Hey folks! I am on vacation this week, so you’ll have to wait till next week to get the next installment of “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant.”
However, if you are looking for some ACOUP content to fill your Friday, I have a few suggestions! First, if you want some of my writing in particular, check out this piece I wrote recently for War on the Rocks on “The Importance of the Battle of Cannae,” a 3,000 word look at the battle, its context and significance, free to read and available to the public (so far as I know):
The virtual annihilation of a massive Roman force at Cannae constituted Hannibal’s greatest victory. Polybius reports 70,000 Roman dead and only 3,000 survivors but, as Lazenby notes, Polybius has left out a substantial camp guard, prisoners, and quite a few escaping soldiers from his tally of survivors. Livy’s casualty figures for the Romans are more reliable: 47,700 Roman soldiers killed, another 19,300 taken prisoner, and 14,550 escaped. But given the scale of the slaughter and completeness of Hannibal’s victory, the most shocking thing about the battle is that it wasn’t enough.
Alternately, if you want a deep dive on ancient culture similar to what we do here, let me suggest Spencer McDaniel’s 2019 “What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?” at A Tale of Times Forgotten. The title is fairly self-explanatory and the article goes through what we think ancient Greek music sounded like and how we know that – a few of the links to actual performances are dead, but most of them seem to still be live.
Finally for more general Classics interest, there was a new Pasts Imperfect newsletter this month, which includes, among other things, a neat short essay by ancient historian and Thucydides expert Jennifer T. Roberts on how the ‘Thucydides trap’ is a misconception. That’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about as well – you can tell reading the Fireside on realism and the older “A Trip Through Thucydides” that I think many of the common IR readings of Thucydides fail to fully embrace the complexity and sophistication of his narrative.
And hopefully that is enough to keep you until I am back next week!
Nice to see Spencer recommended here, though I should caution she is herself not wholly happy with her older articles
Spencer’s blog is a hoot. Their writing style is very enjoyable, not as polished or professorial as Brett’s, and with a much wider breadth of topics. They are far too into “debunking,” which is well and good but has its limits in terms of holding a reader’s attention. Some of the posts are absolute gems, the one about music certainly among the top five.
Not followed the link to the ancient Greek music article yet, but there’s a fantastic rendition of Aristophanes’ ‘The Frogs’ by an aulos expert on YT. Definitely recommend it, it’s quite a good tune outright!
I did have a question about your War on the Rocks article; this looks as good a place as any to ask it:
You say “Hannibal’s tactical victory at Cannae did not yield strategic success.” I wonder if this isn’t an overstatement. As I understand (relying heavily on Robert O’Connell’s Ghosts of Cannae), Hannibal’s army was at the end of its logistical rope by the time of Cannae, and likely would have had to abandon Italy if the Romans hadn’t given battle there. The crushing victory at Cannae convinced many city states in southern Italy to join Hannibal. Those city states provided him with the logistical support he needed to stay in Italy another decade.
Given that, can we really say that Cannae didn’t yield strategic success? I realize it didn’t ultimately decide the war. But extending the war in Italy for more than a decade seems like a rather strategically significant impact, even if it wasn’t the be-all, end-all of Rome’s rivalry with Carthage.
Do you think Carthage would have suffered as much in defeat if they had left Italy at that point vs what ended up happening?
I can potentially see a defensive strategy working with a Hannibal-tier general. The problem as I see it is that Carthage was militarily the weaker power for structural reasons not likely to change and Rome was not going to leave them alone so long-term prognosis was suboptimal (enemy having more *and* better manpower is not great). Hannibal decided to try to flip the table and came fairly close to succeeding.
Like it didn’t end up causing Carthage to *win* the war, but it caused a huge strategic shift in Carthage’s favor, greatly limiting how much manpower Rome could deploy outside of Italy for most of the rest of the war. Cannae and the resulting defections took out close to a third of Roman manpower pool! I don’t think it is fair to say a given operation is a strategic success only if that side wins the war. I would say Cannae was a *huge* strategic success, such a success that a few years after it, Rome’s unutilized manpower pool was at Empty. Rome had already proved itself capable of overwhelming Carthage in a 20-year attritional struggle and war with Rome was not really avoidable. Frankly given Rome had more manpower *and* higher quality manpower judging from non-Hannibal battles, Carthage was quite the underdog.
Perhaps Hannibal could be criticized for his excessive self-confidence given his literally 0 Roman-fighting experience at the start of his campaign. But if you assume he was a tactical genius, as Hannibal clearly believed (then provided himself one of the few people as bright as they think they are), it was pretty reasonable.
Now Hannibal probably should have been withdrawn from Italy in 207 BC. At that point he recognized he couldn’t maintain his network in Italy and withdrew to Bruttium area for the rest of the war. I think it would have been much more useful to pull him out and transfer him to Iberia where things were clearly trending south but there was still quite a bit of manpower available.
