As folks are generally aware, the amount of historical evidence available to historians decreases the further back you go in history. This has a real impact on how historians are trained; my go-to metaphor in explaining this to students is that a historian of the modern world has to learn how to sip from a firehose of evidence, while the historian of the ancient world must learn how to find water in the desert. That decline in the amount of evidence as one goes backwards in history is not even or uniform; it is distorted by accidents of preservation, particularly of written records. In a real sense, we often mark the beginning of “history” (as compared to pre-history) with the invention or arrival of writing in an area, and this is no accident.
So let’s take a look at the sort of sources an ancient historian has to work with and what their limits are and what that means for what it is possible to know and what must be merely guessed.
The most important body of sources are what we term literary sources, which is to say long-form written texts. While rarely these sorts of texts survive on tablets or preserved papyrus, for most of the ancient world these texts survive because they were laboriously copied over the centuries. As an aside, it is common for students to fault this or that later society (mostly medieval Europe) for failing to copy this or that work, but given the vast labor and expense of copying and preserving ancient literature, it is better to be glad that we have any of it at all (as we’ll see, the evidence situation for societies that did not benefit from such copying and preservation is much worse!).
The big problem with literary evidence is that for the most part, for most ancient societies, it represents a closed corpus: we have about as much of it as we ever will. And what we have isn’t much. The entire corpus of Greek and Latin literature fits in just 523 small volumes. You may find various pictures of libraries and even individuals showing off, for instance, their complete set of Loebs on just a few bookshelves, which represents nearly the entire corpus of ancient Greek and Latin literature (including facing English translation!). While every so often a new papyrus find might add a couple of fragments or very rarely a significant chunk to this corpus, such additions are very rare. The last really full work (although it has gaps) to be added to the canon was Aristotle’s Athenaion Politeia (“Constitution of the Athenians”) discovered on papyrus in 1879 (other smaller but still important finds, like fragments of Sappho, have turned up as recently as the last decade, but these are often very short fragments).
In practice that means that, if you have a research question, the literary corpus is what it is. You are not likely to benefit from a new fragment or other text “turning up” to help you. The tricky thing is, for a lot of research questions, it is in essence literary evidence or bust. […] for a lot of the things people want to know, our other forms of evidence just aren’t very good at filling in the gaps. Most information about discrete events – battles, wars, individual biographies – are (with some exceptions) literary-or-bust. Likewise, charting complex political systems generally requires literary evidence, as does understanding the philosophy or social values of past societies.
Now in a lot of cases, these are topics where, if you have literary evidence, then you can supplement that evidence with other forms […], but if you do not have the literary evidence, the other kinds of evidence often become difficult or impossible to interpret. And since we’re not getting new texts generally, if it isn’t there, it isn’t there. This is why I keep stressing in posts how difficult it can be to talk about topics that our (mostly elite male) authors didn’t care about; if they didn’t write it down, for the most part, we don’t have it.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 26, 2021 (On the Nature of Ancient Evidence”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-26.
September 12, 2022
QotD: On the nature of our evidence of the ancient world
As of Saturday night, Pierre Poilievre is now “Hitler” to most of Canada’s legacy media
Of course, he was already well on the way to being “Hitler” even before the landslide voting results were announced:
New Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.
First, this was a completely lopsided blowout victory for the Poilievre team. The Jean Charest people, God bless them, had been telling anyone who would listen these last few weeks that their campaign had a strategy to win on points, thanks to their strong support in Quebec. So yeah, that didn’t happen. Poilievre won on the first ballot with almost 70 per cent of the vote; Charest came in second with … not quite 17 per cent. (Leslyn Lewis came in a distant third with less than 10 per cent, which she’ll probably attribute to the WEF controlling the process using mind-controlling nano-bots hidden COVID-19 vaccines or something similarly totally normal and reasonable.)
But yeah. Sixty eight point one five per cent on the first ballot. That’s a pretty clear signal.
To be honest, we at The Line saw that signal being sent pretty clearly many months ago. As Line editor Matt Gurney wrote almost exactly a year ago here, the only thing that was going to stop the Conservatives taking a real turn to the right was going to be a good showing by former leader Erin O’Toole in the 2021 federal election. He failed to deliver, and discredited the notion of success-via-moderation in the process. Conservatives now want the real thing: a big hunk of conservative red meat on their plate. And we never had any doubt that Poilievre was going to be the guy to serve that up for them.
Poilievre now has something that neither of his last two predecessors had. He has the support of the party behind him. Andrew Scheer needed 13 ballots to win in 2017, and even then only barely edged out Maxime Bernier. O’Toole won a more decisive victory against Peter MacKay, but as soon as he tacked back toward the centre, much of the party became palpably angry and uncomfortable with his leadership. Poilievre will not have these problems. The Conservative Party of Canada is his now.
In terms of our federal politics generally, we repeat a point we have been making here and in other places for many months. We think many Canadians, particularly those of the Liberal persuasion, may be shocked by how well Poilieivre will come across to Canadians. We believe there are a lot of people out there, who don’t have blue checkmarks and don’t spend all their time microblogging angrily at each other, who will like a lot of what Poilievre has to say and won’t find him nearly as scary as those who #StandWithTrudeau.
Poilievre has a nasty streak, and a temper, and we’re not sure that he will be able to control either. He could easily destroy himself. He has baggage too, and maybe get too close to the fringe. But if he doesn’t, we think he has a real shot.
