Quotulatiousness

April 22, 2024

Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones

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

From last week’s blog post, Bret Devereaux reviews a book by a former instructor from his undergraduate days, documenting Roman values and attitudes and how understanding their views of themselves helps put their actions into context:

I studied under Barton as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but only looped back around to fully read her book on Roman honor during my Ph.D studies. This is a book about Roman culture and the Roman worldview – or more correctly the way the Romans view themselves and more crucially their innermost selves. This is an important exercise for the student of history, because, as L.P. Hartley famously put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. And so part of what the historian aims to do is not merely know what happened, but in order to understand why it happened, to be able to get into the minds of those people in the past, doing things differently. To put another way: we must also understand the vibes. This is a book about some serious Roman vibes.

The focus of Barton’s book, of course, is the Roman concept of honor and the whole constellation of ideas and concepts that circle around it (virtus, pudor and so on). For Barton, the Roman lived for the discrimen or certamen – that moment of testing and decision for which we have so many well-worn phrases (“sorting the wheat from the chaff”, “separating the men and the boys” and so on).1 It is in that moment that the Roman is, in a sense, most alive, propelled forward by virtus, guided by the other virtues, to pass the test and thereby win honor.

Two things, I think, distinguish Barton’s approach. The first is a focus on how these ideas make Romans feel and act; the man of honor shines, he is fiery, he glows. He stands tall, while others defer to him. The man filled with shame is the opposite. Understanding how real these ideas could be in Roman culture is in turn important for understanding how the Roman state – republic and empire – works, because it is predicated on those values, on the assumption that those not yet tested defer to those with honos who have been so tested and have shown their virtus. Second, the way Barton engages with the sources leaves a strong impression: the reader is bombarded with quotations (translated in the text, original in the footnotes) where the Romans can speak themselves about their values. And goodness do the Romans ever speak for themselves – almost never one example but half a dozen or more.

That strength can also be a weakness: to get that many references, Barton has to cast a wide net, especially chronologically and it isn’t unusual to see different examples for a point covering centuries, for instance from Plautus (late 3rd cent. BC) to Seneca (mid-late 1st cent. AD) in the same paragraph. That somewhat weakens the book’s ability to address chronological change, though Barton does work a bit of that chronology back in some of the later chapters. That said, Barton’s conception remains rooted with the bulk of her sources in the Late Republic (c. 133-31 BC) and while she stretches beyond this and notes some changes, this is fundamentally not a chronologically focused work. On the upside, the book is printed with footnotes (often taking up half a page or more!) with both original text for the translations and other useful notes, so for the student a trip from Barton’s prose to the original sources is quick and often quite fruitful.

Barton’s prose is very readable. As someone who sat in her classes, I can hear her lecture voice in the pages – she is well-known among the students as a passionate lecturer (now retired) who would shout and gesture, jump up and down and even get a bit misty-eyed at the fall of the Gracchi. The passion, I think, comes through in the book as well, to its benefit and that’s important, because this is fundamentally about things the Romans themselves were passionate about. I will also note, I think this book combines well with J.E. Lendon’s Empire of Honor (somewhat harder to obtain) to give a the fullest picture of honor in Roman affairs. But for someone looking to understand how the Romans thought about their own inner-lives and emotions, Roman Honor is, I think, the place to start.

    1. One thing that’s striking: whereas the Greek equivalent, the agon is a contest against another, the Roman discrimen is a test against any sort of challenge or hardship. Greek arete (“excellence”) tends to be comparative in nature: the best, the strongest, the fastest and so on, whereas the Roman equivalents are less inherently comparative. Virtus is not zero-sum. That doesn’t mean the Romans aren’t competitive, but it is, I think, a subtle but real difference in ethos (especially aristocratic ethos).

April 18, 2024

What to do if Romans Sack your City

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

toldinstone
Published Jan 12, 2024

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:34 Progress of a siege
1:55 Looting and violence
3:42 Recorded atrocities
4:45 Captives
5:27 BetterHelp
6:36 Surviving a Roman sack
7:13 Where to hide
8:27 What to do if you’re captured
9:20 Advice for women
10:09 The fate of captives
(more…)

March 28, 2024

The History of Fish Sauce – Garum and Beyond!

