A polis is made up of households, called oikoi (singular: oikos), to the point that creating a new polis was called synoikismos (or synocism). The Greek there is συνοικισμóς, συν- (meaning “together”) and οἶκος giving the word a meaning something like “living together in one house” or “putting the houses together as one”. This was the word the Greeks used to describe the process by which a disparate set of tribes, villages and households came together to create a polis; Indeed Aristotle (Arist. Pol. 1253b) is explicit that the oikos is the smallest unit, the “atom” to use M.H. Hansen’s word, of the polis, not the individual.
So what is an oikos? Well that word is about as plastic as polis. Oikos can mean a house (as in a physical building), or it can mean a household (as in the family that dwells in that building) or it can mean all of the property of that household, and indeed Greek writers will use this word to mean all of these things, often in the same context (that is they shift freely between these linked meanings, not seeing them as fully distinct). Now as a “family” we should note that an oikos was rather more extensive than our sense of family (though rather less extensive than the Roman concept of a familia and a lot less extensive than a Roman gens; we’ll come to these in a later series): an oikos consisted of all of the people who lived together in a house, which generally meant the adult citizen male, his wife and dependents and also their enslaved workers. It that family had enslaved workers who did not live with them, they also generally counted as part of the oikos because they were understood as the property of it.
The creation of a polis meant merging all of these things together in a very literal way. In a physical sense the creation of a town core meant literally putting houses together, as a good part of the population might move to live in that town core (with their farms just outside the town in walking distance, remember: most of these poleis are very small). Indeed M.H. Hansen notes in the introductory article on synoikismos in the Inventory that the only “purely political synoecism” – that is, a synoikismos that did not involve actually moving people to form or merge with a new town center but merely politically united existing geographically distinct communities – occurs in myth in Theseus’ supposed creation of the Athenian poleis. That this sort of synoikismos never happens in the historical period (there’s an attempt in Ionia in 547/6 but it never gets off the ground) ought to suggest that it probably didn’t happen with Theseus either.
It is also in a sense the merging of families, as one of the key privileges of citizenship in a polis was the right to marry women of citizen status (that is, the daughters of citizens) and thus have citizen children. And it meant the new citizenry putting their fortunes – in a literal, physical sense of the wealth that enabled them to survive (think farms and farming) – together in common when it came to things like war.
This may all seem fairly straightforward, but I invite you to consider the different implications it has compared to the way we mostly conceive of the population of a country, which we tend to imagine as a collection of individuals; as we’ll see the Greeks did this a bit too, but it wasn’t the first thought they reached for. In the polis, it is the households that have standing, represented by their adult, free citizen male heads, not individuals. The polis protects the households from the world, not the members of the household from each other, with the most obvious and immediate legal implication being the fact that crimes against junior members of the household are often understood as property crimes against the head of the household and actions within the household are simply not the business of the state. Now we shouldn’t over-stretch this: the Greeks were capable of understanding non-free and non-male people as individuals at times, but the political structure of the polis is predicated on units of households.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.
September 24, 2023
QotD: The composition of the polis
September 22, 2023
Is the Slovak Uprising Doomed to Fail? – War Against Humanity 115
World War Two
Published 21 Sep 2023Even as they battle an uprising in Slovakia, the Nazis see the opportunity to continue their racial realignment of Europe. The latest victims of this genocidal legacy are Anne Frank and her family, who arrive at Auschwitz. In Britain, the V-1 menace is defeated. But as London breathes a sigh of relief, the Nazis and their allies reduce Warsaw to rubble in a rampage of burning, looting, rape, and murder.
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September 21, 2023
QotD: The Iliad as Bronze Age gangsta rap
What was cool though is I felt like I came away with a much better understanding of Socrates, Plato, and that whole milieu. Much like it’s easy to miss the radicalism of Christianity when you come from a culture steeped in it, it’s easy to miss the radicalism of Socrates if you don’t understand that this is the culture he was reacting against. Granted, the compilation of the Homeric epics took place centuries before the time of classical Athens, but my sense is that in important respects things hadn’t changed all that much. In our society, even people who aren’t professing Christians have been subliminally shaped by a vast set of Christian-inflected moral and epistemic and metaphysical assumptions. Well in the same way, in the Athens of Socrates and of the Academy, the “cultural dark matter” was the world of the Iliad: honor, glory, blinged out bronze armor, tearing hot teenagers from the arms of their lamenting parents, etc.
