Historum - History Forums - Blogs - Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/ Historum History Discussion Forums en Fri, 24 May 2013 04:04:40 GMT vBulletin 60 http://cdn.historum.com/images/classic/misc/rss.jpg Historum - History Forums - Blogs - Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/ The First Pogrom http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/1007-first-pogrom.html Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:23:32 GMT In the summer or autumn of 38 CE an unprecedented outbreak of anti-Jewish violence erupted in Alexandria, perpetrated by members of the city’s Greek... In the summer or autumn of 38 CE an unprecedented outbreak of anti-Jewish violence erupted in Alexandria, perpetrated by members of the city’s Greek population. This violence was tolerated – indeed endorsed – by the Roman governor, the equestrian prefect Aulus Avillius Flaccus, and this government involvement in the violence is particularly remarkable given Flaccus’ previously unimpeachable conduct as governor and his fair treatment of Alexandria’s well-established and large Jewish community. As historians, we must ask what it was that provoked this change in the attitude of Rome’s most senior representative in the land, and we are fortunate enough to have two eyewitness accounts which purport to provide an answer to this question. The Jewish theologian and intellectual Philo wrote two accounts of this first of all pogroms in his historical treatises In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, and in his works we find a dark tale of conspiracy and political skulduggery, of a devil’s pact struck between Flaccus and sinister anti-Jewish elements in the Greek population, all in the shadow of the rise of a demented new emperor.

According to Philo, the seeds of the pogrom lay in some poor political choices made by Flaccus before he even came to Egypt. Flaccus enjoyed high favour under Tiberius, as evidenced by the very fact of his holding the Egyptian prefecture, which at the time was the highest honour available to a non-senator in the Roman Empire (though the post would later come to be eclipsed by the Praetorian prefecture). But during the reign of Tiberius, he made some poor decisions. He offended the young future emperor Gaius (Caligula) by being somehow involved in the successful prosecution of his mother Agrippina. He was a close friend and political ally of Sutorius Macro, the commander of Tiberius’ praetorian guard and one of the earliest casualties of Caligula’s reign, and he belonged to a court faction that favoured the doomed Tiberius Gemellus, Caligula’s rival to succeed Tiberius (and who, needless to say, was soon “liquidated” by Caligula). After Caligula’s accession, five years into his governorship of Egypt, an increasingly despondent Flaccus watched his friends, partners and allies being executed one by one by the new master of the world. This competent and energetic governor began to fear that his neck would be next on the block, and he fell into a profound paranoid depression, becoming unable to complete even the most basic tasks entrusted to him. It was at this low ebb that the Greek enemies of Judaism in Alexandria swooped, and succeeded in bending a Roman governor to their nefarious will.

Greek-Jewish tensions in Alexandria were high under the early Roman emperors. Jews had lived in Alexandria almost since its foundation – one of the early Ptolemies (either I or II) gave them a district, called the Delta Quarter, specifically for Jewish settlement. Under the Ptolemies, Jews enjoyed the judicial status of “Hellenes”, an intermediate status between Greeks and native Egyptians, ensuring that they enjoyed many privileges and exemptions. This arrangement kept the peace successfully between Greeks and Jews for three centuries, but Augustus’ conquest of Egypt changed things decisively for the worse. He abolished Hellene status, meaning that Alexandria’s Jewish community suffered a major decline in prestige, becoming effectively equal to the despised Egyptian population in law. Moreover, he angered the Alexandrian Greeks by forbidding them to have their own council, although he allowed the Alexandrian Jews their own gerousia, a decision-making body in charge of the affairs of the Alexandrian Jewish community. Thus a situation was created where two different ethnic groups both believed that the other group was unfairly privileged by the occupying power – a sure-fire recipe for bitter community strife. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that some well-connected Jews (such as Philo’s own brother Alexander) were illegally usurping Greek citizenship and claiming privileges to which they were not legally entitled, creating Greek concerns about the “purity” of the citizen body. The ferociously anti-Jewish tone of much Alexandrian Greek scholarship of this period (most famously in the works of the poet and grammarian Apion) bears testimony to the profoundly Judeophobic attitude of many Alexandrian Greeks. Alexandria was a powder-keg of festering ethnic loathing – and the despondency and vulnerability of the Roman governor Flaccus after Caligula’s accession would prove to be the spark that set it off.

Flaccus met in secret with several leaders of the Greek community, named by Philo as Isidoros, Lampon and Dionysios. These men are presented by Philo as hate-spewing demagogues who built their careers on incendiary anti-Jewish diatribes. They offered to “protect” Flaccus from Caligula’s anger, on one condition – that Flaccus surrendered the city’s Jewish community to them, and assisted them in destroying the civil liberties of the Alexandrian Jews. Precisely how these people were able to “protect” Flaccus is not clear, but we ought to note Philo’s comments in the Legatio that many of the influential slaves and freedmen at Caligula’s court were Alexandrians, most famously the infamous cubicularius (chamberlain) Helicon. It is perhaps through such channels that these demagogues believed they would be able to advocate on Flaccus’ behalf. Whatever they promised him was enough and Flaccus, motivated by a desire to save his own skin, agreed. The deal was done, and the misery of Alexandria’s Jews was set to begin.

The first manifestation of the governor’s new position was a perceptible bias against Jews in his legal hearings, and a refusal to hear cases or petitions instigated by Jews. As this situation became ever more patently unfair, the situation was destabilised by a surprise visit from Agrippa I, the grandson of King Herod and a close friend of the new emperor, who visited Alexandria on his way to take over the administration of new territories which Caligula had just awarded to him in Judaea. The beleaguered Jews of the city gave him a letter of complaint to send to Caligula about Flaccus’ behaviour, thus bypassing the usual bureaucratic channels (officially, any letter sent from Egypt to the outside world had to be approved by the governor). But the pageantry of the visit infuriated the Greeks, who had been denied the privilege of their own ruler ever since the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. After King Agrippa’s departure, they staged their own mock royal visit, dressing up a mentally handicapped tramp called Carabas in royal robes and addressing him as “Maron” (Aramaic for “My Lord”). Astonishingly, considering the closeness of Agrippa to Caligula, Flaccus took no action to avenge this insult.

But this was still very mild. Soon after this, things got much worse. It began with an edict of the governor which created a de facto “ghetto”, one sole district of the city in which all Jews had to live. Those Jews who had homes or businesses outside this new ghetto found their property forfeit to the state. The Alexandrian Greeks eagerly took it upon themselves to police Flaccus’ new law, and they formed an organised cordon around the Jewish district, viciously punishing any Jews found outside the area. Soon, chronic overcrowding, overstretched sanitation and a lack of resources led to acute misery in the ghetto, the complete collapse of economic activity among the city’s Jews and the outbreak of a plague. Starving Jews who snuck out of the ghetto in search of food were tortured and lynched, with no Roman intervention. Women who were apprehended outside the ghetto and suspected of being Jewish were offered pork – any who refused to eat it were raped, tortured and murdered. Jewish merchants who put in at the city’s harbour, presumably not knowing what was afoot in the city, were burned alive on the docks and had their cargoes ransacked. Synagogues were desecrated with images of Caligula, and desperate, starving Jews spilled outside of the city walls, living on the beaches, in the necropolis, and among the city’s rubbish heaps.

The apogee of these cruelties, and the clearest sign that such atrocities had Flaccus’ endorsement, came on August 31st, Caligula’s birthday, when festive games were celebrated in Alexandria as everywhere else in the empire. More than 30 members of the Jewish ruling council, the gerousia, were publicly flogged, many of them dying. Other Jews who had been caught outside the ghetto or refused to leave their homes were offered as victims in gladiatorial games, and subjected to spectacular deaths described in nauseating detail by Philo. Soon after this, Flaccus sent Roman troops into the Jewish ghetto in search of weapons, a further sign of official endorsement of the Greek pogrom. The situation was bleak indeed and come September and the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Philo tells us that spirits were so low that the Jews were too dispirited to even celebrate it. But a miraculous reversal awaited them – a reversal so dramatic and unexpected that Philo inevitably interpreted it as a divine intervention.

At some point during Sukkot, a boat carrying Roman troops arrived in the harbour and arrested the governor. The precise charges are not recoverable, but it seems unlikely that Caligula, an emperor who would soon try to introduce his own statue in the Jerusalem Temple, would care much about the plight of Alexandria’s Jews. Perhaps Flaccus’ earlier political miscalculations had finally caught up with him; perhaps he was punished for manifestly failing to maintain the peace in a city which was of crucial importance to Rome’s grain supply. Sandra Gambetti suggests another intriguing possibility: it is clear that Flaccus’ search of the ghetto had taken place during the period of mourning for Caligula’s sister Drusilla, a period during which the emperor had forbidden any extraordinary government business to be conducted. Such disrespect to the imperial family was unwise, particularly if Flaccus had already upset Caligula as Philo indicates. Either way, Flaccus’ replacement, Vitrasius Pollio, seems to have rapidly over-ruled Flaccus’ pronouncements and restored many of the Jews’ lost freedoms. However, full restitution would not come until after the assassination of Caligula and his replacement by an entirely more reasonable emperor, Claudius.

Avillius Flaccus was tried by Caligula at Rome (his Greek "allies” Isidoros and Lampon appeared as witnesses for the prosecution) and exiled to the barren Greek island of Andros. Several months later, soldiers with an imperial commission arrived on the island and hacked him to pieces. To this day, scholars debate the extent of his culpability for what happened, and argue over the reliability of Philo’s “conspiracy theory” about the secret deal he struck with the Alexandrian Judeophobes. However, at best he sat back and tolerated the mass mob lynchings of some of his Jewish subjects. In the end, Philo’s In Flaccum falls into the trap of gloating over a fallen enemy. This may be unseemly, but when we read of the atrocities over which Avillius Flaccus presided it is easy to forgive Philo for this venial lapse in taste.

Select Bibliography:
Bilde, P, Engberg-Pederson, T, Hannestad, L, and Zahle, J. eds. (1992) Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt (Aarhus).
Blouin, K. (2005) Le Conflit Judéo-Alexandrin de 38 – 41 (Paris).
Borgen, P, "Philo and the Jews of Alexandria", in Bilde et al (1992) 122 – 138.
Box, H. (1979) Philonis Alexandrini In Flaccum (New York).
Gambetti, S. (2009) The Alexandrian Riots of 38 CE and the Persecution of the Jews (Leiden).
Horbury, W, Davies, W. D, and Sturdy, J. eds (1999) The Cambridge History of Judaism vol. 3, Cambridge.
Schäfer, P. (1997) Judeophobia (Cambridge, MA).
Smallwood, E. M. (1991) Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium (Leiden).
Tcherikover, V. A, and Fuks, A. (1960) Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum vol. 2 (Cambridge MA). (contains the text of an edict of Claudius on Jewish rights in Alexandria, and some papyrus fragments which claim to recount a meeting between Flaccus and the Alexandrian Greek Judeophobes).
Van der Horst, P. W. (2003), Philo's Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Leiden). ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/1007-first-pogrom.html <![CDATA["I, Claudius" (BBC, 1976)]]> http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/598-i-claudius-bbc-1976.html Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:54:50 GMT The 1976 BBC mini-serial, I, Claudius (based on Robert Graves' novel) is often cited as one of the greatest television series of all time. It narrates the life story and family history of Claudius, the fourth Roman emperor, beginning in the reign of Augustus and progressing through the careers of the surly and savage Tiberius and the deranged Caligula. Derek Jacobi won a BAFTA award for his scintillating turn as the title character, and it remains perhaps his career-best performance. Fortunately, the producers resisted their initial urge to give the part to the rotund comedian Ronnie Barker. Jacobi received strong support from an outstanding cast including Brian Blessed as Augustus (he originally auditioned for Tiberius), Sian Phillips as the evil Livia, George Baker as Tiberius (a hugely under-rated performance), a curly-haired Patrick Stewart as Sejanus, Margaret Tyzack as Antonia, and John Hurt as Caligula.

Production of the series was delayed because of complex negotiations between the BBC and the copyright holders of an aborted 1937 Hollywood version of the book. Rehearsals were difficult, since the actors found it hard to establish an effective "tone", and initial reviews were disappointing, but as the series continued the reviewers (and the viewing public) were almost unanimously won over. It went on to be a great success in the US and around the world, and to leave a big mark on popular culture, being parodied by everything from Sesame Street to The Russ Abbot Show.

