Cicero vs Sumner

One of my “runners up” or honorable mentions in last week’s spring reading list was Josiah Osgood’s Lawless Republic, which describes Cicero’s legal career with special emphasis on the early cases that made his name. I finished the book conflicted.

On one hand, it offers a succinct, vividly drawn picture of the legal system and courts in the late Roman Republic, including some insightful explanations of procedure and the way lawyers could try to game Rome’s intricate system of holy days to influence cases. I learned a lot in these passages, even with regard to familiar stories like Cicero’s prosecution of Verres. On the other hand, as I briefly noted last week, the book is not content to tell Cicero’s story, but has to reach—strain—to impart some kind of usable lesson for us in the present.

Here’s an odd interlude in the conclusion: writing of Cicero’s “achievements as a public speaker” and his belief that the legal system “offer[s] a better chance for accountable government and justice than does violence,” Osgood notes how “Cicero’s speeches have remained valuable examples of how to convince others.” He offers this example:

[I]n 1856 the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, delivered on the floor of the United States Senate a five-hour speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner attacked senatorial colleagues for trying to extend slavery into into the territory of Kansas. Of Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina, Sumner said, “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery.” Famously, two days afterward, Sumner was brutally caned at his desk in the Senate by Senator Butler’s nephew, Representative Preston Brooks.

After cataloguing a few Ciceronian rhetorical features of Sumner’s speech, features that could just as easily be found in the oratory of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or Jefferson Davis, Osgood concludes:

Cicero’s speeches should still be studied today for their limitations but also their rhetorical power. We shall be able to better understand the achievement of later orators such as Charles Sumner by doing so, even as Sumner's caning reminds us of the problems a republic faces when it denies equality to all.

Fair enough, but that very last point is a strange thing to take away from either the history of the Roman Republic or the Sumner-Brooks incident. The Romans would have been confused by our idea of equality and the demands we make based upon it. Their legal system wasn’t meant to create or enforce equality—and it is highly questionable whether any state should or even can—but to balance the interests and prerogatives of competing orders in order to maintain Order. The Romans had many flaws but they had no illusions about what a breakdown of order meant.

In the Sumner incident, however, a self-righteous, hypocritical blowhard publicly insulted a severely ill man who wasn’t present to answer him, and said man came from a culture in which personal honor would be defended by force if necessary. Sumner viewed that culture with contempt, to his detriment. Brooks’s caning—after, in accordance with protocol, challenging Sumner and demanding an apology—had immediate and lasting propaganda value. That turned a personal dispute into a political allegory that persists to this day. Here it is popping up in a book about Cicero.

The tacked-on quality of comments like these make me wonder if they were something demanded by the publisher. Regardless, I’d still recommend Lawless Republic for its early chapters, its insight into the functioning of Roman courts, and the important fact that Osgood does not annihilate the sources through gainsaying or deconstruction in order to allow himself to explain what “really” happened, like some prominent anti-Cicero classicists I could name but won’t.

As it happens, with John Buchan June just around the corner I’m reading Buchan’s short 1932 biography of Julius Caesar. Buchan, no mean classicist himself and an elegant writer, is more charitable toward Caesar than I’m inclined to be, but his narrative is compelling and his portrait of Cicero is quite good. A sample:

Cicero was for the moment the most popular man in Rome, for even the mob had been scared by the orgy of blood and ruin involved in Catiline’s success. He deserved the plaudits which he won, for he had made no mistakes; his secret service was perfect; he gave Catiline the necessary rope to hang himself; he had the nerve not to act prematurely, and when the moment came he struck hard.

It’s shaping up to be a Roman summer. I have Osgood’s previous book on Cato the Younger on standby. Stay tuned.

Moral intelligibility

In “Ship to Tarshish,” a short story in The Runagates Club, a collection by John Buchan published in 1928, a member of the titular club tells the story of Jim, a young man whose father, a wealthy businessman, dies immediately after a collapse of the company stocks. Unprepared for responsibility after a sheltered life of luxury and entertainments, Jim buckles under the pressure to save the family business and flees to Canada to start over on his own.

There he spirals, unable to hold down a job that requires hard work or any specific skill or even consistently showing up, and lands in “a pretty squalid kind of doss-house.” The narrator describes Jim’s ruminations there:

The physical discomfort was bad enough. He tramped the streets ill-clad and half-fed, and saw prosperous people in furs, and cheerful young parties, and fire-lit, book-lined rooms. But the spiritual trouble was worse. Sometimes, when things were very bad, he was fortunate enough to have his thoughts narrowed down to the obtaining of food and warmth. But at other times he would be tormented by a feeling that his misfortunes were deserved, and that Fate with a heavy hand was belabouring him because he was a coward. His trouble was no longer the idiotic sense of guilt about his father’s bankruptcy; it was a much more rational penitence, for he was beginning to realise that I had been right, and that he had behaved badly in running away from a plain duty. At first he choked down the thought, but all that miserable winter it grew upon him. His disasters were a direct visitation of the Almighty on one who had shown the white feather. He came to have an almost mystical feeling about it. He felt that he was branded like Cain, so that everybody knew that he had funked, and yet he realised that a rotten morbid pride ironly prevented him from retracing his steps.

Back at the beginning of the year I wondered how much the values and commitments of the characters in Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic, would even be intelligible to a modern reader. Waltharius is over a thousand years old, relating a story from almost half a millennium before that. “Ship to Tarshish” is not even a hundred years old and is set in the 1927 world in which it was published. And yet we have the same problem.

The story’s drama grows entirely from the requirements placed upon Jim. Repairing damage from his father’s time proves too much for him. He can’t take it, and is ashamed that he can’t and that everyone knows and that he made it worse by running away. The redemption in the story comes from, as Kate Macdonald puts it in her introduction to The Runagates Club, “facing one’s fears and demonstrating courage and moral strength,” even when one is “shockingly inadequate.”

