The first thing we need to talk about is the physical location of Rome and the peoples directly around it. […] Rome in its earliest history was, essentially, a frontier city, placed at the very northern end of Latium, the region of Italy that was populated by Latin-speakers. Rome’s position on the Tiber River put it at the cultural meeting place of the Etruscan (and Faliscian) cultural zone to the North, Latium to the South and Umbrian-speaking peoples in the Apennine uplands to the North-East. To the West, of course, lay the Sea, which by Rome’s legendary founding date was already beginning to fill with seaborne merchants, particularly Phoenician and Greek ones […] These patterns of settlements and cultural zones are both attested in our literary sources but also show up fairly clearly in the archaeology of the region.
Rome itself, a cluster of hills situated at an important ford over the Tiber (and thus a natural trade and migration route running north-south along Italy’s Western side), was already inhabited by the close of the Neolithic with small settlement clusters on several of its hills. As you might well imagine, excavating pre-historic Rome is difficult, due to the centuries of development piled on top of it and the fact that in many cases pre-historic evidence must exist directly below subsequent ruins which are now cultural heritage sites. Nevertheless, archaeology sheds quite a lot of light. That archaeological evidence allows us to reject the sort of “empty fields” city foundation that Livy implies. Rather than being “founded”, the city of Rome as we know it formed out of the political merger of these communities (the technical term is synoecism from Greek συνοικισμóς, literally “[putting] the houses together”). There is, importantly, no clear evidence of any archaeological discontinuity between the old settlements on the hills and the newly forming city; these seem to have been the same people. The Palatine hill, which is “chosen” by Romulus in the legend and would be the site of the houses of Rome’s most important and affluent citizens during the historical period, seems to have been the most prominent of these settlements even at this early stage.
A key event in this merging comes in the mid-600s, when these hill-communities begin draining the small valley that lay between the Capitoline and Palatine hills; this valley would naturally have been marshy and quite useless but once drained, it formed a vital meeting place at the center of these hill communities – what would become the Forum Romanum. That public works project – credited by the Romans to the semi-legendary king Tarquinius Priscus (Plin. Natural History 36.104ff) – is remarkably telling, both because it signals that there was enough of a political authority in Rome to marshal the resources to see it done (suggesting somewhat more centralized government, perhaps early kings) and because the new forum formed the meeting place and political center for these communities, quite literally binding them together into a single polity. It is at this point that we can really begin speaking of Rome and Romans with confidence.
What does our archaeology tell us about this early community at this point and for the next several centuries?
The clearest element of this early polity is the Latin influence. Linguistically, Rome was of Latium, spoke (and wrote their earliest inscriptions) in Latin and it falls quite easily to reason that the majority of the people in these early hilltop communities around the Tiber ford were culturally and linguistically Latins. But there are also strong signs of Etruscan and Greek influence in the temples. For instance, in the Forum Boarium (between the Tiber and the Palatine), we see evidence for a cult location dating to the seventh century, with a temple constructed there in the early sixth century (and reconstructed again towards the end of that century); votive offerings recovered from the site include Attic ware pottery and a votive ivory figurine of a lion bearing an inscription in Etruscan.
Archaeological evidence for the Sabines is less evident. Distinctive Sabine material culture hasn’t been recovered from Rome as of yet. There are some clear examples of linguistic influence from Sabine to Latin, although the Romans often misidentify them; the name of the Quirinal hill, for instance (thought by the Romans to be where the Sabines settled after joining the city) doesn’t seem to be Sabine in origin. That said, religious institutions associated with the hill in the historical period (particularly the priests known as the Salii Collini) may have some Sabine connections. More notably, a number of key Roman families (gentes in Latin; we might translate this word as “clans”) claimed Sabine descent. Of particular note, several of these are Patrician gentes, meaning that they traced their lineage to families prominent under the kings or very early in the Republic. Among these were the Claudii (a key family in Roman politics from the founding of the Republic to the early Empire; Liv. 2.16), the Tarpeii (recorded as holding a number of consulships in the fifth century), and the Valerii (prominent from the early days of the Republic and well into the empire; Dionysius 2.46.3). There seems little reason to doubt the ethnic origins of these families.
So on the one hand we cannot say with certainty that there were Sabines in Rome in the eighth century as Livy would have it (though nothing rules it out), but there very clearly were by the foundation of the Republic in 509. The Sabine communities outside of Rome (because it is clear they didn’t all move into Rome) were absorbed in 290 and granted citizenship sine suffrago (citizenship without the vote) almost immediately; voting rights came fairly quickly thereafter in 268 BC (Vel. Pat. 1.14.6-7). The speed with which these Sabine communities outside of Rome were admitted to full citizenship speaks, I suspect, to the degree to which the Sabines were already by that point seen as a kindred people (despite the fact that they spoke a language quite different from Latin; Sabine Osco-Umbrian was its own language, albeit in the same language family).
The only group we can say quite clearly that there is no evidence for in early Rome from Livy’s fusion society are the Trojans; there is no trace of Anatolian influence this early (and we might expect the sudden intrusion of meaningful amounts of Anatolian material culture to be really obvious). Which is to say that Aeneas is made up; no great surprise there.
But Livy’s conception of an early Roman community – perhaps at the end of the sixth century rather than in the middle of the eighth – that was already a conglomeration of peoples with different linguistic, ethnic and religious backgrounds is largely confirmed by the evidence. Moreover, layered on top of this are influences that speak to this early Rome’s connectedness to the broader Mediterranean milieu – I’ve mentioned already the presence of Greek cultural products both in Rome and in the area surrounding it. Greek and eastern artistic motifs (the latter likely brought by Phoenician traders) appear with the “Orientalizing” style in the material culture of the area as early as 730 B.C. – no great surprise there either as the Greeks had begun planting colonies in Italy and Sicily by that point and Phoenician traders are clearly active in the region as well. Evidently Carthaginian cultural contacts also existed at an early point; the Romans made a treaty with Carthage in the very first year of the Republic, which almost certainly seems like it must have replaced some older understanding between the Roman king and Carthage (Polybius 3.22.1). Given the trade contacts, it seems likely that there would have been Phoenician merchants in permanent residence in Rome; evidence for such permanently resident Greeks is even stronger.
In short, our evidence suggests that were one to walk the forum of Rome at the dawn of the Republic – the beginning of what we might properly call the historical period for Rome – you might well hear not only Latin, but also Sabine Umbrian, Etruscan and Greek and even Phoenician spoken (to be clear, those are three completely different language families; Umbrian, Latin and Greek are Indo-European languages, Phoenician was a Semitic language and Etruscan is a non-Indo-European language which may be a language isolate – perhaps the modern equivalent might be a street in which English, French, Italian, Chinese and Arabic are all spoken). The objects on sale in the markets might be similarly diverse.
I keep coming back to the languages, by the by, because I want to stress that these really were different people. There is a tendency – we will come back to it next time – for a lot of modern folks to assume that, “Oh well, these are all Italians, right?” But the idea of “Italians” as such didn’t exist yet (and Italy even today isn’t quite so homogeneous as many people outside of it often assume!). And we know that the different languages were mirrored by different religious and cultural practices (although material culture – the “stuff” of daily life, was often shared through trade contacts). Languages thus make a fairly clear and easy marker for a whole range of cultural differences, though – and we will come back to this as well – it is important to remember that people’s identities are often complex; identity is generally a layered, “yes, but also …” affair. I have only glanced over this, but we also see traces of Latin, Etruscan, Greek and Umbrian religious practice in early Roman sanctuaries and our later literary sources; Phoenician influence has also been posited – we know at least that there was a temple to Uni/Astarte in Pyrgi within 30 miles of Rome so Phoenician religious influence could never have been that far away.
