Arrian: Oh Bother

Lost to the ether of the internet, and bad decision making at Mozilla, is a toot I made in August of last year. My local archive has a copy though:

Nobody:
Nobody:
Nobody:
Nobody:
Me: … maybe I should read Arrian

So yeah. I read Arrian. Or more specifically, the Anabasis of Alexander.

Arrian seemed like a good choice. After having read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon’s Hellenika the next chunk of Greek history chronologically was (almost) the story of Alexander the Great. Now, something I’ve appreciated about previous histories is when they’re written by contemporaneous sources, but I don’t think there’s much extant from contemporaneous sources about Alexander. Instead, the best ancient historical source seems to be Arrian, a Greek of Roman citizenship writing about 400 years after Alexander’s demise.

I read ancient history because I like to understand how ancient peoples saw the world. I find it fascinating to see the continuity of human experience over the last couple thousands years. I like insight into the people and players remembered by history. Pieces of their personality preserved in amber.

In Arrian I got almost none of that.

Honestly, Arrian is the most disappointing ancient history I have successfully finished. Of course, there is the alternative possibility: Arrian is boring because Alexander is boring, since his personality traits are not laudable or enjoyable to me as someone living through another era of rapacious conquest by the powerful.

The Story

Arrian attempts to faithfully recount the life of Alexander III of Macedon, starting from the beginning of his reign to his untimely demise. Unfortunately for me and my interests, his history is thorough and focused on finding a chronology and recounting the tales of battles and slaughters... so many battles, so many slaughters.

The basic thrust of Alexander’s life (as told by Arrian) seems to have been that after firming up Macedonian dominance in Greece, he set his sights eastward, and led an empire building expedition east for a decade. Finally, in India, he overwhelmed his troops ambition, and was forced to turn back. On his return to Babylon he planned to turn it into an administrative centre, before departing on an African campaign. Alas, through illness (or conspiracy says perhaps poison) he died there at 32. Shortly thereafter his empire broke apart, as there was no successor who could hold it together.

Despite being King of Macedon, as near as I can tell, he never returned to Macedon once he left, instead ruling his empire from afar.

The History

I find it fascinating that Alexander the Great is mentioned with sufficient frequency in modern discourse that I think many people, even if they know no details, are aware of his existence. Yet, I was interested to discover from this book and it’s introduction that despite his outsize influence over the ancient world and modern discourse, in a lot of ways he’s way less attested in sources than you would expect. Many primary sources were lost, and it seems he was a little particular about how he was portrayed. As a result, in a lot of ways we don’t have a great view of the real Alexander. This is made worse by the existence and popularity of the Alexander Romance, a heavily fictionalized biography tradition about Alexander which grew and evolved for a thousand years after his death. More on that below.

Apparently Arrian had access to a number of contemporary sources; at the outset of his history he lays out his sources as mostly being Aristobulus and Ptolomy I; their accounts are largely lost to us today. It is through Arrian that we have the best insight into these sources. To his credit, Arrian highlights where his sources diverge, and tries to weigh how he sees them.

Apologia

By the end of Arrian, I was pretty clear that Arrian was writing apologia. I am not sure how Alexander was viewed by the audience Arrian was writing for, but you get the distinct impression that there is a rehabilitation of image happening. Perhaps the most clear happening of this is where Alexander kills Kleitos in a drunken rage.

During a drinking session, Kleitos who I take to be an older soldier, insults Alexander by championing Phillip II -- Alexander’s father -- during the debacle. At some point, he insulted Alexander sufficiently that Alexander grabbed nearby spear, and speared him to death.

Arrian when recounting this has two goals: To make it clear that Kleitos’s behaviour is sufficient to justify his death, and make sure that we recognize Alexander’s overwrought grief that followed his act is sufficient to clear the stain from his reputation.

There are a number of other cases where Arrian seems to underweight or discount loathsome behaviour from Alexander:

  • His potential involvement in the burning of Persepolis
  • Numerous slaughters of civilians, particularly during his Indian campaign.

Compared to others I have Read

One interesting contrast I found between Arrian and Thucydides was the connection between campaign and the seasons. In Thucydides there was essentially “war season”, and then in the winter everyone went home. There was a cycle of the years. Arrian barely covers the cycle of years, and it is occasionally surprising the amount of time covered with relatively little mention. Only in a couple of places does Arrian bother to connect his narrative to nature, such as when Alexander departs too early in the spring for one campaign, facing winter weather to the detriment of his men.

