69. Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture

Who gets to be remembered?

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Cover art of Harriet I. Flower’s The Art of Forgetting

Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006.

Flower is an accomplished scholar, an established historian of the Roman Republic and early empire, who holds a post as Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton. Her other works include The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner, which discusses the extremely local dimension of Roman religion, the role of lares, and the question of what functions they served, as well as Roman Republics, a re-evaluation of the extent of continuity in the Roman polity before the age of Augustus.

The Art of Forgetting was published earlier than these two monographs. It is a study of the development of sanctions on memory in the Roman world from the late republic to the beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius. Flower concerns herself with the development of formal, public (as opposed to informal, familial) rules against the memorialisation of disgraced members of the Roman elite, and the way that official memory sanctions became a way to punish transgression as well as to shape a narrative (or set of narratives) about the (near, as well as further-away) past.

Flower begins with an observation on much more modern (state) efforts to control memory, with a famous 1948 photograph of Czechoslovakian politician Vladimír Clementis standing next to Klement Gottwald, later President of Czechoslovakia. Four years later, Clementis was disgraced and executed for his alleged participation in a Titoist/Zionist conspiracy after an antisemitic show trial, and his image was erased from that photograph in Soviet and Czechoslovak histories for the next couple of decades. Memory and memorialisation remains a locus of concern: deliberate forgetting leaves an absence that might be invisible unless you already know it’s there.

The book is divided into two main parts, the first focuses on the Roman republic and precedents in the Greek world; the second, on developments under the principate from Octavian to Antoninus Pius.

Flower opens with the Greeks, and the existence of memory sanctions in the world of the Hellenistic monarchies, before moving to the origins of memory sanctions in the Roman republic, discussing a handful of early examples — the details of which may be invented by later writers, but which may well have existed. In the early republic, it seems, each elite family decided which of their members would be remembered, and how. Commemoration and forgetting belonged to the family, in which ancestors’ masks were paraded at new family funerals, in how they were buried and how their tombs were maintained.

It is not until the breakdown of republican norms in the time of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (tribune 133 BC: he attempted to have himself improperly re-elected, at which point his first cousin Public Cornelius Scipio Nasica, pontifex maximus, led a mob to kill him) and of his younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus (tribune 123 and 122 BC, whose death came as a result of the very first senatus consultum ultimum declaring him an enemy of the Roman people) that public (ie., state in the form of magistrates and senate) intervention in commemoration begins to take place. Public restrictions on the memorialisation of the Gracchi and their allies are an innovation: one that is taken up and expanded massively by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (consul 88BC, pro-consul 87-84BC, dictator 82-80BC, consul 80 BC), who marched on Rome, revived the dictatorship, and crushed his opponents. The Sullan proscriptions, which saw more than 500 men expropriated and executed, also included sanctions on memory.

Flower opens the second section of the book with a chapter on “disgrace and rehabilitation,” in the early principate, considering among other things Julius Caesar’s attempts to rehabilitate the memory of previously-disgraced politicians (including some who suffered under the Sullan proscriptions) and Octavian’s rehabilitation of the memory of his relative Marcus Antonius. A subsequent chapter focuses on the fresh innovation that was public memory sanctions on women: previously women held no public role and sanctions were all handled within the family, but with their rise to prominence as members of the imperial family they also fell foul of public (usually imperial, in the form of their father or their husband the emperor) judgment on their memory. Flower also devotes a chapter to the complicated negotiation the Flavian emperors engaged in with respect to their predecessors, Nero and Claudius. A further chapter investigates the sanctions on the memory of Domitian, last of the three Flavian emperors, and the lack of memory sanctions after Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian.

It is a shame that the analysis on Domitian and Hadrian is thinner than that of the earlier chapters — the section on the republic is absolutely fascinating, as is the discussion of memory sanctions on Julio-Claudian women — because this is a fascinating and thoroughly scholarly book, one that prompts reflection on the creation of deliberate absences in our sources.

70. Keep Dying And Keep Trying? Django Wexler’s “How to Become the Dark Lord”

A chosen one is tired of dying for humanity in Django Wexler’s latest rollicking fantasy adventure, out 21st May 2024 from Orbit.

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The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. And — since I’ve abandoned the former Twitter — you can also find me on BlueSky. If you enjoy this, feel free to share.

Cover of Django Wexler’s How To Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

Django Wexler, How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. London & New York: Orbit. 2024.

It’s always more difficult to review a book you loved than one you hated or found mediocre. On top of wanting to do it justice and worrying about falling shot, love is an emotion of vulnerability. Admitting to it exposes your soft underbelly.

I’ve enjoyed many of Django Wexler’s books, and loved at least two outright. But I’ll be honest, this one might be my favourite so far. Sarcastic, fast-paced, bitingly funny and gripping as all fuck: it’s just too much fun to put down.

How to Become the Dark Lord opens with its protagonist a captive, in the process of being tortured, eventually to death (if she can’t speed things along first). Davi has been here before, far more often than she’d like. She’s the Chosen One (allegedly), yanked into fantasyland from a world she can hardly remember, and supposed to save the kingdom of humans from the Dark Lord’s hordes. She’s failed — and died — at least two hundred times at this point. Every time she dies, she wakes up at the same point she started: naked in a mountain pond, with a wizard yammering in her ear.

Davi’s just about had it with being the Chosen One. If you can’t beat ’em, join them: it’s time to see if she can’t become the Dark Lord instead. Thus begins a journey into the unknown, off the edges of all the maps that Davi’s ever seen: the enemies of all her earlier lives become her allies as she amasses an army (and applies decent leadership skills and an understanding of logistics to the undertaking) and marches to the conclave that selects the next Dark Lord. She’s really done with being tortured to death! She wants a challenge she might just be able to succeed at!

It’s interesting to be in the first-person perspective of a protagonist who has a hard time seeing other people as entirely… real isn’t quite the word. From Davi’s point of view, the next time she dies, all of this will reset: all the dead people will be alive again, all the consequences will be set at nought. She’s the only person who’ll even remember. To her credit and Wexler’s, this doesn’t actually turn her into a sociopath.

The first time she dies and doesn’t end up back where she started — the first time in countless lives and deaths — it provokes an existential crisis.

In many ways, this is an over-the-top, irreverent narrative. Davi has been desensitised to a great deal in terms of violence, and the narrative reflects a fairly (and understandably, under the circumstances) cavalier attitude towards it. Despite that, and despite her conviction that none of what she experiences will be lasting for anyone but her, she nonetheless cares about the people she finds herself responsible for, and finds herself forming real emotional connections, often despite herself. (I’m particularly fond of her developing relationship with the hot orc woman who’s basically her first recruit to the “Davi for Dark Lord” campaign and who ends up as her most senior captain as the army expands: they’re adorable idiots.) And yet, for all its over-the-top relish, its irreverent (and betimes jaded) protagonist, and its absolute commitment to the bit, Wexler isn’t writing parody. There’s an earnest core in here, alongside the fast-paced adventure and the appreciation for the ridiculous: a commentary on the fantasy genre and on human nature, an argument about whether actions matter even if their effects aren’t lasting.

(How to Become the Dark Lord is also in conversation with isekai as a genre, but I’m a lot less familiar with isekai than I’d have to be in order to say anything intelligent about the conversation that it’s having.)

How to Become the Dark Lord ends with a cliffhanger and a number of open questions. It’s a wild ride. I loved it. I really want to know what happens next, and as far as I’m concerned the sequel can’t come soon enough.

(No, seriously, I will FIND YOU and MAKE YOU TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. I mean it! I cannot bear to wait YEARS!)

Buy HOW TO BECOME THE DARK LORD from Blackwell’s (affiliate link).

PS. This is post number 70 because I had already written and scheduled no. 69 for next week, but decided to have this one go live earlier without changing the numbers. A glimpse behind the chaotic curtain!

68. William M. Owens, The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel: Resistance and Appropriation.

Did an ex-slave write the first known novel? William M. Owens suggests that the answer is “maybe.”

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The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. And — since I’ve abandoned the former Twitter — you can also find me on BlueSky. If you enjoy this post, feel free to share it widely!

Cover of William M. Owen’s The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel.

William M. Owens, The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel: Resistance and Appropriation. (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies.) Oxford: Routledge. 2022. (2020.)

Students of classical antiquity will perhaps be familiar with the Greek novel. Perhaps not: they’re frequently passed over, since they have a fairly odd collection of attributes, and weren’t considered very high-brow in classical scholarship for quite some time. Only five examples survive, one or two (there is, as usual, an argument about dating) from the first century CE, two or three (the same argument applies) from the second century, and one from the third or more probably the fourth century CE. They are written in Greek, by writers living in a world dominated by the Roman empire; they are playful texts, interested in romantic longing; and they involve the passage into and out of enslavement of one or both of the protagonists. These novels are romances: two young people are attracted to each other, and generally suffer trials (including abduction, enslavement, separation etc) before they achieve the satisfaction of secure married life and recognition of their noble status.

It is slavery that is William M. Owens’ focus in this book. Owens takes the view that Xenophon of Ephesus’s Ephesiaca (also known as Anthia and Habrocomes)and Chariton’s Callirhoe are the two earliest of the novels to survive. (There’s an argument over the dating of the Ephesiaca, or there was the last time I paid attention, though I think the argument for dating it to the first century has gained more traction; Callirhoe, on the other hand, is fairly securely placed in the mid-first century.) Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe may be next (second century), perhaps followed by Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon. (The evidence as to dating is not secure enough to be sure of the order.) The last, and the only one still without a Loeb Classical Library translation, is the Ethiopian Tale by Heliodorus of Emesa, which can probably be dated to the late 4th century.

The order in which the novels were written and circulated is important to Owens’ argument, for he looks at the portrayal of slavery in Xenophon and in Chariton and finds in it a strikingly different set of attitudes — ones more sympathetic to the experience of slavery and more realistic in their appreciation of the consequences of its violence — than in Longus, Achilles Tatius, or Heliodorus. While Xenophon and Chariton both express ambivalence when their enslaved noble protagonists act like “bad” (dishonest, in opposition to the will of their masters, angry) slaves,¹ their protagonists have or form bonds with other slaves, and react with a degree of emotional realism (as well as pragmatism and compromise) to their new status as slaves.

From the textual evidence and the few fragments of information about the authors, Owens argues plausibly for the possibility that the authors could have been highly literate freedmen, and/or that the expected audience of these two early novels included highly literate ex-slaves (and perhaps even literate slaves holding responsible positions in the developing bureaucracy of the imperial household) as well as what we might consider a more characteristically elite audience for literary production in the ancient world. (Novels, unlike plays and mimes and even some kinds of poetry, were not intended for public performance.)

He examines the ambivalence towards the protagonists’ behaviour in light of the ambivalence that one might expect to find in slave-owning ex-slaves, who may characterise their own “bad slave” behaviour during slavery as necessary for self-preservation and the pursuit of whatever autonomy may be won out of enduring conditions of unfreedom, violence, control, and denial of personhood — while that same behaviour in other slaves, especially after obtaining freedom, might at best provoke disapproval. (Quite probably it provokes violent repression, when seen in their own slaves: they still inhabit the same context of oppression but from the opposite side.) Williams argues that, while the incidents of the novels are dramatic and implausible, the representation of slavery and of slave-master relations from the point of the view of the enslaved protagonist is grounded in a realistic appreciation of slavery’s violence and constraints.

This is in contrast, Owens finds, to the work of Longus, which presents an idealising vision of nature and human relations, including slavery, one which affirms a vision of “correct” slave-mastery as moderate and humane. “Longus and his readers were,” Owens writes [141], “…aware that individuals of noble birth and character could be enslaved, could suffer as slaves, and could die in slavery. Longus’ mythos of slavery is thus idealising but may be nonetheless read as an affirmation of slavery as an institution that was ground in nature, an institution in which domination, enhanced and moderated by politikē technē,² tended toward justice and humanity.”

Owens’ discussion of Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon is somewhat less illuminating with regard to its portrayal of slavery, in part because (as Owens points out) Leucippe and Clitophon is engaged in several levels of literary play, some of which is using commonplaces of slavery and some of which is in dialogue with what appears to be the conventions of the early Greek novel as a genre (of which more examples circulated than we have surviving). It is an interested discussion of the novel, but the novel itself is perhaps a more complex text from the perspective of someone like me, who has read both the novel and now Owens’ discussion of it for the light it can cast on its social context.

Owens’ discussion of the Aethiopica or Ethiopian Tale (or Charicleia and Theagenes, after its protagonists), is slighter than the preceding discussions and focuses on its philosophical orientation and its use of slavery as, essentially, a set of metaphors and a lens for its philosophies around love and eros. The passage that stood out most to me in Owens’ analysis is as follows [203]:

“This episode [of torture] signals the ability of Heliodorus’ protagonists to withstand the worst that slavery has to offer. Together in the same dank cell, they exhort one another to show their noble virtue, to endure fortune and struggle for virtue. In this regard, they may resemble the philosophical lovers that Socrates describes at Phaedrus 256b, who, through the exercise of virtue, prevail over over the temptations of physical love. Charicleia and Theagenes, through the exercise of virtue, prevail instead over physical punishment. Torture, thus, for them has become an occasion for the display of virtue, a display that reaches its when they are tortured in one another’s presence and engage in a bizarre form of erotic competition in which each wants to be tortured more than the other in proof of their greater love. In contrast, a lesser, if more realistic, novel hero, Xenophon’s Habrocomes, was broken by torture. Another hero, Chariton’s Chaereas, was undone by the brutal conditions of agricultural slavery. Callirhoe’s anguish that her unborn child would be born a slave led her to relinquish her sōphrosynē, to marry Dionysius, and to lie to him that the child was his. These authors [Xenophon and Chariton] depicted how slavery broke the will of their protagonists. Heliodorus’ protagonists do not break. They enact the elite conceit that noble birth transcends circumstances.

…Unlike novel heroes like Anthia and Habrocomes, they do not act like slaves in order to survive.”

As a whole, The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel offers a fascinating close reading of the treatment of slavery in the five extant early Greek novels. Owens’ suggestion of a possible successful freedman authorship/partial wealthy freedman audience for Xenophon and Chariton is plausibly persuasive, though he quite rightly never attempts to argue that the evidence allows for anything more than plausibility. A very interesting work of scholarship. I’m glad I read it.

For those who want a more academic review of this volume, one by John Hilton exists at the BMCR.

1. The trend in the historiography of slavery in antiquity has started, in the last couple of decades, to prefer the term “enslaved person” to “slave,” but I find that a little cumbersome in some discussions (like here) and also at times it feels redundant, as if we won’t recognise the humanity of the person behind the label doulos or servus if we don’t make sure to emphasise that they are a person not just (as they were legally) an instrument. Anyway. Behind every discussion of slavery is a bedrock reality of human suffering, one that begins with the denial of another human being’s essential humanity. ↩︎
2. One translation of this is “civilised arts” or “political skills.” ↩︎

67. Considering the cosy turn in SFF: who gets to be comforted?

Photo by Jayden Wong on Unsplash: image of a lit fire in a stone fireplace

I’ve been thinking about the “cosy turn” in science fiction and fantasy lately, after reading Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes from the library. It appears to be the comparison-text for the New Cosy Wave, and it remind me of nothing so much as the time, many years ago, that I read a murder mystery narrated by a cat. A perfectly normal cat who solved crime by causing its person to stumble over solutions: in a string of Helpful Coincidences, everything works out. The just enjoy familiar comforts, while the unjust suffer consequences of their own making, and there’s never any real doubt about the outcome.

It’s clearly an appealing mode.

And yet, as a trend, it strikes me much as the grimdark turn of… is it really more than a decade ago now? (It is: my youth is retreating.) It strikes me much as the grimdark turn that became prominent in the late 2000s and early 2010s did: the “nasty, brutish, and short” view of human life typified by simplistic fan reception of the work of George R.R. Martin, that found further expression in the fantasy work of Richard K. Morgan, and a more perfect form in the early work of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence, as well as in certain apparently immune-to-irony fictions set in the same Warhammer 40K universe that gave the grimdark trend its name.

The grimdark turn retreated from moral complexity into the kind of ugly nihilism that views right action as either impossible or futile. (If I may cite myself from 2015 without disappearing up my own navel.) The cosy turn shows an inclination to retreat, I think, in the opposite direction: an optimism that sees moral questions, when not entirely irrelevant to the lives of the characters, as presenting no significant – that is to say, easily resolvable – challenges or costs.

If you don’t have the contrast of something bitter, sweetness can be very one-note. But bitterness, or even seriousness, to excess also becomes a form of monotony. Both modes often suffer – in an artistic, rather than commercial sense – from rejecting tonal contrast, and the potential of such contrast to highlight different parts of the human condition, and thus move the audience to reflect more deeply on the work and on themselves. It is in both cases a rejection of emotional complexity as well as moral complexity.

I think necessarily we must distinguish between “cosy” as a marketing category, “cosy” as an aesthetic, and “interiority” and “domesticity” as artistic lenses that overlap with cosy-the-marketing-category and cosy-the-aesthetic but are not encompassed by it. (Cosy as marketing category and cosy as aesthetic are also not precisely the same, but I find they have more in common.)

When I speak of interiority here, as an artistic lens, I mean a focus on what is usually private and interior: quiet reflection or self-reflection, a certain quality of the contemplative, a sense of the import of personal, private thoughts or resolutions for oneself even if the import of those resolutions is never apparent to the world outside one’s own self. I think for me interiority in fiction carries a sense of the fictional actor as one who is engaged in an intimate revelation with and to the reader, not as a performance but such that the reader becomes privy to such intimate struggles that, in the real world of imperfect knowledge, no one is ever really privy to with regard to another.

When I speak of domesticity, I speak not of the private interior self – the self revealed only in thought – but of the private sphere: the concerns of home, family, daily life, the private apartments that by convention are not exposed to public view. The realm of human life traditionally seen as belonging to women, as “women’s work.” Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, for example, is a book much concerned with interiority, and with the domesticity of the titular emperor’s private apartments. Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is science fiction very much engaged with spaceship domesticity.

Cosiness as an aesthetic draws from the domestic scene without being confined by (or to) it: it roots itself in the familiar, at least from its creator’s or presumed audience’s point of view. Thus its political viewpoint is often small-c conservative, taking a position that values established institutions, social norms and relations, rather than seeking to upend or undermine them entirely.

Let me clarify: The small-c conservative political viewpoint has all but disappeared from national politics in the Anglophone world, replaced by lumbering and radical Frankenstein’s monsters dedicated to destroying long-standing state institutions in the name of market efficiency, or to neofascist projects emerging from a “culture war.” It is not a requirement that the instinct to conserve the familiar should be homo- or transphobic or racist: it really depends on what’s seen as safe and familiar. (To take an example: from a political point of view, marriage equality can be seen as a conservative compromise. It preserves the social privilege accorded to legal marriage, and upholds pairbonding and the reproduction of normative middle-class values as an ideal. The abolition of marriage as a legal, state-recognised affair that affords privileges is by far a more radical position.)