We thus have to conclude that Livy is correct on at least one thing: Rome seems to have been a multi-ethnic, diverse place from the beginning with a range of languages, religious practices. Rome was a frontier town at the beginning and it had the wide mix of peoples that one would expect of such a frontier town. It sat at the juncture of Etruria (inhabited by Etruscans) to the north, of Latium (inhabited by Latins) to the South, and of the Apennine mountains (inhabited by Umbrians like the Sabines). At the same time, Rome’s position on the Tiber ford made it the logical place for land-based trade (especially from Greek settlements in Campania, like Cumae, Capua and Neapolis – that is, Naples) to cross the Tiber moving either north or south. Finally, the Tiber River is navigable up to the ford (and the Romans were conscious of the value of this, e.g. Liv 5.54), so Rome was also a natural destination point for seafaring Greek and Phoenician traders looking for a destination to sell their wares. Rome was, in short, far from a homogeneous culture; it was a place where many different peoples meet, even in its very earliest days. Indeed, as we will see, that fact is probably part of what positioned Rome to become the leading city of Italy.
(For those looking to track down some of these archaeological references or get a sense of the source material, though it is now a touch dated, The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol 7.2: The Rise of Rome to 220 B.C., edited by F.W. Walbank, A.E. Astin, M.W. Frederiksen, and R.M. Ogilvie (1990) offers a fairly good overview, particularly the early chapters by Ogilvie, Torelli and Momigliano. For something more suited to regular folks, when I teach this I use M.T. Boatwright, D.J. Gargola, N. Lenski and R.J.A. Talbert, The Romans: From Village To Empire (2012) and it has a decent textbook summary, p. 22-42, covering early Rome with particularly good reference to the archaeology)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-11.
November 12, 2023
QotD: Archaeological evidence on the foundation of Rome
November 7, 2023
QotD: As we all know, medieval peasants wore ill-fitting clothes of grey and brown, exclusively
What we see in ancient and medieval artwork is that even the lower classes of society wore clothes that were bleached or dyed, often in bright, bold colors (in as much as dyes were available). At Rome, this extended even to enslaved persons; Seneca’s comment that legislation mandating a “uniform” for enslaved persons at Rome was abandoned for fear that they might realize their numbers, the clear implication being that it was often impossible to tell an enslaved person apart from a free person on the street in normal conditions (Sen. Clem. 1.24.1). Consequently, fulling and dyeing was not merely a process for the extremely wealthy, but an important step in the textiles that would have been worn even by every-day people.
That said, fulling and dyeing (though not bleaching) were fundamentally different from the tasks that we’ve discussed so far because they generally could not be done in the home. Instead they often required space, special tools and equipment and particular (often quite bad smelling) chemicals and specialized skills in order to practice. Consequently, these tasks tended to be done by specialist workers for whom textile production was a trade, rather than merely a household task.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-02.
November 3, 2023
QotD: The use of Epigraphy and Papyrology in interpreting and understanding the ancient and classical world
Let’s start with the most text-like subcategories, beginning with epigraphy. Epigraphy is the study of words carved into durable materials like stone or metal. For cultures that do this (so, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans: Yes! Gauls, pre-Roman Iberians, ancient Steppe nomads: No!), epigraphy provides new texts to read and unlike the literary texts, we are discovering new epigraphic texts all the time. The downside is that the types of texts we recover epigraphically are generally very limited; mostly what we see are laws, decrees and lists. Narrative accounts of events are very rare, as is the epigraphic preservation of literature (though this does happen, particularly in Mesopotamia with texts written on clay tablets). That makes epigraphy really valuable as a source of legal texts (especially in Greece and Rome), but because the texts in question tend to be very narrowly written (again, we’re talking about a single law or a single decree; imagine trying to understand an act of Congress renaming a post office if you didn’t [know] what Congress was or what a post office was) without a lot of additional context, you often need literary texts to give you the context for the new inscription you are looking at.
The other issue with epigraphy is that it is very difficult to read and use, both because of wear and damage and also because these inscriptions were not always designed with readability in mind (most inscriptions are heavily abbreviated, written INALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATIONATALL). Consequently, getting from “stone with some writing on it” to an edited, usable Greek or Latin text generally requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text, reconstructing missing words (based on the grammar and context around them) and making sense of what is there. Frankly, skilled epigraphers are practically magicians in terms of being able figure out, for instance, the word that needs to fit in a crack on a stone based on the words around it and the space available. Fortunately, epigraphic texts are published in a fairly complex notation system which clearly delineates the letters that are on the stone itself and those which have been guessed at (which we then all have to learn).
Related to this is papyrology and other related forms of paleography, which is to say the interpretation of bits of writing on other kinds of texts, though for the ancient Mediterranean this mostly means papyrus. The good news is that there is a fairly large corpus of this stuff, which includes a lot of every day documents (tax receipts! personal letters! census returns! literary fragments!). The bad news is that it is almost entirely restricted to Egypt, because while papyrus paper was used far beyond Egypt, it only survives in ultra-dry conditions like the Egyptian desert. Moreover, you have all of these little documents – how do you know if they are typical? Well, you need a very large sample of them. And then we’re back to preservation because the only place you have a very large sample is Egypt, which is strange. Unfortunately, Egypt is quite possibly the strangest place in the Ancient Mediterranean world and so papyrological evidence is frequently plagued by questions of applicability: sure we have good evidence on average household size in Roman Egypt, but how representative is that of the Roman Empire as a whole, given that Egypt is such an unusual place?
Outside of Egypt and a handful of sites (I can think of two) in England? Almost nothing. To top it all off, papyrology shares epigraphy’s problem that these texts are difficult and often require specialists to read and reconstruct them due to damage, old scripts and so on. The major problem is that the quantity of recovered papyrus has vastly outstripped the number of trained papyrologists, bottle-necking this source of evidence (also a lot of ancient papyri get traded on the antiquities black market, potentially destroying their provenance, and there is a special level in hell for people who buy black market antiquities).
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 26, 2021 (On the Nature of Ancient Evidence”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-26.
October 30, 2023
QotD: Study military history in hopes of avoiding future conflicts
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.
October 26, 2023
QotD: Making steel
So we are going to limit ourselves here to just carbon and iron. Now in video-game logic, that means you take one “unit” of carbon and one “unit” of iron and bash them together in a fire to make steel. As we’ll see, the process is at least moderately more complicated than that. But more to the point: those proportions are totally wrong. Steel is a combination of iron and carbon, but not equal parts or anything close to it. Instead, the general division goes this way (there are several classification systems but they all have the same general grades):
Below 0.05% carbon or so, we just refer to that as iron. There is going to be some small amount of carbon in most iron objects, picked up in the smelting or forging process.
From 0.05% carbon to 0.25% carbon is mild or low carbon steel.
From about 0.3% to about 0.6%, we might call medium carbon steel, although I see this classification only infrequently.
From 0.6% to around 1.25% carbon is high-carbon steel, also known as spring steel. For most armor, weapons and tools, this is the “good stuff” (but see below on pattern welding).
From 1.25% to 2% are “ultra-high-carbon steels” which, as far as I can tell didn’t see much use in the ancient or medieval world.
Above 2%, you have cast iron or pig iron; excessive carbon makes the steel much too hard and brittle, making it unsuitable for most purposes.Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-09.
October 22, 2023
QotD: The changes in Roman legionary equipment attributed to the “Marian reforms”
For the pilum, Plutarch says that Marius designed it to incorporate a wooden rivet where the long metal shank met the heavy wooden shaft, replacing one of the two iron nails with a wooden rivet that would break on impact, in order to better disable the shield. The problem is that the pilum is actually archaeologically one of the best attested Roman weapons with the result that we can follow its development fairly closely. And the late, great Peter Connolly did exactly that in a series of articles in the Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies1 and while the design of the pilum does develop over time, there’s simply no evidence for what Plutarch describes. The “broad tanged” pilum type could have been modified this way, but we’ve never found one actually so modified; instead the pila of this type we find all have rivets (two of them) in place (where rivets are preserved at all). Moreoever, most pila of that “broad tanged” type, both before and after Marius, have the edges of that broad tang bent over at the sides, which would prevent the sort of sliding action Plutarch describes even if one of the rivets broke. Meanwhile, by the first century there are three types of pila around (socketed, broad-tanged and spike-tanged) only one of which could be modified in this way (the broad-tanged type), and that type doesn’t dominate during the first century when one might expect Marius’ new-style pila to be in use. In practice then the conclusion seems to be that Plutarch made up or misunderstood this “innovation” in the pilum or, at best, the design was adopted briefly and then abandoned.