Another contrast between Arrian and other authors I found was a fair amount of disinterest from Arrian about logistics. It’s mentioned only at a few points (for example, as Nearchus is failed by logistics sailing back from the Indus), but I have to imagine that the challenges of ruling an empire the size of Alexanders, feeding armies on giant marches, must have been true challenges, yet Arrian scarcely touches on it. He is focused on Alexander and his great deeds, not on the minutia of how it was actually done. I feel like logistics came up more in other histories as the authors were more involved in the

The Edition

To read Arrian I returned to the Landmark edition. I continue to appreciate the overall high quality of these editions (though the cover has a quote from the NYT Book Review: “The most thrilling volume in this fine series”, which I find truly laughable). The background provided by the fine introduction and prefaces was very helpful for situating Arrian, and the appendixes dug more deeply into things helpfully, without going on too much at length.

Alexander Romance

A major new thing I learned from reading Arrian actually has nothing to do with Arrian: The existence of the “Alexander Romance”. This is a literary tradition, started shortly after Alexander’s death which situates Alexander as mythical figure, giving him a supernatural conception (Mom gets laid by a Pharaoh who find his way to her bed in the shape of a dragon) and then tells a heavily fictionalized biography of him, as he encounters sages and fantastical figures over his journey, discussing philosophy and more with them.

I call this a literary tradition because the story, as it was retold, translated and copied, seems to have continuously grown adding new tales and new places for Alexander to weigh in.

Reading about this, I was struck by the parallels between this and fan-fiction, musing that Alexander was the first subject of fanfic. After finishing the book, I did some further reading on this, and found this wonderful essay “The 21st century Alexander Romance and Transformative Fiction (aka is it fanfic?)” on precisely this topic, by Reimena Yee, who has a graphic novel retelling of the Alexander Romance available. Yee’s take is “Maybe”, but she quotes at length from a Tumblr post which I think makes a pretty great case that Fanfic is really a 21st century phenomenon and trying to apply it ahistorically is a mistake.

What is particularly fascinating about the Alexander Romance is the scale and breadth of its impact, being well known for thousands of years. It seems to me that it is the Romantic Alexander who is fairly well known, not the historical one!

Conclusion

The story of Alexander seems to be the story of someone born with an unslakable thirst for conquest. I was left at the end of Arrian without any motivation, any clear reason, beyond conquest for conquests sake. I found his life to be a boring meaningless slog. As Arrian approached the end of Alexander, and the omens began to turn, the livers without lobes, I was struck by a palpable relief: “Thank god, he’ll be dead soon”. I was utterly unconvinced by Arrian that there was anything valuable, anything worth emulating in Alexander.

We live in an era filled with shades who share this unslakable thirst. We call them billionaires, and they shape the very bones of the world we live in today. We are surrounded by people like Arrian, who look on what they have wrought on the world, and seem to assume that simply because they have outsized impact they are therefore worth emulating.

Assorted Bits and Bobs

  • The assassination of Philip II is in some sense prologue to Arrian, but is told elliptically through Arrian nevertheless. The narrative is so bizarre and full of weighted allusion: So, Philip is assassinated. The assassin is then executed, but Alexander’s mother, Olympias, gives him an honourable tomb. Later we find out that Philip and Alexander were on the outs a bit because Philip married another woman, Euridike. So I guess we are to take from this (and it appears others do too) that Olympias might have had a hand in the murder of her husband.
  • The city of Tyre in Lebanon has existed since antiquity. I found it particularly interesting to discover that it was an island when Alexander came to conquer it. To enable siege machines to work his troops built a mole or causeway from the shore to the island. This causeway then began to gather silt, and now 2350 years later, the city of Tyre is now a peninsula. This kind of “Thing in the world you can point to as being part of history” is definitely my jam, in the same way as I love the story of the Tunnel of Eupalinos.

Books of Early 2024

Let's talk a bit about some books I read early this year (some are also waiting for a longer blog post too).

