Month: April 2019

There’s lying, and then there’s just making stuff up. A passage from Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet illustrates the contrast. I’ve gone over the basic plot of this essay in a previous post: suffice it to say, Alexander’s a con man who tricks people into thinking he’s a prophet of Asclepius, sets up an oracle, then makes his living by generating fake oracular responses and the various branding opportunities that arrise from that.

For the most part, I’d consider this lying: telling falsehoods that have some basis in truth. After all, people do send him questions. When he answers them, his responses may after all show some psychological insight. The only deception is his implicit claim that those responses come direct from a god. That’s just lying, not writing fiction.

The distinction matters regarding a really interesting interpretive framework developed by Dana Fields for another work by Lucian, De morte Peregrini, which I’ve always thought of as a sort of companion piece to the Alexander. She suggests that Lucian’s apparently quite hostile characterization of Peregrinus’ shameless self-invention and -promotion in that work can also be read as a recognition, on Lucian’s part, that those activities are central in the agonistic high culture of the Second Sophistic to which Lucian himself belongs.

There aren’t many passages in the Alexander where the essay’s namesake appears to be creating out of whole cloth like this. One occuring near the beginning, the long sequence in which he creates his god and sets up his oracle, has been ably addressed by Karen ni Mheallaigh in a 2018 article. Another, appearing near the end of the text, has attracted less scholarly attention. Here, Alexander answers the question(as Lucian puts it) of someone μήτε ἐρομένου….μήτε πεμφθέντος, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ ὅλως ὄντος, in short a petitioner whom Alexander has also made up. Alexander’s response goes as follows:

“Do you want to know who’s secretly screwing your wife, on your own bed, in your own house? It’s your slave, Protogenes, whom you trusted entirely. You screwed him, so he screwed your wife – thus paying you back for your act of hubris. But they’re using black magic against you, so that you can’t see or hear what they’re doing. You’ll find something under your bed, close to the wall near where you lay your head. Your servant Calypso knows what’s up” (Alex. 50.)

The original’s in meter, like all of Alexander’s oracles, and I’ve translated it in less dignified language than it deserves.* Regardless, you can see how the oracle contains a whole narrative: wrongs on both sides, revenge, betrayal, witchcraft, and (probably most importantly) sex. That’s tough to cram in an oracular format, and Alexander deserves credit. Lucian’s prepared to give it to him: even the laughing philosopher Democritus, he says, would be disturbed by the tale, at least until he figured out it was fake.

What about Fields’ framework for treating con-men as rivals? It bears noting, many of the factors that make Alexander’s oracle so compelling are also features (attractive or not) of Lucian’s narrative about Alexander. At least revenge, betrayal, witchcraft and probably way more sex than necessary are all part of Lucian’s recitation of Alexander’s biography. We assume that Lucian’s not just making things up but, as scholars are always reminding us, we can’t be sure. A lot of the contents of the Alexander turn out, on closer examination, to be speculative at best.

The narrative formula, realized at length in Lucian’s essay and concisely in Alexander’s prophecy, is also very much of its time. As characteristic of Greek novels as of Second Sophistic controversiae, these narrative elements work to pull the attention of readership and audience alike. If Alexander deploys them πρὸς ἔκπληξιν τῶν ἀνοήτων, “to shock the brainless,” what does that say about Lucian and his contemporaries?

*
but “screw” stands in for σαλάγει, not exactly a Homeric word and too dirty for most Greek dictionaries to translate.

Artemidorus gives an account of Greco-Roman dream-life that goes down to the most trivial minutiae. For example, a lot of book one of the Oenirocriticon is about what you eat when you’re asleep. Some things are good signs, others not so much. Meat, generally speaking, is a good omen, with a few exceptions. Eating your own livestock is bad, because it means you’re going to lose a member of your household. As Artemidorus explains, “livestock are nothing other than human beings.” It’s fine if you’re eating people, you just don’t want to be eating your own people.

People meat, actually, turns out to be the best sign of all (beating out pork by a hair). That’s because, tropon tina, people eat one another when they help one another; so, if you eat someone, they’re going to do you a big favor. You want this to be a stranger, of course. If you eat someone in your household, that means the same thing as eating livestock, which is that you’ll soon have a death in the family. The exception (there’s always exceptions within exceptions for Artemidorus, which is what qualifies him by ancient standards as a scientific expert) is in case you’re eating those parts of your child “through which the child makes a living,” for instance the feet of a runner or the shoulders of a boxer or the hands of a craftsman. That means your child will provide for you in your old age.

