Ancient World Review

Book Review -- Ancient Rome: The Autobiography

Ancient Rome:The Autobiography, edited by Jon E. Lewis, is a fantastic collection of official reports, personal letters, inscriptions, graffiti, memoirs, speeches, poetry and historical writings that cover the history of Rome from the early days of the kings to the collapse of the western empire.  An epilogue contains some material from the eastern empire and a long extract from The Second Speech Of Marcus Tullius Cicero Against Marc Antony is included in an appendix.

The book has a little bit of everything "...from the writings of Caesars, slaves, generals, and poets, on everything from major battles, conspiracies, and politics to the minutiae of everyday life." Shorter pieces like inscriptions and graffiti are given complete, but much of the anthology consists of excerpts from longer works. The collection doesn't just focus on Roman writers, but includes material from all over the Roman world.

The Autobiography is divided into three main sections covering the Rise, the Empire and the Fall. Part One -- Rise: Rome 753 BC - 31 BC -- starts with Plutarch's description of the ordination of the vestal virgins by King Numa in 680 BC and ends with Horace's description of Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 BC.

This section covers a wide range of subjects including Polybius' account of the Punic Wars, Cato the Elder's advice on how to keep a slave, an example of election graffiti from Pompeii, a reward notice for the return of runaway slaves and Cicero's descriptions of piracy in Sicily, jury corruption and election bribery in Rome and what it was like to have dinner with Caesar. One entertaining excerpt is from a letter that Marc Antony wrote to Octavian, who was complaining because Antony was getting it on with Cleopatra while he was married to Octavian's sister, Octavia:

"To Octavianus Augustus: What's upset you? Because I go to bed with Cleopatra? But she's my wife and I've been doing so for nine years, not just recently. And, anyway, is Livia [Octavian's wife] your only pleasure? I expect that you will have managed, by the time you read this, to have hopped into bed with Tertulla, Terentilla, Rufilla, Salvia Titisenia, or the whole lot of them. Does it really matter where, or with what women, you get your excitement?"

Part Two -- Empire: Rome 30 BC-AD 180 -- starts with The Deeds of  the Divine Augustus, in which Augustus (Octavian) brags about all his accomplishments, and ends with Avidius Cassius' account of an insurrectionist plot by the governor of Syria in 175 AD. This section is full of fascinating material: a letter from Augustus to Tiberius describing his luck at gambling, Philo's description of a personal audience with Caligula and a juicy story by the poet Juvenal (my favorite Roman poet) about the way Claudius' third wife, Messalina, liked to prostitute herself in the streets like a common whore. Other excerpts from Juvenal describe female athletes and gladiators, and the "hot, overcrowded, venal, class-ridden" city of Rome.

Part Three -- Fall: Rome AD 181-476 -- describes the final years of corruption, war, riots and invasion. It starts with Herodian's account of how Didius Julianus bought the Roman empire at auction and ends with a sycophantic piece by Sidonius called "The Magnificence Of The Barbarian Prince Sigismer, Burgundy" (AD 470). As this section progresses, the Visigoths, Huns and Christians start to appear. There are descriptions of gladiatorial games, the conversion of Constantine, mob insurrection, the sack of Rome, and a fascinating account by Priscus of the Court of Attila the Hun.

This is a fantastic book that covers a huge amount of material from original sources. Some of the most interesting material deals with the details of everyday life: the hazards of sea travel, a flute player's contract, window shopping in Rome, recipes, advice on how to bring up children, advertisements for gladiatorial shows, petty crimes, what it was like to live above a Roman bath, and so on. If you're interested in ancient Rome, you should definitely check this out.

Note: "Ancient Rome: The Autobiography" was first published in the UK as "The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Ancient Rome." I somehow ended up with both of these books and as far as I can tell they're identical.