We have a tendency to think of the Greek philosophers as emblematic of their civilization, when in reality they were one of the most bizarre and unrepresentative things that happened in that society. But Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges is here to tell us it wasn’t just the philosophers! So much of our mental picture of Ancient Greece and Rome is actually a snapshot of one fleeting moment in the histories of those places, arguably a very unrepresentative moment at which everything was in the process of collapsing. It’s like if [POP CULTURE ANALOGY I’M TOO TIRED TO THINK OF]. And actually once you think about it this way, everything makes way more sense. All those weird customs the Greeks and Romans had, all the lares and penates and herms and stuff, those are what these societies were about for hundreds and hundreds of years, and the popular image is just this weird encrustation, this final flowering at the end.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
September 20, 2023
Christian views on men and women
The most recent book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith discusses Brian Patrick Mitchell’s Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female:
The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.
John: You know dear, we’ve been writing this book review Substack for eight months now, ever since that crazy New Year’s resolution of ours, but we still haven’t done “the gender one”. And I feel like we have a real competitive advantage at this, since both sides of the unbridgeable epistemic chasm between the sexes are represented here. So let’s settle some of the eternal questions: Can men and women be friends? Who got the worse deal out of the curse in the Garden of Eden? And what’s up with your abysmal grip strength anyway?
I was perplexed by these and other questions, but then I picked up this book on the theology of gender, and it all got a lot clearer. The author is Deacon Brian Patrick Mitchell, an Eastern Orthodox clergyman and retired military officer. In a previous life, Mitchell testified before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces and then followed that up with a book called Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, so he’s been interested in the differences between men and women for a while.
People have been observing for centuries that Christianity can be a little bit schizophrenic on the subject of gender relations. From the earliest days of the Apostolic era, there are two strains in evidence within Christianity: one which shores up the gender divisions common to most agricultural societies, and another which radically transcends them. Oftentimes both strains are visible within a single person! Thus you have the Apostle Paul on the one hand saying in his letter to the Ephesians:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Ephesians 5:22-24)
But then in Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
For as long as Christianity has existed, there have been people emphasizing one of these tendencies as the “true” Christian message on gender while attempting to minimize the other. Sometimes these arguments are interesting and sometimes they bring out something important (I’m a fan of Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People on the one side, and of Toby Sumpter’s fiery homilies on the other), but I think in both cases they’re falling into the error of trying to simplify something that is actually complicated. There’s a certain kind of person who can’t handle inconsistency, and that kind of person is going to have trouble with Christianity, because to a finite being the products of an infinite mind will sometimes appear inconsistent. Does Christianity want women to be subject to men, or does it want men and women to transcend their natures? The answer is very clearly both.
Mitchell’s book is compelling because it doesn’t try to minimize or hide one of these tendencies, but acknowledges up front that they’re both there and both have to be struggled with. It then advances the novel (as far as I know) argument that these two tendencies with regard to gender relations actually reflect the two major ethnic and cultural influences on the early Church: Hebrew and Greek.
The ancient Hebrew attitudes towards male and female are apparent from the beginning of the Bible: God creates Eve from out of Adam’s rib, and she is called Woman because she was taken out from Man. Thus the woman is subordinated to the man, yet fundamentally made of the same stuff as him. God calls the division of humanity into men and women good, He blesses families and helps barren women conceive, He commands His people to be fruitful and to multiply, and He promises Abraham that his seed shall be numbered as the stars of heaven. The entire Old Testament is a story of families, sometimes dysfunctional families, but families nonetheless, as opposed to lone men roaming the earth as in the Iliad or Bronze Age Mindset. Male headship is assumed, but it’s also assumed that men are fundamentally incomplete without something that only women can give them: a home, a future, and the thing that makes both, children.
So in Mitchell’s telling, the Hebrew legacy is responsible for the more “trad” side of early Christianity. What about the Greeks? Well we already discussed in our joint review of Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City how ancient Greek society was basically the world of gangster rap: honor, boasting, violence, women as trophies, women as a way of keeping score, women torn wailing from the arms of their parents or husbands and forced into marriage or concubinage or outright slavery. You will be shocked to learn that this culture did not hold a high opinion of women, procreation, or the marital union. Greek philosophy is a massively complicated and diverse beast, but there’s a strong tendency within it to associate women with physicality, nature, and brute matter, and to disdain all of these things in favor of rationality, spirit, and the intellect (all coded as male).
