Defiling Gore About the Altars

On the other hand, Prof. MacMullen points out that visitors to temple precincts in the Roman empire were apt to encounter less pleasing sights and smells:

[Christians] pointed with elaborate repugnance to "the pollution around the idols, the disgusting smell and smoke of sacrifices, the defiling gore about the altars and the taint of blood from the offerings.  Did they overstate the case?  It was a pagan who described "the priest himself [who] stands there all bloody and like an ogre carves and pulls out entrails and extracts the heart and pours the blood about the altar."  It is clear that the great bulk of meat . . . eaten in the ancient world had been butchered in temple precincts, most of which, ill-supplied with water, could not be swashed down easily, accumulated ugly piles of offal in corners, and supported not only flies but stray mongrels as well.

The Christian criticism quoted by Prof. MacMullen is from the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgos (the Wonderworker) by Gregory of Nyssa.  The "pagan" quoted is the satirist Lucian's De sacrificiis.

The Storm of War

I have read a number of one-volume histories of World War II, and I had sworn them off, but this video interview of the author sorely tempts me to add Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War to the list.  Thirty-eight minutes, but well worth your time.

Published!

Last May I ventured down to Longview, Texas for a wedding.  After some excellent barbecue at Carter's Bar-B-Que, I drove over to the Gregg County Courthouse and took some photos of the monument to the Confederate soldier standing on the front lawn.

Flash forward to later last year, when I received an email requesting permission to use one of the photos on the cover of the December 2011 issue of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine.  The issue is now out, and the result is shown above.

Quiz

Haven't done a quiz in a long while.  Here's one that will outrage you.

What famous enlightenment figure is guilty of the following quote.  Remember, he (or she) said it, I didn't:

What age or period of life is the most addicted to superstition? The weakest and most timid. What sex? The same answer must be given. “The leaders and examples of every kind of superstition”, says Strabo, “are the women. These excite the men to devotion and supplications, and the observance of religious days. It is rare to meet with one that lives apart from the females, and yet is addicted to such practices."

The Pit of Resurrection

Virtually nothing is known of Celsus, a late second century Greek philosopher, other than the fact that in the 170s AD he wrote a major work, called the True Discourse, devoted to debunking Christianity. Ironically, the text is preserved and known to us only because some eighty years later the early Church Father Origen wrote a massive reply to Celsus, in eight volumes, in which Origen quoted from Celsus's arguments at length before refuting them.

Surprisingly, the brief Wikipedia article on Celsus does not quote his most well known bit of invective, which displays an acid wit. I therefore thought I'd share it with you. Origen quotes it in Chapter 34 of Book 6 of his response, Contra Celsum:

Everywhere in their [the Christians'] writings, mention is made of the tree of life, and a resurrection of the flesh by means of the “tree,” because, I imagine, their teacher was nailed to a cross, and was a carpenter by trade; so that if he had chanced to have been cast from a precipice, or thrust into a pit, or suffocated by hanging, or had been a leather-cutter, or stone-mason, or worker in iron, there would have been a precipice of life beyond the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a sacred leather! Now what old woman would not be ashamed to utter such things in a whisper, even when making stories to lull an infant to sleep?

Pliny the Younger

 In his delightful book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Robert Louis Wilken does a wonderful job teasing out all sorts of information about Roman habits and attitudes - how a social club worked, for example, or the difference in Roman eyes between a "superstition" and a "religion."  But I particularly enjoyed his portrait of the diligent and dutiful aristocrat Pliny the Younger, who famously encountered Christians while serving as governor of Bithynia and Pontus in 112 AD and corresponded with the Emperor Trajan about what to do with them.

Like most upper class Romans, Pliny wore his ambition on his sleeve.  But at the same time his frankness on the subject conveys an almost child-like innocence rather than arrogant grasping.  I just loved his straightforward admission in a letter to his friend, the historian Tacitus, of his desire to be mentioned at least in one of Tacitus's works:

I believe that your histories will be immortal, a prophecy that will surely prove correct.  That is why, I frankly admit, I am anxious to appear in them.

How Did Christianity Grow Before the Edict of Milan?

The best guess seems to be that, immediately before the emperors Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, about 5 percent to 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire was Christian. Although these percentages may seen low, they translate to millions of converts. Assuming a total population of about 55 million in the Roman Empire at the time, the number of Christians would have been somewhere between 2.75 million and 5.5 million.

