The Parade of Ants   by Heinrich Zimmer

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f1  Indra the Storm-God

Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943; author of The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil — highly recommended — as well as Philosophies of India) also wrote the terrific Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization.  Within that enthralling repository of mythic tales and their symbolic interpretation (completed after Zimmer's premature death by editor Joseph Campbell), alongside other rich nuggets of Indian mythic lore one finds this glittering gem, “The Parade of Ants”: ^{1, 2}

Indra slew the dragon, a giant titan that had been couching on the mountains in the limbless shape of a cloud serpent, holding the waters of heaven captive in its belly.  The god flung his thunderbolt into the midst of the ungainly coils; the monster shattered like a stack of withered rushes.  The waters burst free and streamed in ribbons across the land, to circulate once more through the body of the world.

This flood is the flood of life and belongs to all.  It is the sap of field and forest, the blood coursing in the veins.  The monster had appropriated the common benefit, massing his ambitious, selfish hulk between heaven and earth, but now was slain.  The juices again were pouring.  The titans were retreating to the underworlds; the gods were returning to the summit of the central mountain of the earth, there to reign from on high.

During the period of the supremacy of the dragon, the majestic mansions of the lofty city of the gods had cracked and crumbled.  The first act of Indra was to rebuild them.  All the divinities of the heavens were acclaiming him their savior.  Greatly elated in his triumph and in the knowledge of his strength, he summoned Vishvakarman, the god of arts and crafts, and commanded him to erect such a palace as should befit the unequaled splendor of the king of the gods.

The miraculous genius, Vishvakarman, succeeded in constructing in a single year a shining residence, marvelous with palaces and gardens, lakes and towers.  But as the work progressed, the demands of Indra became even more exacting and his unfolding visions vaster.  He required additional terraces and pavilions, more ponds, groves, and pleasure grounds.  Whenever Indra arrived to appraise the work, he developed vision beyond vision of marvels remaining to be contrived.  Presently the divine craftsman, brought to despair, decided to seek succor from above.  He would turn to the demiurgic creator, Brahmā, the pristine embodiment of the Universal Spirit, who abides far above the troubled Olympian sphere of ambition, strife, and glory.

When Vishvakarman secretly resorted to the higher throne and presented his case, Brahmā comforted the petitioner.  “You will soon be relieved of your burden,” he said.  “Go home in peace.”  Then, while Vishvakarman was hurrying down again to the city of Indra, Brahmā himself ascended to a still higher sphere.  He came before Vishnu, the Supreme Being, of whom he himself, the Creator, was but an agent.  In beatific silence Vishnu gave ear, and by a mere nod of the head let it be known that the request of Vishvakarman would be fulfilled.

Early next morning a brahmin boy, carrying the staff of a pilgrim, made his appearance at the gate of Indra, bidding the porter announce his visit to the king.  The gate-man hurried to the master, and the master hastened to the entrance to welcome in person the auspicious guest.  The boy was slender, some ten years old, radiant with the luster of wisdom.  Indra discovered him amidst a cluster of enraptured, staring children.  The boy greeted the host with a gentle glance of his dark and brilliant eyes.  The king bowed to the holy child and the boy cheerfully gave his blessing.  The two retired to the hall of Indra, where the god ceremoniously proffered welcome to his guest with oblations of honey, milk, and fruits, then said:  “O Venerable Boy, tell me of the purpose of your coming.”

The beautiful child replied with a voice that was as deep and soft as the slow thundering of auspicious rain clouds.  “O King of Gods, I have heard of the mighty palace you are building, and have come to refer to you the questions in my mind.  How many years will it require to complete this rich and extensive residence?  What further feats of engineering will Vishvakarman be expected to accomplish?  O Highest of the Gods,” — the boy's luminous features moved with a gentle, scarcely perceptible smile — “no Indra before you has ever succeeded in completing such a palace as yours is to be.”

Full of the wine of triumph, the king of the gods was entertained by this mere boy's pretension to a knowledge of Indras earlier than himself.  With a fatherly smile he put the question:

“Tell me, Child!  Are they then so very many, the Indras and Vishvakarmans whom you have seen — or at least, whom you have heard of?”

The wonderful guest calmly nodded.  “Yes, indeed, many have I seen.”  The voice was as warm and sweet as milk fresh from the cow, but the words sent a slow chill through Indra's veins.  “My dear child,” the boy continued, “I knew your father, Kashyapa, the Old Tortoise Man, lord and progenitor of all the creatures of the earth.  And I knew your grandfather, Marichi, Beam of Celestial Light, who was the son of Brahmā.  Marichi was begotten of the god Brahmā's pure spirit; his only wealth and glory were his sanctity and devotion.  Also, I know Brahmā, brought forth by Vishnu from the lotus calix growing from Vishnu's navel.  And Vishnu himself — the Supreme Being, supporting Brahmā in his creative endeavor — him too I know.