Within this generally conservative framework, cosy fiction allows for occasional gestures towards radicalism, but to the extent that it upholds a framework of values – and is not, for example, a montage of wool jumpers, crackling fireplaces, and warm beverages – it gives priority (and assigns worth) to the familiar over the strange, the comfortable over the difficult, the long-known over the new. From, at least, the point of view of the author and the assumed audience. It is a species of fiction that occupies itself with communities and with relationships, one that reaches for a sense of security and stability for its characters, and one rejects the grand in favour of the personal.

(This is not an essay about Legends and Lattes specifically, but if it were, I would be able to substantiate these points by direct reference to that book. And several others. It’s illuminating to compare the modern “cosy mystery” genre with the mystery novels written in the 1920s and 1930s to which they are sometimes compared – or the 1940s and 1950s – and find in the originals much less of an urge towards the comfortable. Yes, I’m being a bit lazy in not quoting you paragraphs – but it’s be a bit lazy or write 5000 words, and I don’t have the focus for the latter right now.)

Cosy as a marketing category brings together disparate works that are united perhaps by their aesthetics, perhaps by sentiment, and perhaps by neither: a work will be labelled “cosy” in marketing terms if those doing the labelling believe it will sell to people who have bought other things labelled in this way. Marketing categories are far from always a useful category for understanding or discussing art, save in economic terms.

I have been trying, as I write, to avoid discussing art in terms laden with moral or aesthetic judgement. Do we have a vocabulary for literature that doesn’t devalue artistic earnestness, or deliberate naiveté, or simplicity? I like my texts replete with complexity, but I seldom enjoy stylistic elaboration or experiment, so I don’t want to say that I find either complexity in any sense to be intrinsically superior to simplicity, or, for that matter, vice versa. Likewise with regard to what is comfortable and what is difficult. Yet it seems to me that language itself – or perhaps a long tradition in literary criticism – makes it nearly impossible not to imply judgement, one way or another. Is it better to be earnest or cynical, straightforward or twisty, fast or slow? Better in what sense? Different works of art have different goals and different audiences.

(I do believe that art is better, more communicative, as art, when it avoids monotony. Balance and proportionality, directing the attention of the audience to what the creator intends the work to be about. What is art for? It’s a conversation about being human, in the end.)

That presents a challenge when it comes to discussing what… let’s be fancy, let’s call it an artistic movement, or at least a trend… what any given movement is doing, and why, on its own merits. The “cosy turn” in science fiction and fantasy, and particularly fantasy, speaks to and reflects something – some need, some lack, some desire, some fantasy – in the current moment, much as the grimdark one did a decade and more ago. The idea of safety, of stability, present in the cosy is powerfully attractive, and I think it must be in some sense in dialogue with the de-stabilised political and social environments that have obtained in both the largest Anglophone democracy (the USA) and the oldest Anglophone parliamentary system (the UK) for the better part of the last decade. (Much as I suspect the grimdark turn was in part a reaction to the cynically imperial and ultimately self-defeating foreign adventures of the US-led Anglo-American “War on Terror,” and the pervasive, self-righteously bellicose propaganda that surrounded, and indeed still surrounds, the entire project.)

I don’t find most works (at least, the ones I’ve read) marketed as “cosy” to be satisfying. Their visions of security and comfort, and the oft-times co-operative coincidences that allow for those visions to be made real, ring a little hollow – as unreal as a world where no one is ever generous. And I am made somewhat uneasy by the way in which the “queer cosy” seems to be an expression par excellence of US (white) middle-class assimilationist queerness, reproducing the structures and strictures of white (capitalist) heterosexuality. On the one hand, this is a victory of sorts: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. On the other hand… that’s a bit of a problem.

It feels telling to me that I have seen vanishingly – and I mean vanishingly — few works by BIPOC writers (and/or featuring BIPOC protagonists) described in “cosy” terms. Does only whiteness get to be “cosy”?

And if so, what does that say about who gets to be comforted by their fictions, and who does not?

66. The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality by Walter Scheidel

Does violence really play an equalising role in the economic history of humanity? Walter Scheidel argues that it does.

The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. And — since I’ve abandoned the former Twitter — you can also find me on BlueSky.

Cover art for Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveller

Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2018.

I first encountered Walter Scheidel’s work in any real way as a postgraduate student. His work on economy, demography, and social history for a scholar of antiquity cannot be overlooked, for example in Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (Leiden: 2001). As an editor and a co-editor of collected volumes, he’s made a marked contribution to the direction of debates about economy and state power in antiquity, among his other very notable contributions to the field.

In The Great Leveller, Scheidel explores the thesis that economic (and other kinds of) inequality grows in peaceful conditions, while violent disruptions can (but do not always) result in a decrease in inequality – that is, violence and mass destruction is an equalising force, economically speaking, in human history. Scheidel makes the point that this comes into clearest relief with regard to the mass mobilisation (and massively destructive) warfare of the first half of the 20^th century, when the combination of mass destruction of capital assets and the need to muster a significant proportion of the population under arms and keep them there combined to drive down inequality, though Scheidel finds similar a perhaps similar process at work in the hoplite warfare of the Archaic and Classical Greek city-states.

To explore his argument about inequality, and to lay out the evidence for it – which is in many periods disparate, complex, and variable – Scheidel divides The Great Leveller into seven parts, for a total of sixteen chapters. Part I, “A Brief History of Inequality,” gives a three-chapter overview of economic inequality and what we know about how it developed from the pre-agricultural stone age to the modern day. Part II, “War,” focuses on the effects of war, with two chapters, 4, “Total War,” and 5, “The Great Compression,” devoted to the world wars of the 20^th century and their aftermath. Scheidel gives particular attention to the experience of Japan, and Japan under Allied occupation. Chapter 6 surveys “Preindustrial Warfare and Civil War,” and must make do with very disparate and challenging sorts of evidence the further back it goes.

Part III, “Revolution,” comprises two chapters, one on “Communism,” and one on revolution “Before Lenin.” Scheidel isn’t shy about the violence inherent in the revolutionary projects of the 20^th century, but there are difficulties involved in the evidence. Part IV, “Collapse,” is one single chapter focusing on the consequences of state collapse, something more common in early history than in the 20^th and 21^st century (with the notable recent exception of Somalia). The complete collapse of state power makes for interesting circumstances.

Part V, “Plague,” divides itself into two chapters. One focuses on history’s most famous and most deadly plague, the Black Death, while the second discusses “Pandemics, Famine, and War.” War is included because this trio tends to co-occur. Evidence for the effect of plague and pandemics on inequality is complex and variable.

Part VI, “Alternatives,” comprises three chapters that look at the effects on inequality of non-violent developments and disruptions (access to education, recessions), including one that looks specifically at counterfactuals – what if this never happened, or this happened instead? In this chapter the weakness and complexity of the evidence is most apparent: the evidence means that Scheidel must focus largely on the 20^th century.

Part VII, “Inequality Redux and the Future of Levelling,” comprises two chapters, “In Our Time” and “What Does The Future Hold”? Many of Scheidel’s assumptions and contentions in this last chapter, particularly about the future of war and warfare, already seem laughably out of date in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while some are strongly implausible given science and what we know about humans: on the whole, it is, for very understandable reasons, the weakest chapter in the book.

Scheidel’s thesis, at its simplest, argues that violence destroys capital assets, thus reducing the wealth of the wealthiest in any given society. Meanwhile, under conditions of violent disruption, poorer members of society die in sufficient quantities that their assets – or at least the resulting better access to agricultural land and food resources, with fewer people to feed – make their heirs and survivors less poor. In mass mobilisation warfare, the power of the masses thus mobilised can require elites to be subject a higher tax burden and redistributive policies, for elite self-interest is also invested in surviving mass-mobilisation warfare: losing would impoverish them worse than allowing their wealth to be redistributed. And the larger and more peaceful the society (or the economy), the more of its surplus the elite of the elite are able to extract at the expense of the non-elite.

It is a persuasively argued book, and a very thought-provoking one. The evidence on which Scheidel relies for this thesis outside the last two centuries, however, is sufficiently complex and variable that I don’t think we can have a truly definitive conclusion on the matter. Even from this evidence, we may find a simpler formulation: mass death events may very well be a necessary condition for a significant reduction in society-wide inequality, but they are clearly far from a sufficient one.

65. Helen Hardacre’s Shinto: A History

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Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017.

Cover art for Helen Hardacre’s Shinto: A History

If we say that I knew nothing about Shinto and Japanese cultural and religious history before reading this book, it would be generous: I had some vague impressionistic stereotypes drawn from pop culture, which is the opposite of knowledge. Helen Hardacre is, according to her bio, Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at Harvard University, however, so I feel reasonably confident that she, at least, knows her stuff.

There are, as I learned from this book, debates about the extent to which one can write a history of Shinto before “Shinto” as a term came to be used to describe practices and beliefs by its practitioners. Hardacre begins her history early, before the Nara period, providing a brief overview of the early history of state development in Japan before identifying institutions connected with practices related to the “Kami,” the gods and/or spirits around which Shinto grew. Tracing institutional continuities through various changes and ruptures up to the modern day, Hardacre proceeds to write a readable and well-illustrated history of practices (and later, beliefs) concerning a set of practices and beliefs that came be held by their practitioners as self-consciously indigenous to Japan. In this light, Hardacre includes discussion of Buddhist, Daoist, and later Christian influence on cultural and religious trends.

If you’re used to a history of religion from a Christian perspective — where the focus is usually on doctrine and belief as much as institutions and practices, and orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy looms large — Hardacre’s history is frankly revelatory, to be honest. The tension and interplay between a divergent set of practices and beliefs and the way in which they develop and are used/promoted/suppressed by different factions and political authorities is fascinating, and the developments of the 20th century are really interesting.

I found it a good introduction to the subject, and a good overview as I try to gain more of a grasp of Japanese history than that available from popular culture.

Buy the book from the publisher.

64. Worldbuilding: An Aesthetic of Coherence?

In this post:

1. An Aesthetic of Coherence? Thinking about Vajra Chandrasekera’s “The Lone and Level Sands.”
2. Reviews at Reactor Magazine (the former Tor.com)

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An Aesthetic of Coherence?

I haven’t yet read The Saint of Bright Doors, but I’ve been reading some of Vajra Chandrasekera’s essays with great interest. Chandrasekera is a deft writer and a vivid essayist, and frequently directs a penetrating insight at science fiction and fantasy. I particularly recommend as food for thought The Extractivism of Setting and the Traitor’s Text:

“By its very nature, the traitor’s text must be layered. It is complex, because the world it describes is complex. It cannot essentialize. It cannot be condescending or onanist. It can never be cozy. This necessarily makes it a more difficult text to engage with than all the others, which makes sense because the traitor’s text can only exist in response to all the others: it comes after them, logically if not necessarily chronologically.”

But the one that I’ve been thinking over, as a historian of Mediterranean antiquity and someone who’s been writing about science fiction and fantasy for more than a decade now, is The Lone and Level Sands, where Chandrasekera turns his eye on worldbuilding and suspension of disbelief, those commonplaces of SFF, and its failings. It’s an uncomfortable challenge to popular conventions. And the thing is, he’s right — or at least, he’s not wrong.

“Coming back to Christian symbolism of worldbuilding as a work of subcreation, Harrison had something to say about that, too

“The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.”

This, I think, is the real danger of worldbuilding as a practice and a literary norm. This is the science-fictional root of longtermism, the clomping foot of the boy demiurges attempting to build a world of the world. As with the real homophobia behind representation on the page, this requires the suspension of disbelief. The world, to be built, must be made small. The technique requires the stripping away of complexities. It is not ambiguous that Eru Ilúvatar created the world. That is a simple fact, the kind of fact that is not only unavailable in what Tolkien called the primary world, not only ridiculous, dangerous and arrogant if treated as fact, not only contestable but with deep and consequential histories of contestation. It is common to describe worldbuilding projects as encyclopedic, but few worldbuilding projects have the space (or the interest) to investigate the depths of historical-psychological complexity, ambiguity, unknowability, and irreducibility that might be seen in the edit history of a single contested Wikipedia page—to say nothing of the epistemological failures of Wikipedia itself, its biases and overwhelmingly vast absences. Worldbuilding as a totalizing project cannot help but fail. My feeling is that “suspension of disbelief” and “secondary world” were not helpful ways to think about what is actually happening when we read a text, and yet they are tropes so influential and well-established that many of us take them as givens, as expectations of how we should read and what a fantastical text is supposedly doing.”

I want to jump off from here to think a little bit about what worldbuilding means to me. Worldbuilding as it is conventionally understood is, I think, an aesthetic of coherence: of knowability, of the sensibility —on its own terms — of any given fictional representation of the world.

Fictional representations of the world have a potential for complete knowability that the real world does not. The creator-composer of a fictional world chooses what it contains, and is frequently right there to justify (or not) their choices. Given that the current modes of fantasy and science fiction privilege the aesthetics of coherence, it’s worth considering the pull of fictional certainties (and of knowable fictional histories) over the striking uncertainties that anyone engaged in the study of history must grapple with over and over again.

One of the reasons I often find myself dissatisfied with epic fantasy is its approach to history. Every fantasy world, or very nearly, has a history: for most, the history is relevant in some way to the action of the narrative’s “present.” That history is surpassingly rarely a competing patchwork of incomplete and frequently contradictory sources, which survive unevenly, and many of which can be relied upon to contain inaccuracies and biased interpretations, out of which annalists, biographers, and historians across time construct a variety of narratives of What Happened. These narratives are sometimes unprovable. Sometimes they are disproven. Sometimes they are embroidered, and the embroidery taken as truth by later generations (and sometimes we can guess as to the embroidery, afterwards).

In epic fantasy, history is most frequently unitary and, when important to the present, either known or knowable. It is rarely outright wrong, save when some truth has been deliberately hidden, only to be uncovered by the protagonists. It is almost never unrecoverable.

The knowability of the past is often paralleled with the knowability of the future: prophecy is one of fantasy’s enduring tropes.

Yet it is possible to construct an aesthetic of coherence that isn’t totalising, or simplified (in this way, at least): the whole fictive world need not be knowable. Texts that construct coherent worlds that nonetheless participate in the great uncertainties of human life — unanswerable questions about the past, the present, ourselves, the existence of the soul or of anything like a god — present a challenge, albeit a gentle one, to the impetus towards totalising certainty and the lure of pseudo-realistic plausibility.

But in the end, I think, the fantastical fictional world is rather like a conspiracy theory, where for many the appeal lies in the details of the conspiracy, the assurance that there is, in fact, some kind of explanation for everything, a (hidden) world whose logic is complete and self-sustaining within its own sphere and capable of endless elaboration. There’s no harm in it as a form of play.* But maybe we shouldn’t forget that it is play, and only one form of creative play, at that.

*Let’s not derogate activities done primarily or solely for enjoyment, all right? This little essay right here, this is a form of play for me right now.

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Reviews at Reactor Magazine (the former Tor.com)

Both published in February:

Lilith Saintcrow’s A Flame in the North:

“It’s always difficult to review a story that has not yet formed a complete narrative arc: You can say much about what it promises and what it does so far, but assessing its successes must usually hinge upon seeing the whole thing. In the case of A Flame in the North, Saintcrow has complicated my task even further in the extent to which her worldbuilding and her protagonist’s journey recollects—elegantly, deliberately, intentionally (as when in music one instrument elaborates a variation on another’s theme), and above all closely—one of the ur-texts of the fantasy genre. The extent of Saintcrow’s echoing of Tolkien’s mythopoesis drives me to caution. Shall it turn out to be earnest imitation, clever commentary, subtle subversion, or some other thing? “

Saara El-Arifi’s Faebound:

“I wanted to enjoy Faebound. And at points, I did: The prose is straightforward—stylistically, Samantha Shannon is a good comparison—the character relationships engaging, the setup interesting and full of potential. But Faebound’s characters seem to me more observers of the narrative than drivers of it, and they make too few connections in what they’re observing (and see too few thematic complexities) for me to feel satisfied with the experience.”

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The majority of my writing here is freely available. If you want to see it direct in your inbox, subscribe! If you want to support more of it, feel free to join up as a paying subscriber here or via Patreon. You can also find me on BlueSky as @hawkwing_lb.bsky.social.

63. Queer Divergence: Consort of Fire, marketing and differential queerness/es

Image credit: Jordan McDonald, UnSplash. A time-lapse image of a raindrop falling into a pool of water that reflects the colours of a rainbow.

With thanks to Elizabeth Bear, Devin Singer, and Fade Manley.

This is an essay about queerness, fiction, and marketing: about queer receptions and queer readings in our cultural moment. It’s an essay that starts with Kit Rocha’s Consort of Fire, but it is not about Consort of Fire, except insomuch as that novel provoked me to consider: what does it mean to say that something is queer? (What is queerness to me, or I to queerness?) How is queerness recognised?

“If part of what desire wants is recognition,” writes Judith Butler in the introduction to Undoing Gender,

“then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well. …[R]ecognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced. This means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as recognisably human and who does not.”

Consort of Fire: queer polyamorous romance/the differential production of queerness?

Consort of Fire is a fantasy romance novel by pseudonymous writer duo Kit Rocha, in which a princess, Sachi, is sent to marry (and then kill) a warrior-god who goes by the cognomen the Dragon, accompanied by her handmaiden-assassin Zanya. Sachi and Zanya are in love, and the primary thrust of the romance is both of them falling in love with the Dragon, and vice versa. I encountered its existence via social media in the context of praise of and for its queerness and emphasis on the existing relationship between Sachi and Zanya: its most prominent blurb (from romance bestseller Katee Roberts) positions it as “A primal cry of queer joy.” I read it out of curiosity, because I don’t think I’d ever read

a) a polyamorous explicit fantasy romance

b) where a primary relationship between two women expanded to include a man.

Having read it, I feel the urge to prod at it. To interrogate its relationship to queerness and to my understanding of queerness. I’m not convinced that we understand the same things by the word queer.

Yet I’m not convinced we don’t, either.

The extent to which sexuality and sexual activity, here, has a Man involved at all times troubles me, with regard to the rhetorical positioning of Consort of Fire‘s blurb and marketing. The cover copy suggests something perhaps less heavily invested in penises and in masculine-centric views of sex.

Let’s pause here to mark the fact that I don’t read, and never have done, a great deal in the way of sex-heavy romance novels, and my interest in heterosexual romance has dwindled to next-to-nil over the last decade. I have been informed by a reliable friend that the conventions of “mainstream” FFM romance/erotica generally mandate that all sexual activity include the M party. My reading of the cover copy was not informed by this context: there may well be a gap between my impressions and expectations and the impressions of someone with a closer familiarity to such generic conventions as exist for this kind of romance.

