The Social World

Tag: Ancient Greeks

  • What did the ancients consider a ‘just war’?

    What did the ancients consider a ‘just war’?

    Since the UN does not provide a definition of the “just war,” it is interesting to see the ancient take on the matter.

    The Greeks contributed little. For Plato, war was necessary for the creation and survival of the city, but it was not its ultimate purpose: that was peace. For Aristotle, life consisted of three arenas of activity: war for the sake of peace, work for the sake of leisure and necessary and useful activities to demonstrate one’s worth.

    But Cicero (d. 43 BC) understood war in ways that have shaped our own understanding. His starting point was that there were two ways of settling an issue: by discussion, or by force. As he said, “the former [is] appropriate for human beings, the latter for animals.” Further, although Rome always marked a just war with a religious ceremony, Cicero thought a just war should flow not from religious sanction but from natural law.

    The search, then, was on for a iusta causa to rectify the rupture of mankind’s natural state, peace. Clearly, self-defense was the most obvious, but equally no war would be just unless the enemy had been given the chance to offer redress. War should advance some good beyond merely self-interested expansion. Other legitimate reasons for going to war, Cicero suggested, should be as a response to an earlier wrong, such as an attack on allies or ambassadors, or to a breach of treaties; or against those who supported an enemy of Rome (which might involve punishing an enemy). Further, Cicero believed that Rome must fight honorably, must not involve civilians and must show mercy to the conquered, though Roman rules of war permitted the seizure of property and enslavement. Most significantly, the word “revenge” plays almost no part.

    But Cicero’s world was torn apart by civil wars in the 1st century BC, triggering his reflections. He lamented that those unjust wars had destroyed the republic and ruefully commented: “As long as the sway of the Roman people was maintained by the bestowal of benefits, not by injustice, our sovereignty might then have been termed patronage, rather than domination, of the world.” Cause for thought?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • A brief history of parties

    A brief history of parties

    As Enoch Powell pointed out, “all political careers end in failure.” More often than not, those failures are self-inflicted. Without Partygate, for example, Boris Johnson might still be Britain’s prime minister. Although the debacle may not have been the final nail in his professional coffin, it certainly arranged the wake. His fans and critics alike were infuriated by the idea of public servants living it up while the rest of the nation was locked down during Covid in May 2020. That sort of scandal, however, is nothing new — anger at Partygate is nothing to some earlier episodes in history.

    Alexander the Great was an Olympian boozer who habitually went on weeklong binges after subjugating his enemies. During one particularly debauched victory party, a Greek courtesan by the name of Thaïs persuaded the wine-soaked warlord to burn down the imperial palace in Persepolis as retribution for the destruction of the Acropolis by Cyrus the Great a century before. Alexander acquiesced and ordered the ancient citadel to be razed to the ground. When he awoke the next morning and left his tent, pitched outside the city, he instantly regretted the decision, fell to his knees and wept. News of the incident must have horrified the Persian people. In one moment of madness, the Macedonians had demolished the spiritual center of their empire. Later in his Asia campaign, Alexander got into a drunken brawl with his childhood friend, Cleitus the Black, and ran him through with a lance. Cleitus had taken issue with the bloodthirsty boy-wonder’s adopting “barbarian” dress and customs — a development that enraged many of the Macedonian rank and file. Although we have no accounts attesting to overt dissent in the aftermath, Alexander’s murder of his close friend would have further alienated him from his already disgruntled troops.

    Rome’s Caesars were perhaps the most sybaritic group of leaders in Western history. Accounts of their luxurious gatherings are scattered through the annals. Suetonius tells us that when Tiberius tired of the daily management of his domain, he took up residence on the island of Capri and entrusted the governance of the empire to his attentive secretary, Sejanus. Sejanus oversaw a season of political trials — kangaroo courts that claimed the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands. While these bloody injustices were being carried out in Tiberius’ name, the emperor was busy arranging decadent orgies at his island villa, orchestrating elaborate group arrangements and scandalizing even the louche with his behavior with children. The pious gentry of Rome were disgusted by Tiberius’ conduct, but none dared rail against him.

