Category: History

Why did Romans persecute Christians?

by philg

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome:

But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judaea. The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents. All kinds of mystical moments of enlightenment might attract new worshippers to (say) the religion of Isis. But Christianity was defined entirely by a process of spiritual conversion that was utterly new. What is more, some Christians were preaching values that threatened to overturn some of the most fundamental Greco-Roman assumptions about the nature of the world and of the people within it: that poverty, for example, was good; or that the body was to be tamed or rejected rather than cared for. All these factors help to explain the worries, confusion and hostility of Pliny and others like him. At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas. The irony is that the only religion that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.

More: read SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

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Great book on the history of the horse

by philg

The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion by Wendy Williams is one of my favorite recent reads. The book is a fascinating mixture of geology, biology, and history. A great gift for anyone who rides, certainly.

Here are some excerpts to inspire you:

Horses are the stars of Ice Age art. Indeed, horses are the most frequently represented animal in the twenty-thousand-year period that preceded the advent of farming and what we call civilization.

contrary to popular belief, science has discovered that they are not “herd” animals. Instead of seeking safety in large numbers, horses live year-round in small groups called bands. Membership in these bands, which may consist of as few as three horses or as many as ten or so, is just as fluid as are the individual bonds, but there’s usually a central core of closely allied mares and their young offspring.

(Because of the stress of constant fighting with other males, stallions often live much shorter lives than mares.)

When I started researching free-roaming horses, I was astonished at their numbers—in the millions. I was also surprised by the variety of ecosystems where the horses not only live, but thrive. There may be more than a million free-ranging horses in the Australian outback alone

All over the American West, free-ranging horses roam in small bands. They even seem to do well in areas around Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places on Earth. You would think that a species that can live in Death Valley would have trouble living in swamps and wetlands, but it turns out that they don’t. A little south of the Namibian desert, another population of horses lives in the Bot River delta of South Africa.

The book gives multiple examples of evolution in action:

consider the case of the sea-island horses who live on Canada’s Sable Island, a small harborless sandbar of an island located far out in the North Atlantic, about a ninety-minute plane flight east from Halifax, Nova Scotia. This tiny island, shaped like a crescent moon, is about thirty miles long and very narrow. Buffeted constantly by violent North Atlantic storms, this island seems an unlikely home for free-roaming horses, yet as many as 450 graze here, surviving by eating beach grass and sea peas. This sounds like a meager diet, but the horses, abandoned there by a Boston entrepreneur before the American Revolution, have endured for more than 250 years.

The only non-marine mammals on the island, the horses serve as a real-world laboratory of evolution. Over the centuries, they have become unique. Their pasterns are now so short that, from a distance, their lower legs look something like the legs of mountain goats. The pasterns of most horses are long and angled, allowing for plenty of spring in the horse’s step, which in turn allows for greater speed and stamina when a horse gallops at high speeds over an open plain. Long pasterns evolved as a survival strategy. But longer pasterns also carry an important disadvantage: the pastern’s fragile bones and vulnerable tendons can easily break or strain, laming the horse. Many a racehorse has ended his career because of this vulnerability. But on Sable Island, the horse does not have to run fast to escape predators. Instead, their enemy is deep sand and their worst “predators” are steep, treacherous sand dunes, some almost a thousand feet high, which the horses must climb in order to eat. These dunes provide some pretty dangerous footing for horses. On Sable Island a horse is much more likely to injure a leg while descending these steep dunes than by running along the island’s beaches. Still, a hungry horse must ascend and descend these obstacles. Consequently, evolution has made a clear choice, just as in the Camargue region. Sable Island horses have shorter, less vulnerable pasterns, giving them that goatlike look. Over 250 years, natural selection has opted for shorter pasterns, improving the horses’ ability to graze, thus improving the horses’ ability to live longer and produce more offspring. We often think of evolution as complicated, but in this case, the process is pretty easy to grasp.

The author covers some of the dynamism of the Earth’s climate:

Most likely, paleontologists suggest, the truth behind the extinction involves many factors. When the asteroid fell, the world was already changing. The great supercontinent of Pangaea had broken up and North and South America were slowly migrating west, creating an ever-widening Atlantic Ocean—an ocean that would become a major player in the appearance of humans and in the evolution of horses and in the flight paths of birds and in the pulsations of ice and rain and drought for the coming tens of millions of years. These long-term events, the results of our always-convulsive, seething-with-energy planet, were probably more influential in the appearance of horses and humans than the onetime crash of a mere mega-asteroid. … the Yale University paleontologist Chris Norris called the emphasis on disaster as a major evolutionary force “asteroid porn.”

His point is well-taken: the worldwide climate had been changing for 10 million years before the asteroid fell. The dinosaurs were no more enjoying a steady-state world before the asteroid impact than we are today.

