Vienna — Designing the World’s Capital: Architectural Achievements During One of Civilization’s Highpoints

The Belle Époque was an era in European history which lasted from 1871 to 1914. Unlike other eras — e.g., the Renaissance — the Belle Epoque is more specifically defined in terms of its beginning and end. A quick survey of textbooks shows that the Renaissance has no clear agreed-upon beginning date or ending date, nor any concrete events to mark a beginning or end. By contrast, the Belle Epoque is understood to begin with the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and to end with the start of WW1. To be sure, there are dissenting voices who would suggest different chronologies for the era, but they are few in number.

The name of this era refers to the flourishing of art, science, and culture in general during an era of peace in Europe. While there were wars in other parts of the world, this era featured more than 40 years of tranquility, which facilitated cultural development.

Although, as the nomenclature suggests, this era is conceptualized largely with regard to France, and even more specifically with regard to Paris, the era applied to large parts of Europe, and at times was more significantly instantiated in places like Berlin and Vienna.

In architecture, one noteworthy example of this era is a grand Austrian project: a large monumental boulevard with major buildings along it, interspersed with parks and sculpted monuments. This is the Ringstrasse (Ringstraße) in Vienna.

Vienna was, and is, the capital — but of what? When the project began, of the Austrian Empire; by the time the project was completed, it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; both of those are more generally called the Habsburg Empire; in 1918, Vienna became the capital simply of Austria. In any case, Vienna was the political and cultural center of most of central Europe, an area much larger than the area of Austria at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The medieval shape of Vienna was bounded by massive walls and moats. By the early nineteenth century, modern methods of warfare had made these anachronistic and of no practical value. They even impeded travel from point to point within the city, because the city had grown well past the former boundaries which they marked. Therefore the emperor, Franz Josef I, ordered them removed in 1857.

Where the walls and moats were once located, the grand boulevard began to take shape. Not a mere city street, the boulevard was nearly as wide as a football field is long. The boulevard itself, and the structures along it, were a showcase for some of Europe’s finest architects, as historian Angus Robertson writes:

As the Belle Epoque period developed across Europe, peace, growing prosperity and urban technological progress could be felt in Vienna too. 1879 was a year of jubilee celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the marriage of Emperor Francis Joseph and Empress Elisabeth. At its heart was a historic inspired pageant around the Ringstrasse with more than 14,000 participants. It was organized by Hans Makart, the most popular Vienna artist of the age. Although the via triumphalis was formally opened in 1865, it would take a number of years for the first main buildings to be erected and further decades to be completed. All were designed in the historicist architectural style, inspired by historical eras thought to be fitting to their modern function: a Hellentic temple from the home of democracy for the parliament, Renaissance palaces for the museums, Roman grandeur for the imperial residence, Flemish urban splendor for the municipal government.

Many of the original buildings still stand intact in Vienna, and segments of the Ringstrasse look much as they did a century ago. Other parts of the Ringstrasse, especially those damaged in WW2, are now home to more modern architecture.

Each of the buildings along the grand boulevard is a specimen for the student of architecture, and has its own rich history. This history is developing even in the twenty-first century.

In 1928, the Denkmal der Republik (‘Monument of the Republic’) was unveiled to celebrate the first decade of the new government, which had begun when the monarchy ended. The National Socialist government, which replaced the Republic, at first hid the monument behind flags, and then dismantled and placed it into storage, in 1934. It was restored to its place in 1948, and in 2009 the city government of Vienna expanded the monument by adding an area next to it with an informational tablet.

Only a few steps from the Monument of the Republic is the Gedenktafel für die sowjetische Kommandantura (‘Plaque for the Soviet Commandant’) which bears the inscription sunt lacrimae rerum to recall the suffering of the Viennese under the military occupation by the Soviet Socialists. The tablet was unveiled in 1993.

The Austrian Parliament building was completed in 1883, and a fountain in front of it was completed in 1902. After being closed for renovations for several years, a phased reopening of the building occurred, and by 2023, the building was largely back to normal usage.

Many sculpted monuments — honoring scholars, artists, military leaders, political leaders, and members of the aristocracy — stand along the boulevard.

Visitors to the city will look in vain for street signs proclaiming Ringstraße. The Viennese long ago divided the boulevard into segments, each with its own name: Stubenring, Parkring, Schubertring, Kärntnerring, Opernring, Burgring, Dr.-Karl-Renner-Ring, Universitätsring, and Schottenring.

Much of the cultural life of the city takes place along the Ringstrasse, as Angus Robertson notes:

The first public building completed on the new Ringstrasse was the Vienna Court Opera (now State Opera) in 1869. The Neo-Renaissance-style building, which accommodates a seated audience of 1,700, with room for another 500 standing guests, is one of the foremost opera houses in the world. At the time of its construction, however, it was very controversial, which led to one of the architects, Eduard van der Nüll, dying by suicide. Over the years, Gustav Mahler and Herbert von Karajan have been among the many leading conductors of its opera company and orchestra, which provides the musicians for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The Vienna State Ballet is based at the State Opera, which also hosts the annual Vienna Opera Ball.

The ball season begins on November 11 each year. There are several hundred balls during the season. There is a strict dress code: men must wear either a tuxedo or a tailcoat, and women must wear floor-length evening dresses. The exact details of the dress code vary from one ball to another, and will be printed on the invitations. The balls occur in a variety of elegant buildings, among which are the Hofburg Palace, the City Hall of Vienna, the Musikverein (‘Music Society’), and the Staatsoper (‘State Opera’). The ball season comes to an end on Shrove Tuesday, i.e., the day before Ash Wednesday.

The Ringstraße not only unifies the city geographically in terms of transportation, but also culturally, as a connecting point for history, architecture, and elegant social events.

The Rise and Fall of Empires — And of Languages

To oversimplify a bit, empires are like bell curves: a founding, a rising, a peak, a falling, and an end. Empires are associated with languages: Rome with Latin, Britain with English, etc.

The languages of empires also follow a bell curve, but a slightly different “normal distribution” than the empires themselves. There is a curious mathematical consistency in the relationship between the bell curves of empires and the bell curves of their associated languages.

The Greco-Macedonian Empire, for example, can be seen as peaking during the time of Alexander the Great (336 to 323 B.C.), having risen from the empires of the Greek city-states and their forced merger under the Macedonian Philip, and declining as Alexander’s empire fragmented, for lack of an articulated plan of succession, into smaller successor empires ruled by his former subordinates. Yet the peaking of the Greek language, in terms of its widespread and frequent use, will happen centuries later.

The same is true of the Roman Empire, which arguably peaked around 100 or 150 A.D., and its language. Not only was the empire’s peak long past, but the empire itself was gone, having fallen in 476 A.D., by the time Latin peaked. More Latin was spoken, heard, written, and read after 476 A.D. than before this date.

Other examples abound. France was no longer a major player in geopolitics when the use of the French language as a standard for international diplomacy, trade, and travel later peaked.

This pattern can be visualized as two bell curves mapped on the same Cartesian plane, with the x-axis representing time, and the y-axis representing widespread use of the language. The two curves will be offset but overlapping. The curve with its peak to the left, i.e., earlier in time, will represent the rise and fall of the empire. The curve with its peak to the right will represent the rise and fall of the use of the language, which lags behind the empire’s curve. Obviously, both curves will begin to the right of the y-axis, i.e., when the value for the time variable is a positive number.

This principle seems still to be in effect. English is in widespread use around the world, long after the British Empire has ceased to dominate the globe.

Beowulf: A Text Which Continually Fascinates

Scholars do not know precisely when and where this fascinating story was written. Some suggest that it was composed as early as the late 600s and others propose dates as late as 1000. The location of the writing is often thought to be England, but there are reasonable arguments to be made for either Denmark or northern Germany. The location of the plot is most probably in or around Denmark.

This book is a story, a poem, and a song. It is narrative, its form has an importance of its own, and whether sung or read aloud, it was designed not only to communicate but also to sound. The book has no title in its surviving manuscript, so the name of the protagonist has become the title.

The text has attracted a steady stream of readers and researchers for over a thousand years, and this for multiple reasons.

Linguists consider it a valuable example of Old English, which was spoken and written from approximately 450 to 1050. Much of the Old English language is nearly indistinguishable from Old High German and Old Low German, which were spoken around the same time. These three languages are siblings, descending from a parent language, West Germanic.

Literary scholars consider it perhaps the only surviving example of a genre of which we otherwise have no remaining texts. Its poetic style and structure are landmarks.

Historians and cultural anthropologists mine the book for clues about the society in which it was composed, and the slightly different society which was its subject matter. The plot is fictional — or rather, contains fictional elements — but also refers accurately to historical events which took place in the late 400s or early 500s, more than a century before the story was written.

The book is also a book of contradictions. As indicated, reliable historical data pinpoints certain events, places, and people. But other elements in the book are not only fictional; they are fantasy. Fact and fiction are interwoven throughout. The characters are warriors, dragons, and monsters. The names will sound ancient to the twenty-first century American ear: Hrothgar, Grendel, Beowulf. The mother of the monster Grendel, herself a monster, plays a major role in the narrative.

