When Bad Things Happen: an Ancient Pagan View

When disaster strikes, I always seem to feel an overwhelming urge to understand it. Whether it's the attacks on 9/11 or the recent flooding of Tennessee, these questions always come up: Where was God? Why did He allow this to happen? This is not unique to Western culture, or even Christianity, as it seems that humans the world over just want to feel safe and secure, and disasters strike a blow to our sense of spiritual safety just as surely as they throw our sense of physical safety right out the window.

The Greek and Roman Pagans did not believe in benevolent, all-loving protector deities, as you will quickly find by reading literally any story about their gods. Most animals were given stories that involved puny mortals pissing off the gods and being cursed with their present forms. Even answering the question of why we have winter for half the year involves deception, kidnapping, and rape.

Persephone was a lovely young girl, and an illegitimate child of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of nature. Like her mother, Persephone enjoyed taking walks in the woods and playing with woodland creatures like a princess in a Disney cartoon. Many of the male gods wanted her for a wife, pursuing her with gifts, but Demeter refused them all, hiding her daughter in some remote woods. This dissuaded the Olympian gods, but you can't hide from Hades. Being the god of the underworld, he heard Persephone singing while picking flowers one day, and burst out from the rocks and kidnapped her. He took her for his wife (which is to say he raped her) and Demeter was heartbroken when she discovered that her daughter was gone. She looked far and wide, neglecting her duty as the goddess of nature, and so the earth became cold and barren. Zeus finally got involved and solved the dispute by agreeing to joint custody of Persephone between Hades and Demeter. Because she had eaten Pomegranate seeds while in the underworld, she could only leave it for a time to be with her mother, which is why we have six months of decay and six months of plenty.

It's very common to read in Ancient Greek literature about some disaster that occurred because Poseidon was upset (he was blamed for earthquakes and storms at sea) or because Hephaestus fell asleep while his forge was burning (volcanic eruptions). Given the violence and pettiness that these gods were prone to, I have to say that these disasters probably didn't bother the Pagans as much as later disasters would bother Christians. They probably just shrugged and said, along with Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.”

Pax vobiscum

It's All Greek To Me!

How do you know what you know? Seriously, think of something you are sure is true right now. How did you come to know that truth? Do you believe that humans are basically good or evil? Do we have souls, or are we purely material, and what is the meaning of life? Is there a God, and is she in a good mood? With the economy the way it is, it's unlikely that most of us have had a lot of time to ponder the deeper meanings in life. Socrates would be greatly disappointed in us for this. And so would Archimedes.

The Socratic Method is the practical application of Socrates' belief in self-examination. It began circa 430 BCE, so the story goes, with a bunch of young Athenians who were trying to find the answers to life's biggest questions. They sought out Socrates, a bricklayer and veteran, who had a most curious way of discussing matters of truth. Rather than making quotable statements or using flowery words to push his point across, he asked questions. For example, if one of them stated that “Love always gives and never seeks to receive,” Socrates might answer, “If love never receives, what will it have left to give?” His entire point in life was to make people say, “Hmmmmm . . . .”

While he was mostly concerned with ethical and spiritual matters, he did use his questioning method as a way of trying to understand the world around him. Archimedes was born hundreds of years after Socrates' death, but it seems obvious from his discoveries that he used the same principles of critical thinking. One of the most famous stories (though it's believed to be Apocryphal) is that of the riddle that King Heiro II posed. A local goldsmith had forged a golden crown, and the King was suspicious that it was a fake. He asked Archimedes to find a way to prove it, so the mathematician went to work. He thought deeply about the subject, but couldn't come to a good conclusion, so he took a bath to relax before going at the problem again. While in the bath, he observed the water rising and falling, and realized that he could use the principle of buoyancy (which he basically created) to determine whether the crown was real or a cheap knock-off.

Greek thinking started with how to think, and it was only when the ancients strayed from the art of questioning that they plunged the known world into an intellectual dark age, with only a few bright lights like Archimedes to lead the way. Aristotle, a student of Plato (who was a student of Socrates) went about using inquisition to determine the natural world. After Alexander the Great, his student, took that knowledge with him to every place he conquered, it became concrete fact for the next thousand years. History loves irony, and so it stands that the scholastic line of Socrates ends with someone claiming absolute truth over the natural world.

Pax vobixcum

Things That Archimedes Made

Following in the footsteps of other great eccentric Greek mathematicians, Archimedes seems to have gone about his life by trying to learn something new every day. To make an exhaustive list of everything he discovered, invented, or improved would take far more space than what should be contained in these virtual pages, so today we'll take a look at just a few of his mind-boggling creations.

The pulley itself is so ancient that its creator's name has been lost in the mist of time. Archimedes experimented heavily with pulleys and created the world's first block and tackle system (basically a mechanism in which two or more pulleys are utilized). He discovered that each pulley he added made the load seem lighter, since the force was being transferred equally among all the pulleys in the array. This allowed merchants to construct great cranes capable of lifting heavier cargo, which meant more money on arrival.

But his genius did not end at maritime physics. While trying to find an easier way to irrigate highland farms, he invented Archimedes' screw, a device capable of carrying water upward. Now, ground water could be raised to the surface and reused on the crops. It could even be carried up mountains, if the pipes and screws were long enough. This revolutionary invention was so useful that the Romans later built it into all their farmland and even used it to carry drinking water into high fortified camps. Here's a great image of how this works:

During the First Punic War, he invented a primitive odometer. It was an array of gears and levers which would drop a ball into a small box for each mile it traveled. To have done this during a time when people believed that disease was caused by the moon is not only surprising; it's mind-bogglingly astonishing. In addition to this, he created several astronomical implements, some of which were carried away as loot by the Roman commander who sacked Syracuse.