    His successor, however, was even worse, and his name has become synonymous with dissipation and depravity. Caligula converted the palace of his adoptive grandfather Augustus into a brothel and insisted that the most prominent members of Roman society attend his dizzying bacchanals, whore out their wives and participate in the ensuing excesses under threat of execution. When Caligula’s stuttering uncle Claudius inherited the golden laurels after the former’s assassination at the hands of courtiers and guards, the citizenry was relieved that the worst wantonness was behind them. They were mistaken. Enter Messalina — Claudius’ sultry young wife. Her lewd jamborees mired the house of the Julii in greater scandal than ever. On one occasion, she challenged the most promiscuous prostitute in Rome to a sex-off. According to some, she won hands down, bedding dozens in one sitting. Or lying. Or some combination thereof.

    In 1393, in the middle of the Hundred Years War, the Valois dynasty was rocked by tragedy on a Shakespearean scale. The court held a charivari — a masquerade party — at the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris. Six attendees, including King Charles VI, wore resin-soaked wildman costumes woven of flax, grass and green leaves. The celebrants met in a small chamber atop a watchtower and drank and jigged late into the night. The King’s brother, the duc d’Orléans, is said to have absentmindedly carried a candle into the rave. The moment it touched one of the flammable costumes, the great flower of French nobility went up in flames. Four out of the six perished in agony. The king was saved by a lady who threw her dress over him. One baron leapt into a barrel of burgundy to dodge the inferno. When the peasantry learned of the disaster, rumors ran rampant that a coup had been attempted or a satanic ritual gone wrong, a punishment from God being exacted on an impious court. The intrigue was so intense that the French royal family did penance at Notre Dame, proceeding there on foot in a gesture of humility. The bal des ardents — of the burning men — cost the Valois political capital in a time of war and weakened the beleaguered country’s already low morale.

    In 1501, a Borgia sat on the papal throne. Widely deemed the most lecherous pontiff in the whole history of the Vatican, Alexander III presided over a veritable wellspring of ignominy. But of all the misdeeds and transgressions ascribed to him and his obstreperous children, none shocked and offended so deeply as the notorious night his son, Cesare, hosted an orgy in the papal palace in the heart of St. Peter’s. This Banquet of Chestnuts or Joust of the Whores included cavaliers and courtesans and reputedly climaxed with the two groups openly and energetically liaising. Prizes were offered for stamina and imagination. It would be reasonable to credit this incredible tale to contemporaneous anti-Borgia propaganda, but our sole eyewitness account of the occasion comes from the papal master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, who was tasked with keeping an eye on Alexander’s administrative costs. He drily jotted down every expense and relevant detail. Discouraging their allies and emboldening their adversaries, word of that wild night undoubtedly increased the Borgia family’s reputation for impiety and hedonism.

    In 1903, the Romanovs hosted a massive ball at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, arguably the last spectacular social event in Russian imperial history. The dance lasted three days and was enveloped in the glittering finery and silken splendor the czar’s family were famed for around the world. But while the government waltzed, the people starved. Stories of the lavish ball infuriated the urban poor and provided another example of the czar’s detestable detachment from his impoverished subjects. As one Grand Duke in attendance noted, “a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace … while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low.” Even in the blinding glamour of that three-day blowout, some revelers could sense the bloody revolution on the horizon.

    These episodes are dwarfed in comparison to the last Shah of Iran’s monumental 1971 banquet to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Achaemenid Empire. Mohammad Reza Shah, the King of Kings, erected a city of tents in the ruins of Persepolis to honor the historic milestone and spoke beside the tomb of his illustrious forebear Cyrus the Great. The level of opulence was astounding. The designs and decor resembled fantastical scenes from a Persian fairy tale. One anecdote tells of the Shah importing 50,000 birds to be released at some climactic moment during the festivities. The flocks are said to have died due to the desert climate. Cost estimates range widely, but some say the equivalent of the national budget of Switzerland for two years was spent in two days to pay for the extravagance. In a period of terrible poverty, Reza’s extraordinary decadence outraged both the opposition and the unaligned, uniting most of the country against him. Exiled after the 1979 revolution, the mournful former empress of Iran conceded the part that display of profligacy played in her husband’s dramatic downfall.

    Oddly enough, the excessive tastes and untoward habits of some leaders can endear them to the general public. Rascals and rakes such as the French revolutionary Mirabeau, the Whig leader Charles James Fox and even — at times — Silvio Berlusconi have been celebrated for their exorbitant appetites when they weren’t being admonished, or in Berlusconi’s case, prosecuted for them. I suppose it can be reassuring to feel an affinity with your leaders — how better than through a shared sense of fun. Leaders need to let off steam like the rest of us, but often their relaxations offend. When you’re at the top of the pile, too much pleasure will always warrant punishment.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.

