The Mediterranean trade being in decline in the 2nd century should be seen in the light of outlying regions of the Empire becoming more Romanized and productive, and, thus, needing less from the Mediterranean.
Trade brings increased productivity by enabling each region to specialize in whatever goods it's best at producing. Self-sufficiency is primitive and brings poverty.
The difference there seems to be in what kind of thing you are self sufficient in?
China has been engaging in increasing trade and extractive industry across Asia and Africa - it has been becoming if anything less self sufficient in primary industries and heavy secondary industry - while becoming more self sufficient in lighter / more technical secondary, and tertiary / quaternary industry.
Self sufficiency in primary industry is primitive, but being able to produce your own advanced technological goods is a step up from having to import them.
There's then a further step where you outsource that again and only do the design / cutting edge work locally, but that so far seems to have much more mixed results than outsourcing your primary industry and simple manufacturing.
Consider also how much more expensive transport was before fossil fuels and therefore how much more limited was the set of goods that could be profitably exported.
I suspect it has to do with the fact that Local elites were there largest employer in the area. These days the largest employer is a corporation, often without a person or family to assign to it. John Deere is certainly the patron of my area, sponsoring sports, festivals, and construction.
You must not live too far from me, then. I grew up in Decatur, IL and the family that first springs to mind in association with that town is the Andreas family. Dwayne Andreas was the long time CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, by far the largest employer. My dad and two brothers all work for ADM, and thank Christ my brothers got in there, the pickings are slim otherwise.
It was very odd, in many ways, to grow up in a town of less than 100,000 that had the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company located in it. You saw their name somewhere in nearly every institution that needed to solicit private donations. IIRC the local college, Millikin, opened a business school whose primary audience were ADM managers studying for MBAs. Mikhail Gorbachev visited Decatur when I was a kid on his post-Soviet inevitably doomed bid for continued relevance, and he came there because of Dwayne Andreas. Andreas' granddaughter was a classmate of mine my freshman year at St. Teresa, the local Catholic school. There was no nearby super-elite independent school like Harvard-Westlake; they had to mix with the _hoi polloi_ to a certain extent, though I think the upper management did spend most of their free time at the country club.
Unfortunately for the Andreases, the heir apparent, Dwayne's son Mick, got caught in a price-fixing scandal, as documented in Kurt Eichenwald's excellent book _The Informant_, and so this multinational corporation which had in some ways been run like a family-owned firm passed out of their control. Within 10 years, the upper management decamped to Chicago, though all the plants are still there in Decatur. You're not going to move those away from the corn & beans.
Now the local _eminence grise_ is Howard Buffett, who, despite his father's far-sighted wisdom in recognizing that a large inheritance is a curse on your children, not a blessing, spends his days as the Undersheriff of Macon County. When Illinois legalized cannabis, he gave $500K to hire a deputy who would be specially trained to do blood draws at the side of the road since there's no equivalent of the breathalyzer for cannabis intoxication. I've never been so glad that I live in the People's Republic of Urbana as I was when I read that.
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2013/07/economies-of-scale-killed-american-dream.html suggests that part of the reason why local elites are diminished in the US is the centralization of elite competition & of selection of entrants into the elite. His theory is that this change represents the fact that people now tend to enter a nationwide political & economic elite by attending prestigious universities & then work & live with other educated elites & so be less connected to & less directly influential on non-elites than in the past (he attributes the change partly to the large-scale businesses enabled by late-19th- & early-20th-century industrialization, partly to the persistence of centralized government after World War 2) when rich & influential people were more evenly distributed across the country & their influence extended over a smaller area.
I think you're right, but there are still reasons to have local elites in a number of fields. Obviously any business that depends closely on a physical location, including chains of stores, large and expensive buildings, or obviously farming/direct land use, is going to lend itself more to a local elite. International banking has probably been outside of the scope of local elites (unless you live in London or New York) for a long time, because it's naturally non-local. Professional sports also comes to mind as something controlled by local elites, at least in terms of the local team.
I live in a pretty small town, and you can see evidence of 5-10 families having a huge amount of influence. They tend to have local businesses that would be difficult to outsource, including car dealerships (three of the families).
Until recently, banking in the US was dominated by banks that weren't allowed to operate across state lines. I seem to recall that in 1998, I needed to open a new bank account when I went to California for college, because the bank my parents used in New Jersey had only merged with a few other east coast banks, and hadn't yet joined into a national conglomerate, the way they all are now.
massive agricultural estates, “latifundium”, worked by slaves or serfs. → "latifundia"; "latifundium" is singular
laid a heavy tax burned on the empire → burden
The results drew a "poverty line" between the areas of society where the golden solidus circulated and a bleak social hinterland where the solidus was absent or difficult to obtain.” — a quote mark has been added or omitted.
This man had been a “rusticuli” → "rusticulus"; "rusticuli" is plural
A landlord often owed storehouses, so he could sell when prices were highest. → owned
The monotheist strains that adapts and exploits all available societal resources — either "strains" should be singular or "adapts and exploits" should be plural.
"Are most cities and towns still run by a handful of old aristocratic families and I somehow have never noticed?"
Yes, I think so: at least in rural areas. I grew up near three small villages, no more than 200 people in any of them, and the Adams were the gentry in at least two of them: they owned two gas stations, a hamburger stand, and a hardware store among other things. They didn't have a mansion or anything, but everybody in those villages knew the Adams: they were a "preeminent family" you might say. If something big needed to get done, you could bet the Adams would have their fingers in it. And if you were a local boy and you needed a job, then you'd go to the Adams first.
A nearby town I went to High School at had a population around 2,500. The big man there was Mr. Heinz. He owned the pharmacy, and he must have owned a lot more I was never told about because he had a mansion up on the hill. He'd sponsor local sporting events, and was generally one of the "big men about town." I went to school with his daughter, and she was notable for being the only person in our rural school with a convertible.
There are thousands of small towns all across America, and in most of them you can find a big man or two who "own half the town": usually not literally half, but maybe half or more of anything that's worth owning, like businesses. And in farm country there are always a few big farmers who own most of the land, or the mill and feed, or both. If you haven't seen it then I would guess you don't come from rural areas: in the big city you can own $10 million in real estate and be invisible among a crown of others who own the same or more, which in a small town $10 million would make you the local nob.
Yes, it doesn't seem so secret to me, even in smaller cities. I'm from York, PA (city > 30k, county ~ 250k) and everybody knows the handful of families who make things happen, including the Wolfs (Tom is now governor of PA), the Kinsleys (construction), etc. Look at the board of any major local non-profit foundation if you want to see who these people are in a city.
That said, I think there are two meaningful differences in our own time. One is that post-civil service reforms (Pendleton Act of 1883 in the US; Northcote Report of 1855 in the UK; Napoleon in France) there was a semi-permanent separation between economic and governmental functions. People can and do use power amassed in one sphere to cross over, but it's no longer automatic, which makes it often more efficient to separate the duties and bankroll a candidate rather than running yourself as in earlier periods. That makes the economic elites less visible.
The other major factor, much more recent, is the vast increase in firm scale after the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s and 80s (see especially the demise of the Interstate Commerce Commission). Profit tends to be extracted more readily at the top, so bosses of mid-size firms have a lot more free cash flow than mid-level executives of large firms, and even those often tend to relocate to superstar cities now. That means smaller cities simply have fewer people of note and in larger cities the competition is much tougher.
I came here to say basically this. I grew up in a few different small rural towns in the midwest USA and all had very recognizable 'big men' who owned major local business and were very involved in local politics.
The famous science fiction novel ‘Canticle for Leibowitz’ has the Catholic Church be the only organization of significance to survive the nuclear war, for reasons similar to what you have described in Rome. But it takes place in Utah, which kind of wrecked my suspension of disbelief; while reading it, I kept thinking “The religious organization that runs Utah after the nuclear war is *not* going to be Catholic...”
I read the book as saying something more subtle. It's less that the Church is the only major organization that survives -- there are plenty of post-Apocalyptic power organizations -- but that it's the only one that survives *unchanged*, which has a sense of continuity that runs all the way back pre-Deluge (and much further). There is a giant tension throughout that book between the continuity which is wisdom and humility, and the continuity which is repeated cycles of folly and making the same damn mistakes for the same dumb reasons.
I don't know about *unchanged* - I'm pretty sure the Vatican moved to Denver and when the novice arrives there he's struck by how it's falling into poverty - but you're definitely right that it has enough continuity to survive the cycles.
If I remember correctly I enjoyed that book until the final third when the story seemed to jump the tracks. Damn. I think I dropped my copy in the book donation bin a couple years ago. Lemme see if it’s held by my library...
On this point, Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" tetralogy (beginning with "Too Like the Lightning...") is worth a read. It's set in a 25th century that is still run by a few familiar organizations, but in unfamiliar roles (the EU, Mitsubishi, the Freemasons, the Olympics Committee...) and a few sites of hereditary authority that are still respected (the King of Spain, the Roman senate) despite all the changes to the idea of the geographic nation-state, religion, and gender.
Really interesting. Thanks for the review. I'm really curious if there were intellectual benefits to Christianity, i.e. did Constantine co-opt Christianity for a specific political purpose? It seems rather odd that a politician would elevate a newly emerging religion. It must have been able to foster some intellectual legitimacy at the time.
So, I used to be more cynical of Constantine's motives in supporting Christianity. But I think there's decent evidence that Constantine had genuine faith, and that his embrace of Christianity wasn't simply a calculated, cynical political move:
* His support for Christianity comes after he is securely established in power.
The idea that he embraced Christianity so that he'd have the political support of Christians would make a lot more sense if he had done it in the early part of his rule when he was competing for power against a number of other claimants, like a modern politician paying lip service to a faith to curry votes.
Instead it's only after he's firmly installed in power that he beings pro-Christian reforms, which is behavior a lot more consistent to his claim of a sudden conversion at Milvian Bridge.
* A lot of his pro-Christian reforms negatively impacted the empire's bottom line.
The Edict of Milan not only instituted tolerance for Christianity, but returned confiscated property *at the state's expense*, as well as other costly policies, like tax exemptions, promoting church officials to high positions, and church building, including huge 30 year projects like The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Old Saint Peter's Basilica.
He did some looting of pagan temples, but only pretty late in his reign - it may have recouped some of the money spent on Christianity, but certainly doesn't work as a motive.
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So I'm not sure what the gain was, if it wasn't financial.
The idea that this was some galaxy brain play on Constantine's part seems to lean too much on him "reading the script", we know Christianity would go on to be the dominant power for a millennium, so we assume that's what he had in mind.
But I think the simplest answer here may be the correct one, and Constantine's adoption and support of the faith may be exactly what he always claimed it was: the result of a sincere faith.