And yet, as Ramsay MacMullen notes in Christianizing the Roman Empire A.D. 100-400, a profound mystery remains as to how Christianity had acquired so many converts. “After New Testament times and before Constantine,” there is almost no evidence of “open advertising” of Christianity, and much evidence that Christians were urged to lay low and to associate only with other Christians, both to avoid being identified in the event of persecution and in order to avoid the impure practices of the pagans.

How exactly, then, Prof. MacMullen wonders, did Christianity generate those millions of followers in the years before toleration? He suggests an answer by trying to “imagine in some detail a scene that conflicts with no point of the little that is known about conversion in the second and third centuries.”

I would choose the room of some sick person: there, a servant talking to a mistress, or one spouse to another, saying, perhaps: “Unquestionably they can help, if you believe. And I know, I have seen, I have heard, they have related to me, they have books, they have a special person, a sort of officer. It is true. Besides and anyway, if you don't believe, then you are doomed when a certain time comes, so say the prophecies; whereas, if you do, then they can help even in great sickness. I know people who have seen or who have spoken with others who have seen. And healing is even the least that they tell. Theirs is truly a God all-powerful. He has worked a hundred wonders.” So a priest is sent for, or an exorcist; illness is healed; the household after that counts as Christian; it is baptized; and through instruction it comes to accept the first consequences: that all other cults are false and wicked, all seeming gods, the same.

Mohammed

 

It's been a while since I've posted a picture of whats-his-name.

Jacob Broom, Man of Mystery

Did you know that Jacob Broom of Delaware is the only signer of the Constitution of whom there is no extant picture of? I didn't, until I read Richard Brookhiser's post at The Corner. It is for this reason that only the top of Broom's (alleged) head appears in Howard Chandler Christy's Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States (1940):

Poor Mr. Broom (or a very small part thereof) may be found by consulting the key below.

Diocletian's Great Persecution: A Modern Parable

What separates a good biography from an excellent one, I think, is the author's ability to explicate the problems encountered by the subject. Only in this way is it possible to appreciate the subject's reactions and responses to them.

Stephen Williams is such an author. In his excellent and highly recommended Diocletian and the Roman Recovery he does a superb job of explaining the myriad issues facing the Roman Empire at the time of Diocletian's accession to the throne - military defense and rampant inflation to name just two.

Williams's discussion of Roman religion, the rise of Christianity during the Third Century and the problems it presented to traditionalists such as Diocletian is as fine as any I have read. Although Williams carefully lays out the many challenges that Christianity presented, I was particularly struck by his use of a "modern parable" to illustrate the "remorseless argument" that ultimately led Diocletian to sign off on the Great Persecution of Christians beginning in February 303:

A small state, brave and resourceful, is permanently surrounded by powerful enemies who threaten to destroy it. By great efforts it had success in repelling them again and again. But its government soberly realizes that, in the long run, it can only be sure of surviving if it retains the friendship (and ultimate protection) of a certain Superpower. Should this be forfeit, no amount of bravery can guarantee it against being eventually engulfed. But in this state is a noisy radical minority violently opposed to the Superpower, whose activities threaten the vital relationship. The government tries to persuade them to keep their views to themselves and show at least outward respect for the Superpower, for the sake of their country's safety. But the radicals utterly refuse such a compromise, and their movement is growing in numbers. Finally, the government's supporters urge that it has no option but to suppress this movement before irreparable damage is done.

"In this parable," Williams concludes, "the small state is Rome, the Superpower is Jupiter and the gods, and the radical minority, the Christians. It was this remorseless argument . . . that shifted Diocletian."

Gimme That Wine (Fourth Century Edition)

In the year 301, the Roman emperor Diocletian attempted to curb rampant price inflation by issuing his famous Edict on Prices, which set maximum prices for a long list of goods and services. The Edict proved to be a dead letter almost from the moment of issuance, but it has been a godsend for historians by "providing a mine of economic [and social] information . . . giving a picture of trades and their relative pay and status, the varieties of goods on the market and their places of origin, types of dress, culinary tastes, and techniques of manufacture."

According to Stephen Williams, the Edict suggests that modern days oenophiles would be sorely disappointed were they to travel back in time to the early Fourth Century. There were different kinds of wine, some of which were sold at a premium. But, whether because the art of aging wine was largely lost (there is evidence that Romans in the late Republic and earlier Empire drank and appreciated older vintages), or Fourth Century Romans just didn't care, little if any wine was cellared; anything more than a year old sold at a discount!

