Quotulatiousness

April 16, 2024

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Impresa – the 1919 occupation of Fiume

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

Ned Donovan on the turbulent history of the Adriatic port of Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) after the end of the First World War:

Fiume was a port on the Adriatic coast with several thousand residents, almost half of whom were ethnic Italians that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for several hundred years after it once having been a Venetian trade port. By some quirk, Fiume was missed in the Treaty of London, probably because it had never been envisioned by the Allies that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would ever truly disintegrate and the rump of it that would remain required a sea port in some form. The city’s other residents were ethnically Serbian and Croatian, who knew the city as Rijeka (as you will find it named on a map today). All of this complexity meant that the fate of Fiume became a major topic of controversy during the Versailles Peace Conference. President Woodrow Wilson had become so unsure of what to do that he proposed the place become a free city and the headquarters of the nascent League of Nations, under the jurisdiction of no country.

By September 1919 there was still no conclusion as to the fate of Fiume. Events had overtaken the place and through the Treaty of St Germain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been dissolved after the abdication of the final Habsburg Emperor Charles I. Once again, Fiume had not been mentioned in the treaty and the country it had been set aside for no longer existed. The city’s fate was still at play.

Enter Gabriele D’Annunzio, an aristocrat from Abruzzo on the eastern coast of Italy. Born in 1863, he was a handsome and intelligent child and was nurtured by his family to be exceptional, with a predictable side effect of immense selfishness. As a teenager, he had begun to dabble in poetry and it was praised by authors unaware of his age. At university he began to be associated with Italian irredentism, a philosophy that yearned for all ethnic Italians to live in one country – by retaking places under foreign rule like Corsica, Malta, Dalmatia and even Nice.

[…]

The Italian government’s lack of interest [in Fiume] was unacceptable to D’Annunzio and he made clear he would take action to prevent it becoming part of Yugoslavia by default. With his fame and pedigree he was able to quickly assemble a small private force of ex-soldiers, who he quickly took to calling his “legionaries”. In September 1919 after the Treaty of St Germain was signed, his small legion of a few hundred marched from near Venice to Fiume in what they called the Impresa – the Enterprise. By the time he had reached Fiume, the “army” numbered in the thousands, the vanguard crying “Fiume or Death” with D’Annunzio at its head in a red Fiat.

A flag designed by Gabriele D’Annunzio for the would-be independent state of Fiume, 1919.

The only thing that stood in his way was the garrison of the Entente, soldiers who had been given orders to prevent D’Annunzio’s invasion by any means necessary. But amongst the garrison’s leaders were many [Italian officers] sympathetic to D’Annunzio’s vision, some even artists themselves and before long most of the defenders had deserted to join the poet’s army. On the 12th September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio proclaimed that he had annexed Fiume to the Kingdom of Italy as the “Regency of Carnaro” – of which he was the Regent. The Italian government was thoroughly unimpressed and refused to recognise their newest purported land, demanding the plotters give up. Instead, D’Annunzio took matters into his own hands and set up a government and designed a flag (to the right).

The citizens of what had been a relatively unimportant port quickly found themselves in the midst of one of the 20th Century’s strangest experiments. D’Annunzio instituted a constitution that combined cutting-edge philosophical ideas of the time with a curious government structure that saw the country divided into nine corporations to represent key planks of industry like seafarers, lawyers, civil servants, and farmers. There was a 10th corporation that existed only symbolically and represented who D’Annunzio called the “Supermen” and was reserved largely for him and his fellow poets.

These corporations selected members for a state council, which was joined by “The Council of the Best” and made up of local councillors elected under universal suffrage. Together these institutions were instructed to carry out a radical agenda that sought an ideal society of industry and creativity. From all over the world, famous intellectuals and oddities migrated to Fiume. One of D’Annunzio’s closest advisers was the Italian pilot Guido Keller, who was named the new country’s first “Secretary of Action” – the first action he took was to institute nationwide yoga classes which he sometimes led in the nude and encouraged all to join. When not teaching yoga, Keller would often sleep in a tree in Fiume with his semi-tame pet eagle and at least one romantic partner.