Cannae showed that Carthage could send their best general and a formidable army into Roman territory, win battles, finally win an absolutely crushing victory … and still not be able to capture Rome. With the advantage of hindsight, it does look to me like a clear indicator Carthage strategy had failed.
I think you can reconcile saying both “Carthage’s overall strategy against Rome failed” & “Cannae was a strategically-significant success for Carthage”
Hannibal great misfortune is in leaving Scipio alive though from my understanding, things in Spain would not have nearly gone as well if not for him.
Also the Alps Crossing cost him SO many people…. might have been better served just staying around in Spain to kick around Roman armies.
Hannibal suffering from the having to carry his own team is a fun issue though.
Hannibal’s losses crossing the Alps were not near as high as commonly imagined. He raised over 100,000 men, but some forces were lost in campaigning in Spain, sent home, or left behind as a reserve.
The actual force that marched forth from the Pyrenees was only 59,000 men. Of this figure nearly 35,000 descended into Italy. Half the losses were in the march to the Alps, the other half in crossing them. These losses were mostly made up for by the Gauls that joined his army.
True the Gauls were lower quality but the same is true of the forces Hannibal lost. He was careful to protect his elite units. Most of his cavalry and African infantry survived the trip.
The idea of Livy being the more reliable source!?
Well, I suppose it had to happen at least once.
Modern me who understands on some level the importance of logistics thinks Carthage/Hannibal should have stayed in Spain (although still recruited from Gaul). Make the Romans take the losses from crossing the Alps and hostile Gaulish territory. Or make Rome invade Spain / Carthage by sea, where the Romans are certainly competent but not so crushingly powerful as they are on land.
But that’s probably hindsight and a modern mindset. Carthage and Hannibal at the time would have known about Alexander, who invaded the massive and still-formidable Persian empire with a comparatively much smaller force and won conclusively through winning three battles.
You can’t beat Rome in Spain for the same reason that the Hellenic monarchs couldn’t beat Rome in Greece. The Romans aren’t going to give up unless you threaten Rome itself, and you can only do that if you’re in Italy.
Maybe Hannibal should have spent some more time in Iberia securing the Catheginian power base there and bleeding Rome of manpower before doing the crossing, but he would had to march into Italy sooner or later.
I think Hannibal was correct in his assessment that the only way to defeat Rome was to dismantle its alliance system, and there was no way for him to do that outside of Italy. It just turned out that dismantling said alliance system was much harder than he’d thought, although I’m not sure he could’ve known that at the time.
Speaking of Fireside on realism – the first recommendation in it was The Pedant’s article in Foreign Policy, titled Ideology Is the Key to Understanding Trump’s Foreign Policy. It included the following paragraphs:
Needless to say, the highlighted part is a very serious accusation. I have been wondering if that interpretation would still be consistent with this recent report.
https://archive.md/Ow2gO
The answer is that it isn’t. The Trump administration’s decision to go after USAID and everything associated with it had jack squat to do with “white nationalism” and everything to do with throwing red meat to its isolationist base that thinks that all foreign aid is wasteful and its paranoiac base that thinks USAID is a way to funnel taxpayer money to left-leaning NGOs.
It’s also worth noting that PEPFAR is back.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/pepfar-spared-concerns-about-global-hiv-response-remain-2025a1000jh4
It can certainly be more than one of those motivations though or even all 3, neither isolationism or paranoia are at all incompatible with white nationalism and racism; in fact it often seems to me that the 3 more often go together than not.
I am not sure it is possible to fully separate modern American isolationism as a political belief from the fact that the vast majority of the countries receiving foreign aid from the United States are majority-“nonwhite” as American white supremacists understand the term. The last time the US sent significant foreign aid to a “white” country was the Marshall Plan, and that was so long ago that political battle lines have shifted a lot.
It is much like the way that much of the intense opposition to welfare programs on the American right is hard to separate from the way that the beneficiaries of these programs are presented in right-wing media as nonwhite, even in cases where there are more white recipients than nonwhite in reality.
Even if there are plenty of right-wing Americans who are convinced that their hostility to domestic poverty aid and to foreign aid in pursuit of US foreign policy has nothing to do with race, it is very rare that we see evidence of the two beliefs being separate. Aid to struggling farmers who are pictured as white is far less likely to be attacked than aid to struggling urban single mothers who are pictured as nonwhite. And the Trump administration is willing to actively declare South African whites as political refugees to be brought in on the basis of outright fabrications, while insisting that nonwhite refugees be stopped at the border at best and thrown into overseas concentration camps at worst.
If one wishes to present these policies as non-racist, it puts the would-be presenter in a disadvantageous starting position to have these things to defend.
…
As to PEPFAR being back, well, the Trump administration reversing course on things anyone would have known would provoke an outcry, after the outcry materializes, is so common that it has its own food-themed four letter acronym these days.
“The last time the US sent significant foreign aid to a “white” country was the Marshall Plan, and that was so long ago that political battle lines have shifted a lot.”