And we think he will be helped by the weakness of the Liberals. This government seems exhausted and increasingly overtaken by events. It is also overly reliant on a few tricks. We suspect Canadians are growing tired of a Justin Trudeau smile and vague non-answer. Some Liberal baggage is just the inevitable consequence of a government aging in office. Some of it seems to be more specific to modern Canadian Liberalism, its leader and their unique, uh, quirks. Too many Liberals are blind to these problems, or least pretend to be — probably because they’re not great at admitting they have any problems at all, least not any posed by someone they find as repugnant as Pierre Poilievre. To them, we say this: Hillary thought she’d beat Trump.
It’s been fixed opinion among “mainstream” “conservatives” in Canada that the only way to get elected is to be more like Justin Trudeau. The obvious problem with this notion is that it’s going to be difficult to persuade Canadians to vote for a blue-suited Trudeau — or even an orange-tie-wearing Trudeau — if the original item is still on offer. I personally think Trudeau is a terrible PM, but a lot of people in downtown Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver clearly disagree with me, and thanks to the Liberals’ hyper-efficient voting pattern, that’s been enough to keep Trudeau in power.
The Lord of the Rings and Ancient Rome (with Bret Devereaux)
toldinstone
Published 10 Sep 2022In this episode, Dr. Bret Devereaux (the blogger behind “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry”) discusses the relationships between fantasy and ancient history – and why historical accuracy matters, even in fiction.
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The art of the constitutional monarchy
At The Ruffian, Ian Leslie considers the form of government nobody set out to design, but has proven to be one of the most stable forms of government we’ve had:
The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.
When I said that nobody would design this system, that is not a criticism. Evolved systems tend to work better than designed ones, even if they can seem maddeningly irrational to those who presume to know better. Yesterday somebody posted extracts from an essay by Clement Attlee. As a socialist, Attlee might have been expected to oppose or at least be sceptical of constitutional monarchy, but he was a strong believer in it. Attlee was writing in 1952, a year after the end of his term as Prime Minister, and the same year that Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. When he refers to the monarch, he refers to her – one of those examples of how the Queen’s longevity stretches our perception of time. “You will find the greatest enthusiasm for the monarch in the meanest streets,” he writes. After qualifying as a lawyer, Attlee ran a club in the East End of London for teenage boys raised in dire poverty. He remembers one of them saying, “Some people say as how the King and Queen are different from us. They aren’t. The only difference is that they can have a relish with their tea every day.”
Attlee notes that Norway, Sweden, and Denmark — countries in which there is “the highest equality of well-being” — have royal families. That’s still true and we might add the Netherlands to that list. While it’s impossible to disentangle the many historical factors that make for a decent and successful society, it is at the very least tough to make the case, on evidence alone, that democratic monarchies are inherently bad. Indeed, they seem to work pretty well versus other forms of government. As the left-wing American blogger Matt Yglesias remarked yesterday, “It’s hard to defend constitutional monarchy in terms of first principles, but the empirical track record seems good.”
If this is so, I’m interested in why (let’s agree, by the way, that there isn’t one definitively superior way of running a country, and that every system has flaws). My guess is that it’s because constitutional monarchies do a better job than more “rational” forms of government of accommodating the full spectrum of human nature. They speak to the heart as well as the head. Attlee puts it succinctly: “The monarchy attracts to itself the kind of sentimental loyalty which otherwise might to the leader of a faction. There is, therefore, far less danger under a constitutional monarchy of the people being carried away by a Hitler, a Mussolini or even a de Gaulle.” (I need hardly add that for Attlee, these were not merely historical figures.) Martin Amis, in the closing paragraph of his 2002 piece about the Queen for the New Yorker, expresses the same idea with characteristic flair:
“A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact,” Bagehot wrote, “and as such, it rivets mankind.” The same could be said of a princely funeral — or, nowadays, of a princely divorce. The Royal Family is just a family, writ inordinately large. They are the glory, not the power; and it would clearly be far more grownup to do without them. But riveted mankind is hopelessly addicted to the irrational, with reliably disastrous results, planetwide. The monarchy allows us to take a holiday from reason; and on that holiday we do no harm.
Yes, there is something deeply sentimental and even loopy about placing a family at the centre of national life, and ritually celebrating them, not for what they’ve done but for who they are. But here’s the thing: humans are sentimental and yes, a bit loopy. Constitutional monarchies accept this, and separate the locus of sentiment from the locus of power. They divert our loopiness into a safe space.
In republics, the sentimentality doesn’t go away but becomes fused with politics, often to dangerous effect. Russia, despite having killed off its monarchy long ago, retains an ever more desperate hankering after grandeur, the consequences of which are now being suffered by the Ukrainians. America’s more “rational” system has given us President Donald Trump, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that their political culture is more viciously, irrationally polarised than ours.
Monarchy, in its democratic form, can also be a conduit for our better natures. It gives people a way to express their affection for the people with whom they share a country, by proxy. Think about that boy in Limehouse: it’s not that he wouldn’t have preferred to have relish with his tea – to be rich, or at least richer. But he recognised that, as different as human lives can be, they are always in some fundamental ways the same. People have mothers and fathers (present or absent, kind or cruel), brothers and sisters, hopes, fears, joys and anxieties. That’s why one family can stand in for all of us, even if that family lives in a very privileged and singular manner.
History Summarized: Classical Warfare (Feat. Shadiversity!)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jul 2017How did people fight in ancient times? Well that’s a good question! Step right up and I’ll learn you a thing or two about history.
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