What did Caligula think of his nickname?

He wasn’t called Caligula, he didn’t go mad after spending three months in a coma, and he didn’t make his horse a senator. There are so, so many myths about this emperor. Some are distortions, some are baseless, some are outright fabrications. Of the fabrications, some are ancient, some modern: even Suetonius’ lurid stories aren’t enough for modern TV and cinema writers.

We’ll stick to just two fabrications today:

1. The nickname ‘Caligula’, little boot.
2. The three month coma.

Left: Gaius (12–41 CE) as depicted in antiquity, copy with colour restored by Stiftung Archäologie, Munich, based on particles preserved in the marble (original: Archäologisches Institut der Universität Göttingen). Right: Gaius as reimagined by @royalty_now_ (Becca Saladin).

1. His name

‘Caligula’ rolls off the tongue nicely, doesn’t it? But he wasn’t called that. He was ‘Gaius’. Contemporary writers, later writers, they all called him Gaius. He wasn’t called anything else until three centuries after his death.

The nickname ‘Caligula’ was only when he was a toddler. His father’s soldiers used it when his parents dressed baby Gaius up in miniature military gear. Several sources mention the story —

Caligulae cognomen castrensi ioco traxit, quia manipulario habitu inter milites educabatur.

He got the nickname ‘Caligula’ as a bit of fun in camp, because he was brought up among the soldiers wearing military uniform.

Suetonius, Caligula 9.1 (tr. Gainsford)

There’s just one reported instance of someone using the nickname when Gaius was an adult. He didn’t like it.

At idem Gaius omnia contumelias putabat, ut sunt ferendarum inpatientes faciendarum cupidissimi: iratus fuit Herennio Macro, quod illum Gaium salutaverat, nec inpune cessit primipilari quod Caligulam dixerat; hoc enim in castris natus et alumnus legionum vocari solebat, nullo nomine militibus familiarior umquam factus, sed iam Caligulam convicium et probrum iudicabat cothurnatus.

The same Gaius took everything as an insult: those who are keenest on offering them are least tolerant of receiving them. He was angry at Herennius Macer when he greeted him as 'Gaius'. And he didn't let a chief centurion get away with it when he called him 'Caligula': he was born in an army camp and was regularly called that as a favourite of the legions, and that was the name by which he was always most affectionately known to the soldiers. But by now, wearing grown-up shoes, he took 'Caligula' as accusatory and belittling.

Seneca, On constancy 18 (tr. Gainsford)

Gaius may have been more tolerant when on campaign with the army, we don’t know.

But this story is even more striking for showing that he didn’t like ‘Gaius’ either. Probably for the same reason: his praenomen may have seemed just as over-familiar as a childhood nickname.

His own preference for a short-form name, I suggest, would probably have been ‘Germanicus’, a cognomen inherited from his father. That’s the name that takes up most space on his coins. And when Gaius renamed the month of September after himself (don’t worry, it didn’t last), ‘Germanicus’ is the name he gave it. But ‘Germanicus’ was too strongly associated with his father — the Germanicus — and Gaius’ reign was too short for him to succeed in co-opting the name for himself. (Suetonius opens his biography of Gaius with a mini-biography of Germanicus. Way to throw shade!)

An inscription dated to ‘the 17th day before the Kalends of Germanicus’, that is, the 15th of August. The inscription could be from Gaius’ lifetime, or from the reign of Domitian, who renamed September to ‘Germanicus’ too. (CIL xi.5745; photo: Bill Thayer’s website)

Contemporary writers invariably call him ‘Gaius’ (Philo, Seneca, Pliny), and it’s the same for the 300 years following his death (Josephus, Suetonius, Dio, Eusebius). ‘Caligula’ gets mentioned only in the specific context of the story of Gaius’ toddler uniform.

The second half of the 300s is when his name changes. Eutropius introduces him as ‘Gaius Caesar, Caligula by nickname’. Aurelius Victor and the Historia Augusta call him ‘Caligula’ consistently; Orosius calls him ‘Gaius Caligula’. There’s no indication of what it was that prompted the change, other than a general trend of belittling him — the Historia Augusta treats him as a byword for a bad emperor — but someone must have started it.

Note. Eutropius, Breviarium 7.12; Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus 3, epit. 3; Hist. Aug. Marc. Aur. 28.10, Avid. Cass. 8.4, Commodus 10.2, Heliogab. 1.1, 34.1, Aurelian 42.6.; Orosius, Hist. adv. paganos 7.5.5–7.

The dissonance is especially striking in Suetonius. If it had been a thing in Suetonius’ time to use a belittling nickname for Gaius, Suetonius would definitely have done it. And the surviving manuscripts of Suetonius do use the title ‘Caligula’ — but only in the headings. The main text always uses ‘Gaius’. It’s clear that ‘Caligula’ isn’t Suetonius’ own title for the biography.

The oldest extant manuscript of Suetonius’ Lives, showing the end of ‘Tiberius’ and the heading for ‘Caligula’. (Cod. Paris. lat. 6115, 9th cent.)

2. His coma

To decide whether Caligula was mad is a problem which requires a much fuller and more thorough discussion than it can be given here. For the moment, it is enough to recognize that the illness of September A.D. 37 was purely physical. Let us hope that the myth of Caligula’s ‘nervous breakdown’ can now be consigned to the oblivion it so richly deserves.

Morgan 1973: 329

Such sadly unprophetic words. If only it were consigned to oblivion. If only, if only.

But it isn’t. It has been revived bloody well yet again by a Netflix docudrama series, which determinedly ignores everything that actual historians have said about Gaius over the last half century, in favour of the most sensationalist nonsense they could find.

The series depicts Gaius becoming ill and falling into a coma for three months. This illness is what supposedly damages his sanity and turns him into a cartoon villain.

The death of Tiberius vaults Caligula to power as Rome’s new emperor, a role at which he initially excels — until an illness unhinges his mind.

Roman Empire, blurb for S03E02 ‘A new hope’ (2019)

All right, the illness was real. The coma and the unhinging ... were not.

No ancient source says that his supposed madness was caused by illness. No ancient source says that his illness provoked any kind of transformation of character. No ancient source says that he suffered from headaches. No ancient source describes any symptoms of his illness. No ancient source mentions a coma, let alone a coma lasting three months. It’s all 20th century supposition.

Caligula (John Hurt) begins having headaches, a symptom of his supposed mental illness, watched anxiously by his sister Drusilla (Beth Morris). BBC, I Claudius (1976), episode 9 ‘Zeus, by Jove!’ The story is based on Robert Graves’ novel (1934), but even Graves, creative though he was, didn’t make up the headaches: they were invented for the TV series.

Over the last century several candidates have been proposed for the disease of 37 CE, and for the cause of his supposed madness:

• combination of alcoholism and epilepsy (Jerome 1923: 419)
• schizophrenia, or ‘dementia praecox’ (Esser 1958: 134–136)
• encephalitis lethargica, or ‘sleeping sickness’ (Sandison 1958)
• psychopathy (Lucas 1967)
• thyrotoxicosis (Katz 1972, 1977)
• an anxiety disorder (Massaro and Montgomery 1978)
• interictal temporal lobe epilepsy (Benediktson 1989)
• herpetic encephalitis (Ferreira Camargo and Ghizoni Teive 2018)

The problem is that there is precisely zero evidence for any symptoms of the illness that struck Gaius in late 37 CE. All that the sources tell us — Philo, Suetonius, and Dio — is that he became ill, that the illness lasted long enough for news to spread all round the empire, that there was fear he might die, and that he got better.

That. Is. All. No coma. No epileptic seizures.

Everything else is a crumbly edifice built on a hodgepodge of details strewn across all the rest of Gaius’ lifespan. Suetonius mentions that he suffered from comitialis morbus as a child, a sickness characterised by lethargy: the phrase is sometimes translated as epilepsy, but it’s very inexact, and it was confined to his childhood in any case. Katz’ diagnosis of hyperthyroidism relies very heavily on Suetonius’ physical description of Gaius, a description that is demonstrably false (Morgan 1973; notwithstanding Katz’ denial of this when he revisited the subject in 1977). The headaches invented for the 1976 BBC series I, Claudius are surely based on Sandison’s theory of encephalitis: that must also be where the coma story comes from. (Though it’s also possible that the headaches are an attribution error: there’s some indication that the dictator Julius Caesar suffered from migraines.)

The idea of a transformation in Gaius’ character comes from Philo’s report that he became licentious upon becoming emperor, and that he returned to licentiousness and savagery after recovering from the illness. That is, as far as Philo is concerned, the illness was an interruption to the licentiousness: and the licentiousness caused the illness, not the other way round.