One of the appealing things about Artemidorus for an ancient reader, I’d imagine, is his knack for putting a reassuring spin on objectively troubling dreams. That’s evident in his interpretations of the cannibal nightmares above, as well as in the interpretations he offers for incest dreams a little further on. Dreaming about having sex with your mother (the subtleties of which “have escaped other dream interpreters,” but not Artemidorus, who devotes several pages to them) isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes it means you’ll be put in a position of power, sometimes it means you’ll come into an inheritance. Everything depends on sexual position, whether the sex is voluntary or not, whether your mother’s alive or dead, etc. The very process of breaking the dream down into such a sequence of details, however, must already do something to lessen the shock of the whole.

One kind of dream sex that’s almost universally a bad sign, though, is oral penetration. The word Artemidorus uses for this, arretopoesis, doesn’t show up in most Greek dictionaries but does have an obvious double-entendre etymology that may explain why he regards it so negatively. It means to do something unspeakable, but also to render somebody speechless. The only person for whom arretopoesis turns out to be a good sign is the rhetor, who obviously wants to make his opponents unable to speak.

Old Nubian is not a language you study for its literature. Most of what’s written in it is translated from works that have survived in Greek or Coptic, which is how they cracked ON in the first place. The rest is epigraphy, which people have a hard time reading anyway, since its lexicon differs from what’s preserved in the literary texts. That leaves ON as a kind of historical curio, a written language on the margins of marquee language areas like Egyptian and Ethiopic which nonetheless testifies to the presence of an indigenous written culture in the Sudan during the Middle Ages.

The miracle of St. Menas is an exception to the rule. It’s probably based on a Coptic original, but that original has been lost, so the ON version is what we have to work with. It’s the simple story of a woman who, along with all the livestock on her farm, has become infertile. A pagan, she nonetheless thinks it’s worth a try to dedicate something at the nearby Christian Church of St. Menas, just to see if that might help. She sends an egg with a boatsman, who forgets about it until several days later, when he finds it and tells his son to cook it so he can eat it. Next Sunday at church, St. Menas appears in glory and kicks the boatsman in the head so hard that he gives birth to a live hen. Back at the farm, the woman and all her livestock start giving birth, so everyone converts to Christianity.

That’s a truly low-stakes miracle, to say the least. It testifies, at some remove, to the religious syncretism of an Egypt whose transition to Christianity was so swift that we otherwise barely catch a glimpse of the intermediate phases. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Roman Empire, there was a time at which Christianity could appear as but one of many sources of spiritual solutions to material problems. Does the story of St. Menas tell us anything about what made it so appealing? Perhaps not, but it does reveal something about the conditions from which Egyptians of that period might have been seeking spiritual release. The lady protagonist, a peasant, gets taken advantage of at every turn; without the intervention of St. Menas, her offering to the church will have been lost. We know that the fellahin really were dependent on intermediaries in this respect as in others (e.g. scribes, for producing legal documents), especially if they happened to be women. That’s the affliction to which St. Menas promises relief. It’s good advertising, whether or not Christianity actually protected Egyptian peasants from the intermediaries on whom they depended for their interactions with the outside world.

The Georgics is a poem about work. For all that, human beings don’t seem to do very much of it. Tom Geue‘s put out an article now that focuses on this conundrum re: book 4, the one about the bees. I was lucky enough to see an early version of that at the SCS a few years ago and think it’s only improved with time, especially as it now addresses better the labor problems in Georgics 1-3. These are, as he highlights, a drag: the trajectory for the poem as a whole is from hands-on to hands-off. Book 4 in essence describes a managed slave economy, or an Empire: once you’re there, you can relax.

Of course, bad luck is still a problem. Vergil’s didactic highlights this, because something is always going wrong. In book 4, the misfortune is that all of Aristaeus’ bees have died; this turns out to be easy enough to fix, even though it’s essentially Aristaeus’ fault for having chased Orpheus’ wife Eurydice to death. An insight of Geue’s paper is that it highlights the importance of (almost) invisible slave labor in bringing about this fix.

