Quotulatiousness

June 1, 2024

So who did write Shakespeare’s plays?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mere mortals might be tempted to answer “Well, Shakespeare, duh!”, but to the dedicated conspiracist, the obvious is never the right answer:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

Was Shakespeare a fraud? The American writer Jodi Picoult seems to think so. Her latest novel By Any Other Name is based on the premise that William Shakespeare was not the real author of his plays. Specifically, in her story, the poet Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) pays Shakespeare for the use of his name so that she might see her work staged at a time when female playwrights were extremely rare.

The theory that Shakespeare was a woman isn’t original to Picoult. As with all conspiracy theories relating to the bard, the “true” Shakespeare is identified as one of the upper echelons of society (although not an aristocrat, Lanier was part of the minor gentry thanks to her father’s appointment as court musician to Queen Elizabeth I). Those known as “anti-Stratfordians” – i.e., those who believe that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him – invariably favour candidates who had direct connections to the court. The general feeling seems to be that a middle-class lad from a remote country town could not possibly have created such compelling depictions of lords, ladies, kings and queens.

[…]

The notion that the actor Shakespeare could have hired out his identity to Lanier, or anyone else for that matter, makes no sense if one considers the collaborative nature of the theatrical medium. Shakespeare was the house playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the company that became the King’s Men on the accession of James I). His job was to oversee productions, to write on the hoof, to adapt existing scripts in the process of rehearsal. (This is probably why his later plays such as Henry VIII contain so many stage directions; at this point he was almost certainly residing in Stratford-upon-Avon, and so was not available to provide the necessary detail in person.) It was never simply a matter of Shakespeare dropping off his latest script at The Globe and quickly scarpering. If he was being fed the lines, it is implausible that nobody in the company would have noticed.

[…]

The theory that Shakespeare’s contemporaries – fans and critics alike – would all collude in an elaborate deception requires a full explanation. The burden of proof is very much on the anti-Stratfordians, but proof doesn’t appear to be their priority. They seem to think they know more about Shakespeare than those who actually lived and worked with him. It’s oddly hubristic.

All of this nonsense began with the Baconian theory propounded by James Wilmot in 1785 and has never gone away. The candidates are usually university educated and aristocratic: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Oxford – even Queen Elizabeth I has been proposed. The anti-Stratfordian position seems to be based on a combination of class snobbery and presentism. They assume that the middle-class son of a glover who did not attend university could not have developed the range of knowledge needed to inform his plays. They forgot, or do not know, that the grammar school education of the time would have provided a firm grounding in the classics. Shakespeare would have been steeped in Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and much more besides. Let’s not forget that Ben Jonson, the most scholarly of all his contemporaries, didn’t go to university either.

Moreover, the plays make clear that Shakespeare was a voracious reader. The idea that one must have direct experience in order to write about a subject is very much in keeping with the obsessions of our time, particularly the notion of “lived experience” and how writers ought to “stay in their lane”.

As I’ve joked in the past, I believe the theory that Homer didn’t actually write The Iliad and The Odyssey … it was another Greek chap of the same name.

May 19, 2024

Alexander III of Macedon … usually styled “Alexander the Great”

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the most recent post at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Bret Devereaux considers whether the most famous king of Macedon deserves his historic title:

Alexander the Great
Detail from the Alexander Mosaic in the House of the Faun in Pompeii, attributed to the first century BC, via Wikimedia Commons.

I want to discuss his reign with that title, “the Great” (magnus in Latin or μέγας in Greek) stripped off, as Alexander III rather than merely assuming his greatness. In particular, I want to open the question of if Alexander was great and more to the point, if he was, what does that imply about our definitions of greatness?

It is hardly new for Alexander III to be the subject of as much mythology as fact; Alexander’s life was the subject of mythological treatment within living memory. Plutarch (Alex. 46.4) relates an episode where the Greek historian Onesicritus read aloud in the court of Lysimachus – then king of Thrace, but who had been one of Alexander’s somatophylakes (his personal bodyguards, of which there were just seven at at time) – his history of Alexander and in his fourth book reached the apocryphal story of how Alexander met the Queen of the Amazons, Thalestris, at which Lysimachus smiled and asked, “And where was I at the time?” It must have been strange to Lysimachus, who had known Alexander personally, to see his friend and companion become a myth before his eyes.

Then, of course, there are the modern layers of mythology. Alexander is such a well-known figures that it has been, for centuries, the “doing thing” to attribute all manner of profound sounding quotes, sayings and actions to him, functionally none of which are to be found in the ancient sources and most of which, as we’ll see, run quite directly counter to his actual character as a person.

So, much as we set out to de-mystify Cleopatra last year, this year I want to set out – briefly – to de-mystify Alexander III of Macedon. Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?

Because this post has turned out to run rather longer than I expected, I’m going to split into two parts. This week, we’re going to look at some of the history of how Alexander has been viewed – the sources for his life but also the trends in the scholarship from the 1800s to the present – along with assessing Alexander as a military commander. Then we’ll come back next week and look at Alexander as an administrator, leader and king.