But, as I wondered about the bonds of loyalty and obligation in Waltharius, how much of this would a modern reader get? The ideas of Fate and retribution from God, or that certain behavior is shameful and that one should listen to critics, or the very concept of duty—Buchan conveys these powerfully but moderns scoff at all of it. Even the cultural allusions that gave the story resonance in 1927—Jonah fleeing to Tarshish, the mark of Cain—cannot be counted on to convey meaning to them. What John Keegan called the “moral atmosphere” of Buchan’s work would be not so much rejected as missed completely.

The modern reader is more likely to sympathize with the “useless” Jim at the beginning of the story: a well-liked, inoffensive, sociable non-entity whose only noteworthy skill is dancing. Rather than tough talk and hard work, they’d recommend therapy. And yet that would leave Jim stranded in his weakness. Worse, it would probably give him a flaw he lacks, a lack that is one of his few saving graces in the story—entitlement.

You can read “Ship of Tarshish” at Project Gutenberg. The Runagates Club is a fine collection of a wide variety of stories and will be one of the first books I write about next week, as this year’s John Buchan June gets underway.

Spring reading 2025

It’s been a hard semester, but through it all I’ve had some astonishingly good reading. With over thirty books read I feel like my reading has finally bounced back from the birth of the twins almost two years ago. I had a hard time narrowing this list down, but below you’ll find a handful of favorite novels, history and general non-fiction, and kids’ books, as well as a few honorable mentions in the two main categories and the books I revisited this semester.

For the purposes of this post, my “spring” ended Monday the 19th, the first day of summer classes here at my school. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

A Month in the Country, by JL Carr—A veteran of the Western Front, physically and spiritually broken, is commissioned to restore a defaced medieval mural in a small church in the English countryside. A short, seemingly simple, but rich, beautifully written, and moving story. One I plan to reread soon, as even while reading it I was aware that I wasn’t picking up all it had to offer.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle is an undistinguished scholar of 19th-century British literature and an expert on the obscure Romantic poet William Ashbless. When an eccentric businessman contacts Doyle with the opportunity to lead a group of millionaire tourists to 1810 London to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Doyle is skeptical but accepts. To his astonishment, the businessman’s time travel works—but Doyle is stranded in London when the party returns. Reduced to begging, he encounters Jacky, a girl disguising herself as a man in order to avenge her murdered brother; Horrabin, a terrifying street-performing clown who leads an army of beggars from an underground hideout; Dr Romany, a magician with ties to the gods of ancient Egypt; and Dog-Face Joe, a werewolf with the ability to swap bodies as the one he occupies becomes more and more obviously a monster. As Doyle simply tries to survive and find a way back to the present—with the help, he hopes, of Ashbless, whom he knows from his research will be in London soon—all of these characters try to use him, and even the businessman who got Doyle into this mess turns out to have hidden designs for Doyle, for Dog-Face Joe, and for the capabilities he has developed. This is the best kind of time-travel story, with minimal explanation of how the technology actually works and a great emphasis on a realistically rendered past for the characters to get lost in. The horror elements are, as a friend put it, a “fever dream,” a totally involving and mysterious adventure, and the intricately constructed plot resolves with one of Powers’s most satisfying conclusions. One of the most purely absorbing and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.

Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd—A short but complex and well plotted spy novel concerning a journalist, having gotten a rare interview with the president of a revolutionary government in the decolonizing Africa of the early 1960s, being slowly pulled into the world of espionage and deception. Shades of Buchan and Ambler with a more powerful sense of uncertainty and paranoia than is usual in either. Full review on the blog here.

Bomber, by Len Deighton—The story of a single day and a single fictitious air raid by the RAF on Germany in the middle of World War II. Deighton moves between the bomber crews, ground personnel, German radar operators and night fighter crews, and the civilians and military authorities of the small German town that the bombers, through technical malfunction and bad luck, accidentally target. Brilliantly executed, gripping from beginning to end, with powerful and moving irony throughout. With The Anubis Gates, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—The Jim of the title is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in history at a small English university. Jim is not very enthusiastic about his job but needs to pass the review chaired by his department head, the vague, inscrutable Professor Welch, in order to have his probationary position made permanent. In his increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Welch he gets drunk and embarrasses himself at a party hosted by the Welches, antagonizes Bertrand, Welch’s bohemian artist son, and must contend with a manipulative sometime girlfriend, irrationally hostile flatmates, an earnest student who knows more than he does, and his own growing attraction to Bertrand’s girlfriend, the angelically beautiful Christine. Hilarious and cringe-inducing, Lucky Jim’s vision of hapless academia is often all too recognizable, and Jim himself vies with Ignatius J Reilly as the worst-case-scenario version of myself. Another one I intend to revisit soon.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A short, snappy crime thriller about low-level Boston thugs selling guns and an aging con trying to play the cops and other crooks off each other to his own advantage. Any plot summary will make the novel sound more familiar and predictable than it is. Higgins’s dialogue is excellent and his storytelling reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard. A great surprise, and I’m going to seek out more of Higgins’s work.

Runners up:

• Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John Le Carré—Two short, brisk, sharply observed detective stories that also happened to introduce George Smiley, one of literature’s greatest spy characters, to the world. Read before revisiting The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time since grad school.

• Baron Bagge, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—A moving, dreamlike novella about an Austrian cavalryman’s brushes with love and death during World War I. Full review for Substack forthcoming.

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—An involving fictional account of one of World War II’s many frustrating side-shows by a man in a thick of it. Full review on the blog here.

Special mention

Back in January I read Uppsala Books’ newly republished edition of Waltharius, a medieval Latin epic translated by Brian Murdoch. The story is set in the mid-5th century and concerns Walther of Aquitaine, Attila the Hun (briefly), and other semi-historical figures familiar from centuries of subsequent legend and poetry. I greatly enjoyed it, and wrote about it in some detail here.