If citizens weren’t interested in yoga, they could take up karate taught by the Japanese poet Harukichi Shimoi, who had translated Dante’s works into Japanese. Shimoi, who quickly became known to the government of Fiume as “Comrade Samurai” was a keen believer in Fiume’s vision and saw it as the closest the modern world had come to putting into practice the old Japanese art of Bushido.

The whole thing would have felt like a fever dream to an outsider. If a tourist was to visit the city, they would have found foreign spies from across the world checking into hotels and rubbing shoulders with members of the Irish republican movement while others did copious amounts of cocaine, another national pastime in Fiume. The most fashionable residents of Fiume carried little gold containers of the powder, and D’Annunzio himself was said to have a voracious habit for it. Sex was everywhere one turned and the city had seen a huge inward migration of prostitutes and pimps within days of D’Annunzio’s arrival. Almost every day was a festival, and it was an odd evening if the harbour of Fiume did not see dozens of fireworks burst above it, watched on by D’Annunzio’s uniformed paramilitaries.

D’Annunzio himself lived in a palace overlooking the city, Osbert Sitwell describes walking up a steep hill to a Renaissance-style square palazzo which inside was filled with plaster flowerpots the poet had installed and planted with palms and cacti. D’Annunzio would cloister himself in his rooms for 18 hours a day and without food. Immaculate guards hid amongst the shrubs to ensure he would not be disturbed. In D’Annunzio’s study, facing the sea, he sat with statutes of saints and with French windows onto the state balcony. When he wanted to interact with his people he would wait for a crowd to form over some issue, walk to the balcony and then ask what they wanted.

March 9, 2024

QotD: Reading for snobs

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I would like, for the sake of hipness, to be able to claim that I am reading some obscure French novelist of the inter-war period, in the original French. Unfortunately, the only thing I can read in the original French is no-smoking signs, and I hate most French novels written after 1890. Instead, I’m reaquainting myself with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, the patron saints of light verse. When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be Dorothy Parker, until I realised that no matter how hard I tried I was never going to be talented, Jewish, or short, and that dying alone only sounds romantic so long as you continue to believe yourself to be immortal.

Megan McArdle, writing as “Jane Galt”, Asymmetrical Information, 2004-12.

December 9, 2023

QotD: A secret of effective writing

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

I’m in the process of editing a document for a technical project that is intended to be an introduction for newbies to certain fairly complex issues. While requesting feedback on the project mailing list, I realized that I had accidentally revealed a major secret of really top-grade writing, exactly the sort of thing that put The Cathedral and the Bazaar on the New York Times best-seller list.

I see no reason not to share it with my readers. So here is the relevant part of my request for feedback:

    Please fix typos and outright grammatical errors. If you think you have spotted a higher-level usage problem or awkwardness, check with me before changing it. What you think is technically erroneous may be expressive voice.

Explanation: Style is the contrast between expectation and surprise. Poets writing metric poetry learn to introduce small breaks in scansion in order to induce tension-and-release cycles at a higher level that will hold the reader’s interest. The corresponding prose trick is to bend usage rules or change the register of the writing slightly away from what the reader unconsciously expects. If you try to “fix” these you will probably be stepping on an intended effect. So check first.

(I will also observe that unless you are already an unusually skilled writer, you should not try to replicate this technique; the risk of sounding affected or just teeth-jarringly bad is high. As Penn & Teller puts it, “These stunts are being performed by trained, professional idiots.”)

Eric S. Raymond, “A major secret of effective writing”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-05.

October 18, 2023

George Orwell’s views on Rudyard Kipling’s worldview

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

David Friedman comments on Orwell’s essay “Rudyard Kipling“, published a few years after the poet’s death in Horizon, September 1941:

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer, 1895.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

    During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

Orwell’s essay on Rudyard Kipling in the Letters and Essays is both more favorable and more perceptive than one would expect of a discussion of Kipling by a British left-wing intellectual c. 1940. Orwell recognizes Kipling’s intelligence and his talent as a writer, pointing out how often people, including people who loath Kipling, use his phrases, sometimes without knowing their source. And Orwell argues, I think correctly, that Kipling not only was not a fascist but was further from a fascist than almost any of Orwell’s contemporaries, left or right, since he believed that there were things that mattered beyond power, that pride comes before a fall, that there is a fundamental mistake in

    heathen heart that puts her trust
    In reeking tube and iron shard,
    All valiant dust that builds on dust,
    And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

But while there is a good deal of truth in Orwell’s discussion of Kipling it is mistaken in two different ways, one having to do with Kipling’s view of the world, one with his art.