A second tension lives in the text: the poetry, the plot, and presumably the author manifest traces of both sincere Christianity and Germanic paganism. The heathen belief systems native both to Europe north of the Alps and to Britain didn’t disappear in an instant when the Christian faith arrived. The two worldviews were interwoven in cultures for many years, and the characters in Beowulf demonstrate certain inconsistencies reflecting their society’s embrace of two incompatible conceptions of the world.

The poet knit Christian and pre-Christian motifs into a single fabric, as scholar Rosemary Jean Cramp writes:

Christianity has so deeply penetrated the language, metaphor, and thought of the poem that we must assume an audience with some tradition of Christianity and most probably Christian poetry behind it. The poet naturally presupposes also a wide knowledge of traditional heroic stories but he penetrates below the surface of such stories and their conventional situations, sympathetically considering the sufferings of innocent participants, the impermanence of success and happiness, and the courage of the heroes who had to live without the consolation of Christianity.

The pre-Christian pagan narratives remain on the surface of the characters. Christianity will introduce an exploration of the inner life. The text of Beowulf gives more occasional glimpses of the protagonist’s inner life than one generally finds in the purely pagan Germanic sagas.

In 1939, the archeological discovery of a burial site from the 700s provided confirmation that the “poet’s descriptions of the equipment and lavish burials of kings was neither exaggerated nor dependent on pre-English traditions.” The discovery, in Suffolk, revealed “a curious mix of heathen and Christian elements in the burial.” Rosemary Cramp adds that “there was no trace” in the burial area “of the human or animal sacrifices which were a feature of fully pagan burial rites.”

While traces of paganism are certainly present and clearly visible in the text, it is no longer the full-throated paganism of pre-Christian Scandinavia, because it lacks human sacrifice.

The dual nature of the text shows, on the one hand, a pagan warrior-code with ruthless familial feuds, a powerful concept of fate, immortal fame being earned by heroic deeds, and an honor culture which drives characters to self-aggrandizement and glory-seeking. On the other hand, with a touch of dissonance, the narrative contains Christian concepts like forgiveness, a framework of good versus evil, biblical allusions, prayer to a benevolent Savior, and a merry afterlife.

The times and places of the plot, and later of the writing, were “rather newly Christian,” writes Burton Raffel: “Layers of morality and tenderness and piety are intermixed,” with the pagan “glorification of war, death, and fame.” In the lingering paganism, on its way out and yet making itself felt in culture, “such humdrum occupations as farming, fishing,” and “the care and feeding of both adults and children are all denigrated, casually, when they are mentioned at all. Slavery is taken for granted.”

The introduction of Christianity into the culture brings about a more sympathetic eye, seeing the humanity of the slaves, servants, and craftsmen.

In this harsh heathenism, “battle is a way of life, a necessary function of the worthiest members of society,” Raffel notes. Among the leadership class of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes, “death being the supreme product of their occupation,” the warriors found honor in killing and in being killed. Christianity refuses to glorify killing.

“This morality, born of its time and its circumstances,” does not “sound particularly Christian. And yet the poem is full of Christian sentiments, joined with or superimposed onto this more or less pagan code of battle-heroism-kingship.” The reader might be tempted to think that the story is the result of a collaboration between two or more authors, so great is the tension between the pagan elements and the Christian elements. Yet Raffel states: “It seems fairly clear, however — and I myself have no doubt — that Beowulf is the work of one man and that its author was a Christian.”

Early in the text, the description of the natural world is such that “whoever wrote it was plainly a Christian.” The reader might think that such a passage was inserted into the narrative by a later hand, but Raffel argues that

Most of the Christianity in Beowulf is not so easily dismissed as interpolation. “Let God be thanked!” (Alwealdan Þanc), cries Hrothgar, for example, when the Danes assemble to celebrate Beowulf’s victory over Grendel. These are his first words; he goes on, almost at once, to assert with great feeling that

... the Almighty makes miracles
When He pleases, wonder after wonder, and this world
Rests in His hands …

It is God, as I have already noted, who leads Beowulf to victory over Grendel’s vicious mother, once Beowulf has proved that he is willing and able to help himself. The examples could be multiplied many times over: the essential nature of this Christianity may not be quite the same as that practiced in twentieth-century London or in California, but it is an integral part of the poet’s thought and view of life.

Trying to imagine how a poet would compose a text in which the heathen worldview and the Christian worldview coexist, sometimes harmoniously, and sometimes dissonantly, Robert P. Creed notes that “Beowulf is the work of a Christian poet.” But this Christian poet set his narrative in times and places in which the Christian faith had not yet arrived. Britain and northern Europe were still solidly pagan in the 400s and 500s. The poet would have heard and read about names, places, and events; he integrated those into his own narrative.

What was this poet’s creative process? Robert Creed offers two options. In the first option, the poet sees latent Christian virtues in the stories of the heroes in a pre-Christian society:

At some point after the arrival in England of the Christianizing mission of St. Augustine in 597 a traditional singer who was also a Christian told again the story of the noble hero. To this Christian singer the notion that this magnanimous warrior was not a Christian was unthinkable. Beowulf’s conduct showed that he had been the willing servant of the true God.

Alternatively, the poet might have heard a song about a warrior, and detecting that both the song and the warrior lacked spirituality, added this dimension to the narrative, and created from scratch a new poem:

Or it might have happened in this fashion. The Anglo-Saxon singer heard a crude song of monster-wrestling and tribal warfare and decided to make a better man out of the hero of these savage doings. God, the singer had learned, was the fountain of all virtue, and the noblest adventure of all was the imitation of Christ. His noble hero would in his fashion have to imitate Christ.

That is, after all, what Beowulf does in this poem. Hearing that the Danes are at the mercy of that devilish son of Cain, Grendel, one of “a brood forever opposing the Lord’s Will,” the hero leaves his home in southwest Sweden and sails to the rescue. He wrestles with and defeats Grendel in the hall that becomes for that moment symbolic of the whole world.

The text names specifically Cain and Abel, and does so once at the beginning of the narrative and once toward the end. The monsters are in a “lake” that “burns like a torch.” These are clear biblical references. In the end, Hrothgar tells Beowulf, “our only help lies with you,” making Beowulf into a Christ figure. In Raffel’s words, Beowulf obliges by being “the man who died to save his people.”

Beowulf’s funeral retains the faintest hint of paganism, as his body is laid atop a funeral pyre. The Christian element is present in the funeral narrative, too: Bewulf’s soul drawn into eternal paradise, as “Heaven swallowed up the billowing smoke.”

The deceased goes up, not down.

Burton Raffel offers two slightly different hypotheses about how the pagan and Christian elements were mingled into the text. There may also be other possible scenarios. In any case, however, the two influences are braided intricately with each other, and organically, reflecting the two influences in the larger society: both present and detectable, but paganism on its way out, and Christianity on its way in.

These two belief systems moved past each other, one on the descent and the other on the ascent, in fits and starts, but generally at glacial speed. It took centuries to root out pagan practices like human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, and the payment of wergeld — a practice in which a human life was given a monetary value, and a killer need merely to pay this sum to the victim’s family in order for justice to be declared satisfied. Other pagan practices — the buying and selling of women, infanticide, and the kidnapping and enslaving of outsiders — extend and continue this general tone of devaluing human life.

So it is, then, that Allen Kent Hieatt writes: “The Christianity of the poet’s England was still strongly influenced by pagan habits of thought.” The narrative belongs to a “great body of partly heathen, partly Christian Germanic poetry and prose.”

The pagan and Christian strands have perhaps one common point: the clear sense of loyalty — to one’s family, friends, tribe, or king — as an ethical principle. Yet this shared ideal is soon split: in the pagan instance, the response is to kill without exception anyone who is disloyal; in the Christian instance, the response is to endure the disloyalty with patience and forgive the traitor.

“The transmutation of Germanic mores from personal vengeance to the fight against evil depends partly on the Christianity of the author,” writes Hieatt. This author’s “Christian milieu influenced his choice of supernaturally evil figures rather than men as Beowulf’s enemies (although of course these figures belonged originally to the realm of folklore).”

Hieatt continues:

There are a number of plainly Christian references in the body of the poem: to an Almighty who is just, to a shepherd who cares for souls and a malicious being who attacks them when they are not vigilant.

Additionally,

There are also definite biblical reminiscences. Grendel is said to be descended from Cain; the sword hilt which Beowulf brings back to Hrothgar from the underwater battle with Grendel’s mother has an inscription referring to an ancient race of giants, alien to God and flood-whelmed, reminiscent of the Nephilim of Genesis.

After offering a few examples of Christian influence, Hieatt points to the competing heathen ideology:

On the other hand, frequent references to an inscrutable, all-controlling fate; to being fated, i.e., doomed to die; and to a man’s fame as the only thing that will live after him are all in accord with what we know of Germanic pagan habits of thought, although there are no references to the ancient Germanic divinities.

Agreeing with Burton Raffel, Kent Hieatt argues that the two disparate worldviews in the text are not “later interpolations.” Instead, “what might seem to be discrete Christian elements and remnants of pagan thinking appear together” organically “and plainly come from the mind of a single author.”

Such elements are capable of residing in a text side-by-side, even if they are capable of generating a small amount of cognitive dissonance:

They are perhaps better described as elements of the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, which assimilated older views rather than completely discarding them.

