257: BEHOLD THE LAND OF LOST (DIS)CONTENT
An affectionate tweaking of our subject’s best-known line. Just as (in the words of Bertolt Brecht) “He got onto the gallows like Pilate into the Creed,” so AE Housman makes it into this column on the strength of an indirect link with Fort.
As detailed elsewhere ( FT135:24), Fort (p670) devoted space to the fraudulent claim (1924) that the 109 lost books of Livy’s Histories had been discovered. This hoax was quickly exposed, among others by Housman’s letter to the Times (23 Sept 1924, p13).
What Fort knew or cared about Housman I have no idea. But, he will surely have read this letter, being a devotee of the Times,
judging by the multiplicity of references in Schlanger’s Index to Books.
Amusingly, this business would resurface decades later in Billy Bunter’s Postal Order
(1951) wherein is mentioned “a rumour that the lost books of Livy had been found,” prompting the remark that one boy (Coker) “would have been more interested in losing the known books.”
Several puzzles and one notoriety further draw Housman into the Classical Corner orbit. Why, for easy beginning, is The Shropshire Lad so entitled? It was originally going to be Poems by Terence Hearsay, until talked out of this by classical colleague AW Pollard. Terence has been taken to allude to the homonymous Roman comic playwright; more plausible is the notion that Terence denoted Housman himself – a friend complains in the penultimate stanza, “Terence, this is stupid stuff.”
Housman was not born in Shropshire, never lived there, and wrote much of the work before ever visiting it. It is often suggested he was enchanted by its striking toponyms, just as often pointed out that he made frequent mistakes. His Shropshire was half-mythical, half patriotic romance; he obviously knew how classical poets used Arcadia in this way.
Chief interest for Housman will have been the Shrewsbury School, famous for its classics and formidable headmaster Benjamin Hall Kennedy, author of that celebrated Latin Primer on which my generation was brought up, immortalised in the Molesworth cartoon ‘Kennedy discovers the gerund and leads it back into captivity.’
Peter Parker ( Housman Country:
Into the Heart of England, 2016) claims that Shropshire is the coldest county in England, something that well fits Housman, described by all who met him as the coldest person they’d ever met, though occasionally thawing into prim – AC Benson described him as “Descended from a long line of maiden aunts.”
Having taken a First in ‘Mods’ (Classical Moderations) at Oxford, Housman stunningly failed his ‘Greats’ (Litteræ Humaniores). There are various explanations: distraught by his father’s illness and the family’s financial troubles; simply not doing enough work; mooning over Moses Jackson, fellow-student and object of his unrequited homosexual passion.
I have a further theory. Housman made no secret of his contempt for the alleged poor Greek of the famous Benjamin Jowett. The latter must have known of this. Did he ensure that the examiners would wreak vicarious revenge this way? – a stratagem for which Hugh Trevor Roper would later be famous.
Housman was not Jowett’s only critic. Another contemporary described his lecturing style as “Getting up quietly and giving a few faint glimpses into the obvious” – a quip worthy of Tom Stoppard’s Housman play The Invention of Love.
The following ditty went the Oxford rounds:
Here come I, my name is Jowett
All there is to know I know it
I am Master of this college
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge. Jowett was also supposed to have warned an agnostic student: “If you do not believe in God by 9am tomorrow you will be sent down.”
Housman’s homosexuality is beyond question. He got nowhere with the resolutely heterosexual Moses Jackson, who emigrated and died in Canada, but may have had better luck with Moses’s brother Adalbert, but this is evidence-less speculation. This was of course the age of Oscar Wilde. The two universities were no strangers to what the Diary of Dudley Ryder (1715-6) called “the most pervasive vice” and what was in Housman’s day dubbed ‘The Higher Sodomy’; cf. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994).
“The slashing style which all know and few applaud.” Thus wrote John Percival Postgate, fellow-classicist and victim of Housman’s notorious invective, albeit, as many others, no slouch himself at dealing it out. As Paul Naiditch remarks in an essay on this, “Traditionally, classical scholars, and British classical scholars among them, speak ill of others.”
Postgate and Wallace Martin Lindsay were two of Housman’s most notable sparring partners at home. Postgate was otherwise distinguished for his stinginess in denying his children nursery heat and lights and scraping “excess butter” from their toast. He was killed when his bicycle collided with a steam lorry, perhaps parsimonious to the end, his last words being “Take me to Addenbrookes; I have a subscription there.” Another nearby hospital would be where Housman expired in 1936. By almost fortean coincidence, Lindsay also died in an accident, his bicycle colliding with a motorbike.
Another fellow-classicist, Robinson Ellis, was dismissed as “Having the intellect of an idiot child”. Unfair at the scholarly level, where Ellis produced work still used on Roman poets. But, he was famously eccentric (caricatured in an 1894 Vanity Fair cartoon) in dress, conversation, lecturing style, indeed everything, culminating in his failed attempt to commit suicide by shooting himself in the face, thus prefiguring Unity Mitford.
