LA to New York
This is very cool: a time lapse video of a road-trip from Los Angeles to New York. Try to name the places you see in it. (Requires Windows Media Player.)
Via Kevin.
Ethnicity in Late Antique Italy
An enticing book arrived at my office yesterday: Patrick Amory’s People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge, 1997). More than any other book I’ve read in the past year, this should help me get some clarity on my thesis.
It’s difficult to express my excitement about something many people would consider a dry, boring monograph.
Now if only the semester would end, I could get to work.
Work in Progress
This past summer I read Michael Kulikowski’s excellent book, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities (Baltimore, 2004). I’m hoping to write a longer note on the book soon, but for now I’ll give just a few short comments. Kulikowski, like Peter Brown and others, downplays the idea of a general third century crisis. He admits that for the elite the third century was a tumultuous time, but questions whether the crisis in the imperial administration would have had the large-scale economic and social impact that many other scholars claim it did. Kulikowski looks at the archeological record first, primarily because of the lack of written sources, to try to detect signs of continuity in the urban society of late antique Spain. Starting in the fifth century, literary sources, although sparse, can begin to add to the picture. Kulikowski continues his study of Spain up to the mid-seventh century. Overall, I found Kulikowski’s claims plausible and impressively argued. The book is very well written with excellent endnotes and bibliography. I only wish I had time to write a more comprehensive review right now.
After reading Kulikowski’s book, I began reading Rachel L. Stocking’s Bishops, Councils and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589-633 (Ann Arbor, 2000). Stocking starts her book just a few decades before the Visigothic conversion from Arian Christianity to Catholicism in 589. The events in the decade before the conversion, around 580 under king Leovigild, are fascinating. Particularly interesting was the new statement of Arian belief that acknowledged the Son as coeval with the Father (while still rejecting the Spirit as part of the Godhead). Stocking’s primary focus really begins with the famous Third Council of Toledo in 589, and she uses the extant documents of this council to illuminate the social structure of late sixth-century Spain. More on this later.
Although I’m still giving a lot of thought to these topics and trying to form a clear thesis statement, I do have two more classes to take, and those classes (and my day job) will keep me pretty busy for the remainder of the semester. In addition to some shorter works (mostly journal articles or book chapters) and some books not yet acquired, the reading list for my classes includes the following:
- A. T. Fear, Rome and Baetica: Urbanization in Southern Spain c. 50 BC-AD 150. Oxford, 1996.
- J. H. W. G. Liebescheutz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford, 2001.
- John E. Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City. Baltimore, 1988.
- Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194-1250. New York, 1931.
- David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. New York, 1992.
I need to start a new project on Peter de Venea (Piero della Vigna). I’m just getting my bearings for that work.
Don’t worry. I’ve still found time to watch some episodes of Family Guy and Entourage. It’s just blogging that hasn’t been getting much attention lately.
And more important than all of this, my wife and I still have dinner together every night, and we’ll be going to a nice restaurant for our anniversary.
Computer Programmer Discovers Roman Villa
Nature reports that a computer programmer in Italy seems to have discovered an ancient Roman villa while studying satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth. The programmer, Luca Mori, posted his findings at his blog (in Italian). (This was slashdotted yesterday.)
Barbarians and the End of Rome
A few days ago, Troels Kristensen posted some comments on The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, a new book by Bryan Ward-Perkins. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve put it on my reading list. Kristensen mentions James O’Donnell’s review of the book, who also reviews a similarly titled work by Peter Heather. O’Donnell, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, categorizes scholars of Late Antiquity into Reformer and Counter-Reformer camps.
The main lines of difference between the New and the New-Old are straightforward. The Reformers speak more often of the eastern empire than of the western, show more interest in religious and cultural history than other streams, speak of rises rather than falls, and are at home in dialogue with similar strains of interpretation in other humanistic disciplines. The Counters focus their attention on the western empire, prefer military and political history to religious, have an Eeyore-like preoccupation with declines and falls, and are in the main untouched by “theory” and other broader academic projects.
(This is, as O’Donnell admits, a bit of an oversimplification of scholarly debate.)
