Author: Erik

Making Clothes 3: Production of Raw Materials

Erik1 Comment

This post is a part of our Making Clothes series.

Our imaginary wardrobe is made up of four different kinds of material: wool, linen, silk, and leather. Each of these materials has a different origin. Today we consider the time, effort, and resources that went into producing the raw materials for each of these components.

Wool

Wool is processed from animal fleece, most typically sheep. Sheep grow their fleece out year round, and it serves them as insulation against cold, wet, and the hazards of the wild. Wool is traditionally gathered in the spring, so that sheep can have the warm summer months to regrow their coats.

There is no definite rule for how much pastureland it takes to raise sheep. Numbers depend greatly on the quality of the land and how it is managed. Modern farming experience gives us a rule of thumb that one sheep needs at least a hectare of land for a year’s grazing, although in historical conditions, the amount of land needed to raise sheep could have been significantly more.

Modern sheep are the result of millennia of breeding. In the pre-modern world, sheep were smaller, and their wool was lighter in weight and less fine. In some places today there are heirloom breeds similar to sheep of antiquity, such as the North Ronaldsay sheep found today in the Orkney Islands. One North Ronaldsay sheep yields between 1 and 1.5 kilos of fleece in an annual shearing. The shorn fleece loses some weight as it is cleaned and processed in preparation for spinning, from as little as 15 percent to as much as 80 percent.

Linen

Linen fibers are derived from flax, a woody-stemmed plant grown both for its fibers and for its oily seeds. Flax historically has been an important crop in many parts of the world.

Producing flax starts with plowing and sowing. An acre of land was traditionally defined as the amount of land that one farmer with one ox could plow in a day. Since a hectare is approximately two and a half acres, plowing a hectare of land in historic conditions would have taken about two and a half days. After sowing, flax plants take about 100 days to grow from seed to maturity.

Flax plants require deep, rich soil and draw lots of nutrients out of the earth, which means that fields repeatedly planted with flax will become exhausted in a matter of years. Sustainable flax production requires rotating with a less demanding crop and fertilizing to restore nutrients. Depending on fertilizer amounts, modern flax may yield between 4.9 and 7.8 tonnes per hectare. In historical conditions, dependent on animal manure or legume cultivation for soil maintenance, flax yields were unlikely to be as high.

Harvested flax requires extensive preparation to create usable fiber. The processing of flax removes 70-90% of the plant to yield fiber fit for spinning and weaving.

Silk

Silk fibers are derived from the cocoons of insect larvae, primarily the domesticated mulberry silkworm, although other creatures’ fibers have also been used historically. Domesticated silkworms are fed on mulberry leaves until they reach their fourth molt. The worms then spin cocoons by producing a long single filament which they wind around themselves.

It takes about 28 days from when silkworms hatch until they spin their cocoons. During that time, domesticated silkworms require careful tending and feeding, since most of their survival instincts have been bred out of them to make them more suitable for fiber production. They move very little and will not go in search of food if it is not provided for them.

Silkworms feed exclusively on the leaves of the mulberry tree. One mature tree produces enough leaves to feed about ten worms until they are ready to spin. Newly planted mulberry trees have to grow for about 8 months before they start producing leaves. To produce 1 kg of silk thread, 3,000 silkworms consume 104 kg of mulberry leaves, grown by about 300 trees.

Leather

Leather is produced from animal skins. A wide variety of different animals, both wild and domesticated, are used for leather. Domesticated mammals like cattle, sheep, goat, and pig yield most modern leather, although leather can also come from wild animals such as deer, squirrel, and rabbit, as well as non-mammals like ostriches, lizards, and fish.

The amount of leather that comes form one animal depends on the size of the animal and the condition of its hide. In modern leather processing, a typical cow hide yields 4.6 square meters of finished leather, while a sheep hide yields 0.8 square meters. Smaller animals naturally have smaller hides, and hides in poor condition may have to be trimmed smaller to be usable.

Skinning an animal after slaughter is relatively quick, but it is only the first step in leather production. The preparation, preservation, and treating of the hide takes many more steps that may amount to months of labor before the leather is ready to be cut, fitted, and finished.