On to the aquila. Now, it is absolutely true that the aquila, the legionary eagle, became a key standard for the Roman legions. Pliny the Elder notes that before Marius it was merely the foremost of five standards, the others being the wolf, minotaur, horse and boar (Plin. HN 10.16). But even a brief glance as legionary standards into the early empire (see Keppie (1984), 205-213 for an incomplete and somewhat dated list) shows that bulls, boars and wolves remained pretty common legionary emblems (alongside the eagle) into the empire. The eagle seems to have been something of a personal totem for Marius (e.g. Plut. Mar. 36.5-6) so it is hardly surprising he’d have emphasized it, the same way that legions founded by Caesar – or which wanted to be seen as founded by Caesar – adopted the bull emblem, quite a lot. But this is a weak accomplishment, since Pliny already notes that the eagle was, even before Marius, already prima cum quattuor aliis (“first among four others”), and so it remained: first among a range of other emblems and standards. Though of all of the things we may credit Marius with instituting, this perhaps gets the closest, if we believe Pliny that Marius further elevated the eagle into its particular position.
Then there is the institution of the Roman marching pack and the furca to carry it, such that Marius’ soldiers became known as “Marius’ mules” because he made them carry all of their own kit rather than, as previous legions had supposedly done, carrying it all on mules. Surely this extremely famous element of the narrative cannot be flawed? And Plutarch sort of says this, he notes that, “Setting out on the expedition, he laboured to perfect his army as it went along, practicing the men in all kinds of running and in long marches, and compelling them to carry their own baggage and to prepare their own food. Hence, in after times, men who were fond of toil and did whatever was enjoined upon them contentedly and without a murmur, were called Marian mules” (Plut. 13.1; trans. B. Perrin). Except that doesn’t say anything about instituting the classic Roman pack that we see, for instance, depicted on Trajan’s column, does it? It just says Marius made his men carry their baggage and prepare their own food, leading to the nickname for men who did toil without complaint.
The problem is that those two things – making soldiers carry their baggage and cook their own food (along with kicking out camp followers) – are ubiquitous commonplaces of good generalship with instances that pre-date Marius. P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus does exactly this – getting rid of camp servants, wagons and pack animals, making soldiers cook their own food and kicking out the camp followers – according to Appian in 134 when he besieged Numantia (which fell in 133, App. Hisp. 85). And then Q. Caecilius Metellus, Marius’ own former commander, does the exact same thing in 109 when he takes command against Jugurtha in North Africa, kicking the sutlers out of the camp, getting rid of pack animals and private servants, making soldiers cook their own food, carry their own rations and their own weapons (Sall. Iug. 42.2; note that Sallust dies in in the 30s BC, 80-odd years before Plutarch is born, so Plutarch may well be getting this trope from Sallust and then attributing it to the wrong Roman). Critiques of generals who issued rations rather than making their soldiers cook or praise for generals who didn’t remained standard into the empire (e.g. Tac. Hist. 2.88; Hdn. 4.7.4-6; Dio Cass. 62.5.5). In short this trope was not new to Marius nor was it new to Plutarch’s version of Marius; it was a standard trope of generals restoring good discipline to their soldiers. Plutarch even hedges noting another story that the term “Marius’ mules” might actually have come how well Marius as a junior officer got along with animals (Plut. Mar. 13.2)!
Well, fine enough, but what about the idea that state-issued equipment is emerging in this period? Well, it might be but our evidence is not great. As noted when we discussed the dilectus, Polybius implies – and his schematic for conscription makes little sense otherwise – that the Romans are in that period buying their own equipment. He also notes that the quaestors deduct from a soldier’s pay the price of their rations (if they are Romans; socii eat for free), their clothing and any additional equipment they need (Polyb. 6.39.14). It makes sense; if a fellow forgot a sword or his breaks, you need to get that replaced, so you fine him the value of it and then issue him one from the common store.
Now Keppie (1984) assumes this system changes during the tribunate(s) of Gaius Gracchus (123-2) and you can see the temptation in this idea. If Gaius Gracchus shifts equipment to being issued at state expense, then suddenly there’s no reason not to recruit the landless proletarii (discussed below) opening the door for Marius to do so (discussed below) and fundamentally transforming the Roman army into the longer-service, professional form we see in the empire. The problem is that, well, it didn’t happen. First, we have no evidence at all that Gaius Gracchus did anything related to soldier’s arms and armor; what we have is a single line from Plutarch that soldiers should be issued clothing at state expense with nothing deducted from their pay to meet this cost (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.1). The assumption here is that this also covered arms and armor, but Plutarch doesn’t say that at all. The more fatal flaw is that we can be very, extremely sure this reform didn’t stick, because we have a bunch of Roman “pay stubs” from the imperial period (from Egypt, naturally) and regular deductions vestimentis, “for clothing” show up as standard.2 Indeed, they show up alongside deductions for food and replacement socks, boots and so on, exactly as Polybius would have us expect. Apart from the fact that this is presumably being done by a procurator instead of a quaestor (a change in the structure of administration in the provinces run directly by the emperor), this is the same system.
Now there are reasons to think that at least some equipment was state supplied or contracted (even if it may have been billed to the accounts of the soldiers who got it). Scipio creates a public armaments production center in Carthago Nova in 210, but this may be a one off. Seemingly more centralized production of arms under contract are more common in the late Republic and by the imperial period we start to see evidence of fabricae which seem to be central production sites for military equipment.3 But we have no hint in the sources of any sudden reform to this system. It may well be a gradual change as the “mix” of personal and state-ordered equipment slowly tilts in favor of the latter; the system Polybius describes could accommodate both situations, so there’s no need for a sudden big shift. Alternately, the preponderance of state-produced equipment might well be connected to the formalization of a long-service professional army under Augustus. Even then, we still find pieces of equipment in Roman imperial sites which were clearly personal; soldiers could still go and get a fancy version of standard kit, stamp their name in it and call it theirs. All I think we can say with any degree of confidence is that self-purchased equipment seems to be the norm in Polybius’ day whereas state-issued equipment seems to be the norm by the end of the first century. But Marius has nothing to do with it, as far as we can tell and no ancient source claims that he did.
Oh and by the by, if you are picking up from all of this (and our discussion of Lycurgus) that Plutarch is a difficult source that needs to be treated with a lot of caution because he never lets the facts get in the way of a good story … well, that’s true.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. “Pilum, Gladius and Pugio in the Late Republic”, JRMES 5 (1997), then “The Reconstruction and Use of Roman Weaponry in the Second Century BC”, JRMES 11 (2000) and then “The pilum from Marius to Nero – a reconsideration of its development and function”, JRMES 12/13 (2001/2).
2. On this, see R.O. Fink, Roman Military Records on Papyrus (1971).
3. On all this, see Bishop and Coulston, Roman Military Equipment (2006), 233-240.
October 18, 2023
QotD: The role of violence in historical societies
This is true even in historical societies that glorified war! Taking, for instance, medieval mounted warrior-aristocrats (read: knights), we find a far more complex set of values and social bonds. Military excellence was a key value among the medieval knightly aristocracy, but so was Christian religious belief and observance, so were expectations about courtly conduct, and so were bonds between family and oath-bound aristocrats. In short there were many forms of authority beyond violence even among military aristocrats. Consequently individuals could be – and often were! – lionized for exceptional success in these other domains, often even when their military performance was at best lackluster.
Roman political speech, meanwhile, is full of words to express authority without violence. Most obviously is the word auctoritas, from which we get authority. J.E. Lendon (in Empire of Honor: The Art of Government in the Roman World (1997)), expresses the complex interaction whereby the past performance of virtus (“strength, worth, bravery, excellence, skill, capacity”, which might be military, but it might also be virtus demonstrated in civilian fields like speaking, writing, court-room excellence, etc) produced honor which in turn invested an individual with dignitas (“worth, merit”), a legitimate claim to certain forms of deferential behavior from others (including peers; two individuals both with dignitas might owe mutual deference to each other). Such an individual, when acting or especially speaking was said to have gravitas (“weight”), an effort by the Romans to describe the feeling of emotional pressure that the dignitas of such a person demanded; a person speaking who had dignitas must be listened to seriously and respected, even if disagreed with in the end. An individual with tremendous honor might be described as having a super-charged dignitas such that not merely was some polite but serious deference, but active compliance, such was the force of their considerable honor; this was called auctoritas. As documented by Carlin Barton (in Roman Honor: Fire in the Bones (2001)), the Romans felt these weights keenly and have a robust language describing the emotional impact such feelings had.