“O King of Gods, I have known the dreadful dissolution of the universe.  I have seen all perish, again and again, at the end of every cycle.  At that terrible time, every single atom dissolves into the primal, pure waters of eternity, whence originally all arose.  Everything then goes back into the fathomless, wild infinity of the ocean, which is covered with utter darkness and is empty of every sign of animate being.  Ah, who will count the Universes that have passed away, or the creations that have risen afresh, again and again, from the formless abyss of the vast waters?  Who will number the passing ages of the world, as they follow each other endlessly?  And who will search through the wide infinities of space to count the universes side by side, each containing its Brahmā, its Vishnu, and its Shiva?  Who will count the Indras in them all — those Indras side by side, who reign at once in all the innumerable worlds; those others who passed away before them; or even the Indras who succeed each other in any given line, ascending to godly kingship, one by one, and, one by one, passing away?  King of Gods, there are among your servants certain who maintain that it may be possible to number the grains of sand on earth and the drops of rain that fall from the sky, but no one will ever number all those Indras.  This is what the Knowers know.

“The life and kingship of an Indra endure seventy-one eons, and when twenty-eight Indras have expired, one Day and Night of Brahmā has elapsed.  But the existence of one Brahmā, measured in such Brahmā Days and Nights, is only one hundred and eight years.  Brahmā follows Brahmā; one sinks, the next arises; the endless series cannot be told.  There is no end to the number of those Brahmās — to say nothing of Indras.

“But the universes side by side at any given moment, each harboring a Brahmā and an Indra: who will estimate the number of these?  Beyond the farthest vision, crowding outer space, the universes come and go, an innumerable host.  Like delicate boats they float on the fathomless, pure waters that form the body of Vishnu.  Out of every hair-pore of that body a universe bubbles and breaks.  Will you presume to count them?  Will you number the gods in all those worlds — the worlds present and the worlds past?”

A procession of ants had made its appearance in the hall during the discourse of the boy.  In military array, in a column four yards wide, the tribe paraded across the floor.  The boy noted them, paused, and stared, then suddenly laughed with an astonishing peal, but immediately subsided into a profoundly indrawn and thoughtful silence.

f2  Brahma and Indra

“Why do you laugh?” stammered Indra.  “Who are you, mysterious being, under this deceiving guise of a boy?”  The proud king's throat and lips had gone dry, and his voice continually broke.  “Who are you, Ocean of Virtues, enshrouded in deluding mist?”

The magnificent boy resumed:  “I laughed because of the ants.  The reason is not to be told.  Do not ask me to disclose it.  The seed of woe and the fruit of wisdom are enclosed within this secret.  It is the secret that smites with an ax the tree of worldly vanity, hews away its roots, and scatters its crown.  This secret is a lamp to those groping in ignorance.  This secret lies buried in the wisdom of the ages, and is rarely revealed even to saints.  This secret is the living air of those ascetics who renounce and transcend mortal existence; but worldlings, deluded by desire and pride, it destroys.”

The boy smiled and sank into silence.  Indra regarded him, unable to move.  “O Son of a Brahmin,” the king pleaded presently, with a new and visible humility, “I do not know who you are.  You would seem to be Wisdom Incarnate.  Reveal to me this secret of the ages, this light that dispels the dark.”

Thus requested to teach, the boy opened to the god the hidden wisdom.  “I saw the ants, O Indra, filing in long parade.  Each was once an Indra.  Like you, each by virtue of pious deeds once ascended to the rank of a king of gods.  But now, through many rebirths, each has become again an ant.  This army is an army of former Indras.

“Piety and high deeds elevate the inhabitants of the world to the glorious realm of the celestial mansions, or to the higher domains of Brahmā and Shiva and to the highest sphere of Vishnu; but wicked acts sink them into the worlds beneath, into pits of pain and sorrow, involving reincarnation among birds and vermin, or out of the wombs of pigs and animals of the wild, or among trees, or among insects.  It is by deeds that one merits happiness or anguish, and becomes a master or a serf.  It is by deeds that one attains to the rank of a king or brahmin, or of some god, or of an Indra or a Brahmā.  And through deeds again, one contracts disease, acquires beauty and deformity, or is reborn in the condition of a monster.

“This is the whole substance of the secret.  This wisdom is the ferry to beatitude across the ocean of hell.

