Health warning: get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine before you engage because this is not a typical blog post.

Its sections run as follows:

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism
2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition
3. The Iliad and Odyssey gave man his voice
4. Women’s viewpoint was first heard in Sappho’s poetry
5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art
6. How Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR
7.  Why Plato blamed Homer, Sappho, sophists, theatre and art for spin

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism 

Rhetoric came to life the moment mankind came together to cooperate. It was and is speech designed to influence others. Yet our story of the message only really begins with a discussion of Homer’s influence in archaic and Classical Greece. That is not because earlier civilisations failed to produce rhetoric that’s worthy of discussion. It is partly because the Greeks produced work which is so recognisable to us, and because they talk about their rhetorical developments so self-consciously. And one of the important developments is the idea that, with the Greeks, we see rhetoric becoming not merely the business of persuading people, but of having radically new ideas worth persuading them about.

According to historians such as C J Emlyn Jones and E H Gombrich, before Homer storytelling and art were not arenas in which ideas were explored so much as straitjackets that transmitted incontrovertible messages. Besides highlighting hunting grounds, battles, kings, queens and campaigns, their function was confined to conveying sacred themes about perceived truths concerning ancient or newly created myths, rituals, deities and magic.

However Homer’s period marked a new beginning for mankind. The key difference being that from around 800BC onward man began to acquire more freedom to manufacture and communicate messages that were open to interpretation and contestation. It was the moment when humanism was born:

Homer’s concern for human spiritual and social development in association with, but also sharply independent of, the gods – what may be termed humanism – separates Greek culture right from the beginning from the essentially god-centred and theologically motivated literature which was composed during the previous millennium in technically advanced but politically conservative cultures of the Near East, chiefly Mesopotamian, Hittite and Egyptian. [The Ionians and Hellenism: a study of the cultural achievement of early Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, C J Emlyn Jones, page 61, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1988]

From then on the cultural and political agenda became more unpredictable and more dynamic than before as humanity sets out to query the will of the gods and question the nature of fate. This was an intellectual innovation that signified that man’s perception of his position in the world had shifted. As Jones points out:

…it was in Ionia, in the poetry of Homer and the cosmology of the Milesians, that for the first time in history, man took the centre of the stage as a thinking and feeling individual – an assumption upon which Western culture has subsequently rested. [The Ionians and Hellenism: a study of the cultural achievement of early Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, C J Emlyn Jones, page 6, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1988]

We cannot be certain why it happened. Perhaps it was luck. More likely it had something to do with the fact that the Greek-speaking world allowed citizens more scope than previous civilisations to ponder, debate and decide upon social matters. But the genesis and the content and purpose of Homer’s ur-verse are the subject of controversy and mystery.

In his book Performing Homer, Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Literature at Harvard University, suggests that because Homer’s narratives were committed to memory and transmitted through an oral culture they were most likely reconfigured by performers over the course several hundreds years. In short, to keep performances relevant, Nagy says Homer’s content was continually adapted to accommodate the shifting needs of what he calls the polis of the audience. Certainly, there is no written copy of Homer’s work earlier than 600 BC (Jones page 88).

Be that as it may, nobody really knows whether the name Homer refers to a person or to an innovative period in storytelling and human development. We don’t even know if Homer’s supposed home in Ionia was an economically advanced or backward region of Greece. There’s so much uncertainty on so much detail that we should keep an open mind about the historical accounts we read. Nevertheless, here is a brief sketch of what scholars surmise to be true about the period, some bits of which are more rooted in verifiable fact than others.

2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition

The period of Homer was one in which war and invasions and colonial expansion had undermined the coherence of the old world’s beliefs. This nascent civilisation was spread over a large area on the southern Balkan peninsula, the Aegean islands, coastal Asia Minor, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean and Black Sea coast. It was when and where the Phoenician alphabet was developed (though there’s no evidence that Homer had access to such knowledge). It was the period that introduced coinage and in which the population became more urbanised. There was also more freedom given to women than was granted during the Golden Age of Greek classical democracy three hundred or so years later.

Society was organised into a loose network of independent communities, which over the course of the next few centuries were to become city-states. They spanned two great cultural traditions: the more austere tradition of Greece, and Eastern flamboyance. Living in them were several tribes who had only recently intermingled, such as Mycenaeans composed of Achaeans, Argives and Danaans, and their northern opponents known as Dorians. There were numerous local customs, rituals and traditions within communities as well as between them. In essence, theirs was a cultural potpourri that shared a common language but no creed rooted in religion, principles and values. No region, community or tribe was capable of imposing its authority and outlook on the others. Even within communities there was such a precarious balance of power that only a measure of toleration made it possible to hold them together.

Kings ruled in most regions, but they were far from secure in their position. They relied for their legitimacy on the support of an aristocracy composed of a socially elite strata of wealthy, land-owning, educated families (but this was not a titled elite as existed in the Middle Ages in Europe). As the aristocracy grew in wealth and political influence they increasingly sought to break free from their kings and by around 750BC they finally ousted them.

Given the challenges that this disparate civilisation faced, the educated elite may have consciously devised a strategy to unite their vast realms or they may have stumbled upon one by accident. As we shall explore here, it is not difficult to imagine how they might have seized upon the potential of Homer’s persuasive messages to bring a semblance of coherence to their society.

While our knowledge of Homer’s time might be wanting, we know much about how subsequent generations from Classical Greece to the present have interpreted Homer’s legacy. It amounts to the founding myth of the civilisation which underpins our own. So, let’s examine Homer in that regard.

The newly installed aristocratic rule of Homer’s world faced serious challenges. During the 250 years it took the city-states to become democracies, yeoman farmers and other members of the rising middle classes, including merchants and manufacturers, regularly colluded with the military to replace oligarchical aristocratic rule with that of tyrants. But their downfall was paved partly by progressive policies that some tyrants pursued and partly by technical and social innovation:

The development of a disciplined heavy infantry (hoplites) gradually eroded the dominance of the cavalry and the aristocrats, whose power had come from their ability to afford horses. This forced leaders of a city state to field a well-trained phalanx of hoplites who had enough in common to be willing to stand together and fight, each protecting with his shield the sword arm of the man to the left. Leaders and their troops had to work together in the interests of the community as a whole, and there was no place for the individualism of an Achilles. [Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists, Michael Gagarin, Paul Woodruff, page xi, University Cambridge Press, 1995]

One of the best-known and most progressive of the tyrants was the poet and reformer Solon who ruled Athens with popular acclaim (638 – 558 BC). The legal rights that “law-givers” such as Solon granted came to be recognised as statutory rights worth preserving. This encouraged a sense of entitlement that eventually encouraged the masses to rebel against the arbitrariness of tyrants such as Hippias of Athens who in mid-reign switched from being a progressive reformer to a regressive dictator.

Hippias was finally ousted in 508BC by a popular uprising backed by Spartan soldiers. Afterward the polis invited the exiled leader Klisthenis back to take control. He transformed Athens by opening the government of the city to all its citizens so that they could create a representative democracy. This new society consisted of legislative bodies, including ten municipalities run by delegates chosen by lot, rather than by kinship or birthright. But the major decisions in this new creation were taken at the Ecclesia, the assembly and government of Athens. There every citizen was given the right to vote, for example, on the price of food, when to go to war, or whether to ostracize troublemakers who threatened to reintroduce tyranny.

Later in BC462, Ephialtes, mentor of Pericles, leader of Athens’ Golden Age of 462 to 429 BC, destroyed the last bastion of aristocratic privilege when he abolished the Court of Areopagus (appeal court) and transferred its duties to the People’s Court.

So as tyrannical, oligarchical and plutocratic rule gave way to democracy, ordinary citizens (exclusively male and never slaves or foreigners) from mostly non-aristocratic backgrounds became the major social and political power. They created a society in which there was a presumed equality of free men based on shared values and assumptions. Hence, it was during this period that the notion of equality under law was first acknowledged and enforced.

According to myth court-based forensic rhetoric originated a little earlier in 476BC in Syracuse, Scilly, when the tyrant Hieron I, the instigator of the secret police in Greece, died. In the turmoil that followed a small group of families formed a restrictive democracy. Their first challenge was to settle their disputes in judicial hearings about how to redistribute the land the king had supposedly taken by force. The story goes that because claimants pleaded on their own behalf in the newly created People’s Assembly, they sought the services of speechwriters (logographos in Greek) to enhance their chances of success. The legend says that to meet this need two professionals arose called Corax and Tsias.  It is claimed it was they who wrote the first textbooks on rhetoric. But none of their written work survives. Some scholars dispute that either character existed. Others say they were one person not two:

Hard facts about Corax and Tisias are almost entirely (some would say entirely) lacking.[1] The former is mentioned by Aristotle, the latter by Plato, and the fact is that a similar argument from likelihood (eikos) is attributed to Corax in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to Tisias in [Plato’s] Phaedrus does not inspire confidence. [Background and Origins: Oratory and Rhetoric before the Sophists, Michael Gagarin, page 30, A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006]

It is said that as full democracy matured in Athens the masters of rhetoric from Syracuse moved to the mainland. That’s the history mixed with myth, now let’s take closer look at how Homer’s epics influenced developments.

3. The Iliad and Odessey gave man his voice

Today, Homer is remembered most for composing two great poetic epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which eulogise the exploits of orator warriors such as Achilles, Hector and Odysseus who fought in the Trojan War. The Iliad relates the story of the Achilles and to a lesser extent his opponent Hector. The Odyssey tells the tale of Odysseus’ journey home from the war. Together they provide an idealised vision of noble heroes, aristocratic virtues, such as honour and courage, and a concept of excellence which Homer’s contemporaries imagined embodied their civilisation’s long-lost Golden Era (circa: 1100/1200BC) when the Trojan Wars supposedly took place.

Caroline Alexander’s recent book, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War[2], highlights that the Iliad was the world’s first critique of war. She explains how it provides an account of the conflict that favours neither side. But perhaps more importantly it portrays its main characters as aspiring to master their fate in preference to remaining passive victims of the gods’ designs. Indeed, the characters in the Ilaid display a lust for life and a contempt for Hades, king of the underworld, god of death, that is quite inspiring.

The Iliad opens with Achilles, the mortal son of the goddess Thetis, ranting about how the nine-year-long war has cost countless lives. He asks king Agamemnon what drove the enemy to fight so hard. He reminds the king that no Trojan had done him or his men any real harm and adds that no prize in war is worth dying for. Angered by a dispute with the king over the spoils of war, Achilles says he’d rather go home than remain dishonoured in Troy. A little later the lowly bow-legged and lame soldier Thersites addresses the troops seemingly on Achilles’ behalf. He denounces Agamemnon for being a coward. He declares boldly that a man committed to rape and rapine and living a life of luxury while his men live a destitute existence is not fit to lead the army. He urges his fellow soldiers to abandon their leaders and return home to their loved ones (Homer’s text has Thersites laughed at and beaten, Shakespeare made him the hero of Troilus & Cressida).

