Ancient Judeo- Christianity and the Big Society

I'm sure you've all heard about Cameron's Easter Reception speech (yes, that time he called himself a giant Dyno-rod- what even?) But he said some other things. Things like "Jesus invented the Big Society 2000 years ago, I just want to see more of it and encourage as much of it as possible." Well, I'm no Bible scholar, and I'm probably not the person to do a decent scripture deconstruction of it. Instead, I'm going to look at the three major things Cameron said he cared about in his speech, and how they align up with what things were like in ancient Judeo-Christianity.

If you are interested, you can read the full text of Cameron's speech here.

1. "To expand the role of faith and faith organisations in our country."

I'm going to liberally replace "faith" here with "non-governmental". This is because there was no seperation between faith and state in the ancient world; people working in civil magistracies were the administrators of local law and goverment and also the important people in festivals, performing the sacrifice or saying the prayer, or making the annual dedications.  But, basically, Cameron would prefer it if the state did fewer things, and the slack was picked up by people further down. Preferably people he doesn't have to pay.

Good news, Dave! The Roman system is just the model for you! What you do, simply, is take over a place with violence or the threat of violence, and then offer financial or status incentives to the existing elites. Allow them to keep their cushy jobs, as long as they go along with what you say and don't rock the boat. Don't worry about accountability, these kinds of local politics are so obscure we in the modern world know almost nothing about them. If people have a problem they can complain to the governor of the province, or to the emperor (we have papyri archives of people's documents, giving court dates and trial details and contracts. One published example is the Babatha Archive, from Judea.) If you complained to the Emperor, you usually had to do it as a whole city, after which you would engrave both your petition and the emperor's response onto a tablet and proudly display it. Look! The emperor had, for a few glorious minutes, thought about your small town! And he'd tell the governor to do something, and if you were lucky the governor actually would.

In the absence of the internet, high-speed communication or Public Schools producing a particularly viciously patriotic brand of civil servants (looking at you, British Empire), this was how the Romans chose to govern. For the most part, it worked. If you don't mind non-existent public services, a postcode lottery like no other, rampant corruption, nepotism and impossible legal systems.

When Judea was first taken over, they had  successive series of client kings and procurators or prefects. The only real difference here was that the client king was from a previous royal familiy (or the Romans had decided he was), and the procurator (or prefect) was a Roman official. Pontius Pilate was the procurator between 26-36 CE. The Biblical story of Pilate is rather relevant here. Famously, he "washes his hands" (Gospel of Matthew) of the Jesus business, and lets the Jewish High Priests do what they want. This nicely epitomises the differences: Pilate is hands-off (literally) and not interested in understanding the intricacies of
Jewish law.

2. "To raise the profile of the persecution of Christians around the world." 

If he'd just left that there, I'd have been happy (ish). Religious persectution is bad, as all forms of persecution are bad, and not to be condoned in any sense. However, he then went on to say "It is the case today that our religion [Christianity] is now the most persecuted religion around the world." He barely elaborates on what this persecution is, and how it is to be definied. Therefore, I'm going to be very clear about this: There are places in the world that Christians are persecuted, and I am not saying that isn't happening. However, contrary to what many panicked Daily Mail readers think, Christianity is not under threat in this country.

In this country, a Christian nurse might be told she can't wear a crucifix on a chain at work. She can wear it on a pin, though, or inside her clothes if this specific one is important! It's just that dangling necklaces are considered a heath and safety violation.

In Judea, and across the Roman world, Jews and Christians were subject to all kinds of discriminations and were often persecuted. The famous Christian persectutions were sporadic but horrible: under Nero some were blamed for the great fire at Rome and were burned to death in AD 64; Pliny wrote a letter between AD109-111 detailing how he'd had to have a Deaconess tortured for being a Christian, in case the rumors about them eating babies was true (Letters x.96); and of course the Great Persecution of AD303, in which an estimated 3,000 Christians were killed and many more imprisoned or tortured.

But persecution doesn't have to just mean death! It means being prevented from practising your faith! That's what's going on in this country!

Well, Jews were exempt from having to sacrifice to the Imperial Cult (the Emperor-worshipping part of Roman practices. Sacrificing to another god (not Yahweh) is banned in the Old Testament which affects both Jews and Christians), except for in their Temple in Jerusalem, where sacrifices were made "on behalf of the Jewish people". So... they were only compelled to worhip the Emperor in their most hold space. That's not so bad! (Caution: sarcasm) Also, after the First Jewish Revolt, the Temple was burned down, and after the Bar Kochba revolt (the second Jewish revolt) the Romans established a Roman colony on top of Jerusalem and put a big temple to Jupiter Capitolinus (Jupiter of the Capitoline, one of Rome's seven hills) right on top of it. Then they banned Jews from entering for ten years and put up a carving of a pig on one of the gates (probably).

