Random reads from the Interweb.

An interesting article from The Tablet magazine, which is basically a review of a recently published book, The Fate of Rome.

The reviewer, a historian himself, briefly looks at the influence of 19th century German historians on studying Rome:

Setting aside the tales of writers ancient or modern, they were the first to line up the hard evidence of documents, inscriptions, coins, archaeology, to tell their story by stepping from fact to fact, frankly recognizing the gaps, and never ever weaseling past ignorance with “must have beens”,

This approach ended up giving new insights into the success of the Roman Empire. I did like this aside:

Only the Jews rejected the bounties of this intelligent imperial rule, as documented in that most reliable of historical sources, Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

The book itself is a variation on this; it takes a scientific look at the Roman Empire, and as a result comes up with some interesting tidbits:

Kyle Harper shows that the ungrateful Jewish rebel was right all along: Carefully citing skeletal studies of burials dug up in England, he proves that under Roman rule people became shorter and sicker, because all the benefits of clean water and baths were outweighed by the unprecedented growth of cities, in which there was no escaping from the bacterial and viral infections brought from the eastern provinces over well-built roads and pirate-free sea crossings—the old life of rude hamlets cut off from the world had been much healthier, and people duly became taller and healthier again once the empire collapsed.

Frankly I find that a little hard to believe. Cities succeeded our traditional hunter-gather lifestyle and were flourishing long before the advent of public health measures, so even if people were shorter and sicker there must have been advantages beyond personal health that made them stay.

This scientific approach also restores to the status of fact the claims made by the ancient historian Prokopius that Justinian’s reign was ended in 541 by the Bubonic Plague. Prokopius’s descriptions of the effects of the disease were detailed and compelling so I found the following comment by the reviewer a sad reflection on modern historians:

But this evidence was ignored by modern historians, because of the corrupting influence of “structuralist” literary theory, according to which everything written is made up to promote some hidden agenda. 

Prokopios was accused of wildly exaggerating some passing seasonal fever for the only purpose of copying the ultimate historian Thucydides and his deservedly famous account of the plague in Athens of a thousand years before.

FFS! Structuralist theory. Critical Theory. Post-Modernism. They’re diseases themselves: idea pandemics of modern Academia, and they’re going to have to be wiped out if the Humanities are ever to be restored.

The book sounds like an excellent read, but so to is the review: A Mighty Empire Brought Down by Plague.