In contrast, scholar Frederick Rebsamen allows for an outside chance that the author of Beowulf was not a Christian:

The Beowulf poet was either a Christian or very familiar with and influenced by Christianity. The very tone of the poem in places, especially in the final third, reflects the Christian patristic influence that pervades much of Old English poetry. But some of the principal characters are historically North Germanic pagans, and much of this tradition is retained by the poet, notably in some of the characteristics of Beowulf.

The author, argues Frederick Rebsamen, whether he was a Christian or not, addressed implicitly if not explicitly the fact that his audience lived in a culture and a society which was Christian, but only recently so, and which was well aware of its pagan past:

The way in which the poet solves the problem of religion in this heroic-elegiac poem composed for a Christian audience is one thing that leads me to believe that the poem was composed not long after 700. At that time, although the Anglo-Saxons were generally converted to Christianity, they were also strongly aware of their pagan past. Thus the poet, while introducing the idea of only one god, a kind of Old Testament god whose name is spelled exactly as today, does not push things further, makes no mention of Christ or anything else in the New Testament.

The author mentions “not one pagan god,” and the English/Germanic word wyrd is used in the text to refer to a concept of fate. The word had been used, prior to the writing of Beowulf, to refer to a Germanic god. The author thus reduces wyrd from a personal god to an impersonal concept. The demotion of wyrd goes even farther, when Beowulf’s “courage withstood wyrd.”

Frederick Rebsamen points out that God “is mentioned thirty-two times as God and at least sixty times” in the text “under several other names.” He concludes:

Though the pagan Germanic tradition is reflected in many ways, one god, named God and introduced through Christianity, is in charge.

As a man, Beowulf was, Rebsamen surmises, “a curious blend of pagan and Christian.”

Writing about the many scholars who’ve analyzed Beowulf over the years, Seamus Heaney suggests:

They devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world which operates in the poet’s designing mind displaces him from his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem — a pagan Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the living overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the afterlife.

Heaney proposes that such investigations are reasonable, but that they perhaps miss a greater investigation: the literary merit of the work. Beowulf is, after all, a poem, and as such, the structure, form, and sound are as important as — or more important than — its meaning and its analysis. He hopes that the reader can enter into a fantasy of monsters and dragons and the heroes who slay them, without having to be bogged down in critical apparatuses or interpretations.

What is the structure that houses the two worldviews which are at work in Beowulf? Heaney posits that the narrative contains an inner and an “outer” perspective, which allow to comment on the plot from two different viewpoints. The inner, internal, viewpoint is that of the pagan Germanic world.

But there is another, outer, rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at places and legends which his ancestors knew before they made their migration from continental Europe to their new home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and even censure the ways of those who lived in illo tempore:

As evidence, Heaney cites lines 175 to 180, in which the poet reports that the ancestors “vowed offerings to idols” and “swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people.” These things happened at “pagan shrines.” The poet distances himself from his ancestors: “that was their way.”

The poet’s own worldview appears in line 188, where he explains that the souls of the dead come to rest “in the Father’s embrace.”

Of course, Heaney offers this data from his own translation of the text; other translations confirm his presentation.

The poet offers a glimpse of the transition from the world of his ancient ancestors to his own world. He does this by showing how materialism receded. In the world of Beowulf, gold is a greatly valuable, perhaps the most valuable, possession. Over the course of the narrative, the status of gold changes:

By the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals riches in the medieval sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all value has been put in doubt.

The dragon, in Heaney’s estimation, is part and parcel of Beowulf’s world, and it is a sort of litmus test for the warrior: Can Beowulf slay the dragon? But the dragon has meaning beyond the mere physical test of skill:

Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival.

It has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with any transcendental promise.

The text of Beowulf offers many onramps for exploration: it can be read aloud for a purely auditory and musical experience; it poses fascinating questions about society’s metamorphosis from blood-thirsty Germanic paganism to a humane Christianity which values every human life; it highlights the tension between outer-directed and inner-directed psychologies, between the narrative of warriors who attend only to being shamed or praised and the narrative of characters who have an internalized sense of honor or guilt; the book blends solidly documented historical realities with fantasy creatures, like blending oil and water.

The many different aspects of this text, and the many different types of questions which it poses, explain the large amount of intellectual energy which scholars from different disciplines have expended in their investigations of it.

Teaching Marcus Aurelius in Introductory Humanities Courses — Find an Approachable Translation

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has long been a staple in interdisciplinary Western Civilization courses at the secondary and post-secondary levels. The text offers connections to both history and philosophy, reflects the influence of Greek thought on Roman thought, and when compared and contrasted with Epictetus, can be used to explore the late Roman version of Stoicism.

In whole or in part, it is included in many anthologies, reading lists, and syllabi.

Many students, however, encounter a significant but unnecessary obstacle to this text: its translation.

In the early twenty-first century, many anthologies, being reprints or slightly revised editions of textbooks published in the twentieth century, offer the Meditations, or excerpts of it, in translations which were done in the nineteenth century — and many of those translations deliberately affected an English prose style which was even older. Imagine an eighteen-year-old in the year 2025 pausing his video game long enough to look at this:

This also thou must consider, that many things there be, which oftentimes unsensibly trouble and vex thee, as not armed against them with patience, because they go not ordinarily under the name of pains, which in very deed are of the same nature as pain; as to slumber unquietly, to suffer heat, to want appetite: when therefore any of these things make thee discontented, check thyself with these words: Now hath pain given thee the foil; thy courage hath failed thee.

This passage was translated into English by Meric Casaubon in the 1600s, and it is still occasionally inflicted on students today.

If the topic of study were English prose style in the seventeenth century, such an assignment might be justified. But if the object of study is Roman Stoicism, then the translation poses an obstacle without any benefit to the student.

A specialist who is studying the history of ancient philosophy may have the patience and ability to untangle Casaubon’s prose, but an introductory course should not burden the student with this reading.

Why are these texts still assigned? Often the reason is, directly or indirectly, money. Older texts are no longer copyright protected, and can be printed and reprinted for free.

More accessible translations are available.

In 2002, brothers and Montana natives C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks offered The Emperor’s Handbook, published by Scribner.

In that same year, Random House published the Meditations as translated by Gregory Hays.

Both of these recent translations make Marcus more comprehensible to twenty-first century teenagers than renderings in Elizabethan or Victorian pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Classical scholars can explore and debate the philological merits and weaknesses of these translations, but the classroom instructor can vouch for their practical value. These twenty-first century translations make Marcus Aurelius intelligible and user-friendly.

This example is one of many. Students are introduced to Aristotle and Plato, to Sophocles and Vergil. A student’s first exposure should be in an enjoyable text.

There are many obstacles which hinder the scholar’s goal of helping young people find the humanities engaging. Difficult-to-read translations of assigned texts needn’t be one of them.

Or, as the Hicks brothers phrase it, “Whether speaking to the Senate or to the humblest person, use language that is respectful, but not affected. Let your speech be plain and honest.”

They Elected Their Kings, They Elected Their Emperors: Democracy Is Older Than You Think

Students hear of ‘democracy’ often for the first time in connection with ancient Athens. Those who have the opportunity to study closely, however, are often disappointed to find out that the Athenian version of democracy was exclusive: only a small number of people were voting citizens, and every effort was made to keep than number small.

The exclusive nature of Athenian democracy is significantly different from the inclusive democracy which has guided American political thought for more than two centuries.

Next, the Romans experimented with partially democratic systems. During the Roman Monarchy, from 753 BC to 509 BC, the Senate elected the kings, who were installed for life onto the throne. During the Roman Republic, from 509 BC to 27 BC, there were a few faint elements of democracy in the elections of consuls and tribunes; censors sometimes elevated elected magistrates to the Senate.

But a full-throated systematic democracy, with the free elections of representatives, was still in the future.

The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) would be one of the first — perhaps the first? — political institutions to have a truly elected leader. The reader will remember Voltaire’s old joke: The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Instead it was a secular middle European defensive confederation.

Charlemagne was crowned emperor of most of Europe in 800 AD, and after his death, his dominions were ruled by several generations of his descendents on a hereditary pattern. This Carolingian dynasty eventually dissolved into chaos. The dominions were regrouped and reorganized into what would become the HRE.

The HRE followed an ancient pattern from middle and eastern Europe in which kings were elected, often by a council of feudal lords. The feudal system was localized, with many lords each having his own small territory. The lords were obligated to the peasants who lived on their land; legal documents detailed the responsibilities of the lords to the peasants. The lords functioned as representatives of the peasants in electing a king.

Thus Conrad of Franconia was elected in 911 AD, and his successor, Henry the Fowler, in 919 AD. Here is a clear and early case of an elected leader.

England introduced the notion of limited government in several documents. In 1100 AD, Henry I issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ (also known as The Coronation Charter or The Statutes of the Realm). In 1215, King John consented to the Magna Charta. In 1689, Parliament issued a Bill of Rights which limited the powers of the monarchs. While the English enactment of limited government is a profound precedent, it happened in the absence of elected executive leadership.

In the HRE, and in areas bordering on the HRE in eastern Europe, elected leadership brought about a de facto limited government, if not de dicto or de jure. The emperors of the HRE were not absolute rulers in the style of the Roman Empire. They needed to seek a consensus of those who elected them before taking actions.