Book three has the very dramatic animal plague, which forces humans to take the place of their now-dead beasts of burden. In that case it’s unclear how, or if, civilization’s going to recover. Among other things, the episode makes clear how much humans owe to animal labor. Without our animal friends, we’re in quite a pickle – forced to find out what Vergil really means when he says that labor omnia vincit.

I’m now planning a paper on the subject of a slightly different sort of animal labor, this not in the service of human civilization but opposed to it. Georgics 1.176-203 has been understood by pretty much everyone as belonging to the poem’s “pessimistic” dimension: it begins with an insistence that the reader focus her attention on tenuis…curas, a properly miserable part of the didactic project, and concludes by insisting that failure to apply constant labor in accord with Vergil’s instructions will lead to a praeceps collapse of the farming enterprise. The core of the passage, though notionally about preparing the area where grain will be threshed, actually ennumerates the various plant and animal pests that are likely to disrupt this work.

Tum variae inludant pestes: but they’re not playing, they’re working, and they only seem to be making fun of you from your perspective. The mouse is building a home and stocking his storehouse; the ant, fearing poverty in old age, struggles to carry off your grain. These earth-born monsters, your rivals in labor, will beat you unless you keep your eye constantly on the ball.

Richard Thomas notes in his commentary that the comic reading of this passage which seems most natural to a modern audience is only partly right. Quae plurima terrae monstra ferunt looks forward to Vergil’s discussion, later in book 1, of the gigantomachy: the farmer is in the position of the Olympian gods with respect to these very serious challengers. An intertext that has so far been overlooked, though, may be equally important. That’s with the paradoxographical tradition, and in particular with the archaic poet Callinos who is the first of many writers to describe mice as gegenes or “earth-born.” Romans and Greeks alike believed that mice were born from the ground by spontaneous generation – which is why, unlike other biological species, they can’t be exterminated. You’ll just get a fresh crop next year.

Vergil’s passage on pests, I think, actually highlights the difficulties involved in bringing animal labor under our control. The kind of micro-management that he’ll later propose for bees isn’t always possible. Sometimes, animals labor in their own behalf. Their aims in so doing are legitimate from a moral perspective, as Vergil’s language in the passage in question suggests. Still, we have to regard them as rivals and fight a war of extermination against them that we can never win.

Why civilization? That’s a question that Vergil’s Georgics, with its civilizing project, never really answers. To its credit, however, the poem at least raises it, here and elsewhere.

Galen wrote a book called Peri phones, On the voice, which is lost. One of the summaries made by Oribasius, court physician to Julian the Apostate, has generally been thought to contain the outline of and perhaps excerpts from the missing Galenic text. I was surprised to find that this summary had little to say about human language (I’m looking for the sources of a letter by the Ikhwan as-Safa on that topic) but I probably shouldn’t have been. Phone (“foe-nay”) means “speech” in literary texts only sometimes and by metonymic extension. In technical contexts, it always just means “sound” – often, “sound biologically produced,” a larger category of which human speech only makes up a small part.

In that much-quoted passage from Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, where he defines humans as “political animals having speech,” this is by distinction from other animals which have phone. Speech allows us to talk about the just and the unjust, which means we can form communities. Phone, on the other hand, only allows indexical signalling of what’s pleasant or painful. You can’t build a community around that, says Aristotle, although I’m sure some would disagree.

The relevant contrast in Galen (as represented by Oribasius) is between phone and dialektos or dialexis. As far as I can tell, this use of those words is otherwise unexampled. Aristotle also opposes dialektos and phone (Historia animalium 535a28), in the sense that men have many languages (dialektoi) but one manner of speaking. Oribasius, however, must mean by dialektos something more like language as such – not a particular language, one among many, which is what Aristotle and most other writers who use the word mean by it.

Oribasius brings up the dialektos/phone opposition at the end of his summary, and apparently only to point out that the former, from an organic perspective, is a lot more fragile than the latter. Break a nose, knock out a few teeth, trim off the lips – that’s not going to prevent anyone from making noise. On the other hand, someone subject to such treatment will have a hard time producing speech. Contrariwise, any intervention that affects the phone will inhibit dialexis too. The human capacity seems to be layered on top of an animal one, not only conceptually (as in Aristotle) but also physiologically. From an evolutionary perspective, which was obviously not the one that Aristotle or Galen adopted, language looks like a late, superficial addition that’s easily taken away.

