Death. The Inevitable Appointment.

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Death is speaking.

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,  now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samara.

The road to Samaria by Somerset Maugham. 

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In the earlier days of dueling, before the specific code duello was created with specific norms to follow, it was common to agree on all sorts of unusual conditions.  In one bizarre incident, an Englishman abroad was challenged to a duel by a wealthy resident of the particular area in which the Englishman was travelling.  Unable to avoid a duel, the Englishman agreed to a meeting with pistols in the challenger's baronial hall - but he specified that it be held in complete darkness.

He was determined not to hurt his opponent, so the Englishman waited till the challenger fired first, and then, slowly and carefully, he felt his way around the wall until he found the large fireplace that he had noted before the darkness.  Then he carefully discharged his pistol up the chimney.  To his horror the body of his overly cautious opponent dropped down to the hearth with a sickening thud.

From The Treasury of the Gun, by Harold l. Peterson

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More popthems needed to illustrate further this unavoidable encounter with Death.

Lord Byron and the Rolling Stones.

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Lord Byron was the original "Bad Boy", and this 150 years before the Stones founded their band.  He was barred from Long's Hotel on Bond St. in London.  The regrettable incident for which he was barred is that, "On a cold wet night, Lord Byron deemed the hall to be a less inclement place than an uncovered yard".  What he did is left to our imagination.

The source for this is "For your Convenience" via "Cleanliness and Godliness"

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In March, 1965 three of the Rolling Stones were spotted urinating in the forecourt of the Francis Service Petrol Station in East Ham.   A private summons was issued against Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman.  In court it was said that Wyman had asked if he could use the petrol station lavatory, but had been refused.

A mechanic, Mr Charles Keeley, then asked Jagger to remove his group from the forecourt, but Jagger had brushed him aside, saying: "We will piss anywhere, man."  The rest of the group then began chanting "We will piss anywhere, man" while carrying out their threat.

As they drove off they added insult to injury by “making a well-known gesture”.

Each of the three Rolling Stones was found guilty and fined £5 with 15 guineas costs on March 18th.

Elizabethans and Cleanliness and Bad Teeth

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As far as washing, if you're poor, you probably don't bother.  So says Ian Mortimer in the BBC History Magazine.  If you live in a rented room on the fourth floor of one of those timber-framed tenement houses it's simply too much effort to go to the public water supply conduit and carry the water back in sufficient quantity for a bath on the fourth floor. and then you wouldn't be able to afford the cost of the firewood to heat up the water. So you stay unwashed, and since all your acquaintances don't wash either, you can't tell the difference

Those who are able to wash don't use soap.  They rub themselves clean with fresh linen, and you can't afford to buy the fresh linen.

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But how does the water get from the public water conduit to the houses of those who can afford it?

The guild of water-carriers took care of that.  They carried two tubs of water either from the River Thames, or from one of the wells, on a yoke across their shoulders.

Around the year 1600, the Company of Water-Tankard Bearers presented a petition to The House of Commons stating that they and their families numbered 4000 persons and complaining that wealthy people were running pipes from the conduits to their houses - the beginning of household water supply.

(from 'Cleanliness and Godliness' by Reginald Reynolds.


In the fourteenth century Fitz Stephen, speaking of London, says of the wells of Holy Well, Clerkenwell and St. Clements Well, "....water, sweet, wholesome and clear, streaming forth among the glistening Pebble Stones".

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The wealthy, according to Ian Mortimer, wash themselves daily by rubbing themselves in clean linen (wet or dry?), they wash their hands and faces daily in clean water, they wash their hands before after and during every meal.  Occasionly they take a hot bath.  They wash their hair in lye and use tooth powder to clean their teeth.

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Source unknown:


In Elizabethan times sugar was an imported delicacy, and as such, expensive.  Only the upper classes could afford it.  Too much sugar without appropriate dental care, as we know and they probably did not know or didn't care, damages your teeth.  So it follows of course that the upper classes would have had bad and blackened teeth; and since such discolored teeth were, like sugar,  exclusive to the upper classes, it became the fashion to re-enforce your status as an aristocrat by blackening your teeth using some kind of cosmetic.

