Quotulatiousness

November 18, 2024

Changing the way “our leaders” speak to us

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia says that the old rules of communicating to the public are undergoing a major shift.

Before they executed Socrates in the year 399 BC — on charges of impiety and corrupting youth — the philosopher was given a chance to defend himself before a jury.

Socrates started his defense with an unusual plea.

Socrates defends himself at his trial (painting by Louis Joseph Lebrun, 1867)

He told his listeners that he had no skill at making speeches. He just knew the everyday language of the common people.

Socrates explained that he had never studied rhetoric or oratory. He feared that he would embarrass himself by speaking so plainly in his trial defense.

“I show myself to be not in the least a clever speaker,” Socrates told the jurors, “unless indeed they call him a clever speaker who speaks the truth.”

He knew that others in his situation would give “speeches finely tricked out with words and phrases”. But Socrates only knew how to use “the same words with which I have been accustomed to speak” in the marketplace of Athens.

Socrates wasn’t exaggerating. His entire reputation was built on conversation. He never wrote a book — or anything else, as far as we can tell.

Spontaneous talking was the basis of his famous “Socratic method” — a simple back-and-forth dialogue. You might say it was the podcasting of its day. He aimed to speak plainly — seeking the truth through open and unfiltered conversation.

That might get you elected President in the year 2024. But it didn’t work very well in Athens, circa 400 BC.

Socrates received the death penalty — and was executed by poisoning.


Is that shocking? Not really.

Western culture was built on one-way communication. Leaders and experts speak — and the rest of us listen.

This is how leaders once spoke to the people — but it’s now changing.

Socrates was the last major thinker to rely solely on conversation. After his death, his successors wrote books and gave lectures.

That’s what powerful people do. They make decisions. They give orders. They deliver speeches.

But not anymore.

In the aftermath of the election, the new wisdom is that giving speeches from a teleprompter doesn’t work in today’s culture. Citizens want their leaders to sit down and talk.

And not just in politics. You may have seen the same thing in your workplace — or in classrooms and other group settings. People now resist one-way orders from the top.

The word “scripted” is now an insult. Plainspoken dialogue is considered more trustworthy. This is part of the up-versus-down revolution I’ve written about elsewhere — a conflict that, I believe, may have even more impact on society than Left-versus-Right.

For better or worse, the hierarchies we’ve inherited from the past are toppling. To some extent, they are even reversing.

This is now impacting how leaders are expected to speak. Events of the last few days have raised awareness of this to a new level — but the “experts” should have expected it. That’s especially true because the experts will be those most impacted by this shift.

November 3, 2024

Ancient Sparta Historian Breaks Down 300 Movie | Deep Dives

Filed under: Greece, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published Jul 8, 2024

Ancient Greek historian Roel Konijnendijk takes a deep dive into the historical accuracy of one of the most iconic and ridiculous depictions of the Spartans – 300 (2006).

00:00 Introduction
00:33 Spartan Society and Customs
02:34 Xerxes’ Messenger
06:56 The Ephors, the Oracle and the Carneia
10:30 The 300
15:39 The Persian Fleet
16:14 Thermopylae, the “Hot Gates”
17:17 Spartan Battle Technique
19:12 The Persian Army
24:42 Xerxes
28:28 Ephialtes
32:01 Dilios – Why Did the Spartans Stay?
34:18 The Final Stand
38:44 Aftermath of Thermopylae and Delios
40:53 Movie Quotes: Fact or Fiction?
(more…)

October 17, 2024

Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Ancient Sparta

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published Jun 26, 2024

Were the Spartans actually the best warriors? Did they really throw their babies off cliffs? Did they … HUNT their slaves? Ancient Greek historian Roel Konijnendijk answers your most googled questions about the Spartans.

00:00 Intro
00:35 When did the Spartans live?
01:00 Were the Spartans Greek?
01:30 Were the Spartans a professional army?
03:00 Were the Spartans the best warriors?
04:46 How did the Spartans train?
06:43 Did the Spartans throw babies off cliffs?
07:42 Did the Spartans practise eugenics?
09:55 Did the Spartans steal food?
10:21 Were the Spartans vegetarian?
11:18 Were the Spartans better than Athens?
12:54 Did Sparta have a navy?
13:15 Why didn’t Sparta have walls?
14:22 Did the Spartans hunt their slaves?
15:30 Did the Spartans get their slaves drunk?
16:42 Did the Spartans have a king?
17:57 Was Sparta a democracy?
19:13 Why did the Spartans fight at Thermopylae?
19:45 Why did the Spartans only send 300?
21:30 Were the Spartans betrayed at Thermopylae?
22:42 Did the Spartans beat the Persians?
24:00 Were the Spartans muscular?
25:40 Did the Spartans have long hair?
26:25 Did the Spartans have same sex relationships?
28:27 Were the Spartan women equal?
(more…)

QotD: Soldiers and warriors

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We want to start with asking what the distinction is between soldiers and warriors. It is a tricky question and even the U.S. Army sometimes gets it badly wrong ([author Steven] Pressfield, I should note, draws a distinction which isn’t entirely wrong but is so wrapped up with his dodgy effort to use discredited psychology that I think it is best to start from scratch). We have a sense that while both of these words mean “combatant”, that they are not quite equivalent.