The feudal lords who began electing kings, and later emperors, slowly redesignated themselves over the years as ‘princes’ and, to distinguish themselves from other princes, as ‘electoral princes.’ These princes often held the upper hand, and it was the emperor who had to answer to them, and not they to him. The emperor of the HRE was then an elected representative whose task was to do the will of the people.

Note the vocabulary in historian Martyn Rady’s account of political events on the geographical margins of the HRE:

The Transylvanian principality was the creation of the Hungarian king, John Szapolyai, elected in 1526 as a rival to Ferdinand. Unable to make good his claim to the whole of the kingdom, Szapolyai had retreated to the highlands of Transylvania, which was internationally recognized in 1570 as an independent principality under its own prince, who was elected by the Transylvanian diet.

The word ‘elected’ appears twice in a short paragraph.

John Zapolya, an alternate spelling of Szapolyai, was elected King of Hungary in 1526, and remained king until his death in 1540. During his reign, a counter-claim was made by Ferdinand I, who was already archduke of Austria, and who was elected king of Hungary in 1526. That’s right. Two different guys were elected to the same office in the same year. How did that happen?

The monarchs were elected by “diets” which were congresses or conventions or some kind of legislative assembly. It turns out that there were two diets in Hungary. One was the parliament of the untitled lesser nobility or gentry; this diet elected John. The other was the higher aristocracy, magnates, or barons; this diet elected Ferdinand. John and Ferdinand were supported by different factions of the nobility in the Hungarian kingdom. Each thought himself to be rightfully king of Hungary.

It’s a complicated and confusing story, but it points to the importance of elections in that time and place. Democracy can be messy.

For present purposes, what’s important is not the complicated and intricate details of Transylvanian and Hungarian politics, but rather the fact this was all done by electoral politics.

While ancient Greece and ancient Rome may have had a system with a few democratic elements, their leaders were not purely the result of voting. On the other hand, the HRE and some of the late feudal systems of central and eastern Europe had leaders who were placed into office purely by voting. The supremacy of the vote can be seen in elections in which the voters (at that time called ‘the electors’) did not function as a mere “rubber stamp” approval of some previously anticipated outcome, but rather were defiantly independent of expectations.

In 1292, the electors chose Adolf of Nassau to be the emperor of the HRE. In 1312, the electors chose Henry of Luxembourg to be the emperor of the HRE (upon taking the throne, he became known as Henry VII).

Both the election of 1292 and the election of 1312 demonstrated the independence of the electors. In both cases, many observers expected the election to go to a member of the Habsburg dynasty, but the electors exercised their freedom to vote otherwise.

The same is true of Conrad of Teck, formally known as Conrad II of Teck, who was probably elected to be emperor — the documents surrounding his election are ambiguous — but was assassinated “within forty-eight hours of his election,” as Martyn Rady phrases it, if indeed he was actually elected at all.

So the electors had real power — the power of the ballot. That’s democracy.

To be sure, suffrage was far from universal. In the years up until 1257, the number of electors was relatively large, but also undocumented, unknown, and varying. In the pre-Merovingian and Merovingian times, quite large numbers of electors took part in the process; but the exact number is not known.

Gradually the number of electors sank. Between 1257 and 1648 — i.e., until the end of the Thirty Years’ War — the number of electors was seven. Between 1648 and 1806 — i.e., until the end of the HRE — the number grew gradually to ten.

Despite the often relatively small number of electors, the process was truly democratic. This was a pivotal moment in history: major leaders — perhaps the leaders of the most powerful political entities on earth — were chosen democratically.

Like freely-elected leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these elected leaders of earlier centuries could not do whatever they wanted — they could not act arbitrarily or capriciously. They answered to the constituency who elected them.

So it was that these early instances of true democracy were directly linked to early instances of limited government. The emperors of the HRE did not act with the unquestioned absolute limitless authority and power of the ancient Roman emperors. After being elected emperor, they continually had to negotiate and compromise with those who elected them, as is clear in the following narrative reported by Martyn Rady:

Rudolf was forced to back down, agreeing in 1606, in the Treaty of Vienna, to full religious freedom in Hungary. Sensing his weakness, the Bohemian diet obliged Rudolf to make similar concessions, including the right to hold Protestant services on crown and church lands. In the Letter of Majesty of 1609, Rudolf agreed that a permanent sub-committee of the diet, known as the Defenders, should police the religious settlement. He promised that, ‘Henceforth no free noblemen or inhabitants of towns or villages, including peasants, should be forced by a higher authority or indeed anyone, be they churchmen or laymen, to give up their religion or be compelled to change religion in any way whatsoever.’ Rudolf gave similar rights to the townsfolk and nobilities of Upper and Lower Austria.

Officially known as Rudolf II, he became emperor of the HRE in 1576. But as the text above shows, he was continually compromising with his subjects. An unavoidable result of truly free elections in increased liberty for the electors.

In sum, it can be argued that the antecedents of modern political democracy, as it is known in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is found not in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but rather in the central and eastern European elected monarchs, and subsequently in the HRE.

An Early Arabian Cathedral: Reconstructing the Design of a Lost Architectural Style

Yemen is the southwestern coast of the Arabian peninsula, a strip of land measuring a little over 100 miles from north to south, and a little over 500 miles from east to west. For reference, the area of Yemen is about 200,000 square miles, a little larger than Montana and a little smaller than Texas. The city of San‘a’ is located in Yemen.

Because the name of this city is originally written in Arabic script, it is also sometimes transliterated into English as Sanaa, as San’a, or as Sana.

In this city, a ruler named Abraha built a grand church. Likewise, for reasons of transliteration, his name is sometimes also spelled Abreha, Abrahah, or Abrahah al-Ashram. In the middle of the sixth century, probably around 567, he caused a structure to be built in an architectural style, “the equal of which neither Persians nor Arabians have ever built,” in his own words. This church has been the object of intense study by historians.

William Hugh Clifford Frend proposed the date of 567 as likely for the building of the church, but this must be regarded as an approximation.

Two historians, Barbara Finster and Jürgen Schmidt, wrote a detailed investigation of the church, including an analysis of, e.g., the building materials used in its construction:

Als Abraha seine Kirche plante, schrieb er an den Qaisar, d.h. an Justinian, und bat ihn um Unterstützung für sein Bauvorhaben. Dieser sandte ihm daraufhin Handwerker, Marmor und Mosaiken. Da auch der Yemen über Marmorvorkommen verfügt, muß Justinian einen speziellen Marmor geschickt haben, vielleicht den schön geäderten prokonnesischen Marmor oder bereits vorgefertigten Säulen.

This structure must have been impressive, because of the high quality of the materials used to build it, and because of the direct involvement of Justinian.

The church no longer exists. It, along with all the other churches in the area, as well as Christian schools and seminaries, was destroyed when Islamic armies invaded the area from the north.

The church as San‘a’ is a reminder of an era, prior to the rise of Islam, when the Arabian peninsula was inhabited by large numbers of Christians, who lived peacefully alongside Jews, animists, and Zoroastrians.

Given the surviving written descriptions of the church’s architectural details, the two historians were able to produce diagrams of the building. The building was surrounded by a plaza or courtyard:

Die Kirche selbst umgab im Abstand von 200 Ellen ein Peribolos mit einem mit Marmorplatten ausgelegten Hof, der möglicherweise Nebengebäude einschloß. Weiträumige Höfe, die vor allem Prozessionen dienten, sind für äthiopische Kirchen überliefert, und es ist anzunehmen, daß auch in San‘a’ Raum für den tawaf geschaffen werden mußte.

The church was an impressive structure, and the indoor and outdoor processions and ceremonies were grand events. The destruction of the church was a tremendous loss to the history of art and architecture.

Luther Fuels the Resistance Movement: Jumping a 400-Year Gap

Martin Luther died in 1546. How did he play a role in energizing an underground network inside Germany working to undermine and disable Hitler’s vicious plans?

The secret organizations which undermined the National Socialist war effort and saved the lives of thousands of Jews were composed of a diverse array of individuals. Lutherans worked with Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Eastern Orthodox believers. Some members of the resistance were not primarily motivated by spirituality, but rather came from aristocratic families or from the military.

Many underground operatives, including famous leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl, were motivated by their Lutheran faith. Others weren’t explicitly Lutheran, but encountered Luther’s thought as they worked with their fellow anti-Nazi conspirators.

How did Luther contribute to this resistance? As historian Uwe Siemon-Netto write, it was Luther’s “ceaseless admonition to speak up in the face of governmental evil,” and “his unequivocal opposition to all wars of aggression — and his advice to soldiers to disobey orders that violate God’s commandments.”

In the early 1930s, when Hitler began to seize power, the demographics of Germany resembled those of many other countries at that time, and throughout both the preceding and subsequent decades: The population could be grouped into those who seriously engaged in their spirituality, and those who were content to be nominal members of some church.

Those who understood, internalized, and acted on their spiritual principles, found themselves obliged to oppose Hitler both with their words and with their deeds.

Those who made no effort to shape their lives and actions according to the Christian faith, and who made no effort to understand the ethical commitments which this faith entailed, were content to sit idly by as the National Socialists started wars and murdered Jews.

The resistance movement was explicit in citing its spiritual motives as it opposed Naziism. Uwe Siemon-Netto explains that “uniformly Lutheran countries, such as Norway, based their resistance to tyranny on Luther’s theology.”