Orwell writes:

    It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have.

There are passages in Kipling, not “Loot“, the poem Orwell quotes but bits of Stalky and Company, which support the charge of a “strain of sadism”. But the central element which Orwell is misreading is not sadism but realism. Soldiers loot when given the opportunity and there is no point to pretending they don’t. School boys beat each other up. Schoolmasters puff up their own importance by abusing their authority to ridicule the boys they are supposed to be teaching. Life is not fair. And Kipling’s attitude, I think made quite clear in Stalky and Company, is that complaining about it is not only a waste of time but a confession of weakness. You should shut up and deal with it instead.

A more important error in Orwell’s essay is his underestimate of Kipling as an artist, both poet and short story writer. Responding to Elliot’s claim that Kipling wrote verse rather than poetry, Orwell claims that Kipling was actually a good bad poet:

    What (Elliot) does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced.

I am left with the suspicion that Orwell is basing his opinion almost entirely on Kipling’s best known poems, such as the two he cites here, both written when he was 24. He was a popular writer, hence his best known pieces are those most accessible to a wide range of readers. He did indeed use his very considerable talents to tell stories and to make simple and compelling arguments, but that is not all he did. There is no way to objectively prove that Kipling wrote quite a lot of good poetry and neither Orwell nor Elliot, unfortunately, is still alive to prove it to, but I can at least offer a few examples …

September 23, 2023

QotD: In which we discover why they’re called antimacassars

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Antimacassar” is such a lovely Victorianism. We still have antimacassars — they’re those pieces of protective fabric you see at the top of your train or plane seat — but do you know why antimacassars are so called? Because in the nineteenth century Rowland’s Macassar Oil became such a popular unguent for gentlemen’s coiffures that the land was full of oily-haired chaps who, upon entering your drawing room, would settle back in your favorite chair — and uh-oh, there goes the fabric. Hence, the vital deployment of the antimacassar. Rowland’s Macassar Oil was one of the first products to be marketed nationally (and, indeed, internationally), and so universally known that Lewis Carroll put it in Alice Through the Looking-Glass:

    His accents mild took up the tale:
    He said ‘I go my ways,
    And when I find a mountain-rill,
    I set it in a blaze;
    And thence they make a stuff they call
    Rowlands’ Macassar-Oil –
    Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
    They give me for my toil.’

Better yet, in Don Juan Lord Byron managed to rhyme it:

    In virtue, nothing earthly could surpass her
    Save thine ‘incomparable oil’, Macassar!

Mark Steyn, “Self-Knitting Antimacassars”, Steyn Online, 2019-08-02.

September 22, 2023

QotD: Progressive hollow men

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

Ever feel like you’re living in a bad movie? I’ve recently found there’s a worse sensation: Feeling like you’re living in a good movie. There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now where Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz recites the opening stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men:”

    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

The poem was written in 1925, but that’s why Eliot was a great artist — he anticipated the soyboi, the soulless urban bugman, by almost 100 years. The Left is nothing but “Hollow Men”-style contrasts. They’re religious fanatics without a religion. They Fucking Love Science™, but think gravity is a social construction. They insist that Blacks are literally being lynched in Current Year America, and yet hardly a day goes by without news that yet another professional race hustler is really White. Their political campaigns, it goes without saying, are Cults of Personality without the personality. Above all, they are moralizers without morality – the things they scold us about are so self-contradictory, or so absurd on their face, that one is forced to conclude that this by design.

Severian, “The Hollow Men”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-19.