I, Claudius presents imperial Rome in a relatively conventional way. As so often on film, the Romans are seen as people who, in some respects, share a "modern" sensibility, but in others are much more uninhibited with regards to violence and sex. Romans, in other words, are more extreme versions of us. Nowadays you can put almost anything in a movie or (at least in Europe) on TV, but in previous decades cinema and broadcast television were very restricted. Ancient Rome allowed film-makers to push at the limits of censorship in the name of historical education, and often scenes in historical Roman epics were seen as "shocking" in their day (think of the homosexual allusiuons in Spartacus, for instance, or the semi-pornographic Caligula movie that came out three years after I, Claudius, or the "blasphemy" of The Life of Brian). I, Claudius continued this tradition of pushing the boundaries of censorship, with relatively frequent semi-nudity, and scenes of sex, incest and violence. The scene where Caligula cuts out the foetus from the womb of his pregant wife/sister Drusilla and eats it was perhaps the most extreme thing that had ever been broadcast on British TV at the time (even though it's handled very discreetly by modern standards). And this problem was all the more acute in the US, where the TV networks were even more censorious than in Britain, and where I, Claudius went out on PBS' Masterpiece Theater, a strand that usually carries much more genteel fare like Miss Marple, or Jane Austin adaptations.

It was perhaps because of the unusually shocking nature of I Claudius that PBS had Alistair Cook, the host of Masterpiece Theater, regularly say in his introductions to the episodes that what viewers were about to see was entirely, completely historically accurate (after all, historical accuracy is a good justification for shocking content). However, very few Roman historians would share this confidence. Graves' novel, and the BBC adaptations, contain a great deal of scandalous and sensationalist material from Suetonius, an author perhaps not renowned for his reliability. Moreover, Graves used "novelistic license" here and there and made claims unsupported in any classical source: for instance, the claim that both Caligula and Herod Agrippa I came to regard themselves as the Jewish Messiah, or that the young Caligula was involved in the murder of his father Germanicus. Most sensationally of all, the shocking scene mentioned above where Caligula eats Drusilla's baby is utterly unattested in any classical source (Drusilla most probably died a natural death of fever). And so, for all its wonderful qualities as drama and its peerless entertainment value, I, Claudius is not, as Alistair Cook would have us believe, completely factually accurate, and it no doubt did a great deal to perpetuate some exaggerated beliefs about Imperial Rome.

To round off, here are a couple of my favourite scenes, illustrating the series' unique mixture of horror and humour.



]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/598-i-claudius-bbc-1976.html <![CDATA[Varus' Big Judaean Adventure]]> http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/572-varus-big-judaean-adventure.html Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:20:54 GMT If you have ever heard of Publius Quinctilius Varus, it will no doubt be in conjunction with the infamous clades Variana of 9 CE, the catastrophic... If you have ever heard of Publius Quinctilius Varus, it will no doubt be in conjunction with the infamous clades Variana of 9 CE, the catastrophic loss of three legions to the German tribes under the command of Arminius in the Teutoberg Forest, near present-day Kalkriese in Lower Saxony, Germany. This celebrated military catastrophe was an event of some consequence - it put an end to the fledgling Roman province across the Rhine, and drastically curtailed Roman hopes of a German imperium. Not only did this event lead to Varus' own suicide, but it blackened his name in perpetuity, to the extent that many people interested in Roman history do not even realise that this individual had a long and rather illustrious prior career, and that one aspect of it in particular is relatively well-documented. Knowing about Varus' previous big military adventure in the territory of Judaea in 4BCE can contribute a great deal to our appreciation of him as a man, and can influence and nuance the way we read the sources that deal with the famous German disaster.

One of the most influential portraits of Varus comes from the writings of Dio. Dio portrays Varus as a sort of "wall-flower", a rather peaceable, scholarly and placid man unfit for the rigours of a command in a military zone. Famously, Dio depicts Varus holding assizes in the wastes of Germania, running a frontier zone as if it were a settled and pacified province. We have various reasons for doubting this. Some modern scholarship on Varus can overlook the fact that, prior to 9, Varus was without question one of the most important figures in Augustus' administration. He was a son-in-law of Agrippa, and thus linked by family to the very heart of the court. He had previously held high office as Governor of Syria, the most important and demanding posting in the Eastern Empire, and his selection to run the newly-acquired German province tells us something about his standing in the eyes of Augustus. Bookish wallflowers did not attain this level of influence in imperial Rome. Moreover, as we shall see, a good many citizens of Judaea would have strong reason to dispute Dio's characterisation of the man.

***

Trouble flared up in Judaea immediately after the death of Herod the Great, when Varus was the governor of neighbouring Syria. Herod's heir Archelaus was able to suppress the initial unrest, but he then had to depart for Rome to convince Augustus of his status as Herod's successor. Turbulent Judaea was left under the supervision of Varus, who visited Jerusalem, left one legion as a garrison, and departed for Antioch. However, further trouble was precipitated by the arrival of Sabinus, the equestrian procurator of Syria who, immediately upon arrival in Jerusalem, began to confiscate land and property. Soon afterwards, when Jerusalem was full of pilgrims at the Passover, fighting broke out between Sabinus' soldiers and incensed locals, in which part of the Temple was damaged and its treasure looted. This caused further unrest. Massive numbers of rebels blockaded Sabinus and his soldiers in Herod's palace, but not before Sabinus was able to send desperate appeals for help to distant Varus.

By the time Varus entered Judaean territory with two legions and large contingents of allied troops, the rebellion had spread from the city to the surrounding countryside. Charismatic rural rabble-rousers with evocative names caused trouble in the country districts of Israel: Athrongeus the Shepherd, Simon the Royal Slave, Judas ben Ezekias. Varus sent a detachment of his army into Galilee, to destroy the city of Sepphoris and take its inhabitants as slaves. Meanwhile, his own army advanced on Jerusalem, en route reducing the towns of Sampho, Emmaeus and Arus. His blood-stained progress through the country terrified the rebels of Jerusalem, who fled from the city at his army's approach. Their ringleaders were ferreted out and, in a horrific display of Roman power, 2,000 Judaean rebels were crucified by the walls of the city. This terrifying example persuaded the remaining rebels, concentrated in the southern region of Idumaea, to surrender and hand over their leaders to Varus' custody.

Thus the "wallflower" of Dio's account is the same man who, thirteen years earlier, had butchered the rebels of Jerusalem in vast numbers and lain waste to their country. Varus' Judaean adventure does not suggest a quiet, bookish, unmilitary temperament. It suggests a ruthless, efficient and unforgiving administrator, and a highly effective military leader. From studying the classical accounts of Varus' Judaean incursion (in Josephus' Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, with a considerably briefer account in Tacitus' Histories) we begin to apprehend why Augustus had such confidence in this man, and how he had risen so high in the administration. Dio's character sketch of Varus cannot stand.

Which might lead to a further interesting historiographical question: why did Dio feel he needed to depict Varus in such an evidently unhistorical way? But that is for another essay! ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/572-varus-big-judaean-adventure.html Josephus http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/546-josephus.html Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:36:32 GMT Titus Flavius Josephus was born Yosef ben Matityehu in 37 CE, probably in Jerusalem. He was the second son of a leading Jewish priest at the... Titus Flavius Josephus was born Yosef ben Matityehu in 37 CE, probably in Jerusalem. He was the second son of a leading Jewish priest at the Jerusalem Temple and, through his mother, he was a descendant of the Hasmonaeans, the former royal dynasty of Judaea and the descendants of the Maccabees.

In his youth, Yosef (according to his own account) experminted with a wide variety of forms of Judaism, learning the doctrines of the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes, as well as studying for three years in the wilderness with a charismatic preacher called Bannus. At the end of all this study, he decided to attach himself to the school of the Pharisees (traditionalists who handed down oral interpretations of the Scripture), but he always retained a high degree of esteem for the mystical and ascetic Essene sect, too. Around the year 64, he sailed to Rome as part of an embassy to the Emperor Nero, to request the pardon of a group of Jerusalem priests who had been arrested. It was in Rome that he enjoyed his first connections with the world of high Roman politics: thanks to the agency of a Jewish actor called Aliturus, Yosef was introduced to Nero's wife Poppaea Sabina, before going on to successfully secure the release of the priests. It is also likely that, on this trip, he made the acquaintance of Antonia, a member of the Imperial Family who was not only a friend of the Jewish king Agrippa II and an assiduous cultivator of Eastern elites, but also the patroness of a fast-rising senatorial family called the Flavians ...

Shortly after Yosef's return to Jerusalem, the outrageous conduct of the Roman governor Gessius Florus provoked a huge uprising in Judaea. Like many other members of the traditionally pro-Roman Jerusalem elite, Yosef initially got caught up in the rebellion and sided with the Jewish cause. Exactly what he was doing in the early months of the rebellion is unknown, but after the humiliating defeat of the legions of Cestius Gallus at the Battle of Beth-Horon, Yosef was appointed military Governor of Galilee, the first line of defence against the imminent Roman onslaught from Syria. The fact that such a key role could be given to a bookish, militarily-inexperienced priest suggests that the Jewish rebels were somewhat short of good-quality leadership at this point.

Yosef fortified the key towns of Galilee and set about recruiting and training an army for the defence of his province. However, tensions within the Jewish Revolutionary Government were already showing, as less aristocratic and more hard-line leaders vied to elbow out the moderate aristocrats from positions of control and take charge of the new state themselves. In Galilee, the tensions between the revolutionary elite and the lower-class rebels manifested themselves in the constant conflicts between Yosef (representing the former) and the bandit-chief Yochannan ben Levi (aka John of Gischala), who rapidly won the affection of the rural poor. Many of the wealthier citizens of Galilee, alarmed by the conduct of the lower-class revolutionaries, began to regret their involvement in the rebellion and defect to Rome. When Vespasian and Titus finally led their four legions into Galilee, Yosef was in an unenviable position. However, his woes were cut short during the fall of Jotapata (modern Yodfat), when he managed to escape from a suicide pact (either by the grace of God or by some clever mathematical manoeuvring), and get himself captured by the Romans.

In captivity, Yosef came to Vespasian's attention as a prophet. Ingeniously "reinterpreting" some of the Messianic scriptures in the Tanakh, Yosef predicted that General Vespasian would attain the imperial throne in the near future. This "prophecy" had little credibility when Yosef first uttered it but, after Nero's suicide in late 68, Vespasian sailed west and made a successful bid for the throne. Consequently the "inspired prophet" Yosef was freed and became a close friend of the new Flavian dynasty. The story of the Jewish prophet foretelling the rise of the Flavians seems to have become fairly widespread (both Suetonius and Dio Cassius record this story, even though neither of them appears to have actually read Josephus' writing), and it was perhaps spread as part of the Flavian propaganda effort, to help legitimise Vespasian's coup. Nevertheless, Yosef spent the rest of the war with Titus, Vespasian's son and successor to the Eastern command, as a free man and honoured advisor. He worked as an interpreter, negotiator, and interrogator of prisoners and, a year after the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple at which he had served as a priest, he sailed west with Titus in time to watch his new friend's Triumph, a grandiose civic celebration of the crushing defeat of Yosef's own people and religion.

Back in Rome, Yosef was awarded Roman citizenship by the Flavians and, in accordance with tradition, he took a new name: Titus Flavius Josephus. He was given accommodation in Vespasian's old house and awarded a state pension, and he spent the rest of his days writing fascinating, if self-serving, works on Judaea, Judaism, the Revolt and his own life.

His first book, the stunningly accomplished Jewish War, is a Thucydidean-Deuteronomistic history of the failure of the Jewish Revolt, which attempts to argue that the destruction of the Temple was God's punishment on the impious rebels. Written twenty years later, the vast Jewish Antiquities is a complete history of the Jewish people from the Creation to the outbreak of the Revolt: the first ten books are a highly Hellenised paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible, and the last ten cover the "historical period" from the building of the Second Temple to the eve of its destruction. Written as an "appendix" to the Antiquities, Josephus' Vita is a brief autobiography which not only tries to justify the author's apparently cowardly defection during the Revolt, but also holds Josephus himself up as an exaple of one of the central theses of the Antiquities - that a life lived in perfect submission to God's laws will be richly rewarded. His final work, the Contra Apionem, is a response to the anti-Semitic slurs penned by several Greek scholars in popular (but now lost) works, and a defence of Judaism as a "philosophy" from its learned Greek detractors.

It is hard to completely like Josephus because of his cowardly defection at Jotapata, and he has certainly gone on to have a dire reputation, not only in the Jewish tradition but in much 19th and 20th Century scholarship. However, several things need to be said in his defence. We cannot cast aspersions on the depth or sincerity of his Judaism, as some have sought to do: he continued to write about Judaism, after all, at a time when he didn't need to and when Judaica was not exactly popular with the elite. Without his books, we would be extraordinarily poorly-informed about Judaea, and he also gives us much important information on non-Jewish events (he is the source, for instance, of by far our most detailed account of the assassination of Caligula and the accession of Claudius). He was a detailed, and apparently accurate, observer, and (in the Jewish War at least) he showed himself capable of producing Greek literature of a very high order. His writing may be tendentious, and his career not exactly glorious or heroic, but our understanding of key events in the first century is highly enhanced thanks to his works, and for that at least we owe him more gratitude than we usually show.

