Breaching the wall

Spartacus was a Thracian slave and gladiator, born in around 103 B.C.E. in what is now Bulgaria, about whose early years (despite several movies and books giving lots of lurid detail) little is known for certain.  He may have been conscripted into the Roman army -- certainly he knew a great deal about fighting and tactics -- but ultimately ran afoul with the notoriously harsh Roman discipline and was forced into slavery.  His physical prowess made it inevitable he'd be chosen as a gladiator, an occupation that could on occasion win you renown and eventual freedom, but much more frequently ended up with your dying a painful death in front of a large, cheering audience.

Spartacus by sculptor Dénis Foyatier (1830) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Spartacus statue by Dénis Foyatier, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Spartacus was having none of it, and in 73 B.C.E. he escaped confinement with about seventy other gladiators.  Soon their ranks were joined by an estimated seventy thousand slaves and poor people, which began the Third Servile War, a conflict Voltaire referred to as "the only just war in history."  They held out for two years -- no mean feat -- by this time, swelling their numbers to 120,000, before the inevitable happened.  The Roman army, under Marcus Licinius Crassus, defeated Spartacus's forces at the Battle of Lucania in 73 B.C.E.  Spartacus himself was killed in the battle (although his body was never found, leading to rampant speculation, lo unto this very day, that he somehow escaped).  In a way, even if he was killed during the fighting it was damned lucky for him, because after the battle ended six thousand of his compatriots were crucified along the Appian Way, surely one of the most horrific and cruel means of execution ever devised.

The Death of Spartacus by Hermann Vogel (1882) [Image is in the Public Domain]

For what it's worth, Crassus got what he deserved in the end.  In 53 B.C.E. he died at the disastrous (from the Roman perspective, anyhow) Battle of Carrhae, by one account being held down and having molten gold poured down his throat.

Man, they did know how to come up with some creatively gruesome ideas, back then.

The reason Spartacus comes up is because of a story over at Smithsonian Magazine about an archaeological find in Calabria, the "toe of Italy's boot" -- a three-kilometer-long stone wall running alongside what appears to be a deep military ditch, and nearby, obvious remnants of a battle, such as broken iron sword handles, curved blades, javelin points, and spearheads.  The types of artifacts are consistent with production during the late Republic, which is right about the same time as the Third Servile War occurred.

In fact, Andrea Maria Gennaro, superintendent of archaeology for the Italian Ministry of Culture, who worked at the site, believes that the wall and ditch were built to contain Spartacus and his fellow rebels, but that there is a spot on the wall that shows sign of a breach.  It's known that the rebellious slave army did fight battles against the Roman army in the region -- and more than once succeeded, before finally being overwhelmed and defeated in Lucania, forty kilometers south of Naples.  Gennaro thinks this very spot might have been the site of one of those breaches by the famous rebel.

Part of the stone wall thought to have been part of the defense against Spartacus and the rebels [Image credit: Andrea Maria Gennaro]

"We started studying weapons recovered along the wall, and the closest comparisons are with weapons from the late Republican period," she said.  "We believe we have identified the site of the clash...  The wall is a sort of barrier due to its topographic location and other factors, like the absence of gates.  It divides the entire large flat area into two parts...  When we realized what it was, it was very exciting.  It's not every day you get to experience history first-hand."

I was struck by that palpable sense of history beneath my feet the entire time I was in Italy two months ago.  Mind you, there's history everywhere in the world; right here where I now live, the Seneca and Cayuga Nations and their ancestors thrived for thousands of years.  But there are few places in the world with as many tangible traces of antiquity as in Italy.

And now we have one with a direct connection to one of the most famous figures from the Roman Republic -- someone who is still held up as an inspiration to those fighting against oppression and servitude.  Even though Spartacus and his rebels ultimately failed -- certainly, the practice of slavery in Rome continued unabated afterward -- seeing the wall that they breached over two thousand years ago still acts as a symbol of brave men and women willing to put their lives on the line to be free.