Images: Woman shearing sheep, from Book of Hours by Jehan de Luc via Wikimedia (currently The Hague; 1524; illumination). “Flax blooms,” photographed by Leonid Kulikov or Mykhailo Kvitka via Wikimedia (currently Fine Arts Museum, Kharkiv; 1893; oil on canvas; by Mykhaylo Berkos). Stamp of Afghanistan showing mulberry branch and silkworms via Wikimedia (1963; postage stamp) (this work is in the public domain under Afghan law). Leatherworking via Wikimedia (1568; woodcut)

How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.

Diana Wynne Jones: Howl’s Moving Castle

Erik

I’ve been looking for cozy, comfortable fantasy reads lately, and I’ve seen several recommendations of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Until recently, I had known this name only for the Studio Ghibli animation (which I have never watched either), and I was surprised to discover that it was a novel first. I have read and enjoyed some of Jones’s short stories, so I was hopeful about picking up this novel. Alas, my hopes were soon dashed.

The story follows Sophie, a young hatter who is cursed by the Witch of the Waste to turn into an old woman and to be unable to tell anyone about the curse. Sophie goes in search of someone who can not only break the curse, but recognize that there is a curse to break without her having to tell them. She ends up in the small cottage of the wizard Howl, which is enchanted to look like a mobile castle on the outside. Howl seems to take no notice of Sophie, but his pet fire demon Calcifer recognizes the curse and agrees to help her if she will in turn help him break his contract with Howl, which, for magical reasons, he can’t talk about either. So Sophie settles in as a sort of freelance housekeeper to Howl and his apprentice Michael, while keeping her eyes open for anything she can learn about Howl and Calcifer’s contract.

So far so fairy tale. It’s a strong beginning with a promising cast of characters an interesting set of problems for them to unravel. And then nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen for two-hundred pages, until the last twenty pages when all the plot that didn’t happen in the rest of the novel suddenly comes crashing in like five trains trying to run on the same track at once.

It’s not that the characters don’t do anything for all that time—there are trips to the royal palace, covert visits to sisters, and a jaunt to modern Wales, but none of them make any sense or accomplish anything for the characters. Indeed, most of what the characters do is senseless. Over and over again the novel repeats that Sophie does or says something “without knowing why.” Jones, of course, knows why, and most of these nonsensical acts turn out to be coincidentally relevant in the finale, but far too much of what happens in the story happens because the author is setting up what she thinks is a clever ending, not because it makes sense given what motivates the characters and what they know or think they know at the time.

Indeed, it turns out in the end that Howl knew about Sophie’s curse all along. So did her sisters, not to mention the powerful magic-worker one of her sisters was studying under, and they were all trying to help break the curse. In fact, almost everyone Sophie encounters over the course of the novel knew about her curse and was trying to help her all along, but none of them ever bothered to tell her so. Why not? For no reason I can see other than that it would have broken the dramatic tension before Jones was ready.

Although the story mostly takes place in Howl’s small cottage, I found the atmosphere more stifling than cozy. Howl is an irresponsible jerk who makes everyone around him clean up his messes (both literal and figurative) while he moons over one lady or another. He is moody and mean, given to sulking when he doesn’t get his way, and never shows appreciation for how much work the people around him are doing to keep him afloat. Sophie falls in love with him at the end of the novel, as a fairy tale demands, but for no reason that I can fathom.

The only interesting thing I can point to in the novel is how it cleverly remixes themes and elements from The Wizard of Oz. There is a living scarecrow, a wicked witch in a castle, a humbug of a wizard from our world lost in a fantasy land, and a girl in search of a way back to her familiar life. She even eventually acquires a faithful dog and magical traveling footwear. For all these echoes of Oz, the story never feels like a pastiche or homage; it reimagines and recombines these elements to form an entirely different story. If only that story were any good, it would be an impressive narrative feat.

Howl’s Moving Castle left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I think I’ve been put off Jones for a good while. Maybe someday I’ll give her other works a try, but I need to cleanse my palate a bit first.

Image by Erik Jensen

ICBIHRTB – pronounced ICK-bert-bee – is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It features book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.

Making Clothes 2: Historical Inspirations

Erik1 Comment

This post is a part of our Making Clothes series.

For the purposes of these posts, we are imagining an outfit that might have been made and worn in many parts of Eurasia or North Africa in the premodern period. Our imaginary wardrobe takes inspiration from a variety of sources, both archaeological and written.

