The ancient Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote a good deal about painting. His interest stemmed from curiosity about which plants and minerals were used to make make pigments, but he also recorded the names of famous artists and some details about their paintings.
Unlike the stretched canvases we are used to today, ancient painters worked on wooden panels, of which extremely few survive, or on plastered walls, a few of which have survived in places like Pompeii and Dura-Europus. Most of the famous painters of antiquity were men, but Pliny makes sure to note that women also took up the brush.
Women have also painted. Timarete, daughter of Micon, created the very old panel painting of Artemis of Ephesus. Irene, daughter and student of the painter Cratinus, painted an Eleusinian maiden, Calypso, Theodorus the juggler, and Alcisthenes the dancer. Aristarete, daughter and student of Nearchus, painted Aesculapius. Iaia of Cyzicus, who was a lifelong virgin, painted and engraved ivory at Rome during the youth of Marcus Varro [late second century BCE]. She mostly made images of women, including a large panel painting of an old woman at Naples, as well as a self-portrait made using a mirror. Nobody had a faster hand for painting than she did, and in fact she was so accomplished an artist that the prices for her works far exceeded those commanded by Sopolis and Dionysius, who were the most celebrated portrait painters of the time and whose paintings fill the galleries. A certain Olympias was also a painter, but all that is recorded about her is that Autobulus was her student.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.147-48 (=35.40)
(My own translation)
Women created famous works, were paid well for their craft, and taught others. It is unsurprising that some of these women were daughters of well-known male painters, since art was often a family business in the ancient Mediterranean.
Wooden panel paintings were among the most highly-prized forms of art in ancient Greece and Rome. Thanks to writers like Pliny, we know more about the famous painters of antiquity and their paintings than we would ever know from the few examples that survive today. It is good to have evidence that women, too, took part in this prestigious art form.
Image: Women preparing for a ritual, cropped from a photograph by WolfgangRieger via Wikimedia (Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries; 1st c. BCE; fresco)
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
The release date has not been publicized yet, but according to Reactor, the episode scripts have already been written. Presumably, the tv series will be based on All Systems Red, the first installment of the book series.
As I love Murderbot, I started off highly suspicious. (Suspicious of any adaptations, that is; I have no special qualms with Apple TV.) This team seems to get it, though. Their pitch reads as follows:
“‘Murderbot’ is an action-packed sci-fi series, based on the award-winning books by Wells, about a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable ‘clients.’ Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.”
When comparing this one-paragraph description to some other write-ups about the adaptation, a few things stand out. Firstly, Murderbot is not a robot. Furthermore, Murderbot never describes itself as a he (but doesn’t object to it). Also, Murderbot is horrified by human emotion and bored with human drama in real life and certainly not drawn to the emotion; if Murderbot is drawn to anything non-media-related, it’s its job of protecting clients, particularly certain kinds of clients (the smart, or small and soft kind). Finally, Murderbot does emphatically not want to live like a human, it wants to be left alone to consume media (which is only a tiny fraction of living like a human).
The adaptation team does get Murderbot; those other writers don’t. (The only iffy detail that copy includes is calling Murderbot an android; The Murderbot Diaries use the word construct. An android is less wrong than a robot, IMO.)
Since December 2023, when Apple TV+ announced the ten-episode Murderbot adaptation, I’ve kept an eye out for more detailed news. Initially, casting was left almost entirely open; only Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot was announced. Now we know a little more: Noma Dumezweni will play Dr. Mensah.
In addition, David Dastmalchian will play Gurathin. Ratthi will be played by Akshay Khanna, Arada by Tattiawna Jones, Pin-Lee by Sabrina Wu, and Bharadwaj by Tamara Podemski.
Having once spent a sleepless night watching part of The Legend of Tarzan, I know Skarsgård will have no trouble keeping his face SecUnit expressionless. (That is confirmed by stills I’ve seen of The Northman. I’ve also seen him in Godzilla vs. Kong, but I have no memory of his character.) The only productions I’ve seen Dumezweni in are two episodes of Doctor Who and two episodes of Only Murders in the Building. (And I know she was well-reviewed for her role as Hermione in the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.) What I remember of her impresses me, though; I’m glad she got cast as Dr. Mensah.
Dastmalchian I remember from the Ant-Man movies and Dune: Part One. (IMDB tells me I’ve also seen him in Blade Runner 2049 and an episode of CSI, but again, no memory.) Wu I’ve seen in one episode of Abbot Elementary and Jones in one ep of Murdoch Mysteries; Khanna and Podemski are completely new to me.
