An Early Definition

I came across an interesting quote about degeneration today from a late nineteenth century book on biology:

Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world.

Sir E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism (1880), p.33. (link).

This paragraph is often quoted by replacing the words “an animal” by the words “a species” and then stopping at the word “Degeneration.” Thus in the Wikipedia article on Lankester. There the article’s author also adds the following: “Lankester extended the idea of degeneration to human societies, which carries little significance today, but it is a good example of a biological concept invading social science.” One would like to see why the definition does not apply to us. But, in any case, every author may interpret the past as he sees fit…

The general observation from history is that an expanding, energetic civilization tends toward decadence—not because it is fighting for survival but because it has achieved some form of lasting and extraordinary wealth. In our own case that wealth has taken the form of “energy slaves” traceable to fossil fuels. But the Roman case had its own parallel: living human slaves.  What that looked and felt like is rendered by Will Durant in Caesar and Christ, Simon and Schuster, 1944, pp. 111-112. The segment deals with an era known as the Agrarian Revolt in the Roman Republic, extending in time from 145 to 78 BC, thus the period immediately preceding the rise of Julius Caesar, who became the first emperor of Rome and thus closed the republican era of Roman history:

The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with the latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from  the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promise, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.

Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare to protect. Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea….

I’ve quoted this passage years ago now in a by-now-vanished version of LaMarotte. It seemed to fit today’s notion that there is a reasonably ordinary (if very huge and collective) explanation for the growing disorder in a society. Thinkers have been calling that “decadence” beginning in the late nineteenth century.

A Greek in Rome

Sometimes I feel as once a Greek might have felt in Rome. That thought surfaced sharply when I read Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution (see this earlier post). The author makes the case there that the Romans had little use for pure science; their consuming interest was power. Yesterday the same thought surfaced when a Japanese student commented on one of my forays into Mathematics on LaMarotte, namely calculation of the log of numbers by hand. My reader sent me notes on how the Japanese calculate square roots by hand. Initially the graphic did not make complete sense to me, hence I attempted to fill in the blanks using Google—and failed on that attempt much as I’d failed earlier on logs. But then came inspiration. I put my question into German and let Google rip again. I instantly had four quite useful answers in that language. Later my Japanese correspondent sent me more materials, not least a link to a Japanese website that—like those in German—took on the question in order to educate its young and (in my case) the venerably old.

Europe and America. Greece and Rome. Genuinely cultivated Romans, to be sure, spoke Greek and valued Greek learning. But Rome, at least until it split in two, was the center of the world. Greek immigrants were everywhere—many of them slaves of course. As Europeans flocked to America—but not as slaves, thank the Lord. Superior culture to one side, superior power to the other. The Greek in Rome must have felt both—and also experienced the ambiguity of that. Odd how an ancient experience now has a modern parallel. And as the United States behaves ever more imperially, the more that feeling intensifies, at least in me. Once the “country of immigrants” made me feel at home; now alienation grows apace—even as I realize that after sixty years of residence I would be quite at a loss in the Old Country unless I quickly mastered Turkish.

Hellenistic Science Rules

The best books come to me as gifts from my children. Michelle gave me The Forgotten Revolution, by Lucio Russo, for my birthday. It is subtitled “How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn.” The original in Italian appeared in 1996, the English version, Springer imprint, in 2004. Russo is an Italian historian of science, a physicist, and a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

This is a splendid and decidedly original work. Its thesis is that what we call modern science originated in full during the Hellenistic era and was essentially lost before that era ended thanks to the collision of Greek with Roman culture. The Romans had no interest in science; their focus was exclusively on power and administration. Science was reborn, and largely through the rediscovery of lost documents (many recovered only as Arabic translations from the Greek) beginning in the sixteenth century. One of his (for me) more fascinating observations is that our tendency to speak of the Graeco-Roman civilization as if it was a coherent whole is a coarse and ignorant blending of what were really opposites, an advanced civilization overcome and essentially buried under by a more primitive force.

Hellenism is typically dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the death of Cleopatra (30 BC), thus the onset of the decadent Roman imperial age. Russo thinks that the scientific era that began with Hellenism actually faded earlier, destroyed by Roman expansionism. He dates it to Rome’s conquest of Greece in the Battle of Corinth (146 BC —the same year that also saw Carthage destroyed). That date also roughly coincided with the Egyptian Ptolemy VIII’s rule (a monarch under Roman influence) who began the intense persecution of the Greek community in Alexandria (145-144 BC), a major center of Greek science.