John Steinbeck’s novel about the Norwegian resistance movement captures this in a passage describing the home of an underground member. In the house hangs a painting of Christ as bringing hope.

Luther was certainly not the only source of thought for the movement. Augustine was often cited, and contemporary German clergy from a diverse range of theologies — Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran — formulated argumentation which revealed why significant and concrete actions had to be taken against Hitler. From these sources and others, the resistance assembled an intellectual framework justifying their actions: sabotage which slowed the manufacturing of weapons, vandalism which slowed military supply lines, misinformation which confused military intelligence assessments, printing forbidden texts to alert the public to the evils of National Socialism, and the organized escapes which took Jews out of Germany and into safe countries.

By contrast, the Nazi leadership was uniform in its opposition to Christianity. The Nazis occasionally co-opted Christian words or ideas to hide their true intentions, but this was a cynical exploitation of Christianity, not in any way an embrace of it. Some National Socialist leaders had be raised in the Christian tradition, but they explicitly rejected Christianity when they joined the Nazi hierarchy, as Uwe Siemon-Netto writes:

The ex-Catholics in the top Nazi leadership rejected the Catholic faith of their childhood in favor of forms of religiosity that would not pass doctrinal review by theologians of any serious Christian denomination, with many, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler, embracing a rabidly anti-Christian variety of neo-paganism.

While individual narratives are complex, the big picture is clear: dedication to the Christian faith was a major component of the intellectual foundation of the anti-Nazi resistance movement.

The Mayerling Incident: Facts vs. Speculations

The deaths of Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf can be explained simply: On Wednesday morning, January 30, 1889, they were found dead inside a locked room in the Crown Prince’s hunting lodge in Mayerling, a small village southwest of Vienna. The circumstances have driven investigators, on that day and for the last 135 years, to conclude that the event was a murder-suicide pact, in which Mary Vetera asked Rudolf to shoot her before he shot himself.

While the basic report is clear, the further details are muddy and complicated. What was the motive — what were the motives — for this horrifying act? Who may have had knowledge or suspicions about it beforehand? One of the factors for the lack of clarity about these further questions was an organized coverup orchestrated by the Habsburg dynasty.

A number of individuals are involved in the events: Rudolf’s wife, Crown Princess Stephanie, who was wounded by the illicit affair between Rudolf and Mary, and who yet needed her marriage to Rudolf to maintain her status near the very top of the dynasty; Rudolf’s mother, Empress Elisabeth, who had been habitually disengaged in her son’s life and thereby perhaps by means of this neglect created a psychological neediness in him; Rudolf’s father, Emperor Franz-Josef, who relationship to Rudolf was distant and disparaging; and Mary’s mother, Helene von Vetsera, who raised her daughter to be an ambitious social climber. To these main figures is added a long list of other family members, a number of various government officials, and a handful of friends.

“Even after more than a century, the subject of Mayerling remains controversial,” note co-authors Greg King and Penny Wilson. The case presents “few known facts” but many “divergent ideas offering alternative explanations.” King and Wilson venture some hypotheses:

Despite the rather obvious hurdles involved in tackling an historical affair and two mysterious deaths clouded by decades of controversy, we believe that we’ve been able to reach some new conclusions offering a starkly different take on the liaison between Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera.

The complexities of investigating the Mayerling case are amplified by the secretive reaction of the Habsburg dynasty. Documents relating to the deaths of Rudolf and Mary have disappeared in some cases, or remained state secrets for many years in other cases.

The royal family had motives to suppress information which might fuel narratives unfavorable to the dynasty, and had motives to promote accounts of the incident which cast the family in a more favorable light. To which extent did the dynasty act on those motives?

Given Rudolf’s geopolitical importance, diplomats and governments around the world produced fevered speculation in large quantities, further muddying the investigative waters. While the case was a personal tragedy, it was also a matter of state.

The starting point for all hypothesizing was the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera on January 30, 1889 in the family’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. The event seemed prima facie to be a murder-suicide by gunshot wound. Letters written by Rudolf and Mary were found, seemingly confirming the murder-suicide hypothesis.

Soon, however, alternative narratives appeared. One version supposed that Rudolf had secret connections to a Hungarian nationalist group, and that when it seemed that these connections might come to light, Rudolf chose suicide rather than have his political entanglements exposed. Another version posited that a member of the royal family murdered both Rudolf and Mary, and that the dynasty was engaged in a coverup to protect the murderer.

The passage of decades has been a double-edged sword: one the one hand, the motives of defending the dynasty’s honor and of geopolitical relevance of Rudolf and his death have faded, lessening the tendency to manipulate the narrative in order to serve either, or both, of those purposes. On the other hand, some of the physical evidence, living witnesses, and relevant texts have gradually ceased to be.

Historians Greg King and Penny Wilson write:

More than 125 years have passed since the tragedy at Mayerling. Shifting stories, deliberate lies, wild theories, and the disappearance of evidence have shrouded the story in seemingly impenetrable layers of mystery. Absent documentation, history can only speculate about what happened between Rudolf and Mary at that isolated lodge. But enough remains, when coupled with modern forensic evidence and psychological analysis, to weave together a plausible version of events, one that not only fits within the framework of known facts but also offers a believable and ultimately devastating reconstruction of those final, fateful hours.

King and Wilson go on to offer scholarly support for the most sober interpretation: that they only two people in the room were Rudolf and Mary, that there was no third-party murderer, and that it was a combination of political and personal stressors, with the added factor of Rudolf’s personal dissipation, that pushed him to, and beyond, the idea of suicide — and Mary with him.

Rudolf’s life, as King and Wilson write, was falling apart, both personally and politically. Mary had become fixated on Rudolf and could imagine no future without him. Rumors add the possibilities that Mary was pregnant with Rudolf’s child, that Mary was actually Rudolf’s half-sister by means of a youthful indiscretion on the part of Emperor Franz-Josef, or that Mary had been infected by Rudolf with a sexually transmitted disease. It is not possible to prove or disprove any of these possibilities.

Politically, Rudolf encountered perpetual frustration: The Emperor failed to take seriously any of Rudolf’s policy views or suggestions. Rudolf was on track to become Emperor, but it would be another twenty-five years before that could happen: twenty-five years of waiting and of being unable to shape policy. Rudolf feared that, when he finally might become Emperor, it would be too late: that, by such a time, the European situation would have deteriorated so far that meaningful reforms could not succeed. Rudolf was correct: the dynasty would fall in 1918. Rudolf believed that he could have saved the dynasty by reforming it.

Beyond the speculations about the nature of the two deaths are the speculations about the ripple effects those deaths had on world history. Had Rudolf lived, he would have had a hand in imperial politics for the next twenty-five years, and then he would have become emperor. Could Rudolf have exerted enough influence in his father’s government to avert WW1? Even if he had been unable to prevent the war, would he have been able to find a better end to it if he’d taken the throne upon his father’s death in November 1916 — two full years before the war’s end?

Franz-Josef had planned for Rudolf to succeed him on the throne. After Rudolf’s death, the next person in the line of succession was Archduke Karl Ludwig, who would have been emperor had he not died in 1896. Karl Ludwig’s son Franz-Ferdinand then became the heir to the throne until his death in 1914. When Franz-Josef died in 1916, the throne was passed to Karl, who was a nephew of Franz-Ferdinand and a grandson of Karl-Ludwig. So it was that Emperor Franz-Ferdinand outlived three different men, each of whom was slated to be his heir.

The sad deaths of Rudolf and Mary leave many questions which will probably never be conclusively answered. The case continues to attract attention both because of its human interest and because of its location in history as a point of contact between a variety of geopolitical and sociopolitical trends.

Linguistics: A Safe Haven for Academics During the Soviet Era

Teachers, professors, researchers, and authors found that life could be difficult and dangerous during the Soviet Socialist era, from 1917 to 1991. Harassment, imprisonment, and even death were inflicted upon those whose writings or lectures were deemed to be contrary to communist orthodoxy.

Even those who desired to conform to the Marxist-Leninist dogma could run afoul of the government agents who monitored the print media, because the standards changed constantly and without warning, and such standards were not always made clear. In some cases, this ambiguity was deliberate, giving the government a method to persecute any academician arbitrarily, because a case could be made against anyone, no matter what she or he had, or had not, written. In other cases, this shifting and invisible sand of standards was the result of competition between various branches of the Soviet government and the result of opportunistic adjustment in the government’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist as applied in concrete situations.

Teachers and professors, then, lived in constant fear. On the one hand, they were expected to give lectures and publish writings. On the other hand, at any moment, with no warning, these writings and lectures could be investigated because they were suspected of promoting Marxist too weakly. These attacks were not limited to political content. A professor might write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and find himself being arrested, because the essay was perceived as not being Leninist enough in tone. A teacher might present to students about the change from paleolithic society to neolithic society, and find himself in jail because his teaching was alleged to depart from communist orthodoxy.

The system was rigged: the government could simply declare that a publication failed to be enthusiastic enough in its promotion of Marxism. No evidence was required, and if evidence was given, it was subjective allegations, and no counter-argument was permitted. The system could be exploited by competing colleagues who could accuse each other of not energetically proclaiming Marxist doctrine. The process could be manipulated to serve the purposes of personal grudges.

Seeking some measure of protection from these arbitrary allegations and investigations, some academics discovered that there were safe zones within academia: disciplines like mathematics and linguistics. Soviet Socialist authorities figured that these fields were so abstract that they would have no political relevance.