It is an entirely competent, indeed compelling, novel. It has an interesting world, and develops interesting tensions. I would put its mode closer to the erotic end of the romance spectrum. The relationship between the two women is rather well done, between the trio somewhat interesting — somewhat, for I find the men of romance sadly boring, and this particular example is not really an exception.

Queer as in “Fuck You”

But I came across it in a discussion of queer fictions. And I feel that queer — as a concept, rather than a synonym for the interminable LGBTQIA+ acronym — expresses something that… isn’t here. Or is here very gently, cosily, very much in a subdued, blink-and-you-miss-it fashion. Queer orients itself with regard to power. Queer orients itself with regard to, and in opposition to norms of sex, of gender, of sexuality. It fucks with boundaries. It turns the normative world upside down.

It turns passivity into power, power into service, sharply divided categories into permeable, penetrable — and interpenetrated — sets.

Queerness subverts. Queerness transgresses.

The portrayal of sex alone, here, wouldn’t set me to prodding at the idea of what it means to call something queer, or how we recognise and understand queerness. But combine it with the portrayal of social roles, and I find myself gnawing on this bone.

The Dragon occupies a position of conventionally male-coded power. He is a warrior, a ruler, a shapeshifting being that others call a god. He is the supplicated, rather than the supplicant. Someone who protects, rather than someone who is protected: someone who has never been rendered abject. From the beginning, he is a personification of power — not of endurance, not of survival, but of the power to make the world itself respond to your will. (How he uses this power is not germane to its existence: he has it.)

Sachi and Zanya, on the other hand, at the outset occupy roles where they are in positions of limited power and agency. Sachi is an (imposter) princess sent into a form of arranged marriage — much against her will, with her life at stake, with a past full of unpleasantness: a very traditionally female position, indeed. Of the three, Zanya is the one most obviously transgressive of gendered norms: a loyal handmaid, a supremely well-trained assassin, and a woman in love with another woman. (Her past, too, is full of brutality and unpleasantness.) They are both intimately familiar with powerlessness and limited choices.

This orientation vis-à-vis power is remarkably conventional: a man holds power, a woman — in this case, two — must figure out how to survive long enough to claim power. It is conventional for romance novels, also: a powerful man (a much older man, at that) wishes to protect a woman — in this case two — in whom he is emotionally invested or sexually interested from the dangers he’s aware of, while a woman figures out whether he’s worth her effort.

Remarkably conventional, especially since the novel is invested in a romantic and sexual triangle — one where all parties have similar levels of interest and investment in each other — not a tripod, where Zanya and the Dragon each individually care for Sachi and never progress past a nonsexual friendship with each other. It positions the man as central and powerful from the outset, and, given the configuration of parties present when sex acts take place on the page, as sexually necessary.

It does not transgress the boundaries of heterosexual, patriarchal norms in the way that, for example, switching the social roles around would. A decorative imposter prince and his valet seducing a warrior queen, or a princess with a handman rather than a handmaid seducing such a queen, or even the Dragon of Consort of Fire, would present a transgression of gendered structures of power, and potentially a critique of the culturally-constructed power dynamics of sexual activity (and particularly of penetrative sex acts) to which the roles of the characters here do not lend themselves.

I want to reiterate: I’m not criticising the novel for what it’s doing as a novel. It’s a well-done, playing-with-and-into-existing-tropes romance novel. I’d call all the poles of the relationships fairly “conventional,” if they didn’t include bisexual polyamory. As conventional as you get while including that, anyway. Does that make it gently radical, in romance novel terms?

It is the marketing, the cover copy, the choice of prominent blurb (“A primal scream of queer joy”), the social media narrative as I encountered it, that set me up with queered expectations.

What do we mean by queer?

The Capacity to Provoke: Queerness and Transgression

I apparently maintain a distinction between, on the one hand homosexuality (or bisexuality) as an orientation of attraction, and queer sex and queerness more generally on the other. When I realised this, it came along with the realisation that I’d accidentally reinvented a (less nuanced, more personal?) version of queer theory, absent any previous direct engagement with queer theory as a discipline or framework of knowledge.

(I always, it seems, come to theory backwards, fumbling to articulate what I mean and only finding afterwards, that the words already existed, the work already done — albeit in a form inaccessible to me at the time.)

Take an example. There is nothing transgressive about my marriage, save for the fact that it exists: save for the fact that the Ireland in which my relationship is both acceptable and normal was frankly unimaginable as little as three decades ago. It mimics the structures of heterosexual relationships among my college friends (an egalitarian bunch, to be fair), at times to a frankly uncomfortable degree.*

*There is an entire subsidiary essay here about the way in which anti-egalitarian pressures in otherwise egalitarian relationships coalesce primarily around children and childcare.

But there are those for whom homosexual attraction, in and of itself, is inherently transgressive: for them, the mere existence of relationships — of lives — like mine provokes disturbance.

And there are those of us who were raised with the unspeakability of the queering of sex and gender in all its forms: with the expectation of invisibility, of isolation, of discrimination and struggle and suffering, if one challenged it. That is, if we could surmount the unspeakability so far as to be able to develop expectations at all, rather than merely finding ourselves inarticulately, miserably, at odds with society’s conventions and received wisdom. A happy relationship — a happy marriage — between two people of the same socially-recognised gender, legally sanctioned and widely accepted, is an ultimate transgression of all those old expectations: a rebuke to an entire system for categorising sex and power.

I want to say former system, but we all know that it’s a long way from dead and buried.

Given social sanction, we recapitulate old hierarchies and situate ourselves within new ones. We no longer provoke and disturb the old system of categories, because we have created new systems, new categories — which we may or may not transgress, but which we do not transgress a priori by existing.

The current lives and literatures of homo- and bisexuality dwell between these two poles: on the one hand, transgression by mere existence; and on the other, normalised within new systems of categories, arising out of the old — normalised, at least, as long as they decline to be too challenging. As long as they’re sufficiently respectable, and not too fuck-you transgressive.

Transgender and genderqueer lives and literatures are far less normalised: sexual relationships can be hammered flat to fit in with older hierarchies where the crossing of categories of being and identity resist.

Those old categories had hegemonic, universalising power, and still hold tremendous force. It’s a force capable of deforming attempts to construct new systems. It exerts pressure to sanitise, to conform: to imitate old hierarchies and to sand down — to refuse — radical differences.

This pressure frequently makes itself felt in the existence of, and the much-debated necessity for, the politics of respectability: the idea that to be valued, to be worth valuing,one must perform in ways acceptable to the dominant social paradigm. This performance usually emphasises morality, particularly sexual morality, and de-emphasises difference, particularly sexual difference and sexual concupiscence.Respectability is the opposite of transgression.

Respectability Politics and Assimilation

“[B]ehaviors are judged respectable by comparing them to racist, sexist, and classist norms… Moreover, respectability politics’ emphasis on individual uplift ignores structural inequalities.”[Pitcan et al, 2018]

Fictional representation is a site in which respectability is contested. It is a site through which the boundaries of what it is permissible to imagine are drawn by the wider society in which those fictional representations circulate, and by which they are received.

A novel of homo-affective romance set in a world where sexual orientation is not an axis of discrimination… both is and is not transgressive. It provokes disturbance only in those for whom homosexual relationships are a priori a transgression; it transgresses against a norm that insists on homosexual suffering. At the same time, it often assimilates itself to other structuring norms of heterosexual romance and behaviour, and to normative categories and hierarchies of power.

Do I need to offer examples, or can I assume that part’s obvious? Let’s take — oh, let’s say an arranged marriage romance (like in Everina Maxwell’s Winter‘s Orbit, or Foz Meadows’ A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, both novels I deeply enjoyed). Such a romance usually assumes certain structuring norms, such as the existence of marriage itself and associated principles of property inheritance. The existence of marriage as a legal convention assumes certain things about society, and the existence of arranged marriages invites other assumptions with regard to hierarchies of power. These stories might in the end complicate, subvert, or upend these assumptions, or they might play them — so to speak — straight.

In its assimilationist form, queerness is reduced to sexuality and attraction. Whether that sexuality is lewd or chaste, a glorious excess of pornographic raunchiness or the most tentative awakening of attractive awareness, it still becomes a matter of genitals and what happens with them, rather than to the wider, more subversive, deconstructionist possibilities that come with deliberately refusing (or refuting) hetero-patriarchal categories, structures, and relations of power.

The queerest book I read in 2023 was Martha Wells’ Witch King. Its queerness had very little to do with sex, but with embodiment and identity. Kai, the titular Witch King, is an extremely queer character. Not because of anything to do with sex, but because of how hard he transgresses categories and norms — for the reader, but also within the world of the story. He crosses borders and boundaries, and fucks with cultural, physical, and metaphysical norms, both voluntarily and out of duress or necessity. He is a figure of ambivalence, whose existence defies easy categorisation. He provokes reconsideration of categories.

This, to me, is also what makes Ann Leckie’s work queer. Not the pronouns, though that choice in the Ancillary books was a provocative delight, but — to paraphrase from a conversation with Elizabeth Bear — the exploration and recasting of societal power expectations. In the Ancillary trilogy, this is primarily seen through forms and relationships other than the sexual. Breq fucks with categories of personhood and power: with subject and object positions, with who is, who does, and who is done to.

But let’s go back to the question of respectability and transgression for a moment.

Paradoxes of Success? Queerness, Radicalism, Comfort

“Respectability politics… reinforces within-group stratification to juxtapose a respectable us against a shameful other.” [Pitcan et al, 2018]

The current moment in science fiction and fantasy is one in which the word “queer” has become marketable– after a long struggle to see its existence welcomed. The successes of Gideon the Ninth and Winter‘s Orbit offer two examples: an audience (of which I am part) has long hungered for the validating support of visibility. And can find it, now, sometimes,in valorised and heroised figures, instead of at the margins; as text, rather than subtext.

Yet we must acknowledge that the queer audience for texts depicting non-heterosexual sexualities is not the only audience: success, in the capitalist marketplace of cultural production, requires making those texts palatable to a wider — to the predominant — social context. The boundaries of the publicly acceptable are circumscribed by what this context will tolerate, and it tends not to tolerate a complete defiance of its legitimacy, or of its right to judge.

Respectability, and its close cousin familiarity, becomes key to reaching this wide audience. Familiar things afford comfort: they are known. They do not require explanation or examination. Their power to perturb is limited.

This presents a constant tension with the radical and transgressive possibilities that queerness contains. The capacity to provoke and disturb social power relations, and social power expectations (and its potential to — as it were — embody Bakhtin’s carnival), remains for me its most defining characteristic.

Queerness exists in tension with comfort, and with the familiar. Not because of genitals, not because of sex, and not even because of histories of discrimination, but rather because of its power to cross and complicate categories and boundaries: its ability to de–familiarise and de–naturalise ordinary assumptions and expectations, and the gendered hierarchies of power which are so entwined in the structures of our society that we almost forget they’re there.

You might remember the impossible-to-attribute quote, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” (Which always struck me as a strange formulation: if everything is about sex, and sex is about power, then what it’s actually saying is that everything is about power. Perhaps sexualised power, but still. Power.) Queerness isn’t about sex (except, of course, when it is also about sex). Queerness, too, is about power: about the structuring logics of who has it, who is subject to it, and who can reject it.

And it is at the site of power that queerness as a marketing artefact,and queerness as the potential for the radical overturning of existing categories, come most visibly into conflict.

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Works cited:

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. 2004.

Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E Marwick, danah boyd, “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 23, Issue 3, May 2018, Pages 163–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmy008

Kit Rocha, Consort of Fire. Seattle: Montlake. 2023.

Works mentioned:

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy.

Everina Maxwell, Winter’s Orbit.

Foz Meadows, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance.

Martha Wells, Witch King.

62. I’m eager for other people to read Meredith Mooring’s Redsight

Perhaps one of them will be able to explain to me what it is I just read.

But first! If you enjoy these posts and want to keep seeing more of them, consider subscribing via Patreon or as a free (or paid) subscriber here at WordPress. 95% of my posts are freely available – and they’re going to stay that way! – but getting paid to write them makes it much more likely that I, you know, actually write.

Cover art for Meredith Mooring’s Redsight

Meredith Mooring, Redsight. London: Solaris. 2024.

Readers who find in Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth a staggering work of thematically coherent genius will find much to enjoy in debut author Meredith Mooring’s space fantasy Redsight. (I think Harrow‘s a hot mess, personally. An entertaining hot mess with a good voice, but a hot mess.) For me, this was a novel I was prepared to enjoy, and for the first few chapters, I found myself imagining I’d rather like it, albeit with several caveats if I came about to recommend it to anyone else.

I held that belief right up until it started throwing itself energetically off cliffs in pursuit of ever larger sharks to jump.

Korinna is an acolyte in the Order of Vermicula. The Order of Vermicula, housed on the giant spaceship Navitas, is devoted to the goddess Vermicula, considers themselves her descendants, and produces Redseers: women blind in conventional fashion who nonetheless can perceive and manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe, making fully trained “red priestesses” valuable as pilots and navigators to the ships of the vaguely-defined space-faring Imperium. Korinna considers herself the weakest of her cohort, and fears the day when she will be found sufficiently wanting to be drained of blood in a sacrifice to her goddess and “recycled.” But in a surprise twist, it transpires that her mentor and tutor has been concealing the extent of Korinna’s strength in the hopes that she will be one day able to overthrow or succeed Renatia, the order’s High Priestess, and pushes her into an accelerated regime of training so that Korinna can pass her navigator exams and escape into the arms of the empire’s military before Renatia has her bumped off.

Sahar is a Lightbender in the service of the Order of Radiosa. The goddess Radiosa, like her sister Vermicula, is long trapped away from the universe, but the Order of Radiosa serves the empire as legal functionaries, judges, and law enforcement. Their abilities let them detect spoken untruths. The discovery of Sahar’s talent as a Lightbender took her away from a much-desired career as an engineer and scientist. Now, in her posting to an isolated world, she has found a heretic scientist constructing fascinating forbidden weapons – once used in the service of the goddess Furia, who was allegedly cast down by her sisters. Sahar judges the scientist in accordance with the law, of course. But her curiosity leads her to investigate the heretical weapons in order to be able to construct one herself, and when she is summoned to a gathering of the Order of Radiosa, she essentially conceals one of these weapons in her luggage. For science.

Litia Sarai is visiting the Navitas as a civilian advisor to an imperial governor and ship commander, Governor Wu, who is attempting to buy a new navigator from the Order. We first meet her as she is about to transform into a scaled snake monster and eat an imperial senator: she is some form of human-seeming shapeshifter. This is a secret which, as with many others, she keeps from her erstwhile employer. (We’ll get to those in their place.) She has other purposes on the Navitas, but her path crosses Korinna’s and the two of them immediately experience a pull towards each other. Ultimately Litia is the one to bring Korinna to Governor Wu’s attention and secure her a role as a navigator outside of High Priestess Renatia’s approval.

On board Wu’s ship, Korinna makes friends, has experiences, and worries about surviving to oust Renatia and reform the Order of Vermicula away from requiring its initiates to sacrifice children. She learns that Wu is headed for a region of space known as the Umbra, to track down a pirate, Aster Haran, and her fleet – responsible most lately for the destruction of an imperial warship like the one in which Korinna is now serving. Litia departs the vessel on business of her own.

Then Aster Haran’s flagship, the Diabolos, successfully attacks Wu’s flagship, and instead of suiciding as she’s expected to, Korinna allows herself to be captured.

Litia Sarai is Aster Haran. And she’s also the last surviving black priestess, descendant of the goddess Furia, the only one remaining from Furia’s space magic star-eating Order. Aster Haran means to restore the goddess Furia to the universe for the sake of vengeance for her centuries of loneliness. And she wants Korinna to help her do it.

Thus we arrive approximately somewhere near Redsight’s midpoint, or at least the end of its first third. Up to this point, I have been a little baffled by some of Mooring’s choices. At this stage, I feel the novel would be improved by cutting significant amounts of Korinna’s training montage out and dropping Sahar’s point of view entirely from the beginning of the novel, while the novel’s pacing is kept off-balance by Mooring’s insistence on having her characters attend meetings in which information is conveyed in disjointed fashion, or recapped from previous scenes. Any sense of narrative unity is undermined by a certain… jumping-about without filling in the gaps.

For goodness sake, don’t hide from the reader that your people-eating space snake shapeshifter monster woman is also an undercover pirate captain! That’s pointlessly burying a really good lede!

This jumping-about grows more pronounced in the latter part of the novel, where new information is presented to the reader out of nowhere, previous relationships and threads are dropped entirely, entirely new plot-points arrive fully-formed from the void, and things develop in a fashion that not only makes the most unhinged Kameron Hurley novel seem tastefully understated, but also, despite its plenitude of transition scenes, fails to join up major incidents involving the major characters in a coherent, sensible, narratively satisfying way. You want vibes? There’s lots of them. You want to feel the satisfying (yet occasionally surprising) inevitability of a well-turned narrative driving down to its well-earned conclusion?

Yeah, not so much that.

The worldbuilding introduces new elements with occasional abandon, sometimes to temporary (and soon neglected) effect, and sometimes signalling an abrupt change of direction in what one had previously understood to be a true constraint.

If you’re hoping for the relationship between Korinna and Aster to acknowledge certain problems – notably around informed consent, appropriate personal boundaries, and healthy ways of dealing with conflicting goals – you’ll be left wanting.

When Korinna is abducted by Aster, who has been lying to her throughout their acquaintance, and is left in Aster’s personal quarters with instructions Not To Look behind a secret door, Korinna decides to comply on the grounds that, “[S]he didn’t want another reason for them to argue.”

(I think we’re beyond anything as tepid as an argument as this point, despite the Power Of Attraction between them. Kidnapping! Is not kosher!)

Aster continues to accommodate Korinna in Aster’s own palatial captain’s suite, rather than affording her privacy or quarters of her own. (I don’t recall if there’s any excuse for this beyond the conventions of abduction romance.) (Send me more cliché! I’m almost out! I have absolutely no objection to deploying tropey tropes but good heavens give me an excuse to believe it makes sense.) Let us note that Korinna has highly destructive space magic powers, and at one point one of Aster’s lieutenants reveals to Korinna (against orders) that she’s on a ship affiliated with her Order’s ancient enemy, then leaves her alone, unsupervised, and somehow still able to send unmonitored messages via the Space Internet.

When the two of them begin a sexual relationship with each other, Aster does not in fact first reveal that she is a shapeshifting space snake person who sometimes eats people. (Also sometimes stars.) Not to discriminate against snake people, but I feel that the fact that eating people is in your C.V. is something you should maybe disclose to your prospective lovers. (Aside from the ethical implications of anthropophagy, think about prions, people. Prions are terrifying. Maybe space snake people don’t need to worry about prions, but I feel like it belongs in the discussion.)

“I’m not a good person,” says space snake pirate captain, while canoodling.