Favorite non-fiction

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, by Russ Ramsey—The followup to my favorite non-fiction read last year, Rembrandt is in the Wind, this volume is not quite as good as that book but was still a thoroughly involving, moving, and thought-provoking look at art and faith with the added dimensions of pain and suffering as a theme. I hope to revisit both of Ramsey’s books sometime soon.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—A massive account of the life of James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare has not only read every source, he has spoken to every possible living connection to Fleming and incorporates all of it into the story. At first the level of detail is overwhelming but once Fleming reaches adulthood and steps into his crucial role in British intelligence during World War II the book settles into a confident stride and breezes through hundreds of pages. The result is an exhaustively detailed picture of Fleming, his world, and his work. Bond doesn’t come along until at least two-thirds of the way through, a good reminder of how much life Fleming was drawing from by the time he created this character. It is also powerfully sad. One gets a sense of Fleming as both a first-rate bounder and a damaged little boy who lost a sterling father and lived his life under the thumb of a ghoulish, manipulative mother—and then married a woman just like her, who mocked his books with her highbrow friends during all-night salons while Fleming tried to catch up on sleep. Far from “failing upwards” because he was posh, as I’ve seen some online critics of Fleming assert, Shakespeare shows that Fleming had both natural talent and a powerful work ethic alongside serious personal flaws. Charm and connections may have gotten him far but can’t account for his success—as reporter, intelligence officer, and finally novelist. This is probably far more Fleming than casual readers will want to spend time with, but a very good biography and a worthwhile read.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers—A comprehensive, readable, and fair biography of Poe that pays good attention to his life, character, work, and reputation. A few years ago I read short biographies of Poe by Peter Ackroyd and Paul Collins as well as thematic studies of his life and work—Poe and science, Poe and the American city. I’d recommend Meyers’s longer biography to anyone wanting a more thorough treatment. His examination of the confusing and controversial parts of Poe’s life is especially judicious, and his account of the posthumous smearing of Poe’s reputation and the long process of rehabilitation since is very good.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—Why do so many kids from affluent families have vaguely-defined anxiety? Why do so many in sheltered suburbs suffer from trauma? Why are so many taking psychoactive meds? Why are so many seeing therapists? And, most importantly, why is none of it helping? Shrier’s basic thesis is that modern American parents, operating from fundamentally flawed premises about harm, have panicked and committed whole generations to regimes of psychiatric “help” that actually leave them emotionally stunted and make them more anxious, passive, morbidly self-absorbed, and less resilient. Shrier couples this with a critique of the child psych industry and the dangerous theories its practitioners often field-test through their patients. A tough but necessary read. Should pair well with The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which my wife read about the time I was reading this and which I mean to read sometime soon.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A wide-ranging thematic account of the life and art of the great German Romantic painter as well as a poignant, often bitterly ironic look at his work’s afterlife—forgotten, rediscovered, repurposed, occasionally stolen, and much of it destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson—An interesting look at the political events, social trends, and intellectual currents in a single year that contributed to our present WEIRDER world. I found some chapters weak and the overall point muddled, but the majority of the book is excellent.

• Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood—A good overview of Cicero’s legal career that also attempts to chart the breakdown of law and order in the late Republic. The former is better than the latter, which is when the author strains for relevance or lessons in this story.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garret M Graff—An enjoyable if necessarily incomplete survey of the evolution of the UFO phenomenon since World War II. Full review on the blog here.

Rereads

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Kids’ books

• Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Gareth Hinds from William Shakespeare

• The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander

• Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

• Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim

• James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

Looking ahead

I’m still reading a few books I had started before my cutoff date and I have several more promising reads lined up, including more John Le Carré and Len Deighton and several books for John Buchan June. Stay tuned next month for those. In the meantime, I hope as always that this list leads you to something good to read, and that y’all have a pleasant and restful summer. Lord knows we need it.

Thanks for reading!

The Return

Ralph Fiennes strings Odysseus’s bow in The Return

Last night I finally had a chance to watch The Return, last year’s film adaptation of the climactic second half of the Odyssey. After anticipating it eagerly for some months, and more so as a steady drip of information about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey epic for IMAX has begun, I was underwhelmed.

First, the good. Ralph Fiennes is an excellent choice to play Odysseus and got into gnarly physical shape for the part. He looks every bit the weathered and toughened old warrior-king, and when he first opens his eyes on the beach at Ithaca they shine with sharply focused intelligence.

And, to be honest, that’s about it. There are a few nice touches I want to come back to, but the best I can say of The Return is that Fiennes performs excellently at the center of a movie that doesn’t measure up to what he’s doing.

I had two big problems with the film. The first is that, from production design and costuming to tone, the film is relentlessly dull and bleak. In the first two areas this bleakness betrays a depressing unoriginality and inauthenticity: inauthentic because this is not what Homer’s or Odysseus’s world looked like, unoriginal because The Return offers the same coarse, dingy, brown-on-brown vision of past peoples as primitives that was already old when Monty Python and the Holy Grail spoofed it.

The Return reminded me of Franco Zefirelli’s Hamlet in that it makes token nods toward a popular misconception of what a period is like—rough wool clothing in impractical designs, rickety dwellings made of sticks, cavernous stone palaces—while using flagrantly anachronistic elements—medieval castles in both cases—to create atmosphere. This could be forgiveable. Indeed, I love Zeferelli’s Hamlet. There will probably never be a movie that gives us a realistic look at the Bronze Age world Homer describes, but at least try to come up with something other than a stereotype.

The bleakness of the film’s tone is the bigger problem. Homer is serious when he needs to be, and presents the stakes—for Odysseus, for Penelope, for Telemachus, even for the suitors—seriously, but is never dour. The Return is simply dour. The film has no comic relief, no joy, no gratitude, no fond reminiscence or hope for the future. There is not even an Athena to pity or help or intercede for Odysseus. The Return is not just demythologized, it’s dehumanized.