If you want a reliable account of Gaius, don’t rely on Netflix. I don’t particularly recommend Stephen Dando-Collins’ 2019 book either: he at least doesn’t make things up, but it’s still terribly sensationalist. For a balanced treatment, which doesn’t play up Gaius’ supposed insanity, and which doesn’t downplay his corruption either, the best is still Anthony Barrett’s Caligula: the abuse of power (2015, 1st edition 1989).

Here’s Philo’s description of the illness. This is as much detail as we get. Take a look and see if you think it justifies a diagnosis of rare forms of encephalitis or epilepsy.

But in the eighth month Gaius was struck down by severe sickness. He had exchanged the recent more homely and, therefore, healthier way of life which he had followed while Tiberius was alive, for one of extravagance. Hard drinking, luxurious feeding and appetites still unsatisfied when the cavities were stuffed full, hot baths, ill-timed, and acting as emetics, followed at once by renewed toping and gormandizing in its train, lasciviousness venting itself on boys and women, and everything else that can destroy soul and body and the bonds in both which keep them together, joined in the assault. Self-restraint is rewarded by strength and health, incontinence by infirmity and sickness bordering on death.

Philo, Embassy to Gaius 14 (tr. Colson)

Now, there are plenty of lurid things to say about Gaius that are solidly grounded in Philo’s and Suetonius’ testimony. Maybe at a later date we’ll come back and look at the business of Gaius’ horse Incitatus, or his supposed declaration of war on the god Neptune. Suetonius’ stories aren’t remotely trustworthy, but still, he does at least attest these things.

But you can’t base any kind of sensible diagnosis on Philo’s vague description. Reading through these articles by modern pathologists feels like watching one of the crazier episodes of House, M.D. Real life isn’t like that.

Or if it is, then I’ll finish by offering my own diagnosis: clearly, it must have been lupus. It’s always lupus.

References

• Barrett, A. A. 2015 [1989]. Caligula. The abuse of power (orig. Caligula. The corruption of power). Routledge.
• Benediktson, D. T. 1989. ‘Caligula’s madness: madness or interictal temporal lobe epilepsy?’ Classical World 82.5: 370–375.
• Esser, A. 1958. Cäsar und die julisch-claudischen Kaiser im biologisch-ärztlichen Blickfeld. Brill.
• Ferreira Camargo, C. H.; Ghizoni Teive, H. A. 2018. ‘Searching for neurological diseases in the Julio-Claudian dynasty of the Roman empire.’ Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria 76.1: 53–57.
• Jerome, T. S. 1923. Aspects of the study of Roman history. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Katz, R. S. 1972. ‘The illness of Caligula.’ Classical World 65.7: 223–225.
• —— 1977. ‘Caligula’s illness again.’ Classical World 70.7: 451.
• Lucas, J. 1967. ‘Un empereur psychopathe. Contribution à la psychologie du Caligula de Suétone.’ L’antiquité classique 36: 159–189.
• Massaro, V.; Montgomery, I. 1978. ‘Gaius — mad, bad, ill, or all three?’ Latomus 37.4: 894-909.
• Morgan, M. G. 1973. ‘Caligula’s illness again.’ Classical World 66.6: 327–329.
• Sandison, A. T. 1958. ‘The madness of the emperor Caligula.’ Medical History 2.3: 202–209.

Quotations and history

Quotation isn’t history. But it can be a tool for suggesting history. Like any tool, it can be used -- and misused -- in lots of ways.

Films, books, and games have many tools for evoking a sense of history. In films like Braveheart (1995) and Robin Hood (1991, 2010) the main tool is false archaism: a mash-up of tropes from different historical periods, combined to create a flavour of oldness that has nothing to do with the actual setting. Tolkien’s tool is language: he uses invented languages shaped by historical sound-shifts, similar to ones that happen in real languages, to create a historical backdrop for his novels. In games like Tomb raider (1996) and Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time (2003), it’s about interactive archaeology. Lara Croft is always diving into trap-filled ruins; the Prince starts out in a supposedly Abbasid-era palace, and later descends into an underground ruin with cuneiform-style writing on the walls, suggesting something Assyrian or Achaemenid -- past layered upon past.

Quotations are another tool. Quotations don’t send a story into the past, they bring the past into the present. Often the idea is to claim a kind of inheritance from the past. Sometimes it’s ironic. Sometimes you just want to claim that Abraham Lincoln or Albert Einstein would have been on your side.

Quit, don’t quit -- noodles, don’t noodles -- you are too concerned with what was, and what will be. There’s a saying. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift: that is why it is called the present.

-- Master Oogway (Kung fu panda, 2008)

Let’s look at some variants. I’ll stick to two themes: quotations in video games, and Alexander and his conquests.

Entrance to Rapture (BioShock, 2007)

Video games

BioShock

All good things of this earth flow into the city.

-- BioShock (2007)

This quotation is openly political. The line is indirectly based on Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.38 -- Thucydides, that hero of alt-righters who either haven’t read him or haven’t understood him. (The Melian dialogue isn’t an instruction manual, guys, it’s a lesson about the immorality of power.)

In BioShock, the line is set over the entrance to Rapture, the underwater city where the game is set. It plays on a double meaning of ‘flow’. First, a boast about Rapture’s affluence, and the supposed superiority of its libertarian economic system; second, a quiet joke on the fact that Rapture is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and its resources come washing in on the ocean currents.

But the use of a classical allusion also feeds into Rapture’s ideological set-up. The founder of the city in the game, Andrew Ryan, intended the city to be a libertarian utopia. But, when the player actually arrives there, it turns out to be an objectivist nightmare, a monster from the lowest circles of Ayn Rand’s malevolence.

The quotation plays on the way that alt-righters often cast themselves as heirs of Greek and Latin culture. If you see people quoting taglines like si vis pacem para bellum (‘if you want peace, prepare war’, paraphrased from Vegetius), or μολὼν λαβέ (‘come and get them’: Herodotus on the battle of Thermopylae), or Deus vult (a modern Latin motto translated from a mediaeval French one associated with the Crusades), or calling themselves ‘the Spartans’ (Thermopylae again) -- well, then, you know exactly where they sit on the political spectrum. You know what colour their skin is, and what they would like to do to people from the Near East.

So when Rapture’s entranceway quotes Thucydides’ line about Athens at the height of its power and wealth, it seems that the fictional Ryan intended to evoke Athens’ ‘golden age’ and his own politics, both at once.

But it’s a bit of genius from the game’s writers, because it’s also ironic. Athens was obsessed with the purity of its democratic constitution. But if you know your history you’ll know that Athens didn’t owe its prosperity in that period to its democracy, but to its tyrannical imperialism and disregard for the autonomy of other states. The ‘greatness’ of Athenian democracy goes hand-in-hand with ideological puritanism, and flagrant violations of human rights. Just like Rapture.

The BioShock quotation isn’t directly from Thucydides: it comes from the film City hall. There Al Pacino speaks the line, as the mayor of New York: he attributes it to Pericles, as ‘the first and perhaps only great mayor’ --

All things good of this earth flow into the city because of the city’s greatness.

-- City hall (1996)

Thucydides’ wording is more literally ‘because of the size of the city, all things come into it from the whole earth’ (ἐπεσέρχεται δὲ διὰ μέγεθος τῆς πόλεως ἐκ πάσης γῆς τὰ πάντα). The minor distortion ‘good things’ for ‘all goods’ (τὰ πάντα) comes from Rex Warner’s translation of Thucydides --

Then the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow in to us ...

-- Thucydides 2.38 (tr. Warner)

I’m guessing the writers of City hall read Rex Warner’s version. Then, later on, BioShock inherited the phrasing.

An Aesop quotation about archery, without any context or relevance to the role of archery in the game (Civilization V, 2010)

Sid Meier’s Civilization

Some entries in the Civilization series (1991 to present) display quotations at moments when the player’s civilisation discovers a new technology or completes a world wonder. Many of them are attributed to ancient sources, and many of them are genuine.

That isn’t praise. Civilization generally has a casual approach to history. The quotations are there precisely to give an appearance of historical content, without any historical method. It’s a veneer of history-flavoured ganache on a dry cake. Some very bad misunderstandings of history have come from Civilization.

I can’t go through all of the quotations because there are too many. Ancient Greco-Roman sources account for sixteen quotations in Civilization VI (2016), seventeen in Civilization V (2010), and fifteen in Civilization IV (2005). Another four appear in the spin-off Alpha Centauri (1999).