[…]

Sources

As always, we are at the mercy of our sources for understanding the reign of Alexander III. As noted above, within Alexander’s own lifetime, the scale of his achievements and impacts prompted the emergence of a mythological telling of his life, a collection of stories we refer to collectively now as the Alexander Romance, which is fascinating as an example of narrative and legend working across a wide range of cultures and languages, but is fundamentally useless as a source of information about Alexander’s life.

That said, we also know that several accounts of Alexander’s life and reign were written during his life and immediately afterwards by people who knew him and had witnessed the events. Alexander, for the first part of his campaign, had a court historian, Callisthenes, who wrote a biography of Alexander which survived his reign (Polybius is aware – and highly critical – of it, Polyb. 12. 17-22), though Callisthenes didn’t: he was implicated (perhaps falsely) in a plot against Alexander and imprisoned, where he died, in 327. Unfortunately, Callisthenes’ history doesn’t survive to the present (and Polybius sure thinks Callisthenes was incompetent in describing military matters in any event).

More promising are histories written by Alexander’s close companions – his hetairoi – who served as Alexander’s guards, elite cavalry striking force, officers and council of war during his campaigns. Three of these wrote significant accounts of Alexander’s campaigns: Aristobulus,1 Alexander’s architect and siege engineer, Nearchus, Alexander’s naval commander, and Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s bodyguards and infantry commanders, who will become Ptolemy I Soter, Pharaoh of Egypt. Of these, Aristobulus and Ptolemy’s works were apparently campaign histories covering the life of Alexander, whereas Nearchus wrote instead of his own voyages by sea down the Indus River, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf which he called the Indike.

And you are now doubtless thinking, “amazing, three contemporary accounts, that’s awesome!” So I hope you will contain your disappointment when I follow with the inevitable punchline: none of these three works survives. We also know a whole slew of other, less reliable sounding histories (Plutarch lists works by Cleitarchus, Polycleitus, Onesicritus, Antigenes, Ister, Chares, Anticleides, Philo, two different Philips, Hecataeus, and Duris) do not survive either.

So what do we have?

Fundamentally, our knowledge of Alexander the Great is premised on four primary later works who wrote when all of these other sources (particularly Ptolemy and Aristobulus) still survived. These four authors are (in order of date): Diodorus Siculus (writing in the first century BC), Quintus Curtius Rufus (mid-first cent. AD), Plutarch (early second century AD) and Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus, writing in the early second century AD). Of these, Diodorus’ work, the Bibliotheca historica is a “universal history”, which of course means it is a mile wide and only an inch deep, but Book 17, which covers Alexander’s life, is intact and complete. Curtius Rufus’ work survives only incompletely, with substantial gaps in the text, including all of the first two books.

Plutarch’s Life of Alexander survives intact and is the most substantial of his biographies, but it is, like all of his Parallel Lives, relatively brief and also prone to Plutarch’s instinct to bend a story to fit his moralizing aims in writing. Which leaves, somewhat ironically, the last of these main sources, Arrian. Arrian was a Roman citizen of Anatolian extraction who entered the Senate in the 120s and was consul suffectus under Hadrian, probably in 130. He was then a legatus (provincial governor/military commander in Cappadocia, where Dio reports (69.15.1) that he checked an invasion by the Alani (a Steppe people). Arrian’s history, the Anabasis Alexandrou (usually rendered “Campaigns of Alexander”)2 comes across as a fairly serious, no-nonsense effort to compile the best available sources, written by an experienced military man. Which is not to say Arrian is perfect, but his account is generally regarded (correctly, I’d argue) as the most reliable of the bunch, though any serious scholarship on Alexander relies on collating all four sources and comparing them together.

Despite that awkward source tradition, what we have generally leaves us fairly well informed about Alexander’s actions as king. While we’d certainly prefer to have Ptolemy or Aristobolus, the fact that we have four writers all working from a similar source-base is an advantage, as they take different perspectives. Moreover, a lot of the things Alexander did – founding cities, toppling the Achaemenid Empire, failing in any way to prepare for succession – leave big historical or archaeological traces that are easy enough to track.

    1. This is as good a place as any to make a note about transliteration. Almost every significant character in Alexander’s narrative has a traditional transliteration into English, typically based on how their name would be spelled in Latin. Thus Aristobulus, instead of the more faithful Aristoboulos (for Ἀριστόβουλος). The trend in Alexander scholarship today is, understandably, to prefer more faithful Greek transliterations, thus rendering Parmenion (rather than Parmenio) or Seleukos (rather than Seleucus). I think, in scholarship, this is a good trend, but since this is a public-facing work, I am going to largely stick to the traditional transliterations, because that’s generally how a reader would subsequently look up these figures.

    2. An ἀνάβασις is a “journey up-country”, but what Arrian is invoking here is Xenophon’s account of his own campaign with the 10,000, the original Anabasis; Arrian seems to have fashioned himself as a “second Xenophon” in a number of ways.

