lifestyle, features a piper and board games). But alongside this, the Nervian village in which Jerom’s ancestors live is literally hidden away: the Romans, despite having conquered all around, do not know where it is, and it takes Zanziorix the dicer to point it out to Corpus Rondix. It is much easier to preserve yourself from what contact brings with it if you make yourself unavailable to contact at all. Tacitus’ Agricola, in a way, makes the same point, when he describes how through Agricola’s strategy of introducing Roman refined living into Britain:

Sequens hiems saluberrimis consiliis absumpta. Namque ut homines dispersi ac rudes eoque in bella faciles quieti et otio per voluptates adsuescerent, hortari privatim, adiuvare publice, ut templa fora domos extruerent, laudando promptos, castigando segnis: ita honoris aemulatio pro necessitate erat. Iam vero principum filios liberalibus artibus erudire, et ingenia Britannorum studiis Gallorum anteferre, ut qui modo linguam Romanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balinea et conviviorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.

(Agr. 21)

‘The following winter passed without disturbance, and was employed in salutary measures. For, to accustom to rest and repose through the charms of luxury a population scattered and barbarous and therefore inclined to war, Agricola gave private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and dwelling-houses, praising the energetic, and reproving the indolent. Thus an honourable rivalry took the place of compulsion. He likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the "toga" became fashionable. Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.’ (translation: Perseus)

This is exactly the sort of stuff of which the absence was held responsible for the good morality of German women in the earlier quotation from the Germania. Thus NN in particular, perhaps because its lighter allegorical load gives the story more leeway, plays out the story of Roman imperialism as narrated by Tacitus and Caesar. Both the old Belgae and the new succumb to this tactic. Alongside the conservatism goes a profound pessimism. Plus ça change.

References

Schadee, H. (2008), ‘Caesar's Construction of Northern Europe: Inquiry, Contact and Corruption in De Bello Gallico’, Classical Quarterly, 58.1 : 158-80

Classical reception through comics (1): the Belgo-Roman past in 'Lambiorix'

A few months ago I had a real yearning for the comics of the Franco-Belgian tradition which were such a large part of my life when I grew up. We had a massive cardboard box in a corner of the living room, in which all the ones we had were gathered together, in no particular order: some Kuifje (the Flemish translation of Tintin, equating to ‘Quiffy’ for his hair), some Lucky Luke, some Guust Flater, some Smurfs, some Rode Ridder, some Blauwbloezen, a little more Nero and Asterix, rather more Kiekeboe, and enormous amounts of Jommeke and Suske & Wiske. It’s the latter, drawn by Willy Vandersteen, I want to talk about today, given that their often-used premise of Professor Barabas’ time machine made the tapestry of many of their adventures much richer and with hindsight this probably appealed to the budding historian in me. [Note: they’ve been published in English, apparently, as Spike & Suzy, but I have yet to meet someone who has heard of them.]

As I’ve grown in age and wisdom and classical knowledge since I first read these, and am now working on the ‘German bits’ of Tacitus for my thesis, I thought it might be nice to revisit two in particular that I remember very well which deal with a similar subject matter. The first is Lambiorix, which first appeared in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard in 1949 and was published as an album in 1950, and the second De Nerveuze Nerviërs (The Nervous Nervii), in the paper from the very end of 1963 into mid-1964 and published in album form later that year.

Redrawn in modern re-editions as http://suskeenwiske.ophetwww.net/albums/pics/4kl/hertekend/groot/144.gif

Original cover; the reissued modern cover at http://suskeenwiske.ophetwww.net/albums/pics/4kl/hertekend/groot/069.gif interestingly shifts focus from a man dressed as a Druid, a woman (actually a forest nymph) in Gallic dress and a Roman soldier getting battered, to foreground the theme of morality by mean of the three tempting poltergeists.

Today I’ll post my thoughts on Lambiorix, and (hopefully) this weekend on the other one, with some comparative thoughts too on the different ways in which essentially the same ‘heritage’ (arguably!) is used.