As a first impression, generally the older games are the more careful, and pay more attention to nuance and context. The quotations in Alpha Centauri are exact quotations from Plato’s Republic, Symposium, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics, and are chosen to reflect the ideological positions of factions within the game. In Civilization VI, the quotations are a blend of accuracy and inaccuracy, and are chosen merely because they’re roughly related in some way. These quotations are accurate --

‘And first Hephaestus makes a great and massive shield ... And he forged on the shield two noble cities.’ -- Homer (Civ VI, ‘Metal Casting’ technology)

= Iliad 18.478 and 490-491 (tr. Robert Fagles, uncredited)

‘At Rhodes was set up a Colossus of seventy cubits high, representing the Sun ... the artist expended as much bronze on it as seemed likely to create a dearth in the mines.’ -- Philo of Byzantium (Civ VI, ‘Colossus’ building)

= Philon of Byzantium, On the seven wonders §4 (tr. Denys Haynes, uncredited)

-- but the game obviously has zero interest in the purpose of Hephaestus’ shield, or in the irony that the historical Colossus collapsed in just a few decades. And these ones are just wrong --

‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’ -- supposedly Aristotle (‘Education’ tech)

‘I sprang upon the swift ship in the form of a dolphin, pray to me as Apollo Delphinius; also the altar itself shall be called Delphinius and overlooked forever.’ -- supposedly Homer (‘Oracle’ building)

The first one starts out with some real Aristotle, but everything after the word ‘mind’ is made up. The second one isn’t Homer, and if you’re thinking it doesn’t make sense, that’s because they missed out part of the sentence.

It is characteristic of an educated man only to look for precision in each class of things so far as the nature of the subject admits. Getting an argument from likelihood from a mathematician would be like asking for theorems from a rhetorician.

-- Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics i.1094b.23-27 (§1.3)

Since, when I was first seen in the murky sea and I leapt onto the swift ship, I was in the form of a dolphin, so you should pray to me as Delphinian. And the altar will itself be ‘Delphinian’ and ‘Overlooking’ forever.

-- Cynaethus, Hymn to Apollo 493-496

Civilization is, in a limited way, good for the public understanding of history, to the extent that it gets people interested in history. But the game’s overall structure is antithetical to history. Every aspect of gameplay revolves around technologies, and every branch of the ‘tech tree’ is teleological, guiding every civilisation to a pre-determined goal, which looks exactly like the technologies available in present-day western countries -- or, in the ‘futurist’ stage of the game, something that looks like western science fiction.

The whole thing presupposes that anything that doesn’t get us towards modern Mechanized Infantry and Mobile SAM isn’t a valid part of history, and isn’t worth knowing about. The point of history, according to Civilization, is to lead towards us. Ever heard anyone ask ‘What has Africa done for us’? Or ‘Why study the Byzantines, when it’s the western Roman Empire that gave us roads, Vergil, and Catholicism’? I have. And that’s teleological history. Or, to put it another way: not history.

Right to left: Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, James Shigeta as Joseph Takagi, Alexander Godunov as Karl (Die hard, 1988)

Alexander

Hans Gruber vs. Plutarch

‘And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.’ {chuckle} Benefits of a classical education.

-- Hans Gruber, Die hard (1988)

The idea behind this ‘quotation’ is to cast Gruber (Alan Rickman) as an opposite to the hero John McClane (Bruce Willis). Gruber is educated, McClane relies on street smarts; Gruber is evil, McClane is good; Gruber wears a suit, McClane looks like a redneck for most of the film; Gruber is European, McClane is John Wayne (‘yippie-ki-yay’).

It’s a pretty straightforward message: education corrupts.

Now, I put ‘quotation’ in scare-quotes, because it isn’t one. ‘Hans baby’ may be an exceptional thief, but I’m afraid his classical education was shonky. In this case, though, I don’t think that’s what the writers intended. This misquotation is more a reflection of America under Reagan than it is of Gruber’s morals. The line echoes something Plutarch wrote (though Gruber doesn’t attribute it to Plutarch, as WikiQuote claims). Die hard gets its version of the line from The Twilight Zone -- ‘he cried because he had no more worlds to conquer’ (‘Of late I think of Cliffordville’, 1963) -- but both of them reverse it: it’s the exact opposite of what Plutarch says.

When Alexander heard Anaxarchos speaking about an infinity of universes, he wept. His friends asked what was wrong. He said, ‘Isn’t it worth weeping if there are infinite universes, and we haven’t yet become the masters of even one?’

-- Plutarch, On tranquility of mind 466d (§4)

Plutarch’s fictional Alexander doesn’t weep because he’s run out of conquests, he weeps because there’s too much to conquer and he can’t get the job done.

(The variation between ‘worlds’ and ‘universes’ is fine, by the way. The Greek word kosmos is just like ‘world’ in English: it can mean the universe as a whole, but also ‘the (human) world’, that is, earth. Plutarch’s Alexander is pretty clearly thinking about conquering the earth, not the entire universe.)

The point of this misquotation isn’t to showcase the laziness of the writers, though: no one cares about that. It’s the notion that education is a sign of moral depravity. And that’s a pretty clear reflection of Reaganism.

‘The Great’

Any time you call Alexander ‘Alexander the Great’, you aren’t doing it because that’s his due title. Because it never was. What you’re doing is supporting the Great Man theory of history.

That’s the theory that the course of history is driven by outstanding individuals, movers and shakers, heroes: Alexander, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon. Historians tend to be very, very hostile to that theory, and for good reason. The famous individuals of history don’t emerge into the limelight because they create limelight around themselves, but because they encapsulate historical ideas and forces that are coming to a head in their lifetimes. That doesn’t mean they aren’t exceptional individuals -- just that history doesn’t revolve around them.

Nowadays the Great Man theory mainly serves to keep the ‘right’ people at the centre of everyone’s attention: it makes sure people talk about rich powerful men. It’s a way to prevent you from thinking about women, minorities, and people who are enslaved or poor.

It’s especially artificial because it isn’t real. Wikipedia names Alexander

Alexander the Great (Ancient Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας ...)

as if it’s a formal title, but there’s nothing to suggest he was called ‘the Great’ during his lifetime. Evidence for the nickname only starts to mount up 250 years after his death, towards the end of the 1st century BCE.

Here’s a whole article on the subject by Professor Catherine Rubincam. She agrees with earlier scholarship that ‘the Great’ was actually originally used for the Seleucid king Antiochus III, around 205 BCE, over 100 years after Alexander died. But after a thorough look at the evidence, she concludes that the popularity of Alexander’s title doesn’t come from Antiochus: its popularity comes from Roman writers talking about Alexander.

Rubincam thinks that process did begin around Antiochus’ time, shown by a reference to ‘great Alexander’ in one of Plautus’ plays (Mostellaria 775-777). I have my doubts. In Plautus it could just be a general term of adulation. Rubincam herself shows that the main support for ‘the Great’ as a title comes from books written centuries later, around the time of Augustus: Trogus, Livy, and Velleius Paterculus. Not that it’s conspicuous that Alexander isn’t called ‘the Great’ any earlier -- I’m just suspicious of granting so much weight to a passing reference in Plautus. Evidence of Alexander being called ‘the Great’ in Greek doesn’t start to pop up until another 200 years later. The earliest references are in Plutarch and Athenaeus, in the mid-to-late 100s CE.

References: Plutarch, Life of Aemilius Paulus 23.5; Life of Pyrrhus 11.2, 19.2; Life of Pelopidas 34.2; On the fortune of Alexander 336e9, 340b4, 341c11; Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 6.19 p. 231 = FGrHist 76 F 37a. The reference in Athenaeus cites a much earlier author, Douris of Samos, but Douris is lost and Athenaeus’ text is a paraphrase, not a quotation. Another early author, Timaeus, is paraphrased in a similar way with a reference to Alexander ‘the Great’ in Longinus On the sublime 4.2.

The hanging gardens: ‘seven wonders’ postscript

Eight months ago I wrote a post on the ‘seven wonders’, as canonised in several ancient lists. I pointed out that the make-up of the list changed over time; that the lighthouse of Alexandria wasn’t in the ancient canon; that there’s no reason to imagine the Colossus of Rhodes stood at the harbour (and it certainly didn’t stand astride the harbour); and that the pyramids are described as ‘shadowless’ in two sources, possibly because ancient tourists were impressed at the shadowless view from the top in the middle part of the day.

I also committed my share of blunders. In particular, I pointed out that the extant lists of seven wonders that mention the gardens -- Antipater, Greek Anthology 8.177, and Philon -- do not tell us where the hanging gardens were. But I blithely ignored several sources that do tell us the hanging gardens were at Babylon.

The hanging gardens as imagined in Lego by ‘Brickman’, Ryan McNaught (‘Let’s go build’ exhibition, Te Papa, Wellington, Dec. 2017. Photo by T. Schaefer.)

This is just a short note to correct that blunder. (I’ve also annotated the older post with some corrections, leaving my blunders present but stricken out.)

