History for Writers

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

Archaeology and Intentionality

Erik

One of the themes that guides a lot of what I post here is that thinking historically is good practice for thinking fictionally. As an example of what I mean by that, let me present the question of intentionality in archaeology.

Much of what we know about ancient cultures comes from archaeology. For all that we can learn from texts, there are many things, peoples, and experiences that were either never written about, or for which the texts have been lost. Individual artifacts can be interesting in their own right, but we often get the most valuable insights from studying objects found together as a group. When we examine groups of artifacts, though, it is essential to begin by asking questions about intentionality: were these objects intentionally grouped together by the people who used them, and was that group of objects intentionally placed where it was discovered? How we answer those initial questions determines a great deal about what further questions we can ask.

When thinking about groups of artifacts, there are two important terms to start with: assemblage and deposition. In archaeology an assemblage is a group of objects found together in the same place. Deposition is the process, whether through human or natural action, by which those objects came to rest in that place. Questions of intentionality are important for how we analyze both assemblages of artifacts and the processes of deposition that left them for us to find.

Assemblages can be either intentional or unintentional. Sometimes we find groups of objects that were purposefully grouped together by the people who used them. In other cases, the objects in an assemblage are not connected except by happenstance. Similarly, some acts of deposition were intentional, while others were not. Recognizing the differences between intentional and unintentional assemblages and depositions is crucial for asking the right questions about the things we find.

For example, the objects placed in a grave were purposefully chosen by the family and friends of the deceased and intentionally deposited. We can pose questions about why these objects were chosen for this person, what it meant for the people who gave them to see them buried, and what the whole assemblage conveys about the person they were deposited with.

The goods we find on a shipwreck, on the other hand, were deliberately chosen, and share an important facet of their history, but they were not intended to end up where we find them. We can pose useful questions about how and why the people who laded this ship choose this particular set of cargo and equipment for their voyage, much as we can ask questions about why mourners chose particular objects to go into a grave. On the other hand, we also have to keep in mind that the ship’s crew expected it to reach port safely, not go down and leave its cargo on the bottom of the sea. If we want to understand the objects found on the ship, we have to consider their intended destinations once they were offloaded from the ship, which were probably numerous and varied.

We also find assemblages of objects that were not intentionally put together by the people who lived with them, some deliberated deposited and some not. The objects we find in an ancient settlement’s rubbish heaps were deliberately disposed of, but not purposefully chosen to go together as a set. Such finds are useful for understanding how the people of that settlement used and disposed of their material goods, but we have to be careful not to assume that the things we find in such a deposit were used by the same people, in the same households, or even within the same timeframe. In fact, looking at what kinds of goods people discarded and how they changed over time can tell us a lot about the life of the place they were found in.

The debris we find in the silt of a disused drainage ditch, by contrast, was neither purposefully assembled nor deliberately deposited. Such finds are useful in examining what kinds of objects were casually lost in a particular place that were too insignificant to their owners to be worth the effort of searching for or retrieving, which in turn tells us about the economic life and material culture of the settlement.

The important thread that unites all of these possibilities is that they require us to think about the people of the past as people, individuals who made choices about what to do with the things around them, just as we do. The habits of thought we apply to archaeology and history are ones that also serve us well when writing fiction: just as we have to think about people in the past as people, we have to think about our characters as people with intentions and desires, too. In a work of fiction, everything is intentional from the author’s point of view, but not everything is intentional from the characters’ point of view. Thinking about what choices characters make, and when they are making a choice at all, is a helpful habit to have.

Image: Dishes from the Helmsdale Hoard, photograph by Erik Jensen (found Helmsdale, Scotland; currently National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; 200-400 CE; bronze)

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

A Name for an Amazon

Erik2 Comments

Amazons, the bold warrior women who figure in Greek myths, are imaginary, but the myths about them likely had their origin in Greek experiences with actual fighting women in the cultures around the shores of the Black Sea. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence shows that women who trained with weapons and fought in battle were known in many of the cultures in the region, and the association of mythic Greek Amazons with horses and bows also matches the realities of life on the Black Sea steppes.