Filed under: Asia, Food, History, Italy, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Dec 26, 2023

Sweet frittata-like patina of pears with classic ancient Roman flavors and sprinkled with long pepper

City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st Century

This patina de piris is one of over a dozen recipes for similar dishes in Apicius’ De re coquinaria, a staple for ancient Roman recipes. It would have probably been part of mensa secunda, or second meal. Not a second breakfast, it was the final course in a larger meal and usually consisted of sweets, pastries, nuts, and egg dishes, kind of like a modern dessert course.

I finally made my own true ancient Roman garum in the summer of 2023, from chopped up fish pieces and salt to clear amber umami-laden liquid. There’s no fishiness in this surprisingly sweet dish, just a saltiness and savory umami notes that complements the other very ancient Roman flavors.

As with all ancient recipes, this is my interpretation and you can change things up how you like. I separated my eggs before beating them, but you could just whisk them up whole and add them like that.
(more…)

March 27, 2024

QotD: Roman imperial strategy

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

There’s a useful term in the modern study of international relations, called “escalation dominance”. What escalation dominance means is that in any sort of conflict, there’s a big game theoretic advantage to being the one who decides how nasty it’s going to be. Ancient wars usually moved slowly up a ladder of escalation, from dudes yelling insults at each other across the border, to some light raiding and looting, to serious affairs where armies made an actual effort to kill and subjugate each other or conquer land.1 Highly mobile forces tended to work best at the lower rungs of the escalation ladder, and Rome frequently allowed conflicts to stay simmering at this level. But the existence and loyalty of the legions meant that it was their choice to do so, because they could also choose to slowly and inexorably march towards your capital city killing everything in their path and doing something truly unhinged when they got there, like building multiple rings of fortifications or a giant crazy siege ramp in the desert. And, paradoxically, the fact that they could do this meant that they didn’t have to as often. Thus the threat of disproportionate escalation became the ultimate economizing measure, by preventing wars from breaking out in the first place.

If deterrence fails and you have to fight, then the next best way to economize on force is by making somebody else do the fighting for you. In the late Republic and early Empire, much of Roman territory wasn’t “officially” under Roman rule. Instead, it was the preserve of dozens of petty and not-so-petty kingdoms that, on paper at least, were fully independent and co-equal sovereign entities.2 Rome actually went to some effort to keep up the charade: the client rulers were commonly referred to as “allies” [socii], and Rome took care never to directly tax or conscript their citizens. But, to be clear, it was a charade. If any of these “allies” ever wanted to leave the alliance or conduct any sort of independent foreign policy, he would not continue to be a king for long. Oftentimes the legions wouldn’t even have to show up — the terrified citizens of the client kingdom would overthrow and execute their wayward ruler themselves, in the hopes that Rome might thereby be induced not to make an example of the citizenry.

What was the point of all of this complicated kabuki theater? Once again, it’s about economy of force, this time on both the “input” and the “output” sides of the great machine of the state. On the input side: efficient government is hard to scale. Roman provincial governors were legendarily corrupt, and could get up to all kinds of mischief out there without supervision. Having a Roman ruling a whole bunch of non-Romans was also bound to cause resentment: it could lead to rebellions, or worse, tax-evasion. All of these problems were solved by pretending to have the barbarians be ruled by one of their own, a barbarian king. He could collect the taxes, and suppress revolts, and generally keep an eye on things. Moreover, as a fellow barbarian, he would know better how to keep his subjects in line, and would be less likely to commit an awkward cultural blunder. On the output side, he could also deal with border raids and other low-intensity threats. This exponentially magnified Roman military power, because it meant that instead of being stuck on garrison duty, spread out along the frontiers, the legions could be concentrated in a strategic reserve. They could then be deployed for “high intensity” operations in some remote part of the empire without worrying that they were thereby leaving the borders unguarded: operations like conquering new lands, or persuading a rebellious client kingdom that their interests lay with Rome.