Note that there is no necessary violence here. These things cannot be enforced through violence, they are emotional responses that the Romans report having (because their culture has conditioned them to have them) in the presence of individuals with dignitas. And such dignitas might also not be connected to violence. Cicero clearly at points in his career commanded such deference and he was at best an indifferent soldier. Instead, it was his excellence in speaking and his clear service to the Republic that commanded such respect. Other individuals might command particular auctoritas because of their role as priests, their reputation for piety or wisdom, or their history of service to the community. And of course beyond that were bonds of family, religion, social group, and so on.
And these are, to be clear, two societies run by military aristocrats as described by those same military aristocrats. If anyone was likely to represent these societies as being entirely about the commission of violence, it would be these fellows. And they simply don’t.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part III: The Cult of the Badass”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
October 14, 2023
QotD: Horses and sheep on the Eurasian Steppe
Now it is worth noting right now that Steppe Nomads have, in essence, two conjoined subsistence systems: there is one system for when they are with their herds and another for purely military movements. Not only the sheep, but also the carts (which are used to move the yurt – the Mongols would call it a ger – the portable structure they live in) can’t move nearly as fast as a Steppe warrior on horseback can. So for swift operational movements – raids, campaigns and so on – the warriors would range out from their camps (and I mean range – often we’re talking about hundreds of miles) to strike a target, leaving the non-warriors (which is to say, women, children and the elderly) back at the camp handling the sheep. For strategic movements, as I understand it, the camps and sheep herds might function as a sort of mobile logistics base that the warriors could operate from. We’ll talk about that in just a moment.
So what is the nomadic diet like? Surely it’s all raw horse-meat straight off of the bone, right? Obviously, no. The biggest part of the diet is dairy products. Mare’s and sheep’s milk could be drunk as milk; mare’s milk (but not sheep’s milk) could also be fermented into what the Mongolians call airag but is more commonly known as qumis after its Turkish name (note that while I am mostly using the Mongols as my source model for this, Turkic Steppe nomads are functioning in pretty much all of the same ways, often merely with different words for what are substantially the same things). But it could also be made into cheese and yogurt [update: Wayne Lee (@MilHist_Lee) notes that mare’s milk cannot be made into yogurt, so the yogurt here would be made from sheep’s milk – further stressing the importance of sheep!] which kept better, or even dried into a powdered form called qurut which could then be remixed with water and boiled to be drunk when it was needed […] The availability of fresh dairy products was seasonal in much of the steppe; winter snows would make the grass scarce and reduce the food intake of the animals, which in turn reduced their milk production. Thus the value of creating preserved, longer-lasting products.
Of course they did also eat meat, particularly in winter when the dairy products became scarce. Mutton (sheep meat) is by far largest contributor here, but if a horse or oxen or any other animal died or was too old or weak for use, it would be butchered (my understanding is that these days, there is a lot more cattle in Mongolia, but the sources strongly indicate that mutton was the standard Mongolian meat of the pre-modern period). Fresh meat was generally made into soup called shulen (often with millet that might be obtained by trade or raiding with sedentary peoples or even grown on some parts of the steppe) not eaten raw off of the bone. One of our sources, William of Rubruck, observed how a single sheep might feed 50-100 men in the form of mutton soup. Excess meat was dried or made into sausages. On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time.
(This “saddle jerky” seems to gross out my students every time we discuss the Steppe logistics system, which amuses me greatly.)
Now, to be clear, Steppe peoples absolutely would eat horse meat, make certain things out of horsehair, and tan horse hides. But horses were also valuable, militarily useful and slow to breed. For reasons we’ll get into a moment, each adult male, if he wanted to be of any use, needed several (at least five). Steppe nomads who found themselves without horses (and other herds, but the horses are crucial for defending the non-horse herds) was likely to get pushed into the marginal forest land to the north of the steppe. While the way of life for the “forest people” had its benefits, it is hard not to notice that forest dwellers who, through military success, gained horses and herds struck out as steppe nomads, while steppe nomads who lost their horses became forest dwellers by last resort (Ratchnevsky, op. cit., 5-7). Evidently, being stuck as one of the “forest people” was less than ideal. In short, horses were valuable, they were the necessary gateway into steppe life and also a scarce resource not to be squandered. All of which is to say, while the Mongols and other Steppe peoples ate horse, they weren’t raising horses for the slaughter, but mostly eating horses that were too old, or were superfluous stallions, or had become injured or lame. It is fairly clear that there were never quite enough good horses to go around.
Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-12-11.
October 10, 2023
QotD: The production of charcoal in pre-industrial societies
Charcoaling solves this problem. By heating the wood in conditions where there isn’t enough air for it to actually ignite and burn, the water is all boiled off and the remaining solid material reduced to lumps of pure carbon, which will burn much hotter (in excess of 1,150°C, which is the target for a bloomery). Moreover, as more or less pure carbon lumps, the charcoal doesn’t have bunches of impurities which might foul our iron (like the sulfur common in mineral coal).
That said, this is a tricky process. The wood needs to be heated around 300-350°C, well above its ignition temperature, but mostly kept from actually burning by lack of oxygen (if you let oxygen in, the wood is going to burn away all of its carbon to CO2, which will, among other things, cause you to miss your emissions target and also remove all of the carbon you need to actually have charcoal), which in practice means the pile needs some oxygen to maintain enough combustion to keep the heat correct, but not so much that it bursts into flame, nor so little that it is totally extinguished. The method for doing this changed little from the ancient world to the medieval period; the systems described by Pliny (NH 16.8.23) and Theophrastus (HP 5.9.4) is the same method we see used in the early modern period.
First, the wood is cut and sawn into logs of fairly moderate size. Branches are removed; the logs need to be straight and smooth because they need to be packed very densely. They are then assembled into a conical pile, with a hollow center shaft; the pile is sometimes dug down into the ground, sometimes assembled at ground-level (as a fun quirk of the ancient evidence, the Latin-language sources generally think of above-ground charcoaling, whereas the Greek-language sources tend to assume a shallow pit is used). The wood pile is then covered in a clay structure referred to a charcoal kiln; this is not a permanent structure, but is instead reconstructed for each charcoal burning. Finally, the hollow center is filled with brushwood or wood-chips to provide the fuel for the actual combustion; this fuel is lit and the shaft almost entirely sealed by an air-tight layer of earth.
The fuel ignites and begins consuming the oxygen from the interior of the kiln, both heating the wood but also stealing the oxygen the wood needs to combust itself. The charcoal burner (often called collier, before that term meant “coal miner” it meant “charcoal burner”) manages the charcoal pile through the process by watching the smoke it emits and using its color to gauge the level of combustion (dark, sooty smoke would indicate that the process wasn’t yet done, while white smoke meant that the combustion was now happening “clean” indicating that the carbonization was finished). The burner can then influence the process by either puncturing or sealing holes in the kiln to increase or decrease airflow, working to achieve a balance where there is just enough oxygen to keep the fuel burning, but not enough that the wood catches fire in earnest. A decent sized kiln typically took about six to eight days to complete the carbonization process. Once it cooled, the kiln could be broken open and the pile of effectively pure carbon extracted.
Raw charcoal generally has to be made fairly close to the point of use, because the mass of carbon is so friable that it is difficult to transport it very far. Modern charcoal (like the cooking charcoal one may get for a grill) is pressed into briquettes using binders, originally using wet clay and later tar or pitch, to make compact, non-friable bricks. This kind of packing seems to have originated with coal-mining; I can find no evidence of its use in the ancient or medieval period with charcoal. As a result, smelting operations, which require truly prodigious amounts of charcoal, had to take place near supplies of wood; Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note that transport beyond 5-6km would degrade the charcoal so badly as to make it worthless; distances below 4km seem to have been more typical. Moving the pre-burned wood was also undesirable because so much material was lost in the charcoaling process, making moving green wood grossly inefficient. Consequently, for instance, we know that when Roman iron-working operations on Elba exhausted the wood supplies there, the iron ore was moved by ship to Populonia, on the coast of Italy to be smelted closer to the wood supply.
