New England: home of lame Civil War generals. And proud of it.

The South loves its romantic generals. As well it should. Though they fought in an evil cause, they were interesting men, and excellent fighters. Fortunately, they lost, and can be regarded almost as fictional characters.

The North won, and one of the reasons it won was that it cared less about military prowess and more about political coalition building. It's frustrating to read about Nathaniel "Commissary" Banks, for example, getting chased around the Shenandoah by the brilliant and deranged Stonewall Jackson and abandoning his stores, thus the nickname. Other campaigns, like the Red River campaign, were notorious for military ineptitude.

There is a noble statue to Banks in the town square in Waltham, where I used to work. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives, Governor of Massachusetts, and apparently much respected.

In front of the Massachusetts State House stands an equestrian statue of the unfortunate Joseph Hooker, who lost the Battle of Chancellorsville. In Providence, Rhode Island, statues of local hero Ambrose Burnside abound.

There are just ones I have noticed myself. It may seem odd, but the war was won, and everyone felt that things had worked out, so there was no need to get mad about this lost battle, or that suicidal charge. After all, war is hard, and very few can be expected to truly excel at it.

This was stimulated by yesterday's thoughts about Benjamin Butler, who, as far as I know, has no statue. But, after all, statues require physical attractiveness as well, which Ben lacked. Ambroze Burnside, everyone conceded, looked great on a horse. I'm not sure how good a horseman the lawyer from Lowell ever could have been....

In praise of Ben Butler

First, let's get the most important thing out of the way:  Benjamin Franklin Butler was short, ugly, and wall-eyed. Stephen Douglas and Alexander Stephens were short, Lincoln was ugly, and while I'm not aware of any Civil War era politicians with strabismus, there surely must have been a few.

But poor Ben had it all, and was pudgy to boot. The tall and handsome are not mocked, and so even the most foolish of them seem to have decent historical reputations. Short ugly people are screwed in that department.

Plus, Ben was not a good general. A political general, he managed logistics well enough, but feared combat, like many other generals did. He failed Grant during Grant's big push toward Richmond in the spring of 1864, but then, so did Sigel and Banks. Success is war is second only to handsomeness as a means of historical approval.

Butler was called to mind by an interesting article in last Sunday's NYT Magazine, about the first slaves to escape across the lines to Union troops early in the Civil War, and Butler's brilliant improvisation of calling them "contrabands of war", thus creating a formula that allowed for freeing escaped slaves without dealing with legal issues of property and reparation.

Ben Butler was involved in many other interesting events in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1853, just before his inauguration, Franklin Pierce witnessed the death of his 11-year-old son in a railway accident. Pierce's wife, Jane, hired Butler to defend the railroad. She regarded the accident as a judgment from God.  Note: this is largely from memory, and it's hard to find a reference to this incident online.

He then, exceeding his authority, commanded troops that held Baltimore in the early days of the war, helping keep Maryland in the Union.

After his "contraband" improvisation, he commanded the occupation of New Orleans. His actions there, ranging from bold to deliberately provocative (notably, General Order 28), led to his execration throughout the South, and is probably what most people know him for.

After the war he managed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, wrote several important Civil Rights acts, promoted payment in greenbacks, and entertained and irritated people in a number of public offices, including governor of Massachusetts. He also ran for President.

Years ago, American Heritage ran a striking photograph of a bizarre elevated railway , with Butler sitting pretty in the middle of a gaggle of local notables.  I can't find the photograph itself, but the description of it is here. That Butler is associated with an eccentric form of transportation is a sign--I had forgotten all about that picture when I started writing this post.

Here is a picture of the railway, from this obituary of the inventor.

Benjamin Butler is more interesting than most historical characters who make appearances in historical novels.  I think it's time to rehabilitate him. And give him a ride on a steam-powered monorail.

A way of understanding the Old Testament that any parent of a teenager will understand

Finally having a teenager in the house has illuminated all sorts of previously mysterious subjects for me.  I've previously mentioned how it led me to understand Evil Child narratives.

Now it has led me to a revelation about the Old Testament. I was at the wake of the parent of a friend yesterday. In talking about what she had to do, my friend mentioned how distressing she had found most of the Old Testament quotations on offer for the funeral ceremony. That God seemed permanently pissed off.

I thought about the Israelites and their relationship with their God, and realized that the entire dynamic works perfectly if you regard the Israelites as a teenager, and God as their parent.

God constantly warns the Israelites not to do certain things. Not only do they do them, but they seem to do them just to get God's goat--I mean, if God so clearly exists, why would you go through all that effort to create a Golden Calf, which is just a statue?

But it sure did piss God off.

The Israelites have short attentions spans, never take care of things when they should, are constantly enraged, sulky, or depressed--and then complain when they are not taken care of. They lie, they hide things, but hate being regarded as anything less than honorable. They hang out with bad companions and bring back terrible habits ("I mean, I'm the only people not allowed to worship idols!  Do you have any idea of how much everyone makes fun of me?")