“You saved my life,” says Korinna (not mentioning that Aster was the one to endanger it in the first place).

“I’m selfish,” says Aster, still not telling her about the eating people thing.

Korinna initially agrees to help Aster’s plan to return her goddess to the universe. When she realises that Aster’s plan involves a lot more outright murder than she’d really thought about, and quite understandably hesitates, Aster feels betrayed. Aster proceeds to drain space magic power from Korinna to use for her own ends and keep Korinna imprisoned.

“Aster was so self-righteous about keeping her imprisoned, but at least she was keeping her from making more foolish mistakes.”

Korinna remains imprisoned until, on foot of several revelations delivered via the intervention of Aster’s goddess-mother (who’s not as gone as the rest of the universe might assume), she levels up in her space magic powers and also comes to the conclusion that Aster was right to feel betrayed by her reaction, and that she should apologise to Aster for driving her to this point.

“Korinna wandered to Aster’s bedroom… This was where they’d been closest, before Korinna made the choice that split them apart.”

The choice not to go all-in on Team Murder when the reality of combat is first sprung upon her, let’s be clear. After which Aster made like a space-snake-vampire on her.

Look, sometimes you have really intense feelings of attraction for people who are Incredibly Bad News. Do not act on these feelings! RUN AWAY! Let the Bad News Hotness have intense, adrenaline-filled, earth-shattering relationships with someone else.

If I were describing the bald, not-space-magical progression of Aster and Korinna’s relationship, I would describe a relationship where one party repeatedly manipulates and pressures the other, restricts their freedom of movement, and steals from them, until eventually the second party sees the first party as right and justified in their actions and adopts the first party’s goals largely as their own.

Such relationships can be interesting fodder for literature, if the ways in which multiple inappropriate things are happening at once is acknowledged and examined. But I do not see Redsight as inclined to view the relationship between the principal characters through such a problematised lens: rather, to the degree in which the text supports a position, it takes the view that Aster acts justifiably towards Korinna. I’m old and jaded: it’s not that I believe fictional relationships need to be healthy, but rather that if the narrative doesn’t recognise the ways in which they’re fucked up, it’s missing a wealth of interesting opportunities and making itself less compelling in consequence.

The social worldbuilding of Redsight strikes me as disjointed. But then, so are narrative developments in the run-up to the conclusion. For example, at one point when the narrative has stayed in Korinna’s point of view for a while, it is revealed that Aster has just captured High Priestess Renatia, and is about to make her abdicate to Korinna. Everything to do with acquiring this captive high priestess, and even the very idea of capturing her, before her arrival, takes place off the page. Suddenly a captive priestess appears!

This is a peculiar approach to take, considering that until now, Mooring hasn’t been shy about spending a chapter or more in Aster’s or Sahar’s point of view. The ability to plan and execute the non-fatal abduction of a highly-placed space-magic-wielder (who is also a key figure in the supply of Redsighted navigators to the empire) should speak volumes about the extent and complexity of Aster’s space-pirate organisation, and its relationship with other political, military and religious organisations in this context. But we see none of that, instead receiving a key turning point in the narrative as a kind of deus ex machina to go along with the actual goddesses that start emerging from their boxes to pull increasing over-the-top twists.

This is an acid trip of a novel. I remain bewildered by its sense of scale. Imperial warships apparently have a crew of 500,000 people. That’s larger than an army corps. At that scale, you’d be carrying an entire division’s worth of personnel just to deal with administration and discipline, to say nothing of logistics and supply, waste management, medical treatment, and deaths in service. And yet somehow space combat can still effectively involve boarding operations that aren’t the equivalent of urban warfare in prepared and fortified environments. The moral scale is also bafflingly off: at one point Korinna muses:

“…consuming an entire star system, killing millions of people in the process – that was the kind of mistake they couldn’t afford if they wanted to survive.”

Not one thought about how wrong it is on ethical grounds to do a war crime, not a single little qualm from a character who had previously balked at killing in combat: just, Oh, hey, everyone will hunt us down if we do that so let’s not.

As matters proceed towards the (theological, goddess-restoring, viscerally bloody) conclusion, I found myself less and less able to believe the narrative’s leaps of logic. Sahar turns from enemy to ally to enemy to ally with whiplash speed, people with little reason to agree with Korinna’s plans go along with her, and somehow, in a fashion whose connective tissue yet escapes me, everything works out for Korinna, Aster, and Sahar – this, though I do not understand how, is the conclusion that they turn out to want.

It’s an acid trip, a kaleidoscopic dreamscape of a narrative, and I’m not sure I can mean that as a compliment. I’m still not entirely convinced that I wasn’t hallucinating parts.

Also, the name “Vermicula” makes me think of both pinworm and potting soil. It is not, I think, supposed to be funny, but the unintentional humour has rather stuck with me.

Fiction, unlike the real world, is condemned to make sense within its frame of reference. I don’t really believe in literary merit, but I do believe that art, in its infinite varieties, has a scale that runs between more and less accomplished, based on what it sets out to do, whether it’s a whodunnit or the fever-dream experience of reading Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf: A New Translation. Redsight is a debut, so I should try to judge it kindly, but to me it exemplifies a recent trend in SFF debuts, where coherence and underlying narrative logic, and ultimately a reading experience that stands up to repetition, are valued below vibes. (Obligatory disclaimer: Not all debuts. Perhaps not even most debuts.)

Perhaps this was always the case, and I was in the wrong place to notice. But I can’t escape noticing that this phenomenon is most frequent with writers who have traditionally marginalised backgrounds and perspectives to offer: queer and/or of colour, disabled and/or coming from outside the US/UK/AUS/NZ Anglophone sphere. It affects novels that have the core of something great, that contain buckets of potential, but ones that don’t feel quite cooked yet: where more time to grow, or perhaps more editorial input, might have resulted in a more polished work.

Is this my unconscious bias at work? Am I holding these works to different standards? Or is it the mark of an industry hungry to exploit authors from historically marginalised backgrounds for their novelty, without efforts to care for and encourage their development as artists? (Oh, wait. I forgot. This is publishing we’re talking about. Only the stubbornest and the luckiest still have a career five years after their debut.)

Either way, I don’t like it. But I’m eager for other people to read Redsight. Perhaps one of them will be able to explain to me what it is I just read.

61. A River of Golden Bones by A.K. Mulford, and some administrative updates

In this post: a review of A River of Golden Bones by A.K. Mulford; moving off Substack to WordPress; ongoing efforts to Plan What I’m Talking About.

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Cover art for A River of Golden Bones

A.K. Mulford, A River of Golden Bones. New York: HarperCollins. 2023.

I’d never encountered A.K. Mulford’s work before picking up A River of Golden Bones for review, though a little research reveals that they’re a TikTok personality who has previously published a series of novels which began in self-published form before Harper Voyager acquired world English rights.

A River of Golden Bones is the perfect storm of things that, while in themselves may be generally unobjectionable or in theory even interesting, in this particular form are not for me. Sleeping Beauty, werewolves, fated soulmates, and more focus on romance and sex than worldbuilding and intrigue: this novel is like six different fanfic tropes climbed out of the ether and collided with a rough burning kiss as their mouths crashed together.

I say this with neither particular praise nor particular criticism for fanfiction as a mode of fiction. It has its own conventions and particular forms of storytelling, its own conversations and sense of genre. Its cross-pollination with the forms and conventions of “original” fiction, particularly in the realm of science fiction and fantasy — or perhaps I should say the fertile spread of its conventions and tropes into the realm of original fiction — is a rather fascinating phenomenon, and one that speaks to a democratisation in the culture of long-form fiction. What makes A River of Golden Bones likely to appeal to a wide audience are those traits that it shares with both fanfiction and genre romance (another very popular field): its failings, for a reader who prefers more fantasy in their romantic fantasy, are failings that it shares with a great preponderance of works in these fields, and viewed solely in terms of the genre conventions and expectations of those fields, are not not necessarily failings at all.

In the world of A River of Golden Bones, Wolves — shapeshifters who can move between human and wolf forms at will — rule all the kingdoms. Wolf society is patriarchal and patrilineal. Humans live separately from Wolves, are physically weaker, and heal more slowly, but have — apparently — a more egalitarian approach to society (across all the kingdoms) than their overlords, and more genders than the Wolves’ binary of male and female.

Calla and Briar are twin sisters. They are the last heirs of the Gold Wolf rulers of the kingdom of Olmdere. When they were born, the dark sorceress Sawyn killed their parents and took over their kingdom. Their lives were saved by the faery Vellia, who came in response to their mother’s last wish, and who has raised them in the forest far from any others. Only a handful of people know Briar survived: she has been raised to fulfil the betrothal arranged before her birth and marry Grae, heir to King Nero, joining their kingdoms (and, theoretically, gaining an ally to overthrow Sawyn). Calla has been raised in Briar’s shadow, educated to be her protector. No one know she’s Briar’s twin except for Nero and Grae himself — who visited her when they were all still children and became her friend.

The betrothal between Briar and Grae is on the cusp of being fulfilled when Calla learns that Nero never meant to help them recover Olmdere, but only use Briar to legitimate his claim to Olmdere’s mines. Then, before the wedding can be completed, Briar and Calla both publicly discover they have soulmates, an unusual and unexpected development. Briar’s is a distant female royal relative called Maez. But Calla’s… is Grae. Worse, Sawyn shows up, kidnaps Maez, and curses Briar into an enchanted sleep. Calla, still an unknown, escapes Sawyn’s focus — but now Nero means to have her wed Grae while doing nothing for either her sister or her country.

Calla’s not willing to stand for that. She’ll rescue Briar’s soulmate on her own if she has to, and overthrow Sawyn on her own as well, for good measure. She flees Nero’s court and falls in with a band of travelling (human) entertainers headed for Olmdere, where Sawyn is hosting a celebration to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her victory. Grae defies his father to follow, along with his two best friends/personal guards. They will face Sawyn together and triumph. Along the way, Calla discovers that their gender identity better matches one of the nonbinary human ones than the Wolves’ one that they were assigned at birth.

As fated soulmates, Calla and Grae are extremely attracted to each other. Once they overcome a small matter of miscommunication about Grae’s loyalties and his intentions, they have lots of sex. Lots of sex. (Including sex at moments that makes the reader strongly question their judgment.) The sex is never awkward or unsatisfying, and neither partner needs to talk very much at all about what they want (except in what’s, I suppose, meant to be erotic dirty talk), and it is described in thorough, albeit somewhat clichéd terms. Unfortunately, from my point of view, there’s no real frisson of feeling to the sex scenes and no real character in them either: a lot of frenzy and burning and sliding and thrusting, screaming and grunting and mewling (a word I would generally prefer not to encounter in a sexual context) and orgasms galore, but not much in the way of erotic charge. It feels perfunctory and mechanical: the sex scenes carry no narrative or emotional weight besides the titillatory. In consequence, if you fail to find them titillating, you’re liable to find them tedious.

The action scenes, too, seem to serve largely mechanical purposes. They have little relationship to the characters’ emotional development, while on a practical (logical, strategic) level, everyone in this novel — the most villainous villains and the very heroic heroes alike — makes some rather baffling choices about who to confront, when, with what allies and to what purpose. The action scenes exist so that the reader can be assured that Calla is badass and Grae is badass and hot, or so it seems: I cannot quite bring myself to believe in their stakes. And the criticism of patriarchy, sexism and discrimination that the novel contains is, from my point of view, too shallow to even count as a thematic argument.

A River of Golden Bones is told in the first person perspective, from Calla’s point of view, and Calla’s personal journey of discovering that they’re not exactly the woman they always thought they were is the most compelling element of the entire novel. I didn’t expect the boyfriend:everything else ratio to skew quite so hard to the boyfriend end of the scale, though, for all that it’s marketed as the new breed of fantasy romance. I read this shortly after T. Kingfisher’s most recent fantasy romance, Paladin‘s Faith, and I can conclude that it’s not that I don’t enjoy romantic storylines in my fantasy, but that I prefer them a) weirder and b) having more complicated plot events around which the romance and characters can grow, encounter obstacles, and change than A River of Golden Bones provides.

If you enjoy reading about young people discovering new things about themselves while killing their enemies and having a lot of sex with their soulmate, you may enjoy A River of Golden Bones. Let me know what you think of it if so: I’m interested to hear what people with a greater preference for romance have to say about it.

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Administrivia:

You may or not be aware that I was running a Substack newsletter. After Substack’s management basically doubled down on being the kind of people who want outright N*zis and white supremacists to make money, I’m moving my all the stuff that used to be on Substack over here, as the most cost-effective option. This doesn’t effect anything here, except that I’m going to be numbering my posts (started doing that on Substack, realised I liked it) and that sometimes, something might be behind a subscription paywall.

Very little of my writing is behind a paywall, even at Patreon (where you can support my efforts to write more about history and history books, as well as science fiction and fantasy), so not much should change at all.

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Between one thing and another¹, I didn’t post at all in December and January about my ongoing personal research project on captivity in antiquity. The first excited flurry of READ ALL THE THINGS has calmed down, leaving me with a few options to work through for how to direct my attention. I’ll report back when I feel that there’s something else to say.

And most nonfiction reading came, in fact, to a bit of a standstill in all the hectic urgency of the months in question. It should pick up again a bit now, so I’ll be reporting in on that. (Some helpful folks on Bluesky gave me some pointers for things to read on Japanese history, since I have a curiosity at the moment.)

That’s it from me for now.

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1. Honestly, it’s because I had no idea what December could be like with a small child discovering the joy of presents and Exciting Events in tow. And it turns out that it is intense. ↩︎

60. Plans and News

Maybe I’m moving this newsletter off Substack anyway, plus good news for those of you interested in my captivity in antiquity posts

Admin update:

I’ve been doing some poking around at other newsletter-type options. I’ve come to the conclusion that I might actually be best served by taking my toys and going back to my WordPress.com site. It offers the benefit of cutting down how much manual cross-posting I’ll need to do.

Downsides: the UI is less smooth.

Upside: lower cross-contamination with disinfo and outright fascism on recommendation algorithms. (I went and explored some of Substack’s app’s features after reading some more reportage and, ah. I was already not exactly comfortable.)

I won’t be moving quickly, since I need some time to muck around with settings and site layout and other things, but at this point I think it’s a matter of when, not if, I move to primarily posting over there.

Other news:

Happy New Year! There’s good news for those of you who were interested in my captivity in antiquity posts: I finally found a listing for THE GREEK STATE AT WAR PART V on Blackwell’s, and ordered it. It’s allegedly been shipped, so we’ll find out when it arrives if I’ve actually acquired the volume to which everyone I’ve read on this topic in English has referred. Then I can try to figure out where I left things off and pick up the threads again.

Hopefully book reviews will resume when I recover from the incredibly hectic experience of December in constant company with a small child, too.

59. Substack, Rhetoric, Nazis, and Money

Or: the internet is full of horrors and fascist fellow-travellers, and I’m not happy about it

It’s become clear that Substack means to profit from Nazis and their fellow-travellers just as much as it has profited from the anti-trans brigade. Substack’s attitude to transphobic and bigoted writers is part of why I turned paid subscriptions off almost as soon as I’d turned them on: Patreon has its own, multiple problems, but it’s… better?

I think so, anyway. For now.

Using the privately-owned infrastructure of the internet is a series of bad compromises. I don’t have the spoons to manage my own website and newsletter solo, so this newsletter will be staying on Substack, and staying, as it has been, entirely free to read. (Aside from everything else, I find myself mostly talking about history, and I feel pretty icky about putting that behind a paywall without a lot more polish on the essays.)

If you want to support my endeavours, Patreon will continue to be the place to do that, at least until Patreon too goes sideways in the way of every useful thing on the internet. Remember Livejournal? (People a little older than me would say, “Remember Usenet.”)

58. Captivity in antiquity: hostages in the Greek world

Oh look, she’s at it again. A fifth part of the ongoing series

Let’s start by returning to the Spartans taken captive at Sphacteria during the Peleponnesian War.

Thucydides 5.34.2:

“regarding those… who had been taken prisoner on the island [Sphacteria] and who had laid down their weapons, it was fear that, impelled by the dread of being reduced to an inferior condition because of what had happened, they would, as long as they retained their full rights (or: although they still possessed full rights), start thinking up some plan of revolution. For this reason they were pronounced atimoi, even though some of them by now held magistracies. The effect of this atimia was such that they could not hold office, nor were they allowed to buy or sell. After a certain period, their full rights were restored to them.”

Jean Ducat in “The Spartan ‘tremblers'” (in Sparta and War, 2006) discusses this incident in light of his treatment of the Spartan attitude towards cowards or defaulters, the so-called “tremblers,” and the legal/social status that such men enjoyed (if that is the word) in Sparta. In brief, it seems that Spartans who were recognised as cowards or otherwise in default of their responsibilities suffered social exclusion and (probably, and probably variable) legal disabilities. The question at hand here is whether the recovered prisoners from Sphacteria, or indeed whether recovered surrendered prisoners in general, qualified as cowards to be subject to such penalty.

Per Thucydides, it seems that returned prisoners were not automatically subject to penalties. Rather that it was a decision taken by the Spartan state as a whole after a small delay, for what amount to psychological reasons. (Ducat discusses this on pp41-42 of his article.) The Spartans as a government considered that the returned prisoners would continue to fear that they would be judged cowards and subject to a potential punishment involving a significant loss of civil status (atimia), and would therefore plot revolution. In consequence of this governmental wariness, they imposed a less severe and temporary loss of status, to head off any such revolution at the pass. This is the only case where this kind of sanction was imposed by the Spartans on recovered prisoners (not that we have a lot of evidence for recovered prisoners in general, much less in Sparta, and Ducat points out the infrequency with which the status of “being a trembler” emerges into historical reality), so it’s impossible to say whether this was ever a standard measure. Clearly surviving a defeat and social disgrace were very closely linked in Sparta, however, given the mutual fear and distrust that led to this limited atimia being imposed.

While they were in Athens, these one hundred and twenty prisoners served a hostage function, in that the Athenians threatened to put them to death if the Spartans invaded Attica again. So let’s move on to consider hostages in general in the ancient Greek world. Though how much we can say about Greek hostages really depends on whether we include the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic period, and Greek interactions with Rome. M. Amit disposed of Greek hostages from the Classical period in a 20-page paper in 1970 (Amit, M. “Hostages In Ancient Greece,” Rivista Di Filologia V. 98: 1970), and there does not appear to be a more recent or more comprehensive treatment. There is, let’s be clear, not an enormous amount of evidence on the matter.

The Greek word for hostage is ὅμηρος, and Amit gives us the Greek definitions of this word as they appeared in Hesychius and the Suda. Unfortunately Amit, like many Classicists of that vintage, prefers not to translate the original Greek, so I’m going to offer my fairly inept attempt below:

Hesychius:

omeroi, the ones given in regard to peace, a pledge in regard to peace.