As for Christians, in AD250, in an attempt to reassert Roman religion, Emperor Decius established a precedent. He ordered that all people (excepting the Jews) had to make a sacrifice to the gods in the presence of a Roman magistrate and obtain a witnessed certificate that they had done so. This forced Christians to violate some of their most deeply held convictions: that they could not worship another god, and that they could not make sacrifices. There are no estimates for numbers of deaths, but many Christians apostatised, and the incident is bitterly remembered in some of the texts from the period.

I think we can all agree, this is not the kind of systematic persecution of Christians that happens in this country.

3. "We [church and state] both need more... evangelism"

Well, the Bible (and other sources) do record early Christians  as evangelisers, no doubt about that. But I thought the Conservatives were in favour of private-run things, because they believe private is better than public for running services at a profit, apparently. In which case... does he really want people to travel the length and breadth of the country preaching the values of the state, of the way it can all benefit us if it worked better? I'm pretty certain we have those people, and they're called "trade unionists". And I don't think Dave likes them.

Are the Lannisters the Literary Julio-Claudians?

Hey everyone. It's been a while, but then I had a dissertation to finish and some exams to study for. And the first one of those is tomorrow, so I'm profitably using my time by blogging about something completely unrelated.


 This week, I'm looking at the links between a real Roman domus or family (lit. "household") and a fictional one. Maybe you've seen the picture of Joffrey Baratheon and Caligula that circulated a couple of weeks back? By the way, if you're worried about spoilers, I'll say this: I have read all the books, and I'm not up to date with the TV series. However, to my knowledge all the stuff I'm gonna mention has already happened in the show. I won't reveal any big plot twists, but there might be small fragments of spoiler here and there. If you're a purist, maybe give this one a miss?

 Don't worry, I was horrified too.

 Anyway, here are some of the Lannisters' more famous attributes:

Money, and Lots of It.

Don't you know a Lannister always pays their debts? You do now.

 The Julio-Claudians were Augustus' descendants, and they were incredibly wealthy for the most part. After the civil wars, Augustus had so much money he was able to bail out the state and still he was the richest man in Rome. Of course, he was also the Princeps and you probably wouldn't want to be richer than him. If you were, he'd probably just have you executed for treason and confiscate your stuff. This was a money-making technique used mostly by "bad" emperors, but it did come around every so often.


An Iconic Patriarch

Let's face it, Tywin Lannister is pretty badass. He's also smart, ruthless, and a pretty poor parent.

 Yup, Augustus had many of these traits. However, Augustus did not have any male children, and so was not succeeded by his direct descendants. Instead, his family tree was made up of those descended from his daughters and those adopted into his family. Even where adoption was concerned, Augustus was not fortunate, having all of his chosen successors die before him. In the end, succession fell to Tiberius, an older senator who really, really did not want to rule. Augustus was also used as a role model by emperors long after his own domus ceased to exist, a fate which will, I fear, escape Tywin.


Incest

Those Lannister twins, eh? Twins! And incest! It's like this is some kind of prime time cable TV show run mad! Don't worry:

This one has also shown up in The Borgias recently, and is actually fairly common as invective. Don't like that dynasty who seem to be doing better than yours? It's cool, just accuse them of incest. It's the kind of statement that's easy to make, hard to prove but even harder to disprove. Julio-Claudian example: Agrippina the Younger supposedly tried to seduce her son, Nero (according to Tacitus), in an attempt to regain power over him. Suetonius doesn't really bother with providing a political motive: he just says, after travelling anywhere in a litter together, their activities were "betrayed by the stains on his clothing." (Suetonius, Nero 28). Right then.

Caligula was also accused of incest with his sister, but we'll return to that in the next section.


Killing an Otherwise Defenceless Small Child Because He Might Be a Harm to You Later On?

C'mon, at least the Bran incident has to be original to the Lannisters, right? Sorry, but: 

 

Well, okay, to our knowledge none of the Julio-Claudians ever threw a small child out of a window. However, remember I said Caligula and his sister might have been making the beast with two backs?  Well, there's  story about that which was told to us by our ancient history teacher. I am pretty much 99% certain that it never happened, and at least a bit concerned that it originates with the I, Claudius TV series. However, since we're talking about tropes, and frankly almost everything we know about any of the Julio-Claudians is subject to heavy construction and reification anyway, I'll pass it on. Take with a pinch of salt!

Supposedly, Caligula had a bit of a breakdown while Julia Drusilla (the sister) was pregnant. Unfortunately, Caligula's particular madness made him think he was Kronos the titan. You might remember that he ate his children except Zeus, who survived to overthrow him. I think you get where this is going. Caligula performed an amateur cesarean section, and proceeded to eat the baby. Needless to say, Drusilla didn't survive. 

