Valentine's Day Deluxe 2015 by Satyrica

Va len tin e’s D

ay D

elu xe

FOREVER ALONE

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

OVID’S TIPS on getting over HEARTBREAK:

Valentine’s day is rapidly approaching and while the lucky few will spend that special day with the person they love, many others - and almost every classicist - will spend it with a bit of Ben & Jerry’s and some sexy Ovid. Here’s a summary of Ovid’s key cures for heartbreak from the Remedia Amoris. For the unlucky ones out there who have recently suffered a break up listen up!

Ovid says: now that you’re not bound to anyone, you can do whatever the fuck you want! While before you might have cried, missing your boyfriend/girlfriend as you left for a short holiday, now you no longer feel the need to do that. You can plant seeds in your garden, you can even hunt some animals. Plus, you can give those limbs (or for those male readers out there, that one limb) a rest because you don’t have to have sex anymore. So, congratulations on your newly found freedom. And fingers crossed you’ll enjoy it. For now…

4 Ovid says: Don’t be alone. You are going through a really tough time right now and you need to surround yourself with friends. So DON’T GO TO LONELY PLACES. If you’re alone, you are going to be sad and most likely will start thinking about your ex. Remember, you don’t want to end up like Phyllis who threw herself off a cliff because of her break up with Demophon. She went for lonely walks and look what happened: she ended up killing herself. Break ups are a time when your best friend is there for you, so make use of their company, it will help - I promise.

1 Ovid says: occupy yourself. Don’t waste your time thinking about lost love. Keep yourself busy, whether it’s beating the shit out of someone on the battlefield, ploughing your farm, defending your friends in the law courts, or, I don’t know, some more modern activity… Lying around and being idle leads to love and, at the moment, YOU DEFINITELY DON’T WANT ANOTHER RELATIONSHIP.

2 Ovid says: Throw their shit out. Get rid of all reminders. It may seem like an obvious point, but trust me - it works. Don’t sit around re-reading those soppy texts or looking through the Facebook pictures, sorrowfully reminding yourself of the way you used to be. Delete them all. Don’t go back to the places that you both shared, but explore new places and make new experiences. Ovid says: Think about their flaws. If you are ever thinking about your ex and are tempted to run back, DON’T! Remember, you have abandoned love once and for all, and you just can’t go back now. Think about her ugly legs. She may have saggy tits; he may be a stingy bastard; they may have been too sensitive or walked weirdly. Whatever it is, console yourself by disparaging your ex’s looks and/or personality. Remember, they mustn’t have been that amazing because if they were, you would still be together.

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

Speech delivered before the battle of Licking-Court

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“Much ink has been spilt by the ruthless, doubleedged, ink-stained blade of ‘licking’. Know, citizens of B6, that, unlike the opposition, sat there on a high horse of academia, I, Lingulus, wholeheartedly support the Lickers’ right to lick as they please. For this, after all, dear citizens, is a free country in which licking for all must be free. It is precisely for this reason that our noble forefathers fell in the battles of the Corridors of the North Building and the Steps of the British Museum: the right to lick. Know also that I myself proudly stand in the front line of the battle for licking beside you, brothers and sisters, so that our offspring, the scions of B6, may lick in freedom and peace for eternity without fear of reprimand. Was not the Parthenon, Jewel in the Crown of Athens, not only converted time and again to suit fluctuating tastes of creed, but even lit up by Athena-only-knows-how-many tons of Venetian gunpowder?! Yet still it stands strong! Not only that, it still stands as proud and beautiful as the day Iktinos and Kallikrates finished it! Was not the Discobolus’ head affixed wrongly, and left that way, because of the whim of Mr Townley? I do believe it was! Was not almost every free standing sculpture left to us today torn down and trampled on, not only by the tide-like comings and goings of iconoclasts, but also by uncompromising and merciless Neglect and Oblivion, that follow like vultures in the wake of Time? What difference will the graceful lick of an aesthete classicist make upon the torso of some Dionysus, or the breast of heavenly Venus, when already the ravages of savage time have pockmarked their cool, smooth, marble bodies? None at all! This, classicists, ever was our duty, and ever will be. And classicists in B6 now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their credentials cheap against those that fought with us shoulder to shoulder upon Saint Tongue’s day.