Greek literature and art records numerous Amazon names. Most of these names are Greek, and they are descriptive of relevant Amazon traits, such as Hippolyta (“She who sets the horses loose”), Melanippe (“Black horse”) or Antiope (“She who confronts”). These names may have been simply invented by Greek writers in the same way that fantasy authors today concoct suitable names for their characters. There is evidence, however, that some of the Amazon names recorded in Greek art might be actual names from languages spoken around the Black Sea.


Greek vase fragment via the J. Paul Getty Museum (made Athens, currently Getty Museum, Malibu; c. 510 BCE; glazed pottery; painted by Oltos)

This Greek pottery fragment shows Amazons riding into battle against the Greek hero Heracles (who appears accompanied by the god Hermes on the other side of the cup). We can recognize the riders as Amazons from their clothing and the bowcases they carry. Text in Greek letters surrounds them, although it is painted in a dark color that is difficult to see. Most of the text is fragmentary and hard to reconstruct, but one word seems to be a complete name. The text PKPUPES can be read by the head of the leftmost rider, evidently her name.

“Pkpupes,” at first glance, may look like mere gibberish. It certainly isn’t Greek. Many scholars in the past dismissed this and similar texts as nonsense words written by semi-literate vase painters. Maybe “pkupupes” was just an attempt at an onomatopoeic for the pounding of a horse’s hooves. It may, however, be something more significant.

Dense clusters of hard consonants like “pkp” are a common feature of languages spoken today in the Caucasus Mountains east of the Black Sea. “Pkpupes” is, in fact, fairly easy to read as an attempt to render a name in Circassian, a cluster of closely related languages of the northwestern Caucasus, with the letters of ancient Greek, which did not perfectly match up to the sounds of the original language. English doesn’t have all the right letters to easily represent the sounds of Circassian either, but a reconstructed Circassian name that would be rendered in English something like “Pqp’upush” is perfectly intelligible. This name is composed of several elements, the first referring to the body, the next to covering, and the final one connoting worthiness. Altogether, the name would mean “Worthy to wear armor,” a suitable name for a warrior woman.

Greeks had extensive contact with peoples around the Black Sea. Many Greeks migrated to the region, and people from the area also settled in Greece. The painter of this vase signed his name “Oltos,” which is not a typical Greek name, and he may have been an immigrant himself. He and other ancient vase painters may well have known people who spoke foreign languages or had ancestors from the Black Sea region who could recommend appropriately authentic names for Amazon characters. It may even be that some of the obviously Greek Amazon names like Hippolyta or Antiope were not invented by Greeks but are Greek translations of authentic names, in the same way that the names of many indigenous Americans in recent history have been translated into English, like Sitting Bull or Red Cloud.

The Amazons of Greek myth remain mythical, but we have evidence for some history behind that myth, maybe even the names of some real warrior women from the edges of the world known to the Greeks.

Source

Adrienne Mayor, John Colarusso, and David Saunders, “Making Sense of Nonsense Inscriptions Associated with Amazons and Scythians on Athenian Vases,” Hesperia 83, no. 3 (July-September 2014): 447-93.

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

Cults and the Cult of Bacchus

Erik

Cults are a staple of modern fantasy. When you need a shadowy organization for your hero to go up against, whether they’re protecting an ancient secret or scheming to bring about the end of days, you can’t go wrong with a cult.

There are plenty of modern examples of secretive organizations that draw in forlorn or gullible people and condition them to submit to the will of charismatic leaders. Such organizations can serve as models for imagining fictional cults, but if you want to write a cult in a fantasy setting, it can be helpful to look at ancient examples. One of the oldest documented examples of a secretive religious organization in conflict with larger society is the ancient Roman cult of Bacchus.