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Ancient UFOs

One argument against UFOs being alien visitors from other star systems is that the number of UFO sightings has risen in direct proportion to our knowledge and awareness that there are other star systems -- suggesting that they're largely a combination of overactive imagination and misinterpreting natural phenomenon (or such human-made creations as satellites and military aircraft).  The whole UFO craze, in fact, really took off during the 1940s and 1950s, when our scientific knowledge of space was accelerating rapidly.

And unsurprisingly, this was also when science fiction tropes in fiction really caught on in a big way.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the conventional wisdom in the Western World was that the skies were the domain of God and the angels, and as such were ceaseless and changeless.  (Which is why such transient phenomena as comets and novae got everyone's knickers in a twist.)  The planets weren't even considered to be places, as such; they were manifestations of powers or forces.  And if you think all that, there's no particular reason you'd look up and expect to see visitors from there, right?

So what we see, perhaps, turns out to be what we expected to see.

But it turns out that a handful of very peculiar UFO-ish incidents do come from the pre-technological world.  Now, I'm not saying any of these are actual extraterrestrial visitations, mind you; I still very much come down on the side of there being natural, no-aliens-required explanations for these phenomena.  But the fact remains that they're interesting accounts, even so.

Let's start with one observed in the days of the Roman Republic.  In 73 B.C.E., Rome was involved in the Third Mithridatic War against King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus and his allies.  The Roman senator Lucius Licinius Lucullus was charged with overseeing the war effort, and had decided to engage the Pontic army near Nicaea despite being outnumbered.  But then -- according to Plutarch -- the following happened:

But presently, as they were on the point of joining battle, with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies.  In shape, it was most like a wine-jar (pithos), and in color, like molten silver.  Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel, as they say, occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae.

Understandably, both sides decided this was an omen worth paying attention to, and called off the battle.  (I guess there was no indication of who the omen was against, so they both decided to play it safe.)  The delay didn't help Mithridates, ultimately; the Romans under Lucullus went on to fight on another day when there were fewer flaming wine-jars in the sky, and Pontus was resoundingly defeated.

So, what was this apparition?

Well, the likeliest answer is that it was a bolide -- a meteor that bursts in midair.  It's understandable how in those highly superstitious times, when omens were detected even in the entrails of slaughtered animals, such an occurrence would have sparked quite a reaction.

An even stranger one is the tale of the "Airship of Clonmacnoise," an account of a sighting that occurred in around 740 C.E. near Teltown, in County Meath, Ireland.  Here, the problem is sorting out what people actually saw from later embellishments.  The earliest versions of this story simply state that several "flying ships with their crews" were seen in the skies, but very quickly it grew by accretion.  In later iterations, the multiple ships coalesced into a single huge one, which was halted over the Abbey of Clonmacnoise when its anchor snagged on the roof of the abbey church.  A "sky sailor" climbed down a rope ladder to free it (shades of the Goblin Ship in the most recent episode of Doctor Who!), and told the astonished monks he was "in danger of drowning in the thicker air of this lower world."

Here's an account from thirteenth century monk and scholar Gervase of Tilbury:

The people were amazed, and while they discussed it among themselves, they saw the rope move as if [the crew] were struggling to free the anchor.  When it would not budge for all their tugging, a voice was heard in the thick air, like the clamor of sailors vying to recover the thrown anchor.  Nor was it long until, hope in the effectiveness of exertion having been exhausted, the sailors sent down one of themselves – who, as we have heard, dangling from the anchor rope, came down it hand over hand.  When he was about to disengage the anchor, he was seized by bystanders: he gasped in the hands of his captors like a man lost in a shipwreck, and died suffocated in the moisture of our thicker air.  But the sailors overhead, surmising that their comrade had drowned, cut the anchor rope after having waited for an hour, and sailed away leaving the anchor.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that by now the scene of the incident had shifted to London, because there's no way a good Englishman like Gervase could let such an exciting tale take place in a remote spot like central Ireland.

This one is probably just a tall tale -- although I do find the bit about the air down here being "thicker" curious, because that certainly wasn't widespread knowledge back then.

