Letters

In his fascinating article on the recent decipherment of Linear Elamite, Tom Stevenson finds it difficult to accept that ‘the Latin or Greek writing systems are simpler or “more precise” than mostly logographic writing systems like written Chinese’ (LRB, 6 March). Does he really believe Chinese script is just as suited as Latin to the rendering of foreign words? ‘Tom Stevenson’ is far simpler and more phonetically precise than 汤姆·史蒂文森, ‘Tāngmǔ Shǐdìwénsēn’, which adds two syllables, six tones and six individual character meanings. The Committee for Language Reform in China acknowledged the relative simplicity of the Latin script as one of the factors behind its abandonment in 1956 of the attempt to develop a phonetic script based on Chinese characters.

If Stevenson says this because he thinks the idea of one script being simpler than another is somehow discriminatory (as well as untrue), then he might prefer to consider the example of the long-vanished Tangut people, who possessed, according to the Tangutologist Gerard Clauson,

one of the most inconvenient of all scripts, a collection of nearly 5800 characters of the same kind as Chinese characters but rather more complicated … It is extremely difficult to remember them, since there are few recognisable indications of sound and meaning in the constituent parts of a character, and in some cases characters which differ from one another only in minor details of shape or by one or two strokes have completely different sounds and meanings … Imagination boggles at the thought of teaching typesetters to set it up.

The Tangut script, supposedly created by a single Chinese bureaucrat in 1038, died out at the start of the 16th century – to the probable relief of future generations, who were free to write in Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian or some other comparatively simple script.

John Gallagher notes that ‘multilingualism was so ordinary in 14th-century England’ that people ‘switched happily between English and French … sometimes even within the same sentence’ (LRB, 6 March). In the Galway Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) near where I live, such relaxed linguistic switching is still common practice. ‘Tá sé go maith anois all right now’ was something I heard recently (roughly, ‘It’s pretty good all right now’), as a polite but sensibly guarded response to ‘Lá breá’ (‘Lovely day’), since the heavens, in these parts, open without warning.

Having recently started to learn German I was surprised to read Georges Clemenceau’s remark, quoted by John Gallagher, that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just badly pronounced French.’ In their book The Year 1000, Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger cite the results of a computer analysis which showed that the hundred most frequently used English words are all of Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) origin. They add that all but one word in Churchill’s ‘Fight them on the beaches’ speech from 1940 came from pre-Conquest Old English. (The exception is the final word, ‘surrender’, a French import.) And almost all the words that Neil Armstrong spoke as he set foot on the Moon come from Old English. Maybe ‘badly pronounced German’ would be more accurate?

Barbara Newman writes that the planned French invasion of England in 1386 involved ten thousand mounted knights and a hundred thousand foot soldiers (LRB, 20 March). Armies of such numbers were impossible at the time (and for long afterwards), given the size of the population (even if France was then the largest and richest country in western Europe) and the impossibility of paying and feeding so many men and horses, let alone that there weren’t enough ships in the whole of Europe to transport such numbers. Jonathan Sumption, in Divided Houses (2009), drawing on documentary records and contemporary accounts, proposes that the total, including servants and hangers-on, may have reached the 28,000 claimed by a chronicler, but that this number was many more than the French court had planned and many more than could be paid or provisioned. Although the English response was hamstrung by the near bankruptcy of a profligate king, it had made plans and had worked out where to expect a landing.

Colm Tóibín describes the photograph Ireland, 1972 by Josef Koudelka, in which three pilgrims are shown kneeling at the summit of Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, as a ‘primitive image of figures at prayer in a stony landscape’ (LRB, 20 February). The story may be more extraordinary than that. The men probably climbed the 2500-foot mountain on their knees, a practice shown in early photographs. They are trying to ease the pain with their angular positions and by putting weight on their sticks. The fragmented path of scree and rocks is both slippery and sharp. A Pathé News film from 1949 shows women making the journey, with helpers clearing the way. A momentary genuflection is for wimps.

Peter Phillips writes that ‘by 1850 Britain had not produced a single composer of any worth, with the possible exception of S.S. Wesley, since the death of Purcell’ (LRB, 6 February). Christopher Eva rightly suggests William Boyce as another exception (Letters, 20 February). Phillips’s sweeping statement might also have surprised Thomas Arne. His opera of 1762, Artaxerxes, held the British stage for more than seventy years: it was produced in London as late as 1836. Haydn attended a performance in 1791 and, according to John Parkinson, ‘professed amazement at such a work by an English composer’.

