Category: Ancient world

Bettany Hughes on the history of Alexandria tonight on More4

Posted on by Roger Pearse

bettany_hughes_cropped

While looking through the Radio Times I came across a picture of the lovely Bettany Hughes, who is presenting a TV programme on More4 tonight.  Judging from reactions online, a lot of people will be watching just because she’s presenting it.

What’s it about?  Oh, some nonsense about the history of Alexandria, I believe.  I didn’t get the impression from comments like “Bettany on a horse! Yum!” that this subject was absolutely critical to the viewing figures…

Returning to seriousness for a moment, I hope that we don’t get too many references to literary texts which we can’t identify.  There’s nothing more frustrating than listening to some programme on the ancient world, hearing a really interesting statement about antiquity, and then being quite unable to work out what it is based on.

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‘Ancient’ texts composed in modern times

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Before the internet, people could circulate documents containing quotations from ancient writers in reasonable safety.  It was very hard for anyone to check them.  This difficulty was enhanced by the tendency of these collections of quotations to be vague about the precise reference. 

But the internet has thrown light into quite a few dark corners.   It has also brought to light some curiosities.  I came across one such today, posted in a forum by an ignorant person who knew no more than that he had found it online.  These are supposed to be ancient texts about the cult of Mithras.  After Strabo and Statius there were these:

3. Lucius Agrius (ca.107bce-41bce) Roman soldier and Mithrasic High Priest (ca.67bce- 41bce)

“Among these soldiers was a strong and mighty warrior, whose personality drew many of the Cilicians to him. By enquiry, I discovered that he was a holy man, and was therefore sought after as a man of wisdom. He led the Cilicians in Prayer at dawn, and again at mid-day and at dusk, never failing to praise his God, Whom he called Mithras.”

– from “The Conversion of Lucius Agrius”, paragraph 2, written ca.67bce. Lucius Agrius was a soldier in Pompey’s army and became the first Roman to serve Mithras, converted by Cilician immigrants to Italy after their defeat by Pompey’s army. Lucius Agrius served as the first Roman High Priest, and his book is included in the Mithrasic Canon of Scripture.

4. Marcellinus (ca.95bce-33bce) Roman soldier and Mithrasic High Priest (41bce-33bce)

“…and the soldiers of the Faith vow to be chaste for months at a time, in dedication to the Lord. And when we marry, we marry women of pure heart, quiet disposition, and clean spirit, for women of ill repute are despised by the men of the Mysteries.”

-from “The Fragment of the Letter of Marcellinus”, paragraph 1, written between 41bce and 33bce. This, too, is included in the Mithrasic Canon of Scripture. Only this and three other paragraphs of this letter survive.

Whatever are we to make of these oddities?  I’ve never heard of either text — indeed my first reaction is that they are fakes –, and they are not referred to in any textbook on Mithras I have ever encountered.  Much of the comment is plainly by someone very, very ignorant.

The second of these items gives no results aside from the forum post.  The first gives four web pages like this one.  It’s hard to feel any confidence in such material.

In Google books I was able to find a reference to an inscription by a certain Lucius Agrius Calendio, from 162 AD, as dedicator of an inscription in a Mithraeum in Ostia.  A search of Clauss-Slaby reveals the inscription is only “Soli Invict(o) Mit(hrae) d(onum) d(edit) L(ucius) Agrius Calendio” (“L. Agrius gave a gift to the unconquered sun Mithras”).

It’s hard to imagine that any of the people quoting this have the wit to invent it.  Possibly there is some, now forgotten, novel, in which this material appears?  But if so, there is no trace of it online.

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Festival of Cybele today?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My attention was drawn to a post at about.com by a certain N. S. Gill here:

On This Day in Ancient History: Entrance of the Tree
Monday March 22, 2010

The ancient Roman festival of the Magna Mater (Great Mother Cybele) included the Arbor intrat (entrance of the tree) on March 22. An imported goddess from Phrygia, Magna Mater was installed in Rome in 204 (at the time of Hannibal) where she grew in importance. A pine tree was made to represent the dead Attis for the day of the entrance of the tree. The Dies sanguinis “Day of Blood” followed on the 24th of March and the “Cleansing” on the 27th. See

“The Cannophori and the March Festival of Magna Mater,” by Duncan Fishwick. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 97. (1966), pp. 193-202.

Now I am a sceptical soul.  I do wonder, therefore, what ancient evidence stands behind all these statements.  Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the Fishwick article, although it is in JSTOR here — anyone care to send me a copy? — but I have a feeling that the answer is “very little”.  Indeed some of this may be inferred from rather than stated by ancient sources.