Greco-Roman sources

First, here are the extant sources that state that the hanging gardens counted among the ‘seven wonders’:

• Megasthenes (C. 4-3 BCE) or Abydenus (C. 2 CE). Megasthenes’ Indica book 4, reported by Abydenus’ History of the Chaldaeans, reported in turn by Eusebius in the Armenian text of the Chronika. Translations: p. 19.13-17 Karst; p. 39 Petermann; pp. 55-6 Aucher Ancyranus. Citation of Megasthenes at p. 41 ed. Petermann (mistranslated in Karst).
• Antipater of Sidon (C. 2 BCE), Greek anthology 9.58.
• Strabo (C. 2 CE), Geography 16.1.5.
• Greek anthology 8.177 (date unknown).
• Philon (C. 4-5 CE), On the seven wonders.

Abydenus-Eusebius and Strabo don’t give complete lists of seven wonders, but they do count the hanging gardens among the seven.

Antipater, Gk. anth. 8.177, and Philon don’t specify locations for the gardens, but Megasthenes(-Abydenus-Eusebius) and Strabo do. They tell us the gardens were in Babylon. So do three other sources. Here’s a complete list of sources that report a location for the hanging gardens:

• Berossus of Babylon (C. 4 BCE), Chaldaean histories book 3, reported in Josephus Against Apion 140-141 and Jewish antiquities 10.225-227 — Babylon.
• Megasthenes (C. 4-3 BCE), Indica book 4, reported in Josephus (C. 1 CE), Jewish antiquities 10.225-227 (= FGrHist 715 F 1a); and with Abydenus (C. 2 CE) as an intermediary source, in the Armenian texts of Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica 9.41 (= FGrHist 715 F 1b) and the Chronica, p. 19.13-17 Karst = p. 39 Petermann = pp. 55-6 Aucher Ancyranus (citation of Megasthenes at p. 41 ed. Petermann) — Babylon.
• Diodorus of Sicily (C. 1 BCE) 2.10.1-6 — Babylon.
• Pliny the Elder (C. 1 CE), Natural history 36.94 — Thebes (i.e. Luxor), Egypt. (Possibly also reflected in Gregory of Nazianzus (C. 4 CE), Oration 34.63, who lists six remarkable places and buildings including ‘Egyptian Thebes’.)
• Quintus Curtius Rufus (C. 1 CE?), History of Alexander 5.1.31-35 — Babylon.
• Strabo (C. 2 CE), Geography 16.1.5 — Babylon.

The earliest sources, Berossus and Megasthenes, do not survive. But they are probably the most important sources. Berossus came from Babylon and wrote about his home city. Megasthenes lived shortly after the time of Alexander and wrote extensively about his travels to the east. But they’re not the only possible sources. Diodorus cites Ctesias for his description of the wall of Babylon (2.8.5), another of the seven wonders in Antipater’s canon. Ctesias was a Greek doctor who worked in the Achaemenid Persian court around the time of Herodotus (late C. 4 BCE): it’s possible he wrote about the hanging gardens as well. As for Pliny’s testimony, I think we can all agree to disregard it as an aberration.

And here’s one last list of sources, this time on the story of the gardens’ origin. See above for links.

• Megasthenes-Abydenus-Eusebius — the gardens were built by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (C. 6 BCE) as an adornment for his palace.
• Josephus, Jewish antiquities 10.225-227 citing both Megasthenes and Berossus, and Against Apion 140-141 citing just Berossus — the gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar II, with the appearance of mountains, to please his wife who was a Mede (i.e. from northern Iraq).
• Diodorus — built by an Assyrian king (which suggests C. 7 BCE or earlier), at some point later than the legendary Semiramis (Shammuramat), in order to please one of his concubines, who was Persian and missed the mountainous countryside of her home.
• Curtius Rufus — built by an Assyrian king to please his wife, who missed seeing groves and forests.

The hanging gardens as imagined in Minecraft by ‘lonestarr86’. (‘I only know what these are because of Sid Meier[’s Civilization games].’ -- noseonarug17)

... or Nineveh?

Stephanie Dalley has made an alternative argument that the gardens were actually at Nineveh. This is in her book The mystery of the hanging garden of Babylon (Oxford, 2013). Nineveh is some 440 km to the north of Babylon, at modern Mosul. The evidence is circumstantial -- there is no direct testimony supporting it -- but that is not to say that it is weak.

• The references to Nebuchadnezzar that Josephus attributes to Berossus may have been inserted by an intermediate source.
• The theme of homesickness is not one that is seen in Babylonian or Assyrian literature, and therefore likely to be a spurious Greek addition.
• Some parallels to Berossus can be found in Babylonian epigraphy, but that is not the case for the hanging garden story.
• The ‘mountainous’ appearance of the gardens as described by Josephus and Diodorus is typical of Assyrian gardens, as shown by illustrations of gardens in bas-relief panels found at Khorsabad and Nineveh. Babylon, by contrast, is flat.
• Nebuchadnezzar’s citadel at Babylon was 13 metres above the level of the river Euphrates, making hands-free irrigation impossible.
• Nineveh had an excellent canal system.
• Sennacherib is known from epigraphic evidence to have built a garden irrigated by a canal at Nineveh.
• Dalley interprets a difficult passage on an inscription from the time of Sennacherib (early C. 7 BCE) to mean that he had access to so-called ‘Archimedean’ screws, used for raising water by applying horizontal force.

I am impressed by Dalley’s argument, but it’s not all plain sailing:

• You can sway between Nineveh or Babylon depending on whether you think the point of the gardens is to be typical for their location, or to be an exceptional reminder of a faraway place. The Greek sources firmly opt for the latter. They specifically state that the gardens were so striking because of Babylon’s flatness, and the point of the story about the king’s wife or concubine is that she missed the hills of her home.
• Much of Dalley’s argumentation is designed to cast Nineveh as a possible location, rather than to make Babylon impossible. For example, the ‘Archimedean’ screws. If Sennacherib did have access to Archimedean screws (which is perfectly plausible), that doesn’t mean they didn’t also exist at Babylon. The Greek sources unhesitatingly put screws at Babylon, as Dalley herself points out: Strabo refers to a screw (kochlias) used to raise water from the Euphrates, and Philon refers to water being raised by a spiral engine (kochlioeidōs ... ton helika tōn mēchanēmatōn). This tells us nothing about the location of the gardens.
• In a similar vein, absence of reference to gardens in Babylonian inscriptions doesn’t mean absence of gardens. We can’t expect a perfect match between Berossus and epigraphic evidence. (It’s not as though we have direct testimony linking the hanging gardens to Nineveh, either.)
• Dalley has overlooked Megasthenes’ testimony. Now, she does posit a Greek intermediate source between Berossus and Josephus, to explain why Josephus’ story features Nebuchadnezzar, which Dalley regards as spurious, without committing to calling Berossus a liar. I suspect if she had been aware of Megasthenes, she’d certainly want to identify him as that vehicle. Megasthenes wrote about Nebuchadnezzar’s western campaigns (so Josephus tells us), which are certainly fictional, and the link between the gardens and Nebuchadnezzar also appears in Megasthenes as reported by Eusebius. It looks pretty likely that it really was Megasthenes that introduced Nebuchadnezzar into the story. But that doesn’t mean that the gardens weren’t at Babylon: it means that Diodorus and Curtius Rufus, who make an Assyrian king the star of the story, didn’t draw on Megasthenes. They’re independent evidence putting the gardens at Babylon.

The idea of homesickness as a Greek literary motif is the one really cogent argument against Babylon: it shows that the Greco-Roman testimony is heavily fictionalised. That carries a lot of weight.

On the other hand, if we’re deciding to disregard every scrap of testimony, why imagine any hanging gardens at all? What Dalley has shown, to my mind, is that it’s very possible the hanging gardens were completely fictional, and that the idea of them was inspired by Assyrian gardens. The choice is between that, and the gardens of Babylon being a real thing. I’m still leaning towards the latter, because of the independent lines of testimony from Berossus-Megasthenes-Josephus-Eusebius, Diodorus, Curtius Rufus, and Strabo. Either way, it doesn’t look like any Greek list-maker ever included a specific garden at Nineveh in the Greek canon of ‘seven wonders’.

Paying the iron price: Spartan money

We do not sow! Game of Thrones, HBO, 2016
(... that’s because sowing is the helots’ job)

Welcome to 2018! Our first topic for this year may not actually be a myth. When modern people hear it, they often think it’s a myth, because it sounds pretty daft. But it’s actually pretty plausible that the early and Classical-era Spartans really did use iron spits as a kind of money. It’s just that there are some solid, sensible reasons why they might have done so.

The main piece of ancient testimony comes from Plutarch, a 2nd-century-CE essayist, biographer, and priest:

For first, [Lycurgus] voided all gold and silver coinage, and decreed that they should use only iron; and to this he assigned only a small price for a large weight and volume, so that a value of ten mnai required a lot of storage in the home, and a pair of oxen to transport it. When this was ratified, many kinds of crimes disappeared from Lacedaimon. For who was going to steal something, or take bribes in it, or steal it, or take it by force, when it wasn’t possible to conceal it, to possess it jealously, or even to make a profit by cutting it up? For the red-hot iron was quenched with vinegar, it’s said, so that the hardening took away its usefulness and value for any other purpose, making it weak and unworkable.