As the tale unfolds Achilles becomes increasingly consumed by the grievances he has with both sides of the battle. At the end, Achilles proves to be inflexible. He comes to terms with the tragic realisation that he will die as consequence of the pointless war against Troy; though he’s comforted by the conviction that his heroism will be remembered for eternity.

The Odyssey is more complex and less fatalistic than the Iliad. It tells how the multi-faceted Odysseus, king of Ithaca, uses deception, courage and intelligence to overcome every trial and tribulation on his ten-year-long journey home from the Trojan War to reclaim his kingdom and wife. So in love is Odysseus with his mortal wife Penelope that he remains faithful to her despite the sea goddess Calypso offering him immortality if only he would stay with her forever.

Among many other adventures he wrestles god-sent storms meant to kill him. He navigates his ship between two perilous rocks, where on one side sits Scylla, a six-headed monster, and on the other Charybdis, a sea-monster whose every gulp of water sets off deadly whirlpools. He blinds the one-eyed giant Cyclops, son of the gods Poseidon and Thoosa. His ship is sunk and his men killed when Zeus attacks them with thunderbolts. Yet somehow using lots of guile he makes it back to his homeland on the island of Ithaca. There with the help of his son Telemachus, he kills the greedy suitors of his faithful wife. Finally Odysseus is reunited with his family with whom we suppose he lives happily ever after.

Of course, Homer’s epics were not the world’s first. The stories of the Old Testament and The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest known epic poems, predate Homer by perhaps thousands of years. Moreover as with Homer’s works their continued relevance owes much to their equally universal and enduring human themes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of king Gilgamesh of Uruk, who is part mortal, and a greater part god. It recounts his quest to discover the secrets of eternal life so that he can become immortal. Along the way he realises that no man can possibly live forever. When he finally arrives back home he concludes that while the gods cannot be trusted, they have granted man something worth treasuring, which is the immortality of man’s achievements. The ageless message of the tale being that man must make the most of his time while he has it (and perhaps also that there is no place like home).

It is not the exploration of the meaning of life and death that sets Homer’s work apart. Neither are Homer’s epics different because of their accounts of the dysfunctional behaviour of the gods or for their exploration of love, friendship, family and sex. What gives Homer’s narratives their humanist content that tales such as The Epic of Gilgamesh lacked is more profound than that. According to the art historian E H Gombrich, Homer’s major innovation in storytelling was not only to tell the “what” in his accounts of mythical events but also the “how”:

Obviously this is not a very strict distinction. There can be no recital of events that does not include description of one kind or another, and nobody would claim that The Gilgamesh Epic or the Old Testament is devoid of vivid accounts. But there is still a difference in the way Homer presents the incidents in front of Troy, the very thoughts of the heroes, or the reaction of Hector’s small son, who takes fright from the plumes of his father’s helmet. The poet is here an eyewitness. If he were asked how he could know so exactly how it actually happened, he would still invoke the authority of the Muse who told him all and enabled his inner eye to see across the chasm of time. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 129, Princeton University Press, 2000]

So however ambiguous this break with the past was, Homer was the first writer to draw the audience’s attention to the author’s narrative as a work of fiction. He’s the first to highlight the human nature of an epic’s messages. He’s the first to portray the main characters as being in many respects superior to the gods. This makes his epics truly groundbreaking.

Homer’s epics were admired for their advocacy of heroism, honour, nobility, cooperation and community values that characterized the popular culture of the Greek-speaking world. In Homer’s wake, a new wave of artists and thinkers sought the same licence to express their voice.

Muses in Raphael's Parnassus (1511)

4. Women’s viewpoint was first heard in Sappho’s poetry

After Homer’s epic poetry dominated oral verse, lyric poetry (from where we get the word lyrics) emerged in the seventh century BC. This innovation in poetic expression introduced musical verse accompanied by a lyre, backed by a choral choir that also danced. It was an artistic movement whose senior figure was Sappho, antiquity’s leading female poet.

In her masterful Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn maintains that Sappho was regarded as being on the same level as Homer. She adds that Sappho is equal to any poet who has lived since then.

Sappho was an aesthetic poet with a light sensual touch who articulated Greek society’s interest in intimate and inward-looking thoughts of mortals. In contrast to Homer’s almost exclusive focus on male characters, she explored themes such as sex, love and beauty from the perspective of individual women. Cheryl Glenn sums it up thus, “the speaking subject of Sappho’s poems was a woman, a woman claiming the right to talk, the right to use her voice” (page 26).

Given that Sappho was neither banned nor condemned by the society of her day, it would seem that she was empowered by the polis of the Greek city-state of Lesbos to subvert stereotypes about the position of women in society.

For example, Sappho provides an alternative account to Homer’s Iliad about how Helen of Troy might have felt about her role in the Trojan War. Homer’s Helen cursed herself for abandoning her husband and coming to Troy; Sappho’s Helen is admired for desiring one thing, “the fairest,” and for choosing to realise her ambition by leaving her husband for Paris in Troy. Unlike in the Iliad, Sappho’s Helen is not a forlorn victim of a man’s world but an independent subject making moral and personal decisions about how she chooses to live her life.

Hence there were differences between the two poets that manifested themselves in a clash of ideas. On the one side, Homer promoted intelligence, courage, selfishness, self-control, moderation, lack of arrogance, hospitality and respect for gods, strangers, parents, justice and fairness. On the other, Sappho advocated surrendering one’s self to hedonistic ecstasy. She wrote sensually about love and beauty. She expressed her delight at seeing flowers being caressed by the slivery moonlight. She wrote about women who loved each other as much as they did men who looked like gods.

As the American scholar Ruth Scodel points out in Listening to Homer, Tradition, Narrative And Audience [page 175, University Michigan Press, 2002], contemporary classicists are less prepared today than they were during the 19^th century to see Homeric epics as historical sources. Instead they are more inclined to view them as ideological interventions (we shall explore in the section on the sophists how Greek ideology was weak and in need of mythological reinforcement) designed to influence contemporary opinions. In support of this viewpoint, Glenn quotes Germany’s leading classicist Werner Wilhelm Jaeger saying something similar about Sappho in his book Paideia [2nd edition, New York: Oxford, UP, 1943]:

[t]he very existence of Sappho’s circle assumes the educational conception of poetry which was accepted by the Greeks of her time; but the novelty and greatness of it is that through it women were admitted to a man’s world, and conquered that part of it to which they had a rightful claim. For it was a real conquest: it meant that women now took their part in serving the Muses and that this service blended with the process of forming character. (1: 133) [Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cherly Glenn, page 25, Southern Illinois University Press, 1997]

While Jaeger’s point is clearly convincing, that should not lead us to suppose that Sappho was a campaigner for equality. Not only is there no sign of that in her poetry, back then the concept of equality applied only to men who were members of the polis. The closest any writer of the time came to advocating equality was in Plato’s Republic. There he remarks that the physical and mental differences between the sexes are minimal. He says that in his ideal society there would be “equality” of opportunity in terms of work and education for women and men. But he makes no concession to his opinion that the souls of women are the reincarnated souls of cowardly and unrighteous men. Moreover, the absence of any modern notion of equal rights in Classical Greece is plain to see in the contemporary acceptance of slavery as being rooted in human nature.

Plato’s views appear relatively progressive when compared to the position of women at the time. In the city-states, including Athens and Sparta, women and men lived apart. Women were excluded from the polis, the ekklesia (principal assembly of the democracy) the Pan-Hellenic games and the oracular shrines of the Classical Greek world. Most scholars acknowledge, however, that women such as Sappho who were daughters and wives of citizens received a good education, though separately to men. The consensus also suggests that women played a major role at funerals, religious rituals and in the arts in Athens, particularly in the chorus, and that in Sparta they were encouraged to participate in athletics. [3]

There’s little doubt that Sappho’s influence was substantial, but Homer’s prestige clearly reigned supreme throughout archaic and Classical Greece. For example, Jaeger’s assessment of Homer cites no less a figure than Plato to stress the important part his epics played in the transmission of tradition in the ancient world:

Plato tells us that in his time many believed that Homer was the educator of all Greece. Since then, Homer’s influence has spread far beyond the frontiers of Hellas [Greece]….all his [Plato’s] attacks did not shake the supremacy of Homer. The Greeks always felt that the poet was in the broadest and deepest sense the educator of his people. [Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume 1, Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, page 34, Oxford University Press, 1939]

Of course, here Jaeger is also pointing out that Plato was a critic of Homer. Plato was not comfortable with the new freedom of expression artists were given. He believed they should have stuck to the prescribed paradigms set by the Egyptians and earlier civilisations. He thought that their artistic licence encouraged them to move away from the pursuit of truth-telling toward what we today call spinning, manipulation and outright deception. But before looking more closely at Plato’s arguments, we shall examine how Homer and Sappho influenced the wider world of messaging in the theatre and review the sophists.

5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art

Theatrical performances in Classical Greece were major events attracting crowds well in excess of ten thousand at a time. They provided an experience, narrative and set of messages that all Greeks shared. In short, theatre was, as Homer had been and remained, a major force in the transmission and diffusion of common values, mores and beliefs throughout the Greek-speaking world. As John Richard Green writes in Theatre in ancient Greek society [Routledge, 1996] the popularity of Athenian drama and comedy outside Athens in the fourth century BC was probably the result of the universal, as opposed to parochial, appeal of their themes.

The theatrical era arguably began in Athens in BC534 when Thespis stepped in front of the chorus and created a role for himself to win the world’s first theatrical competition: ever since actors and actresses have been known as thespians. Later, writers produced innovative plays that gave roles to actors, supported by the chorus. In the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries they invented and developed the art of comedy, including its political form, satire, and they gave us the word tragedy, which means goats music in Greek. The era produced three great bards: Aeschylus (524 – 456BC); Sophocles (496 – 406BC) and Euripides (480 – 406BC). It was they who progressively transformed the world of theatre into its modern format.