[…]

But why? The etymologies of the words can actually help push us a bit in the right direction. Warrior has a fairly obvious etymology, being related to war (itself a derivative of French guerre); as guerre becomes war, so Old French guerreieor became Middle English werreior and because that is obnoxious to say, modern English “warrior” (which is why it is warrior and not “warrer” as we might expect if it was regularly constructed). By contrast, soldier comes – it has a tortured journey which I am simplifying – from the sold/sould French root meaning “pay” which in turn comes from Latin solidus, a standard Late Roman coin. So there is clearly something about pay, or the lack of pay involved in this distinction, but clearly it isn’t just pay or the word mercenary would suit just as well.

So here is the difference: a warrior is an individual who wars, because it is their foundational vocation, an irremovable part of their identity and social position, pursued for those private ends (status, wealth, place in society). So the core of what it is to be a warrior is that it is an element of personal identity and also fundamentally individualistic (in motivation, to be clear, not in fighting style – many warriors fought with collective tactics, although I think it fair to say that operation in units is much more central to soldiering than the role of a warrior, who may well fight alone). A warrior remains a warrior when the war ends. A warrior remains a warrior whether fighting alone or for themselves.

By contrast, a soldier is an individual who soldiers (notably a different verb, which includes a sense of drudgery in war-related jobs that aren’t warring per se) as a job which they may one day leave behind, under the authority of and pursued for a larger community which directs their actions, typically through a system of regular discipline. So the core of what it is to be a soldier is that it is a not-necessarily-permanent employment and fundamentally about being both in and in service to a group. A soldier, when the war or their term of service ends, becomes a civilian (something a warrior generally does not do!). A soldier without a community stops being a soldier and starts being a mercenary.

Incidentally, this distinction is not unique to English. Speaking of the two languages I have the most experience in, both Greek and Latin have this distinction. Greek has machetes (μαχητής, lit: “battler”, a mache being a battle) and polemistes (πολεμιστής, lit: “warrior”, a polemos being a war); both are more common in poetry than prose, often used to describe mythical heroes. Interestingly the word for an individual that fights out of battle order (when there is a battle order) is a promachos (πρόμαχος, lit: “fore-fighter”), a frequent word in Homer. But the standard Greek soldier wasn’t generally called any of these things, he was either a hoplite (ὁπλίτης, “full-equipped man”, named after his equipment) or more generally a stratiotes (στρατιώτης, lit: “army-man” but properly “soldier”). That general word, stratiotes is striking, but its root is stratos (στρατός, “army”); a stratiotes, a soldier, for the ancient Greeks was defined by his membership in that larger unit, the army. One could be a machetes or a polemistes alone, but only a stratiotes in an army (stratos), commanded, presumably, by a general (strategos) in service to a community.

Latin has the same division, with similar shades of meaning. Latin has bellator (“warrior”) from bellum (“war”), but Roman soldiers are not generally bellatores (except in a poetic sense and even then only rarely), even when they are actively waging war. Instead, the soldiers of Rome are milites (sing. miles). The word is related to the Latin mille (“thousand”) from the root “mil-” which indicates a collection or combination of things. Milites are thus – like stratiotes, men put together, defined by their collective action for the community (strikingly, groups acting for individual aims in Latin are not milites but latrones, bandits – a word Roman authors also use very freely for enemy irregular fighters, much like the pejorative use of “terrorist” and “insurgent” today) Likewise, the word for groups of armed private citizens unauthorized by the state is not “militia”, but “gang”. The repeated misuse by journalists of “militia” which ought only refer to citizens-in-arms under recognized authority, drives me to madness).

(I actually think these Greek and Latin words are important for understanding the modern use of “warrior” and “soldier” even though they don’t give us either. Post-industrial militaries – of the sort most countries have – are patterned on the modern European military model, which in turn has its foundations in the Early Modern period which in turn (again) was heavily influenced by how thinkers of that period understood Greek and Roman antiquity (which was a core part of their education; this is not to say they were always good at understanding classical antiquity, mind). Consequently, the Greek and Roman understanding of the distinction probably has significant influence on our understanding, though I also suspect that we’d find distinctions in many languages along much the same lines.)