I looked into Attis and the sources some time ago, although I never compiled a final version.  My working notes are here.  These tell me that a statement in John the Lydian, De Mensibus IV. 41 reads:

On day 11, the kalends of April, a pine tree is carried into the Palatine by the tree-bearers. But the emperor Claudius instituted these these ferias, a man of such justice in judgement that…

John the Lydian’s work needs translation.  It always has interesting things to tell us about Roman religion and festivals.  But moving on, Arnobius, Adversus Paganos book V tells us:

… how can you assert the falsehood of this story, when the very rites which you celebrate throughout the year testify that you believe these things to be true, and consider them perfectly trustworthy?

For what is the meaning of that pine which on fixed days you always bring into the sanctuary of the mother of the gods? Is it not in imitation of that tree, beneath which the raging and ill-fated youth laid hands upon himself, and which the parent of the gods consecrated to relieve her sorrow?

What mean the fleeces of wool with which you bind and surround the trunk of the tree? Is it not to recall the wools with which Ia covered the dying youth, and thought that she could procure some warmth for his limbs fast stiffening with cold? What mean the branches of the tree girt round and decked with wreaths of violets? Do they not mark this, how the Mother adorned with early flowers the pine which indicates and bears witness to the sad mishap?

What mean the Galli with dishevelled hair beating their breasts with their palms? Do they not recall to memory those lamentations with which the tower-bearing Mother, along with the weeping Acdestis, wailing aloud, followed the boy? What means the abstinence from eating bread which you have named castus? Is it not in imitation of the time when the goddess abstained from Ceres’ fruit in her vehement sorrow?

17. Or if the things which we say are not so declare, say yourselves-those effeminate and delicate men whom we see among you in the sacred rites of this deity-what business, what care, what concern have they there; and why do they like mourners wound their arms and breasts, and act as those dolefully circumstanced?

What mean the wreaths, what the violets, what the swathings, the coverings of soft wools? Why, finally, is the very pine, but a little before swaying to and fro among the shrubs, an utterly inert log, set up in the temple of the Mother of the gods next, like some propitious and very venerable deity?

…

That pine which is regularly born into the sanctuary of the Great Mother, is it not in imitation of that tree beneath which Attis mutilated and unmanned himself, which also, they relate, the goddess consecrated to relieve her grief?

I don’t see a reference here to the tree representing Attis; rather it represents the tree under which that luckless boyfriend of Cybele castrated himself.

Arnobius is clearly well informed.  But these are the two references to pine trees in the sources I could find.

What about calendrical material?  I always look at the calendar in the Chronography of 354.  And sure enough, on the 11th day before the Kalends of April we find ARBOR INTRAT.  A couple of days later, SANGUEM.  And the day after, HILARIA.

When Mommsen edited the calendar, in Inscriptiones Latinae Antiquissimae, Berlin (1893) pp.256-278, he added learned notes.  I wish I had a copy of these!

A google search on “arbor intrat” reveals a miserable collection of sites repeating hearsay, often referencing the Fishwick article.

Update (10th Feb. 2022): The link to my Attis notes is to a long deleted Wikipedia page.  I’ve updated it to point to my own wiki which I must really write up one day!

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Bootlegging the Theodosian code

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the texts that is not online and really should be is the legal compedium assembled in the reign of Theodosius II in 450 AD and known as the Theodosian code or Codex Theodosianus. 

The work was compiled from earlier collections of imperial edicts, or rescripts as they were known.  These took the form of a letter from the emperor to some official, usually a proconsul or prefect.  The compilation provided a systematic list of things proscribed or permitted.

The work was translated by a certain Clyde Pharr back in 1954 for Princeton University Press.  That means that it could be out of copyright in the US; unfortunately it is not.

The most interesting portion of the code is the last book.   This consists of the rescripts on religious matters issued by Constantine and his successors, which progressively made Christianity a privileged religion, then the state religion, and then prohibited other religions aside from Judaism.  The tone of these rescripts is often violent, as is often the case with the edicts of later emperors.  Pharr’s introduction points out rescripts which indicate the powerlessness of these emperors, and their repeated and futile attempts by ever heavier penalties to get their will enacted by the imperial bureaucracy.

Such interesting material is always likely to find its way online in unauthorised form.  Today I found a site with a substantial chunk of that book 15 here.  I’m not sure whether it is complete, tho.