Aeschylus is known as the father of tragedy and as the playwright who wrote parts for actors that went beyond liaising merely with the chorus. He put more characters into plays than his predecessors, which allowed him to explore how they interacted and conflicted with each other in his embellishments of themes derived from Homer’s epics. However, there were still only two actors on stage and the plots were kept comparatively simple. It was Sophocles who introduced the third actor that made possible the development of dramatic plot. His work increased the interaction between characters who identified themselves in numerous disguises with the aid of masks on stage. His plays included the ‘Freudian’ Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and unwittingly marries his mother with whom he conceives four children (when the truth is revealed he plucks out his own eyes). Euripides went further still than Sophocles in the development of both plot and characters. Euripides portrayed strong independent, intelligent women. He interrogated the gods and sometimes found their sense of justice wanting (this made him controversial). He explored the psychological motivations of the different characters. Significantly, in terms of style and content Euripides was naturalistic and humanist in a recognisably modern manner. For example, when Euripides wrote his own version of a well-told story about Orestes, a mythological character and subject-matter of several Greek plays, he gave it a contemporary tone that still resonates today:

…in earlier tellings of the story, Orestes killed his mother in pursuance of the unwritten laws of vendetta, but in Euripides’ play Orestes is castigated for not referring the matter to a democratic law court. A Modern society is superimposed on an ancient society based on codes of honour. In more subtle ways, all Greek tragedies observed the same principle, refracting the past through the present to make old stories generate an infinite number of new meanings. [Greek theatre performance: an introduction, David Wiles, page 11, Cambridge University Press, 2000]

It was the development of theatre after Homer and Sappho that perhaps did most to provide a licence for artists to put his or her directed message at the heart of their work. As playwrights produced more life-like drama they increasingly required the development of realistic scenery that could make the audience believe in the scenes they were witnessing. But this in turn required artists to experiment with the schemata of conceptual art because, as Gombrich explains, the more they began to embroider myths and to dwell on and illustrate the “how”of events, the more they were forced to accept that:

…in a narrative illustration, any distinction between the “what” and the “how” is impossible to maintain. The painting of the creation will not tell you, like the Holy Writ, only that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Whether he wants to or not, the pictorial artist has to include unintended information about the way God proceeded and, indeed, what God and the world “looked like” on the day of creation. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 129, Princeton University Press, 2000]

This led the Greeks to do something no previous culture had seen the need to do: mimic reality (mimesis) by mastering perspective and modeling in light and shade to produce convincing illusions. The result was that Greek artists developed a fluid naturalistic style of painting, sculpture and other art forms that came to define their classical culture and later to inspire the Renaissance’s creative outburst. This was how the Greeks gave birth to the world of art as we know it today:

The creation of an imaginative realm led to acknowledgement of what we call “art” and the celebration of those rare spirits who could explore and extend that realm.

It may sound paradoxical to say the Greeks invented art, but from this point of view, it is a mere sober statement of fact. We rarely realize how much this concept owes to the heroic spirit of those discoverers who were active between 550 and 350 BC. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 141, Princeton University Press, 2000

The driving-force of this revolution in art, however, was not a breakthrough in artistic technique, but a breakthrough in the world of ideas in epics, poetry, theatre and democracy expressed through rhetoric. Put another way, developments in artistic technique grew out of the world of ideas, not the other way round.

6. Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR

The sophists (from Greek for wisdom) emerged in the fifth century BC as an eclectic class of roving educators who passed on the techniques and power of persuasion to others. Their popularity reflected the demise in importance of birthrights, class and wealth as the main determinants of a person’s influence within the polis. Instead, in the new Greece influence and authority also depended upon how virtuous others perceived a person’s character to be and on how eloquently they performed in debates. The other great appeal of the sophists was that they had something interesting and original to contribute to public life at the level of ideas. So even though most of them were foreigners (not eligible for citizenship themselves) they flourished in Athens where they spent as much time managing their own image as they did those of others.

James Herrick remarks in A History and theory of rhetoric[4] that it was the sophists who demonstrated how there were at least two sides to every story and showed the world how to make democracy work by consciously putting contentious argument and competing opinions at its centre. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff maintain[5] that it was the sophists who first gave Homer’s notion of the importance of procedural justice in communities theoretical support. Aristotle credits them with having invented the trade of speechmaking and passing on life-style “rules” known in Greek as arête that translates as something akin to excellence, which the Greeks saw as equating to virtue, as described in the Iliad and Odyssey. This claim of the sophists was controversial because previously virtue had been seen as an inherited quality that people couldn’t learn but only hone. Hence there was a widespread belief that the sophists were charlatans who preyed on the vulnerable by promising things they couldn’t deliver.

The sophists lived in an age in which oratory (public speaking) became the most valued social skill of all. So much so that the education system from the age of 14 focused almost exclusively on teaching the techniques and theories of oral expression. To meet society’s need for leaders who could persuade others, competing schools arose run by likes of Isocrates (the next chapter will examine these in detail). Their services, however, were often exceedingly expensive. This was, then, the age in which PR became a recognisable trade concerned with advocacy and managing reputations. But it was our trade at its most loftiest and most worldly. The rhetoric of the sophists brought politics, philosophy and PR to life simultaneously. For all practical intents and purposes they were inseparable in their hands. It took the theoretical work of Socrates, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle to unbundled them by separating sophistry from philosophy, which is something we shall explore more in chapter 2.

Sophists – in the sense of those who practiced sophistry – thought that truth was inseparable from eloquence: arguably, they often mistook eloquence for the truth itself. They invented grammar and philology. They worshipped prose and the periodic structure (holding the main clause or its predicate until the end). They aligned words to express the “truth” rhythmically. They were the masters of the use of assonance, allegory, alliteration, simile and metaphor, and other pleasant sounds that enticed the ears to seduce the mind. In similar manner to the Renaissance thinkers of the 14^th to 17^th centuries Europe, they advocated living life to the full based on the quest for excellence in all human undertakings.

One of the leaders of the early school of sophists was Protagoras of Abdra (490 BC – 420) who started life as a porter, and who is remembered most for coining the humanist mantra, “man is the measure of all things”. He specialised in teaching “antilogik”, which involves arguing every side of an argument in debate in a balanced manner. However, his work Kataballontes (overthrowing arguments) describes strategies and techniques designed to make a desired outcome triumph using the art of persuasion. As a consequence, Protagoras was widely criticised for teaching people how to manipulate arguments so that the ones they favoured always trumped those that they opposed.

Another of the leading sophists was Gorgias. He believed that there were no universal values of right and wrong and that nothing existed (or at least that they could not be proved to exist objectively). He said if things did exist they could not be known. He added that if even if things could be known that knowledge could not be passed from one person to another. In his view truth was the product of debates in which diametrically opposed positions were reconciled in a particular circumstance. Truth in short, according to Gorgias, is something subjective that humans create linguistically through discourse (that sort of makes him the precursor and inspiration for post-modernism).

Gorgias thought that rhetoric was neutral and could be used for good or bad purposes on either side of any debate. He also believed in rhetoric’s supernatural powers, which could enchant audiences with hypnotic incantations and the magic of words. Gorgias maintained that rhetoric was capable of convincing virtually anyone of virtually anything. To prove this point, he showed his students how to defend Helen’s role in the Trojan War by claiming she was not responsible for abandoning king Menelaus and running off with Paris to Troy. Challenging Homer’s classic account in the Iliad, Gorgias gave four possible excuses for her actions: “it was the will of the gods; she was taken by force; she was seduced by words; or she was overcome by love.”

Such claims also resulted in him being denounced for his ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger. He reinforced this view when he stated that all we know about reality “lies in the human psyche and its malleability and susceptibility to linguistic manipulation.” In other words, as modern PRs are prone to say (much too much for my liking), perception is reality.

However, the sophists’ proposition that there were many truths challenged the underpinnings of Greek democracy, which presupposed that some truths were immutable. In contrast, in so far as the sophists believed truth existed they mostly viewed it in terms of probabilities and likelihoods (Eikos in Greek) rather than absolutes. This difference of opinion was exasperated by the lack of clarity within the polis about exactly what truths were immutable. That is beyond the “obvious” concerning the position of women and slaves, and the hold of mythology over the collective imagination that manifested itself in the near-worship of Homeric heroes and the actual worship of the gods.

In practice the city-states of Classical Greece never had a strong ideology to guide their governments: there were an abundance of conflicting gods, no over-arching moral beliefs, no scared texts; besides Homer’s legacy, which acted as Classical Greece’s unifying cultural anchor. The majority opinion within the polis was determined by the majority vote in Athens of citizens and in Sparta by the votes of an elite strata guided by its complicated but quite robust constitutional rules which combined oligarchy with democracy (each of the many city-states was constituted differently). But the outcome of votes was often unpredictable. Athens in particular was prone to losing control of democracy to demagogues who appealed to the prejudices and emotions of the crowd.

The vagaries of Greek democracy, politics and beliefs left the sophists vulnerable to being accused of subversion for contradictory reasons: sometimes for their lack of reason and sometimes for their commitment to it. Socrates, for example, was a critic of the relativism of the sophists. He refused to accept money for his services. He condemned his rivals for their amoral views and for their lack of critical thinking in the pursuit of truth. But he was tried and condemned to death for subverting authority, corrupting the youth, and, among other things, for being an incorrigible sophist.

7. Why Plato blamed Homer, Sappho, sophists, theatre and art for spin

By now, we post moderns are feeling almost queasy with recognition. During the centuries of the Reformation, Renaissance and the The Englightenment, the world stayed fairly solid under our feet and in our heads. We could be fairly content with a rationalistic and materialist account of things. Gods and myths were available, but were increasingly kept for high days and holidays. Increasingly, however, the power of the imagination has been brought home to us until by now relativism, fuzzy logic, emotional intelligence, point of view, and a host of other agendas have led people to half suppose they live in a sort of dreamscape, or even a nightmare.

The School of Athens by Raphael (1509–1510), fresco at the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

This is why reading about Greek thinking is so exhilarating. The further we press on into a world of media and perception, the more we realise just how well-equipped we are by our Classical forebears. They seemed to have seen all the essentials of our dilemmas. And of course, we find Plato waiting for us, a bit stern sometimes, but cool, too, and seemingly determined that we hang on to the nuts and bolts of good sense.

Hundreds of years after Homer and possibly in the year of Gorgias’s death in 380BC, Plato objected to the change in the function of art, literature and rhetoric in the Republic. In the same year he also picked philosophical quarrel with poetry and art in Gorgias. Twenty years later in the Phaedrus, Plato went on to outline his parameters for practical philosophical rhetoric that’s also ethical (more on that book in chapter 2).

Voicing his objection in the Republic to the new freedom of expression society granted artists, Plato condemns them for introducing fakery and psychological tricks into their work. Above all, he blames Homer’s influence for corrupting the morals and character of the youth by popularising myths. He says in effect that Homer’s epics provided society with a poor role model by showing the gods in a humanist light that portrayed them as being unreliable, dishonest and quarrelsome; Plato believed in the goodness and sanctity of the gods. Plato also expresses his disapproval for the way in which people studied Homer’s works with a view to arranging their whole lives around them. He pointedly excludes Homer from his perfect and imaginary “noble state” (kallipolis) because it would be wrong to transmit the ethos of society through mythological poetry in a city-state governed by the exercise of reason.

Nevertheless, in the Republic Plato acknowledges Homer as Greece’s leading poet and in Anthologia Palantia, a work ascribed to Plato, he supposedly dubs Sappho the tenth muse, meaning that in his eyes she was virtually a god in her own right.

According to Plato, for all Homer’s talk of military commanders, medicine, navigation, agriculture, fishing and horsemanship, the author knew little about any of them. In a similar fashion the painter and sculptor knows little except about the appearance of the things that they represent. He argued that the more realistic their art appeared to be the more illusion their facsimile of a facsimile of a form needed to convey.

