Bernie for President 2020

This is not a joke. I'm completely serious: I'm endorsing Bernie Sanders for President in 2020, and I'm doing it now, before the primaries even start.

I've said many times on this blog that I hate Bernie Sanders, and I meant it. And I still hate him. I've blamed him for Trump being elected, and I stand by that. I said back in 2015 that Bernie was the only man who could get Donald Trump elected President, and by God, Bernie did it. I said that the math was clear back in March 2016 that Hillary had it sewed up, just like Rachel Maddow and Barack Obama, and we were right, and I'm not going to discuss it because I can do math, but I don't know how to teach math. And also because most of the people who say they want to debate this don't want to debate, or learn, a goddam thing.

I'm endorsing Bernie this time because I believe that if we don't nominate him this time, he will get Donald Trump re-elected. Because he has a hard core of fanatical, hard-core, unreasonable followers. When Bernie and the Bernie Bros didn't get what they wanted in 2016, they behaved like spoiled babies and wrecked everything.

I do not see the slightest sign that they learned a goddam thing from the experience.

Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the majority of people who voted for Bernie in the 2016 primaries. I'm not talking about the majority of people who put Bernie bumper stickers on their cars. Most of those people were reasonable enough to get behind Hillary before Bernie did, and in a much, much more enthusiastic and meaningful way than Bernie ever did, even though many of them hate her intensely. Even most of the people left of center who hated Hillary still understood that the differences between Hillary and Bernie were tiny compared to the differences between any Democratic candidate and Trump. They were able to grasp the concept of party unity. And the vast majority of people who are supporting Bernie now are going to vote for any Democratic candidate rather than Trump.

I'm talking about the more than 1 million people who wrote Bernie in. I'm talking about the Bernie Bros who didn't vote in November 2016, or voted for Stein or Johnson or Trump, and I'm talking about Bernie, who either can't do the math, or pretended that he couldn't, and honestly, which would be worse?

I'm talking about people who can't be reasoned with.

It will be much more effective to just give these idiots what they want, and unite around Bernie, than it would be to nominate anybody else, and try to get the Bernie Bros to unite around them, and to get support from Bernie himself which would be more than half-assed.

Bernie is far and away the strongest candidate we have for President in 2020, because he has that hard core of idiots who will screw it up for anybody else, exactly the same way they screwed it up for Hillary in 2016, and none of the other candidates has a hard core like that. And he has a hard core like that because he's like that. But he still will be a far, far better President than Trump. Biden or Bloomberg would be much worse presidents than Bernie, and they would still be much, much better Presidents than Trump. Almost any Republican Senator, Congressperson, governor or mayor in the US would be a far, far better President than Trump, but it looks like they're going to nominate Trump for a 2nd term, so this is no time to fuck around. Bernie is the best bet to stop Trump, so I'm 100% behind Bernie. And if I'm in a place where a lot of swing voters can hear me, I'll wear my very best shit-eating grin and pretend to love Bernie, because this is no time to fuck around. (The readership of this blog is very close to 100% Leftist.)

It's easier, it's smarter, to just give Bernie and his Bros want they want. They don't understand the concept of party unity, but enough of the rest of us do. Yeah, it's sort of paradoxical and ironic. Try to enjoy the irony, if you hate Bernie too.

And again, just to be perfectly clear: when I say "the rest of us," I'm including the great majority of people who support Bernie, the great majority of people for whom Bernie would be the first choice. I'm talking about the vast majority of people to the left of center, who understand how important it is that Donald Trump not be re-elected.

Macrobius and the Saturnalia

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius is known for writing 2 works in the 5th century: Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; and the Saturnalia, the work which will primarily concern us here. A third work, De verborum Graeci et Latini differentiis vel societatibus, Differences and Similariites Between Greek and Latin Verbs, has been lost except for fragments.

Macrobius tells his readers that Latin is not his first language. Therefore it is safe to assume that he was not a native of the city of Rome. Where exactly he did come from, which positions he held in the Empire, and his exact dates are matters of considerable controversy. It is safe to assume that he was among the upper class of consuls, prefects and proconsuls. He may have been praetorian prefect of Italy in the year 430, or he may been proconsul of Africa in 410, or he may have been neither. It is fairly safe to assume that his first language was Greek.

