Maty's blog
| 2020-09-04 |
| Caius Julius Trump |
| As we roll into (yet another) US presidential election, I've had the first of what I expect to be several journalists asking me 'Is Donald Trump a modern Julius Caesar?' These journalists always seem somewhat disappointed when I assure them that he is not, but should Trump lead the Second Airborne Regiment over the Potomac to seize control of Washington I'll be prepared to reconsider - after he has written a book in brilliantly lucid prose explaining exactly how and why he did it. Actually Trump has something more in common with a politician called Gaius Flaminius who rose to power in 232 BC while putting the noses of the political establishment severely out of joint by a series of popular policies which thereafter led to calls for his impeachment and the threat of legal action against his associates - including his father. Unlike Caesar, Flaminius was not a good soldier and he was handily defeated and killed by Hannibal. However, it's worth asking whether Trump, like Caesar, rose to power because of a belief that the existing political system was/is not working for ordinary people. In that sense both Caesar and Trump are symptoms rather than the cause of a deeper malaise. Rather than trying to remove obnoxious politicians from power, perhaps any nation's power-brokers need to seriously consider what got such men elected in the first place. |
| 2020-08-04 |
| The Lazy Days of Summer |
| If only. I don't know how it has been for you in this most unusual of years, but this is shaping up to be one of the most frantic summers I can remember. For a start, the (ice) hockey play-offs have begin in August, with temperatures outside the rink in the high thirties centigrade. This means that instead of work, much of each evening is spent sobbing into my beer as I watch my team's futile attempts to score. The scorching heat also means that I spend a lot of time outside with a hosepipe trying to stop my garden going brown and crispy. Then because it's summer after all, I like to spend at least one morning of every week getting my tummy sunburned as I float on my back in the lake. However, due to a lot of people unexpectedly spending time indoors this year, my editors are keen that I supply these people with books to read while there, so deadlines have become very tight. In June I also took on an advisory job for a media company (of which more anon) which is fun but time-consuming. Yesterday was a good example of how the summer is going. I was helping my wife with upgrades to our patio when friends came around wanting us to join them picking huckleberries in the hills. My personal inclination was to finish an exposition on ancient lyres and do some work I'd promised for Cambridge, and I ended up doing that around midnight after picking berries in the afternoon and watching my team lose at hockey in the evening. The huckleberries do make wonderful jam, though. |
| 2020-07-05 |
| The Year of the Cuckoo |
| So we have reached the mid-way point of what has been a very odd year so far. If this time last year, someone had told me that we would be in the middle of a global pandemic during which protesters would be pulling down statues of Ulysses Grant as a symbol of racism, I would have suggested that this individual seriously consider recalibrating his medications. Yet here we are. Oddly enough, social isolation has led to an increase in my social life rather than the other way around. This is because living half-way up a mountain in the middle of a boreal forest tends to limit one's contact with humanity in the first place. So this has always meant that I would be reliant on the internet for many of my social interactions. Thanks to lockdowns, suddenly many more of my friends and colleagues are spending time on Zoom, and now they have gotten the hang of it, many decide to give me a call. During one of these conversations someone suggested that the world appears to have gone somewhat mad. On reflection though, we decided that the world has always been mad - it's just not mad in the way to which we have become accustomed. Consider, for example that a generation ago the United States and Soviet Union were seriously considering destroying the world over a dispute about which country had the better economic system. We've a long way to go before we're back at that level of insanity, though we seem to keep looking for new ways to get there. |
| 2020-06-04 |
| Getting about |
| As followers of my Facebook page will know, when I'm not doing ancient history I like to spend my time in the great Canadian outdoors. For a start, there's an awful lot if it, and secondly, wandering about there is free, and free is important to a writer. However, even outdoors I can't help thinking about ancient history, and yesterday while kayaking across a very scenic lake, my thoughts turned to transport. In winter, I like to snowshoe across mountainous terrain. It's fun, but certainly not easy or speedy. It does not help that one has to put a certain degree of forethought into not dying, and this takes physical form in packs containing torches, first-aid kits, blankets, fire-making materials, rope and about a dozen other things. Also, because getting across deep snow in very sub-zero temperatures needs specialized kit, while wandering around the wilderness is free, the snowshoes, snow suit, boots etc come to a very tidy sum. Then there's summer kayaking, where my entire wardrobe from sandals to baseball cap costs less than one of my highly-specialized winter boots, and the kayak itself costs the same as one pair of snowshoes. (Ideally you need three pairs depending on the terrain and type of snow.) While we were gliding across the water all needed equipment was stashed about the kayak, and other equipment, such as a hammock can be towed behind in a smaller kayak - a huge improvement to humping the lot in backpacks. In short, summer transport on water is more vastly efficient than land transport in winter, in terms of speed, carrying capacity, cost and comfort. No wonder then, that the Romans preferred to ship grain from Africa, even though the huge wheatfields of the Po valley lay just on the other side of the Apennines - geographically close, but in practical terms, almost out of reach. |
| 2020-05-04 |
| Social Isolation |
| One question I'm asked these days is 'How did Romans shelter in place during an epidemic?' My answer is that they didn't, because they couldn't. Roman life was lived largely in public, with many of the functions that today we do at home happening elsewhere. Laundry was done by professionals, meals were largely take-out or tavern affairs, since the average Roman apartment was enough of a fire-trap already without adding wood-stoves to the mix. Toilets and baths were public affairs where a Roman could discuss the morning's gossip with the neighbours while taking his after-breakfast crap. In other words, social isolation was impossible, because the average Roman was too integrated into his society. The same was true of most European homes for centuries. In fact I once used to live in a tiny one-bedroomed terrace house in Cambridge that was exactly six paces across (I measured it). It came as something of a surprise when a local historian told me that a family of fourteen had once lived there. In other words, in ancient times, and in fact until a century ago, humans generally lived on top of each other with all the possibilities for infection which that entailed. The largely self-sufficient western household containing an average of 2.7 people is a new development which seems better placed to insulate humans from the effects of a virus than homes have been at any other time in history. |
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