In his satirical work entitled Gorgias, Plato has his eponymous character Gorgias conduct a discussion with the imagined Socrates (we presume that Socrates was dead by then, but we can’t be certain) about rhetoric. There, Plato slams rhetoric as flattery, foul and ugly, all nous and deceit, based on a good knowledge of words. He says rhetoric is the counterpart to cookery and amounts to no more than kairos, which is about knowing what to say and when to say it.

In Gorgias Plato compares rhetoric to those things traditionally considered an art, such as medicine, politics, and warfare. He reasons that rhetoric, unlike true arts, is a methodology without a specific subject or any basic data to serve as the foundation for those who practice it. The subject of medicine is healing, he states, which is accomplished by knowledge of illnesses and medicines. In contrast, he says there is no need for a sophist (or PR) to know the truth of the actual matters being addressed. Hence he denounced sophists for advocating that one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion, which will make a person appear knowledgeable.

Plato was clearly annoyed by Gorgias’s views. He denounced Gorgias, saying that his rhetoric, “be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack – must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society.” He believed, in contrast, that there were absolute truths to be sought as well as universal principles of right and wrong.

So, Plato frowned upon Homer’s epics and the licences it gave to artists to mess with messages and to invent narratives. He disapproved of the other innovations in artistic technique it encouraged. He believed that poets, playwrights, actors and other artists couldn’t recreate reality but only things that resembled it. He argued that socially constructed messages cast a spell on people that made them lose sight of reality. Hence Plato denounced the new art forms for making most of us, as opposed to the philosophical elite, susceptible to being bewitched by impressions (that’s a very contemporary concern).

Plato was rebelling against mimicry, tricky and the illusion of matching things in ways that made them look real. He was rebelling against what he saw as the corruption of character and morals by sophists and art during what was perhaps the most creative moment in human history. It was a period in which he played a major role and left a lasting intellectual legacy. His reputation as a thinker has survived because he touched on some truths and had some insights that are still valid: the appearance of things is not the same as the real thing.

Greece’s Golden Age in the fourth and fifth centuries was one of free expression and the creation of democracy. It was at that time that rhetoric was taught and practiced as it never had been before. This was a time of philosophic and scientific enquiry. It was a time when ideas became subject to proper interrogation: it was the world’s first Enlightenment. It still marks the moment against which all subsequent epochs have measured themselves.

In the next chapter I shall examine the development of systematised theoretical rhetoric in the thinking of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates (including their disputes). I will also sketch the anatomy of rhetoric that still governs communication and in particular PR today; however hidden its hand might be.

[5] Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists, Michael Gagarin, Paul Woodruff, page x, University Cambridge Press, 1995

No related pages.

Historians have always revelled in Elizabeth as perhaps the first monarch who set out to be loved by her people and who saw how such affection was politic. The nearer we come to our own time, the more admiring analysis we find of the skills she brought to this game. We find ourselves recognising them as tricks and techniques we have made into an important trade. And we also find that Elizabeth, as a Renaissance figure, was – in her very modernity – reaching back to classical skills from the inauguration of her reign to its end.

In 1558, as Queen Mary I lay dying in her bed, Philip II of Spain, Mary’s husband, sent his ambassador to consult with Elizabeth. Count de Feria reminded the queen-in-waiting that she would owe her throne to the king of Spain. His case was strong. Since Philip’s marriage to Mary in 1554 he had protected Elizabeth from the Queen’s wrath. It was Philip who finally persuaded his wife to recognise Elizabeth as her rightful successor.

Elizabeth replied that neither the king of Spain nor the nobility of England had paved the way for her reign. That honour, she said, went to her popularity among the English people. Feria wrote to his master, “She is much attached to the people… and is very confident that they are all on her side; which is indeed true”. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 54, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The rebuke Elizabeth gave Feria took guts. As Elizabeth waited for Mary I to die, her future was far from assured. She faced a sea of existentially threatening reputational issues that threatened to delegitimise her reign.

Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn who was executed for treason, adultery and incest. Officially her mother was decreed never to have married Henry VIII; though that made an absurdity of the adultery allegation. In the reign of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son and successor, Elizabeth was accused of having sexual relations with Thomas Seymour, her stepmother’s husband and the old king’s sixth wife (such a dalliance was taboo in both religions). Seymour was executed in 1549 for treasonable activities that seemingly had Elizabeth’s assent and perhaps even her active participation. After Edward VI died young in 1553, Mary I reintroduced Catholicism to England and, on good evidence, suspected Elizabeth of being complicit in a Protestant rebellion bent on deposing her. In response Mary I had Elizabeth sent to the Tower of London. She was made to enter via Traitors’ Gate, which traditionally meant that an execution was imminent. Even though Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, was persuaded to release Elizabeth, she still regarded her half-sister as a bastard child of an infamous woman. As Elizabeth waited to become Queen, neither the Catholic nor Protestant church recognized the legitimacy of her birth. Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne was also arguably more credible than Elizabeth’s (see part 1).

Meanwhile, England was a relatively poor and weak European power. Its economy was struggling; its army and navy were in a pitiful state and no match for the might of Spain or France.

Princess Elizabeth circa. 1546

So, when Elizabeth became Queen of England at the age of 25, her authority and legitimacy were questionable. Her realm was in danger of being overwhelmed by foreign foes.

Elizabeth I and her Privy Council advisers, not least the great Sir William Cecil and formidable Lord Walsingham, were well prepared to meet the challenges they inherited. They had all spent years reading Renaissance literature that revealed the anatomy of the rhetorical arts and the secrets of persuasion. In particular, they had been taught to wrap compelling narratives in the convenience of symbolic metaphors-in-motion, otherwise known as allegories, which appealed to diverse audiences for conflicting reasons. They now had the opportunity to use that knowledge to add world-changing spark, spice and substance to religious and political expression.

Their Elizabethan Renaissance was the age of emblems, symbols and celebrity. The fashion in England was to weave iconographical and allegorical representations of perceived truths and morals into the fabric of sermons, paintings, proclamations, pamphlets, poetry, pageants and other spectacles.

As Roy Strong explains in The Spirit of Britain, some of the images were kept obscure on purpose. The fashion was to produce coats of arms with pompous Latin mottos, fancy wax seals and abstract patterns in paintings and on clothes that carried hidden meanings, which looked and sounded medieval but were in fact of modern origin. Only the most educated members of elite society understood their messages. This obliqueness was a form of self-expression. It was the pursuit of the wealthy, which had a nostalgic and romantic attachment to the old feudal etiquette and styles. For instance, men loved to dress up as knights even though that position in society had been abolished.

In whatever form ideas were spread, the aim was to paint images in people’s imaginations. However, what concerns us more here is communication that reached out to the wider public.

Over the course of Elizabeth I’s reign she developed a compelling narrative theme that was updated regularly. Carefully managed public events were written up in pamphlets which were distributed nationwide. The narrative was then spread to a much larger audience by word of mouth. Above all, the retelling was staged managed literally at the theatre, which, with audiences often as large as 3000, was the major mass medium of the era:

Rather than use the Church as a communications channel to effect public persuasion, a path that might possibly have brought about open rebellion, Elizabeth turned to the Stage. Although this was by no means an open policy, that she did so has been attested to repeatedly by diplomats, intelligence agents, and educated contemporary observers. [Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Traders in business and aristocrats on estates and people on the street then discussed what they had heard and seen. It was also mulled over by members of all classes sharing a drink in England’s taverns.

Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569

The objective of Elizabethan image-makers was to compose allegories that got people talking about what was being communicated. Hence allegories designed for mass consumption required people to be able to interpret accurately what was being represented:

…the mentality which now turns to the comparative triviality of the crossword puzzle, then pondered on the sophisticated riddles of the emblems and impress.  [Shakespeare in His Own Age, Allardyce Nicoll, page 181, Cambridge University Press, 1976]

Deciphering and pondering these abstractions on a mass scale required a more literate and politically engaged public. This was something Elizabethan England positively encouraged. However, this social advancement had unintended consequences. As Roy Strong hints at here:

In this manner the visual arts were verbalised, turned into a form of book, a ‘text’ which called for reading by the onlooker. There are no better examples of this than the quite extraordinary portraits of the queen herself, which increasingly, as the reign progressed, took on the form of collections of abstract pattern and symbols disposed in an unnaturalistic manner for the viewer to unravel, and by doing so enter into an inner vision of the idea of monarchy. [The Spirit of Britain, Roy Strong, page 177, Pimlico, 2000]

Ironically, then, allegories designed to be easily understood by a broad audience risked being maliciously and humorously misrepresented. For example, J E Neale tells us in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how “drunken Burley of Totnes” regaled his neighbours with stories about how Lord Robert “did swive” the virgin Queen [page 80]. Shakespeare had the queen of the fairies, which was an allusion to Elizabeth, sleep with an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1601, on the eve of his armed rebellion, the Earl of Essex sponsored a public performance of Richard II in the forlorn hope that its storyline would incite London’s masses to join him. Essex and his followers were seduced by the play’s account of Henry Bolingbroke (Essex saw himself) overthrowing Richard II (he saw Elizabeth I) who had abdicated too many of his powers to court advisors (he saw Cecil and Raleigh).

Elizabeth’s successor James I, the first of the Stuarts, continued to communicate through allegories and to encourage the arts. But there was a feeling that the education of the masses had gone too far under the old regime. The Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon told James that he should reduce the number of schools teaching grammar because there was no point producing more scholars than the state could employ. He added that by educating farmers and artisans the realm had become full with “indigent, idle and wanton people, which are but materia rerum novarum [substance of new things]”.

Sadly, toward the end of James I’s mostly peaceful, tolerant and prosperous reign he articulated the old maxim of the divine right of kings. His successor Charles I lost his head defending that right and became an iconic victim of a 16th-17th-century power struggle that encompassed most of Europe .

Sections of Europe’s public, particularly the merchant classes, developed an increasingly distinct identity that was expressed assertively in political and religious matters. New printing presses and better communication links also ensured that new and dissident ideas spread over great distances at great speed. The ruling elites soon discovered, too late in Charles I’s case, that they could not, as they had in times past, easily ignore or silence their opponents.

The Reformation was a public inquisition on the meaning and value of familiar symbols, beliefs and practices that challenged the old elite’s privileges and prejudices. The new ways that dissidents advocated were for many ideas worth dying for, let alone arguing for. At the heart of it was a fundamental dispute about the relationship between religion and politics; it was a test of power between competing factions within society.

People on one side questioned the validity of the old order. They saw God’s word in a new light. On the other, the forces of the counter-Reformation for the salvation of souls defended the old ways. Somewhere in the middle were the humanists who became the catalyst for the creation of a new secular world order. The three tendencies intertwined, but they were really at constant loggerheads in terms of argument, doctrine and the future of society.