God is short-tempered, saves them from the consequences of their actions, and feeds them. Sometimes He doesn't feel like explaining every detail of His plans, and just wants them to do what they're supposed to do, and then has to deal with a lot of complaints.

Sometimes He loses His temper and slays thousands of them.

They make up afterward, but are never quite comfortable with each other. There is no other option, however:  He is their God, and they are His people. So if the trip across the Sinai seems like the worst family vacation you've ever been on ("Are we there yet?"), it makes perfect sense.

The New Testament is something else. Maybe I'll understand it when my kids get older....

Stalin vs. Trotsky (or Bukharin): how high the body pile?

I've recently listened to two interesting Econtalk podcasts, one with Paul Gregory about Nikolai Bukharin, and another with Robert Service about Trotsky. Both were Bolshevik leaders who were outmaneuvered and finally killed by Stalin.

Since Stalin killed millions of people in a continent-wide bloodbath, it has long been a matter of speculation as to whether leadership by either Trotsky or Bukharin would have changed things for the better. Sympathisers with communist ideals say things would have been way better with either of the other two, since Stalin perverted revolutionary ideals, while anti-communists say the entire system was brutal from its beginning and that violent mass terror was inevitable.

I think both are correct.  Aside from the fact that Stalin's dominance was not some kind of chance (he was brilliant, hard-working, and twisted, a patient and implacable force like Nemesis made flesh), I think that personalities and individual decisions did play a role. Violence was inevitable, but how much violence could vary widely.  The conjunction of personality and historic situation was stated most cogently by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon.  Rubashov (a character based, in part, on Bukharin), in prison, is thinking about the man who put him there:

What went on in No. 1's brain? He pictured to himself a cross-section through that brain, painted neatly with gray water-colour on a sheet of paper stretched on a drawing-board with drawing-pins. The whorls of grey matter swelled to entrails, they curled round one another like muscular snakes, became vague and misty like the spiral nebulae on astronomical charts.... What went on in the inflated grey whorls? One knew everything about the far-away nebulae, but nothing about the whorls. That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: "Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process." And, pointing with his ruler to a grey foggy landscape between the second and third lobe of No. 1's brain: "Now here you see the subjective reflection of these factors. It was this which in the second quarter of the twentieth century lead to the triumph of the totalitarian principle in the East of Europe." Until this state was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, mere superstition and black magic....

I'd say that there are two points at which personality played a crucial role: 1936 and 1941.  In 1936, at Stalin's direct order, political violence went from endemic to universal, and the political system from oppressive to psychotic.  It was a surreal spasm, like watching someone stab himself repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Huge swathes of the population were executed or sent to die in labor camps. After 1938 the level went down again, but never back to the earlier merely brutal level until Stalin's death.  After that, it dropped quickly, past brutal to just oppressive.

The second was Stalin's miscalculations that led to the German invasion of 1941.  Sure, Stalin kept things together after that and achieved final victory, but that was partly because he had killed any reasonable alternative to himself.  A leader not blinded by his own megalomania might have seen the warning signs and fought a war that was only destructive rather than devastating.

So, I don't see that Trotsky, Bukharin, or any other Bolshevik would have presided over some kind of liberal regime.  Still, absent Stalin, millions of people might have lived out their full lives, albeit under oppressive circumstances. Even in an awful situation there are many levels of awfulness, and it is worth distinguishing between them.

What killed Tycho Brahe?

The History Blog notes that Tycho Brahe's remains have been exhumed in Prague (and will be reburied on November 19, 2010). They want to investigate whether Tycho got either chronic mercury poisoning (through medication or his experiments) or acute mercury poisoning (i.e., was murdered).

The story on Tycho's death always was that he held his pee too long at a reception for Rudolf II, which sounds like a story a third grader would make up.

The researchers also hope to see if they can find traces of his famous fake nose, to see if they can establish what it was made out of.

None of the results will be particularly earth-shattering, I suppose. Still, minor mysteries like this have an odd fascination.

On my childhood visits to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, I found myself interested in some old wooden models of of his observatories Uraniborg and Stjerneborg (Maybe Stjernborg), which he had built on his island of Ven. I remember them being startlingly detailed. This didn't teach me a thing about astronomy, or even about the state of observational astronomy c. 1600, but they had a magical feel to them, of a kind of dark mystery--particularly Stjerneborg, which was mostly underground. Even the room they were kept in was dark.

I haven't been back to the Adler in years.  I wonder if they are still there?

Winner party trick: Napoleon's death mask

As background research to a possible novel (19th century mystery involving a sculptor, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Catholicism, and homoeroticism: stay tuned), I recently read Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire, which purports to be about Stanford White, her paternal great grandfather, and his influence on her family, but is, as usual with such memoirs, mostly about Suzannah Lessard. It's pretty entertaining, actually.