Our readers are probably thinking, “Hang on a minute, I thought the Hebrews were the patriarchal ones, do you mean to say that the hyper-masculine and hyper-misogynistic culture was the one that decided maleness and femaleness didn’t matter?” Well yes I do, and it’s pretty easy to see why if one hasn’t been totally brainwashed by modernity, but maybe it’ll be more convincing if a woman explains it to them.
Jane: Well, I think you gave a pretty accurate description of actually-existing ancient Greek culture, but we have to remember that the Church Fathers weren’t classicists poring through the corpus trying to accurately characterize the past. Rather, they were men of late antiquity, mostly educated in a “Great Books” canon heavy on the classical philosophy — and the worldview of philosophers is often quite different from the general norms and presuppositions of their society as a whole. (Not that modern — by which I mean post-1600 — classicists have always recognized this; E.R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational is considered a seminal work of classical scholarship precisely because it undercuts a long tradition of taking the philosophers as representative of their culture rather than in conflict with it.)1 So the direct influence on early Christians wasn’t the world Fustel de Coulanges describes (which covers roughly the Greek Dark Ages through the Archaic period), but the texts of the period that came after, as interpreted by an even later era. It’s a bit like looking at our contemporary small-l liberals, who draw heavily on a tradition that rose out of Enlightenment philosophy, which in turn was an outgrowth of and/or reaction to the medieval and early modern worlds: they’re not not connected to all that, but Boethius is not going to be the most helpful context for reading Rorty. You should probably look at Locke instead.
1. Bonus, and shorter, Dodds: “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex“, which you probably do too.
September 10, 2023
Bulgaria at War with Everyone – WW2 – Week 263 – September 9, 1944
World War Two
Published 9 Sep 2023This week the USSR invades Bulgaria … who’ve also declared war on Germany, and who are still at war with the US and Britain, so Bulgaria is briefly technically at war with all four at once. Finland signs a ceasefire, the Germans are pulling out of Greece, the Warsaw and Slovak Uprisings continue, Belgium is mostly liberated, and across the world, the Japanese enter Guangxi, and there are American plans to liberate the Philippines.
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September 9, 2023
The Mystery of Greek Warfare – What You “Know” is Wrong (Part 1 of 4)
Invicta
Published 8 Sept 2023In this series we will explore the mystery of Greek warfare!
What you think you know is most likely wrong. The problem with our understanding of ancient Greek warfare is that no one has been a hoplite or seen them fight. We are therefore left to reconstruct models of combat. This is complicated by the fact that Greek hoplites themselves evolved over the years as have the schools of thought for interpreting clues from the past. To break this impasse, our friend, professor Paul Bardunias, has pioneered experimental research meant to validate or falsify the claims of historians.
In this first episode we will set the foundations for this discussion by exploring the evolution of the hoplite and comparing the competing schools of thought regarding their warfare.
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September 7, 2023
How Britain Helped the Communist Revolution – War Against Humanity 113
World War Two
Published 6 Sep 2023Fight the Nazis or fight your countrymen? From Marshal Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia to the ELAS fighters in Greece, that is the animating question among the Balkans resistance movements. For many, the question is already answered. It is Mihailović and his Chetniks and EDES, EKKA, and the Greek royalist government who must be out-maneuvered first. British foreign policy has so far failed to change this state of affairs, can Churchill get his SOE officers to stop these civil wars?
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August 31, 2023
QotD: A typical polis
In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.
But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2. A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km2 were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.
But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between “oligarchic” or “democratic” or even “tyranical” poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.
August 7, 2023
QotD: How do we determine Roman dates like “46 BC”?