April 13, 2024

The Legend of the Wiener Schnitzel

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jan 9, 2024

Variations of wienerschnitzel throughout history and its legendary origin stories, and a recipe for a 19th century version.

Fried breaded veal cutlets served with the traditional lemon wedges and parsley

City/Region: Vienna
Time Period: 1824

Breaded and fried meat has been around for a very long time in many places, but it wasn’t until 1893 that we get the first mention of the word wienerschnitzel. Then in the early 20th century, the Austrian culinary scene decided to champion this term to refer to a veal cutlet that is made into a schnitzel, and restaurants in Vienna began specializing in schnitzel.

This recipe predates the term wienerschnitzel, and unlike modern versions it isn’t dredged in flour first. This makes it so that the breading doesn’t puff away from the meat, but the flavor is rich and delicious, just like I remember from my trip to Vienna. If you don’t like veal or don’t want to use it, you can use pork or chicken. It won’t technically be wienerschnitzel, but nobody’s going to judge you. You can also use another fat instead of the clarified butter, but butter gives the best flavor.
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April 12, 2024

When it comes to media coverage of environmental issues “bad news sticks around like honey, while good news dries up like water”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley debunks the attitude — universal among climate activists — that humanity’s mere existence is “bad for the planet”:

A 16 foot high sculpture of a polar bear and cub, afloat on a small iceberg on the River Thames, passes in front of Tower Bridge on 26 January 2009 in London, England.
Spiked

Over the past few years, we have been subject to endless media reports on the devastating impact humanity is having on the global bee population. “Climate change is presenting huge challenges to our bees”, claimed the Irish Times last year. “Where has all the honey gone?”, asked the Guardian earlier this year.

The news from last week may come as a shock to some, then. It turns out that America actually has more bees than ever before, having added a million hives in just five years. The Washington Post, which reported these facts, was certainly surprised given what it calls “two decades of relentless colony-collapse coverage”.

Some of us, however, have been pointing out for more than a decade that the mysterious affliction called “colony collapse disorder”, which caused a blip in honey-bee numbers in the mid-2000s, was always only a temporary phenomenon. Globally, bees are doing better than ever. The trouble is that bad news sticks around like honey, while good news dries up like water.

Honey bees are a domesticated species, so their success depends partly on human incentives. In the case of America, the Texas state government’s decision to reduce property taxes on plots containing bee hives has boosted the popularity of beekeeping. When bees were in trouble, they were seen as a measure of the health of the environment generally. So their recovery can be regarded as a sign of good environmental health.

Why do stories of environmental doom, like this one about collapsing bee colonies, linger in the public consciousness, despite being outdated and wrong? The media are partly to blame. For environmental reporters, bad news is always more enticing than good. It’s more likely to catch the attention of editors and more likely to get clicks from readers. Good news is no news.

So I have a simple rule of thumb to work out when an environmental problem is on the mend: it drops out of the news. (The same is true of countries, by the way. When I was young, Angola and Mozambique were often in the news because they were torn by war; not today, because they are at peace.)

Take whales. In the 1960s, they were the (literal) posterboys of environmental alarm. There were just 5,000 humpback whales in the whole world and they seemed headed for extinction. Today, there are 135,000 humpback whales, which represents a 27-fold increase. For the first time in centuries they sometimes gather in groups of over a hundred. I have even seen them several times myself, which I had assumed as a boy I never would.

Most other whale species are doing almost as well: blue, fin, right, bowhead, sperm, grey, minke – all are increasing steadily in numbers (though certain subpopulations, such as North Atlantic right whales, are still struggling). But the story of whales’ resurgence just doesn’t make the news.

Or take polar bears. Just a few years ago, greens were constantly claiming that they were facing imminent extinction. In 2017, National Geographic published a video of a starving polar bear, with the tagline, “This is what climate change looks like”. It was viewed 2.5 billion times. No climate conference or Greenpeace telly advert was complete without a picture of a sad polar bear on an ice floe. Today, that’s a less common sight, because it is harder and harder to deny that polar bears are less and less rare. Despite heroic efforts by environmentalists to claim otherwise, there is now no hiding the fact that polar-bear numbers have not declined and have probably increased, with some populations having doubled over the past few decades. So much so that some environmentalists and researchers no longer think that polar bears are suitable symbols of man’s threat to the planet.

The refusal of polar-bear numbers to conform to the eco-pessimists’ narrative should not be a surprise. In 2009, Al Gore claimed that the Arctic polar ice cap could disappear in as little as five years. A decade on, that is still nowhere near happening yet. Besides, polar bears have always taken refuge on land in late summer in regions where the ice does melt, such as Hudson Bay.

Another Arctic species, the walrus, is doing so well now that it sometimes turns up on beaches in Britain. It’s the same story for fur seals, elephant seals and king penguins. A few years ago, I visited South Georgia in the Antarctic and saw thousands upon thousands of all three species, when little over a century ago they would have been very rare there.