I don't think I've ever bought the overly cynical take on Constantine's conversion either. However, accounts that he didn't technically convert until his deathbed seem accurate to me. He did seem very interested in getting into the weeds of Christian administration with the council of Nicea and the Arian controversies, as well as expelling Athanasius to Trier (though that seems like it was for threatening to withhold the Alexandrian grain supply). Even if his belief wasn't cynical, I still think explanations for how this new religion was able to bolster its legitimacy to the highest echelons of the Empire deserve some kind of rigorous intellectual explanation. An explanation that always seems to be elusive. I think Christianity must have held some pretty intense ontological attraction for the most educated people of the day to think it was worth converting to. What that ontological attraction was may be lost to history, but it would be interesting to see someone try to recover it.
My understanding is that the "deathbed conversion" came from a belief that you needed to be baptized *after* your sins for them to be forgiven. I think this belief is a bit theologically confused (at least by my modern Protestant viewpoint) - but a sincere belief. (If he converted for more cynical reasons, why bother carrying on the farce on his deathbed)
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As for why Christianity was so attractive in general, well, beyond and points of specific belief in its specific claims regarding the life (and afterlife) of Jesus, it was basically proto-liberalism, and attractive for many of the same reasons.
People might view some aspects of Christian teaching as regressive today, but it was undoubtedly progressive compared to the culture of its day - it did a lot to level out social class differences (e.g. wealth, gender, slave free) and transcend political boundaries of city and state (as this essay mentions).
I think, living in a culture that's steeped in Christianity for a millennium, we often miss just how revolutionary it was.
I know for you want to make sure you are forgiven at point of death, whether by baptism or otherwise. There is a scene in Hamlet where Hamlet chooses not to kill Claudius when the latter is in a confession booth. Reasoning that if he kills the King now he will have just been forgiven and will surely enter heaven (something Hamlet wants to avoid).
Christianity drew heavily on the dominant neo-Platonist philosophy of the time, if you're looking for "ontological attraction". A version of it that was less abstract, with more popular appeal.
Christianity also comes with a sense of cosmic justice. Paganism lacked this completely. People are very susceptible to the Just World Fallacy. A religion that incorperates a sense of justice is bound to be more appealing than that doesn't Even Christians and Muslims today bring it up a lot in their apologia. (see also: Buddhism)
For what it's worth (probably about what it costs you), my vague opinion is that by late Empire days, the burdens of "Roman civic honor" were almost intolerable to the young scion of a high-class family. The civic virtues were just too God-damned demanding in intolerant of human weakness. Everyone knew you, you always had eyes on you, you had to stay within this brutal straitjacket of expectations in order to be deemed tolerable, and there was no mercy if you slipped up. (Not to mention, it would be obvious to you that a great deal of this virtue framework was in practice executed hypocritically, and people moved in and out of approval for crass political and social reasons.)
One of the powerful attractions of Christianity as a religion is that its central tenet is redemption. It is *always* possible to repent and be forgiven, even as late as when you are hanging on the cross. Redemption is a key theme of the Gospels (aside from the central story), the Epistles, and it runs all through the assorted rituals of the Church. It's on reason Catholicism has often thrived in places of great bad luck, among the conquered, in prisons.
If you were high-born in the late Empire, and you felt a sense of despair as things seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and those to whom you were supposed to look for leadership came to be seen as influence-grubbing shitheads, underneath, you might find Christianity powerfully attractive, in its promise of redemption and renewal. I would think the attraction might be even greater for an unusuallly competent man trying to plug the million holes in the dyke that might have been what it felt like trying to keep the Imperium going.
> Everyone knew you, you always had eyes on you, you had to stay within this brutal straitjacket of expectations in order to be deemed tolerable, and there was no mercy if you slipped up. (Not to mention, it would be obvious to you that a great deal of this virtue framework was in practice executed hypocritically, and people moved in and out of approval for crass political and social reasons.)
The appeal is obvious- an afterlife of eternal happiness. The pagan religions offered no such reward. They likely evolved from humans' tendency to assume things that change have minds that can be influenced. The roman dieties fit this model exactly. They are anthropomorphic, yet have control over specific natural domains, and must be appeased to have success in this domain.
This isn't especially ontological attractive, it's just a "logical" evolution of belief from primitve humanity where we develop theory of mind.
The ide of a single just God who rewards the good and punsihes the evil in just, predictable ways is definitely a more appealing ontological prospect.
I've heard that most of our ideas about the Roman deities are from satires, and we don't know much about the actual religion. Anyone know whether this is at least plausible?
I think this is so. My very amateur view from cursory reading is that the Romans had a view of the numinous but didn't nail it down to nuts-and-bolts; the Etruscans were the ones who went in for fully-developed religion, and the Romans borrowed a mix of customs from them and from the Greeks when dealing with their own native deities (e.g. identifying Mars with Ares, even though Roman Mars is different in several respects from Greek Ares, for instance having an early association with agriculture).
They had several customs and practices, the reasons for which had long been forgotten, so they cobbled together explanations for them out of folk etymology and the like. They were much stronger on "we do this sacrifice on this day because we have a bargain with this god" quid pro quo stuff, and left 'theology' (to misuse a word) to other cultures.
And of course, like everywhere, folk religion was a different thing from the official or formal religion. St. Augustine is one of those poking fun at minor gods such as the goddess of hinges, but there may be archaic traditions behind such a trivial entity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardea
A lot of people did hold off on baptism until the last minute, preferring to remain catechumens as long as possible, because the idea was that after baptism all your sins were washed away and you now entered into the new life. There were also debates in the early Church about "what happens catechumens who die or, say, are martyred *before* they can be baptised? are they condemned to hell?" because they haven't been enrolled into the church and had original sin washed clean by baptism. The answer for martyrs was eventually worked out as the baptism by blood or baptism of desire:
" Catechumens were limited as to their attendance in formal services. As unbaptized, they could not actively take part in any service, for that was reserved for those baptized. One practice permitted them to remain in the first part of the mass, but even in the earliest centuries dismissed them before the Eucharist. Others had them entering through a side door, or observing from the side, from a gallery, or near the font; while it was not unknown to bar them from all services until baptized.
Their desire for baptism was held to be sufficient guarantee of their salvation, if they died before the reception. In event of their martyrdom prior to baptism by water, this was held to be a "baptism by blood" (Baptism of desire), and they were honored as martyrs.
In the fourth century, a widespread practice arose of enrolling as a catechumen and deferring baptism for years, often until shortly before death, and when so ill that the normal practice of immersion was impossible, so that aspersion or affusion — the baptism of the sick — was necessary. Constantine was the most prominent of these catechumens."
Which is great, but also meant you had to *stop* sinning, and sects such as the Donatists springing up was an indication of the very hard line taken on falling away, back-sliding, and the like. A lot of people considered that it would be hard to live a sinless life, and then if you did fall back into your old sins, you were at very grave risk of damnation. Especially if you wanted to be a success in politics or the like - the pragmatic "gotta break eggs to make an omelette" view of what you would have to do.
So the safest bet was to live your life, hold off on full commitment as long as possible, and then get baptised on or before your deathbed - that would wipe the slate clean and pretty much assure you entry into heaven - after all, if you were on your deathbed, very little chance of committing new sins and throwing away your newly obtained salvation!
Think about Mitt Romney. He is mormon, which is convenient as it means that he has the support of the Mormons in the USA. But I don't think we should assume that he is mormon just for the purpose of getting the mormon vote. The mormon faith is a religion that a lot of people genuinly believe in in it so it's not hard to see why Romney couldn't be one of them. The people of Constatine's time took religion very seriously. If you believe in one religion you wouldn't dare to confess to believe in another. What will the gods do when they find out!
* He asked to be baptised at is deathbed (he waited till then to make sure that he was completely clean at heaven's gate). What cynical benefit could he have had at that point?
Huh, I was under the impression that it was just that his mother (the future St. Helena) was really into it, and he was a good kid that was willing to go along with his mom's crazy idea.
I've read a fair deal of "so why exactly did Constantine make Christianity his state religion?" (you get a *lot* of "the corruption of the pure original Gospel Church started with the Constantinian bargain!" in online apologetics) and my own view has been 'why doesn't anyone consider he might have believed it?'
Sure, there was worldly advantage to it, but people did tend to believe in the gods, and if Constantine felt/was convinced "The new god is on your side and favours you and will give you victory", there is no reason he couldn't have genuinely believed that.
And again, mention of St. Helena is another example of "Roman women converting to Christianity", though her exact background is not well-known, she wasn't a Roman by birth and her family circumstances were humble:
"Helena's birthplace is not known with certainty. The 6th-century historian Procopius is the earliest authority for the statement that Helena was a native Greek of Drepanum, in the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. Her son Constantine renamed the city "Helenopolis" after her death around 330 AD, which supports the belief that the city was indeed her birthplace.
...Fourth-century sources, following Eutropius' Breviarium, record that she came from a humble background. Bishop Ambrose of Milan, writing in the late 4th century was the first to call her a stabularia, a term translated as "stable-maid" or "inn-keeper". He makes this comment a virtue, calling Helena a bona stabularia, a "good stable-maid”. Other sources, especially those written after Constantine's proclamation as emperor, gloss over or ignore her background.
Both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Henry of Huntingdon promoted a popular tradition that Helena was a British princess and the daughter of "Old King Cole". This led to the later dedication of 135 churches in England to her, many in around the area of Yorkshire, and revived as a suggestion in the 20th century in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.
It is unknown where she first met Constantius. The historian Timothy Barnes has suggested that Constantius, while serving under Emperor Aurelian, could have met her while stationed in Asia Minor for the campaign against Zenobia. It is said that upon meeting they were wearing identical silver bracelets; Constantius saw her as his soulmate sent by God. ...The precise legal nature of the relationship between Helena and Constantius is also unknown. The sources are equivocal on the point, sometimes calling Helena Constantius' "wife", and sometimes, following the dismissive propaganda of Constantine's rival Maxentius, calling her his "concubine".Jerome, perhaps confused by the vague terminology of his own sources, manages to do both."
That Helena and Constantine were packed off to Diocletian's court after Constantius divorced her and married the daughter of the co-emperor Maximian (the Diocletian Tetrarchy is *complicated* arrangement) must have been an interesting arrangement, if Helena was a Christian then, given Diocletian's fame for the Great Persecution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution
Whether or not you believe the story of the heavenly vision/dream before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge, there seems to be fair enough grounds to imagine that Constantine was influenced by his mother, probably sympathetic at the very least to her faith, and Diocletian's last Great Persecution was the last gasp of trying to destroy Christianity which was already becoming established. Once Constantine had won all his battles with the other claimants to the imperial throne and established himself, it would have been safe then for him openly to declare himself a Christian. He didn't exactly need to do so, however, because being a pagan Emperor tolerant of Christians and indeed supportive of them was also possible, so I don't think we can discount an element of true belief alongside whatever political and social advantage is attributed to his decision.
Well, this is certainly the review for me! Congratulations on this, very informative and well-laid out!