  • Chroma chameleon

    Chroma chameleon

    “Who knew the Greeks had such bad taste?” This comment was overheard at the preview for Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, a head-turning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This slight wasn’t targeted at the current denizens of Greece, but, rather, their ancestors of yore. You remember the type: chiton-clad Athenians — let’s not forget the ladies in their peploi! — sauntering through the agora, pondering the nature of reality or, perhaps, the role of hoi polloi within a democratic society. They’re the folks whose aesthetic sensibilities were found wanting, at least to one denizen of twenty-first-century museum culture.

    What most of us know about life in antiquity is, I dare say, as broadly conceived as the above description. What most of us know about art from antiquity has been gleaned from trips to specific sites or cultural institutions here and abroad. Donatello and Michelangelo, Renaissance men who looked upon the arts of Greece and Rome as models of emulation, are, in significant part, responsible for codifying our notions about the nature and import of antique sculpture.

    Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the pioneering eighteenth-century art historian, pressed the point: “The only way for us to become great, yes, inimitable, if it is possible, is the imitation of the Greeks.” No one seems to read Winckelmann nowadays except for the stray academic eager to score points by pegging the glories of Western art as harbingers of any and all social ills including, most indelibly, “seas of lily white, spectacled and tweed-wearing people” (as University of Iowa classicist Sarah Bond puts it).

    Chroma is blessedly free of such casuistry. The Met likely took a good hard look at its bread and butter — which would be, among much else, the stunning suite of galleries devoted to Greek and Roman art — and concluded that historical and artistic fact make for better box office than tendentious sermonizing. Or, maybe, the curators were just doing their job — you know, safeguarding the legacy of world art for the pleasure of gallerygoers.

    Certainly, the efforts of Vinzenz Brinkmann, head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt, working in tandem with his wife Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, bear serious consideration. For over forty years, they’ve been knee-deep in the study of polychromy — that is to say, the application of paint on three-dimensional objects. The art world is filled with people who hate art but make it their business anyway. Vinzenz and Ulrike? They love their patch of multi-colored turf. Their eagerness is palpable.

    It’s long been known, if not to the lay public then to anyone with more than a casual interest in the arts, that classical effigies were originally overlaid with color. Paint, being a less durable medium than marble or bronze, is incapable of withstanding the elements, let alone wear and tear over thousands of years. Historical accounts testify as to how colorful sculptures, having been unearthed through excavation, quickly lost their pigment after being exposed to sunlight and oxygen. The notion that (pace Winckelmann) “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is” — and, yes, you can see how extremists might exploit such a statement — has been a convention difficult to overcome. Faced with the preternatural beauty of the “Venus de Milo” as it is currently seen at the Louvre, the typical museum-goer can be forgiven for thinking that, yes, this is enough.

    The Met show includes fourteen reconstructions of classical sculptures overseen and created by the Brinkmanns and their team. Utilizing a variety of approaches, featuring connoisseurship no less than high-tech gadgetry, they’ve managed to divine traces of color from, among other works, “Boxer at Rest,” a world-class masterwork at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, and a longstanding staple at the Met, a marble sphinx dated c. 530 BC. Most of the copies employ traditional materials — plaster and bronze, primarily. The Brinkmanns subsequently overlaid pigments and colors that were particular to the time and region. Rather than exhibit these colorized versions in a separate gallery, the curators have integrated them within the museum’s collection as a means of prompting contrast and comparison.

    How do the replicas stand up to the monochrome standbys? A wall label would have us believe that “with the absence of color, ancient sculpture loses its original animation and full range of meaning.” But curatorial selling points don’t necessarily coincide with aesthetic experience. For all the dutiful research the Brinkmanns have done, their reconstructions are — well, they’re awful. I mean, really awful. Even allowing the necessary wriggle room for stylistic conjecture, there’s reason to doubt the taste of everyone involved in this venture. Blame centuries of conditioning for such an appraisal, and you wouldn’t be altogether wrong. But when the best of these pieces look like Conan the Barbarian after spending too much time in a tanning bed, and the worst like rejects from a Fisher-Price outlet store, you know things are ass-over-teakettle wrong.