Housman took especial pleasure in mocking German classicists, ranging from such one-liners as “Indeed I imagine that Mr Buecheler when he first perused Mr Sudhaus’ edition of the Ætna, must have felt like Sin when she gave birth to death,” to this full-dress assassination: “Not only did Jacob have no sense for grammar, no sense for coherency, no sense for sense, but being himself possessed by a passion for the clumsy and the hispid he imputed this disgusting taste to all the authors whom he edited...”
Fort was often acerbic (e.g. on Dr Grimme, p671), but Housman in full flight outdoes even AA Gill on restaurants, the Welsh, and Carol Vorderman.
GOLDEN WONDER
In 2017, while walking through a field near Market Harborough in Northamptonshire, Kevin Duckett, 49, found a shiny object that he first thought was some crumpled tin foil from the wrapping of a 1970s Mr Kipling cake. “I’d been there about 20 minutes and found nothing,” said the amateur metal detectorist, who lives in Fleckney, Leicestershire. “Then I got a very loud positive signal from my detector and started to dig down before spotting something. It was lodged in the side of a hole just a few inches down. I carefully removed it and knew by its colour and weight that it was solid gold.”
The 2.5in (6.4cm) long object, said to be worth up to £2 million, is now at the British Museum. It turns out to be a figurine from the crown that Henry VIII wore for processions on the feast of Epiphany. It represents Henry VI standing on an antelope, the heraldic beast of the Lancastrian kings, with SH (Saint Henry) inscribed on the base. Prayers to the king (who ascended the throne in 1422) led to miracles and images of him appeared in churches and prayer books. Under Henry VII, the tomb of Henry VI at Windsor became the most popular pilgrimage site in England.
The crown was first documented in 1521. Its five fleurs-de-lys were originally adorned with three figures of Christ, one of St George and one of the Virgin and Child. Henry VIII removed the figures of Christ and replaced them with three royal saints representing the Magi – St Edmund, Edward the Confessor and Henry VI. A portrait of Charles I, painted in 1631 by Daniel Mytens, shows the king standing next to the crown; and in 2012, the painting was used to create a replica of the crown, now on display at Hampton Court.
In 1650, a year after Charles I’s beheading, Oliver Cromwell had the crown – weighing 7lb 6oz (3.3kg) and valued at £1,100 – melted down and minted as ‘unites’ (English Republican coins roughly equivalent in value to a pound). Its 344 gems and pearls were bagged up and eventually sold, but there was no mention of the three royal figurines. The Henry VI figurine was unearthed on the route taken by Charles I as he fled from Cromwell’s cavalry after the Battle of Nasby on 14 June 1645. Charles lost his pistols as he charged through the Roundheads to escape. The king’s baggage was captured and there was a massacre of up to 400 women in the baggage train on the road to East Farndon. The figurine was found by a pond near the main road to Market Harborough, east of East Farndon and south of Bloodyman’s Ford. Was it lost or concealed in 1645, more than three years before the crown was melted down? Was Charles carrying it as a magical talisman? It seems likely we will never know. D.Telegraph, 18 Dec 2020, 31 Jan 2021; thesun.co.uk, dailymail.com, 30 Jan 2021.
EARLIEST CAVE PAINTING
The world’s oldest known cave painting, a life-sized picture of a wild pig made at least 45,500 years ago, was found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia in December 2017. It is located in the Leang Tedongnge cave in a remote valley enclosed by sheer limestone cliffs, about an hour’s walk from the nearest road. It is only accessible during the dry season because of flooding during the wet season – and had never before been seen by Westerners. The finding was described in the journal Science Advances on 13 January 2021 and provides the earliest evidence of human settlement of the region.
Measuring 136x54cm (53x21in), the Sulawesi warty pig ( Sus celebensis) a wild stubby-legged beast that can weigh up to 190lb (85kg), was painted using dark red ochre and has a short crest of upright hair, as well as a pair of horn-like facial warts characteristic of adult males of the species. There are two handprints above the pig’s hindquarters, and it appears to be facing two other pigs that are only partially preserved. It seems to be observing a fight or social interaction between the other warty pigs. In a nearby cave, called Leang Balangajia 1, an even larger painted pig was spotted on the ceiling, measuring about 6.1 by 3.6ft (187x110cm), with four stencilled hands on it. That cave chamber has at least two other animal paintings, but they are too damaged to decipher. Humans have hunted Sulawesi warty pigs for tens of thousands of years, and may have domesticated them. They are found nowhere else and are a key feature of the region’s prehistoric artwork, particularly during the Ice Age.
Maxime Aubert of Australia’s Griffith University, a dating specialist, identified a calcite deposit that had formed on top of the painting, and used uranium-series isotope dating to show that the deposit was 45,500 years old. This makes the painting at least that age, “but it could be much older
because the dating that we’re using only dates the calcite on top of it,” he explained. The previously oldest dated rock art painting – depicting a group of part-human, partanimal figures hunting mammals – was also found in Sulawesi and was at least 43,900 years old. The Leang Balangajia paintings are at least 32,000 years old. The paintings are thought to be the work of Homo sapiens, as opposed to an extinct human species such as the Denisovans, but this isn’t certain. To make handprints, the artists would have had to place their hands on the rock and spit pigment over them, so it might be possible to extract DNA samples from residual saliva.