As the two core characters of All Systems Red, Murderbot and Dr. Mensah should have a lot of screen time, so I’m delighted that actors of renown have been cast for the roles—indeed, the big names bode well for the adaptation, I hope.
At this point, there’s still one thing that bothers me: I haven’t seen enough of Skarsgård’s work to tell whether he can creditably do nuance, and a lot is riding on that, since Murderbot is all about nuance.
On the surface, there’s as much action as in any generic mindless sci-fi action story, but the focus in Murderbot stories is not the what (the action), but the why and how: why do the events of the story unfold as they do, how do people work, how does Murderbot work, and how does it slot itself into this world it doesn’t fully comprehend (or care about). If the writer’s room doesn’t understand that—or isn’t allowed to fully feature the nuance—the adaptation is less likely to be a success. I fervently hope it will be good!
The idea of large, cohesive groups traveling across the map to resettle elsewhere is largely a product of two things: ancient literary conventions and modern historiography. Ancient Mediterranean writers had their own literary habits. Among them was positing large groups of people picking up and resettling elsewhere as a way of explaining cultural relationships (such as, for instance, the legend that the Romans were the descendants of Trojans, or that the Spartans were long-lost kin of the Jews). These stories were not based in any reality but served the literary and political needs of those who told them.
Modern historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries approached ancient history with the assumption that ethnic groups were coherent units with definable traits whose history could be traced across time and space. There was, they believed, a distinct “Gothic” or “Celtic” character that could be identified in literature and art and that marked the movement of whole peoples to replace or subjugate others. These assumptions were grounded in the systems of modern imperialism and the ideals of Romantic nationalist movements, not the realities of ancient history, but they shaped how scholars read ancient literary sources. The idea that there were mass migrations across Europe at any point in antiquity is largely a figment of the modern imagination.
When we revisit the ancient sources and the archaeological evidence, we can identify several different kinds of movement, each of which faced different versions of the problems outlined above and had different ways of dealing with them.
Long-term movement: Many of the “migrations” identified by nineteenth-century scholars are better understood as the result of small groups of people such as families, extended kin groups, or raiding parties taking similar routes over time. Each individual group was small enough to travel without overstraining the resources of the lands they moved through, but many such groups taking the same journey over an extended time period could eventually lead to significant shifts in population and local culture. This kind of movement can be seen for example in the migration of Gaulish warbands into northern Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and the large-scale shift of populations from northern and western Europe into the southern and eastern Mediterranean in the later centuries of the Roman Empire.
Armies: Other movements did involve large groups of people moving within a short time frame, and are best understood as armies on the march, attended by followers and hangers-on. The frontier peoples of the late Roman period were deeply interconnected with the Roman world. Under their own leaders, they competed for power and wealth in much the same way that Roman armies competed to put their leaders into power. Many of these groups included veterans of the Roman army and had diplomatic relations with the Roman elite. Their movements were directed at political ends, and they drew on the same resources that Roman armies did to manage the logistics of travel. The late Roman Franks and Vandals, for example, functioned essentially as armies with large civilian followings.
Refugees: Other groups of people moved en masse not by choice but because the alternative was worse. Economic and political changes could uproot some people and force them to relocate, whether they were prepared for a journey or not. Those forced to relocate could face extreme hardship, just as modern refugees too often do. We can get an idea of how desperate ancient refugees could be from accounts of peoples crossing into eastern Roman territory in the late fourth century selling their fellow refugees to the Romans as slaves at bargain prices just to feed themselves. Refugees faced the same challenges that traveling armies did, but with none of the same support; these groups probably lost many members along the way to illness, hunger, combat, or enslavement. Refugee groups include the Cimbri and Teutones in the late second century BCE and the Visigoths in the fourth century CE.
Migrating groups in antiquity were mostly small. The idea of barbarian hordes hundred of thousands strong is more fiction than history. Those who did travel in large groups mostly did so either as organized armies drawing on the same logistical resources that other ancient armies did or as refugees driven by desperation who managed the best they could under terrible circumstances.
The idea of massive hordes of barbarians migrating at once across the ancient landscape is a figment of the imagination, but that doesn’t mean that they ancient world was static. People moved, and sometimes they moved in large groups, but any such group faced enormous practical challenges. Some groups were in a position to overcome these challenges; many were not. “Barbarian” peoples did not have any special way of overcoming the practical problems of migration. They solved those problems the same way that other peoples did, in small groups, as armies, or as refugees.