Now the Roman calendar is itself kind of a moving target, so we can start with a brief history of that. At some very early point the Romans seem to have had a calendar with ten months, with December as the last month, March as the first month and no January or February. That said while you will hear a lot of folk history crediting Julius Caesar with the creation of two extra months (July and August) that’s not right; those months (called Quintilis and Sextilis) were already on the calendar. By the time we can see the Roman calendar, it has twelve months of variable lengths (355 days total) with an “intercalary month” inserted every other year to “reset” the calendar to the seasons. That calendar, which still started in March (sitting where it does, seasonally, as it does for us), the Romans attributed to the legendary-probably-not-a-real-person King Numa, which means in any case even by the Middle Republic it was so old no one knew when it started (Plut. Numa 18; Liv 1.19.6-7). The shift from March to January as the first month in turn happens in 153 (Liv. Per. 47.13), probably for political reasons.
We still use this calendar (more or less) and that introduces some significant oddities in the reckoning of dates that are recorded by the Roman calendar. See, because the length of the year (355 days) did not match the length of a solar year (famously 365 days and change), the months “drifted” over the calendar a little bit; during the first century BC when things were so chaotic that intercalary months were missed, the days might drift a lot. This problem is what Julius Caesar fixed, creating a 365 day calendar in 46; to “reset” the year for his new calendar he then extended the year 46 to 445 days. And you might think, “my goodness, that means we’d have to convert every pre-45 BC date to figure out what it actually is, how do we do that?”
And the answer is: we don’t. Instead, all of the oddities of the Roman calendar remain baked into our calendar and the year 46 BC is still reckoned as being 445 days long and thus the longest ever year. Consequently earlier Roman dates are directly convertible into our calendar system, though if you care what season a day happened, you might need to do some calculating (but not usually because the drift isn’t usually extreme). But in expressing the date as a day, the fact that the Gregorian calendar does not retroactively change the days of the Julian calendar, which also did not retroactively change the days of the older Roman calendar means that no change is necessary.
Ok, but then what year is it? Well, the Romans counted years two ways. The more common way was to refer to consular years, “In the year of the consulship of X and Y.” Thus the Battle of Cannae happened, “in the year of the consulship of Varro and Paullus,” 216 BC. In the empire, you sometimes also see events referenced by the year of a given emperor. Conveniently for us, we can reconstruct a complete list of all of the consular years and we know all of the emperors, so back-converting a date rendered like this is fairly easy. More rarely, the Romans might date with an absolute chronology, ab urbe condita (AUC) – “from the founding of the city”, which they imagined to have happened in in 753 BC. Since we know that date, this also is a fairly easy conversion.
Non-Roman dates get harder. The Greeks tend to date things either by serving magistrates (especially the Athenian “eponymous archon”, because we have so many Athenian authors) or by Olympiads. Olympiad dates are not too bad; it’s a four-year cycle starting in 780 BC, so we are now in the 700th Olympiad. Archon dates are tougher for two reasons. First, unlike Roman consuls, we have only a mostly complete list of Athenian archons, with some significant gaps. Both dates suffer from the complication that they do not line up neatly with the start of the Roman year. Olympiads begin and end in midsummer and archon years ran from July to June. If we have a day, or even a month attached to one of these dates, converting to a modern Gregorian calendar date isn’t too bad. But if, as is often the case, all you have is a year, it gets tricky; an event taking place “in the Archonship of Cleocritus” (with no further elaboration) could have happened in 413 or 412. Consequently, you’ll see the date (if there is no month or season indicator that lets us narrow it down), written as 413/2 – that doesn’t mean “in the year two-hundred and six and a half” but rather “413 OR 412”.
That said, with a complete list of emperors, consuls and Olympiads, along with a nearly complete list of archons, keeping the system together is relatively easy. Things get sticky fast when moving to societies using regnal years for which we do not have complete or reliable king’s lists. So for instance there are a range of potential chronologies for the Middle Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. I have no great expertise into how these chronologies are calculated; I was taught with the “Middle” chronology as the consensus position and so I use that and aim just to be consistent. Bronze Age Egyptian chronology has similar disputes, but with a lot less variation in potential dates. Unfortunately while obviously I have to be aware of these chronology disputes, I don’t really have the expertise to explain them – we’d have to get an Egyptologist or Assyriologist (for odd path-dependent reasons, scholars that study ancient Mesopotamia, including places and cultures that were not Assyria-proper are still called Assyriologists, although to be fair the whole region (including Egypt!) was all Assyria at one point) to write a guest post to untangle all of that.