Tacitus' Germania: "A Most Dangerous Book"

The Germania by Tacitus has been called "a most dangerous book." His description of the ancient Germanic tribes has become a kind of ethnologic bible in Germany and the Harvard Gazette (2008) said that Tacitus "helped to fuel Nazi propaganda." The book "was exactly what nationalists had been waiting for," according to the New York Times (2011) and many other writers agree:

"Perhaps the most fateful decision in all of European history was made by Augustus Caesar, when he chose to fix the border of the Roman Empire at the Rhine. As a result, the region known to the Romans as Germania would go without the products of Roman civilization (1) —good roads and big cities and the Latin language and Christianity (2). But it would also remain vigorous and untamed enough to threaten Roman power, and finally destroy it in the fifth century A.D." Source: "Ideas Are Viruses - How Tacitus' Germania Became the Bible of German Nationalism," Slate.com (2011)

Comment: This is all crap, of course, not to mention the fact that it's obvious anti-German propaganda. The paranoia about Tacitus' history of Germania is the kind of stuff you would expect from these particular sources. (See the footnotes below for some of the problems with the argument in the Slate article.)

Tacitus was the greatest historian ancient Rome ever produced. His primary concern in all of his writings was to analyze and expose the corruption of the Roman state under the emperors.

According to Moses Hadas, in his introduction to the 1942 Modern Library edition of the complete works of Tacitus (p. xii), "[i]t is a temptation to which many have succumbed to look upon the Germania as a sort of Utopia, a conscious idealization of a primitive and unspoiled people calculated to chasten and reform the decadent Romans. This view is justified in the degree that a strong moralizing strain runs through all Tacitus' work. It has been wittily remarked that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola [his father-in-law] and the Germans."

Concerning the problems with the Slate article:

(1) The writer seems to think that the savage Germans would have become more civilized if they had been conquered by the Romans. It's hard to understand how the warlike Germans would have become less warlike by exposure to the warlike Roman culture, but it hardly matters because the author of this Slate article has his facts all wrong. In reality, the Germans were exposed to Roman civilization and learned Roman methods of warfare from them, among other things. 

Many Germans served in the legions. In one notable example, Arminius, the commander of the German tribes who wiped out three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD, had served in the Roman military and was apparently a Roman citizen. The Romans needed mercenary forces and, like modern Americans, they ended up providing weapons and training to some of their worst enemies.

(2) - The author of the Slate piece was also wrong to say that Germania wasn't exposed to Christianity. The Germans described by Tacitus were still pagans, but by the time of the invasions, many of the invading tribes were Christians, though of a "heretical" variety. The Visigoths who sacked Rome, for instance, were Arian Christians:

"Being Arian Christians, the Visigoths respected Christian sites and treasures. According to one story, a group of them refused to steal rich gold and silver vessels when told that they belonged to St Peter and on Alaric’s orders the sacred objects were carried safely through the streets to St Peter’s Church, respectfully accompanied by a throng of Christian citizens who were only too glad to find sanctuary there themselves. St Augustine told this story in City of God to help rebut allegations by pagans that the sack of Rome was the fault of the Christians, who had enraged the city’s pagan gods." Source: History Today (2010)

I have no idea how true these stories are, but I really doubt if Christians in Rome ever "respectfully" marched through the city with the invading Visigoths or that the invaders "refused to steal rich gold and silver vessels." St. Augustine is a suspect source, to say the least, and he obviously had an agenda in presenting the Visigoths as being respectful of Christian fetishes.

The "barbarians" were Christians, but their religion didn't have any effect on their warlike behavior. That's not too surprising, however. Even if they had been completely "orthodox," there is absolutely no evidence in history that Christianity has ever made people more gentle or nations more peaceful. 

Getting back to Tacitus, it's disingenuous for modern writers to blame him in any way for the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Ethnic nationalism - a sense of common tribal identity - has been a common feature of all countries throughout history. Besides, there's no evidence that I'm aware of that Tacitus' information on the Germanic tribes is inaccurate or intentionally romanticized.

