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Christie and Tolkien: When the World Ends but You Keep Going

Erik1 Comment

The literary works of Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien may not seem to have much in common. One wrote murder mysteries set in genteel English country houses, the other high fantasy in a mythic secondary world. When you look at the themes and ideas of their work, though, interesting parallels appear.

The two authors were close contemporaries; Christie was born in 1890, Tolkien in 1892. They belonged to the generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the First World War. Their experiences were different—Tolkien saw battle firsthand as an officer, Christie its terrible aftereffects as a nurse—but they both reflect the shock of the war in their writing.

One theme that occupies both writers is death. Death was, naturally, a crucial element of Christie’s murder mystery stories. In Tolkien’s legendarium, death and the things people will do out of the fear of it is a running theme. But neither writer’s work is focused on death as a fact; rather, the underlying drive in their work is a search for some way in which death makes sense.

In Christie’s case, this theme is more obvious: she writes about detectives solving crimes. By the time we reach the drawing room summation at the end of the book, we can see clearly how and why the victim or victims died. Order is restored to the world, and reason triumphs over the illogic of death, whether that reason is embodied in a fussy Belgian’s love for methodical neatness or a wise spinster’s deep observation of human nature.

In Tolkien’s work, the drive to make sense of death is subtler. Death often appears pointless in Tolkien. Boromir dies defending Merry and Pippin from Orcs, but after he falls the young Hobbits are captured nonetheless. Denethor dies in despair instead of living to see his city saved. But the larger point of Tolkien’s work is that hopelessness is an illusion. We never know the end of our own story or how profoundly the choices we make will affect the world. In the legendarium as a whole, death is the greatest mystery, but also the greatest hope. The world of Middle Earth had a beginning and will someday end, yet the spirits of mortal beings will not end with the world but transcend it through death.

It is not just the death of individuals that occupied Christie and Tolkien, but also how ways of life come to an end. They both witnessed the end of the world, in a sense. The innocence and hope of the time they grew up in perished on the battlefields of the Great War, but they did not. They kept going and witnessed as the world around them changed.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is about the ending of an age, the Third Age of Middle Earth to be precise. The story takes place during the last days before the Elves either depart into the magical west or dwindle into creatures of fairy tale and folklore, taking their beauty and wisdom with them. Yet the story also carries hope for what is to come after in the ages of Men—hope without guarantees, as Gandalf puts it. The Elf Legolas and Dwarf Gimli reflect on the promise and weaknesses of humans in the streets of Minas Tirith:

“If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”

“And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,” said Gimli. “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.”

– The Lord of the Rings. Book 5, Chapter 9, “The Last Debate”

Christie reflects the changing world in different ways, but also with hope for what the future will bring. Her early works are set in the interwar world of country estates and garden parties that we typically think of when we think of a Christie mystery, but that world was ending. She kept writing through the fifties and sixties as the life and culture of Britain changed around her.

The traces of this change are all over Christie’s writing. One of the ongoing themes in her mysteries is that it is difficult to know who people really are. Many of her plots hinge on people passing themselves off as or being mistaken for someone else. Such impersonations were possible only because the world of country villages and garden parties where everyone knew one another was ending. Miss Marple speaks of this shift in A Murder is Announced:

Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already.

…

But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come—and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.

– A Murder is Announced. Chapter 10, “Pip and Emma”

At the same time, Christie also saw that the fundamentals of human nature that underlay her stories were not changed by the passing of time. People might live differently, but they still had the same jealousies and aspirations, desires and fears as they ever had. Miss Marple, again, reflects on this fact in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side as she explores the new housing development at the edge of her beloved village:

She turned out of Aubrey Close and was presently in Darlington Close. She went slowly and as she went she listened avidly to the snippets of conversation between mothers wheeling prams, to the girls addressing young men, to the sinister-looking Teds (she supposed they were Teds) exchanging dark remarks with each other. Mothers came out on doorsteps calling to their children who, as usual, were busy doing all the things they had been told not to do. Children, Miss Marple reflected gratefully, never changed. And presently she began to smile, and noted down in her mind her usual series of recognitions.