STACEY from Minos is, like famed Classicist Mary Beard, on the fence when it comes to the Elgin Marbles debate. She said: ‘let us not forget the words of historian and moralist Christopher Lasch, who said “the model of ownership in a society organised around mass consumption is addiction”.’

So, friends, classicists and B6-ers, do not cease this mental fight. Let not thy tongues sleep in thy mouths. Seize thy tongues, sharpen them upon the whetstones of gin, and raise the tongue-shaped battle standards! Let not antiquity be mothballed by the ink-stained hands of bookish, tongue-less, desk-surfing academics who cannot see past the dusty pages of some long-forgotten library book. And Tongue Tonguian shall ne'er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remember'd; we few, we happy few, we band of lickers; for he to-day that unsheathes his tongue with me shall be my fellow-licker. Cry ‘havoc’, brothers and sisters, and let slip the tongues of war! ”

Translated from Lives of Great Lickers, 16.1-5, by Dicax Improperii.

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

Constantine Cavafy: Poet of Modern Classicism By Professor Edith Hall The Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is the most important European poet of his era. It is worth learning Modern Greek just to read him (I did). But on the other hand, his poetry works brilliantly in translation. There are several excellent translations out there, especially the one by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, available free on Cavafy’s website.

years he spent in England, age 9 to 14. He spoke Greek with an English accent even in old age. Alexandria was home, but the home of an outsider. Alexandria itself was hybrid: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and for him, Stoic, Hedonist, pagan. The city was founded as part of the Hellenic diaspora, a Macedonian colony, by Egypt-conquering Alexander on the island of Pharos after (as legend reports) Homer came to him in a dream, reciting lines from the Odyssey about the location of the island (4.354-5; Plutarch, Life of Alexander 26.3-5). Alexandria was always hybrid: a seething mix of cultures. In “Going Back Home from Greece” (written in 1914 but unpublished in his lifetime, like much of his work) Cavafy’s Alexandrian philosopher admits his discomfort when visiting the historical ‘homeland’ of Greek culture; he is relieved to come back “home” to where his “Asiatic” side feels comfortable:

didn’t you too feel happier

the farther we got from Greece?

What’s the point of fooling ourselves

That would hardly be properly Greek.

The tension between spiritual home, cultural-ethnic ancestry, and chosen residence is exilic, existential -- and seen ironically.

Through his innovative uses of ancient Greek and Roman material, Cavafy built the bridge between 19th-century romantic/realist Philhellenism (as in Byron, Browning, Tennyson and their continental counterparts), and the austere, psychological Modernism of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. Cavafy was the first major poet to write openly, and with incredible sensuality and pathos, about homosexual love. His most popular poem today is “Ithaka”, inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. “Ithaka” inaugurated the idea of the ‘Ithaca of the Mind’. This is where the modern understanding of the Odyssey as spiritual biography got started. The voyage to Ithaca symbolises the poet’s journey through life: the point is adventure and discovery, rather than arrival. Here is John Mavrogordato’s 1951 translation of its penultimate stanza:

Cavafy’s poems are profoundly urban. He is not a poet to hymn the countryside, or even the sea, except when he is talking about a voyage to another sophisticated city across the water. His settings are cafés and innercity apartments, decadent parties and steamy bedrooms on summer afternoons. For much of his life he lived in Alexandria with his mother and two of his brothers: Paul (who was, like Constantine, homosexual) and JohnConstantine (who was, like Constantine, a man of letters). A series of bereavements between 1886 and 1905 left him ever more alone: as well as his mother (in 1899) he also lost two close friends, his uncle, his grandfather, and four of his brothers. He must have felt as if he had wandered ever further from Ithaca, his comrades and friends falling around him. But the greatest turning-point in his life occurred when Paul left Alexandria to travel abroad in 1908, never to return. Constantine began living on his own, for the first time, at the age of forty-five. He cut back on his social activities and devoted himself to poetry. His influences included, crucially, ancient Greek writers. Mimes by the Hellenistic author Herodas had been discovered on a papyrus when Cavafy was a young man, and they inspired him to experiment with using several voices in his poems, and with tawdry urban settings like shops and bourgeois parlours. From Palladas, the exquisite, mordant Alexandrian epigrammatist of the 4th century AD, he takes the clash of Christian and ancient pagan cultures, especially in his extraordinary poem “Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340” where an ancient Alexandrian mourns his dead Christian lover and the religious chasm that has opened up between their cultures. Nostalgia for pagan Greek antiquity is a theme Cavafy made his own. The great Irish poet Louis MacNeice -- a Classics lecturer -- is responding to Cavafy here, in “Autumn Journal” (1939):

You must always have Ithaka in your mind.

Arrival there is your predestination.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better that it should last many years;

Be quite old when you anchor at the island,

Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,

Rich with all you have gained on the way,

The careless athletes and the fancy boys,

Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches.

The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics

Ithaka has given you your lovely journey.

And the Agora, and the noise

Without Ithaka you would not have set out.

Ithaka has no more to give you now.

Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring

And when I think I should remember the paragons of Hellas I think instead

In this poem, published in 1911, Cavafy discovered his distinctive, coolly cynical voice. He had begun work on “Ithaka” in 1894: sixteen years to chisel its 37 perfect lines, in this now world-famous, lapidary, languorous style. Now in his 40s, he had found his Ithaca, his raison d’être. Most of his great poems were written from this point onward, in Alexandria.

Libations over graves

That great, Greek-founded Egyptian city was where he was born and where he lived permanently after 1885. But international travel in his early years lent him a fertile hybridity. His family had historical roots in Constantinople (Istanbul), and cosmopolitan connections from Trebizond to Trieste, Vienna to London. The family name ‘Kavafis’ derives from the Turkish for shoemaker. He adopted the spelling ‘Cavafy’ during five crucially formative

It was all so unimaginably different

and lastly I think of the slaves. And how anyone can imagine oneself among them I do not know;

And all so long ago.

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

MacNeice’s sense of alienation is spurred by the way Cavafy’s poems thrillingly bring ancient Greek society back to life. The big difference is that Cavafy could imagine himself among the ancient Greeks, and it was not the paragons of Hellas he wanted to join, but precisely the adventurers and opportunists, the careless athletes and the fancy boys, and the women pouring libations over graves. For Cavafy reinvented poetic time. In deeply intimate poems of lack and desire, he recreated the lost world of the ancient Greeks who didn’t make headlines in history: the petty monarchs, the ancient bourgeoisie, the diasporic Greeks of Asia, Syria, and Egypt. The link between then and him is the Greek language. With it, Cavafy’s world meanders along the Mediterranean into Asia Minor and to India, from Homer, Zeno, and Plotinos to late Byzantine emperors, desert barbarians, and to immediate memories of friendships and events of twenty or thirty years earlier.

