More on Roman Emperor Caligula!

I suppose this post should be called "go back to original sources" because in the course of researching the seven or eight ancient accounts of his reign, I sure do get a different picture of him.

Most of the modern constructions of his reign must use a single definitive scholarly work written in the last century or so, as they all follow the same standard lines; Caligula emerged from illness and went crazy, with his mental illness manifested at first by humiliation of important people and culminating in his desire to be worshipped as a god.  It is this latter act that seems to be the justification for assassinating him, given standard accounts of his reign.

The problem is this modern research, portrayed through pop culture or documentaries, are wrong.  Flat, dead, completely wrong!

Omitted from most accounts of Caligula's 4 years as Emperor are the fact that the ancient sources all mention he restarted democratic elections.  Also omitted, that the ancient sources talk about how democracy was a bad thing.  Seriously, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Philo write that putting elections once again "in the hands of many . . . aggrieved the sensible" or that wise men recognized that when more people vote "many intrigues result."  The ancient sources of his reign were against democratic elections!  We must recognize that the ancient sources do not share our cultural values, and as such, call their objectivity into question.

There are exactly two. . . TWO sources, Philo of Alexandria and Seneca, who were alive at the same time as Caligula.  The others write more than 60 years later, largely drawing on anecdotal accounts of the time period from people who had stories about the man.  People who likely were not alive during the period, and if they were, could only have been children at the time Caligula ruled Rome.

They had to draw on anecdotal stories because the official records present from all other imperial eras, consisting of official senate records, notes made by the college of pontiffs, etc, were destroyed by Caligula's successor, Emperor Claudius.  Suetonius notes this destruction in his account of Claudius's reign.  Why were the records destroyed, if Caligula was the madman and tyrant history has claimed he was?

If we use the ancient sources to create a rough timeline we can place specific events within them, relating one thing to another, referencing common details with known events, and get a better picture of Caligula.  A glaring example of how history is wrong: caligula ordered his statue placed in temples, prompting the claim he thought he was a god, but did so in the second year of his reign.  We know this because Philo of Alexandria tells us Caligula's governor in Alexandria was in the 5th year of a 6 year term as governor when Tiberius died and Caligula became Emperor.  A year later this governor stirred up unrest against the jewish population of Alexandria, and Philo was appointed to petition Caligula for a release from this oppression.  While he was in Rome, having made the trip during a "tempestous" season on the Mediterranean, Philo gets word that Caligula has ordered his statue put in the temple of Jerusalem.

We know from other ancient accounts that the emperor's man in Jerusalem dithered for another year about putting the statue up, and that when Caligula returns from spending a season with his troops just prior to his assassination, he told the governor of Judea to forget the idea of putting the statue up.  So we see that during the time that he was to have had the idea, just before being killed, and offering justification for it, he was telling people not to worry about putting his statue up anymore.

I've seen many "experts" perpetuate myths about the man.  The experts are wrong, and so clearly wrong that the only excuse for it is they are using the same scholarly source material, rather than consulting the ancient sources directly and thinking critically.

On the future of the American economy

Lets assume that whatever next big idea that might pull the economy out of its slump will not be manufactured, since anything that can be made will be made overseas.  The jobs that remain will likely be service jobs, which require little to no skills in most cases.  High paying and skilled exceptions would be medical, which require an investment in education and face-to-face interaction that cannot be outsourced.  However, most service work is low to no skilled labor, with its paltry pay and benefits.

What are the implications of this?

Workers will not be able to afford their own homes.  Their parents, struggling to retire, will likely leave nothing for them to inherit short of the house they die in.  Renting will be the way most will house themselves, but those accommodations will prove expensive when demand will be so high.  In time, it will be difficult for children to leave the home at all, which will prove advantageous in the end.  Aging parents will have family to take care of them in their advanced years, and children will not need to resort to daycare to watch their kids. In short, the family unit will return to what has been the norm for most of human history, to say nothing of American history.

The idea that once a child has graduated from school they should set out on their own came along with the rise of cities, which were structurally unsuited for multiple generations to live in one unit.  In the US, home ownership became possible in the years following the first and second World Wars as America's economy produced the goods that the world demanded while Europe rebuilt.  By the 1970s these European and Asian nations recovered sufficiently to be our economic competitors, and the workforce adjusted.  In pursuit of ever cheaper labor to drive up profits, companies hired immigrants, and eventually outsourced labor overseas.  The boom economic years were unsustainable, since by the 70s our factories had competition.  The wages and guaranteed lifetime employment for those that fought the wars allowed a standard of living that cannot be realized today.