For a bit of fun, you might like to try and solve the celebrated "Josephus problem", a mathematical puzzle based on Josephus' suicide pact at Jotapata:


Josephus Flavius game (introduction and simulation) ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/546-josephus.html The Coligny Calendar http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/525-coligny-calendar.html Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:47:18 GMT Image: http://www.roman-britain.org/celtic/coligny.jpg The surviving fragments of the Coligny Calendar were discovered in 1897, at a vineyard in...

The surviving fragments of the Coligny Calendar were discovered in 1897, at a vineyard in the vicinity of Lyons, in the territory of the ancient Ambarri tribe. The fragments apparently formed part of a metal hoard, and were discovered alongside a bronze statue of Mars which has been dated to between 50 and 150 CE. The calendar fragments are bronze plate, inscribed with a Gaulish language text written in Latin characters. The pediments on the letters A, M and N led Marichal to date the calendar to the late 2nd Century. Parallel (though far less complete) calendar fragments from nearby Lake Antre, as well as from Villards d’Heria in the territory of the neighbouring Sequani tribe, confirm that this calendar was in widespread use in the region. It has been argued that the close similarity between the names of festivals and months on the Coligny calendar and in Welsh and Irish traditions suggests that this calendar was very widespread in the Celtic world, but there is a risk of circularity here, since Welsh and Irish texts were used to help interpret and expand the abbreviated word-forms that appear on the calendar.

Though we only have about 45% of the original text, the highly repetitive nature of the calendar form means a full and confident reconstruction of the lacunae has been possible. Scribal copyist errors have been identified in the text, at a rate of 2.8%, suggesting that the Coligny calendar was part of a tradition of written calendars. It is not possible to say exactly when this Celtic calendar was first committed to writing by the Ambarri, beyond observing that the earliest recorded use of Latin script in the region is on a series of coins issued probably around 120 BCE, and so the calendar in its present written form is unlikely to pre-date that.

The calendar presents a sequence of 62 months, representing five years of twelve months together with two intercalary months (an intercalary month of thirty days, to enable the solar calendar to “catch up” with the lunar calendar, was introduced every thirty months, or two and a half years). Each day contains a pin-hole, presumably to help keep track of progress through the year. The year begins in the month of Samon, at midwinter, and is divided into two halves, from midwinter to midsummer and midsummer to midwinter. Likewise, each month is divided into two halves of fifteen (or in some cases fourteen) days, “fortnights” each made up of three solar weeks of five days. Months labelled “Matos” (complete) have the full complement of thirty days, while months labelled “Anmatos” (incomplete) were regarded as inauspicious and have only twenty nine. The first half of the year is regarded as auspicious, and so four of its six months are Matos – the second half of the year is inauspicious, and so four of its six months are Anmatos. However, this symmetry is complicated by the system of “switching” days, both within and between months, and of listing “switched” days by their months of origin, even though they are actually listed in a different month! In addition to this, one month, Equos, was variable, having 30 days in year 1, 3 and 5 of a five-year cycle, 29 days in year 2, and probably 28 days in year 4.

Olmsted has identified three different solstice prediction techniques marked on the calendar, each representing a different stage in the evolution of the calendar, and a brief consideration of these techniques may reveal something of the calendar’s history. In the earliest, preliterate phase the calendar employed what Olmsted calls the “N-counting system”, a simple technique involving ‘borrowing’ one day a month from the thirty month cycle in order to make up the following intercalary month. Olmsted claims that the two extracts of verses which can be read on the calendar entries for the first two intercalary months are preserved from this early oral stage of the calendar’s development, and that these extracts are from the Druidic “gnomic verses” mentioned by Caesar in Gallic War 6.14. These verse snippets read as follows:

“TRICANTON OXOCANTIA QUONQUE
DEDAR TON INON QUIMONIU”

“380 and 5
Are given this year through Quimonios.”

And,

CIALLOS BIIS SONNO CINGOS

“Propitious be the path of the sun.”

Later, the N-counting system was abandoned because of its inability accurately to predict solstices which happened outside the intercalary months, and a more sophisticated system was introduced, which allowed the sun to fall back relative to the moon by 27 days in every 30 months, rather than 30. Finally, at some point after the introduction of the written form of the calendar, the calendar was moved from a 30 to a 25 year cycle and a new and highly sophisticated system of TII markings was introduced, though the markings from the previous two systems were still retained when writing out the calendar. In its final phase, the Coligny calendar (on this reconstruction) was as accurate as our own Gregorian calendar in terms of the solar year, whilst also keeping in much closer alignment with the lunar months. As a predictor of solstices, it is accurate to one day in 455 years. If Olmstead’s reconstruction is correct, then the Coligny Calendar was the most sophisticated and accurate known calendar of the ancient world, and a more impressive mathematical achievement than the Julian Calendar of Rome.

The calendar contains 60 words, clearly Gaulish, most of them heavily and inconsistently abbreviated. Some of the words are written in archaic forms, and some not, suggesting scribal inconsistency on the question of whether to preserve or “update” ancestral forms. Olmsted conjectures that, at an earlier stage, the Ambarri may have written out their calendars in the Greek script, on the basis that a Gaulish dipthong which is usually represented as “u” in Latin is here represented several times as “ou”, the standard Greek orthography for the same dipthong. Though written in Latin script, found next to a classical statue and engraved in bronze, this object’s “Romanness” is perhaps deceptive. Its contents are entirely Celtic, as is its language, and the calendar reflects the continuing importance of local cultural models long after the Roman occupation of the Rhone Valley. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/525-coligny-calendar.html Aristophanes of Kydathenaion http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/495-aristophanes-kydathenaion.html Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:50:19 GMT *_Aristophanes of Kydathenaion_* Rescued from the imminent obscurity of the sadly terminal Ancient Biography Thread! (All dates BCE) ... Aristophanes of Kydathenaion

Rescued from the imminent obscurity of the sadly terminal Ancient Biography Thread!

(All dates BCE)

Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of Kydathenaion is remembered today as the “Father of Comedy”, since his satirical plays are the earliest surviving works of comic drama in history. Eleven of his acerbic, obscene, politically outspoken plays survive, covering some of the most turbulent and fascinating years in Athenian history, and it is a testament to his enormous talent that he is regarded not only as one of the earliest comedians, but still as one of the greatest.

Constructing a conventional biography for Aristophanes is extremely difficult. As an adult male citizen in a time of war, he must certainly have fought in battle for his city, and it’s fairly likely that he would have held political office at least once in his life, but we have no information on this. Nevertheless, it is possible to glean some hard facts about his life from his plays, because one of the peculiarities of pre-Hellenistic Greek comedy was the parabasis, a central choral ode where the chorus cast off their identity and speak in the person of the poet. From his works we learn that he was the son of a man called Philippos, from the deme of Kydathenaion, and that he had three sons, at least two of whom went on to become comic playwrights themselves. He may have had some connection to the island of Aegina, possibly being one of the Athenians who were resettled there at the establishment of the Athenian cleruchy on the island in 431. His name, and that of his father, is Eupatrid, suggesting he may have had aristocratic blood, and this seems to be supported by the generally conservative, pro-aristocratic tone of many of his plays. He went bald at a young age, a fact that he himself mocks in several plays, and he was prosecuted for slander on at least one occasion by the demagogue Cleon (more on this later). There is also a portrait of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, though it’s doubtful how accurate this picture is. Plato’s Aristophanes is an agreeable, friendly man, keen on sex, wine and absurdity, and a good deal more perceptive than his clownish exterior suggests.

In his earlier years as a dramatist, Aristophanes “hired” a professional director, Callistratus, and though he would continue to periodically employ theatre professionals throughout his career, as his confidence grew he increasingly took to directing his own works. His earliest known play, The Banqueters, premiered in Athens in 427, winning second place at the Dionysia Festival, and sadly it does not survive. In the following year he produced another non-extant play, The Babylonians, a play that would go on to cause him problems. The negative portrayal of Athenian imperialism in this play saw Aristophanes hauled into court by the prominent demagogic politician Cleon, on a charge of slandering Athens in the presence of foreigners (foreign dignitaries often attended the Dionysia Festival). Cleon’s prosecution failed, but this incident marked the beginning of what looks very much like a genuine vendetta between the politician and the comedian. Given Aristophanes’ eloquence and the survival of so many of his plays, it was a vendetta that poor old Cleon was bound to lose in the long term.

425 brings us Aristophanes’ earliest surviving play, The Acharnians. It is a simple story, but one full of well-handled and bitingly satirical scenes (the mockery of an Athenian assembly meeting springs to mind), suggestive of a great but as-yet-immature talent. The play is an anti-war satire in which a cranky old farmer, Dikaiopolis (“The Just City”), declares himself an independent republic, separate from Athens and therefore free to make peace with Sparta. Much of the humour comes from the contrast between Dikaiopolis’ new life at peace (full of parties, banquets and carousing) and the life of his neighbour, General Lamachus, a blustery pro-war politician who spends his miserable nights shivering away on sentry duty. Lamachus was a real person, and the portrayal of him in Acharnians is the first recorded “impression” in history. But the more scandal-hungry audience members must have been watching the play to see how Aristophanes would respond to being prosecuted by Cleon. The trial (which seems to have been in progress when Acharnians was being staged) barely gets a mention – but Aristophanes advises his prosecutor to watch out, as he intended to take his revenge the following year.

In 424, that revenge came, and in spades. Aristophanes’ surviving play from that year, The Knights, is perhaps the most complete and devastating character assassination in all literature. Cleon, the play’s central character, is portrayed as “the Paphlagonian”, a base, sycophantic, greedy slave, conning his doddery old master Lord Demos (who represents the Athenian people). There was no grand political ambition behind this play – it was simply Aristophanes repeatedly sticking his knife into the man who had foolishly sought to curtail his freedom of speech in the courts the previous year, and Cleon (who would have been in the audience when the play was performed) cannot have enjoyed the experience much. In an honour-shame culture like Athens, such gross and sustained public humiliation must have been unconscionable. The next year saw Aristophanes’ most ambitious play to date, a play which he may have regarded as his masterpiece. The Clouds mocks an elevated and refined subject, Athenian philosophy, and the “villain” of the piece is none other than the great Socrates himself! In Clouds, Socrates is a representative of philosophy, and so he ends up spouting a lot of nonsense that the "real" Socrates would never have espoused. Though an intellectual triumph, The Clouds was not a hit with the audience, and in a later play Aristophanes criticises his viewers for being too stupid to understand it! The Clouds also sees Aristophanes’ muse reaching its highest levels to date – the lyrical passages, sung by the chorus of clouds, rank among some of the most beautiful lyric poetry in the Greek language, a remarkable achievement for a man most famous for “gross-out” humour. But with this play comes a stark reminder of the responsibilities of the satirical comedian: in the Apology, Plato makes Socrates cite The Clouds as being responsible for much of the popular prejudice against him, prejudice that ultimately led to his condemnation to death.

Responding to The Clouds’ poor popular reception, Aristophanes belted out a real crowd-pleaser in the following year. Wasps is a satire of Athens’ lawcourts, and their corruption and exploitation by the demagogues. Yet again, Cleon features as a character, this time as a greedy and cowardly dog (appropriate for a politican who called himself “the watchdog of the people”). The play’s use of extravagant costumes, visual spectacles, mockery of the aristocracy and copious obscenity show Aristophanes desperate to win back the favour of the ordinary viewers whose patience had been tested by the refined intellectualism of The Clouds. His next surviving play, Peace (421) is another anti-war play, but one with a very different feel to Acharnians. This play was produced in the year of the ill-fated Peace of Nicias, and the play is not so much an urgent appeal for an end to the war as a celebration of the reality of peace. It features probably the most absurd plot in Aristophanes’ canon, where a man flies up to heaven on the back of a giant dung beetle to force the gods to bring peace to the Hellenes!

There then follows a long gap in the record of Aristophanes’ surviving plays, until 414, and the production of The Birds. This play gave us an English-language expression, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (from the Greek Nephalokokkugia). In this play two Athenian chancers become birds, build a city in the sky, and declare war on the gods. Needless to say, their greedy, war-mongering ways shatter the pristine paradise of the skies, reflecting how Athenian greed, restlessness and hubris turn all things sour. Three years later, at the Lenaia festival in 411 (after the resumption of hostilities with Sparta), Aristophanes produced what many would call his greatest play, and the first in which he played with the theme of gender (to which he would repeatedly return in later years). Lysistrata is one of the all-time great anti-war dramas, and has also (through a slightly misguided modern reading) become a set-text for feminism. In this play the women of Athens and Sparta co-ordinate a sex strike, and refuse to sleep with their husbands until peace is made. The joy of the play is watching the men’s total collapse as they go from belligerent war-mongers to pathetic, wheedling, sex-starved puppets. The play’s eponymous heroine is a remarkable creation – not only is she the earliest female principal in comedy, but she doesn’t tell a single joke in the whole play. Lysistrata is no buffoonish comic trickster – she has all the stature and grandeur of a Sophoclean tragic hero.