Image: “Battle of Guadalete,” photograph by Christie’s via Wikimedia (1882; oil on panel; by Mariano Barbasán Lagueruela)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
Deadpool isn’t one of my favorite superheroes; the stories tend to be too explicitly violent, and the humor is about half and half hit or miss for me. I’m therefore not really following any DP news, so the fact that the third DP movie is called Deadpool & Wolverine was, well, news to me. It also made me perk up my ears, so to speak—Hugh Jackman’s performance as the mutant superhero that goes snikt was fabulous and got me to care about the character more than I otherwise would have.
The first trailer for DP&W was released last month:
Looks like the violence isn’t going to be any less gory this time either (even if the trailer itself was relatively clean as DP movies go). The bratty humor is also still there, as you’d expect—gotta keep the fans happy and the character consistent, right? But what I can’t yet figure out is how they’ll interweave the X-Men and DP.
It’s always a joy to see Morena Baccarin and Hugh Jackman. According to IMDB, however, Patrick Stewart will make an appearance, presumably as Professor Xavier, as will Jennifer Garner as Elektra. Whoa. I’ve mixed feeling about Matthew Macfadyen on the basis of past productions of his, so we’ll see what he makes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It should also be interesting to see how, exactly, is Marvel going to untangle (if at all?) their multiverse mess, which certainly hasn’t gotten easier with Jonathan Majors being dropped from the role of Kang. DP&W might actually hold my interest longer than the previous DPs. Here’s hoping!
At this writing, the movie is set to release on July 26, 2024.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
“This isn’t about good or bad. It’s about power… and who is allowed to use it.”
Sounds intriguing. Apparently, however, SW:TA takes place towards the end of the High Republic era, well before The Phantom Menace. That’s completely new to me. Not all new-to-me settings in the Star Wars tv series have been winners, IMO, so whether SW:TA will work for me or not is still very much in the air.
Also, I’ve never been interested in the Sith, and it sounds like the Sith will feature heavily in the series. (Not that I’ve watched much outside the movie trilogies anyway.) However, it looks SW:TA just might provide a more refreshing backstory than a vague ‘they want power and that makes them evil’ handwave. (And I’m sure I’m grossly misrepresenting some SW writers’ thoughts here, but that’s what the Sith appear to this non-superfan.)
What worries me to some extent is they seem to have cast another woman of color as the main antagonist. (Compare to Inquisitor Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi.) The last thing we need is more typecasting.
(Speaking of negatives: I’ve looked very little into the series and have already seen quite a bit of waah-waahing about too many wimmen starring or whatnot. Look, m’dudes: my money is green, too. If the production is good and shows people like me as active characters and people in their own right, I will pay to see it, and so will many others. Di$ney will love our money just as much as yours.)
One source of joy is that we get to see Carrie-Anne Moss and my countryman Joonas Suotamo in the series, too. 🙂
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
In a previous post, we considered the sizes of migrating groups in antiquity. We can probably dismiss any idea of hundreds of thousands of people pouring across the Roman Empire, but the challenges of moving even 10,000 people long distances in ancient conditions are significant.
People need things: clothing, bedding, medicine, tools, weapons, and most of all food and water. People on the road have to make do with less, but some things are still essential for survival and must be either carried with the group or found along the way. The more stuff people carry with them, the slower they move and the longer it takes for them to get to a place where they can settle down and start rebuilding; the faster people move, the less they can carry with them and the more they have to either rely on finding what they need along the way or suffer without. The logistics for moving a large group of people are always a compromise between stuff and speed.
The amount of stuff people can carry is limited. A healthy adult can typically carry around 20-25 kilos and still manage to walk long distances. Trained individuals can carry more, but people who can manage this feat are few, and in a large group will be outweighed by the young, elderly, sick, and disabled who can carry less. Animals can add to carrying capacity, but they also create greater demands for food, water, and medical care; carts or sledges can add capacity, but they are slower and limit what terrain a group can cover. The best way to carry large amounts of stuff long distances is over water, but this also limits what routes a group can take.
Healthy adults traveling by foot in good conditions can typically maintain a walking pace of about 4-5 kilometers an hour, and keep up that pace for hours at a time, covering between 20 and 40 km a day, but large migrating groups were not all made up of healthy adults and did not always have the luxury of traveling in fair conditions. A large group traveling across country would have been slow, and the larger the group, the slower it would have traveled.