These whales, seals, penguins and bears are booming for a very simple reason: we stopped killing them. Their meat could not compete with beef. And, above all, their fur and blubber could not compete with petroleum products. Or to put it another way, fossil fuels saved the whale.

QotD: Prepper fantasy versus prepper reality

Filed under: Books, Gaming, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… note that this is also a bit of a rebuke to the dominant strain of prepper fantasies, such as those I began this review with. Prepper fantasies are most fundamentally fantasies of agency, dreams that in the right crisis the actions you take could actually matter, and that in the wake of that crisis you could return to a Rousseauian condition of autonomous activity freed from the internal conflicts engendered by societal oppression (whether that oppression takes the form of stifling social convention or HRified bureaucratic fiat). It’s obvious how the prepper fantasies relate to the great survival stories like Robinson Crusoe, or to the pioneer dramas of the American Westward expansion. It’s a little less obvious, but just as deeply true, that they’re connected to stories of rogues, rascals, and reavers like those by Robert E. Howard or Bronze Age Pervert. All of these stories, fundamentally, are about how a man freed from external restraint and internal conflict can apply himself to better his condition.

The thing is these stories are totally ahistorical — the best that solitary survivors have ever managed was to survive, none of them have rebuilt civilization. As Jane notes in her review of BAP, the sandal-clad barbarians have generally been subjected to a “tyranny of the cousins” even more intrusive and meticulous than the gynocratic safetyism that Bronze Age Lifestyle offers an imaginative escape from. And as for the pioneers, Tanner Greer notes that:

    Many imagine the great American man of the past as a prototypical rugged individual, neither tamed nor tameable, bestriding the wilderness and dealing out justice in lonesome silence. But this is a false myth. It bears little resemblance to the actual behavior of the American pioneer, nor to the kinds of behaviors and norms that an agentic culture would need to cultivate today. Instead, the primary ideal enshrined and ritualized as the mark of manhood was “publick usefuleness”, similar, if not quite identical, to the classical concept of virtus. American civilization was built not by rugged individuals but by rugged communities. Manhood was understood as the leadership of and service to these communities.

It would be too easy to end the review here, with the implication that the prepper identity is a fantasy of radical individualism and like all such fantasies, kinda dumb. But the thing is, the prepper world has by and large absorbed this critique and incorporated it into its theorizing. In contrast to the libertarian fantasies of the 1970s, second-wave prepperism (reformed prepperism?) is constantly talking about community, the importance of having friends you can trust, of cultivating deep social bonds with your neighbors, etc.

What Yu Gun reminds us is that this is still totally ahistorical, but this time in a way that indicts not only the preppers, but also a much broader swathe of our society. A man without a community is unnatural, but so is a community without leadership, hierarchy, and order. The prepper version of community is a vision of freely contracting individuals respecting each others’ autonomy while cooperating because it’s in their best interests. This is also the folk version of community that motivates much of our economic and legal regime. Scratch an American “communitarian”, and underneath it’s just another individualist.

If you hang out on prepper forums, a recurrent mantra is to “practice your preps”, that is to start living on the margin as if the apocalypse had already occurred. The purpose of this is to gain experience in the skills you’ll need after the end, and to work out the kinks in your routine now, while it’s still easy to make adjustments. Originally this meant practicing getting lost in the woods, using and maintaining your weapon of choice, eating some of your food stockpile, or whatever. In second-wave prepperism it means all that, plus a bunch of new stuff like hanging out with your neighbors, attending community barbecues, and whatever else it is that freely contracting individuals like to autonomously do while temporarily occupying the same space.

But for we third-wave preppers, it has to take on a very different meaning. Greer’s essay that I quoted above is mainly about how leadership and service in local-scale organizations served as training for leadership and service in much larger groups aimed at problems with much higher stakes. In other words, they were practicing their preps. One of the great secrets of leadership is that following and leading are actually closely related skills, and that practice at one of them transfers well to the other. This is difficult for we Americans to see, because an aversion to hierarchy is built into our national character, and consequently we operate with impoverished models of what it means to be in a position of authority or of subordination.

Long ago I read an article contrasting Western and Korean massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Even if you know nothing about computer games, you probably know that in most of them you are the hero, the chosen one, the child of destiny. Talk about fantasies of agency! MMORPGs thus have a tricky needle to thread — somehow all the thousands and thousands of players need to simultaneously be the chosen one, the child of destiny, etc., etc. And they mostly accomplish this by just rolling with it and asking everybody to suspend disbelief. But this article claimed that Korean MMORPGs are different — when players join these games, they’re randomly assigned a role. A tiny fraction might become kings or generals or children of destiny, with the power to decide the fates of peoples and kingdoms, but most are given a role as ordinary soldiers or porters or blacksmiths, and toil away at their in-game mundane tasks, without much ability to affect anything at all.