Later in the same year, Aristophanes would exploit the gender theme once again, this time in pursuit of a new target. In Thesmophoriazousai (try getting your tongue around that title!), the famously innovative tragedian Euripides dresses as a woman and attempts to infiltrate an all-female religious festival, since he believes the women are out to kill him. This play is little-known, but it contains some of his funniest scenes, and the second half is a parodic tour de force – practically the whole second act is a long sequence of parodies of Euripides' plays, as the tragedian’s buffoonish uncle tries one trick after another to rescue his nephew from the clutches of the women. After another long gap, in 405, we find Aristophanes addressing matters theatrical once again in The Frogs (another contender for the “greatest Aristophanes play” title), in which the cowardly god Dionysus and his sassy slave Xanthias undertake a farcical journey into the underworld to bring back the ghost of Euripides and “save” theatre. The play ends with a contest between Aeschylus (representing classic, traditional tragedy) and Euripides (representing modern, innovative tragedy). Aeschylus roundly wins, and in doing so he shows up everything that is ‘wrong’ with innovative modern drama. Reading this extraordinary play (the earliest surviving work of literary criticism), it’s easy to see Aristophanes as a cultural conservative, looking back longingly to an age when theatre was simpler and purer. This has led to accusations of hypocrisy, since elsewhere Aristophanes boasts of his own theatrical innovations, but comedians are not philosophers or historians, and they do not need to be consistent.

Aristophanes’ last two plays are among his least-read and, in truth, his weakest. They both betray signs of changing trends in comedy – most obviously a focus on mythological themes and the drastic decline of the chorus’s importance. Assemblywomen (392) portrays the women of Athens taking over the state and creating precisely the kind of society that Aristophanes’ stereotypical women would create – a society based on food, alcohol and sex. The play may have much less appeal than his earlier works, but it still contains one stand-out, laugh-out-loud scene, when a poor young Athenian Romeo is almost torn apart by no fewer than three sex-starved old crones desperate for his body! His final surviving play, Wealth, is a fairytale about economic inequality. Both plays still contain some satirical “bite” (unlike the later Greek comedies of Menander, which have been thoroughly defanged), but his targets are too diffuse and his points too vague to really draw blood. Whether or not Aristophanes was driving or simply responding to changes in Athenian comedy in this period is unknown, but it seems that his sharp, witty, often rather unpleasant style was fast going out of vogue in the fourth century, and he was never quite able to regain the magic of his earlier triumphs.

Aristophanes died at some point in the mid 380s, leaving an extraordinary legacy to posterity. The variety of his talent and comic vision is remarkable. Satire, obscenity, surrealism, absurdity, comic songs, tragic and epic parodies, double-acts, puns, impressions, visual humour, slapstick – it’s hard to think of a type of comedy that he didn’t employ. The Athenian stage gave him more or less unrestricted freedom of speech (there were no civil libel laws in ancient Athens) and he employed that freedom of speech to the full, and not always fairly or responsibly. He accused his targets of all manner of things: effeminacy, taking bribes, lying to the public, cowardice in battle, poor personal hygiene, being cuckolded by their own slaves, being of foreign extraction, betraying the state to the enemy, profiteering from war, having sex with horses, being bad dancers and (most appallingly of all to the Athenian mind) enjoying performing oral sex on women. He knew no boundaries of taste or restraint, and the same pen that produced the soaring, heavenly lyrics of Clouds or Birds (where the verse meters of the choral odes were painstakingly constructed to reflect the sound-patterns of actual birdsong!) was capable of some of the most sickening smut in print. His refusal to curb his excesses at the behest of the great and the good, and his constant criticisms and mockery of any and every target, embodies the daring intellectual verve of classical Athenian culture. He stands as the father of a long and noble line of outspoken and impudent satirists that includes Villon, Baudelaire, Swift, Private Eye, Monty Python, South Park and The Daily Show. And he is greater than all of his children. Truly, the political leaders of the modern world ought to be glad that Aristophanes of Kydathenaion is not around to chronicle their misdeeds. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/495-aristophanes-kydathenaion.html Politics and Greek Tragedy - UPDATE!!! http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/491-politics-greek-tragedy-update.html Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:49:56 GMT A while ago, I blogged on the importance of recognising the political aspects of Greek tragedy, of not just viewing the plays as family melodramas... A while ago, I blogged on the importance of recognising the political aspects of Greek tragedy, of not just viewing the plays as family melodramas but understanding the specific political circumstances each play addresses. I gave a few examples of how our understanding of individual Greek plays can be enriched by making connections between the text and contemporary political events. Well, I've just stumbled across another excellent example of this, an example I particularly like (not least because it helps to explain a minor detail in Aeschylus that has puzzled me for at least a decade), and since this is so closely related to the subject of an earlier blog post I thought I'd share it with you.

(Source acknowledgement time: I read this in "The Birth of Classical Europe" by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, a book I'm only part-way through, but so far it's been great!)


Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy premiered in 458 BCE, and is the only tragic trilogy to have survived completely intact from antiquity. It tells a familiar and violent story: the return of King Agamemnon from Troy, his murder at the hands of his faithless wife and her cowardly lover, and the wave of familial bloodshed this act unleashes on the next generation of the House of Atreus. This is all very grand and epic, but sometimes focusing on a tiny detail can be surprisingly rewarding, and there's one minor discrepancy that always used to confuse me. In Homer, Agamemnon is clearly identified as the King of Mycenae. In Aeschylus, he doesn't seem to be the King of Mycenae at all. His palace is situated in a completely different city, Argos, about ten miles south of Mycenae!

So how to explain this mystery? As is often the case, the answer lies in contemporary politics - and the little "trick" that Aeschylus plays here sheds some light on the way that Greeks used the mythical past to explain or justify the political present. In the mid-460s, a major earthquake struck Sparta, and in the aftermath of the quake the Messenian helots, Sparta's subject population of rural slave untermenschen, rose in revolt against their Spartiate masters. The resulting guerilla war was bitter and protracted and, in 462, Sparta asked Athens for military assistance. The Athenians obligingly sent a large army (the famous "bad blood" between Athens and Sparta had not yet begun), but the size of the Athenian relief force alarmed the Spartans, who were worried that Athens may change its mind and decide to side with the helot rebels. And so, without a word of explanation, the Spartans peremptorily instructed their new "allies" to march back home as soon as they arrived on Spartan soil! The men of Athens went back east in high dudgeon, and as a consequence of this affront they severed all ties with Sparta and declared themselves allies of one of Sparta's most inveterate and persistent regional enemies ... the city-state of Argos.

It's only in the light of this change of alliance that Aeschylus' decision to move his story from Mycenae to Argos truly makes sense. In the final play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, the matricide Orestes, hounded by the Furies, flees to Athens where he is tried by Athenian citizens in a homicide court. The jury vote to acquit Orestes, and persuade the Furies to leave him alone. In recognition of this, Aeschylus makes Orestes swear before the gods that there will be "everlasting friendship" between Athens and his native city of Argos. And so it is that Aeschylus transforms a very recent alliance, an alliance made in anger at a perceived Spartan insult, into a timeless agreement stretching right back to the Age of Heroes. How reassuring that must have been to the ever-conservative Athenian audience of the Oresteia trilogy! And the only price that has to be paid for this neat bit of retrospective myth-molesting is moving Agamemnon's hometown a little to the south, and slightly confusing Homerically-literate classics students in the 21st Century!


Thank you, Messeurs Price and Thonemann, all grist to my "political reading of Greek tragedy" mill! ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/491-politics-greek-tragedy-update.html The Ashmolean - Ark of Civilisation http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/486-ashmolean-ark-civilisation.html Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:03:40 GMT Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum is the oldest public museum in Britain, dating to 1678. The core of its collection is a number of curiosities collected by two 17th century London antiquarians, a father and son both called John Tradescant. The Tradescant collection was purchased by the scholar Elias Ashmole, who donated the treasures to Oxford University. The University opted to display these treasures to the general public, and they were first displayed in a building on Broad Street, next to Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre -

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Note the rather adorable busts of Roman emperors. This building now hosts the Museum of the History of Science, which is also highly recommended.

In 1845, the Museum moved to the rather more grand, neo-Classical surrounds of its present location on Beaumont Street.

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I visited last week, and sadly I only had time for the first two floors (the remaining three I'm sure I will visit soon, and if they're any good I'll update you!) You should also note that none of the following photos are mine, since I'm not technologically literate enough to upload the photos from my phone to my computer, so they're all culled from the Internet.


The basement floor is excellent, and very "child friendly". Rather than being devoted to any particular periods or cultures, this floor is organised by theme, with illuminating artefacts from many different historical contexts all grouped together around topics such as "The Human Form", "Textiles", "Reading and Writing", "Money" etc. There's also a brief but fascinating section on the museum's own history, and the science and technology of conserving the past. Kids will love this floor, because it's full of fun games and activities for them to enjoy, such as working out the value of old coins, or deciphering bits of ancient writing systems.

My personal favourite part was on "The Human Form", with all sorts of artefacts illustrating how different cultures represented human beings. The gallery includes, rather creepily, Oliver Cromwell's actual death mask -

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The gallery also includes some nice examples of Romano-Egyptian funerary portaits, some classicising 18th century British political busts, and a replica of the famous statue of Augustus as a soldier - but painted as archaeologists believe it would originally have been!

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The section on the history of the Ashmolean also includes the actual lantern used by Guy Fawkes, the conspirator who plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament -

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The writing section of the basement floor includes many different scrolls and inscriptions, and informative labels explaining how different writing systems worked. For me, a highlight of this room was two examples of one of the Oxford Classics Faculty's biggest ongoing projects, the world-famous Oxyrhynchus Papyri -



The basement floor also houses the Cast Gallery, plaster cast copies of some of the greatest Greek and Roman sculptures in existence, originally commissioned by the university to help with the teaching of archaeology and art history. This didn't impress me much because I have been fortunate enough to travel widely in Greece and Italy, and have therefore seen many of the "originals", but the casts are detailed and it's a good chance to see some of the "greatest hits" of Classical sculpture side by side. My favourite was this statue of an old fisherman from Herculaneum -





The Ground Floor is called "Ancient Worlds", and it covers world history down to the fall of the Roman Empire. So much good stuff here it's untrue!

The Ashmolean is famous for its excellent decorated Greek vases. Here are a couple of my favourites -

A shoemaker measures leather around a customer's foot -



A cartoonish Beoetian image of Odysseus with the North Wind at his back -



Its Greek collection also houses the Parian Inscription, the earliest known Greek chronology and an invaluable help to historians of ancient Greece.

From the Hellenistic Period comes this rather marvellous miniature of an Ethiopian boy falling asleep next to a wine amphora (annoyingly I could only find a photograph showing the boy's back) -



The museum also includes some excellent Roman artifacts, such as this magnificent Romano-British pewter dinner service from Oxfordshire -



It also had a great Near Eastern section, including some wonderful terracottas like this Sumerian woman's head -



The Indian section was good - I was rather taken by this ancient terracotta die from the Indus Valley civilisation -



The Ancient India section also had an excellent display of Greek-influenced Gandharan and Baktrian art, like this centaur rhyton -




or this coral head of Medusa -



Sadly, its Egypt section is currently being redeveloped, so I saw none of that and, while I enjoyed the ancient Chinese collection, I had to rush through it so I have no worthwhile recollections of what it contained.


All these treasures on just a couple of floors! So the moral of the story is simply this - if you're ever in Oxford, make some time for the Ashmolean. You will not regret it. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/486-ashmolean-ark-civilisation.html Byron in Greece http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/474-byron-greece.html Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:44:41 GMT Lord Byron (George Gordon) is most commonly remembered as the author of Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrammage, as one of the foremost and most influential poets of the English Romantic movement. He is also widely known as the "first modern celebrity", wildly popular not just in Britain but right across Western Europe, and for his scandalous private life (he once claimed to have lost his virginity to his nanny at the age of nine). But in one country at least he is better remembered for his politics than for his poetry or his scandals.

Greece was always important to the English Romantics as a source of poetic inspiration, and many of them were opposed to the Turkish occupation of the country. For example, Byron's close friend P. B. Shelley wrote Hellas: A Lyrical Drama in 1821, intending to use it to raise money for the Greek War of Independence. The play is modelled on Aeschylus' Persians, and it depicts the Turks as latter-day Persians and the Greek independence movement as the modern heirs of Leonidas and the Three Hundred Spartans. But Byron went further than raising funds and writing sympathetic verses: Byron went to Greece to join the independence movement in person.