Now, it wouldn't be a proper comment without some demurral, so I want to disagree a little about the Vandals and North Africa. Rome had long been dependent on Egyptian (and North African) wheat to supplement its own production. Indeed, Rome *couldn't* produce enough wheat to feed its own population - in that manner, it is reminiscent of many modern nations - see this set of statistics about the United Kingdom, where domestic food production accounts for 55% of all food consumed, the remainder being imported: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/food-statistics-pocketbook/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-global-and-uk-supply
"The issue of state intervention deserves closer scrutiny. The basic aim of the imperial annona was to supply an annual ration of 60 modii of wheat, somewhat more than an adult male needed, to 200,000 ticket-holders at Rome and some 350,000 soldiers, that is at most 25% of the total wheat demand of the city of Rome, assuming one million inhabitants, and a tiny fraction of the empire’s total population of, say, fifty million.
... The common concern of imperial and local officials in a highly urbanised and civilian society with a strong civic ideology was that their cities, the embodiment of their regime, should appear prosperous and happy, and that meant avoiding severe food shortages which might provoke unsettling riots by aggrieved citizens.
...In conclusion, the market in wheat in the Roman empire was essentially a free market, comprising and being influenced by the administered market of the imperial annona and civic interventions. Rome’s achievement deserves recognition. For several centuries an urban population of around 30% of the total, and more if we include the nonfarming element in rural communities, was provided with a reliable supply of wheat at reasonable prices, at least in the main urban centres. It is striking that no serious food shortage at Rome is attested after AD 60 until the Antonine plague in the late 160s. "
So the annona was not simply a matter of feeding "useless mouths", which is where I take exception with your conclusion about "North Africa was required to grow grains for the politically irrelevant citizens of Rome." Egypt was astoundingly fertile by the standards of the time, able to produce two and even three harvests in the year. The grain grown there was feeding *all* the Empire, not just the layabout plebs in the city of Rome itself. As to "The land should have been put to more productive uses. As soon as the Vandals took control of north Africa, the land was put to more productive uses", I think you are overlooking this. If the idea is "well, if North Africa grew other crops or was used more productively, why couldn't the imperial citizens simply switch to other foodstuffs or buy those products?" is rather like saying "why was the Famine such a big deal, why didn't the Irish just buy other food instead of potatoes?"
It's a bit more complicated than that.
As to the Vandals themselves, they were in a sense "barbarians" but they had already been semi-civilised, which is why they could take over the North African cities they had raided and captured and run them successfully. For a start, they were already Christians - though Arians, which put them at odds with their Catholic and Donatist subjects in cities like Hippo. They had been driven out of the Iberian peninsula by Roman alliances with other local tribes and later waves of invaders and set up their kingdom in North Africa which flourished for a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandals
To go off on a tangent, given that after the collapse of the Vandal Kingdom the remainder were either shipped off to Byzantium or integrated into the local African populations, and that they are described as "For they all have white bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon", could this possibly be the ancestry of the literary trope of "lost cities in Africa ruled over by white kings/queens"?
I don't think Carthage was ever associated more with sub-Saharan Africa than Mediterranean civilization, even before the Vandals arrived. Genetically speaking, North Africans tend to cluster more with the Middle East (and that region was genetically shifted toward SSA after the rise of Islam, hence endogamous religious minorities being closer to what we see in ancient DNA).
Speaking of legends & tropes though, Ethiopia being eastern Christian did help promote the idea of finding "Prester John" to ally with against the Muslims.
The "white queen ruling a lost empire in Africa" does seem to have been a Victorian to Edwardian genre, from H. Rider Haggard to Edgar Rice Burroughs, so the Vandal kingdom probably wasn't a direct inspiration (although who knows? Classical education may have had an influence!)
It'd be an interesting setting for anyone wanting to write a fantasy story/game setting, though; the Vandals after their defeat amalgamating with the north African realms around them, maybe pushing into the centre of the continent, and trailing behind them stories that become legends of "the white-skinned people ruling lost African cities"?
North Africans, like Berbers, are already basically white-skinned. Look at a picture of Zinedine Zidane. Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" is seat near South Africa, while "She" is set in the interior from east Africa. Neither of those is north Africa, which the Victorians knew was more like the Middle East.
I went on a wikipedia binge about the indigenous Tamazigh people and their language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_languages) about a year ago. Although their language is from the broader Afroasiatic family, which Punich/Phoenician/Carthaginian, and Hebrew/Arabic/Aramaic are also from, it's a separate branch of the family (just as the successive Celtic, Romance, and Germanic languages that were spoken in Great Britain were from separate branches of the Indo-European family).
Now a few other branches of the Afroasiatic family are spoken primarily by darker skinned sub-Saharan peoples (notably Hausa in Nigeria and Chad, and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia/Eritrea). And I don't know what the consensus is on Egyptian.
But the indigenous Berbers of the area did speak a language related to Phoenician and Hebrew and Arabic and Egyptian. I assume this person is using "Carthage" as a metonym for the whole region, including the pre-Punic population.
"barbarian militias, “little more than freelance pillagers and highwaymen,”
They were a bit more important than that; they regularly defeated Roman armies.
"Altogether, it was civil war – and no bloodthirsty drive of their own – that had moved barbarian militias from one end of the Roman West to the other in under a generation.”"
Constantine III's rebellion was surely a reason for Alaric's invasion of Italy, but he was acting on his own. Same for Gaiseric and the Bonifatius/Aetius war.
"For the most part, barbarian militias did not set out to conqueror."
True enough, but their conquests were important. The Visigoths battled for Narbonne and the Vandals successfully conquered Hippo Regius and Carthage.
"He blames the fractional violence among the Roman elites."
Certainly partly true, but the empire was in very poor shape during the 20 years of Aetius's rule despite a notable lack of factional conflict.
This may be too abstract or just plain wrong, but my impression from reading this is that just by being something in particular, systems are fragile because they're necessarily leaving something out, and that something can undercut the system.
If you will allow me to riff on the theme a bit, what you might be getting at is that *any* governing system has to make some initially somewhat arbitrary choices about how it's going to get stuff done -- everything from the nature of elections and how power is apportioned, to how disputes get settled, the social mythology that binds everyone in common goals, et cetera.
But as time goes by, these choices almost inevitably become hardened, inflexible, encrusted by too many vested interests and interlocking power structures to (1) be flexible in times of crisis (e.g. external enemies, or environmental change), and (2) remain in their demands on society proportionate to their benefit -- that is, they can spawn parasitic institutions that suck the life from the polity.
I agree that arbitrary choices leading to inflexibility is part of the problem, but I was specifically thinking that having the non-pleb poor in large numbers turned out to open an opportunity for corrosion.
Candidates for a similar role in the modern world: stateless people. In the US, we have a left (if my sample is fair, it probably isn't) which wants to just make the right disappear and a right which wants to pretend no one is getting hurt by the system.
I keep thinking about the environmentalist idea that you can't actually throw anything "away", you can only throw it somewhere.
Well, but I think it still fits within the paradigm, once you consider the time evolution. See, the poor scroungers weren't a threat to the stability of Rome early on, because they had upward mobility: join the legions, fight for Rome, get a grant in a colony somewhere, your kids will be born citizens and your grandkids might become equites.
I suggest it's the chance to better yourself (or at least your family) that tends to keep the poorest more or less loyal to the system -- it's only when you feel locked into poverty and powerlessness forever, along with your descendants to the <i>N</i> generation, that you become fed up and desperate enough to riot.
And this plan worked fine -- as long as Rome was rapidly expanding, and there were more lands to conquer, and plenty of newly conquered people to form new lowest stratums of society. But when Rome stopped expanding -- what then? It seems not unlikely she needed some serious reconstruction of her social mythology and social structures.
But she couldn't, because the existing structures had become fossilized. They were functional in AD 1, but had become inappropriate (and encrusted with parasitic features) by AD 400.
"The more I learn about history, the more I realize that conquest is overrated and raiding is underrated."
Raiding has been more common, because it is easier. But the stationary bandit can steal more than the roving bandit over the long run.
"Another inefficient equilibrium was north Africa growing grain for the Roman annona. The land should have been put to more productive uses."
Growing grain sounds like a productive use. That the grain was taxed and sent to Rome is a pecuniary externality. If there was a marginal tax rate on the amount of grain grown, that could be a disincentive, but a Georgist land tax can be efficient.
Overall I thought this was a pretty good but, not great review. I learned a lot about an interesting time period that I thought I knew fairly well, so that's always appreciated. But I don't know if there were any really shocking insights or the like. Also, and this isn't a major flaw but is something that sticks out compared to the other reviews, there's an awful lot of misspelled words. Overall, still glad I read it but still left thinking it could be better.
Anywho, new rankings:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd The Wizard and the Prophet
4th Double Fold
5th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
I think this book would pair well with a reading of Nietzche's attempts to trace the transformation of the morals of antiquity into medieval Christian morals. His interest is primarily in the psychological change taking place in individual minds, and how that later affects the world order, but in a sense, a lot of his work re: transformation in moral valuations is an attempt to understand why Roman elites were ripe for conversion to Christianity. Or It at least strikes me as a historically grounded way to think about the impacts and causes of slave and master morality, and how they relate to the fall of Rome and Christianity's rise.
Great review, and a great general lesson: "The more I learn about history, the more I realize that conquest is overrated and raiding is underrated."
This makes a lot of sense.
You might have added: No-end-in-sight raiding is more likely to lead to the collapse of a system, than conquest. Empires (and states) disintegrate not following conquest, but due to the attrition of never-ending raiding.
The classic definition of a state (applies also to empires) is an organisation that maintains a monopoly on the use of violence within a territory (courtesy of Max Weber). Countinous raiding destroys the economy (why grow/produce/create something when there is a high probability that someone will come and steal it anyway), which limits the state's/empire's taxation capability (fewer things to tax), which limits its ability to pay a sufficiently large army/coercive apparatus to maintain its monopoly on violence, which leads to more raiding. And so on.
The classic (light game-theoretic) treatment of this insight is Mancur Olson's article Dictatorship, Democracy and Development in American Political Science Review no. 3 1993.
(It could have been subtitled: Why it is better to be exploited by stationary bandits than by roving bandits.)
...And then there are Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince, both offering advice on how to dig a territory out of the ditch of roving-ness, to return to the blessed state where one stationary bandit rules us all.
"In many places, olive oil went from a common commodity to 'an almost supernatural luxury' used to fuel church lamps."
Olive oil still has that role in the Catholic Church to this day. The three anointing oils are made from it; chrism has a perfume mixed into it, usually balsam. If you've not seen the word "chrism" before, yes, I know what you're thinking and it is very funny. The standard etymology is from the Greek χρίειν, "to anoint". I find it pleasant to speculate from time to time about the reification of the role of bodily fluids in pagan rituals and how this might connect to the story of Cain & Abel.
From 2010 the dedication of the church of La Sagrada Familia and consecration of the altar (from about 1 hr 42 mins in) by Pope Benedict where the chrism is poured onto the altar and spread around; bishops bless the pillars of the church by marking them with the sign of the cross using chrism (this is why you will see small crosses painted or otherwise marked around the walls of a church, to indicate where this blessing has been done); then incense is burned on the altar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCSoGUWyGo0
"If I was knowledgeable on Catholic theology and ancient heresies then it may have been more interesting. I don’t know much more than Sunday school level theology – I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God."