    A supporter of colorization might point to how the famed portrait bust of Nefertiti hasn’t suffered because of its polychromy. Scholars can readily point to numerous examples of the genre that prove the viability of the medium. (The Spanish are especially strong in polychromy.) But, really, how does “The Nefertiti Bust” stack up against “Boxer at Rest” as a work of sculpture? Color garnishes the former, bringing a degree of specificity to the bust’s streamlined — let’s not call it “generic” — dimensionality.

    In contrast, the burnished patina overlaid on “Boxer at Rest” obscures the attention that’s been invested in its making. Material integrity, anatomical nuance, specificity of contour and the sterling embodiment of tragodía are diminished by somebody’s overwrought notion of mimesis. Other colorized facsimiles at the Met are considerably gaudier, what with their glassy eyes, faint attempts at painterly illusion, and color palette seemingly poached from a package of Necco Wafers. A conspiratorial soul might wonder if the point of Chroma is to wheedle a feel-good correspondence between, say, the “Nike of Samothrace” or the “Jockey of Artemision” with kitsch-mongers like Jeff Koons, Charles Ray and Takashi Murakami — between an era of high artistic achievement and our own age of bewildered expectations.

    Old-school aesthetes may have misread the purity of classical sculpture, but who’s to say new school conservationists aren’t overcompensating for a culture in which overstimulation is the lingua franca? Chroma is probably best considered a lone pit stop on humankind’s eternal journey to bedevil its own finest impulses. In the meantime, let’s give it up for Mother Nature and Father Time, both of whom worked collaboratively to fine-tune our greatest achievements by ridding them of their excesses.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2022 World edition. 

  • In defense of Joshua Katz

    In defense of Joshua Katz

    Last July 17, my daughter, Solveig Gold, married (then) Princeton professor Joshua Katz. It was a glorious, indeed transcendent (as one friend put it) celebration of the glory of God and the power of love — attended by a large gathering of the canceled, the not-yet-canceled and a lucky few who are seemingly uncancellable. Last month, as the world now knows, he was fired. If you haven’t yet read Solveig’s piece in Bari Weiss’s Substack, put mine aside and read hers first. It is beautiful and inspiring. Mine, by contrast, is merely mad as hell.

    In July 2020, Joshua published a piece in Quillette taking vigorous exception to the now infamous July 4 “Princeton faculty letter.” I warned him at the time that there would be consequences, that they would stop at nothing to get rid of him — including re-investigating a fifteen-year-old consensual relationship he had with a senior student for which he has repented daily, and because of which he had already been investigated and punished by the university. It is important to note that the first investigation, which the woman wanted nothing to do with, was instigated by an anonymous third-party report. We are free to speculate about the identity of that third party, and what was in it for her or him. When a university permits and actively encourages anonymous reporting, it creates a Soviet system ripe for self-promotion, back-stabbing and revenge.

    It’s also worth mentioning that the rules of engagement on campus bear no resemblance to what they were only a few years ago. Back in the dark ages, when I was in college, our professors attended student parties and dances. They invited us into their homes for dinner; every Friday evening before lecture, there was a faculty and student cocktail party. The Rhodes scholarship winner was dating a professor and later married him. All of this would now, of course, be strictly forbidden, and both students and the community at large are very much the worse for it.

    Many Princeton professors have chosen to live in NYC and commute, just so they can have a personal life. These days, you see, one is only permitted to meet via that Dickensian law firm: Tinder, Grindr, Bumble & Hinge. Swiping right for anonymous sex is perfectly fine, but God forbid you should date someone you actually know or with whom you share mutual interests. Meanwhile, we can only imagine what would happen if Princeton applied the current Katz standard to the past behavior of all its faculty. Many departments would surely be deserted.

    In any case, Joshua felt he could not stay silent and was determined to forge ahead. Was he overly optimistic and/or naive to suppose he could weather the inevitable storm? Yes. Some will surely call him foolhardy. I call him brave. If only the pure and sinless among us are able or willing to fight for the truth, the battle is already lost.

    It is true, however, that the costs are high and not for the faint of heart. The past two years have been a nightmare — a textbook cancellation. Twitter went wild. Colleagues and long-time “friends” publicly denounced him. Mere days after the Quillette piece appeared, the Daily Princetonian launched an unprecedented seven-month McCarthyite investigation into every conceivable aspect of Joshua’s life. No ancient rumor or bit of gossip was too small for these gleeful little Robespierres-in-training. Every act of kindness, twisted and distorted by anonymous accusers into something salacious and false.