“Life in the cycle of the countless rebirths is like a vision in a dream.  The gods on high, the mute trees and the stones, are alike apparitions in this phantasy.  But Death administers the law of time.  Ordained by time, Death is the master of all.  Perishable as bubbles are the good and the evil of the beings of the dream.  In unending cycles the good and evil alternate.  Hence, the wise are attached to neither, neither the evil nor the good.  The wise are not attached to anything at all.”

The boy concluded the appalling lesson and quietly regarded his host.  The king of gods, for all his celestial splendor, had been reduced in his own regard to insignificance.  Meanwhile, another amazing apparition had entered the hall.

The newcomer had the appearance of a kind of hermit.  His head was piled with matted hair; he wore a black deerskin around his loins; on his forehead was painted a white mark; his head was shaded by a paltry parasol of grass; and a quaint, circular cluster of hair grew on his chest: it was intact at the circumference, but from the center many of the hairs, it seemed, had disappeared.  This saintly figure strode directly to Indra and the boy, squatted between them on the floor, and there remained, motionless as a rock.  The kingly Indra, somewhat recovering his hostly role, bowed and paid obeisance, offering sour milk with honey and other refreshments; then he inquired, falteringly but reverently, after the welfare of the stern guest, and bade him welcome.  Whereupon the boy addressed the holy man, asking the very questions Indra himself would have proposed.

“Whence do you come, O Holy Man?  What is your name and what brings you to this place?  Where is your present home, and what is the meaning of this grass parasol?  What is the portent of that circular hair-tuft on your chest: why is it dense at the circumference but at the center almost bare?  Be kind enough, O Holy Man, to answer, in brief, these questions.  I am anxious to understand.”

Patiently the old saint smiled, and slowly began his reply.  “I am a brahmin.  Hairy is my name.  And I have come here to behold Indra.  Since I know that I am short-lived, I have decided to possess no home, to build no house, and neither to marry nor to seek a livelihood.  I exist by begging alms.  To shield myself from sun and rain I carry over my head this parasol of grass.

“As to the circle of hair on my chest, it is a source of grief to the children of the world.  Nevertheless, it teaches wisdom.  With the fall of an Indra, one hair drops.  That is why, in the center all the hairs have gone.  When the other half of the period allotted to the present Brahmā will have expired,  I myself shall die.  O Brahmin Boy, it follows that I am somewhat short of days; what, therefore, is the use of a wife and a son, or of a house?

“Each flicker of the eyelids of the great Vishnu registers the passing of a Brahmā.  Everything below that sphere of Brahmā is as insubstantial as a cloud taking shape and again dissolving.  That is why I devote myself exclusively to meditating on the incomparable lotus-feet of highest Vishnu.  Faith in Vishnu is more than the bliss of redemption; for every joy, even the heavenly, is as fragile as a dream, and only interferes with the one-pointedness of our faith in Him Supreme.

“Shiva, the peace-bestowing, the highest spiritual guide, taught me this wonderful wisdom.  I do not crave to experience the various blissful forms of redemption: to share the highest god's supernal mansions and enjoy his eternal presence, or to be like him in body and apparel, or to become a part of his august substance, or even to be absorbed wholly in his ineffable essence.”

Abruptly, the holy man ceased and immediately vanished.  It had been the god Shiva himself; he had now returned to his supramundane abode.  Simultaneously, the brahmin boy, who had been Vishnu, disappeared as well.  The king was alone, baffled and amazed.

The king, Indra, pondered; and the events seemed to him to have been a dream.  But he no longer felt any desire to magnify his heavenly splendor or to go on with the construction of his palace.  He summoned Vishvakarman.  Graciously greeting the craftsman with honeyed words, he heaped on him jewels and precious gifts, then with a sumptuous celebration sent him home.

The king, Indra, now desired redemption.  He had acquired wisdom, and wished only to be free.  He entrusted the pomp and burden of his office to his son, and prepared to retire to the hermit life of the wilderness.  Whereupon his beautiful and passionate queen, Shachi, was overcome with grief.

Weeping, in sorrow and utter despair, Shachi resorted to Indra's ingenious house-priest and spiritual advisor, the Lord of Magic Wisdom, Brihaspati.  Bowing at his feet, she implored him to divert her husband's mind from its stern resolve.  The resourceful counselor of the gods, who by his spells and devices had helped the heavenly powers wrest the government of the universe from the hands of their titan rivals, listened thoughtfully to the complaint of the voluptuous, disconsolate goddess, and knowingly nodded assent.  With a wizard's smile, he took her hand and conducted her to the presence of her spouse.  In the role, then, of spiritual teacher, he discoursed sagely on the virtues of the spiritual life, but on the virtues also, of the secular.  He gave to each its due.  Very skillfully he developed his theme.  The royal pupil was persuaded to relent in his extreme resolve.  The queen was restored to radiant joy.

