Bring me the head of St. Vitalis

I wouldn't normally write a blog post about another blog post.  After all, you can find these things for yourself.  But I can't help mentioning the latest offering on the always excellent History Blog.

It seems the patron saint of genital diseases was recently auctioned.  Or rather his head was, the rest of his body is elsewhere, and given what he was patron of, some parts further south don't bear thinking about anyway.

The gentleman in question is St Vitalis of Assisi. I'm going to assume he's no relation to Francis.

Who knew there was a patron saint for the clap?

Aristarchus: a bright lad

Some time in the third century BC, a fellow by the name of Aristarchus of Samos wrote a book in which he said the earth moved around the sun. The book's lost. We know about it because Archimedes quoted it with approval in a book of his own called The Sand Reckoner.

Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book in which the universe is many times greater than that now so called. His hypothesis is that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same center as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the sphere bears to its surface.

That beats Copernicus by about 1,700 years.  It's when you read things like this that you realize how much was lost when the classical world collapsed.

Archimedes clearly bought into the theory. He wrote The Sand Reckoner to work out how many grains of sand it would take to fill up the universe, assuming Aristarchus was right. The numbers were so huge that to do it, Archimedes had to invent a whole new number system. The number of he got, in modern notation, was 8 x 10⁶³ grains of sand, which is amazingly close to modern estimates for the number of known particles (though obviously we now know about massive amounts of vacuum too).

Archimedes finishes:

I conceive that these things will appear incredible to the great majority of people who have not studied mathematics, but that to those who are conversant therewith and have given thought to the question of the distances and sizes of the earth, the sun and moon and the whole universe, the proof will carry conviction. And it was for this reason that I thought the subject would not be inappropriate for your consideration.

Tall poppy syndrome

I heartily agree with the remark that no man who has unsparingly thrown himself into politics, trusting in the loyalty of the democracy, has ever met with a happy death.

You can count me +1 on that. The quote comes from Pausanias, in reference to Demosthenes. Demosthenes had a negative experience when he advised the Athenians to fight Philip of Macedon and his son, a lad by the name of Alexander, and after Alexander died one of his successors called Antipater. After the Athenians had been totally crushed by Antipater, they decided to hand over their leaders for retribution, in the hope Antipater wouldn't raze Athens to the ground and enslave the entire population (no idle concern...Thebes was previously destroyed by Alexander for much the same behaviour). Demosthenes took poison to avoid an inevitable ugly death.

But Demosthenes wasn't the only Athenian leader to suffer. Ancient Athens had a long history of ultimately destroying their best men.

Miltiades, who led them to victory at Marathon, was a year later unjustly convicted of taking bribes from the Persians. He would have been sentenced to death, but in consideration of him winning the most important battle in human history, the sentence was commuted to a fine of a "mere" 50 talents, which he couldn't pay, so he died of war wounds while languishing in prison. His son Cimon was still required to pay the fine. The prosecutor was Xanthippus, the father of Pericles.

Cimon himself proved a fine military commander and an outstanding benefactor of Athens (he built the Academy out of his own pocket). So naturally he was ostracized. The prosecutor was Pericles, son of Xanthippus. (You might be spotting a trend here...) Cimon too died of war wounds while in exile.

In an interesting example of karma at work, Pericles himself when an old man was prosecuted and fined 50 talents. The charge was theft from the public purse, but his real crime was leading the Athenians into a war against Sparta, which didn't work out as planned. Like Miltiades and Cimon, he was almost certainly innocent. He died shortly after of the Great Plague.

Socrates, as is well known, was pretty much judicially murdered. So too was Pericles, the son of Pericles and Aspasia, along with other generals, after they won a sea battle, but didn't win it well enough for the liking of the populace.

Themistocles, the strategic genius who led Athens and all of Greece to victory against Persia in the face of almost impossible odds, was the only one to be brought down and survive. He was ostracized because people feared he was so powerful he might make himself tyrant of Athens, and while he was in exile he was convicted in absentia of treason on trumped up charges on the basis of falsified evidence supplied by Sparta. Themistocles broke the trend though on unhappy deaths. He was smart enough to run while the running was good. He went straight to the court of the Great King of Persia, where he was honored and made a minor satrap and lived in sumptuous luxury. He was quoted as toasting a dinner with the words, "I would have been undone, had I not been undone."