I tend to favor the Reformer’s view, but I also favor Heather’s view of Gothic ethnic identity, which is at odds with Herwig Wolfram’s view of ethnogenesis arising from a pre-historic tribal and cultural tradition among the Goths. And, like O’Donnell’s Counter-Reformers, I tend to focus on the western empire, although lately I’ve begun to see the need to bring the eastern (Byzantine) empire into my studies.
People still use Ada?
A friend recently pointed me to Latin WORDS for Mac OS X, a very good Latin dictionary application. This version runs as a windowed application on Mac OS X, unlike the earlier incarnation of the program which ran as a command-line application. The original version was written in Ada, so the new Mac OS X version is probably compiled from Ada source with a Cocoa user interface. This is strangely appropriate.
Beginning the Aftermath
Although I don’t plan to write frequently here about current events and modern politics, the impact from Hurricane Katrina on human lives along the Gulf is so enormous that I feel the only way to start to impose order on my thoughts is to jot down a few comments here. In this case, I want to mention some posts from other bloggers that caught my attention and seem especially well worth reading.
First is the “Unlocked Wordhoard: Now, on to the long-term…” post of Richard Nokes. His comments on the “long-term care and settlement” of people from the disaster area do indeed provide a “dose of reality.” When this is over, I suspect New Orleans will be resettled as a very much smaller city. The permanent relocation of many thousands of citizens from a single area (and the concomitant near-permanent reduction in the population of New Orleans) will have its own repercussions for a long time to come.
Next is Timothy Burke’s rebuke of the Republican Party leadership and those voters who defensively side with the Party on all issues. In spite of my belief that the unfolding disaster in the Gulf States is rooted in generations of social and political history which both parties share (expressed more eloquently in Alan Jacobs’s comment), this disaster should not have caught anyone by surprise, and for federal officials to claim otherwise is disingenuous at best.
Roman Films
Michael Gilleland has found documentary evidence that ancient Romans watched movies, as in films, cinema. Well, maybe not. Don’t believe everything you read, even if it comes from PBS.
On Choosing to Stay
The situation in Louisiana and Mississippi is still incomprehensible. To try to make some sense out of it, I thought I’d take a new look at the younger Pliny’s recollection of the eruption of Vesuvius. On August 24, A.D. 79, when his famous uncle sailed with the navy across the Bay of Naples in an attempt to rescue people fleeing the volcano, Pliny stayed at home with his books. Later in the day, he started to worry about his safety. There had been small earthquakes for several days, but they “were not particularly alarming because they were frequent in Campania.” That evening, however, the tremors became so severe that he and his mother were afraid the house would collapse on them.
Did Pliny move to a safer place? No, he and his mother sat outside. The seventeen year-old Pliny even asked for another book to read and pretended not to be bothered by the situation. And when an old friend of his uncle’s came to the villa and tried to talk them into leaving, he and his mother refused to move.
The next morning, August 25, the risk of a building collapse had become so apparent that the teenager and his mother finally decided to try an escape. As they left the villa, the area was struck by a severe earthquake, accompanied by a black cloud “rent by quivering bursts of flame” from the volcano. It takes another admonishment from Uncle’s friend before mother and son finally get serious about leaving. Now it was almost too late, as Pliny recounted to Tacitus in his letter:
Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. “Let us leave the road while we can still see,” I said, “or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.” We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore. There were people, too, who added to the real perils by inventing fictitious dangers: some reported that part of Misenum had collapsed or another part was on fire, and though their tales were false they found others to believe them. — Pliny, Ep. 6.20.14-16. Loeb ed.
I have been trying to understand why so many people didn’t evacuate New Orleans before the storm hit. They had fair warning, as did Pliny. Of course, some of those stranded in New Orleans are elderly or sick. Others perhaps simply lack a place to go or the means to get anywhere. But even people of means don’t always act in the face of danger for some reason, so it’s not simply poverty or ignorance that keeps people from acting. Pliny was very, very wealthy and highly educated, and he ignored the signs.
The situation on the Gulf Coast is all very sad, and, as I keep saying, incomprehensible on so many levels. I’m not sure Pliny has helped to clarify it. Or has he?