Oh, Augustine's writing is very interesting and well worth your time. There's an anecdote from the _Confessions_ that I like very much as an illustration of the degree to which the past is a foreign country. Augustine remarks that one day he came into the rooms of his teacher, Ambrose, and found him reading silently. This was an unusual faculty according to his telling; the custom for literate people in those days was to vocalize words as they read them, or at least to form the shapes with their mouths. I've tried to develop the habit of doing this when I read poetry to force myself to feel the rhyme, meter and scansion, because otherwise, I blitz through it too quickly to appreciate the shape of the words. It's hard for me to imagine vocalizing what I read all the time, though, it would slow me down too much to get through my work.
One suspects that until the printing press was invented, your opportunities for re-reading the same book were very limited -- books were excedingly rare things -- so I would guess there was a good reason to try to commit as much of it as possible to memory.
I'm noticing that none of the book review contest entries so far are well proofread. You guys know you have to do that, right? Spellcheck doesn't catch punctuation errors, grammatical errors, or many transpositions or other word errors. For example, this review has "tracks" for "tracts," "fractional" for "factional," "burned" for "burden"...I could go on, but I don't want to pick on this entry in particular since it seems to be a global problem with all the book reviewers, and distracts from their points. Try having someone else proofread it, or go a few days without looking at the document and then proofread it yourself.
"The curiales took care of almost every task of government on behalf of Respublica, except for high justice and the army. Curiales were responsible for police, road maintenance, fortifications, and the collection of taxes. The power and status of being a member of the curiales also came a supreme burden – the curiales were responsible for making up any shortfalls in tax revenue."
...
"For future research, I want to understand if our current society is secretly ruled by local elites. If not, then what happened to them?"
I think there's a connection to legibility and Seeing like a State here. The major service the curiales provided, from the perspective of the Emperor, was legibility. It may not have been a fair system, but it was very easy to administrate. If you want to know if a curiale has paid the appropriate amount of tax, you multiply the tax rate times the area of land they administer. Tax fraud is impossible, by definition. If a curiale has extracted more wealth from the people in their area than the Emperor expected, then they're legally entitled to keep it.
For that reason, I wouldn't expect the aristocracy trend to continue to the present day. There are better ways of establishing legibility now.
"The core of the 530 page book uses the writings of the pagan Symmachus and the Christian writers Ambrose, Jerome, Pelagius, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, John Cassian, Pinianus, Melania the Younger, and Salvian of Marseilles. I found these pieces of the book a little dry and overly theological. Their works are the primary sources from the era, so I understand why they were the focus of the book. If I was knowledgeable on Catholic theology and ancient heresies then it may have been more interesting. I don’t know much more than Sunday school level theology – I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God.
Brown uses these primary sources to narrate the entry of the rich into the Christian churches of the western Roman empire. Christ said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The Church transformed the rich and the rich transformed the church. Many rich Christians gave their wealth to the church – during their life or after their death."
St. Jerome, for instance, is important here for the "entry of the rich into the Christian churches". As well as having a reputation as a Biblical scholar and translator, and as being one of the worst-tempered saints, he had a great deal of influence on wealthy Roman women and the role of women in adopting Christianity is one that is perhaps not fully appreciated (I am not up on my feminist theology so I have no idea if they cover this). Chunks of quotes from Wikipedia to follow:
"The protégé of Pope Damasus I who died in December of 384, Jerome was known for his teachings on Christian moral life, especially to those living in cosmopolitan centers such as Rome. In many cases, he focused his attention on the lives of women and identified how a woman devoted to Jesus should live her life. This focus stemmed from his close patron relationships with several prominent female ascetics who were members of affluent senatorial families.
...In Rome, Jerome was surrounded by a circle of well-born and well-educated women, including some from the noblest patrician families, such as the widows Lea, Marcella and Paula, with Paula's daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. The resulting inclination of these women towards the monastic life, away from the indulgent lasciviousness in Rome, and his unsparing criticism of the secular clergy of Rome, brought a growing hostility against him among the Roman clergy and their supporters. Soon after the death of his patron Pope Damasus I on 10 December 384, Jerome was forced to leave his position at Rome after an inquiry was brought up by the Roman clergy into allegations that he had an improper relationship with the widow Paula. Still, his writings were highly regarded by women who were attempting to maintain a vow of becoming a consecrated virgin.
...Jerome was a scholar at a time when that statement implied a fluency in Greek. He knew some Hebrew when he started his translation project, but moved to Jerusalem to strengthen his grip on Jewish scripture commentary. A wealthy Roman aristocrat, Paula, funded his stay in a monastery in Bethlehem and he completed his translation there. He began in 382 by correcting the existing Latin-language version of the New Testament, commonly referred to as the Vetus Latina. By 390 he turned to translating the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew, having previously translated portions from the Septuagint which came from Alexandria. He believed that the mainstream Rabbinical Judaism had rejected the Septuagint as invalid Jewish scriptural texts because of what were ascertained as mistranslations along with its Hellenistic heretical elements
...Due to the time he spent in Rome among wealthy families belonging to the Roman upper-class, Jerome was frequently commissioned by women who had taken a vow of virginity to write to them in guidance of how to live their life. As a result, he spent a great deal of his life corresponding with these women about certain abstentions and lifestyle practices."
So it was the support of these wealthy and well-connected women that enabled St. Jerome to stand against the enemies he made within the Roman clergy, and that supported him to work on his translations of the Scriptures. And in turn, Jerome's guidance and direction buttressed the status of these women in the nascent Christian society of the times, and their influence in how it was adopted and lived.
That's very interesting, I only ever knew of Jerome because of the Vulgate. The role of a confessor for the wealthy in the medieval period is an interesting one and it sounds as if Jerome helped to lay the foundations of that societal role. Its nearest equivalent in the contemporary world would be a therapist, but the purpose of the relationship and the relative standing between the participants is very different.
Yes, the interesting thing is that while St. Jerome is writing to everyone and writing about heresies etc., what he is also doing is being a mentor to (and supported by) wealthy Roman women - widows, their daughters, other women who are Christians. He's not mingling so much with the *men* at that level of society. Now this may be partly because Jerome is inclined to be an ascetic and to have a very strong inclination to monasticism, only agreeing to be ordained under pressure, but it's also interesting that he's a personal protegé of the pope yet is on poor terms with the Roman clergy.
He follows his natural inclinations, heads off to the Holy Land to engage in scholarship and live as a monk, but he is still supported by and followed by Paula and some other women. I know there's a strain of (polemical) writing which denounces Christianity and/or the Roman Catholic version of it as being a faith for women (instead of Real Manly Men who should be sticking to the pagan virtues), but I do wonder about the influence of rich/respectable Roman women on spreading Christianity and getting it accepted into the ranks of the upper classes and those involved in government, from its beginnings as a religion popular with the poor, slaves, and the lower classes.
You can argue that women are naturally more 'religious' than men, but there does seem to have been *something* in Christianity which had a very strong appeal to women at the time. From our modern viewpoint it may seem difficult to understand why or how women who had money, status, and were independent of men would want to be consecrated virgins or lead ascetic lives, taking on restrictions, but maybe in a way Christianity offered them equality and independence that they couldn't get otherwise, in some form? It's a fascinating question.
"You can argue that women are naturally more 'religious' than men, but there does seem to have been *something* in Christianity which had a very strong appeal to women at the time."
Conventionally, this something is taken to be liberty. For example, there was a system in place in the early Church which it's hard not to describe as a scam, whereby wealthy widows would donate everything they owned to the Church; the Church would then put them in charge of "administering" these holdings for the rest of the widow's life. Why? Because in Rome, a woman couldn't own property. By doing this, the widows evaded their husband's property and their own persons falling into the hands of the nearest male relative, and they were able to spend it as they preferred as long as they didn't engage in gross impiety, which old women aren't the group most prone to anyway. Obviously, this was a win/win for the Church and the widows; the rightful heir was the one who got robbed.
But also, as much as the Catholic Church get shit for being regressive about women now, it was extremely progressive in general about women's role compared to old Roman law.
If a woman couldn't own property, how could she donate anything to the Church?
The version I've read is that a widow was the legal owner of her late husband's property, but she had restrictions on how she could spend it; the idea was that she should be able to support herself but not able to waste the money (which would pass to her husband's kin after her own death). However, one of the things she was allowed to do without restriction was donate to a temple, and the Church was legally a temple.
"Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one."
Christianity was declared the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380.
Part of the story of the modern era is the concealment of power and the the diffusion of responsibility. Systems with no one to blame out-competed the others.
There's certainly still local elites, though I think some combination of more reporting, anti-corruption laws, the brain drain and subsequent national dispersal of graduates of elite national universities, a culture that exposes even obscure local politics to national attention, and perhaps the relatively dynamic economy of the US makes the local elites less dominant, or at least, less publicly dominant.
Nowadays you could go to the most expensive charity galas or most prestigious dinner invitations in your local city to find these local elites. Some combination of local businesspeople, property owners, politicians, very influential media-types, presidents of local universities, maybe the chairman of the hospital, etc.
Local elites can't buy the law they want, at least not in any straightforward way, but they'll certainly have much more influence than the average citizen. Their outraged statements about some proposed highway extension or whatever will get into the newspaper.
It all feels much more obscured and illegible than it used to be, I think likely in response to the increased scrutiny of modern life.
The topic is interesting but the writing and analysis here weren't as compelling to me as some other entries. The connections to game theory and equilibria feel forced and insufficiently motivated, and the sometimes casual tone is distracting. Props for a thorough and thoughtful treatment of the book's content, though.
The Mediterranean trade being in decline in the 2nd century should be seen in the light of outlying regions of the Empire becoming more Romanized and productive, and, thus, needing less from the Mediterranean.
Trade brings increased productivity by enabling each region to specialize in whatever goods it's best at producing. Self-sufficiency is primitive and brings poverty.
This is not necessarily the case. China has become more self-sufficient over the past decade, but also obviously richer.
The difference there seems to be in what kind of thing you are self sufficient in?
China has been engaging in increasing trade and extractive industry across Asia and Africa - it has been becoming if anything less self sufficient in primary industries and heavy secondary industry - while becoming more self sufficient in lighter / more technical secondary, and tertiary / quaternary industry.
Self sufficiency in primary industry is primitive, but being able to produce your own advanced technological goods is a step up from having to import them.
There's then a further step where you outsource that again and only do the design / cutting edge work locally, but that so far seems to have much more mixed results than outsourcing your primary industry and simple manufacturing.
Consider also how much more expensive transport was before fossil fuels and therefore how much more limited was the set of goods that could be profitably exported.
Trade to and from china hasn't exactly decreased in that time has it? In contrast, ports in and around china have become the bussiest in the world.
This is where I need the like button.
It has decreased relative to GDP.
I suspect it has to do with the fact that Local elites were there largest employer in the area. These days the largest employer is a corporation, often without a person or family to assign to it. John Deere is certainly the patron of my area, sponsoring sports, festivals, and construction.
You must not live too far from me, then. I grew up in Decatur, IL and the family that first springs to mind in association with that town is the Andreas family. Dwayne Andreas was the long time CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, by far the largest employer. My dad and two brothers all work for ADM, and thank Christ my brothers got in there, the pickings are slim otherwise.