It is worth getting a sense of the overall efficiency of this process. Modern charcoaling is more efficient and can often get yields (that is, the mass of the charcoal when compared to the mass of the wood) as high as 40%, but ancient and medieval charcoaling was far less efficient. Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note ratios of initial-mass to the final charcoal ranging from 4:1 to 12:1 (or 25% to 8.3% efficiency), with 7:1 being a typical average (14%).
We can actually get a sense of the labor intensity of this job. Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note that a skilled wood-cutter can cut about a cord of wood in a day, in optimal conditions; a cord is a volume measure, but most woods mass around 4,000lbs (1,814kg) per cord. Constructing the kiln and moving the wood is also likely to take time and while more than one charcoal kiln can be running at once, the operator has to stay with them (and thus cannot be cutting any wood, though a larger operation with multiple assistants might). A single-man operation thus might need 8-10 days to charcoal a cord of wood, which would in turn produce something like 560lbs (253.96kg) of charcoal. A larger operation which has both dedicated wood-cutters and colliers running multiple kilns might be able to cut the man-days-per-cord down to something like 3 or 4, potentially doubling or tripling output (but requiring a number more workers). In short, by and large our sources suggest this was a fairly labor intensive job in order to produce sufficient amounts of charcoal for iron production of any scale.
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II, Trees for Blooms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-25.
October 6, 2023
QotD: The “Marian Reforms” to Roman legions
In short, the things that are supposed to have happened here are:
- (Tactical-Organizational) A shift in battle tactics from the two-century maniple (c. 120 men) to the six-century cohort (c. 480 men) as the primary tactical unit on the battlefield,1 as well as the primary organizational unit of the Roman army. Elements of the older Polybian legion persist in names and titles.
- (Organizational) A shift from poorly paid conscript soldiers drawn from Rome’s propertied class (the assidui) drawn up through the dilectus to the use of volunteers drawn from Rome’s property-less poor (the proletarii or capite censi) who served as effectively professional soldiers, lacking any other means of subsistence.
- (Organizational) The practice of granting land and/or citizenship to Roman soldiers on discharge as a regular feature of Roman service.
- (Organizational) The end of the light infantry velites and Roman citizen cavalry (the equites) as part of the legion, as a product of the next point making such wealth distinctions unimportant.
- (Logistical) The introduction of state-supplied equipment (in place of self-supplied equipment) which enabled the mass-recruitment of the proletarii, as they no longer needed to be able to afford their own equipment, as part of a reform ascribed by some scholars to Gaius Gracchus (trib. 123-2).
- (Equipment) The introduction of a new design of pilum with a wooden rivet designed to break on impact with enemy shields (Plut. Mar. 25).
- (Equipment) The prioritization of the aquila, the eagle standard, over other standards in the legion (Plin. NH 10.16), often framed as the aquila fully replacing these other standards.
- (Equipment) The introduction of the furca, a Y-shaped pole for carrying the soldier’s pack (the sarcina), leading to better legionary logistics.
As we’re going to discuss, some of these things happened – but not because of Marius – and some of them didn’t happen at all. So how on earth did this idea of a big “Marian Reform” end up so pervasive in how we (used to) understand the Roman army of this period? The answer really has a lot to do with gaps (lacunae) in our sources. For the early second century, we have two really quite good sources on Roman military activity, Livy and Polybius. But both give out by mid-century,2 leaving us relatively blind until Julius Caesar‘s comentarii (de Bello Gallico and de Bello Civili) suddenly give us a massive infusion of information as we can see Caesar’s army functioning often in quite minute detail.
And we see what seem to be quite different armies! Caesar is using cohorts as tactical and operational units, rather than maniples. His armies don’t seem to have any citizen cavalry in them and they seem to be very loyal to him; he’s using a lot of non-citizens in auxiliary roles in a way that we know will become very standard in the imperial period (eventually making up half the army by Tiberius‘ reign). And indeed, moving forward, the legions of the early empire end up a lot more visible to us, both because of the literary evidence (Tacitus!) and also because, as they become more stationary on fixed frontiers, they leave forts and inscriptions and other evidence we can see far more clearly than the ever-moving armies of the Roman Republic.
And then into that there is Gaius Marius. Remember that our sources in this period are a bit patchier, without a strong continuous narrative (but with a lot of sources so we generally have someone for most of it). But Marius gets a lot of focus because of his roles in the civil wars and his spectacular seven consulships, and the one thing we are told quite clearly about him is that in 107 when he raised his first consular army he broke tradition by accepting volunteers from the proletarii (Sall. Iug. 86.1; Plut. Mar. 9.1). The temptation then to see that substantial change (which, to be clear, our sources are exaggerating for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment) as connected to all the other changes from the “Polybian” legion to the “Caesarian” legion and thus to assume that Marius is doing all of them, reading far too deeply into a few lines of Sallust and Plutarch (the latter not generally a particularly good guide on military affairs).
And I should note finally at the outset that this all also plays into a tendency in our sources generally: ancient authors really like narratives where one particular aristocrat can be credited with making major reforms or innovations as an expression of their particular virtue. We’ve talked about this with Lycurgus, but it shows up consistently with rulers supposedly introducing new weapons and new practices as big, top-down reforms that, on closer inspection, turn out to be gradual changes we can see signs of happening over quite some time. It’s an understandable if irritating bias of habit for authors whose purpose in writing is the education of aristocrats on how to be leaders – every big change has to be a product of the character and leadership of aristocrats (even when it wasn’t). Plutarch, especially, of all ancient authors, loves these sorts of just-so stories and guess who we are heavily reliant on for the life of Gaius Marius? But until relatively recently, historians were often far more willing to accept these sorts of just-so stories than they should have been (in part because late 19th and early 20th century historians shared some of those same assumptions about elite leadership and in part because singular reforms make for compelling stories).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. Note that the size of the century has changed, from 60 to 80 as well.
2. Polybius’ history, already incomplete as we have it, ends, while Livy’s continuous narrative which originally went through the first century cuts out almost completely in 167, leaving us with just summaries of his work.
October 2, 2023
QotD: Who were the Celts?
From antiquity we have two standard terms. On the one hand, the Greeks encountered a people in the Mediterranean and called them keltoi. From Caesar and Strabo we know that at least some peoples called themselves keltoi (or celtae), though as we’re going to see the people who did this are not actually co-terminus with this military system or with all the people folks (including the original video) think of as Celtic or any identifiable polity or political structure. In particular, Caesar reports that the folks living in what is today France (then Gaul) north of the Garonne and south of the Marne and the Seine called themselves celtae, which he takes to be equivalent to the Latin galli (Caes. BGall. 1.1). Strabo, meanwhile, describes peoples in Spain as both keltoi and also keltiberes (which enters English as Celtiberians, Strabo, Geography 3.2.15) as well as those in Gaul (Geography 4.1ff), but doesn’t make the claim that they call themselves that (instead repeatedly noting these groups broken up into smaller tribal units with their own names). Both Caesar (Caes. BGall. 1.1) and Strabo (Geography 4.1.1) go out of their way to stress that the folks they’re talking about do not have the same languages, institutions or mode of life, even those who are, to Strabo, galatikos – “Gallic” or more precisely “Galatian-like” (referring to the sub-group of Gallic peoples the Greeks were the most familiar with).