September 21, 2023

QotD: The Iliad as Bronze Age gangsta rap

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

A few months ago I tried moving the Iliad from the list of books I’m good at pretending to have read to the list of books I’ve actually read, and to my surprise I bounced off of it pretty hard. What I wasn’t expecting was how much of it is just endlessly tallied lists of gruesome slayings, disses, shoutouts to supporters, more killings, women taken by force, boasts about wealth, boasts about blinged-out-equipment, more shoutouts to the homies from Achaea who here repreSENTing, etc. The Iliad is basically one giant gangster rap track, and gangster rap is kinda boring.

What was cool though is I felt like I came away with a much better understanding of Socrates, Plato, and that whole milieu. Much like it’s easy to miss the radicalism of Christianity when you come from a culture steeped in it, it’s easy to miss the radicalism of Socrates if you don’t understand that this is the culture he was reacting against. Granted, the compilation of the Homeric epics took place centuries before the time of classical Athens, but my sense is that in important respects things hadn’t changed all that much. In our society, even people who aren’t professing Christians have been subliminally shaped by a vast set of Christian-inflected moral and epistemic and metaphysical assumptions. Well in the same way, in the Athens of Socrates and of the Academy, the “cultural dark matter” was the world of the Iliad: honor, glory, blinged out bronze armor, tearing hot teenagers from the arms of their lamenting parents, etc.

We have a tendency to think of the Greek philosophers as emblematic of their civilization, when in reality they were one of the most bizarre and unrepresentative things that happened in that society. But Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges is here to tell us it wasn’t just the philosophers! So much of our mental picture of Ancient Greece and Rome is actually a snapshot of one fleeting moment in the histories of those places, arguably a very unrepresentative moment at which everything was in the process of collapsing. It’s like if [POP CULTURE ANALOGY I’M TOO TIRED TO THINK OF]. And actually once you think about it this way, everything makes way more sense. All those weird customs the Greeks and Romans had, all the lares and penates and herms and stuff, those are what these societies were about for hundreds and hundreds of years, and the popular image is just this weird encrustation, this final flowering at the end.

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

June 24, 2023

Official mythmaking about the Empire Windrush in 1948

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

The Armchair General unpacks some of the story-spinning being conducted by the British government and various charities to mark the 75th anniversary of the voyage of the Empire Windrush from Jamaica to Britain:

“The National Windrush Monument” by amandabhslater is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The Armchair General notes that there is much excitement about the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the ship called the Empire Windrush — which arrived on 22 June 1948 — and the contribution of the so-called Windrush Generation.

The myth currently being constructed is that those coming from Jamaica on the ship were invited, in order to rebuild a Britain struggling to recover from Word War II; we are told that, with so many young men killed in the fighting, Britain needed menial workers to selflessly come and rebuild our economy. Indeed, this view of events has been cemented in a much-lauded poem by Professor Laura Serrant.

    Remember … you called.
    Remember … you called
    YOU. Called.
    Remember, it was us, who came.

Like almost any story constructed by governments and charities over at least the last thirty years, this narrative is dodgy at best and downright dishonest at worst. The simple fact is that the ship’s operator had expected to leave Jamaica under capacity and so offered passage at half price: many local men (and it was all men) took the opportunity.

Writing in The Spectator, in an article well worth reading in full, Ed West points out that the British government certainly did not encourage these immigrants at all.

    Far from calling them, the British government was alarmed by the news. A Privy Council memo sent to the Colonial Office on 15 June stated that the government should not help the migrants: “Otherwise there might be a real danger that successful efforts to secure adequate conditions of these men on arrival might actually encourage a further influx.”

    Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones replied: “These people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.” But, he added confidently: “They won’t last one winter in England.” Indeed, Britain had recently endured some very harsh winters.

    The Ministry of Labour was also unhappy about the arrival of the Jamaican men, minister George Isaacs warning that if they attempted to find work in areas of serious unemployment “there will be trouble eventually”. He said: “The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangement is bound to result in considerable difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example.”

Nor was it the solely the evil Tories who were concerned:

    Soon afterwards, 11 concerned Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee stating that the government should “by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people … In our opinion such legislation or administration action would be almost universally approved by our people.” The letter was sent on 22 June; that same day the Windrush arrived at Tilbury.