In his earlier life, he had visited Greece and enjoyed good relations with the Ottoman ruling class. It was even rumoured that, as a young man, he had had a homosexual relationship with Ali Pasha, Ottoman Governor of Rumelia. But when he returned in July 1823 he had been thoroughly "radicalised", and was utterly committed to the removal of Turkish rule from Hellas. He first landed at Kephallonia where, at his own expense, he outfitted a Greek revolutionary navy. In December of the same year he sailed to Missolonghi in the Peloponnese, to join up with the forces commanded by the revolutionary leader Alexandros Mavrokordatos. He endured shipwreck and several exciting "chases" by Turkish ships. He brought with him much-needed medical supplies, and he proceeded to raise and train (again at his own expense) an artillery corps for the revolutionary cause.

Byron was, for the most part, highly regarded by the Greek revolutionaries. As an "outsider", he had no evident bias towards any of the quarrelling factions that made up the resistance movement (though he believed that the Western Greeks were the bravest and most effective fighters), and much of his time was spent in settling disputes between them. Byron was always prone to depression, and his experience of the endless disputes put him in a bad mood, and his health deteriorated all through this period. Though a crack shot, he never took part in any military actions himself. Byron hoped to take part in an attack on Lepanto in February 1824. However, he fell ill and could not sail. Two months later he died at Missolonghi.His remains were shipped back to England - with the exception of his heart (or some sources maintain his lungs!) which was buried in Greece.

His contribution to the Greek cause of independence is often dismissed, but he did achieve some good for the revolutionaries. His financial aid and diplomacy brought stability and much-needed unity to the cause. Moreover, Byron was a Europe-wide celebrity, and his involvement in the cause brought great publicity to what had previously been an issue of only minor public interest.

In Greece, he is held up as a hero of the resistance. There are at least two Byron museums in the country (one in Athens, one in Missolonghi), and it is very common as one travels through Greece to see roads called "Byron Street". "Byron", I am told, used to be a very common boy's name in Greece, and at one time the literary lord even had a Greek cigarette brand named after him (when you see how many people smoke in Greece, you realise that this is a high honour indeed!). One of the columns in the ancient Temple of Poseidon at Sounion even boasts a piece of "graffiti" that Byron wrote during a visit there, which the Greek Ministry of Culture assiduously maintains as an important cultural artefact in its own right. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/474-byron-greece.html Publius Clodius Pulcher http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/444-publius-clodius-pulcher.html Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:53:27 GMT *_Publius Claudius / Clodius Pulcher_* (originally posted on the Ancient Biography Thread) I was once asked by a fellow Historumite why I have... Publius Claudius / Clodius Pulcher

(originally posted on the Ancient Biography Thread)

I was once asked by a fellow Historumite why I have chosen to name myself after such an obnoxious character. My reply basically came down to "cos he's interesting and cool!!!" I recognise that Caracalla has done a brief (and characteristically excellent) Clodius bio earlier in this thread, but I hope nobody objects to me 'revisiting' this character at greater length, since we have a certain connection!

Youth and Private Life.

Claudius was born (probably) in 93 BCE, into the grand gens Claudii. His father was Appius Claudius; the identity of his mother is disputed. He had two brothers and at least four sisters, only two of whom were full sisters. Throughout his life, allegations of incest with all of his sisters would dog him. Given his fondness for causing offence, it is likely that he played up to these rumours. Indeed, given his fondness for causing offence, it's not completely unlikely that these rumours were actually true.

In his early manhood, he was something of a hellraiser. He moved in the same circles as the innovative and scandalous young poets whom Cicero dismissed as hoi neoteroi (Greek for "the novelty-seekers"). The Neoterics and their aristocratic hangers-on were somewhat reminiscent of early 20th Century London's "Bloomsbury Set" - highly literate, witty, devoted to the finer things in life, deliberately shocking and utterly unconcerned with conservative morality. Besides Claudius himself, key players in this "scene" included his sisters (one of whom ran an important literary salon), the poets Catullus and Cinna, and Cicero's wayward protege Marcus Caelius Rufus. There is much speculation among literary scholars that "Lesbia", the woman to whom Catullus addressed his love poems, was none other than Claudius' sister Clodia Metelli. One of the arguments in favour of this is that, in his more bitter poems, Catullus alleges that Lesbia committed incest with her brother "Lesbius". Catullus even begins one poem with the phrase "Lesbius est pulcher". Does this simply mean "Lesbius is handsome"? Or should we rather interpret it as Catullus letting the secret out, and translate it as "Lesbius is Pulcher" - Claudius Pulcher?

In the late 60s, Claudius married Fulvia, a future wife of Mark Antony. They had at least two children together. However, Claudius was not exactly "marriage material", and his somewhat scandalous personal behaviour continued well after his marriage.

Early Career, Early Scandals.

Claudius' earliest recorded public posting was suitably scandalous. He served in the Third Mithridatic War under his brother-in-law Lucullus but, in 68 - 67, he spearheaded a mutiny in the army at Nisibis. This may have been because of a personal enmity that had developed between Lucullus and Claudius - or alternatively it may have been political, with Claudius acting as a fifth columnist on behalf of Pompey, who was eager to take over Lucullus' command. If this is the case, it did the trick - after Claudius' mutiny spread, Lucullus was relieved and replaced by Pompey. Claudius escaped prosecution and, in 67, he went to Cilicia, to command the fleet entrusted to the Governor Quintus Marcius Rex, another brother-in-law. During this command, Claudius was captured by pirates. The pirates mockingly released him, after failing to raise the ransom he had claimed to be worth!

After a stint with the army in Gaul in 64, Claudius returned to Rome to support his commander Murena's consular election campaign. Murena won, prompting Catiline's attempted coup. Contrary to Cicero's later claims, Claudius does not appear to have been involved in the Catilinarian Conspiracy - indeed, he and Cicero had worked "on the same side" in trying to help Murena get elected! This one-time radical mutineer and military rabble-rouser behaved like the model conservative optimatis during this fraught period.

62 brought perhaps the most infamous scandal of Claudius' short life, and probably initiated his famously implacable feud with Cicero. Disguised as a woman, Claudius attempted to infiltrate the all-female Bona Dea festival, which that year was being held in the home of Caesar's wife Pompeia (a woman on whom Claudius apparently had romantic designs). His infiltration was discovered, and he was ordered to stand trial for incestus - not only with reference to his behaviour during the Bona Dea scandal, but also for his alleged intimate relations with his sisters. At the trial Cicero gave testimony which destroyed Claudius' fabricated alibi. Miraculously, Claudius was acquitted (bribery settled the matter), but a hugely significant event had taken place. Cicero had dared to assist the prosecution, and had damaged Claudius' reputation by exposing his lies. Thus began the feud that would dominate the rest of Claudius' life, and that would drive Cicero himself, at one point, to near-suicidal depression. Claudius was determined to teach the upstart from Arpinum what happened to those who crossed a member of the gens Claudii.

Feuding with Cicero, Flirting with Caesar.

Soon after the end of his trial, Claudius was able to absent himself from Rome by taking a post as quaestor in Sicily. This was a wise move - it got him beyond the reach of the powerful enemies he had frustrated by being acquitted, and it bought him time to plot his dastardly revenge. Upon returning to Rome in 60, he began making his preparations, and crucially he began courting Gaius Julius Caesar, consul for the following year. His relationship with Caesar would be lasting and important, although on numerous occasions he embarrassed his patron, and the letters of Cicero from the period of the first triumvirate show that both of Caesar's allies had grave concerns about their colleague's pet demagogue.

In 59, Caesar's consulship, Claudius gained permission to be adopted from his patrician family into the family of Publius Fonteius, a plebeian. This was purely done for one reason - to enable him to take office as a tribune of the plebs, an office for which patricians were not eligible. He quite probably promised Caesar to look after his interests in the succeeding year in return for being allowed to go through this highly irregular procedure. Claudius was determined to bolster his political power by appealing as much as possible to the common people (appealing to the common soldiers, after all, had done a lot for him in Nisibis). He noticed that, in the "working class" Roman accent, the letters "au" were pronounced "o". So, to mark his adoption and changed status, he changed his name. Claudius was now Clodius.

In 58, Clodius took office as a tribune of the plebs. His tribunate was predictably explosive. He passed a raft of measures to appeal to the common people, most famously of all introducing a free corn dole to Rome for the very first time. Modern biographers, in contrast to the ancient writers who unanimously condemn him, often view his tribunician legislation extremely favourably, as a far-sighted, coherent and humane reform package. But in addition to consolidating his influence over the people, he secured a powerful aristocractic backer by sending Cato the Younger to Cyprus, with praetorian powers, to remove the island's king from power and incorporate it as a Roman province. Moreover, his tribunate gave him ample opportunities to prosecute his vendetta against Cicero.

He began by dredging up the spectre of Catiline, who had once been his and Cicero's common enemy. He introduced a law which punished any Roman magistrate who had executed a Roman citizen without trial with exile. This law was undoubtedly passed solely with Cicero in mind. A dejected Cicero had no option but to retreat from Rome, to drag his sorry frame around the Italian countryside (the letters he wrote in this period are infused with deep melancholy and hopelessness). Once he had gone, Clodius was also able to confiscate his property. His Roman townhouse was torn down by Clodius' supporters. The insult Cicero had shown him at the Bona Dea trial had been repaid in full.

Death.
The remaining years of Clodius' life are curiously quiet. Perhaps Caesar was successful in reining in his wilder impulses. He remained active in politics, notably as a leader and instigator of armed gangs, regularly clashing with Titus Annius Milo, a Pompey-backed conservative demagogue who aped Clodius' tactics but employed them in the service of the optimatis cause.

In 57, Clodius tried to use violence to subvert an attempt to recall Cicero. Milo's thugs proved tougher than his, however, and the recall went through. From then on, when we encounter Clodius he is normally tussling with Milo rather than Cicero - they both attempted to prosecute each other multiple times for violence.

In 53, when he was standing for election as praetor, Clodius was murdered by followers of Milo, his conservative "mini-me". The circumstances of his death are recounted in great detail in Cicero's Pro Milone, his defence of the man who had murdered Clodius. Cicero's speech is clearly biased, and there are numerous "plot holes" and inconsistencies in the version of events he presents, but it seems that the two men had been passing each other, with their retinues, on the Appian Way. Scuffles broke out between their followers, but the two men passed each other without incident. Clodius was murdered later, no doubt by agents of Milo who had followed on behind him. Milo was convicted for the murder of Clodius, and sent into exile in Massilia. Clodius' body was burned in the Curia - and the conflagration burned the building down! This was an appropriate memorial for a dangerous, unpredictable, incendiary man who brought chaos, vendetta and violence right to the sacred heart of the Roman Republic, and who lived his life utterly oblivious to the censure of others. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/444-publius-clodius-pulcher.html Re-politicizing Greek Tragedy http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/414-re-politicizing-greek-tragedy.html Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:53:40 GMT It can be tempting to view the Greek tragedies as simply domestic melodramas, ancient "soap operas" dealing with wives who hate their husbands and children who murder their parents. This is certainly one aspect of Athenian tragic drama (Aristotle recommended that tragedies should deal with family relationships, since they are the closest and therefore the most potentially 'tragic' relationships we experience), but it is often overlooked that these plays were public, civic performances, written by playwrights who were considered the teachers of the polis. It is my belief that these plays, just as much as the more obviously-political comedies, were directly involved in commenting on the real-life politics of their day. And if we take them out of historical context and view them simply as timeless parables of domestic life, we fail to do them justice.

But too often we do. Historians of Classical Athens and the Peloponnesian War very rarely draw on tragedy as a primary source. More often, tragedy is left to the literary critics rather than the historians - and the literary critics, too, often fail to appreciate just how "political" these plays really were! I want to demonstrate how rewarding a political reading of Athenian tragedies can be. I will do this using three examples, one concerning the cultural and intellectual life of Athens, and two concerning the political and military realities of the ongoing war with Sparta. I'll do cultural and intellectual first.

1) The Bacchae and the Limits of the Rational.

The Bacchae (405 BCE) is Euripides' darkest and greatest play. Performed posthumously in the final year of the Peloponnesian War and written in self-imposed exile at the Macedonian court of King Archelaus, the play takes theatre back to its roots in the worship of the most ambiguous and dangerous of the Greek gods, Dionysus. The cult of Dionysus had been 'tamed' at Athens, channelled into great public festivals celebrating agriculture and viticulture, but the Dionysiac rites Euripides may have seen performed in Macedon retained more of their authentic, original, "uncivilised" flavour. Certainly the Dionysus cult of the play is (at least when the Bacchae have been provoked) barbaric, including spargismos (the tearing apart of living wild animals) and omophagia (the consumption of raw animal flesh which, in a similar style to the Catholic Communion, mystically becomes the flesh of the god himself). The play concerns the arrival of Dionysus and his followers in Thebes, and the attempts of Pentheus, the young and insecure king of that city, to suppress this new "threat" to his people. Needless to say, Pentheus' attempts are fated to fail, and the sacreligious king (who even tries to turn his soldiers loose on the female worshippers of Dionysus) is destined for the kind of utterly crushing "fall" that only Greek tragedy can supply.