This would have been much clearer to a readership that had seen people have their tongues ripped out, which I think may be most readerships through the Renaissance. At least it was certainly on the menu of gruesome tortures available to the writers of plays like Titus Andronicus or the Spanish Tragedy, so people would have seen it represented onstage; I don’t know how regular an occurence it was in real life, and finding out would be beyond my capacities.

Go back in time a little further, say to late antiquity, and glossectomy starts getting mentioned as though it were quite the done thing. I’m thinking particularly of a story from book three of Gregory’s Dialogues, where the Arrian Visigoths of Spain remove the tongues of a dozen-ish Nicene priests who refuse to convert. The cool thing, in this case – an actually good miracle, though I’ve been dragging Gregory for including a lot of low-tier ones, more of which to come – is that God grants them the power to speak regardless. They make their way to Constantinople, where they set their case before Justinian. Gregory knows a guy who saw them there and can confirm that they were missing the relevant part of speech. Moreover – to make sure we know it’s a divine miracle and not a physiological marvel – one of the priests sinks into “luxuria” and loses the use of language as a result. One of the lessons of Gregory’s Dialogues in general is that God can always call take-backs if you put his gifts to bad use.

The point of this story – as of the more well-known myth of Philomela – is that Aristotle gets things slightly wrong. Language may be useful for talking about justice, but it’s still more important for talking about injustice and giving historical accounts of injustices that you’ve suffered. Unless you can do that, you’re just making noise – even if you’ve still got a tongue in your mouth.

Byung-Chul Han is the latest thing in Making Undergrads Read Philosophy, for good reason as far as these things go. Timothy Morthon is probably the relevant comparandum: there’s a good new idea, put in terms that young people will understand and packaged with enough appurtenances to get readers interested in digging into sterner stuff.

Han’s actually got a lot more irons in the fire than Morton, but the one that draws people’s attention the most is his claim that the modern subject is self-oppressed and self-exploited. The argument goes like this: historically, political subjects have been controlled and made to work by outside violence, while the people in control of that violence reap the profits. Now that’s not necessary anymore, because people have learned to exploit themselves, to think of themselves at once as entrepreneur and workforce – of course, while someone else still grabs the profits. That last category, a little underdefined by Han, would presumably be made up mostly of people who were born rich and thus never felt the need to turn their souls into wealth-producing machinery.

This is a pretty good approximation of the American economy as she is now, driven at the top by flows of venture and vulture capital that extract most of the gains and also turn even products will utopian potential (Patreon is a recent case that comes to mind, but see also all of social media) into millstones around the necks of their users. It’s also more a historical than a philosophical argument. The way Han fills that gap is by introducing the notion that we live in an age of positivity where sameness replaces difference and incentivizing ego-ideal replaces punishing superego. The negativity that served as the motor in earlier theories of history, Han argues, has been discarded like any other outmoded technology.

That idea had a certain plausibility when Han first published it, but the English translation had the misfortune of coming out not long after Trump got elected. It sure seems like negativity is coming back in spades. Was Han just wrong? I don’t think so, but there was always a big problem with Han’s way of arguing that happens to have been exposed by the events of the last few years. Even in 2011, how could a reasonable person have claimed that Agamben’s vision of modernity as the remapping of the world into concentration camps full of non-people was obsolete? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 people got exploded by US drone strikes that year, at least half of them civilians. Agamben says modern governments are defined by states of exception where the law provides no defence against arbitrary state violence. In 2011, America’s state of exception included Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. It hasn’t exactly shrunk since then.

America is “lucky” in the sense that it can afford to keep the state of exception circumscribed and outside its borders. So are Germany, where Han teaches, and South Korea, where Han’s from. Lots of countries, including some developed ones like China and Israel, don’t enjoy that luxury. Han’s biggest intellectual vice is myopia: he just doesn’t see what’s outside the walled garden where he works.