The story of Lambiorix is this. Lambiorix, chief of the Gallic tribe of the Eburones, has to go away to fight the Romans, but cannot leave the tribe ungoverned for fear of his rule being usurped by a neighbouring tribe/chief; one in particular, called Arrivix, is a threat. With the magical help of the ashes of Lambiorix’ grandfather, he manages to transport back in time the familiar character of Lambik, who turns out to be the last living descendant of Lambiorix, ‘still’ living in Belgica [Belgium], in 1949. Lambik is accompanied on his journey back in time by his friend auntie Sidonie and her foster kids Suske and Wiske. Lambiorix leaves to go battle the Romans, but while he is gone and later held captive by the Romans, his caretaker Lambik is lured into gambling away his authority to Arrivix in a game of dice. Arrivix increasingly abuses, oppresses and starves the Eburones whilst Lambik, aided by his friends, struggles ineffectually to limit the damage. The tribe is finally freed by the ‘Vrijschutter’, a masked Robin Hood type character, after a long-term campaign of sabotaging Arrivix with the help of a band of likeminded. The Vrijschutter, at the end, reveals himself at the end to be Lambiorix, escaped from Roman captivity, and with the help of his followers and those who remained loyal to him during his absence they manage to overthrow Arrivix. All’s well that ends well, and Lambiorix’ grandfather magics our friends back to the present time (in haste, because Sidonie remembers she’s forgotten to switch off her electricity while she’s away. Ha ha.)

You’ll already have noted that the cover clearly advertises its classical-era setting, and the title confirms this through its pun on Ambiorix, the leader of a resistance effort against Julius Caesar in the 50s BC. The episodes are narrated in De Bello Gallico books 5, 6 and 8 [the latter by Hirtius], and end with the alliance succumbing to Rome and Ambiorix a fugitive. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking Lambiorix is therefore is a rehashing, fancifully embroidered, of the Caesarian story, perhaps particularly because of the supposedly ‘local’ interest (the Belgae of course bear no relation to the modern day Belgians, but have been enthusiastically appropriated as ancestors).

Indeed, some elements are recycled straightforwardly from Caesar: the very first frame of the top strip of the first page is a straightforward narrator’s vignette with no image, translating as

“The story begins in the year 54BC. Julius Caesar, the Roman general, conquers Gaul but gets into a struggle with the Belgen [conveniently the same appellation is used for old and new, unlike the differing Belgae and Belgians in English], a people of Celts and Germans, who had no fear of anything, argued a lot amongst themselves, played dice a lot and dearly loved a pint, and two pints even more.” (p. 1)

The absence of fear derives from Caesar’s claim that horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, ‘of all these people [of Gaul] the Belgae are the most courageous’ (DBG 1.1). The themes of Gallic internal division and inability to unite even against a common enemy are demonstrated throughout the entire account of Caesar’s Gallic campaigns. (And indeed became a template influencing later Roman authors such as Tacitus as well as modern scholars who do not often enough question their own acceptance of this premise as a ‘given’.) The beer and the dice, I suspect, are modern embellishments more in line with Flemish Breughelian folklore – think Boerenbruiloft – and self-identification than classical allusions. At the same time, the theme of gambling is important in the narrative, both here and in De Nerveuze Nerviërs as a destructive habit of which no good can ever come, which lends itself to the swapping of what really matters for things that are valueless and meaningless. 

[Edit, 3 May 2017: in fact, Tacitus' Germania 24 talks about dice explicitly and how the Germans - we're still in the general part of the work at this point, before moving on to specific tribes - are so addicted to this game that they really are prepared to stake all their possessions on it, and then their own person, ending up slaves if they lose again. Tacitus, to summarize very generally, is very disapproving. I'll think about that some more when I have time. The stereotype of Gallic or German barbarians was indeed also that they were always drunk, even if no ancient authors mention steins of beer. In fact, Lambik talks about 'gerstenat' in one of the two albums, which is barley beer, and that too is in Tacitus' Germania at 23.1. So all four characteristics do indeed correspond to a variety of classical sources, even if I can't know for sure that Vandersteen culled them from these sources directly without mediation.]