Suda:

omeroi, according to Thucydides a pledge, given in regard to peace, in reference to an agreement/treaty. Omeroi are those who are given in an agreement, to omerise (omerosai) is to make a contract/agreement/lend on bond.

It occurs to me that I should perhaps qualify the modern image of the hostage with the historic purpose of hostage-taking and hostage-exchange.

We associate hostages today with terrorism and violence. The modern hostage-taker seizes victims and threatens their lives and safety in order to exchange the safety of the hostages for something the modern hostage-taker wants, for the modern hostage-taker is not generally in a position of relative state or military power and can only achieve their goals by gambling that a relatively powerful state will value the lives of their citizens highly enough to negotiate. Often in fictional portrayals, the modern hostage-taker either kills (some of) the hostages(s) or is killed during a violent rescue of the hostages, or both. (The extent to which this reflects reality is variable: governments and powerful corporations tend not to publicise negotiations with hostage-takers where the hostage-takers get something that they want, lest it encourage the phenomenon.)

I think it’s quite clear in what we’ve previously discussed that what we consider terrorism and war crimes forms a large part of warfare in Greek antiquity. The lives of hostages are still at risk in antiquity: the hostage is in the hostage-taker’s power. The difference between then and now is, broadly speaking, as follows:

1. The hostage-taker is in the position of relative state and military power;

2. Hostages were a normal tool in the arsenal of states and generals to enforce compliance, and hostage-taking was understood as a normal practice. The execution of hostages is rarely reported. (I think any examples of this that we have are from the western Mediterranean, and from Roman-period sources.)

When hostages are taken by states or state representatives, the hostages frequently form part of an agreement whereby a weaker party subjects itself to a stronger. The lives and bodies of the hostages act as a living security bond that said weaker party will do as it is told. This “agreement” is rarely negotiated between peers or near-peers, however — hostage exchange is very rarely mutual, though there are some anecdotes (I think in sources dealing with the Romans, I need to track things down a bit more comprehensively) where a mutual exchange of hostages guarantees a temporary truce — but extracted by the stronger party with the threat of worse consequences if the weaker party fails to comply.

The experience of Philip of Macedon (later the father of Alexander the Great) as a hostage in Thebes (4th century BCE) and Demetrios I Soter of the Seleucids in Rome (2nd century BCE) suggest that hostages taken under treaty agreement could enjoy a privileged lifestyle in keeping with their elite status. Most of our evidence for the treatment of hostages as opposed to the taking of hostages is late, though, and Roman. By comparison to Roman practices and to practices from other times and places in history, we can hazard a guess that the more illustrious the hostage, the better the conditions of their confinement, but that conditions of confinement might vary based on status, the hostage-taker’s opinion of how well the hostage’s home polity or relatives were keeping the terms of the agreement, or whether or not the hostage was considered a risk for escaping.

Amit (p130) considers that “the institution of hostages was a stage in the passage from war to peace, and afterwards for keeping peace.” If peace is the cessation of active fighting, this seems like an accurate view. We may see hostages as security for the compliance of their communities or relatives: a mortgage against hostile action.

Amit draws attention to a word that occurs in Demosthenes, ἀνδροληψία. This word also appears more than once in the Roman writer Appian, where it seems to mean something like “arrest,” but in Demosthenes it appears to have a more specific meaning. (This is in Demosthenes Against Aristocrates: Dem 23.82-84, Dem 23.218.)

ἐάν τις βιαίῳ θανάτῳ ἀποθάνῃ, ὑπὲρ τούτου τοῖς προσήκουσιν εἶναι τὰς ἀνδροληψίας, ἕως ἂν ἢ δίκας τοῦ φόνου ὑπόσχωσιν ἢ τοὺς ἀποκτείναντας ἐκδῶσι. τὴν δὲ ἀνδροληψίαν εἶναι μέχρι τριῶν, πλέον δὲ μή.

“If someone should die in violent death, on account of this to his relatives belongs the ἀνδροληψίας (man-taking), until either they pay the penalty of the law of murder, or they surrender the killers. It is a man-taking of up to three [people], and not more.”

(Murray’s 1939 translation gives this, more fluently and undoubtedly more accurately, as: If any man die a violent death, his kinsmen may take and hold hostages in respect of such death, until they either submit to trial for bloodguiltiness, or surrender the actual manslayers. This right is limited to three hostages and no more.)

There is some question as to whether this is a seizure of foreigners for a murder that took place abroad, or a seizure of the (suspected or actual) killer’s fellow-householders when the killer has fled: ἀνδροληψίας is an uncommon word and Demosthenes is both concise and speaking to an audience already most likely familiar with the practice. Either way, this seems to be speaking of a private seizure of hostages — at the level of individuals and families, not armies and states — to compel a third party to surrender himself to the processes of Athenian law. If the third party fails to surrender, presumably the hostages are subject to the penalties of the Athenians’ laws in his stead, whether or not they did any actual killing.

It’s probably important to mark here that the seizure of foreigners and travellers, either to hold for ransom or to sell into slavery, by individuals or small groups, is a regular hazard in the Greek world. You’ll remember a previous speech of Demosthenes in these posts, where an Athenian citizen had been ransomed. Piracy (with the pirates most likely sponsored by or in a relationship with elites in their home towns or regions) is a widespread and continuing issue throughout antiquity, and capture by pirates and brigands shows up as a regular route into slavery in the Greek novels. (More on captives in the Greek novels in a later post: the novels are pretty much all 2nd-century CE or later, if I recall correctly.)

Of the legal texts remaining to us from the Greek world, none give a definition of the ὅμηρος. No text from the ancient Greek world, Amit says — and as far as I can tell no more recent epigraphic discovery contradicts this — literary or otherwise, appears to describe the giving or taking of hostages in a formal way, as opposed to the brief “took hostages” or “gave hostages.” As far as I can tell (though my knowledge is far from exhaustive) there is no unequivocal depiction of the giving or taking of hostages in Greek or Roman art, though there are images of prisoners and figures in Roman art that have been identified as hostages in Roman possession. Amit says that there is no detailed description of the release of hostages (p131), and that is correct. But that is not to say there is no description at all: certainly in Plutarch’s life of Pelopidas (Plut. Pel. 29) the Theban general Epaminondas receives back Pelopidas and Ismenias, hostages of the tyrant Alexander of Pherae, on foot of truce negotiations. But hostages are certainly mentioned as “taken” more often than released.

It seems from the texts that no particular ceremony attends the taking of hostages in the Greek world, except perhaps to make sure that they’re useful: in parallel, then, it would be surprising if any particular ceremony attended their release.

In later history, hostages are sometimes exchanged between peers as part of an agreement. No such official exchange of hostages is attested for the ancient Greek world, though sometimes one party that has been forced to give up hostages manages to seize hostages of their own (and so trade one for the other). Sometimes this comes about, as in Thucydides 1.89-92, when there is no official mention of hostages at all, merely a question of ensuring the safe return of envoys or ambassadors from a potentially unsafe situation.

Giving up hostages on the part of a community or an aristocrat is a sign of subjection. It’s worth reiterating this point and supporting it with evidence: Lysias, the Athenian orator, makes this clear (Lysias 12.68) when he rhetorically opposes “saving the city” with “destroying the city,” “freedom” with “slavery.” Saving the city, freedom, is defined by not “giving any hostages or demolishing the walls or surrendering the ships.” Destroying the city and “slavery,” is defined by giving up hostages, ships, and walls, and in consequence having to obey the demands of a foreign power (the hostage-holder) thereafter.

Giving up hostages is not a particularly voluntary move. It’s usually part of an agreement to surrender to a greater military power rather than be sacked (with consequences that previous posts touched on), and can be a face-saving move: Xenophon Hellenica 6.1.18 describes the giving of hostages in this light, in an incident taking place in Thessaly:

“And he [Polydamos] begged Jason not to force him to give over the Acropolis of the Pharsalians, his wish being that he might still keep it safe for those who had put it into his hands; but he gave his own children to Jason as hostages, with the promise not only to win over the city and make it his willing ally, but also to help in establishing him as Tagus. When, accordingly, they had exchanged pledgeswith one another, the Pharsalians at once observed peace.”

(This is Jason of Pherae, father of the Alexander mentioned in the Life of Pelopidas: this incident takes place in the early 4th century BCE. “Exchanged pledges” here need not imply that Polydamos received hostages in return, or anything more than Jason’s word not to garrison (or sack) the acropolis.)

We can see the same process at work during the Peloponnesian War more than once, but let’s take Thuc. 3.101 as an example case:

“The army [of the Spartans and their allies] having assembled at Delphi, Eurylochus [leader of that army] sent a herald to the Ozolian Locrians; the road to Naupactus lying through their territory, and he having besides conceived the idea of detaching them from Athens. [2] His chief abettors in Locris were the Amphissians, who were alarmed at the hostility of the Phocians. These first gave hostages themselves, and induced the rest to do the same for fear of the invading army; first, their neighbors the Myonians, who held the most difficult of the passes, and after them the Ipnians, Messapians, Tritaeans, Chalaeans, Tolophonians, Hessians, and Oeanthians, all of whom joined in the expedition; the Olpaeans contenting themselves with giving hostages, without accompanying the invasion; and the Hyaeans refusing to do either, until the capture of Polis, one of their villages.”

Ozolian Locris was a small region lying between the Parnassus mountains and the Corinthian Gulf. Their neighbours of Phocis appear to have had ambitions in the region at this time, and were allies of the Athenians. It seems that the small town of Amphissa was worried both about the Spartans and the Phocians. They picked the Spartans as more likely to be locally dominant, and — undoubtedly worried that the Spartans would just march straight through their lands — gave up hostages before that could happen, and joined in with the army of Sparta and its allies. A number of other small settlements and their hinterlands (these are small settlements, not urban centres on the scale of even Naupaktos/Naupactus, much less Corinth or Athens: considering that at the turn of the 21st century the total population of Amphissa was less than 10,000 people, the area doesn’t support a huge population even today) also gave up hostages.

The threat of coercion towards those who refused on the part of the Spartans is made obvious here: Hyaea/Hyaia (for which we don’t have a secure location) did refuse until the Spartans forcibly seized (εἷλον, from αἱρέω) the κώμη (country town, unwalled village, possibly district) called Polis (here perhaps a placename with a sense of “citadel” or communal centre?). Bad things happen when populated places are seized by force, and this is the threat lurking behind Eurylochus’s diplomacy. The hostages function to assure the Spartans that these new and partly-coerced allies won’t suddenly switch sides.

Hostages taken in war are sometimes returned in peace. This is the case at Thuc. 5.77 (which refers to events and hostage-taking described at Thuc. 5.61):

“The assembly of the Lacedaemonians agrees to treat with the Argives upon the terms following:

1. The Argives shall restore to the Orchomenians their children, and to the Moenalians their men, and shall restore the men they have in Mantinea to the Lacedaemonians.

2. They shall evacuate Epidaurus, and raze the fortification there. If the Athenians refuse to withdraw from Epidaurus, they shall be declared enemies of the Argives and of the Lacedaemonians, and of the allies of the Lacedaemonians and the allies of the Argives.

3. If the Lacedaemonians have any children in their custody, they shall restore them every one to his city.”

Argos, formerly an Athenian ally, is here making a separate peace with the Spartans (Lacedaemonians). Another separate, local peace, this time in western Greece, is described in Thuc. 3.114:

“The Acarnanians and Amphilochians, after the departure of Demosthenes and the Athenians, granted the Ambraciots and Peloponnesians who had taken refuge with Salynthius and the Agraeans a free retreat from Oeniadae, to which place they had removed from the country of Salynthius, and for the future concluded with the Ambraciots a treaty and alliance for one hundred years, upon the terms following. It was to be a defensive, not an offensive alliance; the Ambraciots could not be required to march with the Acarnanians against the Peloponnesians, nor the Acarnanians with the Ambraciots against the Athenians; for the rest the Ambraciots were to give up the places and hostages that they held of the Amphilochians, and not to give help to Anactorium, which was at enmity with the Acarnanians. With this arrangement they put an end to the war.”

A hostage, ὅμηρος, is clearly distinct from the war-captive prisoner, the αἰχμάλωτος or the ἀνδράποδον. In the lexicon of Hesychius, αἰχμαλωτίζοντα is connected with being enslaved through violence (εἰς δουλείαν ἄγοντα μετὰ βίας) and αἰχμάλωτον with capture at spear-point (αἰχμῇ ληφθέντα, τὸν ἐκ πολέμου λαμβανόμενον), while for ἀνδραπόδεσσι the αἰχμάλωτος and the slave are given as synonyms (τοῖς αἰχμαλώτοις, τοῖς δούλοις) and for the verb ἀνδραποδίζει, to capture, to do violence to, and to overpower (αἰχμαλωτίζει. βιάζει. καὶ ὑπεραίρει) are offered.

The war-captive is linked with the status of a slave, but this linkage does not occur for a hostage. Though – as we have seen! – a war-captive may be used as a hostage, and to be a hostage is to be a kind of prisoner as we understand it, in that a hostage’s freedom of movement is constrained.

It’s worth noting that I cannot see a confirmation of a female hostage in hostage-taking between (rather than within) states and armies for the Greek world. The wives and children of employed mercenaries are sometimes threatened by their employers, hostage-fashion, and likewise wives and children are threatened between aggressively competing factions in a single polity. But in the Greek world, when it comes to hostages taken to secure alliance or compliance, we appear to be dealing with boys and men. Whether this is an artefact of the extremely brief mentions of hostage-taking, and whether women (wives, daughters) can sometimes be included in hostage-taking, or whether women are not considered to make good hostages in general — that’s not really something we can see from the available evidence. I’d hazard a guess that men were in fact preferred, though.

Here’s my reasoning:

In the period before the rise of Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Greek world is mostly a collection of polities with politically-active (male) citizen bodies, whether those citizen bodies have limited influence on the state’s hierarchies (oligarchies, into which category we should put Sparta with its weird dual monarchy and ephorate) or whether they have a much wider influence (democracies). Taking male hostages leans on the levers of political power more effectively, because women are not part of the citizen body and have only limited connections with the men who do direct the course of the state.

Outside her immediate family (husband, father, son, brother), a woman’s social connections are primarily to other women. Whereas for men, the cultures of male socialisation (“friendship,” in its much-discussed Greek forms) and male patronage relationships that we can see give men direct and frequently (at least rhetorically) affectionate relationships with each other. Only in an aristocratic monarchy, where a single figure directs the state for the duration of his lifetime and who might well have affectionate relationships with sisters, mother, or daughters — and whose direct relatives have much more influence on the running of the state than they do in a polity with a wider field of political elite — can a woman really wield significant influence, and thus be a hostage of more than limited use. But even with monarchies, as we can see with the Macedonians when Thebes is in the ascendant, or with the Hellenistic monarchies when Rome gains the upper hand, sons and brothers are the preferred form of royal hostage.

The major difference between a hostage and a war-captive prisoner seems to be that there is no question that a hostage remains a free person, albeit one with constrained freedom of movement, and should be treated as a free person (that is, not subject to corporal punishment during captivity, nor subject to sexual exploitation), while the war-captive prisoner may be restored to freedom but appears to be considered to have lost the assumption of a free-person status as a consequence of their captivity. Which is to say, they’re not automatically enslaved, but no one considers enslavement in those circumstances unusual: rather it is freedom that is a gracious concession of the victor.

We still haven’t even done more than touch on Rome. There’s a lot more written about captivity and hostage-taking in Rome and the Western Mediterannean in English. (I’m trying to get access to two works in French on prisonners of war in antiquity, including Greek antiquity, one by Pierre Ducrey and one by Anne Bielman. Alas, as a visiting reader to my local academic library, I have no interlibrary loan privileges there.)

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57. Captivity in antiquity: were several thousand Athenian prisoners starved to death?

Exemplary violence, assimilation by marriage, incarceration in quarries, running around with Plutarch and Arrian and Xenophon and Thucydides

Some things are becoming clear: The historical sources discuss men, their capture, and their occasional returns from captivity, as well as the conditions that attend such a return, far more often than they specifically mention the return of female or child captives.

But women and children were, in numeric and in proportionate terms, far more likely to be taken captive: to make a broad assumption, if one in four members of the free population of the ancient world one was an adult man of military age — that is, between 14 and 60 — then three in four were not. Leaving aside the small portion of men too old or too injured to bear arms, then in a free population of 10,000 people we have something like 7,000 potential non-fighting captives, as many as a third to one-half of whom, given life expectancy and mortality rates in antiquity, may be under the age of eighteen. (For demographic replacement purposes, it is estimated that each fertile woman must give birth to, on average, somewhere between six and nine children to beat the childhood mortality rates. To be clear, in my understanding this does not count pregnancies, but live births.)

Men may be taken as prisoners in the aftermath of battle, on the field or surrounded in camp with little chance to break out, like the Roman general Gaius Hostilius Mancinus and his troops, but they are generally taken and kept alive while hostilities are still in progress, or when the war has dragged on such that a settlement is preferred to further fighting, or when their conqueror does not mean to separate them from their families in defeat, but to incorporate them into a new diplomatic settlement. Elite men are, it seems, both more likely to be kept alive and less likely to be dispatched into slavery. At least when these circumstances apply.

We may note that exemplary and retaliatory violence is often visited — or sometimes promised to be visited, by some law resolved in a council or assembly — on male prisoners of war, which can be seen from these passages of Xenophon in the aftermath of the battle of Aegospotami, a naval clash near the (very bitter) bitter end of the Peleponnesian War:

“Thereupon many charges began to be urged against the Athenians, not only touching the outrages they had already committed and what they had voted to do if they were victorious in the battle —namely, to cut off the right hand of every man taken alive,—but also the fact that after capturing two triremes, one a Corinthian and the other from Andros, they had thrown the crews overboard to a man. And it was Philocles, one of the Athenian generals, who had thus made away with these men.

[32] Many other stories were told, and it was finally resolved to put to death all of the prisoners who were Athenians, with the exception of Adeimantus, because he was the one man who in the Athenian Assembly had opposed the decree in regard to cutting off the hands of captives… As to Philocles, who threw overboard the Andrians and Corinthians, Lysander first asked him what he deserved to suffer for having begun outrageous practices towards Greeks, and then had his throat cut.”

Xen. Hell. 2.1.31-32.

Women were more likely to be taken prisoner in a sack, like at Melos:

“[The Melians] yielded to the Athenians, so that the Athenians could do as they wished concerning them. And the Athenians slaughtered the Melian men that they had taken, the ones that had attained puberty, while the women and children they turned into slaves,* and they settled a colony in the town, afterwards sending out five hundred settlers.” Thuc. 5.116

*andrapodised, a word which Kathy L. Gaca very cogently argues contains brutal violation and violence.

