RKUL: Time Well Spent 07/07/2024

Midsummer Edition

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In my conversation with Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, he mentioned that for books about Rome, he often recommends historical fiction. Specifically, Ward-Perkins singles out Robert Harris’ Pompeii and Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle (also turned into a film). That also made me think of Alan Massie, whose series of excellent novels are centered around prominent Roman personalities; Let the Emperor Speak is about Augustus, Tiberius about the second emperor, while Caligula looks at the third emperor. And of course, historical fiction about Rome probably reached its widest impact and farthest reaching cultural impact with Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God,  which also spawned the 1970s BBC series of the same name.

Genuinely good historical fiction requires a vast amount of research, in addition to facility with characterization and plotting, you need to reconstruct unfamiliar worlds and settings. Harris’ Pompeii delivers as much archaeological detail as a dense scholarly publication. One reason Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, says he chose to write fantasy rather than historical fiction because the research required for the latter was too time consuming for him.

Any Rome-centered list of historical fiction would be incomplete without Colleen McCullough’s The First Man in Rome. The novel captures the Roman Republic as it was in the early 1st century BC, during Gauis Marius’ early consulships. McCullough reflected that writing this novel was difficult because the period’s records and histories were so spotty compared to the Republic’s final decades. Her story continues over six further books: The Grass Crown, which documents Marius’ fall and Sulla’s rise, Fortune’s Favorites, covering Sulla’s dictatorship and the emergence of young Caesar and Pompey, Caesar’s Women, which highlights the future dictator’s relationship with his mother and his lovers and details the beginnings of the First Triumvirate, Caesar, which covers the eponymous protagonist at his peak, The October Horse, which introduces Cleopatra and details Caesar’s later career, and finally Antony and Cleopatra, which closes out Republican Rome with the chaos in the wake of Caesar’s assassination and the Second Triumvirate’s rise and fall. McCullough drew upon extensive primary source texts for many of these novels, so the historical characters come alive, but her punctilious descriptions of the world and its values are so rewarding for the genuine attention to detail. Like J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, McCullough’s works are embedded within a fully-realized world, but in this case it is our own past one.

Bernard Cornwell is better known for his The Saxon Stories (which were turned into the television series The Last Kingdom) and his novels about Richard Sharpe and the Napoleonic Wars. But his 2000 novel Stonehenge attempts to dive deeper back before history, into the time when only archaeology offers us any insights. Cornwell’s narrative is filled with details informed by archaeology, including what seem to have been early contacts between Neolithic and Beaker people. Because it  predates recorded history, the names are by necessity purely fictitious, but the landscape is closely based on England. 

The Covenant seems to begin in prehistoric southern Africa, but soon you realize that James Michener is unspooling the story of South Africa, leading up to the 1970’s and apartheid. The Covenant refers to the Calvinist religious beliefs of the Afrikaner people. But Michener’s narrative then necessarily includes Khoisan and Asian slaves, as they also contribute to the story of Afrikaners, along with Dutch seaman and Huguenot adventurers. South Africa is not as geopolitically relevant as when The Covenant was originally written, but Michener’s narrative still bears reading for how it brings alive that 350-year history.

Daniel J. Peter’s novel The Incas takes place in the last decades before first contact with Spaniards (with the very end alluding to Francisco Pizzaro and his Conquistadors arriving in the north). But this massive book is also a work of archaeology and anthropology. Peters delves deep into Andean culture to lay the scene and bring to life his protagonists’ world. Unlike with ancient Rome or 20th-century South Africa, far fewer readers come to pre-Columbian Peru equipped with a rich background of references, and Peter really delivers on this greater need to flesh out the world in painstaking detail so that the reader can feel immersed. The Incas is a fascinating window on an alien world; civilization without a connection to Greece, Rome, India or China.

Finally, Justinian is a novel whose plot seems so fantastical that it is hard to fathom that it’s based on historical fact. First, this Justinian is not Justinian the Great, who lived and ruled during the 6th century, but Justinian II, who ruled first in the late 7th century and again in the early 8th century. The last descendant of Heraclius, whose campaigns in the early 7th century against the Persians saved the Byzantine Empire, Justinian II’s reign is a bridge between Late Antiquity and the Medieval world. It was in the interregnum when he was out of power and exiled that the Romans lost Carthage to the Arabs. The author, H. N. Turteltaub, is the pen-name of alternative history science fiction author Harry Turtledove, who holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine history, so Justinian is a work that fully leverages his scholarly interests.

Thought

The strange history of osteopathic medicine. I didn’t know much about osteopathy, and was surprised that over time it has converged with conventional medicine so that it is no longer quackery. Candidly, I had always assumed it was as fallacious as much of chiropractic medicine.

