Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 10, 2024This time we take a look at the Fifties BC, the formation of the first triumvirate, Caesar’s consulship, Clodius and Milo’s organised violence, Caesar in Gaul, Crassus in Syria and Parthia. The context is conquest and Roman success abroad with spiralling chaos at home. A big theme is the build-up to the Civil War and Caesar crossing the Rubicon in January 49 BC. We end with a quick run through the campaigns of the Civil War.
Primary sources include Caesar’s War Commentaries, Cicero’s letters and speeches, Plutarch’s Lives, Appian’s Civil War.
December 27, 2024
The First Triumvirate – The Conquered and the Proud 10
QotD: Adapting to “permanent” food surpluses
We late-20th century Westerners are the only humans, in the entire history of our species, to have achieved permanent, society-wide caloric surplus. I’m well aware that it’s not actually permanent — it is, in fact, quite precarious, as the oddly-empty shelves at the local supermarket can confirm — but we have adapted as if it is. And I do mean adapted, in the full evolutionary sense — evolution is copious, local, and recent. Just as it doesn’t take more than a few generations of selective breeding to create an entire new breed of dog, so the human organism is fundamentally, physically different now than it was even a century ago.
More to the point, this is a testable hypothesis. I’m a history guy, obviously, not a biologist, but you don’t need to be a STEM PhD to see it. All our physical structures still look the same in 2021 as they did in 1901, but our biochemistry is far different. Just to take two obvious — and obviously detrimental — examples, we are awash in insulin and estrogen. Time warp in a laboring man from 1901 and feed him a modern “diet” for a week; the insulinemic effects of all that corn syrup etc. would put him in a coma. Even if he didn’t, the knock-on effect of all that insulin — greatly ramped-up estrogen — would deprive him of a lot of his physical strength, not to mention radically alter his mood, etc.
Severian, “The Experiment”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-25.
