72,000 different notions of the center of a triangle. I knew the incenter, the circumcenter, and the centroid. Those are indeed the first three. The fourth is the orthocenter. I guess, when I think about it, I knew the three altitudes were concurrent so I knew this existed. The fifth is the nine-point center, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of. It’s the midpoint between the circumcenter and the orthocenter, though. There are 70,000 more or so. I am happy this exists.
This is, at long last, the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission, IVa). last time we looked at the social status of hoplites and the implications that had for the political and social structure of the polis and even the very basic question of how many people there were in ancient Greece.
I had originally planned for this week’s topic – the amount of training and combat experience hoplites had – to be an addendum to that discussion as it related to how we understand who hoplites are (yeoman soldiers or leisured elites? warrior elites or amateurs?) but there wasn’t the time to work it in. So it sits here almost as a coda to the entire series.
So that is what we are going to look at today: how were hoplites prepared for battle? This topic is going to be a bit more complicated than most of our neat binary orthodox-heterodox divides because they are divisions within the orthodox school here, although oddly those divisions don’t seem to me to be readily acknowledged. In particular, we might identify an old-orthodox position (hoplites drilled and trained), a new-orthodox VDH-position (hoplites fought a lot, but trained little), a non-scholarly and remarkably a-historical pop-orthodox Pressfield-position (hoplites did US Marines boot camp) and finally the heterodox position (hoplites were largely untrained amateurs).
So to tackle this question, we want to ask how often hoplites fought, what kind of training was available to them, when it was available and the degree to which it was compulsory. As we’re going to see, I think the evidence here leans in the heterodox position, though I would argue it doesn’t lean quite as far as Roel Konijnendijk, the heterodox scholar who I think has focused on this issue the most, might have it.
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From the British Museum (1848,1020.35) part of the frieze from the “Nereid Monument’ depicting two hoplites fighting (c. 380 BC). The hoplite turned towards us wears a tube-and-yoke cuirass (a later type of armor, generally made of textile), partially covered by a cloak. Interestingly, he has his helmet pushed up even while fighting. Pushing a Corinthian helmet up like this was common before battle and one wonders if this is merely the artist taking some liberties so that we can see this figure’s face more clearly.
Understanding the (Very Much Not Boot) Camps
But we should start by trying to get a handle on what everyone’s positions actually are and here I think we do need to be careful to make a distinction between three kinds of ‘training’ involved in warfare. When we say drill, we mean training in groups, focused on practicing moving and fighting as a formation. By contrast, when we say training at arms (or ‘training in arms’) we mean individual combat training on how to use weapons. A good way to think about this is the contrast between how a marching band collectively trains to move together during their shows (drill) and how the individual musicians train independently to play their instruments well (training at arms, except the arms are trombones). Finally there is fitness training, which is focused neither on the specific motions of collective action (that’s drill) or the specific motions of individual fighting (that’s training at arms) but rather on strength, stamina and agility.
You will want to keep those terms separate because of course it is perfectly possible for armies to do one kind of training and not the others. Many types of ‘warriors’ for instance, might train for individual combat (training at arms) and even for personal fitness, but because they do not expect to fight in formation in large groups, they have little use for drill. On the other hand, in some societies where the expectation is that soldiers are recruited broadly from a farming class that is already very physically active, there might be less emphasis on fitness training, but if they expect them to fight in formation, a lot of emphasis on drill. And of course different weapons demand different degrees of training at arms: spears are generally easier to use with less training than swords or muskets and so on.
So we’re interested here in both how much training but also what kind of training and we cannot assume just because we see one kind of training that the others are present.
So with our terms in place, to outline the debate briefly, the early German scholars of our ‘Prussian Foundations,’ when they thought about hoplites largely assumed drill, because it was the ubiquitous understood principle of their day that drill was the way that soldiers could be made to fight in formation together.1 Consequently early hoplite orthodoxy assumed that hoplite formations must have drilled in order to function. Likewise, extrapolating from their own (gunpowder) warfare, they assumed rigid formations with standard spacing, assigned places in line which maneuvered like early modern musket or pike formations, marching in time and with standard evolutions to move from column into line and such.2 It seems to have legitimately not occured to these early scholars that there was any way to do close-order infantry that didn’t involve drill and so even though – as we’re going to see – there’s very little evidence to suggest that hoplites regularly drilled, they just assumed they did. So that is the ‘old’ orthodox position: it assumes hoplites drilled and practiced at arms, without a lot of evidence to support the notion, because that’s simply what – to them – soldiers did.
(This is also, I think, another example of ‘Rome acting as the frog DNA for studying Greece.’ The Romans did drill and practice at arms and we know that because the sources tell us repeatedly. But part of the reason the sources tell us is that the Roman practice was strange to them, which of course in turn suggests you cannot use it to fill in the gaps for Greece or anywhere else!)
That said, the ‘Restatement of the Orthodoxy’ phase – inaugurated by VDH’s The Western Way of War (1989) took an odd turn from this point an in some ways. While WWoW is, for the most part, simply a full-throated restatement of the old orthodoxy on hoplites, one of VDH’s obsessions was the idea (substantially critiqued in last week’s post) of the hoplites as ‘yeoman’ citizen-warriors, which leads him to stress the importance of civilian social bonds (sub-units of the polis, called tribes (φυλαί, ‘phulai’)) and thus not to assume the sort of drill that the older Prussian scholars (on whom he otherwise often relies) do. I haven’t found any specific point where VDH openly disputes the notion that hoplites had drill or training at arms, but he pretty clearly assumes they don’t.3
On the other hand, WWoW assumes that in the ideal, archaic form of hoplite warfare, hoplite battles were really frequent, assuming “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”4So VDH seems to assume that hoplites are untrainedbut that hoplite army fight so frequently that most hoplites would have a lot of experience, which would make up for being untrained. VDH’s assumptions about the frequency of hoplite battles are, uh, quite flawed, as we’re going to see.
At around the same time (the late 1990s), hoplites, particularly Spartans surged back into the popular consciousness through the action of Frank Miller’s comic 300 (1998) – it gets a film of the same name in (2006) and Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire (1998). These form the bedrock of the modern popular misunderstanding of Sparta and are all terrible guides to the ancient world (despite Gates of Fire, to my eternal annoyance, frequently making military academy reading lists). Both pieces of popular culture are at best only tenuously connected to any actual historical scholarship or the actual historical sources and both, for reasons of their fiction, want to understand the Spartan agoge as super-badass warrior training. Both imagine both drill and training at arms in the context of Spartan training, with Pressfield especially imagining the agoge as an almost direct analogy to modern military training (particularly his own US Marine Corps boot camp). This is essentially a modern version of the same error our 19th century Prussians were making: assuming that armies have always worked the way they work now.
