It was denial and hubris that got him in the end, general Varus in AD 9, who oversaw one of the worst Roman defeats ever recorded. The massacre, at the hands of the Germans in the Teutoburg Forest east of the Rhine Frontier, was gruesome. But it came to mean more than that: this wasn’t just a major loss that halted Roman imperial expansion, but a cosmic fight between civilisation and barbarism. That may be somewhat of an undergrad reading, but it was handy for propagandising at the time.

I was reading the historian Tacitus’s account of Teutoburg Forest while Oscar-hopeful Timothée Chalamet was making headline news. A clip of the actor was circulating: no one cares about opera or ballet any more, he said. He wants to work in movies – an art form that still attracts an audience. It’s an honest and brave thing to say.

In response? The opera and ballet “community” (dreadful word) lost their heads. They called the remarks “ineloquent”, “narrow-minded” and “reductive”. It was “disappointing” and didn’t he know there was “nothing more impressive than the magic of live theatre, ballet and opera?” This was all just evidence of his inexperience, they went on, his philistinism, his un-collegiate nature; Chalamet posed a danger to the profession.

Meanwhile, the performing arts are in precipitous, some say terminal, decline. Opera attendance is plummeting, its core........

© The Irish Times