I don’t know if you’ve been watching the Netflix dramatised history series Alexander: The Making of a God, but it seems to have divided audience opinion: those who thought it was really good and those who thought it was really bad (I’m trying to avoid the word Marmite. But there I go.)
For me, it provoked two reactions that have dogged me all week. The first was about the way we glorify tyrants and warmongers, thereby granting them the immortality they crave and thus encouraging the next lot. Talk about the oxygen of publicity! If we just let these rogue specimens disappear into the mists of time, rather than naming cities and documentaries after them, maybe we would take away the incentive to follow their example. Would there be a Putin if there had never been a Stalingrad?
It is crazy how a minuscule minority of the human race can bring about so much death and destruction, simply by behaving so badly that the majority don’t know how to respond until it’s too late. It’s pathetic really but it’s a fascination we’re drawn to like moths to a flame. You don’t get many programmes about Gandhi but you can always find something on about the Nazis.
The second was about trousers.
These documentaries are always interesting in the way they make you imagine the world as it was long ago. And it was a world largely without trousers. All those famous conquerors – Alexander, Agamemnon, Julius Caesar, right through to William the actual Conqueror – did it without trousers. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Would Donald Trump be storming the Primaries if he turned up to his rallies in doublet and hose? Actually, come to think of it, he just might.
Although trousers were invented thousands of years ago by the horse riders of China to prevent chafing, they never really caught on in Europe until the industrial revolution, when the Health & Safety Executive deemed it unsafe to operate a loom while sporting a tunic and knickerbockers.
Indeed, the word ‘trousers’ didn’t trouble the English lexicographers until the 1600s and even then no-one really knew where it came from. The best guess is that it evolved from an Irish word ‘triubhas’, translated to the English ‘trouse’, for a pair of close-fitting shorts. The use of the plural is also mysterious. Why not just trouser? But then, why not just bloomer, or knicker, or drawer, or pant? Maybe it was something to do with the pressing need to cover the nether regions that made us pluralise all those essential garments. Safety in numbers.
It does seem daft that we know more about Alexander the Great than we do about trousers, doesn’t it? Clearly the historians are spending their time on the wrong kind of loons. I’ve got 10 quid on with William Hill that in the next 200 years there will be documentaries titled Hitler: The Master Planner and Isis: Ultimate Disruptors. My great great great great great great grandchildren will thank and worship me when that one comes in. They might even build a statue.
