All posts tagged Griffin

H.G. Wells reviews

Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. ‘Wells is sane,’ he thought…
(young Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, page 113)

1890s

1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701

1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers that the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids

1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders

1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade, landing in Surrey and advancing on London, destroying everything with their Heat Rays and Black Smoke, a gripping account told by a terrified survivor

1899 When The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future

1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty and so experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s

1900 Love and Mr Lewisham – how the promising working class student Lewisham goes off the rails and ruins his life by falling in love with the uneducated pretty young assistant of a fraudulent ‘medium’, ending with them living in a poky flat and she has a baby

1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites who inhabit it

1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’

1905 Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul – long, laboured account of boyhood, teens and twenties of the dim protagonist, Arthur Kipps, who escapes from apprenticeship in a soul-destroying haberdasher shop when he inherits a fortune, only to find himself forced to choose between two lovers, his uneducated childhood sweetheart or his ambitious, arty, wood-carving teacher

1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford

1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end

1909 Tono-Bungay – George Ponderevo’s long account of his boyhood then rise to fortune on the coat tails of his fraudulent huckster uncle Edward, packed with negative analyses of contemporary England and upsetting descriptions of his unhappy marriage and love affairs

1909 Ann Veronica – sympathetic portrait of a young woman rebelling against her conventional father and trying to make her way in London who falls into the clutches of a predatory blackmailer before – disappointingly – falling in love with an intelligent he-man who elopes with her to the continent

1910s

1910 The History of Mr Polly – the funniest of the social comedies, following the mishaps of his cheerful protagonist, Alfred Polly, who, characteristically, marries the wrong woman, endures increasing misery trying to make a go of a small-town haberdashery, until he breaks free and finds happiness with the jolly landlady of a country pub

1911 The New Machiavelli – supposedly a novel about contemporary politics which, in reality, is another defence of free love, a long justification by politician Richard Remington of his decision to abandon his wife and political career in order to run off to the Continent with young graduate Isabel Oliver (transparently based on Wells’s own elopement with the young author Amber Reeves)

The New Machiavelli by H.G. Wells: introduction by Norman MacKenzie

1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via the stories of a number of characters who are central to events

About Wells

1920s – Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1) – Virginia Woolf strongly criticised Wells as one of the Edwardian ‘materialists’ who she was reacting against, three famous essays gathered in this selection, namely Modern Fiction (1919), Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923) and Character in Fiction (1924).

1932 – Stamboul Train by Graham Greene where Wells is satirised in the character of Quin Savory, a popular, middle-brow novelist who is depicted as a ‘populist vulgarian’.

1932 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, who in letters and notes explained that his dystopia was to some extent a satirical rejection of Wells’s optimistic utopias

1982 The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp – fascinating, if rather dogged, examination of recurring themes and images in Wells’s writing

2011 A Man of Parts by David Lodge – novel about Wells in old age during the Second World War looking back over his career, focusing mainly on his numerous affairs ,with (as in all Lodge) lots of graphic sex

Luxury and power: Persia to Greece @ the British Museum

This is an exhibition with a thesis. The layout and design, the structure, the choice of topics addressed and even the selection of individual artefacts, have all been made to support the central argument. What is this thesis? It’s another one of those ‘undermining received opinion’ exhibitions, so common nowadays.

In this case the received opinion goes like this: in the fifth century BC, from roughly 500 to 450 BC, the federation of Greek city states, led by Athens, fought off repeated attempts to invade and conquer them mounted by the huge Persian (proper scholarly name, Achaemenid) Empire, under its kings, Darius the Great (ruled 522 to 486 BC) and Xerxes the Great (ruled 486 to 465 BC).

You can see from this map how the Achaemenid Empire, at its height around 500 BC, covered a large swathe of south-central Asia and how vexing it was for its rulers that it swept through the Middle East, all of Turkey and up into the Balkans only to be blocked by the obstinate city states of Greece (at the far left of the map).

The Achaemenid Empire at its Greatest Extent, about 500 BC. Created by Mossmaps, accessed from Wikipedia

Contemporary Greeks, notably the historian Herodotus, but many other politicians and playwrights whose works have survived, portrayed the conflict as a desperate struggle against the odds of free, democratic states battling oriental tyranny.

In particular – and the focus of this exhibition – is the way that Greek leaders, politicians, writers and historians, but also artists, sculptors and craftsmen, routinely associated the Persians with luxury, with excessive wealth, which they went on to associate with moral failings such as decadence, greed, corruption, effeminacy, and so on.

The legendary King Midas (originally an actual ruler of Phrygia in central Anatolia) and how he was curse to turn everything he touched into gold, became associated with the Persians, a symbol of the punishment incurred by unlimited greed.

Recreation of an Achaemenid court robe, made with expensive dyes, rich embroidery and gold applique, designed to be draped and belted across the middle. Designed by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University (2022)

According to Greek writers all this Oriental extravagance and decadence starkly contrasted with their own pure, restrained and high-minded art and culture, which was summed up in the inscription above the famous oracle at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess‘.

East versus West

This stark dichotomy or binary view of civilisations, of a fundamental opposition the West and the Eastern Mediterranean, was to have a strong influence on the Roman Empire, whose leaders and writers also associated themselves with lofty principle and morality, and their opponents in the East – the successors to the Persians, the Parthian Empire – in identical terms. We are brave, they are warlike. We are high-minded and principled, they are lawless and treacherous. We live lives of dignity and restraint, they wallow on luxury and sensuality. All tropes which would again be revived when, in the late Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then pushed on into Thrace, eventually conquering Greece itself in the 1700s.