Since this blog is committed to historical accuracy, as well as blatant sensationalism, I'll give you the far, far more probable version of events. Drusilla was Nero's favourite sister, and they were very good friends. During his first illness (it's possible that this illness caused brain damage, or otherwise precipitated his madness), he made her his heir, the first woman ever to be named so in an Imperial will. However, Caligula survived and Drusilla was stricken by a fever that was rampant in the city. While she was ill Caligula stayed with her- despite a risk of contagion. When she died, he was certainly affected, but that doesn't have to point to incest. However, his mother was no longer alive (and something of a Princess Diana-like figure in her own time) so it is very possible the usual charge levelled against tyrants (incest with one's mother) was replaced here with incest with the favoured sister.

Interestingly, Caligula's extreme grief over the sister is treated as a little bit embarrassing or unmanly. Suetonius describes how "when she died, he appointed a season of public mourning, during which it was a capital offence to laugh, bathe, or dine in company with one's parents, wife, or children. He was so beside himself with grief that suddenly fleeing the city by night and traversing Campania, he went to Syracuse and hurriedly returned from there without cutting his hair or shaving his beard."- Suetonius Caligula 24. Wikipedia also says he refused to let them take the body, but doesn't have a reference, and I can't find it in the usual sources. 

However, those two combined are strikingly similar to Arian's description of the death of Hephaestion: "Some say that for the greater part of that day he flung himself down beside the body of his friend groaning and did not wish to be separated from him, until he was forcibly removed by his companions; in other accounts, he lay beside the body all day and all night; other writers say he strung up the doctor Glaucias, either because of the wrong drug being given or because he saw Hephaestion drinking heavily and allowed him to continue. I think it is likely that Alexander cut his hair over the body, especially because he had been eager to emulate Achilles ever since boyhood"- Arian Life of Alexander 7.14. 

Is it a trope? Quite possibly. I wouldn't be the least surprised if something like this happens in the later Game of Thrones books.

The Cuckoo in the Nest

That Joffrey Baratheon though, he isn't even Robert's son! At least the Julio-Claudians were all really related to each other! Nope:

When emperor Claudius married for a fourth time (to his niece, Agrippina), his new wife brought her son with her, Nero. Claudius already had a son, named Britannicus so no-one would forget Claudius' one military campaign, but Agrippina persuaded him to adopt Nero, who was very slightly older. When Claudius died (supposedly poisoned by Agrippina, but science tells us that couldn't have been it, as they had no poison which acted as fast as the story requires) Agrippina acted fast and had Nero crowned emperor. 

Finally, what of everybody's favourite Lannister:

The Embarrassing Problem Child Who Turns Out to be Surprisingly Badass

Guess what?

 

Yup, emperor Claudius was disabled. He was supposed to have twitched, stuttered and limped and occasionally dribbled, and was a figure of fun throughout the court before his ascension. He has since been diagnosed by scholars as possibly suffering from cerebral palsy, though tourettes has also been suggested. However, Claudius was far from stupid. He was not in the direct line to the throne and never expected to have to conduct himself in public life (he was made emperor after Caligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard, who also killed Caligula's immediate family, just in case) so Claudius made himself a scholar. He wrote a large number of historical works, detailing both Imperial and Republican Rome. He also proposed several changes to the Latin alphabet, adding letters which functioned like modern X and Y,  and also tried to reinstate placing dots to mark spaces between words (at this time, Classical Latin did not have spaces to indicate words), but none of these survived his reign. While emperor, Claudius also wrote an autobiography.

Unfortunately, none of these works survive, but we know he was the source for several passages of Pliny's Natural History and Suetonius read his autobiography as research for his own works (describing it as "lacking taste"). 

So there you have it folks, nothing is new under the sun! Of course, just because his work utilises tropes doesn't make George R.R. Martin a bad author: the fact that he's a bad author makes him a bad author! Tropes are just a part of human existence.

EDIT: I'm sorry about the way the text gets suddenly smaller in the middle of this post. I can't seem to fix it in the edit mode, since that displays all the text as the same size and format. Sorry!

Laser, Ancient Rome Style

Everybody loves lasers, right? You can point them at the moon, use them to annoy cats, or blind people. I probably wouldn't advocate that last one though.

"Fire the laser!"

Even the ancient Greeks and Romans loved lasers, or as they called it, just laser.


What was it?

As I'm sure you clever people twigged, "laser" to the ancients did not mean a highly focused beam of light. Laser was some kind of plant based seasoning for food. That's about as much as we can say, since we don't actually know what it was.