Anybody interested in the history of science will find this book eye-opening. One of its valuable features is that it corrects a deeply rooted current view. It is that the ancients had discovered bits and pieces of science—but it required our genius to do the thing right. Russo’s view is that the Greeks had already done it—right, in other words. We are just now catching up with them. And in some ways some of our greatest (Newton) had still not caught the spirit of the thing and some of our more recent heroes (e.g. Niels Bohr) were again sliding away from the core insights of the Hellenists.

Reviving Poena Cullei?

Having just written a post on LaMarotte suggesting that finance reform should have taken draconian forms rather than the mild shape of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, it occurred to me while walking the dog (Katie-sitting for a bit) that we need not go back to 621 BC when the Athenian Draco put out his harsh code. We could stay closer to our own time and simply revive the Romans’ poena cullei. To be sure some changes are required to modernize this law. The punishment of the sack, as the Romans called it, only applied to parricides; hence we’d have to extend it to apply to financial malfeasance. No other details need to but could be changed. The sack, anciently of leather, could be made of modern canvas or very stout plastic. How did it work? Evidently the culprit was sown into a sack along with (1) a dog, (2) a cock, (3) a serpent, and (4) a monkey. Then he was thrown into deep water.

Academia tells me here that the punishment was last imposed in Germany in the eighteenth century—which is actually quite recent. And a thesis by someone evidently called Clark, at Xavier University, here, tells me that the authority for this punishment is, among others, Richard A. Bauman, specifically in his Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome, Routledge, New York, 1996. But the punishment was in my head because last night I had been reading Suetonius’ life of Augustus. That emperor, although evidently only temporarily, outlawed this sentence. And, reading on, I might also learn who had wisely revived it. We might be among those smart enough to do so again. Something ought to get Wall Street’s attention. Finally.

End of History: A Gloss

A review of Francis Fukuyama’s latest (The Origin of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution) and, coincidentally, a review of The Future of History by John Lukacs, both in the July 2011 issue of The American Conservative, set off a train of thought on the “end of history”: the thematic and title of Fukuyama’s best-known work.

The moment history ended, I immediately stopped reading books about history. Of course. Paradoxically, therefore, I didn’t actually read Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). To tell the truth I wasn’t even tempted. Fukuyama’s conclusion was that we had reached the end of “ideological evolution.” We’d finally reached the pinnacle. The infinite future hereafter would ever and always take the same perfect form achieved when the Cold War ended: western-style liberal democracy. It would rule and rule and rule…forever after. That being Fukuyama’s conclusion, it did not seem worth the bother to learn how he reached it.

But in thinking about the subject in the 1990s, and recently again, it occurred to me that a certain poetic truth attaches to Fukuyama’s verdict if we modify it just a little. From time to time and always when successive waves of civilization reach a certain level of “maturity” a point comes after which the energy of the culture has been spent and, all through its dreary decay, nothing really meaningful happens except slow-motion shatter. And in that sense history temporarily ends. The same old same old starts repeating if with increasingly unpleasant features.

Here I would propose that for the Graeco-Roman civilization the end of history came with Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, 49 BC. The dreary succession of caesars after that is essentially a featureless chaos. This state continued until finally a grown-up appeared again, Diocletian. He carved the Empire into four pieces round about 293—and with that history began again with the emergence of Christendom soon after.

The end of history for us? That we’re now living in such a featureless age is fairly evident to me, anyway. Should we date it from the end of World War II—Eisenhower our first Caesar? —and, by the way, a much more attractive Caesar in every way than Julius? The assassination of Kennedy? The end of the Cold War? Did George H.W. Bush actually proclaim it when he, quite intuitively, spoke of a New World Order? In the spirit of Fukuyama’s future eternal dispensation, I leave the solution to public opinion. Let an appropriate referendum be held and the end of history determined by two-thirds majority.

Notes on February

February, by my calculation, celebrates its two thousand seven hundred and twenty-fourth birthday today, the month having been introduced into the Roman calendar during the reign of, and by, Numa Pompilius (753-673 BC), the second king of Rome and the successor of Romulus. In 713 BC approximately, Numa introduced calendar reforms and added two months to a year that, until then, in the West, had only had ten months. The story is told by Livy (59 BC-17 AD) in these words—the only authority we have for this event. The quoted text is taken from here taken from a work titled Books From the Founding of the City, usually rendered Livy’s History of Rome.

