In Barking and Dagenham, they have taken Homer to heart. Do you think it was fair that Hector was killed? A group of Year 5 primary children is giving the matter serious thought. “He had a wife and baby,” says one. Another shakes his head. “Hector — he was just being messed about by the gods, man.”
And so he was. Hector, slayer of Patroclus, punished for that crime even in death, his body dragged by the heels around the walls of Troy by a rage-filled Achilles. “Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,/ murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls…” So begins Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad, Homer’s epic, complex poem of war and revenge, the earliest and greatest surviving work of ancient Greek literature. Nearly 3,000 years old, The Iliad is a work of almost 16,000 lines divided into 24 books; distant in culture, massive in scale — how is it that ten-year-olds can have such vivid, strong opinions on it?
Because before this poem was written down, it was spoken; there are historical records of recitations of Homer’s works at civic ceremonies, religious festivals and in markets throughout the classical world. Now two remarkable storytellers, Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden, working in conjunction with the Cambridge School Classics Project, have lifted the blind bard’s work off the page and given him new life. Over the course of four years, Lupton and Morden, working in primary and secondary schools, have developed War with Troy: The Story of Achilles, a three-CD set for schools that comes fully supplied with background material for teachers to access the story. War with Troy is not The Iliad; it draws on a range of sources and gives the broader story of the Trojan War. Its form, however, is in keeping with the original poem; Lupton and Morden composed the poem to be heard, and their retelling was never put down in writing (though a transcript of the version on the CDs is available for teachers): every time they tell it, it is created afresh. This package takes The Iliad back to its oral roots and allows a new generation access to its power and beauty.
Why is this worth doing? As Philip Pullman has said of what Lupton and Morden have done: “This particular story is the best one in the world — no question . . . I’ve listened to it, been thrilled and uplifted and terrified and moved and inspired by it.” Pullman knows a good story when he hears one; and, as with so many good stories, elements of Homer’s tale have entered the language. We all know the Trojan Horse, we all fear we might have an Achilles ’ heel — and with reason. This story of the destruction wrought by war is in no way lost in the past. “It seems with every passing month to become more and more resonant,” Morden says. “It’s the blueprint for the story of all wars,” Lupton says. “Except that Homer can show both sides with empathy.”
In recent years, the study of classics has been threatened; particularly the study of classical languages. According to Bob Lister, a lecturer in the education and classics faculties in the University of Cambridge and joint director of the Iliad project in maintained state schools, this is due in large part to the introduction of the national curriculum 15 years ago. Key Stage 2 national curriculum history is now the only place where children in state schools are guaranteed access to classical history or literature, through studies of ancient Greece and Roman Britain. Neither the national curriculum in English nor the national literacy strategy stipulates the teaching of any particular content from classical Greece or Rome (there is one reference to Greek myths in the English national curriculum Key Stage 3 and 4, under “Reading, English literary heritage”). Between 1990 and 2000 Latin A-level entries fell by 30 per cent; Greek entries by 40 per cent (even the independent school entry fell by 35 per cent). And while, at university level, single and joint honours degrees in the “modern” varieties of classics — such as classical civilisation, classical studies, ancient history, and classical art and archaeology — are not suffering, single honours classics, Greek and Latin, demonstrably are. This despite cinema extravaganzas such as Gladiator or even the forthcoming Troy, with Brad Pitt an unlikely Achilles.
It is true that many university programmes are doing their utmost to forge links with schools: in Leeds, classics students go out into primary school and teach Latin using the Minimus book — an introduction to Latin whose central character is a mouse — and in Cambridge, PGCE students act as e-tutors on the Cambridge Online Latin Project, which enables schools with no classics specialist to offer Latin. But, as Lister remarks, this is a long way from having the subject embedded in the curriculum.
But, you might reply, who cares about classics? Well, the issue is wider than that. For a start, you would be in a minority. Lister, along with co-director of the project, Grant Bage, canvassed parents’ views from state schools across the country. Nearly 80 per cent of those who answered thought that learning about the ancient Greeks and Romans was of “significant relevance” to their children. That learning often starts with stories, and stories have an important role to play in all our lives; and this, as Pullman says, is one of the greatest of them all. You could argue that our lives themselves are stories, with a beginning, a middle and an end. In order to make sense of the world we have to construct narratives each and every day.