Ukraine has entered the chat.
“Aid to struggling farmers who are pictured as white is far less likely to be attacked than aid to struggling urban single mothers who are pictured as nonwhite.”
The relevant parts of that sentence are “struggling farmers” and “urban single mothers,” not “white” and “nonwhite.”
“The relevant parts of that sentence are “struggling farmers” and “urban single mothers,” not “white” and “nonwhite.” ”
I’m not sure that’s wholly genuine, though I agree that the example could do with some work to properly highlight the point in question (that aid that’s perceived to be of benefit to white folks is less likely to be attacked by right-leaning folks than aid that’s perceived to be for non-white people).
I’m not steeped enough in US politics to be able to pick a solid example I’m afraid, but it’s a pattern than has parallels elsewhere. Here in the UK I can think of at least one example that may highlight it better (even though our racism is drawn along slightly different lines).
Around 261,000 Ukrainians have been provided visas in the UK since 2022, under a scheme that allowed them to apply directly as a result of the war with Russia. In roughly the same time period, 299,000 refugees have claimed asylum in the UK, primarily from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Refugees a smidge higher, but fairly comparable numbers.
Just yesterday there was a protest by right-wing folks outside a hotel in Epping that was being used to house asylum seekers. Last year right-wing protestors attempted to burn down a hotel used for housing migrants in Rotherham.
During all of this anti-migration protesting…not a single peep about Ukrainians.
Is this a perfect example either? Not quite. But I’d bet my mortgage that if you laid out every single example you could find, you’d find a very strong delineation of attitudes towards ‘stuff that’s seen as affecting white people’ and ‘stuff that’s seen as affecting non-white people’. Even if there are other factors involved in each individual case.
‘Uh, America’s not racist!’ is a very strange idea to line up behind at this point, what with the US government massively expanding a paramilitary force that grabs non-white people off the street and either charges them with made up crimes or puts them in deportation camps. There’s a lot of racial coding in modern American vernacular that is deliberately opaque and deniable (and this was intentionally started by Republican operative and Blues impresario Lee Atwater). “Urban Single Mothers” and “White Single Mothers” are nonoverlaping categories in vernacular ontology, even though simple etymology and common sense say that they should overlap. That’s language, it’s strange. Similar situation with “Farmers” and “Black Farmers” although for many Americans the existence of Black Farmers is disputed (observable reality notwithstanding); indeed the last Secretary of Agriculture to publicly discuss the Federal Government’s role in that dispute had to resign for her remarks.
@Endymionologist: Please inform us how your timeline developed the transdimensional portal.
@Ynneadwraith: Of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Ukraine is a warzone and Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
That having been said, I agree that I certainly can’t possibly imagine why the locals in Rotherham might be a little…tetchy about these matters besides them being racist. Nope, can’t think of a single reason. Not even one.
@guildres, I don’t get it. Is it a joke?
Anyway, you seem to have some sort of constitutional difficulty w/r/t admitting to the existence of racism. That especially doesn’t serve you well in this new age of racists openly admitting their racism, but it was a false understanding of the world even beforehand.
Bigots with a fixation on purity are consistently a faction in all Western bodies-politic, have been since Roman times at least; the specific features that define an impure outsider mutate constantly, as have the specific policy proposals, but the stupid strength-through-inbreeding policy goal has remained.
In America, these racists are now running the Federal government. The Republican majorities in both chambers of the legislature have authorized redirecting funding from education and foreign aid into the expansion of an agency that was originally created as a logroll to get the previous generation’s Congressional racists to support a bunch of authoritarian and anti-privacy measures. That agency has already been mobilized this year for a public terror campaign, showing up in liberal/diverse neighborhoods and workplaces in masks and tactical gear to grab and intimidate people. You could be aware of this if you wanted to be. Charges filed against protestors in Los Angeles are so riddled with obvious lies by the federal agents that the US Attorney responsible for prosecuting them is having to order subordinates to disregard their professional guidelines.
That having been said, I agree that I certainly can’t possibly imagine why the locals in Rotherham might be a little…tetchy about these matters besides them being racist. Nope, can’t think of a single reason. Not even one.
Agreed entirely. Picking Rotherham for that particular example seems…..really strange.
Bigots with a fixation on purity are consistently a faction in all Western bodies-politic, have been since Roman times at least; the specific features that define an impure outsider mutate constantly, as have the specific policy proposals, but the stupid strength-through-inbreeding policy goal has remained.
Whether or not you agree with “strength through inbreeding”, I don’t think it has much to do with racism (which i see as being much more about inequality and hierarchy, and less about purity).
@Endymionologist: If the presence of widespread, blatant racism is so self-evident, then you should be able to find examples that don’t have alternative explanations. So far, you haven’t come up with one, as your characterization of ICE’s activities could, at best, be described as tendentious.