Can this be true?  Bad dental hygiene, discolored teeth, and yet still the subject of sonnets?

Early America and Portrait Artists

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Itinerant portrait artists roved around the country looking for portrait commissions.  There were so many of them that William Dunlap in his 'Lives of the Artists' wrote that Gilbert Stuart remarked of them:

       "By and by you will not by chance kick your foot against a dog-kennel but out will start a portrait painter".

Gilbert Stuart was the great American portrait artist who painted the iconic portrait of George Washington.

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Thomas Cole, 1801-1848, was the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement. He was a renowned landscape artist, but first he tried his hand at portraits.  He grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, and there he learned the rudiments of his profession from a portrait artist named Stein.  In his early twenties he set up as a wandering portrait painter, walking from village to village with his paints and brushes.

He found that others had got there before him and had already reaped the harvest in the towns  of southern Ohio such as Zanesville, St Clairsville and Chillicothe.  In particular he butted heads with one, Jacob Descombes, who had painted portraits of the most prosperous citizens of these towns.  Descombes soon gave up the arts to become a minister.

One might have supposed that the woods were full of painters, for there were portraits all over the walls of the many inns of the area.  But there were still villages further off the beaten track where farmers were ready to welcome the work of another itinerant artist. However, Cole had little success painting portraits, and his interest shifted to landscape.


From 'The World of Washington Irving', by Van Wyck Brooks


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Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot and hero of the American Revolutionary War, who oversaw the construction of the fortifications of West Point, was a painter of portraits.  He painted Thomas Jefferson in 1798, before returning to spend the latter part of his life in Europe.

They freed the slaves. One was Abraham Lincoln.

Of two men in history can it be said, "They freed the slaves".  One was Abraham Lincoln.  The other was Epaminondas  (ca. 418 BC - 362 BC).  He was a Theban general and statesman of the 4th century BC.  Thebes was a city-state a little north of Athens.

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His references:

The Roman orator Cicero called him "the first man of Greece" - placing him ahead of Alexander, Pericles, Socrates etc.

Montaigne, 16th Century writer of the famous 'Essays', judged him one of the three "worthiest and most excellent men" that had ever lived".

But today few people have ever heard of him.

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In 371 BC., Sparta sent an invading army into Theban territory.  Everyone knows of Sparta's fearsome reputation in war, so it seems like a foregone conclusion that 10,000 Spartans would annihilate 6000 Boeotians (Thebans).  Faced with these odds, Epaminondas, the leader of the Thebans, was to display a grasp of tactics hitherto unseen in Greek warfare, and in so doing he would change the face of battle for all time to come.

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Psychology of ancient battle.

The foot soldiers of the phalanx formation used by Greek armies held a shield on their left arm, and a sword in their right hand.  There was a distinct tendency to seek the shelter of the shield of the foot soldier on your right during the charge into battle and during the battle "because fear makes each man do his best to shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next to him on the right". (Thucydides)

Traditionally, therefore, a phalanx would line up for battle with the elite troops on the right flank to act as a wall or anchor to counter this tendency, and to keep the line tight.  With both sides following the same strategy, it seems that the result would be an indecisive anti-clockwise movement - kind of yin yang turning anti-clockwise.

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The battle of Leuctra. (371 BC)

The Spartan army contained some 10,000 hoplites, of whom only 700 were the elite warriors known as Spartiates, while the rest consisted of allies; which was not untypical of the Spartan way of war.  The Boeotians opposite them numbered about 6,000, but were bolstered by a cavalry superior to that of the Spartans.

Based on the traditional tactics, in the Spartan phalanx at Leuctra, Cleombrotus (the spartan general) and the elite 'Spartiates' were on the right, while the less experienced Peloponnesian allies were on the left.