The way the characters are dressed nods to some of the commonly accepted conventions on Gallic cultural markers: when we first meet Lambiorix (p. 1), he wears an (oddly loose) torque, a round shield, dark hair, and rides a horse, even if his cuirass, furry skirt and leggings with laces criss-crossing up from his feet may be less historically accurate. The spatial representations of Gallic territory are remarkably sparse, with the expected woods, glades and swamps (p.7) offering a plausible setting in line with the classical representation of them (all notably encountered, for example, by Germanicus in his German campaigns around the Rhine in Tacitus’ Annals books one and two. 

[EDIT 14 May 2017: The paaldorp - or village on stilts - on p. 30 seems out of place in northern Gaul, but could come straight out of Pliny's description of the Chauci's habitation at NH 16.3: tribunalia extructa manibus ad experimenta altissimi aestus, casis ita inpositis, 'platforms raised up by manual labour to be tried and tested by the highest tide, and in this way built up with houses'] 

On the other hand, there is a surprising absence of rivers (more prominent than woods in the Tacitean account of Germany in the Histories), despite the narrator setting the territory in between Maas and Rijn (p. 1 again). Deviations from the expected classical template and likely reality are an inexplicable ‘mountain river’ (bergrivier) on p. 22, and the accompanying mountains and a ravine on p. 35 – not really a Low Countries landscape. Urban settings are dominated by wooden longhouses surrounded by wooden palisades (e.g. p. 11); in contrast, the Roman camp is similarly wooden and similarly palisaded, but is clearly a close-timbered fortification (p. 17), though not at all along the lines of actual Roman forts (no ditch alongside the palisade, no agger, no internal streets, etc.) Interior decoration is limited largely to oil lamps (p. 12), vases and antlers (p. 13-5, also 26) – with antlers, possibly, being a distinguishing factor between ‘posh’ quarters such as those of Arrivix and ordinary ones – and on the whole these indications are clearly not intended to be more than filler for scenes necessarily set indoors. Tables, oddly, seem made of stone rather than wood, though it’s hard to tell in the original two-colour print (pages alternate in blue and brown).

(As my dad noted when we were talking about this over Easter: ‘I doubt whether he sat down with either Caesar, military handbooks or archaeological reports much before he started drawing, Leen’. And he’s right of course, but I still find this interesting, especially if you take into account the original author-illustrator Willy Vandersteen’s fairly basic education which would certainly have not included Latin. On Twitter, @Roelkonijn mentioned the appropriation of the Belgae by the Belgians in the rather nationalistic post-war 1920s, exactly the time when a young Vandersteen, born in 1913, would have been a schoolboy. He may not have been reading Caesar, but his history textbook would have been channeling Caesar and appropriating him in the service of a growing national post-war identity. Whether Flemish and Walloon appropriated this national legend differently, separately, or jointly in the course of the emerging ‘ontvoogdingsstrijd’ – the battle for recognition of the Dutch language within the relatively new Belgian nation-state as a valid medium of instruction and government - is another question I’d like to know the answer to. EDIT 14 May 2017: Having said all this, they might have read Caesar, but it is unlike they would have tackled any of Pliny’s Natural History – so via what medium did Pliny’s Chaucian template of habitation on stilts trickle down? )

In all, though, attempts are made to pay some lip service to expectations of a particular landscape, and of a certain ‘rudeness’ and simplicity in Gallic material culture, though these are sacrificed occasionally to the demands of the story. The Roman fort should probably be included in the category, given that we do not often see the outside, given that the Romans have very little part in this story, and that Arrivix very quickly occupies the fort and makes it his headquarters. Which brings me to the real point of this exposition of signs which indicate an attempt at an immersive, semi-realistic Gallic setting: the album (published in 1949, remember) is an allegory for the fate of Belgium during the Second World War. The story played out in old clothes is actually that of the Nieuwe Belgen, not the Oude.