I'm loathe to publicly call out bad books, but I will say, one book not represented here is one I paid good money for, and hated. Everything about it says I should have loved it; a well-loved author, genre and subject a lovely mishmash that should have worked for me, and yet less than a third of the way into the book I had to stop. I haven't hated a book like this in a long time. All the reasons why I should have loved it made the pain of it being bad all the more painful.

Three Men in A Boat

I am gently shocked I didn't write a blog post about this book previously; this was actually my second read through. Published in 1889, it's a humour book which holds up ridiculously well for something which is 135 years old. I first discovered it after it was mentioned/tied gently into Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, so it's likely my first read through of Three Men in a Boat was roughly 2018.

In theory it is the story of three young men taking a break from their lives to take a vacation by boat up the river Thames, and it is that; however, a good chunk of the book however is humorous digressions. One of which is very prescient reads on our contemporary character:

To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers.  Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.  I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes.  The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.

Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

Others instead poke fun at the manner and mores of the day; visit the Project Gutenberg ebook, and read from "Have you ever been in a house where there are a couple courting?".

Or perhaps if you're in for the fantastic story of a ripe cheese, read from "For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon".

Persuasion

When I got sick recently, I discovered all I wanted was Austen. So we watched Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice , Mansfield Park (Grim) and I read Persuasion. First time reading it, though I was familiar with the story beats, having watched an adaption last year.

Persuasion is an interesting book; tension wise, it is a slow burn, building to its crescendo only in the final chapters. It's a good love story, told well, in a world that feels lived in.

I was struck however by the characters. Last year I read Middlemarch (which I apparently never wrote about?? Something I find gently shocking considering how highly I now regard it!), and what I find having read the two near each other is how much more alive the characters in Middlemarch feel -- their emotions more clear, their strains more communicated.

I am very happy I read Persuasion, but I think I preferred Pride and Prejudice when I read it a few years ago.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

This was just a very cozy story of found family in a gentle magical world just behind the veil of our own. It was warm and fuzzy (with a small amount of sex, including one ??? moment for me), and it was just the right thing for a cold winters day.

A Few Cozy Mysteries

I lucked out and got to read two lovely cozy mysteries over this Christmas break:

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers

A man dies in a lonely teashop, and the proprietor decides that she is going to solve this mystery. I loved this book, and it was the perfect read for my holiday. This joins the Thursday Murder Club for great mysteries involving older people solving mysteries.

You may have heard of the idea of love languages: Vera Wong’s love language is food and I found myself starving after almost every chapter.

Aunt Dimity’s Death

Not a murder mystery, but more fantastical mystery, I nevertheless was mostly charmed by this book. However, a misapprehension gained early in the book led me down a wild goose chase that never paid off; the book is for the better not paying my hunch off, but my wife went down the same road, which suggests this is either intentional or at least a flaw others have tripped on.

Still. This was a cute read, and could probably be comfortably consumed a weekend or less, if you don’t have children clambering across you.

Polybius: The Rise of the Roman Empire

After reading Thucydides, I was fascinating by the idea of contemporaneous historians; people writing histories of times they lived through, of events they had even participated in.

When hunting for another contemporaneous history, Polybius was the first choice that seemed to come up in my searches. Polybius was a Greek hostage of the Romans, of a peculiar sort with a seemingly wide amount of freedom during his captivity that allowed him access many high tiers of Roman society; he was an active in both Greek and Roman politics in some of the times he wrote of in his history.

Despite the seeming alignment with what I was looking for, when I tried to read Polybius last time, I bounced off of him, and ended up reading Herodotus instead.

On a vacation last summer, we were in a wonderful used bookshop, and I picked up a few classical histories. Plutarch, another Xenophon (haven’t read yet) and The Rise of the Roman Empire, which is a selection of a subset Polybius’ Histories) by F. W. Walbank, that uses Polybius’ discussions of Rome to chart its growth into the super power it became.

Through this edition, I was able to get through Polybius. It required some effort, but I am glad I did it.

A forewarning; This blog post is filled with far more long quotes than any other. This is partially because in many cases, Polybius makes his case far better than any restatement I could make, and partially because I now can scan text via my phone, so I didn’t have to type out the quotes by hand.

The History

Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome , and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years? Or who again can be so completely absorbed in other subjects of contemplation or study, as to think any of them superior in importance to the accurate understanding of an event for which the past affords no precedent. -Plb 1.1.