But this notion of hoplites generally and Spartans particularly as highly trained ‘super elite’ warriors persists in popular culture and leads to the sort of shocked incredulity one gets when noting that there is in fact relatively little evidence for extensive drill or any training at arms at Sparta, much less anywhere else.
Finally, there is the heterodox position, which has been most recently compiled and defended by Roel Konijnendijk in Classical Greek Tactics (2018), 39-71. Konijnendijk describes the question of training as a “hidden controversy” and I think that is right: there is in fact a lot of disagreement here, but because it is embedded in the assumptions beneath the arguments rather than the arguments themselves, it is rarely expressed as disagreement. Konijnendijk surveys the evidence and concludes, to quote him, “the typical Greek citizen hoplite knew no weapons drill, no formation drill, and understood only the simplest of signals“5 Konijnendijk allows for “modest advances” by smaller, more elite units in the late Classical but largely rejects a developmental model where the amount of training and drill increased over time.6 In short, hoplites were consummate amateurs – with the exceptions (Spartans, the Sacred Band, etc.) having still only very limited real training – and remained that way through the Classical period. Real military drill and effective mass-training would have to wait for the Macedonians.7
So let’s take a brief look through the evidence and see which of these viewpoints holds up.
How Often Did They Fight?
It may actually be easier to move out of order a bit and deal with the easiest to dispense with position first, which is actually Victor Davis Hanson’s notion that a polis and thus most of its hoplites fought a “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”8 VDH provides no supporting evidence for this argument and it does not hold up either as a direct, evidentiary matter or as a matter of its logical implications.
The idea here is that, if the polis has a hoplite battle every 2-3 years, the typical hoplite who survived the roughly forty years of military eligibility – citizens served as hoplites from their late teens to 60 years of age – would see at least a dozen battles and perhaps something closer to 16. The problem with that argument is the obvious one: actual major hoplite engagements (and even minor ones!) don’t seem to have ever been that common. You may recall we listed every major Spartan battle (and a fair number of minor ones) between 500 and 323 B.C. and found 38 of them or one battle every 5 years or so, roughly half the frequency VDH supposes (Sparta is useful for this exercise because unlike other poleis (other than Athens) we can be pretty confident that basically every major Spartan battle is attested). And that’s a list that includes battles in which there were basically no spartiates present (e.g. Amphipolis (422)) or which were very small actions involving just a few hundred hoplites (e.g. Pylos (425)) or fourteen naval battles. Filtering for all of that, we end up with Sparta fighting a major pitched hoplite battle something like once roughly each decade.
Making that figure even worse, it’s not clear that we can be sure any of those battles involved something like the entire Spartan citizen force. There ought to be something like 8,000 spartiates in 479, but only 5,000 show up for Plataea (479 B.C.; the remainder of the Spartan force are helots and perioikoi). The Spartan force at Mantinea (418), a major battle in Sparta’s backyard, we’re told had five-sixths (Thuc. 5.64.3) of the spartiates present, which comes close to an all-call. But most of these battles are much smaller and involve only a minority of the citizen body.
In short then, when we actually try to run the numbers, the suggestion we get is not that hoplites are rolling out for a major battle every 2-3 years, but rather than a polis probably only fights a major pitched battle around once a decade, with a few minor engagements between and that not every hoplite is at every battle, suggesting the typical hoplite, rather than seeing 12-16 actions in his life, might instead see perhaps 3-4. An interesting data-point: we know that Socrates was of military age and fought as a hoplite for Athens during the difficult days of the Peloponnesian War and that he served in three campaigns and saw three battles: Potidaea (432), Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422); given the context – Plato is giving us a full accounting of Socrates’ service to the city in his defense – we can probably assume this is an exhaustive list.9
Which, as an aside, VDH has to be wrong demographically as well. As Peter Krentz notes,10 a typical pitched battle between hoplites seemed to produce roughly 10% losses, split between about 5% of the victor and 15% of the loser. Needless to say, a society losing 10% of its adult male citizen population every two to three years on a permanent basis is not going to remain a society for very long. Quickly running the math, a generational cohort would have lost half its population by the sixth battle and by the twelfth only a quarter would be left alive, purely from combat related deaths. Accounting for normal civilian mortality on top of this, a society fighting four hoplite battles (each at 10% casualties) a decade would lose half of its generational cohort reaching adulthood by thirty and lose ninety percent of it by age 45. Accounting for male child mortality on top of that, you’d have a society birthing one thousandmale babies (so just under two thousand total births) each year to have twenty eight men in that surviving cohort make it to 45 and around fifty or sixty men total living over the age of 45.11 That is simply not the sort of age structure suggested by ancient Greek literature.
In short then it seems like the typical citizen-hoplite saw battle infrequently. It was hardly a wholly foreign experience – the typical citizen hoplite expected to participate in a few engagements and perhaps one or two major battles in their life time – but they were hardly doing this often enough or consistently enough to get a lot of fighting experience. The contrast with the Romans – the average Roman male during the Middle Republic will have had to serve around 7 years to make up the numbers for the Roman armies we see – is marked.12
Hoplites simply didn’t campaign that often.
Training and Drill?
So let’s start with training at arms. Was there much training at arms among Greek hoplites?
Broadly, I think the evidence suggests ‘no,’ but I think Konijnendijk is maybe a little too quick to dismiss a developmental model, where the edges of that ‘no’ fuzz over time.
The general sense one gets is that broadly the Greeks did not think that contact fighting requires specific, focused training in the motions and patterns of fighting – that is, training at arms. Note how that doesn’t mean they didn’t think fitness was important – remember, that is separate. This appears to be Xenophon’s view, for instance: in the Cyropaedia (Xen. Cyrop 2.3.9-10, trans W. Miller), Xenophon has his ideal ruler, the Persian Cyrus, arm many of light-armed poor as heavy contact infantry (though with swords, not spears), on the grounds that fighting this way would eliminate the skill distinction (removing the advantage of enemy rich Persians, who trained extensively in archery) because:13
“And now,” he continued, “we have been initiated into a method of fighting [that is, hoplite-style fighting], which, I observe, all men naturally understand, just as in the case of other creatures each understands some method of fighting which it has not learned from any other source than from instinct: for instance, the bull knows how to fight with his horns, the horse with his hoofs, the dog with his teeth, the boar with his tusks. And all know how to protect themselves, too, against that from which they most need protection, and that, too, though they have never gone to school to any teacher. As for myself, I have understood from my very childhood how to protect the spot where I thought I was likely to receive a blow; and if I had nothing else I put out my hands to hinder as well as I could the one who was trying to hit me. And this I did not from having been taught to do so, but even though I was beaten for that very act of putting out my hands. Furthermore, even when I was a little fellow I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, although, I declare, I had never learned, except from instinct, even how to take hold of a sword. At any rate, I used to do this, even though they tried to keep me from it—and certainly they did not teach me so to do—just as I was impelled by nature to do certain other things which my father and mother tried to keep me away from. And, by Zeus, I used to hack with a sword everything that I could without being caught at it. For this was not only instinctive, like walking and running, but I thought it was fun in addition to its being natural.
