Romans, Levelers, and Wicked Thoughts

Nonfiction occupied my bedside table the past couple of weeks. Brief reviews are below of four that are worth a read:

**** ****

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper

What is there to say about the fate of Rome that hasn’t been said before? Didn’t Gibbon say it all more than 200 years ago? He surely said a lot, but not quite all. (The six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is still a superb read though.) Gibbon and two centuries of historians after him focused on internal social, political, and economic factors in combination with a rising barbarian threat. Those were indeed crucial ingredients in the slow-motion collapse, but in 1976 William H. McNeil in Plagues and Peoples argued that microbes gave a final push over the edge. In the pre-vaccine/pre-antibiotic ancient world, diseases were demographically devastating.

Kyle Harper reports on recent DNA sequencing from Roman graves that confirms most of McNeil’s suspicions about the identity of various ancient epidemics. The Antonine Plague was indeed smallpox and it ravaged the Empire (Marcus Aurelius himself died of it) at a time when the barbarians on the Rhine and Danube were on the offensive. Even more devastating was the Plague of Justinian in the 6^th century, which has been identified as bubonic plague and which killed half the population. Bubonic plague was particularly deadly because the primary vector was not person to person but from flea-bearing rats to people. Rats were as prevalent in the countryside where most of the population lived as in the cities, so the plague was not, as most plagues were, mostly an urban event. (The lethality was demonstrated again and for the same reason when it returned as the Black Death 800 years later.) The demographic and economic destruction wreaked by it put a permanent end to hopes of recovering the Western provinces.

As his own contribution to the literature, Harper then tells us that one more pressure on the Empire has been much overlooked: climate change. The Roman Empire’s great centuries (1st century BCE through 2nd century CE) were during the Roman Climatic Optimum, an unusually warm and wet period ideal for expansive agriculture. Climate then swung erratically due to natural causes (volcanoes, solar variability, ocean currents, etc.) before settling into the Antique Little Ice Age after 450 CE. This curtailed agriculture and interacted unexpectedly with diseases: fleas that died in hot summers, for example, survived when summers were cooler. Harper explains the various methods including soil, plant, and ice samples by which ancient climate can be reconstructed. Harper doesn’t make the mistake of attributing Rome’s decline specifically to climate just because it is his own special interest, but he tells us it was one more nail in the coffin.

**** ****

Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii a Day by Philip Matyszak

The Roman Empire ended as all things do but it had a good run. What was it like actually to live there? Books purporting to explain everyday life in ancient Rome have been around for centuries, but they typically are such dry reading that it’s easy for one’s eyes to glaze over. Matyszak gets around this with his travel guide aimed at a 21^st century reader who presumably has access to a time machine. He starts us off not in Rome but in Alexandria in order to experience the trip to the city. We get all-important practical advice, such as to use traveler’s checks instead of cash. Yes, really. Shipping companies doubled as banks: their reps in Alexandria would give you scrip in exchange for your coins and this could be exchanged for gold at the company’s office in Ostia (Rome’s port city), thereby making you less of a target for thieves on the trip.

By internal evidence, the guide puts us in the time of Severus when the city is at its height. Matyszak tells us how to get a room in Rome, how to buy fast foods, where to find public toilets, how to use the public baths, where the best brothels are, what neighborhoods are dangerous after dark, and so on. And, of course, he tells about the must-see sites, many of them still in existence today in various degrees of repair, such as the baths, aqueducts, and temples. There are a lot of them. We are told what is polite and what is rude in Roman society, how the sexes interact, and how the classes interact. There also is the list of handy phrases.

All-in-all it is a pleasant romp and a painless way to get at least some inkling of what it was like to visit the ancient city. If you do happen to be a time traveler, it will save you many denarii, too.

**** ****

The Great Leveler by Walter Sheidel

Walter Sheidel, professor at Stanford, studies economic inequality from Neolithic times to the present. His book is neither a polemic against inequality nor a defense of it (though his predisposition to “against” is evident), but rather a well-researched examination of it over time. It is full of charts and Gini coefficients. In general, he finds inequality tends to increase over time in any and all types of societies with any and all types of governments provided economic trends are stable or trending upward. This, he contends, has to do with the relative scarcity of capital to labor and with the intertwinement of wealth and the governing elites. The exceptions to the general rule – the times of great leveling – involve “the four horsemen”: total war, Revolution, systems collapse, and plague.

Smallish wars won’t do it. Wars with full mobilization do, for they involve intense labor demand in the military and in industry and intensive taxation to pay for it. Also mass destruction of property in war naturally costs the people who own the property. They have more to lose, so massive destruction has a leveling effect. Revolution on a grand scale as in Russia and China in the last century certainly lowered inequality but at a staggering human cost. Collapses, such as those of the Roman Empire and the Tang Dynasty, wiped out the old aristocracies and thereby increased equality until the new aristocracies built their wealth up. The economic collapse of the Great Depression also was a leveler by destroying the asset values of those who had assets. Plagues, which formerly carried off large percentages of the population (upward of a third of population of Europe in the Black Death) actually lead to increases in median living standards (rather than just killing or bankrupting the rich with no benefit to anyone else) by spreading around the assets of the deceased and increasing the demand for labor. The greatest leveling in history took place in the time spanning the two world wars, the Depression, the accompanying Revolutions, the creation of social welfare states that the crises made possible, and the rebuilding after the wars. Yet, after the rebuilding was done (the 1970s) inequality again ticked upward including in social democracies.

Whether one views inequality as a problem in itself or no problem at all if other incomes are rising or stable, the book provides a treasure trove of data. Sheidel doesn’t anticipate change anytime soon and worries what it might look like if it does arrive: “For thousands of years, history has alternated between long stretches of rising or high and stable inequality interspersed with violent compressions… All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”

**** ****

A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Anyone who ever has, say, looked up “2018 Silverado” online only to find Chevy ads on the next five websites he visits knows that Web searches are not secret. In general, only AIs designed for commercial purposes bother to read them, but they are vast data sources for anyone who wants to use them for other purposes.

Neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam analyzed 55 million sexually oriented search terms compiled by Dogpile, broke them down into categories, and tried to see what these searches tell us about human sexuality. The answers are creepy but intriguing. Some of them are totally unsurprising, such as the conclusions that men overwhelmingly search for visual porn while online romance novels, albeit raunchier than the softcovers sold in stores are almost exclusively accessed by women (though there are female targeted porn sites). The plots of those romances are most commonly fiercely un-PC, and then there are the female-targeted EroRoms about romances of gay men. Porn searches – whether straight or gay oriented – are often counterintuitive to put it gently: Yes, teen cheerleaders are popular searches, but the fifth most popular male search term is “grannies” and the third is “mom?” Beyond the (almost mundane) BDSM searches there are amazingly specific fetishes: the authors only slightly exaggerate when they remark, “Type in ‘Find people who have sex with goats that are on fire’ and the computer will say ‘Specify the kind of goat.’” The findings show a divergence in male and female interests greater than whatever you think it is, and the nuances of straight and gay searches offer material on which to ponder.

Though the reader may have the urge to wash his or her hands after putting down the book, it offers a perspective on and information about our fellow human beings (and perhaps ourselves) that might never be shared in a public forum. Online, in presumed privacy, we reveal our wicked ways and thoughts.

Dorothy – Wicked Ones