It was very odd, in many ways, to grow up in a town of less than 100,000 that had the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company located in it. You saw their name somewhere in nearly every institution that needed to solicit private donations. IIRC the local college, Millikin, opened a business school whose primary audience were ADM managers studying for MBAs. Mikhail Gorbachev visited Decatur when I was a kid on his post-Soviet inevitably doomed bid for continued relevance, and he came there because of Dwayne Andreas. Andreas' granddaughter was a classmate of mine my freshman year at St. Teresa, the local Catholic school. There was no nearby super-elite independent school like Harvard-Westlake; they had to mix with the _hoi polloi_ to a certain extent, though I think the upper management did spend most of their free time at the country club.
Unfortunately for the Andreases, the heir apparent, Dwayne's son Mick, got caught in a price-fixing scandal, as documented in Kurt Eichenwald's excellent book _The Informant_, and so this multinational corporation which had in some ways been run like a family-owned firm passed out of their control. Within 10 years, the upper management decamped to Chicago, though all the plants are still there in Decatur. You're not going to move those away from the corn & beans.
Now the local _eminence grise_ is Howard Buffett, who, despite his father's far-sighted wisdom in recognizing that a large inheritance is a curse on your children, not a blessing, spends his days as the Undersheriff of Macon County. When Illinois legalized cannabis, he gave $500K to hire a deputy who would be specially trained to do blood draws at the side of the road since there's no equivalent of the breathalyzer for cannabis intoxication. I've never been so glad that I live in the People's Republic of Urbana as I was when I read that.
https://www.sheriff-macon-il.us/Undersheriff.html
https://capitolfax.com/2019/12/17/decatur-police-will-use-blood-tests-to-check-drivers-for-pot-use/
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2013/07/economies-of-scale-killed-american-dream.html suggests that part of the reason why local elites are diminished in the US is the centralization of elite competition & of selection of entrants into the elite. His theory is that this change represents the fact that people now tend to enter a nationwide political & economic elite by attending prestigious universities & then work & live with other educated elites & so be less connected to & less directly influential on non-elites than in the past (he attributes the change partly to the large-scale businesses enabled by late-19th- & early-20th-century industrialization, partly to the persistence of centralized government after World War 2) when rich & influential people were more evenly distributed across the country & their influence extended over a smaller area.
Perhaps the point is - you used to be able to be a big fish in a small pond, but nowadays we are all in the big pond whether we like it or not?
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-gentry
An interesting read, as is this:
https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladders-in-america-archive/
I think you're right, but there are still reasons to have local elites in a number of fields. Obviously any business that depends closely on a physical location, including chains of stores, large and expensive buildings, or obviously farming/direct land use, is going to lend itself more to a local elite. International banking has probably been outside of the scope of local elites (unless you live in London or New York) for a long time, because it's naturally non-local. Professional sports also comes to mind as something controlled by local elites, at least in terms of the local team.
I live in a pretty small town, and you can see evidence of 5-10 families having a huge amount of influence. They tend to have local businesses that would be difficult to outsource, including car dealerships (three of the families).
Until recently, banking in the US was dominated by banks that weren't allowed to operate across state lines. I seem to recall that in 1998, I needed to open a new bank account when I went to California for college, because the bank my parents used in New Jersey had only merged with a few other east coast banks, and hadn't yet joined into a national conglomerate, the way they all are now.
They had, and still have, multiple Federal Reserve banks access the country.
Additionally, the use of tracks instead of tracts of land
massive agricultural estates, “latifundium”, worked by slaves or serfs. → "latifundia"; "latifundium" is singular
laid a heavy tax burned on the empire → burden
The results drew a "poverty line" between the areas of society where the golden solidus circulated and a bleak social hinterland where the solidus was absent or difficult to obtain.” — a quote mark has been added or omitted.
This man had been a “rusticuli” → "rusticulus"; "rusticuli" is plural
A landlord often owed storehouses, so he could sell when prices were highest. → owned
The monotheist strains that adapts and exploits all available societal resources — either "strains" should be singular or "adapts and exploits" should be plural.
Also there are a couple cases of "equilibrium" where it seems like it should instead be the plural "equilibria".
laid a heavy tax burned on the empire.
burden ??
"Are most cities and towns still run by a handful of old aristocratic families and I somehow have never noticed?"
Yes, I think so: at least in rural areas. I grew up near three small villages, no more than 200 people in any of them, and the Adams were the gentry in at least two of them: they owned two gas stations, a hamburger stand, and a hardware store among other things. They didn't have a mansion or anything, but everybody in those villages knew the Adams: they were a "preeminent family" you might say. If something big needed to get done, you could bet the Adams would have their fingers in it. And if you were a local boy and you needed a job, then you'd go to the Adams first.
A nearby town I went to High School at had a population around 2,500. The big man there was Mr. Heinz. He owned the pharmacy, and he must have owned a lot more I was never told about because he had a mansion up on the hill. He'd sponsor local sporting events, and was generally one of the "big men about town." I went to school with his daughter, and she was notable for being the only person in our rural school with a convertible.
There are thousands of small towns all across America, and in most of them you can find a big man or two who "own half the town": usually not literally half, but maybe half or more of anything that's worth owning, like businesses. And in farm country there are always a few big farmers who own most of the land, or the mill and feed, or both. If you haven't seen it then I would guess you don't come from rural areas: in the big city you can own $10 million in real estate and be invisible among a crown of others who own the same or more, which in a small town $10 million would make you the local nob.
Yes, it doesn't seem so secret to me, even in smaller cities. I'm from York, PA (city > 30k, county ~ 250k) and everybody knows the handful of families who make things happen, including the Wolfs (Tom is now governor of PA), the Kinsleys (construction), etc. Look at the board of any major local non-profit foundation if you want to see who these people are in a city.
That said, I think there are two meaningful differences in our own time. One is that post-civil service reforms (Pendleton Act of 1883 in the US; Northcote Report of 1855 in the UK; Napoleon in France) there was a semi-permanent separation between economic and governmental functions. People can and do use power amassed in one sphere to cross over, but it's no longer automatic, which makes it often more efficient to separate the duties and bankroll a candidate rather than running yourself as in earlier periods. That makes the economic elites less visible.
The other major factor, much more recent, is the vast increase in firm scale after the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s and 80s (see especially the demise of the Interstate Commerce Commission). Profit tends to be extracted more readily at the top, so bosses of mid-size firms have a lot more free cash flow than mid-level executives of large firms, and even those often tend to relocate to superstar cities now. That means smaller cities simply have fewer people of note and in larger cities the competition is much tougher.
I came here to say basically this. I grew up in a few different small rural towns in the midwest USA and all had very recognizable 'big men' who owned major local business and were very involved in local politics.
The concept of american aristocratic families is covered well here: https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-gentry
Thank you for that link! I had read that article a few months ago and wanted to link it, but I couldn't find it.
The famous science fiction novel ‘Canticle for Leibowitz’ has the Catholic Church be the only organization of significance to survive the nuclear war, for reasons similar to what you have described in Rome. But it takes place in Utah, which kind of wrecked my suspension of disbelief; while reading it, I kept thinking “The religious organization that runs Utah after the nuclear war is *not* going to be Catholic...”
I read the book as saying something more subtle. It's less that the Church is the only major organization that survives -- there are plenty of post-Apocalyptic power organizations -- but that it's the only one that survives *unchanged*, which has a sense of continuity that runs all the way back pre-Deluge (and much further). There is a giant tension throughout that book between the continuity which is wisdom and humility, and the continuity which is repeated cycles of folly and making the same damn mistakes for the same dumb reasons.
The Battle Mass said by the Pope as the cycle closes for the second time sticks in my mind to this day.
I don't know about *unchanged* - I'm pretty sure the Vatican moved to Denver and when the novice arrives there he's struck by how it's falling into poverty - but you're definitely right that it has enough continuity to survive the cycles.
If I remember correctly I enjoyed that book until the final third when the story seemed to jump the tracks. Damn. I think I dropped my copy in the book donation bin a couple years ago. Lemme see if it’s held by my library...
On this point, Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" tetralogy (beginning with "Too Like the Lightning...") is worth a read. It's set in a 25th century that is still run by a few familiar organizations, but in unfamiliar roles (the EU, Mitsubishi, the Freemasons, the Olympics Committee...) and a few sites of hereditary authority that are still respected (the King of Spain, the Roman senate) despite all the changes to the idea of the geographic nation-state, religion, and gender.
Really interesting. Thanks for the review. I'm really curious if there were intellectual benefits to Christianity, i.e. did Constantine co-opt Christianity for a specific political purpose? It seems rather odd that a politician would elevate a newly emerging religion. It must have been able to foster some intellectual legitimacy at the time.
So, I used to be more cynical of Constantine's motives in supporting Christianity. But I think there's decent evidence that Constantine had genuine faith, and that his embrace of Christianity wasn't simply a calculated, cynical political move:
* His support for Christianity comes after he is securely established in power.
The idea that he embraced Christianity so that he'd have the political support of Christians would make a lot more sense if he had done it in the early part of his rule when he was competing for power against a number of other claimants, like a modern politician paying lip service to a faith to curry votes.
Instead it's only after he's firmly installed in power that he beings pro-Christian reforms, which is behavior a lot more consistent to his claim of a sudden conversion at Milvian Bridge.
* A lot of his pro-Christian reforms negatively impacted the empire's bottom line.
The Edict of Milan not only instituted tolerance for Christianity, but returned confiscated property *at the state's expense*, as well as other costly policies, like tax exemptions, promoting church officials to high positions, and church building, including huge 30 year projects like The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Old Saint Peter's Basilica.
He did some looting of pagan temples, but only pretty late in his reign - it may have recouped some of the money spent on Christianity, but certainly doesn't work as a motive.
---
So I'm not sure what the gain was, if it wasn't financial.
The idea that this was some galaxy brain play on Constantine's part seems to lean too much on him "reading the script", we know Christianity would go on to be the dominant power for a millennium, so we assume that's what he had in mind.
But I think the simplest answer here may be the correct one, and Constantine's adoption and support of the faith may be exactly what he always claimed it was: the result of a sincere faith.
I don't think I've ever bought the overly cynical take on Constantine's conversion either. However, accounts that he didn't technically convert until his deathbed seem accurate to me. He did seem very interested in getting into the weeds of Christian administration with the council of Nicea and the Arian controversies, as well as expelling Athanasius to Trier (though that seems like it was for threatening to withhold the Alexandrian grain supply). Even if his belief wasn't cynical, I still think explanations for how this new religion was able to bolster its legitimacy to the highest echelons of the Empire deserve some kind of rigorous intellectual explanation. An explanation that always seems to be elusive. I think Christianity must have held some pretty intense ontological attraction for the most educated people of the day to think it was worth converting to. What that ontological attraction was may be lost to history, but it would be interesting to see someone try to recover it.
