Viggen

Book Review by Marc Ollard Twenty years ago I stood on an island on the other side of the world from where I live. The journey of something like thirteen thousand miles had taken a dull and tiring twenty five hours. Yet in many respects it was easy. I had simply paid for my air ticket, packed my bags, turned up at the airport, completed the prescribed procedures, and off I went. We take this modern transport system for granted, but two thousand years ago there was no such thing. There is only one recorded instance of a Roman ship reaching China, and no indication they ever made it back. Nonetheless trade between east and west existed. Goods reached either end of an arduous eight thousand mile journey and those that travelled spread news and told stories. Both the mighty Roman Empire and the sophisticated Han Empire of China knew the other was out there, somewhere beyond the horizon. There were even rare attempts by either nation state to establish relations with the other. If only they could find that great empire the merchants told them about. The Roman Empire And The Silk Road by Raoul McLoughlin seeks to describe a situation that existed for a few hundred years in the past. Trade routes across Asia and the societies that interacted along it. He writes in an engaging style without sensationalist questioning. Everything is derived from ancient sources in a factual manner. In most cases, the study of Roman history remains focused on that empire's interior and periphery, but McLoughlin places SPQR in context, in relation to the world around it, and demonstrates convincingly how important how important these contacts were to keeping the Roman Empire economically viable. The emphasis is on one product - silk. It might seem a little myopic but the point is that silk was a hugely valuable and desirable commodity. The Chinese paid their troops in bales of it. Once the Romans discovered this wonder material from a far off land they craved it as a fashion necessity, as a practical material, and as a status symbol. There has long been debate on contact between Rome and China. Stories of Roman mercenaries or captives sold as slaves by the Parthians are persistent. There is also the DNA research on slave skeletons in Rome that detected at least one with a far eastern origin. McLoughlin's approach remains level headed. There is no place in his work for constructing a fantasy, and whilst there are some strange anomalies in the past, he resolves these questions with evidence and clear sighted rationalism. There are fascinating glimpses of the capabilities of ancient travel. In an age when fragile wooden ships are thought to have rarely left sight of land, we find sailors of the Persian Gulf advising a Chinese envoy that if he wanted to reach Rome by sea, he must go around Africa, and that could take at least two months or at worst up to two years depending on winds. How did they know that if the journey wasn't practised regularly? In a world without charts or geographical knowledge? The author does not speculate himself - he records the information for our own conclusions. Whatever they may be, it is clear that ancient sailors were well aware of the distances they might have to travel. On the other hand, the author does not dwell on this aspect, and the reader is left a little in the dark on average travel times for various means. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Silk Road wasn't an overnight service. A quick calculation suggests that by walking eight hours a day I might expect to reach China in just over a year. Our world is of course a different enviroment from that the ancients knew two thousand years ago. The River Oxus, once a a vital waterway through Asia, once mooted as a future frontier of the Roman Empire, is now almost gone. So much of Alexander's Hellenistic Empire depended on that waterway. The cities along it are now little known ruins, and in the light of modern events, somewhat difficult to research. In a substantial manner we are missing pieces of the puzzle, yet these pieces have been painstakingly reconstructed by McLoughlin academically. A picture emerges that shows a semi-global market, empires that do not stand alone but interact with the world beyond their borders, a moment in time when human activity evolves and progresses, only for it to crumble and wither away in later years. We ae well aware of our global status thanks to modern media, but the interesting reality is that the ancients managed to create their own without the communication we take for granted. The appendices are worth their weight in gold. You will find comparisons for the Romans, Parthians, the Hellenistic East, Sarmatians, the Steppe nations, the Kushan Empire of India, and of course the Chinese on revenue, costs, and commerce. Military forces are weighed against each other, all providing an impressive and consistent record. ...more Book Reviews! Empire at War by Don Taylor Latin Via Ovid by Goldman and Nyenhuis Oxford Classical Dictionary by Hornblower In all this is a fascinating book that outlines the characteristics of several cultures spanning a third of the globe. Military, political, and especially economic information underline the relationships and events of the time. Anyone reading this book is going to understand a very special period of our past a whole lot better, and on that I cannot fault this book. This is a work that delves into a subject that has rarely been given any serious literature, a labour of love by the author, and even if half the book is correct, what I just finished reading is astonishing. An entire complex global community in a world that's gone forever. But not forgotten. Raoul McLoughlin is an independent Irish scholar not attached to, or supported by, a university department. During his research he created a framework for understanding the Imperial Roman economy based on significant international trade. The completed model is supported by ancient source evidence and recent archaeological discoveries. His original doctoral thesis on this topic was submitted in 2006, then published as a monograph by Bloomsbury in 2010. At present he is continuing with his unfunded independent research into the contacts and contrasts between the Roman Empire and the Han Chinese. He is also using ancient source evidence to investigate commerce beyond Rome's western frontier, in particular with ancient Hibernia, Caledonia and the Western Isles. Tell us your opinion - Submit your Review - Buy the book! Book Review of Roman Empire And The Silk Road - Related Topic: Ancient Roman Economy Bibliography Get it now! Empire And The Silk Road for the UK ________________________________ Archive