That said in most cases all of this work has largely been done and so it is a relatively rare occurrence that I need to actually back convert a date myself. It does happen sometimes, mostly when I’m moving through Livy and have lost track of what year it is and need to get a date, in which case I generally page back to find the last set of consular elections and then check the list of consuls to determine the date.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
July 30, 2023
The Grave of the Man Who Never Was: Operation Mincemeat
Tom Scott
Published 7 Nov 2016In a cemetery in Huelva, in Spain, is the grave of Major William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. Or rather, it’s the grave of a man called Glyndwr Michael, who served his country during World War 2 in a very unexpected way … after his death.
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July 27, 2023
History Summarized: The Cities of Ancient Sparta
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Apr 2023Is. This. Sparta???
SOURCES & Further Reading:
– “The Spartans” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
– “The Greek Polis – Sparta” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
– “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
– “Being a Greek Slave” from The Other Side of History by Robert Garland.
– The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
– The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline.
– AskHistorians posts by u/Iphikrates “Is the Military Worship of the Spartans Really Justified?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
– “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” by historian Bret Devereaux argues that Sparta was a horrible place to live, had poorly educated citizens, was militarily mediocre, culturally stagnant, and was ruled by elites who were pretty crappy too. Anything inaccurate in that assessment?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
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June 24, 2023
QotD: The plight of miners in pre-industrial societies
In the ancient Mediterranean, the clear testimony of the sources is that mining was a low-status occupation, one for enslaved people, criminals and the truly desperate. Being “sent to the mines” is presented, alongside being sent to work in the mills, as a standard terrible punishment for enslaved people who didn’t obey their owners and it is fairly clear in many cases that being sent to the mines was effectively a delayed death sentence. Diodorus Siculus describes mining labor in the gold mines of Egypt this way, in a passage that is fairly representative of the ancient sources on mining labor more generally (3.13.3, trans Oldfather (1935)):
For no leniency or respite of any kind is given to any man who is sick, or maimed, or aged, or in the case of a woman for her weakness, but all without exception are compelled by blows to persevere in their labours, until through ill-treatment they die in the midst of their tortures. Consequently the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present and therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life.
It is clear that conditions in Greek and Roman mines were not much better. Examples of chains and fetters – and sometimes human remains still so chained – occur in numerous Greek and Roman mines. Unfortunately our sources are mostly concerned with precious metal mines and those mines also seem to have been the worst sorts of mines to work in, since the long underground shafts and galleries exposed the miners to greater dangers from bad air to mine-collapses. That said, it is hard to imagine working an open-pit iron mine by hand, while perhaps somewhat safer, was any less back-breaking, miserable toil, even if it might have been marginally safer.
Conditions were not always so bad though, particularly for free miners (being paid a wage) who tended to be treated better, especially where their labor was sorely needed. For instance, a set of rules for the Roman mines at Vipasca, Spain provided for contractors to supply various amenities, including public baths maintained year-round. The labor force at Vipasca was clearly free and these amenities seem to have been a concession to the need to make the life of the workers livable in order to get a sufficient number of them in a relatively sparsely populated part of Spain.
The conditions for miners in medieval Europe seems to have been somewhat better. We see mining communities often setting up their own institutions and occasionally even having their own guilds (for instance, there was a coal-workers guild in Liege in the 13th century) or internal regulations. These mining communities, which in large mining operations might become small towns in their own right, seem to have often had some degree of legal privileges when compared to the general rural population (though it should be noted that, as the mines were typically owned by the local lord or state, exemption from taxes was essentially illusory as the lord or king’s cut of the mine’s profits was the taxes). It does seem notable that while conditions in medieval mines were never quite so bad as those in the ancient world, the rapid expansion of mining activity beginning in the 15th century seems to have coincided with a loss of the special status and privileges of earlier medieval European miners and the status associated with the labor declined back down to effectively the bottom of the social spectrum.
(That said, it seems necessary to note that precious metal-mining done by non-free Native American laborers at the order of European colonial states appears to have been every bit as cruel and deadly as mining in the ancient world.)
