Rome on the Euphrates: The Story of a Frontier, by Freya Stark, Murray/Tauris, 528pp, £12.99 (paperback)
When Dame Freya Stark died in 1993 at the ripe age of a hundred, she left a rich and varied body of work. In addition to twelve travel books, dozens of articles, three books of essays and a four-volume autobiography, she published eight-volumes of letters as well as a one-volume selection, and an anthology of highlights from her travels. A prolific writer, she was also an accomplished photographer.
As one of her many godchildren, I knew her well, and frequently stayed with her at the Villa Freya, the gatehouse she had inherited from Herbert Young, a wealthy Australian friend of Robert Browning’s son Pen, in the Italian hilltown of Asolo near Venice. In the late 1980s when her mind was beginning to lose its focus, I collected some six thousand black and white prints which she had bound into volumes and brought them from her house in Italy to St Antony’s College in Oxford, where they are now held, together with some fifty thousand odd negatives. An invaluable pictorial resource of a now vanished Middle East, they include remarkable images of Iraq, Iran, the Gulf and Southern Arabia before the impact of oil and modernization. As a woman traveller she had access to the secluded female quarters – harems – of residential homes. Some of her most compelling images are of the delicately crafted costumes worn by brides and female shepherds in the Arabian Protectorate (now southern Yemen).
Rome on the Euphrates, now reissued by Tauris Parke as part of its ongoing Freya Stark collection, was first published in 1966 when Stark was well into her seventies. An impressively ambitious book, it took her six years to research and write. Her publisher, Jock Murray, had tried to dissuade her from this project, fearing that a book centred on Roman history would prove less popular than the travel books that had made her famous. In this he was probably right: the book was not a commercial success, and its somewhat laboured historical thesis – that the Romans had closed a frontier that had previously been open to trade – is questionable, to put it mildly.
Stark’s pre-war books had won her recognition as a doughty explorer who had boldly ventured into places such as the Valley of the Assassins in Iran or the Hadhramaut in Southern Arabia, hitherto unvisited by Westerners and certainly not by a Western woman unaccompanied by a male consort. For admirers of her writing she was Jane Austen rather than Gibbon or Mommsen, a deft stylist whose sentences, in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s words ‘always fall on their feet with a light, spontaneous aptness.’
This was not a spontaneous effulgence, but rather a carefully cultivated literary approach. ‘I have read the whole of Jane Austen and think of beginning over again’ she told her mother in a letter from the Hadhramaut in 1938. An early masterpiece, A Winter in Arabia, 1940 (also reissued by Tauris-Parke) reflects her reading of Austen in the unfamiliar world of southern Arabia. Fired by the success of the journeys recorded in The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels (1934), which had earned her the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Back Memorial Prize and the Royal Asiatic Society’s Burton Memorial Medal, she had joined an expedition led by the formidable Gertrude Caton-Thompson, a Cambridge-trained archaeologist. The founder of Castrol lubricants, Lord Wakefield of Hythe, financed it. The two women fell out over professional priorities and domestic arrangements. Stark, as an Arabic speaker, had been charged with organizing the expedition locally, but had failed to take account of the Ramadan fast, when workers were unobtainable, and valuable time was lost. Impatient to get on with the dig, Thompson resented Stark’s leisurely approach with the locals. Stark, for her part, thought Thompson treated the natives like coolies, and was bored by her professional talk with her geologist colleague Elinor Gardner, the third British woman in their group. ‘I hate archaeology if it means that one’s whole soul has to turn into statistics and eliminate human beings’, she told her mother ‘You may not believe it but with Gertrude our whole conversation is either ancient flints or tinned food: there seems no half-way house.’
Matters came to a head when Thompson brusquely shoved a labourer aside to examine a find, causing a riot to break out in which one man was seriously injured. The argument was not just about a clash of personalities between two powerful women. Stark perceived in Thompson’s single- minded pursuit of knowledge an example of Western arrogance. By giving scientific inquiry priority over human relationships the archaeologists were exploiting the people of the valley. They were failing in their obligation to behave as honoured guests.
Stark’s revenge was a brilliant inversion of the comfortable bourgeois world of Emma and Mansfield Park.
Qasim [the cook] is falling in love.
The sayyids next door lend us their maidservant, a pretty round creature from Rakhiya in the next valley. Her name is Ne’ema (the same name as Naomi) and her face is like a very cheerful diminutive moon. Her voice has a lilt in it, a petulant little note of song, and she has small quick gestures and something funnily
French
about
her.
She
is
quite
wealthy,
chiefly
in
the
ownership of girdles, of which she has gradually collected two, all studded with silver and coral beads, with amulet cases round the lower edge … Ne’ma has a husband somewhere or other, but I think he is going to divorce her, and anyway he does not count;;
and
her
pretty
singing
voice
goes
on
in
the
shed
with
Qasim long after the rooms are swept. She is not allowed in the Archaeologist’s room which is locked with a European key, but she tidies Alinur upstairs, and Qasim usually helps her, and the whole proceeding takes a very long time.
The Austenesque resonances are clear. ‘Qasim is falling in love’, ‘Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody’, ‘Mr. Collins was not a sensible man’ – faux-naïve statements that convey a subtle combination of affection and ironic distancing. There is also, as the literary scholar Justin Garrick points out, a subtle inversion of the conventions of nomenclature that characterise most western travel writing where the European is named while the native loses his or her distinctive identity in a human landscape depicted as alien. By similar convention servants in Jane Austen’s world are mostly anonymous, while as Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism, colonial sources of wealth – epitomised by the Bertram family’s plantations in Antigua – are conspicuously absent from Mansfield Park. (A film version of the novel containing a cameo performance by Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas Bertram acknowledges Said’s point using the device of a portfolio of sketches depicting the brutal treatment of slaves).
In Stark’s narrative the name of Elinor Gardner is Arabised as Ali-Nur, a hybrid of two widely-used Muslim forenames, which is doubtless how the locals would have vocalised the English geologist’s name. Gertrude Caton-Thompson is never named: she is simply the Archaeologist. Like her room she herself remains locked with a ‘European key’, indicative of her inability to dissolve barriers of race and status, or even to acknowledge the humanity she shares with Ne’ma and Qasim.
In an episode that would not be out of place in an Austen novel Stark turns the tables on the Archaeologist. Whereas Stark, consistent in her belief in the essential goodness of people, entrusts all her money to the safekeeping of Qasim, all the expedition’s dollars are stolen from Thompson’s bedroom with its useless ‘European’ lock. When Stark herself has one of her rings stolen, she engineers its return by threatening the thief with divine exposure by means of a potion containing a fragment of the Holy Quran. Far from being a conventional travel book where the (usually male) writer seeks a certain target or goal, A Winter in Arabia becomes in Garrick’s words ‘a study in morality, intimacy, domestic affairs and intercultural relations, in which Stark, like Jane Austen, makes her point about appropriate behaviour and the nature of good personal character.’
Stark’s genius lay in her command of languages (she spoke Arabic and Farsi in addition to fluent Italian, English, German and French), the range of her human sympathies and the lucidity of her writing. Yet in the course of time her capacity for human empathy came to be at odds with the imperial values she espoused at a formal, public level. As Robert Kaplan has noted, she ‘combined a gift for romantic travel writing with one for wrong-headed analysis’. This tendency became more evident in the books that followed her wartime work as a propagandist for the British Ministry of Information in Cairo and Baghdad where she helped persuade nationalist-minded Arabs that they were better off supporting the British devil they knew than the Nazis and Fascists they didn’t.
Public recognition of this work, not to mention seduction by the Establishment, may have contributed to the morphing of the unconventional and sometimes acerbic Miss Stark of the 1930s into the Dame Freya of the 1980s. ‘The British Empire, as far as empires go was the best rule of life after Christianity’, she told her astonished biographer Molly Izzard. ‘Christianity teaches you to love your brother as yourself;; the Mandate says you rule and teach a people to rule itself, then give it its freedom … The Empire has practiced this and given freedom to about twenty countries, and in doing so has carried out Christian precepts.’ No reference to the struggles and massacres, the slaughter occasioned by Indian partition, or – as Izzard put it – ‘the angry nationalist demonstrations, the communal disorders, the eighteen-year-old National Servicemen taught to shoot other eighteen-years-olds of another race and colour.’
Freya Stark’s ideological schizophrenia may have been rooted in her social sympathies. Her desire for acceptance in the upper echelons of British society cohabited uneasily with her capacity for navigating skilfully among non-western peoples. With an artist’s intuition she projected this split in her outlook onto her vision of classical antiquity. She admired the Greeks – especially Alexander the Great – but despised the Romans. In Alexander’s Path she followed the route through Lycia (southern Turkey) that Alexander took after the victory of Granicus in 332 BC. The country was still wild and rugged, criss-crossed with confusing mule-tracks. Without a fleet or supply-train the Macedonian conqueror had to rely on whatever he could extract from the cities to pay and feed his men. Yet, according to Stark, this help was freely given, because Alexander – like the British – promised the cities their freedoms. A civilizing influence, he Hellenized the whole culture of Anatolia, so that Homer, Sophocles and Euripides came to be read by non-Greeks along with Greeks. ‘No Empire, before or since’, she wrote ‘has been so persuasive, nor has any conversion except a religious one been so complete or widespread.’ The Hellenistic ideal bequeathed by Alexander corresponded to what she believed to be the best in the British Empire – open frontiers, free trade, religious tolerance, respect for cultural differences. It had been the failure of the British to live up to these ideals, she believed, their frequent clubbishness and insensitivity towards subject peoples, their disastrous record on education, that caused the Empire to crumble in a welter of competing nationalisms.
In Rome on the Euphrates – her last major work – she takes this argument further. In contrast to the Greeks, the Romans were brutal and unimaginative. ‘I have started chapter one of the Romans’, she told her friend Christopher Scaife, a professor of English at the American University in Beirut, ‘the miserable tearing up of the Middle East by those brutal Fascists. I must find a few nice ones to keep me going, Pliny so boring, Cicero insufferable, Julian, I discover on reading his letters, an appalling prig. Even Catullus jeers at a man for being poor.’ She thoroughly disapproved of the Roman policy in Asia which she saw as being based on the mistaken idea of sustaining a ‘weak periphery.’ Whereas Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids, had ‘kept the passage into further Asia open as a bridge’ for trade and cultural intercourse, the Romans closed it as a frontier, ending, for nearly two millennia, Alexander’s dream of uniting the world.
The historical thesis of Rome on the Euphrates has been challenged by classical scholars, though military historians were more impressed. An anonymous American reviewer in Military Affairs welcomed the book’s ‘masterful combination of history and geography.’ Mason Hammond, doyen of Harvard classicists, wrote that scholars would enjoy ‘the author’s vivid style and her descriptions of the country’ but would be ‘disappointed in her historical penetration.’ His Oxford peer E. W. Gray was rather more critical.
A glance at the distribution of maps … of objects of trade found beyond the Rhine and Danube frontiers … might suggest that Roman frontiers were often as much a stimulus as a barrier to trade. There was certainly no continuous physical barrier in the east … In the long view the eastern Roman limes was a relatively stable frontier, never seriously pushed out of place, dented, or punctured for long over a period of 500 years. The continuous cultural overlap, counterpart of economic laissez- aller, on either side of the Euphrates, was a phenomenon of inestimable importance for west and east. We should not ignore
the beneficent effects of the pax Romana in the Roman east … or the diffusion of cultural influences from the area of overlap westerwards as far as the Atlantic and the Sahara.