The Saturnalia was a week-long Roman holiday celebrated around the winter solstice. In Macrobius' Saturnalia, learned gentlemen gather during the Saturnalia in the year 383 or earlier, and discuss matters of history, literature and philosophy, placing the work in the genre extending back to Plato's Symposium. Just as in the Symposium and other works, the tone of the discussion in the Saturnalia varies greatly, depending to a certain extent on factors such as the time of day, how much the characters have had to drink, whether they're being interrupted by other party guests, and so forth. Those involved in the learned discussion include Praetextatus; Symmachus, famed editor of Livy, who pleaded that pagan altars not be removed by Christian Emperors; Nicomachus Flavianus, who edited Livy alongside Symmachus; someone who is either Avienus the translator of Aratea or Avianus the writer of fables, although called Avienus in either case; and Servius, here a very young man, later famous as the commentator of Vergil.

Vergil is discussed far more than any other topic. Roman history and Roman festivals are discussed with great dignity. An example of some less dignified discussion has to do with the effect of the consumption of food and drink on people's appearance.

Estimates as to when the Saturnalia was written range from ca400 to ca435 or later. The earlier the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius was writing about people he knew personally, and perhaps even describing an actual event in his life. The later the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius is delivering a nostalgic vision of a life before the Christianization of the Empire, a time he knows only by hearsay. It is remarkable that Christianty is mentioned nowhere in the Saturnalia.

For scholars, the Saturnalia is, like Aulus Gellius' Noctes Attica, Quintilian's Rhetores Latini Minores, Severus' commentary on Vergil and Isidore's Etymologiae, an immensely valuable source of passages of ancient literature which are otherwise lost or controversially attested. It also holds a natural interest for those studying the last days of "pagan" Rome.

6 9th-century manuscripts of the Saturnalia survive, and hundreds of manuscripts altogether.

Ammianus

Ammianus Marcellinus, ca 330-395, was a Roman soldier and historian. The 31 books of his Res Gestae originally covered Roman history in the period from AD 96 to 378. The first 13 books have been lost. Books 14-31 cover the period from 353 to 378. Some have speculated that originally there were an additional 5 books, 32-36.

Most of the surviving part of Ammianus' history describes Rome's armies defending the Empire's borders in great battles from Gaul to Persia. The passages describing the city of Rome portray it mostly as decadent and declining. The last surviving book, book 31, describes the Huns (before the birth of Attila) besieging Constantinople -- unsuccessfully. But with hindsight, the tone of the entire history is quite ominous. I cannot honestly say how much this is due to my knowing, as Ammianus did not know, that the city of Roman, and the western half of the Empire, was within a century of collapsing.

Ammianus saw himself as continuing the work of Tacitus, who wrote a history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, AD 14, to the death of the Emperor Domition in 96. Tacitus had seen himself as continuing the work of Livy, who wrote a history from the legendary beginnings of Rome until the time of Augustus. However, great portions of the work of all three authors have disappeared, so that we can no longer read this history of Rome in one continual sweep, from the end of the Trojan war until near the end of the Western Empire, as it was intended to be read. That could be done for probably only a couple of centuries, as it seems that it was in the late sixth century AD that large parts of these histories, along with much of the rest of Classical Latin literature, began to disappear, whether from the destruction of wars, or from indifference on the part of readers, or the decisions of scribes to copy this text and therefore not that one, or from the disdain of Christians for "pagan" accounts of history, or what have you.

Today, the text of Ammianus derives from the fragments of a 9th-century manuscript, M, another 9th-century manuscript, V, which has been shown to have been copied from M, and 14 manuscripts of the 15th century, all of which have been shown to be copies of V.

Few if any readers would place Ammianus in the same class as Livy and Tacitus as a writer. Livy and Tacitus are justly celebrated as great prose stylists. Latin was not Ammianus' first language, and it is therefore not surprising that his work is rarely praised on purely stylistic grounds. As a recorder of historical events, however, some have held him in very high esteem. For example, Edward Gibbon, who in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when he reaches the point in his own narrative where Amminaus' history ends, says of him:

"It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary."