How to be remembered forever: some career advice

Here's a little game to play.  Get out a sheet of paper (or open Word, or whatever), and down the side, number lines 1 to 17.

Now on each line, list 3 or 4 people from that century.  So for line number 1, list 3 people who lived anywhere within 100AD to 199AD.  (Yes, I know the 100s are the 2nd century; I'm avoiding ordinals to eliminate confusion)  For line 15, list anyone who lived during the 1500s, & etc.  Do this for all 17 lines.

I did this.  Here are my observations.  If you want to give it a try, stop reading and play the game now!

Some centuries are really hard!  Some are fairly easy.  I deliberately started at 1 because the century 0-99 is way too easy.  Anyone with even a slight knowledge of the Bible or the Roman Empire can whip off lots of names.  It gets trickier from 100AD onwards.  I stopped at 1799 because likewise, the period 1800 to the present is too recent to be a challenge.

I found with the tricky centuries that once I got one famous person located, I could pick off others.  So for example I happen to know Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day, 800AD.  That instantly gave me the Sultan Haroun al-Rashid, who I know was his contemporary, and Roland his knight, of Song of Roland fame, and Carca, who withstood a siege from Charlemagne and gave her name to Carcasonne.

Have a look at your list.  I'd be willing to bet almost every name you wrote falls into one of these groups:

Is a national leader.
Is an artist.
Is a scientist.
Is a religious figure.
Is a military commander.

That's it!  If you're a chartered accountant, you're fresh out of luck in the fame stakes.  And for all but the popular centuries, such as the Renaissance, it's a struggle to recall more then a few names.

This makes me wonder who a thousand years from now will be remembered from the 20th century.  You might think lots and lots, because so much happened; but much happens in every century, and this little exercise shows the number of people destined for immortality is probably not more than a handful.

 Here are my own suggestions for 20th century immortality.  I've cut ruthlessly, keeping in mind the lesson of trying to name people from a thousand years ago.

Einstein.  The quintessential scientist.
Hitler.  An evil man, but he put his stamp on the century like no other political leader.
Lennon & McCartney. Easily the greatest artists, or if you don't like greatest, then best known.

Who do you think will be remembered from last century?

Why you shouldn't trust information on web sites (including this one)

I've previously ranted about the disaster that is Wikipedia for anything more complex than pop culture. Disaster if you want correct information, that is. It's terrific if you'll be happy with something that merely sounds right.

Today I'd like to point out something from an entirely different site. I noticed this as I was doing some book research for the fourth in my series. I won't embarrass the site by naming it. I'll merely repeat the embarrassing bit.

Our subject is a short biography of Callias, who if you've read The Pericles Commission you'll know appears as a character. He was the richest man in Athens and their chief diplomat. Here's what the rather authoritative-looking web site says:

Callias was a diplomat and a notable member of one of the wealthiest families of ancient Athens, as well as an Athenian leader.

Correct!

He was a general of the Peloponnesian War.

Er...no. There was a Callias who was a strategos (General), but it was a different Callias. It was a relatively common name. The wealthy diplomat was Callias son of Hipponicus. The military leader was Callias son of Calliades.

He distinguished himself at the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.)

Very true! (Note the date in parentheses)

In his old age Callias was one of the ambassadors sent to Sparta with Callistratus to negotiate a peace treaty in 371 BC.

In his old age indeed. He must have been at least 137 years old by this date, considering he fought at Marathon. The Callias here is the grandson of the one they started with. I mentioned in a previous post that the Greeks almost always named the firstborn son after the paternal grandfather. That's a trap for new players, for anyone writing about ancient Greece.

One short bio has confused three different men. What's probably happened here is whoever wrote this wrong bio did a Google search across "Callias" and "Athens" and just assumed it was the same Callias every time. Then they repeated it all as fact for hapless schoolchildren to copy and paste into their essays. I hope the teachers catch it.

My advice for anyone researching ancient Greeks:

1. When you find a reference, always ask yourself, "Is this the guy I want? Could it be his grandson? Could it be his grandfather?"
   
   
2. Always check the "son of" value! It's like a surname.