This is disturbing, but hardly a reason to throw Topology of Violence in the chipper-shredder. Like everything else, it needs to be read critically. A book I was often thinking about when I read it was David Edgerton’s Shock of the old, a revisionist history of technology arguing that the impact of innovation gets way overstated (fun fact from within its pages: nuclear weapons delivered as many corpses per dollar as firebombs did in WWII. The main deliverable from that particular innovation has been anxiety about the coming apocalypse.) The way technology actually works, on a global scale, is as a repertoire from which bits are selected by users with particular needs and capacities. Worldwide, most users don’t choose the latest thing, either because they can’t afford it or because it won’t work without significant infrastructure investments or just because it’s designed to satisfy artificially generated needs that advertising hasn’t started to engender outside Western markets yet.

Given that Byung-Chul Han admits a sizeable material component to the entrepreneurial self (the total transparency of social media, for one thing), it’s no big leap to apply Edgerton’s theory here as well. Self-exploitation can take over from other disciplinary apparatuses in particular settings, where infrastructure (the internet, home workspaces) and incentives (lots and lots of money, not that you’ll ever get your hands on any) work together to turn it into the most effective (read: low-cost) way of getting people to do work. Where these conditions don’t hold, it’s not a viable technology of the self. We’re trying to export it (via the spread of social media, mostly) but the very conditions of the global economy prevent it from taking root: the whole thing doesn’t work if someone’s not being forced to mine raw materials for starvation wages.

That tells us something interesting about the entrepreneurial self and the society that explains it. Han is right to say that this self develops, survives and reproduces in an atmosphere of universal positivity. Given that other, more negativity-driven forms of exploitation persist across most of the globe, the territory taken up by this positivity must be limited. Moreover, since negativity abhors a vacuum, it also has to be defended. That means preemptive war abroad, but it also means platoons of pig-fucking cops to protect positivity-minded yuppied against the negative next-door. Not only that, if you’re Peter Thiel it means suing Gawker out of existence for pointing out that you suck at investing.

That lawsuit was part of a culture war between people who just wanted to feel good and people who still believed in enemies. Weirdly, Byung-Chul Han seems to be on the former side, since he thinks that Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction is just one more thing that’s gone obsolete. Not long after Gawker went under, though, it would become pretty much impossible to ignore that we did have enemies, even (maybe especially) if we just wanted to feel good.

Trump was a dead fish that washed over the gunwhales on a wave of negativity. His supporters were, and are, the most doctrinaire negative motherfuckers you can find – at least the ones who show up on TV. Was part of this negativity directed precisely against the positivity that Han identifies as capital’s new favorite way of extracting surplus value? It sure seems so, especially if we see the political correctness attacked by right-win pundits as a weird reflection of the culture of no criticism that defines the office space of most tech-companies. There are a lot of nice things about positivity, or nice things that get wrapped up in positivity: equality of race and gender and gender orientation, in short all of civil rights. By appropriating those things as tools of business, capital managed to politicize them and paradoxically to put them in a more perilous position than they’ve been in since the 60’s. Han’s purported description of modern culture thus ends up exposing one of its deepest faultlines.

So, are we stuck with a choice between endorsing Han’s dystopia of sticky positivity and, as it seems, siding with the Nazis? I don’t really feel that way – I think leftists can just go ahead and be mean – but I might be wrong. The reason that I started reading Byung-Chul Han was because his theory of the burnout society spoke pretty personally to me: I absolutely feel like I’m either exploiting myself or conscientiously not doing that by “wasting time,” which should be fun but isn’t. I’m pretty sure I didn’t used to be driven this way, but I don’t know how to get back there. Would I suffocate outside of the atmosphere of supercharged positivity in which I live and work?

For ancient dream interpreters, the most important thing to know about a given dream was the class, status and character of the person that dreamed it. A basic issue might be whether the person in question was a big eater, in which case a disturbing dream was more likely to stem from indigestion than from divine premonition. If a dream happened to be straightforwardly about someone’s daily business or a matter to which they’d recently been giving a lot of thought, then it was probably only a continuation of those processes and, again, of no predictive value.

Supposing you did go to bed with an empty stomach and a clear head, though, it still mattered whether you were a carpenter or a king. Artemidorus of Daldis, the most famous of ancient dream interpreters, demonstrates this using an example taken from Homer. If anyone else had dreamed the dream that Agamemnon did in book 2 of the Iliad, no one would have paid it any attention, and they would have been right to disregard it: a dream like that, affecting the whole Greek army, could only have been sent to its leader. If, ironically, the dream turns out to be a trick, it’s at least a trick sent by the gods, so still proves Artemidorus’ point that only important people get important dreams.