The most interesting ancestor in the book did not turn out to be Stanford White, brilliant architect with a disordered private life ending in murder, but her maternal great grandfather's brother, Archie Chanler.  Both Archie and maternal great grandfather were famous as members of the "Astor Orphans", a group of children raised in a big Hudson mansion named Rokeby, all intelligent, all eccentric, perfect for stories. He married romantic and beautiful Southern belle Amelie Rives, who later became a bestselling author and then ran off with a Russian prince:

 

Archie believed that

...he could change the color of his eyes if he stood looking west out a window at a specified time, holding a pearl stickpin in one hand and looking deeply into a mirror he held in the other.

Nice choice of trick, actually, since almost no one can remember the color of someone else's eyes.

Then he went farther, and became convinced that he could go into a trance and take on the appearance of Napoleon's death mask.  Note, he didn't claim to be Napoleon, just that he could look like Napoleon. And not a living Napoleon.  Dead Napoleon.  Here he is doing the face:

 Looks just like the dear old Emperor, doesn't he? We all have our quirks....

Archie was later institutionalized in New York, escaped, and got declared sane in Virginia, his ex-wife's home state (and thus became famous as the man who was insane in New York, and sane in Virginia), and spent the rest of his life fighting his other siblings over the family money. When one of his brothers married an opera singer, Archie cabled him, "Who's loony now?" which became a universal catchphrase for quite a long while, even serving as the title of a comic strip.

Stanford White was interesting (and a brilliant architect), but my money is on Archie as a novelistic character.  Stay tuned.

Spanking Woodrow Wilson

Pure linkbait, that title. I mean, the guy is so hot right now, his name guarantees an avalanche of visitors.

But what do I say when they get here? That I don't get what's up with Woodrow Wilson? I think liberals try to defend him because he was...well, an intellectual, an Ivy Leaguer with big schemes and an unexpected skill for political infighting.  But his schemes were crazy, he resegregated Federal employment, and he dragged us into a war that there were good reasons for avoiding. Leftists have no reason to love him.

On the other hand, he's not responsible for creating the national state we now have. That was a cooperative effort of many people, on both the right and the left. Rightists just hate his annoying teacher's pet personality.

There's an interesting twist near the end of Robert Heinlein's novel Time Enough For Love, where the hero, Lazarus Long, who has traveled back to the early Twentieth Century to have sex with his mother (it's from that period of Heinlein's writing, so be warned), gets caught by America's entry into WWI because he's not really paying attention. He has every reason to keep out of it, knowing it's going to be a big mistake for everyone, but the women in his life want him to go, so he does.  This is portrayed as somehow heroic, rather than cowardly, at least as I remember it. It certainly isn't one of those books I insisted on keeping in my library for years, so regard this reference as less than dependable. But how can you condemn Wilson's overambitious internationalism without also condemning military interventions in pursuit of national power? (Addendum:  as I should have mentioned, "Lazarus Long" is a nom de methuselah: his birth name was...Woodrow Wilson Smith! Wouldn't a revelation of Heinlein's secret devotion to Woodrow Wilson really cause some trouble?)

Even Gore Vidal, who really should know better, offers a charming portrayal of Wilson in his Hollywood. Given Vidal's political position, Wilson's manipulations and gigantic schemes for reformulating the world should have appalled and disgusted him, but the fact that conservatives have been bashing Wilson since the time of their beloved Teddy Roosevelt (another overweening statist, as it happens) tempted Vidal into defending him--or at least his personal character.

The wise thing is to prefer Presidents who are pragmatists with clear and limited goals to those who are extravant theorists, no matter what their political coloration. To oversimplify, Wilson called Eugene V. Debs a traitor for his words and threw him in jail. Warren G. Harding let him out. Who looks more respectable? And what should that say about their postumous reputations?

Foundational military read: "How the North Won", Hattaway and Jones

Sometimes I read military history books for the story (and the interesting odd facts).  Sometimes, though, I find one that examines and clarifies the underlying motivations and causes for the surface events that I find so engaging.

How the North Won, by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, is the book for someone of non-military background who is interested in the Civil War, but is not a buff.  Buffs read (and own) books about specific units, can talk calibers and muzzle velocities, and can tell instantly that the illustration of the private in the Clinch Rifles is wearing a piece of trim issued only the following year.  People interested in history, but not the Civil War in particular, know the high points, but don't care about the details of military strategy.

I'm in the middle (as I am in many things). The first thing about the Civil War is that it was a war, a bloody one between two determined opponents. How did they fight it? What problems did they face?

While the North had the resources, it had by far the tougher job:  conquering and subduing the hostile and violently resisting South. It proved impossible to conquer and hold territory--that took more troops than the North could possibly raise (even after it finally instituted a draft, and thus faced violent resistance from urban mobs). Hattaway and Jones are extremely clear on the war in the West. As long as they could move along the rivers, they could penetrate South.  When the rivers turned the wrong way, they had to move by land.  Their supply lines were constantly harassed and raided.

And armies need to be supplied. These are tens of thousands of active men. Think about this: when McClellan's 1862 Army of the Potomac was standing still, it was the second-largest city in the South, after New Orleans. An army in one place for a few days devoured the countryside around it. When it moved, it pulled supply lines after it.

