Category: Culture

I am five episodes into Britannia season 1. This was a must-watch for me, since I am particularly interested in the history of the Romans’ clash with the Celtic world.

As for the history, the writers of Britannia seem to have stuck to the basic outline of what Roman history recorded. Everything else is imagined. The year is 43 A.D., 17 years before Queen Boudica’s uprising against the Roman occupation in 60 A.D.

The series has not been getting very good reviews. One reviewer said that it is “crazy as a box of frogs.” There is much to be said for that. My own view is that the Celts and druids were not nearly as wild and barbaric as they are depicted here. Celtic art, for example, and Celtic technology including ships, wagons, and chariots, were plenty sophisticated. Many of the druids spoke Greek. When the Gaulish druid Divitiacus went to Rome and spoke to the Senate around 60 B.C., by no means did he make a fool of himself. Cicero was impressed by Divitiacus’ knowledge of astronomy and natural philosophy. But in Britannia, the druids are half-mad, drugged-out bone-rattlers. They are sinister and ugly, as opposed to the kind of elite caste who left us the Brehon laws. And nothing has been said so far about Celtic music. How could they leave that out?

In many ways, this series defames the Celts and druids. Whether it lionizes Rome remains to be seen.

Still, the series is very pretty to watch, with great locations (though many locations, filmed in the Czech Republic, don’t look much like southern England). The scripts and dialogue are smart. The situations are unpredictable. Except for the Kerra character, all the Celts have bad hair, which I suspect is a trend started by the Vikings series.

I’m not exactly recommending this series, but if you have Amazon Prime, it’s worth streaming an episode or two and checking it out.

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, by Kyle Harper. Princeton University Press, 2017. 418 pages. ★★★★★

This book is an extraordinary piece of scholarship. It’s also a demanding and dense read. Kyle Harper retells the story of Rome, adding new findings that were not available until relatively recently. We owe these new findings to the work of archeologists and to scientists working to understand the history of diseases (especially plagues and pandemics) and the history of earth’s climate.

Earlier histories tried to understand the fall of Rome solely from a political perspective. But Harper shows that plague after plague was an important part of the story. We also know now that the rise of Rome occurred during a “climate optimum” in the Mediterranean. But the optimum didn’t last. Volcanoes are part of the story, too, as well as solar output and Atlantic currents. By the time of the last emperor, a little ice age had set in.

Harper agrees with Bryan Ward-Perkins, whose book I reviewed some years ago, that the fall of Rome was not a rational and smooth “transformation,” an idea that was fashionable with some academics for a while. Rather, as Ward-Perkins argues, the fall of Rome was a catastrophe from which Europe did not recover for centuries. Harper’s book is much longer and more detailed than Ward-Perkins’, and Harper’s account is more about a series of catastrophes and recoveries rather than a final fall. Rome was very resilient, and time and again the empire recovered from plague, famine, and war. But ultimately Rome collapsed, first in the west and then in the east. The only winner was the church, which was able to partly fill the vacuum left by Rome.

In many ways, this book is a companion to the last book I reviewed here, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain. Both books contain details that put a lot of light on how the ancients lived — not just the powerful, but also the little people — slaves, soldiers, traders, bureaucrats, travelers, seamen. The book looks toward Asia, and the importance of Roman trade with India via the Red Sea. And the book looks north and east, to Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns. Some of this detail is so colorful that I long for stories. There is so much history to be mined by novelists and screenwriters. Yet again and again our storytellers write the same old suburban dramas. Why don’t we take a hint from Shakespeare? How many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in Shakespeare’s here and now?

Books like this, I think, are important references to keep on the shelf for years to come. I’m tempted to buy the Kindle edition in addition to the hardback, so that the book would be searchable. If I have a complaint about this book, it’s the quality of the maps. The maps are in black and white. The maps are rudimentary, and they are terrible. Get yourself some good maps of the ancient world before you read this book. In addition to the history, you’ll also learn a lot of geography.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by James C. Scott. Yale University Press, 2017. 312 pages.

Why did human beings abandon their hunter-gatherer livelihoods, build the first towns and cities — and therefore create the first governments? This book uses new findings from archeology, epidemiology and climatology that may radically change our views on this radical period in human history that completely upset how we live as human beings.

The long-prevailing view was that farming and sedentary human communities were a great advance in human wellbeing and comfort that led to rapid advances in human cultures. But maybe not. Farming and pasturing actually were harder work than hunting and gathering and took more time and labor. Crop failure and famine were frequent. Sedentary people were sitting ducks for raiding. The greater density of people and domesticated animals, not to mention their wastes, brought all sorts of new diseases and epidemics. The diets of sedentary people were far less varied. Settled people weren’t nearly as healthy as hunter-gatherers. Grain was easily taxed. Elites arose to lord it over the peasants. Walls were built not just to keep raiders out but also to keep the peasants in. People actually liked their hunter-gatherer lifestyles and did not necessarily take up farming eagerly. Slavery was already well known, but slave labor was especially needed to keep the towns and cities running. If a town went bust (as frequently happened), the survivors would return to hunting and gathering. The move from wild to domesticated living was not a sudden and permanent switch. There was a lot of back and forth for centuries.

The only environments that were rich enough to support the early towns and cities were the mouths of rivers where the rivers slowed and spread into alluvial plains where the soil was enriched by siltation. Water was plentiful and provided transportation as well as irrigation. But all sorts of things could go wrong — floods, droughts, war, epidemics, environmental degradation and soil exhaustion, and natural changes in the climate. It was a risky, dangerous life. Child mortality was easily 50 percent.

The author has so much to say about taxation and the oppression of states that I was afraid I was being set up for a libertarian message. That did not happen. Scott, who is at Yale, is too good a scholar for that.

Part of the beauty of this book is that it sheds so much new light on how our Paleolitic and Neolithic ancestors lived. Their lives were not unappealing! They were free, they were bigger and healthier than city people, and most of them preferred a wild life to a life as a domesticated human, which was not all that different from the life of a domesticated animal. When cities and their governments squeezed the people too hard, people would often flee back into the wild. Returning to the frontier, Scott points out, was easier than revolution.

The sad thing is that, today, we have run out of wildness and frontiers. We are all domesticated now. We all are subjects of states. Though it’s terrain that this book is not concerned with, nevertheless these two opposites — wild vs. domesticated — beg some thought experiments. How can we do as much for ourselves as possible and disengage as much as possible from domestication and corporatization? To our overlords — who are now stronger and richer than they have been in a hundred years — we are just livestock. They exploit our surplus. They abhor us, but they also are afraid of us because we outnumber them and we are the source of their wealth and power. In that sense, nothing has changed in 10,000 years.