This general situation, and the specific instance of Vitaly Shevoroshkin, are explained by author Robert Wright:

Linguistics has long been a haven for Soviet intellectuals of a contrary sort. In the pre-Gorbachev era, when the study of history and economics and nearly everything else involving human beings was tailored to exacting Marxist specifications, the study of language was exempt. It had been deemed in 1950 to have no connection with ideology (and had been so deemed by no less an authority than Joseph Stalin, who considered himself something of an expert on language). So linguists were free to say whatever they wanted — about language, at least — without fear of rebuke. Naturally, the discipline attracted a number of people with a disdain for authority, and developed a culture that tended to reinforce this disdain. Maybe, then, it isn’t surprising that Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a linguist at the University of Michigan who immigrated to America from the Soviet Union in 1974, has spent much of the time since then waging a guerrilla war against the orthodoxies of Western thought.

An academic who escaped from the Soviet Union knew what serious persecution was: it could mean years in a labor camp. By contrast, if his linguistic hypotheses were unpopular in America, as a tenured faculty member, the worst it would mean was encountering some disdain from a few colleagues: a laughably minor consequence.

Shevoroshkin went on to champion some radical propositions in linguistics, encountering the skepticism of his colleagues. The skepticism didn’t bother him; they weren’t, after all, going to throw him into the Gulag. Decades later, some of Shevoroshkin’s views have gained general acceptance; others are still hotly debated. But making controversial statements about historical philology probably saved his life: had he made equally controversial statements about economics or political theory, he probably would have frozen to death in Siberia.

Plato the Fascist: Was He Serious or Satirical?

A philosopher presents a detailed program for an ideal society: that’s what Plato’s Republic seems at first glance to be. But careful readers often suspect that something very different is afoot: is Plato joking?

The idea that the Republic is an extended comedy seems foreign to those who’ve cut their teeth on the ponderous nineteenth-century scholarship which treats Plato, and the entire Greco-Roman classical canon, with great reverence. Such scholarship attributes great gravitas to Plato, and considers it unlikely that he’d play such a prank.

The text leaves the reader with a choice: either Plato was joking or he was serious.

This choice, however, points to a less comfortable option: if Plato were serious, then he advanced a blueprint for a society that would be both cruel and bizarre. Couched in Plato’s friendly prose are details which would violate any level-headed concepts of justice or human rights.

Plutarch’s account of Lycurgus and the Spartan constitution seem mild compared, e.g., to Plato’s prescription that a child should never be allowed to know who her or his parents are, and that the parent should never be allowed to know who their child is.

There are details about Plato’s plan for an ideal civilization that are so strange and brutal that the plausibility of the Republic as a scheme for social engineering is stretched to the breaking point.

Among these oddities are some self-destructive recommendations by Plato that the activities of writers be severely restricted. Such limits would presumably apply to Plato himself, and, as author Hans Magnus Enzensberger explains, would be the basis for government oppression of written creativity. Enzensberger shows what the literal effects of Plato’s text would be:

The state decides what poets may or may not write — that is a nightmare as old as the Occident. Decency and good behavior must be observed. The gods are always good. Statesmen and officials may not be disparaged in public. Praise be to heroes, no matter what. The crimes of our rulers are not fit subjects for poetry but for committee meetings behind closed doors. Protect our youth! Therefore, there must be no portrayal of unbridled passion unless it is authorized by the state. Irony is forbidden. There must be no effeminacy. Poets, being born liars, are to be assigned to the public-relations detail. The control commission not only assigns topics; it also decrees what forms are admissible and what tone of voice is desired. The demand is for harmony at all costs; this means “good language and good harmony and grace and good rhythm” — in a word, affirmation. Nuisances will be exiled or eliminated, their works banned, censored, and mutilated.

Indeed, Enzensberger makes Plato guilty for a number of problems in Western Civilization’s treatment of creative writing:

These familiar maxims, formulated in a small Balkan state more than two thousand years ago, can be found at the root of all European discussion of poetry and politics. They have since spread across the entire world. Dully, monotonously, brutally, they clang through history with the terrible regularity of a steam hammer. They do not question what poetry is, but treat it simply as an instrument to influence those held in subjugation, as something to be used at will in the interests of authority. Hence the tenacious life of these maxims, for they are tools of power — the selfsame thing into which they are trying to turn poetry. For this reason they are passed from hand to hand through history, like bludgeons, fungible, easily detachable from the philosophy from which they were hewn. Not only do they serve Platonism as cudgels against Aeschylus and Homer, but they serve every political administration.

But Enzensberger’s indictment of Plato is valid only if Plato was sincere in his instructions. Is there a chance that Plato was joking?

The likelihood that Plato did not intend for his directions to be taken literally increases with the consideration that Plato, as an author, would have suffered greatly under his own rules. Consider the constraints mentioned in the text of the Republic, as worded in Jowett’s translation:

The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mold the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

Plato goes on to suggest that even the texts of Hesiod and Homer be redacted:

The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence.

Through the mouthpiece character of Socrates, who is clearly in no way related to the actual Socrates, Plato asserts that such stories are “not to be repeated in our” republic:

We shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.

Whether the stories are taken as literal or figurative does not matter to Plato: in either case, they must be eliminated: “​​These tales must not be admitted into our” Polis, “whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not.”

This censorship is in no way a self-censorship, or one informally imposed by social custom, but rather a statist enactment:

The founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them.

A translation by Paul Shorey confirm’s Jowett’s rendering: “We must not accept from Homer or any other poet the folly of such error.” The state will determine what is true, and will eliminate any text which asserts an untruth. Plato writes that the state “will not approve” or “permit our youth to hear” certain passages from Aeschylus. Plato has named at least three major poets as earning censorship. This amounts, if taken literally, to a frontal assault on the Greek canon.

Which is a good reason not to take it literally.

In his other dialogues, Plato demonstrated affection and respect for Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus. Yet in the Republic he instructs the audience to redact, censor, and ban them from his polis. Either he is guilty of blatant self-contradiction, or his comments in the Republic are meant as satire.

The text of the Republic goes on to assert that the state will forbid an individual to “assert” certain things “in his own city if it is to be well governed.” This would be “one of the laws” and “speakers and poets will be required to conform” to it.

Plato goes so far as to assert “we” will not “allow teachers to use” Homer and Aeschylus “for the education of the young.” This proposition does such great violence against Greek sensibilities that it certainly urges the reader to suggest that Plato is joking.

Likewise, a translation by George Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, shows the strict censorship which Plato proposes: “We must supervise such stories and those who tell them.” Plato writes: “We’ll expunge” and “delete” texts which are displeasing to the state. “Names for the underworld must be struck out.” Not only will the state forbid poets to write certain things; the state will also require them to write other things: “We’ll compel the poets.”

Francis Macdonald Cornford also confirms what is in Plato’s text: “We shall have to prohibit such poems and tales and tell them to compose others in the contrary sense.” In these words, Plato goes beyond censorship and conscripts the writers into the service of propaganda:

Then we must not only compel our poets, on pain of expulsion, to make their poetry the express image of noble character; we must also supervise craftsmen of every kind and forbid them to leave the stamp of baseness, license, meanness, unseemliness, on painting and sculpture, or building, or any other work of their hands; and anyone who cannot obey shall not practice his art in our commonwealth.

After deciding that most of the other arts — sculpture, painting, music — should also be subject to strict censorship, Plato concludes that “we could not but banish such an influence from our commonwealth.”

The reader, then, is left with a choice: Either Plato is making a joke — an absurd joke, a provocative joke — or Plato is proposing the most ruthless type of censorship.

On the one hand, history teaches us that such extreme and inhumane censorship is indeed possible: one need only to consider activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who sought to forbid the reading of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Thomas More, Mark Twain, and others.

Censorship is merely one of the brutal measures prescribed in the Republic. Taken together, the sum of the ordinances in the text would constitute a fascist totalitarian program which would locate Plato among the bloodthirsty likes of Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and Daniel Ortega.

On the other hand, Plato has already demonstrated his ability to write comedy in the Ion, one of his most humorous dialogues.

Surely, a poet who calls for the banishment of poetry and a creative author who calls for the rigid regulation of creativity must be writing ironically. If Plato’s program were enacted as written, most of his dialogues would be condemned and he would be exiled.

If Enzensberger is correct in seeing Plato as a serious totalitarian, and if Plato was therefore not joking, then the implications for civilization are indeed as grim as Enzensberger paints them.

But if Enzensberger is wrong, and Plato is merely joking — it will be a separate question as to whether his joke is funny — then generations of scholars have misdirected their students into a literal reading of the Republic.

The Blessings of Chaos: The Noisy Public Square Keeps Humanity Humane

As in the past, so in the present: the obiter dicta which an author places into the mouths of fictional characters serve as vehicles for aphorisms on a wide variety of subjects, applying to situations well beyond the central plot of the book in which they appear.

In the novel Persepolis Rising, author James S.A. Corey takes the opportunity to do precisely this, when one character in the book endorses a totalitarian government because parliamentary processes can become bogged down and stuck in discussions. Impatient with such legislative processes and eager for quick and decisive action, the character says, "There has to be a way to come to a final decision."

