These are annotations for the ninth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?
p. 153
•epigraph:
Some men have a passion for horses, others for birds, others, again, for wild beasts; but I, from childhood, have been penetrated with a passionate longing to acquire books.
§Julian, letter to Ecdicius (AD 362).
•a dream to reverse the relentless march of history: William F. Buckley once vowed to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” which is halfway to the same thing. The problem is that stopping history is very hard to do; if you consider how much history has passed since Buckley made this pronouncement in 1955, you'd have to include Buckley in the list of those who failed.
It’s a long list of failures (Julian included), which is why we have idioms about cans and worms, or genies and bottles. But some people have managed to hold the movement of history off for a while: Japan's decision to discard firearms in a classic example. In most countries, the introduction of firearms led to a proliferation of their ownership and use; when ownership has dropped, it is because the state has mandated a monopoly on deadly force. Many developed countries have very few people who own or habitually use guns, but that's never true of the army, for example. So once Japan started using Portuguese flintlocks in the mid sixteenth century, it's no surprise that its soldiers began to adopt their use, that their engineer quickly worked at improving their design and manufacture. The Japanese army used flintlocks extensively in their invasion of Korea in the 1590s, for example. For a society with an elite that prided itself on swordsmanship, the gun acted as an “equalizer,” making peasants and bandits as dangerous as samurai: In the film Seven Samurai, every samurai who dies gets killed by a bullet. Swords were the past, guns were the future. And yet…when Commodore Matthew Perry landed in Japan two and a half centuries later, he found a country with very few firearms, even in the armed forces—and the firearms they had were archaic flintlocks, of the same old sixteenth-century design. In two hundred and fifty years, Japan had made no further improvements in a vital technology, and even lost almost all manufacture. They’d managed to get rid of almost every gun in the country.
Japan was a special case, though. Its geography allowed it to remain almost completely isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. Once the country was unified under the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603, there was literally no one to fight. The only use the Shogun could see for guns was rebellion…against him!…so he got rid of them. If France had tried to get rid of all its firearms in 1603, it would have simply been conquered by England or Spain. But Japan was able not only to halt history, but even to turn it back to an age when firearms were almost nonexistent.
Of course, at the end of the nineteenth century, Japan was fully armed again. By 1876 they'd begun maneuvering for the conquest of Korea, for real this time. By 1905 their armed forces beat Russia. By the 1940s they controlled East Asia. (Japan now once again has the lowest gun ownership in the developed world; but their police still have modern weaponry.) So history wasn't really stopped, but it was stalled for two hundred and fifty years, which is pretty good.
Change is often scary, and we have a tendency to label things as they are now, or were in the recent past, as right or natural. Some of the extravagant features of the nun's habit, such as the “wimple” that the Flying Nun wore, are just items of medieval dress that never got updated as secular fashions changed. Nuns eschewed the vagaries of worldly fashion, and the end result is that some of them wear clothing that was perfectly ordinary half a millennium ago—but is almost unprecedented today.
Keeping your wimple in place while the world moves through hairnets to pillbox hats is difficult enough, but nothing compared to the difficulty of forcing history to move backwards, Julian-style. That hasn’t stopped people from trying: “Fundamentalist” and “radical” sound like antonyms, but at heart they both point to a philosophy of returning to some original state, the “fundamentals” or the “root” (radix is Latin for root) of a movement. In the 1970s The Khmer Rouge tried to move Cambodia back to a pre-modern agricultural society before the introduction of currency (they even started their calendar over, beginning it at “year zero”); predictably, this led to widespread famine and a couple million deaths. People still try, though. Sometimes you gotta try.
p. 154
•Julius Caesar is only the most famous of a host: Other ancient assassinees familiar from IH includes Philip II (Alexander the Great’s father), Seleucus I (Alexander the Great’s “successor”), Caligula, Nero, Domitian, etc.. Add the as-yet unmentioned: Polycrates (tyrant of Samos; 522 BC); Dion (tyrant of Syracuse, 354 BC); Tiberius Gracchus (Roman tribune, 133 BC); etc.; etc.