And first of all he divided the year into twelve months, according to the revolutions of the moon. But since the moon does not give months of quite thirty days each, and eleven days are wanting to the full complement of a year as marked by the sun’s revolution, he inserted intercalary months in such a way that in the twentieth year the days should fall in with the same position of the sun from which they had started, and the period of twenty years be rounded out. [7] He also appointed days when public business might not be carried on, and others when it might, since it would sometimes be desirable that nothing should be brought before the people. [Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, Book 1, Chapter 19]

The two new months, January and February, were added, one at the beginning and one at the end of the year, thus ending up in reverse order, all in efforts more or less to bring the months into conformity with the lunar calendar. The solar year’s length, 365 days, was already known in Numa’s time. If we divide that number by 29 days for the lunar cycle (in actuality 29.5306), we get 12.36 months, hence adjustments must be made. Herewith some other arithmetic:

365 / 29.5306 days = 12.36 months — more than a third of a month too many.

365 - 29 = 336 days

336 days / 11 month = 30.5 days. From this we get the alternating 30 and 31 days for months, but with seven months having 31 and four having 30 days, for a total of 337 days. That leaves 28 days for the 12th months, February, which under Numa was also the last month. Now since the year is actually 365.25 days long, every four years an extra day is added—again in February, the odd lady out, as it were. We owe the observation of that quarter day slip to the Julian calendar, instituted by Julius Caesar (100-44 BC).

Now another problem arises. The actual solar year, the time of the earth’s actual orbit around the sun, is precisely measured to be 365.2425 days in length, thus not quite a quarter of a day a year longer than 365 days. The upshot is that adding a day to February every four years adds too much time to the calendar, about 11 minutes every fourth (leap) year. For this reason, and to compensate, we omit the leap year every 100 years—unless the year is evenly divisible by 400. The exception is that if a year is divisible both by 400 and 100 evenly, the 400 carries the day and the 100 year omission of the leap year is therefore not observed. Five examples:

Year	Divided by 400	By 100	By 4	Leap Year
2000	5	20	500	Yes
2012	5.03	20.12	503	Yes
2100	5.25	21	525	No
2200	5.5	22	550	No
2400	6	24	600	Yes

In the above I highlight the computation that determines the leap year itself. The rules: If evenly divisible by 400, always a leap year. If evenly divisible by 100, never a leap year except when also divisible by 400. If evenly divisible by 4, always a leap year unless also divisible by 100.

February is the oddest month—because it varies. And it was in that year that changes were made because it used to be the last month too. That changed in 452 BC when the then ruling powers in Rome, the decimvirs (“the Ten Men”—no feminism then) switched the positions of January and February—and the last became the second. The Ten Men, by the way, were a kind of constitutional committee with time-limited rule. When their time came to leave, they didn’t want to (surprise!) and had to be forced out of office…

The Scale's the Thing

The strange thing to your left is the photo of something like a map; it is called the Rand McNally Histomap of World History, by John B. Sparks. It purports to show the relative importance of nations and empires 1950 B.C. to 2000 A.D. This object hung on the back of the door, the door into my office—when I still had an office outside the home—and on the rare occasions when I closed that door, the large pink blob in the center of this histomap reminded me of the Glory That Was Rome. — Did so, indeed, until, on one occasion, I looked at the graphic seriously and discovered that the image did not have a horizontal scale.

I dug out the rolled up copy again this morning. I had been reading Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet, a philosophical work) in which our poet urges us (Chapter 4, Book 4) to accept the concept of an imperial ruler because Rome’s preeminence had led to God’s own approval of the Latin people as the exemplars of mankind.

That claim then reminded me of my retired map; I found it on a shelf. But over all these years I had forgotten about the missing scale at the bottom of this curious object. Indeed, if you accept John Sparks’ imaginative scaling, Rome does seem, during this vast expanse of time, to be by far the largest single domain ever to grace the globe. Then, sitting down at the machine again to consult the oracle about the scale once more—thinking that in the intervening time I had become so much more skilled at Googling that I would be successful now—I discovered that the missing scale is missing still. What had changed, in the meantime, is that lots of people had discovered this lack and had made their displeasure known. Too bad.

I had fairly recently looked at population data reaching back into antiquity and discovered in that process that Sparks could not have used headcounts to size his empires and realms. Not enough menaningful data. He may have used geographical extent—but surely, with Rand McNally as his publisher, someone there should have reminded him to note the fact. Yes, at its greatest extent Rome’s footprint pretty much covered Europe and bits of Africa and Asia, but how much territory did China then occupy—and India? Their populations, by guess and by golly, must have been quite large even then.