This tonal problem is rooted in the film’s approach to the source material. The screenwriters have used the Odyssey to dramatize and explore modern pathologies. This is most evident in the case of Odysseus’s two most important allies upon his return, Eumaeus the swineherd and Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. In the film, both of them hate Odysseus for leaving for Troy and tell him so. They help him grudgingly. When he finally reveals himself and kills the suitors, Penelope reacts in horror and intervenes to spare Antinous, one of the ringleaders, whom Telemachus kills anyway. Penelope turns on them both, berating Odysseus for turning their hall into “a slaughterhouse” and leading Telemachus into a life of violence.

At this point, by replacing Homer’s characters with modern people, the story becomes absurd. What did you think was going to happen when Odysseus came back, lady? When Telemachus hesitated to give Odysseus his bow in the first place, why did you tell him to do so? Why did you bother to delay the suitors at all?

Then, in their long-anticipated reunion, Odysseus tells Penelope that he took so long to come home because he was ashamed of what he had become during the war. At this point all clicks into place: he’s been traumatized you see. Everyone in The Return is dealing with trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma, just like a bunch of suburbanites moping their way through life. In place of Homer’s lost world of custom, loyalty, duty, ritual, and protocol, a world in which there is still room for love between father and son and tenderness between a well-matched husband and wife, The Return gives us angst and resentment.

It’s strange to me that the film finally squandered what goodwill I still had toward it during the climax, the well-staged slaying of the suitors. But I suppose it was there that the film shows its hand and I realized how far from Homer this story has wandered.

And yet a few glimpses of Homer shine through. When Odysseus poses as a beggar and is beaten and mistreated by the suitors, I felt an outrage true to the poem. When Eurycleia, Odysseus’s elderly nurse, recognizes him from a scar on his leg and is overpowered by excitement that he has returned, I felt that excitement, too. And, most poignantly of all, Odysseus’s encounter with his dying hunting dog Argos, abandoned outside the palace and the first creature on Ithaca to recognize his master, makes it into the movie. This simple, wordless scene moved me to tears.

If I’m being harsh it’s because I’m disappointed. I’m grateful to see an attempt to treat this story seriously, but grieved that the original wasn’t apparently good enough for the filmmakers. That the most emotionally powerful moments in the film were those lifted from the Odyssey with the least alteration or meddling makes The Return a useful warning against trying to improve on the classics.

I suspect it’s already too late for Nolan to learn the lesson. We’ll see next summer. In the meantime, I plan to reread Homer.

Backwards ran technology

I’ve been setting up one of my summer courses all day. As I’ve been doing the drudge work of the process—changing due dates, editing attendance rosters, rearranging grade columns—I’ve listened to a few episodes from the back catalog of a favorite podcast. It’s a sort of “Unsolved Mysteries” from a Christian angle and, though I’m not interested in every topic it covers, I’m very fond of it.

But in listening to episodes about the Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting, purported Area 51 insider Bob Lazar, and the Pascagoula abduction in 1973, I noticed the host returning several times to an assumption that I have to question. Though ordinarily properly skeptical about a lot of this stuff, he nevertheless infers advanced technological development in other sciences—medicine in the Pascagoula case, propulsion systems in the Zamora case—on the simple assumption that That’s the kind of thing a civilization able to achieve interstellar space travel would have.

There are a lot of points to argue about here, but I don’t think that assumption is a safe one. Consider the nearest thing the real world has ever experienced to an actual alien encounter: the contact of Europeans with Native Americans.

• The Spanish and Portuguese had sufficient shipbuilding and navigational technology to cross the Atlantic, but their astronomy was nowhere near as accurate as the Mayans’—or ours, since the Ptolemaic geocentric model was still the unchallenged paradigm at the time.

• The Mayans and Aztecs on the other hand built vast cities that astounded their European guests, but had never developed metal tools (despite the availability of the raw materials to do so), domesticated animals, or even invented the wheel.

One could multiply examples across many other cultures and civilizations. (Every time you hear someone dog on medieval medicine, go look at a gothic cathedral.) Scientific development in one area might proceed linearly, but not all of them will develop at the same pace or toward the same ends. To assume otherwise is to read our own present state of science and technology and its history backwards into circumstances that are almost entirely speculative.

Imagine a flying saucer landing, a ramp descending, and creatures from another world disembarking bearing spears.

It is entirely possible that an alien civilization could develop interstellar faster-than-light travel and have rudimentary medical science, or no written language, or no projectile weapons, or no way to communicate beyond the nearest hill much less with their home planet. I’d even say—granting the existence of such civilizations, which I doubt—that it’s not only possible but likely.

Intelligence in 1066

Harold Godwinson listens to a messenger in the Bayeux Tapestry

This morning on my commute I listened to the latest Rest is History Club bonus episodes. Among the questions Holland and Sandbrook fielded was one about the intelligence networks available during the Norman Conquest. Could William have known what Harold was doing before he sailed from Normandy?

Such questions are ultimately, per Holland, “unanswerable,” though it is not quite true that, as Sandbrook says, there is “no evidence.” The following passage from Wace’s Roman de Rou, which I cited and expanded upon in my master’s thesis, comes immediately to mind. From Glyn Burgess’s translation:

One of the knights in the area [of Pevensey] heard the noise and the shouting coming from the peasants and villeins, who saw the great fleet arrive. He was well aware that the Normans were coming with the intention of taking possession of the land. He took up position behind a mound so that no one could see him; he stood there watching how the great fleet arrived. He saw the archers emerging from the ships and afterwards the knights disembarking. He saw the carpenters, their axes, the large numbers of men, the knights, the building material thrown down from the ships, the construction and fortification of the castle and the ditch built all around it, the shields and the weapons brought forth. Everything he saw caused him great anguish. He girded on his sword and took his lance, saying he would go to King Harold and give him this news. Then he set out, sleeping late and rising early. He travelled extensively night and day in search of Harold, his lord, and found him beyond the Humber, where he had dined in a town. Harold was acting with great arrogance. He had been beyond the Humber and defeated his brother Tostig; things had gone very well for him. . . . Harold was returning joyfully and behaving with great arrogance, when a messenger gave him news of the sort which made him think differently. Suddenly the knight who had come from Hastings arrived.