There are references throughout which make this really quite clear, which I would not have picked up on as a child: what Lambik first gambles away to Arrivix are his ‘frontstrepen’ (front stripes, a decoration of some sort which entitled veterans to health treatment, amongst other things – more info here). As he keeps losing, the last thing he is able to offer to Arrivix in payment is his ‘bewijs van burgerdeugd’, literally a ‘proof of civic virtue’ in the form of an official certificate which you were required to show in the 1940s before you were able to enjoy certain fruits of citizenship. In other words, it was a means of excluding collaborators during the war from the full benefits of citizenship and participation in public life. Intriguingly, Arrivix (whom we now realize stands for the Germans) dismisses this as a useful object for barter, saying “I do not know what that is. I only play for something that has value.” And after Lambik’s appointment as Lambiorix’ steward, he describes himself to his friends as the newly appointed ‘chairman of the College of General Secretaries’. Not a dig at petty bureaucrats everywhere, the College consisted of the chief civil servants of each government department and was the entity which governed Belgium under the German occupation, in an uneasy arrangement which could be deemed collaboration, while the Belgian government was in exile in London and after the unilateral surrender of King Leopold III to the Germans, which had imperiled, in the government’s eyes, his right to rule – more about which is here.

All this has long been noted (indeed, was clear upon publication). What interests me is that the allegorical framework acquires a new meaning even for some elements from the Caesarian story: the tendency to disagree and squabble internally becomes descriptive of the state of occupied Belgium under the Germans and responsible for the longevity of Arrivix’ domination. Lambik’s love of dice (presented by Vandersteen as ‘traditional’ in the very first frame of the album, though as we saw not classical) is proof of a lack of moral fibre, which becomes the key to his failure to protect his people from this foreign occupation. Combined with his acknowledged role as chairman of the College of General Secretaries, it condemns his efforts and those of the real College as valueless in the face of the sovereignty lost and moral shame of governing with and under the German occupation. It seems implied that resistance would have been the more honourable thing to do, even if it would have resulted in a harsher occupation.

[though I am not enough of a historian of the period, it is clear that the morality of the story isn’t straightforward: Lambik is traditionally self-important and a bit daft but essentially shown to possess a good heart underneath, and though King Leopold III’s capitulation finally resulted in his abdication in 1951 following a referendum, Lambik at least rejoices in Lambiorix’ return to his people after being held captive by the Romans – though the introductory page to the 65^th anniversary edition of the album from which I’m working says that the final 4-frame strip of the album in which he does so appeared in the paper but was excluded from the ‘later’ (=original, first edition?) album publication.]

The Belgae’s famed bravery is what allows them to ‘keep calm and carry on’ while they labour under the oppressor’s yoke, and to resist (though not all of them, as dictated by the division template) from the very first moment until they achieve their goal with the help of the Vrijschutters. These are specific elements of the ‘old’ framework of the Belgae which make it suitable to apply it to the new framework of the modern Belgians. Ambiorix himself isn’t really relevant beyond the opportunity to pun on the name of Lambik (a character not specifically created for this story and the general suitability of his ‘legend’ to reading it as a narrative of noble tribal [national] uprising against a foreign invader.

So these are the ways in which the ‘old’ framework of Caesar’s brave but divided Belgae as well as Ambiorix and his Eburones nobly but misguidedly fighting the windmills of Rome lends itself to allegorical re-use. Now it is time to look at the way in which this framework did not easily accommodate this modern redeployment: the Romans are largely absent from this story. Though sketched in as a foreign power to be fought against, they make no appearance beyond a patrol clashing with Lambiorix on page 3. They get the better of him, which leads him to proleptically exclaim on his way home that ‘if Jules sends a couple more like that, we’re not done getting battered yet!’. This, in turn, prompts the council of tribal chiefs at which Lambiorix decides he needs to go away to deal with the Roman threat definitively. Their function in the narrative is purely utilitarian in providing an excuse for Lambiorix’ absence. In recognition of this, they are literally only ‘sketched’ in, as their visual representation is pretty bland. In the two frames in which they appear, they are seen first at a distance as a row of six uniformed men, depicted in the same stance, holding with shields and spears. In the second frame, we see them in close-up, tripping up Lambiorix with their spears, but they are still not granted textural detail. Within the clear lines that constitute them, there is no filler. Even their massive shields appear blank.

