The fall of the Roman Empire in the West (please, right now, just mentally add the phrase “in the west” next to every “the fall of Rome” and similar phrase here and elsewhere) is complicated. I don’t mean it is complicated in its causes or effects (though it is that too), I mean it is complicated in its raw events: the who, what, where and when of it. Most students are taught a fairly simple version of this because most of what they need to actually learn is the cause and the effects and so the actual “fall” part is a sort of black box where Huns, Vandals, Goths, plague, climate and economic decline go in and political fragmentation, more economic decline and the European Middle Ages come out. The fall itself ends up feeling like an event rather than a process because it is compressed down to a single point, the black box where all of the causes become all of the effects. That is, frankly, a defensible way to teach the topic at a survey level (where it might get at most a lecture or two either at the end of a Roman History survey or the beginning of a Medieval History survey) and it is honestly more or less how I teach it.
But if you want to actually try to say something intelligent about the whole thing, you need to grapple with what actually happened, rather than the classroom black-box model designed for teaching efficiency rather than detail. We are … not going to do that today … though I will have some bibliography here for those who want to. The key thing here is that the “Fall of Rome” (in the West) is not an event, but a century long process from 376 to 476. Roman power (in the West) contracts for a lot of that, but it expands in periods as well, particularly under the leadership of Aetius (433-454) and Majorian (457-461); there are points where it would have really looked like the Romans might actually be able to recover. Even in 476 it was not obvious to anyone that Roman rule had actually ended; Odoacer, who had just deposed what was to be the last Roman emperor in the west promptly offered the crown to Zeno, the Roman emperor in the East (there is argument about his sincerity but James O’Donnell argues – very well, though I disagree on some key points – that this represented a real opportunity for Rome to rise from defeat in a new form yet again).
Glancing even further back historically, this wasn’t even the first time the Roman Empire had been on the brink of collapse. Beginning in 238, the Roman Empire had suffered a long series of crippling civil wars and succession crises collectively known as the Crisis of the Third Century (238-284). At one point, the empire was de facto split into three, with one emperor in Britain and Gaul, another in Italy, and the client kingdom of Palmyra essentially running the Eastern half of the empire under their queen Zenobia. Empires do not usually survive those kinds of catastrophes, but the Roman Empire survived the Crisis, recovered all of its territory (save Dacia) and even enjoyed a period of relative peace afterwards, before trouble started up again.
The reason that empires do not generally survive those kinds of catastrophes is that generally when empires weaken, they find that they contain all sorts of people who have been waiting, sometimes patiently, sometimes less so, for any opportunity to break away. The rather sudden collapse of the (Neo-)Assyrian Empire (911-609 BC) is a good case study. After having conquered much of the Near East, the Assyrians fell into a series of succession wars beginning in 627; their Mesopotamian subjects smelled blood and revolted in 625. That was almost under control by 620 when the Medes and Persians, external vassals of the Assyrians, smelled blood too and invaded, allying with the rebelling Babylonians in 616. Assyria was effectively gone by 612 with the loss and destruction of Ninevah; they had gone from the largest empire in the world at that time or at any point prior to non-existent in 15 years. While the Assyrian collapse is remarkable for its speed and finality, the overall process is much the same in most cases; once imperial power begins to wane, revolt suddenly looks more possible and so the downward slope of collapse can be very steep indeed (one might equally use the case study of decolonization after WWII as an example: each newly independent country increased the pressure on all of the rest).
Yet there is no great rush to the doors for Rome. Instead, as Guy Halsall puts it in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007), “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”. Among the kicked and gouged of course were Attila and his Huns. Fought to a draw at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, his empire disintegrated after his death two years later under pressure from both Germanic tribes and the Eastern Roman Empire (and the standard tendency for Steppe empires to fragment); of his three sons, Ellac was killed by revolting Germanic peoples who had been subject to the Huns, Dengizich by the (Eastern) Romans (we’re told his head was put on display in Constantinople) and the last, Ernak just disappears in our narrative after the death of Dengizich. The Romans, it turns out, did eventually get down to business to defeat the Huns. But the Romans doing all of that kicking, gouging and screaming were not the handful of old families from the early days of the Repulic; most of those hard-fighting Romans were people who in 14 AD would have been provincials. And indeed, the Roman Empire would survive, in the East, where Rome wasn’t, making for a Roman Empire that by 476 consisted effectively entirely of “provincial” Romans.