    Did he provide counsel and care to dozens of students suffering from anxiety, depression and even suicidal thoughts? Guilty! Did he invite dozens of thesis advisees — male and female alike — to dinner and pay? Guilty! Did he devote hour after hour to writing student recommendations, recommendations which were so highly coveted because of their legendary success rate? Guilty! Did he challenge, inspire and support literally thousands of Princeton students over the years? Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

    Meanwhile, the administration stood by and watched as one of their most devoted, hard-working and long-time faculty was hounded, abused and vilified. Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber, who has in years past impressed by standing up for free speech, disgraced himself and stood by as Joshua was thrown to the wolves.

    The mob, you see, had decreed that Joshua Katz was a “racist!” Strange how successfully he had hidden it for the past twenty-five years! Turns out he’s not only a first-rate linguist, he’s also a superb actor!

    Strange how this very same professor once nurtured and mentored a young black student named Dan-el Padilla Peralta, how that young man had confided in no one — no friend, fellow student, or any professor — until he told all to the kind and supportive Professor Katz. Strange how that same professor, upon learning that the young man was undocumented, immediately set about solving the problem. Don’t believe me. Read Padilla Peralta’s book, Undocumented. This same young man then went on to Oxford, Stanford, Columbia and a remarkably swift, tenured professorship at Princeton.

    It is not an exaggeration to say that Padilla Peralta owes his current position in no small part to Joshua Katz. Yet Padilla Peralta now claims his former confidante’s “flagrant racism speaks for itself,” and openly champions his mentor’s destruction on Twitter.

    Strange. The only thing I hear speaking for itself is Joshua’s extraordinary kindness to a young man in need.

    Then, last fall, no longer content with letting the students do all the dirty work, the administration joined in the witch hunt, and produced a website and video called “To Be Known and Heard,” which was mandatory viewing for the entire freshman class. In it, Joshua is denounced as a racist. Indeed, they literally doctored a quotation to drive the point home. If you have not already done so, please read Sergiu Klainerman’s superb pieces in Tablet on the subject.

    There will surely be more attacks. The mob can never rest. Today, it’s Joshua Katz, tomorrow it will be someone else. Because this is not really about Katz the human being. It’s about what he represents: empathy, excellence, erudition and a deep commitment to the essential, universal truths to be found in studying classics and, more broadly, Western civilization.

    Do I sound hyperbolic? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Padilla Peralta and his acolytes have repeatedly and openly declared their mission to tear it all down. Read the profile of Padilla Peralta in the New York Times. Indeed, they have already succeeded in getting rid of the Princeton classics’ Greek and Latin requirement. With Katz out of the way, Padilla Peralta holds the entire department in thrall. Classics, the very field that gave him everything, he now seeks to destroy… along with all those who helped him on the way. What a deliciously fascinating, Freudian case study. If only the real-life consequences were not so ruinous.

    Until two years ago, Joshua Katz was one of the most beloved professors at Princeton. His classes were always oversubscribed, his student evaluations legendary. Many believe he is the world’s foremost Ancient Greek teacher. He is also, incidentally, the only member of the Classics faculty fluent in all of the other ancient and medieval Indo-European languages — and some non-Indo-European ones — which the department maintains it wants to highlight in lieu of those “white supremacist” tongues, Latin and Greek. It will be interesting to see how they manage without him. As a speaker, Joshua was in demand all over the world.

    In 2014, years before I met him, Katz’s freshman Egyptology seminar visited the Metropolitan Museum and came to our apartment afterwards for tea. Joshua needed to see his ailing father so only the students were present. I still remember listening to them as they spoke rapturously about their professor. How inspiring he was, and how his ability to answer emails in the middle of the night was nothing short of miraculous. Four years later, he took the entire seminar for a farewell drink at the Yankee Doodle Tavern — and yes, he paid.

    To all the thousands of students who have been inspired, encouraged and comforted by Katz, and to the many who literally owe their careers to him: if you did not raise your voice in his defense, you are cowards. And to the complicit faculty who stood by as a mob destroyed a long-time friend and colleague: wait until they come for you. Wait until you think a wrong thought or make the wrong joke or use the wrong pronoun. I hope you’ve all led lives of spotless purity. Mother Teresas, every one of you, no doubt. Shame, shame on all of you.