Without access to the rivers, it was impossible to progress.  A raid at Grant's supply base at Holly Springs delayed his attack on Vicksburg by months. Grant only took Vicksburg by cutting himself loose from his supply lines and moving across a springtime forage-covered countryside that had not had to support an army.

Incidentally, this need for springtime forage accounts for the seemingly late timing of both Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia (the 1941 Wermacht was still largely a horse-drawn force, with mechanized forces used only over short distances): they needed to feed their horses, or be stranded.

And Civil War armies, armed with accurate long-range rifles, were like porcupines, almost impossible to get at and kill.  They could be defeated, but then would retreat, falling back on their own supply lines and leaving a devastated country for the pursuing army to pass through.  Even Lee after Fredericksburg did not pursue the savagely defeated Burnside. Decisive battle proved impossible, though it was constantly demanded by the childish and pathetically self-deluded populations of the respective regions.

Grant took what he had learned in the West and applied it when he came East: his war was a series of raids, not invasions. Even the bloody Overland Campaign was supposed to hold Lee's forces in place while raids did their work elsewhere. Sherman's raid on Atlanta, and then to the sea and up into South Carolina, succeeded, while the others (Butler, Sigel, Banks) all failed. And Grant was only fighting Lee in northern Virginia because it was politically impossible not to--he would much have preferred fighting almost anywhere else.

How the North Won also has sharp schematic maps with just enough detail to show interior lines and turning movements, with good explanations for the non-buff of how all that worked.

If you are interested in the military side of the Civil War, and already have a good sense of the sequence of events, you will find enlightenment in this book.  You'll understand why things that seem like they should have been easy, weren't. You'll gain an appreciation for mud. You'll even have some sympathy for McClellan and Halleck, two men who usually get little of it. Solutions are only obvious afterward, and the price Grant paid for his was strikingly high.

How the North Won
Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones

Good military history read: How Far from Austerlitz?

Late in the summer of 1805, the Army of England, which Napoleon hoped to put across the English Channel to invade England, stood at readiness at the Channel ports, as it had the previous year. A coalition of Austria, Russia, and some of the German states, bankrolled by England, gathered to make a thrust at Strasbourg.

Napoleon liked a gamble, but even he was probably uncomfortable with spinning the roulette wheel and putting all his chips on the double zero of a cross-Channel invasion. So having some slow-moving enemy armies on the other side of Europe must have been a relief. He turned the Army of England around and sent 200,000 men east.

They moved with incredible speed, and were masked by a splendid deception operation, and in 20 days they were crossing the Rhine. In early October they were at the Danube, to the confusion and shock of the Austrian army.

Napoleon had accurately predicted where the Austrians would station themselves, and what route the lumbering Russian army under Kutuzov (ten days late because of a confusion between the Gregorian calendar, used in the West, and the Julian calendar used by the Orthodox Russians) would take in joining them.

He defeated the Austrians under Mack at Ulm (readers of War and Peace might remember the shabby figure saying: "You see before you the unfortunate General Mack!", though he actually said this to Napoleon), and then the Coalition army at Austerlitz, probably his greatest tactical victory.

The story is excitingly told by Alistair Horne in How Far from Austerlitz, Napoleon 1805-1815, and if you want to get up to speed on Napoleon's military career in an entertaining way, there are few better. Horne has written a number of pleasing military histories, mostly dealing with the encounters between France and Germany in their three wars--Austerlitz then forms the first of these, for it is during this period that Germany really starts to get it together as a military power.

Aside from clearly delineating the strategy and operations of the wars, Horne gives us the required illuminating anecdotes.  Napoleon was

an indifferent horseman (Odeblen says scathingly, 'Napoleon rode like a butcher.... Whilst galloping, his body rolled backwards and forwards and sideways') and was thrown more than once

not too surprising for a former artilleryman. Horne details the detail Napoleon went into to make his dispositions:

As soon as the site for Imperial Headquarters in the field had been decided, d'Albe would set up Napoleon's 'operations room', the centre-piece of which would be a vast map table of the theatre of war, so large that the Emperor and his topographer would often be forced to lie on it full length together. 'I have seen them more than once,' wrote Baron de Fain, the Cabinet archivist, '...interrupting each other by a sudden exclamation, right in the midst of their work, when their heads had come into collision.'

Though it covers the period 1805-1815, Horne sketches in Napoleon's early career, including Italy and Egypt, as well as Napoleon's fate after defeat.  Highly recommended.

Alistair Horne
How Far from Austerlitz, Napoleon 1805-1815

Are we ancient or medieval?

A while ago, I wrote about the Persian Wars, where Greece kept itself independent of Persia.  We tend to look back to the democratic Athenian state of roughly 500-400 BCE, which owned its survival to those successful wars, as the source of our own democracy.  But how true is that?  Almost no Athenian political practice, from 500-person juries to election by lot, from one-year terms of office to ostracism, makes it into our own system.  It all vanished under Macedonian domination after 330 BCE or so.  Macedonian domination was replaced by Roman domination, and then the Eastern Roman Empire.  Does anyone see any trace of Athenian democracy in Byzantium? I sure don't.