The tax base will shrink as well, as high paying jobs become a rarity, and the reliance on government support will strain the social safety net further.  The notion that graduates should immediately leave home and incur a lifetime of debt in order to support an unsustainable fantasy is both financially harmful and psychologically stressing.  Much better to recognize the reality, and carry on the tried and true practice of having multiple generations live together!

Everyone will benefit from it.

Egypt's Greatest Pyramids Are Not Tombs

Numerous myths about the Giza pyramids have been dispelled through archaeology; that they were not built by slaves, Jewish or otherwise, would be the most prominent example.  A worker's village was uncovered that included communal eating areas, housing, and cemeteries that indicated the workers were compensated for their tremendous efforts.  Remains in the cemetery include signs that injuries were treated, and broken bones mended in what was top-notch medical care for the day.  The graves of supervisors listed their job titles, and the topmost bureaucrats had elaborate inscriptions in tombs designed for them.  Work crews labeled stones in the pyramid themselves, and inscriptions indicate various crews competed against each other with prizes and honors for the greatest number of stones laid.  In fact, the workers' presence is so well documented through graffiti and grave inscriptions in the cemeteries that surround the pyramids, their number and obvious pride in their work underscores the lack of official inscriptions to support the idea that they were built as tombs for a single pharaoh.

Take Khufu's pyramid, for example.  The only sign that structure is linked to Khufu comes from graffiti hidden in the upper parts of what has been called the "king's chamber" that was not meant to be seen.  It was only by tunneling through ceiling stones in pursuit of treasure that early European explorers even found these structural voids, the uppermost of which contains the stained words "friends of Khufu" or something to that effect, designating which work crew set the stone.  What Egyptologists call the king's chamber, thought to be the resting place of Khufu's remains before grave robbers and looters cleared the room, doesn't contain a single heiroglyph or inscription to note the occupant of the tomb.  Choose any of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and the walls are decorated with stories depicting the king in life, scenes of battles, family, or other achievements.  Pick any obelisk or temple, and within minutes you can locate the name of the king that erected it as well as their reasons for doing so.  None of the three great pyramids contain the same inscriptions.  Even the stone sarcophagus in Khufu's pyramid is devoid of word of its supposed occupant.  An obelisk erected in a few months is covered in inscriptions, but a mountain of stone erected by men over an estimated 20 years for the singular purpose of giving the king a final resting place contains none?  What gives?

There is a school of thought that the pyramids were actually public works projects.  With their alignment on the compass, as well as shafts pointed at various contellations, the pyramids could be intepreted as "resurrection machines" built to allow a person a speedy transition to the afterlife.  Used by the royal family, but open to use from others as well, a body would likely rest in the pyramid for a particular length of time, before their mortal remains are interred in the necropolis that surrounds the pyramids.  In the case of royalty, perhaps their bodies would move on to the Valley of the Kings after ceremonies in the pyramids.  Given the lack of inscription or claim of ownership, the public works idea makes sense.  If they were built for community uses, no individual's name would belong on the project.  It also explains why Khufu's alleged sarcophagus has no lid; rather than being taken away by grave robbers (silly on its face since it would have been tremendous in weight, with little monetary value) there in fact was no lid, since the sarcophagus was not meant to be sealed.

As a final note, under this new paradigm the roles ascribed to the various chambers need to be
reassessed, since the roles were created with the idea that this was the final resting place for a king and his queen.

Fractal geometry

The shapes created by fractal geometry are infinitely repeating shapes that compose a whole that look just like any part of that whole.  Zoom in on any part of a fractal shape and that small part looks just like the larger shape.  Zoom in on part of that part, and it too looks like the larger shapes, and so on into infinity.

It is thought that nature works using fractal geometry, where investigation of any part will reveal insight into the larger whole.  With this in mind, I have been struck by night time flights over metropolitan areas and how the layout of the lights look like galaxies in the abstract.  With the terrestrial real estate between metropolitan areas invisible in the dark, the light from cities could easily be mistaken for a trip through the universe.