Epaminondas needed to counter the Spartans' numerical advantage.  He implemented two tactical innovations.  Firstly, he took the best troops in the army, and arranged them 50 ranks deep (as opposed to the normal 8–12 ranks) on the left wing (not the right as was typical), opposite Cleombrotus and the Spartiates

Secondly, recognizing, that he could not match the width of the Peloponnesian phalanx, he abandoned all attempts to do so.  Instead, he instructed the weaker troops on his right flank to avoid battle and withdraw gradually during the enemy's attack.  This reversing of the position of the elite troops, and an oblique line of attack were innovations never before tried in battle.  At the battle of Leuctra, Epaminondas was responsible for the military tactic of 'refusing one's flank'.

The fighting opened with a clash between the cavalry, in which the Thebans were victorious over the inferior Spartan cavalry, driving them back into the ranks of the infantry, thereby disrupting the spartan phalanx.  The powerful blockbuster of the Theban left flank now charged into battle while the right flank retreated.

After intense fighting, the Spartan right flank began to give way under the impetus of the mass of Thebans, and Cleombrotus was killed.  The Spartans held on for long enough to rescue the body of their king, but the line was soon broken by the sheer force of the Theban assault.  The Peloponnesian allies on the left wing, seeing the Spartans put to flight, also broke and ran.

One thousand Peloponnesians were killed, while the Boeotians lost only 300 men.  Most importantly, since it constituted a significant proportion of the entire Spartan manpower, 400 of the 700 Spartiates present were killed.  When, after the battle, the Spartans asked if they and their Peloponnesian allies could collect the dead, Epaminondas suspected that the Spartans would try to cover-up the scale of their losses.  He therefore allowed the Peloponnesians to remove their dead first, so that those remaining would be shown to be Spartiates, thus emphasising the scale of the Theban victory.

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THe spartan society was a slave-based society.  Messenians, who were conquered in the Messenian Wars of the 8th century BC, become the slaves known as Helots.  They were ritually mistreated, humiliated and even slaughtered.  According to Aristotle, the ephors (religious leaders of Sparta) declared war on the Helots every autumn, thereby allowing Spartans to kill them without fear of religious pollution.  This task was given to the Kryptes, graduates of the difficult agoge (advanced school system) who took part in the Krypteia.  This lack of judicial protection is confirmed by Myron of Priene, who mentions killing as a standard mode of regulation of the Helot population, which was several times greater in number than the pure Spartan population.

The Nazi SS would have felt right at home in Sparta.

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More Nazi stuff:

What was the Krypteia?

Young Spartan men who had completed their training at the agoge with such success that they were marked out as potential future leaders would be given the opportunity to test their skills and prove themselves worthy of the Spartan military through participation in the krypteia.

The kryptes were sent out into the countryside, with only a knife to survive on their skills and cunning, with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered at night and to take any food they needed.
Their mission was to root-out potential sedition.  Troublesome Helots could be summarily executed. Such brutal oppression of the Helots permitted the Spartans to control the agrarian population and devote themselves to military practice.

If only night-time killing was allowed, it suggests there was a curfew in place, and that any Helot out after dark would be considered a troublemaker.

Only Spartans who had served in the Krypteia as young men could expect to achieve the highest ranks in Spartan society and army.  It was felt that only those Spartans who showed the ability and willingness to kill for the state at a young age were worthy to join the leadership in later years.

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In the immediate aftermath of Leuctra, the Peloponnesian cities, formerly under Spartan dominance, became independent.  The Mantineans decided to unify their settlements into a single city, and to fortify it.  This greatly angered the Spartans who declared war on Mantinea, whereupon the majority of Arcadian cities grouped together to oppose the Spartans and requested assistance from the Thebans. The new Theban army arrived late in 370 BC, led by Epaminondas and Pelopidas.  It consisted of some 50-70,000 men.  In Arcadia Epaminondas encouraged the Arcadians to form a league, and to build another new city named Megalopolis as a center of power opposed to Sparta.

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The Theban army moved south, crossing the Evrotas River, the frontier of Sparta, which no hostile army had breached in memory.  The Spartans were unwilling to engage the massive army in battle. They stayed within their city simply defended it, and the Thebans did not attempt to capture it. The Thebans and their allies ravaged Laconia, down to the port of Gythium, freeing some of the Lacedaemonian perioeci from their allegiance to Sparta.