Polybius believed that it was important to trace cause and effect through history, and so his history covers an enormous amount of ground; however to keep it tractable, Walbank focuses The Rise of the Roman Empire on the parts of Polybius’ history that talk about Rome, it’s interaction with other nations, and the story of Carthage, as told via the Barca family of Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Hannibal, however it also interweaves some of Polybius’ own philosophy of both politics and history.

Polybius viewed history as an important education for statesmen, and saw history as valuable only insofar as it provided true stories of decision making that provides either positive or negative lessons to readers. He also thought it was critical that people who wrote history understood, by experience, the politics they would document:

There is, however, another category of authors, who appear to be justified in undertaking the writing of history, but who in fact are just like the theoretical doctors. They haunt the libraries and become thoroughly versed in memoirs and records, and then convince themselves that they are properly equipped for the task; but while they may appear to outsiders to bring everything that is needed to the writing of political history, yet in my opinion they provide no more than a part. Certainly the, study of the memoirs of the past has its value for discovering what the ancients believed and the ideas which people formerly entertained about conditions, places, nations, states and events, and also for understanding he circumstances and eventualities with which each nation in earlier times had to deal. And certainly past events are relevant in making us pay attention to the future, provided that a writer inquires in each case into the facts as they actually occurred. But to persuade oneself, as Timaeus did, that the resources of documentary research alone can equip one to write an adequate history of recent events is naive beyond words. It is as though a man were to imagine that he was a capable painter, indeed a master of the art, merely by virtue of having looked at the works of the past. — Plb 12.25e

The narrative history was all new ground for me, covering the three Punic wars (though, the Third Punic War was not covered with much depth). Honestly, I found that Polybius did a good job of achieving exactly his goal set at the introduction: Explaining how the Romans came to rule the known world in a very short period of time.

One of the things I love about reading history is the way it reminds me that human institutions are fragile, and change is always just around the corner.

Below, I cover two small sections of the history I found interesting, sharing some block quotes.

The Cycle of History

One of the ideas that Polybius is famous for is his notion of the ‘Rotation of the Polities’. He sees political systems as following in a natural cycle of succession. In his analysis, there are six different forms of government (or constitutions):

  1. Kingship
  2. Tyranny
  3. Aristocracy
  4. Oligarchy
  5. Democracy
  6. Mob rule

Each pair of these are a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ version of the same thing:

The truth of what I have just said may be illustrated by the following arguments. We cannot say that every example of one-man rule is necessarily a kingship, but only those which are voluntarily accepted by their subjects, and which are governed by an appeal to reason rather than by fear or by force. Nor again can we say that every oligarchy is an aristocracy, but only those in which the power is exercised by the justest and wisest men, who have been selected on their merits. In the same way a state in which the mass of citizens is free to do whatever it pleases or takes into its head is not a democracy. But where it is both traditional and customary to reverence the gods, to care for our parents, to respect our elders, to obey the laws, and in such a community to ensure that the will of the majority prevails - this situation it is proper to describe as democracy. — Plb 6.4

From natural beginnings, political systems transition, Kingship to Tyranny, to Aristocracy, to Oligarchy, to Democracy, to mob rule, and then finally a new king arises from the mob, and the cycle begins again.

Living in times where democracy feels fraught across the globe, it was interesting to read Polybius’ take on the decline of democracy (emphasis mine):

At this point the only hope which remains unspoiled lies with themselves, and it is in this direction that they then turn: they convert the state into a democracy instead of an oligarchy and themselves assume the superintendence and charge of affairs. Then so long as any people survive who endured the evils of oligarchical rule, they can regard their present form of government as a blessing and treasure the privileges of equality and freedom of speech. But as soon as a new generation has succeeded and the democracy falls into the hands of the grandchildren of its founders, they have become by this time so accustomed to equality and freedom of speech that they cease to value them and seek to raise themselves above their fellow-citizens, and it is noticeable that the people most liable to this temptation are the rich. So when they begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbours; then as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring, but is excluded from the honours of office because of his poverty, they will introduce a regime based on violence. After this they unite their forces, and proceed to massacre, banish and despoil their opponents, and finally degenerate into a state of bestiality,’ after which they once more find a master and a despot. Such is the cycle of political revolution, the law of nature according to which constitutions change, are transformed, and finally revert to their original form. - Plb 6.9