If you can’t make somebody else do the fighting, then the next, next best thing is to carefully choose the time, circumstances, and location of the fight. Ideally you would muster a heavy concentration of your own forces and confront the enemy while they’re still dispersed. Ideally the ground would be thoroughly surveyed, well understood, and perhaps even prepared with static defenses. Ideally your own forces would have ample supply and good lines of communication, and your opponent would have neither of these things. It was to all these ends that in the second of the periods Luttwak surveys, the Romans built the limes3 — a massive system of defensive emplacements. These extended for thousands of miles around almost the entire frontier of the empire, but the most famous portion was Hadrian’s Wall.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.

    1. This is actually also true of modern wars, and if you think you have an exception in mind, you may just not know the history that well. For instance, the current war in the Donbass wasn’t really a surprise invasion, but is best viewed as the latest and most violent stage of a conflict that’s been slowly ratcheting up for a decade.

    2. Were you ever confused by who exactly this King Herod guy in the Gospel stories was? Why was there a king and also a Roman governor? He was precisely one of these client rulers!

    3. Pronounced “lee-mays”, not like the fruit.

March 23, 2024

The Roman Army’s Biggest Building Projects

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published Dec 15, 2023

The greatest achievements of the Roman military engineers.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:38 Marching camps
1:36 Bridges
2:40 Siegeworks
3:26 PIA VPN
4:32 Permanent forts
5:49 Roads
6:24 Frontier defenses
7:41 Canals
8:21 Civilian projects
8:54 The aqueduct of Saldae
(more…)

March 22, 2024

Rome conquered Greece … militarily, anyway

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Gavin McCormick reviews Charles Freeman’s new book The Children of Athena: Greek writers and thinkers in the age of Rome, 150BC – 400AD:

“To a wise man,” said the first-century wonderworker Apollonius of Tyana, “everywhere is Greece.” That is to say, Greece is not a mere place, but a special state of mind. For Apollonius, on his extensive travels around the Greco-Roman world, the purported truth of this maxim is seldom open to doubt.

The author of Apollonius’s colourful biography, Philostratus, depicts his hero as not just a philosopher but also an impossibly accomplished champion of culture — a confounder of logic and expectations who could vanish in plain sight, now fascinating Roman emperors and foreign sages, now inspiring whole towns into acts of celebration and renewal. The guiding ideology that drove this hero is a heady mix of philosophy, religion, magic and political insouciance — or, to give it another name, Hellenism.

In the context of the third-century world, where Christianity was an increasingly noteworthy presence in the towns and cities of the Roman empire, pagans such as Philostratus were keen to highlight what their own tradition had to offer.

In fact, he seems almost to present his hero as a pagan rival to Jesus. And, in turn, Apollonius — in his successful renewal of the shrines and local cults of Hellas — seems to hint at what Philostratus would like to see happen in his own contemporary context.

Despite living under Rome, Apollonius (and Philostratus) wants to celebrate an emphatically Greek form of culture. The celebration of Greek culture in the Roman world was, of course, nothing new, and it was something the Romans themselves had long enjoyed.

Alongside their admiration for Greek literature, philosophy, art and architecture, there was the successful movement known as the “Second Sophistic” — whose parade of Greek-speaking intellectuals left a heavy imprint on the public life of the High Roman Empire.

But it is striking nonetheless that the virtues of Hellas — not Rome itself — were what many educated citizens of the empire turned to when they thought of cultural renewal. Indeed his was precisely the route taken later in the fourth century by the last pagan emperor of Rome, himself a champion of all things Greek, Julian the so-called Apostate.

Charles Freeman’s latest book, Children of Athena, is a highly readable tour through the lives and accomplishments of some of the great exponents of Greek culture under Rome. He introduces readers to a bracingly varied and energetic cast of characters — the geographers, doctors, polymaths, botanists, satirists, and orators are just part of the repertoire. In an early chapter, we meet the brilliant Greek historian Polybius, who wrote in the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, while training his sights on the rise of Rome in his own time.

March 10, 2024

Viking longships and textiles

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

Virginia Postrel reposts an article she originally wrote for the New York Times in 2021, discussing the importance of textiles in history:

The Sea Stallion from Glendalough is the world’s largest reconstruction of a Viking Age longship. The original ship was built at Dublin ca. 1042. It was used as a warship in Irish waters until 1060, when it ended its days as a naval barricade to protect the harbour of Roskilde, Denmark. This image shows Sea Stallion arriving in Dublin on 14 August, 2007.
Photo by William Murphy via Wikimedia Commons.