According to Moses Hadas again, "More than six hundred items of information are recorded [in the Germania], of a credibility, to be sure, varying with that of Tacitus' sources. The sources were undoubtedly the best available, and included eye-witness accounts as well as written material, and Tacitus was a conscientious workman."

Modern Germans have every right to be proud of their ancestors.

New Dead Sea Scroll Caves Discovered?

Video from 2015.

"Archaeologists have discovered two caves near Qumran, in the West Bank, that may hold Dead Sea Scrolls." Source: Live Science.

"So far, the archaeologists excavating the caves have yet to find the remains of any biblical-era manuscripts. However, both caves, now called 53b and 53c, are near caves that held the already-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls, and the team is not done investigating the sites."

Qumran Cave One, 2012. Most of the amateur videos of Qumran you can find on YouTube seem to have been taken by Christians touring the so-called Holy Land.

Note: If more manuscripts are discovered, the odds are that they won't have anything to do with the Bible. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he majority of the texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls are non-biblical in nature and were thought to be insignificant for understanding the composition or canonization of the Biblical books, but a different consensus has emerged which sees many of these works as being collected by the Essene community instead of being composed by them. Scholars now recognize that some of these works were composed earlier than the Essene period, when some of the Biblical books were still being written or redacted into their final form."

Comment: I thought it had been established that the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, but apparently that's still a matter of contention. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here has been much debate about the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The dominant theory remains that the scrolls were the product of a sect of Jews living at nearby Qumran called the Essenes, but this theory has come to be challenged by several modern scholars."

Museum Of The Bible Says That Five Of Its Dead Sea Scrolls Are Fake

"At least five of the 16 'Dead Sea Scroll' fragments in the Museum of the Bible are fakes, an independent study has concluded." Source: Live Science (Oct. 2018).

"The Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington, D.C., last year, had been under scrutiny for publishing and displaying the texts despite their murky origins [1]. The museum sent five of its alleged Dead Sea Scroll fragments to Germany's Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin for an investigation that included X-ray scanning and ink analysis."

[1] How many ancient documents don't have "murky origins"?

"The museum announced today [Oct. 22, 2018] that those five fragments 'show characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin'; in other words, they are not 2,000-year-old texts, but instead more-recent forgeries. The scroll fragments will no longer be displayed, the museum said."

Comment: A lot of people are using this to attack the Museum of the Bible in particular and Christianity in general, but I think the museum should be commended for having the scrolls tested and then removing them when they turned out to be likely forgeries. They probably should have tested them more thoroughly in advance, though -- that's easy to say in hindsight -- and it appears that some of their other displays may not have been completely authenticated.

According to one Canadian researcher, seven of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries and "conclusions on the status of the remaining fragments are still forthcoming." I don't know how accurate that is, but authenticating ancient artifacts and documents is a major problem for museums everywhere and it looks like the Museum of the Bible fell for a scam. It would be interesting to know how many other museums are displaying objects of doubtful authenticity; the answer to that question would probably be surprising.

The museum got into trouble last year when it was "ordered to pay a $3 million forfeiture and to hand over thousands of artifacts after illegally importing cuneiform tablets, clay stamp seals and other ancient Mesopotamian items from Iraq." This kind of thing happens all the time, though, and the Museum of the Bible is hardly the first museum that has run into problems like this. The traffic in looted artifacts is gigantic and the distinction between a "looted" object and one which has been unearthed by an "official" archaeological expedition is sometimes pretty hazy.

Authenticating ancient documents is more of an art than a science. There's a lot of money to be made in looted and forged artifacts, but there have to be easier ways to make a living than by forging Dead Sea Scrolls. That's got to be a tricky business. You'd have to use the same type of ink that would have been used during the period in question, papyrus or parchment aged somehow to make it look suitably old, and the text itself would have to be authentic enough to fool a presumed expert. Some of these forgeries must be works of art in their own right.

The following scene is from The Ninth Gate, 1999. It doesn't have anything to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it includes a discussion of the problems involved in forging ancient documents, in this case a medieval book which supposedly can be used to raise the Devil.