This is so to speak an empire-friendly approach to dream interpretation. Writing sometime during the early second century CE, indeed, Artemidorus cannot but be attentive to the hazards of writing about fortune-telling in a Roman imperium whose rulers were increasingly paranoid about the dangers of the oracular arts, imagined and real. Some emperors are said to have believed in various forms of what we would call magic, meaning I suppose that they also thought magic practitioners could do them harm. Even non-believers were wary, however, of the power a prediction couched in terms of astrology, oneiromancy or whatever had over the substantial portion of the Roman populace (and elites, too) that took those arts seriously. A horoscope indicating that the emperor was soon to be replaced could certainly help to bring about what it predicted.

This put fortune-tellers and their clients in a delicate position and sometimes in real danger. Astrologers and their ilk were more than once expelled from the city of Rome, though not threatened with anything more violent until the fourth century. Earlier than that, in the first and second centuries CE, plenty of Roman aristocrats got put to death because they had allegedly ordered a horoscope cast for the emperor. In individual cases, one can hardly judge whether the charge was true or a pretext; that it was so often leveled, however, suggests this was the kind of crime for which other senators might accept that one of their own had to be put to death.

The fortune-tellers themselves responded to such threats in various ways. Alexander of Abonoteichos, for instance, cannily held onto questions sent by Roman senators to the oracle he managed: they were excellent instruments of blackmail, since in many cases their content, had it been known to the emperor, might have meant death for the questioner. Artemidorus’ approach, like that of ancient handbook-writers in most predictive fields, is more evasive. By establishing at the outset that only the emperor can dream dreams of relevance to the empire as a whole (and dreams about the emperor dying or being deposed would certainly count), Artemidorus seeks to neutralize the threat posed by his art – and likewise, perhaps, to give clients who sought interpretations for such dreams a ready-made excuse should news of this get back to the emperor.

An interesting exception to the rule comes at the end of the section in which Artemidorus introduces it: οὐ γὰρ ἑνὸς ἰδόντος ἀπέβη ποτὲ ἰδιώτου ὄνειρος εἰς τὸ κοινόν, ἀλλὰ πολλῶν κατὰ τὸ αὐτό, ὧν οἱ μὲν δημοσίᾳ ἀναγορεύουσιν οἱ δὲ ἰδίᾳ ἕκαστος. καὶ γίνεται οὐκ ἰδιώτης ὁ ἰδὼν ἀλλὰ καὶ στρατηγοῦ καὶ ἄρχοντος οὐδὲν ἥττων δῆμος· ἀγαθοῦ μὲν γὰρ ἐσομένου κοινοῦ πόλει μυρίους ἄν τις ακούσαι λεγομένους ὀνείρους, οἳ σημαίνουσι τὸ μέλλον ἄλλος ἀλλοίᾳ καὶ διαφόρῳ ὄψει.

“A private citizen’s dream never came true for the community just because one private citizen saw it, but only when many people foresaw the same thing, of whom some interpret it with respect to the people and others with respect to themselves. And [in that case] it is not a private citizen who sees it, but a demos, which is no less than a general or an archon. If something good were going to happen to the city as a whole, then one would hear thousands of people recounting dreams, which each signify the thing to come in a different manner and with a different vision.”

The demos is no less significant a figure than Agamemnon or the emperor or whoever. Its dreams, however, are infinitely harder to interpret, because, like the demos itself, they are many. It’s not just that lots of people need to be dreaming the same thing at once: unless you’re a skilled interpreter, you might not even be able to tell that lots of people are dreaming the same thing at once, since they’ll be receiving the same message via different opseis or visual presentations. That makes the dream interpreter a figure of central political importance, or, conversely, it means that a politician needs to have all the skills of a dream interpreter. After all, a real politician isn’t interested only in what the demos wants, but in what’s going to happen to it.