Popular feminist retellings like the History Channel’s fictional saga Vikings emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial women’s work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.

One of the central characters in Vikings is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.

In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.

Ignoring textiles writes women’s work out of history. And as the British archaeologist and historian Mary Harlow has warned, it blinds scholars to some of the most important economic, political and organizational challenges facing premodern societies. Textiles are vital to both private and public life. They’re clothes and home furnishings, tents and bandages, sacks and sails. Textiles were among the earliest goods traded over long distances. The Roman Army consumed tons of cloth. To keep their soldiers clothed, Chinese emperors required textiles as taxes.

“Building a fleet required longterm planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce,” Dr. Harlow wrote in a 2016 article. “The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.” Spinning and weaving the wool for a single toga, she calculates, would have taken a Roman matron 1,000 to 1,200 hours.

Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They don’t manufacture essential goods.

Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied. “The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.

Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the world’s poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined. But that “great enrichment” had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of women’s historic contributions to one of humanity’s most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment. “In the West,” Dr. Harlow wrote, “the production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.”

February 17, 2024

QotD: Lessons for today from the decline of the Western Roman Empire

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

What lessons can we draw from this book [The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak] for today? There are many, but I will leave you with one. Reading about the Roman client state system gave me an uncomfortably familiar feeling. Can we think of another empire that outsources governance to vestigial polities that pretend to be sovereign, and even get called “allies”, but are actually clients? An easy example is the Warsaw Pact. A more controversial one is present-day America and her dependencies. Consider Canada: a normie friend of mine once remarked that Canada pretended to be an independent country, but that if the present world were translated into a computer strategy game its territory would be shaded in the same color as America’s. Indeed, Canada’s sovereignty is exceedingly virtual — it exists only so long as it isn’t tested, just like the sovereignty of a Roman client. Canada is self-governing and self-administering, it passes its own laws and collects its own taxes. But if its foreign policy objectives ever diverged one micrometer from America’s, then Canada would cease to exist. Seriously, imagine Canada offering to host a Chinese or Russian military base and what would immediately occur. There is a real sense in which America rules the land that we know as “Canada”, but has outsourced governance to local elites in a highly federalized structure.

Luttwak has a charmingly racist bit about how some client states have the IQ and sophistication to understand the true nature of the arrangement, while others are too dumb or barbaric to remember who’s boss without having their faces regularly rubbed in it. In the Roman case, the former camp contained the various Hellenistic kingdoms in Asia Minor and the Levant, who didn’t need legionaries standing around and supervising them, because they could imagine the existence of those legionaries and what they would do to them if provoked. The latter camp included many of the Germanic tribes, who tended to forget their place if the legions weren’t garrisoned within eyeshot, and even then would rise up in fruitless rebellion every couple of generations. We can make this marginally less racist by positing something more like a spectrum of how tolerable the client arrangement was, and consequently a spectrum of how coercive it had to be. The Greeks were relatively compatible culturally with the Romans, and the warrior spirit of their ancestors had been sufficiently sanded down that they didn’t mind being told what to do. The Germans were more foreign, and also retained the barbarian’s yearning for freedom, so a careful eye had to be kept on them.

A true cynic might think that there was something similar going on with America’s imperial dependencies … sorry, with America’s “allies”. There are no American garrisons in Canada, because the Canadians are culturally-compatible, and also because they’ve been thoroughly cowed and do not dream of an independent national destiny. But look overseas, for instance at some of our Middle Eastern “allies”, and you will see a situation more analogous to the Germanic tribes. What a coincidence that these same “allies” host a much heavier American military presence! Even here, however, the situation isn’t strictly coercive, and insofar as it is, the coercion is mostly outsourced to local elites. Those elites, in turn, can mostly be handled with carrots: the imperial power subsidizes their trade and security arrangements, not to mention keeps them in charge of their respective countries! The Romans commonly rewarded loyal clients with citizenship and a cushy sinecure for a job well done. It would be rude of us to do otherwise.