Exactly how we interpret this play depends largely on with whom we choose to sympathise. If we sympathise with Pentheus, the play can be read as a warning about Dionysiac abandonment, a plea for restraint in matters religious. If we choose to sympathise with Dionysus, we can see it instead as a warning against religious censorship, and against denying the irrational Dionysiac parts of ourselves. Alternatively, we can observe that neither character is especially sympathetic and see it as an attack on both sides - those who hamper religious freedom, and those who take it too far. Perhaps the play is difficult to interpret simply because it doesn't offer a simple message - it's a meditation on the idea of religious freedom, and a meditation that accepts that it is a difficult concept with no clear-cut answers.

So how can this be linked into the world in which it was written? I have seen it said that it was a direct response to debates in the Athenian Assembly about whether or not to "clamp down" on the rites of Dionysus, although I have to admit that I have never seen any evidence that these debates took place. It might be better to cast our net wider. Athens was a culture proud of its "rationality" (as we can see from Thucydides' famous version of Pericles' funeral oration), but a culture that nevertheless had potent irrational, even anti-rational, tendencies. The dying years of the war saw the beginning of a series of anti-intellectual "purges" - purges which may have been partially responsible for Euripides' decision to leave and make a new life for himself in the north. Philosophers - and even playwrights - found themselves scapegoated for the failure of the Athenian war effort, their irreligious rational speculations blamed for Athens' loss of the favour of heaven. Can it really be a coincidence that, against such a back-drop, Euripides produces a powerful meditation on rationality and irrationality, on 'civilisation' versus 'superstition'? Can it be a coincidence that both Pentheus and Cadmus (a charlatan who advises Pentheus to pretend to worship Dionysus for the sake of his reputation) speak like sophists, their dialogue liberally peppered with "buzz-words" from contemporary Athenian philosophy? Euripides' play is many things - and one of them is a meditation on the place of reason and philosophy in an increasingly benighted and irrational city.

2) Melos and The Women of Troy.

Euripides' Women of Troy depicts the consequences of the fall of Troy on the women of the royal house of Priam. It is an important departure from usual practice in Greek tragedy. Rather than following closely the story of a single protagonist, it interweaves the tales of five main characters, each of whom has her life ruined in a different way. It has been called the first "collective drama", and its tone can be summarised in three words, "war is hell" - not just for what it does to the losers, but because of what it forces the winners to become (the Greek characters are highly unsympathetic). Trojan Women has a timeless quality that means it often gets revived and performed during modern-day controversial wars - but when we consider its date of production, we see that in its day it had a very specific point of reference.

415 saw nor only the premier of Trojan Women but also, earlier in the year, the shocking sack of the city of Melos, a neutral state which had decided to opt out of Athens' "voluntary" Delian League. Thucydides' appalling (and appalled) account of this debacle makes it clear that "enlightened" Athenians at the time were rightly dismayed by their city's behaviour during this episode. That dismay finds its echo in this angry and scathing play. In choosing to set his play in Troy, Euripides made a good choice, since it has ensured that the play has remained timeless. Modern theatre directors do not have to work hard to make Euripides' Troy represent Sarajevo, or Baghdad, or Tripoli - it is already, intrinsically, all of them. But it is also, in a very specific and unique way, Melos, and losing sight of this is to separate the play from its essential context and to fail to understand it fully.

3) Philoctetes and Alcibiades.

Sophocles' Philoctetes (probably best known in English in Seamus Heaney's excellent adaptation, The Cure at Troy) was produced in 409. It tells the tale of a physically handicapped hero who was abandoned by the Greek fleet on the desert island of Lemnos, en route to Troy. In the war's tenth year, a prophecy tells the Greeks that they need Philoctetes, and his magic bow, in order to take Troy. So Odysseus is given the hateful job of sailing to Lemnos to persuade Philoctetes, the man they had abandoned, to cast off his resentment and return to the army.

In 409, the war with Sparta had been dragging on interminably. One of Athens' most competent but controversial leaders, Alcibiades, had been forced to defect to Sparta because of allegations of impiety brought against him while he was absent in Sicily. After working for both the Spartans and the Persians, Alcibiades managed to return to the Athenian side in 411, when the democratic government had been temporarily replaced by the oligarchic government of the probouloi. After the restoration of democracy, Alcibiades had been languishing abroad, afraid to return to Athens because of the charges that still hung over him, and therefore unable to take a leading role in the war against Sparta. Alcibiades was controversial, widely disliked because of his earlier defection, but he also had his supporters in the city who called for his pardon and restoration, claiming that his talent was Athens' best remaining weapon against the Lacedaemonians (one of his supporters was the comic playwright Aristophanes, whose Frogs includes a passionate plea for his return).

So it isn't far-fetched to see parallels here between Sophocles' play and the political context in which it was written. Sophocles' play depicts an unpopular, rejected hero - but a hero whose return to the ranks is necessary to end a protracted, painful war. I think it's impossible not to see echoes of Alcibiades here (and the play would suggest that Sophocles, like Aristophanes, wanted him back).

Conclusion.

These examples show, I think, the importance of locating Greek tragedies in their precise political and cultural contexts. One of the great strengths of these plays is their universality - the fact that they can speak to us just as powerfully as they spoke to their original Athenian audience - but that should not blind us to the particular historical circumstances that produced them, and which they addressed. If a literary critic ignores this, they are tearing away a whole layer of meaning from the plays, and diminishing them as works of art. Likewise if a historian of Athens or the war ignores tragedy, she is passing up an opportunity to gain insight into how Athenians responded to contemporary events, a window into the debates that raged on Athens' streets and no doubt in its assemblies too. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/414-re-politicizing-greek-tragedy.html Holy Hallucinogens: Hoffman, Eleusis and Classical Athenian Drug Culture. http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/410-holy-hallucinogens-hoffman-eleusis-classical-athenian-drug-culture.html Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:24:40 GMT The Mysteries of Eleusis were perhaps the most important religious festival in the ancient Athenian calendar. Each year, initiates who had... The Mysteries of Eleusis were perhaps the most important religious festival in the ancient Athenian calendar. Each year, initiates who had participated in the Lesser Mysteries would process to a sanctuary dedicated to Demeter and Persephone in the little town of Eleusis, a short distance from Athens (the modern town of Elefsina stands there today, and the sanctuary has been excavated, a remarkable archaeological site which tourists rarely visit – highly recommended if you ever find yourself at a loose end in Athens). There they would spend several days participating in the highly secret rites of the goddesses. As is common with the mystery religions of antiquity, we have very little secure information on precisely what went on in the festival (publicising the details was a severe crime – it’s not called a “mystery religion” for nothing!!!) As is also common with the mystery religions of antiquity, a great many scholars have written extensive accounts and descriptions of precisely what the rituals involved, based on very little secure information and a great deal of supposition. But one thing is commonly attested in the sources – year after year, the Mysteries of Eleusis could be depended upon to produce visionary experiences where participants believed they were being brought into direct, mystical communion with the divine. The precise nature of these “mystical visions” has puzzled scholars for centuries, but in 1978 a possible solution emerged from an extremely unlikely source, a hypothesis that takes us right to the heart of modern-day drug culture and the 1960s countercultural movements of the United States.

The Road to Eleusis, by Hoffman, Wasson and Ruck caused a sensation on publication. Two of the authors, Wasson and Hoffman, were pioneers of the psychedelic drug scene (Hoffman will be forever known as the chemist who invented LSD on behalf of the CIA), and Ruck was a classicist with a mystical bent, charged with trawling through the documentary record for proof of Hoffman and Ruck’s extraordinary hypotheses. The book is an extraordinary, even exhilarating, read, and its conclusions have been seized upon as the gospel truth by certain groups of people, including the “shroomer” community (people who enjoy taking magic mushrooms), and certain academic chemists. But how well does their argument stack up historically?

Their central contention is as follows. They observe that one of the attested features of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the ingestion of a mystery potion called kykeon. Furthermore, Ruck managed to dig out an extremely obscure fragmentary quote from the comic poet Eupolis which shows that one of the ingredients in kykeon was barley. Hoffman and Wasson knew that, under certain circumstances, barley can play host to the parasitic grain ergot fungus, a relative of “magic mushrooms” which contains LSA, closely related to LSD. They observe that the specific cultivation of ergot fungus can (possibly) be demonstrated in ancient Egypt, and there is therefore no inherent reason to suppose that the Eleusinian hierophants could not have known about it. Hallucinogenic fungus, they conclude, was one ingredient in the kykeon potion. Thus the mystical “visions” of Eleusis were in fact “acid trips”, grand hallucinogenic benders undergone in total darkness by the awestruck devotees of Eleusis, and interpreted as revelations from the divine.

Numerous problems have been identified with this theory. Perhaps most strikingly of all, it has been noted that ergot consumption can often lead to miscarriage and, though we know that women regularly participated in the Mysteries of Eleusis, there is no record of miscarriages resulting from participation. Moreover, ergot fungus reduced to liquid form is only a mild hallucinogen, unlikely to yield genuinely intense visions. However, defenders of the ergot theory have suggested that intense visuals were not in fact required – the kykeon might have been used simply to intensify altered states of consciousness achieved through more traditional ritual means during the Mysteries. Much of Ruck’s contribution to the book comes from linguistic “evidence” that mystery religions in antiquity were related to hallucinogenic mushrooms, but many modern classicists dismiss his sometimes rather half-baked etymologies.

A more recent variation on the Hoffman theory is that grain ergot fungus was not put into the kykeon potion, but rather baked into sacred bread for consumption at the festival. The idea is that the fungus grew perhaps accidentally on the mouldy grain in the massive granaries near Eleusis. Apparently, eating ergot fungus will give a more intense “trip” than drinking it in liquefied form, and the “accidental growth” suggestion also gets around the problem that we have no real evidence of the Greeks deliberately cultivating hallucinogens for ritual purposes. However, there are problems with this idea too: not only is there no unambiguous evidence that “sacred bread” was consumed during the Mysteries, but the supposed massive granaries of Eleusis have proved elusive to archaeology.

In total, then, the “evidence” for the hallucinogen theory of Eleusis is not overwhelming, but then it wouldn’t be, since we have so little secure information for any aspect of the festival. Albert Hoffman’s contribution to classical studies is not, therefore, as impressive as his contribution to undergraduate hedonism, but it remains a tantalising vision: the great Athenians of the classical age as unwitting proto-hippies, turning on, tuning in and dropping out, tripping the light fantastic and communing with the transcendental on a toxic cocktail of hallucinatory narcotics. Peace out, dudes! ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/410-holy-hallucinogens-hoffman-eleusis-classical-athenian-drug-culture.html The Christ-Myth Myth http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/405-christ-myth-myth.html Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:35:02 GMT I hadn't intended to post anything else about the historical Jesus (I like to keep my blog varied!), but comments on my previous H J post, as well as some discussions on other Forum threads, made me realise that I needed to address a question I had (deliberately) ignored in the past - the question of the "Christ Myth" theory, which argues that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, in any shape or form, and that his very existence was a fiction. Below is my defence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

Almost no modern church historian, regardless of their faith position, believes that Jesus is an entirely fictional construct. This alone is not an argument against Jesus being fictional – it is simply a preliminary observation, and I hope by the end of this essay to have demonstrated some of the reasons why the academic consensus is against it. However, academic credibility is not always a factor in determining which theories get the widest publicity. It doesn’t take a great deal of Googling to find numerous websites all advancing the view that there was no historical Jesus, that the figure we read about in the New Testament accounts is the product of some imaginative ancient bricolage, a cobbled-together composite of various long-forgotten Jewish holy men, or a patchwork quilt of obscure pagan myths. The idea that Jesus did not exist at all is usually called the “Christ-myth theory”, and probably its most well-known exponent is Professor Robert M. Price. I will demonstrate why I find the Christ-myth theory implausible by briefly discussing six of the most commonly-advanced arguments for the non-existence of Jesus, and then by offering a positive argument that he did. I want to stress that I am not arguing that he was divine, supernatural, or the son of God. This is a more faith-neutral argument, simply that there did exist in the first century a Jewish teacher who we remember as “Jesus of Nazareth” (though in his own tongue he would have been called Yeshua). I am an atheist, and nothing in this argument depends on religious faith.

Argument 1: There is no archaeological trace of the life of Jesus.