Our oldest piece of inspiration comes from the Altai Mountains in central Asia. In the fifth century BCE, a woman was buried in a tomb on the high Ukok plateau of what is today the Altai Republic in Russian Siberia. The cold, dry climate of the region helped preserve the burial until the late twentieth century when it was discovered and excavated. The woman, popularly known as the Siberian Ice Maiden, was well dressed for her burial, and her clothes were remarkably well preserved. She wore a dress of wool and camel hair, a silk shirt, and thigh-high leather boots, along with a tall headdress made of wood.

Reconstruction of the Ukok woman’s clothing and coffin, photograph by Sue Fleckney via Wikimedia

For our next historical reference, we look to the Vindolanda Tablets, an assortment of documents written on thin sheets of wood found at a Roman fortress near Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. Wooden tablets like these were used in antiquity for personal letters, memoranda, and other everyday documents of the kind that rarely survive for very long. These documents were written in the first and second centuries CE, and survived because they were preserved in waterlogged ground around the fortress. Among them we find the household accounts of Roman soldiers and officers detailing what sort of clothes they were spending their money on. A couple of tablets record the business affairs of a man named Gavo. We do not know who he was or what role he played in the life of the fort, but he seems to have supplied a lot of clothing and other textiles. One tablet lists some foodstuffs along with several bedspreads, a cloak, and thirty-eight pounds of wool. (Tabulae Vindolandenses II 192) Another tablet, part of whose text has been lost, listed at least ten cloaks of different types, three tunics, seventeen hooded cloaks, and some number of capes. (Tabulae Vindolandenses II 207) Yet another letter—we don’t know from or to whom—evidently accompanied a gift of underwear, socks, and sandals to some lucky soldier. (Tabulae Vindolandenses II 346)

Reconstruction of a Roman soldier’s dress, photograph by Fabryb13 via Wikimedia

Our last piece of inspiration comes from Egypt in the late antique period, probably the fifth century CE. It is a beautifully preserved tunic made of linen with intricate decorations woven into the fabric in dyed wool. The decorations include flowing vine motifs and depictions of the god Dionysus in surrounded by mythical sea creatures.

Tunic with Dionysian Ornament via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

We’ve chosen this set of examples to inspire our fictional wardrobe for a few reasons. Between them they span nearly a thousand years of history across Asia, Europe, and North Africa. They come from a wide range of environments, from the cold, arid heights of Central Asia to the hot, dry Egyptian desert to the rainy British Isles. The Ukok woman presents us with the complete outfit of one person; the Egyptian tunic gives us a detailed look at the construction of one garment; and the Vindolanda Tablets help us see individual items of clothing in the context of a larger economic and social world.

Our Example Outfit Described

For the purposes of quantifying necessary raw materials and production time to make a single outfit, we needed a specified set of clothing.

Our imaginary wardrobe starts with a long linen undertunic or short linen underdress. (From the point of view of materials and time required, we consider a dress very roughly equivalent of pants plus a tunic.)

The underlayer is topped by a silk overtunic. For the under- and overtunics, we imagined a simple T-style cut. Many historical tunics use gores at the side and central seams to add comfort, but we’ll try to keep our numbers manageable and stick with a basic design.

In addition, we include leather shoes or boots. Finally, a good-sized, rectangular wool cloak or mantle protects the wearer from elements.

For simplicity’s sake, we postulated a dyed but otherwise unadorned outfit, since the size and amount of decorative banding, embroidery, etc., can vary so widely. Accessories like underwear, wool socks and wool legwraps, hoods and headwear, belts, pouches, bags, and the like were also left out of our example.

How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.

Winter Count

Erik

As a historian, its always fascinating to me to encounter the historiographic practices of another culture. Every culture has reasons to remember the past, and finds its own solutions to the problems posed by the limitations and fallibility of human memory. While written narrative histories have been privileged in the Western world, they are not the only way of preserving the past.

The winter count is a tradition of the Lakota, Kiowa, and several other indigenous nations of the North American plains. Customarily painted on buffalo hide, the winter count records years with one or two pictographic symbols representing major events of the year. These documents served as an aid to memory so that important past events could be recalled and put in relation to one another. In more recent times, some were also created on fabric or paper.

Copy of a Kiowa winter count for 1889-1892 via Wikimedia (previously Smithsonian Museum, now lost; 1890s; ink on buckskin; copy by Ankopaaingyadete of his original work on paper)

We know of winter counts dating from as early as the late seventeenth century and some still being kept in the early twentieth century. Not many have survived intact to today. Like many cultural objects created by indigenous North Americans, winter counts were sometimes destroyed by white settlers and at other times taken by collectors as anthropological curiosities. Some of those that no longer survive were photographed or copied, and in some cases, while the images have been lost, written descriptions survive.