Well I’m glad that a post about literally nothing at all by Bret spontaneously turned into a flamewar about whether racism is real in the comments. Really reinforces my belief that the internet beyond static webpages was a mistake
I don’t recall stating that there was no other reason for the residents of Rotherham to be angry other than racism. That wasn’t my argument. In fact, I was quite careful to say things like ‘there are other factors involved in each individual case’ and ‘I’m not sure that’s wholly genuine’ to qualify my statement.
Could you quote the part where I stated that?
” If the presence of widespread, blatant racism is so self-evident, then you should be able to find examples that don’t have alternative explanations.”
Although it’s from a different thread, this statement of yours might help me clarify my argument.
The argument isn’t that ‘racism is the only cause’. That doesn’t appear to have been how racism has manifested ever, as far as I’m aware. What appears to happen is that specific grievances are targeted towards an ethnic minority while equal/similar/greater grievances are overlooked from groups who are deemed to be ‘in the same group’.
My bringing up those riots was deliberate. The primary grievance stated by the majority of people at Epping is around sexual assaults carried out by migrants (the whole grooming gangs thing). Don’t get me wrong, this is a genuine problem. It happens, and it’s horrific.
What doesn’t get discussed in these circles is that 80% of the perpetrators of these grooming gangs are white British. Disproportionately, the overwhelming majority of sexual crimes occurring in Britain are perpetrated by white British people.
Yet, these members of the public generalise the issue of a *very small proportion* of migrants responsible for sexual assaults to *all migrants* (innocent or otherwise) in a way that flat-out doesn’t happen for white British perpetrators. They flat-out ignore sexual crimes undertaken by white British people.
This is where the racism creeps in. It takes existing societal grievances and ensures they apply only to migrants (or whoever it is who’s the out-group at the given moment).
The same is true of violent crime and Rotherham. Violent crime gets generalised to the out-group, but not to the in-group.
“Of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Ukraine is a warzone and Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”
You’re right. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with there being a war going on. Somali migrants are targeted. Afghan and Kurd migrants are targeted (including ones who fought on our side in the wars there). Syrians, Eritreans, Sudanese. All get targeted in ways that Ukrainians simply don’t.
@60guilders: “They are eating cats and dogs.”
Not blatantly racist enough for you?
@Ynneadwraith:
While I am not surprised that 80% of child groomers in Britain are white British, since 80% of the population in Britain is white British, in Rotherham, specifically, the perpetrators of the abuse were extremely disproportionately…not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
That the UK government decided to throw even more refugees their way is insane.
I’m aware of that.
If racism wasn’t a significant factor in the Rotherham riots…why weren’t there similar riots (or even protests, hell even the slightest discussion) in response to the uncovering of white grooming gangs? At any point over the last decade and a half, when all of the following high-profile cases broke in the media:
2009 Plymouth – nothing
2009 Jersey – nothing
2010 Camborne (with successive arrests of connected individuals all the way to 2025) – nothing
2010 Kidwelly – nothing
2013 North Wales – nothing
2014 Operation Voicer – nothing
2015 Norwich – nothing
2016 Kesgrave – nothing
2016 Berkhamsted – nothing
2019 Beechwood – nothing
2025 Blackrod – nothing
The hypocrisy of the response from the EDL-types is deafening. This is what I’m talking about when I say ‘the racism comes in when existing societal problems are applied only to migrants’.
The whole thing is horrendous. There’s people here preying on the most vulnerable in our society. That cannot be allowed to happen. Folks are correct in identifying that migrants are over-represented in *this particular type* of sexual abuse. However, the complete and total lack of any response at all when similar crimes are uncovered with white perpetrators, and the complete and total lack of response to other forms of sexual abuse perpetrated by white British people, severely undermines the case they’re trying to make.
It makes it very easy indeed to dismiss their case as being racially motivated. Because when race isn’t a factor…they’re silent.
Note that this isn’t the same as saying that these grievances don’t exist. They do. People have a right to be angry about this sort of stuff. It’s horrendous.
What people don’t have a right to do is cherry-pick a single issue that has a racial disparity, ignore any and all instances that don’t have race as a factor, and cry foul when they’re accused of racism.
Folks are correct in identifying that migrants are over-represented in *this particular type* of sexual abuse. However, the complete and total lack of any response at all when similar crimes are uncovered with white perpetrators, and the complete and total lack of response to other forms of sexual abuse perpetrated by white British people, severely undermines the case they’re trying to make.
@Ynneadwraith,
I had been under the impression for years that statutory rape convictions or accusations were really wildly higher among South Asians (I guess you just call them Asians) in England, based on an editorial in Dawn from the mid 2010s, which supposedly was citing UK government numbers. As far as I can tell from going to official government sources though, that doesn’t appear to be the case, and I haven’t been able to track down the original Dawn piece, so I’m going to need to conclude that this is a question on which I was wrong.
@Hector No problem. It’s definitely one of those things where the public perception/narrative has run away with things. High ‘sensationalisation quotient’ if you will.