Mark Antony's Last Will & Testament A Forgery?

The use of documents to start wars or smear your political enemies is nothing new. One of the most famous examples from the ancient world is Mark Antony's last will and testament, which Octavian, the future Augustus, used to turn the people of Rome against Antony and justify an invasion of Egypt. The authenticity of the will has been called into question, however. It may have been forged or partially forged, which wouldn't exactly surprise me. Whatever the case, releasing Antony's will was an extremely effective piece of propaganda:

"Whether it was real or not – and scholars debate this point still – the will contained such inflammatory claims that it set the Roman people against Antony. Octavian read this document aloud in the Senate house (according to Plutarch’s Life of Antony, 58) and he made it widely available by getting the Senate to issue a decree that was posted in the forum and sent out widely through the empire by messengers. This way, Octavian convinced the people of Rome – and Antony’s many allies in the Senate – that Antony had lost his head and given himself over to the allure and despotism of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt." Source: The Conversation.

The Creation Of The Domesday Book

BBC program from April 2014.

"Nearly a thousand years ago, a famous king created a famous book, later given the title 'Domesday' (pronounced 'doomsday')." Source: Science Daily.

"At least that's been the common story: William the Conqueror, 20 years after his 1066 invasion of England from Normandy, ordered a massive survey of his new realm. One year later, he got a book with the results -- a record of the nation's wealth and resources, everything from property to sheep to servants."

Putting the Domesday Book together in a single year would have been an incredible feat, but as it turns out this may not have been what happened at all:

"Now, after years of research, [Illinois history professor Carol Symes] makes the case in the journal Speculum that the final 'Great Domesday Book' came years and perhaps decades later than the 1087 date to which it's attributed, also the year of William's death."

Video from 2010.

Comment: The state is the monopoly on violence over a particular territory. When you strip away the self-serving rhetoric, governments of all kinds are little more than bureaucratic machines which use physical violence and the threat of physical violence to maintain control over a territory and exploit its resources (which include its human population).

The Domesday Book is a classic example of this principle in action. After William's conquest of England, he took an inventory of his new territory so he get his cut of the action, sending his agents "over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out 'how many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire." (Wikipedia)

In other words, the tax assessment that resulted in the Domesday Book was an act of "legitimate" robbery -- legitimate because William was now the "legal" ruler of England. His agents set a value on every piece of taxable property and there was no appeal. That's why the book is called the Domesday Book. "Domesday" is Middle English for "doomsday," according to Wikipedia.

"... for as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skillful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to ... its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity. That is why we have called the book 'the Book of Judgement' ... because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable." -- Dialogus de Scaccario (circa 1179), Richard FitzNeal.

Mystery Of The Codex Gigas: The "Devil's Bible"

"Codex Gigas, otherwise known as ‘the Devil’s Bible’ is the largest and probably one of the strangest manuscripts in the world.  It is so large that it is said to have taken more than 160 animal skins to make it and takes at least two people to lift it.  It measures approximately 1 metre in length." Source: Ancient Origins.

"According to legend, the medieval manuscript was made out of a pact with the ‘devil’, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Devil’s Bible. It was written in Latin during the 13th century AD, and although the origin of the manuscript is unknown, a note in the manuscript states that it was pawned in the [Cistercian] monastery at Sedlec in 1295."

Note: Sedlec is the home of the bizarre Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel which contains "the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel," according to Wikipedia.

The Sedlec Ossuary. Video from 2016.

The Voynich Manuscript

"In the library of a famous Ivy League college rests an illuminated manuscript book, hundreds of pages long. No one knows how old it is, where it comes from, who wrote it, or what it is about. A monarch is believed to have bought it for a fabulous sum from a notorious practitioner of the black arts, after which it disappeared for centuries. Its illustrations are pictures of unidentifiable plants and incomprehensible scientific diagrams. The test is in an unknown script which some of the world's best codebreakers have been unable to decipher. The language of the script is also unknown, but computer analysis shows that the manuscript is written in no known human tongue." -- from the introduction to "The Voynich Manuscript for Beginners," by Richard Newmanson.