Cavafy’s Modern Greek is a hybrid containing the whole history of the Greek language and literature. In Peter Bien’s words, “he saw the Greek language, from ancient to modern times, as one diverse but unified entity full of riches for the poet”. His diction and rhythms are inflected by Homeric, Ionic Greek; the Athenian Greek of Aeschylus and Plato; the contrived literary Greek of the poets who clustered round the ancient library of Alexandria; the Byzantine Greek of Anna Comnena, the learned katharevousa of the 19th-century Greek literary revival; and the pungent 20th-century demotic spoken on the streets of Alexandria, with its Turkish and Arab loan-words. This historical and semantic depth of Cavafy’s language is indeed lost in translation. His poems’ tiny dramas, psychohistories, pungent tones and epigrammatic barbs stick in the memory and don’t need to be in Greek to take effect. Still, much is lost. Cavafy loved his native tongue: it was for him the main triumph of Greek civilization. Cavafy’s interest is history was anything but antiquarian. He was the first major 20th-century writer to re-create a historical past as an instrument for revealing modern man. The aim was not to use the past to remove us from the present, but rather to remove us from illusory perspectives which cause us to distinguish past and present. Like the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, with whom Cavafy has much in common, an intimate treatment of minor and flawed historical figures humanizes the past, removing it from the normal rhetoric and abstraction of chronicle and history. An intentional confusion of past and present brings everything into the light of one time spectrum. Cavafy singles out bit players in history, the weaknesses that humanize and doom them, the indecisions that make a character plausible, the vices that arouse pathos and rearrange conventional morality, underworld personalities, gauche bandits, clandestine homosexuals, deposed heroes, flawed minor royalty such as King Demetrios of Macedonia (not Alexander the Great but his stepbrother), or the young Nero deceived by the Delphic Oracle -- or the unnamed dead in war. Long ago, when I was editing Aeschylus’ Persians, I discovered an amazing poem by Cavafy responding to this foundational tragedy entitled “The Naval Battle”. Cavafy includes a refrain, based on the laments of the chorus in the play -- “oá, oá, oá” (“wa, wa, wa”). These long, sad vowels resonate, haunting the hearing and imagination of the audience with the memory of all those Persians who drowned in Greek waters around Salamis so long ago. I included Cavafy’s poem as an epigraph in my edition. Nearly twenty years later, in 2014, I witnessed an important production of Aeschylus’ Persians by the State Theatre of Northern Greece, at the ancient theatre of Epidauros in the Peloponnese. One of my KCL PhD students, Leonidas Papadopoulos, was on the directorial team for this acclaimed production. He discovered the Cavafy poem through my edition. The performance ended with an extra chorus of sea-nymphs, or Persian widows (depending on your interpretation of the design) reciting the oá, oá lines from the poem. An excellent KCL postgraduate, my favourite ancient dramatist, my favourite modern Greek poet, and my favourite venue for Greek theatre anywhere -- it was quite a combination! But the best way to entice you into discovering Cavafy for yourselves is to quote the words of the English-speaking writer who brought him to the attention of the world, E. M. Forster, in his essay collection Pharos and Pharillon (1923). This is how he memorably describes Cavafy: “A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe... Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence -- an immensely complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1006, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or with George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with

equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.” Joy and despair pervade Cavafy’s poetry: joy and ecstasy in recollecting sensual love experience; despair tingeing everything as historical figures are futilely driven to act out their roles. Despair is most decisively apparent when the poetic voice recognises the present’s future impossibilities, blackened by unredeemed death. But in the famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”, http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=119&cat=1 such despair is considered with allegorical humor. The barbarians are coming. We will change our lives, we will prepare, we will practice our speeches and put on our best robes. But then word comes that the barbarians are not coming; indeed, there are no more barbarians. And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.

In the poem “Of the Jews (A.D. 50)” Cavafy speaks of a brilliant young man who declares he wants to identify as a son of “the holy Jews” (paragons of conventional virtue) -- but, the poem closes: “The Hedonism and Art of Alexandria / kept him as their dedicated son”. It is a clear metaphor for Cavafy’s homosexuality and a disapproving society. He found his own resolution in yielding completely to sensuality and to the demands of poetry. The poem “Melancholy of Jason Cleander, Poet in Kommagini, A.D. 595” reads in full: The aging of my body and my beauty is a wound from a merciless knife. I’m not resigned to it at all. I turn to you, Art of Poetry, because you have a kind of knowledge about drugs: attempts to numb the pain, in Imagination and Language. It is a wound from a merciless knife. Bring your drugs, Art of Poetry -they numb the wound at least for a little while.