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 9.1-2

Now, Plutarch’s story is certainly distorted. Most of the stories of Spartan exceptionalism that are still popular today -- about the Spartan agōgē, killing ‘defective’ babies, military supremacy, and so on -- were shaped by centuries of myth-making, long after Sparta’s actual heyday. Some of them are pure fiction. Plutarch is one of the most unreliable sources we have for classical Sparta.

So you’d think there’s good reason to raise eyebrows at Plutarch’s story. And yet, there may be a kernel of truth in it. Pre-classical and classical Sparta may have used iron to store value. But it wasn’t a novelty introduced by the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, and in context, it makes complete sense.

Plutarch’s biggest mistake is that coinage wasn’t invented anywhere until the 6th century BCE, when Sparta’s military dominance was already at its height. That’s when coins were first developed in Lydia, a kingdom that dominated western Anatolia. A few decades later, Greek states like Aegina and Athens started making their own coinage.

Lydia doesn’t have a big public profile nowadays, but there are still two names from ancient Lydia that are pretty famous: king Midas, who really was a historical figure, even if we take it as read that the story about turning things to gold is fictional, and king Croesus, who was famous for being wealthy, and for losing his kingdom in the most ironic way possible, and who still survives in the proverbial saying ‘as rich as Croesus’. (The saying is a bit out of fashion now: maybe it’s better known via Terry Pratchett’s parodic version, ‘as rich as Creosote’.)

Anyway, by the time coinage arrived in the Greek world, myths of Spartan exceptionalism were well on the way. The oddity of Sparta isn’t that they adopted iron currency: it’s that they held off on adopting coinage for a few centuries, until the 200s BCE. That delay ended up being built into the self-image of later Sparta, which was fixated on nostalgia for a distant past that was largely fictional.

As to the use of iron, rather than silver: it was completely normal to use base metals to store value. Anyone who has ever read the Homeric Iliad or Odyssey (mid-7th century BCE) will have noticed that when people give each other wealth, it’s often in the form of metal household utensils: namely, tripods. These tripods were metal stands used to support braziers and the like. And it’s not just Homer: tripods are a frequent subject of interest in the surviving Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece. Homer and the Mycenaeans had a real thing about tripods.

Possibly not the best person to burgle: Herakles gets caught red-handed stealing a tripod from the god Apollo (Attic hydria, Madrid Painter, ca. 530 BCE, Museo Arqueológico Nacional of Spain)

That isn’t because of a fetish, and it’s not because they’re made of valuable materials. (They’re normally bronze: even baser than iron.) It’s because

1. Metal utensils are fungible. They’re interchangeable commodities which will have a similar use-value and exchange-value everywhere.
2. Metal utensils don’t degrade, they’re hard to damage, and they’re easily transportable. All of these things make them a hell of a vehicle for storing value.

We do see other measures of value in early Greek history, too, like clothes, barley, and oxen: they had fungibility too, but not all the advantages that metal had. Grain spoils; oxen die. Transporting them poses various challenges. On the other hand, they had other advantages: grain and oxen can produce more grain and oxen. So they were strong measures of productivity, more than ownership.

For stored value, metal tripods were the most prestigious unit. But a tripod is a pretty big object, and they have to come in whole numbers. You can’t buy an item for half a tripod, or a twelfth of a tripod. Tripods are for rich people: they’re the $1000 note of the ancient world. What did people do for smaller values? Did they pay bills in bags of grain? Were there shops that sold trinkets for, say, a hat and one shoe? Could a poor girl have a time-share in a cow as her dowry?

All of those are very feasible. But they may also have used smaller metal utensils. And the leading candidate for the utensil of choice is the spit -- the kind used for roasting things over a barbecue. The value of spits wasn’t just tied up in their metal content: they had potential ritual and social functions, which could make them good not only for storing value, but also for exchanging small values. If bronze tripods were the ancient $1000 bill, metal spits were the ancient payWave.

One of the most important venues that involved a large number of small transactions was the communal sacrifice. One relatively well-off person holds a sacrifice, and to spread the cost, invites a whole community to take part. Everyone likes this idea, because meat was a very small component of the ancient Greek diet: a sacrifice like this is where you get an awful lot of your protein. In exchange for a small payment, each participant gets a share of the meat and settles down with their family for a feast. The result is a combo of religious festival, picnic, and restaurant.

And in that context, what better way of paying the entry fee could there be, than the one metal utensil you’re actually going to need at the event? This function is suggested in the terminology: the Greek word for ‘spit’ is obelos, and in cities that adopted coinage, the word for a small-denomination coin was obolos. We’re a single unstressed vowel reduction away from a definite link.

A ‘handful’ of obeloi at the Numismatic Museum, Athens: could the Spartans have used these as currency?

(The larger unit, the drachmē worth six obols, is often thought to come from a dragma or ‘handful’ of spits. But it could also have an independent origin. Hesychius tells us that drax, another form of the same root, was a ‘handful’ in the sense of a quarter of a xestēs ‘pint’: that suggests a measure of grain rather than a handful of metal spits. See Hesychius δ.2319; similarly LXX 3 Kings 17:12.)

We don’t have 100% certainty (a) that this is how the word ‘obol’ came about, and (b) that when Plutarch reports a story about the Spartans using iron money, the story is actually about iron spits. That’s the theory that we find in some lexicographers, like Zonaras, but there’s no guarantee that they weren’t just guessing. But it does look plausible enough to treat it as the standing theory on the subject.

Even Plutarch’s more limited claim, that the Spartans prohibited silver and copper coinage, needs some careful interpretation. The Lycurgan ban is certainly fictional -- if Lycurgus was ever a real person, he died before coinage was first invented -- but Plutarch reports on another ban of other cities’ coinage in 404 BCE, which could well be historical (Plutarch Life of Lysander 17). Yet it’s a pretty common principle of ancient history that bans like that happened because the practice was actually going on fairly commonly -- that’s why the ban was needed. Moreover we have a report from a 4th-3rd century BCE writer, Dicaearchus of Messana (reported in Athenaeus iv.141c), that when Spartiates brought food contributions to their dining societies (syssitia) they also regularly brought a cash contribution of 10 Aeginetan obols. So even in times when there was a ban on other cities’ currency, Spartans may well have used it on the black market pretty regularly.

There’s no certainty here: we have no guarantees that the obolos ‘small denomination coin’ and obelos ‘spit’ are related, and that the Spartans really did use iron money. They may have simply used other cities’ coinage. But the weaker form of Plutarch’s story has something going for it: that the Spartans may well have used metal utensils to store value, as many people did in archaic Greece; and/or that there was a genuine ban on foreign currency in 404 BCE.

Seven wonders of the world

Both the wall of rocky Babylon, a road for chariots,
     and Zeus on the Alpheius have I seen;
and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Sun,
     and great toil of steep pyramids,
and Mausolus’ terrific monument; but when I saw
     Artemis’ house, racing to the clouds,
those others dimmed. I thought, ‘Look: apart from Olympus,
     the Sun never shone on anything like it.’

-- Antipater of Sidon, in Greek anthology 9.58

The ancient Greeks had lots of lists of seven things. The first one was a canon of ‘seven sages’. That’s the context for the ‘seven wonders’. Another source, spuriously attributed to Hyginus (Fabulae 221-223, 1st century CE), puts lists of ‘seven sages’, ‘seven lyric poets’, and ‘seven wonders’ right next to each other. And our earliest source, the Laterculi Alexandrini (Berlin papyrus 13044v), is partly lost, but enough survives that we can tell it had lists of ‘seven famous men’ and the ‘seven greatest islands’ as well. Seven is a typical number. (Not a symbolic number, mind: there isn’t anything in particular that it symbolises. Just typical.)

Antipater’s poem, above, is the earliest intact list (2nd-1st centuries BCE): (1) the city wall of Babylon; (2) the sculptor Pheidias’ statue of Zeus, in the temple at Olympia, on the river Alpheius; (3) hanging gardens, of uncertain location (usually Babylon) (correction:) at Babylon; (4) the ‘Colossus’, an enormous statue of the sun god Helios on the island of Rhodes (correction:) in the city of Rhodes; (5) the pyramids at Giza; (6) the tomb of Mausollus, or ‘Mausoleum’, at Halicarnassus; and (7) the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

But different lists exist. They shuffle the sequence, they have many substitutions. Pseudo-Hyginus leaves out the hanging gardens, and puts the palace of king Cyrus at Ecbatana in its place.

