Ancient World Review

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.

Conan The Barbarian Wouldn't Look Like Arnold Schwarzenegger

I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, one of the best American writers who ever lived. I like the movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, even the second one which is almost universally considered, with considerable justification, to be a piece of crap. The Conan of the movies is so radically different from the Conan of the Howard stories that they might as well be two different characters, but never mind that.

The scene in the clip above is from the first movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). It shows how Conan, enslaved as a child after his village was destroyed by the forces of the evil Thulsa Doom, was chained to a mill wheel and grew into a heavily muscled giant after years of pushing the wheel around in circles.

This scene always bothered me because it seems unlikely that pushing a wheel around like that would give you the physique of a world-class bodybuilder. It's possible, I guess, at least to a certain extent. This kind of labor would definitely strength your thighs and calves, and I suppose the pushing action would have some effect on your chest, back and other muscles, but would it turn you into The Arnold? Very doubtful.

There's also the question of nutrition here. Bodybuilding, even accidental bodybuilding, requires a good diet and I find it hard to believe that the slaves pushing that wheel were fed very well. I'm not sure how old the movie-Conan was supposed to be when he was first chained to the wheel, but he must have spent at least ten years pushing it around and around in all kinds of weather. In the real world I'm guessing all that repetitious slogging would have left him extremely thin, wiry and prematurely aged when they finally released him. And he probably would have had all kinds of knee and back problems.

Around the time Conan the Barbarian was made, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" with a 52" chest, a competition weight around 235 and an off-season weight around 260. (Source: Bodybuilding.com) The guy was flat-out monstrous and even though he had the genetics for size he didn't get that big on a slave's diet. Hard labor can give you mass and make you tough and strong (if it doesn't kill you) but the one thing it doesn't do is give you gigantic, well-defined muscles like a bodybuilder. That kind of physique requires a specific type of training and it's not the same thing as training for strength.

There's a big difference between bodybuilders like Arnold, who train for size and definition, and powerlifters, who train for strength. For example, the next video shows the Georgian powerlifter Lasha Talakhaze at the 2017 Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California. His build is a long, long way from Arnold's, but it's fairly typical of powerlifters I've seen.

Warriors in movies are usually shown as being extremely chiseled, but that kind of physique requires long sessions of targeted exercises in the gym. It's not the kind of body that a Viking farmer, for instance, or a Cimmerian like Conan would develop as a matter of course. In the stories, Howard describes Conan as being huge and muscular with amazing endurance and lightning reflexes. He can also move across a forest floor as "silently as a panther," a talent not usually associated with sheer mass. These qualities -- speed, size, stealth, fast reactions -- aren't usually found together. In and of themselves, they're not totally unrealistic, but even if Conan combined them all in one lethal package, he still wouldn't have looked like Arnold.

There's also the question of how good a fighter someone as big and muscular as Arnold would be. If you put a sword in his hand, he could probably do a lot of damage -- for a while -- but he would probably gas out pretty quickly because sustained fighting requires a lot of cardio conditioning and cardio tends to work against the bodybuilder's goal of size. Runners have a completely different kind of physique and a smaller, lighter opponent can usually run circles around a bigger, slower man. For example, the next video shows the notorious MMA fighter, Conor McGregor (around 155 pounds, depending), sparring around with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (400+ pounds), the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones.

They're just playing around here, but it's obvious that Björnsson could crush McGregor with his bare hands if he ever got hold of him in a real fight. It's also obvious that someone as big as Björnsson doesn't have the cardio to keep the conflict going for very long. If this was a sword fight, the lighter, faster McGregor could probably beat Björnsson if he could just stay out of his reach and wear him down long enough to get in close, something that probably wouldn't take very long. The heavier you are, the slower you are. It's the classic size-and-brute-strength vs speed-and-agility tradeoff. Smaller fighters have an advantage over bigger, heavier opponents if they know how to use it. This is how Bronn won the trial-by-combat against the heavily armored Sir Vardis Egan in Game of Thrones. It's also how the Viper almost beat the Mountain in GOT. Unfortunately for the Viper, he got cocky and that particular fight didn't end so well for him.

Getting back to Conan, though, what would someone like him look like in real life? That's hard to say. He would be big, certainly, and muscular, but he wouldn't have the kind of physique that Arnold had in his prime. There were no bodybuilding gyms (or steroids) in the Hyborean Age. Conan was fast as well as strong, so he wouldn't look like Lasha Talakhaze, either. If he did, his stamina and fighting abilities would be limited. A real-life Conan would be big, but not too big, and he would also be lean due to his diet and the generally harsh conditions of his life. He might look something like a extremely fast UFC heavy-weight (206+ pounds) fighter, but considering his speed and agility it seems more probable that he would fit into the light heavy-weight (186-205 pounds) category. In other words, he wouldn't be a giant.