The cult of Bacchus emerged in southern and central Italy in the late third century BCE. It was centered on the worship of the god Bacchus, a version of the Greek Dionysus associated with wine, fertility, and ecstatic release. The Italian Bacchus also borrowed some traits from the Roman god Liber, connected with grapevines, wine, fertility, and freedom. The worship of Dionysus, Bacchus, and Liber was well established as part of the state religion of the Roman republic, which by this time had solidified its control over the whole of the Italian peninsula. The cult of Bacchus was a new religious movement that drew on older traditions but offered its followers new ways of celebrating them.

Followers of this movement practiced their worship in secret, not as part of the state-sanctioned public religion. Only initiated members of the cult were allowed to join in. Unlike traditional Roman religious celebrations, which maintained distinctions between social classes and had separate roles for men and women, initiates of Bacchus included people of all genders and classes who mixed together indiscriminately in their rites. Celebrations were raucous nighttime affairs that featured feasting, drinking, music, and dance.

The Roman elite was scandalized by the popularity of this religious movement. All the surviving sources describing its activity come from this hostile perspective and include lurid suggestions that the Bacchic revelers were practicing magic, engaging in wild sexual frenzies, and scheming at poisonings and other nefarious deeds. Despite these unfavorable sources, there is no reason to think that the cult of Bacchus was actually so outrageous. Seen in the context of the time, we may actually find the cult appearing in a much more favorable light.

To understand the cult of Bacchus, we need to set aside both the hostile attitude of the Roman elite and many of our modern associations with the term cult. While we associate the term today with secretive, manipulative organizations, cult, in its historic use, refers simply to the set of practices that are appropriate to the worship of a particular god or divine entity. All ancient gods received cult from their worshipers, from the official ceremonies for gods of the state to the everyday rituals that attended family and household spirits. Although the cult of Bacchus carried out its rituals in private, there is no indication that the organization was manipulative or coercive, or that members were isolated from the rest of society. In fact, in many ways, the cult offered a positive experience for its members.

Italy in the late third century BCE was recovering from the devastation of the second Punic War. From 218 to 204 BCE, the Carthaginian army led by Hannibal operated largely unchecked in Italy. The effects of war were far-reaching. Many young people from Rome’s Italian subjects were called up to fight in Rome’s legions, some never coming home again. Roman and Carthaginian armies alike ravaged farms up and down the peninsula. In the aftermath of the war, many small farms faced ruin, and a lot of Italian families had little choice but to sell their land to the aristocratic elite at whatever price they could get and move into cities like Rome looking for any work they could find to scrape together a living. Italy in the late third and early second centuries BCE had a vast population of poor people barely getting by, dislocated by war and poverty from their ancestral homes, and resentful of the elite who had come out of the war riding high on plunder and foreign slaves.

The cult of Bacchus offered relief from the pressures of life—if not a hope for a better world, at least a temporary distraction from the troubles of this one. It helped people who had been displaced from deeply rooted ties of family and community find new connections outside the limitations of gender and class. For people who had little joy in their lives and faced a hard daily grind just to eat, the appeal of a celebration full of food, music, and dance was strong. It’s not hard to understand why the cult gained a following in post-war Italy.

It’s also not that hard to see why the Roman aristocracy reacted with such alarm and hostility. The Second Punic War had hit Rome hard. Even though the Romans emerged victorious over Carthage in the end, a generation of potential recruits for Rome’s armies was killed or wounded in the fighting. Rome’s resources were stretched to the limit. What’s more, the war exposed weaknesses in Rome’s hold on Italy. Hannibal’s strategy was to deny Rome resources and fighting power by helping its subjects in Italy rebel. Not all of Italy took Hannibal up on his offer, but enough cities did, especially the Greek cities of southern Italy, to make the Roman elite nervous about their ability to maintain control of the peninsula. Since the cult of Bacchus particularly appealed to the southern Italian Greeks, it doesn’t take much to see why the Roman aristocracy in the years after the war saw disaffected poor Italians gathering together in secret and challenging established social lines as a dangerous thing that needed to be stamped out. The Roman state aggressively suppressed the cult of Bacchus, the first documented example in Western history of a religious movement persecuted by the state.

