bonus post
Praising by Faint Damn
A chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries “that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day” and watches the ad revenue roll in, while the candidate launches a line of propaganda on the theme “look how much those elitists hate me and how powerful I am” and hires a new accountant to track his donations. Ever since smartphones came out, vlogs and podcasts are funded by people declaring another influencer the enemy, launching a five-part series to attack them, and sending their viewers to the ‘enemy’ channel until the ‘enemy’ returns the favour by launching a counter-video or anti-episode. This pays much better than useful factual videos on knitting or woodworking. There is a related concept whose name I am trying to find.
Read moreThe Great Rebalancing
In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.
Read moreOn Trip-Hammers and Rolling Mills
Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax “heart-protector” on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No such plate survives from a Roman site after 300 BCE, and no sculpture or painting shows it. As Roman rule expands across Italy, locals stop building tombs with detailed paintings full of arms and armour, and body armour tends to be a rare find. By the fifth century BCE, Samnites and Campanians had replaced simple disc breastplates with more complex arrangements of a breastplate, a backplate, a bronze belt and armoured straps over the shoulders and under the arms. We therefore have to assume that Romans either reverted to a style of armour from several hundred years before, or that Polybius’ description just mentions one-part of a seven-part armour. To my knowledge, no other surviving writer says that Romans wore such a breastplate, and there are no carvings or paintings which show Romans wearing them (Varro’s pectorale was made of strips of leather, De Lingua Latina 5.24). Both interpretations match objects from the ancient Mediterrean, and both match later armour from other cultures such as the “good iron for his body” worn by Robert the Bruce’s militia in 13181 and char-aina “four mirrors” armour in the Persianate world. I am doubtful that most Romans could afford not only a helmet, a sword, and and iron-bound shield but most of a bronze breastplate, but Devereaux is more confident. There are a lot of things to think about here, such as why the Roman Republic, a relatively egalitarian society, did not leave much art which showed ordinary soldiers. However, this week I will write down my thoughts about one technical question which I took the time to work through.
Read moreA Quick Note on “Two Battles in Three Years”
Twice in The Western Way of War (1989, my copy Oxford University Press 1990) Victor Davis Hanson makes similar statements:
In the fifth and fourth centuries, battle broke out in the Greek world nearly two out of every three years, so the chances were good that a man would have to leave his farm, take up his arms, fight in repeated engagements, and fall wounded or die one summer’s day in battle. (p. 31)
For the citizen of the fifth-century Greek city-state who saw battle of some type on an average of two out of three years, the changes were good that he would not die a natural death: in one of those years of his long service he would likely become one of the dead or wounded (p. 89)
A moment’s thought shows that this is incorrect. Even during the Peloponnesian Wars Athens or Sparta only fought a battle every few years, and not all Athenian hoplites or Spartiates fought in every battle. Plato’s Socrates was proud to have fought in one battle, a siege, and an expedition and he was an adult during intensive warfare (Plato, Apology, 28e, Symposium 219-221).1 What could Hanson have meant by the passages above?
Read moreThere Was No Typical Polis
Bret Devereaux recently published a strong post in his series on the hoplite wars. This was an especially strong post because it drew on his research focus. His current book creates financial and demographic models of the Roman Republic, Carthage, and the Hellenistic kingdoms and argues that the Romans were able to get citizens and allies to contribute more military service, arms, and armour than their rivals, while some of their rivals had higher incomes in silver. Victor Davis Hanson and Hans van Wees also created detailed models of early Greek farms and how the men with panoplies (hoplites and horsemen) fit into ancient Greek societies: how many of them were there, how wealthy were they, and where did their incomes come from? Even in Athens the sources are not as good as Polybius and Livy on the Roman Republic, but Hans van Wees was able to believe in them because he came from Homeric studies where the evidence is even worse. van Wees has long suspected that there was no hoplite class, but a leisure class who could easily afford a panoply and a group of small farmers and shopkeepers who could afford it at the cost of suffering. This week I will go over some of the ideas in Devereaux’ post from a slightly different perspective and show where they lead me. This post has consumed two days of writing time and is not as polished as I wish it was.
Read moreAncient Greek Kit is Hard to Make
Bret Devereaux has published his second essay about the debate about early Greek warfare with some back and forth from Richard Taylor and Hergrim. This week I will follow up on one of the questions which newcomers to the debate often have, namely why until around 2015 researchers rarely obtained replica kit and tried it out. There are many reasons, but the biggest reason is that ancient kit is hard to make.
Read moreFour Theses on the Hoplite Wars
Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.
Read moreComments on the Djurhamn Sword
(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)
A complex-hilted sword was found in 2007 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.
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