It was clearly an important, expensive commodity: the Egyptians had a specific glyph for it, and the Romans described it as "worth it's weight in denarii [silver coins]". On the other hand, a plant doesn't weigh that much... Here's a picture of it on a coin:

These coins are from Cyrene, where the export of laser was an important part of their economy.

We now think that laser might be an extinct form of fennel, but since we can't even say for certain what it was, we can't really say if it's really extinct.  


Uses in Food

Laser was most commonly used as a cooking additive. Apicius (the Roman Gourmet. A kind of cross between Heston Blumethal and Constance Spry, if you can imagine such a thing) offers lots of recipes involving laser. How about a spice mix of:  "moderately acid broth; or pepper, parsley, dry mint, laser root, honey, vinegar and broth... ground, compounded and dissolved together"? Or "pepper, caraway, anise, parsley, dry mint, the leaves of silphium [laser], malobathrum, Indian spikenard, a little costmary, honey, vinegar and broth."?

It seems to have been used to flavour both sweet and savoury dishes.


Uses in Medicine

Laser was also, apparently, a medical herb. Pliny the Elder (a credulous man who complied a huge encyclopedia of natural phenomena) claimed laser could be used to treat coughs, sore throats, indigestion, fever, aches and pains and even warts. If it could do all that, it would be a godsend to modern Britons, since we're perennially suffering from colds.


Uses in Birth Control

It is possible that laser was used to induce miscarriage or prevent conception. You know what that means? It means the Romans had laser based birth control. Imagine, for a second, the awesome power of that image.


What happened to it?

There are a few theories about what happened to laser. It only grew in an isolated region of modern Libya, so it has been suggested that over-harvesting or over-grazing may have been the cause. There was apparently a craze for the meat of animals grazed on laser. Apparently it altered the taste.

The last known stalk of laser was given to Emperor Nero.

Drinking in Roman Britain

That's right, it's the blog you've all been waiting for: What did the ancient Britons drink, and where can we get some?


Beer

It's the booze we're all familiar with, it's the staple of student life, and it's one of the cheapest things avaliable. It was pretty cheap in Roman Britain too. My A-level ancient history teacher once told me that with one day's pay for a Roman soldier, you could buy 200 pints of local beer- and that's why it took so long to build Hadrian's Wall! I can't find anything to back this up, so we'll have to assume it's just a nice anecdote.

What would it have tasted like? Well, different, for certain. Hops weren't used in European beer until the 12th century, so the beer enjoyed by the Britons would have been more like ale, and have had a shorter shelf life. This was probably an excuse to drink more of it, and who would say no to that? In Southern Britain, beer was probably brewed from spelt wheat, and in the North they seem to have used barley.

There were broadly two kinds of beer: strong ale, and small beer. Small beer, as you might expect, was only weakly alcoholic and was probably drunk in lieu of water by most parts of the population, including children.

A shopping list from Vindolanda suggests that an average weekly consumption for the commander's household was at least 90 litres! Given that beer had a short shelf life, it is not unlikely that the army had dedicated brewers and malsters, as both would have been vital to the upkeep of morale. I like to imagine the Roman temporary camps had a hierachy of Most Important Jobs: first, they had to build the camp walls, set up the ovens for the soldiers to bake their own bread, and then doled out the booze.


Wine


Wine was a bit more up-market, then as now. Prior to the Roman conquest in 43 CE, there was already a faction of upper-class Britons importing really good Roman wine from Campagnia and Sicily. This was the real deal, both expensive and classy. Wine was at that time stored in large pottery jars called amphorae (below), and there are remains in southern Britain that attest to its presence. Of course, it is possible that is was less good wine from the same area, like cheap fizzy wine from the Champagne region. Pliny dismissed the Falerian wines, saying they gave him a headache that lasted until midday the next morning.

There are also gorgeous wine strainers decorated in a very Celtic style (La Tene to be more precise) as pictured below.  One of my lecturers has looked at the evidence, and has suggested that the wine was used for some kind of ritual purpose. This was probably just getting drunk in worship of a particular god, so not that different from modern day Kent.

Much of the wine imported during the Roman occupation of Britian was probably for the army, and it's hard to know how much of it the Britons might have come by. However, there was at least one successful attempt to grow vines in Britain by the Romans, at Wollaston in Nene Valley, and not on a small scale. This one site could probably have produced between 10,000 and 30,000 litres of wine.  

The Roman manner of drinking wine involved mixing it with water, and there were a large number of different kinds of utensil and ladle for doing so. The Romans were not a people to do things by halves. Again, I like to imagine the wealthiest Britons attempting to get the hang of this complex ritual: "So I start at the outside... and work in?"


Spirits?

Well, not really. But Apicius offers a recipe for Roman absinthe...