It was hot. For a brief period, it was very hot, much hotter than when I visited. In fact, it was as though there was a sudden explosion of heat, as remarkable in its own way as the fall of the asteroid had been 10 million years earlier. Curiously, this explosion of heat also marks the appearance of Polecat Bench’s horses and primates. This was a time when temperatures in some places shot up by 6 or 8 degrees Celsius in a very short time period, lingered at those heights, then, almost as suddenly, dropped back down. The cause of this heat spike remains elusive, but it may have been due to large bursts of methane that bubbled up from the deep ocean. On temperature charts that track the rise and fall of heat throughout our planet’s history, the heat spike looks to me like the outline of the Eiffel Tower. The anomaly is officially called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, PETM for short, but I prefer to think of it as the Eiffel Tower of Heat, with its sharp lines of ascent and descent that mimic so closely the graceful lines of the Parisian landmark. It’s a weird event. And it’s doubly weird that both horses and primates may owe their existence, in part, to its existence: the spike marks the beginning of the Eocene, when not just horses and primates, but most modern mammal groups finally came into their own.

Just a few things that surprised me:

  • North America, devoid of horses when the Europeans showed up to trash the place, has a rich fossil record of horses. Horses were here at least as recently as 30,000 years ago.
  • Horse teeth keep pushing out for about 20 years.
  • “The ten thousand or so varieties of grasses that cover Earth today take up an estimated 30 percent of our planet’s land surface.” (and grass is a relatively new plant)

More: Read The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion.

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Weekend in Gettysburg

by philg

Richard and I flew down to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over the weekend to visit his brother, a professor at Gettysburg College.


On the way down we stopped at the Kingston-Ulster airport and were picked up by Richard’s friend Annie, a flying kinetic whirl of activity whose mass could only be characterized by a probability distribution.  We drove a few miles to Bard College’s new auditorium, designed by Frank Gehry.  From the air this had seemed like a misshapen metal-clad lump.  From the ground it still looked misshapen but not ugly.  It cost $60 million to build.  Running a not-for-profit college would seem to be a very good way to accumulate cash.  Even after spending $60 mil the school had enough money left over to pay lots of security guards.  A performance was in progress in the small theater and every door was locked and guarded.  Annie was not be deterred.  We walked around the back and walked in the stage door with the members of the Charles Mingus Orchestra, unchallenged past the security guard who was reading a book.  Lesson:  never hire a hippie college kid to work security.  The main theater did not impress but the backstage was amazingly huge and intricate.


While the local swells attended a play the students played Frisbee and sang folk music in front of the Student Center.  Posters advertised a show of “Palestinian Art; Four Decades of Response to Oppression” (with the world’s fastest-growing population (5% per year) and most of their money being siphoned off by kleptocratic rulers perhaps the Palestinians are now going to support themselves via indigenous arts and crafts).  We walked past the booths selling tie-dyed clothing and through the campus until we arrived at a mansion on the Hudson River, complete with formal garden.


After a late lunch in Rhinebeck we got back into the DA40, bound for Gettysburg.  We flew up a beautiful river valley that crammed together an enormous open-plan new prison, an enormous fortress-like old prison, a golf course, and a scattering of McMansions around the fairways.  We followed a ridge of uplifted hills, cut through by rivers and highways, then climbed to a more efficient altitude of 6500′.  We passed near Harrisburg and over the Three Mile Island nuclear power plants (two cooling towers dead; two blowing steam) before landing at the Gettysburg Airport.  This airport is right next to a mobile home park in which you could buy a nice trailer for $20,000 then rent a hangar for $200 per month.  All the convenience of an airpark without the expense!


The Gettysburg battlefield park is one of the best-preserved and most interesting among those in the U.S.  This was the pivotal battle of the War of Northern Aggression (know to the victors as the “American Civil War”).  The Southern armies under General Robert E. Lee had come to bring the fight into the North and were briefly in a position to reach the big cities of the Northeast.  After the South went home on July 4, 1863, the outcome was inevitable.  This was the first time that artillery, the rifle, and the digging of trenches came together to give the defense a huge advantage.  The Civil War was thus the first modern war in terms of tactics, in terms of press coverage (photographers were embedded with the troops), and in terms of the total mobilization of industrial civilian economies.  The offense did not gain the upper hand until Hitler’s air power, tank columns, and mechanized infantry conquered Europe in the 1930s and 40s (we’re still in the “offense wins” epoch of war, apparently, if the invasion of Iraq can be considered typical).


[To see what an improvement in political leadership can be achieved via professional speechwriters and Microsoft PowerPoint, check out the Gettysburg Address (original and improved).]