Maybe this was already obvious to everyone else, but reading the “rules-based international order”1 as a concealed hegemon/client system feels a bit like having the skeleton key to understanding current events. Like why do European countries so often act in ways contrary to their own economic or geopolitical self-interest, but consonant with America’s interest? How do the political and business elites of these countries maintain such an impressive unified front in the face of popular discontent? Why do the rulers of all these very different countries have seemingly identical tastes, worldviews, and mannerisms? What is the meaning of “populism,” and why do people treat it like it’s a single, consistent thing, despite the fact that “populist” parties in different countries often seek diametrically opposite policies?

Just pretend, imagine with me, that these European “allies” are client kingdoms. They are permitted a certain amount of latitude, but when the chips are down they do not have an independent foreign policy. Their ruling classes are client rulers that administer certain territories, and there is tacit agreement with the imperial overlord on what they may and may not do. Over time, the client rulers identify less and less with their countrymen, more and more with their counterparts in other client states, and most of all with the distant metropole, whose social approval they desperately desire. The “populists” are simply the anti-imperial party, in whatever country. The thing the “populists” have in common is a desire to be free of the suffocating imperial embrace,2 but they all have a thousand different stupid ideas about what to do with that freedom. This includes the “populists” in the United States itself, by the way. The American Empire is called that because it started here, but it has long-since burst free of the host in which it incubated, and the rot of our own political institutions can be understood as our transformation into the biggest client kingdom of them all.

None of what I’ve said above is meant to be a value judgment. I think many people resist the notion that America is an empire because empires are “bad” and we’re obviously the good guys. But others, including myself not too long ago, resist it because we have an overly-simplistic notion of what an empire looks like, especially what it looks like from the inside. Empires exist on a spectrum — America’s subjects certainly have more ability to act independently than Rome’s did. But many empires also go to some lengths to conceal their true nature. Around the time of the birth of Christ, the official story in many of the lands ruled by Rome was that Rome was merely their largest trading partner and a staunch military ally. Some of them might even have believed it.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.

February 13, 2024

“I am a proud member of the Airfix generation”

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

I didn’t realize that Peter Caddick-Adams is the same age as me, but it does seem that our interests pretty much ran parallel for a while:

Re-enactors in Roman legionary gear, 19 May, 2021.
Original photo from https://pxhere.com/en/photo/883133 via Wikimedia Commons.

I am a proud member of the Airfix generation. The desire (less so the ability) to assemble and paint plastic model kits of aircraft, tanks and ships hit me squarely between the eyes on my tenth birthday in 1970. Several aunts and uncles had arrived at the same solution to bring out my inner Spitfire on the same day. Who needed the high of polystyrene cement and Humbrol enamel when you could refight D-Day across your bedroom floor with kits costing as little as 1/6d? Although Airfix was the premium producer of scale kits, other competing brands included Frog, Tamiya, Monogram, Hasegawa and Revell. I wish I knew what I did with them all, but many of the aircraft I recall casting out of upstairs windows, set on fire by match and candle. Looking back, I can see how it sewed the seeds of my becoming a professional military historian decades later. From little acorns, eh?

Two years later, I discovered I was interested in anything historical when my parents packed us into a train (great excitement in itself) for a trip to London. Although long past the days of steam, I can remember my father walking me down to thank the engine driver for getting us safely into Euston and then the true adventure began. The arrival at the British Museum to see the Tutankhamun Exhibition, which ran from March to December 1972. When it ended, besides the young Caddick-Adams, 1.6 million visitors had passed through the exhibition doors, making it the most popular attraction in the museum’s history. My favourite art class activity thereafter altered from drawing Spitfires and Messerschmitts chasing each other across every page to depicting ghostly, golden burial masks. Ever since, I have held an unbelievably soft spot for the old BM, always remembering that due to its vastness, it is best to go there to see something specific, rather than wander hither and thither, lost in its many treasures.

Then in 1977, when studying Ancient History for “A” Level, it was the turn of the Royal Academy in Piccadilly to capture my imagination with its Pompeii AD 79 exhibition. Mosaics, personal possessions, wall paintings and plaster casts of Romans and their animals caught in the moment of death as toxic gases, ashes, molten rock and pulverized pumice froze them forever, like insects in amber, likewise left a profound mark on my understanding of the bigger wheels of history.