Galli, rendered into modern English as “the Gauls” (though the latter is not a descendant of that word, but a wholly different derivation), is likewise tricky. We’re fairly sure that both keltoi and galli are Celtic-language words, meaning that (contrary to the video) they’re both probably “endonyms”, (a thing people call themselves) but it is really common for peoples in history to take the endonym of the first group of people they meet and apply it to a much larger group of “similar” (or not so similar) people. The example I use with my students is “Frank”; – it was common in both the Eastern Mediterranean and later in East Asia to use some derivative of “Frank” or “Frankish” to mean “Western or Central European” – the term got applied to the Portuguese in China, and to both Germans and Sicilian Normans during the Crusades. It’s possible that galli in Latin is connected to the Galatai (Greek) or Galatae (Latin), the Galatians, a Celtic-language speaking La Tène material culture group who migrated into Anatolia in the 270s, but a number of etymologies have been proposed. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the Romans named a massive ethnic group after the first people they met; this is how we get the word “Greek” when the Greeks call themselves Hellenes. So assuming off the bat that all of these different tribal groups that Caesar or Strabo treat as a cultural unity thought of themselves that way is most unwise. The most we know is that if you called some of these folks (but not all of them, as we’ll see) keltoi or galli, they’d say, “yeah, I guess that more or less describes me”, perhaps in the same way describe a Swiss person as “European” isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t quite right.1
Surely here linguistics will help us out? If we can identify a Celtic language then surely everyone who speaks that language will have that culture? First, this is yet more question begging; English is the official language of South Sudan and yet the South Sudanese are not English, British or American. Linguistic connections do not always imply ethnic or cultural connections extending beyond language. And, in fact, examining the Celtic language family is a brilliant way to illustrate this.
There is, in fact, a family of Celtic languages and indeed it is only in the sense of languages which you will see me use the word Celtic in a formal way precisely to avoid the giant pickle of confusion we are currently working through. Very briefly, it has been shown linguistically that the various surviving Celtic languages are related to each other and also to the extinct languages of pre-Roman continental Europe that were spoken in Gaul, Noricum and parts of Spain. So far so good, right, we have a nice, perfect match between our keltoi and Celtic-language-speakers, right?
Of course not. That would be easy! Because notice there that Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are all Celtic languages. But our sources are actually quite clear that at least the Romans and the Greeks did not consider these folks to be galli or keltoi. Indeed, Strabo explicitly defines the people of Britain against the keltoi as two distinct groups, making it clear he doesn’t think the inhabitants of the British Isles were “Celts” (Geography 4.5.2); Caesar doesn’t either (BGall. 4.21ff). Tacitus sees in the britanniae evidence of German, Iberian and Gallic influence, marking them as distinct from all three, but concludes that Gallic settlement is the most likely cause, a point on which we may be quite certain he is wrong, for reasons discussed just below (Tac. Agr. 11). So the groups described as “Celts” don’t entirely overlap with Celtic language speakers.
Well, surely here the archaeologists can help us out, right? Yes and no. On the one hand, we have a collection of object types, artistic motifs and archaeologically visible patterns that we associate with some of the areas settled by people who our sources regard as “Celts” and who were Celtic language speakers. The older of these two material culture groupings we call “Halstatt culture” after the original type-site in Hallstatt, Austria, though we find Hallstatt culture objects (remember, these are objects, not people, a thing to be relevant in a moment) in a territorial range that forms a sort of crescent shape embracing the northern edges of the Alps, from around 1200 BC to around 500 BC. We then shift to a material culture pattern which may have developed out of late Hallstatt culture which we call La Tène culture after its type-site of La Tène in Switzerland; it runs from around 500 BC (very roughly) to around 50 AD, with lots of subdivisions.
And just about all of the folks our sources will identify as “Celts” or “Gauls” tend to live in areas where where we find, by the third century or so, at least some elements of La Tène material culture (and many in places where they have the full package). So do we at last have a way to identify some “Celts”, by matching wherever we find La Tène material culture?
No. Of course not. That would be easy and history is not easy.
First, not all of the people our sources describe as Celts adopt all or even most of the elements of La Tène material culture. Most notably, the folks in Iberia who were keltoi (according to Strabo) or Celtiberians have some elements of La Tène material culture, but are notably missing others. They don’t have, for instance, the whole La Tène military package – mail in particular is absent in Iberia until the Romans arrive, and the La Tène swords they have are local variations of early La Tène I swords by the third and second centuries, not the La Tène II swords we find in most of the rest of the cultural zone.2 The artistic style in “Celtic” Spain is also different and unsurprisingly there’s a lot of Iberian borrowing. As a result, archaeologically, the keltoi of south-western Iberia aren’t some sort of carbon-copy of the keltoi of central France. There’s not no connection here, they are Celtic-language speakers and they have some La Tène stuff, but the Iberian Celtici are quite a bit further from the Helvetii (the folks who probably inhabited the La Tène site) than, say, the Senones.
Meanwhile, we find some La Tène material culture objects in southern Britain, but they don’t fully penetrate the Isles (despite the general assumption that all of the people of Britain and Ireland were Celtic language speakers) and many appear to be expensive, high-status imports. Indeed, while it was once supposed that the arrival of La Tène material culture objects signified some invasion or settlement of Britain by people from Gaul, an analysis of burial patterns3 demonstrates pretty clearly that this isn’t happening in this period, because burial practices in southern Britain remain distinct from those on the continent. Instead, we’re seeing trade.
Meanwhile, we find tons of La Tène material culture objects in cultural contexts that we know were neither “Celtic” in any cultural sense nor filled with Celtic-language speakers. The clearest instance of these are in Illyria and Thrace, who spoke Indo-European but not Celtic language (so a language as close to Celtic languages as Latin or Greek or German), where it’s clear that folks adopted at least some La Tène material culture, including weapons and armor. Of course by the third century, when it came to militaria, we’d have the same problem with the Romans, who by the end of the Second Punic War, had adopted a La Tène sword (albeit from Spain and with a different suspension system), a variant of the La Tène shield, a La Tène helmet type (domestically manufactured), and La Tène body armor (mail). If we didn’t have any surviving Latin language material, I am almost certain there would be nationalist pseudo-archaeologists claiming the Roman Empire was clearly some “pan-Celtic” imperial construct on that basis.4 And of course in the third century, a Greek variant of the La Tène shield, the thureos, begins showing up everywhere in the Hellenistic East, but that doesn’t make them Celts either (they’d be the first to tell you).
Meanwhile, there’s even more complexity than this, because objects of La Tène material culture aren’t the whole of archaeologically visible culture. There are building habits, burial habits, evidence for social organization and on and on. And those vary significantly within the La Tène material culture zone. I put this in the bibliography and I’m afraid it is a (necessarily) difficult and technical read, but if you want to get a sense of just how complex this can get, check out Rachel Pope’s efforts to define the Celts in the Journal of Archaeological Research (2022). To quote some of her conclusions, “In fact, ‘Celts’ as a historical label does not map neatly onto any archaeological tradition; it overlaps with late Hallstatt traditions in northeast France and less ostentatious archaeologies farther west … Nor did the name ‘Celt’ ever equate to all of Gaul, let alone all of Europe.”
So to be clear, we have Celtic-language speakers who aren’t called Celts by our sources and don’t have La Tène material culture (Ireland, N. Britain), Celtic-language speakers who are called Celts by our sources but don’t have the full La Tène material culture package (Spain, Portugal), non-Celtic language speakers who do have some of the La Tène material culture package but who are clearly not Celts to our sources (Thracians, Illyrians, Dacians, etc.), full La Tène material culture-havers who are explicitly not Celts in our sources (Caesar, specifically) and maybe speak a Celtic-language (the Belgae), and partial La Tène material-culture-havers who do speak a Celtic language but are still explicitly not Celts in our sources (S. Britain). Oh, and while we’re here, by the second century we also have La Tène material culture-havers who probably still speak a Celtic-language and are called Celts/galli by our sources but write inscriptions in Greek (the Galatians) and seem to have different religious structures and folks identified as Celts in our sources who are in the process of ditching large parts of La Tène material culture and learning Latin (Cisalpine Gaul), who might, à la Pope (op. cit.), actually be the direct, local descendants of the “original” Celts.
And then of course we have a band across parts of the Alps and central France where everything lines up: Celtic-language speakers with La Tène material culture who our sources call keltoi or galli and live in a place called Gallia by the Romans. But it would be a mistake to assume this is the cultural “heartland” of a “Celtic” people – indeed, La Tène material culture may be more deeply rooted in more Northern parts of France [than in] the Danube region, which has a lot of non-Celtic language speakers in it in this period! Because, to be clear, what we actually have are a host of smaller, tribal societies which share come cultural elements and differ in others, who seem to think of themselves primarily as members of a tribe and who lack notable “pan-Celtic” institutions, to which Greeks and Romans, needing a way to label their neighbors, took whatever ethnic signifiers they had and applied them (over)broadly.