Book Review by Michael J. Mates Professor Peter T. Struck’s Divination and Human Nature takes the reader on a guided tour of ancient philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonist Iamblichus) and their opinions regarding “natural” divination, as opposed to “technical” divination such as the reading of entrails, described as “the application of…logic to empirically gathered external signs” (p 16). The purpose of natural divination varies, but its nature remains strikingly similar among the philosophers examined: “the immediate apperception of something without the intervention of any reasoning process,” (p 20) knowledge which “arrives to us by ways other than self-conscious, goal-directed inferential chains of thought” (p 31), “an epiphenomenon of human anatomy and cognition (p 177), or, simply put, “intuition.” Very briefly, then, and using quotations only from the author to keep things short: Plato regards natural divination as “intuitive insight” (p 52), revealed to be true as a result of the Socratic method of cross-examination, in which, at its simplest level, an illiterate slave boy is coaxed to reveal the truths of geometry. Our perceptions of higher truths thus take place without any dependence on the “unstable and illusory character of…empirical data” (p 55), and “turn our minds toward the immaterial” (p 56). The soul also performs “divination through dreams” (p 82). Aristotle describes “foresight through dreams,” mediated not by god(s) but by the daimonic (my transliteration; see Note 2 below), who are “part of a realm of intermediate divinity beyond human control” (p 86). Sleep is a prerequisite, since defenses are down, and “movements of air” are thus able to produce “a palpable impression” in the sleeper, producing “a mental image that is inserted into the dream” (p 98). The weak-minded also benefit from the process; by contrast, “higher-order intellects occlude this lower-order information processing system” (p 104). For the materialist Stoics, who view the cosmos as “a single unified animal” (p 172), and for whom god is “an extraordinarily refined mist that permeates and suffuses inert matter” (p 172), all intuitions and inexplicable connections occur within a unified system, rather than between realms, as with Plato and Aristotle. Because the universe is predetermined (“Nothing happens that is causally undetermined from what came before” p 196),), and souls are physical bodies, divination for the Stoics is “a gradient and not a rupture” (p 196). Given the Stoics’ definition of time (“an infinitesimal present and a past and future that do not properly exist” p 203), and the material unity of the universe, it is no surprise that Stoic divination is often prediction. Struck concludes his generally chronological examination by illustrating divination according to the Neoplatonists (especially Iamblichus), whose oracles illustrate a new and “true divination, through assimilation to the divine, which yields sweeping knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of the universe” (p 216). This identifies “true divination as a meditative exercise in which the divine and human mind are understood to make a connection” (p 243). Obviously, this is a turning point, which dematerializes divination, in contrast to previous thinking. To conclude, Struck takes us back in time, and out of philosophical discourse, to examine the role that divination plays in helping Penelope recognize her long-absent husband Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey. The divination is manifest as “hints, signs, and enigmas”—and even “kledonomancy, or divination by overheard words” (p 253). This is an extraordinarily erudite book, both wide-ranging and specific, and repays close attention by the reader. It is therefore all the more surprising that two prominent typographical errors involve “phenomena” (used with a singular verb on p 36: “The phenomena…embraces…”) and “phenomenon” (used as a plural on p 111: “…to analyze these phenomenon…”). Michael Mates earned his PhD in 1982 at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena CA, writing his dissertation on St. Patrick and the British Church. After seminary, he taught in Pakistan, and then worked as a U.S. diplomat with the Department of State, serving in Islamabad, Canberra, Karachi, Cluj (Romania), Columbia (District of) and Chisinau (Moldova), before retiring in 2011 to Monroe, Washington State, and starting a new career as co-landscaper at his hectare of gardens, lawns and forest, and brewer of black-fudge garden compost. ...more Book Reviews! Companion to Josephus by Chapman Debating the Saints Cult by M. Dal Santo The Mythology of Plants by A. Giesecke Note to 21st-century reader: It is crucial to note that Plato considered the immaterial to be realer than the empirical, in an exact reversal of most contemporary unconscious thinking about the nature of reality. For example, every table will decay and collapse, but the idea, or substance, of “tableness” lasts forever. Note 2: Throughout the book, Struck translates daimon as “demon,” which is likely to be confused by some with the Christian word for an evil spirit; in pre-Christian thought, daimones were spiritual beings, intermediate between men and the gods, and frequently the conveyers of intuition. Plato describes the daimoniov semeion (daimonic sign) as a “voice” and a warning, and thus “a kind of guardian angel” (p 68). The Greek word is the same in pre-Christian and Christian writings, but the usages are vastly different. Note 3: It helps to have some knowledge of Ancient Greek and Classical Latin, as Struck advances his argument passage-by-bilingual passage, and even word-by-word. Tell us your opinion - Submit your Review - Buy the book! Book Review of Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity - Related Topic: Roman Mythology Bibliography Get it now! Divination for the UK ________________________________ Archive