That woman is just like Carry Edwards—and the dark one is just like that Hooper girl—she’ll make a mess of her marriage just like Mary Hooper did. Those boys—the dark one is just like Edward Leeke, a lot of wild talk but no harm in him—a nice boy really—the fair one is Mrs Bedwell’s Josh all over again. Nice boys, both of them. The one like Gregory Bins won’t do very well, I’m afraid. I expect he’s got the same sort of mother…

She turned a corner into Walsingham Close and her spirits rose every moment.

The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they had always been.

– The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Chapter 1

Some days now it feels like we are living through the end of the world we knew, and none of us knows what will come next. In these times, there is comfort in going back to writers who lived through the end of one world and saw that there was hope in the next.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 855.

Christie, Agatha. A Murder is Announced. London: HarperCollins, 2023, pp. 132-133.

Christie, Agatha. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. London: HarperCollins, 2023, pp. 13-14.

Image: Photo collage of Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien by Erik Jensen. Photograph of Christie via Wikimedia; photograph of Tolkien via Wikimedia

Post edited to correct formatting errors

Story Time is all about story-telling and how stories work, and what makes us love our favorites.

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.

The Amazing Colors of an Ancient Perfume Bottle

Erik3 Comments

So much of what survives of ancient art has lost the colors it originally held—statues have lost their paint, pigments have faded, textiles have weathered. One of the few materials that holds its color well over time is glass. Just look at this ancient Greek glass perfume bottle and see!

This type of bottle, called an alabastron, was used to store small quantities of valuable liquids like perfumed oil. Like this one, they typically had pointed or rounded bottoms and were kept in wooden or metal stands or hung from loops. The bright colors of this bottle are made from layers of colored glass and gold, bent around one another and blown into shape.

The swirling colors of this bottle almost make me think of 1960s psychedelia. It can be startling to find an ancient object that has kept its color and be reminded that it was created and used in a world that was equally colorful.

Image: Alabastron via Metropolitan Museum of Art (found Greece, currently Metropolitan Museum, New York; 1st c. BCE; glass)

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

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.

Envisioning Persepolis

Erik1 Comment

Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. While other cities such as Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana had royal residences and centers of administration, Persepolis was the symbolic heart of the empire. It was here that one of the central rituals of Achaemenid rule was carried out, the annual presentation of gifts from the peoples of the empire to the king.

Early Persian kings, like Darius I and Xerxes I, built up the palace at Persepolis into an impressive monument suitable for the ceremony. Persepolis was meant to be both imposing and welcoming, asserting the king’s power while also embracing the diverse peoples of the empire in a peaceful ritual in which they were treated as valued members of the empire, not defeated subjects.

It was in part because of Persepolis’ symbolic significance that Alexander the Great burned the palace in his conquest of Persia. The site of the palace was not reoccupied but was left in ruins, which has allowed modern archaeologists to reconstruct the Achaemenid palace in significant detail.

The stills below come from a video exploring a digital reconstruction of the palace, which can be viewed on Wikipedia.

In a wide view, we see the palace complex as it stood at the edge of the hills. The large columned hall in the center is the apadana or throne room where the king received the delegations of gift-bearers from around the empire. To the left is the Gate of All Nations, through which the procession of gift-bearers entered the complex, and to the right are the buildings of the treasury where the ceremonial gifts were stored after the ritual was completed.

A view of Persepolis, still from a video by ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial via Wikipedia

From a ground-level view we see the Gate of All Nations, erected by Xerxes, which gave admission to the courtyard before the apadana.

The Gate of All Nations, still from a video by ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial via Wikipedia

Another ground-level view gives us an idea of what it would have been like to approach the apadana, with some human and animal figures for scale.

The north porch of the apadana, still from a video by ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial via Wikipedia

The whole video is well worth a watch. It can be quite valuable to try to imagine ancient spaces not as the ruins we find them in today but as living places filled with life and activity.