[…]
At no point where all of these people united in a single polity (the closest they get is that most of them get conquered by the Romans) and there’s no indication that they ever saw themselves as a cultural or ethnic unity. And of course we haven’t even gotten into the idea that they might all be somehow closely ethnically related but let’s just go ahead and tag that as “very unlikely” and keep moving.
All of that is to make the point that any treatment of “Celtic” warfare is immediately begging an enormous question because “who were the Celts?” is at best an unanswered question and to be frank, probably an unanswerable question. Crucially, “the Celts” do not share a military system. Warfare among Celtic-language speakers in the British Isles isn’t necessarily based around La Tène material culture, nor is warfare in S. Portugal among peoples identified by our sources as keltoi; both areas seem to have very substantial regional variation. By contrast, the galli of central France and Cisalpine Gaul do seem to share at least substantial elements of a military system with the – according to Caesar – non-celtae of broader Gaul and as well as with the Galatians who live, I must repeat, in Anatolia (having migrated there in the third century). There is thus no “Celtic” military system which maps clearly onto either Celtic-language distribution or peoples described as keltoi by our sources.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Who Were ‘the Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-12.
1. Especially in the sense that “European” gets used to mean “citizen of a country in the European Union”, which Switzerland is not. Mostly. The EU is complicated.
2. On these differences, see F. Quesada Sanz, “Patterns of Interaction: ‘Celtic’ and ‘Iberian’ weapons in Iron Age Spain” in Celtic Connections, vol. 2, eds. W. Gillies and D.W. Harding (2005) and in even more detail F. Quesada Sanz, “El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica” (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997). Interestingly, the Roman gladius Hispaniensis seems likely to have been a Roman adaptation of the peculiar Iberian La Tène swords, so you have the La Tène I sword making its way to Iberia, becoming distinctive, being adopted by the Romans instead of the more common (to them) La Tène II sword, thus becoming the gladius. On this, see F. Quesada Sanz, “Gladius Hispaniensis: an Archaeological View from Iberia” JRMES 8 (1997).
3. On this, see S. James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention (1999).
4. On this, see M.J. Taylor, “Panoply and Identity During the Roman Republic” PBSR 88 (2020). On the helmet type and its evolution, see U. Schaaff, “Keltische Helme”, in Antike Helme (1988) for a rundown; P. Connolly Greece and Rome At War (1981), 121 also has a fantastic visual chart of the development of the type in the La Tène material culture zone, where you can see quite clearly where in the fourth century the Italic variants of this helmet type are breaking off from, while the La Tène helmets continue their development in other directions, later to be re-adopted by the Romans who thought it was so nice, they borrowed it twice.
September 28, 2023
QotD: “Tenure Track” positions in an American university
A tenure-track position begins with a national (or international) search and a fairly long hiring process (from job-posting to job-offer usually takes around 6-8 months). A newly hired professor is an assistant professor, which means they are on the tenure track but do not yet have tenure. Instead, after about five to six years, they’ll go up for tenure review, where a committee of faculty in their department along with some external reviewers will look at all of the work the professor has done since their appointment and either recommend them for tenure or not; the university leadership structure typically has a role in confirming a grant of tenure but this is generally a rubber-stamp role. By far the most important part of tenure review at large universities is research; this is the part of the system that is “publish or perish”.1 Untenured tenure-track faculty (so, assistant professors) represent roughly 9% of all faculty members in the United States, according to the AAUP.
A professor that passes tenure review becomes an associate professor, which confers tenure (making it difficult to fire them) as well as a bump in pay. After another few years, they can go up for review again for promotion to the next rank, simply professor (often termed “full professor” for clarity), which comes with another bump in pay. This second transition is different from the first though; whereas the review from assistant to associate professor is an “up or out” moment (you either get tenure and stay or get rejected for tenure and leave the department), some professors can and do remain associate professors forever. Finally, a handful of professors who really distinguish themselves may wind up with an endowed chair and we tend to call these folks distinguished professors, though their actual job title will usually be something like “the so-and-so Professor/Chair of this-and-that” where the ‘so-and-so’ is the name of the donor that endowed the money being used for the distinguished professorship. Tenured professors represent roughly 24% of all university professors according to the AAUP, meaning that the total slice of tenured or tenure-eligable professors in higher education is just 33% – one third.
Let me say that again: only one third of all faculty work the way all of you think all faculty works. Just one third. This is a big part of what I mean when I say that the United States’ university system is being pillaged without the public knowing; if you told most people “only one third of college instructors are actually professors, most of your little Johnny’s classes are taught by non-professors now“, they’d be shocked! But that’s the current situation.2
Tenure-track professors generally teach a fixed course-load, expressed in most cases as a load over semesters, so a “2/2” (pronounced “two-two”) load is four courses a year (two in each semester). Tenure-track faculties at research-focused universities (which are all of the flagship state schools) generally teach a 2/2 load; mixed research/teaching schools (your third-string state schools and less well-funded private schools) often have 3/3 loads. Teaching-focused institutions may have 4/4 or 5/5 teaching loads (or more) and of course fractional loads (like a 2/3, etc.) do exist, but are less common.
In addition to teaching, tenure-track faculty are expected to publish research and do “service”. We’ll talk in another post more about these demands (indeed, we’ve talked about research already), but they deserve a few words here. The amount of research demanded varies by the level of institution; at an R1 the general expectation for a faculty member going for tenure in a humanities department is that their book is out3 and they have a good number of articles and other publications besides. At less research-focused universities, you might see instead that tenure is set at a certain number of articles and the book is instead at the jump to full professor.
Meanwhile “service” refers to all of the non-teaching roles faculty fill in a department. The university is predicated on self-governing departments of academics (“colleges” in the literal sense of an association of colleagues) and so departments are effectively run by committees and faculty appointed to do various key roles: student advising, graduate admissions committees, hiring committees, committees on teaching, and of course department chair (and possibly vice or assistant chairs) who steers the department. Of course faculty are assisted in those roles by the department staff who handle much of the paperwork, compliance and book-keeping. Some, but by no means all, of these service jobs come with a “course release” which is to say the faculty member teaches less in order to do the extra service, but there is an expectation of a certain amount of service work always being part of the workload mix.4
Finally, the more important service positions are often restricted to either associate or full professors – you have to get tenure first before you get a particularly loud voice in the running of the department. Nevertheless, even assistant professors are going to be “in the room” when decisions about courses, resource allocation, scheduling, and so on are made, which matters quite a lot. Moreover, because even assistant professors are expected to become permanent members of the department, their interests tend to be considered because, well, frankly, the tenured professors have to live with them for the next few decades, so you might as well be friends. This fact is really important for understanding why departments can be so callous to anyone not on the tenure-track (and why tenure-track faculty can be so oblivious to how callous they are being), because NTT faculty are usually not in the room when decisions are made.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Academic Ranks Explained Or What On Earth Is an Adjunct?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-04-28.
1. A phrase that I am sick to death of hearing, but it seems to be functionally the only thing most people in the public know about academia and also the thing that select members of the public seem to think we need repeated to us at every possible opportunity, as if we’re not aware. It’s useless in any case, in history at least. Which hiring numbers being what they are now, by far the most common career path is in fact, “publish and then perish”.
2. In fact, COVID made these numbers look better than they had in the years previously, not because universities hired more tenure-line professors (they didn’t), but because they fired a lot of non-tenure line professors due to COVID, taking advantage of their lack of job protection.
3. In yesteryear, a book simply forthcoming was good enough. These days, that might not even be good enough to get hired as this entire system breaks down. By the end of 2022, I had actually qualified for tenure at the institutions which did not hire me in 2020; I still do not have a tenure track job.
4. So for instance being department chair often comes with a course release, but being on a committee or serving as an undergraduate or graduate advisor often doesn’t.