This is certainly true, and any archaeological “evidence” for Jesus that has emerged has turned out to be fake. Consider the Turin Shroud, for example, or the so-called “Jesus family tomb”, both incontestably debunked. However, this in isolation is a fairly weak argument. It arises from an inflated expectation: the expectation that somebody as important as Jesus surely must have left an imprint on the material remains of his day. We need to shake off this unrealistic perspective and remember who Jesus actually was. He was a peasant preacher in an economically deprived part of the Roman Empire. Such people simply don’t leave their footprints in the archaeological record.

It is instructive to look at exactly which Gospel characters can be confirmed by archaeology. Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, is attested in a Latin inscription from Tel Aviv. Archaeologists have unearthed an ossuary which possibly (probably even) belonged to Joseph ben Caiaphas, a senior Jewish priest who features in John’s account of Jesus’ trial. The various Herodian kings who are mentioned in the narratives are all well-attested, since we have their coins, residences, monuments and grand building projects. In short, the Gospel characters who are confirmed by archaeology are the high and mighty, the kings, ecclesiasts and Governors, exactly the sort of people we would expect to leave a material legacy. If you were to ask an archaeologist to read the Gospels and predict which of the characters would be most likely to be visible to archaeology, these are the exact people they would pick. They would not predict an archaeological afterlife for Jesus and his rag-tag bunch of peasant followers. The absence of archaeological evidence for Jesus is absolutely no reason to suppose he never existed.

Argument 2: Suspiciously, the only people who wrote about Jesus close to his lifetime were Christians. Surely if he really existed we would expect Jewish and / or Roman testimony to his extraordinary deeds?

Again, inflated expectations lie behind this objection. The thinking is that since Jesus’ ministry has had such an enormous impact on world history he would surely have been recorded by non-Christian authors. But this is reading later history back into the first century. Jesus was nothing unusual in his own historical context: an eccentric Jewish holy man who claimed messianic status and was executed by the nervous provincial authorities. There are records of a dozen such individuals from the first century alone, and no doubt there were many more who slipped through the historical net and are now completely forgotten. Nobody Jewish or Roman living in the first century had any reason to suppose that Jesus was in any way special or worthy of notice or consideration. We also need to remember just what a mutilated ruin first-century literature is, just how enormously unlikely it was that any given document would survive from antiquity to the modern day. Entire wars that were fought in the Hellenistic Period are not commemorated in any surviving literature and are only known to modern historians through archaeology. If a war is going to escape the documentary record, how unlikely must it be that the career of an unremarkable Jewish rabble-rouser should survive in the texts?

I have sometimes seen this argument stated even more specifically: we should expect to have actual Roman government records of the ministry and execution of Jesus. This baffles me. I presume the people who make this claim simply don’t understand ancient history. We have Roman government records for almost nothing. (The exception to this rule is Egypt, where a very large number of administrative papyri have survived in the sands thanks to local climatic conditions). To raise this as a serious objection to the existence of Jesus tells us nothing except that the objector has no understanding of the nature of the sources available to those who study Roman history.

In fact, this objection is not quite true. There actually are a small number of non-Christian writers of the first and early second centuries who do mention Jesus. We have to tread very carefully here, however, since evangelicals and Christian apologists very regularly misuse these writings, claiming that they are all positive proof of the existence of Jesus. I have seen this happening in several pieces of evangelical literature that have come my way. When examined, the passages usually cited (by Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and Pliny the Elder) are, in fact, either probably later insertions in the text, or they do not in any way prove the existence of Jesus. There is only one possible exception to this.

One passage by a first-century non-Christian author can be used (slightly indirectly) to prove Jesus’ existence. Strangely, this is the one non-Christian source rarely quoted by the evangelicals. In a little-known passage, distinct from his highly dubious crucifixion narrative, the Jewish historian Josephus gives us an account of the execution of “the brother of Jesus (the so-called Christ), whose name was James.” We know something about James the Brother of Jesus: after the crucifixion he was appointed the head of the Christian community in Jerusalem. Unlike the part of his book dealing with Jesus’ crucifixion, textual scholars unanimously accept this passage as genuinely Josephan. In this instance (and unlike his crucifixion narrative) Josephus had a plausible narrative purpose for telling us about James’ death: the unconstitutional execution of this evidently popular man led to the firing of the high priest Ananus. So we have here authentic confirmation of the existence of James, the brother of a man called Jesus who went by the name of Christ.

This second scrap of Josephus is the only plausible first-century literary testimony we have for the existence of Jesus outside the Gospels. It might not be much, but it is enough to show that it isn’t quite right to claim there is “no” evidence outside the Bible. Moreover, it’s more than we are entitled to expect. Even if we didn’t have non-Christian literary attestation for Jesus, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Argument 3: The Gospels contain many stories that are strikingly similar to Jewish and pagan myths. They are clearly just copied from other people’s religions.

It cannot be denied that many of the tales about Jesus have close parallels in contemporary myths that were circulating in the Eastern Roman Empire at the time the Gospels were written. This should put us on our guard, but it is not enough to reject wholesale the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

The mythologising of actual historical figures was a small industry in the Classical world. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are the classic examples: they were both people who undeniably existed, but also people who had extraordinary and miraculous stories told about them by their devoted followers after death. In each of these cases the myth-making process began strikingly early. Not all their mythical deeds were politically manufactured: a good deal of the Alexander tradition, in particular, seems to be “bottom-up”, consisting of stories invented by ordinary people and communities who revered the king’s memory. This process was not completely restricted to emperors and generals, either. You just have to read Philostratus’ remarkable biography of the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana to see evidence of a much more humble figure picking up mythological accretions as his story was told and retold. In short, the mythological elements of the Jesus story can comfortably be explained as exaggerations and tall tales that grew up around an actual historical figure after his death, no doubt originating among people who regarded him as special and extraordinary. In this, Jesus would be far from unique.

But what about the other possible explanation: that Jesus was entirely mythological, the explanation that the Christ-mythers eagerly promote? Well, if this is the case Jesus would be entirely unique in the Classical world. Certainly many characters in ancient mythology are entirely “made up”, though not necessarily all of them (King Agamemnon, for example, may be based on the folk-memory of a powerful Bronze Age chieftain). However, the fully fictional protagonists of the Graeco-Roman myths were all said to have lived in a distant age of heroes, an indistinct and ill-defined never-never land safely located in the remote past. The Jesus tradition sprang up remarkably early. The first Gospel was written within living memory of the supposed date of the crucifixion. Only twenty years after Jesus’ alleged death, Paul was recounting details of the Gospel story in his extant letters. A fully mythological character taking root so quickly and being precisely located in recent historical time would be utterly unparalleled in all of ancient history. There would have been literally no precedent for this. It cannot ring true.

So we are faced with a choice. Jesus was perhaps a real individual who came to be mythologised after his death, as many other individuals in the classical world had been before him. Alternatively, he may have been a fully mythological figure who, at his date of invention, was located less than twenty years in the past, an unprecedented scenario. Probability is strongly against the latter. The mythological elements of the Jesus story cannot be denied, but they give absolutely no reason to flatly refute his existence.

Argument 4: We have no original manuscripts of the Gospels. We only have copies of copies, made by scribes often centuries after the event, and the manuscripts we possess contain so many differences that they cannot be used as reliable historical sources.

The objection is that we have no way of checking that the copied texts we have contain the actual words written by the original authors. But this statement applies to almost all of the literature of the Classical period. It is no grounds for doubting the essential validity of pagan or secular Greek and Roman texts, so why should it be grounds for objecting to the textual integrity of the Gospels? In fact we have far more ancient manuscript copies of the New Testament than of any other literature of the Graeco-Roman period, and the more independent copies we have, the surer we can be that the texts we read today are faithful to the original words written by authors in antiquity. By comparing as many different manuscripts as possible with each other, we can obtain the most likely reconstruction of the words as they originally stood. If we’re happy to accept the text of Homer’s Iliad as being largely accurate and intact (as all classicists are), there’s no way we can’t draw the same conclusion for the Gospels. Anyway, this argument concerns the textual integrity of the Gospels, and actually has nothing to do with whether or not Jesus existed, though it is often (bizarrely) cited as an argument in support of the Christ-myth theory.

Argument 5: The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and are not contemporary documents, so how can we know if what they say is true?

The idea here is that, since the Gospels were not written at the time of Jesus’ life and ministry (or even particularly soon after his death) they are not “primary sources”, and are therefore of dubious reliability. This complaint reflects a lack of understanding of ancient history as a disciple. Due to the patchy documentary record of the period, it is standard practice for historians to rely on “after the event” accounts when writing ancient history. The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, records events that occurred well before his lifetime in the Annals. Such documents need to be treated with great care, certainly, but the fact that they were written post factum is not sufficient grounds for dismissing them, any more than we should immediately discount a modern book about the Second World War because it was written by a historian living after the period she describes. Tacitus and other first-century writers had access to many documents now lost to us. They researched their books, they didn’t just make them up. With great care, it is possible to work out which sources ancient writers had at their disposal when constructing their narratives, and so to critically assess how reliable their information is (as had been attempted, with varying degrees of success, for the Gospels). Rather than just complaining about how potentially dubious the Gospels are, it would be better to subject them to the kind of critical analysis that classicists use on writers like Tacitus, so we can assess for ourselves how much truth they are likely to contain. They should not be uncritically accepted, but they cannot be uncritically dismissed.

Argument 6: Nazareth did not exist in Jesus’ lifetime.

The town in which the “historical” Jesus is said to have been raised, it has been claimed, did not in fact exist until after Jesus’ lifetime. If this were true, it would be persuasive evidence of the “fictional” nature of the Gospel accounts. In fairness to people who make this assertion, it was tenable until quite recently. However, in December 2009 the Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre excavated an early first-century dwelling on the site of Nazareth. The fact that Nazareth is not referred to in any non-Biblical sources in the early first century is easy enough to explain when we remember that, ever since the earliest systematic excavations of the area in the 1960s (which uncovered water cisterns, making the subsequent discovery of a settlement pretty inevitable) we have known that Roman-period Nazareth was never more than a tiny village. Nazareth existed in the lifetime of Jesus. Nobody should make this claim anymore, but you may encounter it in old books and on non-updated websites, so I felt it was worth briefly discussing.

***

So none of the usual arguments upon which the “fictional Jesus” argument depends in fact hold water. But this is a negative approach to the debate. Are there any positive arguments I could advance for Jesus’ existence? Is there anything (in addition to Josephus’ above-quoted reference to Jesus’ brother) that might lead us to accept that Jesus of Nazareth, in some form or another, existed as a historical figure?

The best place to start is to consider Jesus’ alleged fame in his homeland. The Gospel accounts regularly refer to the size of the crowds he drew both in Jerusalem and in the Judaean and Galilean countryside. From here, it’s just a question of probability. If this character had been entirely invented, how could his story have been so widely accepted in Judaea and Galilee despite the people of this region having no recollection of his ministry? Foreigners might have bought it, certainly, but not people who lived in the very regions through which the “fictitious” Jesus was said to have travelled and gained widespread fame. And we know for sure that the very first Christian converts after the crucifixion were not foreigners, but came from the province of Judaea. More specifically, they seem to have come predominantly from Galilee, the northern region where Jesus himself was brought up and is said to have spent most of his ministry. In Acts 1:11, in the first ever recorded address to a group of Christian worshippers after the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus are referred to as “men of Galilee”. And it isn’t only the Bible which affirms the Judaean origins of the Christian faith. Tacitus, writing with Roman disdain about the famous persecutions of Nero, describes Judaea as the “source of this wickedness”, meaning Christianity.

It is simply unthinkable that the strength of local support the movement enjoyed in its earliest years would have been possible had the character of Jesus been entirely fictitious. Let’s try a thought experiment. Just imagine for a moment that a religious group emerged in the modern world claiming that the Son of God had preached and died in your home town a few years ago. They allege that this Messiah had travelled right through your region, appearing in the local papers and on regional TV news and addressing large gatherings of people in public spaces. One problem – neither you nor anyone else in your area has any recollection of any of this happening. How much success do you suppose these claims would enjoy? Sure, they may fool a few people on the other side of the world, but how many people on your street would go with it? This is the great difficulty that the “Jesus didn’t exist” school faces. People in the past were not inherently more gullible or stupid than people in the present. They were human beings with the same capacity for rational thought as you or I. If the “fictitious local Messiah” scam wouldn’t work in your town today, there’s no reason to suppose it would have washed in first century Judaea.