Professor Hall - among many other things - holds the Chair in Classical Performance and Reception at King’s. Her best known books include The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey, and she is rumoured to be cutting loose in Athens next week with Margaret from The Apprentice.

See satyrica.co.uk for access to more of Cavafy’s poems.

O long locked jock, my heart it does not mock, I often w*nk into my sock at the thought of your c*ck. Don't give me a shock or a knock like the soviet bloc, for you will always be my rock. 80s pornstar Ron Jeremy’s bespectacled doppelganger

What rhymes with Fiddle? Or Middle? Or Dew? Dew Middle. You are the man mountain, a treasure with a comely face and an enigmatic smile. O mighty Dew Middle, you have the body of the god of the woods, Nemestrinus, for you are as thick as an oak. Ride me o black stallion, ride me and make me neigh!!! Sultry Aphrodite with a headband

You’re short - shorter than short. Shorter than the surviving works of Euripides. Your dance moves are smoother than the Elgin marbles. You’ve got facial hair as tawny as an owl, glasses as thickly rimmed as Kim K, and a smile more cunning than a sack full of weasels. How cruel the fates are that I cannot pluck up the courage to ask you to descend between my thighs! I might kiss you three hundred thousand times and never be sated, not even if my kisses were more than the crop’s ripe ears of wheat. Be my Cleopatra, for I am a shy Antony. If you're a spice girl, I wanna be your Voller. The Mighty Emperor of Spicy Nights

With that winning grimace and those delightfully elfish ears, you’ve swept me off my feet like Zeus did Europa. Hung like a horse, with breath like one too, the one that I love is wholeheartedly Hugh. Oliver.harrington@kcl.ac .uk

Let your crush know how you feel today at satyrica.co.uk!

With the body of Hector, the hair of Odysseus, and the face of Narcissus, I can only imagine you’re hung like a centaur. You are wise, a leader amongst men, someone who has the mental prowess to direct a student play. But while your head’s in the Clouds, you’ve also got the Pasíon of a Cuban sextuplet.

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

by Marcus Bell & Harriett Gifford

Dear Sextus,

Ottho

My wife is debauched – a total nimpho-minx with greater beauty than she has morals! I’m worried that I’ll be unable to keep up with her uncontrollable sexual lust for me, I mean I can’t blame her – after all, I’m pretty damn sexy – but I’m just one man! The other day I came home and she was laid out in the atrium, head to toe in purple silk robes. She’d fashioned a golden garland and was reading ‘50 Shades of Griseus’. Is this her way of telling me that she wants to spice things up in the bedroom? In the last few months, she’s become insatiable and adventurous. I don’t know how to keep up. Thank goodness for Nero though, a couple of times I’ve come home and found him straddling her over our Lararium, his weight supported by four slave boys. He’s such a good friend, teaching her a couple of extra special moves to surprise me with on the night of the Festival of Valentinus. I need help, Sextus. I need some new positions! Mind you, nothing too Greek. What about if I left my sandals on? Tired’n’Bruised

Sextus says… To Tired’n’bruised: From what I can gather, your wife has a pretty adventurous spirit, but may have ulterior motives. It may be dangerous for you to be on the receiving-end of her sexual exploits, you never know when the fatal-blow will come. However, you don’t want to isolate yourself from her pasión. Therefore, if you feel you need to match her virility with something new, try suggesting a threesome. Perhaps with your “helpful” friend. To Ambitioslover69: I can see where your problem lies. First of all a moronic husband can be frustrating, but equally, power can be dangerous! However, if you’re dead set on pursuing this, there’s a tantric sex class in the forum on Thursdays. There they’ll teach you the most exotic of moves guaranteed to bag you your man. Though it might seem calculating, you could practice with your husband. I have a feeling he might be tempted to try something new, which may see you getting closer to the one you want while keeping your husband satisfied. Your husband will be knackered after a couple hours of downward facing Spartan and wont have the energy to investigate into your futher exploits. However, remember to stretch. To S&Mperator: Your Royal Kinky-ness. May I suggest, and you may decide to take this advice on board or not with your infinite royal judgment, that Hemlock is probably the way to go. I heard it’s coming back into fashion.