There’s more than one way to preserve historical knowledge. Here’s one idea to keep in mind when thinking about how we know about the past and how people in a culture different from our own might relate to historical memory.

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

Making Clothes 1: Introduction

Erik1 Comment

For most of human history, people couldn’t walk into a shop and buy a new outfit. The work of creating clothing was complex and demanded multiple skills and a lot of labor. In the pre-modern world, the processes that led from raw materials to finished clothing were long and took up a significant amount of everyday people’s time and energy.

We’re beginning a new series of posts where we examine what it took to make a single outfit, from the raw natural materials to the finished product, in a world without factories and global supply chains. To do that, we’re starting with an imagined wardrobe that would have been at home in many parts Eurasia within the past couple of millennia and working out just what would have gone into creating such a set of clothes, both the materials it would have taken to make and the work that would have gone into gathering, processing, and finishing those materials.

In our next post, we’ll introduce our imaginary set of clothes and show you some of the historical examples that inspired it. After that, we’ll talk about where the raw materials to make our set of clothes would have come from and the labor that would have gone into producing and gathering them. From there, we’ll break down just how each of those raw materials got turned into textiles, and how those textiles then got turned into clothing. We’ll round the series out by trying to quantify the labor and resources that would have gone into our imaginary wardrobe with some hard(-ish) numbers.

Image: Women doing textile work, from Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris via Wikimedia (currently Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; 15th c.; illumination)

How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.

Fulvia: The Politics of War in the End of the Roman Republic

Erik1 Comment

Fulvia was a descendant of one of the leading families of the Roman republic and wife of Marcus Antonius, one of the men responsible for its end. Her family commanded both respect and enormous financial resources. While there was no formal role for women in Roman politics, aristocratic women were often important in connecting families and individuals. Fulvia went further than most Roman women, aiding her husbands’ ambitions not just with her family connections but with a canny knack for political theatre. She even raised and helped to lead her own army in the penultimate stage of the Roman civil wars.

The politics of the late republic were chaotic and sometimes violent. The violence of the times was a symptom of a deeper shift in the political and social landscape. Changes were under way in the Roman world that not everyone was astute enough to recognize or skillful enough to manage. Fulvia was among the most skillful players of this game, and although she ended up on the losing side, her history is a valuable window into what it took to survive the politics of the end of the republic.

From its earliest days, the Roman republic had survived by balancing the interests of two groups: the wealthy aristocracy and the ordinary people of Rome. The balance was not always easy to strike, and early Rome went through periods of tension, even violence, as these two groups hashed out a way of living together. Many things bound these groups together. The people fought in Rome’s armies, led by aristocrats; while generals got the glory that came with victories, the citizen-soldiers who fought for them expected to see their share of the profits of war. Elite families dominated the competition for political office, but they depended on the people to elect them, and could not afford to entirely ignore the peoples’ needs and opinions. Ties of patronage ran through all levels of Roman society, as the more privileged exchanged favors and protection for the services and support of those lower down the social ladder. For most of the history of the republic, the rich and the poor found ways of working together—sometimes with gritted teeth and held noses, but together nonetheless.

In the second century BCE, the compromises and concessions that had kept Rome functional began to break down. By this time, Rome had become a Mediterranean empire, but its politics were still organized for a city-state. The profits of conquest on such a grand scale made some of the rich so rich that they could now buy off voters, bribe juries, and force their way through political life without adhering to the traditional compromises. While the rich were getting richer, economic changes buffeted the poor, leaving many without the means of making a living.

Roman politicians of the late republic had divided into two camps, calling themselves the optimates and the populares. The optimates represented the interests of the elite. They tended to be conservative, even reactionary. The populares depended on the common people as their base of support. They pushed for reforms to better the lives of Rome’s poorer citizens at the same time as they rabble-roused in support of their own ambitions. Neither group was a political party as we would understand it, with a coordinated message or strategy, but individual politicians triangulated themselves between these two interest groups.

Optimates and populares alike were slow to realize that the political ground was shifting under their feet. By the end of the republic, there was a third constituency up for grabs whose support would be key to political success. In the last century of the republic, The Roman army had shifted away from the old model of a citizen militia into a professional force, which meant that the interests of soldiers were no longer the same as the interests of civilians. Rome’s soldiers and veterans were themselves slow to coalesce as a political force, but the middle of the first century BCE, astute politicians were starting to realize that Roman politics now had three major interest groups, not two: the aristocracy, the people, and the army. Success would come not to those who most ardently supported one, but who could most skillfully coordinate the support of at least two, if not all three.