Throughout Europe these differences were debated in print and in the pulpits. However the divisions expressed ran much deeper than just a Catholic versus Protestant schism. They also pitted Catholic against Catholic and different Protestant tendencies against each other and monarchists against republicans and vice versa.

For instance, Cervantes pokes fun at the Spanish Inquisition, the church and monks in Don Quixote (1605 – 1615), revealing how the old order in Spain was being undermined from within. The Dutch Catholic humanist Desiderius Erasmus was one of many who delivered a radical, and at times hilarious, critique of his own church’s ecclesiastical abuses: “Luther was guilty of two great crimes – he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly”.

Whichever side people took, the ancient world’s rediscovered wisdom and the contemporary humanists who promulgated it influenced how they expressed their own ideas.

To its credit, since the early-15th-Century the Catholic hierarchy in Rome had been funding humanist writers to develop Ciceronianism, the literary movement of the Renaissance. It first encouraged the translation of Greek and Rome classics and the construction of a library in Rome devoted to humanist thought. It then hired humanists to overhaul the church’s Latin communications and to give its sermons more verve. Amazingly, in 1458 it elected the humanist Pius II Pope. He had a reputation as a Casanova (he had two illegitimate children), diplomat and belletrist. He courageously wrote about his life in the style of Cicero in his tell-all Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a wearer of the Papal tiara. Among many salacious revelations, the book describes how he was invited to an orgy in Britain, and how his election as Pope was rigged by a group of cardinals conspiring in the urinals. Subsequent popes may not have been inclined toward humanism in quite the same manner as Pius II, but they continued to make full use of its insights and practitioners. For instance, in the 1520s the Church used Cicero-style polemics to combat Martin Luther’s doctrines; one of which, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, was written by the English Catholic humanist Thomas More.

So by the time Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, the Catholic Church had already spent more than 100 years acquiring a modern voice. It was capable of using rhetoric and humanist writers to produce eloquent arguments in robust pamphlets, proclamations, speeches, broadsides, treatises and invectives designed to rouse people’s spirits and influence their opinions.

Indeed, as early as 1568 the Catholic Church was training secular youth in the Netherlands to oppose English Protestantism. In 1580 a year-old school in Rome sent the first Jesuit missionaries to England to reclaim the land for Catholicism.

Almost twenty years after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Pope Gregory XV consolidated these efforts in his Congregation of Propaganda Fide.

Elizabethan England was, however, more than a match for the Pope’s PR machine. The Queen herself was a great communicator. While her closest advisers Sir William Cecil and Lord Walsingham were the world’s first modern spindoctors and arguably the best to have ever practiced the art. She also had the support of William Shakespeare. He is thought to have worked for a company of actors and playwrights known as Queen’s Men and later The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which produced patriotic propaganda for the masses. In her 1947 book, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, the American intellectual Lily Campbell states that:

Each of the Shakespeare histories serves a special purpose in elucidating a political problem of Elizabeth’s day and in bringing to bear upon this problem the accepted political philosophy of the Tudors. [Quoted in Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Moreover, there was Edmund Spenser, who wrote the allegorical poem Faerie Queene in Elizabeth’s honour. It proved to be a potent piece of nationalistic propaganda:

Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine (full text here)

Elizabeth I: The Pelican Portrait - an allegory of her selfless love

Elizabeth and her inner-circle were visionaries. Their advantage over both their contemporaries and near successors was their understanding that feudal society’s mores and morals and all forms of immutable religious faith no longer provided sufficient glue to maintain stability. Tyranny was also of limited appeal to them, though not without its uses, given the rise of powerful new social forces capable of asserting their will. Instead, they accepted that the monarchy’s long-term survival meant letting go of some aspects of their control over society. They saw the need to relax somewhat their hold on people’s religious beliefs and practices. They conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that they no longer had a proper monopoly over debate and the dissemination of ideas within their realm. Though censorship remained a frontline weapon wielded with zeal.

Rising to the challenge of recasting her reputation, Elizabeth’s communication strategy was brilliantly formulated to redefine her ambiguities as strengths. Her intention was to make cognitive dissonance work for her.

Elizabeth I took the facts of her position and decisions and made sure that their merit was made glamorous and comprehensible. She made sure that her behaviour was seen (accurately, actually) to be the epitome of statecraft for her people. Everything was tweaked and honed to unite a wide range of audiences who might otherwise threaten her rule.

The first narrative salvo was fired during Elizabeth’s pre-coronation pageants before she’d had a chance to achieve anything. It was a bold and inspired example of Renaissance creativity in practice. Her confidence in her narrative reflected the ancient world’s humanist mantra that people could establish themselves in the esteem of an audience through eloquent words and telling images.

Elizabeth I’s pre-coronation pageants were a mixture of pomp, ceremony and unceremoniousness. It was very much a charm offensive that showcased her trademark touchy feely PR style. But there was more.

As Elizabeth was wheeled through London’s streets she insisted on stopping to talk to passersby. She also replied to the scriptwriters’ themes and interacted with the performances of the actors at the various pageants. As Professor Dale Hoak maintains, this effectively turned the procession into a conversation between the queen and her people:

…something Richard Mulcaster, the ‘reporter’ [he wrote the defining account of the event within a week of it] who helped script the pageants realized was unprecedented. [The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, The Transformation of the Tudor Monarchy, Dale Hoak, which can found in Westminster Abbey Reformed: 1540 - 1640, by C S Knighton and Richard Mortimer, page 135, Ashgate, 2003]

Elizabeth encouraged what Mulcaster described as “baser personages” to converse with her in private. They would handover flowers or express their goodwill, while she “staid her chariot, and heard theyr requestes”. According to J E Neale’s biography of Queen Elizabeth I this seemingly unbecoming behaviour from a monarch shocked the envoy from the Italian city of Mantua, who recorded that, “she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum” [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 63, The Reprint Society, 1942].

Ditchley Portrait highlighting her divine powers

Hoak says that Elizabeth I was the first English monarch to exploit the psychological possibilities of a coronation’s spectacle. Her proactive approach demonstrated that she valued her subjects’ opinions and their support. Her behaviour at the pageants communicated that she was their servant as well as their Queen. The seeming unity on the streets of aristocratic courtiers, London magistrates, merchants and artisans signified that the bonds linking the monarch to her people were reciprocal. It conveyed the impression that the bond she had with her people transcended social and official status and that she considered other classes to be level with the nobles in importance. Back then no other kingdom in Europe would have positioned their monarch’s relationship to their people at their coronation in such a populist manner.

Much of Hoak’s information comes from Richard Mulcaster’s account of the pageants in The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London To Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion. Mulcaster’s pamphlet, like the pageants he partly drafted, was paid for by London’s commercial elite; but the narratives and allegories of the pre-coronation pageants were most likely the co-creation of wealthy aldermen, Elizabeth and her advisers.

Mulcaster’s text provides some insights into the anxieties surrounding Elizabeth’s coronation. Describing the scene of London’s aldermen handing her one thousand marks in gold, Mulcaster records the exchange of words between Randolph Cholmley, London’s Recorder, and Elizabeth. Cholmley reportedly tells her to “mynd” [the purpose] of the gift. When Elizabeth accepts the money, from the people upon whose tax contribution her state depended, she replies, “no wille in me can lacke.” She adds, “neither doe I trust shall ther lacke any power”. And to drive home her message, she says, “for the safetie and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if nede be to spend my blood”. As Susan Frye assesses:

For just a moment, Elizabeth’s response breaks out of the mould of gracious obedience to make sure of the bargain: I will perform my part, but you must support my sovereignty. [Elizabeth I The Competition for Representation, page 42, Oxford University Press, 1993]

Frye is being astute. Elizabeth I was not yet secure. At the same moment as she celebrated her accession she was negotiating, if only symbolically, with her people about the terms of her rule. The pageants were helping the Queen to gauge public opinion as much as to influence it.

Our concern here is her PR messaging, rather than the events themselves. So let’s review in some more detail the narrative that emerged from her five pre-coronation pageants and from her first post-coronation speech.

Elizabeth I was painted in the mind’s eye as a “queen with the heart of a king”. She was presented as being very much her father’s daughter. This was an image that served her well thirty years later when she rallied her troops to resist the Spanish Armada:

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. [1588: Speech to the Troops at Tilbury]

Indeed, Elizabeth’s rhetoric in 1588 was consistent with how she presented herself in 1558. J E Neale writes in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how Spain’s ambassador Count Feria noted at the beginning of her reign that she longed “to do some act that would make her fame spread abroad in her lifetime, and, after occasion memorial for ever” [page 67]. Her messaging always reflected this aspiration.

Elizabeth I: The sieve is a symbol of chastity and purity

At the pre-coronation pageants Elizabeth made a virtue of being the product of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the woman blamed for the social turmoil after the break with Rome. She glossed over how her father had denied the legitimacy of her own birth in his will and Second Act of Succession. She instead blamed the problems of her society under the Tudors, not on the Tudors, but on the consequences of the War of Roses, which ended in 1485. The positive messages here were that she was a Tudor and a bringer of unity and concord, the unifier of the two warring houses of Lancaster and York. She was committed to maintaining the peace and that above all was what people wanted to hear.

The pageants’ allegories drew extensively on familiar themes from the Old Testament. Elizabeth explained her escape from the Tower of London, where they kept lions, as if she had had the same God-given help as Daniel when he miraculously escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s lions. The message was communicated by her in a prayer (women didn’t normally lead prayers in public so this was significant). She implied that God had saved her from the Tower so she could become Queen.

Elizabeth also portrayed herself as the new Deborah; a Hebrew goddess, female judge and military leader who rid the land of Canannite idolatry (a clear allusion to Catholicism) and restored good governance to Israel (a dig at Mary I). The allegory made great play of how she would consult the estates of England for the good of her citizens, the same way that the Old Testament in chapters 4 and 5 of Book of Judges said Deborah had.

For the consumption of the educated classes Elizabeth’s character was endowed with mythological qualities associated with the three Roman vestal virgins: Minerva, Vesta and Diana. She was compared most favourably to the goddess Diana, acclaimed for her light, inaccessibility, virginity, sovereignty, supremacy and impassibility.

At the pageant at Temple Bar she was proclaimed as the modern embodiment of two mythological giants, Gogmagot the Albion and Corineus the Britain. This allusion to English folkloric tales linked her spirit and lineage with the mystical founding fathers of England. It also had the benefit of invoking the images of well-known Old Testament characters of almost the same names – see here & here. Such allusions were designed to touch and provoke potent nationalistic and Biblical sentiments that reached out to everybody.

At the pageant Truth, the Daughter of Time, Elizabeth was heard to say “and Time hath brought me hither.” The pageant was:

…set in the form of two hills. One was green and beautiful, and on the summit was a handsome youth, gay in dress and spirits, standing under a green laurel tree: this represented a flourishing commonwealth [Respublica bene instituta]. The other all withered and dead, and a youth in rude apparel sat mournfully under an arid tree: this was the decayed commonwealth [Ruinosa Respublica]. Between was a cave from which Time emerged, leading her daughter Truth who carried and English Bible in hand. [Queen Elizabeth by J E Neale, pages 61/62, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The message had a double edge. The City was expressing what it wanted from her, which was Protestantism. She responded by implying with her actions and words that she was on their side. Elizabeth seemingly confirmed her role as the personification of the Truth by kissing the English Bible and then theatrically holding it aloft before hugging it to her bosom. Afterward she thanked the City for giving her the book. She said with God’s help she would oversee the renewed glory of the commonwealth after Mary’s rule had allowed it to wane. She was going to stamp out vices, which the audience took to be Catholicism, and uphold virtues, which they took to be Protestantism. The crowd cheered; though at the time it was unclear just what plans Elizabeth had in mind for the future of her realm.

The second salvo was fired several weeks after her coronation. Elizabeth I’s maiden speech to Parliament and her Privy council, read for her by Sir John Mason, declared that from now on she stood free from any reputation that had dogged her in times past or present (one assumes she meant before the pre-coronation pageants). Then, addressing the male audience on the sensitive topic of her gender and her marriage intentions, she said:

…albeit it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage, yet it is not to be feared but He will so work in my heart and in your wisdom as good provision by his help may be made in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir. That may be a fit governor, and peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me. For although I be never so careful of your well doings and mind ever so to be, yet may my issue grow out of kind and become perhaps ungracious. And in the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

Elizabeth Coronation portrait

It was a bold position to take. She had declared openly that she was minded not to marry; previously that option had been regarded as unthinkable. But marriage was not out of the question either. Creating this elbowroom was important. It was used as tool of her diplomacy. Beginning with proffering a maybe to marry Philip II, she went on to feign her intention to marry numerous suitors from states whose neutrality she required for a while.

The allegory of the Virgin Queen and Mother of England contained the overarching narrative of Elizabeth’s reign. God had preserved her so she could be wedded to her people. This way she took the judgement of her reputation out of the hands of man and placed it in the higher authority of God. This positioned her almost on the same level as the most elevated female from the New Testament: the Virgin Mary. Of course Catholics worshiped the Virgin Mary’s icon, but that was a practice now frowned upon in Protestant England. Instead, Elizabeth was portrayed as the sacred one, the deliverer of England’s people to a better world. This nationalist sentiment resonated with both England’s Protestants and Catholics.

The appropriation of this familiar theme for a new purpose and person was a stroke of brilliance.

It took the heat out of the thorny problem of finding an heir to throne that had bedevilled the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I. It allowed her to escape the constraints of traditional female virtue that positioned good women as passive creatures. As Susan Frye says in Elizabeth I, The Competition for Representation, the image of the Virgin Queen portrayed her instead as being free from the confines of marriage and male dominance; she had no husband, father, brother or other male relatives to obey. This was, therefore, a power play.

This clever use of the art of rhetoric persuaded the public, and not least elite society, to alter their perception of what to expect from Elizabeth as a woman and monarch. It provided Elizabeth with the necessary consent to play the man’s role in society as England’s legitimate Queen. Yet Elizabeth’s greatest PR masterstroke was not this, but it was the way in which she was able to unite and motivate her people.

One of the major issues she confronted was filling the vacuum at the heart of English communal life in the wake of the demise of overt Catholicism. Austere Puritans and pious parsons positively discouraged much of the seasonal fun and frolics the old religion had once encouraged in village life. In response, Elizabeth once again revealed her conservative instincts by getting her branding gurus to redefine past practices to serve contemporary purposes.

In 1586 William Warner published his popular poem Albion’s England, which set out a romantic vision of English traditions. It even eulogised the legend of Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws living in Sherwood Forest:

As Paske [Easter] began our Morrisse, and ere Penticost our May, Tho Robin Hood, Liell John, Frier Tuck, and Marian deftly play, And Lord and ladie gang till Kirke with Lads and Lasses gay. [Quoted in Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment, François Laroque, page 336, Cambridge University Press, 1991]

Warner implied with wit that Catholic and older pagan irreverent festivities were part of a patriotic culture that celebrated England’s glorious past, which supposedly began with Noah’s flood. Albion’s England met with some ecclesiastical resistance. However because the poem was passed by the censors it gave courage and support to those wanting to restore May Day, Whitsun and summer fun to the parishes and greens of England’s towns and villages.

As I outlined in part 1, Elizabeth I had a great understanding of contemporary realities. There was substance, policies, inspired leadership and a great grasp of ambiguity behind everything Elizabeth did. Above all, we should note that Elizabeth I was her own agency for change (she was not at the mercy of fate). She redefined Renaissance England according to her will and what was possible.

While Elizabeth clearly admired Cicero for his eloquence and insight into how to communicate effectively, she was just as influenced by his views on the principles governing the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Throughout her reign she showed a commitment to the Ciceronian maxim: Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex; the welfare of the people is the ultimate law. She even, for example, created the basis for the world’s first welfare state by introducing the Poor Law, which took a compassionate view of the state’s responsibility to alleviate poverty, in 1601.

English Renaissance communication techniques might appear primitive to us, perhaps. But let’s not forget what Daniel Boorstin says in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. He maintains that today’s PR, marketing and advertising executives are “simply the acolytes of the image”. He suggests that modern image-makers obscure the origin of content so that form takes on new meaning, in much the same way that Elizabeth I did. (I shall review the views of Boorstin in the second half of On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game).

Overall, Elizabeth’s positioning, messaging and policies were ahead of their time. From her cautious beginning she wrapped romance, war, progress and a new national identity in an evolving and compelling meta-narrative. Roy Strong summarizes the uniqueness of her PR achievement well:

Never before had so many lay people been drawn into the creation of a new national identity, one in which the arts were seen to play a crucial role. Even then nothing could have quite prepared anyone for the explosive energy of creation which followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. [The Spirit of Britain, by Roy Strong, page 174]

By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, she had inspired and united a kingdom previously murderously divided by two major religions of almost equal weight.

Out of the Elizabethan era came English nationalism, a new mercantile spirit, English colonialism and a cultural revolution. But from a PR perspective there was something even more significant and lasting to celebrate.

Elizabeth I’s near-separation of politics from religion defined a new space outside of public life, which was its modern counterpart: the private sphere.

What more should it take to become a PR icon than that?

Related posts:

1. Queen Elizabeth I: PR Icon (part 1)

In a letter to the FT last week, she criticises PRs who worked for Col Gaddafi and any who wouldn’t mind working for Iran. Setting out her own ideas, Fiske gets into a muddle and contradicts herself without shame or perhaps without realising it:

We [Public Relations Society of America] believe every person or organisation has the right to have its voice heard in the global marketplace of ideas. But for PR firms to represent dictatorships that do not afford that same freedom to their own people is disingenuous towards the liberties of a democracy and to democratic societies’ reputations as marketplaces for dissenting ideas.

Well, she can’t have it both ways. Either everybody has a right to a PR advocate, or they don’t. Her position, if we take what she says seriously, is that only people who run their countries according to the same democratic principles as the United States deserve PR counsel from the Western world. Moreover, Fiske writes in her letter:

Ethical public relations places an emphasis on counselling reputable organisations and individuals in developing and maintaining beneficial relationships with concerned stakeholders.

Nice work if you can get it.

Leave aside for the moment that Fiske is positioning the PR industry as the arbiter – which we are not qualified to be – of which person and organisation or country is “reputable” or what stakeholders are “concerned”.

Surely, the point of some very important PR is that it helps people who are considered (or may self-evidently be) unreputable. If they were of good reputation, they’d have scant need of our work. Oil companies need a lot of PR when their pipes and ships leak. Tobacco companies presumably need good PR all the time. (See Thank You For Smoking.) Ditto, professional downsizers. (See Up in the Air.) You get the picture.

The point isn’t that so-called sinners should be denied PR. Surely it is: what class of rogue is so utterly roguish that PRs shouldn’t take their money? Of course, we all have our limits, but they’ll likely be different.

A moment’s thought suggests that famous, outed, seemingly obvious rogues have a strong claim to PR’s efforts. They are the targets of huge, prejudiced, tediously liberal, right-on attacks, which are often unjustified. Why shouldn’t they have a defence? Besides, such media “victims” come with a huge risk for PRs, and that makes defending them an act of some courage, and therefore of some merit on those grounds alone.

I can easily imagine why for selfish reasons most PR agencies might reject Col Gaddafi’s reputed two million pounds sterling to launch a belated lobbying campaign against NATO. They would be right, I suspect, to assume the contract would do their reputations more harm than it would do his any good. Though if anybody does take the job, they should not be condemned by fellow PRs living in glass houses. (See PR Week).

There are far murkier waters than these, though. What about the covert-rogue? That’s the one who has a good and undeserved reputation and employs PRs to keep it that way. Is that acceptable work for a PR? The answer depends in part on how nasty the rascal is and how much the PR knows. (See “Deadly Spin” is mere spin.)

It is no good for PRs to argue that they don’t have to be any more picky than a defence lawyer. While courts of law might be symmetrical, the court of public opinion seldom is. In reality, the balance of opinion and media coverage is often tipped unfairly against clients. Hence we rightly assume the prosecution is competent and well-resourced: its best shot is likely to be pretty good and merits as good a response as is available. (See A new moral agenda for PR.)

It seems pretty obvious that Ms Fiske’s position is obviously way too saintly. She suggests that even if the US government was working in the past to repair relations with Libya and Syria, American public relations firms should have cold-shouldered them. Her qualification for our endorsement appears to be “people like us”. But that would exclude Saudi Arabia, China and Russia and many other countries in which PR is booming.

Of course, one could argue that in China PR firms mostly represent Chinese companies, rather than the state. Except that would be dishonest. In China the state owns most major companies and still commands the economy. It also gets its claws, admittedly indirectly, into the Western firms which operate there. (See Google comes of age in China.)

Ms Fiske works for the Public Relations Society of America. I imagine that it would like PR to be a respectable profession. Presumably its members believe that obeying a rather strict code is good in itself or good for business or both. I am interested in the merits of that sort of scheme. (See: When “friends” fallout over “dirty tricks”.) But I also admire the PR firms that say they don’t want to be part of the public relations industry’s hypocrisy.

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The White House, of course, does put a positive spin on all negative perceptions. The line is that the president inherited an economic mess that is taking longer than expected to fix; recovery is underway, affirming the president’s policies; the benefits of ObamaCare will soon become evident; Osama bin Laden has been taken out; the Afghanistan “preemptive withdrawal” strategy is working; and Libya is a matter for European and Arab countries and doesn’t require US leadership.

Still, much as we PR folks pride ourselves on our craft, there is a limit to what talking points can achieve. This narrative may satisfy political sympathizers but it is surely not enough to explain Barack Obama’s continuing level of popularity as the United States enters its election campaign season. Almost all of his predecessors had better economic records or could boast some significant progress in foreign policy. The fact is, Obama’s basic record does not compare favorably. So here are some non-spin explanations as to why he is still very much in the game.