Why get this traditional enemy out of the way so fast? After all, the Nazi army’s use of Roman military symbols such as the eagle, and their vision of themselves as new Romans in this regard, makes the Romans extremely suitable to stand in for the Nazis in the allegory. I wonder whether the point is not to grant a foreign enemy the status of invader. The point Vandersteen may have wanted to make, and to which the framework of the Belgae also lends itself, is that the Eburones get subjected by their neighbours. Arrivix and his coterie are fellow Germans. Whilst looking in one, obvious direction (that of the Romans) to safeguard his people against a potential invader, Lambiorix leaves the door open for an enemy much closer to home, and much less ‘Other’. I can see of no immediate real-life equivalent (Hitler did not invade Belgium whilst Leopold III was on his guard against, say, the French) but the point can surely stand. By eliminating the Romans early on, the real enemies are revealed to be dissension at home and a bad neighbour, and the implication is that the moral turpitude of this kind of betrayal goes beyond the injustice of a foreign invasion in general.

I must say that in re-reading Lambiorix and writing about it, I’ve had to reassess my view of it as suitable for kids. I don’t mean that kids should be banned from reading it, but I do wonder whether, unlike a good Disney or Pixar movie, these are attractive to kids who can’t access the political dimension. The story qua story is rather convoluted, and contrived in order to fit the requirements of its allegorical dimension. And then I’m reminded that these were published in the newspaper as dailies (as indeed they still are in De Standaard, though far inferior now), doing the sort of thing that we expect the covers of Private Eye to do. I’m surprised I enjoyed it as a child, but clearly remember doing so.

I also apologise to historians of the Second World War in case I have mangled facts or am completely misinterpreting. If I am, that too intrigues me, in the sense that an allegory which would have been transparent to readers of a not-particularly-highbrow daily newspaper in 1949 should now prove so difficult for me to interpret.....

Thoughts on text-mining and intertext

Friends, Romans, countrymen: why haven’t we built a text-mining tool to facilitate one of our favourite occupations within the field, namely the spotting of intertext?

Most of the time, I imagine most of us establish intertext by dint of knowing the one (or two, or three) author(s) of our specialisms extremely well – well enough that certain phrases may trigger our recognition so that we connect the two. Sometimes the idea of intertext has to be discarded if no meaningful engagement can be argued; sometimes we craft entire articles around what the allusion by one author to the words of another can mean. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this. What I am wondering is whether we are missing opportunities.

The current approach produces results which, though valid in the individual instances they are establishing, cannot say anything about the extent of borrowing and engagement between two authors more widely. We may recognize, if we know our Plautus well, a Ciceronian borrowing of him in a particular speech that we’re working on, but there it ends. Is it the only speech in which he engages with Plautus? Does he do this frequently? Does he draw on some passages or works more than others? Does he borrow from Plautus, and within that from particular works, more than he borrows from other authors which predate him? The questions are much more difficult to answer without a deep and long immersion in both texts, with no guarantee of further results. (I’m not saying this would be ‘wasted’ time in the absence of results, but within the current realities of academic knowledge production and career assessment, time must to a certain extent ‘pay off’.)

People have written theses around constructing these sorts of relationships on the basis of individual occurrences, and may even in recent years have started feeding their authors of choice into text parsing programmes to help with the work, but the results are still limited to a pre-selected set of authors which we either know well or suspect of such intertextual engagement, and therefore informed by our bias and expectations from the beginning.