Fulvia was one of the people who grasped this new reality. From her early days as a political actor, she was deep in the realm of the populares. Her first husband was Publius Clodius Pulcher, a scandal-prone popularis leader who was loved by the people as much for his outrageous provocations against aristocratic convention as for his reformist policies. Clodius also exerted power through his patronage of armed gangs on the streets of Rome. Fulvia and Clodius were inseparable, and she was as much a part of his public life as any of his male allies. When Clodius was killed in a clash with a rival’s gang, Fulvia had his bloody body publicly displayed, knowing the sight would rouse his supporters among the people. Under her leadership, Clodius’ followers smashed their way into the Senate house and turned it into Clodius’ funeral pyre.

After Clodius’ death, Fulvia retained the loyalty of his street gangs and was one of the few members of Clodius’ circle who remained in Rome amidst the optimatis backlash. She married again to Gaius Scribonius Curio, a former optimatis turned popularis. Unlike Clodius, Curio had some military experience under his belt. He and Fulvia allied with the rising general Julius Caesar, and Curio was tasked with recruiting soldiers for Caesar’s bid to take over the Roman state. Curio died while commanding part of Caesar’s army in Africa.

After Curio’s death, Fulvia married again, aligning herself even more closely with Caesar’s cause by taking his right-hand man Marcus Antonius as her new husband. Fulvia brought with her not only her family’s wealth and connections but also her ties to Clodius’ clients and supporters. After Caesar’s assassination, Antonius skillfully stage-managed his funeral as an opportunity to whip up the anger of the people against the assassins and their aristocratic supporters, and it is likely he was guided by Fulvia’s expertise at provoking and channeling popular outrage.

When Antonius and Caesar’s heir Octavian became the leaders of the two sides in a new round of civil war, Fulvia vigorously supported her husband, not just politically but militarily. Together with Antonius’ brother, she traveled around Italy raising troops for Antonius’ side and visiting towns where veterans had been settled to remind them of their loyalty to Antonius. While Antonius was away in the east, Fulvia’s army briefly held Rome against Octavian before being forced out, besieged at Perusia, and finally defeated. Fulvia was sent into exile, where she died of an unknown illness.

The literary sources are not kind to Fulvia, and they may exaggerate some elements of her life. She was on the losing side of the final stage of the Roman republic’s self-destructive civil wars, and like her husband Antonius, her memory was tarnished by Octavian’s supporters. A frequent theme in anti-Antonius propaganda was to portray him as effeminate, so making out his wife to have been overly masculine was a natural addition. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Fulvia was not shy of engaging with the man’s world of politics and war. She was a confident political operator, a popularis provocateur, a chief of street gangs, and a capable recruiter and leader of soldiers. She learned from the men in her life and shared the lessons she had gained from them.

What’s more, she grasped the fundamental shift in late republican politics: it was no longer enough to be with the aristocrats or with the people. Neither popularis nor optimatis could prosper if they did not get the support of the soldiers. It was a truth that the most successful politicians of the age, men like Caesar and Octavian, had realized, and a fact that laid the ground for the imperial age to come. If some of the civil war’s battles had turned out differently, we might look back to Fulvia as one of the founding figures of Rome’s first dynasty.

Image: Coin portrait of a woman, possibly intended to be Fulvia; photograph by Classical Numismatic Group via Wikimedia (Copenhagen; c. 41-40 BCE; copper alloy)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

“It’s What My Character Would Do”

Erik

This phrase is sometimes brought out by players in tabletop role-playing games to justify actions that are harmful (or at least annoying) to the rest of the party: “It’s what my character would do.”

My answer to that is: “Then your character wouldn’t be a member of this party.”

Role-playing is, of course, an important part of the game. We take on the personalities, histories, and motivations of characters who are not ourselves and tell stories about them. Sometimes, those motivations can lead to situations where characters come into conflict. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with having conflict, stress, or even outright hostility among the characters in a game, but when conflict between characters becomes conflict between players, that’s a problem that needs to be resolved.