The composite images of the world at night, with population centers glowing and tendrils of light connecting them composed of smaller cities, remind me of maps of galaxy clusters and universal distributions of matter.  These maps in turn remind me of maps of neural connections in the brain.  The small is the big is the small again; the pieces look just like the whole.

On "civilization"

After the fall of the Roman Empire came a period history refers to as The Dark Ages.  The area and people formerly under the yoke of Rome dissolved into smaller organizational units, while the technological achievements of the empire decayed; roads, aqueducts, etc that allowed Roman society and culture to flourish.  The label of this period of dissolution betrays some paradigms--calling it "dark" implies that what came before was light; that the loss of an oppressive centralized plutocracy was bad, while "local control" was somehow a step backward culturally or technologically.  History seems to have the opinion that the period beyond Roman rule in Europe was a loss of civilization, a return or regression to barbarism.

This makes me wonder what "civilization" as an historic label is exactly. The period following the gradual decline (rather than the historically preferred word "fall") of Rome is rather marked by a realignment of political structures.  The strong, centralized political force of the Emperor and aristocratic plutocracy run from a single European city dissolved into something almost tribal in nature.  Through competition for resorces these many parts congealed into the kingdoms that would dominate the Middle Ages, but did so largely along the cultural lines that Rome was supposed to have erased.  These kingdoms, in turn, looked geographically similar to the nation-states of Europe today, even after several political experiments tried to forge smaller areas into larger political structures (the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon, the first and second World Wars).  The Roman labels of areas such as Gaul and Germania are largely France and Germany, with border areas fractured into smaller nation-states such as Belgium, Switzerland and Austria.  It is these border areas that have been cause for conflict throughout European history.

So if the cultures of these areas have been able to remain largely distinct despite attempts to merge them into larger political structures over centuries, what civilization was Rome offering that didn't already exist, and what was lost when Rome declined?

The key may be in the political structures.  While cultural norms were maintained within regions controlled by the Roman Empire, Rome imposed political norms on conquered territory.  What are these political norms? A standardization of political structures.  This standardization of political structures allowed the dissemination of Rome's political will, but also of how "the state" provides for its citizens.  This required Rome's standard answers; technological achievements, entertainment, judiciary, coinage, and so forth which influenced but did not, or could not, supplant cultural aspects and ties.  At its core, the Roman system offered standardization.  The period that followed Rome's influence was decidedly unstandardized, politically speaking, but not culturally.  So what is "civilization?"  Political standardization, simply put.

This raises the question about the many smaller political units that emerged as Europe found its own way; did these smaller units, almost tribal in nature, not have internal standardized political structures as well?  And given this standardization, were they not civilization?  Historians would argue they were not, due to paradigms about size and complexity of societies, but where the line is drawn to define what is big and complex versus small and simple is another arbitrary distinction.  As I've demonstrated in many posts, arbitrary markers are signs that no marker exists at all, functionally
speaking.

At best, civilization is the ability to impose political standardization on a society, regardless of cultural distinctions, size, or complexity.  At best.  At worst, it is a meaningless label full of arbitrary distinctions that are meaningless in themselves, and does nothing to further our understanding of human organizations, past or present.

Confirmation

I have written about the need to embrace complexity and the limitation of labels, and how so much of our world refuses to be bound in discrete categories but rather occurs as a spectrum, or a continuum. The December issues of Scientific American and Wired contain articles that support this contention.  Wired demonstrates the problem of defining a species as needed to save it under the Endangered Species Act, while Scientific American writes about how the quantum world is not quantum (not discrete particles) but a continuum of wave action.

The Scientific American article author even uses my example of Pluto to make his point that nature is continuous and that where we draw distinctions in science is arbitrary.  Some interesting highlights: if we break a "particle" into three component smaller pieces, was the original "particle" a discrete parent particle, or was it always those three smaller pieces? The author describes a particular fermion that if you could hold it and turn it 360 degrees would find it was something completely different.  To get back to the original fermion, you would in fact have to turn it 720 degrees, meaning that the fermion doesnt exist in just 3 dimensional space as we define it.