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When did the Christians start to reuse the temples?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From archaeologist Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani, The destruction of ancient Rome: a sketch of the history of the monuments, p. 36 f. (here):

To what use the temples were put immediately after the expulsion of their gods, we do not know; but it is certain that they were not occupied by Christians, nor turned into places of Christian worship. This change was only to take place two centuries later, when the scruples about the propriety of worshipping the true God in heathen temples had been overcome. In the year 600, Pope Boniface IV asked the Emperor Phocas for the temple which was called Pantheon, and turned it into a church of Mary the Virgin ever blessed.” Two periods, then, may be distinguished in the converting of pagan edifices into places of Christian worship, one anterior to the year 609, the other following that date. During the first, civil edifices alone were transformed, partially or completely, into churches; such were the Record Office, which became the church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, and the round market on the Caelian Hill, now S. Stefano Rotondo. After 609 almost every available building, whether secular or sacred, was made into a church or chapel, until the places of worship seemed to outnumber the houses.

This view, expressed by a 19th century archaeologist, is interesting.  But is it true?

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Getting hold of books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I pulled down from my shelves yesterday a cheap reprint of Lanciani’s The destruction of ancient Rome, and made it my bedside reading.  It’s full of interesting statements, about how the monuments disappeared into the lime kilns.  Unfortunately it is rather under-referenced.  The latter is very frustrating. 

The book also refers to the destruction of the Septizonium.  Interestingly it tells us that a medieval guide to Rome, the Einsiedeln itinerary, contains transcriptions of inscriptions visible when it was made.  This includes an inscription on the septizonium which is long since vanished.  I was unable to find the itinerary online, tho.

Lanciani refers readers to his Ruins and excavations, and last night I decided I would just buy a copy of this.  The cheap reprints based on PDF’s usually make this possible, although in this case it seemed very difficult to get one at what I consider a reasonable price.  I did notice a copy of the first edition, with fold-out maps, offered for $200!  This raised the issue of how good the reproductions of the plates would be.  Those in my copy of The destruction were pretty grainy, which rendered them largely useless.  Indeed we might ask whether Google books is really preserving illustrations at all.

UPDATE: I was able to find Lanciani’s Italian publication of the itinerary here.  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to contain the inscriptions.

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Keyser’s “Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was able to get a look at this today.  It’s interesting, but some elements of it left me wishing it had been done differently.

One problem hit me immediately:

Because the book primarily contains Greek scientists, Greek names are transliterated without prior Latinization. … Direct transliteration is no more arbitrary than any other system, …

Of course direct transliteration is not more arbitrary than using the standard system.  Had the humanists chosen to use it, at the recovery of Greek, all the literature would use it, and there would be no issue.  But since they all wrote in Latin, they Latinized the forms, and every piece of literature since is derived from that.

It is exceedingly arbitrary to throw existing writing out of the door in favour of a new system, devised for ideological reasons.  The result of this is that the reader finds himself continually retranslating the transliteration in case some random unfamiliar series of vowels and consonants actually represents an old familiar figure.  In short the editors have elected to place a barrier in the path of the educated reader; and who else would use such a volume. 

Worse still, the transliteration has been done to the level of marking long O and E.  Galen acquires an overscore over the ‘e’ — a matter of little importance, except that again it renders the familiar unfamiliar.  All this tends to exclude the general reader, tends to elitism and must be deprecated.

My next port of call was the article on the obscure alchemical writer, Stephanos of Alexandria.  This article was good.  I think it was quite satisfactory, although I would have preferred to see the sources for the statements made referenced.  It gave the edition and the translation — including the fact that it only includes three of the nine praxeis.  The bibliography was scanty — a complaint that might be levelled against most of the articles.  But from the look of it, it is adequate.  Modern sources and encyclopedias are generally referenced.  There are no footnotes, and I really felt the absence of them.  Without references to the ancient sources, the value of the data given is hard to judge.

Another area that I would have liked to see different is the ordering of the entries.  Authors are listed in alphabetical order, which is understandable.  But if they had been arranged by chronology and region, as in Quasten’s Patrology, it would have been possible to read through the book and gain a good knowledge of the progress of science, simply by so doing. 

The book itself, as a reference book, is a bit of a mistake.  This book is a website.  The book badly needs hyperlinks, connecting authors together.

All these points seem important to me.  But let us not lose sight of the key thing here.  This books gives us, if we are wealthy enough, a reference text in English to all the ancient scientific writers, together with references for further reading.  That is a huge advance on what we had before, and we must welcome it.

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Dark ages, middle ages, and how it’s all the fault of the Christians

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While reading James Hannam’s blog Quodlibeta I noticed this post, discussing the history of vivisection and dissection.  It references a rather bad-tempered post by atheist polemicist Richard Carrier here. 