Poppaea Sextus! I am married to a total and utter buffoon! I would try and divorce him but my pushy father Titus Ollius is invested in me staying with him, until their business deal goes through. Unless I can bag me an Emperor, I’m screwed (but not in the good way)! What with the big festival coming up, I need to find a way to make myself more appealing to a certain S&Mperator. I’ve been practicing my downward facing Spartan and the reverse slave girl, but I don’t think it’s twisted enough to tempt him. Thank Jupiter my husband’s so dumb otherwise he’d have had me in the courts. Instead, he thinks I’m doing it all for him. How do I get out of this mess? Ambitiouslover69

Salve Sextus,

Nero

There’s this crazy hoe who’s been sniffing around. I mean, my wife’s nearing her twenties now so it’s probably time to trade her in. This one seems pretty open to some slave boy action and things should be hotting up for the Festival of Valentinus. She definitely showed off her moves at my last barge orgy, and dat ass tho. So Sextus, should I poison my wife or drown her? Any suggestions? S&Mperator

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

Arms for Antiques Cultural violence in the Middle East

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEPH EID/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

By Jerome Gavin

Over the last 12 months, ISIS have gone from being a relatively poorly understood group founded in 1999 to the most discussed and potent terror threat of this century. While the human consequences of the ISIS campaign have been undiminishably catastrophic, this article will focus on a lesser known (and in no way more important) issue: the organisation’s fatal impact on an enormous part of the cultural heritage of the Middle East. Artefacts of a rich and timelessly valuable ancient history are being irreversibly stripped away, leaving archaeological sites as crumbling, pock marked wreckages, in order to fund the correspondingly destructive activities of ISIS.. Following an Iraqi military operation back in June which led to the capture of 162 memory sticks detailing the administration of ISIS, The Guardian published its findings on the financial inner workings of the organisation. Since then, there has been an increasing concern for antiques in the conflict zone. Evidence suggests that from one region in Syria alone, up to $36 million had been gained from the smuggling of artefacts. ISIS, in its hunger to be perceived as a legitimate state, imposes levies on the looters and sets them up as ‘archaeologists’, prompting the destruction of antiques they feel to be ideologically challenging, and the sale of others on the black market. They irrevocably ruin the original sites of the pieces they sell by employing heavy machinery to pull them from the ground, with complete disregard for the precious archaeological surroundings. The satellite images from sites like Apamea are incredibly evocative. The destruction of this heart of ancient heritage, famed for its treasured 300BC colonnade is an especially sad sight to

behold: it has been reduced to looking like Swiss cheese (in the words of historian Katharyn Hanson). The financing of ISIS is of particular interest now. With plunging oil prices, the organisation is struggling to finance its campaign of terror. This desperation was laid bare in the recent kidnapping of a Japanese journalist Kenji Goto and his friend, Haruna Yukawa, along with a $200 million ransom demand, which wasn’t met leading to their barbaric executions. Desperate measures trigger a drive towards the decimation of ancient sites. It is believed that ISIS as a ‘state’ are not looting sites themselves, but instead earn millions by imposing taxes on the pieces that are sold on the black market. The thing is, before I started doing my research into all this, I had no idea of the extent of the issue – and many of us in the classics community, experts in ancient history and archaeology, still don’t. It’s a recent burning issue that we have not talked about enough (whoever said classics and current affairs were mutually exclusive?) What’s more, these terror-funding activities are closer to home than we’d like to think. Stolen artefacts have made their way into the possession of collectors possibly not just in the Middle East, but North America and in Europe too. The money made by these artefacts is being used to fund a war and an oppressive regime against the very people who (arguably) have the most right to these artefacts, the locals. What are the concrete efforts being made? Is there much that can be done in the face of the violent and repressive rule of this terrorist group?