My understanding is that the "deathbed conversion" came from a belief that you needed to be baptized *after* your sins for them to be forgiven. I think this belief is a bit theologically confused (at least by my modern Protestant viewpoint) - but a sincere belief. (If he converted for more cynical reasons, why bother carrying on the farce on his deathbed)
---
As for why Christianity was so attractive in general, well, beyond and points of specific belief in its specific claims regarding the life (and afterlife) of Jesus, it was basically proto-liberalism, and attractive for many of the same reasons.
People might view some aspects of Christian teaching as regressive today, but it was undoubtedly progressive compared to the culture of its day - it did a lot to level out social class differences (e.g. wealth, gender, slave free) and transcend political boundaries of city and state (as this essay mentions).
I think, living in a culture that's steeped in Christianity for a millennium, we often miss just how revolutionary it was.
I know for you want to make sure you are forgiven at point of death, whether by baptism or otherwise. There is a scene in Hamlet where Hamlet chooses not to kill Claudius when the latter is in a confession booth. Reasoning that if he kills the King now he will have just been forgiven and will surely enter heaven (something Hamlet wants to avoid).
Christianity drew heavily on the dominant neo-Platonist philosophy of the time, if you're looking for "ontological attraction". A version of it that was less abstract, with more popular appeal.
Christianity also comes with a sense of cosmic justice. Paganism lacked this completely. People are very susceptible to the Just World Fallacy. A religion that incorperates a sense of justice is bound to be more appealing than that doesn't Even Christians and Muslims today bring it up a lot in their apologia. (see also: Buddhism)
You might be interested in this:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/05/05/how-the-old-gods-die/
This one would be more relevant to the book being reviewed:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/04/27/the-rise-of-a-christian-elite/
For what it's worth (probably about what it costs you), my vague opinion is that by late Empire days, the burdens of "Roman civic honor" were almost intolerable to the young scion of a high-class family. The civic virtues were just too God-damned demanding in intolerant of human weakness. Everyone knew you, you always had eyes on you, you had to stay within this brutal straitjacket of expectations in order to be deemed tolerable, and there was no mercy if you slipped up. (Not to mention, it would be obvious to you that a great deal of this virtue framework was in practice executed hypocritically, and people moved in and out of approval for crass political and social reasons.)
One of the powerful attractions of Christianity as a religion is that its central tenet is redemption. It is *always* possible to repent and be forgiven, even as late as when you are hanging on the cross. Redemption is a key theme of the Gospels (aside from the central story), the Epistles, and it runs all through the assorted rituals of the Church. It's on reason Catholicism has often thrived in places of great bad luck, among the conquered, in prisons.
If you were high-born in the late Empire, and you felt a sense of despair as things seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and those to whom you were supposed to look for leadership came to be seen as influence-grubbing shitheads, underneath, you might find Christianity powerfully attractive, in its promise of redemption and renewal. I would think the attraction might be even greater for an unusuallly competent man trying to plug the million holes in the dyke that might have been what it felt like trying to keep the Imperium going.
> Everyone knew you, you always had eyes on you, you had to stay within this brutal straitjacket of expectations in order to be deemed tolerable, and there was no mercy if you slipped up. (Not to mention, it would be obvious to you that a great deal of this virtue framework was in practice executed hypocritically, and people moved in and out of approval for crass political and social reasons.)
They invented Twitter.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry, honestly...
The appeal is obvious- an afterlife of eternal happiness. The pagan religions offered no such reward. They likely evolved from humans' tendency to assume things that change have minds that can be influenced. The roman dieties fit this model exactly. They are anthropomorphic, yet have control over specific natural domains, and must be appeased to have success in this domain.
This isn't especially ontological attractive, it's just a "logical" evolution of belief from primitve humanity where we develop theory of mind.
The ide of a single just God who rewards the good and punsihes the evil in just, predictable ways is definitely a more appealing ontological prospect.
I've heard that most of our ideas about the Roman deities are from satires, and we don't know much about the actual religion. Anyone know whether this is at least plausible?
I think this is so. My very amateur view from cursory reading is that the Romans had a view of the numinous but didn't nail it down to nuts-and-bolts; the Etruscans were the ones who went in for fully-developed religion, and the Romans borrowed a mix of customs from them and from the Greeks when dealing with their own native deities (e.g. identifying Mars with Ares, even though Roman Mars is different in several respects from Greek Ares, for instance having an early association with agriculture).
They had several customs and practices, the reasons for which had long been forgotten, so they cobbled together explanations for them out of folk etymology and the like. They were much stronger on "we do this sacrifice on this day because we have a bargain with this god" quid pro quo stuff, and left 'theology' (to misuse a word) to other cultures.
And of course, like everywhere, folk religion was a different thing from the official or formal religion. St. Augustine is one of those poking fun at minor gods such as the goddess of hinges, but there may be archaic traditions behind such a trivial entity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardea
A lot of people did hold off on baptism until the last minute, preferring to remain catechumens as long as possible, because the idea was that after baptism all your sins were washed away and you now entered into the new life. There were also debates in the early Church about "what happens catechumens who die or, say, are martyred *before* they can be baptised? are they condemned to hell?" because they haven't been enrolled into the church and had original sin washed clean by baptism. The answer for martyrs was eventually worked out as the baptism by blood or baptism of desire:
" Catechumens were limited as to their attendance in formal services. As unbaptized, they could not actively take part in any service, for that was reserved for those baptized. One practice permitted them to remain in the first part of the mass, but even in the earliest centuries dismissed them before the Eucharist. Others had them entering through a side door, or observing from the side, from a gallery, or near the font; while it was not unknown to bar them from all services until baptized.
Their desire for baptism was held to be sufficient guarantee of their salvation, if they died before the reception. In event of their martyrdom prior to baptism by water, this was held to be a "baptism by blood" (Baptism of desire), and they were honored as martyrs.
In the fourth century, a widespread practice arose of enrolling as a catechumen and deferring baptism for years, often until shortly before death, and when so ill that the normal practice of immersion was impossible, so that aspersion or affusion — the baptism of the sick — was necessary. Constantine was the most prominent of these catechumens."
Which is great, but also meant you had to *stop* sinning, and sects such as the Donatists springing up was an indication of the very hard line taken on falling away, back-sliding, and the like. A lot of people considered that it would be hard to live a sinless life, and then if you did fall back into your old sins, you were at very grave risk of damnation. Especially if you wanted to be a success in politics or the like - the pragmatic "gotta break eggs to make an omelette" view of what you would have to do.
So the safest bet was to live your life, hold off on full commitment as long as possible, and then get baptised on or before your deathbed - that would wipe the slate clean and pretty much assure you entry into heaven - after all, if you were on your deathbed, very little chance of committing new sins and throwing away your newly obtained salvation!
That makes sense. Augustine talks about his mother wanting him to hold off on baptism.
also
* people generally believe in their religions
Think about Mitt Romney. He is mormon, which is convenient as it means that he has the support of the Mormons in the USA. But I don't think we should assume that he is mormon just for the purpose of getting the mormon vote. The mormon faith is a religion that a lot of people genuinly believe in in it so it's not hard to see why Romney couldn't be one of them. The people of Constatine's time took religion very seriously. If you believe in one religion you wouldn't dare to confess to believe in another. What will the gods do when they find out!
* He asked to be baptised at is deathbed (he waited till then to make sure that he was completely clean at heaven's gate). What cynical benefit could he have had at that point?
Huh, I was under the impression that it was just that his mother (the future St. Helena) was really into it, and he was a good kid that was willing to go along with his mom's crazy idea.
I've read a fair deal of "so why exactly did Constantine make Christianity his state religion?" (you get a *lot* of "the corruption of the pure original Gospel Church started with the Constantinian bargain!" in online apologetics) and my own view has been 'why doesn't anyone consider he might have believed it?'
Sure, there was worldly advantage to it, but people did tend to believe in the gods, and if Constantine felt/was convinced "The new god is on your side and favours you and will give you victory", there is no reason he couldn't have genuinely believed that.
And again, mention of St. Helena is another example of "Roman women converting to Christianity", though her exact background is not well-known, she wasn't a Roman by birth and her family circumstances were humble:
"Helena's birthplace is not known with certainty. The 6th-century historian Procopius is the earliest authority for the statement that Helena was a native Greek of Drepanum, in the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. Her son Constantine renamed the city "Helenopolis" after her death around 330 AD, which supports the belief that the city was indeed her birthplace.
...Fourth-century sources, following Eutropius' Breviarium, record that she came from a humble background. Bishop Ambrose of Milan, writing in the late 4th century was the first to call her a stabularia, a term translated as "stable-maid" or "inn-keeper". He makes this comment a virtue, calling Helena a bona stabularia, a "good stable-maid”. Other sources, especially those written after Constantine's proclamation as emperor, gloss over or ignore her background.
Both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Henry of Huntingdon promoted a popular tradition that Helena was a British princess and the daughter of "Old King Cole". This led to the later dedication of 135 churches in England to her, many in around the area of Yorkshire, and revived as a suggestion in the 20th century in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.
It is unknown where she first met Constantius. The historian Timothy Barnes has suggested that Constantius, while serving under Emperor Aurelian, could have met her while stationed in Asia Minor for the campaign against Zenobia. It is said that upon meeting they were wearing identical silver bracelets; Constantius saw her as his soulmate sent by God. ...The precise legal nature of the relationship between Helena and Constantius is also unknown. The sources are equivocal on the point, sometimes calling Helena Constantius' "wife", and sometimes, following the dismissive propaganda of Constantine's rival Maxentius, calling her his "concubine".Jerome, perhaps confused by the vague terminology of his own sources, manages to do both."
That Helena and Constantine were packed off to Diocletian's court after Constantius divorced her and married the daughter of the co-emperor Maximian (the Diocletian Tetrarchy is *complicated* arrangement) must have been an interesting arrangement, if Helena was a Christian then, given Diocletian's fame for the Great Persecution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution
Whether or not you believe the story of the heavenly vision/dream before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge, there seems to be fair enough grounds to imagine that Constantine was influenced by his mother, probably sympathetic at the very least to her faith, and Diocletian's last Great Persecution was the last gasp of trying to destroy Christianity which was already becoming established. Once Constantine had won all his battles with the other claimants to the imperial throne and established himself, it would have been safe then for him openly to declare himself a Christian. He didn't exactly need to do so, however, because being a pagan Emperor tolerant of Christians and indeed supportive of them was also possible, so I don't think we can discount an element of true belief alongside whatever political and social advantage is attributed to his decision.
Well, this is certainly the review for me! Congratulations on this, very informative and well-laid out!
Now, it wouldn't be a proper comment without some demurral, so I want to disagree a little about the Vandals and North Africa. Rome had long been dependent on Egyptian (and North African) wheat to supplement its own production. Indeed, Rome *couldn't* produce enough wheat to feed its own population - in that manner, it is reminiscent of many modern nations - see this set of statistics about the United Kingdom, where domestic food production accounts for 55% of all food consumed, the remainder being imported: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/food-statistics-pocketbook/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-global-and-uk-supply
This paper on the Roman grain market doesn't cover the same period as the book under review, but I think it gives a general idea: http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/Early-Economies/Efficiency_Markets_Preindustrial_Societies/Rathbone_Amst_paper.pdf
"The issue of state intervention deserves closer scrutiny. The basic aim of the imperial annona was to supply an annual ration of 60 modii of wheat, somewhat more than an adult male needed, to 200,000 ticket-holders at Rome and some 350,000 soldiers, that is at most 25% of the total wheat demand of the city of Rome, assuming one million inhabitants, and a tiny fraction of the empire’s total population of, say, fifty million.