To be completely transparent, South Asians do appear to be over-represented in uncovered grooming gangs. IIRC they are also very slightly over-represented in sexual assault stats in general as well (by a couple of tenths of a percentage point per head of population). I don’t know how the former relates to the latter. The full stats are published on the UK gov website if you wanted to dig into the data (not that that’s necessarily the full picture either).
It’s not that there isn’t a problem. The issue is that it’s being treated as emblematic of a broader problem with migrants in a way that doesn’t fit the reality of sexual assault in the UK, but does fit a boatload of other issues that centre around race, immigration, and general white nationalist sentiment.
@YARD,
I think Bret (like many other people) is confusing two different things here, which is maybe adding to your confusion.
Someone might believe that Africa is already overpopulated, that their fertility rates right now are unsustainably high, and that African immigration to parts of Europe threatens to ‘swamp’ the native population (or any one of the three). If you believe that then presumably you’re going to be a big supporter of contraception aid to African countries, with the goal of reducing their fertility rates. At a higher level of abstraction, you should also be a supporter of development aid in general, since economic development is very reliably linked to reduced fertility. (Including in Africa, fertility rates have dropped significantly in almost every African country, though slower than one would like).
On the other hand, someone might or might not believe any of these things, but just have an antipathy or indifference to African people (and “black” people elsewhere), in which case you might not want to spend money on anythng that helps them or is in their interests.
Bret (and often many other people) tend to conflate these two positions, but they’re really separate. I don’t know if Trump falls into the first group, but i’m fairly confident he falls into the second, so destroying contraceptives meant for Africa seems to me like *exactly* the kind of thing he would do. It’s really less an ideological position- to me- than a visceral, instinctive one.
The evidence suggests that Trump’s underlying belief is “giving anything to anyone is a sign that you’re a loser and a sucker who deserves to be considered as a failure, and the height of being a successful winner who deserves to be treated like a god is to constantly abuse, belittle, humiliate, and rob people who can’t do anything about it because of how powerful you are.”
Most of his foreign policy and trade policy and for that matter domestic policy can be explained with reference to this underlying form of psychological damage, and to the fact that tens of millions have embraced this form of psychological damage as the essential guiding light of their entire belief system.
I don’t know about the second bit- I’ll let Trump voters speak for themselves about that- but yes, I think that’s a pretty good summary of the way Trump himself thinks (or, i guess, “thinks”). I still think he probably has a particular indifference/antipathy towards Black people, but you might well be right and that the more important thing is that he doesn’t relate to the idea of charity at all.
Well, that interpretation can be inconsistent, but that wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, per se. The inconsistency could be on the part of the white supremacist, who holds several different ideals at once that are, in some cases, in direct opposition with each-other.
As is written in the quoted article:
If you have a White Supremacist Christian Fundamentalist, who believes that abortion, contraception and family planning are all sinful and go against God’s plan, then their wish to reduce the African population will contradict their position against the distribution of contraceptives. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t necessarily White Supremacists, or that White Supremacy wouldn’t seek a reduction in populations of black peoples – just that an another set of convictions won out and was more important in this case.
That is, of course, if one ascribes agency to the Trump administration with relation to the contraceptives themselves being destroyed, rather than it being a regrettable, but inconsequential side-effect of a haphazard decision by Washington to simply abolish USAID, all consequences be damned.
Is there a world where Hannibal wins or at least stalls things out to a draw? Whether he manages to recognize Scipio’s generalship as a threat and kills or captures him beforehand, supports his brother in the Spanish front, gets actual support from the Carthaginian government at home, bides his time instead of besieging Saguntum, takes the long shot and attempts to beseige Rome, etc. Bret hinted several times that the Carthaginians were pretty close to beating the Romans (in contrast with the Hellenistic kingdoms), so this implies that things could have gone the other way around in a number of plausible scenarios. What are they?
The most likely scenario I see in which Carthage can plausibly win is the Sicilian theatre going in its favor after Syracuse turned against Rome. Had Himilco’s army not been hit by a plague and/or had Bomilcar attacked the Roman fleet when he had superior numbers, a successful capture of the island and/or a successful challenge of Roman naval supremacy could have opened a supply route to Hannibal’s forces in Italy. Hannibal being better at sieges (compared to field battles he seems average in this area) could have also put him in a better position to chip away at Roman held cities in Italy (not Rome itself). For example, taking the citadel of Tarentum would have given him a better port to potentially receive supplies, though that probably needs a more daring Bomilcar too to become a real advantage. You can’t make Carthage win with one small change, but two or three more things going in its favor in the years directly after Cannae would give it a real shot.
Rather than a trap to read about in Thucydides I am always fundamentally impressed by what a masterful apology he produced for Pericles. Pericles absolutely blows what had been a solid winning streak for Athens and seemed to be about continue with what was looking like an easy win against Perdiccas… with instead delivering a total own goal war of choice with Sparta. And then Pericles adds injury to insult with an opening strategy that pretty much kills any chance Athens had of winning the war. Also gotta give Thucydides credit for making you think you are reading about some kind of binary conflict of just two power blocks and forget Persia even exits or has serious interests in the outcome (and an Athenian loss in particular). If there is a Thucydides trap its really rather don’t blunder into war to the knife with another great power while a hostile third one is sitting around in the wings and is right next door.
