Greek to me: two movies, and a palace

Knossos, Crete

This time last week I was in Rethymnon, Crete, to give a talk about nominative case in Irish English and Late Middle English to an expert workshop audience.

Concerning the talk itself, it was an instance (pun avoided) of "least said, soonest mended" – an unfashionable, and probably unhelpful proverb.

Yet, in addition to discovering how outdated my theoretical knowledge had become, I did learn many useful things. Ironically, all of these lessons are even older than my education, and have greater relevance than ever.

The trip began and ended with in-flight movies.

'...for we will shake him…or worse days endure.' Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The Oryx entertainment system on the Qatar Airways flight from Haneda to Doha offered about 100 movies, almost none of which were watchable unless bad rom-coms or Marvel comics are your thing. The one remarkable outlier, in the Classic Movies section, was the 1953 Brando/Mason/Gielgud MGM production of Julius Caesar, thanks to which play the expression 'It's Greek to me' has endured since its mediaeval origins. What is most stunning about JC is its current relevance, especially in the run-up to the US midterm elections. It left me with two questions: Will Mark Antony be played by Bannon or Miller? What is the vocative case form of Jared, anyhow?

On Saturday, I headed back to Heraklion, to visit Knossos. About as old as we can usefully imagine, this pre-Mycenaean Bronze Age civilization, of which Knossos offers the most extensive remains, lasted from c. 2700 – c. 1600 BCE. If you strip away the legends and Sir Arthur Evans' fond imaginings, there's really not a lot left, except a few acres of building rubble that went unnoticed for the better part of 3000 years. Art, technology, language, other aspects of material culture (construction, sanitation, irrigation) were all lost. There's a lesson there too, as we slide towards our own political and environmental catastrophe: I can't know what an official managing the store-houses at Knossos in 1750 BC must have thought about the future, but I'd bet he didn't think it that 1000 years of development would all crumble away so quickly.

And on the way home, I watched another movie, and bought a book. The movie was the Greek 2016 film The Other Me (Eteros ego), a rather poorly shot, slow moving murder mystery. But with two brilliant features. The first, which is the central conceit of the movie, is the theory of amicable numbers (the pair 220 and 284 being the first in the series). Maybe if I'd had a decent mathematical education I'd have known about these long ago, but I didn't, and they are rare and beautiful things to (be)hold, these numbers...

The other mathematical analogy in the movie, which again I should have known of earlier, was attributed to Tolstoy:

'A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.'

Which brings me to the book: Yanis Varoufakis' book Adults in the Room. I'll reserve final judgment until I get to the end. Still, I can say this. Every Remainer should read this book, especially starry-eyed pan-European federalists like myself who would throw out national flags and have the nations singing Ode to Joy on every festive occasion: if only half of what YV writes about them is true, the EU commission and the financial elite are much, much uglier, vicious and vindictive beasts than I would ever have imagined. Which is a tragedy (of classical proportions), because even armed with this knowledge, I'd still vote Remain. The fascist, nationalist alternative of Brexit is many times worse.

And so we are between Scylla and Charybdis.

The other relevant observation is that — as much as I am enjoying reading it — the book may not be worth much at all, if Tolstoy is correct. This is because, in Varoufakis' case, the denominator is evidently a very large number (and, like the man, probably more amiable than amicable).