The most important supplies for a traveling group are food and water. In extreme circumstances people can do without bedding, tools, weapons, even clothes, but if they run out of food and water they are done for. The average adult needs about 1.5 kilos of food and 1.5 liters of drinking water every day to sustain the exertion of long-distance travel by foot. Fresh water is available from wild sources across many parts of the temperate world, but large groups can exhaust local supplies. Some amount of food can be foraged or hunted in the wild, but there are very few landscapes anywhere rich enough in wild food sources to sustain a group of 10,000 while still allowing them time to make significant progress on their journey. A large group of people traveling across an ancient landscape had only two practical choices: carry food with them, or acquire it from the farms and fields of the regions they passed through.
Carrying your own food for a journey is helpful, but it has limits. Considering that typical adult carrying capacity is 20-25 kilos, and an adult needs 1.5 kilos of food a day, even a person carrying nothing but food can only carry about two weeks’ worth of rations. Carrying that much food means sacrificing any other gear, even the tools to prepare and cook the food with. In a large group including young, old, sick, and disabled, some people have to carry food for others. Even in the best conditions, a large group traveling overland could carry its own food for only about 10 days. Adding pack animals does not help the situation, because the proportion between what a horse, donkey, or camel eats and how much food it needs to sustain itself is the same as for a human being: even a pack animal loaded with nothing but food will eat up its entire cargo in less than two weeks. Allowing animals to graze extends the number of days they can go, but also slows them down. A large group traveling for 10 days might just be able to carry all their essential supplies with them. 10 days of travel would allow them to cover a distance of at best around 200 km, but in practice most migrating groups could not maintain such a speed. Realistically, any large group undertaking a long journey would have to acquire food (and other supplies) from the regions they traveled through.
Acquiring supplies locally is its own challenge. Ancient agriculture was of limited productivity. Most ancient farming towns did not produce a large surplus. Large migrating groups were unlikely to be carrying with them either trade goods or cash sufficient to buy or barter for all the food they needed (unless they were willing to sell off some of their own number as slaves). Any large migrating group probably reached a point, willingly or not, where they had no option but to take by force the food they needed to keep going. Such raiding surely provoked the local population to either fight back or hide their food supplies, either of which was another problem for the migrating group that slowed down their travel and stretched their resources.
Now, all of these problems did have solutions in ancient conditions. They are essentially the same problems that an army on the march faced, and there were plenty of armies in the ancient world, some of which may even have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Armies, though, had two advantages that migrating groups did not: 1) they were mostly made up of healthy adults, and 2) they had the financial and logistical support of a state behind them. Groups of people that did not have these two advantages faced serious challenges if they wanted to move long distances en masse.
Next time, we’ll put together what we know about the realities of numbers and logistics to see what we can say about what a “barbarian migration” might have actually looked like.
Image: Huns via Wikimedia (1910; painting; by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
Ememem is a France-based visual artist known for repairing small areas in urban environments with colorful mosaics. He calls his technique flacking.
Since 2016 he’s been anonymously patching cracks in Lyon and Paris, and other European cities for instance in Norway, Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
He typically works at night. His efforts are usually discovered in the morning as people start their day. Most of his efforts seem to focus on street surfaces, but some retaining walls or building walls also get some Ememem love.
Ememem’s repairs are absolutely delightful! They remind me a lot of visible mending or quilting. I wish this type of repair were more common, but I understand the financial realities of why not.
Barbarian migrations are a staple of popular histories of the ancient world. From early wandering groups like the Cimbri and Teutones in the late second century BCE to massive hordes of Goths, Vandals, Juthungi, and the like streaming across the map of the late Roman Empire, it seems that gathering up in huge masses and tromping around the world is just what barbarians do.
But is it? The popular image of migrating barbarian hordes comes from older scholarship, many of whose assumptions and conclusions have been challenged in recent generations. No one today doubts that people in antiquity moved, sometimes in groups, and sometimes long distances, but the idea of massive hordes pouring across the landscape is becoming less and less tenable.
To get an idea of why massive barbarian migrations are questionable, we’ll consider two interrelated issues: numbers and logistics. How large were the groups that moved long distances in antiquity? And how did those groups manage the practical problems that come with moving long distances? This post addresses numbers. In the next post, we’ll talk about logistics. Finally, we’ll see what conclusions we can draw about how and why large groups of people moved around the ancient world.
Ancient sources are notoriously unreliable when it comes to estimating the numbers of people in large groups. Greek and Roman writers trying to describe the movements of large groups of potentially hostile outsiders are especially unreliable. Even today it is difficult to estimate the size of crowds, and we have much better tools at our disposal than ancient authors did. Most writers who report figures for the movement of large groups were not eyewitnesses, and were certainly not in a position to get an accurate count.