Medical experts: Biden needs to be evaluated for Parkinson’s. It’s not just regular aging. But you probably knew that.

A.I. Begins Ushering In an Age of Killer Robots. The future creeps up on us. It is notable that we already live in a science fictional world, but very few of us are paying attention to it.

Elite misinformation is an underrated problem. Some journalists just don’t know enough about their beat and are easily misled. But worse are those who knowingly rearrange facts like a street hustler running a shell game to support a particular pet narrative. We have a word for that. It’s not journalism; it’s propaganda.

AI Doesn’t Kill Jobs? Tell That to Freelancers. It’s happening, it’s just very targeted. Overall I find myself agreeing more and more with the optimists that AI will increase productivity among skilled professionals while only impacting a few fields negatively. At least in the next decade or so, after which all bets are off.

Why It Pays for Startups to Move to Silicon Valley. It’s really hard to disrupt the returns to agglomeration of human capital. The Bay Area has a fully realized and developed ecosystem of young founders, VC’s and larger firms. The only thing preventing an eternal monopoly is the reckless governance of the Bay Area.

Speaking of which, ahem, Oakland gas station falls victim to flash mob robbery. “Close to 70 people swarmed the 76 gas station on Hegenberger Road at 4 a.m. According to the store's owner, there was around $100,000 in losses.”

Data

Deep genetic substructure within bonobos. This preprint reports that bonobo population structure is at least as ancient as that among modern humans at 145,000 years old. Though they occupy a much smaller region of the world, chimpanzees and bonobos are far less mobile than humans (they don’t cross rivers very well, for example). This results in a large amount of genetic variation even across small distances.

Reconstructing the Genetic Relationship between Ancient and Present-Day Siberian Populations. One of the major findings of this paper places the origins of Finnic populations in Bronze Age Yakutia, in east-central Siberia.

Population History and Admixture of the Fulani People from the Sahel. The Fulani are often assumed to be recent admixtures between northern Arab or Berber people and Sub-Saharan Africans, but this preprint discerns their  deep and distinctive ancestry. 

Polygenic risk score portability for common diseases across genetically diverse populations. GWAS and PRS are less than 20 years old, so immense efforts to fine-tune and improve our kludgy early models and expand the range of populations we take data from all remain ahead of us. Both because of where research was initially funded and worries about the confounding effect of population structure, initial work was disproportionately  done on Europeans, so they’re going to be the baseline from whom we start. 

The Genetic History of the South Caucasus from the Bronze to the Early Middle Ages: 5000 years of genetic continuity despite high mobility. Not surprising, mountainous regions are often last redoubts for populations charting steep declines elsewhere.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. My most recent deep dive is on Australia:

Scions of Sahul: the steadfast Australian settlers who held off sedentarism for 45,000 years:

Australian Aboriginals, foraging like their first ancestors to have arrived in Sahul, reflect an older pattern of more diverse, more stable ethnographic configurations and human cultural conservatism. Australia’s isolation beyond the edge of the contiguous continents of Afro-Eurasia allowed it to harbor diverse and strange marsupials, but also served as a cordon sanitaire against the spread of the agriculturalist lifestyle, and therefore people, who had relentlessly acquired every inch of Eurasia and Africa in turn. In popular imagination, the Aboriginal mythos revolves around the Dreamtime, a deep past when heroes strode the earth and established the lineaments of Aboriginal culture. But perhaps the greatest miracle of the Dreamtime is that back to the establishment of human settlement in Australia, the heroes of the deep past exerted an improbably enduring influence reaching down into modernity. Against all odds, they protected an entire vast continent’s worth of their distant descendants from the discontents and tradeoffs of a life eternally tied to discrete patches of land. It was a feat of resistance rarely achieved anywhere on the planet even in the tiniest redoubts; these scions alone among the modern human diaspora held the great cultural revolution of agriculture at bay, at scale, for millennia. There are few things on earth more improbable than Australia’s platypus, but perhaps the duration of this unlikely streak by Australia’s longest-term human residents rivals it..

Discussion

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are my guests (and monologue topics) since the last Time Well Spent:

• Bryan Ward-Perkins: The material consequences of the fall of Rome

• Nikolai Yakovenko: the stillborn promise of the LLM age

• J. P. Mallory: Indo-Europeans found?

• Sean Anthony: the Muhammad of history

ICYMI

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com

There you’ll find links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, links to more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• My total feed of content

• My long-time blog, GNXP

• Some of my past pieces for UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, and The New York Times 

• My old podcast, The Insight

• This podcast, Unsupervised Learning

Over to you

Comments are open to all for this post, so if you have more reading/listening suggestions or tips on who I should be talking to or what you hope I’ll dig into next, lay it on us.