Then we have the events of the morning of April 14, 1561, when "many men and women of Nuremberg" witnessed something very peculiar.  The incident caught enough attention to be written up in a widely-circulated broadsheet the following week.  Here's how it was described by the witnesses:

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the Sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women.  At first there appeared in the middle of the Sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the Moon in its last quarter.  And in the Sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color.  Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the Sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.  In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.  These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the Sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the Sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the Sun.  Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.  And when the conflict in and again out of the Sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the Sun down upon the Earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the Earth with immense smoke.  After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.

Like the apparition that stopped the Roman/Pontic battle, this was interpreted as an omen -- in this case, that God was even more pissed off than usual, and everyone should immediately repent and promise not to be naughty hereafter.  So once again, everyone interpreted what they saw based on their cultural context -- which, honestly, is pretty universal.  But from a more scientific standpoint, what the hell was this?  

An illustrated news notice from April 1561, showing a drawing of the phenomenon [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unlike the Airship of Clonmacnoise (or Teltown or London or wherever they finally decided it happened), it's hard to dismiss this one as a tall tale.  The accounts are numerous, detailed, and -- most important, from a scientific standpoint -- all agree substantially with each other.  Skeptic Jason Colavito says that he believes the account is consistent with the atmospheric phenomenon called sun dogs, in which high-atmosphere ice crystals cause light refraction when the Sun is low in the sky, creating two bright spots (sometimes with a rainbow sheen, and often with a partial or complete halo) on either side of the Sun.

The problem is, I've seen many sun dogs, and nothing about them moves -- they can be kind of eerie, but they just hover near the horizon and eventually fade.  I've never seen a sun dog that "fell from the Sun down upon the Earth and then wasted away with immense smoke."  So for me, this one is in the "unknown" column.

Perhaps the strangest of all is the event that happened in February of 1803 in the Hitachi Province of the east coast of Japan.  Called Utsuro-bune (虚舟, hollow boat) the story was recorded in at least four separate written accounts.  The story goes that fishermen saw a strange object drifting in the ocean, and upon approaching it, found that it was a peculiar vessel "shaped like an incense burner," about 3.3 meters tall by 5.5 meters wide.  They said that the top half was "the color of lacquered rosewood," with windows made of glass or crystal, and the bottom half made of metal plates.  They towed it to land, and found that inside was a very small (but apparently adult) woman, only about 1.5 meters tall, with pale pink skin and red hair with white tips.  She spoke to them in some strange language, and could neither speak nor understand Japanese.  She clutched a rectangular metal box covered with strange inscriptions, and wouldn't let anyone touch it.

A drawing of the Utsuro-bune by Nagahashi Matajirou, ca. 1844 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Understandably, everyone in the area was pretty freaked out by this.  After numerous unsuccessful attempts to communicate with her, or at least see what was inside the box, they gave up and decided she was too creepy to keep around.  Ultimately, they put her back into her strange vessel, towed it back out to sea, and let it drift away.

UFO aficionados naturally are predisposed to interpret this as a Close Encounter with an alien.  Certainly her odd appearance and tiny size make that explanation jump to mind.  But can we infer anything more solid from it?

The story itself is strangely open-ended -- they never find out anything more about their weird visitor, and ultimately send her back to her dismal fate in the ocean.  It hasn't the tall-tale aspects of the Clonmacnoise Airship story, nor the obvious astronomical explanation of the flaming wine-jars over Nicaea.  Some have suggested that she was simply some poor soul -- possibly Russian or western European -- who had been cast adrift.  Unfortunately, no one thought to copy the odd symbols inscribed on the metal plates of her craft; at least that'd give us information about whether we're talking about an object of terrestrial manufacture, or something more exotic.

Like the Nuremberg incident, this one was widely-enough recorded that it's hard to dismiss it entirely as a myth.  But who the woman was, and where she'd come from, are still a mystery and probably always will be.

So there are four old tales that are widely touted in UFOlogical circles as evidence of visitation.  Predictably, I'm not convinced, although I have to admit they're curious stories.  But my reaction is tempered by the fact that "it's a peculiar tale" isn't enough to append, "... so it must be aliens."  Before we jump to a supernatural or paranormal explanation, it's critical to rule out the natural and normal explanations first -- and, critically, to determine if there's even enough hard evidence to draw a conclusion.