Every kind of state, we may say, is liable to decline from two sources, the one being external, and the other due to its own internal evolution. For the first we cannot lay down any fixed principle, but the second pursues a regular sequence. I have already indicated which kind of state is the first to evolve, which succeeds it, and how each is transformed into its successor, so that those who can connect the opening propositions of my argument with its conclusion will be able to make their own forecast concerning the future. This, in my opinion, is quite clear. When a state, after warding off many great perils, achieves supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long-established prosperity life will become more luxurious, and among the citizens themselves rivalry for office and in other spheres of activity will become fiercer than it should. As these symptoms become more marked, the craving for office and the sense of humiliation which obscurity imposes, together with the spread of ostentation and extravagance, will usher in a period of general deterioration. The principal authors of this change will be the masses, who at some moments will believe that they have a grievance against the greed of other members of society, and at others are made conceited by the flattery of those who aspire to office. By this stage they will have been roused to fury and their deliberations will constantly be swayed by passion, so that they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of their leaders, but will demand everything or by far the greatest share for themselves. When this happens, the constitution will change its name to the one which sounds the most imposing of all, that of freedom and democracy, but its nature to that which is the worst of all, that is the rule of the mob. — Plb 6.57

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, feels appropriate here.

Views on Roman Superstition

I thought this passage was remarkable:

However, the sphere in which the Roman commonwealth seems to me to show its superiority most decisively is in that of religious belief.

Here we find that the very phenomenon which among other peoples is regarded as a subject for reproach, namely superstition, is actually the element which holds the Roman state together. These matters are treated with such solemnity and introduced so frequently both into public and into private life that nothing could exceed them in importance.

Many people may find this astonishing, but my own view is that the Romans have adopted these practices for the sake of the common people. This approach might not have been necessary had it ever been possible to form a state composed entirely of wise men. But as the masses are always fickle, filled with lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passions, they can only be restrained by mysterious terrors or other dramatizations of the subject. For this reason I believe that the ancients were by no means acting foolishly or haphazardly when they introduced to the people various notions concerning the gods and belief in the punishments of Hades, but rather that the moderns are foolish and take great risks in rejecting them. — Plb 6.56

There’s a modern-feeling cynicism about religion here; he talks about Roman religion as if it exists only as a tool, instilled in the Roman people as a means to the end by the powerful. He might even be right, and yet, in this he reminds me of a dark-version of Marx, praising the Roman opioid as a key to social control.

The Edition

I read Penguin Classics The Rise of the Roman Empire by Polybius, selected by F.W. Walbank, and translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (the same one who translated the Plutarch I read).

The introduction was good and did an excellent job of introducing Polybius’ work, or at least the selection Walbank made. I’m not sure I would have read the book had it not been for the quality of the introduction. Each chapter lead with a good introductory note, setting the stage and providing historical context, which was very helpful.

Last time I read Polybius, I accused him (or the translation) of being stilted and awkward. This time, knowing how much I appreciated the translation of Plutarch by Scott-Kilvert, I suspect the blame lay on Polybius. (During the writing of this blog post, also used Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library, which has the Evelyn S. Shuckburgh translation, which really showed how much I appreciate Scott-Kilvert’s translation skills, and his use of a more modern vernacular).

I still found him to be stilted for the early chapters this time around, but over time I adapted, or he became a better writer and it bothered me appreciably less.

Despite the promise of the edition, it was overall one of the weakest classic history editions I’ve read:

  • The Footnotes were of strongly varying quality: some useful, some clearly superfluous or misplaced and no notes to fill in the missing pieces. While I don’t think Polybius needed the very detailed notation that I had in the edition of Thucydides that I read , I was nevertheless let down often by this edition’s supplemental information.
  • The maps are atrocious. They are almost entirely unusable through huge swathes of the book. Admittedly, I’m hugely spoiled from reading the Landmark Ancient Histories, which are absolutely lousy with excellent maps, but the maps in this book were just trash.
  • There’s a diagram of a Roman camp, which is trying to help you visualize what Polybius describes in one chapter… but all the labels are in un-translated latin. Which makes it a pain to decipher.