One can hardly be surprised: after all, 75 years ago, the Labour Party at least strove to represent the working class of Britain and the simple fact is that there was, at the time, massive unemployment — so much so that the government was heavily subsidising tickets to Australia (at £10) in order to encourage British people to emigrate (over 2 million British people left between 1948 and 1960).

    There is a certain amount of well-intentioned inclusive myth-making in this story, and from a historical point of view the idea that “diversity built Britain”, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is bizarre. Until 1952 Britain was the richest country in Europe, after which we massively fell behind our continental rivals – so if diversity did “build” the country, it didn’t do a great job.

One can argue, I think, that the Windrush Generation made a great many contributions, in common with many immigrants; and if their contribution was not, in reality, as large as is claimed, then they share that with the EEC/EU’s Common Market which, again (and despite all the claims), brought no discernible benefit to the UK.

H/T to Tim Worstall for the link.

June 10, 2023

Feeding a Greek Hoplite – Ancient Rations

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Jun 2023
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May 30, 2023

Ban all the words!

Filed under: Books, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray reflects on the historical context of literature bans:

Before the Civil War, Southern states banned abolitionist literature. That ban meant that postmasters (illegally!) searched the mail, seized anti-slavery tracts, and burned them. And it meant that people caught with abolitionist pamphlets faced the likelihood of arrest. The District of Columbia considered a ban, then didn’t pass the thing, but Reuben Crandall was still arrested and tried for seditious libel in 1833 when he was caught with abolitionist literature. He was acquitted, then died of illness from a brutal pre-trial detention. Seizure, destruction, arrest: abolitionist literature was banned.

The Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a 1924 novel, We, depicting a world in which an all-powerful government minutely controlled every aspect of life for an enervated population, finding as an endpoint for their ideological project a surgery that destroyed the centers of the brain that allowed ordinary people to have will and imagination. The Soviet government banned Zamyatin’s work: They seized and destroyed all known copies, told editors and publishers the author was no longer to allowed to publish, and sent Zamyatin into exile, where he died without ever seeing his own country again. Seizure, destruction, exile: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s work was banned.

During World War I, the federal government banned literature that discouraged military service, including tracts that criticized conscription. Subsequently, “socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude”. They were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Anti-conscription literature was banned: It was seized and destroyed, and people caught distributing it were sent to prison.

In 2023, the tedious midwit poet Amanda Gorman posted on Twitter that she was “gutted” — the standard emotion for tedious midwits — to discover that one of her poems had been “banned” by a school in Florida. The news media raced to proclaim that Florida schools are banning books, the leading edge of the Ron DeSantis fascist wave.

As others have already said, Gorman’s boring poem was moved from an elementary school library shelf to a middle school library shelf, without leaving the library

May 12, 2023

QotD: Great (but young) Romantic poets

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

History being the study of human beings and how they do, you need a baseline grasp of how humans are. It doesn’t matter how smart you are — if you don’t have a good baseline grasp of human nature, History, the discipline, will always elude you.

[This is true of any Humanity, of course. Shelley and Keats have to be in the conversation for “greatest English poet,” right up there with Shakespeare. One or both of them might’ve been more naturally talented than the Bard. But Shakespeare was clearly a man of long, deep experience, whereas the Romantics … weren’t. For every “Ozymandias” or “To a Nightingale”, there’s at least one reminder that these guys died at 29 and 25, respectively. To call “The Masque of Anarchy” sophomoric is an insult to sophomores. “Like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number.” Ugh. Good God, y’all].

Which is why that “social construction” stuff is so popular. Yeah yeah, it has some real (though really limited) explanatory power, but mostly it’s an excuse for kids who believe themselves clever to avoid contrary evidence. Calling, say, “masculinity” “just a social construction” frees you of the burden of entering the headspace of men who do things as men, because they’re men. To stick with a theme: Shakespeare could’ve written something like “the Masque of Anarchy” — probably as a wicked bit of characterization in Hamlet: The Wittenberg Years — but Shelley never could’ve written MacBeth’s “sound and fury” soliloquy. Shakespeare had obviously seen violent death; Shelley obviously hadn’t.