Being a professor at Gettysburg College seemed like a lot of fun.  First of all, even on a professor’s salary you can afford a large newish house on several acres of land, typically part of a recently subdivided farm (subdividing farms is to this decade what day trading was to the 1990s).  Now that you’ve got the big house you can start throwing parties for your colleagues.  Most of them will show up because there isn’t much else to do in Gettysburg.  Thus your life consists of going from one party to another, mixing with academics from every area of inquiry.


[Why doesn’t this happen at MIT?  First, the young fun people who work at MIT can’t afford to live anywhere near the school unless they want to cram themselves into a studio or 1-bedroom apartment, not suitable for parties.  Second there are all kinds of social and entertainment opportunities in a big city like Boston.  Third, there are too many professors in one’s own department to get to know and therefore one is unlikely to be coerced by circumstance into socializing with people from other fields (the EECS department at MIT has more than 150 faculty).]


Having soaked up the scenery and the smell of the apple blossoms it was time to depart this morning.  We were greeted by a dreary mist, clouds hanging on the hills, and a steady rain.  Flight Service said that the warm front was coming through sooner than expected but that the weather was clear to the northeast.  Richard and I departed under instrument flight rules (IFR).  This is a bit tricky at an airport with no control tower and no radio repeater for the air traffic controllers (ATC).  You need to take off and gain altitude before you can talk to ATC but it isn’t safe, prudent, or legal to climb into the clouds unless you’ve already talked to ATC.  We picked up our clearance with a cell phone call to Washington Center from the airplane as we sat on the ground in Gettysburg.  They cleared out the airspace north of Gettysburg for 10 minutes, giving us enough time to depart (if we’d had a problem taking off we would have called them back to cancel).


Despite a headwind, we were on the ground in Boston 2.75 hours later.  We had climbed up to 5500′ and never entered the clouds.

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Biographical Focus: Jeffrey Amherst, the first biowarrior

by philg

It’s Sunday, a time for looking at inspiring biographies.  Today we consider Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America during the French & Indian War (1754-1763).   The town of Amherst, Massachusetts is named after this pioneer in the field of biological warfare.  It was Lord Amherst who came up with the idea of giving smallpox-infested blankets to the Indians.  This theme is explored in a bit of detail on this page at UCLA and more profoundly in tonight’s highly recommended episode of South Park (rebroadcast from Wednesday):  “Red Man’s Greed”.

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Saudi Royals, Big Rockets, and Hitler

by philg

The May 2003 Atlantic Monthly merits a trip to the library or newsstand.  While the great minds of the Boston Globe fret about Cessna 172s, Robert Baer’s “The Fall of the House of Saud”  points out that a simple terrorist strike at one location in Saudi Arabia could remove from the world markets an amount equal to one third of the U.S.’s oil consumption.  The article is rich with details on the more eccentric princes, such as Abdul Aziz who built a magnificent $4.6 billion palace and Islamic theme park that “includes a scale model of old Mecca, with actors attending mosque and chanting prayers twenty-four hours a day.”  For those who slept through 9/11 and its aftermath, Baer recounts the Saudi funding and manning of Al-Qaeda and its continued obstruction of FBI investigations.


Gregg Easterbrook also has an article in this issue, about the Russian-American Sea Launch company that sails from Long Beach to the equator, fires off huge rockets into space, then sails back to LA.  The cost is 1/10th that of the Space Shuttle for a comparable payload.


Timothy Ryback visits the Library of Congress and discovers the “remnants of the private library of Adolf Hilter, a man better known for burning books than for collecting them.”  In fact Hitler had thousands of books and, even when his means were modest, spent lavishly on books and bookshelves.  Hitler was not a huge fan of novels but enjoyed non-fiction, being motivated to underlining by a nineteenth century writer’s call for “the relocation of the Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine”.


If you’re soaking in the bathtub and done with New Yorker magazine, give the May Atlantic a whirl.

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Biographical Focus: Idi Amin

by philg

Sundays on this blog will be for focusing on one person, ideally someone connected to current events but who has slipped from notice.  Today’s focus is Idi Amin.


Idi Amin might seem like an odd choice because he has not been in the news for more than a decade and in fact many Westerners have the impression that he is dead.


Amin earns his place in this blog today because of the fact that the whole crop of modern Islamic rulers are merely following the trail blazed by Idi Amin. Amin, who ruled Uganda in the 1970s, took on the challenging project of creating a true Islamic nation out of a country that was only about 6 percent Muslims at the time. Amin, accused of murdering hundreds of thousands of Christians, did not get too much good press in the West (like Saddam) but he was a hero to Arabs and Muslims worldwide (like Saddam). Like Saddam, Idi Amin was the victim of a long-distance Israeli air raid (Entebbe 1976).  Like Saddam, Idi Amin was overthrown by a foreign military (in Amin’s case it was the war that he started against neighboring Tanzania that ultimately brought Tanzanian troops back to Kampala, the capital of Uganda).