Most of what we recognize as our democratic institutions are really graftings of revived Roman Republican rhetoric onto political practices with medieval origins, like 12-person juries and Parliament.  I don't particularly care for the Middle Ages, but realize that much more of my civilization grows out of that Christian, multifocal, continental civilization than from Rome, much less Greece.

Some of the Greek emphasis comes out of philhellenic propaganda from the wars of Greek Independence, in the early 19th century.  Greece had been ruled by Moslem Turks since the fall of Byzantium.  A nationalist independence movement had to hearken back to some unifying idea.  Now, it's not as if Greece had been of no interest to scholars--opera itself, a mainstay of European culture for centuries, was invented in imitation of what Renaissance revivalists supposed Greek choral odes had been.  Greek thought was everywhere.  But as a popular touchstone for your political system?  Not so much.

That war of Greek independence, the one in which Byron romantically died, led to western Europeans identifying their own culture with that of Greece, and their opponents the Turks with the ancient Persians.  History is never just "what happened", but how what happened speaks to who we think we are.  When we see the Persian Wars now, it has some of that conflict annealed invisibly onto it.  And that conflict itself was never as straighforward as European propagandists, anxious to pick up pieces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, would have had it.

This does have an influence over what we think is "interesting" history to read about, and what we don't.  It's inevitable.  We just need to be aware of it.

Buying virtue with technology

We don't own slaves, and none of us are slaves. This is an unambiguous good.

But when you look back at history, slavery was pretty much universal. Sometimes subsets of slaves became incredibly weird and powerful, like Janissaries and Mamelukes, but some institution of bound labor was something everyone had as part of their cultural toolkit. Many variations existed, from house slaves that were able to behave more like servants, to field slaves that might work side by side with a small farmer--even Ulysses S. Grant did this, in his farming days.

And brutal large enterprises, like the latifundia of late Republican Rome that Tiberius Gracchus used as justification for his reforms or Athenian silver mines, used slaves up without mercy.

Anything that benefits us can be found to have a moral justification. If we don't have property we define property as theft. Once we have property to defend, our attitudes mysteriously change. Most of us like comfort, security, and pleasure, and become enormously resentful if some change threatens this arrangement. And in history, comfort, security, and pleasure were rare enough to be worth fighting for savagely, and accepting the enslavement of others to achieve.

And now? Who needs hewers of wood and drawers of water to be comfortable? Our thermostat turns on the furnace, and water comes right out the tap at the right temperature. Vacuum cleaners clean better than a brigade of maids with feather dusters and brooms, cars take us places faster and more comfortably than a sedan chair or coach, washing machines keep our cotton and synthetic clothes cleaner and more comfortable to wear than any handwashing of linen and wool.

And owned human beings require food, lodging, and care. They get sick, they get old, they get violent, they try to run away. They're high maintenance. Russian nobles often had serf orchestras. Much cheaper to buy some speakers and download some mp3s.

SF novels where slavery returns in some form seem to think that oppression is the point. They contend that people own slaves to express their power. Pushing other people around can be fun and emotionally satisfying for a certain type of individual, but this is quite secondary to the comfort and service they provide. Slaves that can't make your life physically more comfortable are a too-expensive luxury.

So if we look back at history and congratulate ourselves for our relative virtue, we haven't really earned it.  Really, to consider ourselves virtuous, we should all be saints compared to people from past centuries. But I doubt that ethics classes indicate that the most powerful force for good behavior toward others is the one that brings us microwave popcorn and HD TVs.

The spotlight of history

Regular readers know that I read a lot of history. I like to think it helps my fiction, but it's always been a favorite form of reading for me.

I've recommended some fun reads in past months, and readers have appreciated those recommendations.  But not all periods of history, not even all significant periods, with big events and big effects, are popular as topics for books.  In Greek history, for example, you've got the Persian invasion, the Peloponnesian War, and the artistic production of the fifty years in Athens that lie in between those two periods.

I recently decided to learn Greek history more broadly, and picked up The Ancient Greeks, a critical history, by John V. A. Fine.  It is specifically a history of politics and events--he explicitly says he's not the one to go to for art, literation, philosophy, etc.  So that's a distinct lack. But if you want to get the entire picture--or as much of it as we have, this is a good way to get it. Just don't expect a quick, entertaining read.

And that "as much of it as we have" is key to Fine's method, as he tells the reader in the preface:

My aim has been not to produce a smoothly flowing narrative which can lull a reader into unthinking acceptance of the views presented, but to try to make him think. One should never forget that we, as our predecessors were, are constantly being misled because we accept too readily the views that have become sacrosanct through tradition. A history which does not constantly cause one to reflect on what he is reading and to be cognizant of the nature and ambiguities of the evidence is hardly performing the function that a historical work should

The book covers from the earliest days until the Macedonian conquest of the peninsula. You can see the Peloponnesian War as just one large event in a series of miserably endless wars that never resolved anything.