All of this, of course, directly contradicts Howard's own descriptions of Conan. For example, in the classic novella Red Nails, Conan is said to be "almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown." In Queen of the Black Coast, he's described as a "tall powerfully built figure in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from which jutted bull's horns highly polished." In The Hour of the Dragon, he's a "mailed giant" and so on. He can move over a bed of dead leaves in complete silence and he's always bounding around, as "supple as a panther." In other words, Conan somehow manages to combine the muscularity and size of a heavyweight bodybuilder with the speed, reactions and endurance of a lightweight MMA fighter, not to mention the fact that he's highly intelligent, literate and a wise ruler with a strong sense of honor and chivalry towards the weak. All told, that's a fantastic collection of attributes not normally found in the real world; but he is, after all, a fantasy character, the greatest fantasy character ever created.

Scene from The Whole Wide World (2003), based on the life of Robert E. Howard.

The History Of Halloween

Comment: How accurate is this description of the origins of Halloween? It's hard to say. "The three main sources for Celtic religion are Romano-Celtic epigraphy and iconography, the comments of classical authors, and insular Celtic tradition as represented by recorded Irish and Welsh literature." Source: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed, revised.

From what I can tell, most of what we know about Celtic mythology was written down during the medieval period. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he Celtic peoples who maintained either their political or linguistic identities (such as the Gaels in Ireland, and the Brittonic tribes of Great Britain) left vestigial remnants of their ancestral mythologies, put into written form during the Middle Ages." (Emphasis added)

The Roman conquest and the gradual conversion of the Celts to Christianity created a kind of syncretic muddle that makes it difficult to separate the facts of Celtic religious practices from the myths that grew up around them. The problem is "one of reconciling [the] very different modalites and frames of reference [of the different sources], and of matching insular myth to Romano-Celtic image." (OCD)

The picture we have of the Celts is also complicated by Roman war propaganda, the most famous example of which is Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. Caesar, for instance, described the practice of human sacrifice by the Druids, though he probably never witnessed such a sacrifice himself. Apparently, there's still some question about whether these sacrifices actually occurred and, if they did, who was responsible for carrying them out:

"How widespread human sacrifice was among the cultures that the druids served is another mystery," according to Live Science (2014). "It’s important to note that much of the writing that survives comes from Roman writers who could be hostile toward the druids and the cultures they served." Historical distortions, if not outright fabrications, could have easily crept into the descriptions of the Celts recorded by Christians hostile to pagan practices in general.

The bottom line, I guess, is that we don't really know if our standard history of the origin of Halloween is accurate or a mixture of truth and legend complicated by distortions introduced by later writers. The only thing certain is that the rituals practiced by modern "neopagans" probably don't have much to do with real pagan rituals and beliefs.

Gentic Variation Of The Scythians On The Pontic-Caspian Steppe

Video from 2014. Part Two here.

"The genetic variation within the Scythian nomad group is so broad that it must be explained with the group assimilating people it came in contact with. This is shown in a new study on Bronze and Iron Age genetics of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, situated in the Black Sea region." Source: Science Daily.

"...The vast area of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe region has worked as a motor for demographic events throughout Eurasia, especially in the western part of the meta-continent. Crucial events in European history and prehistory can be traced back to people of the Steppe. Including the invention of horseback riding, chariots, a new type of warfare and the spread of Indo-European languages [1]."

[1] "The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) or steppe theory is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe, Eurasia and parts of Asia. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курган), meaning tumulus or burial mound." (Wikipedia)

Blood On The Deltoids: Conan The Barbarian

In the interests of improving my mind, I just watched Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer again, plus I've been reading the original Robert E. Howard stories, the later books by Robert Jordan, and the Dark Horse collections of the Savage Sword of Conan comics. This is all great stuff, even the second movie, which is generally panned as campy and too light for serious barbarian action. The Destroyer has its dopey moments, true--quite a few of them, in fact--but I've always been a sucker for stories about evil queens who try to bring ancient gods back to life so they can take over the world. Something always goes wrong, naturally, and they end up releasing monsters which turn on them and run amok. This same general plot was also used by Robert Jordan in his excellent novel "Conan the Triumphant," by the way. It never gets old.

DNA Of Early Alemannic Warriors Decoded

"Archaeologists recovered thirteen human skeletons, the remains of three horses and some excellently preserved grave goods of diverse origin. This burial, which was discovered near a Roman road not far from Ulm, is considered one of the most important Alemannic gravesites in Germany. The site consists of individual and multiple graves, from which it was hypothesised that the individuals had not all been buried at the same time. The molecular genetic investigations have now brought new details to light about the individuals and their final resting place in this high-ranking warrior type burial." Source: Science Daily.

The Valley Of The Thracian Kings

"The Valley of the Thracian Rulers is a popular name which was made public by the archaeologist Georgi Kitov and describes the extremely high concentration and variety of monuments of the Thracian culture in the Kazanlak Valley [in modern Bulgaria]. It is believed that there are over 1500 funeral mounds in the region, with only 300 being researched so far." Source: Wikipedia.

One of the spectacular discoveries made in this area, the Kazanlak Tomb, was discovered in 1944. According to Wikipedia, the "vaulted-brickwork 'beehive' (tholos) tomb ... is part of a large royal Thracian necropolis in the Valley of the Thracian Rulers near their ancient capital of Seuthopolis in a region where more than a thousand tombs of kings and members of the Thracian aristocracy can be found."