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Now comes one of those transcendental moments in the history of the world.  Instead of marching his army home, Epaminondas continued on to Messenia, the home of the Helots.  He freed the Helots and then, after obtaining omens from the gods, making sacrifices and inviting the spirits of past rulers and heroes to live in Messene, Epaminondas invited construction engineers and artisans from everywhere to join him.

In 85 days the combined armies and exiles guided by the engineers and artisans completed the walled city of Messene over the site of the previous Ithome.  The new city included within its walls Mt. Ithome and enough agricultural land and spring water to withstand a siege indefinitely.  The massive new walls and fortifications were among the strongest in Greece.  Epaminondas then issued a call to Messenian exiles from other parts of Greece from Italy, Sicily and Africa to return and rebuild their homeland   

Did he do it out of expediency?  For the loss of Messenia was particularly damaging to the Spartans, since the territory comprised one-third of Sparta's territory and contained half of their Helot population. It was the Helots' labor that had allowed the Spartans to be a constant "full-time" army.

Epaminondas' campaign of 370/369 has been described as an example of "the grand strategy of indirect approach", which was aimed at severing "the economic roots of Sparta's military supremacy."  In mere months, Epaminondas had created two new enemy states that opposed Sparta, shaken the foundations of Sparta's economy, and all but devastated Sparta's prestige.  Having  accomplished this, he led his army back home, victorious.  After the departure of the Theban army the Spartans attempted unsuccessfully to retake Messenia.

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Abraham Lincoln likewise had strategic reasons for emancipating the slaves; but whatever their reasons, Lincoln and Epaminondas are the only two leaders in history of whom it can be said, "They freed the slaves".

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How ironic that he walls that Epaminondas built to free the slaves still stand to this day, whereas little remains of the architecture of Sparta to show that it ever existed, for unlike other cities of Ancient Greece, Sparta did not have any walls surrounding it.  In part the walls weren’t needed because the Spartans had little to steal; in part it was Sparta’s remote location, deep in the mountains and far from the sea.   Mostly, it was the reputation of the warriors of Sparta.


When one Athenian questioned the Spartan king about the lack of walls, the king responded "Our shields are our walls." The Athenian asked how many warriors they had and the response was "Enough".  Another Spartan King replied to the same question saying that "The bodies of our young men are our walls and their spear points are our borders".

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Aftermath.

Upon his return home, Epaminondas was greeted not with a hero's welcome but with a trial arranged by his political enemies.  According to Cornelius Nepos, in his defense Epaminondas merely requested that, if he be executed, the inscription regarding the verdict read:


"Epaminondas was punished by the Thebans with death, because he obliged them to overthrow the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) at Leuctra, whom, before he was general, none of the Boeotians (Thebans) durst look upon in the field; and because not only, by one battle, did he rescue Thebes from destruction, but also secured liberty for all Greece..."

The jury broke into laughter, the charges were dropped, and Epaminondas was re-elected as Boeotarch for the next year.

Islam and Image Deprivation

Painting of Abu'l Hassan, Persian Ambassador to the Court of St James (England), 1810. Painted by one of the greatest portrait artists of all time, Sir Thomas Lawrence.

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What does aniconism mean?  It's the absence of images like paintings and statues in a particular society, such as Islam, where there is a proscription against the creation of images of sentient living beings.  Images of Allah are absolutely forbidden, followed by depictions of Muhammad, and then Islamic prophets and the relatives of the Prophet.

However, the depiction of all humans and animals is discouraged by the long tradition of Islamic authorities, especially Sunni ones.  This has led to Islamic art being dominated by Islamic geometric patterns, calligraphy and the foliage patterns of the arabesque style.

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The painting above gives an insight into the results of this 'image deprivation'.

It was commissioned by Sir Gore Ouseley during Abu'l Hassan's tenure in London as Persian Ambassador.  Later, Sir Gore went to Persia as Ambassador Extraordinary for the purpose of concluding a treaty between England and Persia, and he took the painting with him.  He took the painting with him.