I think Pericles deserves more respect than you offer. First, wars in the ancient world are a given. The ancient world did not have a developed idea that two powers could peacefully coexist. Instead every state thought you had to eat or be eaten. The closest I can think of to modern great powers coexisting without war would be the Bronze Age just before the collapse. Greek city-states did not peacefully coexist. Neither did the Hellenistic monarchies, nor Rome and anyone, nor Carthage and Rome/Sicilian Greeks/Iberians/other North Africans, nor the Chinese Warring States. I think an ancient politician would safely assume that Athens and Sparta would go to war eventually.
As for Persia, Persia didn’t buy Sparta a fleet until the end of the war. I think that was decades after Pericles died. A Greek polis allying with Persia and selling out the Ionian Greeks would have been shocking to think of at the beginning of the War.
I am not sure what strategy Pericles had that was so bad. In general building Long Walls, then hiding your population behind them instead of fighting a land battle in Attica seems reasonable. It plays to Athens’ strength (navy) and not to Sparta’s strength (army). Maybe Pericles should have foreseen a plague, since plagues were typical then, but the ancients had no way to effectively combat a plague. Even an effective strategy is always vulnerable to bad luck, or the will of the gods as the Greeks would have viewed the plague.
Some good news for Our Gracious Host – turns out, you can make a film that’s fully centered around managing logistics in preindustrial times, as well as have it depict the past while (generally) making the clothing, etc. look fairly colourful and also have it atop the box office! Or at least, you can do that if you work in China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2OTkfvZmEM
As you can see from the trailer, The Litchi/Lychee Road is a historical dramedy which depicts the (largely) true story of how an official in the Tang Dynasty was able to deliver a fruit that normally spoils in 3 days over a route which typically lasts nearly three weeks. In the face of skepticism and outright sabotage, he was able to reduce the delivery time to 11-12 days, while employing every preservation technique available at the time. Aspects like the ability to smoothly switch horses at courier stations get an extended look here.
It’s quite a depiction of what the Tang Dynasty was already capable of achieving back then – as well as what they chose to waste that power on. Much like our host has observed in the earlier agricultural series on here, the little people very much did not benefit from such extravagant gambits – and though this may not come across in the trailer, the film is very mindful of that fact. In all, a definite recommend.
As you can see from the trailer, The Litchi/Lychee Road is a historical dramedy which depicts the (largely) true story of how an official in the Tang Dynasty was able to deliver a fruit that normally spoils in 3 days over a route which typically lasts nearly three weeks
From personal experience, lychees still have a notoriously short shelf life, which is a major problem in poor countries which produce them- they’re in oversupply and really cheap for a few weeks of the year, and rreally expensive at other times (or in other parts of the world, like America), but farmers can’t really take advantage of that fact because they spoil so fast. Unlike many other fruits.
Did the aforementioned Tang official use ice from the mountains to keep them cool, or anything like that?
He did – but ice was only a part of it, and less significant one (probably the only one which the film skips over somewhat, only mentioning that he organized the Imperial ice barges from a mountain city to travel down the river to meet the land route at the required time). The most important aspect, according to the film, was actually to transport the entire tree in the soil inside horse carriage. Of course, the tree would eventually die from that – but not until about a week in. Then, they removed lychees from the branches, washed them in salt water, and placed them into double-layer ceramic vessels, with the outer layer filled water – and then those were meant to be loaded onto the ice barges! And of course, the steps before and after would not have been possible with the intricately maintained relay network, as described below. (In the film, he even does literal A/B testing of four possible routes before deciding on the fifth one.)
https://chinaminutes.com/2025/06/23/how-tang-dynasty-delivered-lychees-at-lightning-speed/
Now, I say “meant to be loaded onto barges”, because in the film at least, it doesn’t really work that smoothly. (Spoilers below.) As noted, it is ultimately very critical of how the imperial system marshalled these resources on an emperor’s whim. In the story, once the task everyone (the protagonist included) had initially dismissed as impossible began to look achievable, the court eunuch who punted that task to said official (technically, to the head of the Imperial Gardens bureau, who then picked the main character as the scapegoat) became very much mindful such success would make him look incompetent and attempts to sabotage the delivery with a masked man attack in the final mile. (Halfway through, the lychee-growing area’s governor attempts an intervention for the same reasons.)
Yet, the key irony is that a literal armed assault actually does much less damage than the assistance from the Imperial Treasurer, who extends his full backing halfway through as his own power play. The way he goes about it, though, ends up vastly increasing the demands on the source region, Lingnan (“If the Emperor and Pure Concubine deserve to taste fresh lychees, then why not her sister too, and the court and, and…”) from the initially-agreed 10 trees, to 100 – and then to 200, “to be safe”. Besides wreaking havoc on production, this exponentially increases the demands on the villages supplying the relay network, which are demanded to provide supplies for all those 200+ couriers in advance – and the system collapses under the strain before it can deliver the trees to the barges’ port.