These tropes lived on into 18th and 19h century scholarly works, of history, art and anthropology, as what the American critic Edward Said called ‘Orientalism’ i.e. associating the empires, states and peoples of the East with luxury, corruption, decadence, sexual profligacy and so on.

Arguably, this great founding binary between noble democratic West and tyrannical barbarous East underwent another enormous revival in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, in aftermath of which loads of American leaders and opinion-makers revived all these old tropes, painting the Middle East as a land of wild-eyed religious fanatics, with the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington going as far as claiming the terrorist attacks had revived an age-old, unchangeable and inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’.

The only thing problem with this long and hallowed tradition is that, right back where it started, with the polar opposition between Greeks and the Persians… it’s wrong. And this exhibition at the British Museum sets out to show why.

Undoing the stereotype

It does so by presenting two counter-claims:

Persian luxury wasn’t what the Greeks claimed it to be
the Greeks were far from being as spartan and luxury-free as they claimed, but themselves valued luxury goods and incorporated many aspects of Persian craftsmanship and style into their own artefacts

To put it another way, for over two thousand years scholars and writers in the West have tended to take the Greeks’ at their own valuation of themselves, not least because our own power structures (of Christendom versus the Turks, of the European powers when they created their empires, of the modern 21st century American empire) found the Greeks’ binary tropes useful to confirm the superiority of the moral West. But the actual objects from these two supposedly distinct cultures tell a different story. They reveal a far more complex and messy picture of cultural interaction, interpenetration, influence and involvement than the official documents.

Thus, with disarming simplicity, the exhibition reflect this binary worldview, starting with two rooms: the first one displays a range of objects from different parts of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, some to explain the history and structure of the empire, some to demonstrate how luxury objects were used to express and support political and cultural power.

Room two focuses on the other half of the dyad, classical Athens of the 5th century BC, again with some objects used to explain the history and cultural highpoints of the period (of which the construction of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 BC is the most notable item), before going on to display cases which indicate how the Athenians incorporated, remodelled and adapted influences from the East through a variety of handicrafts and objects.

Hellenistic

And then, to prove its point that there was always more complex interplay between cultures right across the region, the third and final room looks in detail at the culture which arose after the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Alexander turned the tables on the Persians for, after conquering all of Greece, he swiftly took Anatolia, conquered Egypt and then pushed on into modern Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan. It was here that his dazzling ten-year career of ceaseless conquests came to an end with his untimely death in Babylon in 323 BC.

On his death Alexander’s short-lived empire quickly collapsed into individual kingdoms ruled by his various generals and there’s a display of coins with heads of those who managed to emerge as new rulers including the Antigonids (who emerged to rule Macedonia), the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Persia. Nonetheless the Greek culture, literacy, models of poetry and writing, models of sculpture and architecture, lived on after him across the whole region.

Because some Greeks called their homeland Hellas and its inhabitants Hellenes, scholars have for hundreds of years referred to the period from 323 until the Romans conquered Egypt in 31 BC, as the Hellenistic period, and art historians refer to the style which developed across it as the Hellenistic style.

The curators include a room on post-Alexander Hellenistic culture in this exhibition because they want us to arrive at it with fresh eyes: instead of the Hellenistic style representing a new synthesis of opposing traditions – which art historians have traditionally seen it as – this exhibition argues that Hellenism was more like the logical continuation of complex cross-cultural contacts and currents which had been swirling across the region for centuries before, despite the insistence to the contrary of Greek propagandists, who scholars for too long have taken too literally.

Room 1. The Achaemenid Empire

So room one attempts to show that the so-called ‘luxury’ of the Persians wasn’t indicative of moral failings, as Greek propagandists liked to claim, but was an intrinsic aspect of their statecraft. In other words, artefacts and objects, ceremonies and rituals which involved or highlighted wealth were important tools in keeping together such a huge and heterogeneous empire. When the Achaemenids conquered a territory, they went out of their way to appease populations. They often left native rulers in place (such as King Arbinas of Lycia for whom the Nereid Monument was built which is viewable elsewhere in the museum) or replaced them with regional administrators called satraps.

The new Persian rulers let their subject peoples continue to practice their religions – but they insisted on the pomp and pageantry which established them firmly as the ultimate rulers, distributing largesse and gifts to confirm the hierarchy of client king or satrap, and emperor. Satraps in turn collected taxes and tributes, and then granted largesse on a local level.

Thus the Persian administrative system court used objects of exquisite luxury not only as markers of authority but as intrinsic means to the administration of the empire. In doing so, a distinctive Persian style developed that was copied by different social classes throughout the empire and spread far beyond, into Greece itself and up into the Balkans. To quote one curator, the ‘Persians wielded “luxury” as a political tool across a vast and complex empire.

The Greek interpretation of Persian ‘luxury’ was a misreading: the Greeks interpreted it through a moralising prism and failed to understand that ostentatious displays of luxury were central to the Persian Empire’s administrative methodology.

Power was demonstrated not just by luxury objects but ceremonies and activities such as holding public audiences, banquets for subject kings and courtiers, and hunting expeditions. The court moved seasonally between the capital Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, to hold court, administer justice, and confirm his power around his huge multicultural empire. The king travelled with a vast camp including a royal tent equivalent to a palace throne.

According to the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian emperor would reward client kings and courtiers with gits such as a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, a gold scimitar, a Persian coat, and so on.

