History Books Review on New and Noteworthy in History on iTunes

I have just looked and to my amazement History Books Review is on the new and noteworthy page for history podcasts on iTunes.  Blimey.

Leo the Wise by Lars Brownworth – Kindle Mini Book

Its a mini-book so this is a mini-review.  Leo the Wise was the founder of the Macedonian dynasty of the Byzantine Empire. 
His life was fairly eventful, but it isn’t obvious from this account that anything he did was particularly wise, though he did just about manage to get the dynasty off on fairly firm footing.

Lars is mainly known as the first history podcaster, with his 12 Byzantine rulers being an inspiration to many.  This book has many of the virtues of that series.  By concentrating on a particular individual it has a strong story line.  It is very clear and easy to read.

The only problem with it is, for me at least, it is too short.  This might be personal preference – after all my favourite book is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall which is definitely on the longish side – but I think most people will get to the end of Leo the Wise thinking ‘Was that it?’.   But its cheap enough so there are no grounds for complaint.  If you stop for lunch on a long journey it will cost you less than a coffee and sandwich, and probably only last you slightly longer.

It will be interesting to see if this catches on as a format.  Maybe there will be Kindle owners who find the idea of downloading a cheap book the length of a magazine article that they can polish off fairly quickly appealling.

The Fractal Geometery of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot

I was saddened to hear of the death of the great Benoit Mandelbrot today.  Although this is a history blog, I am a scientist. 
My love of history comes from the same place as my love of science, both help us understand the way the world around us is.  I don’t think anybody in the second half of the twentieth century did as much to explain the world as Benoit Mandelbrot.

So what are fractals?  It is short for fractional dimension, and the phrase was coined by Mandelbrot in 1975.   They do rather defy the conventions of a formal definition, but you sort of know one when you see one once you have had your eyes opened by reading some of Mandelbrot’s work.  For instance, a fern has a fractal structure.  Each frond is similar, though not identical, in shape to the whole fern.  This can be modeled mathematically by using a recursive equation, where the same element is run a number of times. Or something like that.  Anyway, this is not a fern.  It is the output of an equation which defines a process to be continued until another condition is met. 

This knowledge can be used to produce a whole range of realistic looking images that resemble the real world.  Using the fractal approach for instance it is possible to produce really realistic looking clouds.

When I read the Fractal Geometry of Nature in the early nineties was a revelation.  Suddenly lots of things that had never really been part of science were given a rigorous and very beautiful treatment.  The shape of ferns. The way clouds look.  How long is the coast of Britain.

It is a strange book, in the sense of it being hard to know where you should put it. It isn’t really a maths book.  It isn’t really a science book.  I will admit it, it definitely isn’t a history book.  It is the only book I have read where the illustrations are the most important single bit of the book.

You don’t really read the Fractal Geometry of Nature.  You hold it in front of your face and let the fractal view of the world diffuse into your brain by a sort of osmosis.

With the death of Mandelbrot the science of fractals moves into history as one of the leaps mankind has made in understanding the Universe we live in.  We shall miss him.  He was one of the few people who has really gazed deeper than the rest of us, and come back to illuminate our lives.

History Books Review now on iTunes

I have just received notification from Apple that my podcast is approved for the podcast section of the iTunes store.

Subscribe to iTunes here.

Another update….

I am not going to make a habit of posting updates on what I am up to, but I thought a bit of explanation of what is going on might be of interest to my small but perfectly formed band of followers.  First off, I am writing new stuff for this blog faster than I ever have before.  I have 5 (count them!) episodes written and recorded and ready to publish.  I have several more scripts written and ready to go.  I am hanging back on them because I am in the process of transferring the old ones to a new host.  I have been using Dropbox which is a great, and free, short term expedient.  But it didn’t support all the things I wanted so I have switched over to LibSyn.  It is taking me a while to transfer the old ones to the new host.  There is a limit to how much you can upload in a given month so I can’t do it all in one go.

The other thing that is holding me back is that I have just submitted the podcast to iTunes, and I am waiting anxiously to see whether or not they are approved.  I have a cunning plan for how I am going to promote the podcast if Apple doesn’t like what I am doing, but in the mean time I will be holding back on the new stuff.

Thanks for reading and/or listening and I hope I will catch up with myself and be getting some new stuff out soon.

Alexander Severus: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 6 Part 5

If you want to follow this series it starts with the reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus.  The previous episode is about the most eccentric emperor of  Rome, Elagabalus.

With the body of his cousin bobbing down the Tiber in disgrace, Alexander was instantly acclaimed the emperor and acquired the huge list of titles that the role had accumulated in the years since Augustus.
He was only 14 so it must have been somewhat bewildering to find himself now father of the nation.
Most of the time in writing up the scripts for this podcast I am cutting Gibbon’s text down and getting rid of unnecessary detail.  The book is after all, long enough.  But in the case of Alexander I think it is worth giving a bit more of a picture because his reign really does illustrate extremely well just what was going wrong in Rome at the time and why a system that had worked so well under the Antonines and which nominally had hardly changed, was to be gripped by crisis for decades after the death of Alexander.