Instead what we see are essentially three sets of actions by provincial elites who in any other empire would have been leading the charge for the exits. There were the kickers, gougers and screamers, as Halsall notes. There were also, as Ralph Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul (1993) has noted, elites who – seeing the writing on the wall – made no effort to hasten the collapse of the empire but instead retreated into their estates, their books and their letters; these fellows often end up married into and advising the new “barbarian” kings who set up in the old Roman provinces (which in turn contributes quite a bit to the preservation and continued influence of Roman law and culture in the various fragmented successor states of the early Middle Ages). Finally, there were elites so confident that the empire would survive – because it always had! – that they mostly focused on improving their position within the empire, even at the cost of weakening it, not because they wanted out, but because “out” was inconceivable to them; both Halsall and also James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2009) document many of these. If I may continue my analogy, when the exit door was yawning wide open, almost no one walked through; some tried to put out the burning building they were in, others were content to be at the center of the ruins. But no one actually left.
During the Crisis of the Third Century, that set of responses had been crucial for the empire’s survival and for brief moments in the 400s, it looked like they might even have saved it again. For all of the things that brought the Roman Empire down, it is striking that “internal revolts” of long-ruled peoples weren’t one of them. And that speaks to the power of Rome’s effective (if, again, largely unintentional) management of diversity. The Roman willingness to incorporate conquered peoples into the core citizen body and into “Roman-ness” meant that even by 238 to the extent that the residents of the Empire could even imagine its collapse, they saw that potentiality as a disaster, rather than as a liberation. That gave the empire tremendous resiliency in the face of disaster, such that it took a century of unremitting bad luck to bring it down and even then, it only managed to take down half of it.
(As an aside, those provincial Romans were correct in the judgement that the collapse of the empire would mean disaster. The running argument about the fall of the Roman Empire is generally between the “decline and fall” perspective, which presents the collapse of the Roman Empire as a Bad Thing and the “change and continuity” perspective, which both stresses continuity after the collapse but also tends to try minimize the negative impacts of it, even to the point of suggesting that the average Roman peasant might have been better off in the absence of heavy Roman taxes. That latter view is particularly common among many medievalists, who are understandably quite tired of the unfairly poor reputation their period gets. This is an argument that for some time lived in the airy space of narrative and perspective where both sides could put an argument out. Unfortunately for some of the change-and-continuity arguments about living standards, archaeology has a tendency to give us data that is somewhat less malleable. That archaeological data shows, with a high degree of consistency, that while there is certainly some continuity between the Late Antique and the early Middle Ages the fall of Rome (in the West) killed lots of people (precipitous declines in population in societies without reliable birth control; probably this is mostly food scarcity, not direct warfare) and that living standards also declined to a degree that the results are archaeologically visible. As Brian Ward-Perkins notes in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), the collapse causes cows to shrink, speaking to sudden scarcity of winter fodder (which in turn likely speaks to a general reduction in available nutrition). Some areas were worse hit than others; Robin Flemming, Britain After Rome (2010) notes, for instance, that in post-Roman Britain, pot-making technology was lost (because ceramic production had been focused in cities which had been largely depopulated out of existence). The fall of Rome might have been good for some people, but the evidence is, I think, at this point inescapable that it was quite bad for most people. Especially, one assumes, all of the people who got depopulated.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
September 10, 2025
QotD: “The [western Roman Empire] did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”
September 9, 2025
MG38: Colt’s Interwar Water-Cooled Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 May 2025After World War One, Colt was the sole owner of license to produce Browning machine guns. With production tooling well established from the war, the company set about looking for international sales. The water cooled .30 caliber (the M1917 in US service, essentially) was designated the Model 1919 Automatic Machine Gun. In 1931, it was renamed the MG38, although basically the same gun as in 1919. It had a few distinctions from the US military pattern, including:
- Manual safety on the backplate
- Self-contained recoil spring
- Large water fill and drain fittings, identical to the ones used on Colt’s .50 caliber guns
- Slightly different top cover latch
Colt offered the guns with lots of options and features, including a variety of calibers (basically any modern rifle cartridge of the time), flash hiders, lightened anti-aircraft bolts, and spade grips (guns sold with spade grips were designated MG38B). From 1919 until commercial production ceased in January 1942, Colt had sold 2,720 water-cooled Brownings in total. Most went to South America in 7.65mm, with Argentina being the single biggest buyer.
Full video on the Browning M1917:
• Browning M1917: America’s World War O…
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QotD: The horrible 1970s
Colby Cosh, “Cinema: recently seen”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-08-19.