This heart of ancient heritage has been reduced to looking like Swiss cheese

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015

protection. British forces are training local forces on how to deal with these artefacts too. ‘The problem is, there is no unified approach in fractured places like Syria. No one is protecting these artefacts. As a result, the local looters treat these sites as their personal bank of treasures.’

Before: Apamea on Google Earth, 20th July 2011

As Isis sweeps across areas of the Middle East, they not only gain from the looting of artefacts, but also destroy those that conflict with their violent dogma. We have seen the Raqqa lions butchered, and 6th Century Buddhas that were once carved into a Syrian mountain blown apart with dynamite - to name but two examples. This cultural violence is irreparable. ‘We have a responsibility to defend our collective cultural heritage’ claims an animated Dr Wootton. ‘Our antiques market does have a lot to answer for…’

So what more can be done?

After: Apamea on Google Earth, 4th April 2012

Where there’s a Will there is a way I organised a meeting with Dr Will Wootton, the foremost expert on the subject at our very own King’s College London. It was my first interview, so I had checked and re-checked my prepared questions. We sat down in his office and I ended up starting off instead with just the two most overwhelming things: can we know the scale of what’s been lost, and what can we do about it? ‘No! It is impossible, we simply can’t quantify the amount,’ he said. Nevertheless, Will’s passion for defending these innumerable artefacts in conflict areas in the Middle East has taken him as far as Libya, where he helped co-ordinate air strikes to prevent ISIS from targeting ancient sites – ‘there is more practical stuff we can do’.

This ‘cultural violence’ as Will describes it is nothing new. A classicist will study myriad pieces that have been damaged or defaced at some point in some ideologically motivated act. While these efforts to counter the violent cultural erosion are not entirely coherent, stolen artefacts that make their way on to the black market are not lost. It is possible for them to be traced and recovered. Putting into play the collective wealth of archaeological skills and knowledge in the classics community, underhand dealings can be combatted if we employ our resources to examine artefacts, sourcing their origins and putting pressure on the antiques market and buyers to avoid dealing in items with no attributed provenance. Together with other organisations, including the British government, we can make it harder for these pieces to make their way into the homes of collectors, and the terror of ISIS might be successfully challenged. For their destruction, exploitation and abuse of human world history only serves to symbolise the organisation’s gross abuses of human rights and potential threats to our shared human future. This, in any way possible, we must defend. Jerome Gavin is a second year Ancient History student, Satyrica’s Assistant Editor and a former Emmental fan…

He tells me about the second deck of cards given to soldiers in Iraq that are printed not with the faces of dangerous VIP criminals, but with images of the most precious artefacts to look out for and rescue. I hear about how local shepherds are often moved on to ancient sites so they are not bombed, and about the ways in which museums have had to be sealed off for

SATYRICAVALENTINE’S February 2015 Under Ollie ‘Garch’ Harrington’s fierce direction, Aristophanes’ Clouds is playing in the Greenwood Theatre this week. We sent Catherine Rhodes to sniff out the gossip of this year’s Greek Play rehearsal proceedings… 1. In terms of how lengthy the rehearsal process has seemed – if the time were a phallus, how long would it be?