If you want to work on the foundations of you knowledge of the classical world, this is an excellent way to do it. If you want to kick back with some entertaining reading, not so much.

Read the histories

One annoying piece of advice from a know-it-all fictional character immediately after stating some dubious political opinion such as "whenever people turn to entertainment rather than to duty, the system collapses within a decade", or "democracies only last fifty years" is: "read the histories!" This is supposed to demonstrate the truth of the assertion.

Robert Heinlein, for example, liked to do this, and I think he got it from GB Shaw.  They never say which histories, exactly, though I suspect they mostly mean works by Thucydides, Tacitus, and Plutarch. A Classical historian writing about Classical events with a moralizing atttude always gives the most status to your pronouncements.

I read the histories. The more I read, the less sure I am that they really tell us anything particularly clear about what moral virtues we should possess to successfully run a civilization, or a life. The Romans were corrupt, depraved, and totally self-interested while they were on their way up, while they ruled a vast empire, and while they were on their way down. Trying to find some kind of overall civic virtue among the squabbling generalissimos of the Later Republic is a futile endeavor.  Republican government was then submerged in the rule of the Emperor--and the system went on from triumph to triumph for another two and a half centuries, and remained incredibly powerful for two centuries beyond that.  What does that tell us about republican virtue?

And then there are the events, and the interpretation of them. To have to clearly distinguish between what is known to have happened, and what people of said about them: "This is reminiscent of the way William III had to let James escape to the Continent so he wouldn't have to try him: Macauley's account is not without interest here...." or "You cite Justinian's reconquest of the West as an example of imperial overstretch, but there is reason to believe that without the plague, he might well have succeeded in reincorporating at least North Africa and Italy for the long term...and don't pay too much attention to Procopius, that Sixth Century Kitty Kelley."

Of course, once you get specific, you've given your opponent (or person you're trying earnestly to instruct) something to argue with: "Just think of how much better atheists would have handled both those situations!" Better to stick with "read the histories".

On reading history

It's clear that not all history is equally interesting, or equally popular.  Sometimes it seems that at least three quarters of all history books are about either the American Civil War or World War II, with most of the remainder devoted to the Founding Fathers,  the British Empire, and maybe a bit about the Winning of the West. In this case, English-speaking people triumphing over other races and nationalities (sometimes nobly over each other) is what makes it "interesting".

So, when history buffs get exasperated because students, particularly those of other ethnic backgrounds, ask how any of this is relevant, they should think twice.  Reading about young men on battlefields or middle-aged men in council chambers is a more specialized taste than it might first appear.  And believe me, I fit right into the demographic.

But despite the wails I used to read about overly technical monographs by professional historians and the death of narrative history, I think we are living through a kind of golden age of pop historical writing--as we are of pop science writing.  As a result, I can read three excellent books on the fall of the Roman Empire in close succession, and then start a fourth, Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, to find out what happened after it.

I know, I know:  Romans didn't speak English, but movies make it seem like they did, and so this hasn't moved that far from the Anglotriumphalism of mainstream history reading. At least it's about a defeat. That should count for something.

Next time: periods of history with narrative, periods without. Is the difference real, or just a matter of whether a great historian was around?

The Fall of Which Rome?

When people talk about the Fall of the American Empire, they are usually analogizing the state of American now (we've been doing this from about 1950) to the state of the Roman Empire at some point in the 400s. In fact, most people's knowledge of that period tends to be murky at best, but what they mean is the end of a powerful and dominant empire, and its replacement by something else.  This will happen to us in the near future, they say...ignoring how long it actually took the western Empire to collapse, and the Eastern Empire to retrench and restructure.

But I don't see a collapse of that sort as a near-term possibility. The Rome I fear we are actually like is that of the 1st century BCE: the late Republic.  That Rome remained strong on the periphery, and collapsed in the center through vicious infighting through what was once called the Roman Revolution.  The old ramshackle republican system was replaced by a military dictatorship where "the image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence". That collapse doesn't have the clean (if misleading) visuals of barbarians streaming through the gates, and so doesn't get used as journalistic shorthand for what we face.

Interestingly, our fiction is more cognizant of the resemblance than our journalism.  Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, Robert Harris's Cicero novels, Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mysteries, and the TV series Rome have all been popular, and speak of the corruption and downfall that characterized the period.

Was the Roman Revolution inevitable?  Did the Republic have to end?  Was the price paid for the Republic's dissolution a good one?  Many citizens, cut off from public participation in any event, certainly must have thought the price was more than fair, giving them prosperity and personal security.

The growing deadlock of our own representative republic, with its gargantuan yet petty squabbles over self-inflicted wounds like absurd healthcare financing structures, unsustainable entitlement programs, and increasingly untouchable public sector employees, certainly seems bound for some tour de force "solution" that will lead to a state none of us expect, or want.