Knowledge of human nature is almost nonexistent in the Biz.

Severian, “How to Teach History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-23.

April 4, 2023

History Summarized: the Ancient Greek Post-Apocalypse

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Mar 2023

Turns out the “Studio Ghibli Post-Apocalypse” aesthetic has a historical basis in ancient Greek history’s Bronze Age Collapse, long Dark Age, and slow re-emergence into the Polis Age. I don’t know if I’d call the process pleasant, but it sure as hell is a vibe.

GO READ THE ILIAD: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ilia… — We enjoy the Fagles translation, as it’s the typical classroom and library standard, but if you want a real treat, try the Alexander Pope edition from the 1700s that’s written entirely in RHYME. THE DAMN THING RHYMES!!!

SOURCES & Further Reading:
“The Age of Heroes” and “Delphi and Olympia” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney – “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble – “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland “The Greeks: A Global History” by Roderick Beaton, “The Greeks: An Illustrated History” by Diane Cline, Metropolitan Museum “Geometric Art in Ancient Greece” https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grg… also have a degree in Classical Studies
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March 24, 2023

QotD: The academic specializations of the Great Library

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

[Carl] Sagan’s roll call of Greek scientists who he claims worked at the Great Library makes it sound like some kind of ancient Mediterranean MIT: Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Euclid, Dionysius of Thrace, Herophilos, Archimedes, Ptolemy and so on. Unfortunately, only one of these people – Eratosthenes – can definitely be said to be associated with the Great Library. Two others from Sagan’s list – Dionysius and Ptolemy – may have been. And once you take out all the others, that really leaves only Eratosthenes and (maybe) Conon of Samos and, much later, Ptolemy as scholars of the Great Library who did anything like what we would call “science”. We can perhaps shoehorn in Euclid and the physicians and anatomists Herophilos and Erasistratos, depending on when the Mouseion was established, but overall the evidence for the institution as some great centre of scientific research is actually rather thin.

Which means it is perhaps less surprising to learn, on examining the sources, that the Great Library was actually celebrated mainly for a specialisation which is about as far from modern science as possible: the study of poetry. This makes some sense, given that the Mouseion was dedicated to the Muses, four of whom represented forms of verse. The works of Homer, in particular, were a primary focus of study across the Greek world and his poems permeated thought, writing and everyday speech rather like the works of Shakespeare and the texts of the Bible do today. It was the scholars of the Mouseion who, on gathering and comparing copies of the Illiad and Odyssey from across the Greek-speaking world, noticed textual differences large and small and established the kind of textual analysis still used by editors to this day; working to determine the best possible text from the manuscript variants. Other works of Greek poetry, such as the odes of Pindar, were also analysed and studied in a similar way, as were the works of the great Athenian playwrights.

The importance of literary studies at the Mouseion can be seen by analysing the specialisations of the men we know were directors of the institution and therefore “librarians” of the Great Library. […] of these scholars, only Eratosthenes is known for doing anything that we would consider “science”, the others were devoted to literary and textual analysis, poetry and grammar. Of course, these scholars were polymaths and most of them would probably have ranged over many topics including areas of mathematics and natural philosophy; Eratosthenes himself was nicknamed “Beta” because he covered so many disciplines he was something of a jack of all trades and master of none, so his colleagues mocked him as “Number 2” in all subjects. That aside, the idea that the Mouseion was a major centre of scientific speculation is at best an exaggeration and largely yet another fantasy.

Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.

January 21, 2023

A club for autodidacts?

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

Ed West regrets the lacunae in his knowledge of many things, which I suspect also describes a lot of my blog visitors (given how often my own autodidactic web explorations end up here or on my social media accounts). His proposed solution is a club to study the western canon:

I’m ashamed of how little I know about a lot of things. Classical music, for instance, is a huge ocean of unknowns to me. I appreciate it, and I would like to know more, but it still feels like a language in which I have only the barest of vocabulary.