The cult of Bacchus may not fit the mold of the classic sinister fantasy cult, but understanding the context in which it arose and the forces which drew people to it can help with the worldbuilding for a story in which a cult may not be so benign. Desperate times drive people to find community, relief, and happiness in whatever ways they can. The cult of Bacchus was in reality a benevolent organization that provided much-needed fellowship, but unscrupulous people and organizations can take advantage of the same needs for darker ends.

Image: A scene of Bacchic revelry from a Roman sarcophagus, photograph by Wolfgang Sauber via Wikimedia (currently Anatalya Archaeological Museum; 2nd c. CE; marble)

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

Barbarian Migrations: The Imaginary and the Real

Erik

Previously we considered how large the groups of people who moved around the ancient world actually were and what challenges such large groups faced in migrating from one place to another.

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.

Barbarian Migrations: Logistics

Erik2 Comments

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.

Barbarian Migrations: Numbers

Erik2 Comments

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.

Quotes: He Lay on top of Me Like an Enormous Stone

Erik1 Comment

Saint Patrick’s Day is coming, and while some folk will be out there marching in parades or drinking green beer, I am reminded that Patrick is the source of one of the clearest early accounts of sleep paralysis and the frightening sensations that can come with it.

Patrick wrote an account of his life, called the Confession. This document was written late in his life and in response to some unknown allegations of misconduct during his mission in Ireland. Patrick’s Confession accordingly focuses on his humility and spiritual piety as it tells the story of how he was enslaved in Ireland as a young man, escaped to Britain, and finally returned to spread the Christian message. At one point in narrating his escape, Patrick recounts a frightening nighttime experience which he perceived as a demonic attack:

On that very night as I was sleeping, Satan tested me powerfully, such that I shall remember it for as long as I am in this body. He lay on top of me like an enormous stone, and I had no strength in any of my limbs. How did it occur to me, ignorant in spirit, to cry out “Elias?” In the midst of this, I saw the sun begin to rise in the sky, and as I shouted “Elias! Elias!” with all my strength, behold, the splendor of the sun fell over me and at once all the weight left me.

Saint Patrick, Confession 20

(My own translation)

Sleep paralysis is a frightening experience that happens when the brain’s processes for falling asleep or waking up are not quite in sync. In normal sleep, the body becomes paralyzed at the same time the brain becomes unconscious, and both states pass when we wake up. Sleep paralysis happens when the body is paralyzed but the brain is partially aware of its surroundings. Unable to properly process stimuli, the brain fills in the gaps with hallucinations. Because the brain is aware of the body’s vulnerability in its paralyzed state, these hallucinations often feel threatening. It is not unusual for a sufferer to scream themselves awake in response. Sleep paralysis most often happens in the evening when first going to sleep or in the early morning while waking up.

Many cultures have folk traditions that interpret sleep paralysis as the effect of hostile supernatural visitation. Old-fashioned explanations include incubi, night hags, and ghosts; more modern folktales may feature alien abduction. Patrick details a clear account of sleep paralysis—it happens at dawn, he is unable to move, he feels a weight on his body and perceives a hostile presence which he shouts away—but interprets the events in a specifically Christian context.

Patrick’s night terrors are a reminder of both the universality of human experiences, and how powerfully our own specific cultural outlook can shape our reactions to those experiences.

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Train Like a Spartan

Erik

There are some folks who are very into bodybuilding, weightlifting, and other such activities and who like to fancy themselves as the heirs of the ancient Greeks, especially the Spartans. Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with having hobbies like these. Do what makes you happy, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! But the ancient Spartans wouldn’t want modern bodybuilders among their number.

