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The Barbarians Are Coming! The Barbarians Are Coming!

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There are two ways of looking at the Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. For the first, we have Orientius, said to be a cleric from Gascony, in his Commonitorium:

Look at how death has swept through the entire world,
at how many peoples have been affected by the madness of war.
What use are thick forests or high and inaccessible mountains,
what use the raging torrents with violent whirlpools,
carefully located fortresses, cities protected by their walls,
positions defended by the sea, the squalor of hiding places,
the darkness of caves and the hovels among the rocks;
nothing has been of use in avoiding the barbarians hunting in a pack….
In the villages and the villas, in the fields and at the crossroads,
in all the hamlets, on the roads and in every other place,
death, suffering, massacres, fire-raising, and mourning:
the whole of Gaul was burning in a single blaze.

Then there is the view of Greek poet Constantine Cavafy in his wonderful poem:

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Now which attitude do we take if Donald Trump and his incel hoards should regain the Presidency of the United States?


When Alexander Got Tyred Out

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Ancient Tyre

I have been reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Discourses, in which he writes about governance and warfare in his day (around AD 1517). In Book II, he gives an anecdote about how not to negotiate with Alexander the Great:

When the whole East had been overrun by Alexander of Macedon, the citizens of Tyre (then at the height of its renown, and very strong from being built, like Venice, in the sea), recognizing his greatness, sent ambassadors to him to say that they desired to be his good servants, and to yield him all obedience, yet could not consent to receive either him or his soldiers within their walls. Whereupon, Alexander, displeased that a single city should venture to close its gates against him to whom all the rest of the world had thrown theirs open, repulsed the Tyrians, and rejecting their overtures set to work to besiege their town. But as it stood on the water, and was well stored with victual and all other munitions needed for its defence, after four months had gone, Alexander, perceiving that he was wasting more time in an inglorious attempt to reduce this one city than had sufficed for most of his other conquests, resolved to offer terms to the Tyrians, and to make them those concessions which they themselves had asked. But they, puffed up by their success, not merely refused the terms offered, but put to death the envoy sent to propose them. Enraged by this, Alexander renewed the siege, and with such vigour, that he took and destroyed the city, and either slew or made slaves of its inhabitants.

Leonardo’s End

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The Clos Lucé, Leonardo da Vinci’s Château in Amboise, France

It is not generally known that Leonardo da Vinci spent his final years in Amboise, France, where he was honored by François I with his own little château within walking distance of the Royal Palace. Some twenty years ago, Martine and I visited the Loire where we saw the châteaux at Chambord, Chenanceau, Chaumont, Villandry, Azay-le-Rideau, Cheverny, and Amboise.

We based ourselves in Amboise and spent time at François I’s château of Amboise. We were startled to see in the château’s chapel of St. Florentin the tomb of the great Italian artist and thinker:

Tomb of Leonardo da Vinci at Amboise

We then found out about Leonardo’s nearby home and visited it. Leonardo had spent many thankless years with Lodovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, without really being appreciated for his talents. It is good to know that, in his last years, Leonardo found a ruler who did not mistreat him. In fact, Giorgio Vasari says that François I cradled Leonardo’s head on his deathbed. Whether or not he did, Leonardo died will full honors on May 2, 1519..

Et Tu, Brute?!

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The Assassination of Julius Caesar by Mariano Rossi (1731-1807)

I have just finished reading an interesting book that sheds light on how rhetoric influenced the way people acted in ancient Rome. J. E. Lendon’s That Tyrant Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World shows that public speechifying was the dominant mass medium of the time and affected the laws and, in many respects, the way people acted.

Lendon used as his prime example the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar by Brutus, Cassius, and their associates. In Chapter Four, he discusses eight reasons why the whole conspiracy had been a shambles:

  • Decimus Brutus had armed gladiators near the Senate House of Pompey. Why did they not kill Caesar?
  • Why did all the conspirators in the Senate House want to stab Caesar themselves, producing a confused melee?
  • Why did the conspirators do nothing about Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, or any other followers of Caesar, not even arrest them for kid-glove treatment if the fastidious Brutus insisted? It was especially leaving Antony alive that Cicero later regarded as “childish.”
  • Why did Brutus think that after the assassination he would be able to address the Senate? Why did he not expect the senators, most of them loyalists of Caesar, to be terrified of the deed?
  • Why were the conspirators apparently surprised by the panic their deed caused in the city?
  • Why did the conspirators go up the Capitoline Hill?
  • Why did the conspirators spend March 16 giving speeches in the Forum?
  • Why, other than descending to give speeches, did the conspirators apparently have no plans for what to do after they ascended the Capitoline Hill, given that the reactions of Lepidus, Antony, their troops, and Caesar’s veterans could have been predicted?