The official is forced to call for the ice barges to arrive at an earlier location – but the captains refuse to change destination without the Treasury’s explicit authorization. Only one ship arrives (owned by the Lingnan merchant who initially bankrolls the effort hoping to be rewarded with tax relief – only for it to backfire once the Treasury steps in), so most of those trees, which take years to mature, end up lost for absolutely nothing. The official is exiled to Lingnan for delivering only a small fraction of what was expected – yet this ends up saving him and his family, as the capital, Chang’an, is taken over in an uprising just a year later. (Apparently, that was the Zhu Wen takeover in 901.)
Now, the film is adapted from a recent novel, (by Ma Boyong, who apparently won the People’s Literature Prize 15 years ago), and it’s possible it exaggerates a lot (the article linked above makes no mention of some of the plot’s details, for one.) However, it seems like a fairly obscure page in history, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even the more-implausible aspects are truer than they might seem.
Another relevant thing which happened quite recently – in a feature article, Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, made some claims which might have benefited from getting run past The Pedant – particularly since they were made as a part of what is effectively a book promotion tour.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-04/societal-collapse-democracy-inclusive-global/105358546
For those wondering, Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things is in direct contradiction to the highlighted parts. In particular, “taller and healthier” seems to combine a possible truth – the increased disease burden in crowded Roman times attested by multiple studies – with what seems like a total misunderstanding, since “mean femur length rises over the early Roman Empire, falls slightly in the late second and early third century, rises again but not quite so high over the fourth century, and then utterly collapses in the fifth”. (Additionally, the Collections argues that even the supposed increase in other health indicators might be a mirage, caused by the pre-Roman and post-Roman burials including more elites, who mainly got cremated in Roman times – though the biggest peer-reviewed work on the subject had apparently already dismissed this explanation.)
Now I’m curious about history of slavery in Italy. We know that Rome have a slave economy, while anything I read about Italy in 1000s seem to have a dearth of slaves. What happens in between? Is the rise of Christianity wholly responsible?
Here’s a possibility – it’s about the economics of slavery. Slavery makes more economic sense in high-productivity economies, because the value of the slave to the slaveowner is the slave’s output (which is less than a free adult’s output, because they’re slaves) minus the slave’s subsistence (which is the same as a free adult’s minimum subsistence requirement, because the slave is a human). So if you’re a subsistence farming economy, and a household barely produces enough to feed itself at minimum level, adding a slave to the household is adding one underperforming worker plus one extra mouth. There might be a bit of a margin there but it’s not going to be very much, so you won’t be willing to pay much for that slave.
But if you’re in a very productive farming economy – say, one plugged into a large regional trading network, so you can produce and export cash crops – a free adult’s output might be five or six times a free adult’s subsistence. Slaves now make a lot of sense – because the alternative is to hire a free labourer, and he’ll want a high wage (because you’re in a highly productive, high wage economy) whereas you can still just give the slave minimum subsistence.
It’s believable that tenth century Italy was less productive than Imperial Italy, and therefore slaves just didn’t make as much economic sense.
Some of it was probably economic/social structure change, but the Church was also generally hostile to enslavement of Christians which caused slavery to decline as it gained institutional strength. By the 1100s it was basically gone other than along the religious frontiers of Christendom.
Given the Roman model (household slaves were frequently emancipated, rural slaves tended to blend into the lower classes over time), slavery tended to die back without constant inflow. In the late Republic this was supplied by war, in the early empire by predation in the frontier zone (the Germanic word for merchant derives from the Roman terms for slave-merchant). By the later empire, some form of semi-free status seems to have become the rural norm, and slavery mostly an urban phenomenon.
This is a fairly common pattern – other than in cash-crop areas (plantations selling a few commodity crops into a large market: Italy 100 BCE- 150 CE; mid-medieval Sicily, lower Iraq 9th/10th century, the Caribbean and Brazil with sugar, the US South with cotton ..), slavery tends to bump along at maybe 10% of the population (eg that level in Domesday Book). Simply, gang-slavery is much more trouble than serfdom unless the rewards are high: more supervision, usually less reproduction, constant fear of rebellion …)
That’s a good point – widespread slavery only in cash-crop areas does suggest that it was an economically-driven phenomenon, at least partly. And a lot depends on whether you count serfs as slaves. Maybe serfdom was just a better solution to the question of “how do I legally and sustainably force people to work on my land for bare subsistence”.
“widespread slavery only in cash-crop areas does suggest that it was an economically-driven phenomenon”
IIRC, every crop in the English-speaking world was a cash crop. Widespread slavery was confined to the subtropical lowlands i.e. the areas where English settlers were likely to die of tropical diseases that were new to them.