    My own father was a professor. He adored teaching. Encouraging, inspiring and debating students was his greatest pleasure. As a child, I remember perching on the staircase watching while he led seminars in our living room. How he loved it — and how entranced were the students. I thank God that he is not around to see what has become of the academy. I thank God that he will never know what it is to teach in this environment. The mob would surely have destroyed him, or tried. They would never have been able to tolerate his passionate, uncompromising pursuit of the truth or his impatience with fools.

    Joshua will be fine. He has the love of my fierce and formidable daughter, his family and many new and amazing friends. Most importantly, he has the truth on his side. Nothing anyone can do or say will take that away. No, the real harm is to Princeton, and the generations of students who will never know one of the most caring, generous, and brilliant professors ever to grace the halls of East Pyne. What a loss. What a tragedy.

  • Going Greco-Roman in Boston

    Going Greco-Roman in Boston

    In a way it felt like a walk around campus on graduation day: one last stroll through the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston before the mayor’s medically nonsensical, legally dubious, morally atrocious mandates force museums, restaurants, gyms and more to oblige entrants to prove that they’re vaccinated against Covid-19. I could comply, but I will not. “There’s nothing more American than coming together to ensure we’re taking care of each other,” said our unctuous new mayor in her typical passive-aggressive fashion. Perhaps, but there’s nothing less American than commanding such sentiments from City Hall and punishing us who see through the ruses of power.

    The commencement, then, was that of a new relationship between your reporter and his adopted city’s art holdings. WWSD: What Would Seneca Do? I contemplated that question as I perused the newly renovated galleries for the MFA’s Greek and Roman holdings. Seneca, the most reasonable Stoic, served the court of Nero who, were he alive today, would be a corpulent, prismatically coiffed ninny with avant-garde pronouns in his Twitter bio. Nevertheless, Seneca counseled, “Hear now Socrates cry out from that prison which he made pure by entering it and made more honorable than any senate-house.” I’m no Socrates, but also Boston is no prison, not literally, not yet.

    So one can find a way to awe before the freshly restored Juno, a Roman work from the first century of the common era. She towers at thirteen feet high of solid marble, but her gravity is more than physical. She embodies dignity and looks down on us with kindness. In fact, this is a pastiche, likely a decapitated muse with goddess’s head added back to it in a later century using different rock. No matter, it coalesces. Her relaxed composure and grandeur make it obvious why contrapposto, rhythmic draping and mimetic form-making permanently entered the Western canon.

    Ah, the beleaguered Western canon. Because this is a museum in a progressive metropolis in 2022, wall-labeling implicates the germane cultures in slave-mongering. It does likewise in the halls of Dutch and Netherlandish art, also newly renovated and scintillating in their own right, as well as in the entrance to the Art of the Americas addition. (To avoid mention of slavery, keep to the MFA’s exhibits of Egyptian art and that of the Islamic world. Note the irony.)

    A digital full-color recreation of the Athena Parthenos hangs near the real statue (Roman, second or third century ad). Signage indicates that this is offered as a corrective to a white-nationalist misconception that the sculptures of the time were bare marble, though such interpretive literalism is purported by no white nationalists I can find, and even in color she looks European. One label calls the Greek settlers of the Bay of Naples “colonists.” (Why not “immigrants” — would that be too sympathetic?) This attitude hails from the same ethos as the mandates, a political pseudo-religion that spuriously rewards fealty with knowledge and health.

    Seneca would advise putting the world’s inevitable idiocy out of mind and attending to one’s soul. In true pagan manner one can do so by beholding beauty, on display in great capacity in the galleries. I find long swaths of Greek pottery trying, but the reds of the red-and-black ceramics glow against the sage greens of the displays. The coinage sparkles, the silver tableware feels as familiar as that of a modern home and I am astounded every time I see them that we have examples of Roman glass, to say nothing of such lovely objects.

    Some of the Roman portrait busts are piercingly individual. One terracotta in a hallway lined with such works, called “Bust of a Man” from the first century BC, is so distinct that you could use it to pick the fellow out in a crowd. He looks astute and troubled, a condition I know well. There is a strong visual case, even if the historical case is weaker, that Rome invented the atomic person. For better or worse, you feel yourself to be someone because of psychological impulses preserved in a manner that only became typical of portraiture in the first years of the first millennium in the northern Mediterranean.

    The primitivism of the little gilt-silver “Seated Dancer” (fourth century ad) is every bit as engaging, however, and as full of personality. The same could be said of the sixth-century mosaic fragment that personifies Pleasure and Wealth in the Byzantine gallery, where the presence of Christianity begins to make itself felt. Realism waned along with the viability of the old gods, though a new kind of spirit came into its own. The museum, in the end, is merely a box. It locks away the treasures, but that spirit, inalienable and eternal, remains free.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2022 World edition. 

