Painting Fakes

One of the endearing things about Australia is that we are just as bad at national days as we are at national songs . Our supposed official national holiday, Australia Day, marks the day when the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove in 1788.  It provides a telling contrast with its US equivalent. Thanksgiving Day celebrates the anniversary of the pilgrim fathers' first harvest in New England, their heartfelt thanks at the progress of their new community of religious freedom far from the tyranny of their English oppressors. By contrast, very few of those who landed in Sydney Cove in 1788 were inclined to celebration.  Most of them were in chains, with their oppressors on hand and well armed to keep them down.  Nor were the soldiers who guarded them much more enthusiastic, sent on this posting to the ends of the earth to guard dangerous prisoners.  The original inhabitants were none too pleased either at having their best lands taken by these strangers. Our celebrations occasionally

One of my childhood treasures is a pair of books by C Walter Hodges: The Namesake  and The Marsh King.   First published in the mid-1960s, these are what would today be called "Young Adult" novels which I read for the first time in late primary or early high school.  They tell the story of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex (south England) from 871 to 899 CE, and his conflict with the invading Vikings. I loved these books and read them over and over again, especially The Namesake , narrated by an engaging character of Hodges' invention, a one-legged boy also called Alfred who is part of the king's household.  They deal with the period from just before Alfred's accession to the throne in 871 to the conclusion of his second campaign against the Vikings led by Guthrum in 878.  I'm sure Hodges would have been pleased with the impression they made on me - to this day my ears prick up whenever I hear Alfred mentioned. I recently decided to approach

Over the past few days I've found myself wondering what the socialist German playwright and poet Berthold Brecht would have made of my short post on Plutarch and his biography of Mark Antony.    The trouble with using someone like Plutarch as your source of historical information is that as a biographer, he is only interested in the individual.  You learn plenty about Mark Antony but not much about those around him, and virtually nothing about those under his command or under his rule.  This can make him seem like a romantic figure, an actor in a glorious tragedy. You do learn enough, though, to know that things were not so glorious for others.  When he stuffed up the campaign in Parthia thousands of his soldiers died, and the others had to resort to eating bark and leather to survive on their long retreat through the desert.  Thousands more died in his ill-fated naval battle against Octavius, while he and Cleopatra high-tailed it back to Egypt with their gold on board.  No w

Reading ancient authors can be disconcerting.  It's hard to be certain if you're inhabiting the same mental universe as they are.  How similar are we to our forebears of two millennia ago, and how much have shifts in time and culture made fundamental changes to our outlook?  For instance, my recent reading of some of Plutarch's Lives . Plutarch was a Greek author and philosopher who wrote at the end of the first and beginning of the second century CE.  He was a philosopher, trained at the Academy in Athens, and also a priest of Delphi, the famous shrine of Apollo from which Greek and Roman leaders sought oracles before they set out on important ventures.  However, he is best known for his "Lives", a series of short biographies of prominent Greek and Roman leaders from various eras.  He produced these in pairs - one Greek, one Roman - intended to illustrate different moral and political lessons and to compare and contrast Greek and Roman civilisation.  The Peng

I'm reading Josephus' The Jewish War , as you do.  I love the bizarre intrigues of the Herod family and the hugely inflated numbers of people involved in everything, although the battles and the long list of forgettable names kind of lose me.  Most of all I love this story, about a Roman general called Petronius who has just become my hero of the week. In 37 AD the Roman Emperor Tiberius died and was succeeded by his adopted grandson, Gaius Caligula.  Not much good could be said of Tiberius but at least he was not completely crackers.  Caligula on the other hand was as mad as a cut snake and poor Petronius, as the chief imperial administrator in the Middle East, was now required to do whatever this madman said.  Josephus takes up the story. Gaius Caesar's accession to power so completely turned his head that he wished to be thought of and addressed as a god, stripped his country of its noblest men, and proceeded to lay sacrilegious hands on Judaea.  He ordered Petroni

Apologies for my short absence.  I've been busy with work, it being the end of the financial year and all, and not much spare time to write down the thoughts clattering around my head.  Anyway, in between other things I've been gradually working my way through Eusebius' History of the Church.   Eusebius has been called the "father of church history" and this work, which first appeared early in the 4th century, is the earliest surviving attempt at a comprehensive account of the first three centuries of Christianity. I say "attempt" because the work is hardly comprehensive.  In the first place, it is almost entirely a history of the Greek-speaking church of the Eastern mediterranean, with occasional insertions of events from the West, especially Rome.  Yet for me this was the least puzzling thing about it.  As a 21st century reader it is easy to see what it lacks as a work of history. For a start there is no real sense of development.  We know that