So why can’t we build a database tool that makes connections across all of Latin literature, and then select from the results what strikes us as interesting? Granted, it would throw up a lot that is misleading or of no use on account of being meaningless -- fixed expressions being one of the obvious pitfalls (if 80% of authors from 3^rd century BC Plautus to 4^th century AD Ausonius used the phrase ‘getting up at the crack of dawn’ we can probably safely discard the possibility of intertext between them all). But by widening the net I suspect we would notice a lot that no one has before, simply because not many of us are sufficiently closely conversant with more than a handful of authors or texts in the course of our lifetimes. We would also eliminate the possibility that we’d just ‘missed’ stuff, even within our own field of expertise.

What I would greatly enjoy using, should it ever exist, would be an online data-churning resource for the entire body of Latin classical texts (yes, the chronological parameters would require some thinking) which compares syntax and vocab across these texts and flags up passages of similarity, possibly with a percentage indicator judging how great the overlap is. There are already programmes designed to flag up plagiarism, such as CrossCheck/iThenticate, which do similar things. I never dealt with them much during my time in publishing, nor with Turnitin in my academic teaching so far, so sadly I don’t know much about the detail.

Of course these programmes operate slightly differently: you put in a chunk of text, say a submitted journal article or a student’s work, and the programme compares this chunk to the whole body of articles in its database. But even if we simply copied this format, this would already be extremely useful for classical scholars who, as I said above, still start from a point where they pre-select the material they’d like to work with.

After all, I know of no projects centered around questions as broad as ‘let’s see what comes up if we compare everthing ever’. I suspect the processing power required to do this, depending on the database size, would be too much, and building an intelligible and user-friendly interface for viewing the results would be impossible. But ‘let’s see what comes up if I copy and paste Tacitus’ description of the battlefield of the Varian disaster in the Teutoburgerwald’ would already produce wider-reaching results than the human mind is capable of and I, for one, would be extremely interested in seeing them. They machine would not draw your conclusions for you, but you could get straight to the interpreting without having to slosh through the data in a human, and thus flawed, manner.

(Amusingly, about a year ago I was at my funder the AHRC’s annual skills training conference, about which I blogged here. I remember having a conversation with an artist from Falmouth named Dane Watkins at the time, who had an interest in such things and told me that as I was already doing some of this stuff anyway (as indeed I was, in the third chapter of my thesis, which I actually wrote first and must have told him about at the time) I should do it more systematically. I wish I remembered more of the conversation, but it clearly didn’t prompt me into action or even serious consideration at the time.)

So why doesn’t this kind of resource exist yet? I’ve had a long old think about this, and I think it’s possible to split the reasons into the two broad categories of ‘technical’ and ‘emotional’.

Classicists don’t tend to be techies. As a species we are not educated into becoming masters of digital skills, but into linguists, historians, translators, and critical thinkers in a way which has not so far required any (or not much) external mediation between us and our source material. With the advent of Digital Humanities thankfully many people have woken up to the possibilities and importance of IT to the field, with lovely results such as my personal favourites ORBIS or PHI Latin Texts. Though pretty low-grade in its looks (I don’t know about the back-end), I am also rather fond of the texts on Perseus, as well as its dictionary and word study tools. The most exciting one of all that I’ve come across is Diogenes, made by classics scholar and digital humanist Dr P. J. Heslin at the University of Durham, which draws on various other databases of classical texts to allow for rather complicated searching, such as (in Dr Heslin’s own example from this talk) all possible declensions of the word ‘Caesar’ in the works of Cicero, or only certain declensions of the word ‘Athena’ in texts marked in the database as belonging to the genre ‘epic’. What I can’t ascertain at the moment, because I don’t yet understand how to use the thing, is whether it is set up to do what I have outlined above, even though that seems to me to be only a moderate expansion of what it already seems to do.

So why haven’t we gone for full-on text-mining, given that there are some of us who have the technical skills and others who do not have clearly found suitable partners to help them build things? This brings me to the ‘emotional’ reasons.