Adventures are, after all, as Bilbo Baggins put it, nasty uncomfortable things that make you late for dinner. The characters in a role-playing game are very often not having a good time, but the players should be. Some players thrive on intra-party conflict; others abhor it. Sorting out what is and isn’t acceptable at your table is an important part of a session 0 conversation. You can have whatever rules suit your group, and if everyone at the table enjoys playing out character conflict, then go for it, but a good player should not be playing in a way that makes other players’ experience worse.

People who like intra-party conflict will sometimes claim that avoiding conflicts is a betrayal of role-playing. “In this situation,” they say, “my character would attack their character. It’s what my character would do.” But this attitude itself reflects a shallow approach to the role-playing aspect of the game.

Role-palying isn’t just about actualizing your own character’s deepest wishes; it’s also about exploring the dynamics of the group as a whole. Players need to remember that they are not just playing a character with a background and motivations, they are playing a character who has agreed, under some terms, to travel, fight, and work with a group of other characters. It may be an alliance of convenience, they may be working together with gritted teeth and watchful eyes, but they have agreed to work together all the same. Playing out how they manage to keep working together even when their interests collide is a greater and often more interesting role-playing challenge than deciding to do something even though it pisses off your fellow players. If you can’t play your character in a way that allows your fellow players to enjoy the game, then your character wouldn’t be a member of that party to begin with.

Keeping a role-playing game going isn’t always easy. It takes a good-faith effort by everyone at the table to make sure that everyone else is having a good time, even when things get rough for the characters they’re playing. Your goal as a player should always be to make sure the game is good for everyone, and sometimes that means putting in the effort to figure out how your character would decide to put the good of the group ahead of their own interests. It’s what your character would do.

Image by Erik Jensen

Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.

I Know You’re a Barbarian, But What Am I?

Erik

The ancient Greeks had certain stereotypes about the people they called barbaroi: Romans were brutes; Scythians were drunkards; Persians were perverts, and so on. Like all ethnic stereotypes, these conventional views were based on prejudices and assumptions rather than truth. Not everyone necessarily believed in or agreed with these stereotypes, but they were recognizable elements of Greek culture in the same way that “French are cowards” or “Italians are reckless drivers” are recognizable stereotypes today. But what stereotypes did other peoples have for the Greeks? We don’t have very many sources that offer non-Greek views of the Greeks, but there are some hints that suggest that the common view of the Greeks, and Athenians in particular, is that they talked too much.

The Greek historian Herodotus reports a story that a Scythian named Anacharsis had traveled in Greece and come home to Scythia with a pointed opinion on the Greeks:

In fact, I have heard a story told by the Peloponnesians about Anacharsis, who was sent by the king of the Scythians to Greece to learn about our ways. When he returned, he told the king that all the Greeks strive for wisdom except the Spartans, but the Spartans are the only one who talk and listen thoughtfully.


Herodotus, Histories 4.77

Since the Spartans were famous for being people of few but well-chosen words, the point of the anecdote is that other Greeks talked to much and said too little. We can compare the story of Anacharsis visiting Greece with Herodotus’ account of the Greek scholar Hecataeus visiting Egypt and getting a lesson from the priests there about Greek pretensions:

The scholar Hecataeus was once in Thebes and recounted his genealogy back to the sixteenth ancestor, which he made out to be a god. The priests of Zeus did the same thing for him that they also did for me, though I made no such claims about my ancestry. They led me into the hall of the temple and counted out the wooden statues that were there, which equaled the number they had already told me. Every high priests erects a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these statues and counting as they went, the priests showed me that each was the son of the man before him, from the one who most recently passed away back to the earliest of them all. When Hecataeus claimed to be descended from a god in the sixteenth generation, they did not believe that was possible. They instead traced the ancestry of the priests by counting the statues, each one a piromis, the son of a piromis (piromis being their word for a gentleman), counting back three hundred and forty-five statues, and not a one of them a god or demigod.



Herodotus 2.143

The stories of Anacharsis and Hecataeus both come to us from a Greek source, so neither is a direct report of a foreign view of the Greeks, but it is interesting that they seem to have the same point. Anacharsis approved of the Spartans because they were careful with their words. Hecataeus got put in his place by the Egyptian priests because he had made an outrageous claim before listening to people who knew better. In both cases, the Greeks would have been better off if they talked less and paid attention more. Since Herodotus was widely-traveled and had spoken with people of many different cultures, he may be giving us something reflecting an authentic perception of the Greeks by outsiders.