... The common concern of imperial and local officials in a highly urbanised and civilian society with a strong civic ideology was that their cities, the embodiment of their regime, should appear prosperous and happy, and that meant avoiding severe food shortages which might provoke unsettling riots by aggrieved citizens.
...In conclusion, the market in wheat in the Roman empire was essentially a free market, comprising and being influenced by the administered market of the imperial annona and civic interventions. Rome’s achievement deserves recognition. For several centuries an urban population of around 30% of the total, and more if we include the nonfarming element in rural communities, was provided with a reliable supply of wheat at reasonable prices, at least in the main urban centres. It is striking that no serious food shortage at Rome is attested after AD 60 until the Antonine plague in the late 160s. "
So the annona was not simply a matter of feeding "useless mouths", which is where I take exception with your conclusion about "North Africa was required to grow grains for the politically irrelevant citizens of Rome." Egypt was astoundingly fertile by the standards of the time, able to produce two and even three harvests in the year. The grain grown there was feeding *all* the Empire, not just the layabout plebs in the city of Rome itself. As to "The land should have been put to more productive uses. As soon as the Vandals took control of north Africa, the land was put to more productive uses", I think you are overlooking this. If the idea is "well, if North Africa grew other crops or was used more productively, why couldn't the imperial citizens simply switch to other foodstuffs or buy those products?" is rather like saying "why was the Famine such a big deal, why didn't the Irish just buy other food instead of potatoes?"
It's a bit more complicated than that.
As to the Vandals themselves, they were in a sense "barbarians" but they had already been semi-civilised, which is why they could take over the North African cities they had raided and captured and run them successfully. For a start, they were already Christians - though Arians, which put them at odds with their Catholic and Donatist subjects in cities like Hippo. They had been driven out of the Iberian peninsula by Roman alliances with other local tribes and later waves of invaders and set up their kingdom in North Africa which flourished for a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandals
To go off on a tangent, given that after the collapse of the Vandal Kingdom the remainder were either shipped off to Byzantium or integrated into the local African populations, and that they are described as "For they all have white bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon", could this possibly be the ancestry of the literary trope of "lost cities in Africa ruled over by white kings/queens"?
^this is the comment on the review for me. Thanks especially for the Rathbone paper.
Thank you! This is exactly the kind of book and exactly the kind of review that grabs my interest.
I don't think Carthage was ever associated more with sub-Saharan Africa than Mediterranean civilization, even before the Vandals arrived. Genetically speaking, North Africans tend to cluster more with the Middle East (and that region was genetically shifted toward SSA after the rise of Islam, hence endogamous religious minorities being closer to what we see in ancient DNA).
Speaking of legends & tropes though, Ethiopia being eastern Christian did help promote the idea of finding "Prester John" to ally with against the Muslims.
The "white queen ruling a lost empire in Africa" does seem to have been a Victorian to Edwardian genre, from H. Rider Haggard to Edgar Rice Burroughs, so the Vandal kingdom probably wasn't a direct inspiration (although who knows? Classical education may have had an influence!)
It'd be an interesting setting for anyone wanting to write a fantasy story/game setting, though; the Vandals after their defeat amalgamating with the north African realms around them, maybe pushing into the centre of the continent, and trailing behind them stories that become legends of "the white-skinned people ruling lost African cities"?
North Africans, like Berbers, are already basically white-skinned. Look at a picture of Zinedine Zidane. Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" is seat near South Africa, while "She" is set in the interior from east Africa. Neither of those is north Africa, which the Victorians knew was more like the Middle East.
I went on a wikipedia binge about the indigenous Tamazigh people and their language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_languages) about a year ago. Although their language is from the broader Afroasiatic family, which Punich/Phoenician/Carthaginian, and Hebrew/Arabic/Aramaic are also from, it's a separate branch of the family (just as the successive Celtic, Romance, and Germanic languages that were spoken in Great Britain were from separate branches of the Indo-European family).
Now a few other branches of the Afroasiatic family are spoken primarily by darker skinned sub-Saharan peoples (notably Hausa in Nigeria and Chad, and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia/Eritrea). And I don't know what the consensus is on Egyptian.
Carthage wasn't a native African city. It started as a Phoenician colony.
But the indigenous Berbers of the area did speak a language related to Phoenician and Hebrew and Arabic and Egyptian. I assume this person is using "Carthage" as a metonym for the whole region, including the pre-Punic population.
The section on the barbarians is definitely off.
"barbarian militias, “little more than freelance pillagers and highwaymen,”
They were a bit more important than that; they regularly defeated Roman armies.
"Altogether, it was civil war – and no bloodthirsty drive of their own – that had moved barbarian militias from one end of the Roman West to the other in under a generation.”"
Constantine III's rebellion was surely a reason for Alaric's invasion of Italy, but he was acting on his own. Same for Gaiseric and the Bonifatius/Aetius war.
"For the most part, barbarian militias did not set out to conqueror."
True enough, but their conquests were important. The Visigoths battled for Narbonne and the Vandals successfully conquered Hippo Regius and Carthage.
"He blames the fractional violence among the Roman elites."
Certainly partly true, but the empire was in very poor shape during the 20 years of Aetius's rule despite a notable lack of factional conflict.
Tracts of land, not tracks.
And they should be huge.
Nice review, somebody.
This may be too abstract or just plain wrong, but my impression from reading this is that just by being something in particular, systems are fragile because they're necessarily leaving something out, and that something can undercut the system.
If you will allow me to riff on the theme a bit, what you might be getting at is that *any* governing system has to make some initially somewhat arbitrary choices about how it's going to get stuff done -- everything from the nature of elections and how power is apportioned, to how disputes get settled, the social mythology that binds everyone in common goals, et cetera.
But as time goes by, these choices almost inevitably become hardened, inflexible, encrusted by too many vested interests and interlocking power structures to (1) be flexible in times of crisis (e.g. external enemies, or environmental change), and (2) remain in their demands on society proportionate to their benefit -- that is, they can spawn parasitic institutions that suck the life from the polity.
I agree that arbitrary choices leading to inflexibility is part of the problem, but I was specifically thinking that having the non-pleb poor in large numbers turned out to open an opportunity for corrosion.
Candidates for a similar role in the modern world: stateless people. In the US, we have a left (if my sample is fair, it probably isn't) which wants to just make the right disappear and a right which wants to pretend no one is getting hurt by the system.
I keep thinking about the environmentalist idea that you can't actually throw anything "away", you can only throw it somewhere.
Well, but I think it still fits within the paradigm, once you consider the time evolution. See, the poor scroungers weren't a threat to the stability of Rome early on, because they had upward mobility: join the legions, fight for Rome, get a grant in a colony somewhere, your kids will be born citizens and your grandkids might become equites.
I suggest it's the chance to better yourself (or at least your family) that tends to keep the poorest more or less loyal to the system -- it's only when you feel locked into poverty and powerlessness forever, along with your descendants to the <i>N</i> generation, that you become fed up and desperate enough to riot.
And this plan worked fine -- as long as Rome was rapidly expanding, and there were more lands to conquer, and plenty of newly conquered people to form new lowest stratums of society. But when Rome stopped expanding -- what then? It seems not unlikely she needed some serious reconstruction of her social mythology and social structures.
But she couldn't, because the existing structures had become fossilized. They were functional in AD 1, but had become inappropriate (and encrusted with parasitic features) by AD 400.
This is in great need of copyediting.
Yeah, it wasn't proofread well, but it reads fine for the most part.
"The more I learn about history, the more I realize that conquest is overrated and raiding is underrated."
Raiding has been more common, because it is easier. But the stationary bandit can steal more than the roving bandit over the long run.
"Another inefficient equilibrium was north Africa growing grain for the Roman annona. The land should have been put to more productive uses."
Growing grain sounds like a productive use. That the grain was taxed and sent to Rome is a pecuniary externality. If there was a marginal tax rate on the amount of grain grown, that could be a disincentive, but a Georgist land tax can be efficient.
"But the stationary bandit can steal more than the roving bandit over the long run."
Which requires continued effort on their part. These days we call them governments.
Overall I thought this was a pretty good but, not great review. I learned a lot about an interesting time period that I thought I knew fairly well, so that's always appreciated. But I don't know if there were any really shocking insights or the like. Also, and this isn't a major flaw but is something that sticks out compared to the other reviews, there's an awful lot of misspelled words. Overall, still glad I read it but still left thinking it could be better.
Anywho, new rankings:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd The Wizard and the Prophet
4th Double Fold
5th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
6th Through The Eye Of A Needle
7th Order Without Law
8th Why Buddhism is True
" And most obviously, don’t give barbarian militias license to plunder your country."
LOL - our own elites are doing the job quite well.
No. Our elites give great license to unorganized crime and organized leftwing groups, but they are not threats to the state.
This review pairs well with the review of Henry George's book and Georgism.
I think this book would pair well with a reading of Nietzche's attempts to trace the transformation of the morals of antiquity into medieval Christian morals. His interest is primarily in the psychological change taking place in individual minds, and how that later affects the world order, but in a sense, a lot of his work re: transformation in moral valuations is an attempt to understand why Roman elites were ripe for conversion to Christianity. Or It at least strikes me as a historically grounded way to think about the impacts and causes of slave and master morality, and how they relate to the fall of Rome and Christianity's rise.
Great review, and a great general lesson: "The more I learn about history, the more I realize that conquest is overrated and raiding is underrated."
This makes a lot of sense.
You might have added: No-end-in-sight raiding is more likely to lead to the collapse of a system, than conquest. Empires (and states) disintegrate not following conquest, but due to the attrition of never-ending raiding.
The classic definition of a state (applies also to empires) is an organisation that maintains a monopoly on the use of violence within a territory (courtesy of Max Weber). Countinous raiding destroys the economy (why grow/produce/create something when there is a high probability that someone will come and steal it anyway), which limits the state's/empire's taxation capability (fewer things to tax), which limits its ability to pay a sufficiently large army/coercive apparatus to maintain its monopoly on violence, which leads to more raiding. And so on.
The classic (light game-theoretic) treatment of this insight is Mancur Olson's article Dictatorship, Democracy and Development in American Political Science Review no. 3 1993.
(It could have been subtitled: Why it is better to be exploited by stationary bandits than by roving bandits.)
...And then there are Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince, both offering advice on how to dig a territory out of the ditch of roving-ness, to return to the blessed state where one stationary bandit rules us all.
Again, great review.
How did all 20 Saxons strangle one another? 19/20 I could understand..
You know, I was wondering the same thing. Maybe that last guy had incredible self-discipline.