Now this is essentially a made-up story that Xenophon is putting in the history of Cyrus II (the Great) who he is presenting as an ideal ruler, so this didn’t happen, but what it suggests very strongly is that Xenophon – an experienced military man, a mercenary general who wrote manuals on tactics – does not think that training at arms is necessary. Instead he stresses that the style of warfare is instinctive – that humans fight in contact warfare, in his view, the same way a bull fights with its horns, entirely untrained.
And that impression extends to much of the rest of our sources. Xenophon’s description of the agoge and broader Spartan rearing program features fitness and obedience training, but not practice with weapons (Xen. Lac. Con. 11, 12.5-6).14 Tyrtaeus, in a classic passage (West fr. 12) declares that he “would not rate a man worth mention or account either for speed of foot or wrestling skill, not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace […] no, no man is of high regard in time of war unless he can endure the sight of blood and death and stand close to the enemy and fight,” essentially declaring that all forms of excellence that might result from practice or training were less important than simple personal courage. When Agesilaus was “wishing to practice his army” he offers the cavalry prizes for the best horsemanship, the skirmishers prizes for the best shooting and throwing and the hoplites just a prize for physical fitness, leading to the hoplites to call exercise in the gymnasia (Xen. Hell. 3.4.16). Over and over again we see that when hoplite armies do train, training at armsis unmentioned and instead physical fitness is stressed.15
On the other hand, we have some interesting references in Plato. In Plato’s Republic, we get a discussion of the military of the ideal city: Plato has Socrates in the dialogue suggest that their ideal, utopian society ought to have a professional army, precisely to allow for this kind of training, but notably he suggests this precisely because Glaucon – his interlocutor at this point – assumes that this ideal politeia will be defended by its untrained citizenry (Plato, Rep. 2.373-4). The implication is that at least some Greeks recognized that skill at arms might be useful, but that the typical hoplite generally didn’t train at it. Likewise, Aristotle (writing decades later and living for some time in the Macedonian court of Philip II) argues directly that mercenary troops were superior to citizen militias precisely because mercenaries actually trained on their weapons (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1116b.7-8). Again, the implication training at arms was understood to be potentially useful, but something everyone assumed citizen hoplite armies did not do.
Alongside this was the emergence of hoplomachoi – trainers at arms for hoplites – and their attendant hoplomachia. Our first references to these fellows are in Plato (Plat. Lach. 181e-183a) and honestly the vibe one gets from our sources is sometimes derisive: Plato has Nicias present this sort of training in arms as good and very helpful for young men, only to be immediately dismissed by Laches who notes quite bluntly that the Spartans – more interested in preparing for war than other Greeks – don’t make use of it, so it must be useless. Xenophon too is mocking (Xen. Anab. 2.1.7; Mem. 3.1). Konijnendijk, I think, maybe reads some of this mockery a little too straight – Xenophon wouldn’t feel the need if many folks did not take these guys seriously – but is fundamentally right to note that individual traveling weapon instructors were hardly going to train entire hoplite armies.16
The conclusion I think we have to draw here is that the lack of training at arms became a known problem in Greece but that at least in the Classical period, that problem was never ‘solved.’ Notably, it certainly was not solved in Sparta, which seems to have neglected this training entirely; so much for the idea of the agoge as being like a modern boot camp in terms of having practice on specific weapons. On the other hand arranging these reports chronologically, one senses something of a growing awareness – Plato and Xenophon are writing after the Peloponnesian War and Aristotle is a generation younger than them – that this is in fact a problem. Athens is going to make the ephebia, a military training program for young men mandatory in 336/5 (it existed before, but was non-mandatory and unpaid, so probably only for the very wealthy), right at the tail end of the Classical period, which may also be suggestive of something a little more like the ‘developmental’ model. It seems consistent with our limited evidence to suppose that other poleis – for which our evidence is far less complete than Athens – might have been trending in the same way in the late Classical, a trend which might have culminated in the Macedonian army of Philip II and Alexander, which is generally assumed to have been trained at arms and in drill.17
After training at arms, we can consider drilling, that is training to fight in groups. And here Konijnendijk summarizes the evidence neatly that prior to the 330s (when the Athenian ephebia is made mandatory, as noted above), “there is no evidence for formation drill anywhere outside of Sparta.“18 As Konijnendijk also notes, this isn’t just a question of pure silence – every so often sources note the absence of such training (.e.g Plato, Laws 831b). The most dramatic is the passage that tells us the Spartans could do formation drills: Xenophon presents as astounding the fact that the Spartans can perform even basic maneuvers “which hoplomachoi [instructors in fighting] think very difficult,” like forming from column into line (Xen. Lac. Con. 11) and elsewhere (Xen. Mem. 3.12.5) explicitly notes there was no public military training at Athens in his day.
Which is to say that the Spartans, the only poleis we have evidence did any sort of formation drill, amazed everyone by being able to do something that, in a broader world-historical sense is an extremely basic formation drill. If you will permit the contrast, in a century Macedonian sarisa-phalanxes are going to be advancing in separate units, charging, giving ground, wheeling under pressure, opening ranks to admit light infantry and even once forming squarein combat but the very best that the Classical Greek hoplite can manage – and only in Sparta! – is forming from column into line as a group and a few other quite basic maneuvers that show up elsewhere in Xenophon (largely in the Hellenica). Once again, our ancient authors seem aware that this is a weakness and we might imagine there were some efforts here and there to remedy it, but the overall impression is that outside of Sparta, hoplites generally did not drill at all such that even the relatively modest Spartan achievements in this respect were considered remarkable.
Now I do think, when it comes to training at arms and drill, we probably ought to be alive to the idea that young men of the appropriate social status were probably prepared for the battles they were going to fight informally, at home. We’ve stressed the lack of formal training, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t informal training. Now, it has to be immediately conceded: our sources breath not a word of this to us. No real sense that young men learned to wield a spear or stand a position from their fathers. But there’s a lot about the raising of children in antiquity we don’t really know – this omission isn’t surprising. That said, given the frequent notes on our sources of how limited the capabilities of citizen hoplites were, just how amateurish they were compared to mercenaries or the still-fairly-unimpressive Spartans, this informal training could never have been very thorough, if it happened.
