BOOKS & ARTS
Rich man, poor man,
friar, saint
A.N. Wilson
Francis: A Life in Songs
by Ann Wroe
Cape, £16.99, pp. 191This passionate series of engagements with
the life of St Francis will stay in my mind
for a very long time — I hope forever.
Ann Wroe describes it as ‘A Life in Songs’,
and it does, indeed, rehearse the famil-
iar story of the rich young merchant’s son
dispossessing himself, and giving his life to
Christ so wholeheartedly that not only he,
but the world, was transfigured. We revis-
it the kissing of the leper, the preaching to
the birds, the founding of the order, the call
of St Clare, the mission to the Middle East
to bring peace to the Crusades, the gift of the
stigmata. All these familiar events are ren-
dered in a series of verses, sometimes metri-
cal and rhyming, sometimes free.
The sequence of the sermon to the birds
is especially successful:They did not stir. Perhaps each phrase
slid off their smooth enamelled backs
like rain, like light. Yet, on one limb
set separately the wisest bird,
wide-eyed and cowled, weighed every word.They are interlaced — and this is what
makes the retelling of the Francis story so
riveting — with a whole series of poeti-A perversion of the Classics
Natalie Haynes
Not All Dead White Men: Classics
and Misogyny in the Digital Age
by Donna Zuckerberg
Harvard, £20.95, pp. 270
Who could possibly take exception to the
Stoics? One of the more passive arms of Hel-
lenistic philosophy, Stoicism required its fol-
lowers to believe in a world where virtue was
all, worldly goods were trivial and everything
was predetermined. Perhaps you might take
exception to this last pillar of faith, since it
leaves us dangerously close to being organ-
ic robots, with no real autonomy. ‘I was des-
tined to steal,’ a slave once told his Stoic
master, Zeno of Citium. ‘Yes, and to
be flogged,’ Zeno replied, carrying out the
punishment. Your destiny does not excuse
you of responsibility, in the Stoic mindset: it
just robs you of choice.
With its emphasis on virtue and self-
control, it is curious that Stoicism has proved
so appealing to the men who lurk on the
internet under the banner of the Red Pill
(an umbrella term taken from the film, The
Matrix, which now describes multiple vari-
eties of men’s rights activists, pick-up art-
ists and ‘incels’ or involuntary celibates).
These are men who go out of their way to
bully, deride and harass women on a daily
basis (Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in
a spree shooting in Isla Vista in 2014, called
himself an incel, and wished to punish women
for failing to have sex with him).
Donna Zuckerberg is a classicist with
a strong internet pedigree: she set up the
excellent website Eidolon, which publishes
essays on Classics in the contemporary world.
She is also — as she explains on the second
page of her book— Silicon Valley royalty:
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook
(and my older brother) is frequently mocked
as ‘Mark Cuckerberg’... epithets based on the
term cuck, a particularly significant form of
insult within the Red Pill, derived from the
term cuckold.
So she is ideally placed to analyse the
deeply unpleasant phenomenon of these men
appropriating ancient authors — Ovid, Sen-
eca, Marcus Aurelius — to try to bolster their
vicious world view. One author she quotes
finds himself unduly exercised by the notion
of a white woman having sex with a non-
white man, because some Red Pill zealots
consider that women’s reproductive organs
belong to ‘the males in her society’. Zuck-
erberg must have a strong stomach to spend
as much time as she clearly does researching
these people.
The men who dwell in these dark cor-
ners of the internet are drawn to the ancient
world because they see a patriarchy which
they believe reflects a continuous natural
order of things. And while the societies of
imperial Rome and classical Athens were
indeed oppressive to women (adult women
needed a male guardian to transact business,
for example), they weren’t terrifically good
for many men either. Just like their sisters,
young Roman men were subject to parental
authority: they also couldn’t possess property
in their own right and the paterfamilias held
power of life and death, although this weak-
ened over time.
Zuckerberg astutely observes that ‘this
illusion of continuity is actually an ideologi-
cally motivated strategy to resurrect ancient
norms in the present day’. Only by ignoring
(or refusing to acknowledge) the elements of
the ancient world which don’t fit their blink-
ered view do these men manage to twist the
classical world into an inspirational force for
themselves. Indeed, Mary Beard (among oth-
ers) has suggested that ‘we probably don’t
need to worry too much about these alt-right
guys hijacking Classics if they make such
a mess of it. We just need to keep pointing
out the howlers’. Zuckerberg disagrees, and
this book is her attempt to document this
appropriation of Classics by people who nei-
ther know nor care how limited their under-
standing is.
Her goal is to raise the question of wheth-
er classicists should be worried about these
men and their sudden fondness for Ovid. It’s
hard to know who else her book is aimed at:by her own admission, she has described only
selected lowlights of misogyny in the ancient
world, and it reads a great deal like a PhD
thesis, filleted of its most academic elements
for broader appeal.
But Zuckerberg is right. Ignoring these
people is no longer the answer. If we don’t
engage, we end up with farcical cases, as hap-
pened recently when the alt-Right became
enraged by a BBC cartoon featuring brown-skinned people in Roman Britain: isotope
evidence shows that around 20 per cent of
Roman Britons were long-distance migrants.
It isn’t enough for only classicists to know
these statistics.
Marcus Aurelius would doubtless have
disputed this conclusion: ‘That men of a cer-
tain type should behave as they do is inevita-
ble. To wish otherwise is to wish the fig tree
would not yield its juice.’ But that is why
Stoicism is such an ultimately unsatisfying
world view. It’s better to fight ignorance than
surrender to it.Subscribe for
only £1 an issue
9 Weekly delivery of the magazine
9 App access to the new
issue from Thursday
9 Full website accessINTRODUCTORY OFFER:Auto-renewing payments only. $1 a week in Australia
call 089 362 4134 or go to http://www.spectator.com.au/T051A0330 333 0050 quoting A346Ahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/A346AHow worried should we be about
these alt-right men and their
sudden fondness for Ovid?