This Lord of Magic Wisdom, Brihaspati, once had composed a treatise on government, in order to teach Indra how to rule the world.  He now issued a second work, a treatise on the polity and stratagems of married love.  Demonstrating the sweet art of wooing ever anew, and of enchaining the beloved with enduring bonds, this priceless book established on sound foundations the married life of the reunited pair.

Thus concludes the marvelous story of how the king of gods was humiliated in his boundless pride, cured of an excessive ambition, and through wisdom, both spiritual and secular, brought to a knowledge of his proper role in the wheeling play of unending life.

f3  The sleeping Vishnu, whose dream is the World Dashavatara temple, Deogarh, India – photographer Byron Aihara

¹ Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa, Kṛiṣṇa-janma Khaṇḍa, 47. 50-161.

² Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, edited by Joseph Campbell, 1946, Bollingen Series VI, Pantheon Books, Random House, Inc., New York, 1963; pp. 3-11.

^f1 Indra the Storm-God, from Buddhist Artwork: Buddhist Line Art: Indra, at BuddhaNet.net.

^f2 Brahma and Indra, by artist Takuma Shōga (fl. 12th century Japan), from Selected Relics of Japanese Art (20 volume set), edited by Shiiji Tajima, photographs and collotypes by K. Ogawa, published by Shimbi Shoin (Nippon Shimbi Kyokwai), 1899-1908, Volume 13, Plate 14; selections therefrom available on-line at BaxleyStamps.com.  See also the same image (from the same source) at WikiMedia.org.

^f3 The sleeping Vishnu, whose dream is the World (cropped), from India 2004 Dashavatar Temple Deogarh (Set), photographer Byron Aihara (byronic501 at Flickr.com).

Labels: Brahma, Heinrich Zimmer, Hindu, India, Indra, Joseph Campbell, myth, Vishnu

Sex in Antiquity III – the Wages of Adultery

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I've been watching the first couple seasons of the BBC series Rome, checked out from the library.  Covering the period of Caesar and Octavian, it's pretty entertaining, especially considering the various antics and tribulations that Vorenus and Pullo, two non-historical characters whose supposed lives we follow through the history, get into (I won't spoil it for folks by detailing them).

Rome as a production does appear to go to some effort trying to get its portrait of classical history and civilization basically correct, but can be seen to fail on occasion.  I was amused by a scene in season two where a high-status woman who is having an affair with a man is quite offended when he attempts to offer her money, rejecting it as portraying her as a prostitute — which it turns out is quite ahistoric, merely projecting modern attitudes onto a very different antique society.

As Paul Veyne writes in his chapter “The Roman Empire” in Volume I of A History of Private Life: ¹

The social and institutional character of the Roman economy was so different from that of our own that it is tempting to call it archaic.  It sustained, nevertheless, a high level of production and was as dynamic and ruthless as capitalism.  For, if Roman aristocrats distinguished themselves by their culture and their interest in philosophy, they were still avid for profit.

The greatest nobles talked business.  Pliny, a senator, in letters intended to be specimens of the finest in the genre, held up his behavior as a wealthy landlord as an example for others to follow.  When a noble wished to get rid of old furniture or building materials, he held a public auction.  (Auctions were the normal way for private individuals to sell their used belongings; the emperors themselves auctioned off unwanted palace furniture.)

Money was not supposed to lie idle.  Even loans to friends and relatives earned interest (not charging interest on such loans was considered a mark of special virtue).  A woman's father had to pay interest to her husband if transfer of her dowry was delayed.

Usury was a part of daily life; modern anti-Semites might have made ancient Rome the object of their obsession instead of the Jews.  In Rome commerce and money-lending were not left exclusively to professionals or to any one class of society.  Any toil, no matter how pleasurable, merited payment.

One picturesque aspect of amorous customs among the Romans was that the female partner in a high-society affair was paid for her trouble.  A matron who deceived her husband received a large sum or, in some cases, an annual income from her lover.  Some cads reclaimed these gifts when affairs were broken off, and on occasion the courts became involved.

The practice of accepting gifts from lovers was considered not prostitution but work for hire.  The woman did not give herself because she was paid, the jurists held; she was rewarded for giving herself of her own free will.  She who loved best was most handsomely paid.  Women sought the wages of adultery as eagerly as men sought dowries.