The richest source we have for outside views of the Greeks is the Romans. The Roman perspective is complicated because so many Romans admired and identified with Greek culture, but when we hear negative views of the Greeks from Roman sources, they often tend the same way: Greeks, and Athenians in particular, talk too much.

The Greek antiquarian Plutarch, in his life of the Roman politician Cato the Elder, reports that Cato’s opinion of the Greeks as long-winded and superficial:

He dealt with the Athenians through an interpreter, although he could have spoken to them himself […] He said that the Athenians were astonished at the speed and punch of his [Latin] words, for what he said briefly [in Latin] took the interpreter many words to say [in Greek]. It was his opinion that on the whole, the words of Greeks came from their lips, those of Romans from their hearts.


Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder 1.12

The Roman satirist Juvenal gives a similar anti-Greek attitude to his character Umbricius:

Quick-witted, damned audacious, always ready with a

speech, and they can out-talk Isaeus [a famous orator]. What do you

suppose that one is? He’s brought us a bit of everything:

schoolteacher, professor, surveyor, painter, wrestling coach,

seer, tight-rope walker, doctor, magician—your hungry little Greek

does it all! Tell him to fly and up he goes!


Juvenal, Satires 3.73-78

While we don’t know what words non-Greeks would have used for the Greeks, parallel to the Greek word barbaros for non-Greek-speakers, there’s a good chance it was something along the lines of “blabbermouth” or “bore.”

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

A Retirement Transmog for My Priest

Erik

At the end of Shadowlands, I was planning to retire my holy priest. He’s the first character I ever played, so I’m never going to delete him, and he will always be holy specced, but I don’t do group play any more where a healer would be needed, and leveling up a holy priest has been a slog for a long time. I put together a nice transmog for him to wear and was thinking about where I was going to leave him to enjoy his retirement.

Then the talent changes in Dragonflight made leveling as a holy priest pretty okay, so he’s come back out of retirement after all, but I thought I’d share his transmog anyway. Here you go!

And here’s the pieces it’s composed from.

Image: World of Warcraft screencap

Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.

Thoughts on Dungeons & Dragons: Rules and Options

Erik

Not long ago I found myself reflecting on my history playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s been a bit of an odd road. I first started playing in the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the late 80s, continuing on with the 2nd edition of AD&D in the 90s. I then had a break from the game until I started playing again with a group of friends in grad school in the mid-aughts. Version 3.5 of the game had come out by then, but we kept playing with the 2nd edition rules. I then had a long hiatus from D&D until 2021, when I started playing 5th edition.

In some senses, the long break from the game was good, since I lost a lot of gaming muscle memory in the meantime and didn’t have as much to fight against when learning the new edition. On the other hand, missing out on so much of the ongoing development of the game also meant having to make some big adjustments to my basic approach to running games when I started up again. I’ve been thinking for a while about how to put that shift into words, and I think I can sum it up best like this:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was designed for people who like rules. 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons was designed for people who like options.

In AD&D, the rules spell out very clearly what a character can and cannot do. A DM’s job is to apply those rules consistently and fairly so that players can do their best to overcome challenges while staying within those rules. Fighters can’t be sneaky; that’s a Thief thing. Magic Users have to figure out their spells at the beginning of every day, then they have to make the best of their choices. Characters get XP from killing monsters and finding treasure; they’ll level up when they reach the right amount on the chart and not before.

In 5th edition, players have lots of options for how to approach any given challenge, and the rules have a lot of flexibility built into them to allow for alternative solutions. A DM’s job is to present the players with interesting challenges that push them to be creative. Fighters can be sneaky if they roll well on Stealth. Spellcasters have spell slots they can use for any spell they have prepared. A DM has options, too. You can use XP for leveling if you want, or you can just say: “You completed the adventure and saved the day. Everyone gets a level!”

Neither way of gaming is wrong. Some players thrive on the challenge of a tightly prescribed set of rules—chess hasn’t survived for thousands of years by being wacky and unpredictable. They want and enjoy a game with fixed parameters, where failure has a real cost and victory comes through precise tactical execution. That’s the gaming experience that AD&D delivers, but I’ve learned in the past couple years that it’s not the gaming experience I enjoy best. I’m happy with 5th edition’s flexibility and willingness to let players figure out their own ways of engaging with the challenges an adventure presents them with.

It used to be my job as DM to make my players play by the rules. Now it’s my job to make them make the most of their options. I like this way better, but that doesn’t the other way bad; it’s just a different way of playing.

Image by Erik Jensen

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