The nice thing in the discussion is to see ancient medical writers discussed and quoted.  James shows that the Hellenistic physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus carried out human vivisections in Alexandria, as witnessed by Celsus the 1st century medical author.  He rightly comments that we should not suppose that, just because we would find this appalling, an ancient would do so.  Martial’s epigrams describing things done to criminals in the arena make that plain enough.

I had never heard of Herophilus, still less that a edition of the fragments existed by Heinrich von Staten (Cambridge, 1989).  Religious controversy does unearth things that calmer debate would not, and we can all be enriched therevy.

Richard Carrier’s post is too long and too far outside my area of interest (and too unreferenced) for me to read much of it.  A couple of passages in it caught my eye accidentally. 

He objected to a Christian saying “[The Christians] preserved and copied an enormous amount of Greek mathematics, technical writings, and natural philosophy.”  This unexceptionable statement apparently upset Dr. C, who met it with the objection that only a tiny percentage of ancient literature has survived.  I was unclear how this evidently true observation refuted the point made, however.  Surely both are true?

keyser_encycl_natsciMuch more interesting in the same part of the post was an image of a book cover attached, which proved to be that of Paul Keyser &c, Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists (here).  I had not heard of this book, but as regular readers will know I am rather an enthusiast for compedia of authors.  But at $360, who of us could buy a copy?  Keyser himself is interviewed here; he turns out to be a fellow software engineer, working for IBM, who has also produced Greek science of the hellenistic era on the basis that:

Science accounts for more of the texts surviving from antiquity than any other sort of writing, and yet is rarely studied or even read because the texts are relatively hard to find in translation.

Well said, sir!  How many of us are even familiar with the dusty volumes of ancient science, the 20-odd volumes of Galen, and the like?

I don’t pretend to be that interested in the history of science, so much of what was discussed was above my head.  But one element involved a curious misunderstanding.  Carrier barks repeatedly that the term “Dark Ages” is one that is being suppressed in our day, and being suppressed by the awful Christians, because they are trying to conceal how awful it was. 

The attempts to remove the term from our language certainly exist, in our day, but I never heard that the Christians were responsible.  After all, whoever used any other term, before our own days?  On the contrary; most Christians I ever heard of think the middle ages was a period of degeneration in religion and everything else, and think of the poor conditions in the West during the Dark Ages, rather than the unknown splendours of Syriac and Arabic science.

The people who object to it seem primarily to be the medievalists.  Presumably professional pride influences this.  Indeed one medievalist has never spoken to me, ever since I queried a gross mis-characterisation of that wretched period of human existence.  Another, probably more influential group, seems to be the politically correct.  Why these object to it I do not know. 

But what seems quite clear to me is that the dichotomy is not between Christian and heathen, but between those like myself who look at the Dark Ages as a time in which we would certainly not like to live, unlike antiquity; and those more interested in it who see things differently.

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Why was Domitian unpopular?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The emperor Domitian has never had a good press.  After his assassination, his successors awarded him the damnatio memoriae.  The account in Suetonius is evidently comprised mainly of scurrilous gossip.  Martial’s epigrams flattering the emperor become ever more fulsome as the reign progresses — although hardly more so than Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus on Trajan — only to suddenly condemn the emperor as a despot once he was safely dead.

Much that Domitian did was laudable.  He did his best to resist the debasement of the currency, and left a surplus in the treasury, a sure sign of fiscal competence.  He adopted the role of perpetual censor, and attempted to reform the equally debased morals of the people.  He cleared hucksters off the pavements of Rome.  He was a competent, if not sparkling war leader, and his administrative reforms were retained by his successors.

Several things made him look  bad.  He was  unpopular with the senatorial class, mainly because he didn’t socialise effectively with them and treated them as just another lobby group in Rome.   Considering his autocratic ways, that meant subjecting them to the fear of immediate execution that lesser men more commonly had.

Domitian also had himself named “god” in his official titulature, which his enemies did not fail to mention.  An epigram by Martial on his courtiers, praising them for their moderation and fairness, contrives to give an impression of haughty, greedy minions whom no man could safely oppose.  The widespread use of delation — informers who stood to gain from the estate of the accused man — meant that few felt safe.  First it became unsafe to criticise the emperor; then, as the evil worked its course, it became unsafe not to flatter him.  This process we do see in Martial, and it is probably unfair not to remember this when reading his works.  It reminds me of those video clips of Stalin receiving frenzied applause with a stony face, looking to and fro, not to accept the applause, but to see who is not clapping.

There must have been relief when Domitian was murdered.  Suddenly the climate changed.  Suddenly it was safe to speak your mind.  It is perhaps for this, that the memory of Domitian is damned.

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