The Goblin Emperor

I finished The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison the other day. It was a wonderfully satisfying read. While it was daunting at first — the book opens with a “Travellers Guide” to the world, explaining the linguistic and cultural world, as well as an enormous glossary/dramatis personae — I found the story to be immensely compelling and satisfying.

While I am certain I had heard of the book before, what had caused me to want to read it recently was an article called “Hopepunk, Optimism, Purity, and Futures of Hard Work “, by Ada Palmer. She described the book like this:

[…] a story where good people treating each other fairly within a political system succeed in improving their world and triumphing over corrupt backstabbers through the power of the rational fact that most people would rather work with people who treat us well and have our backs than with corrupt selfish backstabbers. Amid so many tales of murder games and cutthroat games of thrones, there is a genuinely punk-like in-your-face contrariness to stories where, when crisis looms, people stand by each other and do good, a portrait of human nature which rebels against the ubiquity of the claim that, when the going gets tough, the smart trust no one.

After that description I felt like I really had to read it; and I loved it. It was not without its drama, but very restorative in a way I found genuinely compelling.

I am now reading Addison’s most recent publication, The Witness for the Dead, which takes place in the same world. I have high hopes.

Plutarch: The Rise and Fall of Athens

I just finished reading ‘The Rise and Fall of Athens’, a collection of writings by Plutarch, extracted from his Parallel Lives, a project where he compared and contrasted notable Greek and Roman figures.

The Rise and Fall of Athens is a selection which uses the Greek biographies to chronicle Athens from its founding by Theseus to its figurative fall led by Lysander.

This was a very pleasant read. As praise, I have to say, the translation by Ian Scott-Kilvert was smooth to the point of feeling as if it may not accurately reflect the source; of course, because I don’t read Ancient Greek, I can’t know that.

In the early biographies, in particular Theseus, it’s really fascinating to see Plutarch trying to navigate the murky waters of legendary figures. Clearly he needs to rely on myth for his biography, but he tries to be as careful as he can in his recounting of said myth, and tries to nail down, to the extent he can, a real person underlying the legend.

Later biographies are interesting to see figures I’d seen in other contexts get their own focus. For example, Cimon and Lysander.

I didn’t take much in the way of notes this time around, but I did grab two extended quotes.

Contrasting Cleon and Nicias:

Cleon commanded a large following because of his practice of ‘pampering the people and finding jobs for all’, but even those whom he went out of his way to win over, when they saw the greed and effrontery of the man, turned to Nicias as their leader. Nicias, by contrast, wore an air of gravity which was by no means harsh or vexatious but was blended with earnestness and caution, and this won him the confidence of the people by giving the impression that he was positively afraid of them.

On the banning of currency in Sparta, and resulting philosophy:

Finally, it was decided that currency could be imported for public use, but that any private person found in possession of it should be put to death. This was as if to say that Lycurgus had been afraid of money itself, and not of the greed that it engenders; and indeed, as events turned out, so far from eliminating this vice by forbidding private individuals to own money, the law tended to encourage them by permitting such ownership to the state, so that in this way its use acquired a certain dignity and honour.

It was hardly possible for men who saw money valued in public to despise it in private, or to regard what was evidently prized and cherished by the community as something worthless or useless to the individual. On the contrary, public practices tend to impress themselves far more swiftly upon the habits of private life than individual faults or failings ever do upon the community. When the whole deteriorates, it is only natural that the parts should become corrupt with it, but those diseases which travel from the part to the whole encounter plenty of correctives and antidotes in the parts which remain sound. Thus the Spartans set terror and the law to guard their citizens’ houses and prevent money from finding a way in, but they did nothing to make their spirits impervious or superior to its power: instead they implanted in their people a lively ambition to acquire wealth by setting it up as an exalted and noble object.

The Raven Tower

I finished The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie a few days ago. Though it had a bit of a slow start for me, when it grabbed me I really enjoyed the ride.

I’m hesitant to write too much about it. When I recommend her previous work, Ancillary Justice, I tell people to go in as cold as possible… ideally don’t even read the book summary. Half the joy of Ancillary Justice for me was the experience of figuring out just who your main character was. In The Raven Tower, I feel similarly… there’s a real joy in experiencing the story unfold around you with as few markers to guide the way as possible.