Jane Austen attended a performance of Artaxerxes in London in March 1814. The opera had been restaged the previous autumn as a showcase for the 18-year-old soprano Catherine Stephens, who sang the role of Mandane; Parkinson writes that the part ‘contains coloratura writing of awesome difficulty’. Such was Stephens’s success that she was still performing in the role six months later. But perhaps Austen shared Phillips’s low opinion of Arne. She wrote to her sister, Cassandra, ‘Excepting Miss Stephens, I daresay Artaxerxes will be very tiresome,’ and after the opera confirmed that she was ‘very tired of Artaxerxes’. Arne is also the composer of a patriotic song that is still sung today on occasion, but the title escapes me.

Tom Johnson mentions Edward III’s assertion in 1340 that he was king of France (LRB, 20 February). English and subsequently British monarchs somewhat outrageously included king or queen of France in their formal titles until the custom was dropped by George III in 1801, following the Act of Union of 1800 and the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. I learned this while looking into the manorial records of the history of our copyhold house. A record of a transaction from 1734 is introduced as follows: ‘At a Court Baron held for the said Manor [of Barcombe] the thirtieth day of December in the Eighth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Second by the Grace of God of Great Britain France and Ireland King Defender of the Faith and so forth and in the year of Our Lord 1734 …’ I was intrigued by the ‘and so forth’. The steward of the manor, seemingly having little truck with royal formalities and imbued with the Sussex spirit of ‘We wunt be druv,’ was clearly disinclined to add the king’s not-so-English titles, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneberg, Archtreasurer and Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.

Daniel Trilling quotes from a pamphlet authored by Morgan McSweeney in 2010: ‘Every one of us needs to roll up our sleeves and get to work’ (LRB, 20 March). Given the hold that McSweeney is said to have over Keir Starmer, it’s striking that Starmer uses this expression so often, most recently when abolishing NHS England (‘If something isn’t working, I roll up my sleeves and fix it’). Indeed, to show how much he likes to roll up his sleeves, he has appeared on a number of occasions literally having done so, usually alongside Wes Streeting (sleeves rolled up, naturally), when delivering a speech in front of working people.

James Romm, in his review of my translation of Strabo’s Geographica, speculates that ‘Strabo’s rather egregious overestimate of the eastern extension of Asia’ may have been transmitted to Christopher Columbus, which would mean that ‘Strabo’s greatest impact on subsequent ages came from one of his greatest errors’ (LRB, 20 February). I would like to rescue Strabo from Romm’s charge and to suggest that Columbus and his advisers were guilty of a highly selective reading of Strabo’s work.

For Strabo, Asia extended no further east (the use of the term ‘east’ reflects Strabo’s Mediterranean perspective) than what is now Bangladesh. The landmass and islands occupied by Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia etc simply did not exist. Instead, Strabo believed it was possible to sail north-west from what is now Bangladesh into the northern end of the Caspian Sea (mistakenly believed to be a gulf), along a supposed ocean shore that mimicked the European coast of the Atlantic in the west. Most of China, all of Mongolia and most of Russia were also omitted from his worldview. In the sense of geographical landmass, then, Strabo severely underestimated the eastward extent of Asia.

Does Romm mean that Strabo overestimated the eastern extent of this truncated version of the lived-in world? In assessing whether this is so, we are helped by the fact that Strabo and other ancient geographers were very interested in establishing the ratio between the lived-in world and the spherical world. To find this ratio, they estimated the span of the lived-in world from west to east along the line of latitude passing approximately through Athens and Rhodes, then divided it by an estimate of the circumference of the world at the same latitude.

Strabo believed that the promontory in south-west Portugal now called Cabo de São Vicente constituted the western point of the lived-in world and Bangladesh the eastern point. This eastern point was something of an imagined construct, but its salient feature was that it ended just east of the Ganges delta. Strabo gives the distance between these two points as seventy thousand stades. He adopts from an earlier writer, Eratosthenes, the figure of 252,000 stades for the circumference of the Earth. This would be the circumference at the equator. The circumference at the latitude along which Strabo measures this west-east route would be less: about 204,000 stades. Strabo’s lived-in world would therefore represent about a third of the distance around the Earth. It is true that this would be a slight overestimate of the actual ratio: it means that Strabo effectively puts the eastern point of the lived-in world at around the longitude of what is now Guangzhou in China. This error is not, however, egregious enough to be responsible for Columbus’s mistaken belief that, in reaching the Caribbean, he had reached Asia.

Strabo’s use of Eratosthenes’ data would be the equivalent of scientists today using data from 1775, an indication of how much slower the pace of scientific progress was in his day. We do not have the relevant works of Eratosthenes – and neither did Columbus – but we do have Strabo’s comments on them. From him, we learn that Eratosthenes used a slightly higher figure, 77,800 stades, than Strabo later did for the west-east dimension of the lived-in world; that Eratosthenes believed this represented ‘more than a third’ of the circumference of the Earth at the relevant latitude, and that ‘if the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean did not prevent it, we could sail from Iberia to India along the same parallel.’ Eratosthenes’ words may have spurred Columbus to undertake his voyage across the Atlantic but his overestimate of the extent of the lived-in world is not sufficient to explain Columbus’s belief that his fleet had reached Asia.

Perhaps more important, Eratosthenes deduced that the northern hemisphere was climatically habitable all the way around, even in the half not occupied by what Strabo calls ‘our’ lived-in world. This leads to Strabo’s prescient statement: ‘It is possible that there are two or more lived-in worlds within the same temperate zone, especially in the vicinity of the Athens parallel where it is drawn through the Atlantic Ocean.’ In other words, Strabo is open to the possible existence of what we now call North America. This is the passage of his work that Columbus should have noted.

Strabo is adamant that any lived-in world across the Atlantic would be a different lived-in world from ‘the world we live in and know’. He believes that, if a world does exist there, ‘it is not lived in by those people who live in our world’ but ‘rather, that other lived-in world would have to be considered a separate one.’ For Strabo, lived-in worlds that are different from ours need not even be separated from us by the Atlantic Ocean. He is open to the suggestion that there is a lived-in world at the equator, and therefore south of our lived-in world, but insists that it would still have to be considered a different entity from ‘our own lived-in world’.

Strabo’s belief in multiple lived-in worlds illustrates that, for him, each world is the product and creation of the people who live in it. As a consequence, I prefer the translation ‘lived-in world’ over the more traditional ‘inhabited world’. It better conveys the sense of interaction and reciprocity between people and the world in which they operate. Romm objects that the term has overtones of being worn out. That reading of the term at least reflects a sense of human agency. But Strabo’s lived-in world is far from worn out: it is a vibrant place, which is the sense I hoped to get across.

Eratosthenes’ figure for the circumference of the earth at the equator was not the only figure mooted by scholars before Strabo. Lower figures were also doing the rounds. Posidonius, at work some sixty or seventy years before Strabo, suggested two alternative figures: 240,000 stades or 180,000 stades. We don’t have Posidonius’ work (neither did Columbus), but these are the figures attributed to Posidonius by Strabo and other writers. Using the lower of his two figures for the circumference of the Earth at the equator, Posidonius apparently did the same calculation as Eratosthenes had done to find the ratio of the lived-in world to the spherical world. He seems to have assumed that the west-east dimension of the lived-in world was much the same as Strabo later made it, and that the circumference of the Athens/Rhodes line of latitude would work out at around 145,000 stades. This would make sense of Strabo’s statement that Posidonius ‘thinks that the length of the lived-in world, being some seven myriad [seventy thousand] stades, accounts for half the entire parallel circle along which it is drawn, with the result … that if you were to sail from the west with an easterly wind, you would reach the Indians within the same number [of stades]’.

This is the passage that is probably responsible for Columbus’s mistaken belief that in reaching the Caribbean he had reached Asia. That belief was not, however, based on Strabo’s calculations, in which some two-thirds of the northern hemisphere would have to be sailed across before reaching Asia by sailing westwards from Portugal, with the added possibility of encountering other lived-in worlds en route. Rather, it was based on the smaller figure given by Posidonius, as relayed but not condoned by Strabo.

There is an unfortunate tendency in Strabonian scholarship to use ‘Strabo says’ to mean ‘there is a statement in Strabo’s work to the effect that …’ In my translation, I make strenuous efforts to differentiate the two types of statement. For example, in the two cardinal passages discussed above in which Strabo represents the views of Eratosthenes and Posidonius, I use italics to indicate that Strabo is voicing the opinions of writers other than himself.

So far as we can tell from the report of Columbus’s son Fernando, the two passages in which Strabo details the views of Eratosthenes and Posidonius were known to Columbus and were among those passages from antiquity that motivated him to make his voyage across the Atlantic. But when it comes to allocating blame for Columbus’s confusion as to where he landed, Strabo is merely the messenger.

I hope that the headings, margin comments and varied fonts used in my translation will help readers better to distinguish between Strabo’s own views and those of earlier scholars. If you find, as Romm does, the pages too cluttered, stay tuned. I am thinking about producing a shorter, more portable paperback version in which the marginal notation is sacrificed so that each page carries only the words of the translation. I am not sure the font size will be any different, however. As it is, the font is no smaller than the font in the H.L. Jones (1917-32) translation preferred by Romm. Neither is it any smaller than the font in Romm’s review in the LRB. But for those ‘whose eyes are no longer sharp’, one option is to download the e-book of my translation from the Princeton University Press website and enlarge it onscreen to whatever size is desired.