The literacy hour, introduced into primary schools in 1998, goes a good way towards improving these narrative skills — but most narratives, most communication, happens off the page. This is undoubtedly why — at almost the same time that War with Troy was launched at the British Museum last month — the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority introduced a drive to improve children’s speaking and listening skills. David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools, said that many children were unable to speak properly when they started school thanks to the use of television as a babysitter. Alan Wells, director of the Basic Skills Agency, said that communication within families often amounted to little more than a “daily grunt”.
The desire to hear a story is truly ingrained: and children adore them. Told well, they conjure images far more vivid and durable — because they are the creation of the listener — than anything found on film or television. Because language creates the pictures, the language can take root and grow. “I saw the images of characters forming in my head,” was one Year 5 response to War with Troy. “I could see pictures of characters doing things.” (Of course, strength of response isn’t always positive: “There was too much love and kissing,” remarked one young listener. “It was disgusting in my opinion.”) Analysis of the children’s responses to the story too show that even those who are resistant to reading are able — and more than willing — to engage with War with Troy. But it isn’t just children who love it: at the British Museum launch, Morden and Lupton performed a 20-minute segment — the death of Hector and the recovery of his mutilated body by his father Priam — and had an audience of hardened classicists close to tears.
Yet this is not, in the main, a story of sentiment — it is a story of battles, of warring gods and blood and gore. It is, if you like, a boys’ story — and that’s not unimportant at a time when it seems harder and harder to get boys to engage with literature. Yet Lupton describes how one group of children became so fond of Patroclus that they nicknamed him “Choccy”; another group would afterwards construct fantasy football teams from the Greek heroes the pair had introduced. What better indication could there be of a complete acceptance of this story into contemporary culture? Jennie Dunn, a primary teacher at a state school in Cambridge who has worked with the material, told me that the response from boys was “phenomenal”. “There was a group of boys — the footballers — who were always the first to run out of the class. And when Hugh and Daniel finished they wouldn’t leave. They just sat and talked about it.” That was three years ago, when the boys were ten: now, at 13, they have left primary school, “but when I bump into them in the shops they still talk about it and say it was the best thing they ever did”.
Bage recalls working with Lupton and Morden in an education action zone, a cluster of schools in most need of support. One of the boys — at the bottom of his class in terms of literacy; he could barely write his name — was “simply on fire” with the story. “Is it real?” he wanted to know. “Could you go dig stuff up, that these people left behind? And do them storytellers, like, believe in gods?” An archaeologist and a classicist in the making, surely.
This is the strength of storytelling: the teller’s passion is transmitted in its purest form to the listener. When that teller is a man — able to be masculine and yet to be a poet, too — and the listener is a boy, an important and often overlooked connection can be made. Bage notes that initially there was some concern that there was no female voice in the telling; yet this has seemed to bring in boys while never putting off girls.
Both Lupton and Morden have brought years of experience to this task. Both — working individually and together — earn their livings as storytellers, travelling all over the world and telling tales from many cultures to audiences of all ages. Storytelling, as a form, exists in a kind of continuous present — that is also the past and also the future — as a story is handed on from generation to generation, still speaking some truth to those who listen and to those who tell. As Morden says: “There are sections of War with Troy that are very, very close to Homer’s Iliad. And then there are sections that we have taken from other Greek myths and put them in our version. And then there are tiny sections that we have invented for ourselves. And every time we tell the story we change it in little ways. In that way it stays fresh for us, and it changes. Our feelings today, our moods today, what’s been happening in the news — that might make us emphasise a moment in the story that we’ve never previously emphasised. All these things combine to form a performance on a particular day.” Of course, that experience — of the storyteller’s “particular day” — isn’t available as part of the CD package. But Lupton and Morden can’t be everywhere at once, and as Lupton points out, with the CD, “the teacher is the third voice; when you are telling, you are in a dialogue, especially with children; with the CD, the dialogue is with the teacher. So it still will have that aspect of change, of play.” Over 200 CDs and packs have already gone out to schools all over the country — and now Lupton and Morden are working with CSCP to develop versions of The Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
That freshness, too, is inherent in the story itself. “Once you scratch the surface,” Bob Lister says, “it’s a way of enabling children to think and talk about war. It can be easier to talk about Troy than it is to talk about Iraq.” He remembers discussing Hector’s death with a group of Year 5s where one girl was a refugee from the Horn of Africa. Was Hector’s death fair? “I don’t think it’s fair for anyone to die,” she said.
Further information and sales inquiries: www.CambridgeSCP.com; rll20@cam.ac.uk
Hugh Lupton’s website, which includes dates for performances of The Iliad and The Odyssey for adults: www.hughlupton.com
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