Persian armlet © The Trustees of the British Museum

The room starts with historical background to the Greco-Persian wars: with Cyrus the Great (died in 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then Darius I (550 to 486 BC) who launched the first invasion of Greece (492 to 492). This failed, he began preparation for another one, but died before it could start and handed on preparations to his son, Xerxes.

Xerxes (486 to 465 BC) led the second attempted invasion of Greece, invading via a bridge he had constructed across the Hellespont (480 BC), and mounting a military campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although he at one point captured Athens and burned the buildings on the Acropolis (480), Xerxes was defeated at Plataea and, facing revolts in various provinces back in the empire, was forced to retreat from Greece. The defeat of his huge campaign spelled the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenian Empire.

Room 1 displays

Having given a brisk overview of the historical background, the exhibition moves on to cases devoted to various aspects of the central topic, ‘luxury’.

One of the most numerous types of object are so-called rhytons. These are drinking vessels but, the exhibition tells us, were part of a surprisingly ornate ritual. You’re a very senior Persian official and, at a banquet, you hold the rhyton in one hand while a slave fills it with wine. When it reaches a certain level you tip it with one hand and a stream of wine gushes forth from a small hole at the bottom, often concealed amid an elaborate design, and the thing is, you had to direct this stream of wine towards a shallow bowl you’re holding in your other hand. You don’t drink from the rhyton, you drink from the bowl. The rhyton is a luxury object designed to showcase your power and prestige, as is the entire ritual.

Gilt silver rhyton shaped as a griffin © The Trustees of the British Museum

Sound unlikely? Well, there’s a carved stone relief showing precisely this action being carried out at a banquet and there’s several cases full of beautifully worked examples of these wine pourers, crafted into all kinds of animal motifs.

Detail of the Nereid Monument showing Arbinas, king of Lycia, at a banquet using a rhyton and drinking bowl. In multicultural fashion, he sports a Persian beard but is wearing a Greek gown © The Trustees of the British Museum

Other aspects of Persian ‘luxury’ include bottles created to contain rare and precious spices and oils and objects such as the exquisite gold armlet (above), details of peacocks and parasols, jewellery and make-up. The king wore fur-lined coats, a golden torc around his throat, all markers of supreme power.

Persian rulers used chariots for hunting but also as symbols of power and dominance. The most common animals in Persian imagery are the mightiest animal then known, the lion, and the mythical creature, the griffin, both of which are depicted across all media from the Persian Empire.

Gateway 1. The Persian wars

You pass from room 1 to room 2 through a kind of gateway, angular upright and lintel painted jet black to distinguish it from the dazzling white of the rest of the show. In each of these there is an animated map and a couple of artefacts reflecting war. The first one is a 30-second animation showing the path of the two Persian invasions into mainland Greece: the first one from 492 to 490, ending in defeat at the Battle of Marathon; the second one, from 480 to 479, which featured the battle of Thermopylae, the naval battle of Salamis (480) and the Persians’ definitive defeat at Plataea. To set the tone the animation is accompanied by a classic Greek helmet and a figurine of a warrior.

Room 2. Ancient Athens

Again, the room starts with the basic history, describing the development of the Greek city states, especially Athens, which rose to have an empire of its own, complete with an enormous population of slaves and a flock of smaller cities who paid her handsome tributes, as well as wealth from the silver mines discovered in 483.

Bust of Pericles (about 430 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a bust of Pericles the great statesman (495 to 429 BC), whose noble speeches are recorded by the historian Thucydides, and who oversaw the development of Athenian democracy and the building of a new, astonishingly beautiful and mathematically precise temple to Athena Parthenos atop the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was not only a temple but a treasury, a storehouse, packed with treasures of all kinds.

The exhibition backs this up with an illustration of the original Parthenon, brightly painted and decorated, and photos of the modern reconstruction of the enormous statue of Athena Parthenos (‘the virgin’) which was the focal point of the Parthenon and which was a gaudy, brightly painted figure, 12 metres tall, made of ivory, wood and gold.

Reconstruction of the statue of Athena Parthenos at the reconstruction of the entire Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Luxury permitted when it enhanced the prestige of the city.

There’s an inventory of some of the treasure the temple once contained, carved in stone (including the throne of King Xerxes, captured at the Battle of Salamis); and part of a relief from the Elgin Marbles showing women processing towards the temple carrying luxury plates and objects, possibly captured from the Persian army, to devote to the goddess.

This section explains how the Athenians struggled to reconcile their self image as noble, egalitarian democrats with their growing wealth. One solution was to decide ‘luxury’ was permissible so long as it wasn’t attached to individuals but was used to honour that state.

It also explains the socio-political reasons for this aversion to luxury. Democracy was a response to civil conflict. Competitive displays of wealth among Athens’s richest families had led to tensions and violence at the end of the 6th century. When the statesman Kleisthenes introduced his reforms in 508 they were designed to defuse these tensions by enforcing greater equality between citizens. The laws he introduced distributed political responsibility among all adult male citizens in a system they came to call the rule of the people, demos-kratos.

Thus the animadversions of so many writers against personal displays of ‘luxury’ wasn’t based on morality alone, but on a very real fear that they would revive the social conflicts of the late 6th century which had threatened to plunge the city into civil war. Banning private displays of wealth was a political necessity.

Room 2 displays

Take peacocks. Peacocks were a very Persian marker of luxury and caste. They arrived in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC. Expensive to keep and with no practical purpose, they were classic markers of wealth and luxury, which meant their owners had to be careful not to raise democratic hackles. One aristocrat publicly displayed his peacocks once a month: luxury was acceptable so long as it was presented as benefiting the community.

As to Athenian views of the Persians, there’s a hilarious display case showing how the Greeks portrayed them on the many, many vases they made, decorated with line drawings of characters and animals. On earlier pots Persian characters are depicted as wearing trousers and jackets, very barbaric from a Greek perspective, but dignified and noble warriors.

After the triumphs of the Persian war, the depiction of Persians became more mocking and derisive, notably in the image of a defeated Persian sitting side-saddle (effeminate) on a donkey (not a warlike horse) facing backwards.

Green pot showing a Persian warrior seated side-saddle, facing backwards on a donkey (about 470 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Or take the Persian habit of having slaves carry a parasol to protect you from the fierce Middle Eastern sun. In Greek depictions, this was turned into parasols for delicate ladies, associating the Persians with effeminacy. In part this was because women played no part in Athenian politics and so were, in a sense, free to toy with decadent habits. Another one the exhibition points out, is the use of make-up and eyeliner, something Persian men wore but would be unthinkable in a fine, upstanding male Greek citizen.

Fish were another pressure point. Rich Athenians imported from the Persians a taste for rare and exotic fish, something which was publicly disapproved of, as shown here by a vase illustration and a disapproving quote from the playwright Aristophanes. (Compare and contrast with Roman moralists from Cicero onwards singling out ownership of rare fish ponds as one of the first markers of the Roman Republic’s slide into decadence and decay.)

Remember the rhytons which figured largely in the first room? This room has half a dozen examples showing how the Greeks adapted and undermined their grandiloquent originals. For a start they’re generally made from the Greeks’ favourite material, good democratic clay not ostentatious silver. And , as in this example, the bombastic use of an animal’s head (a lion’s) is undermined by the realistic and very Greek narrative depicted on the main body of the vase, above it.

Lion head drinking cup © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a case explaining that the Persians used images of bulls, lions and griffins in their power objects, but that these characteristically Persian motifs were also incorporated by Athenian designers. The exhibition features examples including beautifully crafted jewellery such as pendants and bracelets, and even a wonderful pair of earrings with tiny deer-heads in the shape of rhytons. What had been exemplary markers of Achaemenid royal court have been transformed into high-end fashion accessories for wealthy Athenians.

Interestingly, Persian motifs and depictions of characters wearing classic Persian dress became slowly more stylised and generalised, over time. A century after peace had been made with Persia (i.e. by 350) Persian motifs had been generalised into images and symbols of the vague East, including griffins, Amazons and other legendary animals and peoples.

Gateway 2. Alexander’s conquests

As with the passage from room 1 to room 2, so the passage from room 2 to room 3 is through a narrow, relatively low archway painted jet black in which is embedded a screen showing an animation, in this case showing the path of Alexander’s astonishing victories across Anatolia, into Egypt and then across Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan.

Map showing extent of Alexander’s conquests in 323 BC. As you can see, it almost completely replicates the extent of the Achaemenid Empire at its height (source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Room 3. Hellenistic culture

Born in 356 BC Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia on the death of his father, Philip II, in 336, at the age of 20, and almost immediately set about fighting his rivals in northern and central Greece, wars in which he enjoyed unparalleled success, uniting all of Greece under his rue before pursuing campaigns in Asia Minor, into Egypt and then east into Mesopotamia.

The period from Alexander’s death in 323 down until the overthrow (suicide) of Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 BC, is generally referred to as the Hellenistic period.

Alexander not only swept aside the Persian empire but the range and cosmopolitan nature of his empire ushered in a new age in which eastern and western styles of luxury were fused, hence the need for a distinct adjective, ‘Hellenistic’ style, a style which originated in Greece but freely incorporated eastern and oriental subject matter and styles.

Alexander has, of course, been traditionally viewed as a great Greek hero. The curators ask the teasing question, was he? Or could he more accurately be described as the last Achaemenid king? Because when he conquered the Persian Empire he inherited a highly organised, centralised administration. He maintained the existing system of provinces and retained some Persian governors. And then he remodelled images of his rule on the Persian style. He held court in the tent of his foe, Darius III and ordered suppliants to kneel before him, in a most ungreek manner.

In the era after Alexander’s conquests, cities across Asia developed as trading hubs for precious materials such as gold, silvery and ivory, housing specialist craftsmen. True to the spirit of Hellenism, they mixed motifs from Greece, Persia and Egypt.

Room 3 displays

Again there are a couple of panels summarising the history before we move on to look in detail at a range of objects. One of the most stunning is a gold wreath from Turkey, similar to those found in elite tombs in the kingdom of Macedonia. The gold oak wreath consists of two branches, bound together at the front by a model of a bee and with two gold cicadas concealed among the leaves. From the tomb of a local aristocrat in western Turkey, it epitomises the spread of ‘luxury’ across the region and the evolution of cosmopolitan styles in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.

Gold wreath: can you spot the two cicadas hidden among the leaves? One is just above the bottom-left leaf; the ‘bee’ is at the top of the thin circle of gold, with 3 triangular wedges at the bottom, looking more like a tiny owl © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a display case about ivory, explaining the culture’s attitude to elephants, the trade in tusks and the ‘luxury’ good made from them. There’s a set of clothes, trousers and a jacket, representing Hellenistic cultural synthesis. It’s actually a recreation of a Persian riding costume. Persians wore a costume which included cap, coat, tunic and trousers. Alexander liked to mix Persian and Macedonian costume. He adopted the tunic, cap and sash but not the trousers which, as a good Greek, he considered barbaric.

Persian riding costume as recreated by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2022)

The Panagyurishte Treasure

But pride of place in the third room goes to extraordinary Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria (roughly equivalent to ancient Thrace). Accidentally discovered by three brothers in 1949, these treasures are outstanding examples of ancient metalworking and demonstrate the influence of Persian and Greek luxury across the Balkans.

Remember the Persian rhytons from room one, and how we saw them being echoed and rework by the Athenians in room two? Well, of the nine pieces in the Panagyurishte Treasure, no fewer than eight are rhytons, beautifully crafted gleaming gold. The ninth object, the big circular plate, is one of the shallow bowls which you poured wine into from a rhyton and actually drank from. Still can’t really imagine how you’d do this without spilling loads of wine down your front, unless you were exceptionally dexterous.

Panagyurishte Treasure © National Museum of History, Bulgaria

The Panagyurishte treasures rarely leave Bulgaria, and were last seen in the UK in 1976, so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see them.

Information cabinets: raw materials and techniques

The exhibition is punctuated by information ‘boxes’, white cubes with text printed on them and a little glass pane showing samples of the material being explained. So there’s a box devoted to frankincense which contains samples of the aromatic gum from frankincense trees which was used in antiquity as medicine and incense. Apparently rulers of Arabia sent to the Achaemenid emperor every year about 26,000 tonnes of frankincense as tribute, which was then distributed to rulers across the empire as a symbol of the emperor’s largesse.

There’s a box about silver and its role in Persian artistry, which contains some actual silver ore, ingots and silver coins.

There’s one about the marble the ancient Greeks used to build the Parthenon and other temples, explaining that the particular type they used (‘Pentelic’ marble from Mount Pentelikon, 10k from Athens) contained traces of oxidised iron which gives the buildings that warm glow around sunset time, with some examples of marble fragments.

There were other similar explanations and samples of alabaster (‘a soft, luminous stone prized for its coloration and distinctive veining’) and ivory (the role of elephants in Persian and Greek culture, and the use of ivory, having a display case to themselves, including a cute ivory carving of a satyr’s head, which once decorated the head-rest of a couch).

Some of these info boxes are complemented by videos, each only about 60 seconds long, which give you insight into methods and techniques. There’s an interesting one about techniques used to manufacture a stunning Persian robe (displayed next to it), another one about how to create black glaze pottery ancient Greek style, one showing how the Greeks used glazes to give ceramic pottery a finish which mimicked Persian metalware. Persian metalware = decadent luxury; Greek pottery = democracy and morality.

But the standout one for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition, was a 60-second video showing how the Tyrian purple dye, famous across the Mediterranean for over for millennia, is actually made. I’ve read about it hundreds of times but never before seen a craftsman take one of the murex sea snails, crack it open with a hammer, dexterously extract its hypobranchial gland from the gloopy body and add this to a load of others kept in a jar, where sunlight and decay make them turn a rich purple colour. Once the coloration process is complete, the jar of glands is laid out in the sun to dry, then ground to a fine powder to create the basis of the purple dye, for over a thousand years associated with royalty and power. Because of its labour-intensive production, pure Tyrian dye was more expensive, pound for pound, than gold.

Conclusions

Does the exhibition succeed in its aim of persuading me that there was less of a binary opposition between Greek abstemiousness and Persian ‘luxury’ than previously thought? To be honest, it’s difficult to say. I imagine that most visitors, like me, are just not qualified enough to judge and are entirely in the hands of the curators. If they say so, I guess it must be so.

What does come over, for me at any rate, was a related but different conclusion, which is to do with the profound disconnect between official discourse (Greek texts) and the evidence of the objects on the ground, of the life of people in the broader culture which, the curators claim, strongly contradicts official Greek propaganda.

It made me wonder if it’s always true, if it’s a rule of human societies, that governments, almost by their nature, have views and official versions which fetishise a nation’s culture and heritage and so on – but that these will always clash with the far more messy and complex realities of life on the ground, of how people actually live, with the language and artefacts and habits and customs of actual populations, which often don’t fit into anybody’s neat categories.

To put it another way: that, throughout history, societies are always more multicultural than their leaders want or imagine them to be.*

Other rooms

The Greeks and Persians are favourite attractions at the museum, and at the end of the exhibition there’s a list of rooms where you can see objects related to the exhibition, being:

Nereid monument (room 17)
Parthenon (room 18)
ancient Athens (room 19)
The world of Alexander (room 22)
ancient Iran (room 52)
Mesopotamia 1500 to 539 BC (room 55)

* This thought has behind it the evidence and analysis presented in Michael Ignatieff’s trilogy of books about nations and nationalism.

More British Museum reviews

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (1897)

[Huxter] extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. ‘I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,’ said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. ‘The fact is, I’m all here – head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?’
(The Invisible Man, Chapter 7)

The invisible man in Iping

Since we know the title of the book is The Invisible Man there’s not much mystery about the stranger who turns up one winter night at a West Sussex inn (the Coach and Horses) and books a room, wearing a heavy overcoat with the lapels turned up, a hat and big black glasses, gloves and with the few bits of his skin which ought to be exposed, wrapped in bandages. Not much mystery at all.

The early part of the story is played for laughs, as Wells describes the rural character and foibles of the inhabitants of Iping, the little village the man has come to – snooping Mrs Hall the landlady, bluff Mr Hall, Mr and Mrs Brimstone the vicar and his wife, Teddy Henfrey the clock repair man, and so on.

Mr Cuss the local physician pays a courtesy call on the stranger and is terrified when an apparently empty sleeve reaches out to him and invisible fingers tweak his nose. He flees. Mr and Mrs Bunting are puzzled when someone breaks into the vicarage to steal money from the housekeeping box; they can see a candle being lit and the back door open and shut, but can’t see any burglar. When Mr and Mrs Hall go into the lodger’s apparently empty room they are horrified to see chairs and pillows suddenly levitating of their own accord, as the invisible man tries to frighten them off.

The vicarage burglary (which the invisible man did, indeed, perform: he’s run out of money) takes place the night before Whitsun Monday. This is the day of a big fair in Iping, with itinerant stallholders, a merry-go-round, coconut shies and so on thronging the village high street.

Wells has set it on this date so that there is a big crowd to witness all the shenanigans: the local magistrate and policeman try to serve a warrant on the invisible man for suspected involvement in the burglary, which leads to an impressive bar-room brawl during which the invisible man takes off all his clothes and flees, the rumpus attracting a large crowd of fair-goers.

Once safely out of Iping, the invisible man comes across a tramp, Marvel, in a country lane. He terrifies the man into going to Iping, ordering him to fetch the clothes, bandages, hat, sunglasses and so on that he (Mr Invisible) left behind at the inn. In particular, the invisible man wants the precious volumes of his ‘diary’ in which he’s been making records of his attempts to undo whatever ill-fated experiment it was that made him invisible in the first place.

There is a comic scene where Mr Invisible corners Cuss and Bunting in the small pub parlour and forces them, by threatening them with a poker, to take off their trousers and jackets, which he bundles up and runs off to hand over to Marvel who he told to wait in Iping churchyard.

Meanwhile, the tramp had been spotted breaking into the invisible man’s room by the landlord, landlady, and their faithful friends, and an even bigger hue and cry been raised as half the village chases after him. But these pursuers are felled one by one by the invisible man tripping them up or bundling them over, allowing the tramp to get clean away with his bundles of clothes and books.

All this takes up the first hundred or so pages of the book, during which we are introduced to a sizeable cast of yokels, all of whom are played for laughs, with Wells humorously recreating the lumbering Sussex dialect:

Mrs Wadgers, the blacksmith
Mr Jaggers, the cobbler
Mr Shuckleforth, the magistrate
Mrs Huxter
young Archie Harker
Old Fletcher, whitewashing his front room ceiling
Bobby Jaffers, the village constable
Mr Gibbins, the local amateur naturalist, out botanising on the Downs
Thomas Marvel, the tramp who the invisible man bullies into fetching his things from Iping

But there is also a dark strain running beneath the comedy. When he bullies the tramp to go to Iping to reclaim his belongings, the villagers’ ongoing obtuseness eventually drives the invisible man mad with frustration and, instead of fleeing, he goes on a rampage of destruction.

From the moment when the Invisible Man screamed with rage and Mr. Bunting made his memorable flight up the village, it became impossible to give a consecutive account of affairs in Iping. Possibly the Invisible Man’s original intention was simply to cover Marvel’s retreat with the clothes and books. But his temper, at no time very good, seems to have gone completely at some chance blow, and forthwith he set to smiting and overthrowing, for the mere satisfaction of hurting.

You must figure the street full of running figures, of doors slamming and fights for hiding-places. You must figure the tumult suddenly striking on the unstable equilibrium of old Fletcher’s planks and two chairs – with cataclysmic results. You must figure an appalled couple caught dismally in a swing. And then the whole tumultuous rush has passed and the Iping street with its gauds and flags is deserted save for the still raging unseen, and littered with coconuts, overthrown canvas screens, and the scattered stock in trade of a sweetstuff stall. Everywhere there is a sound of closing shutters and shoving bolts, and the only visible humanity is an occasional flitting eye under a raised eyebrow in the corner of a window pane.

The Invisible Man amused himself for a little while by breaking all the windows in the ‘Coach and Horses’, and then he thrust a street lamp through the parlour window of Mrs. Gribble. He it must have been who cut the telegraph wire to Adderdean just beyond Higgins’ cottage on the Adderdean road. And after that, as his peculiar qualities allowed, he passed out of human perceptions altogether, and he was neither heard, seen, nor felt in Iping any more. He vanished absolutely. (Chapter 12)

It feels like a rural Ealing Comedy, a sort of Titfield Thunderbolt vision of charming Sussex rural life, and Wells even describes it using proto-cinematic techniques – the repeated use of the phrase ‘you must figure’ working like cuts to different camera angles on the mayhem the invisible man has caused.

The fight at the Jolly Cricketers

Having escaped Iping, and reclaimed all his belongings, the invisible man bullies the tramp along the road towards the coastal town of Port Stowe. Here there is another fight. Marvel escapes the man’s clutches long enough to seek refuge in another pub, the Jolly Cricketers, begging the landlord and his handful of customers to protect him. They lock Marvel in a backroom but then hear the back door being forced open and enter the room to see Marvel being strangely pulled backwards as if by invisible hands.

Unfortunately, though, one of the customers is an American, and Americans (apparently), unlike the Brits in the story, freely carry side-arms. Marvel breaks free of his invisible assailant and the American fires his revolver in a spray pattern covering the small courtyard.