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and …”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-29.

October 12, 2024

Classics Summarized: The Oresteia

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Jul 19, 2017

Nobody look at how long ago I promised to do this.

That’s right! The sequel to Iphigenia, which itself was a prequel to the Iliad, has finally been given the ol’ OSP treatment! And it only took me TWO AND A HALF YEARS
(more…)

October 5, 2024

QotD: The polis as a physical place

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A polis is also a place made up of physical spaces. Physically, the Greeks understood a polis to be made up of city itself, which might just be called the polis but also the astu (ἄστυ, “town”), and the hinterland or countryside, generally called the chora (χώρα). The fact that the word polis can mean both the city and the (city+chora=state) should already tell you something about the hierarchy envisaged here: the city is the lord of the chora. Now in the smallest of poleis that might make a lot of sense because nearly everyone would live in the town anyway: in a polis of, say, 150km2, no point might be more than 8 or 9 kilometers from the city center even if it is somewhat irregularly shaped. A farmer could thus live in the city and walk out – about an hour or two, a human can walk 6-7km per hour – each morning.

But in a larger polis – and remember, a lot of Greeks lived in larger poleis even though they were few, because they were large – the chora was going to be large enough to have nucleated settlements like villages in it; for very large poleis it might have whole small towns (like Eleusis or Thoricus/Laurion in Attica, the territory of Athens) as part of the chora. But we usually do not see a sort of nested heirarchy of sites in larger poleis; instead there is the astu and then the chora, the latter absorbing into its meaning any small towns, villages (the term here is usually kome), isolated homesteads or other settlements. The polis in the sense of the core city at the center of the community was not a settlement first-among-equals but qualitatively different from every other settlement in the polis – an ideal neatly expressed in that the name of the city served as synecdoche for the entire community (imagine if it was normal to refer to all Canadians as “Ottawans” regardless of if they lived in Ottawa and indeed to usually do so and to only say “Canada” when it was very clear you meant the full extent of its land area).

That is not to say that the astu and chora were undivided. Many poleis broke up their territory into neighborhood units, called demes (δημοι) or komai (κῶμαι, the plural of kome used already) for voting or organizational purposes and we know in Athens at least these demes had some local governing functions, organizing local festivals and sometimes even local legal functions, but never its own council or council hall (that is, no boule or bouleuterion; we’ll get to these next time), nor its own mint, nor the ability to make or unmake citizen status.

There are also some physical places in the town center itself we should talk about. Most poleis were walled (Sparta was unusual in this respect not being so), with the city core enclosed in a defensive circuit that clearly delineated the difference between the astu and the chora; smaller settlements on the chora were almost never walled. But then most poleis has a second fortified zone in the city, an acropolis (ἀκρόπολις, literally “high city”), an elevated citadel within the city. The acropolis often had its own walls, or (as implied by the name) was on some forbidding height within the city or frequently both. This developed in one of two ways: in many cases settlement began on some defensible hill and then as the city grew it spilled out into the lowlands around it; in other cases villages coalesced together and these poleis might not have an acropolis, but they often did anyway. The acropolis of a polis generally wasn’t further built on, but rather its space was reserved for temples and sometimes other public buildings (though “oops [almost] all temples” acropoleis aren’t rare; temples were the most important buildings to protect so they go in the most protected place!).

While the street structure of poleis was generally organic (and thus disorganized), almost every polis also had an agora (ἀγορά), a open central square which seems to have served first as a meeting or assembly place, but also quickly became a central market. In most poleis, the agora would remain the site for the assembly (ekklesia, ἐκκλησία, literally “meeting” or “assembly”), a gathering-and-voting-body of all citizens (of a certain status in some systems); in very large poleis (especially democratic ones) a special place for the assembly might exist outside the agora to allow enough space. In Athens this was the Pnyx but in other large poleis it might be called a ekklesiasterion. The agora would almost always have a council house called a bouleuterion where a select council, the boule (βουλή) would meet; we’ll talk about these next time but it is worth noting that in most poleis it was the boule, not the ekklesia that was the core institution that defined polis government. In addition the agora would also house in every polis a prytaneion, a building for the leading magistrates which always had a dining room where important guests and citizens (most notably citizens who were Olympic victors) could be dined at state expense. Dedicated court buildings might also be on the agora, but these are rarer; in smaller poleis often other state buildings were used to house court proceedings. Also, there are almost always temples in the agora as well; please note the agora is never on the acropolis, but almost always located at the foot of the hill on which the acropolis sits, as in Athens.

And this is a good point to reiterate how these are general rules, especially in terms of names. Every polis is a little different, but only a little. So the Athenian ekklesiaterion was normally on the Pnyx (and sometimes in the Theater of Dionysus, an expedient used in other poleis too since theaters made good assembly halls), the Spartan boule is the gerousia, the acropolis of Thebes was the Cadmeia and so on. Every polis is a little different, but the basic forms are recognizable in each, even in relatively strange poleis like Sparta or Athens. But it really is striking that self-governing Greek settlements from Emporiae (Today, Empúries, Spain) to Massalia (Marseille, France) to Cyrene (in modern Libya) to Panticapaeum (in Crimea, which is part of Ukraine) tend to feature identifiably similar public buildings mirroring their generally similar governing forms.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.

September 25, 2024

The Life and Times of Xerxes

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published Jun 10, 2024

An occasional lecture for our Classics Week, this was given to provide historical background for a lecture from the Music Department on Handel’s opera “Serse” (1738).

Books by Sean Gabb: https://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle-dbs/e…

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

If you have enjoyed this lecture, its author might enjoy a bag of coffee, or some other small token of esteem: https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/…

September 8, 2024

Ancient sources

In writing history from the early modern period onward, it’s a common problem to have too many sources for a given event so that it’s the job of the historian to (carefully, one hopes) select the ones that hew closer to the objective truth. In ancient history, on the other hand, we have so few sources to rely upon that it’s a luxury to have multiple accounts of a given event from which to choose:

Unrolled papyrus scroll recovered from the Villa of the Papyri.
Picture published in a pamphlet called “Herculaneum and the Villa of the Papyri” by Amedeo Maiuri in 1974. (Wikimedia Commons)

We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?

What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a “river of gold”. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.

But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity.1 Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.

And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.

[…]

Now let’s look at a text with a very different history, the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia is the name given to a group of papyrus fragments found in 1906 at the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, modern Al-Bahnasa, Egypt (about a third of the way down the Nile from Cairo to the Aswan Dam). These fragments were found in an ancient trash heap. They cover Greek political and military history from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BC. In his Hellenica, Xenophon covers the exact same time frame and many of the same events.2 Both accounts pick up where Thucydides, the leading historian of the Peloponnesian War (fought between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC), leaves off.

While no author has been identified for the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, the grammar and style date the text to the era of the events it describes. This is a recovered text, meaning it was completely lost to history and only discovered in the early twentieth century. Here, the word discovered is appropriately used, as this was not a text that was renowned in ancient times. No ancient historians reference it, and it did not seem to have a lasting impact in its day. What is dismissible in the past is forgotten in the present. The text is written in Attic Greek. This implies that whoever wrote the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia must have been an elite familiar enough with the popular Attic style to replicate it, and likely intended for the history to equal those of Thucydides and Xenophon. There were other styles available to use at the time but Attic Greek was the style of both the aforementioned historians, as well as the writing style of the elite originating in Athens. Any history not written in Attic would have been seen as inferior. Given that the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was lost for thousands of years, it would seem our author failed in his endeavor to mirror the great historians of classical Greece.

The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia serves as a reminder that the modern discovery of ancient texts continues. Many times, these are additional copies of texts we already have. This is not to say these copies are not important. Such was the case of the aforementioned Codex Siniaticus, discovered by biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf in a trash basket, waiting to be burned, in a monastery near Mount Sinai in Egypt in 1844. Upon closer examination, Tischendorf discovered this “trash” was in fact a nearly complete copy of the Christian Bible, containing the earliest complete New Testament we have. One major discrepancy is that the famous story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery – from which the oft-quoted passage “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” originates – is not found in the Codex Sinaiticus.

Yet, sometimes something truly new to us, that no one has seen for thousands of years, is unearthed. In the case of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, no one seemingly had looked at this text for at least 1,500 years, maybe more. This demonstrates that there is always the possibility that buried in some ancient scrap heap in the desert might be a completely new text that, once published for wider scholarship, greatly increases our knowledge of the ancients.

How does this specific text increase our knowledge? Bear in mind that before this period of Greek history, we have just one historian per era. Herodotus is the only source we have for the Greco-Persian Wars (480–479), and the aforementioned Thucydides picks up from there and quickly covers the political climate before beginning his history proper with the advent of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. But Thucydides’s history is unfinished – one ancient biography claims he was murdered on his way back to Athens around 404 BC. Many doubt this, citing evidence that he lived into the early fourth century BC. Either way, his narrative ends abruptly. Xenophon picks it up from there, and later we get a more brief history of this period from Diodorus, who wrote much later, between 60 and 30 BC. While describing the same time frame and many of the same events, these two sources vary widely in their descriptions of certain events. In some cases, they make mutually exclusive claims. One historian must have got it wrong.

For centuries, Xenophon’s account was the preferred text. That is not to say Diodorus’s history was dismissed, but when the two accounts were in conflict, Xenophon’s testimony got the nod. This was partially because Xenophon actually lived during the times he wrote about, whereas Diodorus lived 200 years after these events in Greek history. Consider if there were two conflicting accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg from two different historians: one actually lived during and participated in the war, while the other was a twenty-first century scholar living 150 years after the events he describes. They disagree on key elements of the battle. Who do you believe? This was precisely the case with Xenophon and Diodorus. Yet, once the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was published, it corroborated Diodorus’s history far more than that of Xenophon, forcing historians to reconsider their bias toward the older of the two accounts.


    1. You can find a list of texts we know that we have lost at the Wikipedia page “Lost literary work“.

    2. “Oxyrhynchus Historian”, in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. MC Howatson (Oxford University Press, 2011).

August 13, 2024

QotD: The weird world of the Iliad

[Jane Psmith:] … as weird and crufty and full of archaism as it is, the Iliad is actually the first step in the rationalization of the ancient world. Like, it’s even weirder before.

Homer (“Homer“) presents the gods as having unified identities, desires, and attributes, which of course you have to have in order to have any kind of coherent story but which is not at all the way the Greeks understood their gods before him (or even mostly after). The Greeks didn’t have a priestly caste with hereditary knowledge, or Vedas, or anything like that, so their religion is even more chaotic than most primitive religions. “The god” is a combination of the local cult with its rituals, the name, the myths, and the cultic image, and these could (and often did) spread separately from one another. The goddess with attributes reminiscent of the ancient Near Eastern “Potnia Theron” figure is Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, or Athena, depending on where you are. Aphrodite is born from the severed testicles of Ouranos but is also the daughter of Zeus and Dione. “Zeus” is the god worshipped with human sacrifice on an ash altar at Mt. Lykaion but also the god of the Bouphonia but also a chthonic snake deity. Eventually these all get linked together, much later, primarily by Homer and Hesiod, but even after the stories are codified — okay, this is the king of the gods, he’s got these kids and this shrewish wife, he’s mostly a weather deity — the ritual substrate remains. We still murder the ox and then try the axe for the crime, which has absolutely nothing to do with celestial kingship but it’s what you do. If you’re Athenian. Somewhere else they do something completely different.

I also really enjoyed this book, and I think for similar reasons to you. Because you’re right, at the end of the classical world it wasn’t just the philosophers. One major theme in Athenian drama is the conscious attempt to impose rationality/democracy/citizenship/freedom (all tied together in the Greek imagination) in place of the bloody, chthonic, archaic world of heredity.1 It’s an attempt at a transition, and one which gets a lot of attention I think in part because people read the Enlightenment back into it. But my favorite part of the The Ancient City is Fustel de Coulanges’s exploration of the other end of the process: where did all the weird inherited ritual came from in the first place?!

The short version of the answer is “the heroön“. Or as he puts it: “According to the oldest belief of the Italians and Greeks, the soul did not go into a foreign world to pass its second existence; it remained near men, and continued to live underground.” Everything else follows from here: the tomb is required to confine the dead man, the burial rituals are to please him and bind him to the place, the grave goods and regular libations are for his use, and he is the object of prayers. Fustel de Coulanges is incredibly well-read (that one sentence I quoted above cites Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, “sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum“, plus Euripides’ Alcestis and Hecuba), and he references plenty of Vedic and later Hindu texts and practices too. I also immediately thought of the Rus’ funeral described by ibn Fadlan and retold in every single book about the Vikings, in which, after all the exciting sex and human sacrifice is over, the dead man’s nearest kinsman circles the funerary ship naked with his face carefully averted from it and his free hand covering his anus. This seems like precautions: there’s something in the ship-pyre that might be able, until the rites are completed, to get out.2 And obviously we now recognize tombs and burial as being very important to the common ancestors of the classical and Vedic worlds — from Marija Gimbutas’s kurgan hypothesis to the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the Yamnaya culture (Ямная = pit, as in pit-grave) — their funerary practices have always been core to how we understand them. But I’m really curious how any of this would have worked, practically, for pastoral nomads! Fustel de Coulanges makes it sound like you have your ancestor’s tomb in your back yard, more or less, which obviously isn’t entirely accurate when you’re rolling around the steppe in your wagon.

I’d also be interested to see an archeological perspective on his next section, about the sacred hearth. This is the precursor of Vesta/Hestia and also Vedic Agni, the reconstructed *H₁n̥gʷnis (fire as animating entity and active force) as opposed to *péh₂ur (fire as naturally occurring substance). I looked back through my copy of The Wheel, the Horse, and Language and (aside from a passing suggestion that the hearth-spirit’s genderswap might be due to the western Yamnaya’s generally having more female-inclusive ritual practices, possibly from the influence of the neighboring Tripolye culture), I didn’t find anything. I suppose this makes sense — you can’t really differentiate between the material remains of a ritual hearth and a “we’re cold and hungry” hearth, especially if people are also cooking on the ritual hearth so there’s not a clear division anyway. But if anyone has done it I’d like to see.

I don’t know enough of the historiography to know whether Fustel de Coulanges was saying something novel or contentious in the mid-19th century, but he seems to be basically in line with more recent scholarship even if he’s not trendy. But The Ancient City can be read as a work of political philosophy as well as ancient history!

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.


    1. And of course that tension is extra intriguing because the dramas are always performed at one of these inherited rituals, in this case the city-wide Great Dionysia festival, although it was a relatively late addition to the ritual calendar. Incidentally it’s way less bizarre than the Attic “rustic” Dionysia which is all goat sacrifices and phallus processions. (There’s also the Agrionia in Boeotia which is about dissolution and inversion and nighttime madness, and another example of “the god” being a rather fluid concept.)

    2. Neil Price, in his excellent Children of Ash and Elm, says that the archaeological evidence seems to confirm this:

    “Most of the objects [in the Oseberg ship burial] were deposited with great care and attention, but at the very end most of the larger wooden items — the wagons, sleds, and so on — were literally thrown onto the foredeck, beautiful things just heaved over the side from ground level and being damaged in the process. The accessible end of the burial chamber was then sealed shut by hammering planks across the open gable, but using any old piece of wood that seems to have been at hand. The planks were just laid across at random — anything to fill the opening into the chamber where the dead lay. The nails were hammered in so fast one can see where the workers missed, denting the wood and bending or breaking off the nail heads.”

August 11, 2024

QotD: Greek and Roman notions of courage

That understanding of courage [of First Nations tribes of the Great Plains] was itself almost utterly alien to, for instance, the classical Greeks. While Greek notions of military excellence had their roots in Homer (on this, see J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (2005)) and an ethic of individual combat where honor was gained by killing notable enemies, by the fifth century this had been replaced by an ethic almost entirely focused on holding position in a formation. As Tyrtaeus, a Spartan poet, writes (trans. M.L. West):

    I would not rate a man worth mention or account
    either for speed of foot or wrestling skill,
    not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength
    or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace;
    I would not care if he surpassed Tithonus’ looks,
    or Cinyras’ or Midas’ famous wealth,
    or were more royal than Pelops son of Tantalus,
    or had Adrastus’ smooth persuasive tongue,
    or fame for everything save only valour: no,
    no man’s of high regard in time of war
    unless he can endure the sight of blood and death,
    and stand close to the enemy and fight.
    This is the highest worth, the finest human prize
    and fairest for a bold young man to win.
    It benefits the whole community and state,
    when with a firm stance in the foremost rank
    a man bides steadfast, with no thought of shameful flight,
    laying his life and stout heart on the line,
    and standing by the next man speaks encouragement
    This is the man of worth in time of war.

This is not a daring courage, but a stoic (in the general sense) courage – the courage of standing a place in the line. And note for Tyrtaeus, that courage is more important than skill, or strength or speed; it matters not how well he fights, only that he “bides steadfast” “with a firm stance”. There is no place for individual exploits here. Indeed, when Aristodemus (another Spartan), eager to regain his honor lost by having survived the Battle of Thermopylae, recklessly charged out of the phalanx to meet the Persian advance at the Battle of Plataea, Herodotus pointedly notes that he was not given the award for bravery by the Spartans who instead recognized those who had held their place in line (Hdt. 9.71; Herodotus does not entirely concur with the Spartan judgement).

This was a form of courage that was evolving alongside the hoplite phalanx, where either shameful retreat or a reckless charge exposed one’s comrades to danger by removing a shield from the line. While, as Lendon is quick to note, there was still a very important aspect of personal competition (seeking to show that you, personally, had more bravery to hold your position than others), this is a fundamentally collective, not individual style of combat and it has values and virtues to match. Indeed, the Greeks frequently disparaged the fighting style of “barbarians” who would advance bravely but retreat quickly as cowardly.