Sana – I’ve only been to one rehearsal… Laura – Even longer than Josh’s.* *It must be clarified that this comment refers to his balloon phallus, not the real one…probably. Ella – As long as a giraffe’s neck is short. 2. Describe how the past few weeks/months have been under the Ollie-garchic regime? Harriett – From the outset I have personally found the regime mediocre-to-satisfactory. When I turned up to the audition painfully hungover - almost unconscious in fact - Ollie could still point out the levels of ‘wrongness’ in me. A tyrannical, evil yet perceptive leader. Josh – It’s been an enjoyable experience, though we’ve been worked hard. I mean, he is a firm hand at the grindstone… (Obviously it is difficult to voice truthful opinions under such crippling authoritative rule.) 3. Tell me how you feel about the fact that by the end of this experience, you will probably have seen more shaft than an elevator engineer. Steph – What’s a shaft…? Caitlin – It’s definitely something I will put on my CV. If all else fails I can go into the phallus industry. I guess it’s kind of classics related? In a way.

4. What are your views on the suspiciously Aryan-looking male protagonists? Sana – I personally feel that they were only chosen because of their hair. Each of their heads resembles a drop of pure sunlight. Oh, and probably because Ollie seems to love surrounding himself only with people that look like him. Steph – Erm…they’re hot. Liam – It makes sense. Gets bums on seats. Marcus – It’s an evil conspiracy to take over the world. And I am very proud to be a part of that. We’re all just so devilishly good looking. 5. Considering the possibly idealistic portrayal of both length and girth of the balloon willies you’ve been provided with, do you feel that they present an unrealistic idea of the human anatomy? And how do you think this will affect your future relationships in the real world? Harriett – All I’m going to say is that size matters. Laura – I have to say that I’ve found them pretty representative of my experiences so far.

6. Do you think everyone has just felt too awkward to point out to Mattho that he keeps accidentally coming to rehearsals in his pyjamas? Elena – Comfort over fashion. Every time. Josh – The only way I could describe it is that he seems to think his role is that of the fifth member of the Teletubbies.

Head to see Clouds while you still can! As Ollie himself put it, “If the play’s discussion of the dangers subversive forms of intellectualism present to a divided society as epitomised by a satirical characterisation of Socrates doesn't please you then at least the dick jokes will.”

AGORA AUNT

Dear Agora Aunt,

Reader’s Responses:

Agora Aunt’s Response:

Here’s the thing – my mum has made me look like a girl so I don’t have to go to war, and now I’m hiding in a place I can’t name (for obvious reasons). I’m really not enjoying it; there must be another way out of fighting but I’ve thought of everything under the son – I mean sun… Like, can’t they just capture Troy without me? The worst thing is, this peddler is coming today and I really should buy a necklace or something to stay in character but I’m not sure I can stop myself from taking the armour. Anyway, can someone help me? I can’t wait to get out of hiding and see the son – I mean sun…

‘We have a hard time staying away from other people’s equipment too…’ –Kerkopes

I can’t really help you with this one since you obviously aren’t that bothered about keeping yourself hidden - from what Deidamia has told me you’ve exposed everything to her…

- Achilles

CLASSIWALL Rules: You must rearrange the wall so that each line forms a category, e.g. ‘Roman numerals’ or ‘Roman Emperors’.

Romulus and Remus

Hector

Paris

Actium

Aphrodite

Athena

Helen

Menelaus

Cleopatra

Achilles

Sabines

Apollo

Ares

Phryne

Aeacus

Poppaea Sabina

‘Ooh, a necklace!’ –Eriphyle ‘Not enjoying it? Well that’s a load of bull.’ –Minotaur

Agora Aunt XOXO

‘Only made you look like a girl? I’d feel sorry for you if she made you into a girl.’ – Tiresias ‘Sure I’ll help you, just let me adjust my cloak…’ – Herakles

ODE to a Latin MASTER Oh Jamie with your luscious hair, Oh Jamie with that beauteous stare, Oh how you made the Latin flow, You taught us the conjugations From ‘dare’ to ‘do’. Yours was the only class I never missed, I never even turned up pissed For I loved the way you bumbled in, The way you illuminated the dim. You even taught Coldplay’s Chris Martin! Why that is no mean feat. ‘Tis true, first year was really sweet. But alas, none will ever compete: Jamie Masters, you swept me off my feet. By Ann Non