The thing that really interests me about this argument from design, though, is the counterfactual: you couldn’t possibly be brought to believe that this empty house was built by mice and weasels, i.e. the ones that still inhabit it. We’re still miles from understanding why Cicero would choose this as an alternative to intelligent design – by contrast, e.g., with the notion of chance emergence advocated by Epicureans elsewhere and indeed in DND too – but a sense of the property frame for the argument, which I discussed in my previous post, gets us closer. Cicero envisions mice and weasels usurping human property, which is absurd on the face of it – especially for a Stoic like Balbus, who presumably shares that school’s view that animals can’t make contracts. But it also taps into deeper Roman anxieties which mice tend to stir up.

The weird thing about mice, from a Roman point of view, is that they’re neither tame nor wild. They don’t fit into the structural division, proposed and demonstrated by Dominic Goguey, between wild animals that you hunt and kill and domestic animals that you exploit and sacrifice. Pliny points out that they’re semiferi, but even that word assign them an in-between status that’s not really appropriate. As Pliny also points out, mice can’t be tamed, because they’re already domestic; but you also can’t get them out of your house, because they’re still wild.

That leaves Romans with no ready-made way to treat mice, mentally or physically. Like many other anomalous animals, mice thereby acquire an oracular value that makes them into a bad omen the sound or sight of which in the senate building is enough to cancel that day’s business. The tendency of mice to chew on whatever objects happen to be to hand throws this oracular value into relief, as Cicero recounts in De div:

“Nos autem ita leves atque inconsiderati sumus, ut, si mures corroserint aliquid, quorum est opus hoc unum, monstrum putemus. Ante vero Marsicum bellum quod clipeos Lanuvii, ut a te dictum est, mures rossent, maxumum id portentum haruspices esse dixerunt; quasi vero quicquam intersit, mures diem noctem aliquid rodentes scuta an cribra corroserint! Nam si ista sequimur, quod Platonis Politian nuper apud me mures corroserunt, de re publica debui pertimescere, aut, si Epicuri de voluptate liber rosus esset, putarem annonam in macello cariorem fore.” (DD 27.59)

Unlike, e.g., shrews, another animal semiferum whose squeaking could call off senate business, mice could signify in a way that was not only negative. By selecting their chew-toys , mice were also able to highlight coming threats with great specificity. Cicero’s particular exempla are clearly jokes, but testimony from elsewhere in the literary tradition shows that mouse-chewing was generally regarded as a prodigy in the way just outlined.

Mice were the object of an attentive anxiety not only because of what they portended, but also because of the real threat they posed. Mice liked to chew on grain most of all, and this made them the farmer’s enemy. In a passage of the Georgics which has been seen as key to the work’s generally pessimistic tone, Vergil depicts them building houses and granaries below the threshing floor which they will fill with the farmer’s crops. Part and parcel with this pessimism is Vergil’s failure to mention the muscipuli, or mousetraps, with which ancient farmers tried to protect their crops. However, these may have had more of a totemic function than an actual effect against the murine hordes.

Mice are a threat that lives inside the domus and which the domus cannot “do without.” Not surprisingly, this leads to their identification with slaves: in Artemidorus’ Oneirocriticon, for instance, dreaming of a mouse means you’ll soon get a new household servant. What they share in common with slaves, in the Roman imagination, is the threat that they pose to the household but also their inability to hold it by true right. These are also the elements of the mouse’s “personality” to which, I believe, Balbus’ design argument refers. It poses the alternative, not between design and no design – for the latter, by Balbus’ lights, is inconceivable – but between the rule of the designer and usurpation by anyone other than the dominus. Thus the logic of property gives rise to an early, and stereotypically Roman, form of gnosticism.

The argument from design sucks. I’ll be the first to admit this, and it will probably be the last thing I shout as they haul me off to jail. The interesting thing about it, though, is the way it gives us an index of what a given culture considers “designed” – information which, for eras before the existence of tech journalism, is otherwise hard to get. The classic enlightenment examples, for instance, mostly feature clocks, presumably because clockwork struck people back then as a product of intelligence that couldn’t occur by chance. Nowadays, instead, the argument from design (or that we’re living in a simulation, but it amounts to the same thing) gets made from the apparently granular, bitwise and pixelated character of small-scale physics, presumably because these are traits of a digital computer which we don’t think could have otherwise arisen than at the hand of a programmer.