To read Gibbon you would think that Alexander’s instant acclamation to absolute power was in some way a result of sympathy for him and his personal qualities and charisma.  Well history is rarely swayed by niceness.  What was really going on?

I turned to the Historia Augusta, one of Gibbon’s sources. It is easy to work out the sources Gibbon used.  All of them.  I imagine that if Gibbon had hired a PR agency they would have come up with a motto like ‘reading Latin literature so you don’t have to’.  Reading the Historia Augusta it is pretty clear what the motivation behind the praise being lavished on Alexander was.  The pressing need was to establish the regime as legitimate and in control.  If this wasn’t done the army would certainly fill the vacuum.  The balance of power between the Senate and the army was hugely in favour of the troops.  The only card in the Senate’s hand was its residual authority hanging over from previous eras. It played this weak card like its life depended on it.  In fact, the life of some of it members probably did depend on it.

If you are a Roman history buff you are probably wondering why I am quoting the Historia Augusta with such reverence.  I know, I know.  It is a notoriously unreliable testament to say the least. Like many, I am of the view that the Romans themselves probably regarded the Historia Augusta as strictly for laughs.  But I think the account of why the Senate did what it did rings true, and the risk of civil war would have been in the forefront of everyone’s mind.

But although the attractive character of Alexander was probably not the key factor in his lauding by the Senate, his character was nonetheless quite an appealing one, especially when compared to his cousin. He seems to have been hard working, conscientious and with a passion for education.  It’s not hard to see why Gibbon approved of him.  He was a model for an enlightened prince.  But it was his mother, Mamaea, that was to prove decisive.  She took effective control of the situation and was the de facto ruler of Rome from that point onwards.  This was justifiable when Alexander was very young.  It became steadily more questionable the older he got.

Civil administration was quickly brought under the control of a council of wise heads.  The chief among these was a famous and popular lawyer called Ulpian. The council was honest and effective, and the excesses and chaos of previous reigns were tackled.  The problem was the army.  It was aware of its power and would simply not be brought to heal.  The Roman Empire had in effect become a very large glorified protection racket run for the benefit of its nominal defenders.  The administrative abilities of Ulpian for example did not protect him when he fell foul of the troops.  He was killed in front of the emperor, despite the emperor pleading on his behalf.

Alexander did make efforts to assert his authority.  But it would have taken a man of huge strength of character to escape from the gilded cage in which he found himself.  On one occasion he addressed rebellious troops and won them round by very nearly carrying out a threat to dismiss them.  He later had the ringleaders killed.  This must have taken huge courage, and suggested that he was not short of the kind of willpower that would have been needed.  In addition to some direct confrontation, there was also some deft scheming to get men into positions that suited the emperor.  But it was a hopeless situation – the strong men were aware  of their strength.  And to make things worse, there were also significant military threats from the Persians and the Germans.

Fate had dealt Alexander a poor hand.  The evidence is that he was an able and capable man who under other circumstances might well have proved to be a great emperor.  He could easily have settled in to enjoy the life of the pampered first citizen.  That he tried to break out of the situation he was in is a tribute to him.   But it is hard to see what he could  realistically have done differently given that he came to the throne with no connection to the army and no independent power base.  The one thing he could have done, but didn’t, was to escape the hold his mother had on him.  Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have done.

The biggest threat came from the Persians who made a bid to regain Asia Minor which had been lost to them since the time of the more famous Alexander some 400 years before.  The threat was serious and real and the Persians had some early successes, but in the end the superior Roman resources were brought to bear and the Persians were forced to sue for peace.  There are varying accounts of how well the emperor performed in the field, but in any case the victory was not glorious enough to strengthen his hand internally or to win him the love and respect of his troops.

There was, in any case to be no peace.  The Germans were stirring on the borders, and Alexander was obliged to lead the legions against them, leading them in fact into Germany itself.  He had serious difficulties with the troops.  They nearly rebelled when he paid off one tribe rather than fighting them.  We don’t know whether this was a good or bad decision. But presumably the rank and file were more bothered by the missed opportunity to acquire some booty than in the overall strategic situation.  The discontent with his handling of military matters grew as the campaign progressed, and in the end he was killed by his own troops on the 18th of March in 235. Fittingly, his mother was killed too.

The death of Alexander was not the result of popular discontent or palace intrigue.  It was certainly not an ideological challenge.  He simply lost control of the army.   The soldiers got rid of him because they didn’t like the way he did things – or to be precise, the way his mother did things.  And they chose a successor that was to their taste.  There was no pretext of consulting the Senate, or fashioning an elaborate smokescreen of supposed legitimacy.  If you could command a body of troops, you could make a play for the top job. For the rest of the third century, this would be the way that it would be.

In the next episode we cover the career of Maximin, the first barbarian emperor of Rome.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the use of the images.