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A piece of the puzzle

Given how thoroughly explored the world seems to be, it's easy to assume that we've found pretty much everything there is to be found.  Yeah, we continue to stumble across small, obscure, well-hidden stuff -- frog species living in the deep parts of the rain forest, fossils buried under meters of sedimentary rock, a cache of flint tools out in the middle of the steppe.  That sort of thing.

The fact that sometimes we find something big and flashy sitting, as it were, right under our noses should give everyone hope that we are far from understanding everything there is to understand, and that we're not yet down to the level of simply cleaning up the minuscule details.

The latest example of this continues along the archaeological path we've been following for the past week or so, and looks at the discovery of a huge intact mosaic, made over two millennia ago, in Rome.  Not just in Rome, but on Palatine Hill, surely one of the best-studied, most thoroughly excavated historical sites in the world.

The mosaic, which has been described as "a jewel" by archaeologists, is estimated to be about 2,300 years old.  It was constructed of a variety of materials, including chips of marble and travertine, shells, pearls, coral, and pieces of a rare and expensive blue-green glass paste thought to have been imported from Alexandria, Egypt.  (The latter, Egyptian blue faience, is a semi-vitrified, or sintered, opaque quartz material colored with calcium copper silicate -- the exact recipe for which was a closely-guarded secret known only to a handful of master artisans.)

So whoever commissioned the mosaic -- at this point, unknown -- had money to burn.  The design appears to commemorate land and naval victories that were probably funded (if not actively led) by the project's patron.  There are also intricate decorative motifs, and fanciful representations of mythical creatures, including sea monsters swallowing enemy ships.  The wall holding the mosaic is thought to have been part of a large, ornate banquet hall.

A detail of the Palatine Hill mosaic [Image courtesy of photographer Emanuele Antonio Minerva]

“This banquet hall, which measures 25 square meters (270 square feet), is just one space within a domus (the Latin word for house) spread on several floors," said lead researcher Alfonsina Russo, head of Rome's Colosseum Archaeological Park.  "In ancient times, when powerful noble families inhabited the Palatine Hill, it was customary to use rich decorative elements as a symbol to show-off opulence and high social rank...  We have also found lead pipes embedded within the decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make fountains spout to create water games."

Further excavation into the site might not only turn up more artifacts, but could reveal who had the structure built -- likely a Roman senator.  "The person was so rich they could afford to import such precious elements from across the empire to decorate this mansion," Russo said.  "We have found nothing so far to shed light on their identity, but we believe more research might enable us to pinpoint the noble family."

It will be fascinating to see what else the researchers find out about this site, occupied by a fabulously wealthy Roman at the height of the Roman Republic.  (When this was built -- if estimates of its age are correct -- the Empire was still in the future; the first Roman Emperor, Octavian/Augustus, was born in 63 B.C.E., at which point this mosaic would already have been over two hundred years old.)

So this should provide some incentive for people to keep looking.  We are far from finding everything there is to find, even here on the Earth's surface, much less out in space.  And whatever new bits we come across -- like this mosaic, hidden beneath one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world -- will add one more piece to the puzzle of the complex and beautiful universe in which we live.

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Descent into chaos

There's an interesting concept called sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Here's a simple example.  If you take a deep bowl, and drop a marble into it, it doesn't take any great intelligence or insight to predict what the end state will be.  Marble on the bottom of the bowl.  It doesn't matter how high you drop it from or where exactly it hits the sides first.  After a bit of rolling around, the marble will stop moving at the bottom.

Now, do the same thing -- but with the bowl flipped over.  Where will the marble end up?

Impossible to say, because it is an inherently chaotic system.  You could do it a hundred times and the marble will end up in a different place each time, because its final location depends on exactly the speed and angle of its path, where it hits the curved edge of the bowl, even whether the marble is spinning a little or not.  A system like this is said to be "sensitive to initial conditions" -- therefore unpredictable.  Perturb it a little by altering it in a tiny way, and you get a completely different outcome.