I’ve already said we do intertext all the time, and we like making connections. Is there, however, some unspoken or even unconscious feeling that these things should be spotted through hard graft rather than automated comparison? Do we feel it's somehow at odds with the literary nature of these texts? Does it demean their art to involve a level of automation in our engagement with them? Do we fear it may undermine past research on intertextual connections which have been argued to be unique but may in fact occur elsewhere, in authors one doesn't happen to be familiar with or interested in? Do we think it would throw up too much that is irrelevant so that it would be too labour-intensive to use? Have others had this idea (I struggle to imagine they haven’t) but haven't had the time, money, inclination, technical skills, right contacts to pursue it? Is someone somewhere already working on this in silence?

Or is it because we like our current method of selecting the direction of our research before starting it, as opposed to seeing what the data throws up and then selecting what we'd like to get our teeth into? Would narrowing down what to follow up on be too difficult? An admittedly quick google (but, in fact, on DuckDuckGo, because they don’t track your searches) on text mining in the humanities threw up only these two examples, on text mining ancient Chinese medical literature and classical music scores.

Why are we not doing this? (If we are, please tell me.)

IT savvy friends have assured me that it wouldn’t be very difficult at all to build such a data-churning tool. Much of our raw data is already out there in digital form (Perseus has most of current Latin literature texts uploaded, as does PHI, as does even a bare-bones, quick-reference resource such as The Latin Library), and it’s not as if we have to worry about copyright.

I imagine the fact that Latin is a declined language could be a bit of a problem, but there must be ways round that. Texts on Perseus, for example, are coded so that if you click on any word in the Latin text it will take you through to a list identifying the word’s morphology. Which means the back end of the resource recognizes word stems and dictionary entry forms as well as their possible modifications when declined or conjugated. It would have to be explored whether building a supra-engine for text mining which drew on the databases of these already existing resources and their databases is possible and whether the institutions which host them would give permission, or under what conditions/for what remuneration they would do so. The Diogenes ‘Thanks’ page refers to Perseus’ Creative Commons licencing which has allowed Dr Heslin to draw on their database, so again I can’t imagine it would be very hard.

If sufficient collaborations could not be established, having to duplicate the data entry work would be a disadvantage in terms of the time and money required to set it up. But at the same time a resource not reliant on the others’ continued hosting of compatible (!) databases into the future would have the advantage of complete control over both its future and its design. A newbuild could make its coding open source and its licencing format CC-BY-NC, allowing others to borrow (for example for other fields of literature), but not for commercial purposes.

Techie people with a classics background must be hard to find, so there would still be a large and important role for classical ‘editors’ to test successive developments of the resource in order to help refine the rules which determine results so that the output would be as accurate and relevant as possible. Presumably, they’d also need to have people on hand to explain to them, nevermind to the programme, how Latin actually works.

Is this the stuff that postdocs are made of?

I need to do more research and then have a long hard think. But really, I need to get on and write the fourth chapter of my thesis.

(**The answer to the question of how I came to have these thoughts is longer and less interesting than these loose thoughts, but briefly: a Tacitean passage I’m working on struck me as very Caesarian in ‘feel’. Leaving aside the difficulty of establishing which criteria to adopt in order to potentially verify this, I also realized that I didn’t have the time to get to know Caesar as well as I do Tacitus during the scope of my current project, and this led me to think of the idea of the digital tool I am ruminating on in this blog post.**)

Women's Classical Committee Wikipedia Editathon - 23 January 2017

My most recent (but not so recent) blog post, you may remember, was to do with the Women's Classical Committee. It's an organisation of recent standing which does marvellous work in pursuit of admirable aims, with the heartening support of all possible genders. Though I'm not good enough with crowds and unfamiliar places to have felt comfortable joining the Women's March in London this Saturday just past, I like to think I made a small gesture, but a practical as well as a symbolic one, towards equal representation by attending the WCC's all-day Wikipedia editathon at Senate House in London.