‘The Normans have arrived’, he said, ‘and established themselves in Hastings. They intend to take the land from you, unless you can defend it. They have already built a castle with brattices and a ditch.’

Later, in a passage I’d forgotten about until rereading it this morning, Duke William benefits from similar intelligence:

In the land there was a baron, but I do not know his name, who had loved the duke greatly and become one of his close advisers; he would never have wanted things to go wrong for William, if he could manage it. He sent him word privately that he had come with insufficient forces; he had few men, he believed, to accomplish what he had undertaken. There were too many people in England and it was very difficult to conquer. In true faith he advised him, and in sincere love sent him word, that he should withdraw from the country and go back to his land before Harold arrived; he was afraid that things would go badly wrong for him.

Wace is a late, poetic source and is problematic for reasons both obvious (his portrait of Harold as a hubristic usurper) and subtle (using post-Conquest feudal terms like “baron” and “knight” and “villein” in an Anglo-Saxon context), but here he presents a plausible picture of what is now called HUMINT or human intelligence. It jibes with many, many other stories from the world before signals intelligence and aerial and satellite surveillance, a world of eyewitnesses desperately offering actionable information to their side’s leadership—something they can only do as quickly as the fastest horse can carry them—not to mention a world of rumor, uncertainty, and, in the case of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon lord who feeds information to William, secret betrayal.

Further, it jibes with the Bayeux Tapestry, which several times shows messengers bringing word to Harold, William, and others and the recipients listening intently, and other sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the Chronicle writes, over and over in every extant version, that Harold “was informed” or “came to know” of some new development, we should probably picture something like what Wace describes.

The evidence is extremely limited and raises as many questions as it answers, but it gives us enough for reasonable inferences. It also—and this is why I remembered the story so many years later—offers a rare glimpse of the men involved in these campaigns at the ground level. Who can read Wace’s account of that anonymous thegn, alerted by the people fleeing in terror and watching from behind a hill as the invasion proceeds unopposed, and not feel his “great anguish”?

You can read the whole passage of Wace in an older translation at Project Gutenberg here.

Gibbon vs geographic determinism

I’m reading a good, thoughtful, thought-provoking book about the factors behind the emergence of the secular, industrialized modern West, but its early chapter on geography bugs me. The author leans hard into geographic determinism, the historiographical theory that human cultures are largely at the mercy of the environments in which they arise—an odd position for an intellectual history to take, but stranger books have been written.

The author introduces this theme through an anecdote from Captain Cook’s voyages. Having landed on Easter Island and taken in the colossal wreck of the civilization that had once flourished there, Mahine, a Polynesian accompanying Cook, commented, “Good people, bad land.” The author takes this at face value, but Mahine’s observation is rubbished by the very thing he’s responding to: the land was good enough to support a large, sophisticated society. It must be some other factor that led to its collapse.

The author signals that he’s focusing on geography as an explanatory factor in order to avoid racial determinism—or suggesting even a little bit that some cultures are more successful than others, an observation commonly confused with racism—but using race to explain everything and using geography to explain everything is not even a false dichotomy. There are other options.

Whenever I run across geographic determinism in my reading, a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall always springs to mind. Here we have, to paraphrase Mahine, good land and bad people. From Vol I, Ch X:

The Goths were now in possession of the Ukraine, a country of considerable extent and uncommon fertility, intersected with navigable rivers, which, from either side, discharge themselves into the Borysthenes; and interspersed with large and lofty forests of oaks. The plenty of game and fish, the innumerable bee-hives deposited in the hollow of old trees, and in the cavities of rocks, and forming, even in that rude age, a valuable branch of commerce, the size of the cattle, the temperature of the air, the aptness of the soil for every species of grain, and the luxuriancy of the vegetation, all displayed the liberality of Nature, and tempted the industry of man. But the Goths withstood all these temptations, and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty, and of rapine.

I first read this in grad school at the same time I was reading books that were part of the then-current wave of geographic determinism, books like Michael Cook’s Brief History of the Human Race or the massively popular Guns, Germs, and Steel, by anthropologist Jared Diamond. Gibbon’s pervasive emphasis on culture was refreshing. Plunk any society you care to come up with into an environment rich with natural resources, but it takes more than the mere presence of those resources for that society to use them.

Conversely, a society with poor land but a spirit of ingenuity can make much out of little. Witness Icelandic society, which has sustained itself for a thousand years despite almost immediate deforestation during the Viking Age and a lack of much else that their forebears from Scandinavia depended on. Nature and human cultures exist in a constant push-and-pull. Geographic determinism makes it all nature, pushing, all the time.

Culture matters. Contra Mahine, what went wrong on Easter Island wasn’t the land, but the use of the land. That’s a cultural problem, just like the Goths’ neglect of their land. The environment imposes barriers and places sometimes hard limits on societies, but whether the people living in a given place creatively adapt to the land, reshape it to their liking, or simply accept it and eke out a living within the limitations imposed by nature is a much more complex question. Their priorities—dutifully serving their gods, seeking honor through war, maintaining their inherited order, raking in cash—are the determining variable, not the environment.

Despite all my disagreements with and misgivings about Gibbon, this is one of the things that keeps his work engaging and readable 250 years later. Likewise the ancients he drew upon. Read Tacitus’s Germania for more on the cultures of Germanic peoples, not all of which, contrary to a common interpretation of his work, is laudatory.