After the defeat of a people, the slaughter of many adult men, the enslavement and brutalisation of women and children, and the dispossession of the remaining survivors of their moveable property and sometimes also their land and crops, prisoner restoration is not a common occurrence. If the defeated city was part of an alliance or coalition, its allies were victorious, and those allies insisted (were able to insist) on some form of the return of enslaved prisoners at the end of hostilities, some number of (surviving, identifiable, not-sold-too-far-afield-to-recover) captives might return to freedom and their despoiled homes. The victims, and the allies of the victims, of a town whose people had been subject to ἀνδραποδίζειν, andrapodising, viewed it as an outrage and an injustice, something that cried out for revenge (a revenge which would likely be andrapodising in its turn). The victors generally considered it a natural perk of their success.

In the Hellenistic period there are a handful of examples of kings essentially changing their minds and deciding to (take a few steps to) restore a dispossessed and enslaved populace: the city of Stageira, birthplace of Aristotle, is one of the few mentioned.

Plutarch Life of Alexander 7.3: “The city of Stageira, that is, of which Aristotle was a native, and which [Philip] had himself destroyed, he peopled again, and restored to it those of its citizens who were in exile or slavery.” This took place when Alexander was old enough to need a tutor, so perhaps after 350BCE.

But Stageira was again deserted, or so it seems, by the time of Strabo (see Geography 7.8.35; Strabo was born c.64/3BCE and lived until at least midway through the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, dying perhaps c.23/4CE): either their restoration had not been sufficient to allow the town to thrive, or they had subsequently been andrapodised again during the wars of Alexander’s successors, or in the Roman wars in Greece.

It seems reasonable to assume that the destruction of a city, the death of (many of) its male citizens, and the enslavement of its non-fighting population (which includes the rape of women and girls and sometimes the mutilation of boys, and the continued enslavement and probable re-brutalisation of its population of already-enslaved people) is a situation where in the vast majority of cases, the enslaved have exceedingly little hope of a restoration of their freedom. In the case where freedom is restored to some number of the enslaved, with the idea of reconstituting their city as a living community, one must consider the ongoing consequences of such a set of traumatising experiences for the survivors.

Communities that surrendered under terms frequently did so to avoid this destructive violence and retain an existence as a community, albeit one now subject to the exactions of another power. Those exactions could include military service, hostages (though men on military service in the midst of another power could also be seen in light of hostages), tribute in money, moveable property, and/or people (slaves), cession of landholdings, and the marriage of appropriately-ranked women to individuals of high status among the new overlords (which can be seen through the lenses of hostageship, dispossession [of the subject men’s control over the marriages and property of their female relatives, among other things], and forced assimilation: for this especially Alexander’s weddings at Susa, Arrian, Anabasis 7.4.4 and following, though some of these royal women were captured in the aftermath of battle or sack, and only escaped enslavement by virtue of Alexander’s aristocratic recognition of and respect for their own aristocratic status: Arrian describes Alexander’s alleged generosity and graciousness to the captured female relatives of Darius after the Battle of Issus).

When Greek men were captured in the aftermath of battle, what happens to them frequently seems to depend on how high feelings are running, the balance of power in the wider war, and the personal inclinations of the victorious commander. Perhaps the best description of a military surrender that didn’t end in a massacre or sale into enslavement is the one described by Thucydides (4.37 and following) in the wake of the battle of Sphacteria in 425 BCE. Four hundred and twenty hoplite soldiers fought on behalf of the Spartans until backed into a corner, at which point the Athenians asked them to give up their weapons and surrender. The surviving two hundred and ninety-two of them, of whom one hundred and twenty were Spartan citizens, chose to surrender rather than fight to the death. This, after the Spartans’ reputation from Thermopylae onwards, was apparently quite a shock: they had been expected to fight on to the end.

The prisoners were brought back to Athens, and the Athenian assembly decided to keep the Spartans under guard in chains until they could come to terms. They also decided that if the Spartans invaded Attica in the meanwhile, they would kill the prisoners. (The prisoners were also hostages, in this sense, and we should consider any prisoners kept alive and not sold to likely also serve some form of hostage-purpose even if it is not stated in the sources.)

The Peace of Nicias that intervened between the two halves of the Peloponnesian War provided for the mutual return of captives (Thuc. 5.18): they would “give over” or “yield up” those captives of each principal (Athens and Sparta) and their allies that they “had”. (Thucydides’ text does not allow us to be sure, reading it, as to whether this included non-citizen-status captives, or captives sold abroad and beyond easy recovery.) The surrendered Spartans who returned home at least initially were restored to their citizen rights: I need to follow up Jean Ducat’s study of “The Spartan ‘Tremblers'” in Sparta and War (when I get access to it) to follow up what happened subsequently, and the scholarly discussion around why: it seems after a while they were deprived of their citizen rights.

The Spartan prisoners (and possibly their allied hoplites) from Sphacteria seem to have had the closest experience available in antiquity to that of a modern prisoner of war. It is not very close to what the Geneva convention prescribes. I do not mean to say that they were well-treated (though they were likely better-treated than the Athenians taken prisoner in Sicily), but while they were humiliated and under threat of death, they were not intentionally killed, they were apparently kept together, and they were not sold into slavery.

We should note that estimates for the size of the Spartan male citizen body during the Peloponnesian Wars vary (perhaps 6000? not more than 10,000) but that 100 men represents at least 1% of the whole number,

We can compare this experience with that of the Athenian disaster in Sicily in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War. This disaster compromised Athenian strength in men under arms very significantly.

The army of the Athenians and their allies ended up divided in two, and each section experienced defeat in detail. (Thuc. 7.82 and following.) Demosthenes, in command of one section, surrendered under terms: none of his troops were to be killed by violence, or in chains, or from being deprived of things necessary to life.

Nicias, in command of the other section, was told by the Spartans and the Syracusans that Demosthenes had surrendered. He tried to negotiate a settlement for his own troops to withdraw, offering to pay an indemnity and leave Athenians as hostages for the security of this payment. His attempt at terms was refused. He lacked supply, and his attempt at a fighting retreat turned into a rout and a slaughter. Nicias surrendered himself to the Spartan leader Gulippos, after which Gulippos gave the word to take live captives.

If I am correctly parsing the text of Thucydides at 7.85, the Spartan and Syracusan troops were taking occasional prisoners anyway, and after Gulippos’s instructions, some (but not many) of these captives were given over to be held in common, or given over as public captives, but a great many of the captives were instead διακλαπέν, “kept back/kept alive by stealth,” and Sicily was “glutted full” with them, “seeing as,” Thucydides says, “[they were not taken] by an agreement like the men who were taken with Demosthenes.”

Some escaped the battlefield, and some were made slaves and escaped later. Of those who did not escape and did not die, and (it’s implied from that earlier διακλαπέν) were given over as captives-held-by-the-authorities, most were held in the quarries near Syracuse. (Thucydides is not completely clear, but the text suggests that this included those taken with Demosthenes and not just with Nicias.) Nicias, who gave his name to the earlier Peace, was killed, as was Demosthenes. Thucydides suggests that if Nicias had not been killed, he might have been tortured (“But some of the Syracusans who had been in correspondence with him were afraid, it was said, of his being put to the torture” 7.86.4). The conditions in the quarries were appalling, and some men — the Athenians — were kept here for eight months. Most of the Athenians’ allies, however, were sold into slavery after seventy days, except those from Sicily or from Italy. Thucydides estimates seven thousand captives as a minimum: most modern scholarship considers this number high but not completely out of bounds, even as a total of men taken under arms. It is fairly reasonable if we consider that this number may also include any camp followers and enslaved people in whatever supply train remained with the armies of Demosthenes and Nicias, even if they are not specifically mentioned.

One thing to bear in mind about hoplite warfare is that its level of blunt force trauma is quite high. Another is that deaths are generally quite low among the victors, with most fatalities occurring among the defeated after they have turned to flee: morale breaks and deaths follow, rather than the reverse. (I simplify terribly.) So a large number of captives out of the whole is quite plausible if members of the broken army could not flee effectively.

From what Thucydides (7.87) tells us about the Athenian prisoners in Sicily, we can see that there is no particular consensus that one should offer one’s not-yet-enslaved prisoners any standard of care: “they were kept in a hollow space exposed to the sun, and first the choking heat distressed them as they had no shelter; and then the nights, coming on the opposite way, autumnal and cold, forced them into sickly weakness by the change.” They ate and slept and shat all close together, and the bodies of those who died from their wounds were not removed, or at least not very quickly, and during the eight months, each of them were only given “a measure of water and two measures of grain” (the measure is often translated as “a half-pint”, so presumably this is a day’s ration).

If these are the relatively high-value prisoners, kept together and just about alive in case they are needed for hostages, to get ransom money, or for exchange in order to close hostilities on better terms, that’s not really a very good statement on treatment.

Diodorus Sicilus and Plutarch say that the Athenian prisoners were left to die in the quarries, but contemporary sources are silent, and Thucydides, who might be expected to mention this in his account of the disaster, says nothing of their ultimate fate. Kelly (1970) suggests that those who survived the eight months and whose friends and families, or at least ransom-minded wealthy fellow-citizens with an interest, could afford to ransom them were eventually brought home, with only the remainder condemned to enslavement and/or death. The Athenians took Syracusan prisoners later, and do not appear to have starved them to death, or otherwise killed them out of hand.

These Sicilian prisoners are mentioned in Xenophon: kept in quarries and escaping (409 BCE); a generation later, in 373 BCE, the Athenians are willing to ransom Syracusan captives via a fixed-price agreement: would they have, if several thousands of their own citizen-men (roughly estimating an adult citizen man population of between 25K and 50K at this time and a total Attic population of between 250K and 500K, demography in antiquity is difficult, these are rough figures, do not make me go into the weeds on Athenian demography, I don’t like it there) had been starved to death within living memory? It seems like it would cry out for revenge in kind. So mistreatment followed by ransom seems more plausible: Plutarch’s main interests in his biographies did not lie in the details of events, but the character of men he considered great leaders, while Diodorus condenses the whole episode.

I have gone through a lot of words and we are still mainly dealing with the Greeks. I’m aware that I’m perhaps sometimes repeating myself, and that my treatment has not been particularly chronological, nor particularly thorough in its details as yet: we’re still in the read-all-the-things, throw-bits-at-walls-to-see-what-sticks phase of fucking around and finding out.

My kingdom for off-site access to my closest academic library’s resources, or a fortnight’s worth of childcare, or both. (I don’t have a kingdom. Kings are stupid.)

56. Captivity in antiquity: why dwell on Horrible Things?

Reasons for delving into sexual violence in antiquity. Value in transparency?

If you’re just here for the talk about books, I’m sorry. I’m on a bit of an obsessive kick at the minute.

My last post on captivity in antiquity went into some detail on the themes of violence and sexual violence in the course of capture and captivity, particularly as applied to women. In the texts I quoted from, I pointed out that other translations, ones which made the implicit violence of the situation more visible in English, were possible. Even ones which emphasised violence and humiliation.

Why? Why spend so much time dwelling on such acutely horrible things? I think it’s worth being transparent about intent and purpose here, since sexual violence remains an everyday part of many people’s lives.

It’s not the purpose of titillation. We’re all aware that power games are some people’s kink. Kink is fine. Consent is sexy. Go have wild BDSM parties, or whatever it is that people do.1 (I do personally find it rather disrespectful to treat real human suffering, however long past, as material for some wank fantasy.2 But opinions on art vary widely.)

Far more harmfully, some people (usually men) subscribe to misogynistic ideologies that take active and doctrinaire satisfaction from the subjugation and humiliation of women. For them, the details of ancient women’s3 experience serves only to confirm their prejudices.4 You shouldn’t investigate sexual violence in antiquity in order to support your own biases. (Though it’s not as though it’s easy to stop very literally white-washed images and impressions of antiquity from being used in support of various flavours of modern fascistic authoritarianism.)

I’m partly interested in antiquity because, quite frankly, it’s horrifying. And partly because I find it fascinating how people in different social contexts and with very different frameworks for understanding the world lived their lives and navigated problems of power and survival, how they attempted to exercise control over their circumstances. Whether that’s the enduring problems of health, illness, and bodily frailty that kept me interested throughout my thesis, or the human cruelty of soldiers and slave masters. What I’m saying is, people try to live. They form communities, look for joy and pleasure, try to avoid what they think of as the worst outcomes: and what that means to them can be very different to what it means to us, but it can also be strikingly relatable. To downplay or diminish the challenges they faced, though, diminishes their successes, too: the imaginative resources, the stubbornness, that kept people going and that kept survivors alive for so long as they lived.

The history of writing (and from the 20th century, film-making) about the ancient Mediterranean has in its largest part focused on men, and on “great” men, the military leaders, kings, and emperors that held incredible amounts of power in their societies. The experience of their less “great” victims has only recently drawn serious attention.

And from antiquity itself, the phenomenon of sexual violence has often been passed over with euphemism. Most students of the ancient world study it because they find in it, or found it in once, something appealing: something to admire or some sense of kinship. This, combined with a legacy of in-print prudery (at least in the English-language world) and the years during which many standard translations were printed5 means that the sometimes already euphemistic endemic sexual violence and rape of the ancient world has been sanitised still further in its English renditions.

It may not always be right to emphasise violence in a translation. To see, for example, where Rolfe in 1946 for Loeb translates

Inter quas unam rex ipse conspexit maestiorem quam ceteras et producentibus eam verecunde reluctantem . Excellens erat forma, et formam pudor honestabat;

into:

“Among these women the king himself [Alexander] noticed one more sad than the others, who modestly resisted those who would lead her forward. She was of surpassing beauty and her modesty enhanced her beauty,”

and instead offer as a translation:

“Among them the king himself observed one more downcast than the others, and who ashamedly struggled against those who led her forward. She was of surpassing beauty, and her shame6 honoured her beauty.”

But the first version implies the blushing, becoming reticence of a Regency débutante. The second, on the other hand, at least acknowledges the pervasive presence of violence and humiliation that was almost certainly part of this woman’s experience as captive, rather than sanitising it and rendering the context of violation invisible.

We can see this process also at work with Frank Cole Babbitt in his 1931 Loeb translation of Plutarch tells us the Roman officer “obtained possession” of his captive where “seized violently” is another possible translation, and offers us a Roman captor decapitated “as he was affectionately taking leave” of the captive he had raped, instead of “taking a farewell kiss,” (or in my loose and seriously unfriendly translation, “having a last grope goodbye”).7

Am I harping on this? Perhaps. But consider the popularity of “leadership lessons from the ancient world”: military leaders and autocrats from antiquity whose conquests are reframed for capitalist corporate boardroom leadership seminars. Amazon advertises me several, including The Wisdom of Alexander the Great: Enduring Leadership Lessons from the Man Who Created an Empire; The Leadership Genius of Julius Caesar; Julius Caesar: Lessons in Leadership; Leadership Lessons from the Ancient World: How Learning from the Past Can WIll You the Future. And several on Marcus Aurelius, some of which may be more about his philosophy than his leadership, and at least one on Attila the Hun, who is a little behind the scope of my expertise.

These men, even if the books attempt to contextualise them, are held up as admirable. Emblematic of successful leadership, a valuable trait. Part of the sanitised, popularised, made-palatable vision of antiquity, the vision that contributes to feel-good nostalgia about a more ideal past, a more civilised age, where the youth respected their elders and the trains (or ox-carts) ran on time. That nostalgia provides cover to our modern autocrats, who use it to hark back to an age of strong leaders.

Justice, as the historian Thucydides had his Athenian ambassadors tell their audience, is only in question between equals in power. The strong make demands and the weak concede. [Thuc. 5.89.1]

But modern democratic societies at least try to build a world that holds the powerful to account, collectively, even when individual people cannot. That’s the whole point of not having bloody stupid kings. An autocrat is a king without even the glamour of divinity: what sensible person wants to end up with one of those?

How many of those inspired-by-ancient leadership books, do you think, reckon with the fact that these ancient leaders built their careers and success on widespread, at times grotesque, socially sanctioned, organised cruelty? Does the mythologising of the ancient autocrat stand up when you take away the figleaf and look directly at the thousands of people massacred in the wake of defeat and the thousands more whose enslavement — in all the attendant brutalities, rape, and exploitation — paid for those autocrats’ continuing campaigns?

There’s always a political dimension to violence, as well as to silence. Who gets spoken of, who gets to speak. The sources from antiquity are already filled with silences: preservation and time has taken its toll so that we have so much less surviving from antiquity than was written, but gender and status controlled who had most opportunity to write in the first place.

I think we owe it to ourselves and to history to look at the sources with as much critical appraisal about the violence and sexual exploitation present in the world of antiquity as we can bring to bear. Not to overstate its presence, but not to understate its potential either. The people who died of that violence — or who made their lives with its scars, in its wake or in its shadows — are every bit as human, and every bit as interesting, as the Alexanders and the Scipios and the Caesars of antiquity.

I mean, to pick one conqueror out of a hat, is it any good to pretend that Alexander didn’t order massacres of thousands at Thebes, Tyre, Gaza, and Persepolis, and sell thousands of the survivors into slavery? (Is a high death toll really grounds for calling a man “the Great”?)

1

I was raised prudish and never really got over the part where talking about sex at all in public feels wildly embarrassing and inappropriate. And yet I have spent much time on the internet, learning in the process that this is not at all a universal and also that some people’s idea of a consensual good time is really icky to other people (me). The widespread acceptance of a) tagging and b) content warnings is a good thing, friends.

2

Do NOT get me started on certain novels set in antiquity that purport to be romance and involve slavery. Even leaving aside their historical inaccuracies.

3

Assume, please, that when I say “women” I mean “people socially gendered as women by their society” or “people living as women,” rather than any kind of biological determinism. The same goes for men. I’m not going to digress on the whole concept of gender in Greek or Roman antiquity: that is complex enough for entire academic careers to be spent on.

4

Whether those prejudices are “it wasn’t so bad,” or “they deserved it,” or “it’s only natural that life should work this way,” or “things are always like this and always should be.” I don’t know, I fail to understand the internal logic of most forms of misogyny.

5

The Loeb Classical Library was established in 1911: many popular texts were translated into this series between that date and the late 1938s, and remained standard texts for the length of the 20th century.

6

Pudor means shame, modesty, and honour in Latin, there are whole theses written about this word and I’m not a Latinist.

7

I value the Loeb Classical Library as a project immensely: one of its goals in 1911 was the democratisation of classics, the serious study of which then even more than now was the preserve of a monied elite. And anyone who can do readable and broadly accurate translation is very skilled. But everyone comes to a project of translation in their own social context.

55. Captivity in antiquity: let's follow up on ransom

and oh yay, the experience of female captives

If this were AO3, we’d be tagging for “canon-typical violence” as well as sexual assault.

In my previous post on this topic, I mentioned how I’d started to investigate captivity in antiquity, and the return from it. I need to clear up something from that post first, though.

