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 from 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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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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Lingua franca

Here's a question I wonder if you've ever pondered:

Why do the Spanish and French speak Romance languages and not Germanic ones?

It's not as weird a consideration as it might appear at first.  By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the last part of the fifth century C.E., the entire western part of Europe had been completely overrun by Germanic tribes -- the Franks, the Burgundians, and especially the Visigoths.  This latter group ended up controlling pretty much all of southern France and nearly the entirety of Spain, and their king, Euric, ruled the whole territory from his capital at Toulouse.  It was Euric who deposed the last Western Roman emperor, poor little Romulus Augustulus, in 476 -- but showing unusual mercy, sent him off to a (very) early retirement at a villa in Campania, where he spent the rest of his life.  That he felt no need to execute the kid is a good indicator of how solidly Euric and the Visigoths were in control.

So the Germanic-speaking Goths more or less took over, and not long after that the (also Germanic) Franks and Burgundians came into northern France and established their own territories there.  The country of France is even named after the Franks; but their language, Franconian, never really took hold inside its borders.

Contrast this to what happened in England.  The Celtic natives, who spoke a variety of Brythonic dialects related to Welsh and Cornish, were invaded during the reign of the Emperor Claudius in the year 43 C.E., and eventually Rome controlled Britain north to Hadrian's Wall.  But when all hell broke loose in the fifth century, and the Roman legions said, "Sorry, y'all'll have to deal with these Saxons on your own" and hauled ass back home, the invaders' Germanic language became the lingua franca (pun intended) of the southern half of the island, with the exception of the aforementioned Welsh and Cornish holdouts.

All three places had been Roman colonies.  So why did France and Spain end up speaking Romance languages, and England a Germanic one?

The easier question is the last bit.  Britain never was as thoroughly Romanized as the rest of western Europe; it always was kind of a wild-west frontier outpost, and a great many of the Celtic tribes the Romans tried to pacify rebelled again and again.  When the Romans troops withdrew, there weren't a lot of speakers of Latin left -- exceptions were monasteries and churches.  Most of the locals had retained their original languages, and when the British Celts told the troops "Romani ite domum" (more or less), they just picked up where they'd left off.

The problem was, when the Angles and Saxons started arriving in huge numbers over the next two centuries, there wasn't a single dominant language there to stand up against them -- just a bunch of various dialects spoken by tribes that never were all that numerous, and didn't get along very well with each other anyhow.  So the West Germanic language the invaders spoke became the common language, eventually evolving into Old English.

The situation was different in France and Spain.  By the fifth century, those had both been solidly Roman for three hundred years.  The Celtic/Gaulish natives were by this time thoroughly subjugated, and many had even thrown their lot in with the conquerors, rising to become important figures.  (One example is first century B.C.E. writer and polymath Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, who despite his Roman name was from the Celtic Vocontii tribe in the western foothills of the Alps.)  Business, record-keeping, and administration were all conducted in Latin; most of the cities were predominantly Latin-speaking.  

The Germanic tribes who swept through western Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries had an interesting attitude.  They didn't want to destroy everything the Romans had built; they just wanted to control it, and have access to all the wealth and land.  They didn't even care if the Roman town-dwellers stayed put, as long as they acknowledged the Goths' overlordship.  (Which almost all of them did, given that there were no other options.  Practical folks, the Romans.)

The invading Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians had no written language we know of, so when they settled in to rule the place -- and most importantly, to do business with the local landowners -- their only real option was to learn Latin.  Latin became the prestige language, the language you learned if you wanted to go places, much the way English is now in many parts of the world.

The result was that Latin-derived Old French and Old Spanish were eventually adopted by the Germanic-descended ruling class, ultimately being spoken throughout the region, while the opposite pattern had happened across the Channel in England.  Interesting that the Franks gave their name to the country of France and its language, but the only modern language descended from Franconian is one spoken two countries northeast of there -- Dutch.

It's always fascinating to me to see how chance events alter the course of history.  You can easily see how it could have gone the other way -- the Visigoths might have been more determined to eradicate every trace of Romanness, the way so many conquerors have done.  Instead, they saw the value in leaving it substantially intact.  Not because they had such deep respect for other cultures -- they weren't so forward thinking as all that -- but because they recognized that they could use the Roman knowledge, language, and infrastructure for their own gain.  The result is that my Celto-Germanic ancestors spoke a language derived from Latin, even though by that time it was about the only Roman thing about them.

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The enduring mystery of the Huns

In 376 C.E., an enormous group of Germanic-speaking Goths, primarily from the Tervingi and Greuthungi tribes, showed up along the Danube River, which had long stood as an uneasy boundary between the Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire.

Most people are aware that the Roman Empire -- especially the western half of it -- would, for all intents and purposes, collapse completely less than a hundred years after that.  What's less well-known is that up to this point, it was doing pretty well; no one, in 375 C.E., would have looked around them and thought, "Wow, these people are doomed."  British historian Peter Heather analyzed all the usual factors cited in Rome's fourth-century troubles, including an uncontrolled and rebellious army, restive peasantry, food shortages from a drop in agricultural production, and conflicts with Persia on the eastern border.  None appear to be sufficient to account for what was about to happen.  Rome had stood for almost a thousand years -- to put that in perspective, four times longer than the United States has been a nation -- and had survived much worse, including the chaotic "Year of Five Emperors" (193 C.E.), which started with the murder of the paranoid and megalomaniacal emperor Commodus, made famous in the movie Gladiator.

The Roman Empire had dealt with border conflicts pretty much during its entire history.  Given its expansionist agenda, it was directly responsible for a good many of them.  But this time, things would be different.  No one at the time seems to have seen it coming, but the end result would write finis on the Pax Romana.

The difference was a group of people called the Huns.

Reconstruction of a Hunnic warrior [Image licensed under the Creative Commons George S. Stuart creator QS:P170,Q5544204 Photographed by Peter d'Aprix & Dee Finning; Owned by Museum of Ventura County, Attila the Hun on horseback by George S Stuart, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Huns are a historical enigma.  For a group so widely known -- every schoolkid has heard of Attila the Hun -- their origins are pretty much a complete mystery.  (For what it's worth, they did not give their name to the nation of Hungary; the name "Hungary" comes from the Oghur-Turkic word onogur, meaning "the ten tribes of the Oghurs."  And the Magyars, the Finno-Ugric ethnic group that makes up the majority of the ancestry in modern Hungary, didn't even come into the region until the ninth century C.E.)

As far as the Huns go, we don't even know much about what language they spoke, because they left no written records.  There are a handful of words recorded in documents from the fourth and fifth centuries, and some personal names, but the evidence is so thin that linguists haven't even been able to determine what language family Hunnic belonged to -- there are arguments that it was Turkic, Iranian, Yeniseian, Mongolian, Uralic, and Indo-European, or perhaps a linguistic isolate -- but the fact is, we simply don't know.

So basically, the Huns swept into eastern Europe from we-don't-know-where.  Certainly they at least passed through the central Asian steppe, but whether that's where they originated is a matter of pure conjecture.  There's even a contention they might have come from as far away as what is now northern China, and that they're allied to the Xiongnu culture, but the evidence for that is slim at best.

Roman chronicler Ammianus Marcellinus, who witnessed many of the events of the late fourth century that were to lead to the downfall of the Roman Empire, was grudgingly impressed by what he saw of the Huns:

The people called Huns exceed every measure of savagery.  They are aflame with an inhuman desire for plundering others' property...  They enter battle drawn up in wedge-shaped masses.  And as they are lightly-equipped, for a swift motion, and unexpected in action, they purposely divide suddenly into scattered bands and attack, rushing about in disorder here and there, dealing terrific slaughter...  They fight from a distance with missiles having sharp bone, instead of their usual points, joined to the shafts with wonderful skill; then they gallop over the intervening spaces and fight hand-to-hand with swords.

Ammianus, though, didn't know any better than anyone else where the Huns had originated; his best guess was that they'd lived on "the shores of the ice-bound ocean," but never provided any reason why he thought that.

When they did explode onto the scene, though -- wherever they'd come from -- the effects were catastrophic.  The Goths, Alans, and Sarmatians of what are now the Balkan countries of eastern Europe were shoved farther and farther west, and all of a sudden, the Roman Empire had a serious problem on its hands.  The emperor at the time, Valens, was ill-equipped to deal with a hundred thousand refugees, mostly from Germanic-speaking tribes who had long been considered little more than barbarians.  (To be fair, it's hard to imagine how anyone would be well-equipped to deal with this.)  His decision to treat the Goths as enemies, rather than joining forces with them against the greater threat of the Huns, led to the Battle of Adrianople in 378.

Valens lost both the battle and his life.

While there was some attempt to come to terms with the Goths (or even turn them into allies) by Valens's successor Theodosius I, the stage was set.  The domino effect of Huns shoving the Goths and the Goths shoving the Romans continued, chipping away at the Western Roman Empire, ultimately leading to the Gothic leader Alaric sacking Rome itself in 410.  The Huns made their way into Gaul, and even into Italy, under Attila.  This forward motion continued until the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, fought in 451 near what is now the town of Châlons, France, at which a combined force of Romans and Goths finally defeated the Huns and forced them back.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the Huns was that after that battle, they began to fall apart themselves with a speed that was just this side of bizarre.  Attila died in 453 -- from what appears to have been an esophageal hemorrhage -- and none of his many sons proved capable as a leader.  They fractured into various factions which rapidly succumbed to internecine squabbling, and their power waned as fast as it had waxed seventy years earlier.  What happened to them after that is just as much of a mystery as everything else about them; most historians believe that what was left of the Huns were absorbed into other ethnic groups in what are now Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and they more or less ceased to exist as an independent culture.

So we're left with a puzzle.  One of the most familiar, instantly recognizable civilizations in history is of unknown origin and had an unknown fate, arising from obscurity and fading back into it as quickly.  But what's certain is that after they surged through Europe, the western half of the Roman Empire never recovered.  The last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, abdicated in 476.  The western half of Europe fragmented into petty kingdoms ruled by various Germanic chieftains, and the power center shifted to Constantinople, where it would remain until Charlemagne came to to the throne three hundred years later.

Historical mysteries never fail to fascinate, and this is a baffling one -- a mysterious people who swept into Europe, smashed an empire that had stood for a thousand years, and then vanished, all within the span of a single century.  Perhaps one day historians will figure out who the Huns were, but for now, all we have is scanty records, the awed and fearful accounts of the people who witnessed them, and a plethora of questions.

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Blind spots

Authors reveal more in their work, sometimes, than they may have intended.

That thought crossed my mind more than once while reading the book Hadrian by British historian, antiquarian, diplomat, and writer Stewart Perowne.  The book is a history and biography of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was the emperor of Rome from 117 to 138 C.E.  Hadrian is considered to be one of the better rulers Rome had -- generally fair-minded, astute, and intelligent -- although considering he's competing against guys like Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Elagabalus, that may not be a very high bar.

A sculpture of the emperor Hadrian, circa 130 C. E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Djehouty, München SMAEK 2019-03-23n, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The book, which was published in 1960, was interesting enough, if a bit dry and pedantic at times (did we really need an entire chapter devoted to minute details about the architecture of the Pantheon?).  But there were a couple of times that what he wrote made me do a double-take.

The first time came when he was discussing the Roman program of expansion and colonization, and engaged in a digression comparing it to the policies of the British Empire between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  Perowne writes:

No other country has ever had a finer or more generous record in its dealings with other races than the English.  No great power, since history began, has occupied, and advanced to autonomous sovereignty, so large an extent of territory in so short a period.  The advance, it is true, was from the very first, when the American colonists set the precedent, encouraged by the inhabitants of the territory concerned; nevertheless, it did not take long for England to adopt as a principle that the aim of all colonial enterprise is the elevation of the colonials, and their establishment as independent states, in whatever form of association they may choose with Great Britain. 

Say what?

I think there are citizens of a few nations I can think of who would beg to differ.  Great Britain fought like hell not to let a good many of their colonies gain their independence.  It was only when faced with sustained revolt -- and the impossibility of continuing a minority rule over the unwilling -- that they grudgingly granted sovereignty.  (And a great many of those nations are still struggling to overcome the long-term effects of colonialism -- oppression, exploitation, wealth inequality, and bigotry.)

I know there's the whole "man of his time" thing you hear about writers in the past, and which has been used to look past even the horrific racism that threads through a lot of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.  Here, it's not quite that extreme, but was still kind of startling to read.  And perhaps there are still a good many of us who have the tendency to consider our own country as intrinsically superior, even if we wouldn't necessarily put it that way.  But it's somewhere between baffling and appalling that someone who was a historian, who devoted his life to investigating and understanding other cultures -- who, in fact, worked as a diplomat in Malta, Aden, Iraq, Barbados, Libya, and Israel -- could come away with the impression of the British Empire as the Gentle Guides of the Civilized World.

Stewart Perowne in 1939, while serving in the British diplomatic corps in Libya [Image is in the Public Domain]

Now, mind you, I'm not saying the British were any worse than a lot of other militaristic colonial powers.  The history of the world is one long sorry tale of the powerful exploiting the weak.  But to write what Perowne did, especially with his extensive knowledge and experience, is evidence of a blind spot a light year wide.

Then there was the sniffy, superior bit he threw in about Hadrian's male lover, Antinoüs.  Hadrian, in fact, was pretty clearly gay.  He was married to an apparently rather obnoxious woman named Vibia Sabina, but the marriage was an unhappy one and produced no children.  His devotion and love for Antinoüs, however, was the stuff of legends; the two were inseparable.

Hadrian and Antinoüs [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, Marble Busts of Hadrian & Antinoüs, from Rome, Roman Empire, British Museum (16517587460), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Perowne writes:

It was in Bithynia that Hadrian formed his famous and fatal attachment to Antinoüs, a lad of whose origin nothing is known, except that he came from the city of Bithynion...  Antinoüs, at the time when Hadrian met him, must have been a lad of about eighteen.  He was broad-shouldered and quite exceptionally handsome...  Whether the relations between the emperor Hadrian and his beautiful young favorite were carnal or not, we cannot be sure.  But what we can be certain of is this: that for the next nine years Antinoüs was the emperor's inseparable companion, that many people did suppose their association was based on a physical relationship, and that they did not reprobate it in the least...  However much we may deplore this fact, it simply is not possible to equate ancient and modern canons of morality.

He can't even bring himself to write "homosexual" -- but comments that it is unsurprising that later Roman authors used the word Bithynian as "a euphemism for something vile."

After reading this, you may be shocked to find out that Stewart Perowne himself was gay.

In a bizarre parallel to Hadrian's own life, Perowne reluctantly agreed to marry explorer and writer Freya Stark in 1947, but the marriage was unhappy, childless, and possibly even unconsummated.  Eventually the two divorced after it became obvious that Perowne's sexual orientation wasn't going to change.  He finally put it into writing to his wife, but once again meticulously avoided using the word homosexual:

It is difficult to say what "normal" is – my friend a counsellor of St. George's Hospital always refuses to use the word and in both men and women, you have a wide and graded range from ultra-male to ultra-female with naturally most people in the middle ranges...  Now for myself, I put myself in the middle group.  I have ordinary male abilities.  I like male sports some of them, and I love the company of women.  In fact, I find it hard to exist without it.  At the same time, I am occasionally attracted by members of my own sex – generally.  For some even pleasurable reason – by wearers of uniform.

I was simultaneously appalled and heartbroken to read those words, from the pen of the same man who called Hadrian's love for Antinoüs "something vile" and implied people were right to "deplore" it.  How deeply sunk in self-loathing would you have to be to be able to write both of those passages?

That a culture could produce such a tortured and damaged soul is a horrible tragedy.  And how many others did this happen to, men and women we don't know about because they never ended up in the public eye, but lived their entire lives in fear, shame, and obscurity, never able to openly love who they loved for fear of condemnation, imprisonment, or even death?

I'd like to think we've grown beyond that, but then I look around me at my own culture, where books are currently being banned merely for including queer people -- where even mentioning we exist is apparently improper -- and I realize that it's still going on.

So my reading of Hadrian got me thinking about way more than just a long-ago emperor of a classical European civilization.  It started me wondering about my own blind spots, things about myself and my culture that I take for granted as The Way Things Should Be, and which a future civilization might rightly shake their heads at.  

And thinking about Perowne himself made me recognize what complex, contradictory, and fragile creatures we humans are.  Will we ever find a way to move past all the antiquated hidebound moralizing, and simply treat each other with kindness, dignity, and compassion?  To live by the rule that has been set up as a guiding light in many cultures, but is best known in its biblical form -- "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?

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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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Rose-colored glass

My wife, Carol Bloomgarden, is an amazing artist, and participates in art shows all over the northeastern United States.  (Her work is called micrography -- it's drawings made from patterns of tiny handwritten text.  You can, and should, check it out at her website.)  Because showing framed art work requires moving lots of stuff around -- not only the work itself, but the canopies, frames, and stands on which to display it -- I frequently accompany her to her shows.

My usefulness is best summed up in a line from a t-shirt a student of mine used to wear: "I May Not Be Very Smart, But I Can Lift Heavy Objects."

In any case, in between setup and breakdown, I usually have lots of time to wander around the show and see what the other artists are selling.  Last year, one of the booths belonged to a very talented jeweler who made jewelry out of (amongst other things) fragments of Roman glass.

Carol hinted at me that she loved this jeweler's work, so for her birthday I got her a necklace and matching set of earrings made from chunks of turquoise-colored glass dating to about 300 C.E.

The Romans were outstanding glassmakers, and a lot of their work survives (unfortunately, much of it in fragmentary form).  And one curious thing about a lot of Roman glass is that it has a patina -- an iridescent sheen on the surface, sometimes refracting light and creating a metallic or rainbow appearance.  There is nothing in the existing writing from that era indicating that those effects were created deliberately; it seemed to be some sort of byproduct of the aging of the piece.

Fourth century C.E. Roman glass from a glassworks in Syria, showing the gold patina over pale green glass [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of its creator, Marie-Lan Nguyen]

Researchers in materials science at Tufts University became curious about how these coatings were produced, and did microscopic analysis of the surfaces of pieces of Roman glass.  They came to a surprising conclusion; the gold, silver, or rainbow-colored coatings were (1) naturally produced after the pieces were buried, and (2) were photonic crystals -- regular, periodic microlayers of precisely-arranged molecules, of the same sort used in semiconductors and solar cells, which have the effect of generating light interference and an opalescent or iridescent appearance.

It turns out that the interaction between the glass surface, rainwater, and the minerals in the soil results in a very slow, orderly deposition of thin films on the artifact's surface, and in two thousand or so years, you have something truly spectacular.  "It's really remarkable that you have glass that is sitting in the mud for two millennia and you end up with something that is a textbook example of a nanophotonic component," said Fiorenzo Omenetto, who co-authored the study.  "While the age of the glass may be part of its charm, in this case if we could significantly accelerate the process in the laboratory we might find a way to grow optic materials rather than manufacture them."

"This is likely a process of corrosion and reconstruction," said Giulia Guidetti, also a co-author.  "The surrounding clay and rain determined the diffusion of minerals and a cyclical corrosion of the silica in the glass.  At the same time, assembly of 100 nanometer-thick layers combining the silica and minerals also occurred in cycles.  The result is an incredibly ordered arrangement of hundreds of layers of crystalline material... [so] the crystals grown on the surface of the glass are also a reflection of the changes in conditions that occurred in the ground as the city evolved -- a record of its environmental history."

So here we have another example of the kind of fascinating crossover you see in the very best science -- in this case, between materials science and archaeology.  With possible applications to engineering.  

I know I'll think about this study every time Carol wears her Roman glass jewelry.  

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The fingerprints of a slaughter

During the reign of Augustus Caesar, the Roman leadership felt very close to all-powerful.

They had enjoyed unbridled expansion into what is now France and Spain, the Near East, and North Africa.  The Roman legions were well-trained, disciplined, and powerful, led by ruthless men chosen because of their knowledge of strategy.  When they launched campaigns northward, against the Germanic tribes who lived in what is now Austria, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before just about all of Europe came under Roman sway.

That all came to a screeching halt in the year 9 C.E.

I'd heard about the overwhelming defeat of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Legions near the village of Kalkriese, Germany in my college history classes, but I got a much better perspective on it last year when I read the wonderful book The Battle that Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoberg Forest by Peter S. Wells.  The general gist is as follows.

Arminius (known in German as Armin or Hermann, but most historians use his Latin appellation of Arminius) was a chieftain of the Cherusci, a Germanic tribe who lived in northwestern Germany.  Arminius had been sent to Rome by his father, Segimerus (Sigimer), after the latter had agreed to become a vassal of the Roman Empire.  Many of the Cherusci resented this deeply -- Arminius amongst them.  But while he was in Rome, he played along, and learned a great deal about Roman military strategy, and eventually achieved Roman citizenship.

By trusting him, the Romans had sown the seeds of their own defeat.

Upon Segimerus's death, Arminius returned home to take up the chieftainship.  At the same time, the three legions that were charged with maintaining the peace in Germany were taken over by a brutal man named Publius Quinctilius Varus, whose harshness raised a great deal of ire amongst the Germanic people -- both those who were enemies and those who were nominally friendly.  Arminius became Varus's trusted advisor -- and used his knowledge to forge secret alliances with a number of other groups in the area.

The plans came together in autumn of the year 9 C.E.  The weather was turning bad, and Varus wanted to get his legions back to Rome before it became too difficult to travel.  What is especially ironic is that Arminius's uncle, Segestes, warned Varus the night before they decamped that Arminius was a traitor -- but Varus dismissed the warning as nothing more than a family feud and personal animosity at Arminius's popularity.

Arminius's training in strategy paid off.  He chose his site beautifully.  In the wooded hills near the modern town of Osnabrück, they entered a forest that was bounded by overgrown, thicketed hillsides on one side and a bog on the other.  This necessitated that they spread out -- by the time they were into Teutoberg Forest the legions were a long, straggling line over fifteen kilometers in length, hemmed in on both sides, with no easy place to mobilize defense and nowhere to run.

That's when Arminius sprang his trap.

All three of the legions were completely destroyed.  Varus himself survived, but the following day committed suicide in humiliation.  Total Roman losses in the debacle are estimated at between fifteen and twenty thousand.  A handful of men escaped -- or were allowed to escape -- to bring the news back to Augustus, who reportedly shouted, "Quinctili Vare, legiones redde!"  ("Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!")  It's said that Augustus never really recovered from the shock of the defeat; it certainly put an end to any serious attempt to recapture German territory, and the Rhine River became the boundary between the Roman Empire and the uncontested lands of the Germanic tribes for decades.  Augustus himself died almost exactly five years later, disappointed to the end at how his campaign for European domination had come to a crashing halt.

The Teutoberg Forest today [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nikater, Hermannsweg02, CC BY-SA 4.0]

A lot of Roman artifacts have been found near Kalkriese -- significantly, very few Germanic ones -- but it's difficult to date metal with any kind of precision.  But a recent study of some of the artifacts by a team from the German Mining Museum Bochum, Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-Resources, and the Varus Battle Museum has developed a technique that suggests a way to identify the provenance of metal goods, and has pinpointed the artifacts from Kalkriese as coming from the 17th, 18th, and 19th Legions.

Thus, relics of the famous Battle of Teutoberg Forest.

Each Roman legion came with its own set of metalworkers, and each of them created their tools using a slightly different recipe for making bronze and brass.  Using a mass spectrometer, the researchers were able to pinpoint the subtle fingerprint of each legion's spearpoints, knives, shield fittings, armor, and jewelry, and from comparing metal objects known to come from the three "lost legions," they identified the articles from Kalkriese as remnants of one of the most famous battles ever fought.

"In this way, we can allocate a legion-specific metallurgical fingerprint, for which we know the camp locations at which they were stationed," said Annika Diekmann, one of the co-authors of the study.  "We find that the finds from Dangstetten [where the 19th Legion was stationed prior to their destruction in the battle] and Kalkriese show significant similarities.  The finds that come from legion sites whose legions did not perish in the battle, differ significantly from the finds from Kalkriese."

It's fascinating that we now have a way of identifying archaeological artifacts that are non-organic, where such techniques as carbon dating don't work.  What is now a quiet, peaceful forest was once the site of unimaginable bloodshed, in a battle that altered the course of history.  Looking at these objects brings home the impact of this victory on the Germans; Arminius is still considered a national hero, and the imperial ambitions of Rome were changed forever.  

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A coin out of chaos

Allegedly there is a traditional Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."

It's certainly true that the periods in history that are the most engaging to read about are often the ones no one in their right mind would want to experience first-hand.  For myself, I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule in Britain at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

I riffed on this idea in my recently-completed (not yet published) novel The Scattering Winds, in which a similar crisis in the modern world propels us into a new Dark Age -- and five hundred years later, when the surviving remnants of humanity have reverted to a non-literate agrarian culture, one man discovers what's left of a modern library that has somehow survived all the intervening chaos.

The effects such a discovery would have on a people was fascinating for someone like me -- a linguist and (very) amateur historian -- to explore.  But to find out what happened, you'll need to wait till it's in print!

Anyhow, back to reality.  Only a hundred years earlier than the onset of the canonical European Dark Ages, the Roman Empire went through its own Interesting Times -- the "Crisis of the Third Century."  Things had been moving along rather nicely for the Romans (if not for all of the various people they conquered), but then a series of short-lived and completely incompetent emperors led to a period of about seventy years of utter chaos. 

The spiral began with the emperor Elagabalus, who was only fourteen when he succeeded to the throne.  Historians haven't been kind to the young man, largely because he was (1) a raging egotist, (2) completely uninterested in running the government, and (3) gay.  Elagabalus seemed to look upon his position as being not much more than a golden opportunity to find large numbers of hot-looking young men to have sex with, and it's unsurprising that his reign didn't last long.  Just under four years after he was crowned, he was assassinated by the members of his own Praetorian Guard, and was succeeded by his cousin, Severus Alexander.

Severus Alexander was only thirteen when he was crowned (222 C.E.), but for a while, it seemed like things were going to be okay.  The "interesting times" started in earnest when Rome was invaded (for the umpteenth time) by Germanic tribes from the north and then from the Sassanid Empire from the east.  Severus Alexander did a pretty good job meeting both of these threats, but there were members of the Roman army who didn't like the fact that he used both diplomacy and bribery in his peace efforts -- and in the year 235, they murdered the emperor and put one of their own, a man named Maximus Thrax, on the throne in his place.

Maximus Thrax was the first of the "barracks emperors" -- men who had been declared emperor by some faction of the military, despite having neither the skills to rule nor the hereditary claim to gain support of the people.  238 C.E. was called "the Year of Six Emperors," during which six men rose to the high throne and were one after another defeated and killed within weeks to months.  The once-mighty Roman army became a fragmented mess, where different legions supported different claimants to the throne, and spent more time fighting each other than fighting the threats on the imperial borders.

Then, in mid-century, the Plague of Cyprian struck.  No one is completely certain what the disease was, but whatever the cause, it was bad.  Here's an account of the epidemic, by one Pontius of Carthage:

Afterwards there broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house in succession of the trembling populace, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people, every one from his own house.  All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends, as if with the exclusion of the person who was sure to die of the plague, one could exclude death itself also.  There lay about the meanwhile, over the whole city, no longer bodies, but the carcasses of many, and, by the contemplation of a lot which in their turn would be theirs, demanded the pity of the passers-by for themselves.  No one regarded anything besides his cruel gains.  No one trembled at the remembrance of a similar event.  No one did to another what he himself wished to experience.

There are no good estimates of the death toll, but what is certain is that for the Roman Empire, it made a very bad situation a great deal worse.  Fortunately, in around 270, there were a series of barracks emperors who at least were able to garner enough popular support (and to stay alive long enough) to fight back invasions from the Goths and the Vandals, and the whole miserable period finally ended when Diocletian was crowned in 284.  While he was no one's idea of a nice guy -- Diocletian's known as the leader of the last and bloodiest persecution of the Christians the Roman Empire perpetrated -- there's no doubt that his reform of the government and military was a brilliant success.  He also did something virtually unknown amongst crowned leaders; he ruled for twenty-one years then voluntarily abdicated, preferring to spend his final years gardening.

The reason all this comes up is that the chaos in Europe in the third century leaves historians having to piece together what happened from fragmentary records, and new discoveries can sometimes generate some surprises.  Like the gold coin discovered in 1713 in Transylvania, long considered a fake, that was just demonstrated to be genuine by microscopic analysis of the material it was embedded in.  And the image and inscription on that coin turned out to be of an emperor no one even knew about -- a man named Sponsian.

Sponsian seems to have been another of the barracks emperors, and ruled at least part of the Roman province of Dacia (now part of modern Romania) some time between 260 and perhaps 270.  Given that he's only known from a single coin, we don't know much about him -- the likelihood is that he met the same end as most of the other mid-third century claimants to the Roman throne.

All of which makes me wonder why any of these people wanted to be emperor during this period.  Did they really think, "Okay, the last fourteen guys have all been brutally murdered by howling mobs, but everyone is gonna love me!"?  Myself, I think I'd pre-empt Diocletian and take up gardening from the get-go.

Be that as it may, this new analysis of an old discovery is pretty cool -- and points out that even the Dark Ages may have left behind enough traces that we can piece together what happened.  Even if we never find an intact library, like in my novel, we can still know something about an era that until now has been largely a mystery.

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