Not everyone would agree with Gibbon that Ammianus is unusually unprejudiced, and, let's not dance around the issue, atheists tend to praise him more highly than Christians. Ammianus was not a Christian; seems to have put little stock into religion of any kind; served in the army under the Emperor Julian, who was the only non-Christian Emperor after Constantine the Great and has often been seen as a great monster by Christians and a great hero by atheists; has mostly high praise for Julian, but criticizes what he sees as the fanaticism in Julian's promotion of "pagan" (that is: traditional Roman polytheistic) religion. In short: however prejudiced Ammianus may have been, let's not pretend that the evaluation of Ammianus has been without religious prejudice. I won't pretend that I haven't been drawn to Ammianus to a great degree because of his non-Christian standpoint.

11 of the remaining 18 books of Ammianus' history are devoted to the exploits of the non-Christian Emperor Julian. Julian is often referred to, often sarcastically, as Ammaianus' hero. I think it's fair to say that Ammianus sees Julian as a hero, although I don't think that the sarcasm is necessary -- or effective, either, if you're trying to look like a serious critic of Ammianus and his view of history. As far as whether Gibbon was correct when he characterized Ammianus as unusually unprejudiced -- I think that would be much easier to judge if we could read the missing 13 books of his history, which cover the period between Ad 96 and 353. If Julian were praised in those 13 books, during the discussion of events centuries before his own birth, then I would find the accusations of prejudice more credible.

Trogus and Justin

Pompeius Trogus was a Roman of the 1st century BC who wrote a history of the dynasty of Philip of Macedon, and much miscellanaous related material, in 44 books. Some modern readers have made the mistake of thinking that this means Trogus' history would fill 44 of our modern volumes. Instead, think "book" in the sense of "books of the Bible." 2000 years ago, a book was generally a scroll, and scrolls generally didn't hold as much writing as our books, or codices, as the volumes with covers and writing on both sides of the pages are also called. The Bible, Old plus New Testament, contains 63 books in some versions. Of Livy's 142 books of Roman History, we have 35 books today, plus some smaller bits and pieces. Those 35 surviving books containing approximately the same amount of writing as the 63 books of the Bible, and the 44 books of Trogus' history, as he originally wrote it, mostly likely also contained a similar amount of writing.

Except that only a small fraction of Trogus' original history is known to us today. Some time after Trogus, probably in the 4th century, a writer named Justin (not to be confused with Justin Martyr) collected some excerpts from Trogus' history, a little bit from each of the 44 books, and strung them together with a few of his own remarks. The result is one volume which runs to 300 or 400 pages in most editions. Scholars have tried very hard to separate Trogus' words from Justin's, but the most we can say with near certainty is that most of the volume is fairly close to what Trogus said. In any case, these several hundred pages are one of the major ancient sources for the history of Philip II of Macedon, his famous son Alexander the Great, and their predecessors and successors. Did Justin actually do a good job in selecting and preserving the most interesting and/or the most historically valuable portions of Trogus' work? That's very, very hard to know. What an enormous boon it would be to historians if Trogus' entire work were ever to be recovered!

Other than Justin, there are a few passages from Trogus' history, called prologi, in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a few words of praise from Livy and some other writers, and that's about all we can say for sure. It's very difficult to say how much Livy and other historians may have borrowed from Trogus.

Although Livy admired Trogus and the admiration seems to have been mutual, the two historians make quite a contrast. Livy's history is patriotic and centered around Rome, and many passages clearly have been invented in order to make the work more dramatic and entertaining. Trogus' history is cosmopolitan and centered around Greece, and, according to Justin, he criticized Livy, and also Sallust, for embellishing their historical works with fanciful speeches put into the mouths of historical figures.

It's very unfortunate that the great majority of Trogus' work has been lost. Justin's selections from that work, on the other hand, made for a very popular codex during late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: more than 200 manuscripts of Justin survive, which derive from 4 separate sources.

It seems to me that Justin has been somewhat less popular reading lately, because I have not been able to find an edition printed later then the 19th century.