In his book, Lendon deals with each of these questions in great detail. As I read his book, I suddenly saw that public speaking in ancient Rome was the equivalent of our social media, and that the conspirators who, at Donald Trump’s urging, marched on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were being misled in much the same way that Brutus and his co-conspirators were by the conventions of ancient rhetoric.

“A Certain Apprehension of Darkness”

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This is not what one usually hears when talking about the settlers who crossed the continent in wagon trains to settle California. I am currently reading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which presents a much-needed corrective to the prevailing boosterism. This is interesting because Joan Didion’s ancestors came to California in the same wagon train that included the Donner Party. Joan’s ancestors split off and settled in Oregon at first.

To read these crossing accounts and diaries is to be struck by the regularity with which a certain apprehension of darkness enters the quest, a shadow of moral ambiguity that steadily becomes more pervasive until that moment when that traveler realizes that the worst of the Sierra [Nevada Mountains] is behind him. “The summit is crossed!” one such diary reads. “We are in California! Far away in the haze the dim outlines of the Sacramento Valley are discernible! We are on the down grade now and our famished animals may pull us through. We are in the midst of huge pines, so large as to challenge belief. Hutton is dead. Others are worse. I am better.” By this point, in every such journey, there would have been the accidents, the broken bones, the infected and even the amputated hands and feet. Sarah Royce remembered staying awake all night after a man in her party died of cholera, and hearing the wind whip his winding sheet like “some vindictive creature struggling restlessly in bonds.” There would have been the hurried burials, in graves often unmarked and sometimes deliberately obliterated. “Before leaving the Humboldt River there was one death, Miss Mary Campbell,” Nancy Hardin Cornwall’s son recalled. “She was buried right in the road and the whole train of wagons was driven over her grave to conceal it from the Indians. Miss Campbell died of mountain fever, and Mother by waiting on her caught the fever and for a long time she lingered between life and death, but at last recovered. Miss Campbell was an orphan, her mother having died at Green River.”

There would have been, darkest of all, the betrayals, the suggestions that the crossing might not after all be a noble odyssey, might instead be a mean scrambling for survival, a blind flight on the part of Josiah Royce’s “blind and stupid and homeless generation of selfish wanderers.”

A Royal Palace on American Soil

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Honolulu’s Iolani Palace (Built 1879)

Not far from the Hawaii State Capitol sits the Iolani Palace, home of the monarchs of the Kingdom of Hawai’i from Kamehameha III in 1879 until the overthrow of the monarchy under Queen Lili’uokalani by a group of American merchants in 1893.

As I prepare to go to Hawaii in a week or so, I am conscious once again that the United States ruthlessly stepped on the rights of the Hawaiian people just so that a cabal of American merchants could have their way. On this trip, I plan to read Queen Lili’uokalani’s autobiography. For eight months, the Queen was imprisoned in one of the second floor bedrooms until she was tried by a military tribunal on some trumped-up charge.

It was like the U.S. and the American Indians all over again. Fortunately, there were no massacres by the cavalry in this instance, though the takeover was no less final—and unjust.

Kahuna Lapa’au

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In preparation for an upcoming trip to Hawaii in a couple of weeks, I am reading the work of a distinguished novelist and microbiologist: O. A. Bushnell’s The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawai’i. Never before have I read a book about what happens to public health when a 19th century Western power takes over a primitive aboriginal society.

Bushnell claims that the native Kahuna Lapa’au healers were not inferior to American physicians of the period. When you consider that 19th century medicine was into bloodletting, blistering, and the ingestion of mineral poisons. it is not surprising that aboriginal healers were in now wise inferior.

Unfortunately, they were dealing with a whole new range of illnesses introduced by the white man, diseases such as measles, smallpox, malaria, leprosy, and the various venereal diseases. This led to widespread confusion among native healers as to which treatment to use, at a time when neither American nor native Hawaiian medical practice was effective.

In this book and in his novels—The Return of Lono, Ka’a’awa, Molokai, The Stone of Kannon, and The Water of Kane—Bushnell created an impressive body of work on the interface of the two cultures.

“Accidental to the Truth”

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The Flag of Venezuela

I have just finished reading V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World. No one can describe the sometimes barely visible gradations that make up racism and colonialism. At one point, his character Francisco Miranda—a fictional precursor to Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and the other liberators of South America from Spanish rule—discusses the difficulties inherent in unifying the newly freed peoples of Venezuela:

“In all your years of writing about Venezuela and South America, you simplified it, General. You talked about Incas and white people. You talked about people worthy of Plato’s republic. You always left out two of the colours. You left out the black and you left out the mulatto. Was that because you were far away?”