All of which leaves physical fitness training.
The Greeks thought physical fitness training was important and put a fair bit of emphasis on it, although the fact that our sources also assert that poor wiry farmers made the best soldiers (e.g. that Plato, Republic 556cd) – the poor farmers who could not afford to spend a bunch of time training at the gymnasion is rather suggestive about how limited the role of formal fitness training was in most poleis. We do often see ‘picked’ bodies of men in hoplite armies, but these are generally the youngest and fittest fellows picked out, rather than a special unit that trains together (though special units do emerge – things like the Sacred Band – in the late Classical). Indeed, often Greek military fitness programs make the most sense if understood as an effort by the leisured wealthy elite to keep themselves and their sons from falling catastrophically behind the poor farmers in fitness. That certainly seems to be how we should understand the agoge, which included a ton of fitness training, but no training in arms that we are told of (nor any real ‘schooling’ as such, but it did include a lot of child abuse).
That said, alongside an emphasis on fitness training, we also hear complaints that, outside of Sparta (which did emphasize physical fitness), citizen hoplites were often in parlous condition. Xenophon complains of armies “from poleis” including too many old men, some soldiers who are too young and only a few men somaskein (σωμασκεῖν), “train their bodies” (Xen. Hell. 6.1.5).19 Still, this was something that poleis focused some pretty clear intentional collective action on, instituting physical spaces (gymnasia) and institutions for fitness training among the citizenry or at least among the wealthy citizenry.
Putting this all together, I fall closest to the heterodox position here. I am a bit slower than Konijnendijk to reject a ‘developmental’ model where training at arms and drill become (modestly!) more common over time, but hoplites do not appear to have regularly drilled (outside of Sparta, which did some drill but hardly excelled at it compared to the later practice of the Romans or Macedonians) and they did not regularly train at arms, although some training arms seems to have begun to seep in – not very much, just a bit – by the fourth century. Physical fitness was percieved as more important and central than either, although it is not clear how successful most poleis were at achieving a high fitness standard.
Overall then, the old-orthodox tacit assumption of drill is not based on the evidence. The modern pop-historical vision of hoplites (especially Spartans) as ‘elite warriors’ with rigorous boot-camp like training is functionally entirely a fabrication of modern fiction writers falling into precisely the same trap as some of the Old Prussians did: unable to imagine that a culture often presented to them as ‘familiar’ could in fact do something so alien as fail to have a modern-style drill-and-training tradition. It seems notable to me that while there is intense incredulity that the evidence for hoplite training is what it is, that disbelief does not follow if I say that other ‘non-Western’ cultures didn’t appear to engage in drill or training at arms. I think the underlying problem here is the assumption that the ancient Greeks were ‘like us’ and indeed even more ‘like us’ than modern or early modern people who were ‘non-Western.’ Whereas the truth is, Ancient Greece was a deeply alien place from our modern perspective.
Ancient Greeks were not Romans, but they were also not moderns and there is a specific kind of error (which, let’s be honest, often comes paired with a thick dose of orientalist xenophobia) which wants to imagine they were ‘like us.’ They were not.
Conclusions
So after all of that, where do we find ourselves?
We’ve laid out the two opposing ‘camps’ on hoplites so I suppose it is worth, at this point, doing something of an inventory of the key questions and where I fall.
On the emergence of the phalanx, I think the orthodox model of rapid and early development is simply clearly wrong, disproved by the archaeology for some time and largely abandoned. However, I also think the heterodox model has a problem: it takes an excessively narrow view of what a ‘phalanx’ is, to push back the ‘date of the phalanx’ in a definitional sense further than I think it should go. Instead, it is clear to me that hoplite equipment emerged gradually over the course of the eight and seventh centuries, but that it was likely being used for some kind of ‘shield wall’ from the beginning. I am willing to call that shield wall a ‘proto-phalanx’ early on, as it hasn’t fully excluded the light infantry, but I think it is clearly a kind of phalanx from at least 650 BCE.
That position is in turn supported by my view on hoplite arms and armor, where I effectively reject the ‘strong’ form of both camps. On the one hand, the ‘strong’ orthodox position, that hoplite equipment was so heavy as to be unusuable in anything other than a tight, shoving phalanx is absurd; as heavy infantrymen, hoplites were not particularly heavily equipped. On the other hand, the notion of a ‘skirmishing’ hoplite, as suggested by some ‘strong’ heterodox scholars is also, to me, quite silly: these are heavy infantrymen, not skirmishers and they are using an equipment set that seems tailored to operating in a close-order shield-wall formation. You could do other kinds of warfare in it, and Greek hoplites sometimes did, but the panoply is most clearly suited – from its very emergence – for a shield wall. It is ‘shield wall native,’ as it were.
That in turn informs my view on hoplite tactics. The orthodox ‘shoving othismos‘ rugby scrum has to be rejected – it is not required by the sources and is exceedingly implausible. However, I think the ‘strong’ heterodox position, which imagines ‘skirmishing’ hoplites moving fluidly in masses of men with no fixed formation or firm place, is also wrong – far too much of a correction from the overly rigid orthodox model. Instead, I favor something of a midpoint, a modestly tight (60-90cm file width) formation, with assigned places and an expected if not standard depth and width, which operated principally (eventually exclusively) in shock. That shock engagement in turn took the form of a sequence of ‘micro-pulses’ and ‘micro-lulls,’ not a ‘series of duels’ but in fact a rolling sequence of several-on-severals as the formations ‘acordianned’ forward and backwards. It would be rare for either side to fully disengage after contact, but men would spend a lot of time pulled just out of measure, looking for an opening to surge forward (or fearing their opponents might do the same).
When it comes to the rules of war for hoplites, I think that the heterodox habit of treating battles, raids, sieges and ambushes without distinction and thus insisting that essentially there were no rules is unhelpful and leads to confusion. The orthodox model, which imagines some sort of (unattested) Archaic golden age where the rules were always followed is absurd, but the idea of, if not rules, expectations that governed war between Greek states under certain circumstances (and which might not apply to non-Greeks, or in certain kinds of war) clearly seems true and is the way these things work in basically all cultures. In no culture does the ‘discourse’ of war fully match its ‘reality’ but the degree of disconnect is variable and the discourse does influence the reality. Within that frame, the orthodox scholars are correct to point to the Peloponnesian War as a conflict which ruptured the discourse that existed at the time it was fought, even if they are wrong to suppose that entire discourse had existed unaltered since 650.