The details of ancient Spartan training are not easy to be certain about, since many of the sources that describe them were written by non-Spartans, often those who held unrealistically admiring attitudes toward Sparta. Yet even these sources are of some interest, because they were written by people familiar with the conditions of ancient warfare trying to imagine what kind of training a nation of perfect warriors would institute for themselves. Among these descriptions we find very little focus on getting big muscles or sculpted abs. Spartan training instead focused on two things: the endurance of hardship and camaraderie among the Spartiate elite.

A Spartan character by the name of Megillus in conversation with an Athenian interlocutor in Plato’s dialogue The Laws gives this account of the most important institutions in Spartan life:

Athenian: […] Should we say that the eating clubs and exercise grounds were established by the lawgiver for the sake of war?

Megillus: Indeed.

Athenian: Is there a third and fourth thing? […]

Megillus: The third thing he instituted is hunting, as I and any Lacedaimonian will tell you.

Athenian: Let us try to state the fourth thing, if we can.

Megillus: I will try to explain the fourth thing as well: we train ourselves to endure pain, both by fighting each other hand-to-hand and by stealing at the risk of a sound beating every time. Also the “Crypteia,” as some call it, is an astonishingly painful thing to endure, as they go barefoot in winter, sleep rough, attend to themselves without servants, and wander the whole countryside both by day and night. In our Gymnopaideia festival we face awful sufferings as we contend with the stifling summer heat, and there are so many more examples that listing them all off would nearly take forever.

Plato, Laws 633a-c

(My own translations)

There are good reasons why Spartan training focused on these areas rather than building muscle or cutting fat. Fighting makes up a very small part of what soldiers do in war. Most of an ancient soldier’s activity was marching, setting up and taking down camps, marauding for food and supplies, standing watch, and carrying out maneuvers. Even when the moment to fight came, big masses of muscle were of less use than the willingness to stand and fight and risk one’s life for one’s fellow soldiers.

In these conditions, physical endurance and a commitment to the one’s comrades were what mattered. Soldiers who could march for days on little food and no sleep were worth far more than those with low body fat. Maintaining big muscles and a sculpted physique takes time, food, and sleep that soldiers on the march couldn’t afford. Such fighters would be dead weight on their comrades, not an asset on the battlefield.

The poet Archilochus, who had experience as a mercenary soldier, gave his own opinion about soldiers who liked to show off their bodies:

I don’t like a general who is big or who likes to run,

nor one who is vain about his curly locks or sculpts his beard.

Give me a little bandy-legged-looking one

who’s steady on his feet and full of guts.

Archilochus, quoted/paraphrased in Dio Chrysostom, Orations 33.17

Now, while bodybuilding was not a favorite Spartan pastime, there were two activities for which Spartans were famous that trained both endurance and the ability to work well with the people around you: dancing and choral singing. Spartans were renowned for their skills in both coordinated group dances and singing together.

So, if you really want to train like a Spartan, leave the gym and the weights behind and go join a choir or take a ballet class. That will make a true Spartan out of you.

Image: Gerard Butler as Leonidas in 300 via IMDb

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

Ghosts of Marathon

Erik

Tales of haunted places are a nearly universal part of human experience. Ghost stories can be one of the ways in which we remember the past, especially traumatic or painful parts of it. Even in ancient Greece there were legends of hauntings connected with the site of the battle of Marathon.

Normally, in ancient Greece, the bodies of fallen soldiers were brought back to their home city after the battle and buried wherever their families buried their dead, but an exception was made for the fallen of Marathon in recognition of the exceptional nature of the battle. The dead of Marathon were buried on the site of the battle and an enormous earthen mound raised over their tomb.

The travel writer Pausanias reported local legends about ghostly apparitions around the tomb mound some six centuries after the event (and a warning to any would-be ghost hunters):

Every night there can be heard the sound of horses neighing and men fighting. It has never done anyone any good to go looking for these manifestations on purpose, but those who happen upon the scene by chance do not suffer the spirits’ wrath.


Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.32.4

(My own translation)

If you’re enjoying some ghost stories this Halloween, know that you’re in good company and part of a long tradition.

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

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.