The other day I was more than happy to be reunited with my old friend, the British Museum, this time hosting another Roman exhibition, which promises to be every bit as impactful as the Tutankhamun and Pompeii antecedents. Just unveiled, Legion: Life in the Roman Army is an inspired portrayal of an institution which numbered around 450,000 at its peak in AD 211 (33 legions and c. 400 auxiliary regiments), although numbers always fluctuated. The first amazing realisation is how little archaeological evidence remains of this vast organisation that endured for many centuries. The second is how well the scanty remnants in this exhibition have been preserved and interpreted.

Here, the British Museum has assembled the best surviving examples of arms, armour and personal possessions from collections around the world, in over 200 artefacts from 28 lenders. Though we view gleaming bronze helmets, swords long-rusted into scabbards, a pile of near-fossilised chainmail, it is incredible to think that there is only one intact example remaining of all those hundreds of thousands of rectangular and curved legionary shields (called a scutum), still bearing its decoration and crimson dye. This one comes from Syria.

There are some fine funerary carvings of Roman officers from around the empire, then we encounter some of the battlefield detritus including breastplate armour found near Kalkriese, in the Teutoburgerwald of Lower Saxony. This is where a coalition of Germanic tribes led by a rebel chieftain called Arminius ambushed 3 legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus in 9 AD. The story of discovering this battle terrain was as dramatic as the assault itself. It was the result of a meticulous British soldier who combed an area north of his base at Osnabrück with a metal detector in 1987. Major Tony Clunn recorded each discovery of Roman coins and sling shot, making it possible to reconstruct the route taken by Roman legionaries under Varus and determine where they were ambushed and massacred.

February 9, 2024

The (so-far limited) ability to read the Herculaneum Papyri may vastly increase our knowledge about the Roman world

Filed under: History, Italy, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the achievement of the three young researchers who were awarded the Vesuvius Challenge prize earlier this month, and what it might mean for classicists and other academics:

On Monday morning, Farritor and two other young Vesuvius Challenge notables, Youssef Nader and Julian Schillinger, were announced as winners of the grand prize. Nader and Schillinger had, like Farritor, already won Vesuvius Challenge prizes for smaller technical discoveries, and Nader had in fact been a mere heartbeat behind Farritor in producing the same “porphyras” from the same scan. After Farritor nabbed his US$40,000 “first letters” prize, the three decided to combine their efforts to net the big fish.

The result is a text that represents about five per cent of one of the thousands of scrolls recovered — and there may be more not yet recovered — from the Villa of the Papyri. The enormous villa was owned by an unknown Roman notable, but there are clues that one of its librarians was the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who lived from around 110 to 35 BC. Until his identity was connected with the library, Philodemus did not receive too much attention even from classicists. But the Vesuvius Challenge efforts have now yielded fragments of what has to be an Epicurean text — one which discusses the delights of music and food, and condemns an unnamed adversary, possibly a Stoic, for failing to give a philosophical account of sensual pleasure.

The recovery of dozens more of the works of Philodemus would be — one might now say “will be” — a world-changing event for the classics. We know Philodemus was close to Calpurnius Piso (101-43 BC), the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a likely owner of the doomed villa. He almost certainly had a front-row seat for the prelude to the end of the Roman Republic. We know he wrote works on religion, on natural philosophy and on history: even his thoughts on music and poetry would be of marked interest.

But nobody knows what else, what copies of older works, may be lurking in Philodemus’s library. At this moment antiquarians know the titles of dozens of lost plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; we are missing major works of Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and Eratosthenes. We know that Sulla wrote his memoirs and that Cato the Elder wrote a seven-book history of Rome. Any of these old writings, or others of equal significance, may materialize suddenly out of oblivion now, thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge. It’s an impressive triumph for the idea of prize-giving as an approach to solving scientific problems, and the news release from the challenge offers a discussion of what the funding team got right and where the project will go next.

February 5, 2024

The Vesuvius Challenge prize has been awarded!