The Voynich Manuscript has been described as "the most mysterious book in the world." Its author and the date of its composition are unknown -- along with everything else about it -- but the medieval manuscript is probably (1) authentic and entropy analysis (PDF) of the text reveals that the book is highly organized and doesn't just consist of random gibberish. It may be an alchemical text or a Cathar bible (specifically a few books from the Bible) used for ritual purposes, but this is all speculation at this point. Whatever it is, the book was encrypted using a complicated and still unknown code, possibly to hide its contents from the Inquisition.

(1) Some experts believe that the book may be a hoax, but entropy analysis seems to rule this out.

The short book by Richard Newmanson cited above gives a concise but relatively complete overview of the Voynich Manuscript. Highly recommended. Judging by the illustrations,  the book appears to be divided into several sections dealing with herbs, astronomy, cosmology, biology, pharmaceuticals and recipes, but Newmanson points out the possibility that the figures may simply have been inserted in order to obfuscate the actual contents of the manuscript. The fact that no one knows what language was used to write the book makes it extremely difficult to break its code, but lots of people are working on it and every now and then someone will announce that the mystery has been solved.

 The book has attracted a lot of attention and speculation, but as far as I can tell the text is still a mystery. Some experts have suggested that it was written by Roger Bacon or the notorious occultist John Dee, but no one really knows for sure (2). Considering its apparent medieval origin, the manuscript is likely alchemical or perhaps Rosicrucian.

(2) "Like its contents, the history of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is contested and filled with some gaps. The codex belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576-1612), who purchased it for 600 gold ducats and believed that it was the work of Roger Bacon. It is very likely that Emperor Rudolph acquired the manuscript from the English astrologer John Dee (1527-1608). Dee apparently owned the manuscript along with a number of other Roger Bacon manuscripts." Source: Yale University Library.

"The hoax hypothesis can’t be ruled out," according to The New Yorker (2013). "But if the Voynich is a fake, it’s an elaborate one. A twentieth-century scam artist would have to have located a hundred and twenty sheets of blank six-hundred-year-old vellum in anticipation of the invention of radiocarbon dating (which did not yet exist when the manuscript first reëmerged, in 1912). Scholars remain deeply divided over the question of whether the text is likely to be meaningful. But the distribution of letters and words is anything but random, even demonstrating statistical features generally associated with natural-language texts—features that weren’t discovered until the nineteen-thirties."

My favorite theory about the Voynich Manuscript is that it is either the real version of the Necronomicon invented by H.P. Lovecraft or that it inspired Lovecraft and other fantastic writers such as Arthur Machen. This is all fictional, though. "The link between those two mysterious manuscripts - Voynich’s book and the Necronomicon - was first hypothesized in the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of the English author and critic Colin Wilson," according to Daniel Harms (1998). Unfortunately, the Voynich MS is only a couple hundred pages long -- too short to be the Necronomicon - and linguistic analysis has shown that it wasn't originally written in Latin or any Arabic language.

Personally, I hope that the Voynich Manuscript is never decrypted. If it is, the book will probably turn out to be yet another medieval grimoire and lose all of its mystery.

Related: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Has Finally Been Decoded. According to this 2017 Ars Technica article, one researcher claims that the book is "mostly a plagiarized guide to women's health, " but "[s]cholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the [researcher's] translation 'makes no sense' and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers."

The Vatican "Secret" Archives

Video from 2011.

Comment: If nothing else, this huge labyrinthine archive proves that the Vatican, like any other bureaucracy, generates tons of paperwork. I suspect, though, that this "secret archive" isn't the real secret archive and I'm sure they've got more interesting -- and dangerous -- material hidden away in some underground, climate-controlled bunker that very few people know about.