Here's a much cooler example, that I stumbled across in doing research for this post.  It's called a double compound pendulum.  Take two rigid rods, and suspend one so it's free to swing.  Then tie the second rod to the bottom of the first.  Start with the rods pulled horizontal, then let it go.  Can you predict how the whole system will move?

Simple answer: no.  It's a chaotic system.

[GIF is in the Public Domain]

A little mesmerizing to watch, isn't it?

The reason this comes up is because there's decent evidence that the intersection between the Earth's climate and human society is a chaotic system that has at least some degree of sensitive dependence to initial conditions.  If you perturb it, it may not respond the way you expect -- and sometimes small changes in one location can lead to big ones somewhere else.  (This concept was made famous as "the butterfly effect.")

As an example of this, take the research that was released just last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the link to which was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday.  In "Extreme Climate After Massive Eruption of Alaska’s Okmok Volcano in 43 BCE and Effects on the Late Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom," by a team led by Joseph R. McConnell of the University of Cambridge, we find out about an Alaskan volcanic eruption that may have been one of the significant factors leading to the collapse of the Roman Republic, and its consolidation as an empire -- events that radically changed the course of history in Europe and North Africa.

Geologists on the team identified tephra (volcanic ash) in ice cores from the Arctic that were fingerprinted chemically and shown to come from the volcano named Okmok in the Aleutian Islands.  The dating of the tephra deposit shows that the eruption happened in 43 B.C.E. -- right after the assassination of Julius Caesar, during a time when Rome was in chaos as various political factions were duking it out for control.  The eruption of this volcano halfway around the world is also correlated with the coldest year Europe had for centuries, possibly longer.  Snow fell in summer, crops failed, there were famines and repeated uprisings by desperate and starving citizens.

This sudden drop in temperature was one of the factors that contributed to the realignment of the Roman government as someone emerged who said he knew what to do to fix the situation -- Octavian (later known as Augustus), Julius Caesar's great-nephew.  And he did it, establishing the Pax Romana, quelling the revolts and ushering in two centuries of relative peace and prosperity for Roman citizens (and wreaking havoc on the Gauls, Celts, Teutons, and whatever other tribes happened to be in the way of the Roman Legions).

It helped, of course, that once the volcanic tephra from Okmok settled out, the temperature rebounded, and the first years of Augustus's reign were noted for a beneficent climate and rich crop yields.  Not all of the good bits of the Pax Romana were due to Augustus's skill as an emperor; he got lucky because of conditions he had no control over and could not have predicted, just as the last leaders of the Republic got unlucky for the same reasons.

The point here is that we should be wary of perturbing chaotic systems, which is exactly what we're doing by our rampant dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  And what we're seeing over the last decades is exactly the sort of unpredictable response -- some areas experiencing droughts, others floods; deadly heat waves and trapped polar vortexes that drop areas into the deep freeze for weeks; increased hurricanes, tornadoes, and bomb cyclones.  One of the frustrations felt by the people who understand climate systems is that the average layperson doesn't see this kind of  unpredictability as precisely what you'd expect from pushing on an inherently chaotic system.  If you can't make predictions to pinpoint accuracy -- "okay, because the climate is changing, you can expect it to be 95 F in Omaha on July 19" -- it's nothing to be concerned about.

"The scientists don't even know what's going on," you'll hear them say.  "Why should we believe it's a problem if they can't tell us what the outcome is going to be?"

But that's exactly why we shouldn't be messing with it.  Systems that have sensitive dependence to initial conditions are dramatically unpredictable, and get pushed out of equilibrium quickly and sometimes with catastrophic results.

As the leaders in the final years of the Roman Republic found out.

I feel like another figure from the Classical world -- Cassandra -- for even bringing this up.  Cassandra, you may recall, is the woman who was cursed by the gods to having accurate foresight and knowledge of the future, but with the difficulty that whatever she says, no one believes.  The climatologists have been sounding the alarm about this for decades, to little effect.  If you can't accurately predict the outcome, to most politicians, it doesn't exist.

Which makes me wonder if before we try to get our leaders to get on board with addressing anthropogenic climate change, we should require they sit through some lectures on chaos theory.

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I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]