In terms of the status of hoplites, I think the heterodox camp is essentially correct: the legally defined ‘hoplite class’ (like the Athenian zeugitai) were significantly smaller and wealthier than the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model advanced in The Western Way of War. Even if we include the ‘working-class’ hoplites who often didn’t enjoy the political privleges of the ‘hoplite class,’ we are still talking about a smaller slice of society than either Beloch or VDH suppose. That has implications for the relative breadth of political participation for the polis (narrower in oligarchies than sometimes supposed),20 the structure of class and wealth in the Greek countryside (meaningfully less equal than supposed) and finally the absolute population of the Greek world (higher than generally supposed). The field of ancient Greek history is beginning to really grapple with some of these implications (albeit not fully with the demographic one, yet).
Finally, in terms of training, while I give the ‘developmental model’ (a very little bit of increasing drill and training in arms over time) a bit more credit, I think the current heterodox position – functionally no drill outside of Sparta, extremely little formal training at arms, but an emphasis on physical fitness (with uneven results) – is the direction in which our evidence, such as it is, points. Hoplites were not drilled early modern soldiers, nor battle-hardened ultra-veterans, nor the products of elite boot camp style training – they were, for the most part, citizen amateurs with relatively little (if any) formal training. One strongly suspects that they were prepared for their military role by parents and other older male relatives, but not in any formal way.
The result is a mental model that is, I suppose, somewhat more heterodox than orthodox, but which does not fit neatly into either ‘camp’ and is instead something of a synthesis of their arguments and ideas. It is ironic that in a running debate about how rigid the phalanx is, both ‘sides’ suffer, I think, from a degree of doctrinaire rigidity. In my view, the next place that the debate needs to go is a synthesis of the two positions, although obviously it will not be me doing that work, as I am not a Greek warfare specialist.
This was it. This was the week that America admitted America is going fascist – which is to say has gone fascist, i.e. has had its government seized by fascists with broad fascist support for imposing fascism which it is now doing with zeal, i.e. has an acute case of fulminant fascism.
I've been watching this bear down on us for a half a century, so it's slightly dizzying to finally have everybody else come into alignment. One of the basic exigencies of my life has been moving through the world being reasonably certain of a bunch of things that I knew the vast majority of my fellows thought were insane to believe. Over the last ten years, more and more people have been noticing, "what are we doing in this handbasket and where is it going?" but – as evidenced by the behavior of the DNC over the last year – it's taken the secret police gunning Americans down in the streets (since I started writing this: and throwing flashbang grenades at or into (reports vary) passing cars carrying little kids) for the greater liberal mass to come around.
Obviously, it would have been nicer for the realization It Could Happen Here to have not required It Happening Here to be the conclusive rebuttal of their pathological skepticism. But one of my favorite sayings is, "There's three kinds. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves," (Will Rogers) and this is why. Clearly America needed to piss on the electric fence for itself. I try to be philosophical about it.
I just felt, if only for myself and posterity, I should note this long-in-coming nation-wide realization has finally been attained.
I'm not getting too carried away, though. It's hard to be too jubilant when the problem that brought us here is still very much with us, by which I don't mean the fascism itself, I mean the terrible mentality on "my" "side" that causes that pathological skepticism and other catastrophic thinking faults that brought us to this pass and lead to the fascists getting away, quite literally, with murder.
I wanted more books about people exploring dangerous and mysterious alien spaceships! And I found some! This one was well written, and an engaging read, but I did wind up feeling like it answered too many questions and wrapped things up too neatly for good cosmic horror. I want them to end with me having some degree of feeling unsettled and pondering things.
This has more explicit gore/body-horror than Ship of Fools did, in case anyone is seeking/avoiding such things.
This is blackly hilarious and absolutely worth a read.
Leftist journalist Laura Jedeed showed up at an ICE recruiting events to do scope it out and write about what she found. What happened next is... eye widening.
At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.
The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.
In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.
[...]
I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.
“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”
As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.
And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”
The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.
Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.
Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.
According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”
I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”
By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.
I did not enjoy listening to this song! I think maybe a version without the ding ding ding duh duh duh ding ding of the casio keyboard would be good, but I was not a fan of this version.
The titular Trinidad turns out to be a town in California.
Current Music:Fresh Cherries in Trinidad — The Mountain Goats
P.F. Chisholm, A Suspicion of Silver. Ninth in its mystery series, set late in the reign of Elizabeth I/in the middle of when James I and VI was still just James VI. I don't recommend starting it here, because there was a moment when I wailed, "no, not [name]!" when you won't have a very strong sense of that character from just this book. Pretty satisfying for where it is in its series, though, still enjoying. Especially as they have returned to the north, which I like much better.
Joan Coggin, Who Killed the Curate?. A light British mid-century mystery, first in its series and I'm looking forward to reading more. If you were asked to predict what a book published in 1944 with this title would be like, you would have this book absolutely bang on the nose, so if you read that title and went "ooh fun," go get it, and if you read that title and thought "oh gawd not another of those," you're not wrong either. I am very much in the "ooh fun" camp.
Matt Collins with Roo Lewis, Forest: A Journey Through Wild and Magnificent Landscapes. Photos and essays about forests, not entirely aided by its printer printing it a little toward the sepia throughout. Still a relaxing book if you are a Nice Books About Nice Trees fan, which I am.
John Darnielle, This Year: A Book of Days (365 Songs Annotated). When I first saw John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats live, I recognized him. I don't mean that I knew him before, I mean that I taught a lot of people like him physics labs once upon a time: people who had seen a lot of shit and now would like to learn some nice things about quantum mechanics please. Anyway this book was fun and interesting and confirmed that Darnielle is exactly who you'd think he was from listening to the Mountain Goats all this time.
Nadia Davids, Cape Fever. A short mildly speculative novel about a servant girl in Cape Town navigating life with a controlling and unpleasant employer. Beautifully written and gentle in places you might not have thought possible. Looking forward to whatever else Davids does.
Djuna, Counterweight. Weird space elevator novella (novel? very short one if so) in a highly corporate Ruritanian world with strong Korean cultural influences (no surprise as this is in translation from Korean). I think this slipped by a lot of SFF people and maybe shouldn't have.
Margaret Frazer, This World's Eternity. Kindle. I continue to dislike the short stories that result from Frazer trying to write Shakespeare's version of historical figures rather than what she thinks they would actually have been like. Does that mean I'll stop reading these? Hmm, I think there's only one left.
Drew Harvell, The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life. If you like the subgenre There's Weird Stuff In The Ocean, which I do, this is a really good one of those. Gosh is there weird stuff in the ocean. Very satisfying.