We like to imagine that after the bombs fall and the smoke clears we will emerge as the new Yu Gun, apportioning merit and assigning tasks. And perhaps you will indeed be called upon to do that, so you should prepare yourself to step up and do it. That preparation will involve some practice commanding others and some practice obeying others’ commands, because the two are inextricably bound together. But in life as in Korean video games, there’s isn’t very much room at the top. Far more likely, when the stage of history is set, we will be cast in a supporting role, like the Korean gamer assigned to role-play as a peasant or like Yu’s followers standing in orderly ranks. Let us not turn our noses up at this vocation, the poorly-behaved seldom make history.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 by David A. Graff”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-06-05.

April 6, 2024

The Fake (and real) History of Potato Chips

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jan 2, 2024

The fake and true history of the potato chip and an early 19th century recipe for them. Get the recipe at my new website https://www.tastinghistory.com/ and buy Fake History: 101 Things that Never Happened: https://lnk.to/Xkg1CdFB
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February 26, 2024

QotD: Lockdown rebuttal

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

First, lockdowns were neither prudent nor essential. It’s not as if government officials considered the collateral damage to be inflicted on the economy, society, and health – not all health problems are caused by covid – by the lockdowns and then rationally concluded that the benefits of locking down outweighed these costs. No. The collateral damages were ignored. As the New York Times‘s Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair‘s Bethany McLean – authors of the just-released The Big Fail – write, “But there was never any science behind lockdowns – not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.”1 In no universe is such a policy prudent.

Nor were lockdowns “essential”. As Nocera and McLean note,

    … the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust – the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”.)

Second, the lockdowns were, contra Mr. Orrell’s claim, utterly unprecedented. Isolating individuals known to be infected, such as Typhoid Mary, is a categorically different measure than locking down whole societies. Such lockdowns were never used until China locked Wuhan down in early 2020. Here again are Nocera and McLean: “On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days – two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it ‘unprecedented in public health history’.”

It’s jarring to encounter in an essay that features many excellent arguments – as Mr. Orrell’s does – such irrational and utterly uninformed claims as Mr. Orrell offers about lockdowns.

Donald J. Boudreaux, responding to an article by Brent Orrell in Law & Liberty, 2023-10-31.

February 19, 2024

QotD: Cleopatra VII Philopator

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

This week on the blog we’re going to talk about Cleopatra or to be more specific, we’re going to talk about Cleopatra VII Philopator, who is the only Cleopatra you’ve likely ever heard of, but that “seven” after her name should signal that she’s not the only Cleopatra.1 One of the trends in scholarship over the years towards larger than life ancient historical figures – Caesar, Alexander, Octavian, etc. – has been attempts to demystify them, stripping away centuries of caked-on reception, assumptions and imitation to ask more directly: who was this person, what did they do and do we value those sorts of things?2

Cleopatra, of course, has all of that reception layered on too. In antiquity and indeed until the modern era, she was one of the great villains of history, the licentious, wicked foreign queen of Octavian’s propaganda. More recently there has been an effort to reinvent her as an icon of modern values, perhaps most visible lately in Netflix’ recent (quite poorly received) documentary series. A lot of both efforts rely on reading into gaps in the source material. What I want to do here instead is to try to strip some of that away, to de-mystify Cleopatra and set out some of what we know and what we don’t know about her, with particular reference to the question I find most interesting: was Cleopatra actually a good or capable ruler?

Now a lot of the debate sparked by that Netflix series focused on what I find the rather uninteresting (but quite complicated) question of Cleopatra’s heritage or parentage or – heaven help us – her “race”. But I want to address this problem too, not because I care about the result but because I am deeply bothered by how confidently the result gets asserted by all sides and how swiftly those confident assertions are mobilized into categories that just aren’t very meaningful for understanding Cleopatra. To be frank, Cleopatra’s heritage should be a niche question debated in the pages of the Journal of Juristic Papyrology by scholars squinting at inscriptions and papyri, looking to make minor alterations in the prosopography of the Ptolemaic dynasty, both because it is highly technical and uncertain, but also because it isn’t an issue of central importance. So we’ll get that out of the way first in this essay and then get to my main point, which is this:

Cleopatra was, I’d argue, at best a mediocre ruler, whose ambitious and self-interested gambles mostly failed, to the ruin of herself and her kingdom. This is not to say Cleopatra was a weak or ineffective person; she was very obviously highly intelligent, learned, a virtuoso linguist, and a famously effective speaker. But one can be all of those things and not be a wise or skillful ruler, and I tend to view Cleopatra in that light.

Now I want to note the spirit in which I offer this essay. This is not a take-down of the Netflix Queen Cleopatra documentary (though it well deserves one and has received several; it is quite bad) nor a take-down of other scholars’ work on Cleopatra. This is simply my “take” on her reign. There’s enough we don’t know or barely know that another scholar, viewing from another angle, might well come away with a different conclusion, viewing Cleopatra in a more positive light. This is, to a degree, a response to some of the more recent public hagiography on Cleopatra, which I think air-brushes her failures and sometimes tries a bit too hard to read virtues into gaps in the evidence. But they are generally gaps in the evidence and in a situation where we are all to a degree making informed guesses, I am hardly going to trash someone who makes a perfectly plausible but somewhat differently informed guess. In history there are often situations where there is no right answer – meaning no answer we know to be true – but many wrong answers – answers we know to be false. I don’t claim to have the right answer, but I am frustrated by seeing so many very certain wrong answers floating around the public.