I’d discussed this line from the law code of Gortyn:

αἰ κ’ ἐδδυσ̣[άμενον] πέρα̣[νδε] ἐκς ἀλλοπολίας ὐπ’ ἀν-άνκας ἐκόμενος κελομένοˉ τις λύσεται, ἐπὶ το͂ι ἀλλυσαμέοˉι ἔˉμεˉν πρίν κ’ ἀποδο͂ι τὸ ἐπιβάλλον.

“Anyone who has been called on for aid, who ransoms out of foreign cities those who were forcibly got away abroad in order to be sold, the ransomed ones belong to him until they pay the debt.” (My translation).

“If anyone, bound by necessity, should get a man gone away to a strange place set free from a foreign city at his own request, he shall be in the power of the one who ransomed him until he pay what is due.” (Willetts 1967).

Then I made an error, because I was sleepy: I said, There is another passage about how if a man is ransomed but can prove it wasn’t at his request, he doesn’t owe anything.

This was wrong. The text in fact specifies that it’s a matter for a judge to decide, what and whether the ransomee owes their ransomer.

I want to clear this up, because this passage suggests that anyone who is ransomed definitely owes something, which has a bearing on the question of status after the ransomee’s return.

With that cleared up, let’s move on to new material!

The question of ransom led me to Joshua Sosin’s “Ransom at Athens”, a thorough discussion of a passage of one of the law court speeches of Demosthenes, who lived in Athens between 384 and 322BC, during the wars attending the rise of Philip of Macedon. The passage that concerns Sosin is 53.11 (English translation at link):

“σὺ οὖν μοι,” ἔφη, “πόρισον τὸ ἐλλεῖπον τοῦ ἀργυρίου, πρὶν τὰς τριάκονθʼ ἡμέρας παρελθεῖν, ἵνα μὴ ὅ τε ἀποδέδωκα,” ἔφη, “τὰς χιλίας δραχμάς, ἀπόληται, καὶ αὐτὸς ἀγώγιμος γένωμαι. συλλέξας δʼ,” ἔφη, “τὸν ἔρανον, ἐπειδὰν τοὺς ξένους ἀπαλλάξω, σοὶ ἀποδώσω ὃ ἄν μοι χρήσῃς. οἶσθα δʼ,” ἔφη, “ὅτι καὶ οἱ νόμοι κελεύουσιν τοῦ λυσαμένου ἐκ τῶν πολεμίων εἶναι τὸν λυθέντα, ἐὰν μὴ ἀποδιδῷ τὰ λύτρα.”

Sosin’s argument hinges on the word, κελεύουσιν, in the phrase ὅτι καὶ οἱ νόμοι κελεύουσιν τοῦ λυσαμένου ἐκ τῶν πολεμίων εἶναι τὸν λυθέντα, ἐὰν μὴ ἀποδιδῷ τὰ λύτρα.

“For the laws even [bid, command, urge, exhort] that the one ransomed from the enemies belongs to the ransomer, if he should not pay the ransom.”

Does this law of enslavement apply to the ransomee in this case? Sosin’s argument is complex and ultimately amounts to no (he wasn’t ransomed by fellow Athenians to whom the law applies, and he’d already achieved his freedom through a loan, so he’s exaggerating), but in the course of it Sosin enumerates several ways that being freed from captivity shows up in the epigraphic and literary evidence, and concludes that what is in play is in fact manumission.

Sosin discusses and argues for six scenarios in which this can be seen to occur:

1. purchase followed by a free gift of manumission;

2. purchase followed by manumission, the price of the manumission lent by the purchaser to the ransomee on condition of repayment, with penalties for failure to repay coming under the laws and customs of contract for debt;

3. purchase followed by manumission, the price of the manumission to be repaid in labour (indenture, debt-bondage) but with the ransomee no longer a chattel slave whose status is inheritable, with penalties for default under debt laws;

4. purchase followed by an agreement for manumission on the payment of a sum of money: in this case the ransomee remains a chattel slave until the money is paid, and is afterwards free (though the ransomee may then owe money to someone else);

5. purchase followed by an agreement for manumission after a term of service: in this case again the ransomee remains a chattel slave until the term is done, though with perhaps with certain contracted freedoms. This interpretation hinges on Sosin’s view of paramone, which other scholars view as a post-manumission obligation, in which failure to carry out the obligated service leads to re-enslavement. (This is a thing that occurs in later Roman slavery: but Sosin is persuasive (JSTOR link) about the Greek binary view of slave and free.¹)

6. purchase followed by an agreement for manumission after a money payment and a term of service: again this hinges on Sosin’s view of paramone, and again means that the ransomee remains a chattel slave until the term of service is complete.

If we disagree with Sosin’s view of paramone, as some older scholarship does, and view paramone obligations as offering a conditional freedom (the person is no longer a chattel slave but is liable to re-enslavement if they fail the conditions of service, in circumstances which may well be no better than continued slavery: a half-in, half-out sort of status), then cases 5. and 6. instead afford a revocable freedom.

Either way, Sosin’s argument is that the ransomee is in fact a chattel slave after their capture, at least in war (which agrees with a number of statements in the ancient sources), whatever about non-state piracy. The circumstances under which they may be set free are the same as for any chattel slave: if they are purchased by their fellow country-person, then that purchaser may impose such conditions upon their release as seems good to them.

Sosin also draws attention to the fragmentary law code from Miletos, which imposes reciprocal obligations citizens of Phaistos and Miletos who come into possession of war captives from the other city. If the citizen has asked to be purchased in order to be ransomed home, then the citizen must repay the ransom. If the citizen has not asked to be purchased, the purchaser is obliged to not purchase him (or presumably otherwise let him go, if it can be proved that he didn’t ask for ransom). Sosin likewise cites a fragmentary law imposing the same reciprocal obligations on citizens of Delphi and Pelene. So allies have rules about buying each other’s citizens to keep in slavery.

Nikostratos, the ransomee in the speech of Demosthenes mentioned above, returns to Athens as a free citizen man. He ends up in court on account of the debt he incurred to a fellow-citizen in the course of buying his way out of the initial ransom-debt. (As does his brother, the primary target of the speech.) He must be a free citizen, as Demosthenes never suggests otherwise and Demosthenes’s speech was written for Apollodorus, the prosecutor. If he remained in some lesser status, then that would be ammunition against him. So return from captivity can and does entail a return to previous citizen status for at least some ransomed Greek citizen men.

(I am currently leaving aside prisoner exchanges and potential returns of prisoners at the end of a war, on account of I haven’t yet got to grips with any material that treats of that in detail.)

The question may be more fraught for Greek women of citizen status.²

For one thing, the context in which the largest number of Greek women and girls are taken prisoner is after military defeat has resulted in the sack of a city or town, or in the course of enemy forces harrowing the countryside. Some will have be taken by pirates or brigands while travelling, as is also the case for men, or in pirate raids on coastlines for the purpose of plunder and slave-taking. But women, girls, and young boys are taken prisoner in their largest numbers in defeat, in circumstances where a great number of their adult male relatives have been killed rather than captured.

This process of capture is attended by exemplary, terroristic violence. Kathy L. Gaca discusses the violence behind the Greek word that is sometimes given as “andropodise” in English, in a paper that aims at linguistic precision (“The Andrapodizing of War Captives in Greek Historical Memory”). The unwarlike populace is rounded up by violent means — murder either incidental or exemplary, wounding with blades, breaking bones and beating with spear hafts and other blunt instruments, literal man-handling — and the women, girls, and young boys are separated from elders and toddlers. (In his life of Agesilaus, Xenophon praises Agesilaus for taking steps to keep alive young children discarded by slave-merchants in the wake of his armies as well as elders so that they “might not fall a prey to dogs or wolves”. See 1.20-1.22, English text. This is enlightened self-interest: depopulated lands will not support an army on campaign.) Exemplary torture may take place, and the killing of adolescent boys and men of age to carry arms who have been taken prisoner is also attested.

The women, including girls too young to marry, are subject in addition to rape and other forms of sexual violence. (Gaca has another interesting paper on just this topic, again primarily investigating a commonplace phrase in discussions of war in antiquity from the linguistic angle: “Telling the Girls from the Boys and Children: Interpreting Παȋδεϛ in the Sexual Violence of Populace-Ravaging Ancient Warfare”) This sexual violence can sometimes be extreme enough to result in death, presumably from wounds inflicted during it. Vaginal rape is considered normal: anal and oral rape far from unimaginable. Gaca cites Pausanias 1.23.6: the English translation takes reference in euphemism (“Her the Satyrs outraged not only in the usual way, but also in a most shocking manner”), but Pausianas is rather more specific: “The Satyrs assaulted (or “outraged,” ὑβρίζειν) her not only in the established way but all over her body.”³

The women and girls who survive this process are then distributed among the victors, or sold to merchants who take them to sell at larger markets. That enslaved women are subject to repeated and ongoing sexual exploitation is evident.

The evidence from manumission inscriptions at Delphi includes one woman, Laodika, whose path towards freedom includes τ[ὰ] λύτρα ἐκ τῶν πολεμίων, “ransom from enemies,” but who is required to remain with one of her owners, Timandros, for the length of Timandros’s life. (Link to Greek text.) (I don’t think it’s an interpretative stretch to see Laodika as Timandros’s παλλακίς, his concubine.)

Women are taken captive en masse in circumstances where ransom may be less likely, simply on account of who survives to be able to ransom them and of what resources remain to the survivors. And given the male Greek concern in antiquity with the sexual fidelity and chastity of women, it may be possible (I have no evidence either way, at least not yet) that ransoming one’s enslaved and sexually exploited wife, if one survives a military defeat that resulted in her capture, is perhaps less pressing than seeking one’s other relatives.

There are several mentions of cities that have been sacked, polities that have been wiped out, and then had some part of their population brought back out of slavery and resettled in their original territory, but given the bias of our sources it’s difficult (impossible in all cases? or just most? I haven’t tracked all mentions yet) to say whether the freeing and resettling was done relatively randomly across men, women, and children, previously rich or previously poor, or whether some part of the enslaved population was prioritised for restoration. I can make some guesses, but so far that’s it.

I have encountered so far two specific mentions of individual women in the literary sources who are restored from the status of war-captive to free woman — women who were captured and enslaved, as opposed to given or taken as hostages. They are both women of aristocratic status, and neither are Greek. (Or Roman, for that matter.)

The first, a Persian noblewoman, does not even appear in a Greek text, but in Q. Curtius Rufus’s Latin History of Alexander. A mopey Alexander has “captive women singing” at his entertainments after he’s taken Susa and Persepolis.

“Among these women the king himself [Alexander] noticed one more sad than the others, who modestly resisted those who would lead her forward. She was of surpassing beauty and her modesty enhanced her beauty; with downcast eyes and with her face covered so far as she was allowed, she aroused in the king a suspicion that she was of too high birth to be exhibited amid entertainments at a banquet. On being accordingly asked who she was, she replied that she was the granddaughter of Ochus⁴, who had lately been king of the Persians, being the daughter of his son, and that she had been the wife of Hystaspes⁵. He had been a kinsman of Darius and himself the commander of a great army. There still lingered in the king’s mind slight remains of his former disposition; and so, respecting the ill-fortune of a lady born of royal stock, and so famous a name as that of Ochus, he not only gave orders that the captive should be set free, but also that her property should be returned to her; likewise that her husband should be looked for, in order that when he had been found, he might restore his wife to him. Moreover, on the following day he ordered Hephaestion to cause all the prisoners to be brought to the palace. There, having inquired into the rank of each one, he separated from the common herd those who were of high birth. There were a thousand of these; among them was Oxathres, brother of Darius.”⁶ (6.2.6-10)⁷

I think, even if this interlude is an invention of Quintus Curtius Rufus, several things are important to note explicitly here:

1. Entertainers, even free entertainers, are frequently considered sexually available in the ancient Greek world.

2. The unnamed noblewoman here is a war captive and has not been separated from other captive women. In keeping with the common operations of captive-taking and the assumptions of the ancient sources, we may take as given that she was repeatedly raped at the start of her captivity, very possibly by multiple men, and is subject to ongoing sexual violence.

3. The text — either Rufus or his sources — is at pains to establish that this noblewoman is striving to keep her modesty. (Her pudor, her sense of shame and/or honour.)

4. This sense of shame/honour is inextricably linked to her birth status as the granddaughter of the most elevated person in the kingdom, a king: it is the mechanism by which her high birth status and thus the inappropriateness of a good/just/generous king (the “former disposition” of Alexander) allowing her to remain in a state of chattel slavery.

5. Her restoration to freedom and therefore to sexual respectability goes hand in hand with her prospective restoration to her husband, if he can be found.

The other incident where a female war-captive is restored to freedom is recounted in Livy (writing a century after the event) and in Plutarch (writing some two centuries after), and apparently in a lost text of Polybius, who was contemporary enough to actually meet the woman in question.

In Plutarch:

“It came to pass that Chiomara, the wife of Ortiagon, was made a prisoner of war along with the rest of the women at the time when the Romans under Gnaeus overcame in battle the Galatians in Asia.⁸ The officer who obtained possession of her used his good fortune as soldiers do, and dishonoured her⁹. He was, naturally, an ignorant man with no self-control when it came to either pleasure or money. He fell a victim, however, to his love of money, and when a very large sum in gold had been mutually agreed upon as the price for the woman, he brought her to exchange for the ransom to a place where a river, flowing between, formed a boundary. When the Galatians had crossed and given him the money and received Chiomara, she, by a nod, indicated to one man that he should smite the Roman as he was affectionately taking leave of her. And when the man obediently struck off the Roman’s head, she picked it up and, wrapping it in the folds of her garment, departed. When she came to her husband and threw the head down before him, he said in amazement, ‘A noble thing, dear wife, is fidelity.’ ‘Yes.’ said she, ‘but it is a nobler thing that only one man be alive who has been intimate with me.’

Polybius says that he had a conversation with this woman in Sardis, and that he admired her good sense and intelligence.” [Bravery of Women, 22.]

Livy’s account does not differ by much, though it offers more details.¹⁰ The English text is here.

In this case, we may note that the aristocratic woman in question can arrange for her own ransom, per Livy, through a messenger (previously one of her own slaves) released for the purpose. Livy is at pains to suggest the officer is an outlier in his willingness to take advantage of aristocratic female captives. Do we believe Livy in this? I’m not sure we should.

(The officer might be an outlier in his greedy stupidity, though.)

Things to take away from this incident:

1. Chiomara is the wife of a Galatian chieftain, a noblewoman of the highest order in her own society.

2. She arranges for her own ransom through a prisoner, a former slave, released as a messenger.

3. The ransom arrangements appear to be fairly ad-hoc, and not as official as the Roman officer’s commander would have preferred them to be: the only participants in the exchange are two Galatians, the Roman officer (a centurion according to Livy) and the prisoner herself. More, the officer’s own troops are kept in the dark, possibly to keep them from agitating for a share of the ransom money.

4. Chiomara arranges to have her capture and rape immediately avenged by the two Galatians who come to ransom her.

5. It is this immediate revenge, as much as her status or her return to freedom and her husband, that leads to this incident being sufficiently memorable as to be acknowledged in several ancient historians: she shows up in Valerius Maximus (6.1, “On Chastity”) and in Florus’s Epitome¹¹ as well.

The two incidents offer two very different paths to release from captivity, though both of them rely on the captive’s high pre-captivity status.¹² In neither case do we know much of anything about what became of these women later, though Plutarch says that Polybius met Chiomara in Sardis, which is outside the region ruled by the Galatian people even after their defeat and reduction to a client state by Rome. We can tentatively assume that she remained of high status, since Polybius (and thus Plutarch) would likely have mentioned a significant change in her circumstances.

I’m not touching abduction-captivity-sexual-assault in the Greek novel yet. Sticking with not-wholly-fiction so far, I have arrived at a couple of conclusions:

The status of men returning from captivity can vary depending on how they managed their return, including who paid for it.

Aristocratic women in aristocratic societies may return from captivity to recognition of their prior free, aristocratic status, especially if they display appropriate shame-honour behaviours during captivity or if they appropriately avenge the insult to their honour represented by rape.

However, the experience of women as war-captives is defined by sexual violence in a way that men’s experience is not (or at least, is not in nearly so visibly a way).

There’s a bit in either Polybius or Livy (which I read two days ago and forgot to note down, so citation pending) set during the Punic Wars, in which the Iberian peoples give hostages to the Carthaginians, and the Roman general explains that when those hostages fell into his hands instead, he found them being treated like “slaves and war-captives” (if I’m remembering it right, it was only in translation) rather than hostages. (Was there something about dishonour?) This potentially implies that the dividing line between “hostage” and “slave/war-captive” rests in the degree of explicit sexual violence to which the (female) prisoner is subject.

Going back to the questions with which I started, I don’t think we’ve got anything like close to good answers yet.¹³ But the outline of how difficult it is to get to grips with the evidence is becoming a lot clearer.

---

1I like his argument, it simplifies things for me. That’s no reason to take it at face value, though.

2Greek women as a rule didn’t have the ability to participate publicly in political affairs as men did, except in certain aristocratic contexts. A woman does not have the same rights of citizenship as a man, and while a man can often pass on his citizen status to his children with a non-citizen woman (the best-known exception to this is at Athens, after Pericle’s citizenship law around 450BC), the vast majority of the time a woman cannot pass on her citizen status to her children with a non-citizen man. (There may be exceptions: I do not know of them.) So it’s not really accurate to talk about “citizen women,” I think, but “women of citizen status” is perhaps an awkward workaround that implies the matter is more complicated.

3This is a mythological anecdote, but it offers evidence for the extent of Greek imagination of sexual violence.

4Otherwise known to history as Darius II, reigned 423BCE-405/4BCE.

5Hystaspes is a name that shows up several times in the family of the kings of Persia.

6The text doesn’t say anything about setting the other prisoners of high birth free, apart from the king’s granddaughter and her husband, we should be careful to note, though it is quite possible that they enjoyed something closer to hostageship than slavery thereafter.

7Inter quas unam rex ipse conspexit maestiorem quam ceteras et producentibus eam verecunde reluctantem . Excellens erat forma, et formam pudor honestabat; deiectis in terram oculis et, quantum licebat , ore velato , suspicionem praebuit regi nobiliorem esse, quam ut inter convivales ludos deberet ostendi. I feel that Rolfe’s English translation is potentially understating the level of implicit violence and humiliation here. My Latin is fairly bad, so I’m not terribly confident, but I think you could translate the first sentence as: “Among them the king himself observed one more dejected than the others, and who ashamedly struggled against those who led her forward.” The Latin supports “ashamedly” just as well as “modestly,” and “struggled against” as well as “resisted,” but the English of each implies a different emotional reading of the scene.