Then there is… silence. He has escaped!

The invisible man reveals himself

Meanwhile, up at a villa on the hill above the Jolly Cricketers, one Dr Kemp is working late into the night. Finally going to bed, he notices a blood spot on the linoleum. And then blood on the handle of his bedroom door. And then that his bedsheets have been ripped. It is the invisible man!

But imagine the scene when the invisible man looks at the intruder and realises that he knows Kemp. They were medical students together.

Mr Invisible tells Kemp who he is, the man who’s been in all the newspapers and causing the rumpus down the hill. His name is Griffin.

‘I’m an Invisible Man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an Invisible Man. And I want your help. I don’t want to hurt you, but if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don’t you remember me, Kemp? Griffin, of University College?’
‘Let me get up,’ said Kemp. ‘I’ll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet for a minute.’
He sat up and felt his neck.
‘I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible. I am just an ordinary man – a man you have known – made invisible.’
‘Griffin?’ said Kemp.
‘Griffin,’ answered the Voice. (Chapter 17)

It takes a long time for Griffin to persuade Kemp that he exists, and that he is invisible, that it isn’t hypnosis or some trick.

Finally, Kemp fetches him food, then lets him sleep. And in the morning there is the big Explanation Scene – like you get in all these kinds of books – the scene where Griffin explains ‘how it all happened’.

Griffin explains how, as a student, he set himself to investigate the properties of matter. He started with common knowledge about light, how it is refracted or reflected by solid objects – and then takes these basic facts and extrapolates them to human cells, themselves mostly made of water and, individually, under a microscope, quite transparent. And so on, until Griffin has persuaded us that one dark and stormy night, he made the fateful discovery of how to make the agglomeration of translucent cells which is a human being – invisible!

But the book is not subtitled ‘A Grotesque Romance’ for nothing. This second half of the book is distinctly different from the first half. Whereas it had mostly been rural hi-jinks in part one, now Wells goes out of his way to make Griffin a repellent disagreeable and angry man.

It seems Griffin loathed and resented being forced to teach in some provincial college to make a living. He loathed his superior who was always sniffing around his experiments. He stole money from his father so he could take rooms in a shabby lodging house in London. But it turns out, in fact, not to have been his father’s money, and, unable to repay it, his father committed suicide. This prompted no remorse in Griffin – the reverse – he vents a bitter diatribe about having to return to the village of his birth for his father’s funeral, his indifference to his memory, his contempt for his one-time girlfriend.

Wells paints Griffin as a type of the sneeringly superior loner, the kind of Raskolnikov-anarchist figure which haunted late 19th century fiction.

Griffin tells Kemp how he worked day and night till he arrived at the brink of the successful experiment. First he makes a wad of cotton wool invisible. Then a stray street cat. And then he takes the potion and exposes himself to the ray which makes him invisible, too.

At this very moment, his landlord comes banging on the door shouting for the rent. Now invisible, Griffin hides and watches the Jewish landlord and his thuggish stepsons break down the door to his room and search it in puzzlement. As soon as they’re gone, he makes a pile of his unneeded papers, straw and bedding and sets it alight. ‘You burned the house down?’ asks Kemp, shocked. ‘Yes, what of it?’ replies Griffin, with typical unconcern.

Wells could have gone a number of ways on this, the elaboration of his fantasy.

His protagonist could have been a naive and innocent experimenter whose experiment went wrong, condemning him to lifelong invisibility and drawing on our sympathy.

Or he could have continued the essentially comic vein of the first half.

Instead there are increasing shades of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the figure of the demented scientist, feverishly working with homemade equipment in a remote garret, a loner shunned by the world and turning violently against it. The debt to Stevenson is reinforced by the way the transformation to invisibility is horribly painful – just like Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde.

‘It was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night of racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth, though my skin was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like grim death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I chloroformed it. Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room. There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck to it…. I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness.

‘The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I gritted my teeth and stayed there to the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers.’ (Chapter 20)

The invisible man abroad in London

The three chapters which recount the invisible man’s adventures in London, after he’s burned down his lodgings, are breathlessly exciting.

It is winter and Griffin quickly discovers all the disadvantages of being invisible. One – he is instantly freezing cold. Two – people and vehicles can’t see him and so are continually banging into him. Three – his feet get muddy and so leave footprints. A couple of street urchins spot these muddy footprints appearing as if by magic as Griffin heads towards Bloomsbury, and they raise a chase after them.

The invisible man is quickly realising that to be invisible is to be chased.

He makes his escape into a department store on Tottenham Court Road, hides, waits till it’s closed up, then feeds and sleeps. Woken by the dawn, he chooses clothes to wear, a wig and a fake nose in an effort to cover every inch of his skin. But he is seen by the shop staff who are opening up, and there is another chase which only ends when Griffin strips naked again and slips out a side door.

Again, it is freezing and Griffin gets muddy feet. Worse, snow falling settles on him, creating a ghostly outline. He hurries towards Drury Lane where there are theatrical costumiers and there is a prolonged scene where he sneaks into the shabby, rundown shop of a costumier, who begins to suspect someone is following him around. This is an intensely imagined and claustrophobic sequence as the increasingly scared man grabs a poker and tries to identify his invisible spectre. It climaxes in a struggle and in which Griffin knocks the shopkeeper unconscious and ties him up. Then selects clothes, hat, bandages, a fake nose, a wig, a hat and sunglasses and once again emerges on the street.