Before we dive in briefly to the boring question of Cleopatra’s parentage before the much more interesting question of her conduct as a ruler, we need to be clear about the difficult nature of the sources for Cleopatra and her reign. Fundamentally we may divide these sources into two groups: there are inscriptions, coins and papyrus records from Egypt which mention Cleopatra (and one she wrote on!) but, as such evidence is wont to be, [they] are often incomplete or provided only limited information. And then there are the literary sources, which are uniformly without exception hostile to Cleopatra. And I mean extremely hostile to Cleopatra, filled with wrath and invective. At no point, anywhere in the literary sources does Cleopatra get within a country mile of a fair shake and I am saying that as someone who thinks she wasn’t very good at her job.

The problem here is that Cleopatra was the target of Octavian’s PR campaign, as it were, in the run up to his war with Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony; I’m going to call him Marcus Antonius here), because as a foreign queen – an intersecting triad of concepts (foreignness, monarchy and women in power) which all offended Roman sensibilities – she was effectively the perfect target for a campaign aimed at winning over the populace of Italy, which was, it turns out, the most valuable military resource in the Mediterranean.3 That picture – the foreign queen corrupting the morals of good Romans with her decadence – rightly or wrongly ends up coloring all of the subsequent accounts. Of course that in turn effects the reliability of all of our literary sources and thus we must tread carefully.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.

    1. Or even just the seventh!

    2. This is not to diminish the value of reception studies that trace the meaning a figure – or the memory of a figure – had over time. That’s a valuable but different lens of study.

    3. It’s not all Octavian, mind. Cicero’s impression of Cleopatra was also sharply negative, for many of the same reasons: Cicero was hardly likely to be affable to a foreign queen who was an ally of Julius Caesar.

January 25, 2024

The Bathtub Hoax and debunked medieval myths

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman spends a bit of time debunking some bogus but widely believed historical myths:

“Image” by Lauren Knowlton is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The first is a false story that teaches a true lesson — the U.S. did treat Amerinds unjustly in a variety of contexts, although the massive die off as a result of the spread of Old World diseases was a natural result of contact, not deliberate biological warfare. The second lets moderns feel superior to their ignorant ancestors; most people like feeling superior to someone.

Another example of that, deliberately created by a master, is H.L. Mencken’s bathtub hoax, an entirely fictitious history of the bathtub published in 1917:

    The article claimed that the bathtub had been invented by Lord John Russell of England in 1828, and that Cincinnatian Adam Thompson became acquainted with it during business trips there in the 1830s. Thompson allegedly went back to Cincinnati and took the first bath in the United States on December 20, 1842. The invention purportedly aroused great controversy in Cincinnati, with detractors claiming that its expensive nature was undemocratic and local doctors claiming it was dangerous. This debate was said to have spread across the nation, with an ordinance banning bathing between November and March supposedly narrowly failing in Philadelphia and a similar ordinance allegedly being effective in Boston between 1845 and 1862. … Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was claimed to have campaigned for the bathtub against remaining medical opposition in Boston; the American Medical Association supposedly granted sanction to the practice in 1850, followed by practitioners of homeopathy in 1853.

    According to the article, then-Vice President Millard Fillmore visited the Thompson bathtub in March 1850 and having bathed in it became a proponent of bathtubs. Upon his accession to the presidency in July of that year, Fillmore was said to have ordered the construction of a bathtub in the White House, which allegedly refueled the controversy of providing the president with indulgences not enjoyed by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Nevertheless, the effect of the bathtub’s installation was said to have obliterated any remaining opposition, such that it was said that every hotel in New York had a bathtub by 1860. (Wikipedia)

Writing more than thirty years later, Mencken claimed to have been unable to kill the story despite multiple retractions. A google search for [Millard Fillmore bathtub] demonstrates that it is still alive. Among other hits:

    The first bathtub placed in the White House is widely believed to have had been installed in 1851 by President Millard Fillmore (1850-53). (The White House Bathrooms & Kitchen)

Medieval

The desire of moderns to feel superior to their ancestors, helps explain a variety of false beliefs about the Middle Ages including the myth, discussed in detail in an earlier post, that medieval cooking was overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.

Other examples:

Medieval witch hunts: Contrary to popular belief, large scale persecution of witches started well after the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval church viewed the belief that Satan could give magical powers to witches, on which the later prosecutions were largely based, as heretical. The Spanish Inquisition, conventionally blamed for witchcraft prosecutions, treated witchcraft accusations as a distraction from the serious business of identifying secret Jews and Muslims, dealt with such accusations by applying serious standards of evidence to them.