Meanwhile, the oldest known drawing (of any kind) made by a human is a 73,000-year-old hashtag painted on a rock flake from South Africa. [AFP], livescience. com, 13 Jan 2021.
TRANCE FLOWER
Pinwheel Cave rock art in California may depict Datura, the hallucinogenic ‘trance flower’. Just before going into a hallucinogenic trance, Indigenous Californians who had gathered in a cave probably looked up to the rocky ceiling, where a pinwheel and big-eyed moth were painted in red. This mysterious ‘pinwheel’ is thought to be a depiction of the delicate, white flower of Datura wrightii, an hallucinogen the Chumash people took for ceremonial, medicinal and supernatural purposes. The moth is probably a species of hawk moth, known for its ‘loopy’ intoxicated flight after slurping up Datura’s nectar. Chewed globs that humans stuck to the cave’s ceiling provide more evidence of these ancient trips; these up to 400-yearold lumps, known as quids, contained the mind-altering drugs scopolamine and atropine, which are found in Datura.
The finding marks “the first clear evidence for the ingestion of hallucinogens at a rock art site,” the researchers wrote in the study, published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The artists probably weren’t high when they drew the rock art, however. “It’s extremely unlikely because of the debilitating effects of Datura,” study lead researcher David Robinson, a reader in archæology at the University of Central Lancashire, told Live Science. Rather, just like religious artwork and objects in a church, these rock paintings were likely “setting the scene” and helping people about to go into a trance to understand the flower’s power and the tradition of taking the hallucinogen in that particular cave.
Archæologists first learned about the rock paintings in 1999, when workers at Wild Wolves Preserve, a nature reserve 90 miles (145km) northeast of Santa Barbara, found a pinwheel and insect painted with ochre. At first glance, the 4in by 7in (10.5x17cm) pinwheel drawing doesn’t look much like a Datura flower, but any botanist would tell you otherwise. Datura (aka jimson weed and angel trumpet) unfurls at dusk and dawn when insects pollinate it, but during the heat of the day it twists up. It’s possible this cave painting features an opening Datura flower. Researchers already knew the Chumash people used Datura for ceremonies and in everyday life, according to historic descriptions from missionaries and anthropological work. Historians think Datura was used to gain supernatural power for doctoring, to counteract negative supernatural events, to ward off ghosts, and to see the future or find lost objects, but, most especially, as a medicant for a variety of ailments. It was also put in a tea called toloache for a coming-of-age ceremony for boys (and sometimes girls), who took the plant to mark their entrance into adulthood.
However, the researchers needed more evidence than cave art to suggest that Indigenous people used this site for Datura ceremonies. So the team investigated the quids stuffed into the ceiling’s crevices. Quids, known from other archæological sites in the American Southwest, are plants usually chewed for their nutrients or stimulants, including yucca, agave or tobacco. In this case, 3D digital microscopy revealed that the quids in Pinwheel Cave were also likely chewed. They consistently had indentations that one would expect from molars. The quid fibres were also matted together, which one would expect to occur through moisture that would make it adhere, such as human saliva. Chemical analysis revealed the presence of the Datura’s hallucinogenic compounds atropine and scopolamine, and a scanning electron microscope analysis further identified the quids as Datura, although one was made of yucca. After the quids were chewed, they were apparently stuck into the ceiling, like a piece of chewed gum.
Radiocarbon dating shows the cave was used on and off again from about 1600 to the late 1800s. Indigenous people used it for many other purposes: projectile points and an arrow shaft straightener, indicated the cave might have been used for preparing hunting tools, while ground seeds and animal remains suggest it was also employed for food preparation, storage and communal meals. The new discovery helps dismantle the myth of the lone shaman, going into a cave by himself to have a mystical experience. This is a community site. The Tejon Indian tribe, comprising the descendants of the Chumash, Yokuts and Kitanemuk peoples, still use the site today. livescience.com, 23 Nov 2020.
LOCKDOWN DISCOVERIES
Metal-detecting was prohibited or restricted during lockdowns in 2020, leading to a marked increase in finds made while gardening, including 50 South African oneounce gold Krugerrands from the 1970s unearthed in Milton Keynes. Weeding a garden in the New Forest, Hampshire, revealed a hoard of 63 gold coins (and one silver) from the reigns of Edward IV through to Henry VIII. Unusually, four Henry VIII coins featured the initials of his wives Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. From Old Basing in Hampshire came a copper-alloy Roman furniture fitting decorated with the face of the god Oceanus framed by intricate seaweed fronds, an artefact with no close parallel. Tiny dolphins beneath each ear swim down towards the god’s chin, while serpentine creatures rest on either side of his temples. A lead-alloy mediæval seal matrix in the name of David, Bishop of St Andrews, identified as David de Bernham (r. 1239-53), was discovered in Dursley, Gloucestershire. Given the cheap material and crude craftsmanship, this is thought to be a contemporary forgery, perhaps used to authenticate copied documents. British Museum press release, 9 Dec 2020.