September 8, 2025
Ancient Historian Reviews Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Deep Dives
History Hit
Published 1 May 2025In this new video, classicist Honor Cargill-Martin delves into the iconic Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is it historically accurate or is it a very naughty film?
00:00 Intro
00:53 Judea A.D. 33
01:55 Colosseum?
06:56 People’s Front of Judea
10:28 “What have the Romans done for us?”
16:05 Roman Grafitti
19:44 Hypocaust
23:30 Biggus Dickus
28:42 “Crucifixion?”
30:37 “… release a wrong doer from our prison”
32:09 “I’m Brian!”
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QotD: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
One of the most famous hoaxes of that era was the so-called Cottingley Fairies. Two girls in Yorkshire, cousins Elise Wright and Frances Griffith, took a series of five photos in 1917 showing themselves near a stream in the presence of tiny fairy-like creatures. Elsie’s father Arthur Wright, an amateur photographer, never doubted that the photos were fabricated. But the girl’s mother Polly was more credulous. The pictures became public when Polly Wright attended a lecture on “fairy life” at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford. They were quickly circulated among the group’s adherents, who found the photographed fairies consistent with their theosophical beliefs. The extraordinary images soon came to the attention of the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist who was writing an article on fairies for the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was convinced the fairies were real. His article was published under the headline Fairies Photographed, describing the Cottingley Fairies as an “epoch-making event”.
“The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life,” wrote Conan Doyle. “Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been put before it.” In 1922, Conan Doyle followed up with a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in which he announced that proof of fairy existence was a blow to cold Victorian science, which “would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon”. He added: “There is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing things that are invisible to others.”
Conan Doyle was wrong of course. Like many other spiritualists at the time, he’d been taken in. The photos were fake. The two girls Elsie and Frances both lived into their 80s. Toward the end of their lives in the 1980s, they admitted that they’d fabricated the fairy photos using paper cutouts.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
September 7, 2025
The BEF and the German Sichelschnitt of May, 1940
Dr. Robert Lyman rebuts the common-since-the-1950s adulation of the Wehrmacht‘s attacks of May-June, 1940 through the Low Countries that drove the British Expeditionary Force off the continent and destroyed the flower of the French army prior to the surrender of France in June:
Detail from the West Point Military Atlas map of the “Campaign in the West, Disposition and Opposing Forces, 1940”
Full map.
The world has largely remembered Sichelschnitt as a brilliant German operation of war, but it was one that was fundamentally enabled by Allied ineptitude. Indeed, Blitzkrieg wasn’t particularly new, innovative or even a warfighting doctrine. It is best described, in the context of France 1940, as an event. It was simply the way that the Wehrmacht exerted its tactical and operational superiority over its more pedestrian enemies in 1940. In fact, it was the 1940 extension of what the German Army had first demonstrated in Flanders in March 1918, this time with tanks and Stukas. It was the Panzerwaffe (“tank force”) – combined with a tactical air force – which in 1940 would create the breakthrough that Ludendorff had been unable to achieve in 1918. Where it was applied, by Army Group A, it concentrated fast-moving armoured vanguards co-ordinated with tactical air power, such as 400 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, to so overwhelm the enemy in both time and space that they were unable to respond quickly enough to the changing and challenging battlefield. In 1940 the panzer came into its own, the sound of clattering tracks on French cobblestones a new feature in the sound of battle and a key element in how France remembers its defeat in 1940.
It wasn’t the type of tank in the German inventory which mattered, but the way in which these tanks were employed. Only about 10 per cent of the army comprised tanks, the remainder relying on horse and wagons and the raw, painful feet of the marching infantry. Of the 2,539 tanks the Wehrmacht deployed in 1940, only 916, or 36 per cent were battleworthy, the remainder being clattering tin cans with machine guns (the obsolete Panzer Mark Is and Mark IIs). The only modern tanks were 683 Panzer Mark IIIs and Czech T38 tanks armed with a 37mm gun, and 278 of the larger Mark IVs with a short 75mm gun. But it was enough. The German operational strategy was to use this mass of armour not to fight a large confrontational tank battle, but to achieve breakthrough and breakout, bursting through the enemy’s linear defences. It was surprise and shock action that so discomforted the Allies, who had lazily and, given what we know of British failure to understand 1918, ignorantly assumed that the war would progress against a 1914 rather than a 1918 pattern. The armoured vanguard would surge through the outer skin of the enemy defences, concentrating heavy effort in one place, before driving hard into the heart of enemy territory. With an enemy intent on fighting a linear battle, the rear areas, behind this outer crust, would be weakly defended and full of rear-echelon, administrative and supply troops managing the lines of communication up to the front, not expecting to have to fight. It was by driving hard and fast behind the enemy front line, breaking the cycle of Allied battlefield decision-making, that Blitzkrieg was to achieve its psychological effect.