Almost the only significant price difference in wine seems to be between the plain (rustici) and the rest. Tiburtine, Falernian, Sabine, Picene and others are all 30 denarii a pint, with reductions for wine a year old, confirming that storage and maturation had not yet been generally mastered.

And for you beer lovers, sorry, no fancy IPAs, stouts, or designer beers for you. Only "[t]hree kinds of beers are mentioned, Celtic, Pannonian and Egyptian, the latter an inferior brew at only two denarii.

Diocletian's Horse

John Malalas, a Sixth Century chronicler from Antioch, is apparently the sole source for the story of how Diocletian's horse saved the residents of Alexandria from mass slaughter.

As you may know, the great Roman emperor Diocletian restored the Roman Empire after the Crisis of the Third Century almost destroyed it the mid-Third Century. He was acclaimed emperor by the eastern army in late 384 and ruled (first alone, then later with other members of the Tetrarchy until his retirement in 305.

Early in the year 297, the Roman province of Egypt exploded in revolt. Although the revolt may have been triggered by fears of anticipated tax increases following the announcement of a new census, there was reason to believe that it was coordinated by or with the Sassanid (Persian) Empire, Rome's dangerous enemy to the east. In 296 a powerful Sassanid army under its expansionist king Narses had invaded into the areas of modern day Turkey and Syria. In early 297 – just about the time of the Egyptian uprising – the Persian army defeated a Roman army led by Diocletian's colleague Galerius near Carrhae (where the Persians had annihilated a Roman army under Crassus 350 years earlier). The revolt appeared to be part of a treasonous conspiracy to aid the Persians by opening a second front requiring the diversion of Roman troops. (The fact that Manicheans were believed to have spearheaded this fifth column may have contributed to the later decision to persecute the similar-looking Christian sect.)

Leaving Galerius and the bulk of the army to deal with the Sassanids, Diocletian rushed with a detachment of troops to Egypt in the spring of 297 to stamp out the rebellion. He ultimately did so, but it was not a walk in the park for the entire province was in revolt. While largely reducing other areas and towns to submission by the end of 297, during the late summer or early fall Diocletian laid siege to Alexandria. With almost one million residents, second in size only to the city of Rome itself, the provincial capital was well prepared. The city stubbornly resisted for eight months, reportedly falling only in the spring of 298.

The ends of sieges in the ancient world were rarely pretty affairs. From Troy on, the rule of thumb was that, if the besieged city did not capitulate early on, when the end came all of the inhabitants were killed or enslaved. Consistent with this tradition, and convinced that the revolt represented a treasonous conspiracy with Rome's mortal enemy to destroy the empire, when Alexandria fell Diocletian issued orders that so much blood should be shed that his horse might go knee-deep in it.

Now, however, the gods intervened to save the Alexandrians. As Diocletian approached the city gate his steed stumbled over a corpse, falling to its knees, which were stained red with the gore. Recognizing the omen, Diocletian ordered that the slaughter be stopped, no doubt to the great disappointment of his men.

In the ensuing celebrations the grateful Alexandrians displayed a sardonic sense of humor. They are said to have erected a bronze statue of Diocletian's horse in the city in honor of their savior.

St. Cuthbert and the Otters

The Venerable Bede relates this wonderful story in his Life of St. Cuthbert:

Now one night, a brother of the monastery, seeing [Cuthbert] go out alone, followed him privately to see what he should do. When [Cuthbert] left the monastery, he went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reached his neck and arms, spent the night in praising God.

When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two quadrupeds, called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with their hair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element. Cuthbert himself returned home in time to join in the accustomed hymns with the other brethren.

The illustration is modern, but too perfect not to use.

Bundle Up . . .

. . . Fall's coming.

Frank Zappa Friday

How about two versions of "How Could I Be Such A Fool?"

First from Freak Out:

And then the Ruben and the Jets variation:

Don't Forget to Convert Your Historical Dates

Are you worried about observing your favorite historical anniversaries on the correct date?  The internet has the answer.

Let's say that you're obsessed with the Roman emperor Valens and want to celebrate or mourn his catastrophic defeat and death at the Battle of Adrianople on August 9, 378 AD.  But wait!  Something's bugging you.  August 9, 378 was the date of the battle according to the calendar of the time - the Julian Calendar.  To properly observe the event, you realize, you need to figure out what that date translates to on the Gregorian Calendar we now use.