First, there is currently no alternative to Barack Obama. Republican hopefuls have only just begun vying to win the opportunity to challenge him. The most likely choice at this point in time appears to be Mitt Romney, hardly a popular politician in his own party given the failing health care entitlement he introduced as governor of Massachusetts. Tougher opponents like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey have said they won’t be competing. Several other candidates could emerge, including Sarah Palin, the bête noire of European intellectuals, but at the moment there is no clear leader rallying the conservative base.

Second, although the economy is doing badly, many voters are willing to give the president a little longer before judging whether his deficit-led/ weak dollar approach has helped or made things worse. The jury is still out on Obama’s economic policies.

Third, Obama is the consummate social justice politician governing in a social entitlement era. Most people in Europe have grown up expecting the state to take care of their old age and ill-health, and to intervene in economic activities for the common good. The United States is perhaps a generation behind this curve but its entitlement programs are in many ways more generous than Europe’s. The wheels of our entitlement culture are beginning to look wobbly, with riots in debt-ridden Greece, resistance to austerity measures in Portugal, and budget travails in California. But the financial limits of big government are still not widely accepted among independents and liberals. The US federal government has been protected from high interest rates by the reserve status of the dollar but with the big three entitlements – social security, Medicare and Medicaid – all heading towards insolvency, judgment day is coming ever closer to Washington. The backlash has begun in the United States with the Tea Party movement but hard political choices can still be deferred for now and Obama has even extended the gravy train with his controversial ObamaCare legislation.

Fourth, the US media is overwhelmingly pro-Democratic, pro-big government and overtly partisan. This means that the president does not have to contend with the same levels of scrutiny and criticism as his predecessor or his political opponents. The new electronic media and Fox News have injected some balance into the equation, but the playing field is still heavily tilted in the president’s favor.

Add to these four facets the personal appeal of the president, a predisposition among Americans to want their presidents to succeed, the absence of personal scandals and the discipline of former officials to keep differences to themselves, and we have the basis for Barack Obama’s current approval levels. In Europe, his unwillingness to flex America’s muscles, particularly in Libya, is also an approach that has been largely embraced.

But two things are sure to change over the next year. First, Barack Obama will have an opponent who will challenge and bring greater attention to his record. Second, voters will be entitled to make a judgment on the president’s economic record. Will they feel better off than four years earlier? Will they believe that the economy is getting better as a result of the president’s policies?

Public relations cannot claim the credit for the president’s approval ratings. Too many other factors are at work. A lot will happen between now and Election Day and, as the campaigning gets underway, the real spin starts now.

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Egypt’s population is more than 80 million. According to the ITU, internet penetration stands at around 21 percent, much of it narrowband or very poor broadband. According to a comScore survey, there were just five million users of Twitter in the whole of the Middle East and Africa in August 2010.

Facebook, according to internet World Stats, is more popular than Twitter, with more than four million users in Egypt alone, some of whom are bound to be radicalised campaigners. Early on in the crisis a Facebook group attracted 80,000 members pledging to protest on January 25. It has influence, then, but hardly a major one.

The masses in Egypt are not connected to the internet. They are not social media users. Of course, the early protesters in Egypt were, as US Vice President Joe Biden said, mostly middle class. So, yes, they are the ones with most internet access.

Meanwhile, the much more massive working class stood back, restrained, perhaps, by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which wishes to avoid provoking the army. Even now that they are more visible, reports suggest that the crowds are large rather than huge. We are seeing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, but not millions of people on the streets: so far, anyway.

Now, when it comes to IT, the really powerful communication tool in Egypt is the mobile phone. In common with many developing countries mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent. That’s because most people have more than one phone from more than one provider. Moreover, a combination of 2G, 2.5G and 3G services allows for a measure of multi-media interaction between users; particularly when it comes to sharing videos and pictures.

The most effective application for organising protests, however, is low-bandwidth text messaging. Texting is fast. It is mostly written in street-speak on the street. It is difficult for the authorities to monitor or control its influence in real-time (a lesson the British police learned when Prince Charles’ car was recently attacked by students in London). But phones – like the internet – are easy to cut. They also leave a trail that can be traced.

Rather than being a revolutionary’s ideal hub, social media forums are a secret security service’s dream haunt. They are asymmetrical in an unexpected way. Though guerrilla in some respects, they allow spooks to observe and track down users without being noticed; eliminating the risk that following people on the street poses. On social media virtually everybody is undercover, or seemingly anonymous, in the sense that you can never be sure people are who they claim to be. The state, though, can find out nearly anybody’s true identity. This gives them ready-made lists of people, knowledge of their intended actions and actual opinions, not to mention their network connections.

In short, social media allows a dictatorial regime to deactivate activists at will, as this Egyptian case highlights:

“Khaled Said was a shy, soft-spoken 28-year-old who ran a small business in Alexandria.

“Last summer, he came across a video that appeared to show local police officers dividing up the spoils of a drug bust, so on June 6, he posted it on his blog.

“A few hours later, two plainclothes officers emerged from a nearby police station to pay Mr. Said a visit. They found him in an Internet café [internet cafe's are not safe havens] by his house, just off the harbour, and dragged him to the street.

“Twenty minutes later, Mr. Said was dead, his head smashed against a marble staircase in the lobby of the building next door.”

Of course, that incident itself provoked a backlash on Facebook. Around 30 000 people joined a page which proclaimed “We Are All Khaled Said”. So, undoubtedly Facebook has been become a rallying point for some activists and a means for them to spread their word at home and abroad.

But what’s really striking to me is how outside Egypt social media users have become voyeurs. Some of us have also become delusional cheerleaders of other people’s struggles. We feel involved – even when we are not really even aware of the real issues or possible outcomes – because we’re all apparently linked via social media, or because we saw some appalling violence on YouTube or here.

There’s something very narcissistic (not to mention morbid) about watching video-clips of demonstrators getting tear-gassed and shot. Commenting on it all has become a kind of social media sport. It is not about Egypt, but mostly about us and how we feel about the supposed power of our new toys. The complexity and the nuances and the shades of grey – the fact that we mostly know virtually nothing about the forces, or who the good or bad guys really are, behind the protests – gets obscured in our social media forums and self-obsessed minds.

But let’s not get carried away. According to Jared Cohen, based in New York, a former State Department tech guru and now Director of Google Ideas, ”one” (yes, just one) Egyptian claimed: “facebook used to set the date, twitter used to share logistics, youtube to show the world, all to connect people”.

Well, contrariwise, I’ll give my expert opinion on organising protests and taking on the police; my credentials are (the insight of a misspent youth) fairly credible on this point.

The reality of revolt is that old-fashioned word-of-mouth communication is the best form of communication in any confrontation with one’s nation state. That communication takes place in real-life social networks inside living communities, rather than in virtual online ones. It takes place between people who look each other in the eye and then trust each other on the street when the going gets rough. Of course – and  I don’t know how much experience I had of this – protesters may be subject to deep undercover observation by the state. (And even, to be vulgar for a moment, and apropos the UK’s climate protest, the prospect of deep-throat undercover treatment by the organs of authority.)

Soon, I hope to post on the important role of new-old technology: Al Jazeera may be spreading a wholly new understanding in the Arab world. It is communicating vividly and continuously that the state may attempt to be omniscient, and is powerful: but it is not – perhaps – omnipotent.

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The media are a jumpy herd. The Guardian newspaper profited from Julian Assange’s release of classified American documents that exposed military intelligence and diplomatic cables. It published them on WikiLeak’s selective, prejudiced and partisan terms. But now the same newspaper has published leaked details of the sexual assault charges that Assange faces in Sweden. I hope he’s innocent, of course. Then we can go back to disliking him for his intolerable smugness.

In the tradition of Xmas seasonal humbug Assange accuses the Swedish authorities of “deliberately and illegally, selectively taking bits of its material and giving them to newspapers”. He also told The Times newspaper that he has become critical of The Guardian’s reporters as journalists and as human beings. It seems that the hand that he fed has got up some nerve and swiped him, and it hurts. The rest of us have the small thrill of watching a leaker leaked-against, and his hating it more than those he leaked against did. “A gentleman” doesn’t tittle-tattle, Assange said, with a straight face. What a po-faced little git of a hero he is, to be sure.

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph has secretly recorded the views of the UK’s Business Secretary Vince Cable on Rupert Murdoch’s quest to acquire the majority equity in BSkyB. Scorning his ministerial obligation to remain neutral in the decision-making process, Mr Cable told undercover reporters that he was intent on blocking the deal on political grounds:

“You may wonder what is happening with the Murdoch press. I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win.”

Someone at The Daily Telegraph seems to have been worried that because of his or her newspaper’s opposition to Murdoch’s ambitions it might not have shared this sting material with us and so leaked it to Robert Peston, of the BBC, which probably doesn’t like the deal either.

It may good or bad news that it is no longer Cable (at Industry) but Hunt (at Culture, Media and Sport) who’s going to take the decision on Murdoch’s empire-building. It depends which way the decision goes; which way you want it to go; and which way you think it might have gone. Good luck in unpicking that little lot.

Before we get lost in the Murdoch stuff, we should gawp at Vince Cable accusing the government of leading a “kind of Maoist revolution”. It won’t be long, I fear, before Mr Cable denounces the Tories as revisionists in need of re-education.

Mr Cable certainly showed signs of having read the “Little Red Book” when he acknowledged Chairman Mao’s insight that real power comes from the barrel of a gun:

“They know I have nuclear weapons, but I don’t have any conventional weapons. If they push me too far then I can walk out and bring the government down and they know that.”

They will also have spotted (and probably Mr Cable has as well) that the point about the nuclear option is that it can also be a form of martyrdom, which is all too fashionable these days, and not the least bit attractive.

Mr Cable has emerged as a man close to events as well as being flaky, vain, and changeable, as well as clever. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his customary dry deftness, described his lefty Lib-Dem colleague as a “powerful ally”, which was deliciously ambiguous. Indeed, one might say the Tories have had a good week: Cable has been allowed to survive and – now being thought a twit by all sides – has been weakened as an enemy and defined as an unreliable collaborator. The left will go on thinking him noble, and a BBC journalist opined:

“…once the kafuffle has died down, he [Cable] may well conclude that the whole episode has played to his advantage.

For the talk of “fighting a war” within the Coalition surely shows the seriousness with which Mr Cable is prepared to go toe-to-toe to stand up for Lib Dem views.

“…All of which can only be music to the ears of apprehensive Lib Dem activists concerned they’ve been rolled over by David Cameron.”

But surely it is also likely that he has started to enfeeble the wider impact of his resignation or sacking, whichever comes first (assuming he doesn’t totter on until the Government falls or faces re-election)? After all, one wonders what odds a bookmaker would give any Lib Dem candidate’s chances of survival at the next general election.