Filed under: History, Italy, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

Scrolling through Twit-, er, I mean “X” this morning brought me this amazing piece of news for classical scholars:

We received many excellent submissions for the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize, several in the final minutes before the midnight deadline on January 1st.

We presented these submissions to the review team, and they were met with widespread amazement. We spent the month of January carefully reviewing all submissions. Our team of eminent papyrologists worked day and night to review 15 columns of text in anonymized submissions, while the technical team audited and reproduced the submitted code and methods.

There was one submission that stood out clearly from the rest. Working independently, each member of our team of papyrologists recovered more text from this submission than any other. Remarkably, the entry achieved the criteria we set when announcing the Vesuvius Challenge in March: 4 passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of characters recoverable. This was not a given: most of us on the organizing team assigned a less than 30% probability of success when we announced these criteria! And in addition, the submission includes another 11 (!) columns of text — more than 2000 characters total.

The results of this review were clear and unanimous: the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000 is awarded to a team of three for their excellent submission. Congratulations to Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger!

Much more information at the Vesuvius Challenge site.

February 3, 2024

A Day in Ancient Rome

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

toldinstone
Published Nov 10, 2023

Following Marcus Aurelius on the day of his final triumph.

Chapters:
0:00 Another day
1:05 Petitions
3:12 Breakfast
3:51 The Triumph
4:44 Romanis Magicae
5:37 Artifacts of the wars
7:09 Caesar, you are mortal
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January 29, 2024

Ancient Roman Garum Revisited

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 7, 2023
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January 17, 2024

QotD: Did Hari Seldon live in vain?

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

Both cliodynamics and psychohistory assume these differences and problems “come out in the wash” over a long enough period and a big enough sample. It doesn’t take much of a counterfactual thought experiment about how small changes by individuals could lead to enormous historical differences to see that they don’t. The defense that cliodynamics only deals in probabilities is little comfort here: in fact the apparent randomness (which one may argue is merely complexity on a scale that is beyond simulation) swallows the patterns. One could easily argue, for instance, that the extremely unlikely career of our fellow Temujin is a necessary cause (albeit merely one of many, several of which might be considered deeply improbable) for the fact that all commercial pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide have to learn a form of English (which one may well assume has its own structural knock-on effects in terms of the language used for business and from there the outsized cultural impact of English-speaking countries).1 No one in 1158 was likely to have supposed that English – a language at that time not even spoken by the English nobility (they spoke French)! – would become the first truly global lingua franca (and arguably the only one, though here caveats may overwhelm the claim) and thus the language of aviation. But that is precisely the kind of big structural change that is going to be really impactful on all sorts of other questions, like patterns of commerce, wealth, culture and influence.

Such complex causation defies general laws (even before we get into the fact that humans also observe history, which creates even more complexity) with such tremendous import from such unlikely events in an experiment which can only be run once without a control.

The other problem is evidence. Attempting to actually diagnose and model societies like this demands a lot of the data and not merely that you need a lot of it. You need consistent data which projects very far back in history which is accurate and fairly complete, so that it can be effectively compared. Trying, for instance, to compare ancient population estimates, which often have error bars of 100% or more, with modern, far more precise population estimates is bound to cause some real problems in teasing out clear correlations in data. The assumptions you make in tuning those ancient population figures can and will swallow any conclusions you might draw from the comparison with modern figures beyond the fairly obvious (there are more people now). But even the strongest administrative states now have tremendous difficulty getting good data on their own lower classes! Much of the “data” we think we have are themselves statistical estimates. The situation even in the very recent past is much worse and only degrades from there as one goes further back!

By way of example, I was stunned that Turchin figures he can identify “elite overproduction” and quantify wealth concentration into the deep past, including into the ancient world (Romans, late Bronze Age, etc). I study the Romans; their empire is only 2,000 years ago and moreover probably the single best-attested ancient society apart from perhaps Egypt or China (and even then I think Rome comes out quite solidly ahead). And even in that context, our estimates for the population of Roman Italy range from c. 5m to three to four times that much. Estimates for the size of the Roman budget under Augustus or Tiberius (again, by far the best attested period we have) range wildly (though within an order of magnitude, perhaps around 800 million sestertii). Even establishing a baseline for this society with the kind of precision that might let you measure important but modest increases in the size of the elite is functionally impossible with such limited data.