Of course, as I said at the very outset, none of this necessarily supports the idea that Jesus was a miracle-working Son of God. The responsible approach to the historical study of Jesus is a critical, sober analysis of the Gospels and any other material that may shed light on this figure. It is historically irresponsible to simply, automatically accept everything the Gospels tell us, and it is irresponsible to automatically reject a claim simply because it occurs in a Gospel. The Gospels are historical texts, fascinating but frustrating collages of fact and mythology, and the responsible approach to them is to draw on the standard tools of historical and textual analysis to help us tell one from the other. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/405-christ-myth-myth.html Swinging Londinium - The Colonial Origins of an Imperial City http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/397-swinging-londinium-colonial-origins-imperial-city.html Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:18:09 GMT Part of a reconstruction of first-century Londinium, from the Museum of London Attachment 3 (http://historum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=3) ... Part of a reconstruction of first-century Londinium, from the Museum of London

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The opening of the Joseph Conrad classic “Heart of Darkness” finds its protagonist, Marlow, in a reflective mood. Leaning on the rail of a houseboat on the Thames in suburban London, this veteran of African colonialism reflects on what it would have been like to have been the captain of a Roman trireme 2,000 years in the past, gazing out into unbroken forests populated by blue-painted savages, well outside the limits of the “civilised” world. Coming at the beginning of such a potent meditation on colonialism, the significance of the imagery is clear. Britain, which in Marlow’s day was busy exporting “civilisation” to the “savages” of Africa, had started out as an uncivilised place, full of pale-faced tribesmen awaiting the benefits of the “olive-skinned man’s burden” and the attentions of a hyper-civilised superpower. We can quibble with some aspects of Conrad’s presentation of Roman Britain (we can start by pointing out that the London area was not heavily forested in the first century), but Marlow’s meditations reflect the conflicted manner in which high Imperial Britain remembered its past as a province of somebody else’s Empire. That same conflict can be seen just off Westminster Bridge, in the form of a famous bronze statue of Boudica (that pin-up of anti-Imperialism) that was erected at the height of Britain’s Imperial phase, in the middle of a city that was once razed to the ground by the very woman whom the statue commemorates. Victorians found it sobering to reflect that their great imperial nation, and its great imperial capital, began their recorded histories as someone else’s possessions.

Statue of Boudica, Westminster Pier -


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The deepest origins of Londinium are mysterious. It most likely grew up around the wooden bridge constructed across the Thames very close to present-day London Bridge. The earliest object found in London is part of a wooden drain that dates to 47, probably part of the city’s very earliest phase. Certainly by the 50s Londinium was up and running, and maybe even flourishing. Tacitus tells us that by 60, the year of the Boudican rising, Londinium was “often thronged with many businessmen and merchant ships”, the first inkling of the city’s long association with international trade. Tacitus tells us that, at the same time, Londinium had not been accorded the elevated status of colonia, and the city quite possibly never attained this status. However, soon after its foundation (perhaps after the Boudican Revolt) the city took over from Colchester as the primary residence of the Governor of Britain, the de facto capital. The Governor’s vast and elaborately decorated residence has been excavated near present-day Cannon Street Station.

The heart of Roman Londinium was north of the river, around the present-day financial district (the City of London, with a capital c). A three mile long late second century wall (supplemented by a late third century river wall constructed in the face of the threat of Saxon raiding) encompass what was probably the heart of the town. In terms of the modern city, the walls extend from Ludgate in the west to the Tower in the east, and from Cripplegate (site of a garrison fort) in the north to the river in the south. Small parts of this wall survive and can be seen, most noticeably in the grounds of the present-day Museum of London.

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This northern block is the site of most of the key public buildings that have been found, including the above-mentioned governor’s residence, several baths, temples and hypocausts, and a second-century forum-basilica complex that seems ridiculously, pointlessly large considering the size of the settlement it served. Outside the walls we have found cemeteries and, most spectacularly of all, traces of a wooden amphitheatre under the present-day Guildhall. A recently-discovered Roman-period skeleton found at a London cemetery was initially believed to have belonged to a female gladiator, though this interpretation now seems extremely questionable. Of the places of worship, particularly worth seeing is the Walbrook Mithraeum, where ancients offered praise to an Iranian deity in the rainy northern outpost of Empire. The Mithraeum offers one of the most jarring and incongruous spectacles available in London – a first-century structure, mouldering away in the shadows of the concrete-and-glass monstrosities erected in the name of 21st century high finance.


Walbrook Mithraeum -

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Unlike many modern-day London cabbies, the Romans were happy to go south of the river, too, and soon after its foundation the city was sprawling across the far bank of the Thames (it hasn’t stopped sprawling since). The modern district of Southwark seems to be a particularly happy hunting-ground for Roman archaeologists. South of the river, excavators have found a number of well-appointed suburban villas, evidence of a Temple of Isis, and a mansio (a state-owned hostel used by officials travelling the cursus publicus). On both sides of the Thames (though especially the north), the remains of substantial harbour works have been found. The Roman waterfront extended from London Bridge to the river Walbrook, and two large warehouse structures have also been detected. Archaeologists note an unusual proportion of imported goods in London, and a relative dearth of locally-made artefacts, providing testimony to London’s importance as a mercantile centre, and perhaps also to the relative affluence of its inhabitants.

In addition to the structures mentioned above, the Museum of London has excellent coverage of the Roman period, and a trip to the British Museum (somewhat to the north of the Roman city limits in Bloomsbury) will also reveal some notable “local” discoveries from the Roman and Iron Age periods, perhaps most spectacularly the well-known Waterloo Helmet.

It’s hard to imagine London in Roman times, particularly since its subsequent centuries have made such a pronounced mark on its architecture and layout. But tramping around London looking at the visible evidence of its earliest phase is a highly rewarding enterprise, one recommended to any Roman enthusiasts who find themselves in the city at a loose end. Two thousand years of growth and development have largely obscured London’s origins, but the city still bears the marks of its colonial birth, and it will yield up its Roman secrets to those who come equipped with sturdy shoes and who know where to look. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/397-swinging-londinium-colonial-origins-imperial-city.html <![CDATA[A Bluffer's Guide to Historical Jesus Studies.]]> http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/389-bluffer-s-guide-historical-jesus-studies.html Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:31:04 GMT This essay is designed to be a brief overview of the major trends in the study of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a massive... This essay is designed to be a brief overview of the major trends in the study of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a massive field, and I can only paint it in the very broadest of brush-strokes. I’m going to ignore the two most extreme positions – Biblical literalism, and the “Christ Myth” theory which claims that Jesus never existed. I think there are strong reasons for rejecting both of these schools, but for now I will simply ignore them and focus on the academic mainstream, the efforts of those who accept the existence of Jesus but are seriously engaged in the historical study of the Gospels as fallible primary sources, not as the revealed wisdom of a God who, to me, seems inherently improbable.

The critical history of Jesus began in the Enlightenment, when much religious orthodoxy came to be challenged. Its pioneer was Hermann Reimarus, a German schoolmaster, a formidable classicist, and a deist who rejected Christianity’s personal God. He wrote a series of historical studies of the life of Jesus, which were published posthumously as “Fragments by an Anonymous Writer” (1774 – 1778). He is most famous for his approach to miracles, influenced by the writings of David Hume, and especially for his determination to find a naturalistic explanation for the miracle stories of Jesus. For example, on the “Walking on Water” miracle, he hypothesised that visibility conditions on the Sea of Galilee had been poor, that the disciples were not as far out as they thought they were, and thus when they saw Jesus standing on land, they mistakenly believed he was walking on the water. This approach has not been influential (most modern writers, following on from the great David Friedrich Strauss, treat the miracle stories as legends, rather than factual records, and use them to help reconstruct early Christian beliefs about Jesus rather than Jesus’ life itself), but his attempt to find rational explanations for the peculiarities of the Gospels has ensured his reputation as the “father” of historical Jesus studies.

Until the 1950s, much Jesus scholarship followed Reimarus’ lead in seeking to demythologise Jesus himself. From the 1950s, a new trend (influenced by earlier developments in mainstream ancient history) narrowed the focus of the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” onto the source documents themselves. Much work was done on the Gospels, their history and formation. During this period, the 4-source hypothesis came to be the consensus (as it remains to this day). This hypothesis states that Mark was the earliest Gospel, and that Matthew and Luke both copied much of Mark’s account in succeeding decades. In addition to Mark, both Matthew and Luke had a separate and now lost common source, called “Q”, in addition to unique sources of their own, called M and L respectively. Q has been subject to a great deal of abuse by careless scholars, who add vast amounts of Scripture which cannot be demonstrated to have come from Q, and include material from the apocryphal “Gospel of Thomas”, despite serious doubts about this text’s provenance. The apogee of Q foolishness came when one particularly cavalier scholar started trying to fully reconstruct it as a document, and even attempted to “stratify” it, confidently asserting that the lost Q Gospel went through three stages of revision. This sort of baseless speculation has given historical Jesus studies a bad name among mainstream ancient historians, but despite the more “enthusiastic” scholarship the bare existence of a Q Gospel has been established beyond reasonable doubt. Q itself should not be rejected simply because a lot of rubbish has been written about it! In general, this phase of Jesus research gave us a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the Gospels, the essential sources on which any study of Jesus must be based.

Later 20th Century scholarship, drawing on the textual breakthroughs of earlier historians, was largely based upon a series of “criteria” used to determine whether or not any given Gospel statement is likely to be true. Unfortunately, not all of these criteria are sound, and there was wide disagreement among scholars about the criteria and how they should be employed. Common criteria included: whether or not a fact is attested in an early document; whether or not a fact is attested in multiple independent sources (we have to watch that word “independent”, since there was clearly a certain amount of copying between the three synoptic Gospels); whether or not a fact is embarrassing to the early Christians (‘embarrassing’ facts are more likely to be true than convenient facts, since later Christians are unlikely to invent inconvenient material about their founder); and whether or not a fact is plausible in the context of Second Temple Judaism or first century Judaea and Galilee. Using these criteria enabled scholars to develop a “hierarchy of probabilities”, to work out which claims about Jesus are likely to be authentic, and which are likely to be later inventions.

The “criteria” approach has largely been abandoned in the most recent scholarship, partly because of the difficulties with developing a consistent methodology along these lines. Recent scholars focus much more on the context of Jesus’ life – nowadays, to be a good Jesus historian, you need to be something of an expert on ancient Judaism and first century Judaea – Galilee. Many of the debates that nowadays occupy historical Jesus scholars' time are actually questions about the world he inhabited. The never-ending debates about the extent to which Jesus’ Galilee had been penetrated by Hellenism is a classic example. This is a rather indirect approach but, unlike more direct studies of Jesus’ life, it has the advantage of having excellent, varied and extensive sources (we know more about Judaea in the 1st Century than any other Roman province except Egypt). Particular attention is now paid to the political dimensions of Jesus’ ministry. It has been noticed, for instance, that crucifixion was an insurrectionist’s death, and that quite a few other people claimed to be the messiah in the first century, all of whom were anti-Roman or anti-Herodian. A greater sensitivity to first-century Judaism also characterises modern work on the subject – reading the Talmudic literature, for example, has revealed some promising parallel figures to Jesus, other first-century Jewish miracle-workers like Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle-Drawer.

Scholars whose writings on Jesus are, in my humble opinion, particularly worth reading include – Geza Vermes, John P. Meier, Bart Ehrman, Paula Fredrickson, E. P. Sanders, Richard Horsley and Hyam Maccoby.

I will now give a brief list of some of the most important debates in Jesus studies. After each point, in brackets, I’ll supply the answer I would give to that question. I can justify these positions, but I’m not going to here, partly for considerations of space, and partly because, for the purposes of this blog, my opinions don’t matter at all. What’s important is that interested readers can find out what the key disputes are and then, on the basis of their own investigations, come up with their own answers.

- Could Jesus read and write? (Probably not, but it’s hard to answer this convincingly).
- Was Jesus familiar with Graeco-Roman culture, and did he draw on it in his ministry? (No and no).
- Was Jesus’ ministry universal, or directed solely at Jews? (Solely at Jews).
- Did Jesus really preach a coming apocalypse? (Yes).
- Did Jesus really teach that he was the messiah? (Yes).
- Was Jesus anti-Gentile / anti-Roman? (Yes on both counts).
- Is the vision of Jesus’ message in Paul’s Epistles accurate to the message of the historical Jesus? (No).
- Do the noncanonical Gospels contain any reliable information on the historical Jesus? (Very very little).

I’ll end with a warning. Historical Jesus studies is a curious academic ghetto. Although it draws heavily on Jewish and Classical history, it doesn’t sit comfortably in either category, and more mainstream ancient historians regard it with a lot of scepticism (this isn’t helped by the reckless methodological tendencies of some well-known Jesus historians). In my experience, it’s like a quicksand – once you start reading about it, you don’t stop. There’s now such a massive literature on this topic that it could never all be processed in a single lifetime. However, I still think it’s worth it. About 2 billion people on this planet believe they are in a personal relationship with Yeshua ben Yosef. For many of those people, this relationship is the single most important “fact” of their life. So surely it’s worth trying to find out who he really was. ]]> Clodius http://historum.com/blogs/clodius/389-bluffer-s-guide-historical-jesus-studies.html