And so the man who holds his place in the group and does not advance recklessly is the bravest of Greeks, but among the Crow Native Americans would seem a coward, while the bravest Crow who cleverly and daringly attacked, raided and got away before the enemy could respond would in turn be regarded by the Greeks as a reckless coward, unworthy of honor. These notions of courage aren’t merely different, they are diametrically opposed demanding entirely different actions in analogous circumstances!

The translator will call both of these ideas “courage”, but clearly when one gets down to it, they demand very different things. And these are just two examples. As Lendon notes (op. cit.), the virtus of the Roman was not the same as the andreia of the Greek, though both words might well be translated as “courage” or “valor” (and both words, etymologically mean “manliness”, lest we forget that these are very gender-stratified societies). Roman virtus was often expressed in taking individual initiative, but always restrained by Roman disciplina (discipline), making that system of military values still different from either the Crow or the Greek system.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

August 10, 2024

History Summarized: Athens (Accidentally) Invents Democracy

Filed under: Greece, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Apr 26, 2024

“TOP FIVE Athenian Tyrants – #2 will surprise you and #3 will get murdered in a polycule-gone-wrong!”
-Herodotus if he had a blog.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
“Revolution & Tyranny” & “The Origins of Democracy” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
Athens: City of Wisdom by Bruce Clark, 2022
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton, 2021
The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline, 2016
I also have a university degree in Classical Civilization.
(more…)

July 30, 2024

Sparta’s bane – Cicero labelled him “the foremost man of Greece”

Filed under: Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Theban general who finally broke the military power of Sparta:

Epaminondas defending Pelopidas by William Rainey.
Illustration from Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls: being selected lives freely retold (1900) via Wikimedia Commons.

The ancient Roman orator and statesman Cicero labeled him “the foremost man of Greece”. Cornelius Nepos, a biographer and contemporary of Cicero’s, regarded him as “incorruptible”. The 16th-century French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne judged him “one of the three worthiest and most excellent men” in all of history.

This man was a warrior-philosopher, a revolutionary, an ascetic, a statesman and diplomat, a liberator, and a military genius. Yet the deeds for which he is best remembered spanned less than two decades (379–362 BC), 2,400 years ago.

To whom am I referring?

His name was Epaminondas. If it doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Outside of Greece, few people anywhere today know of him. I never heard his name until this past April when an economist friend, Dr. Luke Jasinski of Maria Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, suggested I write about him. Luke says he:

    …was a broad-minded man with a libertarian streak, a visionary who showed the Greek world a viable alternative to the endless wars of the time. For modern libertarians, his story is worth remembering. Impressed by it myself, I dedicated one of my economics books to him.

What we know about Epaminondas comes entirely from secondary sources. He left behind no writings that have survived, but from contemporaries and later historians, we do know at least this much about him:

  • He was born in the Greek city-state of Thebes in the central Greek region of Boeotia, sometime between 419 and 411 BC, when Thebes was a tiny backwater. It would be largely due to Epaminondas and his loyal friend and fellow general Pelopidas that Thebes would become a powerhouse a few decades later.
  • Sparta, the brutal city-state that governed the Greek region of the Peloponnesus, orchestrated a coup against the Theban government in 382 BC and installed an armed garrison there. Three years later, Epaminondas played a key role in a revolution that ended the Spartan dictatorship, restoring local, democratic government.
  • In the wake of the Theban revolution, Sparta went to war with Thebes and its Boeotian allies for the next decade. When peace talks broke down in 371 BC, the stage was set for the climactic Battle of Leuctra. Through masterful and unprecedented tactics on the battlefield, Epaminondas led the outnumbered Theban armies to a decisive victory over the Spartans.
  • To end the Spartan threat for good, Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnesus a year later. He liberated the region of Messenia that the Spartans had occupied and savaged two centuries earlier. Epaminondas did not subsume and subdue the Messenians; instead, he introduced democratic rule and then left. Grateful for their liberation, the Messenians became allies of Thebes and a buffer against the Spartans. Shortly thereafter, Epaminondas founded a new city in the northern Peloponnesus and named it Megalopolis. With Sparta shrunken and bottled up, its days as a menacing bully were numbered.