But that was in a society in which most people were free servants for at least part of their lives. A society in which most people were more closely tied to the family farm would have fewer free servants, and more need for tradable slaves.
“Cash crop” in historical / economic discussions does not mean a crop you *could* sell for cash, it’s referring to farmers who don’t eat what they grow.
The default farming household in pre-industrial societies runs on a simple rule: if we don’t grow enough of our own crop, we’ll die of starvation. This doesn’t mean that they can’t buy some food on special occasions. Doesn’t mean that they can’t sell the surplus in good years and use the money to buy nice stuff. Neither is essential to their survival. The goal is to be (almost) self-sufficient.
(Of course, thanks to social horizontal bonds, they can rely to some extent on neighbours to bail them out in tough times, but it’s still the village that has to grow enough food, or people die.)
A cash crop farmer is relying on selling their crop for money which they use to buy food somebody else has grown. They might have a small plot of their own which grows some food they eat themselves, but not enough to survive. If you’re growing olives or grapes, and nobody wants or is able to buy them, or nobody has food to sell you, you’re going to die of starvation. (Well, someone is going to die of starvation. Hence slaves.)
So yeah this does give different incentives.
scifihughf, AIUI, farmers in 1800 England were notorious for toasting a bad harvest, because they gained more from high grain prices than they lost in low grain output.
“every crop in the English-speaking world was a cash crop. Widespread slavery was confined to the subtropical lowlands i.e. the areas where English settlers were likely to die of tropical diseases that were new to them.”
I wouldn’t be inclined to limit the discussion to the English-speaking world. Of the examples Peter listed of cash-crop slavery – “Italy 100 BCE- 150 CE; mid-medieval Sicily, lower Iraq 9th/10th century, the Caribbean and Brazil with sugar, the US South with cotton” – only one falls into this category.
On the face of it you need cash to buy slaves, so you are not going to be buying many slaves for agricultural work unless you have a cash crop to buy them with.
Put another way: you can have forced labour without money, but you can’t have a form of forced labour that requires money without money.
You can certainly have slavery without money, e.g. the Pacific Northwest, or SE USA Indian tribes. War captives -> slaves. You might not have as much of a slave trade… but you can still trade without later ideas of ‘money’.
Perhaps more accurate to say you won’t have slave trade without a lot of trade, and you may not have a lot of slaves (proportionally) without being able to trade them and disrupt their local ties. If it’s all one big population then forms of forced labor like serfdom might be better for preventing violent backlash without having to imitate Spartan society.
(Or conversely, if you’re not trading people around a lot, then you don’t have the reason to break up families a la chattel slavery.)
I must say, the mention of the Ancient Music blog post is remarkably apropos – because right around now, there’s a brand-new documentary (which even got cinema screenings here, due to the presenter being from Down Under) devoted to the most historically recent pieces of music featured in that post, the Oxyrhynchos Hymn.
A straightforwardly titled The First Hymn is, IMO, a fairly good documentary – although I certainly preferred the earlier parts about the history of Oxyrhynchos (i.e. the claim Christianity was a major driver of the shift from scrolls to books due to the bound book being more portable than a boxed scroll – reflecting the need to both migrate away from persecution and to move around to proselytize) and the hymn as it was. The later parts focus on the effort to “modernize” the hymn by Chris Tomlin, which ultimately leaves us with a song which hits the key lyrics (they emphasise a lot how stunned they were by the “Let stars be silent” line and how they made sure to make it a focal point), but is otherwise largely impossible to mark out as something with ancient history if you haven’t known the context. In fairness, it was momentarily quite interesting when they bring in a singer from the American Egyptian Coptic diaspora, and she mentions how their music (and much of the region’s music, apparently) uses double the number of notes Western music usually does, but they never really revisit that aspect.
Altogether, their team hopes that the translation’s history as the “predenominational” Christian music will make it cut through for the “believers and doubters” in a way other similar songs would not, but I rather doubt it’ll be a make-or-break moment for more than a handful of people. For someone outside the U.S. and that general mode of culture, the more illuminating proclamation that the aforementioned Chris Tomlin is “the most sung songwriter in the world” – and in fact, he had apparently first been defined that way over a decade ago. While I’m not completely sure of that, another claim from there which I was able to double-check is that in the U.S., Christian music had hit the status of “fourth fastest growing”, with multiple songs now staying on the Billboard Top 100 for weeks at a time. (While Brazil is apparently the 2nd-fastest area of growth.)
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/13/nx-s1-5430545/christian-music-forrest-frank-brandon-lake-popularity
While this blog rarely goes into contemporary religion, there was that very early Miscellanea debunking the claim Christianity needed to become a Roman state religion in order to reach the everyday people, so a documentary discussing that exact period (the hymn was written down a century before the Nicene Creed – one part they zoom in on is how its text apparently debunks the idea the Holy Trinity wasn’t a theological concept until then) is an interesting echo of that.