Idi Amin made and kept friends throughout the Middle East.  For example, Yasser Arafat was Best Man at Amin’s 5th wedding.  After Idi Amin was overthrown he was set up by the Saudis in a magnificent seaside villa in the Red Sea port of Jiddah (i.e., when we fill up our SUVs part of the money goes to pay for Amin’s wives, cars, servants, etc.).


Idi Amin turned 78 years old on January 1 and currently lives in Mecca.

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Happy Friday: the ice pack is breaking up

by philg

A wise man once told me that people tended to be unhappy because they focussed on the problems in their life.  Things that were going well did not require attention and therefore did not get it.  Consequently if you asked a person what he or she had been thinking about it was generally an unpleasant and difficult to solve problem.  This blog will try to fight this tendency with a Happy Friday policy.


Yesterday my friend Brad and I took the DA40 out of its hangar and headed out to Williamstown, Massachusetts.  There are three great art museums within 3 miles of the Harriman and West Airport (paved but VFR-only and surrounded by mountains):  Clark, MassMOCA (installation art fueled by approx. $50 million of Massachusetts taxpayer funds; run by New Yorkers who dress and sound like Dieter on Saturday Night Live), and Williams College’s art museum.  We stopped by Williams College and looked at their magnificent 9th century BC Assyrian tablets plus a visiting show of Tibetan art.


The Assyrian tablets remind one that the current conflict in Iraq is not the first one and that the artifacts of ancient civilization in Iraq have nothing to do with its current Arab rulers.  The Assyrians are the heirs to a literary and cultural traditional that goes back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and Sargon’s kingdom circa 2350 B.C.  For some reason it became conventional in Assyrian literature for heroes to be discovered in baskets floating on rivers, washed into the reeds.  This is how Gilgamesh was found and also Sargon.  For those of you going to a Passover Seder this year, a good way to really piss off your hosts is to start asking questions about whether the story of Moses being found in a basket in the Nile wasn’t simply copied from much earlier Assyrian stories.  Suppose that it is true that Moses grew up in an Egyptian royal household but not that he was found in the river.  That would make Moses, the Jewish leader of the Jews, … an Egyptian pure and simple.  (The descendants of Moses’s relatives would therefore be the Coptic Christian minority that survived the Arab invasion of Egypt.)


Assyrians converted to Christianity shortly after the death of Jesus and have been fighting a losing battle with Muslim Arab invaders since the 7th century A.D.  They seem to be a forgotten oppressed minority in an Arab country but they do have a Web site: http://aina.org/aol/


From the art museum we walked out into the 50-degree sunshine and along a creek filled with snowmelt.  A young woman came up behind us, smiling, red-faced, and walking briskly with wet hair.  She had been celebrating Spring by taking a swim in the freezing water.


For our return flight to Boston we took off just as the sun was setting in the Berkshires.  The hilly landscape around the Connecticut River was painted with a pinkish light reminiscent of the Hudson River School.  We could distinguish the subtle tones with our eyes but there is no way that film would have captured it so Brad and I just enjoyed it.  In flying over lakes we noticed that the pack ice was broken up and covering less than 50 percent of the surface.  Spring is here.  Brad flies for American Airlines so you’d think that he would have become jaded with aerial scenery but he looked out the window in wonder (and in fear; I did much of the flight with a hood on so that I could see only the instruments while Brad looked for other airplanes and critiqued my performance on 4 instrument approaches).


Now that we New Englanders seem finally to escaped the clutches of Winter it may be worth reflecting that it could have been much worse.  Here’s a note from Marion, an old friend who lives in Alaska:



I am curious whether you heard as far away as Boston about the storm of the century we had here in Anchorage about two weeks ago. 130 mph winds, right off the inlet and onto our poor little condo. The winds and low temperatures also meant there was about a -30 degree F windchill. First the power went out and the car alarms in the neighborhood were going off like crazy. Debris was flying everywhere, trees were going down, and the dust was high. Then the roof flew off next door (from the green house on the corner), up about 15′ and onto our building’s roof, crushing it and breaking a joist. Boards were falling from the ceiling onto Sylvia & Jerry while they were in bed (Jerry tried to dismiss Mom’s complaints about the roof falling in until a board hit him in the ear! That is what he deserved). Then, early in the morning, our downstairs neighbor, Sherman, came flying into my condo announcing that the pipes had burst and water was spraying everywhere. We had to shut off the water. Concurrent with this, we also lost our heat. The water and heat stayed off for about a week. 

Marion lives in Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska and one of the places with the mildest climate. Full post, including comments