In response, the interlocutor offers this epigram:

No, there doesn't. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It's messy and undignified, but it's when we're at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there's just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.

James S.A. Corey, which is actually a nom de plume for a two-man writing team, offers an analogue to Winston Churchill’s famous quote:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

Churchill spoke in 1947; Corey wrote in 2017. The sentiment holds. People who are otherwise reasonable and rational can be seduced into totalitarianism in several different ways; one of them is the simple desire to see things done in an orderly way paired with a distaste for squabbling chaos. Thus it is that totalitarianism sometimes sneaks in under the disguise of being scientific or technically proficient: “let the experts decide.”

But the price of order achieved by means of dictatorship is too high.

By placing the word “final” into mouth of the character who advocates totalitarianism, Corey alludes to Hitler’s National Socialism and its Endlösung — the “final solution.” The word Nazi is simply an abbreviation for the German phrase for “National Socialism.”

As a fiction author not constrained by the academic’s duty to insert all manner of qualifications and cite relevant antecedents, Corey is able to move on with his plot after briefly reminding the reader of a truism about freely elected representative bodies, and of the need to patiently endure annoying and even painful political processes: the alternative is far worse.

The Development of Roman Military Strategy: The Empire’s Army in Different Phases

The last phase of Roman history is the history of the empire: it began around 27 B.C. and ended in 476 A.D. This imperial phase came after both the monarchical phase and the republic phase. This final five centuries of Roman civilization can be further subdivided into three segments, according to historian Edward Luttwak. These three spans reflect three different goals for the imperial military. They are, in chronological order, expansion, maintenance, and defense.

Like most historical generalizations, these three phases of the empire cannot be taken as precise demarcations. There is some blurring of the distinctions and some overlapping of the time segments. Edward Luttwak presents the three phases as he devises them:

With brutal simplicity, it might be said that with the first system the Romans of the republic conquered much to serve the interests of a few, those living in the city — and in fact still fewer, those best placed to control policy.

Even within this first phase, there was development, both of the basic principles of this phase, and of what would become features of the next two phases. “During the first century,” Luttwak writes, “Roman ideas evolved toward a much broader and altogether more benevolent conception of empire.”

Although the first phase was characterized by expansion, it was in 9 A.D., during this first phase, that a German chieftain, known as Arminius or Herrmann, successfully attacked, defeated, and largely destroyed “three legions and auxiliary troops” commanded by Varus. Thus features of the latter two phases — maintenance and defense — are seen already in the first.

The clever act of bestowing fully Roman citizenship on many people living in the colonies or provinces marks the second phase. Enjoying their citizenship, and the rights and privileges it brought, these people developed an attachment to the empire, and were willing to support it and serve in its defense.

Under the aegis of the second system, men born in lands far from Rome could call themselves Romans and have their claim fully allowed; and the frontiers were efficiently developed to defend the growing prosperity of all, and not merely of the privileged. The result was the empire of the second century, which served the security interests of millions rather than of thousands.

During the third phase, in which Edward Luttwak sees the Roman military as largely defensive during the gradual contraction of the empire, echoes of the first phase are seen in, e.g., attempted Roman expansion eastward into Persia and Persian-controlled territories.

Under the third system, organized in the wake of the great crisis of the third century, the provision of security became an increasingly heavy charge on society — and a charge very unevenly distributed, which could enrich the wealthy while certainly ruining the poor. The machinery of empire now became increasingly self-serving, with its tax collectors, administrators, and soldiers of much greater use to one another than to the society at large. Even then the empire retained the loyalties of many, for the alternative was chaos. When this ceased to be so, when organized barbarian states capable of providing a measure of law and order began to emerge in lands that had once been Roman, then the last system of imperial security lost its last source of support, men’s fear of the unknown.

In addition to dividing the military history of the empire into these three phases, Luttwak also conceptualizes the fall of the empire as having one of its many roots in the growing awareness on the part of the Roman populace of the fact that the Germanic tribes could be, and often were, reasonable. The end of the empire would not be a descent into total chaos and destruction, but could be a someone orderly transition of power.

Indeed, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer ended the empire in 476 A.D., he was careful to observe a number of customs and phrases as he presented himself, and a number of Roman institutions were left functioning in place, like the Senate.

Julian the Apostate: His Ambivalence

The history of Christianity during the Roman Empire is bumpy and complicated. The Roman Empire began around 27 B.C. and Christianity began around 30 A.D.

During the earliest years of Christianity, the Roman officials regarded Christianity as simply a variety of Judaism: Jesus being a rabbi, the events starting the Christian faith having taken place in Jewish territory, and the first groups of Christians being Jews.

After the first few decades, the Romans came to see Christianity as something distinct from Judaism, but this understanding didn’t make a practical difference: both religions were persecuted by the Roman authorities. Thousands of Christians and Jews were arrested, jailed, beaten, and killed.

Despite this oppression, the Christian faith spread rapidly. The new religion gained members from all social classes and in every region within the empire. Conditions, however, gradually began to improve for Christians.

On April 30, 311, the Emperor Galerius issued The Edict of Toleration. Between February and June 313, Emperor Constantine and Emperor Licinius, ruling jointly at the time, issued the Edict of Milan. These two documents established Christianity as a legally accepted option alongside the various forms of paganism in the empire.

Christianity was tolerated, but not accepted. A century later, in 410, Christians were being harassed as pagans blamed them for military defeats, primarily when Germanic tribesmen sacked the city of Rome in that year. Christianity was an all-purpose scapegoat: it could be blamed for any social difficulties in the empire.

After Constantine’s edict in 313 A.D., Christianity did not become the state religion of the empire, as is sometimes reported. Christian baptism was not a legal requirement. Quite the opposite: Christians were a minority of the empire’s population, and Christianity remained on the margins of society.

The imperial career of Julian makes this clear; historian Edward Arthur Thompson reports that

Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus) (331 - 363), commonly called Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor A.D. 361 - 363, was born at Constantinople, the son of Julius Constantius, a half brother of Constantine the Great.

Julian’s family tree alone gave him a headstart on the road to power and fame. In addition, he was smart, obtained a good education, and proved himself practical in matters of military leadership.

He had a half brother named Gallus. Like Julian, Gallus was destined for leadership roles in the upper levels of the imperial administration. Edward Arthur Thompson explains that Emperor Constantius II promoted Gallus:

In 351 Gallus was elevated to the rank of Caesar and appointed to rule at Antioch; and it seems to have been about this time, when he was associating with the best-known philosophers of the day, that Julian secretly abandoned Christianity.

The career of Gallus came quickly to an end in 354, when the emperor Constantius II suspected him of disloyalty and had him executed.

Julian was aware that Constantius II was paranoid — even if the paranoia was perhaps justified by the ambitions of power-seeking men — and so remained alert for any threats from the emperor. Meanwhile, Julian’s military successes gave him political momentum, and his reputation was so good that the men of his army named him augustus — effectively emperor — by acclamation. He was certainly now a target for the wrath of Constantius II.

Julian’s spiritual involvement was at this point in time ambiguous. Although a pagan, he had occasionally attended Christian worship events, perhaps out of curiosity, or perhaps for the thrill of engaging in an event which was not in the social mainstream. But that would soon change, and his attachment to paganism would become a determining factor in his actions:

On Jan. 6, 361, he attended a church service, perhaps for the last time.

Frequently on the move, as his army’s task was to keep the Germanic tribes away from the city of Rome, Julian spent some time stationed at a city called Naissus, modern-day Nis, in Serbia. It was while Julian was at Nis that he learned that Constantius II had died, probably of natural causes.

Some reports claim that Emperor Constantius II asked to be baptized shortly before his death. Whether Julian received those reports, and how they may have factored into his thinking, is not clear.

In any case, with the emperor’s death, the immediate threat to Julian’s life was removed — of course, there would be others, as was the case for nearly every Roman emperor. Julian would now effectively be emperor and sole ruler of the empire. Perhaps it was this elevation that moved him from an interest in, and attraction to, paganism, toward a commitment to paganism. From the beginning of the empire until Julian’s reign, the vast majority of Roman emperors were pagans.

Julian appears to have become openly a pagan while still at Naissus.

Having become emperor in 361, Julian now wanted to build his reputation as emperor. While Jews and Christians had abandoned the practice of animal sacrifice for three centuries, it was still a central activity among the pagans. Julian hoped to solidify his emperorship’s reputation by these pagan rituals. While Christianity was a minority religion in most of the empire, Antioch was one city in which a large percentage of the residents were Christians. Julian received an unenthusiastic reception there:

Envious of Alexander the Great, Julian wished for military glory in the east and entered Antioch on July 19, 362. Associating closely with the pagan orator Libanius, he frequented the temples, multiplied his sacrifices to the gods, but failed to win much popularity with the predominantly Christian citizens.

Although now a dedicated pagan, Julian still pursued the tactic of religious tolerance, at least until late 362. He saw the growing numbers of Christians as a threat and a mystery. They were a threat to the credibility of paganism, and they were a mystery because their membership grew despite the movement’s lack of political, military, or economic might.

Julian hoped to pattern a new version of paganism after Christianity:

On Aug. 1, 362, Julian was still recommending religious tolerance. He decided to reorganize the pagan priesthood, appointing a chief priest in each province, and his letters of instruction to these men were most detailed: he wished to equip the pagans with an organization comparable to that of the Christians.

