Sphinx

It was scarcely a revelation that Boris Johnson should have written two articles about the EU Referendum, trying out the arguments and testing the different propositions before choosing the side that seemed to suit his personal ambitions best. A little more surprising was the lapse in his knowledge of classical myth, confusing two different classical accounts of journeys into hell: “He [Cameron] was going to probe the belly of the beast and bring back British sovereignty, like Hercules bringing Eurydice back from the underworld.” Johnson’s gratuitous classical references are, we may reasonably suspect, all part of his carefully constructed image, and I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if one of the reasons for the crisis of A-level Classical Civilisation turned out to be widespread aversion to classical literature and history as a result of his appropriation of them, making it ever harder to argue against the association of the subject with arrogance and privilege. But this supposed display of superior intelligence and education does depend on him getting the references right…

Well, we all make mistakes. But it would be an error, as Freud reminds us, to imagine that mistakes are always random and meaningless, and that the only thing of interest here is Johnson confusing Orpheus and Eurydice with Heracles and Alcestis. Why does he confuse or conflate the stories in this particular way? For example, Heracles is a very different sort of hero from Orpheus; the master of bewitching music might indeed have made a better analogy for PR man Cameron, but figuring the latter as a club-wielding, lion-wrestling strongman introduces a deliberate note of bathos – while at the same time revealing Johnson’s unconscious fears and sense of inferiority compared to such a figure, who had at least attempted to act rather than write a few self-deprecating newspaper columns.

Further, Heracles succeeded in rescuing beautiful Sovereignty from the hell of Brussels bureaucracy [you see why classical allusions are great? Giving an air of sophistication to a fundamentally idiotic conception of the world], whereas Orpheus failed: which story did Johnson really have in mind, only to be sabotaged by his tendencies in the other direction? A story of the hopelessness of Cameron’s renegotiation, undercut by the sense that this could actually end well with the right man in charge, or a story of the successful reclaiming of the right to discriminate against foreigners disturbed by the thought that, in a globalised world, this may be a pretty hollow victory, the recovery of a ghost that fades away when you look at it?

And then we might compare the back story of the two expeditions; why travel to hell in the first place? For Orpheus, it’s all about love of an idealised object, a selfish refusal to accept change. Heracles, on the other hand, is genuinely heroic, but it’s all because of the absolute selfishness of Admetus that he has to do it at all. By conflating these stories, Johnson is perhaps trying to construct a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the British people’s beloved Sovereignty has been taken from them by a cruel twist of fate with the connivance of the self-serving cosmopolitan elite, so she must be rescued – but the wrong hero has been chosen…