Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Many aspects of history aren’t quite as I thought them to be Helping Maya with history revision has readjusted Chris’s entire world view…

Ihave been revising for school exams over the last couple of weeks. Well, it’s actually my daughter Maya’s exams we’ve been studying for.

By “studying” I mean, I read out questions, she gives me the wrong answer, I correct her and she then shouts at me for believing the notes she’d written rather than the words she’s now saying. It’s as if she’s having a full-scale argument with herself and I’m in the middle trying to break it up.

Something good about all this, though, is that I’m learning lots of new things. While with trigonometry I’d prefer just to keep on not knowing, my favourite topic has been history – in particular Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and dear old cuddly Hannibal.

Something I’ve really noticed is that many aspects of history aren’t quite as I thought them to be. For instance, Alexander wasn’t that great – he was a narcissist who killed his friends with spears during drinking sessions and went on to believe himself to be the son of the god Zeus.

OK, we’ve all dabbled in a bit of murderous selfdeification in our time, but it’s not really great, is it?

Hannibal probably wasn’t that great either – he was just lucky enough to fight some really rubbish Romans. When he finally came up against a Roman who was quite good at fighting, he immediately got everyone around him killed – some of them because his own elephants charged at them.

And to cap it all the stunningly beautiful Cleopatra wasn’t particularly beautiful. Her beauty just got embellished century after century until we ended up with Elizabeth Taylor.

All this prompted me to look up other anomalies in history – little things I’d always believed, but aren’t true at all.

For instance, Christopher Colombus didn’t discover the USA; only some Caribbean Islands. Joan of Arc, always held up as a hero of the French in their struggles against the English, was actually captured by a French army and sentenced to death by a French Bishop.

Maybe in revenge for getting the blame, one of Britain’s first major attacks in World War Two wasn’t on the Germans, but on the French Navy, sinking a large portion of it.

Staying with the French, Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake,” and moving across the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin probably didn’t fly a kite in a thunderstorm – but simply suggested it would be a good idea.

Not one of the Salem witches was burned at the stake, Martin Luther probably didn’t nail anything to a church door, and Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burned. There’s no proof any of these things ever happened.

Also, JFK wasn’t assassinated and now lives on the moon with Elvis and the Clangers. OK, that last fact may be from dubious sources, but the rest are apparently true. Amazing!

Of course, if Maya now fails history based on an essay about Elvis and the Clangers, I’m in seriously big trouble…