The idea was to go some way towards redressing the gender imbalance in notable classicists' Wikipedia profiles: before Monday, about 20 out of 200 biographical pages were of women. During the event, each of us picked an un- or underrepresented woman (**) to work on that afternoon after the morning's training, so that by the end of the day we'd added 12, which is around 6%. A small but significant jump. You can find the project page here.

(** by 'under' I mean either already existing as a stub or as a 'red link' on another page, which is a passing mention without a page of one's own)

The lady I chose was Dr Miriam Tamara Griffin, because she's a great classical scholar (of Nero, the Julio-Claudians more generally, and Seneca -- as well as various other things) who on Wikipedia was no more than a dead link in her famous classics professor husband's profile. Now in her early eighties, she was also real Oxford trailblazer in terms of being a female academic in classics. She deserves recognition for both her scholarly output and the trailblazing! You can find the page I made here.

And here's a video of Dr Ellie Mackin (Twitter @EllieMackin) of Leicester and me, discussing why the event felt so valuable for us and how we see it impacting on what we might do in the future:

To round off, therefore, a big and well-deserved shout out to the organisers of the event, Claire Millington (Twitter @Claire_M) at KCL and Emma Bridges of the Open University (Twitter @emmabridges), as well as to the Wikimedia UK paid staff (Richard Nevell and somebody called John whose surname I unfortunately didn't catch), ably supported by volunteers Roberta, Kelly and Andrew, for the training and support provided. Wikipedia has more procedural and content rules than you would imagine, so the guidance is not only welcome but even to this fairly technically literate person seemed welcome. Personally I love a bit of low-level coding, and Wikipedia's is so low you probably can't even call it that, but for those who don't there is a visual editor that looks a little like a word processing programme to help you write and mark up your post (not unlike Blogger, in which I am writing this post, in fact). No, the real challenge is what you can and can't say, how you can or can't say it, and what counts as sufficient evidence to back it up. For photographs, you get into the territory of licensing arrangements, and that can get tricky too. Dr Griffin was kind enough to email me a photograph to put up on her Wikipedia page, so you'd think this would be an easy one, but this too seems to come with its own set of problems, which I am still trying to work out how to solve. Or more accurately: the uploading itself will be simple, but assuring Wikipedia and its real and bot-shaped editors that it's ok for the photo to be up there will be a different matter. Watch not this space, therefore, but this one.

And finally, a postscript, for those not yet bored of reading... I'm including this because I'm as happy to expose what I think is male bias, however unconscious, as I am to expose myself to the disagreement of others on this matter. On the very day of my Wikipedia initiation, I also made my first foray into the territory of 'edit wars' (or at least, the temptation to start one...). By the time I had travelled from the pub near Russell Square to the coach stop at Baker Street, I already had a notification from Wikipedia that my profile had been 'checked', and approved by someone, subject to some edits. These edits were: the removal of the word 'distinguished' in the introductory sentence, which had said 'Miriam Tamara Griffin is a distinguished American classical scholar', as well as the removal of the words 'long and distinguished' from a sentence talking about the Festschrift she had dedicated to her in 2002 in recognition of her, indeed, long and distinguished career. In both cases the adjectives were removed as being 'subjective'. In view of Wikipedia's criteria of notability for academics, this felt to me as if she passed the notability test but I wasn't allowed to say so. (Incidentally, in the case of the subjects we worked on on Monday, the notability test is in itself arguably sexist: much is made of named professorships, international awards, chairmanships of organisations, etc., exactly the sorts of posts from which these first-wave 20th century female scholars were habitually excluded for a long time. I know they've listed other reasons, and you only need one, but the list seems to be made without any awareness of this historical background for academics specifically.) More importantly, though, I was amazed that a demonstrable career of 50+ years which the article was obviously outlining could not be called objectively 'long', and that the dedicatee of a Festschrift with Oxford University Press could not objectively said to have had a distinguished career. A Festschrift is, surely, by its very nature, a recognition of someone's.... long and distinguished career! But ho hum. That's by the by...