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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.

How to Get Away With Murder, In Ancient Rome, With a Bear

Erik

If someone out there is looking for a good plot for an ancient Roman mystery thriller, here’s a tip. There’s a famous case in classical Roman law according to which it is possible to get someone killed and face no legal consequences. The catch is: you have to get lucky, and you have to use a wild animal like a bear.

To start with, we have to lay down a few fundamentals of Roman law: dominium and possessio. Dominium means ownership, the absolute right to control a particular piece of property. Possessio, unsurprisingly, means possession, the direct control of property.

In most cases, people have both dominium and possessio at the same time. You own a vase, which you keep in your house as decoration on a table—you have both the legal right to that vase (dominium) and direct physical control over it (possessio). It is also possible to have one without the other. If you lend that vase to a friend so they can decorate their house for a party, you still own the vase (dominium) even without possessio; as long as your friend has it in their house, they have possessio, but that doesn’t give them dominium.

Now, if someone uses that vase to smash someone over the head and kill them, it doesn’t matter who owned or possessed the vase. Inanimate objects are not responsible for what people do with them. The person who did the smashing is liable for the results of their actions. Neither an owner nor a lawful possessor is liable for what other people do with their property.

With animals, though, we get into a more complicated area. Sometimes people can directly provoke animals to cause harm, like spooking a herd of cattle into a stampede or siccing a dog on another person. In those cases, Roman law recognizes that the person who provoked the animals is responsible for the harm they caused, in the same way that someone who picks up a vase and smashes it over someone else’s head is responsible for the damage done by the vase. Yet animals can also act on their own initiative. A charging bull or biting dog can ruin someone’s day without a person directly commanding it, and you can’t sue an animal for the damage it causes.

To deal with cases where animals caused harm without direct human intervention, Roman law provided the action of pauperies. In a lawsuit for pauperies, the owner of an animal was held legally liable for harm the animal did when acting on its own nature. It didn’t matter whether the owner caused the animal to act, or was even present when the damage was done. The person who had dominium of an animal was responsible for what that animal did. (There was a limit, however: if a person was sued for damages done by their animal, they could escape all liability by handing over the animal in question to the wronged party. In this way, the limit of liability was the value of the animal itself.)

For domesticated animals, pauperies provided a degree of legal recourse, because a domestic animal always belongs to someone. Even if your bull breaks out of its paddock and goes on a rampage through town, it’s still your bull. Once the bull is off your property, it is no long in your possessio, but you still have dominium and the legal liability that goes with it.

Wild animals are a different case. Under Roman law, you can have dominium over a wild animal only so long as you have possessio of it. If you are hunting a deer and catch it in a trap, the deer belongs to you as long as it is in your trap or if you can get a rope on it to wrangle it back to your property, but if it breaks free and runs off through the woods, you loose your claim to it unless you catch it again. If another hunter kills the deer while it is running from you, you have no recourse against them, because as soon as the deer is out of your possessio, it is also out of your dominium.

So far so good. All of these legal principles have a sound practical purpose and make logical sense. When we put them together, though, an unexpected result emerges.

Suppose you have a bear in a cage. A bear is a wild animal, like a deer, so as long as it is in your direct physical control, it belongs to you. If the bear reaches out of its cage and mauls someone, you are legally on the hook for damage because it is an animal in your dominium. But what if it gets out? Once the bear escapes its cage and is running free, you no longer have direct physical over it, so you lose possessio. Because it is a wild animal, not a domestic one, as soon as you lose possessio, you also lose dominium. On one hand, that means that if someone else captures or kills the bear, you have no legal right to sue them or demand they return it to you. On the other hand, you also have no legal liability for any damage the bear does.

It would take a lot of luck to pull off, but if you can concoct the right scenario where a dangerous animal gets loose at the right time and kills the person you want to target, under Roman law, you would be free and clear.

Image: Roman mosaic of a bear, photograph by Jerzystrzelecki via Wikimedia (currently Bardo Museum, Tunisia; Roman period; tile mosaic)

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