Dear Readers! As I’ve noted during the summer, I was planning on a one to two month hiatus towards the end of this year in order to allow me to focus on finalizing the manuscript of my book project, a study of the cost of fielding armies in the third and second centuries BC.
That hiatus has now come. It’ll run for at least September and then I’ll take stock if I want to push it through October, based on where I am progress-wise.
That said, I didn’t want to leave you with nothing over these long, bare fall months, so I thought I would put together a list of blogs, channels and podcasts you might consider following in the meantime. These are, of course, in no particular order.
We can start with blogs:
Eleanor Janega’s blog, Going Medieval is a great (if not necessarily family friendly) blog focused on society and culture in the European Middle Ages. The blog is particularly notable for Janega’s focus on topics that are often every-day and perhaps a bit earthy: daily life, bathing, obscenities, and, of course, sexuality. And there is quite a back-catalog of posts to read!
Also with a significant back catalog is Spencer McDaniel’s Tales of Times Forgotten; McDaniel has a masters in Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis and that is what her blog focuses on, often with a bit more of a literary bent than what I do here. Her posts are pretty carefully researched and often offer really solid introductions to key classical questions. Absolutely worth working your way through her back-catalog if you have any interest in antiquity.
For a bit of very focused ancient literature analysis, Joen Christensen (the fellow behind Sententiae Antiquae) is (re)-starting a series working through the Iliad, pulling out notable passages and analyzing them. He begins his effort this week looking at the moment that Athena turns aside Achilles’ rage at Agamemnon (at least, for the moment) and is focused on how Athena ‘manages’ the famously difficult to manage Achilles. His plan is for this to be weekly, so keep an eye on his substack, Painful Signs.
Also on the ancient world, let me recommend Liv Yarrow’s adventures in my head. Yarrow is one of the leading Roman numismatists (that is, expert on money and coinage) today. Her blog tends to be a bit more ‘stream of thought’ following on her research and interests (mostly coins), which can make it a bit hard to follow, but it is well worth it for the insights she brings out and also all the pictures of lovely ancient coins. Over the last few months, a number of Yarrow’s posts have been focused on chronology and so also interweave with the major figures of the Late Roman Republic, which also provides fascinating evidence of how we can use coins to date events, but also use events (with known dates from other sources) to help nail down the dates for coins.
Also for the ancient world the Pasts Imperfect newsletter, headed up by a collection of academic ancient historians, is well worth keeping track of in order to stay up to date with happenings in ancient history and the study of the ancient past more generally. The newsletter comes out more-or-less twice a month and includes short essays, links to material online, and rundowns of what academic work is coming out, especially any that is available open-access to the public.
In modern history reading, Joshua Tait (PhD in American History from UNC Chapel Hill, and so a grad school colleague of mine) is an expert in the history of American conservative and writes about the ideas and movements of conservative intellectuals mostly in the 1900s at his substack, To Live is To Maneuver. Josh’s approach is in-depth, which can sometimes make it fairly technical (and his subjects are at least trying to have Big Ideas, which are also often a touch hard to follow) but well-worth the effort. There is real value in trying to understand an intellectual movement, especially if one doesn’t share it, as an exercise in meeting ideas and idea-makers on their own terms and learning to be able to view the world from their eyes – even if you’ll never agree.
Finally, not a history blog, but a film blog by a historian (he has his PhD in medieval history from UNC Chapel Hill and is thus also a grad school colleague of mine), check out if you haven’t already, Peter Raleigh’s The Long Library. Peter is just getting started, so there isn’t a big back catalog, but the first few essays he’s written, I’ve found fascinating and he claims to have at least another couple on the way!
Also some podcasts and youtube channels!
On the military history side of things, I should hope anyone with even a passing interest in naval history does not need to be told about Drachinifel’s channel covering naval history, especially but not exclusively in the Age of Steam. Also well worth your time is Military History Visualized by Bernhard Kast, which covers warfare with slides (and occasionally animation), mostly focused on modern warfare. A particular strength of both of these channels is that they get into the sources, often citing specific books or reports or field manuals to support what they are saying, so that the approach is strongly evidence based and careful. Both channels also frequently highlight disagreement among academic experts, giving a sense of the uncertain or unknown. They’re really some of the highest quality for-the-public military history educators out there – far better than something like a history channel documentary – and so well worth a follow.
For those in a more kinetic frame of mind, Tod Todeschini’s Tod’s Workshop channel is a fantastic vision into what we call “experimental archaeology” (in this case, mostly weapons, as Tod is a weaponsmith/cutler by trade), which is trying to understand the past by recreating and testing the physical stuff (like tools or weapons) that people had in the past to better understand how they worked. There are limits to this approach, but you can learn a lot with it and Todeschini does some of the best for-the-public stuff out there, using carefully made replicas, typically under measured and relatively controlled conditions.
If you are instead coming off of my historical video game analysis and looking for more of that, let me suggest Rosenceutz’ YouTube channel, which isn’t all video-game analysis (he deals with broader media as well), but brings a fair bit of sophistication to ask how historical ideas end up embedded in media and how they are expressed.
Meanwhile, if you are just a huge strategy game nerd, then you should already be following Three Moves Ahead, hosted primarily these days by video game writer (mostly at IGN) Leana Hafer, which gets in to all sorts of strategy games, both historical and otherwise. These episodes tend to be discussions of a given game as a whole, rather than deep-dives into a single facet of them, but the continued focus on the strategy genre (rather than all games everywhere all the time) is what gives the series its great value, for strategy nerds, at least.
In any case, watch this space in this first week in October, when I’ll have an update on our ‘return’ date. For those curious about when to expect that book I mentioned, the short answer is, “I don’t know” and the slightly longer answer is that there’s still a lot of things that happen after the hard work of getting a completed, more-or-less final manuscript written and that can take variable amounts of time. That said, patrons will be getting regular monthly updates throughout the process and of course I will let everyone know – whether you want me to or not – when the book is coming out.
Mildly surprised you didn’t mention Historia Civilis in the YouTube section! It’s an excellent channel with a bunch of extremely detailed descriptions of historical military and political events, especially but not exclusively in the classical world.
It’s also pretty damn wrong about a lot of stuff, especially stuff outside the Roman republic. At it’s best, it takes a very literal interpretation of the source material which is about 100 years behind modern scholarship.
Can you elaborate? I’m not super-familiar with some of the stuff HC has covered, so I wouldn’t be able to spot the errors, which means I might need to update some beliefs I picked up from that channel.
I don’t remember everything he’s said off by heart. But the entire Julius Caesar series is basically taking Caesar’s word at face value with virtually no source criticism. Some other stuff, like the Sea Peoples’ video especially, is almost entirely junk that was passable in the late 1800s but is contradicted by over a century of research since.
Essentially, if you take his videos as animated translations of the sources, they’re not bad. Just don’t take it as an analysis of those sources or a scholarly attempt at reconstructing a true version of events.
I wrote this on Reddit’s r/BadHistory on HC’s video on Cicero. He didn’t do a very good job and messed up a number of details. Beyond mischaracterising the political situation and misunderstanding the First Catilinarian, he messes up the timeline and in doing so obscures many of the real reasons for Cicero’s activities. https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/12q4jj1/ciceros_year_63_bc/
I myself have not watched any of Historia Civilis’ videos; however, I know you are not the only one who had debunked one of them on r/BadHistory.
HC, had apparently once claimed that medieval peasants worked less than modern people, a conclusion absurd to anybody with enough knowledge of rural areas without electricity, either from their grandparents time or in current developing countries. https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/16y233q/historia_civiliss_work_gets_almost_everything/
However, I do not know about the quality of his other videos.
I think that is very much of an open question, the amount of work medieval peasants did. Bret seemed to suggest–he was talking about the ancient Mediterranean, but medieval Europe was at about the same technical level–that the pre-modern rural economy was characterized by significant labor surplus. So people didn’t work that hard, because there wasn’t that much work to do. They also devoted a lot of energy to feasts and other bond rituals, as a form of social insurance. All of that didn’t mean they were rich, of course.
Much the same situation characterizes many Third World countries today, which frequently have high unemployment rates. The fate of most people in such societies is grinding poverty, but not brutal, endless labor. (That is reserved for those lucky enough to get the sweatshop jobs that the unemployed are seeking.)
Hmm, to be completely honest I am not so sure of that actually.
An economy having a ‘labor surplus’ which could be mobilized when the land/labour ratio increases, thanks to such things as warfare or plague, is not exclusive with them already working more/harder than people in contemporary developed countries.
Not to mention that some of the work then was mostly dependent upon the amount of people in a household. For example, making and repairing clothing back then was an enormous amount of work* and had to be done for every member of the household.
Though, in the r/BadHistory post I had linked to it had been mentioned that according to the book ‘The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History’, the people within Mediterranean communities lived unbelievably diverse lifestyles that would change within incredibly short distances. So, I suppose we should avoid making hasty generalisations about that time period.
* IIRC, in his series ‘Clothing, How Did They Make It?’ on this blog Bret had included a table of estimates of how many hours per week peasant women and girls had to spend scouring, spinning, weaving, and so on, to produce all the textiles their households needed, it was enormous.
In the comments section it had been mentioned that those numbers were overestimates as they had been based on attempts of European hobbyists to work with recreated pre-industrial tools; and that thanks to their lack of experience and the correct techniques they thus worked less efficiently than women in contemporary developing countries still producing textiles with pre-industrial techniques. However, even after adjusting for that the time needed remained a huge lot.
These cats are the Greatest! And I speak of someone as a veteran of three black cats myself. Bast bless and keep them!
That is a cool cat stand that Percy has there.
My better half picked it out and it is really neat. The cats really like it and you can tell Ollie got to the cat towers second, because whoever shows up first takes that top spot.
Enjoy the hiatus! May you have many productive writing days, and only have about half of them get sucked up by distractions!
And where the academicats are concerned, I at least always kind of do it by checking which cat looks surprised, that’s Ollie.
If I may be so bold as to offer an additional selection, “The Lubber’s Hole” is a podcast focusing on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. This is early 1800s sailing, but in addition to being a fascinating time in and of itself, they touch on a lot of other historical eras. O’Brian had a remarkable depth of knowledge, and the ability to insert a Latin phrase or rare bird that both subtly foreshadows the entire plot, and is totally unnecessary to enjoy the novels. And this podcast is going through all of it.
I have in interest in those books, even though I only read the first of them, “Master and Commander”. One of my writer friends recommended those to me.
May your hiatus be fruitful, Bret!
It’s corny –but true!– to say that your site has (modestly) enriched my life and mind since I started coming ’round here. Thanks.
I *thought* I could tell your cats apart, but then in the first photo of this post, Ollie makes a Percy face.
I’d add ToldInStone to the list of YouTube channels worth following (and the others by the same person: ToldInStone Footnotes and Scenic Routes to the Past). The formats differ but they’re all a tightly focused and well researched, narrated, and put together spotlight on a specific “everyday” topic from Ancient History. And while occasionally moving, they’re free of the hyperbole and fake tension that so much of YouTube has. Bret’s even been a guest on it!
“To live is to maneuver” seems to have a pretty low interesting-information-to-political-posturing ratio.
I’m curious about the others.
Agreed. The author lost me somewhere around the time when he made it clear that he thought having problems with the administrative state means that you are not just incorrect but probably also immoral.
Random Kipling Tangent: How plausible is the underlying story of The Roman Centurion’s Song?
(footnote: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_romancenturion.htm)
Those are some excellent cat pictures
There used to be a fearsome predator that lived sometime in the Pliocene. We don’t know what ity looked like, but we know it made a sound like a vacuum cleaner and ate cats.
My theory is: Cats hiss when they are mad. So to them a vacuum cleaner is something VERY BIG that is VERY ANGRY.
I find writing as vulgar and foul-mouthed as Janega’s unreadable. I wonder if she speaks like that in class. Certainly Profs. Kagan, Tooze, and all I studied with in between did not.
I’ve never understood this attitude. I mean, I get it–Classism is foundational to the English language (it’s why we raise pigs but eat pork, for example)–but it never made sense to me to perpetuate it this day and age. As an aside, the differentiation in swearing by class is an interesting thing to look at in and of itself.
For me, complaints about foul language have always been akin to rejecting a gift because you don’t like the wrapping paper. The important thing is the ideas being conveyed, and curse words are extremely good at conveying certain ideas. This is useful in English, which is after all a language of allusion, approximation, and inuendo. As Chesterton pointed out, lower-class language is highly poetic in nature (why is an open question). Further, I’ve found that people often use pseudo-erudition to obfuscate vacuity, whereas those who swear like sailors on shore leave have something to say and want to make it as clear as possible.
Curse words are, in fact, singularly poor at conveying any actual content, and it’s snobbery to pretend otherwise.
The fact that they’re widely used demonstrates this to be false. Things that don’t serve their purpose tend to be repurposed or abandoned in language. But really, let’s be honest, the reason people don’t like curse words is Classism. They’re typically used by lower rungs on the socio-economic ladder, and people don’t want to be associated with those rungs. Everything else is post-hoc justification of that a priori conclusion.
I will grant that they are not great at communicating ideas on their own. However, they are fantastic modifiers of other ideas–far more flexible, efficient, and effective than other terms. They facilitate conveying emotions particularly well, allowing listeners to rapidly understand one’s views on a topic with minimal verbiage. Given the paucity of emotional language in English (as opposed to, say, French), this is a significant advantage. It’s also advantageous when the emotions are particularly strong, because such situations tend to be ones where you don’t have a lot of time to convey meaning. Such information is by no means irrelevant in conversations; knowing the mental state of one’s audience is vital to constructing arguments that can be properly understood by them.
For all his flaws, George S. Patton was fantastic at using swear words in this manner. Many of his speeches used fairly foul language, but they got the point across! Most scientists I know do the same thing. They are passionate people, and speak as such.
No, let’s be honest. People use them to be vulgar and offensive. And they use them in a way that not only lacks meaning but actively strips their original meaning so severely that you have to avoid them to convey it.
You yourself admit it when you say that they don’t convey ideas but emotions. No one cares what your emotions on your views are. They care what your actual views are, right up to the point until they are afraid you are dangerously out of control.
And your “classism” claim is pure snobbery on your part.
“They facilitate conveying emotions particularly well, allowing listeners to rapidly understand one’s views on a topic with minimal verbiage.”
You mean they are particularly good at expressing anger, disgust, hatred and contempt?
Would you care to give explicit examples of how such words can be used to effectively elucidate the speakers views?
One notes, by the bye, that it was recommended as a blog to learn history from. Injecting your emotion into your views is the fast route to convince people that your history is unreliable.
@ad9 Yes, they can be used for that, but that’s only really half of their useful range. They make for world-class superlatives (it was ****ing huge), are unsurpassed in expressing surprise, shock and incredulity (**** me that took my by surprise), can be used to indicate a change of tone from one’s usual mode of speaking, or defuse uncomfortable phrases (e.g. I have the typical British allergic reaction to expressing sincerity, and it’s a lot easier to say ‘bl***y love you’ than it is to say it straight).
Like all powerful language they’re best used sparingly where the situation demands it, and over-use dilutes their effect, but to say that they’re only used to convey negative emotions is a singularly unimaginative use of words.
Those are excuses put forth by those who just want to cuss to be offensive. They are not superlatives except in the imagination of those who want that excuse, have many equals for surprise and such emotions, have more equals for change of tone, and as for defusing language, do nothing of the sort.
A curse is originally invocation of divine wrath against an enemy.
What we now call curse words might not be invocations of unseen powers, but they do often express hostility. I think such language is all too often used as a back handed way of not having to say directly what one means, in other words, a species of manipulation.
“Embracing cursing is snobbery” is one of the best laughs I had today, thank you for that.
See? Pure snobbery.
“For me, complaints about foul language have always been akin to rejecting a gift because you don’t like the wrapping paper. The important thing is the ideas being conveyed, and curse words are extremely good at conveying certain ideas.”
People say this kind of thing, and then get very upset if someone claims Idi Amin, instead of a murderous back man, was a murderous rhymes-with-digger.. And their whole complaint is about the language used. Not the reality or otherwise of the accusation.
Which suggests to me that they really still care about the propriety of the words. I won’t say they shouldn’t, but they shouldn’t then claim not to care about the propriety of the words.
Its all about the sacred and the profane.
Authors who spit venom at their readers are unhinged, not authentic truth-tellers. The vituperative writing style you seem to enjoy is also no sign of a working-class background, but a manner among activists who are too sheltered from consequences (which may include violence) when they address others. Academia is unfortunately an overly friendly habitat for them.
In fact, Janega’s vulgarity seems to spring more from a need to conceal intellectual vapidity than from powerful insight which calls for extreme linguistic resources. If you read her latest post, she appears to claiming one of two things: (i) that there was no difference in attitudes towards sexuality between medieval peasant girls and 21st century coeds on spring break, which I find highly unpersuasive, or (ii) that humans always and everywhere, even medieval peasant girls, have sexual thoughts and desires, which is so trivial as to be not worth mentioning.
Being charitable to her, I would guess that what she really believes is somewhere in between (that medieval European peasant girls were less promiscuous than modern European or American young women, but more promiscuous than what Christian morality would teach, and more promiscuous than what we might tend to expect). But, I agree with you that the post isn’t actually that interesting since she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually estimate what the sex lives of these people were really like and what the distribution of lifetime sex partners might have been like.
Though in fairness this is a tough question to answer even for modern anthropologists and survey takers, since people lie and self-deceive about sex, a lot.
My point is, that obscenity-laced vituperation does not advance the analysis of that interesting, but possibly insoluble question.
Were I so easily distractible that a few “shits” and “cunts” rendered me functionally illiterate I’m not sure I’d have the bollocks to admit it, and certainly not on this site, so, although you won’t be able to read it, fucking good on you.
Not sure if this is satire or an deliberately bad-faith reading of the comment being replied to.
The language might be, um, colorful, but the attitude is condescending.
It’s ironic- a few friends that I have recommended Janega’s blog to instead rejected it on the grounds that they thought it too academic, dense, and pretentious. Maybe I need better friends.
Eleanor Janega’s colloquial style is refreshing. Grateful to BD for calling her blog to my attention.
I haven’t read anything else of us his, but I liked “The Tell of Us All” (https://peterraleigh.substack.com/p/the-tell-of-us-all) from Long Library.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the podcast Tides of History. I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and to my (non-historian’s) ear it sounds like he does a good job of acknowledging gaps in what we can know and disputes within the field about how up interpret stuff. As a layman, this is the kind of thing I look for as a marker that someone is likely engaged in thoughtful and reasonable analysis. But it would be good to hear the take of an actual trained historian on this podcast.
Beautiful boy kitties!
Tod’s Workshop is truly excellent. Hard to choose a favourite video, but I think it’s the plumbata one. He just looks like he’s whale of a time throughout the whole thing, wondering why they ever went out of fashion because they’re just so fun to use (not to mention effective).
His mini series on the pilum is useful too, getting in a professional javelin thrower to help test various different circumstances.
Can someone please recommend a good narrative history of the Hellenistic period, death of Alexander the Great to whenever that period is thought to have ended? There is CAH, which I am reading through but the relevant volumes are quite old, mid-20thC I think, and I believe there have been new discoveries since then. The CAH is at a neighboring library. When I picked up Vol. VIII through interlibrary load, the librarians tsk tsked about decrepit books being loaned out, so IDK how much longer I will be able to access them.
Greece Against Rome: The Fall of the Hellenistic Kingdoms 250–31 BC by Philip Matyszak was a good read.
Thank you for the recommendation.
There are two options by Peter Green:
The Hellenistic Age: A Short History
Alexander to Actium (this one is far longer and more detailed – 900+ pp!)
Thank you. I like reading Green. The Alexander to Actium looks like what I want.
For the start of that period Robin Waterfield’s Dividing the Spoils (OUP 2011) is the best IMO. Most books on Hellenism skim (or completely skip) this period because so much happens so chaotically so quickly. But Waterfield manages to make the whirling mass of characters tractable and the story engaging.
For a narrative of the period as a whole the standard text is probably The Greek World After Alexander by Graham Shipley (Routledge Ancient History, 2000). It’s not the most exciting telling of the story to be honest, and it’s more of a university textbook than a casual read. But it’s not so technical and obtuse that it’s tough to read (not if you can read this blog anyway).
My favourite might be A Companion to the Hellenistic World ed Andrew erskine (Blackwell Companions 2005) which has contributions by many different experts. It starts off with essays that cover the chronology of the period, followed by some that cover more detailed themes over the whole period.
Reading those three in that order should give you a solid narrative of the whole period, and lots of ideas for what aspects you might want to read into deeper. But if you only want one, Shipley will touch all the bases.
Good luck!
Also, I already bookmarked Tales of Times Forgotten.
Best of luck with your writing!
Ok, so as this was apparently a place you could post recommendations for history blogs. I thought to recommend one myself I had read some things on and had just thought off:
The blog https://historyforatheists.com by Tim O’Neill, who has studied historiography, seeks to as much as possible represent the consensus/majority opinion of a broad range of professional historians, and is himself an atheist who had grown tired of New Atheists and adjacent people spreading such nonsense from ‘Jesus did not exist and actually was Horus’, through ‘In the Middle Ages they believed the Earth was flat’, to ‘The Renaissance was a radical break with the Middle Ages’ and is now debunking such nonsense on his blog.
Yes, that blog is worth reading. O’Neill doesn’t post that often, but he manages to be funnily caustic without being either abusive or vulgar. In his latest post, he gives a fairly negative review to a book he describes as “slightly odd and oddly slight,” by which he means, as the review demonstrates, both distorted and superficial, but his formulation is funnier.
Yesterday I pulled Rubicon. The Last Years of the Roman Republican Republic off my shelf. CW 2003, by one Tom Holland. Can anyone here tell me anything about either the book or author? My copy has an inscription showing it was a gift to someone who must have put it out for 2nd. hand without reading it.
Won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize in 2004. (Haven’t read it myself.)
I gather Holland is a professional writer of fiction and non-fiction, not a professional historian. So far, preface and 1st chapter, there is lots of interesting detail, which I always like, and he seems quite opinionated although not so far as I can detect, not pushing any particular ideology. Opinionated, but not a polemicist, and thoroughly footnoted; he or someone apparently combed through all Cicero’s letters.
That’s a pretty fair assessment–if you’re looking for a general overview of a period of history that’s written for laymen, reasonably well-researched, and has a little bit of verve to it, Holland’s your guy. If you like Rubicon, Persian Fire is pretty solid, as is Millennium and In the Shadow of the Sword.
Dominion is also good, but there’re a lot of people who really don’t like its central thesis.
Holland is a very engaging writer–I wish I wrote that well–and well-educated. I’ve read a couple of his books. Maybe some people don’t like the thesis of “Dominion,” but I’ve yet to hear it persuasively refuted. (If anyone can point to a worthwhile essay on that, please do.)
For those who haven’t read it, the thesis of “Dominion” is that Christianity has shaped Western culture so pervasively, for good and for ill, that even those who don’t profess it operate on its intellectual, psychological, and behavioral terms.
Does he consider the reverse proposition?
(That Western culture has shaped Christianity so pervasively, for good and for ill, that even those who don’t profess it operate on its intellectual, psychological, and behavioural terms. AIUI, for example, Christianity has picked up monogamy from Europe, not the other way around.)
I’m pretty sure Christianity picked up monogamy from first century Judaism. (Which may have picked it up from the Indo-European cultures, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman, which surrounded it.)
@ad9: Christianity didn’t get its insistence on monogamy from Europe. Even though polygamy is never explicitly forbidden in the Bible, the Gospels (which pretty much all historians accept were written before Christianity became majority European) appear to assume monogamy as the default state, and the Pauline letters state twice that elders/pastors are supposed to be “the husband of one wife.”
Further, IIRC, non-Christian Europe was relatively accepting of polygamy.
“non-Christian Europe was relatively accepting of polygamy”
Maybe depends on the part. Greece and Rome were pretty thoroughly monogamous long before Christianity. I can’t speak for the northern parts.
“For those who haven’t read it, the thesis of “Dominion” is that Christianity has shaped Western culture so pervasively, for good and for ill, that even those who don’t profess it operate on its intellectual, psychological, and behavioral terms.”
I think that was certainly true a couple of hundred years ago, and even a hundred years ago, but it’s much, much, much less true today.
“much less true today”–Holland argues otherwise, and bare assertions to the contrary don’t carry much weight. To take some examples, 21st-century Westerners spend a lot more time talking about human rights (that’s the “for better”) part, and sniffing out heretics from the preferred orthodoxy (that’s the “for worse” part) than people from most cultures without Christian roots.
I’m reading Peter Heather’s Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, and one point he argues is that the adoption of Christianity by the Empire was very much a two way street – Rome became Christian over a couple of centuries while Christianity became Roman (he instances the techniques of literary analysis developed in the formal training in rhetoric that was the hallmark of the Roman elite that were applied to the biblical texts as they were used to support Roman ways – eg to accommodate to the wealthy and the imperial power).
I think the same argument could be made for the Carolingians, who saw their own warrior-aristocracy very much in Old Testament terms (see Chris Wickham on this), and for later periods. There is a dialectic between the Christian texts and the ethos of the age – as evangelicals in the US are demonstrating at the moment.
“21st-century Westerners spend a lot more time talking about human rights”
ey81, does that demonstrably come from Christianity? Did people in the Roman Empire talk about human rights after Christianity, and not before?
I’m prepared to be proven wrong, but that is not the sort of phrase I really associate with medieval or ancient Christendom.
ad9: I can’t “demonstrate” very many historical propositions in blog comments. That is why Holland wrote a whole book.
ey81, I’m sorry, I expressed myself poorly enough for you to misunderstand me. Holland cannot logically demonstrate anything about Christianity by showing that “21st-century Westerners spend a lot more time talking about human rights” than people from other cultures. Christianity was around long before the 21st century. If he does not show Christians in, for example, the Byzantine Empire or 10th century France talking about human rights, what justification does he have for pointing to Christianity being the explanation for why 21st century westerners talking about human rights?
If we haver a 2000 year gap between the invention of Christianity and people talking about human rights, that suggests that Christianity was not very involved in the invention of human rights.
@ad9, I have read Dominion but not recently. To repeat ey81, it’s complicated, as would be expected from two thousand years of history.
Holland looks both at Christianity influencing European thought, and European thought influencing Christianity. That is not saying that there weren’t Christians in other parts of the world, or that those other parts weren’t sometimes influencing Christianity too, but Europe is where for better or worse Christianity became the dominant religion over a long period; and then the age of colonisation / imperialism spread those values across most of the world.
For your specific example of whether Christians were talking about human rights two thousand years ago, Holland’s argument is that yes they were! Early Christianity had different values and ethos to the dominant Graeco-Roman culture, for example in regard for the poor, and when Christianity became the “official” religion those values propagated across the Empire. (And yes there was also considerable overlap since Christianity arose within that culture, and no a modern progressive would consider that early Christianity didn’t go nearly far enough in universal human rights.)
Dominion is an interesting book, I think worth a read even if you end up disagreeing.
“For your specific example of whether Christians were talking about human rights two thousand years ago, Holland’s argument is that yes they were! Early Christianity had different values and ethos to the dominant Graeco-Roman culture, for example in regard for the poor, and when Christianity became the “official” religion those values propagated across the Empire.”
scifihughf, having “different values and ethos to the Graeco-Roman culture” is not the same thing as “talking about human rights”. Attila the Hun, for example, had different values and ethos to the Graeco-Roman culture, it does not follow that he was a great supporter of human rights.
Christianity in the Roman Empire is a social movement among the citizens. It took over the governing institutions by mostly non-violent means. Attila and his Huns are an external force that wanted to conquer the Roman Empire.
I specifically mentioned the Christian attitude to the poor as one of the many examples Holland brings up. If you want to dismiss an entire book without reading it, sure go ahead.
“If you want to dismiss an entire book without reading it, sure go ahead.”
If I wanted to dismiss the book I would have done so without asking so many questions about it. I am trying to find out if it is worth reading.
So far I have been told that it says that Christianity must have had a big impact on how westerners think, because they talk about “human rights” more than non-westerners. I have not been told that it shows westerners talking about “human rights” within, say, a thousand years of their conversion to Christianity.
That suggests to me a rather tenuous connection between “Christianity as it originally was” and “Human rights as they are currently thought of”.
Northern Europe proto-Vikings and Vikings were fairly relaxed about polygamy. When various Christian missionaries tried to convert them, aristocrats and kings didn’t like being told that from now on they’d have to have just one wife and zero concubines. Our evidence isn’t great, but it seems the more successful missionaries didn’t push too hard on that point, figuring that a foothold now would lead to better compliance later on.
Western European men usually at least paying lip service to women’s rights might have something to do with Christianity, seeing as the tradition of pretending to treat women well (I think it is usually called “chivalry”) goes back quite a bit.
Men in other parts of the world find it easier to blithely admit to their hatred of women.
It seems worth noting that medieval Europe, including the Byzantine emperors, were better at “woman sometimes inherits wealth or power from husband or father” than the Greeks and earlier Romans. Some of that might be different circumstances (semi-freeform feudalism, leading to father favoring daughter in the absence of sons, rather than the formal law of an all-male republic), but it’s not like the pre-Christian Emperors ever had a daughter or wife take over, while the Byzantines occasionally did.
So maybe Christianity had an influence there? Don’t ask me _how_, exactly, I’d just flap my hands at “role of women in the early Church”.
The Scandinavian norm was one wife (if only because marriage tied one into a network of obligations, including feud), but concubines and slaves were common – for the upper classes. Irish law was complicated, but again what might be called monogamy plus was the default.
On the role of women, western/northern/eastern Europe was much more accepting of prominent roles than classical culture. It’s hard to trace a specifically Christian influence – it seems to me to come more from the western steppe, whence a lot of ‘Germanic’ customs had their origins (assembly politics, representation, the sacred royal family …), with a Celtic mix in there too.
@ey81:
this (in its time quite controversial) essay by a 19th c Anglican bishop, addressing the topic of polygamy among Christian converts in South Africa, argues that polygamy was tolerated by both first century and medieval Judaism, to some degree, and isn’t explicitly forbidden by the New Testament either.
https://anglicanhistory.org/africa/colenso/polygamy1855.html
AFAIK in Norse culture monogamy was the norm. The sagas portray a society fairly relaxed about illegitimacy and extramarital sex, and there was a recognised form of concubinage (it plays a central part in Egil’s Saga), but still basically monogamous. Irish law was much the same. Rome was monogamous in law, Greece in custom.
Were the Norse monogamous by choice, or because most men didn’t have the wealth to support several wives. Or have the diplomatic skills to mediate between several wives.
Most “polygamous” societies have only elite polygamy. There’s not only the matter of supporting the wives but the social conflict inherent in that every man with two wives means another man with no wife.
One interesting exception where you find a kind of “egalitarian” polygamy is in a Pacific Island society that Jared Diamond talks about in one of his books. It was a kind of gerontocracy where status was pretty much dependent on age, so they more or less prohibited young men under 30 or 35 from marrying, but as you got older and rose up in status you accrued property and the right to marry. Because this was a society with premodern mortality rates there were a lot more young women than older men, so there were plenty to go around and each of the high-status older men could have more than one. It’s an interesting way to solve the problem.
The young men can be a real problem in those sorts of set-ups.
@Mary,
Right, the key would be to get young men to buy into the system on the expectation that if they pay their dues now, obey the rules of the system, and manage to survive till they’re older (which isn’t a given in a society with premodern mortality rates) then they can have multiple wives too.
this would work better in some societies than others, but Jared Diamond points out that gerontocracy is a pretty widespread and in many cases quite stable form of social order, so it seems like more young men than we would think did in fact buy into these kinds of arrangements.
It’s still elite polygamy, because the elite status is “elder’
It’s still elite polygamy, because the elite status is “elder’
Fair enough!
I don’t know what Diamond says about this, but one would expect that societies which deny young men the ability to marry would have a high incidence of homosexual activity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Although they were not polygamous, the socioeconomic structures of most ancient Greek societies prevented young men, or at least young aristocratic men, from marrying, which led to the result I have predicted.
“I don’t know what Diamond says about this, but one would expect that societies which deny young men the ability to marry would have a high incidence of homosexual activity.”
I think he indicates that covert adultery (or “extra-pair copulations” as we biologists like to say) was the outlet, more so than homosexuality. some societies are more tolerant than others of that kind of thing. Homosexuality might be a factor too. I’ll see if I can look up the source- it was in his book “The World Until Yesterday”, i think.
Among the Tiwi young men first married old women, then as they became older and more socially powerful, added younger women. Very gerontocratic, with ‘adultery’ (young women having it off with young men in defiance of the expected social order) a major source of disputes.
Marriage came with a lot of social ties, including obligations of vengeance and support at assembly and law. If the brother of Wife 1 kills the brother of Wife 2 who do you kill? If you are rich you buy a slave-girl – imported in bulk from the Rus lands
Greece and Rome may have been “pretty thoroughly monogamous” but among the upper classes concubinage and the sexual use of slaves, men and women both, was simply taken for granted.
“among the upper classes concubinage and the sexual use of slaves, men and women both, was simply taken for granted”
Concubinage, or “mistresses”, seems taken for granted among Christian upper classes too. Charlemagne, first “Holy Roman Emperor”, had several concubines (and divorced some of his wives, too.) Wikipedia has a page “List of French royal mistresses”, for a long list of kings; Francis I enjoyed ‘official’ _and_ ‘unofficial’ ones. As did Henry II, Henry IV (with _thirty_ unofficial ones named), Louis XIV, Louis XV (6 official ones, several overlapping)… Equally there’s the page “English and British royal mistresses”, with its own lists. Pages for Russia and Sweden, too.
Heck, multiple Popes kept well-known mistresses.
Wiki says “Defenders of the practice of mistresses referred to the practice in the ancient Near East of keeping a concubine; they frequently quoted verses from the Old Testament to show that mistress-keeping was an ancient practice that was, if not acceptable, at least understandable”
Scot Alexander of Astral Codex Ten has done a survey on how often men think about Rome. (And women too.) While limited to ACX readers, he did get over 5000 responses.
Notably, women also often think about Rome, although not quite as often as men. More details at
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome
With ~600 responses from women I would hesitate to reach any conclusions on that topic. Any statistics with less than 1000 responses are too skewed by random chance.
If the sample is representative, about 600 responses should still be enough to make a rough estimate; for example the Wikipedia article on Margin of Error gives an example wherein a sample size of 600 has a margin of error of only 4%.
However, as the survey was limited to the readers of a single specific blog, we can be sure the sample was extremely unrepresentative.
The context of why people thought about the Roman Empire included such examples of ‘Roman roads’ or ‘Roman time keeping methods’.
According to the same logic I would have been thinking about the British Empire whenever James Watt’s steam engine or Victorian railroads had been brought up.
I wonder whether such very wide definitions of ‘thinking about Rome’ are thus the main reason such polls came back with such very high numbers. Previously my guess had been unrepresentative samples, though that might also still be important.
I had encountered the following links somewhere on twitter recently, I think it had been mentioned in a thread by Bret Devereaux. It could be relevant for this discussion:
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/47481-men-women-thinking-about-the-roman-empire-poll
https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/50546-what-americans-think-about-the-roman-empire
Apparently, their numbers for men and women where but a small fraction of the survey done by that blog:
And even including the amount which only thinks ‘most days’ about the Roman Empire leads to only 5% of the US adult population often ‘thinking about Rome’.
Also, their methodology sections gives me the vague impression their results are likely more representative of the general population than that blog’s survey.
For people that understand Polish I can reccomend ‘Podcast Wojenne Historie’
https://www.youtube.com/@podcastwojennehistorie/videos
Extremely well reaserched WW2 videos, mostly military.
As an aside, I lament how many of the reccomendations shared here marry politics with history/science. Truth has a sad tendency to be of secondary concern in those circumstances.
Another blog I had thought of which I decided to post here in case some people are still looking for something to read during the hiatus: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/
I ended up there because it was recommended by Spencer McDaniel of Tales of Times Forgotten as something which gets rid of misconceptions about the ancient world. I had already read a few posts there, the two parter Stripping myths down to a historical core, and found it rather interesting. However, it might not be something for everybody.
I have also noticed there is way less activity on the comment sections there; with some posts even having no comments at all. However, one could regard that as a plus, as it means there is a much lower risk of encountering enough ‘I have to reply to this’-comments that one losses their entire evening; though that apparently only members of that blog may post could also help in that respect.