Chastity Belts: Supposedly worn by the ladies of knights off on crusade. The earliest known evidence of the idea of a chastity belt is well after the end of the crusades, a 15th century drawing, and while there is literary evidence for their occasional use after that no surviving examples are known to be from before the 19th century.

Ius Prima Noctae aka Droit de Seigneur was the supposed right of a medieval lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night. Versions of the institution are asserted in a variety of sources going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but while it is hard to prove that it never existed in the European middle ages it was clearly never the norm.

The Divine Right of Kings: Various rulers through history have claimed divine sanction for their rule but “The Divine Right of Kings” is a doctrine that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with the rise of absolute monarchy — Henry VIII in England, Louis XIV in France. Medieval rulers were absolute in neither theory or practice. The feudal relation was one of mutual obligation, in its simplest form protection by the superior in exchange for set obligations of support by the inferior. In practice the decentralized control of military power under feudalism presented difficulties for a ruler who wished to overrule the desires of his nobility, as King John discovered.

Some fictional history functions in multiple versions designed to support different causes. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria has been variously blamed on Julius Caesar, Christian mobs rioting against pagans, and the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, the Caliph Umar having supposedly said that anything in the library that was true was already in the Koran and anything not in the Koran was false. There is no good evidence for any of the stories. The library existed in classical antiquity, no longer exists today, but it is not known how it was destroyed and it may have just gradually declined.

January 11, 2024

Pushing back against the Colonialism Narrative

Filed under: Africa, Books, Britain, History, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Samizdata, Brendan Westbridge praises Nigel Biggar’s 2023 book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning:

He examines the various claims that the “de-colonisers” make: Amritsar, slavery, Benin, Boer War, Irish famine. In all cases he finds that their claims are either entirely ungrounded or lack vital information that would cast events in a very different light. Amritsar? Dyer was dealing with political violence that had led to murder. Some victims had been set alight. Anyway, he was condemned for his actions by the British authorities and, indeed, his own standing orders. Slavery? Everyone had it and Britain was the first to get rid of it. Benin? They had killed unarmed ambassadors. Irish famine? They tried to relieve it but they were quite unequal to the size of the task. In the case of Benin he comes very close to accusing the leading de-coloniser of knowingly lying. The only one of these where I don’t think he is so convincing is the Boer War. He claims that Britain was concerned about the future of the Cape and especially the Simonstown naval base and also black rights. I think it was the pursuit of gold even if it does mean agreeing with the communist Eric Hobsbawm.

He is far too polite about the “de-colonisers”. They are desperate to hammer the square peg of reality into their round-hole of a theory. To this end they claim knowledge they don’t have, gloss over inconvenient facts, erect theories that don’t bear scrutiny and when all else fails: lie. Biggar tackles all of these offences against objectivity with a calmness and a politeness that you can bet his detractors would never return.

The communists – because they are obsessed with such things and are past masters at projection – like to claim that there was an “ideology” of Empire. Biggar thinks this is nonsense. As he says:

    There was no essential motive or set of motives that drove the British Empire. The reasons why the British built an empire were many and various. They differed between trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official and statesman. They sometimes differed between London, Cairo, Cape Town and Calcutta. And all of the motives I have unearthed in this chapter were, in themselves, innocent: the aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government. There is nothing morally wrong with any of these. Indeed, the last one is morally admirable.

One of the benefits of the British Empire is that it tended to put a stop to local wars. How many people lived because of that? But that leads us on to another aspect. Almost no one ever considers what went on before the Empire arrived. Was it better or worse than went before it? Given that places like Benin indulged in human sacrifice, I would say that in many cases the British Empire was an improvement. And if we are going to talk about what went before what about afterwards? He has little to say about what newly-independent countries have done with their independence. The United States, the “white” (for want of a better term) Commonwealth and Singapore have done reasonably well. Ireland is sub-par but OK. Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent have very little to show for themselves. This may explain why Britain needed very few people to maintain the Empire. At one point he points out that at the height of the Raj the ratio of Briton to native was 1 to 1000. That implies a lot of consent. Tyrannies need a lot more people.

The truth of the matter is that talk of reparations is rooted in the failure of de-colonisation. If Jamaica were a nicer place to live than the UK, if Jamaica had a small boats crisis rather than the UK then no one would be breathing a word about reparations or colonial guilt. All this talk is pure deflection from the failure of local despots to make the lives of their subjects better.

Biggar has nothing to say about what came after the empire and he also has little to say about how it came about in the first place – so I’ll fill in that gap. Britain acquired an empire because it could. Britain was able to acquire an Empire because it mastered the technologies needed to do it to a higher level and on a greater scale than anyone else. Britain mastered technology because it made it possible to prosper by creating wealth. That in itself was a moral achievement.

November 17, 2023

Prometheus

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

Virginia Postrel tries to correct the common misinterpretation of the story of the Titan Prometheus:

“The Torture of Prometheus” by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
Oil painting in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini via Wikimedia Commons.

Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World“:

    The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude.

    1. Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.

    The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model … a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.

    The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.