Graham Chapman's performance as the last member of the Queen's Own McKamikaze Highlanders leaps to mind.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2qdr1a
One of my favorite skits!
"In many places, olive oil went from a common commodity to 'an almost supernatural luxury' used to fuel church lamps."
Olive oil still has that role in the Catholic Church to this day. The three anointing oils are made from it; chrism has a perfume mixed into it, usually balsam. If you've not seen the word "chrism" before, yes, I know what you're thinking and it is very funny. The standard etymology is from the Greek χρίειν, "to anoint". I find it pleasant to speculate from time to time about the reification of the role of bodily fluids in pagan rituals and how this might connect to the story of Cain & Abel.
Sorry, meant to put a link in there.
https://simplycatholic.com/what-are-holy-oils/
From 2010 the dedication of the church of La Sagrada Familia and consecration of the altar (from about 1 hr 42 mins in) by Pope Benedict where the chrism is poured onto the altar and spread around; bishops bless the pillars of the church by marking them with the sign of the cross using chrism (this is why you will see small crosses painted or otherwise marked around the walls of a church, to indicate where this blessing has been done); then incense is burned on the altar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCSoGUWyGo0
"If I was knowledgeable on Catholic theology and ancient heresies then it may have been more interesting. I don’t know much more than Sunday school level theology – I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God."
Oh, Augustine's writing is very interesting and well worth your time. There's an anecdote from the _Confessions_ that I like very much as an illustration of the degree to which the past is a foreign country. Augustine remarks that one day he came into the rooms of his teacher, Ambrose, and found him reading silently. This was an unusual faculty according to his telling; the custom for literate people in those days was to vocalize words as they read them, or at least to form the shapes with their mouths. I've tried to develop the habit of doing this when I read poetry to force myself to feel the rhyme, meter and scansion, because otherwise, I blitz through it too quickly to appreciate the shape of the words. It's hard for me to imagine vocalizing what I read all the time, though, it would slow me down too much to get through my work.
One suspects that until the printing press was invented, your opportunities for re-reading the same book were very limited -- books were excedingly rare things -- so I would guess there was a good reason to try to commit as much of it as possible to memory.
That's a very good point, I hadn't considered that.
I'm noticing that none of the book review contest entries so far are well proofread. You guys know you have to do that, right? Spellcheck doesn't catch punctuation errors, grammatical errors, or many transpositions or other word errors. For example, this review has "tracks" for "tracts," "fractional" for "factional," "burned" for "burden"...I could go on, but I don't want to pick on this entry in particular since it seems to be a global problem with all the book reviewers, and distracts from their points. Try having someone else proofread it, or go a few days without looking at the document and then proofread it yourself.
"The curiales took care of almost every task of government on behalf of Respublica, except for high justice and the army. Curiales were responsible for police, road maintenance, fortifications, and the collection of taxes. The power and status of being a member of the curiales also came a supreme burden – the curiales were responsible for making up any shortfalls in tax revenue."
...
"For future research, I want to understand if our current society is secretly ruled by local elites. If not, then what happened to them?"
I think there's a connection to legibility and Seeing like a State here. The major service the curiales provided, from the perspective of the Emperor, was legibility. It may not have been a fair system, but it was very easy to administrate. If you want to know if a curiale has paid the appropriate amount of tax, you multiply the tax rate times the area of land they administer. Tax fraud is impossible, by definition. If a curiale has extracted more wealth from the people in their area than the Emperor expected, then they're legally entitled to keep it.
For that reason, I wouldn't expect the aristocracy trend to continue to the present day. There are better ways of establishing legibility now.
"The core of the 530 page book uses the writings of the pagan Symmachus and the Christian writers Ambrose, Jerome, Pelagius, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, John Cassian, Pinianus, Melania the Younger, and Salvian of Marseilles. I found these pieces of the book a little dry and overly theological. Their works are the primary sources from the era, so I understand why they were the focus of the book. If I was knowledgeable on Catholic theology and ancient heresies then it may have been more interesting. I don’t know much more than Sunday school level theology – I haven’t even read Augustine’s The City of God.
Brown uses these primary sources to narrate the entry of the rich into the Christian churches of the western Roman empire. Christ said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The Church transformed the rich and the rich transformed the church. Many rich Christians gave their wealth to the church – during their life or after their death."
St. Jerome, for instance, is important here for the "entry of the rich into the Christian churches". As well as having a reputation as a Biblical scholar and translator, and as being one of the worst-tempered saints, he had a great deal of influence on wealthy Roman women and the role of women in adopting Christianity is one that is perhaps not fully appreciated (I am not up on my feminist theology so I have no idea if they cover this). Chunks of quotes from Wikipedia to follow:
"The protégé of Pope Damasus I who died in December of 384, Jerome was known for his teachings on Christian moral life, especially to those living in cosmopolitan centers such as Rome. In many cases, he focused his attention on the lives of women and identified how a woman devoted to Jesus should live her life. This focus stemmed from his close patron relationships with several prominent female ascetics who were members of affluent senatorial families.
...In Rome, Jerome was surrounded by a circle of well-born and well-educated women, including some from the noblest patrician families, such as the widows Lea, Marcella and Paula, with Paula's daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. The resulting inclination of these women towards the monastic life, away from the indulgent lasciviousness in Rome, and his unsparing criticism of the secular clergy of Rome, brought a growing hostility against him among the Roman clergy and their supporters. Soon after the death of his patron Pope Damasus I on 10 December 384, Jerome was forced to leave his position at Rome after an inquiry was brought up by the Roman clergy into allegations that he had an improper relationship with the widow Paula. Still, his writings were highly regarded by women who were attempting to maintain a vow of becoming a consecrated virgin.
...Jerome was a scholar at a time when that statement implied a fluency in Greek. He knew some Hebrew when he started his translation project, but moved to Jerusalem to strengthen his grip on Jewish scripture commentary. A wealthy Roman aristocrat, Paula, funded his stay in a monastery in Bethlehem and he completed his translation there. He began in 382 by correcting the existing Latin-language version of the New Testament, commonly referred to as the Vetus Latina. By 390 he turned to translating the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew, having previously translated portions from the Septuagint which came from Alexandria. He believed that the mainstream Rabbinical Judaism had rejected the Septuagint as invalid Jewish scriptural texts because of what were ascertained as mistranslations along with its Hellenistic heretical elements
...Due to the time he spent in Rome among wealthy families belonging to the Roman upper-class, Jerome was frequently commissioned by women who had taken a vow of virginity to write to them in guidance of how to live their life. As a result, he spent a great deal of his life corresponding with these women about certain abstentions and lifestyle practices."
So it was the support of these wealthy and well-connected women that enabled St. Jerome to stand against the enemies he made within the Roman clergy, and that supported him to work on his translations of the Scriptures. And in turn, Jerome's guidance and direction buttressed the status of these women in the nascent Christian society of the times, and their influence in how it was adopted and lived.
That's very interesting, I only ever knew of Jerome because of the Vulgate. The role of a confessor for the wealthy in the medieval period is an interesting one and it sounds as if Jerome helped to lay the foundations of that societal role. Its nearest equivalent in the contemporary world would be a therapist, but the purpose of the relationship and the relative standing between the participants is very different.
Yes, the interesting thing is that while St. Jerome is writing to everyone and writing about heresies etc., what he is also doing is being a mentor to (and supported by) wealthy Roman women - widows, their daughters, other women who are Christians. He's not mingling so much with the *men* at that level of society. Now this may be partly because Jerome is inclined to be an ascetic and to have a very strong inclination to monasticism, only agreeing to be ordained under pressure, but it's also interesting that he's a personal protegé of the pope yet is on poor terms with the Roman clergy.
He follows his natural inclinations, heads off to the Holy Land to engage in scholarship and live as a monk, but he is still supported by and followed by Paula and some other women. I know there's a strain of (polemical) writing which denounces Christianity and/or the Roman Catholic version of it as being a faith for women (instead of Real Manly Men who should be sticking to the pagan virtues), but I do wonder about the influence of rich/respectable Roman women on spreading Christianity and getting it accepted into the ranks of the upper classes and those involved in government, from its beginnings as a religion popular with the poor, slaves, and the lower classes.
You can argue that women are naturally more 'religious' than men, but there does seem to have been *something* in Christianity which had a very strong appeal to women at the time. From our modern viewpoint it may seem difficult to understand why or how women who had money, status, and were independent of men would want to be consecrated virgins or lead ascetic lives, taking on restrictions, but maybe in a way Christianity offered them equality and independence that they couldn't get otherwise, in some form? It's a fascinating question.
"You can argue that women are naturally more 'religious' than men, but there does seem to have been *something* in Christianity which had a very strong appeal to women at the time."
Conventionally, this something is taken to be liberty. For example, there was a system in place in the early Church which it's hard not to describe as a scam, whereby wealthy widows would donate everything they owned to the Church; the Church would then put them in charge of "administering" these holdings for the rest of the widow's life. Why? Because in Rome, a woman couldn't own property. By doing this, the widows evaded their husband's property and their own persons falling into the hands of the nearest male relative, and they were able to spend it as they preferred as long as they didn't engage in gross impiety, which old women aren't the group most prone to anyway. Obviously, this was a win/win for the Church and the widows; the rightful heir was the one who got robbed.
But also, as much as the Catholic Church get shit for being regressive about women now, it was extremely progressive in general about women's role compared to old Roman law.
If a woman couldn't own property, how could she donate anything to the Church?
The version I've read is that a widow was the legal owner of her late husband's property, but she had restrictions on how she could spend it; the idea was that she should be able to support herself but not able to waste the money (which would pass to her husband's kin after her own death). However, one of the things she was allowed to do without restriction was donate to a temple, and the Church was legally a temple.
"Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one."
Christianity was declared the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380.
The society wasn't a Christian society until later though.
Great review. Particularly with your “ rationalist” analysis
Part of the story of the modern era is the concealment of power and the the diffusion of responsibility. Systems with no one to blame out-competed the others.
"Brahmine elite" is the subject of Thomas Piketty's new book.
There's certainly still local elites, though I think some combination of more reporting, anti-corruption laws, the brain drain and subsequent national dispersal of graduates of elite national universities, a culture that exposes even obscure local politics to national attention, and perhaps the relatively dynamic economy of the US makes the local elites less dominant, or at least, less publicly dominant.
Nowadays you could go to the most expensive charity galas or most prestigious dinner invitations in your local city to find these local elites. Some combination of local businesspeople, property owners, politicians, very influential media-types, presidents of local universities, maybe the chairman of the hospital, etc.
Local elites can't buy the law they want, at least not in any straightforward way, but they'll certainly have much more influence than the average citizen. Their outraged statements about some proposed highway extension or whatever will get into the newspaper.
It all feels much more obscured and illegible than it used to be, I think likely in response to the increased scrutiny of modern life.
Brief review-of-the-review:
The topic is interesting but the writing and analysis here weren't as compelling to me as some other entries. The connections to game theory and equilibria feel forced and insufficiently motivated, and the sometimes casual tone is distracting. Props for a thorough and thoughtful treatment of the book's content, though.