  • The Great God Pan is all things to all men

    The Great God Pan is all things to all men

    Pan’s name is thought to derive from “paean,” the ancient Greek verb meaning “to pasture.” His half-man, half-goat form reflected his role in protecting flocks of goats and those who herded them among the wild hills of Arcadia. Panic was his superpower, freaking out mortals in the woods with distorted sounds, even neutralizing hostile armies.

    This might seem like an adequate portfolio of godly aspects, but, as Paul Robichaud demonstrates in Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return, it didn’t take long for things to get more complicated. The Homeric “Hymn to Pan” had a slightly different story, which was that the strange goat-child, rejected by its earthly nurse, got taken in by all the gods instead, and they named him Pan, or “all.” In this accident of language, each of his name’s two meanings created a distinct version of who Pan was and what he stood for.

    The Orphic cult saw the “all” of Pan as the genesis of the four elements that made up the material world; the Stoics argued that his part-goat, part-human form reflected the domains of earth and reason. Pan’s meaning accordingly turned cosmic. The announcement of Pan’s death on a ship headed to Italy — news that prompted the emperor Tiberius to call for an inquiry —might have been a second linguistic accident, in which a ceremonial lament of the death of another god was mistaken homophonically for Pan’s.

    The flexibility of meaning afforded by Pan’s multitude of identities would later enable him to be incorporated as a reimagined proto-Christ in Renaissance and Restoration culture. Pan died, and so did Christ; because Pan meant “all,” and Christ was the all, Pan was legit, and could exist in all his goat-headed glory. These theological gymnastics are all the more impressive for Pan’s persistent horniness, in all senses: the goat-horns on his head, his protuberant genitals and his distinctly problematic predatory tendencies towards maenads and, depending on who you believe, the Moon.

    Later, romantic nostalgia for a wilder pagan world invoked a version of Pan as defender of nature. This Pan was formless, an idea more than a figure, or he was lamented as dead. Pan’s death was symbolic of the demise of the pre-modern culture that birthed pagan mythology; to lose this was to lose enchantment. And yet the terror and awe of the romantic sublime looks suspiciously like Panic — a dark enchantment of its own, the shadow side of ecstasy.

    This chasing of enchantment would enter a new era with fin-de-siècle occultism. While we tend to imagine the Pan-like form of Satan as a result of the early Church’s sidelining of pagan godheads into demonic inadmissibility, Robichaud instead traces the elision of goat-god and devil to the iconic illustration of “The Baphomet of Mendes” by the 19th-century occultist Éliphas Lévi. For Lévi, Baphomet was Pantheos, the Absolute in iconic form, winged and goat-headed with a pentagram embossed between his horns, female-breasted and sitting meditatively with crossed legs and outstretched arms. Lévi’s Baphomet went viral: his bronze statue continues to be unveiled from time to time by the Satanic Temple outside US courthouses to protest the selective application of freedom of speech and religion.

    The magickal communities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries went wild for this new, countercultural version of Pan. Beast-affiliated Aleister Crowley wrote bad poetry in attempts to summon Pan in order to become him; no doubt the licentiousness of pagan gods was part of the attraction too, allowing occultists to graze on a candy-shop-style array of quasi-theological identities, each with its own libertine pleasures.

    The story of Pan sometimes looks like apophenia, the attribution of meaning to unconnected things, writ large. It does make you wonder whether there’s a tendency for adherents to any given icon to argue for its universality, one that can easily enough be read into the accommodating messiness of the outside world. As Robichaud tracks Pan through time, it turns out, for example, that 20th- and 21st-century depth psychology is notably talented at this, finding Pan variously in existential dread, sexual activity and the Iraq war. But perhaps this is an ancient problem: as soon as Pan was associated with the all, he was in danger of being identifiable as nothing in particular.

    The panic-inducing randy goat archetype comes across as the Pan more congruent with the Arcadian pastoral world as it must once have been — one of dark forests, dangerous beasts and lust; of a Nature with the capacity to inflict fear rather than pity. Robichaud’s skill is in weaving a coherent path through all this, setting out his material with scholarly specificity. It is a fascinating account of a strange god with meme-like reach across the ages, and a study in the temporal shape-shifting of mythology itself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.