FORTEANA FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD COMPILED BY BARRY BALDWIN
296: PRINCESSES OF WAILS
Although a devout republican, I feel sorry for Kate. Not only, of course, for her illness but for the ridiculous hysteria that greeted her family photograph. Photographers amateur and professional regularly edit their snaps. Why the devil not?
All this nonsense about conspiracies, based on a child’s misaligned hands, puts me in mind of this epigram by Thomas Babington Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” And editing photos evokes Jane Austen remarking that she “lop’t and crop’t” Pride and Prejudice.
The ancients, of course, had no photos to edit. Their version was in Roman terms known as Damnatio Memoriiæ, meaning the chiselling out of a predecessor’s name from inscriptions, thus appropriating his/her achievements, along with the full-scale demolition of statues. Although most associated with Roman emperors, this process goes back to Pharaonic Egypt; cf. Richard Wilkinson, ‘Damnatio Memoriæ in the Valley of the Kings’ – abstract online from the Oxford Handbook (2014) of the same name, pp.335-46.
Describing the sudden fall of Tiberius’s all-powerful prætorian prefect Sejanus in AD 31, Juvenal (Satire 10, vv61-4) exults thus (Peter Green’s Penguin translation):
The head of the people’s darling glows red-hot, great Sejanus, Crackles and melts. That face, only yesterday, ranked Second in all the world. Now it’s so much scrap metal, To be turned into jugs and basins, frying pans, chamber pots.
Obvious modern comparison is the sudden arrest and liquidation of Stalin’s Secret Police boss Lavrenti Beria, and ensuing (as in the case of his many predecessors) toppling of his statues and erasure of him from official photographs, as down the ‘Memory Holes’ of 1984.
Princesses do not fare well in Greek literature. Agamemnon was quite prepared to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to obtain favourable winds for Troy. Andromeda was chained naked to a rock to be ravaged by a sea serpent (shades of Honeychile Rider in the film version of Dr No) to expiate some religious offence – she was rescued by the cavalry in the shape of Perseus on his winged horse Pegasus (once the name of a famous English amateur soccer team). Lower down this lurid chain comes Nausiceia in the Odyssey, charged with supervising the slave girls doing the palace laundry – can’t see any of our lot wrestling with a box of Tide… Read Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daugh