To his credit, the author of the book I’m currently reading acknowledges late in the chapter that culture does matter, but the long meditation along pure geographic determinist lines makes this feel like a feeble gesture toward the immense complexity of man’s relationship with his world.

Warfare

A few years ago I quoted Stephen Hunter’s review of Windtalkers, a bad movie for which Hunter offered good insight. In comparing the arch, balletic, frenetic action of that movie to real footage of men in combat, Hunter wrote of how the latter always “amazed” him: “The soldiers appear so informal and undramatic. They never seem to be in any heroic poses; their minds, if you can infer from their body postures, are concerned with very small things, like ‘Let’s get over there’ or ‘Let’s get down’ or ‘Gosh, I wish I wasn’t here.’ They are beyond rhetoric or exhortation.”

I have thought of that passage many times over the years, but it came to mind especially clearly and strongly when watching Warfare over the weekend. A new movie co-directed by Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL turned film military advisor Ray Mendoza, Warfare is the nearest a movie has ever come to fitting Hunter’s description of real-life combat footage.

Part of that is surely down to Mendoza himself. The movie, which is apparently the result of conversations with Garland during the making of Civil War, is based on his experiences during the Battle of Ramadi in the fall of 2006. Mendoza appears as a character, a young SEAL radio operator, though he is by no means the central protagonist. Warfare is an ensemble picture, and the team—radioman Ray, observation post commander Erik, sniper/corpsman Elliott, petty officer Sam, Marine fire support officer Mac, callow new guy Tommy—shares the spotlight.

Briefly, because I really don’t want to give anything away, Warfare recreates a single incident from Mendoza’s time in Ramadi almost in real time. Having commandeered a house shared by two Iraqi families, whom the SEALs confine to a downstairs bedroom, Mendoza’s team observes a busy street in a hostile neighborhood. An opening title tells us they’re operating in support of a Marine unit elsewhere in the city, and though combat can be heard elsewhere and it occasionally diverts the SEALs’ air support, we never see it.

While watching as a growing group of MAMs (military-age males) gathers in a busy market down the street, the SEALs are hit by a grenade and rifle fire and have a furious shootout with enemies they can’t see. Following a second deadly surprise attack, the SEALs are trapped in the house trying to stabilize their wounded while the insurgents from down the road launch their assault. They need air support, their fellow SEALs from other observation posts nearby, and medical evacuation by road—before they’re overrun, and before their friends die of shock or blood loss.

Another quotation that came to mind, this time from Clausewitz: “Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Utterly unromanticized, detail-oriented, and agonizing in execution, Warfare makes you feel that in your bones.

In addition to eschewing a main character, Warfare scraps most of the other conventions not only of war movies but of movies in general. Other than a brief, comedic prologue, the film follows the classical unities, taking place entirely in and around a single house over the course of an hour and a half of a single day of the battle. No one talks about the girl they left behind or what they plan to do when they get back home and no one finds an excuse to explain to a buddy—for the benefit of the eavesdropping audience—what military jargon means or why they’re doing what they’re doing. The characters receive no more characterization than what we can observe of them, and we must infer the reasons for their actions from their results (or the lack thereof).

With so little Hollywood convention to rely upon, Warfare’s brilliance rests on two things: the performances, which are great across the board—I really forgot I was watching actors for a long time—and its technical excellence, especially its cinematography and sound design. There is no musical score; all sound is diegetic, sourced within the world of the story, and though we have all seen soldiers in war movies briefly lose their hearing after an explosion, in Warfare it takes a long time to come back. An uncomfortably long time. And when it does, you might prefer not hearing.

Warfare is exclusively about the experience, the “What was it like?” of the Iraq War, and refreshingly takes no political stance whatsoever. It concerns these men in this house, and what they have to do to fight and survive. If they are “beyond rhetoric and exhortation,” they are also beyond policy and partisan talking points. (This has, predictably, upset some people.) Like their experience of war, Warfare is blunt, direct, stripped down, and teaches no obvious lesson. To do so would be to cheapen and uncomplicate what these men lived through. Warfare brought Ernst Jünger’s entomologist eye to mind: like Storm of Steel, it seems to say War is a thing that is. Here is the specimen I observed.

Warfare is a one-of-a-kind movie, a small gem that deserves a wide viewership and all the praise it’s gotten. It is, in short, exactly what it says in the title, with no embellishments or flourishes. Per Hunter, it is “informal and undramatic,” and though the men fight bravely they do not do so in “heroic poses.” They do what their training and duty and their affection for their friends—never stated or explained but obvious through their actions—require them to do, and several times they do things so dangerous that the word hero, which seems irrelevant in the moment, only occurs to us afterward.

More if you’re interested

While I’ve read a lot about the two battles of Fallujah in 2004, most of what I know about Ramadi comes from the excellent memoir Joker One, by Donovan Campbell, who commanded a Marine infantry platoon in the city at the same time Fallujah was dominating the news. This was two years before Warfare takes place, but would be a worthwhile read whether your see the Warfare or not. Here’s my Amazon review from fifteen years ago.

Addendum, May 1: Since posting this review earlier this week I’ve come across two more good items. First, here’s Kyle Smith’s review for the Wall Street Journal, which says much of what I was trying to praise, only better. Second, here’s a long interview hosted by Jocko Willink with the two real guys wounded in the fight depicted in Warfare. It’s powerful.

On Richard Adams’s Traveller

Wednesday was the 160th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yesterday was the anniversary of Lee’s General Order No. 9, his farewell to his army. To commemorate these events, one of the Civil War history Instagram accounts that I follow shared Soldier’s Tribute, a painting of Lee’s farewell to his troops by the incomparable Don Troiani. 

The painting shows Lee, mounted, surrounded by his exhausted men who reach out to him, as they so often did, for succor. Lee turns to his right to shake the hands of his soldiers; in his left he loosely holds Traveller’s reins. If Lee is still, already statuesque, Traveller, his head pulled slightly back, shows subtle movement, either slowly edging through the gathering crowd or coming finally to rest in the face of it. If Lee is calm and resigned, Traveller’s eyes show, if not anxiety, puzzlement.