November 12, 2023

Who Destroyed The Library of Alexandria? | The Rest is History

Filed under: Africa, Greece, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest is History
Published 21 Jul 2023

Step back in time with renowned historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland as they embark on an enthralling journey to explore the enigmatic tale of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction. Join them as they uncover the who, what, and why behind one of history’s greatest losses.

#LibraryOfAlexandria #DominicSandbrook #TomHolland

QotD: Archaeological evidence on the foundation of Rome

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

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 7, 2023

QotD: As we all know, medieval peasants wore ill-fitting clothes of grey and brown, exclusively

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

… the popular image of most ancient and medieval clothing is typically a rather drab affair, with the poor peasantry wearing mostly dirty, drab brown clothes (often ill-fitting ones) and so it might be imagined that regular folks had little need for involved textile finishing processes or dyeing; this is quite wrong. We have in essence already dispatched with the ill-fitting notion; the clothes of poor farmers, being often homespun and home-sewn could be made quite exactly for their wearers (indeed, loose fitting clothing, with lots of extra fabric, was often how one showed off wealth; lots of pleating, for instance, displayed that one could afford to waste expensive fabric on ornamentation). So it will not be a surprise that people in the past also liked to dress in pleasing colors and that this preference extended even to relatively humble peasants. Moreover, the simplest dyes and bleaching methods were often well within reach even for relatively humble people.

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.

October 11, 2023

In their attacks on southern Israel, Hamas is “making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray explains the otherwise insane tactics employed by Hamas terrorists:

The border area between the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, 9 October 2023.
Map by Ecrusized via Wikimedia Commons.

Hamas broke through a fortified border, had unchallenged freedom of movement inside Israel for a shockingly long time, and attacked … a dance music festival and some kibbutzim. Not airfields, not fuel depots, not power stations, not army motor pools to deny mobility to the enemy. They went after soft targets first, and focused especially on women and children. Eyewitness reports and footage of female hostages are telling us that Hamas engaged in sustained sexual violence, and took care to make it known. A subhed in Tablet: “Scenes of young women raped next to the dead bodies of their friends.”

And I think we know what this means.

But first, look at the proposed explanations offered in the news:

    It seems that Hamas, also, is trying to force Israel into negotiations. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a note in Hebrew to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting he take a “calculated risk” by agreeing a long-term truce. While Netanyahu agreed to some easing of pressure on Gaza, he was unwilling to accept Hamas’s long-term demands, including a large-scale prisoner swap, lifting the siege by opening the international border crossing, and establishing a port and airport in Gaza. After 16 years of siege and several catastrophic rounds of war, in which thousands of Gaza residents have been killed, Hamas may be hoping to break the deadlock.

That’s not it. Here’s another try:

    Hamas could well be trying to torpedo the Saudi deal and even try undo the existing Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson said that the attack was “a message” to Arab countries, calling on them to cut on ties with Israel …

    To be clear: Saying it makes strategic sense for Hamas to engage in atrocities is not to justify their killing civilians. There is a difference between explanation and justification: The reasoning behind Hamas’s attack may be explicable even as it is morally indefensible.

So the much-repeated claim is that Hamas in engaging in diplomatic maneuvering, sending messages to nation-states. They used mass rape at a dance festival to gain leverage in negotiations over a possible new port.

That’s absolutely not it, and I strongly suspect that the presence of widespread and carefully displayed attacks on 1.) families with children and 2.) the sexually traumatized bodies of women represent an extremely deliberate and calculated adoption, explicitly planned for months or years, of the familiar tools of ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is dirtying the memory of the Jewish spaces bordering on the Gaza Strip. They’re marking southern Israel in the memory of future families, and especially women of childbearing age, with the deliberately cultivated images of murdered children and the mass rape of young women, so that young women regard the place with dread and don’t return to have children there. They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.

Mass rape by armies is not a mystery; it has been studied carefully.

Group X, as a group and deliberately, rapes women from Group Y in Neighborhood Z so women from Group Y never feel that they can safely return to Neighborhood Z, in a tribal memory passed down to later generations. Now the space belongs to Group X.

Hamas is making sites of trauma. To empty them, and to keep them empty.

Their military objective is to use the witnessed mass rape of women, the documented hunting and torture of families, and the videotaped murder of children in front of their parents to keep Jews out of southern Israel in the future. Their military target is site-specific Jewish fertility.

In the comments, Chris also points out the military insanity of how Hamas is implementing the propaganda aspects of their plan:

It’s insane for infantry to carry cellphones into combat, because cellphone locations can be tracked. But Hamas seems to be recording everything they do, and they’re stopping to upload new footage as they capture it. They’re taking the risk of carrying trackable devices in combat for the intended benefit of the display. I’d be very curious to hear if they’re all carrying standardized, organization-issued cellphones, and I’d be very curious to see a detailed analysis of where all of the footage is appearing first. This is a deliberate information operation.

Hamas has clearly calculated that the risk is worth the propaganda bonanza they are reaping from the atrocities being beamed almost in real time to the outside world.

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