It turns out there are multiple calendar converters on the web that will accomplish the task in just a few seconds.  Here's one of many that I found, which appears no better or worse than many others.  It turns out that Thursday August 9, 378 (Julian Calendar) would have been August 10 on the Gregorian Calendar.

"What's for dinner, Hun?"

As I mentioned in the last post, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus claimed that the Huns partially cooked their meat by warming it between their thighs and the backs of their horses:

[T]heir way of life is so rough that have no use for fire or seasoned food, but live on roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal, which they warm a little by placing it between their thighs and the backs of their horses.

To my surprise, in The End of Empire: Attila the Hun & the Fall of Rome, Christopher Kelly asserts that there may be a germ of truth to Ammianus's assertion:

Hans Schiltberger, a fourteenth-century mercenary and adventurer from Bavaria, claimed to have observed that among the Tatars, nomadic neighbors of the Mongols who captured Kiev in 1240, horsemen preparing to travel long distances placed raw meat under their saddles.  "I have also seen that when the Tatars are on a long journey they take a piece of raw meat, cut it into slices, place it under the saddle, ride on it, and eat it when they are hungry.  They salt it first and claim that it will not spoil because it is dried by the warmth of the horse and becomes tender under the saddle from riding, after the moisture has gone out of it."  Tenderized raw meat seems to have been something of a steppe signature dish.

Of Mice and Huns

Found on a classroom floor at a university that shall remain nameless:

 History 385/Mathematics 385

History of Mathematics and Science in the Ancient World

Professor Elektratig

Final Exam

This examination consists of two question, requiring both mathematical calculations and an essay discussing the historical reasoning behind those calculations.

1. In Book XXXI of his Res Gestae, Ammianus Marcellinus described the Huns as wearing "garments made of the skins of field-mice." Calculate the number of such skins it would take to clothe the average Hun warrior, using both Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometry. Explain the reasoning behind your calculations, including considerations such as (a) the size of the average Hun warrior (taking into account Ammianus's description of the Huns as "of great size, and bow-legged, so that you might fancy them two-legged beasts"), and (b) the types of garments that you believe the average Hun warrior wore, such as tunics, hats, leggings or trousers, shoes, etc., and which of those garments you believe would have been fashioned from the skins of field mice rather than from some other material. If you conclude Ammianus correctly described the Huns as covering their "shaggy legs" "with the skins of kids" rather than with the skins of field-mice, calculate the number of kids required.

2. Ammianus also observed that the Huns did not cook their meat using fire, but rather warmed "the half-raw flesh of any animal" "by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses." Calculate the amount of riding time necessary to adequately warm to "half-raw" the flesh of a chicken, a boar, a stag, a bear and a trout. Explain the bases of your calculations, including the effect on warming time of (a) the speed and gait of the horse, (b) the amount of flesh being warmed, (c) the season, and (d) whether the warrior was wearing leggings, the material of the leggings, and, if leggings were worn, whether the half-raw flesh was placed inside or outside the leggings 

The exam will last one hour.

Valens Says, ""Julian, Are You Friggin' Nuts?"

What a fantastically ironic (indirect) quote, delivered by the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in 361 A.D., as per Ammianus Marcellinus:

While [Julian] was so arranging these matters, tolerating no slackness in action, his intimates tried to persuade him to attack the neighbouring Goths, who were often deceitful and treacherous; but he replied that he was looking for a better enemy; that for the Goths the Galatian [slave] traders were enough, by whom they were offered for sale everywhere without distinction of rank.

Seventeen years later, at the terrible Battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D., those Goths would destroy the cream of the Roman Eastern army and kill its leader, the Emperor Valens.

Hat tip to Michael Kulikowski, whose wonderfully opinionated yet balanced and transparent book Rome's Gothic Wars is highly recommended.

Counting Holiness

A society prepared to vest fellow humans with such powers was ever vigilant. Men watched each other closely for those signs of intimacy with the supernatural that would validate their claim. Holiness itself might be quantifiable. Symeon Stylites, we are told, touched his toes 1,244 times in bowing before God from the top of his column. The true horror of this story lies not in the exertions of the saint, but in the layman who stood there counting.

Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity.