How to Win a Roman Chariot Race
lives, legends and Treasures from the Ancient World
Icon Books 2015
Pb, 224pp, illus, bib, £8.99, ISBN 9781848319462
FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £8.
Initially feared (cue the justdeceased Yogi Berra) déjà lu all over again, following JC MacKeown’s two classical compendia ( FT268:58, 269:59), plus Philip Matyszak’s (2009).
Hood’s farrago ranges from titular chariot-racing to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, coyly introduced (p199) as “At last we reach what everyone really cares about,” though her content is more 12A than R18: “This is a miscellany. It includes things that I find funny, terrible, entertaining or important.”
And why not? Hood also takes some unusual – and welcome – tacks, incorporating lengthy extracts from classical literature and detailed considerations of modern scholars, notably Liddell & Scott of Greek Lexicon fame (Thomas Hardy’s poem on its completion appended), along with Liddell’s daughter Alice – yes, THAT Alice!
Likewise, papyrus-hunters Grenfell & Hunt, latterly immortalised by Classicistpoet Tony Harrison’s musical (which deserved a mention), the Vindolanda letters partly found in a lavatory – sheer loo-nacy – near Hadrian’s Wall (including the first-ever woman-written text),
58 and the Anglo-French Rosetta Stone decipherers, Young and Champollion. Welcome, too, is Hood’s treatment of Lord Elgin, more sympathetic than customary tirades from the Return Them! mob.
Full marks also for her insistence (p9), unshared by many band-waggoneering academics, that we learn equally from ancient-modern differences as similarities, something I always stress to students.
Subsidiary compliments to her recognition (p173) that Atlantis is allegory, not history (cf. FT163:23), and for many unfamiliar nuggets, e.g. Augustine as patron saint of beer (p111), the Macedonianleaning DNA of Afghanistan’s Kalash tribe (p32), and the possibility (p83) that Salem’s witch hysteria was caused by ergot poisoning, a line of enquiry begun with Mary Matossian’s Poisons of the Past, one that might profitably be extended to (e.g.) the ancient Abderite mass hysteria described by Lucian and Eunapius, involving mobs endlessly quoting from Euripides’s Andromeda.
Organisation is not always Hood’s strong point. Her opening gallimaufry glides disconnectedly through chariot racing, cosmetics (no mention of Cleopatra’s beauty book), Londinium, concrete, codes, food, Alexander the Great, oil lamps (Lucian’s Lamp City deserved a word), and the mysterious Antikthera Mechanism (as many, Hood rather romantically sees it as a protocomputer – I’m regretfully not so sure). Subsequent sections, though, are more homogeneous, including an FT- style roundup of strange deaths.
Nit-pickings: the Red racing fan’s suicide is misdated (p8: source, Pliny’s Natural History 6. 176); the reference to Trimalchio and Fortunata (p68) is imaginary; Caracalla (p39) hardly deserves to be dismissed as “just another crazy emperor”; Crassus was killed in battle, not by forced drinking of molten gold – a better story retailed by Dio Cassius 46. 23. 3; emperor Titus’s death – a retread of Nimrod’s – from nose-invading mosquito is merely a Babylonian–Islamic fantasy, and Hood (p118) misses the lurid detail of its picking at the royal brain for seven years; Aristophanes’s theory of human origins (p200) is from Plato’s Symposium, not one of his own comic plays; Boudicca’s/Boadicea’s last battle was probably not near King’s Cross (p16), a pity since her supposed burial under Platform 9 or 10 can be further romanticised by a link with the secret one used by the Hogwarts Express.
Hood’s style is a bit breathy (quite Angela Brazilian Jolly Hockey Sticks), but blessedly free from academic Newspeak. It is also laced with nice flashes of wit, my favourite being her description of Augustine’s rackety youth as “Really no different to many students away from home today.”
Sometimes quasi-fortean. Her elliptical line (p156) on the Big Bang Theory, “But what need could there possibly be in whatis-not?” is worthy of our master himself.
The book is accurately printed, regularly adorned by highlighted definitions from Johnson’s Dictionary (kudos for these), some desultory illustrations, interspersed with a few rather pointless quiz-lets (answers supplied), more suitable for the kiddies, a haphazard Further Reading List (I fancy Alan Cameron’s two superlative books on chariot racing would be more congenial to her intended audience than Autenreith’s Homeric Dictionary), and – preposterously – No Index.