In between revolutionary and brilliant inventions, he did Calculus. But wait! Didn't Sir Isaac Newton invent Calculus? No more than Henry Ford invented the automobile. Newton greatly expanded the science, which laid dormant for more than a thousand years, but it was Archimedes himself who made the first foray into the measurement of the infinite. Unfortunately, there was no one around capable of understanding Archimedes' work, let alone carry it on. Though he served as a bright light for a time, the world went dark again at his passing, and the Greeks and Romans went back to their day-to-day business, being afraid of things they didn't understand. His work lives on, and he remains one of the most important mathematicians and inventors in all of history.

The Siege of Syracuse

Located in south-eastern Sicily, Syracuse was an old Corinthian-Greek Colony with old-time values. Ruled over by kings and tyrants since its founding in 733 BCE, Syracuse enjoyed the many benefits of its central Mediterranean locale and became very wealthy through trade with Egypt, Rome, Carthage, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Spain. After the Pyrrhic war in 275 BCE, however, it was the sole remaining Greek settlement west of the Peninsula itself, and in a very tenuous position sandwiched between Rome and Carthage.

Syracuse survived for quite a while after Pyrrhus' final defeat because its leaders made smart alliances and used skilled diplomacy to ensure the protection of either Rome or Carthage. When the first Punic War broke out, Syracuse was at the center of the action and made an alliance with Carthage from fear of Rome. Luckily, Rome and Carthage fought each other so bitterly that by the time Rome got around to dealing with the unlucky Sicilian Greeks, they had already lost so many in battle that they were willing to settle for an apology and a cut of their trade. However, when the second Punic War broke out, Syracuse made the mistake of allying with Carthage again, and the Romans were determined to make them pay. However, Roman vengeance would come at a high cost to the Republic because of one resident of Syracuse whose mind possessed knowledge that could bring both great prosperity and very great destruction. This man's name was Archimedes.

I like to think of Archimedes as a sort of ancient world Da Vinci, except without the moral qualms about creating weapons. Where Da Vinci was purposefully putting gears in the wrong place so that his designs would ultimately fail, Archimedes was not only sketching these out, but utilizing them to a terrible degree of success. For this week's Famous Friday, we'll delve into Archimedes' discoveries in greater detail, but since it's Military Monday, let's focus on his original and horrific siege weapons.

The most famous of his weapons was The Claw, which utilized pulleys and complicated weight balancing to capsize Roman Triremes. Seriously, this crane-like weapon would hook onto the bow or stern of the boat, lift it out of the water, and send it crashing against the nearby rocks. Each boat carried about two hundred soldiers, so you can imagine the carnage that ensued when this happened over and over:

Another of his creations was an improved catapult. Again, using pulleys and counterweights, he was able to create an engine capable of throwing a 500 pound rock with much better accuracy than the inferior Roman scorpions and ballistae. He also contributed to the building of other weapons which could fire missiles and keep the Romans at bay.

The most controversial of his creations was his 'death ray.' Several authorities have tested it using various techniques, and some have been successful, while most have ended in a wash. Supposedly, Archimedes built a large array of bronze mirrors which could be turned, focusing their reflected light into a concentrated beam onto an approaching ship. The Roman ships, which were sealed with tar, caught on fire and sunk. While this does seem a bit far-fetched, I wouldn't put it past old Archie to give it a try. After all, it was Hiero II, the king of Syracuse and relative of Archimedes, who frequently challenged the genius and gave him the funding he needed to build better weapons since the first Punic War, so why wouldn't this mathematician try literally everything he could think of? Were there easier ways to light ships on fire? Yeah, lots. But if I were an invading Roman, I might think twice about mixing it up with an enemy who can light my ships on fire without shooting anything.

Syracuse eventually fell to sheer Roman determination, and Archimedes was killed, possibly while drawing circles in the sand. If not for him, the last Greek colony on Italian soil would surely have fallen in the first year, and Carthage wouldn't have stood a chance of surviving the Second Punic War. By the time the Roman army came to the gates of Carthage, they had suffered so many casualties from Syracuse and from fighting Hannibal for ten years that they allowed Carthage to live, albeit under severe economic sanctions. And when Carthage was finally leveled in the Third Punic War, there were no more brilliant mathematicians around to set Romans on fire from a distance.

Pax vobiscum

Bonus Post: Tiberius' Farming Reforms

I realized earlier today that I neglected to detail what Tiberius Gracchus' reforms actually were, focusing instead on a narrative of his life and death. Basically, there was an old law in Rome that no one person could own more than about 308 acres of land, but this hadn't been enforced for centuries.  Tiberius' bills restated this law and planned on enforcing it, seizing the excess land and distributing it to the disenfranchised veterans.  He also planned on doling out conquered soil to Roman soldiers who had fought in the relevant campaigns.  The Patrician Senators most likely objected to the enforcement of the land limit, as many of them had estates comprised of thousands of acres.  The giving of conquered lands to Romans would have also been a revolutionary idea, and perhaps caused some of the more far-sighted politicians to fear that, over time, these colonial descendants would care nothing for Rome and lead well-trained armies in revolt of the mother city.  He also advocated distributing money to the poor so that they would be eligible for military service, something which today would certainly be labeled as Socialist.  His basic reforms of distributing land to the veterans were enforced after his death, but the redistribution of wealth, giving conquered lands to the homeless, and confiscating land of very wealthy nobles were brushed aside.  Hope that clears up any confusion or questions from yesterday's post.
On an unrelated note, next week will be Archimedes week, for no reason in particular.  Every day we will learn more about this famous mathematician who would move the world if he only had a place to stand.
Pax vobiscum