[PS, 17 December 2019: WHOOPS! Otto Seel's Teubner edition is from 1972. And it includes the prologi. Clearly the way to go. My thanks to evagre at the Classics subreddit at Reddit for pointing this out.]

[PPS, 18 December 2019: Thank goodness some experts read my stuff: Professor Alice Borgna, a member of the Facebook group Classics International, says: "It is not true that in academia he is neglected, and that the last edition is Seel’s one (!!). In the last decade, in fact, studies on Trogus and Justin have flourished, an element which your post seems to miss. More than 30 contributions, books or paper, has been published in recent years, and also new editions: a digital one (https://www.forumromanum.org/literature/justin/index.html) ) and -most of all - the new critical edition of Justin from the prestigious series Les Belles Lettres, with text edited by Bernard Mineo and historical notes by Giuseppe Zecchini, whose first volume (book I-X) was published in 2016. The second volume (books XI–XXIII) appeared in 2018, while the third (and last) is expected in 2020. But a lot of other stuff (translation, commentary) has also been published, as you can easily find." Thank you, Professor, but, obviously, some things are easier for some of us to find than for others. Yesterday, after I was made aware that Seel's edition was from 1972, not from the 19th century as I had thought, I asked myself, Well then why didn't LD Reynolds mention Seel's edition in his piece on Justin (Reynolds writes it "Justinus") in Texts and Tradition? And, of course, Reynolds did, and I had overlooked it: page 197, footnote 1. Actually, Reynolds points out that Seel published two Teubner editions, in 1935 and in 1972, and a further article and book devoted to Justin. About the middle third of the long note 1. And I just completely missed all of that. Reminder to self: You're old. Be more careful reading the fine print. Skimming may not cut it anymore.]

I have a reprint, made by the University of Michigan Libraries, of an 1858 edition by Jacques LeCoffre et cie of Paris, and it's not the Michigan Libaries' finest work. 4 of the pages, pp 24, 26, 30 and 34, are printed at an angle, with their tops at 1 to 1:30 on a clock dial and their bottoms at 7 to 7:30, with a few words squeezed and a handful missing altogether. Not all of the pages are in the proper order. Between page 72 and the end, page 355, the left-hand pages appear on the right and vice-versa. An introduction on page i through iv is inserted between pages 352 and 353. But much more importantly, on all the pages, except for the 4 pages mentioned above, the type is all quite legible. Although definitely below average for Michigan Libraries, it's far from the worst reprint I've ever seen. The reprint by a company which calls itself Forgotten books, of the 1782 edition of Raphael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana, is far worse. It's missing letters from the beginning of all of the lines on almost all of the right-hand pages. That may be the worst reprint I've ever seen, and I've seen a great number of them.

Surely, a new edition of Justin will appear this century. I would think.

David Butterfield on the Indirect Tradition of Lucretius

The "direct tradition" of an author is the manuscripts, printed editions and others copies of whole works by that author. The term "indirect tradition" refers to the times when an author is quoted and/or mentioned by another author.

I have written once before on this blog about David Butterfield's book entitled The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. It's a pleasure to return to Butterfield's book and report some of what he found about the indirect tradition of Lucretius, as I examine the question: to what extent can Lucretius said to have been "forgotten" before Poggio found a manuscript of Lucretius in 1417 at a German monastery he did not bother to name? A manuscript which Poggio then lost, as he seems to have lost by far the most of those Classical manuscripts he discovered. To be fair to Poggio: copies were made of most of these manuscripts before they were lost; also, Poggio had very good handwriting, as we can see from some of these copies which have somehow survived.

Butterfield sums up what he has been able to find of Lucretous' indirect tradition between when Lucretious wrote his poem, around 55 BC, and the end of the 10th century, on pp 100-101, where he says: "Fifty-five different Latin authors cited 492 different Lucretian verses in full or in part." On page 100 Butterfield also notes that the indirect tradition indicates that manuscrupts of Lucretius were available in Rome up until the 5th century, in north Africa between the 2nd and the 4th centuries, and, most interestingly, in Spain around the turn of the 7th century.