September 24, 2023
QotD: The composition of the polis
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 20, 2023
QotD: The structure of an American university
So let’s start dividing all of those employees down so we know what we’re dealing with. We can start by splitting the university into faculty and staff (with student-workers as a third group we’ll not discuss this week); faculty teach and do research whereas staff are all of the supporting administrators and workers that make the university function. We’re not going to talk much about staff, but briefly we can divide them quickly into four big groups: leadership (chancellors, deans, and assistant deans of various kinds; of old these used to be professors pulled into leadership temporarily but these days these are professional managers),2 department staff (who work within academic departments handling the scheduling, paperwork and other essential support services), university staff (who staff the university-wide bureaucracies like the registrar or bursar) and finally what I’ll call – somewhat imprecisely – facilities staff (a wide category covering all of the folks who do a lot of the physical work that keeps a university running; repair, grounds-keeping, janitorial tasks, running dining areas, etc. etc.). All of these people are important, but this week’s post isn’t about them; I break them up here so that when I do mention them, you understand who I mean.
Faculty are divided as well into two large groups: tenure track and non-tenure track. Tenure-track jobs are what most people are familiar with, at least in a vague way. The tenure track was supposed to be (and pre-aughts, was) the “standard” career path for an academic at a university. That’s the system everyone knows, if they know a system. But another system was made.3 And that brings us to non-tenure track positions, both permanent and temporary, full-time and (fake) part-time (which are often actually full time), which will consume most of this post. We’re going to break these up primarily between full-time non-tenured or teaching track positions and notionally “part time” or adjunct appointments, but there are a few other types thrown in there. Crucially, this other system makes up the majority of university teachers, around 67% and rising.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Academic Ranks Explained Or What On Earth Is an Adjunct?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-04-28.
1. R1 is a term from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which classifies colleges and universities by the degrees they grant and how research oriented they are. An “R1” classification indicates the highest level of research focus; nearly all of the large flagship state schools are R1 institutions.
2. Whose stewardship of their universities is somehow almost uniformly worse than what was accomplished by amateur professors who’d rather not have been asked.
3. Please read with the voice of Cate Blanchett intoning, “but another ring was made”.
September 16, 2023
QotD: The Persian “Royal Roads”
The oldest road network that we have pretty good evidence for was the Persian Royal Road of the Achaemenids but these too were not the first (the Achaemenid dynasty ruling a vast empire from 559 to 330 BC; this is the Persian Empire of Xerxes and Darius III). Even before them the Assyrians (Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empires running from 1363 to 609 BC)1 had build roadways to hold together parts of their empire, though I confess I know very little of the extent of that road system except that we’re fairly sure it existed and like the later systems we’re going to talk about, it included not just the physical infrastructure of the roads but a sophisticated relay system to allow official messengers to move very rapidly over the network.
The modern perception of the Persian Royal Road is conditioned perhaps a bit too much by Herodotus who described the royal road – singular – as a single highway running from Susa to Sardis. Susa was one of several Achaemenid royal capitals and it sat at the edge of the Iranian plateau where it meets the lowland valley of Mesopotamia, essentially sitting right on the edge where the Persian “heartland” met the area of imperial conquests. Meanwhile, Sardis was the westernmost major Achaemenid administrative center, the regional capital, as it were, for Anatolia and the Aegean. So you can see the logic of that being an important route, but the road system was much larger. Indeed, here is a very rough sketch of how we might understand the whole system.
Compare the dashed line – the Royal Road as described by Herodotus – with the solid lines, the rest of the system we can glean from other sources or from archaeology and you can see that Herodotus hasn’t given us the whole story. For what it is worth, I don’t think Herodotus here is trying to lie – he has just described the largest and most important trunk road that leads to his part of the world.
This system doubtlessly emerged over time. Substantial parts of the road network almost certainly predated the Achaemenids and at least some elements were in place under the first two Achaemenid Great Kings (Cyrus II, r. 559-530 and Cambyses II, r. 530-22) but it seems clear that it is the third Achaemenid ruler, Darius I (r. 522-486; this is the fellow who dispatched the expedition defeated at Marathon, but his reign was far more important than that – he is the great organizer of the Persian Empire) who was responsible for the organization, formalization and expansion of the system. And in practice we can split that system into two parts, the physical infrastructure of roads and then the relay system built atop that system.
In terms of the physical infrastructure, as far as I can tell, the quality of Persian Royal Roads varied a lot. In some areas where the terrain was difficult, we see sections of road cut into the rock or built via causeways over ravines. Some areas were paved, but most – even most of the “royal” roads (as distinct from ancillary travel routes) were not.2 That said, maintenance seems to have been more regular on the royal roads, meaning they would be restored more rapidly after things like heavy rains that might wash an unpaved road out, making them more reliable transport routes for everyone. They also seem to have been quite a bit wider; Achaemenid armies could have long logistics tails and these roads had to accommodate those. Several excavated sections of royal roads are around 5m wide, but we ought to expect a lot of variation.
On top of the physical infrastructure, there was also a system of way-stations and stopover points along the road. These were not amenities for everyone but rather a system for moving state officials, messengers, soldiers, and property (like taxes). While anyone could, presumably, walk down the road, official travelers carried a sealed travel authorization issued by either a satrap (the Persian provincial governors) or the king himself. Such authorizations declared how many travelers there were, where they were going and what the way-stations, which stocked supplies, should give them. Of course that in turn meant that local satraps had to make sure that way-stations remained stocked up with food, fodder for animals, spare horses and so on. Fast messengers could also be sent who, with that same authorization, would change horses at each way-station, allowing them to move extremely fast over the system, with one estimate suggesting that a crucial message could make the trip from Sardis to Susa – a trip of approximately 2,500km (1,550 miles, give or take) in twelve days (by exchanging not only horses, but riders, as it moved).
All of which gives some pretty important clues to why royal roads were set up and maintained. Notice how the system specifically links together key administrative hubs, like the three main Achaemenid capitals (Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis) and key administrative centers (Memphis, Sardis, Babylon, etc.) and that while anyone can use the roads, the roads serve as the basis for a system to handle the logistics of moving officials and state messages, which of course could also serve as the basis for moving armies. After all, you can send messengers down the royal roads, through the existing system set up for them, to instruct your satraps to gather local forces or more importantly to gather local food supplies and move them to the road in depots where the army can pick them up (and perhaps some local troops) as it moves through to a nearby trouble spot (while the nice, wide road allows you to bring lots of pack animals and carts with your army).
In short this is a large, expensive but effective system for managing the problem of distance in a large empire. Cutting down travel and message times reduces the independence of the satraps, allowing the Great King to keep an eye on them, while the roads provide the means to swiftly move armies from the core of the empire out to the periphery. We can actually see this play out with Alexander’s invasion. He crosses into Asia in 334 and defeats the local satrapal army at Granicus in 334. Moving into the Levant in 333, he’s met at Issus by Darius III with a massive army, collected from the central and western parts of the empire – which means that news of Alexander’s coming has reached Darius who has then marshaled all of those troops from his satrapies (and hired some mercenaries), presumably using his efficient message system to do it and then moved that force down the road system to meet Alexander. Alexander defeats that army, but is met by another huge army at Gaugamela in 331, this time gathered mostly from the eastern parts of the empire. While the Persian army fails in defeating Alexander, the exercise shows the power of the system in allowing the Great King, Darius III to coordinate the military efforts of an enormous empire.
So this is a system meant to enable the imperial center to control its periphery by enabling the court to keep tabs on the satraps, to get messages to and from them and move armies and officials (and taxes!) around. And doubtless it was also not lost on anyone that such a visible series of public works – even if the roads were not always paved and had to be repaired after heavy rains and such – was also an exercise in legitimacy building, both a visual demonstration of the Great King’s power and resources but also a display of his generosity and industry.
And I lead with all of that because the Roman road network works the same way, just on an even larger scale. Which isn’t to say the Romans were copying the Achaemenids (they don’t seem to have been) but rather that this is a common response to the problem of managing an uncommonly large empire.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Roman Roads”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-02.
1. The Middle Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Assyrian or New Assyrian Empires were, in fact, the same state. We split them up because of a severe contraction in Assyrian power during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
2. On this, see Henkelman and Jacobs, 727-8