The Vatican, after all, is a state in its own right with a very long history of intrigue, corruption and the occasional murder. I'm sure this book about the secret archives (The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books) only contains documents that the Church decided can be safely shown to the public. Even though it's an interesting and historically important book in its own right, it's also a kind of PR effort by the church designed to counter popular conspiracy theories and show they have nothing to hide.

Nonsense. They've probably got all sorts of juicy documents hidden away somewhere. I'd love to know, for example, what kind of information they have about the early days of the church--how it was actually founded, who the original Popes were, how they managed to accumulate so much power and wealth. The real story, I think, will turn out to be radically different from anything we've been told so far.

I also suspect that they've got a lot of documents relating to more modern scandals like the alleged connections between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia and the death of "God's Banker," Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge near the financial district in London back in 1982. (Take a look at the Wikipedia photograph of Calvi on his Wikipedia page; he looks like a mafiosi.) It would be interesting to read those documents, to say the least, and I'd also like to read the transcripts from the trial of Giordano Bruno, the 16th Century philosopher who was burned at the stake.

The thing I'd most like to find out, however, is how much the Vatican knows about the origins of Christianity. It's possible, I suppose, that they don't know anything more than we do, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have secret histories that go all the way back which are locked up because they're too dangerous for the world to see. This assumes, of course, that the documents weren't destroyed long ago.

Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace

"The original Tudor palace was begun by Cardinal Wolsey in the early 16th century, but it soon attracted the attention of Henry VIII, who brought all his six wives here. Surrounded by gorgeous gardens and famous features such as the Maze and the Great Vine [1], the palace has been the setting for many nationally important events." Source: Historical Royal Palaces.

[1] " A nearby conservatory houses the 'Great Vine', planted in 1769; by 1968 it had a trunk 81 inches thick and has a length of 100 feet. It still produces an annual crop of grapes." (Wikipedia)

"The palace houses many works of art and furnishings from the Royal Collection, mainly dating from the two principal periods of the palace's construction, the early Tudor (Renaissance) and late Stuart to early Georgian period. In September 2015, the Royal Collection recorded 542 works (only those with images) as being located at Hampton Court, mostly paintings and furniture, but also ceramics and sculpture." Source: Wikipedia.

The palace was apparently built on top of other previous structures. "The archaeological remains on the site are integral to our understanding of the development of the palace. Partial excavation has shown that remains of the 12th century grange [farmhouse or estate?], 15th century house and many Tudor buildings survive below-ground. The site holds a high degree of potential for further investigation and will contain archaeological and environmental information relating to its occupation, use and history. " Source: Historic England.

Comment: According to Wikipedia, this beautiful palace is located "in the borough of Richmond upon Thames, 11.7 miles ... southwest and upstream of central London ..." (Emphasis added) More precisely, the palace is in East Molesey in Surrey, "a wealthy county due to economic, aesthetic, conservation and logistical factors." In other words, Hampton Court Palace is currently insulated to a large extent from the crime and rapid Islamification taking place in London, but I have to wonder how long that will last.

The UK's idiotic immigration policies have already transformed London out of all recognition and the problem continues to accelerate. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here were 607,083 Muslims reported in the 2001 census in the Greater London area. In the 2011 census Office for National Statistics, the proportion of Muslims in London had risen to 12.4% of the population (21% of England's Muslims). In the boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets, the percentages of Muslims were over 30%." I'm not sure what the current numbers are, but the trend is as obvious as it is suicidal.

The national treasure of Hampton Court Palace is only around 12 miles from Central London. If present trends continue, how long will it be before the palace is turned into a mosque or simply blown up? Ten years? Twenty? If you think this couldn't happen, you haven't been paying attention. London museums have already had to increase their security in response to the threat of bombs and back in 2016 the authority in charge of historical palaces requested additional funds to meet the threat of terrorism. And anti-terrorism pedestrian barriers have already been installed in Surrey, the county where the palace is located.

Hampton Court Palace is a kind of time capsule haunted by ghosts. If things don't change in Britain, this incredible monument to the past may disappear completely even if it doesn't end up as a pile of rubble like the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.