Reading about the pompous Marius, the sinister Sulla, the smart-then-surprisingly-dumb Pompey won't provide any kind of specific guide to our era, though it's fascinating. But it's important to see how choices can get made by default, how people can put exaggerated faith in institutions that don't maintain themselves without work, and how a loss of freedom can be greeted with relief by a people who don't see themselves as giving anything important up.

The real gladiators

Whenever someone refers to football players, or extreme fighters, or NASCAR driver as "gladiators", you can show them this, from Mind Hacks (I don't have access to PubMed and so can't excerpt the original article).  It's an examination of skulls from a gladiator cemetery in Turkey, matching fractures with known gladiator weapons.

Gladiatorial combat was highly structured, with elaborate rules, not just a free for all.  But it had, as its common end, the death of a combatant.  If the body was still twitching, it was dispatched by a hammer blow by an arena employee dressed as an Etruscan god.

There is no comparison between gladiatorial combat and even the most violent sport of modern times, or jousting for that matter.  Take a look at the skull with the trident holes in it and imaging going to see that as standard entertainment. Roman civilization looks superficially like ours, but was deeply different.

If Romans had had realistic simulations of violent death, as we do, would they have needed gladiatorial combats?  Why did they "need" them in the first place?  Other cultures at the time, while having public executions of criminals, mass slaughters of fallen cities, etc., did not have such an elaborate practice of violent death.

I once wrote a story about a couple of animal trainers (violent, bizarre, and even sexual animal encounters were another big part of the show) who go off in search of a rumored hippogriff to kill in a show but instead find...well, now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps I should pull it out again.

Persian Fire, and our own

I enjoyed Tom Holland's Rubicon (about the fall of the Roman Republic) a few years ago, and I just enjoyed his Persian Fire (about the Greco-Persian Wars) even more.  Holland starts out with a deep exploration of the backgrounds of the various combatants (Persia, the Babylon Persia incorporated into its empire, Athens, and Sparta), pointing up the idiosyncrasies of each society.  Then he shows how they moved into conflict.

Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus and a Persian dependent, launched a Persian-supported invasion of the Greek island of Naxos to bolster his own position: Miletus was on the verge of civil war between democratic forces and aristocrats.  The invasion failed, and, to avoid being deposed, he incited the Ionian Greek cities of Asia Minor to revolt against Persia--"Wag The Dog"-like invasions of other parties to distract from domestic problems have a long history.  Athens joined the Ionians in burning the imperial city of Sardis, an unmotivated act of terrorism from the Persian perspective.  What had they ever done to Athens, after all? The ill-organized Ionians were quickly defeated, and Darius of Persia turned his attention to the trouble-fomenting Greeks of the mainland.  A small invasion of 490 BCE (which would have been substantially larger if it hadn't been for a storm that sank much of the fleet) ended at Marathon, and was followed by the big one of 480 BCE, under his son Xerxes.

No matter how often you read it, it's a stirring story.  Holland is particularly good on the sense of encroaching doom as the Persians approach on the great invasion of 480.  Getting this huge army across the Hellespont was an incredible act of engineering.  The Greek states were divided, both between themselves, and internally, between various aristocrats and popular forces, just as the Ionian cities had been.  Many made accommodations with the Persians.  Even the force of Spartans, Athenians, and other allies was constantly riven by dissension, mistrust, and arguments about proper strategy.  One failure could doom Greece, and leave it as just another Persian satrapy.  Terror was everywhere.

What should have been a long action in the narrow passage of Thermopylae, forcing the Great King's huge army to winter in Thessaly, was instead quickly crushed.  Athens was torched.  Xerxes could have moved on to landings in the Peloponnese and the encouragement of anti-Spartan states to revolt.  Instead, he went for a high-stakes naval battle at Salamis, and lost.  His general, Mardonius, lost the battle of Plataea the next year, and the Persians never returned to Greece.

Afterward, the Greeks characterized the Persians as effeminate and luxury-loving (a characterization that persists, showing up in movies like 300).  Xerxes committed hubris, they said, by symbolically lashing and then binding the waters of the Hellespont after a storm sank an early model of the huge bridge that brought his army across (I suspect this was a regular magical practice, only remarked on if you lose your army afterward).  It was natural that manly Greeks would triumph.  A lot of that swaggering had to come from the terror they were trying to forget.

Great empires inevitably suffer from overstretch, and can be defeated, sometimes dramatically, despite their great power.  A few generations later, Athens followed Xerxes's example in the Sicilian Expedition, helping to end its own empire.  History offers lessons, certainly, but unfortunately there are so many contradictory ones that you don't know which one you should learn from until it's too late.

Holland does not push any comparisons with our own dominant nation, but they certainly come to mind, particularly when you reflect that Athenian forces helping burn Sardis in an act of terrorism was what set Darius and Xerxes off on their mission of preemptive state building.  What stories will Afghani or Iraqi historians of the far future tell of the great empire that blundered around their landscape for those few years in the early 21st century?

I was riveted by the story, even though I knew how it came out.  Great job from Holland.