Lucretius is not always named by these authors who quote him. On pp 47-100, Butterfield goes over the indirect tradition in great detail. I hope these are in mostly chrological order: Lucretius is named by Cicero, Ovid, Vitruvius, Nepos, Velleius Paterculus, Pliny the Elder, Statius, Tacitus, Quintilian, Apuleius, Quintus Serenus, Jerome, Sidonius Appolinaris, the anonymous 8th-century Fragmentum Parisinum de notis the anonymous 9th-century florilegium Exemplore diversorum auctorum, and the anonymous work of the 9th or 10th century known as the second Vatican Latin mythology. That's quite a lot of prominent mentions, by 12 different authors, which would work against Lucretius been forgotten. As for the times when the remaining 43 authors quoted Lucretius without naming him, and as for how often readers would have known that Lucretius was being quoted, that's much more difficult to say.

Butterfield is very conservative in mapping out this tradition: on many occasions, he mentions that other scholars have described passages in various texts as having come from Lucretius, but he feels that the evidence for this is insufficient. For example, papyrus fragments from the 1st century AD have been found at Herculaneum, and some have attributed the texts to Lucretius, but Butterfield maintains that the texts are too short to allow us to be certain of this attribution.

Butterfield stops this phase of his description of the indirect tradition at the end of the 10th century, because these are the only instances, before 1417, where he believes that it can be conclusively demonstrated that another author had direct access to a manuscript of Lucretius. In a footnote on pp 286-286, about two dozen further authors from the eleventh century up until 1417 are mentioned who seem to have been familiar with some part of the text of de rerum natura, but who, in Butterfield's judgment, could have been familiar with the indirect tradition only. That is, instead of referring to a complete text of Lucretius' poem, they may be simply quoting a quotation.

To depart from the theme of indirect tradition and mention direct tradition, while staying with the question of to what extent Lucretius can be said to have been "forgotten" before 1417: there are 3 surviving 9th-century manuscripts of Lucretius, 2 complete and fragments of a 3rd.

On page 32, Butterfield offers a stemma, a diagram showing his theory of which manuscripts were copied from which other ones, which, in addition to those 3 surviving 9th-century manuscripts, postulates the existence of 5 more made between the 9th and the 12th centuries.

And of course there there was more readership of Lucretius, there were more quotations and and mentions, there were more manuscripts. We don't know how many more. Butterfield is not saying that this is the extant of the readership of Lucretius. He's saying that this is the extent of what he can prove.

And it's a great pleasure, for me, to follow Butterfield on his search for all of this evidence. It's great to get into so many details. But, for a long time previously, I already had had a general idea of the size and shape of Lucretius' audience. As had very many others who had some familiarity with Latin literature.

Which is why it seemed so strange to us when we heard about this hugely best-selling book by a Harvard English professor, which claimed, among other strange things, that Lucretius had been forgotten before Poggio miraculously, just by chance, saved him from oblivion, which in turn changed the world, because the world had been completely unfamiliar with Lucretius and all that he had to say.

Dream Log: Reporter in Philadelphia

I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter who lived and worked in downtown Philadelphia. I had some sort of unexplained gift of making myself almost completely unnoticeable, so that I could get up close to people and listen in on conversations they thought were private. Some of my colleagues in journalism referred to me as "the Ghost."

In the lobby of a huge skyscraper was a white-tablecloth restaurant patronized by people who were very expensively-dressed. The restaurant's dining area was separated from the rest of the lobby only by a waist-high partition, with no wall or windows. Against a wall across the lobby from the restaurant, a homeless man wearing an orange-and-black checkered overcoat sat on the floor. Two expensively-dressed men approached him and spoke with him, and I did my unnoticeable thing and listened in.

"Does the restaurant ever give you food?" one of the expensively-dressed men asked the homeless man. He was tall and broad-shouldered and bore a slight physical resemblance to David Harbour.

The other expensively-dressed man was nondescript.

"No," the homeless man answered. "Some of the customers are very nice. They'll get leftovers in a doggy bag and bring it out and give it to me. Good stuff. The duck is out of this world, but all of the leftovers I've had from this place have been outstanding. But the restaurant itself seems to have an official get-rid-of-me policy. The maître d' especially seems to have a hard-on for me."