Let’s not spend time on all of the wonders. Before we look over a select few, I’d better confirm that this post was originally inspired by the recent announcement of a fascinating discovery at the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza: scientists used muon tomography to discover a large void in the middle of the pyramid. It’s a terrific discovery, but I don’t have any special insights myself: nothing I say here has any bearing on it.

‘The Great Lighthouse’, one of the wonders in Civilization VI (Firaxis Games, 2016): +1 to ship movement, +3 gold, and +1 Great Admiral point per turn. If you like that sort of thing.

The lighthouse of Alexandria (a.k.a. Pharos)

The lighthouse of Alexandria doesn’t appear in any ancient list of the seven wonders.

Oh, it existed. It just wasn’t one of the seven wonders.

This is contrary to what you may read in the New Pauly, or the Britannica, or Wikipedia, or the Ancient history encyclopedia. (The Oxford classical dictionary gets it right, though.) If you go and read the sources these encyclopaedias cite -- where they do cite any, that is -- you will find not a single mention of the lighthouse, nor any reference to the island of Pharos that the lighthouse was named after.

Conversely, if you read up on the Pharos -- for example, the description in Strabo 17.1.6, or Pliny the Elder’s Natural history 36.83-- you will find no mention of a list of seven wonders.

Now, this bald statement does need some qualification -- but only a little. Pliny’s description of the Pharos is embedded in an account of a couple of dozen remarkable constructions, of which two or three others are normally considered to be among the canonical seven wonders (the pyramids of Giza, 36.75-76 and 78-82; Pharos, 36.84; hanging gardens of Egyptian Thebes -- not Babylon! -- 36.94; temple of Artemis at Ephesus, 36.95-97). You could call this a kind of a list of wonders, but it’s certainly not ‘seven’ and there’s only a partial overlap with ancient lists of a canonical seven.

The Pharos only starts to creep into lists of seven in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. These late antique and early mediaeval lists are very different from the ancient canon. Here are the earliest appearances of the Pharos in these lists:

• An anonymous poem in the Greek Anthology (9.656) listing: the palace of emperor Anastasius in Constantinople; the ‘Capitolian hall’ (not hill) in Italy; the ‘Rufinian grove’ at Pergamon; the temple of the deified Hadrian at Cyzicus; the pyramids; the Colossus of Rhodes; and the Pharos.
• Gregory of Tours, On the course of stars (preface): Noah’s ark; the wall of Babylon; the temple of Solomon; the tomb of a Persian king (presumably Mausollus. who was a Persian satrap); the Colossus of Rhodes; the theatre of Heraclea; and the Pharos.
• (ps.-?)Bede, On the seven wonders: the Capitolium of Rome; the Pharos; the Colossus of Rhodes; a statue of Bellerophon suspended in air (unknown location); the theatre of Heraclea; a heated bath (unknown location); temple of Artemis.

Why did the Pharos make its way into these late lists? That must surely be because the ancient canon had mostly been destroyed by that time. Only the Mausoleum (destroyed by earthquake in the early mediaeval period) and the pyramids were still standing. The Pharos remained in operation until the 12th century. Now, that doesn’t explain why these lists continued to include some long-lost structures: maybe the Colossus and the temple of Artemis owe their continued presence in the lists to their sheer memorability.

The Titan of Braavos (Game of Thrones, HBO)

The Colossus of Rhodes

The Colossus was a statue of Helios (the sun), made by Chares of Lindos, which collapsed in an earthquake around 226 BCE, less than a hundred years after it was built. It’s popularly imagined as standing astride the harbour entrance at the port of Rhodes. But that’s a complete fabrication, dating to the early modern period.

Even so, that’s how George R. R. Martin imagines it when he parodies it in his A Song of Ice and Fire books -- and if it’s good enough for Braavos, then by golly it must be good enough for Rhodes! Just in case you weren’t sure Martin was taking inspiration directly from ancient Rhodes, we’re told that the Titan is one of a canon of nine ‘Wonders made by man’. The thing is, George Martin does get a bit over-excited about imagining ancient edifices as being really really big.

The Colossus was certainly a jolly big statue. Here are the sources on its size:

• Strabo, Geography 14.2.5: quotes a poem (presumably 3rd cent. BCE) putting it at 70 cubits, or 32.3 m.
• pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 223: 90 feet high, or 26.6 m.
• Pliny, Natural history 34.41: 70 cubits high, or 32.3 m.
• Philon of Byzantium (ca. 4th-5th century CE; not the same person as the 2nd cent. BCE mechanical writer), On the seven wonders 4: 70 cubits, or 32.3 m.
• (Pseudo-?)Bede, On the seven wonders: 136 feet, or 40.2 m (if we reckon in Roman feet).

There’s no doubt that 70 cubits was the canonical figure. Ps.-Hyginus’ figures are untrustworthy, as we’ll see below, and Bede had no access to any better information than the ancient sources did. Even if the 70 cubit figure was exaggerated -- which is likely -- the statue was probably still around 30 metres high. For comparison, the Statue of Liberty is 46 metres high (from feet to torch).

The modern harbour entrance at Rhodes is about 150 metres wide. Ancient triremes needed about 12 metres horizontal space (with oars). Even if the statue was getting on for 40 m high, which it wasn’t, its feet could hardly have been more than 10 metres apart. At 32 m, we’re talking more like 8 m apart. And that’s if it’s doing a really good stretch.

So, no.

In actual fact there’s nothing to suggest it was even located at the harbour, let alone standing astride the harbour. The whole scenario is hogwash. Pliny reports that ‘it is a marvel even lying down’, and talks of visitors seeing the places where the limbs became detached and trying to put their arms around one thumb. In other words: when it collapsed, it fell on land.

I’m a pyramid ... but probably not the one you were expecting. A 2nd century CE pyramid at Meroë (modern Sudan), much pointier and shorter than the famous ones at Giza. (Photo by Fabrizio Demartis, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence)

The pyramids

The list of wonders that we get in pseudo-Hyginus helpfully gives sizes for several buildings in the list. The last entry reads:

The pyramids in Egypt where no shadow is visible; 60 feet high.

-- ps.-Hyginus, Fabulae 223

A couple of problems here. First the height; second, the absence of shadows. They’re both wrong. But it turns out that neither of these elements is unique to ps.-Hyginus.

Ps.-Hyginus’ figure, 60 feet, in Roman feet comes to 17.7 m, which is much too small. Then again, Philon’s On the seven wonders (4th/5th cent. CE) gets it wrong too: Philon reports the height as 300 cubits (133 m, converting using Roman feet), and the circumference as 6 stadia (278 m per side). The actual figures for the Great Pyramid are 146 m high and 230 m per side. Philon is at least in the right order of magnitude, unlike ps.-Hyginus ... but it does show that accurate figures for the pyramids’ size were not well known.

Second problem: ‘where no shadow is visible’ (quarum umbra non videtur). A later writer, the 2nd century essayist Lucian, also refers to shadowless pyramids (Toxaris 27). (Later still, so does Cassiodorus, Variae 7.15.4; but Cassiodorus’ list of wonders is based closely on ps.-Hyginus, so he’s not an independent source.)

Now, ps.-Hyginus and Lucian can’t possibly be thinking of pyramids that were shadowless even at sunrise and sunset. That’s geometrically impossible. They must mean pyramids that were shadowless in the middle of the day, especially at midday -- because in antiquity, shadow measurements regularly refer to gnomon readings taken at midday.

In summer, the Great Pyramid is indeed shadowless at midday. But not all year round: only for eight months or so. In antiquity, the earth’s axial tilt was 23.8° (slightly greater than the present-day figure of 23.4°), and the Great Pyramid is at latitude 30.0° N; that means that at the winter solstice, the sun’s midday altitude was 36.3°. (Yes, there’s a rounding error in there.) But the slope of the Great Pyramid is 51.9°. Result: shadow.

It’s futile to go looking for alternative pyramids to suit ps.-Hyginus’ report, because there are no good candidates. Pyramids in present-day Egypt are all in the north, with none south of the Fayum, so the difference in the sun’s height at midsummer isn’t nearly great enough to matter. The Nubian pyramids at Meroë, in what is now Sudan, about 200 km north-east of Khartoum, are much further south -- the sun reaches 49.3° above the horizon in midwinter -- but they still get shadows, because they’re much steeper than the Egyptian pyramids (about 70°, as compared with the usual Egyptian angles of 40-50°). If an Egyptian-style pyramid were built at Meroë, it could easily have no midday shadow all year round; but Nubian-style pyramids are just too pointy.

Besides, pretty much every other account of the pyramids makes it clear that they’re talking about the pyramids at Giza. If there’s anything at all to the claims in ps.-Hyginus and Lucian, they must have been thinking of pyramids that are shadowless in limited circumstances: between the spring and autumn equinoxes, at most, and only in the middle part of the day.