8189 BCE.

9 ὁ δὲ λαβών αὐτὴν ταξίαρχος ἐχρήσατο τῇ τύχῃ στρατιωτικῶς καὶ κατῄσχυνεν. We should note again the way in which translation choices can emphasise or downplay violence: λαμβάνω, here in participle form as λαβών, is a word that can be translated “take” or “receive,” but it can also be translated as “seize,” “take by violence,” “carry off” (as of plunder), and “capture.” So “The officer, the one who seized her violently, proclaimed his good luck soldier-fashion and dishonoured her.” Likewise τὸν Ῥωμαῖον ἀσπαζόμενον αὐτὴν καὶ φιλοφρονούμενον, rendered “the Roman [as he was] affectionately taking leave of her” by our 1931 translator, can also be translated as “the Roman [as he was] clinging to her embrace,” or perhaps more plausibly, “[as he was] kissing/caressing her in farewell.” Or more colloquially and with absolutely zero charity towards the Roman in question, “having a last grope goodbye.”

10 supererat bellum integrum cum Tectosagis. ad eos profectus consul tertiis castris Ancyram, nobilem in illis locis urbem, pervenit, unde hostes paulo plus decem milia aberant. ubi cum stativa essent, facinus memorabile a captiva factum est. Orgiagontis reguli uxor forma eximia custodiebatur inter plures captivas; cui custodiae centurio praeerat et libidinis et avaritiae militaris. is primo animum temptavit; quem cum abhorrentem a voluntario videret stupro, corpori, quod servum fortuna erat, vim fecit. deinde ad leniendam indignitatem iniuriae spem reditus ad suos mulieri facit, et ne eam quidem, ut amans, gratuitam. certo auri pondere pactus, ne quem suorum conscium haberet, ipsi permittit, ut, quem vellet, unum ex captivis nuntium ad suos mitteret. locum prope flumen constituit, quo duo ne plus necessarii captivae cum auro venirent nocte insequenti ad eam 1 accipiendam. forte ipsius mulieris servus inter captivos eiusdem custodiae erat. hunc nuntium primis tenebris extra stationes centurio educit. nocte insequenti et duo necessarii mulieris ad constitutum locum et centurio cum captiva venit. ubi cum aurum ostenderent, quod summam talenti Attici — tanti enim pepigerat — expleret, mulier lingua sua, stringerent ferrum et centurionem pensantem aurum occiderent, imperavit. iugulati praecisum caput ipsa involutum veste ferens ad virum Orgiagontem, qui ab Olympo domum refugerat, pervenit; quem priusquam complecteretur, caput centurionis ante pedes eius abiecit, mirantique, cuiusnam id caput hominis aut quod id facinus haudquaquam muliebre esset, et iniuriam corporis et ultionem violatae per vim pudicitiae confessa viro est, aliaque, ut traditur, sanctitate et gravitate vitae huius matronalis facinoris decus ad ultimum conservavit. [Livy 38.24]

11The identity of the Florus behind the Epitome of Roman History is much discussed. The Epitome itself is probably 2nd century CE.

12Both of them imply or state outright the sexual violence to which the captives are subject, and Livy is explicit about the captives’ reduction to slavery (Livy, quod servum fortuna erat, which my terrible Latin works out as: “because a slave was her condition”) though Q. Curtius Rufus does not say it outright, using only the word “captive” (non dimitti modo captivam, not only to release the captive).

13Those questions being:

– the status and treatment of prisoners in practice: captivity, slavery, hostageship, ransom, release, and whether there were patterns in who was liable to what;

– change in patterns over time and between Greece and Rome;

– whether return to one’s home city (or territory) after capture and enslavement resulted in a return to one’s previous status in terms of rights and freedoms, or whether permanent or temporary disabilities applied, and how this differed between Greece and Rome;

– how fragmentary is the evidence.

54. Captivity in antiquity: the problem with getting all curious again

Or how I started Doing A Research again and now I can’t stop.

I encountered someone on the internet making gross generalisations about captivity, ransom, and prisoner status in ancient Greece and Rome. This annoyed me. But I realised that, while I knew the generalisations were wrong, I did not in fact know specifically:

– the status and treatment of prisoners in practice: captivity, slavery, hostageship, ransom, release, and whether there were patterns in who was liable to what;

– change in patterns over time and between Greece and Rome;

– whether return to one’s home city (or territory) after capture and enslavement resulted in a return to one’s previous status in terms of rights and freedoms, or whether permanent or temporary disabilities applied, and how this differed between Greece and Rome;

– how fragmentary is the evidence.

What particularly interests me now is the zone of transition: temporary captivity, followed by functional assimilation as a free person into the society of one’s captors or a return to one’s previous home territory as a free person.

What happens in the space of captivity and in the transition, what makes return possible, and what social consequences attend it?

So I set out to answer these questions to my own satisfaction.

I’m still in the process of answering them.

There doesn’t seem to be a single volume or article, or at least I have not yet found and read one, that answers these questions as a whole, though there are treatments of (male) prisoners of war and the issue of hostageship and ransom, largely in the form of unpublished PhD theses. (The one published monograph¹ on hostageship appears to have attracted several snarky academic reviews.)

It may be useful to outline how I’ve set about trying to answer these questions. While I’m a historian of antiquity by training, my PhD was on healing cult practice (the cult of Asklepios in Greece between the 5th century BCE and the 2nd century CE²), not anything associated with ancient warfare or social practices around warfare³, and I’m fairly rusty to boot.

The first thing I did was several online searches. I used the terms “captivity in the ancient Mediterranean,” “captivity in the ancient Greek world,” “captivity in the Roman world,” “hostages in…,” “ransom in…” etc.⁴

I also used search terms for captivity, hostageship and ransom “…in Hellenistic Greece,” “in Classical Greece,” “in the Roman Republic” to see what that threw up.⁵ Google is terrible, and DuckDuckGo is differently bad, so I discarded any results not on JSTOR or not from a reputable university’s repository of Ph.D theses.⁶ (I also made some remarks on social media, which gave me some other resources to chase.)

One of the top results using this method was a Ph.D thesis submitted at Liverpool in 2014 by Jason Paul Wickham⁷ on “The Enslavement of War Captives by the Romans to 146 BC.” Wickham’s thesis is a useful survey of the early Roman evidence, and discusses some Greek material by way of comparison. His arguments are useful in beginning to answer some of my questions. Tracking down his references, in addition to the previous search engine and social media queries, has filled out my reading list substantially, and helped me narrow down the ancient authors (and the passages in them) that might relate to these question.

No one wants to have to read the entire ancient canon with a notebook, pen, and a set of stickynotes to hand. No one. (These days you can wing it by searching specific terms through the Loeb online collection, or a few other places, thank heaven, but that requires a day out in a library with access for me.)

Wickham also reminded me that the Law Code of Gortyn⁸ (online here in Greek form, translated in 1967 by Ronald F. Willetts as The Law Code of Gortyn as a supplement to the journal Kadmos, accessible here) has a very small passage relevant to my interests.

The passage, which comes near the end of column 6, is given as follows by Willetts:

αἰ κ’ ἐδδυσ̣[άμενον] πέρα̣[νδε] ἐκς ἀλλοπολίας ὐπ’ ἀν-άνκας ἐκόμενος κελομένοˉ τις λύσεται, ἐπὶ το͂ι ἀλλυσαμέοˉι ἔˉμεˉν πρίν κ’ ἀποδο͂ι τὸ ἐπιβάλλον.

My Greek was never very good to start with, and the Gortyn inscription is in the Cretan dialect, which makes things even more complicated. It took me an hour to come up with a translation (undoubtedly a bad one) for this one sentence:

“Anyone who has been called on for aid, who ransoms out of foreign cities those who were forcibly got away abroad in order to be sold, the ransomed ones belong to him until they pay the debt.”

This largely agrees with Willetts:

“If anyone, bound by necessity, should get a man gone away to a strange place set free from a foreign city at his own request, he shall be in the power of the one who ransomed him until he pay what is due.”

There is another passage about how if a man is ransomed but can prove it wasn’t at his request, he doesn’t owe anything. I did not do my own translation for that one, since the first one took me so long.

Why did I struggle to do my own translation? What I wanted to know, specifically, was the status of the ransomee who had been returned home. Some translators, particularly older ones, are inclined to play down Greek and Roman slavery: translating “servant” and “maid” for male and female slave, for example, or choosing the most gentle and generous interpretation of a verb. It’s a verb here that matters: ἐπιβάλλον.

ἐπὶ το͂ι ἀλλυσαμέν-οˉι ἔˉμεˉν πρίν κ’ ἀποδο͂ι τὸ ἐπιβάλλον is the kicker clause, the one I’m interested in. It’s reasonably straightforward by the standards of Greek, but alas for my hopes of certainty, its meaning can definitely be argued. Old ἐπιβάλλον has a multiplicity of meanings.

It’s important to note that at this time, Gortyn distinguished between unfree persons who were bound to masters but could dispose of property (the 1967 translation calls them serfs) and chattel slaves. The ransomee “falls to the share of” or “follows” or “belongs to” (that’s what ἐπιβάλλον is doing there) the ransomer until the debt is paid.

But does the ransomee become the slave of the ransomer? His serf? His debt-bound client? Does he have restricted civic rights? (Likely.) Can we straightforwardly read this as continued enslavement albeit in home territory, or is it a form of indenture or forced clientage? The text does not in fact securely answer the question of status.

It is unlikely but not impossible that this means a form of chattel slavery in practice: the ransomed person, in this case, has had to ask someone to ransom them, thereby voluntarily putting themselves under obligation. If their friends and kin are actively trying to find and ransom them, ransoms them without their direct request, the law code does not see the ransomee as owing a debt. Presumably the ransomee who asks someone else for ransom (as opposed to asking their friends and kin to arrange it from their own resources) has to ask someone with more wealth than their own household and kin. And the ransomed person would likely be either killed or enslaved without a ransom: in very general terms, the ancient world understands that when you’re captured in battle you belong to the victor. You are in essence your captor’s property, though your captor may choose to release you freely or for terms. If you’re taken by pirates or brigands, on the other hand, you may be illegally enslaved but in practical terms it makes little difference to what happens if you’re not ransomed.

So the status of chattel slavery seems possible for a free person from Gortyn captured and returned to their home territory. But given the social context, some form of indenture seems more likely, possibly including a reduction in status to serfdom. It really all depends on what ἐπιβάλλον means here.

If I want to dig at the meaning of the Gortyn code, I need to find comparable Greek references to ransomed people. And/or ἐπιβάλλον in relation to people. I don’t know whether I want to dig at the meaning of the Gortyn code yet, though, especially when I still need to read more widely and more deeply in the whole subject.

Next up in my reading is Joshua Sosin’s article on “Ransom at Athens,” and a couple of Kathy L. Gaca’s articles on martial rape in Greek antiquity, to see if that bears any fruit in putting ancient captive-making in context. There’s also a thesis from 1980 and a couple of texts in French that should be fruitful if I can manage to cudgel my brain around them, particularly Anne Bielman’s 1994 Retour à la liberté, in addition to a bunch of works in English that seem to be mostly about Romans.

I would do a minor crime for W. Kendrick Pritchett’s The Greek State At War Part V, from 1991, which never made it as far as Trinity College Library (the research library where I have reader privileges). It has been cited by nearly every article I’ve read so far. But it’s a little pricey for the individual to acquire, even electronically, on intellectual whim. (At least it is available electronically: Yvon Garlan’s Slavery in Ancient Greece, also frequently cited, has not been given a new lease of life in that form.)

If you want to hear more on this topic, let me know: I don’t think I’m going to stop following it up until I’m either satisfied or have run out of accessible works to chase.

---

1 A monograph is a book-length detailed study of a single particular subject area, usually with only one author.

2 In retrospect I’m not very happy with my Ph.D: it’s not comprehensive enough to be broadly useful to future researchers, and my European language skills weren’t up to the challenge of assimilating the German and Italian material in time to have anything ready for my submission deadline. It’s narrowly useful, maybe: it was certainly original research.

3 I certainly think we may call captivity arising from warfare a social practice

4If you use the search term “X” + “in ancient Greece” or “in Rome,” rather than “in the ancient Greek world,” you get so much more bullshit. Some of it is fashionable fashy bullshit, some of it is the search engine prioritising “ancient Greece” rather than your whole query, and most of it is the gross over-simplification that happens when people design instructional materials to cover wide swathes of history in too short a time for complexity, and assume their audience can’t handle complexity anyway. But adding “world” brings up more detailed material, probably on account of titling conventions among academics.

5 In the days of yore, one would have gone to a research library’s card catalogue, or to a subject librarian, for a starting point. I’ve never not had a search engine.

6 Oxford calls a Ph.D a D.Phil. It’s the same thing.

7 Who appears to since have had an “alt-ac” career since, rather than a purely academic one. Pity: I think he might have written interesting papers.

8 Gortyn was a city on the island of Crete, and the law code (written in boustrophedon or ox-turning style, alternating lines from left to right and right to left) most likely dates to the first half of the 5th century BCE: it might be contemporary with the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, but it’s more likely to have been composed sometime between then and 450 BCE.

The Consumption of Justice by Daniel Lord Smail: a fascinating history about law and the public performance of feelings

Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. (2003.)

Blackwell’s affiliate link.

Cover art for The Consumption of Justice

The Consumption of Justice is a very interesting book. It takes as a focus for investigation the law courts of Marseille between the thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, and examines them from the point of view of the public performance of emotions like enmity, anger, and friendship. Smail’s thesis is that, rather than being driven to use law courts by a growing royal monopoly on violence, Marseille’s residents chose to use the law courts as one among a number of tools to enact their enmities.

Smail divides his work into five chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix on the nature of legal records from this period in Marseille. In chapter one, “Using the Courts,” he outlines, using specific cases, how the courts of Marseille operated, what kinds of cases they oversaw, and how in general people interacted with the local legal systems. Chapter two, “Structures of Hatred,” discusses how enmity, hatred, friendship and kinship were socially constructed and performed as emotions, and how this came into play in a legal system where a witness who was too much a friend or too much an enemy to one of the parties at law could be forbidden from giving testimony. Chapter three, “The Pursuit of Debt,” looks specifically at how cases for the recovery of debt enacted or exacerbated otherwise-existing enmities: debt represents by far the largest number of encounters with the legal system.

Chapter four, “Body and Bona,” discusses the penalties assessed and assigned by the courts in Marseilles. “Bona,” here is a term referring not only to someone’s goods but also to their good name, their reputation, as I understand it in Smail’s explanation. Marseillaise courts preferred to penalise the bona rather than the body, and people potentially subject to capital penalties usually fled into exile and negotiated their return from outside the Marseillaise courts’ jurisdiction. In practice, it appears, corporeal punishments were reserved for people who had no bona to extract penalties from (which means no kin or friends willing to lend them means, either): foreigners or poor people of confirmed bad reputation. And chapter five, “The Public Archive,” discusses the public, outdoors nature of law courts in Marseilles, and how community knowledge of individuals and their deeds and possessions was a vital part of what courts considered as evidence.

Smail’s work here is readable and accessible to the interested layperson (not my period, but I found everything easy to follow) and filled with fascinating details and the traces of centuries-old grudges and affections. Like The Voices of Nîmes, it brings the past to life in the form of its people.

53. Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseilles, 1264-1423

A fascinating look at how people used the courts

Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. (2003.)

Blackwell’s affiliate link.

The Consumption of Justice is a very interesting book. It takes as a focus for investigation the law courts of Marseille between the thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, and examines them from the point of view of the public performance of emotions like enmity, anger, and friendship. Smail’s thesis is that, rather than being driven to use law courts by a growing royal monopoly on violence, Marseille’s residents chose to use the law courts as one among a number of tools to enact their enmities.

Smail divides his work into five chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix on the nature of legal records from this period in Marseille. In chapter one, “Using the Courts,” he outlines, using specific cases, how the courts of Marseille operated, what kinds of cases they oversaw, and how in general people interacted with the local legal systems. Chapter two, “Structures of Hatred,” discusses how enmity, hatred, friendship and kinship were socially constructed and performed as emotions, and how this came into play in a legal system where a witness who was too much a friend or too much an enemy to one of the parties at law could be forbidden from giving testimony. Chapter three, “The Pursuit of Debt,” looks specifically at how cases for the recovery of debt enacted or exacerbated otherwise-existing enmities: debt represents by far the largest number of encounters with the legal system.

Chapter four, “Body and Bona,” discusses the penalties assessed and assigned by the courts in Marseilles. “Bona,” here is a term referring not only to someone’s goods but also to their good name, their reputation, as I understand it in Smail’s explanation. Marseillaise courts preferred to penalise the bona rather than the body, and people potentially subject to capital penalties usually fled into exile and negotiated their return from outside the Marseillaise courts’ jurisdiction. In practice, it appears, corporeal punishments were reserved for people who had no bona to extract penalties from (which means no kin or friends willing to lend them means, either): foreigners or poor people of confirmed bad reputation. And chapter five, “The Public Archive,” discusses the public, outdoors nature of law courts in Marseilles, and how community knowledge of individuals and their deeds and possessions was a vital part of what courts considered as evidence.

Smail’s work here is readable and accessible to the interested layperson (not my period, but I found everything easy to follow) and filled with fascinating details and the traces of centuries-old grudges and affections. Like The Voices of Nîmes, it brings the past to life in the form of its people.

The Mercenary Mediterranean by Hussein Fancy: fascinatingly complex history

Hussein Fancy, The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2016.

Blackwell’s affiliate link.

Cover art for The Mercenary Mediterranean

The Mercenary Mediterranean is an award-winning history focusing on the thirteenth and fourteenth century territories of Aragon, ruled by Christian kings, and its Muslim neighbours. Fancy investigates the phenomenon by which Muslim holy warriors and crusading Christian knights took service under each others’ rulers, though Fancy’s focus is primarily on the jenets (Latin jeneti, Spanish jinetes, Catalan ginets, a term for Muslim soldiers in the pay of Christian lords during the 13th and 14th centuries). Through detailed study of the surviving documentation in Arabic and the Romance languages, including the archives of the Crown of Aragon, he traces what can be known of certain individuals as they crossed and recrossed borders between polities, using their careers to examine social and religious relations in the frontier zone between Christian and Muslim polities. He also uses them to examine the self-presentation of the kings of Aragon (with their connection to the Holy Roman Empire) in a European and pan-Mediterranean context.

While Fancy acknowledges the potential purely materialistic motives for mercenary service — either taking service as a mercenary or employing mercenaries as a lord or king — he makes a persuasive argument for the importance of religious considerations on both sides, a multi-vocal, multi-factorial set of considerations, goals, conflicts and compromises.

This is a fascinating book, and one which made me want to take copious notes (that I did not, in the end, have time for) because it is also a complex one. I wish I had the background to put some of Fancy’s arguments in context: it’s clear that the borderland societies of medieval Iberia and its North Africa neighbours are a truly rich and complicated area of study and one that must grapple with an even more politicised history than most places.

Anyway. I enjoyed reading it. Now I need a really good overview so I can fill in the giant gaps in my understanding.