Rupert Latimer, Murder After Christmas. Another light British murder mystery from 1944, another that is basically exactly what you think it is. What a shame he didn't have the chance to write a lot more.
Wen-Yi Lee, When They Burned the Butterfly. Gritty and compelling, small gods and teenage girl gangs in 1970s Singapore. Singular and great. Highly recommended.
Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, eds., We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. There's some really lovely stuff in here, and a wide variety of voices. Basically this is what you would want this kind of anthology to be.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. I don't pick your subtitles, authors. You and your editors are doing that. So when you claim to be a history of sex and Christianity...that is an expectation you have set. And when you don't include the Copts or the Nestorians or nearly anything about the Greek or Russian Orthodox folks and then you get to the 18th and 19th centuries and sail past the Shakers and the free love Christian communes...it is not my fault that I grumble that your book is in no way a history of sex and Christianity, you're the one that claimed it was that and then really wanted to do a history of semi-normative Western Christian sex among dominant populations. What a disappointment.
Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells and The Lost Words (reread). I accidentally got both of these instead of just one, but they're both brief and poetic about nature vocabulary, a good time without being a big commitment.
Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. This is one of those broad-concept pieces of nonfiction, with burial mounds but also mycorrhizal networks. MacFarlane's prose is always readable, and this is a good time.
David Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and At Peace, 1670-1840. And again: I did not choose your subtitle, neighbor. So when you claim that your history goes through 1840...and then everything after 1796 is packed into a really brief epilogue...and I mean, what could have happened to the Cherokees after 1796 but before 1840, surely it couldn't be [checks notes] oh, one of the major events in their history as a people, sure, no, what difference could that make. Seriously, I absolutely get not wanting to write about the Trail of Tears. But then don't tell people you're writing about the Trail of Tears. Honestly, 1670-1800, who could quibble with that. But in this compressed epilogue there are paragraphs admonishing us not to forget about...people we have not learned about in this book and will have some trouble learning about elsewhere because Cherokee histories are not thick on the ground. Not as disappointing as the MacCulloch, but still disappointing.
Tim Palmer, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. I found this to be a comfort read, which I think a lot of people won't if they haven't already gone through things like disproving hidden variables as a source of quantum uncertainty. But it'll still be interesting--maybe more so--and the stuff he worked on about climate physics is great.
Henry Reece, The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic. If you want a general history, that's the Alice Hunt book I read last fortnight. This is a more specifically focused work about the last approximately two years, the bit between Cromwell's death and the Restoration. Also really well done, also interesting, but doing a different thing. You'll probably get more out of this if you have a solid grasp on the general shape of the period first.
Randy Ribay, The Reckoning of Roku. As regular readers can attest, I mostly don't read media tie-ins--mostly just not interested. But F.C. Yee's Avatar: the Last Airbender work was really good, so I thought, all right, why not give their next author a chance. I'm glad I did. This is a fun YA fantasy novel that would probably work even if you didn't know the Avatar universe but will be even better if you do.
Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxie's Penalty. Fourth in a series of mysteries, but it's written so that you could easily start here. Well-written, well-plotted, generally enjoyable. I was thinking of rereading the earlier volumes of the series, and I'm now more, not less, motivated to do so.
Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below. I feel like the cover of this was attempting to sell it as a cozy. It is not a cozy. It is a fantasy novel that is centered on books and bookshops, but it is about as cozy as, oh, say, Ink Blood Sister Scribe in that direction. And this is good, not everything with books in it is drama-free, look at our current lives for example. Sometimes it's nice to have a fantasy adventure that acknowledges the importance of story in our lives, and this is one of those times.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lives of Bitter Rain. This is not a novella. It is a set of vignettes of backstory from a particular character in this series. It does not hang together except that, sure, I'm willing to buy that these things happened in this order. I like this series--it was not unpleasant reading--but do not go in expecting more than what it is.
Iida Turpeinen, Beasts of the Sea. A slim novel in translation from Finnish, spanning several eras of attitudes toward natural history in general and the Steller's sea cow in specific. Vivid and moving.
Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. The nation in question is the US, in case you were wondering. This was a generally quite good book about the middle of the 19th century in the US, except of course that that's a pretty big and eventful topic, so all sorts of things are going to have to get left out. But she did her very best to hit the high spots culturally as well as politically, so overall it was the most satisfying bug crusher I've read so far this year.
1) fandomtrees still has 3 trees below the minimum number of 2 gifts, and is thus at risk of delaying reveals again (currently scheduled for Jan 17 reveals), with the decision on delaying to be made the morning of 1/17. Needy trees are mastershield's Tree (f:astro boy, f:balan wonderland, f:kingdom hearts); kalloway's Tree (f:brave nine, f:crossovers, f:fire emblem, f:granblue fantasy, f:gundam, f:kingdom of heroes, f:super robot heroes) whoremoantreatments' Tree (f:advance wars, f:bleach, f:hypnosis mic, f:kuroko no basket, f:pokemon, f:tales of berseria, f:the world ends with you). (List kept updated here.) All of these are open to fic, and the minimum fill for fic is only 100 words, if anyone knows these fandoms and can help out.
(My tree has above the minimum number of gifts but is here, and I’m eager to see what’s on it :)
2) I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. lunasariel is hosting a sync read of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath in her DW here. Currently it’s her, me, and cyanmnemosyne reading along, but contrary to the name, we don’t actually have to be all synched up to participate, so if (like me) you’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, or if you’ve read it already and want to follow our impressions as we make progress through it, come join! I am currently just past halfway, lunasariel is 10-20 chapters ahead of me, and Cyan has just recently started. (And yes, my thoughts on this book are ~50% on the chemistry. Actual Periodic Table of Elements chemistry, I mean, not chemistry between characters, although I’m enjoying that too.)
3) Snowflake catch up!
The problem with doing Snowflake every year for the last, uh… 10 years, I guess? – is that for repeated questions like this, which are about ME as opposed to about my fandoms or projects or objects, which can accumulate it is much harder to come up with something new to say! Both of these questions fall under that category, and so were more challenging than most for me to answer. But let’s see if I can come up with something without repeating myself.
Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.
I do want to stick to fandom-related things I like about myself for this one, so, hm. Last time I answered this question seems to be in 2017 (and my things were “good fannish role model for my children”, “thorough and detailed in talking about what I’m reading/watching”, and “conscientious beta”) and the first time in 2016 (my answers were “good fannish baba/matchmaker”, "committed to fannish crack”, and “conscientious about fandom participation”) – and I do still feel those things are all applicable to me and I still like them. But I’ve done a bunch of new things in the last 9 years, from attending conventions to paying attention to the Hugos to signing up for Yuletide, so let me focus on those new things and see if I can extract three new things I like about myself fannishly from them.