So if this shadowlessness is so limited, why did ps.-Hyginus and Lucian find it so striking? There may be a clue in Philon:

The length of the ascent makes it tiring to travel up there, and standing on the peak makes people’s vision darken when they look down at the drop.

-- Philon (of Byzantium?), On the seven wonders 2

Modern visitors aren’t allowed to go climbing up the pyramids. The penalty is three years in prison, if you’re interested. But ancient tourists could. It seems plausible that looking down 146 m, with no shadows in any direction, could have been disorienting and disturbing. The modern lawbreakers who scale the Great Pyramid every few years don’t get to see this, because they have to do it under cover of darkness.

Further reading

• Brodersen, Kai 2006 [1999]. Die sieben Weltwunder. Legendäre Kunst- und Bauwerke, 7th ed. Munich: C. H. Beck.
• Clayton, Peter A.; Price, Martin J. (eds.) 1988. The seven wonders of the ancient world. London/New York: Routledge.
• Roscher, W. H. 1906. Die Hebdomadenlehren der griechischen Philosophen und Ärzte. Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Klasse der königl. Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 24.6. Leipzig: Teubner. pp. 186-193.

Endnote. Lists of the seven wonders

The earliest list, but incomplete, is in the Laterculi Alexandrini, partially preserved on Berlin papyrus 13044 v (late 2nd century BCE) at column 8. Preserved entries: temple of Artemis, pyramids, Mausoleum.

Antipater, Greek anthology 9.58 is the earliest complete list; the same items appear in a different sequence in Greek anthology 8.177; and an incomplete text, Philon’s On the seven wonders (4th/5th cent. CE) is missing the seventh wonder but is otherwise consistent with the two poems. Wall of Babylon; statue of Zeus; hanging gardens; Colossus of Rhodes; pyramids; Mausoleum; temple of Artemis. Philon breaks off before getting to the Mausoleum. These are the only full lists to include the ‘hanging gardens’, but none of the three mentions its location. Pliny Natural history 36.94 places the hanging gardens at Egyptian Thebes, i.e. Luxor; Strabo 16.1.5 places the gardens at Babylon, specifying that they are considered to be among the seven wonders; Gregory of Nazianzos’s reference to Thebes (see below) may support the Egyptian setting.

Correction, July 2018:

Though none of the three (Antipater, Gk. Anth. 8.177, and Philon) mention the gardens’ location, other sources do:

• Berosus of Babylon, Chaldaean histories book 3, reported in Josephus Ap. 140-141 and J.Ant. 10.225-227;
• Megasthenes, Indica book 4, reported (with Abydenus as an intermediary source) in Josephus J.Ant. 10.225-227 (= FGrHist 715 F 1a), Eusebius Praep. Ev. 9.41 (= FGrHist 715 F 1b), and Euseb. Armenian Chronica p. 19.13-17 Karst = p. 39 Petermann = pp. 55-6 Aucher Ancyranus (citation of Megasthenes at p. 41 ed. Petermann, mistranslated in Karst);
• Diodorus of Sicily 2.10.1-6;
• Q. Curtius Rufus Hist. Alex. 5.1.31-35;
• Strabo Geography 16.1.5.

I’ve now made a new post (July 2018) with better information on ancient testimony for the hanging gardens. See here.

End correction.

Two more lists which are identical to one another (and in the same sequence) appear in ps.-Hyginus Fabulae 223 and Cassiodorus Variae 7.15. Mostly the same as Antipater, above, but they omit the hanging gardens, and include the palace of Cyrus. Only these two lists include the palace of Cyrus. Cassiodorus adds the city of Rome at the end, as an ‘eighth wonder’.

Gregory of Nazianzos, Oration 43.63 (xxxvi.580 Migne) lists six works, of which four or five also appear on the earlier lists: Thebes in Boeotia; Thebes in Egypt (a reference to the hanging gardens?); walls of Babylon; Mausoleum; pyramids; Colossus.

Late antique and early mediaeval sources start to give very different lists, which typically share only two or three items with the ancient lists: Greek anthology 9.656; Gregory of Tours On the course of stars, preface; (ps.-?)Bede On the seven wonders; and many more. For more mediaeval examples see Brodersen 2006.

References outside lists. Diodorus of Sicily’s Library refers to two edifices ‘numbered among the seven most famous works’: the Great Pyramid (1.63.2, 18.4.5); an obelisk at Babylon (2.11.4-5).

Propertius 3.2.17-26 states that the longevity of his poetry is greater than three items conventionally related to the canonical seven: pyramids; temple of Zeus at Olympia; Mausoleum.

Pliny, Natural history 36.64-100, lists numerous ‘wonders’, including three that normally belong to the canonical seven: pyramids (36.75-76, 78-82); hanging gardens of Egyptian Thebes (36.94); temple of Artemis (36.95-97). Elsewhere he describes the Colossus (34.41), in the middle of a discussion of many colossal statues.

Martial, On spectacles 1.1, lists six items of which four normally belong to the canonical seven: pyramids; wall of Babylon; temple of Artemis; altar of Apollo at Delos; Mausoleum; Flavian amphitheatre (Colosseum).

Strabo’s Geography names five items, separately, stating that they belong to the seven: Colossus (14.2.5); Mausoleum (14.2.16); wall of Babylon (16.1.5); hanging gardens of Babylon (16.1.5); pyramids of Khufu and Khafre (17.1.33). He appears to cite the last as two separate wonders.

John Malalas, Chronography 11.16 (279 Dindorf), names the temple of Hadrian at Cyzicus as ‘one of the wonders’.

(I’m sure I’ve missed other isolated references: I’ll admit I haven’t read Kai Brodersen’s book end to end, and I haven’t been able to read Clayton and Price because someone has it out of the library just now.)

Volcano Day

‘Pompeii ... we’re in Pompeii! And it’s Volcano Day!’
Doctor Who, ‘The fires of Pompeii’ (2008)

Warning: this blog post is wrong!

After I posted it, the archaeologist Sophie Hay alerted me to an article, Abdy 2013, which entirely tears out the rug from the central piece of evidence discussed here. The coin which I refer to as ‘minted no earlier than September 79 CE’ actually comes from an earlier issue. The inscription, illustrated and reported below as containing the phrase Imp XV ‘(recognised as) general 15 times’, actually reads Imp XIIII ‘general 14 times’, and there is no PP at the end. The poor state of preservation of the coin misled some very skilled numismatologists ... and I am no numismatologist.

Coin struck from the same reverse die as the coin found at Pompeii. In the case of the Pompeii coin it was originally thought that the number after IMP must be XV, because the capricorn’s tail would block any longer number. In this better preserved coin, however, notice that the XIIII actually crosses the tail. According to Abdy 2013, the Pompeii coin actually dates to July or August 79 CE.(Source: Abdy 2013, Plate 18)

I shall leave the post up, unedited, as a monument to my capacity for being completely wrong!

-- PG, ca. nine hours after post first went up

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The eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 CE, which wiped out the city of Pompeii, is famously recorded in an eyewitness report by Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16. Pliny tells the story of how his uncle, Pliny the Elder, the famed collector of facts, factoids, and oddities, launched a rescue expedition, in the course of which he died from causes apparently related to poor respiration.

Let’s talk about the date of the eruption. According to mainstream tradition, it happened on the 24th of August, 79 CE. This is the date Wikipedia reports, and the date that appears in every edition of Pliny’s Letters. Wikipedia also adds a caveat, ‘(probable)’, and has a substantial section devoted to doubting the date. Still, it leaves a final impression that the evidence is inconclusive. Readers will probably come away feeling free to go on quoting the date as 24 August -- maybe with a ‘(probable)’ warning at most.

In fact the evidence is entirely conclusive: the 24 August date is very definitely wrong. It’s just that among all the discussion, it may be difficult to see what the really decisive piece of evidence is. That’s also the case in the only academic discussion that the Wikipedia discussion cites, Rolandi et al. 2007. Rolandi et al. present loads of information, but their aim isn’t to weigh up which piece of evidence is the most important. But here’s a hint: it’s not the one in the headline of the article (‘the southeast tephra dispersion’). Judging from the Wikipedia article, it looks like it isn’t easy for a layperson to make out the smoking gun amidst the clouds of volcanic sulphur.

The really decisive piece of evidence is this: a coin, which was found in a hoard belonging to victims of the eruption, and which was minted no earlier than September 79 CE.

That’s the one item of evidence that points unambiguously to a later date for the eruption. Everything else is supporting evidence. Climate conditions and the locations of pyroclastic fall deposits; textual evidence in manuscripts of Pliny’s letter; food items found at Pompeii; styles of dress found on the bodies of the dead ... those things are all well and good, sure. But they’re all secondary to the direct and nearly explicit evidence of that coin. They’re helpful to the extent that they make the coin’s evidence more plausible, not because they’re more important than that coin.