The wired article describes efforts to save a small population of fish in an aquifer at the edge of Death Valley.  Due to shrinking populations which have nothing to do with human activity, but rather environmental pressures (as one would expect of a fish that makes its home at the edge of Death Valley), the population has reached a point where genetic diversity is so small that mutations will doom the fish to extinction.  The possibility of breeding the fish with larger populations of relatives from elsewhere would make that genetic line extinct, but save the notion of having fish in this particular aquifer.  The idea that the offspring of the two different fish populations would be a hybrid is challenged by the fact that the two populations are more genetically similar than I am with a person from Kenya.  Again, given the genetic similarity, the two populations may not actually be seperate species after all, in which case breeding them for the survival of one population isn't such a bad idea, but challenges their place on the Endangered Species List at all making saving them less a question of saving a species but rather preserving their location in this particular aquifer.  In short, we dont have a good definition of what constitutes a species, but the old Linnean system of counting scales and fins  is wholly insufficient given our understanding of genetics.  And using genetics, which offer so many places to draw arbitrary lines as to be useless, demonstate the continuous nature of animal life from single cells to complex organisms such as ourselves.

Interesting!

Why Caligula may have been Rome's greatest Emperor

No doubt this idea deserves a lengthier discussion than I can provide here.  Just based on a cursory read of Suetonius and a semester of Roman history in college, paired with a lifelong interest in modern politics, I think Caligula has suffered from a common problem; history is written by the winners.  He sought early to endear himself to the political establishment, but turned on them and sought to destroy the power and control structures he came to regard as oppressive.  That he was assassinated should make the fact that he was a threat to the establishment self-evident, but the victors were successfully able to spin his behavior as madness, cruelty, and wanton unprovoked violence.  Caligula's image as crafted by those who hated him (and killed every member of his family, for good measure) is hardly helped by the crappy pornographic movie made to illustrate his reign in the 1970s.

If one reads Suetonius as a skeptic, realizing how modern political opponents portray each other in the worst possible light, Caligula takes on the color of a profound reformer.  The historical record shows Caligula was his predecessor's plaything at any early age, and grew up in an environment where he was exposed to the worst of the Roman system and aristocratic oppression.  At some point he was taken under the wing of Tiberius, as opposed to simply being his toy, who then showed young Caligula the political ropes.  Upon the death of Tiberius, the Senate heaped titles and power on Caligula to ingratiate themselves with him.  Caligula probably believed the leading citizens of Rome thought well of him and truly embraced him, given the arc of his childhood abuse, and he returned their generosity.  Then he got sick.

No doubt without a chosen successor or heir, Caligula's family and political allies jostled for position while the rumors flew that he was near death.  The extended illness would have allowed plots to rise and fall, contingency plans made and broken.  When he unexpectedly recovered and took the lay of 
the land, he saw the sycophants, political opportunists and power hungry for what they were.  He may have even thought he'd been poisoned.  He saw that greed was what motivated the leading elite, and was disgusted.

In response to the collapse of the illusion he lashed out.  He made a political statement with the joke about appointing his horse Consul, he killed political enemies and took the source of their family power--inherited wealth.  He took on the military by humiliating them at the English channel, he took on the temples and religious authorities. Yet the average Roman citizen had nothing to fear from him.  he never pulled a poor person out of a crowd and had him killed just for pleasure; he instead often gave Romans large sums of money and held many entertaining and extravagant games to please them.  He surrounded himself not with slaves with whom he could do as he wished, nor rich elites, but freed slaves, men and women he had liberated from bondage.

As the plots against him grew, he realized the only way he could be free to remake the political, economic and social structures of Rome would be to move the Capitol off the Italian peninsula.  Alexandria, established as a center of knowledge in the ancient world by the Ptolemies, provided the answer; Roman Senators were forbidden by law to travel there, and the aristocratic elites would have to upset their political power structures and generations of tributes and favors to move there.  It was not madness but necessity that drove Caligula to want to move the Capitol of the Empire to Egypt.  It was less a symptom of Caligula's illness, more a sign of someone who wanted to destroy the establishment.  This threat was a step too far, and Caligula was assassinated for it.  And not just he but everyone else who could succeed him was killed, with the exception of one, who was named Emperor by the guard in a power grab in defiance of the aristocratic elites who plotted the attack.  As rumors of his death spread, rather than joy in the streets history records average Romans turned out in droves and held vigil at Caligula's palace.  This is not the sign of a man as hated by the public as he was by the aristocrats who profited from the inequities of the Roman system and were victims of his reign.

It was those aristocrats, and the puppet of the Praetorian Guard who succeeded him, who wrote the  historical record of that era.