The painting was temporarily placed on a sofa, and the Persian Prime Minster, Mirza Shefi, entered the room.  He had never seen a European oil painting and he mistook the painting for the real person.  He is said to have become outraged and to have shouted at the offending painting:

"I think that when the representative of the King of England does me the honor of standing up to receive me, in due respect to him, you should not be seated."

Only when he had touched the painting did he realize his mistake.

He said, "I could have sworn by the Koran that it was a projecting substance - in truth that it was Abu'l Hassan himself".

Plato and the Olympic Games

                                         The stadium today.

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The Olympic Games were held at four-year intervals, and later the term Olympiad (the period between two Games) was used as a measure for counting years.  For example, Diodorus states that there was a solar eclipse in the third year of the 113th Olympiad, which must refer to the eclipse of 316 BC.  This would give a date of 765/6 BC for the first year of the first Olympiad.

The Olympic Games were held in Olympia, in a remote area of southwestern Greece, about 200 miles from Athens.  To get there most spectators had taken rough mountain roads and a ten-day journey.  When they got there they found a venue poorly prepared to accommodate them.  "An endless mass of people" is how second-century A.D. author Lucian describes it.

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Whatever facilities Olympia had would have been swamped.  At night most of the spectators would have flung their bedding wherever they could find a spot, or they would have put up a tent or paid for a spot in some temporary shelter.  Sounds like Woodstock.

Plato himself once slept in a makeshift barracks, head to toe with drunken strangers.  An image of Plato as a hippy - probably in his younger years.

                                        
                                         Athletes entry into stadium.

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Dried riverbeds used as latrines, and sweat of unwashed multitudes wafting out nose-teasing odors; and everywhere the flies, a plague of them.  Priests at Olympia sacrificed animals to "Zeus, the driver-away of flies" probably to little effect.


The spectators stood for up to sixteen hours.  Seating was not provided.  In fact the Greek word stadion means 'a place to stand'.

"But" said Epictetus, "you put up with it all because it is an unforgettable spectacle."

Lucian writes,  "..... you should be there sitting in the middle of the spectators, looking at the men's courage and physical beauty, their marvellous condition, their skill and invincible strength, their enterprise, their emulation, their unconquerable spirit, and their never-wearied pursuit of victory.  Oh, I know very well, you would never have been tired of talking about your favourites, cheering them on them with your shouts and hand gestures."  He could be writing today not eighteen centuries
The Games were sensationally popular, and were held without fail every four years from about 765 B.C., till they were banned as a pagan festival by Christian emperors in A.D 394.

Like a pilgrimage to Mecca, for the Greeks it was considered a great misfortune to die without having been to Olympia.  One Athenian baker boasted on his gravestone that he had attended the Games twelve times.

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Some observations on the Olympic events:

Sprinters would be leaning slightly forward, feet together and arms outstretched.  False starts were punished with a thrashing from official whip-handlers.

The pankration was a kind of mixed martial arts contest; differing from today's MMA in that the only thing barred was eye-gouging; whereas snapping opponents' fingers, even tearing out intestines were acceptable and, as one coach noted, "the judges approve of strangling".  It is said that Plato [427-347 BC] was a double winner of the pankration, which adds a new dimension to his philosophy.

The long jump was performed with a weight in each hand which would have the effect of "pulling'  the jumper forward, and then, jettisoning the weights backward prior to landing would give that final "push" for distance.

A four hundred yard sprint was run in full body armor, emulating the charge of the Greek hoplites into battle.

Boxing became increasingly brutal over the centuries.  Initially, soft leather covered the fingers, but eventually, hard leather weighted with metal was sometimes used.  The fights had no rest periods and there were no rules against hitting a man while he was down. Bouts continued until one man either surrendered or died.  However, killing an opponent was frowned on, and the dead boxer was automatically declared the winner.


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Corruption.

The judges sometimes took bribes.  In A.D. 67 they took some pretty heavy bribes from the emperor Nero to award him first prize in the chariot race - notwithstanding that he fell out of his chariot and failed to complete the course.  Like Sacha Baron Cohen's movie 'The Dictator' in which he wins the sprint by shooting anyone who threatens to beat him.

From an article in the Smithsonian, August 2004, by Tony Perrottet.