July 23, 2024

Why Most “Ancient” Buildings are Fakes

Filed under: Architecture, Greece, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published Apr 12, 2024

Almost every ancient monument has been at least partially reconstructed, for a wide range of reasons …

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:06 The Forum and Colosseum
2:27 The Ara Pacis
3:24 Early restorations
4:37 Mondly
5:47 Roman forts and baths
6:42 Knossos
7:23 The Stoa of Attalus
8:59 The Acropolis
10:05 When to restore?
(more…)

July 5, 2024

History Summarized: The Greek Age of Cities

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Mar 15, 2024

Ancient Greece created a social ecosystem of numerous independent cities to cater to my tastes specifically.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton, 2021
The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline, 2016
Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece by Donald Kagan & Gregory F. Viggiano, 2013
“Revolution” & “Tyranny” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
“Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
“Dark Age and Archaic Greece” & “The Greek Way of Waging War” & “Greek Language, Literacy, and Writing” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
I also have a degree in Classical Studies
(more…)

June 22, 2024

The End of Everything

In First Things, Francis X. Maier reviews Victor Davis Hanson’s recent work The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation:

A senior fellow in military history and classics at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Hanson is a specialist on the human dimension and costs of war. His focus in The End of Everything is, as usual, on the past; specifically, the destruction of four great civilizations: ancient Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and the Aztec Empire. In each case, an otherwise enduring civilization was not merely conquered, but “annihilated” — in other words, completely erased and replaced. How such catastrophes could happen is the substance of Hanson’s book. And the lessons therein are worth noting.

In every case, the defeated suffered from fatal delusions. Each civilization overestimated its own strength or skill; each misread the willingness of allies to support it; and each underestimated the determination, strength, and ferocity of its enemy.

Thebes had a superb military heritage, but the Thebans’ tactics were outdated and their leadership no match for Macedon’s Alexander the Great. The city was razed and its surviving population scattered. Carthage — a thriving commercial center of 500,000 even after two military defeats by Rome — misread the greed, jealousy, and hatred of Rome, and Roman willingness to violate its own favorable treaty terms to extinguish its former enemy. The long Roman siege of the Third Punic War saw the killing or starvation of 450,000 Carthaginians, the survivors sold into slavery, the city leveled, and the land rendered uninhabitable for a century.

The Byzantine Empire, Rome’s successor in the East, survived for a millennium on superior military technology, genius diplomacy, impregnable fortifications, and confidence in the protection of heaven. By 1453, a shrunken and sclerotic Byzantine state could rely on none of these advantages, nor on any real help from the Christian West. But it nonetheless clung to a belief in the mantle of heaven and its own ability to withstand a determined Ottoman siege. The result was not merely defeat, but the erasure of any significant Greek and Christian presence in Constantinople. As for the Aztecs, they fatally misread Spanish intentions, ruthlessness, and duplicity, as well as the hatred of their conquered “allies” who switched sides and fought alongside the conquistadors.

The industrial-scale nature of human sacrifice and sacred cannibalism practiced by the Aztecs — more than 20,000 captives were ritually butchered each year — horrified the Spanish. It reinforced their fury and worked to justify their own ferocious violence, just as the Carthaginian practice of infant sacrifice had enraged the Romans. In the end, despite the seemingly massive strength of Aztec armies, a small group of Spanish adventurers utterly destroyed Tenochtitlán, the beautiful and architecturally elaborate Aztec capital, and wiped out an entire culture.

History never repeats itself, but patterns of human thought and behavior repeat themselves all the time. We humans are capable of astonishing acts of virtue, unselfish service, and heroism. We’re also capable of obscene, unimaginable violence. Anyone doubting the latter need only check the record of the last century. Or last year’s October 7 savagery, courtesy of Hamas.

The takeaway from Hanson’s book might be summarized in passages like this one:

    Modern civilization faces a toxic paradox. The more that technologically advanced mankind develops the ability to wipe out wartime enemies, the more it develops a postmodern conceit that total war is an obsolete exercise, [assuming, mistakenly] that disagreements among civilized people will always be arbitrated by the cooler, more sophisticated, and more diplomatically minded. The same hubris that posits that complex tools of mass destruction can be created but never used, also fuels the fatal vanity that war itself is an anachronism and no longer an existential concern—at least in comparison to the supposedly greater threats of naturally occurring pandemics, meteoric impacts, man-made climate change, or overpopulation.

Or this one:

    The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given unchanging human nature, despite the pretensions of a postmodern technologically advanced global village.

I suppose the lesson is this: There’s nothing sacred about the Pax Americana. Nothing guarantees its survival, legitimacy, comforts, power, or wealth. A sardonic observer like the Roman poet Juvenal — were he alive — might even observe that today’s America seems less like the “city on a hill” of Scripture, and more like a Carthaginian tophet, or the ritual site of child sacrifice. Of course, that would be unfair. A biblical leaven remains in the American experiment, and many good people still believe in its best ideals.

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