When Christians expressed disagreement with his paganism, and with some of his harsher actions, Julian abandoned the policies of tolerance, as Edward Arthur Thompson explains:

Christians were forbidden to teach in the schools, certain bishops (including Athanasius) were exiled, taxes were levied on Christian clergy, preference was given to pagans in appointments to high office, etc.

Although Julian was now openly persecuting Christians, he still wanted to see paganism restructured along Christian lines. He wanted the pagans to have the same success that the Christians were having, as Timothy Dalrymple writes:

In the fourth century, a Roman emperor who was so riddled with religious skepticism and pagan ideology that he was known as Julian the Apostate could not help but recognize the transformative power of Christian love and care. In a letter to a pagan priest, Julian wrote, “The Christians support not only their poor but ours as well; all men see that our people lack aid from us.” Julian’s letter went so far as to urge the pagan priest to mimic the charity of the Christians.

Among the Romans, the Christians were sometimes referred to as “Galilaeans.” The full quote from Julian’s letter reads:

For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.

Julian was not the only Roman to notice the counterintuitive growth of the Christian movement. Other texts from the era express similar bemusement and similar observations, e.g., Pliny the Younger in his letters to Trajan.

It puzzled many Romans that such a movement with no financial or legal power could attract so many followers so quickly. Among the Christians, some Roman social patterns were violated. Pliny writes of a Christian gathering led by female slaves; sitting in the audience were free male Roman citizens who listened attentively and regarded these speakers as authoritative. This represented a reversal of the Roman social order: slave vs. free, male vs. female, citizen vs. non-citizen. Yet the movement grew, attracting ever more members from all demographic categories.

The Christians were persistent in providing food and medical care to anyone who needed it. Christian missionaries carried this ethic of service to every corner of the empire. Brian Palmer writes about such activity:

The missionaries don’t profit personally from their work. They are compensated very poorly, if at all.

Julian hoped to instill such determination among the pagans. His death in 363, while fighting in Persia, brought an end to his efforts. It’s worth noting that for the remaining 113 years of the Roman Empire, which ended in 476, all the emperors were Christian.

While many Romans deprecated, admired, or were mystified by the rapid growth of the politically powerless Christian movement, Julian had a slightly different response: he hoped to co-opt Christianity’s method and duplicate Christianity’s success for paganism.

Julian’s plan didn’t work.

Crime and Lack of Punishment

The legal tradition of Western Civilization has long distinguished between crimes against persons and crimes against property. This distinction existed long before the United States became an independent country, and is found in many different countries around the world.

In practical terms, for example, this distinction helps to identify the importance of legal concepts like domestic violence and victims’ rights. Both of these notions deal with crimes against people, and the law views those crimes more severely than crimes against property.

Legal scholar Brian Mackie notes that it is “rare” to have “a judge sentence someone to jail for a property crime” in the United States. Prisons are not “filled with shoplifters, dope smokers, and car thieves.” Instead significant prison sentences are given to “people we should be afraid of.”

Looking specifically at the State of Michigan, Mackie notes “that Michigan is the second most violent state in the Midwest,” with “a violent crime rate more than fifty percent higher than the state of Ohio.” What seem to be high rates of incarceration in Michigan are actually lower, considered as rates, than states like Montana.

Michigan doesn’t “seek jail terms for folks who steal Slurpees,” in the words of journalist James Leopard who reported in 2020 on both Mackie and Mackie’s critics.

Mackie reports that Michigan doesn’t routinely imprison those who’ve committed a crime against property. Instead, “74% of Michigan’s prison inmates are sentenced for a violent crime (a figure which the national ACLU reports).” Those who commit crimes against property are routinely spared prison time, and engage in various forms of rehabilitation or restorative justice.

The tendency to distinguish between ‘crimes against persons’ and ‘crimes against property’ is a tendency that is found in Western Civilization. In other civilizations, there are legal traditions which include severe consequences for theft: the amputation of hands, for example, or the death penalty.

In Western Civilization, the death penalty was and is reserved for only extreme crimes against persons: murder, rape, kidnapping, and treason.

Western Civilization does not allow the capital punishment for burglary, theft, or other forms of stealing. This is a statement about the value of human life.

In non-Western civilizations, capital punishment is meted out for various forms of theft, for adultery or infidelity, and for various ‘thought crimes’ and ‘word crimes’ like blasphemy, defamation, slander, or libel.

The challenge facing the legal system in the United States at present is the growing demand to severely punish various ‘speech crimes.’ This demand represents a departure from Western Civilization, demanding a physical penalty for spoken or written words. This demand would see individuals fined, jailed, or removed from gainful employment because they expressed certain thoughts.

Another challenge to Western Civilization’s value system is the minimizing of rape. Traditionally, rape was considered a serious crime, even in some cases meriting the death penalty. The trend in recent years has been to give lighter sentences to convicted rapists. This undermines the dignity and worth that Western Civilization has traditionally attributed to women.

Likewise, in non-Western civilizations, the status of the victim affects both the legal proceedings and the sentences issued at the end of those proceedings. In some countries, e.g., a driver who negligently kills a pedestrian will be sentenced more harshly if the victim was a man, and sentenced more lightly if the victim was a woman. In Western Civilization, legal doctrine has long decreed that a crime’s sentence — e.g., for negligent manslaughter — should be the same with no regard to the demographic of the victim or of the perpetrator: the sentence should be the same, regardless of gender, age, race, religion, economic status, etc.

This concept, too, is being challenged in the current legal environment: harsher sentences are being demanded based upon the race or gender of the victim or of the perpetrator. This is a direct contradiction of Western Civilization.

The current era will be seen, from the perspective of the future, as a pivotal one: an era in which either Western Civilization’s basic sense of justice held, or an era in which it crumbled.

The Death of Friedrich Schiller: Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Idealism

The history of literature is ever plagued by ambiguities, especially when it tries to sort various authors into various movements, schools, and eras. The roots of imprecision are necessarily rooted deeply in the method of sorting authors into these types of groupings, because the groupings themselves are constructs: they are generalizations made after the fact, and subject to a necessary amount of inexactness.

In discussing the career of Friedrich Schiller, and in describing the influences in his environment, some scholars use a bewildering flurry of terminology, including: Romanticism, pre-Romanticism, proto-Romanticism, Classicism, neoClassicism, Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Enlightenment.

Each of those words is alleged to describe some literary trend. Yet when examined carefully, the ambiguities and indistinctnesses multiply. Where do the boundaries of these groupings fall? Which characteristics are defining for these groups? Do these movements overlap each other, include each other, or exclude each other?

There is a clear distinction in methodology: one can compare and contrast two texts, examining the observable concrete details of each, or one can compare and contrast two constructs, muddling through ever more ambiguous generalizations. One can compare and contrast Herder’s Christliche Schriften with Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, or one can attempt to compare and contrast Weimar Classicism with the Enlightenment. The former can yield well-articulated conclusions, which, even if false, nonetheless have clear content, while the latter will produce merely increasingly vague generalizations about generalizations.

Two scholars, Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister, describe the death of Friedrich Schiller:

Als Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) mit nur 46 Jahren in Weimar verstarb, waren die Ärzte, die für die Obduktion des Dichters zuständig waren, höchst verwundert — vor allem darüber, »wie der arme Mann so lange hat leben können«. Seine Lunge hatte sich fast aufgelöst und war mit den verknöcherten Rippen und dem Herz verwachsen; das Herz selbst war laut medizinischem Bericht ein darüleerer Beutel», fast ohne Muskelgewebe; ähnliche Befunde lieferten Niere, Milz und Gedärme. Woher hatte Schiller überhaupt die Energie, zu schreiben, genommen? Die Antwort lässt er seinen Wallenstein geben: »Es ist der Geist, der sich den Körper baut.«

Note the transition from precise concrete details to generalized constructs as these same two scholars continue, in their next paragraph:

In der Aufklärung rückten vor allem die erzieherischen und selbsterzieherischen Aspekte in den Vordergrund: Die Distanzierung von den Affekten und leiblichen Dringlichkeiten, von Naturzwängen und Trieben wurden als Emanzipation verstanden. Die Freiheit des Geistes sollte in jedem entfacht werden und ihn zu einem mündigen Bürger machen. Schiller ist der leibhaftige Beweis, dass es sich dabei um mehr als nur leere Worte und windige Ideen handelt.

It is not merely the use of abstractions which characterizes the second paragraph, but rather the exclusive use of abstractions, and specifically abstractions which have no clear method verifiability. The second paragraph probably contains some specific meanings, but a great deal of interpretation would be necessary to distill those meanings and to relate them to any observable or concrete phenomena — even the phenomena found in a literary text.

Abstractions can be used in salutary ways, and are not to be banished from all writing. But abstractions carry more meaning, and carry it better, when connected to concrete features of a text or of a historical event.

A grammatical analysis might reveal features in Schiller’s texts: how often verbs are used in the imperative mood; how often in the passive voice. A semantic analysis might reveal how often concrete nouns are used in comparison to abstract nouns; how often the subject of a sentence is specified; how often the metrical structure of a poem is maintained or violated.

It requires a great deal of self-discipline for a scholar to confine herself or himself to the concrete details of a text or the concrete details of an author’s historical context. The generalizations of constructs about movements and genres is ever enticing and seductive.