(For similar assessments see Beard 2008: 17-19; Lazer 2009: 79-80. They mention all the other evidence, but like me, they both conclude that the coin is ‘[m]ore clinching’ (Beard); ‘This contentious issue may well have been resolved by the ... silver denarius’ (Lazer). If you want another second opinion that’s easier to get at, you can also try this 2013 blog post by ‘Roma Invicta’.)

The traditional date

The traditional date comes from Pliny. Here’s the relevant bit in his letter:

erat Miseni classemque imperio praesens regebat. nonum Kal. Septembres hora fere septima mater mea indicat ei apparere nubem inusitata ...

(My uncle) was at Misenum, on duty in command of a fleet. On the ninth day before the kalends of September, at roughly the seventh hour, my mother pointed out to him that an unusual cloud was appearing ...

-- Pliny, Letters 6.16.4

‘The ninth day before the kalends of September’ is a standard Roman way of reporting the date. The ‘kalends’ were the first day of the month, so the ninth day before that (counting inclusively) was the 24th of August.

Pointing at the coin isn’t going to be enough: we also need to account for Pliny’s testimony. If he says it was the 24th of August, that’s always going to be more explicit than a coin, right?

Well, this is where the manuscripts come in. Looking at actual surviving manuscripts of Pliny shows that it’s extremely unlikely that nonum Kal. Septembres is what Pliny actually wrote. Most manuscripts of Pliny are pretty incoherent about the date, and only one manuscript gives a nice clear-cut text that actually makes sense, and that’s the one that reads ‘24th of August’. Some other manuscripts read novem, which could be either ‘nine’ (‘nine days before the Kalends of September’), which would be an unusual phrasing, or more probably an abbreviation for November, Novem(bres). It may well be that confusion between Novem(bres) and novem has produced nonum (ninth); the phrase hora septima ‘at the seventh hour’ could be responsible for the introduction of Septem(bres).

Realising that this piece of testimony doesn’t actually have much of a leg to stand on is an important component of this argument. It’s still not the decisive point, though. The manuscript readings just remove evidence for the 24 August date; it’s the coin that proves the eruption didn’t happen on 24 August.

Mount Vesuvius looms over the remains of Pompeii

Weighing up the evidence

Here’s the break-down of reasons for doubting the 24 August date, and the different ways in which each reason matters. I’ll give the evidence in the order that Wikipedia mentions it:

1. Manuscript readings in Pliny Letters 6.16.4 show that the traditional date is poorly supported. They are not in any sense contrary evidence: they don’t disprove the 24 August date. Their role lies in making the positive evidence for 24 August decidedly weak.
2. Evidence of heavy clothing found on casts of some eruption victims is mildly supportive of an autumn date. This is very far from compelling, since there are plenty of other explanations (there’s always variation in seasonal weather; the people were fleeing their homes, and may have planned for being without shelter). But it is mildly interesting supporting evidence for doubting the August date. Not remotely in the same league as the next two items, however ...
3. Archaeological finds of autumnal crops, including fruits, hemp, etc., suggest an autumn date for the eruption. These are historically the reason why the traditional date was first doubted, by Carlo Maria Rosini, who excavated Pompeii in the late 1700s. They were decent evidence, and somewhat compelling, but not quite strong enough to counter the Pliny manuscripts that do read ‘24th of August’. Now that stronger evidence has come along, these finds are demoted to being high-quality supporting evidence.
4. The coin mentioned above, found in 1974, and with a detailed argument published in 2006 by Grete Stefani, director of the Office of Excavation of Pompeii. This coin is the first unambiguous evidence that Pompeii was not buried before September at the very earliest. It is clear-cut, absolutely decisive, and extraordinarily difficult to refute.
5. Dispersal of pyroclastic deposits. An article published by Rolandi et al. (2007) relies on seasonal wind patterns to argue against the August date. As with item 2, above, this isn’t decisive (I’m not aware of a place that has no variation in seasonal winds ... but then, I live in Wellington), but it is still interesting supporting evidence.

The Wikipedia article demotes the most compelling piece of evidence to fourth place, and devotes more than half of its discussion to the least compelling ones, items 1 and 5. It’s not surprising people are confused.

On the other side we have the evidence in favour of the 24 August date:

• Pliny Letters 6.16.4: though the manuscript tradition is inconsistent, we do have the date 24 August supported there. Just not strongly.
• Cassius Dio 66.21.1 states that the eruption took place ‘in the very time of summer-waning’, or late-summer/early-autumn. This would normally put the event between ca. 6 August (the setting of the constellation Lyra, to Pliny the Elder Natural history 18.59) and 25 September (the autumn equinox). Well, it’s consistent with the 24 August date, at least. On the other hand, Cassius Dio also reports that the eruption was preceded by omens of giants stalking the countryside and flying overhead (66.22.2) ...

Yeah, these points are pretty weak. They certainly don’t stand up to the overwhelming evidence of the coin, and the supporting evidence from archaeological finds of seasonal crops.

The coin

Two coins of emperor Titus, one (top) showing Titus recognised as imperator (‘general’) fourteen times, the other (bottom, outlines enhanced) the coin discussed by Stefani 2006, showing Titus recognised as imperator fifteen times, and therefore dating no earlier than September 79 CE.
Top: Heads side reads Imp Titus Caes Vespasian Aug PM, ‘Gen(eral) Titus Caes(ar) Vespasian(us) Aug(ustus), p(ontifex) m(aximus).’ Tails reads TrP VIIII Imp XIIII Cos VII PP, ‘Tr(ibunician) P(ower) 9th time, (hailed as) gen(eral) 14th time, cons(ul) 7th time, f(ather of his) c(ountry).’
Bottom: Heads side same as above. Tails reads TrP VIIII Imp XV Cos VII PP, ‘Tr(ibunician) P(ower) 9th time, (hailed as) gen(eral) 15th time, cons(ul) 7th time, f(ather of his) c(ountry).’

The bottom coin is the important one. It was found in 1974 next to the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet, along with about 200 other coins that victims of the eruption took with them as they fled. No, it’s not the most beautiful coin ever designed. Titus has quite the neck there, doesn’t he? But it’s neatly unambiguous: as the inscription on the tails side says, when it was minted (or, arguably, just about to be minted), Titus had been recognised as imperator (‘general’) fifteen times.

How does it have a bearing on the date? It’s because we know that as late as 8 September 79 CE, official Roman documents were still referring to Titus as imperator for the fourteenth time. In particular, the emperor’s own office was still calling him imperator for the fourteenth time on 7 September.

This is not something that can be chalked up to news travelling slowly: changes in who was emperor and the emperor’s status were circulated around the empire very promptly. For example, we have papyri from Egypt reporting on new emperors within a month or so of their taking the position. And Pompeii is a lot closer to Rome than Egypt is. And with a coin, you also have to add in extra time for it to be minted and get into circulation and into someone’s purse.

The documents in question are two inscriptions. One is a military diploma found in Egypt dating to 8 September (line 17: a(nte) d(iem) VI Idus Sept(embres)); that could be blamed on communication delays between Rome and Egypt. The other is much more compelling: it is a letter on a bronze tablet sent from the office of the emperor himself and dating to 7 September (line 16: dat(um) VII Idus Septembr(es)). So unless we’re going to argue that the emperor’s own secretarial staff had somehow forgotten there had been a fifteenth acclamation as imperator, we have absolutely rock-solid evidence that Pompeii was still unburied when the letter was sent on 7 September.

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Endnote

As noted at the beginning of this post, this post is wrong! The coin highlighted as the central piece of evidence here was misidentified, and the misidentification was only realised in 2013. See Abdy 2013, and some further details at the beginning of this post.

References

• Abdy, R. 2013. ‘The last coin in Pompeii: a re-evaluation of the coin hoard from the house of the Golden Bracelet.’ Numismatic Chronicle 173: 79-83.
• Beard, M. 2008. Pompeii. The life of a Roman town. London: Profile Books.
• Borgongino, M.; Stefani, G. 1999. ‘Intorno alla data dell’eruzione del 79 d.C.’ Rivista di studi Pompeiani 10: 177-215.
• Lazer, E. 2009. Resurrecting Pompeii. London/New York: Routledge.
• Rolandi, G.; Paone, A.; Di Lascio, M.; Stefani, G. 2007. ‘The 79 AD eruption of Somma: the relationship between the date of the eruption and the southeast tephra dispersion.’ Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 169: 87-98.
• Stefani, G. 2006. ‘La vera data dell’eruzione.’ Archeo 206: 10-13.
• Stefani, G.; Borgongino, M. 2007. ‘Ancora sulla data dell’eruzione.’ Rivista di studi Pompeiani 18: 204‑6.