Greek and Roman authors had reasons to exaggerate the scale of forces they perceived as hostile intruders. A large movement was more dramatic to write about, and the defeat of a large hostile force reflected more glory on the Greek and Roman armies and leaders who fought them. The literary mood of late antiquity was particularly pessimistic, influenced both by the competition for power among rival generals who needed to claim that they had triumphed over unbeatable odds and the Christian hope for an apocalyptic end of the world. The image of massive hordes of invading barbarians suited the needs of contemporary writers, but that does not mean that barbarians were actually invading in massive hordes. The same dire language was used to describe urban unrest, rural banditry, undisciplined soldiers, even overzealous monks.
Still, there was nothing new about Greek and Roman authors wildly overestimating the size of outside groups on the move. The Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE famously estimated the size of the Persian king Xerxes’ expeditionary force in Greece (army and navy combined) at a ludicrously high figure of 5,283,220; modern estimates vary, but generally put the total at less than 100,000.
Given these facts, we should be skeptical of ancient sources that breezily conjure up 80,000 Vandals, 150,000 Goths, or 400,000 followers of Radagaisus. While any of these figures could theoretically be correct, and we cannot categorically reject them, none of them is any better than an estimate by an outside observer passed through several hands and recounted by a writer with literary and political axes to grind.
So, how large were the actual groups of people moving around the ancient world? It is impossible to say with any certainty, but we can make a few suggestions. To begin with, the lower literary estimates are a workable upper bound. 80,000 is repeated by enough sources in enough different contexts that it probably represents a literary convention for “a very big number of people.” If we suppose that this literary convention is derived from actual experience of the practicalities of moving large groups of people, then it makes sense to suggest that few if any moving groups in antiquity numbered more than 80,000, and most were much smaller.
Accounts of some late antique battles give figures of approximately 10,000 fighters in the “barbarian” armies. These figures are questionable for all the same reasons described above, but they are not out of proportion to the sizes of known ancient armies. Fighting forces represent only a fraction of an entire population, conventionally estimated at an eighth, or perhaps as much as a quarter in extreme circumstances. A fighting force of 10,000 would then represent a total population of 40,000-80,000. Since the “barbarian” armies in these battles were often temporary alliances of disparate groups, the constituent groups themselves must have been smaller.
Our numbers can only be speculative, but drawing together these inferences, we are probably not terribly far wrong if we imagine most migrating groups in antiquity on the scale of 10,000-20,000 people, with some temporary alliances adding up to 80,000 or so.
In the next post, we’ll think about what it would actually take for even a group of 10,000 or so people in ancient conditions to migrate from one place to another.
Image: Ludovisi sarcophagus, photograph by Jastrow via Wikimedia (currently Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Altemps, Rome; c. 251 CE; marble)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
The Indian black narrowmouth frog (Melanobatrachus indicus) is a vulnerable species endemic to wet evergreen forests in southern India.
Not much is known about them outside of academia and/or research circles (and I’m currently too sick to start combing through more in-depth sources). They seem to be quite small, though. And how cute are those tiny blue polka dots! And its face, too! At least this individual looks so smart it could easily be the model for a dungeon boss for a computer game.
Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?
There’s been a thing going on in the past month on the Internet about fairies and walruses. If you’re not in the loop, it all started with a poll posted on tumblr by user baddywronglegs that asked respondents to consider which one they would be more surprised to find at their front door, a fairy or a walrus?
The fun of this poll is that it pits two very surprising (in most parts of the world) things against one another, but those things are surprising in two different ways. Fairies don’t exist, but if they did, it would be perfectly plausible for one to knock on your door. Walruses do exist, but the idea that one would survive the trip out of the Arctic, make it to your front door, and knock is beyond belief. What’s more surprising: the most unsurprising surprising thing or the most surprising unsurprising thing?
Yes, Finland is an Arctic country in the sense that we straddle the Arctic Circle, even though most of our land area is south of it. We do not, however, currently have any coastline in the north; all of our salt water access is to the south and west, i.e., to the Baltic Sea. Visits like this are, therefore, extremely rare. The walrus had to travel all the way around Scandinavia, through the Danish Straits (Kattegat and Skagerrak), and east along the Gulf of Finland to reach Hamina and Kotka.
It’s quite staggering that we live in a place where, theoretically—very much in theory, but nevertheless—a walrus could turn up on the yard! (No sign of fairies, though.)
Co-Geeking 
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