Video from 2011.

The Achaemenid Empire

"The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC), also called the (First) Persian Empire, was an empire based in Western Asia, founded by Cyrus the Great. Ranging at its greatest extent from the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, it was one of the largest empires in history, spanning 5.5 million square kilometers, and was larger than any previous empire in history." Source: Wikipedia.

The early history here is very murky and a lot of it seems to be based on one source: The Histories of Herodotus. Basically, Cyrus was originally a local monarch who revolted against the domination of the Median Empire. "According to the official story, the Achaemenid or Persian empire was founded by Cyrus the Great, who became king of Persis in 559 BCE and defeated his overlord Astyages of Media in 550." (Source: Livius.) Persis, aka Parsa or Persia, was the name of the region Cyrus controlled before he launched his rebellion.

According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, "We are told that Cyrus was the grandson of Astyages (1) on his mother’s side, but that did not stop him wanting to shake off the Median yoke. By 552 BCE, he had formed the Persian tribes into a federation and begun a series of uprisings. When the inevitable showdown with his grandfather came in 550 BCE, the Medes mutinied and joined Cyrus to march on [the Median capital city of] Ecbatana.

"Cyrus took the title ‘Shah [‘King’] of Persia’ and built a capital on the site of his victory, which he called Pasargadae, after his tribe. Winning the Medes over had landed Cyrus with a vague, sprawling empire of countless different peoples ..." In other words, Cyrus was now in charge of an early multicultural empire which, like all multicultural empires, was highly unstable and could only be held together with force.

(1) Astyages was apparently the son of the Median king Cyaxeres. It's unclear if Astyages ever became king himself, but one way or another Cyrus was directly related to the royal family of the Medes. This is just another example of the old adage that revolutions usually come from the upper strata of society.

Next video is a lecture about the Cyrus Cylinder, written in the name of Cyrus after the conquest of Babylon. Actual lecture begins at app. 6:30.

The Achaemenid empire was only the first in a series of imperial dynasties described collectively as the "Persian Empire." The rise and fall of the Achaemenids was so complex and turbulent that I'm not even going to try to summarize it here. Different rulers came and went, many of them poisoning their previous overlords and rivals only to be poisoned in turn themselves. By the time Alexander the Great invaded Asia Minor around 330 BC, the last Achaemenid king, Darius III, had taken control of the empire and was trying to subdue Egypt (again). "In the ensuing chaos created by Alexander's invasion of Persia, Cyrus's tomb was broken into and most of its luxuries were looted," according to Wikipedia. Alexander was supposedly horrified by this desecration and ordered the tomb to be restored, but this may have been an act of political theater to help establish his control.

Just to put all of this into perspective, the Achaemenid empire, the largest empire in the world up until then, only lasted for around 220 years. That's about the same length of time that the United States -- "the greatest country in the world" -- has been in existence. Two-hundred and twenty years is about 9 generations, assuming 25 years per generation. For most of those people, the Achaemenid empire was their entire world and it probably seemed like it would last forever. And who knows how many brave patriots died for their glorious nation in the service of Cyrus and his successors? Looking back on it now, it's easy to see that the empire -- like all empires and nation states -- was just a transient power coalition based on violence, as ephemeral as the weather. If nothing else, history teaches us that history itself is absurd.

Ancient Germanic Weapons

"German weaponry was the result of many years of inter-tribal wars, the lack of contact with any other culture from which new weapons could be acquired, and, as Tacitus and others tell us, the German difficulty in working with iron. Tacitus does not tell us why the Germans were poor iron smiths, but it is clear that they were far behind the Celts and Gauls, who were making chain mail armor superior to the Romans’ in the second century b. c. e . Roman sources note as well that only a few of the German warriors, probably their nobles or the best warriors, wore body armor or metal helmets." Source: Weapons and Warfare.

Ancient Black Ops - The Germanic Ghost Warriors

"The Harii ( West Germanic 'warriors') were, according to 1st century CE Roman historian Tacitus, a Germanic people [1]. In his work Germania, Tacitus describes them as using black shields and painting their bodies ... and attacking at night as a shadowy army, much to the terror of their opponents. Theories have been proposed connecting the Harii to the einherjar, ghostly warriors in service to the god Odin, attested much later among the North Germanic peoples by way of Norse mythology, and to the tradition of the Wild Hunt, a procession of the dead through the winter night sky sometimes led by Odin." Source: Wikipedia.

[1] "For their part, the Harii, besides the military might in which they surpass the peoples listed above, savage as they are, enhance their inborn ferocity by trickery and timing: their shields are black, their bodies stained, they choose dark nights for battles, and thus inspire terror with the shadowy horror of a ghostly army. None of their enemies can withstand that strange and so to speak hellish sight: for in every battle the men are overcome first." -- Tacitus, Germania. Quote from Celtic-Germanic Culture, Myth & History.