Seeing Traveller in that painting, especially with the subtle motion and emotion with which Troiani always packs his work, brought Richard Adams’s novel Traveller to mind again. It’s an unusual book, even for the author of Watership Down, and in it Adams does something remarkable.

The novel is narrated by Traveller, in the first person, in thick phonetically-rendered dialect. It can be hard to understand at first, and the danger of such narration is that it will come across as silly. But you get used to it, and the “accent” of Traveller’s speech is never used to mock him. Traveller has a distinctive voice, and Adams, an Englishman, captures the tone and style of Southern yarn-spinning with remarkable accuracy.

That’s one area in which such a book could have misstopped but didn’t. There’s also a running gag of sorts in that Traveller, a simple animal unquestioningly loyal to his master, always interprets every event in the most optimistic way possible. At first it’s ha-ha funny and we chuckle in amused sympathy, but gradually, as the novel nears its end, this use of irony creates a profound sense of pathos. Traveller ends the novel thinking he and Lee won, that Lee is leaving Appomattox not downcast and defeated but relieved at having forced “the blue men” into submission, and instead of a punchline it’s powerfully moving.

I don't know of any other novel quite like it. Dramatic irony is so often used for reasons other than pity.

It also achieves its most powerful effects if you know the Civil War and the Eastern Theatre and its colorful cast of characters—well-known generals like Jackson, Longstreet, Hill (AP and DH), and Stuart as well as more obscure figures like Prussian cavalryman Heros von Borcke—and even their horses well. Jackson’s horse Little Sorrel, in particular, a pensive horse full of dark forebodings, is an especially powerful presence. I have to wonder what someone ignorant of all that would make of it. The animal characters are so well-drawn and memorable and their skewed understandings of the human world so well conveyed that I imagine even someone with only passing knowledge of the Civil War would get it, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, Traveller is criminally underappreciated. Its concept sounds like a cute gimmick and I’m sure a lot of people have written it off as kitsch or a mere curiosity as a result. But as I’ve written here before, it’s artfully done, a marvelous, inventive angle on a familiar story. And the goal of retelling a familiar story, as I often tell me students when approaching a subject they might actually already know about, should be to make it strange again. Check it out.

You can view Soldier’s Tribute with some extensive explanatory notes at Don Troiani’s Facebook page here. The dust jacket art of my first-edition hardback of Traveller is Summer, one of four memorial murals by Charles Hoffbauer at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond. And if you’re ever in Lexington, VA, visit Traveller’s grave right outside the crypt of Lee Chapel, where his master is entombed.

I swear we are not making this up

Anglo-Saxon infantry vs Norman cavalry at Hastings in the Bayeux tapestry

The Rest is History, after a short series on the reigns of Æthelred, Cnut, and Edward the Confessor and a side trip through the life of Harald Hardrada, released a four-part series on 1066 this week. I finished the third episode, on the Battle of Hastings, on my commute this morning. The series is very good, so naturally I’m going to gripe a little about historiography.

The less-well remembered battle of the three in England during the fall of 1066 is Fulford Gate outside York. Here, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, with Tostig Godwinson—a deposed and exiled eorl and brother of the King of England—landed with his fleet and fought with the fyrd of Mercia and Northumbria under Eorls Edwin and Morcar. Our sources on Fulford Gate are pretty thin, and include the much later and heavily embellished King Harald’s Saga of Snorri Sturluson.

Sandbrook introduces the battle by noting that “the saga’s descriptions of this battle are exceedingly confusing, and historians who claim they know what happened are obviously talking balderdash.” Fair enough. Snorri is a colorful but late and problematic source. Sandbrook goes on:

What seems to have happened is this. Basically, at first, Harald Hardrada’s men are going slightly uphill through all this mud, the Saxons are throwing spears and firing arrows at them, bodies pile up, people are stumbling in the ditch and whatnot. The right hand side, the right wing of Hardrada’s force where Tostig’s mercenaries are, they start to waver we’re told. Now it may be—is that because everyone hates Tostig? Or is this the saga just trying to buttress Harald Hardrada’s reputation dissing Tostig? Who can say.

Sandbrook, who is not typically given to deconstructing sources at this level, excludes an important alternative: Maybe this is simply what happened?

Later, Sandbrook and Holland suggest that Snorri’s account of Harald Hardrada’s death at Stamford Bridge, having been shot in the throat with an arrow, may have been “modeled on” Harold Godwinson’s supposed death at Hastings a month later (as they also suggest stories of bad omens being wittily spun by Harald and William the Conqueror were “modeled on” Caesar in Suetonius). I’d suggest deaths by arrow wound are more easily explicable in unusually large all-day battles like Stamford Bridge and Hastings. As The Battle of Maldon reminds us, “bows were busy.”

Much more sensible is a point Holland makes in the Hastings episode about two very early Norman sources: William of Poitiers’s Gesta Guillelmi and the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a Latin verse epic attributed to Guy of Amiens and written probably within a year of the battle. After Sandbrook jokes that a few of the Carmen’s laudatory details about William the Conqueror sound like heroic formulae of the kind Snorri used of Harald Hardrada, Holland avers:

I think it’s unlikely that they would just make up details that everyone would have been able to scoff at. The details may be slightly spiced up. I think that probably the details we’re getting from the Carmen and from William of Poitiers in the main are fairly accurate because there are so many people who’d be reading them that they would know if they weren’t.

Sharp, and broadly applicable. In their postmodern focus on ancient and medieval sources as instruments of control over narratives, modern historians often lose sight of the fact that sources don’t appear in a vacuum, that their authors had contemporaries who could contest self-serving accounts and outright fabrication.