In contrast the Allies remained concerned about retaining the integrity of their defensive lines. The diaries of Major General Henry Pownall, for instance, are replete with concerns as the days spun past about the widening frontages on one defensive line or another. British concern was misplaced. It was to spread the ever-decreasing butter of the British infantry across ever-widening stretches of French and Belgian bread, without realising that the Germans were concerned not with rolling up a front line, but with driving hard to the rear. By so doing they would take risks with their flanks, but the discombobulatory effect on the enemy was considered to far outweigh any worry about the risk of counter- attack from an increasingly battered and disorganised enemy. Of course this operational concept was risky, but the risks taken were carefully calculated given what the German General Staff knew about British and French tactical doctrine, or the lack of it.
These German tactics were psychologically disconcerting for those not trained to expect them. As was demonstrated on the Meuse, artillery would batter a position in co-ordination with armoured columns bypassing fixed defences and attacking those it needed to clear from the flanks and the rear. The infantry accompanying the advancing armour – Panzergrenadiers (mechanised infantry) – arrived in tandem with the Stukas, which could drop their bombs from a screaming dive. Each Stuka seemed to those at the receiving end to be diving directly at them, personally. For untrained troops it was a terrifying experience. The panzers would sweep on while the truck-borne infantry would turn up to deal with survivors of this storm of fire and movement. By this time, of course, the disorientated French and British would now consider themselves cut off, behind their front line, with no prospect of being relieved. Surrender or a disorganised escape to the rear would seem to be a more sensible option than the forlorn hope of continued resistance when the surrounding fields were dotted with the grey-green uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets of their enemy. The psychological effect of Blitzkrieg was considerable. This wasn’t how their fathers had told them war was fought. How did the Germans manage to discomfort them on the battlefield so comprehensively? Were they inadequate soldiers, unable to meet the standards of campaigning set by the previous generation? Or was it that their tactics were simply not able to cope with the shock of a comprehensive assault by German infantry, armour and air power all descending on them at once? This was the battlefield that the British had entirely dominated, by virtue of their tactical innovations, in 1918. It was now Germany’s turn, a direct result of the failure of the British Army to develop its doctrine and approaches to warfighting at the end of the Great War. Brave men in 1940 did their duty, but against a battle-winning concept of their enemy, they were out-thought rather than out-fought. And critically, when an army thinks it is beaten, it is indeed beaten.
How Did Göring Get the Cyanide? OOTF Community Questions
World War Two
Published 6 Sept 2025In this episode of Out of the Foxholes, we dive into your community questions about World War II. How did Hermann Göring manage to get the cyanide capsule that ended his life at Nuremberg? What role did Slovakia really play in 1939? Why didn’t the Allies invade the Balkans instead of France, and why didn’t Japan use its submarines like Germany did?
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Long before the “Bad Orange Man”, there was “T.R.”
In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes points out some strong similarities between Donald Trump’s career and that of the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt:
Though a century apart—TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.
The Trump-TR Parallels
But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions.
Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.
Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.
[…]
BULLY
The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well.
As president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts”.
TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory”. Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.
J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.
No.
Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong”.
As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king”. That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.
Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility.
Up on the Mountain: a History of the Ski Cap
HatHistorian
Published 1 May 2025The ski cap, sometimes also called by its german name of Bergmütze, is a visored cap with ear flaps secured to the front by buttons or a buckle. Allegedly descended from eastern bashlyks worn by Russian soldiers, it was popular in the alpine regions of Germanic countries. First adopted by the AUstro-Hungarian Empire as a field cap, it was infamously worn by the Wehrmacht during WWII. It continues to be used as a field or dress cap by German, Austrian, and Hungarian armed forces, and civilian versions can be found around Central and Eastern Europe.
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September 6, 2025
New Evidence on the loss of HMS Hood!
Drachinifel
Published 5 Sept 2025Today we take a look at a heretofore unpublished account from a sailor who saw the destruction of HMS Hood, and take a look at what this might tell us about the incident.