I’m so clueless and lightweight on that front that my favourite classical music LP when I still had a record player was a double album which told you which advert each piece was from (“The Hovis advert with the boy walking up the hill” for Dvorak, “the Hamlet cigar ad with Gregor Fisher” by Bach).

My knowledge of poetry is quite poor, too, and I wish I could recite more of it, rather than, say, the lyrics of the first seven Iron Maiden albums I learned off by heart at 13 (nothing against Iron Maiden, I still love them, but I’ve found this a slightly less useful skill down the years when trying to impress people).

Poetry has never been my thing. I enjoy hearing others read poetry, but there’s always something that prevents me from reading poetry on the printed page and “getting” the rhythm of it for more than a stanza or so. However, with song lyrics the underlying music provides sufficient support that I undoubtedly know far more lyrics by heart than any other kind of poet-created text.

YouTube is full of videos following in George Birkbeck’s tradition of adult learning. There are podcasts like Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps or The Partially Examined Life. One of the most popular Twitter accounts at the moment is The Cultural Tutor, with over a million followers, producing threads on the art, architecture, music and literature you should know about. People really want to learn this stuff, and regret that they were never made to do so earlier.

Some of this is due to the education system, although I don’t want to be one of those tedious people who go on Twitter and blame the curriculum for the gaps in their knowledge of history: “why weren’t we taught about the Second Schleswig war in school? Why am I only learning this now?” as if their teachers had thousands of hours spare rather than a very limited amount of time. But it’s also true that most people leave the British state education system knowing very little about the western canon, and are afterwards playing catch-up with a less absorbent mind.

In my case, with a couple of exceptions, the way that history — especially Canadian history — was taught in school seemed to be deliberately made as bland and uninteresting as possible … we of course skipped over most of the battles and campaigns so we could concentrate on the diplomats and treaties. Steve Sailer noted a similar phenomenon in US schools:

In Europe, anthropologists have promoted the “pots not people” theory to argue that trade and changes in fashion must explain why Corded Ware pots suddenly showed up all over Europe about 4,900 years ago. (So did battle axes; indeed, early scientists called this the Battle Axe Culture. But that sounded too awesome. Hence, more recent academics renamed it after its pottery style to make these brutal barbarians sound dweebier and thus less interesting to boys.)

Oddly, we were at least given some minimal insight into the plight of First Nations children in the residential school system which was not true when my son went to school a generation later. I’m still puzzled about that change in the curriculum. But back to Ed’s proposal:

Perhaps the main reason is that there already aren’t enough people who know about these things to teach in the first place, and who are also willing to endure the strain of having to keep order among an unwilling audience. So the knowledge does not get passed on, and public culture becomes ever more lowbrow.

But while it’s a hopeful sign that so many people go online to learn these things, my take-away from lockdown is that in-person is always better — going to something live, meeting people face to face, allowing your sensory perception to aid the learning process. I also believe that the more clubs and institutions we have, the healthier and happier our society.

That is why I’m proposing an idea, for a sort of club where people come and listen to talks about a particular feature of the western canon — Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Van Eyck, whatever — and fill in all these enormous holes in our knowledge. It would be a bit like an old-fashioned salon, or a Lyceum club. Although there are local salons still running, this would ideally be national. This canon club — I’m open to suggestions for a different name — would initially start in one city, presumably London, but if there was further interest we could help set up branches across Britain (and then even maybe abroad). Each local club would run semi-independently, but the wider organisation would help with arranging speakers and so on.

I see his point, but in my experience a lot of autodidacts are also rather introverted by nature so a physical salon or club with a lot of strangers might be less appealing than some of the existing online options.

December 2, 2022

Legends Summarized: The Trojan War

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Jul 2022

The grandest epic cycle this side of the Aegean! Today let’s talk about the tale of which The Iliad only makes up a tiny (if impressive) fraction!

Pst! Wanna know more about Quintus Smyrnaeus’s Posthomerica? Watch Blue’s Historymaker video about him HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfHGQ…
And if you want to know more about the historical, archaeological precedent that indicates some form of this story REALLY HAPPENED, watch Blue’s video on Mycenaean Greece HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cki-9…
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