As I’ve written here before, I think ancient and medieval sources simply recorded what happened more often than we, hairsplitters and tweet-parsers, are inclined to believe. Cf. my notes on the modern habit of pooh-poohing anything interesting in a source, on whether the term “propaganda” is really appropriate in the ancient and medieval worlds, and on Tolkien’s observation that an event need not be fake because it feels literary.

Again, a very good series. The greatest praise I can give it is to say that Holland, in narrating King Harold’s death at Hastings—the mystery of which was the subject of my undergraduate thesis—convinced me that some version of the story in the Carmen, with Harold hacked down by Norman cavalry and possibly William the Conqueror himself, is more likely true than the arrow in the eye mentioned in later sources. And on that bombshell…

We’ve come to resemble them

The latest School of War episode dropped yesterday and featured historian Sean McMeekin, whose book Stalin’s War I’ve quoted and recommended here before. McMeekin discussed his latest, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, a book that’s been on my to-read list since it was announced.

The interview was insightful and wide-ranging despite coming in under an hour and is well worth a listen. But the conclusion was especially pointed. Speaking of Communist regimes that not only survived the fall of the USSR but have become globally ascendant—note carefully the subtitle of his book—McMeekin assessed the present dangers not only of external Communist enemies but of threats from within. These threats are not the Hollywood pinkos of Cold War anxiety but our own inbuilt mimetic tendencies, through which we gradually become like the thing we resist, and, even more to the point, the uncritical embrace and celebration of technologies that enable tyranny:

I don’t think the kind of threat, let’s say, to either Western values or our way of life is quite the same as you might have seen from the years of high Stalinism or high Maoism, even as far as people being fellow travelers or kind of trying to embrace those ideas, but some of it I still think—and I guess this is what I was trying to get at in my epilogue—certain elements of Communist practice which have in some ways actually you might even say been streamlined or improved that is to say: the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, social credit system. . . .

I remember back in the 90s when I was in Model UN among other things there were all these debates about US policy vis-à-vis China and the idea of opening up China, and back then the argument was that we should trade with China, we should open up to China . . . because that way we’ll make them more like us. That is to say, “You know, it’s true they crushed the rebels, the student protestors at Tiananmen Square . . . they obviously crushed and suppressed them, they obviously did not introduce any kind of genuine democracy or accountability to the public, however, if we trade with them they’ll be a little bit more like us and eventually they’ll develop liberal political institutions.”

That doesn’t seem to have happened. If anything, the opposite seems to have happened. I mean, if anything I think we’ve come to resemble them more than they resemble us, that is to say, our own public life is increasingly kind of taken over by social controls. And, you know, the early euphoria about the internet, maybe we should have been suspicious because the internet was originally ARPANET, a project of basically the Pentagon and the Defense Department. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that, in the end, these tools of social or political liberation could also be turned against us by governments, large corporations, etc.

I think it’s something to worry about. I think, you know, we just have to stay vigilant, and make sure our own traditions are upheld.

Host Aaron MacLean ends the episode by inviting McMeekin back someday to discuss “the global designs of universal liberalism.” I’d be there for that. Not exactly uplifting but necessary. Listen to the full interview here.

Food for thought, especially when it comes to discerning what “stay[ing] vigilant” means and just which of “our own traditions” we wish to preserve. For some related thoughts about the warping effect of the technologies used against ideological opponents, see this post from three years ago.

The masculine urge to zap space bugs

This week on my commute I’ve been taking a break from podcasts to revisit a novel I last read in college, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It’s been about twenty years.

I faintly remember being disappointed by it, but not much else. I still wish it had more action, but with the benefit of twenty years of growing up, studying, reading, and learning from life, I can see that the problem with my first read was me. Under the sci-fi adventure premise and WWII-memoir-in-space style, Starship Troopers is an uncommonly rich and complicated book.

This passage from relatively late in the story struck me especially sharply. The protagonist, Johnny Rico, joined the Mobile Infantry straight out of high school, during peacetime. While training, war broke out with the “bugs,” the most notorious early incident of which was a bug attack on Buenos Aires that “smeared” the entire city—including Johnny’s parents. Or so he thinks. As he departs his original ship for OCS, he bumps into his father, now an NCO despite being in his mid-40s.

Johnny’s father had strongly disapproved of joining up, so not only his survival but his about-face on military service surprises Johnny. He assumes his father joined to avenge his mother. Not so. Johnny’s enlistment awakened something long dormant in his father:

“Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do… even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock—you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain—and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal… but a man.”

There’s a lot going on here. Running through it is a strong strand of Ernst Jünger—who like Heinlein proved controversial for being clear, unsparing, and uncategorizable within the permissible simplistic divisions—and the word “man” means Johnny’s father is not only making a statement about himself, masculinity, and courage, though that is the obvious surface-level meaning, but about what people are and ought to be.

What I immediately thought of was a short but poignant line from Dr Johnson, who has been much on my mind lately. In his Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell quotes him as saying, on the topic of war:

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”

— Samuel Johnson

An apt description of Johnny’s father, who is a fairly minor but memorable character, and a lot of the rest of us. I had my own abortive brush with the service after grad school, the kind of thing that was clearly not meant to be (a little too old, a little too slow) and worked out well in the end. I wouldn’t change a thing. But thinking back on it still causes me a pang of “what if” every so often. Fortunately we have imagination and stories, and the examples of the men who did soldier, who did go to sea.

Starship Troopers might be a “controversial classic,” as the most recent paperback calls it, but that it resonates so strongly with itself, with other great literature, and with a powerful impulse inside most men, an impulse either fulfilled for felt forever as accusation, is a clear mark of its worth.

For a recap of some of the controversy, a good examination of some of the nuance in the book, and a very good critique of the film adaptation, which was an deliberate act of vandalism, see this piece from American Reformer. For a similar premise with different themes and a strikingly different tone but similarly powerful social critique and more action, read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, a novel I’ve read or listened to a number of times.