As it turns out, there’s no real limit to the range of objects that a person can use as grounds for a design argument. Consider this version, from Cicero’s De natura deorum:

An vero, si domum magnam pulchramque videris, non possis adduci ut, etiam si dominum non videas, muribus illam et mustelis aedificatam putes: tantum ergo ornatum mundi, tantam varietatem pulchritudinemque rerum caelestium, tantam vim et magnitudinem maris atque terrarum si tuum ac non deorum inmortalium domicilium putes, nonne plane desipere videare?

“If you should see a big beautiful house, even you didn’t see its owner, could you really be led to believe that it had been built by mice and weasels? Well then, if you don’t think that this so great adornment of the world, this such wide variety and beauty of the heavens, this so strong force and breadth of the sea and land is the domicile of the immortal gods, don’t you seem plainly to be mad?” (DND 2.27)

It’s Balbus the Stoic who puts this argument. In a dialogue where Cicero is a speaker, this means we maybe shouldn’t take it totally seriously. Even so, the argument needs to have at least a specious probability. That means a house – just the basic stuff, columns, rooms and roof – must be able to do in a Roman context the kind of intellectual work that a watch would do for Hume 1800 years later. Given that some Romans (e.g. Vitruvius) were still super-consciousness of the way that architecture began as an imitation of nature, this is a bit hard to swallow.

What actually makes the argument from design work for Cicero, I think, is an element of ownership not explicitly present in its more modern iterations, which is the property relation. Houses in Rome are non only manmade, but man-owned. That adds a degree of urgency to Balbus’ hypothetical which later versions of the argument lack. The question Balbus asks, after all, is not only who built the house but also to whom it belongs – and the latter question seems to be more salient when Balbus extends his analogy to the position of the gods vis a vis the world. If you come to an empty house, who built it is a matter for idle speculation. On the other hand, whether you think someone owns it determines whether you’ll go inside or not, and who you think owns it might make the difference between leaving flowers on the doorstep and putting a rock through the window.

The upshot is that, while most arguments from design hector you into answering a question that you otherwise might not think about and certainly wouldn’t act on, Balbus’ version appeals to a form of social knowledge that already interests people and motivates action. In that respect – rhetorically, at least – it’s an advance over other versions of the argument from design that would come later.

What’s the point of studying classics? It’s useful to know a thing or two about how history happens in the middle distance, at scales between geological time and the daily news cycle. It’s useful, especially at the present moment, to know that nothing we worry about matters in the long run since the United States is bound to collapse in a century or two and get replaced by some other kind of entity with a different public to whom our concerns are totally alien. Roman pagans were probably worried about Christianization; I bet they cheered when Julian started rolling it back in 361, and I bet they totally lost it when he died a couple of years later. It would probably have comforted them to know that pretty much all the most active purveyors of Christianity would end up getting declared heretics by one or the other of the main churches, which themselves would start getting rolled back by various forms of post-Christian enlightenment: Islam starting in the seventh century, libertinism from the 15th century onward. Even if you win, there’s no such thing as winning: the throne melts out from under you.

This kind of perspective is available to us if we want it. One of my areas of specialization is how the past felt about its own past, and I feel like I can say with confidence that they didn’t have anything like it in Greece or Rome. The Islamic World did have it – at least by the time of Ibn Khaldun, if not in the Qur’an itself – but then maybe lost it at some point between the 14th century and now.

Does studying the classics help me chill out about the news? Not as much as I wish it did. On the one hand, I know that the day-to-day and even the year-to-year churn of events don’t really matter in the long run. On the other hand, though, one can’t know about ancient history and still believe in progress. One can’t even really believe in the power of norms and institutions, which is a faith that seems to keep a lot of people going. You think we’ve come too far forward to backslide? You think it can’t get worse than this, or even that there’s a point beyond which it can’t get worse? You have no idea.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Lucian, the Syro-Greek comedian who lived in some pretty interesting times. His writing combines a kind of hyperbolic outrage that reminds one of Rush Limbaugh or Celine with a calculated bloodlessness and actual wit that keeps you from taking things too seriously. Did Lucian worry a lot about the future? It’s possible – and any answer would be speculative – but I suspect not. He would have recognized a half-truth in the modern conceit that history happens twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. The real story is that it only happens as farce, every time.