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Unique British Crankfire .58 Morse Manual Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Apr 2025This is a really interesting piece with a mostly unknown origin. It was manufactured in the UK (the barrel was deemed Enfield-made by former Royal Armouries curator Herb Woodend) and is chambered for the .58 Morse centerfire cartridge. The date of production is unknown. It uses a gravity-feed magazine and fires via hand crank. Turning the crank cycles the bolt forward and back, not completely unlike a Maxim gun but without the automatic operation. It came out of a small Canadian museum in the 1950s, but its provenance before that is unknown.
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QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3
The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”
There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.
But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5
Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:
“Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”
2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.
3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”
4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.
5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.
6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:
“I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”
7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.
September 5, 2025
BBC’s new King and Conqueror series
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank discusses the BBC’s latest attempt to recast British history in a way more pleasing to, as the Critical Drinker would say, “modern audiences”:
If you care about truth, beauty or goodness, I have bad news for you: the BBC has just created a historical drama set in the Middle Ages. Yes, this is the arrival of King and Conqueror, which depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. The raw matter of the historical record is incredibly promising: ferocious royal intrigues, hagiographical piety, civil and not so civil war, and all the strange poetics and ceremony of French and Anglo-Saxon courtly life. The culture that gave us Lincoln Cathedral and the culture that gave us Sutton Hoo, should be reason alone for the most spectacular of costumes, battles and speeches.
But anyone hoping for a moving epic or a gripping thriller would be equally disappointed, as the brainless BBC tramples cheerfully into a sordid pastiche even more gormless than Game of Thrones (which at least had a decent budget). Future King of England Harold Godwinson (played by James Norton) is introduced to audiences uttering the admittedly pretty Anglo-Saxon phrase “it’s a fucking massacre”, in the manner of someone commenting on an especially brutal 3-nil football match.
I could induce miserable groaning from readers at this point by listing every meta-level historical inaccuracy from the almost entirely fictitious events of the coronation, to the succession of geographical and biographical distortions that rain down on viewers like so many 11th century arrows, to the inexplicable but inevitable (it’s the BBC) presence of black Anglo-Saxons. But none of these departures from the historical record are inherently unforgivable and might in theory be justified in the name of telling a compelling story.
What is truly egregious is not the fictionalisation of details, but the outright misrepresentation of the morals, manners and minds of medieval man. If the past really was a foreign country, then the BBC would be rightly besieged by those outraged at the bigoted, hate-filled and slanderous portrayal of that alien nation in this drama. Edward the Confessor, a man who has been quite literally beatified, is depicted beating his own mother to death. Duke William of Normandy, is shown murdering a man in broad daylight for setting a captured enemy free. Later on, when the enemy — rebellious vassal Guy of Burgundy — is recaptured, he is personally tortured by William’s wife Matilda.
The modern imagination has rendered these figures, and the times they lived in, as more brutal than they truly were. Even the famously ruthless William, who grew up dodging assassins and facing down rebellious barons, is not the thuggish hard man the series would present. The historical accounts suggest that he was a strict adherent to chivalric custom and a deeply pious man. In the real world, William banishes Guy then declares the “peace of God” in Normandy, bringing an end to violence and retribution for the crimes of the past decades. King Edward, who is presented as a snivelling, cowardly mother’s boy, was by every contemporary account a heroic, forceful and gregarious ruler, one who had his mother exiled, and certainly not murdered.
How To Host An Ancient Roman Dinner
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Apr 2025Roast duck basted with defrutum and served with a sweet and savory dipping sauce atop a bed of herbs
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyFirst off, this is not a flamingo. While they’re still eaten in some parts of the world, where I live is not one of those parts. I’m using a duck instead, and it’s absolutely delicious.
The real star of this dish is the sauce, which I think would go well with pretty much anything. It’s sweet at first, then you get the savoriness and complexity of the herbs and spices along with a luxurious richness from the duck drippings. It might just be my favorite Roman sauce that I’ve made (and I’ve made quite a few).
For flamingo:
Pluck the flamingo wash, tie, and put it in a pot; add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar. Half-way through cooking, add a bundle of leek and cilantro and cook. When it is nearly done add defrutum to give it color. Pound in a mortar pepper, cumin, coriander, silphium, mint, rue; moisten with vinegar, add dates, pour over some of the drippings. Put it in the pot, thicken with starch, pour the sauce over the bird, and serve. The same recipe can be used for parrot.
— Apicius De re coquinaria, 1st Century