The wider electorate will think Cameron-Osborne were wise to keep the old fellow more or less onboard and the Tories will have gained sympathy for having to deal with such wobbly allies.

What I’m enjoying most from these two parallel headline-making farces is that they show that the mainstream media – dead tree press or otherwise – are far from moribund. There’s still a fourth estate to be reckoned with. It is not easily governed or corrupted by either governments or pompous scandal-merchants such as Assange and there’s always a ready supply of puffed-up chatterers like Cable for it to expose. Sure, the media are not trustworthy or particularly consistent or predictable. They make reputations only to trash them.

The good news is that even the likes Assange and the once-thought-saintly Vince Cable get outed in the end, however much they delude themselves that they are kingmakers beyond public interrogation. So, yes, the media are conflicted. That’s what makes them invaluable and dangerous. But it is precisely because influencing the media over the long-haul is such a tough job that PRs are in such demand.

Talking of future demands, to all the readers of this online review of 21st-century PR issues, I offer my seasonal best wishes. I say farewell to 2010, and I hope that you will welcome 2011 with the same optimism and sense of fun that I hope to keep. Meanwhile, here’s three quotes from comrade Mao to chew on:

“The differences between friends cannot but reinforce their friendship.”

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.”

“I voted for you during your last election.”

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My countryfolk are screaming foul. Oh dear, they were always dreaming. They never stood a chance. It is possible that England’s governing Football Association thought that PR could influence the outcome. The Russians showed them what nonsense that was. They lost the technical and commercial bids and the wider PR campaign. Yet they won the vote to host the World Cup because they were offering what FIFA craves. The Russians probably also focused almost exclusively on the private views of the 22 committee members, rather than FIFA’s public rhetoric.

Never mind any possibility of corruption’s persuasive powers, there were sound reasons for Russia’s win. FIFA’s President Sepp Blatter has long been intent on spreading football’s influence across the globe. As the BBC reported:

Russia wrapped things up with their Fifa member Vitaly Mutko pointing out that eastern Europe has never previously hosted the World Cup.

“Twenty one years ago the Berlin Wall was broken,” said Mutko. “Today we can break another symbolic wall and open a new era in football together.

“Russia represents new horizons for Fifa, millions of new hearts and minds and a great legacy after the World Cup, great new stadiums and millions of boys and girls embracing the game.

“Russia’s economy is large and growing, and Russia’s sports market is developing markedly.”

The last World Cups have been in Japan and South Korea (2002) and South Africa (2010). The next ones will be in Brazil (2014), Moscow (2018) and then Middle East (2022). The fact that Russia and Qatar were high-risk choices should provoke a “so what” response. Risk is a challenge to overcome and not a reason for inaction or rejection.

Actually, wouldn’t a good liberal, kindly, globalising, civilised view be that it is exactly right that FIFA’s choices fell as they did? Russia (which has for centuries half-yearned to be Europeanised) and Qatar (which has for several years been an invaluable Western-bridgehead to the Moslem world) are the very places where football may be a benign influence. Indeed, why not argue that football mostly thrives in Westernised countries, but can be a force for culture and good in more backward countries just as it is in Manchester’s Moss Side?

The British footballing establishment’s moan that FIFA is bent, or at least manipulatively dishonest, reeks of sour grapes. It is a statement of the blindingly obvious. But given what goes on from the FA downwards in Britain’s domestic game, claiming moral superiority whiffs of cynical hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, anybody who blames the British media for FIFA’s rejection of England’s bid is looking for scapegoats. The BBC’s Panorama‘s controversial last-minute report on FIFA’s “wrong doings” lacked substance and was far from convincing and very possibly libelous. However,The Sunday Times did cleverly catch two of FIFA’s World Cup selection committee openly selling votes for cash. But so what? England was already defeated. In this battle, winning never depended upon the media’s support.

The question, then, is why did prime minister David Cameron expose himself to inevitable humiliation on the world stage? There are a couple of linked possible explanations. Clearly, he would have quite liked to host the World Cup. Presumably, it would have helped pay for the 2012 Olympic infrastructure losses. He may have lusted after the competition’s ability to bring his people together around a vision of sporting glory at Wembley Stadium: but that would have been a dream, too, surely? We might have proven ourselves good losers and warm hosts: as South Africa did. Indeed, it may well be that we rise to similar opportunities during the Olympics. Let’s hope so.

The only explanation I can propose is that at home David Cameron was in a no-lose situation. Backing the bid, and going down with the ship, gave him a chance to modify his Top Toff Tory, Squire Cameron, image: he was at one with us oiks, at small cost to his pride. (Ditto, the heir to the throne, by the way.)

We have to hope that Britain’s Foreign Office and its spy network had enough inside information to advise David Cameron wisely about the FIFA process (if not he could have asked me). Hence, it is doubtful that defeat came as a complete shock, even if the lack of even minimal support did.

It is time that people got real about football. It is the last bastion of the politically incorrect and skullduggerous old world. It gets away with it because it is a game that provokes passion precisely because it does not obey the real world’s rules. If Cameron and Barack Obama, who wailed that the rejection of the US bid was a mistake, had remained cool and stood aloof, Russia’s and Qatar’s victories would not have been half so consequential politically, indeed they could have been welcomed gracefully.

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He writes about the sometimes bizarre personal behaviour of his colleagues, and asks:

“What is interesting is why politicians take the risk. … My theory is that it’s precisely because of the supreme self-control you have to exercise at the top … Your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control. Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control.

“Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue … and put on a desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree … It’s an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life.”

Alice Thomson in today’s The Times amusingly remarks that Tony stops just short of advocating adultery as a form of stress relief. But she notes how the white lie of former prime minister Stanley Baldwin that “we are a Cabinet of faithful husbands” ended under Blair. She quotes him saying:

“They [the public] now understand, they empathise, and to some extent they indulge.”

Former Thatcherite minister Cecil Parkinson was never forgiven for fathering a child with Sarah Keays in the 1980s. Fallen Tory minister and now sports commentator David Mellor will always be defined by Antonia de Sancha sucking his toe, says Thomson. But former New Labour ministers Robin Cook, John Prescott and David Blunkett are now more likely to be assessed on their political records or even their croquet playing than their off-side affairs with women, she adds.

I’d love it to be true. But the signs are not good. Foreign Secretary William Hague’s special adviser has just resigned over “untrue and malicious” allegations made against him. Supposedly the two shared a room on the election campaign trail more than once. Who cares what two men did in a hotel room? Their families, perhaps. But the rest of us don’t give a damn if the married shadow and then actual Foreign Secretary is gay or bisexual or not. It would be rather fun if he declared himself a modern metrosexual man in the style of David Beckham, and then still denied the charges.

Of course it doesn’t seem all that likely that a millionaire author would need to bunk up with a staffer as though he were a broke sportsman or musician on tour. But there you go. And one might conjecture why if the events were wholly innocent why WH didn’t just show the media the finger. Though it is plausible that WH felt his wife’s dignity was owed a full-on denunciation of the hacks and their innuendo. Mind you, if the accusations were true, it would still be proper for WH to lie his head off in the style of Hollywood’s “A Guide For The Married Man“, directed with a light touch by Gene Kelly, for the sake of anyone he cared about who cared.

Tony Blair is fluent in French and he has made French values (Swiss, Italian and German ones, too) almost acceptable in British public life. Surely, given that boost, now is the time for David Cameron to say in defence of Hague and his adviser – “move on, it is at worst a family matter. It is of no concern of ours. By all accounts the adviser is a star and good at his job. Both men deny ever having a relationship. Let’s call next business, please”.

I’ll come back to the meat of Tony’s memoirs when I’ve read them myself. But here’s a few first impressions. There’s something very confusing and masked in Tony Blair’s book. Sure, it is confessional: Princess Diana-style. But is it honest about the big issues? My first take is that Tony is all over-the-place and gushing in the book. That’s not helpful when one is interested in finding a rational core to what went on. But then again, his was a three-term emotional roller-coaster of a government from beginning to end. His memoirs, I suppose, were always going to be about him and how he feels and felt, rather than what really went on and why.

Available now: Blair’s memoir A Journey (Hutchinson) priced £25.

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Tony Blair knew he might as well have kept the money he’s going to earn from his book for all the love giving it away would get him. But he also knew he didn’t need the money; that it was blood money; that he owed it to the soldiers. And, he knew that he needed to de-taint the book if it was going to be read, which is what mattered most to him. With a controversial gift, which in itself attracts readers and interest, he decontaminated the brand, not his, but the book’s.

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She was out and about in Florida. She was there sending out reassuring PR messages to tourists. She told them not to abandon the Gulf Coast, in other words not to believe all the environmental catastrophe talk they’d been hearing on the news. She reminded the world that:

“There are still thousands of miles of beaches not touched by the spill. There are still opportunities to experience these beautiful beaches,”

She added:

“… folks here in Florida and across the Gulf Coast are still depending on visitors and tourist dollars to put food on their tables and to pay their mortgages and to send their kids to college.

Talking of paying bills. A local restaurant owner by the name of Patronis told the First Lady that oysters were off the seafood menu, not because they weren’t available but because “all the oystermen are working for BP,” leaving few men to scrape the oysters from nearby Apalachicola Bay.

Thank God for Mrs Obama and for the local tourist lobby who briefed her well. Her words couldn’t have been better timed, coming as they did as BP finally – we hope – plugged its deep-sea leaking oil pipe. If all goes well, by August the relief oil wells will have sealed the leak permanently. I predict that we will all be shocked by just how quickly the environment and BP’s reputation recovers.

Of course, my message, and I’m sure Mrs Obama’s message likewise, is not that environmental harm has not been done. The message is simply to keep it all in perspective.

This little incident highlights the power of competing PR agendas. There’s been a lot invested by environmentalists and politicians – not least Mrs Obama’s husband – in traducing BP over this spill. But the criticism was hyped and bordered on scaremongering. That had consequences far beyond BP.

Actually, early on in this crisis, President Obama also found himself stressing how lovely and open most of the Gulf beaches were. His remarks then, even more than Mrs Obama’s now, remind us that catastrophism is a very dangerous weapon. Being doomy is great when you’re trying to deflect blame and raise the stakes, but it’s less good when real hoteliers, for instance, get side-swiped as collateral damage.

The trouble is that it is hundreds of times easier to spread ideas, impressions and images of damage – and make them seem widespread, severe and permanent – than it is to remind people of a nuanced picture. This is an important effect of the media, which is much more the politician’s tool than reality is. The media can make one oiled pelican stand for all nature and for every pelican. Reporters can easily go to the most damaged spot and make it stand for the generality of damage, and make damage seem general.

Anyway, after a few months of uncertainty, noise and safe exaggeration, perhaps Mrs Obama’s remarks will see the beginning of a subtler picture. Of course, we have yet to see what the real damage of the spill is. We’ll know much better about a year from now.  Let’s hope Louisiana has thriving seaside and wildlife tourism between now and then and long after.

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