By now Griffin has realised that a busy city is no place for an invisible man, and he makes his plans to decamp down to rural Sussex, stealing money, acquiring luggage and booking a train ticket. And that is where part one of the story commenced, with his arrival in Iping.

So the story is now back in the present: Griffin tells an awestruck Kemp that he has thought long and hard about the advantages invisibility give him and they are really only twofold: the ability to creep up on people and the ability to escape.

It shocked me that he draws the conclusion that the chief conclusion of these capacities will be the ability to kill. To assassinate. To institute a reign of terror!

The reign of terror

Dr Kemp has listened to this long, long telling of Griffin’s story with mounting impatience. Because we, the readers, know that the previous evening, after Griffin had finally gone to sleep, Kemp had sent a note to his neighbour, Colonel Adye, to come with the police.

Now they arrive, are let into the house by the maid, and enter the downstairs. Griffin hears them and realises Kemp has betrayed him. They fight, Griffin pushes Kemp out of the way, bounds down the stairs, knocks over Colonel Adye and runs out the front door.

Kempt and Adye now raise the alarm and organise the police. Proclamations are issued. Posters are distributed. All householders are ordered to lock their doors. Trains are to seal their carriages. All police are to go armed and to begin to beat the bounds within a twenty mile radius. The Invisible Man is on the loose!

The first person narrator explains to us how the evidence of the next 24 hours is patchy, but it appears that Griffin nonetheless got hold of food and rested. However, he then murders a man, a harmless Mr Wicksteed, whose body is found near a gravel pit with the head stove in by an iron bar.

Then Kemp’s housemaid, terrified, brings him a scribbled note the invisible man gave her out of thin air:

You have been amazingly energetic and clever, though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night’s rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me – the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch – the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example – a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes – Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is to die. (Chapter 27)

It is difficult what to make of this note, and of the way the plot had developed. We are now a long long way from the comical yokels at the Coach and Horses. The word ‘grotesque’ seems to fit not only the story, but the weird way in which Wells handles it. Griffin has now gone more or less mad.

Moments after receiving the note, Kemp’s house is under siege from unseen hands wielding rocks to smash in the windows and then an axe to smash open the wooden blinds. The narrative has turned into the trope of ‘the besieged house’, which appears in so many subsequent horror and zombie movies.

Kemp and his maid rush round trying to lock all the doors and windows but still the relentless smashing proceeds all the way round the ground floor. Colonel Adye approaches with two policemen and is let into the house by the front door, at the same moment that Griffin breaks in through the back. There is a prolonged fight, with policemen lashing out with pokers. Adye goes out the front to fetch help but is confronted by the invisible man. He pulls a revolver but Griffin wrestles it off him and fires, killing him. Kemp sees all this from an upstairs window. The story has long ago stopped being remotely funny.

Griffin renews his assault on the house and Kemp flees out the back door, running like a maniac downhill into Port Stowe, yelling at everyone that the invisible man is coming!!!. Children run screaming into their homes, mothers bolt front doors – but some workmen laying pipes are slow to react and Grifffin blunders into several of them in his mad pursuit of Kemp.

Once again, being invisible seems to boil down to being pursued, except this time Griffin is not the prey but the hunter.

But, having bumped into a crowd of them, the various tram-men and navvies join in the chase and suddenly Kemp realises they far outnumber his pursuer. Kemp stops, turns and is immediately punched to the floor but, as Griffin aims other blows, the navvies and tram-men are on him, seizing his arms, wrestling him to the ground and then there is a good deal of kicking – with navvies’ steel-capped boots. ‘Enough, enough,’ cries Kemp and kneels by the space where Griffin seems to be.

And then a marvellous thing happens. And although Wells’s psychology, plotting and characterisation may be a little haywire, forced and simplistic throughout this problematic text – he still has a gift for the uncanny, conceiving the weird, imagining the wonderful with great power and conviction.

For the mob has beaten Griffith to death and now… his body reappears. Before the amazed eyes of the crowd that have gathered round the body, Griffin’s invisibility wears off.

Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the big navvy, screamed sharply. ‘Looky there!’ she said, and thrust out a wrinkled finger.

And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they stared.

‘Hullo!’ cried the constable. ‘Here’s his feet a-showing!’

And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison. First came the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Presently they could see his crushed chest and his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.

When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty. His hair and brow were white – not grey with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism – and his eyes were like garnets. His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his expression was one of anger and dismay.

‘Cover his face!’ said a man. ‘For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!’ and three little children, pushing forward through the crowd, were suddenly twisted round and sent packing off again. (Chapter 28)

It is one of the oddities of these older books that they can combine being quite preposterous, ridiculous and melodramatic with suddenly, being oddly touching and moving.

Conclusion

The Invisible Man may, on many levels, be twaddle or, more accurately, schoolboy fiction on the Sherlock Holmes level, with a pseudo-scientific kink. But there’s no denying Wells had this great gift for the economical, precise and incredibly vivid description of the marvellous and strange and amazing.

Apparently, the immensely serious modernist poet T.S. Eliot wrote that Wells’s description of the sun rising and shedding its dazzling light across the surface of the moon (in The First Men in the Moon) was ‘quite unforgettable’. The time traveller’s vision of the deserted beach under a dying sun a million years hence has stayed with me ever since I first read it forty years ago.

And although the Invisible Man is a less successful book than either of those, although it is a strange mish-mash of the broadly comical and the grimly homicidal – just the same it, too, contains images of uncanny power.

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