Well, too bad. We carry mental maps and censuses inside our heads—and in Dante’s world the memory of Rome, and the more recent memory of Charlemagne’s empire, still loomed very large. And, to be sure, Dante (1265-1321) might have known of Marco Polo (1254-1324) but may not have read Polo’s Il Milione; he was busy writing his own opus and may have written his Convivio (finished circa 1307) before he had heard of Kublai Khan.

The second photo shows the histomap from closer up, focus on Rome—as it usually is here in the West as we look back in time. Great realm! But without a scale, how can we know for sure that Octavian ascended the throne of empire with a nod from on High? If Dante had studied China, however, he might well have added the useful concept of The Mandate of Heaven to his arguments in Chapter 4, Book 4.

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If you can stomach the price, Amazon will sell you this item even today: Histomap of World History.

Empire Now and Then

In Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso, we enter a high heaven, that of Jupiter, where warrior saints have their space of manifestation. And up there, in a sphere already bright and silvery (the sixth of seven heavens) bright lights—but these lights are alive, they are the warrior saints—conjoin to print out a command in Latin, in the sky as it were, which means “Love justice, ye that judge the earth.” The final word of this command ends in the word TERRAM, and that word of course ends in M. Now as the canto develops, the lights begin to transform the final M of the command into the image of the Roman Eagle—a symbol that somewhat resembles the letter if the bird’s wings are lowered; you need but add a neck and head and elaborate the descending lines into wings and tail.

In Dante’s day the Roman Empire was dead, dead, dead—and I mean like the dodo. And its nostalgic revival, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, just would not, would not hold together. But we are at a point (early fourteenth century) when the Renaissance is dawning. The world was turning its face toward the sensory; a great nostalgia for the glory that was Rome possessed our poet. He elaborates this feeling throughout the Divine Comedy, and he also elaborated it in less poetic form in his book on monarchy. Therefore this symbol of military power, might, and conquest is made to appear in a very high heaven. And nothing happens in those heavens without the absolute sanction of God. Therefore this eagle, and emphatically the Roman eagle, is a symbol of God.

The passionate and thick entwinement between this and a projected transcendental world is a characteristic aspect of Dante’s work—and greatly amusing to discover how very thickly populated with Italians are hell, purgatory, and paradise. Amusing to discover how keenly the noble, high, and long-since departed concern themselves with what we would now call the sordid, grimy politics of a corrupt era—or perhaps Dante’s visit gave them a welcome respite from the tedium of perpetual divine contemplation?

In any case, that damned Eagle startled me—not that I hadn’t gotten a bit uneasy in the pursuit of Paradise already. My view of Empire is much darker than Dante’s. I’m not taking my cue about Rome from Virgil, who wrote as Empire was just beginning and had barely any track record as yet. I see the whole bloodstained brutal history of Empire and live in a time that trends in the same direction once again. And of course, quite like Dante, I make the foolish mistake of looking backward with nostalgia to medieval and earlier times, entirely overlooking fact, seeing only those things that appeal. Recognizing this sort of habitual perception as a mere climate of emotions, waking up in the morning as I did, sobered and irritated, makes me sympathetic to a gnostic view served straight in a shot-glass.
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Image from the the Chauvin family linage site.

More Notes on the "Divide"

Several posts on Ghulf Genes deal with economics, always in a more or less cultural context; I tend to deal with the subject at a more technical/practical level on LaMarotte. Two entries in particular, one on wealth and one on disposable income have touched upon what I perceive as a gradually evolving divide in society. In both of these cases the mere presentation of the data consumed the space that I allocate per entry, a kind of limit I impose based on personal habits of reading things on a screen: too long and I get restless. But a consequence of that limitation is that I never get to the point that I am after, which is to ponder the underlying factors that produce the situation I spend so much time describing.

As I look back fifty years or so, it seems to me that the great divide began to open up at around the time when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Certainly from the time when I arrived here as an immigrant in 1951 until 1989 when the wall fell, the country underwent a kind of cultural winter. The spontaneous development, the natural life-cycle, of our civilization was suspended during that time—and resumed when the threat of the Communist menace retreated. Ample signs of relaxation began to appear in the early 1960s already, usually associated with youth and hippies. But at the more organized levels of society, the release of tensions awaited the Reagan years. And afterwards Western Civilization—more here than in Europe—resumed its natural vector. All right. This is a personal take. The official or ambient narrative is still that of Progress. Therefore whatever comes out of the future is by definition better, and the coming of the New World Order, the avalanche of technology, the waves of commercialization, the rights revolutions falling over themselves in a rush to ecstatic fulfillment—all this is viewed in positive ways. I try to view all this, including the dangerous cleft I see opening in the society, in a neutral way: before a higher civilization is rooted, the old one must pass away. Hence I ought to praise all signs of breakup. The sooner done, the sooner over. At the same time, I foresee that the future will be ugly; from a strictly rational point of view, I’d like to get there with as little damage to as many people as possible.