This is another one I’ve done before, in 2019 and in 2015, but looking at even the 2019 one, I talked about fannish poetry and graphics, but not about fannish prose/fanfic. So clearly that’s what I should talk about, but what IS my process?
In this engrossing historical novel, three storylines converge on a single target, a female Nazi nicknamed the Huntress. During the war, we follow Nina, one of the Soviet women who flew bomber runs and were known as the Night Witches. After the war, we follow Ian, a British war correspondent turned Nazi hunter, who has teamed up with Nina to hunt down the Huntress as Nina is one of the very few people who saw her face and survived. At the same time, in Boston, we follow Jordan, a young woman who wants to be a photographer and is suspicious of the beautiful German immigrant her father wants to marry...
In The Huntress, we often know what has happened or surely must happen, but not why or how; we know Nina somehow ended up facing off with the Huntress, but not how she got there or how she escaped; we know who Jordan's stepmom-to-be is and that she'll surely be unmasked eventually, but not how or when that'll happen or how the confrontation will go down. There's a lot of suspense but none of it depends on shocking twists, though there are some unexpected turns.
Nina and Jordan are very likable and compelling, especially Nina who is kind of a force of nature. It took me a while to warm up to Ian, but I did about halfway through. Nina's story is fascinating and I could have read a whole novel just about her and her all-female regiment, but I never minded switching back to Jordan as while her life is more ordinary, it's got this tense undercurrent of creeping horror as she and everyone around her are being gaslit and manipulated by a Nazi.
This is the kind of satisfying, engrossing historical novel that I think used to be more common, though this one probably has a lot more queerness than it would have had if it had been written in the 80s - a woman/woman relationship is central to the story, and there are multiple other queer characters. It has some nice funny moments and dialogue to leaven a generally serious story (Nina in particular can be hilarious), and there's some excellent set piece action scenes. If my description sounds good to you, you'll almost certainly enjoy it.
Quinn has written multiple historical novels, mostly set during or around WW2. This is the first I've read but it made me want to read more of hers.
Content notes: Wartime-typical violence, gaslighting, a child in danger. The Huntress murdered six children, but this scene does not appear on-page. There is no sexual assault and no scenes in concentration camps.
First I need to find an idea for a fanfic, and there are two options * I need to read this fic. No one does it. Or they do it, but by reading them I realize we have completely different headcanons. Oh I need to write mine * Writing prompts ! Exchange fic ! Gifts ! It has changes with times. Now it's more of the second one. It was initially more of the first one. I think I'm reading less fanfics (and more novels, but I don't write novels). It's still a fix. I remember writing bad smut for someone I was courting as a young women, ha ha, and it might have been my second fic ever.
I'm mostly writing short one-shots, so the next part it thinking up themes, ideal, lines, lines of dialogues, all that motivates me to write the fic. Sometimes some new themes or narrative parallels appear by themselves as i'm writing. It's good.
I'm so bad with long form. So many things I have started and never finished.
The last line is very important to me, it needs to be good!
I'm so bad at titles. half the time, my strategy for finding a title is crying to me beta or another friend that I can't find one, and they give me a half-hearted attemps, and ti's still better than all I could have found in hours. So I'm taking it shamelessly.
I'd like to think, yeah, still got it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were desperately scratching around for somebody who'd even heard the name of the author of once-renowned and now pretty well forgotten, except by specialists in the field, sex manual. Which has its centenary this year.
Anyway, have been approached by a journo to talk with them about this work and its author -
- on which it is well over 2 decades since I did any work, really, but I daresay I can fudge something up, at least, I have found a copy of the work in question and the source of my info on the individual, published in 1970. Not aware of any more recent work ahem ahem. The Wikipedia entry is a stub.
My other issue is that next week is shaping up to be unwontedly busy - I signed up for an online conference on Tuesday, and have only recently been informed that the monthly Fellows symposium at the institution whereof I have the honour to be a Fellow is on Wednesday - and I still have that library excursion to fit in -
- plus arranging a call is going to involve juggling timezones.
Still, maybe I can work in my pet theme of, disjunction between agenda of promoting monogamous marriage and having a somewhat contrary personal history....
Not the most quality books I read but the ones that hit me hardest:
M.L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven —Highly cathartic! Really earned that ending.
Kelly Braffet, The Unwilling—I love when unpleasant characters make terrible decisions; bonus if it includes magic. A meditation on agency, and what it means to not have any, and what choices are left to us. Not for everyone but 100% for me.
Layne Fargo, The Favorites—Equal parts dishy and wrenching
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth — Honestly there is nothing as riveting as rich girl problems. Put my name down for the Edith Wharton Completionist Club.
Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age —Ada makes history sexy using her secret weapon: historiography! Ada’s brain is so weird and so brilliant it should be a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race—From now on Tchaikovsky is only allowed to write novellas. He gets rambly in his novels but this was a perfect chef’s kiss of a genre-straddler.
Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads and The Nameless Land—The duology that converted me to Elliott and her brand of sprawling worldbuilding
Good news: I reviewed almost everything I read in 2025, which was my goal! I didn’t DNF as much as I much as I ought; will work on that in 2026. Every year I bemoan how few older books I’ve read and every year I keep reading frontlist. Not new-release frontlist, but published in the last five years. I certainly don’t think I had a bad reading year. It was, for lack of a better word, mid. 2025 was the year I read the first volume of Middlemarch and just did not have the stamina to continue….maybe I would have if I’d shifted other stuff around and made room for it? In 2025 I joined two in-person book clubs and two online ones, which is 3.5 book clubs too many. Sometimes the discussions were great and sometimes they were fine, but the main selling point was I was unlikely to have picked the books on my own so it broadened my reading horizons.
Alexander Knox was born on this date a hundred and nineteen years ago and without him I might never have discovered that the fan magazines of classical Hollywood could get as specifically thirsty as the modern internet.
Come to that, you would have been pretty tasty in the pulpit, too, Alex. You look, except for that glint in your eyes and that dimple in your cheek, like a minister's son. You look serious, even studious. You dress quietly, in grays and blacks and browns. Your interests are in bookish things. You live in a furnished apartment on the Strip in Hollywood, and have few possessions. You like to "travel light," you said so. You like to move about a lot, always have and always will. You've lived in a trunk for so many years you are, you explained, used to it. Of course, you've been married twice, which rather confuses the issue. But perhaps two can travel as lightly as one, if they put their minds to it. But you do have books. You have libraries in three places. At home, in Canada. At the farm in Connecticut, of which you are part owner, and in the apartment where you and your bride Doris Nolan still live. You write, which would come in handy with sermons. You're dreamy when you play the piano. For the most part it isn't, let's face it, church music you play. But you could convert.