As one of ‘two godsons’ mentioned in the book, in her account of the expedition to Nimrud Dagh in the ancient kingdom of Commagene, my memories of the travels in the summer of 1962 that form part of the narrative are less than comfortable. As a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, I was thoroughly hostile to suggestions about the benign nature of the empire. Then I had an argument with her – about Camus’s The Outsider – which, I thought, she saw as a tract about criminality rather than an essay on existential despair: Freya was staunchly anti-modernist in her reading. I doubted if she had even read Ulysses. Having been entrusted with buying food for our expedition I disgraced myself by acquiring several large tins of thirst-inducing anchovies which, not knowing Turkish, I had mistaken for sardines. Yet bruised as I was by finding myself at odds with her in matters both intellectual and administrative, my admiration for her professionalism as a traveller grew as we made our way up the Euphrates and across the Taurus mountains. Armed with a general letter of introduction from the director of one of the Turkish banks she had met in Istanbul, Freya brandished the document as though it were a firman from the Ottoman Sultan, spelling instant dismissal – not to say death – to anyone impeding our progress. The suspicion of mayors, district governors and policemen dissolved before us;; and when we left their protection for wilder Kurdish-speaking areas whose dangers were all the greater because the Turkish authorities mulishly refused to recognised the Kurds or their language, she deftly shifted her ground, and, despite her ignorance of Kurdish, charmed the muleteers into becoming our protectors. Arriving at Thilo, a large remote village far from any jeepable road, she so fascinated our host, the village chief, that he insisted that a granddaughter, born that very night to the sounds of blood-curdling female cries, be named after her. I wondered how many girls in remote Asian valleys had grown up bearing the improbable name of a Nordic goddess because she happened to be passing at the hour of their birth.
Freya was then in her seventieth year and suffering from bronchitis. Yet such was her confidence in herself, and the confidence she inspired in us, that I never once feared for our safety, even when, crossing a ridge of the Taurus mountains, we encountered a gale so severe that both of us godsons had to pin her to her mule by her stubby redoubtable legs.
Re-reading Rome on the Euphrates after more than four decades, I am impressed by the ease with which she converses with Roman history. On the whole the erudition is worn lightly. Her evocations of a landscape that was virtually unchanged since classical times make the struggles between armies more plausible than maps or diagrams. At best there is a seamless interweaving of past and present, obliterating the millennia separating them:
Lucullus … marched from Pontus with two or three legions and some five hundred horse or so, in autumn when mists lie shallow in the sun and poplars shimmer behind the jade-green willows. From Sivas he crossed the Kizmil Irmak, the Red River, and climbed to open highlands where grass and stubble offer no obstacle except in its season, a shortage of food. The soil is thin on a rocky uplifted floor, the poplars glitter in the lap of small declivities, the flocks shine stationary in the distance like islands
The same can be said of her evocations of people long dead, such as the Seleucid king Antiochus III ‘an anxious, sensitive, civilized, extraordinarily modern man, with reasonable eyes and a delicate wry mouth and the ghost of a smile that life has drowned.’ Even if the thesis of good-guy British- style Greeks versus bad-boy Roman fascists fails to satisfy scholars, her rendering of Roman history as lived experience, as distinct from chronicled events, makes for a compelling and satisfying read.
Freya Stark’s most important writings are currently being republished by Tauris Parke, an imprint of I. B. Tauris Publishers. Seven books have already appeared and remain available. The next, her autobiographical Perseus in the Wind: A Life of Travel will be published in April: www.ibtauris.com
Hugh Leach’s photographs are reproduced by kind permission of Arabian Publishing and are from his recently published book, Seen in Yemen: Travelling with Freya Stark and Others, Arabian, 2011, 320pp, £45 (hardback): arabian.publishing@arabia.uk.com