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
June 20, 2023
QotD: When kings and emperors become gods
Divine rulership was not universal however – it was subject to cultural context. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was the Living Horus, a physical incarnation of the divine; when he died he became Osiris, the ruler over the underworld. The mystery of the duality whereby a Pharaoh was both a specific person (and might be a different person in the future) but also the same god each time seems to owe something to the multipart Egyptian conception of the soul. Naram-Sin, an Akkadian King (2254-2218 B.C.) represents himself as divine (shown by his having horns) on his victory stele; future kings of Akkad followed suit in claiming a form of divinity, albeit a lesser one than the big-time great gods.
But in Mesopotamia, the rulers of Akkad were the exception; other Mesopotamian kings (Sumerian, Babylonian, etc) did not claim to be gods – even very great kings (at least while alive – declaring a legendary ruler a god is rather more like a divine founder figure). Hammurabi (king of Babylon, c.1810-c.1750 B.C.) is shown in his royal artwork very much a man – albeit one who receives his mandate to rule from the gods Shamash and Marduk. Crucially, and I want to stress this, the Achaemenid kings of Persia were not considered gods (except inasmuch as some of them also occupied the position of Pharaoh of Egypt; it’s not clear how seriously they took this – less seriously than Alexander and Ptolemy, quite clearly). The assumption that the Persians practiced a divine kingship is mostly a product of Greek misunderstandings of Persian court ritual, magnified in the popular culture by centuries of using the Persian “other” as a mirror and (usually false) contrast for European cultures.
But the practice that my students often find most confusing is that of the Roman emperors. To be clear, Roman emperors were not divinized while they were alive. Augustus had his adoptive father, Julius Caesar divinized (this practice would repeat for future emperors divinizing their predecessors), but not himself; the emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed, famously made fun of this by declaring as a joke, “Alas! I think I’m becoming a god” (Suet. Vesp. 23.4). And yet, at the same time, outside of Rome, even Augustus – the first emperor – received cult and divine honors, either to his person or to his genius (remember, that’s not how smart he is, but the divine spirit that protects him and his family).
I think it is common for us, sitting outside of these systems, to view this sort of two-step dance, “I’m not a god, but you can give me divine honors in the provinces and call me a god, just don’t do it too loudly” as fundamentally cynical – and to some degree it might have been; Augustus was capable of immense cynicism. But I think it is possible to view this relationship outside of that cynicism through the lens of the ideas and rules we’ve laid out.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.
June 10, 2023
Feeding a Greek Hoplite – Ancient Rations
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Jun 2023
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June 8, 2023
QotD: Heroes, demi-gods and gods in the ancient Greek world
These figures – complete with tales of being swept up into divinity while still alive or at the moment of their death – are in some way atypical of hero worship in the Greek world. More typical is a figure like Achilles, who very definitely was mortal and very definitely died and whose spirit is very much in the Underworld in the Odyssey (and neatly contrasted with Heracles – only Heracles’ shade is in the underworld, for his soul was divine; but cf. Pindar on Achilles, Olympia 2.75-85). Our sources (e.g. Plin. Nat. 4.26) continue to speak of Achilles as a man, with a physical tomb. And yet Alexander pays him honors (Arr. Anab. 1.12.1) and we have ample evidence for cult observances of Achilles in the Greek world. it was possible to be a man in life, and yet have enough influence to be worthy of cult in death.
This sounds strange, but its worth noting that some of the most common mortal figures to receive this kind of cult worship were founder figures – people (often legendary or mythical in nature) credited with the foundation of a community. We’ve actually discussed that here before in Lycurgus and Theseus, but as you might imagine, such figures were very common. It is not entirely crazy to assume that these figures have some power to shape your world or life, because they already have – you live in the city they founded! They deeds in life continue to shape the confines of your experience – why wouldn’t that influence, in some way, carry with them?
(And while I’m here, I should note that the American architectural veneration of our founder figures on the National Mall is explicitly framed in terms of Mediterranean cult observance. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials both borrow their forms from Roman temples and contain super-life-sized cult statues exactly as and where a Roman temple would has the cult statue of the god, while the Washington Monument – as an Egyptian style obelisk – mimics Egyptian practice quite intentionally. We even have our monuments to the di manes [the divine shades of your dead ancestors who watch over you] in our war memorials, framed around collective veneration. A Roman time-traveler would have no problem interpreting the display, and might think the many millions of visitors coming from all corners quite pious in their observance.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.