I woke up thinking about ICE and vigilantism. Then I wanted to hear the song "The Vigilante" from some time a long time ago. A quick search of youtube with just the title gave me a gazillion wrong hits. I dredged up a line of the lyrics, typed it into duckduckgo with the word lyrics, was given the whole song and the singer's name, went back to youtube, and here is is
It's from 1973. Someone in the last 20 years or so thought it was worth making the lyrics readable. Someone else thought youtube users would like to hear it. Was it actually Topic records, when they did the reissue? I knew some people who worked at Topic in London in the early 1980s. If I think very hard, will I remember Tony's last name or the street address? Or maybe if I think of other things it will just pop into my head.
Julian Barnes said some interesting stuff about memory in a Fresh Air interview yesterday. He's 80. I remember going to hear him read (something) decades ago at a bookstore in Boston (I don't remember which one, or what book he was promoting).
In these days of climate change, the notion of coastal areas going underwater is a familiar fear. But it's not a new one; we have stories of drowned lands going back for thousands of years.
The famous example, of course, is Atlantis. Which Plato wrote about for allegorical purposes, not literal ones: he was making a point about society, building up Atlantis as a negative foil to the perfections of Athens. That hasn't stopped later writers from taking the idea and running with it, though, with interest particularly surging after Europeans learned of the New World. That's one of many locations since identified with Atlantis, with considerable effort expended on identifying a real-world inspiration for Plato's story (Thera leads the pack) . . . alongside wild theories that build up the sunken land as a place of advanced technology and magic. The supposed "lost continents" of Lemuria and Mu -- which may be the same thing, or may be synonymous with Atlantis -- are later inventions, discredited by the development of geological science.
We don't have to lose whole continents to the ocean, though. The shorelines of northern Europe are dotted with legends of regions sunk below the waves: the city of Ys on the coast of Brittany, Lyonesse in Cornwall, Cantre'r Gwaelod in Wales' Cardigan Bay. Natural features can contribute to these legends; the beaches of Cardigan Bay have ridges, termed sarnau, which run out into the ocean and have been taken for causeways, and environmental conditions at Ynyslas have preserved the stumps of submerged trees, which emerge at times of low tide. The so-called Yonaguni Monument in Japan and Bimini Road in the Bahamas are eerily regular-looking stone formations that theorists have mistaken for human construction, again raising the specter of a forgotten society drowned by the sea.
Many of the examples I'm most familiar with come from Europe, but this isn't solely a European phenomenon. I suspect you can get stories of this kind anywhere there's a coastline, especially if the offshore terrain is shallow enough for land to have genuinely been submerged by rising sea levels. Tamil and Sanskrit literature going back two thousand years has stories about places lost to the ocean, which is part of why some modern Tamil writers seized on the idea of Lemuria (supposedly positioned to the south of India). It doesn't even have to be salt water! A late eighteenth-century Russian text has the city of Kitezh sinking into Lake Svetloyar: a rather pyrrhic miracle delivered by God when the inhabitants prayed to be saved from a Mongol invasion.
Some drowned lands are entirely factual. Doggerland is the name given to the region of the North Sea that used to connect the British Isles to mainland Europe, before rising sea levels at the end of the last glaciation inundated the area. Archaeological investigation of the terrain is difficult, but artifacts and human bones have been dredged up from the depths. If we go into another Ice Age, Doggerland could re-emerge from the sea -- and if it had been flooded in a later era, what's down there could include monumental temples and other such dramatic features. We're robbed of such exciting discoveries by the fact that it was inhabited only by nomadic hunter-gatherers . . . which, of course, need not limit a fictional example!
Doggerland was submerged over the course of thousands of years, but most stories of this kind involve a sudden inundation. That may not be unrealistic: after an extended period in which the Mediterranean basin was mostly or entirely cut off from the Atlantic Ocean, the Zanclean flood broke through what is now the Strait of Gibraltar and refilled the basin over the course of anything from two years to as little as a few months. Water levels may have risen as fast as ten meters a day! Of course, the region before then would have been hellishly hot and arid rather than the pleasant home of a happy civilization, but it's still dramatic to imagine.
Then there are the phantom islands. I have these on the brain right now because the upcoming duology I'm writing with Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, the Sea Beyond, makes extensive use of these, but they've fascinated me for far longer than we've been working on the series.
"Phantom island" is the general term used for islands that turn out not to be real. Some of these, like Atlantis, are entirely mythical, existing only in stories whose tellers may not ever have meant them to be more than metaphor. Others, however, are a consequence of the intense difficulties of maritime travel. Mirages and fog banks can make sailors believe they've spotted land where there is none . . . or they see an actual, factual place, but they don't realize where they are.
To understand how that can happen, you have to think about navigation in the past. We've had methods of calculating latitude for a long time, but they were often imprecise, and a error of even one degree can mean your position is off by nearly seventy miles/a hundred kilometers. Meanwhile, as I've mentioned before, longitude was a profoundly intractable problem until about two hundred and fifty years ago, with seafarers unable to make more than educated guesses as to their east-west position -- guesses that could be off by hundreds and hundreds of miles.
The result is that even if you saw a real piece of land, did you know where it was? You would chart it to the best of your ability, but somebody else later sailing through (what they thought was) the same patch of sea might spot nothing at all. Or they'd find land they thought looked like what you'd described, except it was in another location. Well-identified masses could be mistaken for new ones if ships wrongly calculated their current position, especially since accurate coastal charts were also difficult to make when your movements were at the mercy of wind and current.
Phantom islands therefore moved all over the map, vanishing and reappearing, or having their names reattached to new places as we became sure of those latter. Some of them persisted into the twentieth century, when we finally amassed enough technology (like satellites) to know for certain what is and is not out there in the ocean. There are still a few cases where people wonder if an island appeared and then sank again, though we know now that the conditions which can make that happen are fairly rare -- and usually involve volcanic eruptions.
The sea still feels like a place of mystery, though, where all kinds of wonders might lie just over the horizon. And depending on how much we succeed or fail at controlling global temperatures and the encroachments of the sea, we may genuinely wind up with sunken cities to form a new generation of cautionary tales . . .
Today was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.
Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.
The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across thesepoems.
It is still possible to file taxes on paper, by mail. I have an online account, and the government suggests filing online. The easiest way would be to use Turbotax (or the HR Block equivalent). I am peeved by how much lobbying both of those companies did to make it hard for people to file for free. I would not qualify for the free filing anyway, I'm just mad on principle.
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