When it comes to elites, we have at best only one historical datapoint for the size of the top Roman census class (the ordo equester) and it’s in 225 BC, but as reported by Polybius in the 140s and also he may have done the math wrong and it also isn’t clear if he’s actually captured the size of the census class! We know in the imperial period what the minimum wealth requirement to be in the Senate was, but we don’t know what the average wealth of a senator was (we tend to hopefully assume that Pliny the Younger is broadly typically, but he might not have been!), nor do we know the size of the senatorial class itself (formed as a distinct class only in the empire), nor do we know how many households there were of senatorial wealth but which didn’t serve in the Senate because their members opted not to run for public office. One can, of course, make educated guesses for these things (it is often useful and important to do so), but they are estimates founded on guesses supported by suppositions; a castle of sand balanced atop other castles of sand. We can say with some confidence that the Late Roman Republic and the Early Roman Empire saw tremendous concentrations of wealth; can we quantity that with much accuracy? No, not really; we can make very rough estimates, but these are at the mercy of their simplifying assumptions.

And this is, to be clear, the very best attested ancient society and only about 2,000 years old at that. The data situation for other ancient societies can only be worse – unless, unless one begins by assuming elite overproduction is a general feature of complex, wealthy societies and then reads that conclusion backwards into what little data exists. But that isn’t historical research; it is merely elevating confirmation bias to a research methodology.

As noted, I have other nitpicks – particularly the tendency to present very old ideas as new discoveries, like secular cycles (Polybius, late 2nd century BC) or war as the foundation of complex societies (Heraclitus, d. c. 475 BC) without always seeming to appreciate just how old and how frequently recurring the idea is (such that it might, for instance, be the sort of intuitive idea many people might independently come up with, even if it was untrue or that it might be the kind of idea that historians had considered long ago and largely rejected for well established reasons) – but this will, I hope, suffice for a basic explanation of why I find the idea of this approach unsatisfying. This is, to be clear, not a rejection of the role of data or statistics in history, both of which can be tremendously important. Nor is it a rejection of the possible contributions of non-historians (who have important contributions to make), though I would ask that someone wading into the field familiarize themselves with it (perhaps by doing some traditional historical research), before declaring they had revolutionized the field. Rather it is an argument both that these things cannot replace more traditional historical methods and also that their employment, like the employment of any historical method, must come with a very strong dose of epistemic humility.

Psychohistory only works in science fiction where the author, as the god of his universe, can make it work. Today’s psychohistorians have no such power.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.

    1. For those confused by the causation, the Mongols are considered the most likely vector for the transmission of gunpowder from China, where it was invented, to Europe. Needless to say, having a single polity spanning the entire Eurasian Steppe at the precise historical moment for this to occur sure seems like a low probability event! In any event, European mastery of gunpowder led directly into European naval dominance in the world’s oceans (its impact on land warfare dominance is much more complex) which in turn led to European dominance at sea. At the same time, the English emphasis on gunnery over boarding actions early in this period (gunpowder again) provided a key advantage which contributed to subsequent British naval dominance among European powers (and also the British navy’s “cult of gunnery” in evidence to the World Wars at least), which in turn allowed for the wide diffusion of English as a business and trade language. In turn, American and British prominence in the post-WWII global order made English the natural language for NATO and thus the ICAO convention that English be used universally for all aircraft communication.

January 13, 2024

History RE-Summarized: The Byzantine Empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Sept 2023

The Byzantines (Blue’s Version) – a project that took an almost unfathomable amount of work and a catastrophic 120+ individual maps. I couldn’t be happier.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
“Byzantium” I, II, and III by John Julius Norwich, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome by Anthony Kaldellis, The Alexiad by Anna Komnene, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel, Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. I also have a degree in classical civilization.

Additionally, the most august of thanks to our the members of our discord community who kindly assisted me with so much fantastic supplemental information for the scripting and revision process: Jonny, Catia, and Chehrazad. Thank you for reading my nonsense, providing more details to add to my nonsense, and making this the best nonsense it can be.
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