The image of the Sack of Rome

The sacks of ancient cities were brutal events.  They usually followed an extensive siege, sometimes lasting years, so the population was already starving.  Then the besiegers, in miserable shape themselves, finally burst in and took their revenge.

They also took everything that could be moved, killed most of the population, and enslaved the rest.  This was as true at Troy as it was at every subsequent event.  In 146 BCE, for example, the Romans totally destroyed both Carthage and Corinth, two great cities of the ancient world.  Both were eventually refounded as Roman colonies, and those are the ruins we now see.  Lucius Mummius, destroyer of Corinth, was mocked by sophisticates because he didn't seem to understand the artistic value of all the statues and other works he looted.

But what was the Sack of Rome?  If you think about it, you may have a hazy image of Classical temples looming against a smoky sky as the city burns, and hairy barbarians from up north rampaging among the fat, decadent Romans.  Maybe an image like this:

Alaric and his Visigoths, 410.  These guys had been besieging the place for quite some time, but it was part of a longer struggle between the Goths and the Emperor Honorius.  It took three days, and was pretty much just an organized looting, after which they left.  Note that by this point, Rome hadn't been the functional capital for quite some time.  The East was ruled from Constantinople, the West from various places--at this point, Ravenna.  I remember this picture from National Geographic, particularly the half-naked adolescents being offered up to the Visigoths by their mothers, though their gestures are intended to look protective.

Then came this one

Geiseric and his Vandals, 455.  Geisiric ruled North Africa, and launched a major expedition from Carthage (almost exactly 600 years after that city's destruction by Rome) to spend a good two weeks in a systematic looting of the city.  No battle, no siege, though there was no doubt violence.  The forces were from North Africa, but Vandals were from eastern Germany, and their population mostly descendants of Phoenicians and Italians, plus desert tribes, so I'm not sure about the ethnic composition here.  And they came by ship, so I'm not sure about the horse either.  The menora was itself presumably looted from Jerusalem by Titus over 300 years earlier.  And, given how much there is to steal, I don't know why those two in the background are struggling up the victory arch: to pry out the bronze lettering?  Knock a few heads out of the relief?

Rome was already rapidly losing population because the Vandals, by capturing North Africa a couple of decades earlier, had cut off the source of its dole grain, and this comprehensive looting must have accelerated the decline.  It was pretty spectacularly depopulated from now until the later Middle Ages.

There were some later events during Justinian's unfortunately successful attempt to reconquer Italy, and the subsequent wars with the invading Lombards, but by that point there was not a lot of movable stuff left. There really is no one Sack marking the end of Roman power, and certainly nothing like that suffered by Carthage and many other victims of Roman expansion.

I think the modern vision of what happened to the Eternal City at the end of Antiquity is actually influenced by a much later Sack of Rome:  that of 1527.  Charles V's (largely German) troops looted, tortured, raped, and burned the city for months, bringing an end to its Renaissance golden age.  It was horrific, and must have seared itself into the imaginations of Europeans.  When they thought of sacks of the city by Germanic barbarian tribes, they projected the events of the dramatic recent one back, though in reality, those had been relatively orderly procedures by comparison.  Recent history influences our perception of deeper history much more than we usually realize.

Using the Peloponnesian War

It was a nasty little regional war, with combat from Sicily to the Hellespont, lasting (with poorly adhered-to truces) for 27 years, involving all the great Greek states (wealthy farming Thebes and oligarchic commercial Corinth as well as the better-known war-geek Sparta and art-for-our-sake imperial/democratic Athens), and many smaller ones, often involuntarily, with brutal massacres, sieges, ethnic cleansings, dramatic turnarounds, and plagues. Being written about by Thucydides sealed its interest for well over two thousand years.

The Peloponnesian War was popular during the Cold War, since it asked various questions of interest, like:

• Can a democracy successfully fight a long war that requires a lot of sacrifice from its population? (Answer: yes, extremely well, but you don't want to be a general in its army or navy. If you fail they execute or exile you, and if you succeed they fete you, then become suspicious of you and execute or exile you)
• If the main path to victory is blocked by a determined opponent, should you try striking in an unexpected place? (Answer: often it's unexpected because it's dumb. Try to avoid high-risk enterprises that, even if successful, have minimal payoffs.  We should all fear a Syracusan Expedition, but instead find the concept of a surprise end-run around a stalemate irresistable.)
• Can terrorizing civilian populations and destroying resources win a war without crushing the opponent's main force? (Answer: no, but it has a weird sort of satisfaction that can become dangerously addictive.)
• Who is more effective at war, determined tyrannies or fractious democracies? (Answer: the judgments of battlefields can be fickle, and chance can play a large role. But no matter who wins, democracies have staying power:  Athens lost, and then regained its prosperity and dominance--before losing all to Philip of Macedon and his nasty little boy, Alexander, in the next century.)

Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other taught me a lot about the ground level truth of that war. Highly recommended to anyone trying to depict realistic state-level combat with Classical-era edged weapons. It's a painful, bloody grind. You have to watch your back as well as your front, and you may do everything right and still die of plague.