"That's too bad."

"I can see his point of view," the homeless man said. "Some restaurants will give you food, but I can see why they might not want to. They pay God only knows how much for the rent here, and they see me as bad for the ambiance."

The next day, the two expensively-dressed men-- silk suits, both of them -- were at the same place at the wall where the homeless man usually was, but the homeless man wasn't there. They were looking across the lobby into the restaurant and smiling. The homeless man was there, seated at a table in the dining area, scrubbed and brushed and clipped and clean-shaven and wearing a silk suit, looking like three million bucks.

Suddenly, the maître d', holding the overcoat the homeless man had been wearing the day before, charged up to where he was sitting, shouting something which was unintelligible from where we stood across the lobby, threw the overcoat at the homeless man's feet and literally chased him all over the dining area. The two expensively-dressed men ran across the lobby and into the restaurant and got between the maître d' and the homeless man. I stayed back and watched. The two expensively-dressed men and the maître d' were all yelling at the same time. I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. The homeless man wasn't saying anything. He just looked embarrassed.

Finally, the yelling died down a little, and the two expensively-dressed men stood protectively on either side of the homeless man and walked him out of the restaurant, out of the skyscraper's lobby, around the corner and into an only slightly less-fancy restaurant nearby, where they all three sat down together for lunch.

Frontinus

The ancient Romans were very proud of their aqueducts, and even today, the remains of these structures, standing from France and Spain to northern Africa and Turkey, are amazing to see.

Sextus Iulius Frontinus, AD c35 -- c103, served as Praeter of Rome and Governor of Britain. Although he was a homo novus, that is, a man without an aristocratic family background, he served as consul three times. Having shown great ability as a military commander in Britain -- it is said, for example, that 70,000 members of the Gallic tribe the Lingones surrendered to him -- he was appointed curator aquarum, that is, supervisor of all of the Empire's aqueducts, in the year 97.

Upon assuming this post, the first thing Frontinus did was to acquaint himself with the details of the history and operation of aqueducts now under his care, and to arrange what he learned from his own inquiries, from official documents and older technical treatises, into a short book which he himself intended to use as a reference. It is mainly because of this book that we are familiar with Frontinus today. If you wonder how a book about the history, operation and technical details of acqueducts could possibly fascinate readers for thousand s of years -- read de aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus. If the man was half as good an administrator as he was a writer, then Rome's aqueducts were in very good hands for a few years as Frontinus oversaw them.

Frontinus lists all of the rivers from which the Empire's aqueducts took their water; the length traveled by the aqueducts; the various diameters of pipes used at various places; instances of diversion of water by farmers before it got to the cities; estimations of when such diversions were justified by drought, and when they were unjustified; problems of pollution at various points in the water supply; the names of past officials in the aqueduct system; what Frontinus intends to do as the supervisor of the whole; and a lot more, in a text which is 60 pages long in Kunderewicz's 1998 Teubner edition. Frontinus' text is a model of economical prose. And it demonstrates that economical and technical by no means must equal dull.

Frontinus also wrote a work entitled de re militari (On Military Matters, which is now lost, but is mentioned as a source by Vegetius in his 4th-century book of the same name. A short work entitled strategemata survives, in which Frontinus describes historical accounts of various strategies used effectively by Greek and Roman generals. Dozens of inscriptions have been catalogued which record Frontinus' official positions and great official deeds.

But it is mainly for de aquaeductu urbis Romae that he is remembered. Tacitus, the younger Pliny and Martial all record various positive aspects of his public service, but one wonders how much they would have had to say about him, if they had not also recognized and admired a fellow author.

Of the manuscripts of Frontinus' work on aqueducts which we have today, only one is older than the 15th century. It was written in the 12th century at Monte Cassino, mostly by Paul the Deacon, and somehow survived having passed through the hands of Poggio. Scholars debate whether all of the later manuscripts derive from this 12th-century copy; several MSS shows signs of having come from an 11th-century Germany ancestor. The work was first printed in Rome in 1484; dozens more editions have followed.