The incipit of a radio column in the Scotsman:

Is Dot Branning a one-woman Greek chorus? Might Sophocles, not averse to a goblet of wine or two, have drawn inspiration at the bar of the Queen Vic? In OedipusEnders, comedian and self-confessed closet classicist Natalie Haynes discovers that ancient Greek tragedy and TV soap operas have more in common than might meet the eye. She meets soap scriptwriters and academics to consider this unlikely sounding thesis. Both genres, she argues, tend to focus on families under pressure, both make it their business to confront audiences with social taboos – and both, she adds, seek to attract large audiences. Talking to the likes of John Yorke – current head of BBC Drama and a former executive producer of EastEnders – and other writers and producers involved in Brookside and The Bill, she is assured that the spirits of Sophocles and Aeschylus hover around soap script conferences more frequently than you might imagine.

Not everyone agrees, however, and Barrie Rutter, artistic director of Northern Broadsides Theatre Company, currently touring with Euripides’s Medea, reckons that any perceived link between the two genres is rather spurious …

via Radio listener – The Scotsman.

I suspect/hope we’ll be getting more coverage on this one … an excerpt from the Times (tip o’ the pileus to Diana Wright):

Argument still rages over where the Alpine crossing took place. While there is general agreement that Hannibal moved up the Rhône from Avignon almost to Valence, from there onwards every valley and pass has had a case made for it being the route across the mountains into the plain of the Po near Turin. In 1959 an elephant called Jumbo was taken over the Col du Clapier by the British Alpine Hannibal Expedition to prove the route’s feasibility. This adventure was immortalised in John Hoyte’s book, Trunk Road for Hannibal. In 1988 the cricketer Ian Botham did the same thing, but with three elephants, in aid of leukaemia charities.

From the Col du Mont Cenis in the north to the Col Agnel 35 miles 60km almost due south of it three approach routes have been argued for. In the most recent study, Dr William Mahaney, a geomorphologist, and his colleagues have looked at the evidence from Classical sources.

“As documented by Polybius and Livy in the ancient literature, Hannibal’s army was blocked by a two-tier rockfall on the lee side of the Alps, a rubble sheet of considerable volume,” they note in the journal Archaeometry. “The only such two-tier landform lies below the Col de la Traversette, 2,600 metres above sea level, a rubble sheet with sufficient volume to block the Carthaginian army.

“The character of the rockfall can best be seen from the sides or below, where a thin cover mass lies atop a much larger and more substantial rubble mass,” they say. “The trail cuts across a steep bedrock slope laced with a two-tier combination of rockfall and slide, just as Polybius described more than 2,150 years ago.” The trail has been shored up with ballast one to two metres thick, and Dr Mahaney’s team believes that artefact evidence may survive: “The three-day struggle to forge a path through the rockfall must surely have resulted in the abandonment or loss of implements used by Hannibal’s troops to prepare a path with sufficient ballast to support the passage of the baggage train, horses and elephants.”

Hannibal is said by Livy to have ordered timber to be cut and laced around the blocking rocks and then set alight. When a high temperature was reached, sour wine was thrown on to the hot rocks, splitting and spalling many of the large stones and allowing Hannibal’s engineers to remove them.

Dr Mahaney’s studies, in a book, Hannibal’s Odyssey, suggest that the tree line would have been higher in ancient times, so that timber would have been available; the area today is treeless. So far, however, there is no evidence of fire-shattered rock on the Col de la Traversette, although otherwise it fits the ancient descriptions. The site is the only area where rockfall and rockslides blocked part of an existing road, and where they can be plausibly dated to the right period. In most respects, “this location meets the criteria outlined by Livy and Polybius,” the team concludes.

• via Hannibal’s real Alpine trunk road to Rome is revealed – Times Online.

The Times also gives a source for the original article in Archaeometry which (o joy of joys) happens to be a freebie :

THE TRAVERSETTE (ITALIA) ROCKFALL: GEOMORPHOLOGICAL INDICATOR OF THE HANNIBALIC INVASION ROUTE* (p 156-172)
W. C. MAHANEY, B. KAPRAN, V. KALM, P. TRICART, C. CARCAILLET, O. BLARQUEZ, M. W. MILNER, R. W. BARENDREGT, P. SOMELAR

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Of course, the debate will rage on …