The core aspect of the divide, as I see it, is the disaffiliation of the major elements of the society, particularly of the haves and the have nots, a cultural-war in the making. The onset of this cleavage is clearly visible in the sharp drop in marginal tax rates applicable to the wealthy that took place during the Reagan administration. The rate fell by 30 percentage points in the 1981-1989 period. To see a quite revealing graphic showing fifty years of tax rates, I refer you to my post today on LaMarotte. In that post I also argue that high taxes benefit the whole population whereas low taxes benefit elites—another way to talk about the cultural cleavage.
One makes these observations because the picture that opens is fascinating. The practical aspects of such a blog, I fear, are nil. I’m engaged in contemplation rather than advocacy. The phenomena that I’m observing are beyond personal influence, as I think currently unfolding history will show. But what it is likely to show, in the longer reach, will be, I think, rather surprising. In the long haul the left will win, believe it or not. But not in the way in which, perhaps, we anticipate the outcome.

The parallel I now evoke is that of Rome—and that culture because it is the one most accessible to me. Rome’s “world wars” were a combination of the Punic Wars (Rome v. Carthage, Hannibal and Elephants, etc., 264-146 BC, in three separate waves) and the concurrent Macedonian Wars (the conquest of Greece, in four separate conflicts, 215-148 BC). In the wake of these vast and draining conflicts, Roman was left in sole possession of the world—at least as things then looked from Roma. But thanks to the enormous wealth that then began to flow from the possessions that Rome acquired, the same process of social division that I detect taking place here (under the slogans of Freedom, Markets, and Capitalism) began in Rome. The process featured a very powerful and wealthy ruling class and a population of ordinary people increasingly impoverished. Impoverished how? Imported slave labor displaced the ordinary farmer and craftsman. Within fifty-five years of the final defeat of Carthage began what is known as the Social War. The actual disturbances lasted only briefly (91-88 BC), but the processes that then began continued to be violent and eventually led to the fall of the republic. We would today label the two sides Right and Left: the propertied ownership class and the ordinary plebs. The leadership of both came from the aristocracy. Eventually the left, in the figure of Julius Caesar, won the field. Caesar? A lefty? Absolutely. We think of him as an emperor, but he came from a so-so neighborhood in Rome. You know. Small shops, modest houses, a brothel here and there. He was of noble background, poor, but he had lots of talent. And he was on the side of the people against the Establishment. Enantiodromia is one of my favorite Greek words: it means a process that transforms something into its very opposite. The Roman Empire was a left-wing enterprise that never again, after Augustus took power, let the wealthy oligarchs even touch, never mind hold, the reins of power.

This Conquest May Be Hazardous to Your Culture

Flet victus, victor interiit. The conquered mourns, the conqueror’s undone.
[Roman proverb]

When this old saw is carefully unpacked, a task historians routinely accomplish long after each major upheaval, it turns out that conquerors are transformed by their victories and the culture of the conquered ultimately triumphs. We speak of a Graeco-Roman culture because Rome conquered Greece in a contest that extended over fifty-five years and ended in 146 BC. In the wake of that conquest wave after wave of Hellenistic culture transformed Rome permanently. And we, mostly descendants of the barbarians who, in the late and morbid stages of the Roman Imperium, invaded and conquered Italy, absorbed its superior culture and became its inheritors by a kind of osmosis.

Remembering this sort of thing is unavoidable for folks like me who grew up head down over big thick books—and our minds filled with the nightmare from which James Joyce tried to awaken—when we note the preparations for withdrawal from Shiite Iraq just as we step up our efforts to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A while back now I read a book entitled What Is Life? written by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in which the authors present the fascinating hypothesis that evolution proceeded in part by creature eating creature, thus by conquest, as it were. To be sure, this was not the only mechanism of change, but it is thought to be one. Ingested creatures, if small enough, may find a new home inside their eater and sink anchor into the alien soil and turn into symbionts. My own earlier excursions into the nightmare of biology (echoing Joyce) had prepared me to accept this. The presence in the cell of mitochondria, little structures with their own DNA and reproductive cycles, little oxygen-generating power plants that supply the cell’s energy, seemed to say that cells have immigrants who came from elsewhere.