•coating one side of a knife with poison: The (never reliable) Historia Augusta suggests that Marcus Aurelius killed his co-emperor Verus in the same way, which honestly doesn’t sound like something Marcus Aurelius would do. [David Magie, trans., Historia Augusta vol. I (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1932) p. 171.]
p. 156
•Julian affected the long beard that marked a philosopher: “‘Come now, Epictetus, shave off your beard.’ If I’m a philosopher, I’ll reply: I won’t shave it off. ‘Then I’ll have you beheaded.’ If it pleases you to do so, have me beheaded.” [Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford UP, 2014) p. 9.]
(Tip of the hat to
from whose post I stole this reference.)p. 158
•Rome and Persia were pretty much always at war: In this case one bone of contention was that the Persian king Shapur II claimed “historical” dominion over all lands east of Macedonia. This would be the equivalent of modern-day Italy claiming the rights to London, England, by virtue of ancient Roman conquest.
p. 161
•Constantius abruptly caught a fever and keeled over dead: According to Ammianus, Constantius received an omen of his death when he spotted a headless corpse with feet pointing west. I’m not sure if such a sight is always an omen of death. Was it important that Constantius at the time was marching west? That he saw a headless corpse in a “suburb” of Antioch called Horsehead? [Ammianus op. cit. pp. 228–29.]
p. 162
•Rome had long espoused religious pluralism: One of Julian’s arguments against Christians was that although there are many acceptable gods to worship, the Christians worshiped none of them and were therefore atheists. Naturally, from Julian’s point of view Jews were therefore also atheists, a common slur against them (as we have seen). [Julian, “Against the Galilaeans.”]
p. 163
•rhetoric, philosophy, and grammar: These basic subjects were called the trivium, which gives us ultimately out word trivial (although oddly not the mostly unrelated trivia).
p. 164
•or, if you wish, miracles, prevented the work from progressing: Here’s Francis Wrangham, writing in 1795:
…The same Almighty WORD
Which summon’d into being and dissolv’d
The pond’rous Edifice, in pristine form,
At his appointed time shall reunite
It’s [sic] scatter’d parts: no feebler arm may raise
The ruin’d pile. This, erst the Roman Lord,
Rash Julian knew; with fruitless effort toil’d
The insolent Apostate, so to thwart
Jehovah’s plan: Him, hurl’d from central depths
By arm divine, the conglobated fire
Repell’d, as oft his daring hand essay’d
The impious work.
[Wranghham, The Restoration of the Jews (Archdeacon & Burges, 1795) pp. 9–10.]
p. 166:
•Procopius: Not the same Procopius as gets quoted on IH p. 331.
p. 168
•epigraph for the second section:
I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.
§W. Somerset Maugham, Sheppey (1933).
p. 170
•Moses was the humblest man: Usually I quote the King James version of the Bible, but this time I quoted…no real version? I mean, the quote isn’t made up, but I guess I amalgamated a couple and pretended I translated the whole thing from Hebrew myself?
Anyway, cf. the actions of everyone’s hero, Stalin, who inserted into his official biography the sentence: “Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”
All of this ribbing of Moses is probably unfair, though. The KJV I failed to quote used the word meek. Honestly, the passage could mean that Moses was shy (which he clearly was, at least in Exodus 4). One study bible suggests that Moses is in fact humbled by nonstop “affliction”; this suggestion has at least the merit of making sense in context (his siblings are roasting him), which the meek/shy/humble axis does not.
[Stalin: Paul Johnson, Modern Times (Harper Perennial, 1992) p. 454; KJV Apply the Word Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2016) p. 267.]
p. 172
•Eventually, Muslims held the majority in Egypt: When exactly Muslims took the majority is a question that is perhaps unanswerable and for which the estimates are all over the place. If anyone has a good source with good evidence, please let me know.
p. 173
•rarely ran smoothly for very long: Here’s another example, from long before Julian’s time: In northern India in the second-century BC, the emperor Pushyamitra persecuted Buddhists in his empire so assiduously that said Buddhists welcomed foreign invaders (in this case Greeks) who promised to stop their suffering.
(W.W. Tarn suggests the persecution may be a myth, but concedes that the “usual view among historians of India has been that, though the story is greatly exaggerated, it must have some basis in fact.”)
[Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India (Ares, 1985) p. 177.]
p. 180
•Copernicus…Ignatius of Loyola: Apparently I did not take seriously enough my claim on IH pp. 389ff. that none of the same people would have been born after a change in history (such as the longer reign of Emperor Julian).