“No. I did it because it was easier for me intellectually. Most of my ideas about liberty came to me from conversation and reading when I was abroad. So the country I created in my mind became more and more like the countries I read about. There were no Negroes in Tom Paine or Rousseau. And when I tried to be like them I found it hard to fit in the Negroes. Of course, I knew they existed. But I thought of the m as accidental to the truth I was getting at. I felt when I came to write that I had to leave them out. Because of the way I have lived, always in other people’s countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head about the same thing. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about myself. I have paid a heavy price for this.”

As I read these lines, I suddenly thought about why Spain lost South America. The Spanish monarchy sent out mostly men, accompanied by very few Spanish women. Many of these men married native women, or black women, or mulattoes. Consequently, the thought arouse back on the Iberian peninsula that these Spaniards who “went native” probably did not have the best interests of the Spanish monarchy at heart. Consequently, they were almost never promoted to positions of authority. The rebels who defeated the Spanish armies were mostly these men, referred to as Creoles, who were not quite Spanish.

The Crossing of the Berezina

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The low point of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was the crossing of the ice-choked Berezina River, after the Russians had destroyed the bridge. Curiously, that crossing was also a choke point in Charles XII of Sweden’s invasion a hundred years earlier—a fact that Napoleon was aware of as he carried with him Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII. Here is the scene as described in Patrick Rambaud’s The Retreat:

What Voltaire wrote of the Swedish troops could have been a description of this shadow of the Grande Armée: “The cavalry no longer had boots, the infantry were without shoes, and almost without coats. They were reduced to cobbling shoes together from animal skins, as best they could; they were often short of bread. The artillery had been compelled to dump all the cannon in the marshes and rivers, for lack of horses to pull them….” The Emperor snapped the book shut, as if touching it would put a curse on him. Slipping a hand under his waistcoat, he made sure that Dr Yvan’s pouch of poison [for possible suicide] was safely attached to its string.

And here is the beginning of Victor Hugo’s poem “Expiation,” part of his The Punishments, about the retreat from Russia (as translated by Robert Lowell):

The snow fell, and its power was multiplied.
For the first time the Eagle bowed its head—
Dark days! Slowly the Emperor returned—
Behind him Moscow! Its own domes still burned.
The snow rained down in blizzards—rained and froze.
Past each white waste a further white waste rose.
None recognized the captains or the flags.
Yesterday the Grand Army, today its dregs!
No one could tell the vanguard from the flanks.
The snow! he hurt men struggled from the ranks,
Hid in the bellies of dead horses, in stacks
Of shattered caissons. By the bivouacs
One saw the picket dying at his post,
Still standing in his saddle, white with frost
The stone lips frozen to the bugle’s mouth!
Bullets and grapeshot mingled with the snow
That hailed ... The guard, surprised at shivering, march
In a dream now, ice rimes the gray moustache
The snow falls, always snow! The driving mire
Submerges; men, trapped in that white empire
Have no more bread and march on barefoot.
They were no longer living men and troops,
But a dream drifting in a fog, a mystery,
Mourners parading under the black sky.
The solitude, vast, terrible to the eye,
Was like a mute avenger everywhere,
As snowfall, floating through the quiet air,
Buried the huge army in a huge shroud ...

That was the low point of Napoleon’s reign, unless you include Elba, Waterloo, and captivity under the English at St. Helena.

The Greatest Chart Ever Drawn

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Charles Minard’s Chart of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign 1812-1813

Never before has a military campaign been illustrated so completely as Charles Joseph Minard’s 1869 Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812–1813. It shows the strength of Napoleon’s forces at every point in the campaign.

Compare the red band at the far left of the illustration showing Napoleon’s force of half a million men as they crossed into Russia in June 1812. Notice as the red band narrows until it reaches Moscow, particularly after the casualties of the Battle of Borodino.

The black band illustrates the retreat from Moscow as winter is beginning to set in. That band gets progressively narrower until the crossing of the Berezina River at Studienka, highlighted by a black smudge I made on the above chart. After Berezina, only 25,000 combatants and 30,000 non-combatants survived. You can see the black band narrow after Berezina.

That particular battle was frequently described in Honoré de Balzac’s stories. particularly “Adieu.” It market the catastrophic end to a catastrophic campaign, which led in short order to Napoleon’s first exile, on Elba.

On the lower part of Minard’s graph, the relative temperature at several selected points during the retreat from Moscow is shown. Note that it was it its lowest around the time the Berezina was crossed.