Other examples from a larger scale aren’t hard to find. In the New York Times the other day (June 30, 2009) is a brief story headlined When a Hybrid Takes Hold, The Outcome Can be Bad. Hybridization. The story deals with a new hybrid salamander produced in Salinas Valley in California when barred tiger salamanders, brought to the region from Texas by bait dealers, escaped and began to mate with the native California tiger salamanders. The resulting larvae, which are the food of the California newt and the Pacific chorus frog, were radically different and nearly did in all the frogs. New hybrids are sometimes indigestible, and not just in this case.

This, in turn, reminds me of “as above, so below”—which might be extended to say, “and in the middle too.” If we don’t want our culture to change, therefore, we must avoid both conquest and absorption—and we mustn’t mate with folks our parents don’t approve of. Good luck…

Of Brains, Cars, Romans, and Phoenicians

Today’s headline in the Detroit Free Press was A NEW LEASE ON LIFE—a curious way of marking the fact that Chrysler has fallen into bankruptcy.

Almost instantly my brain presented an association that immediately made sense, but not quite in a lineal and therefore obvious way.

I remembered a rather impressive scene that Gibbon described—but it might have been Mommsen. It’s the account of an event during the second Punic War when Hannibal, in an attempt to relieve pressure on his forces elsewhere, moved on the city of Rome itself. According to this account, the Romans arrayed a large force in front of the city in splendid formation, standards lifted high, sunlight reflecting from shining armor, shields, etc. The Romans also engaged in what we’d call psychological warfare today. They managed to leak word to Hannibal’s forces that a large piece of land the Carthaginian army was then occupying had just changed hands in Rome, and at a very decent price… Stiff upper lip! In your face! We shall overcome!

To be sure, Rome was a formidable obstacle Hannibal couldn’t have taken in any case except, perhaps, at catastrophic cost. So far as I know, the only people ever to overrun Rome were some early Celts (take note John); but even they failed to take the last fortified tower. And being barbarians, they didn’t know what to do with the city and moved out again. Hannibal, in any case, was merely engaging in scare tactics, trying to move public opinion, hoping, perhaps, to produce hysteria he could exploit. The stand-off continued until Hannibal finally marched off to the south, “no shot having been fired,” as it were.

Why this image as a mental echo of the day’s headline? Because deep down I reacted to the headline with a feeling: I wanted a more dignified, a more elevated, and less servile and crawling sort of response to the grim news of fate that had reached Motown yesterday. And my brain immediately and obligingly fetched from my memory the nearest available and most vivid example of a dignified public response to a major threat: Rome marshalling its spirits in response to Hannibal who, by that time, had savaged Spain, marched north, through Gaul, crossed the Alps, beaten Rome in two stiff battles (as I recall) and now stood before the gates. The real state of mind inside the walls of Rome was actually fear and trembling—but those in charge rallied and made a great show. And that’s how I really wanted Detroit to take the news. With dignity. But that response was still a coil of feeling inside me. It hadn’t unpacked its meaning yet when picture was already there.

Chrysler almost went bankrupt thirty years ago. The government and the leadership of Leo Iacocca (a Ford guy) saved the company then. Next a German automaker (Daimler) made a stab at it. Then venture capitalists thought they’d pretend to love the cars in order to grasp Chrysler’s financial organ. Now it is the government again, and an Italian firm (Fiat) who are the saviors. Look. This is just a corporate entity. Let’s help Chrysler’s labor element find new ways of making a living. But enough of the dance macabre. A new lease on life? A better iron lung? — As you can see, my brain obligingly serves up images as my inner vision surveys this scene of mayhem.

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A note or two for the younger reader. Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Theodor Mommsen was a German scholar, Nobel Prize winner, and one of the best-known historians of Rome. He wrote History of Rome, which covers the period from the origins of the city to the time of Caesar in three volumes. The fourth, about the imperial period, never got done. — The wars of Rome with Carthage were called the Punic wars because the Carthaginians were supposedly Phoenicians, and the Romans referred to them as Punici; hence Punic. The Phoenicians were traders originating in what is now Lebanon. They colonized an area across the Mediterranean which is now Tunis. That’s where Carthage was. But the name Phoenician had followed them to Africa. Hannibal’s stand before Rome took place in 211 B.C.: one long time that that one image has lasted to inform a modern man about the loss of a relatively minor battle in the War of Cars.