¹ Paul Veyne, Chapter 1: “The Roman Empire,” Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, A History of Private Life, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987; pp.  146-147.  Originally published as Volume I: De l'Empire romain à l'an mil, of Histoire de la vie Privée, Editions du Seuil, 1985.  Additional paragraph breaks added to the quoted text.

UPDATE:  2009-09-08 17:40 UT:  See also the earlier posted “Sex in Antiquity I” and “Sex in Antiquity II – Moral hypochondria.”

UPDATE:  2009-09-06 16:00 UT:  University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse had a posting this last week “From an expert on ‘the etiquette of open marriages’,” quoting that “expert” as saying, “I'm a class act in infidelity.”  Note that I have no reason to think that Althouse (who was only just married herself a few weeks back) supports this “class act's” position in this regard (quite the contrary, I think), but a poster on that Althouse thread made a comment which enhances my point above concerning the profound differences between cultures, ancient and modern, in this connection.

As “cubanbob” put it in that thread (emphasis added):

Years ago when I traveled to Taiwan extensively on business it was expected that a successful man have a mistress.  Indeed if he did not have one it would almost [be] a loss of face.  However the rules were very clear:

1 — never be seen in public with the mistress, especially with by people who know the wife.  Under no circumstances can the wife be subject to embarrassment.

2 — no outside children or STD's.

3 — home every day at a reasonable hour and on weekends [to] spend time with the kids.  The wife must be able to maintain the fiction that there is no affair indeed it is the desired goal that [she] should not even be aware there is a mistress.  Only the close circle of the boys at the club can know.

4 — money is always left on the night stand by the bed after sex with the mistress.  If she refuses to take the money the affair is to be ended immediately.  Even if she loves him, she must take the money otherwise he must end it.  As long as she takes the money she has no claim on him.

5 — If the wife is publicly humiliated by the husband due to his having an affair, the punishment for the husband is to be left essentially penniless as she can never remarry (or at least in socially acceptable circles) and the money is her compensation.

It's been a while since I [have] last been there, I wonder if those unwritten rules are still in effect.  As for the woman in the article, she should know that discretion is the only way something like that can be made to work.  So why openly comment on your marriage and embarrass your husband?  She will find her herself divorced soon enough.

Labels: adultery, ancient Rome, Ann Althouse, antiquity, BBC Rome series, open marriage, Paul Veyne, Roman law, sex, Taiwan, usury

Cancer is an evolutionary process

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F1 Figure 1.  Cancer is an evolutionary process.  “The lineage of mitotic cell divisions from the fertilized egg to a single cell within a cancer showing the timing of the somatic mutations acquired by the cancer cell and the processes that contribute to them.” Further description of the figure from the Nature article quoted below:  “Mutations may be acquired while the cell lineage is phenotypically normal, reflecting both the intrinsic mutations acquired during normal cell division and the effects of exogenous mutagens.  During the development of the cancer other processes, for example DNA repair defects, may contribute to the mutational burden.  Passenger mutations do not have any effect on the cancer cell, but driver mutations will cause a clonal expansion.  Relapse after chemotherapy can be associated with resistance mutations that often predate the initiation of treatment.”

An illuminating perspective on the nature of cancer has been achieved in that we now realize that cancer is itself the result of a process of biological evolution (random mutation plus natural selection) occurring amongst individual cells within the environment of one's own body.

A technical review article appearing in the renowned scientific journal Nature on the subject of the newly deciphered cancer genome lays out our recent understanding of the nature of cancer: ¹

Cancer is an evolutionary process

All cancers are thought to share a common pathogenesis.  Each is the outcome of a process of Darwinian evolution occurring among cell populations within the microenvironments provided by the tissues of a multicellular organism.  Analogous to Darwinian evolution occurring in the origins of species, cancer development is based on two constituent processes, the continuous acquisition of heritable genetic variation in individual cells by more-or-less random mutation and natural selection acting on the resultant phenotypic diversity.

The selection may weed out cells that have acquired deleterious mutations or it may foster cells carrying alterations that confer the capability to proliferate and survive more effectively than their neighbours.  Within an adult human there are probably thousands of minor winners of this ongoing competition, most of which have limited abnormal growth potential and are invisible or manifest as common benign growths such as skin moles.

Occasionally, however, a single cell acquires a sufficiently advantageous set of mutations that allows it to proliferate autonomously, invade tissues and metastasize.

Some people reject this concept, at least on first encounter, believing it to be, as one person put it, ”a misapplication of evolutionary theory,” because “cancerous changes in cells insure their own destruction rather than being passed on to the next [human] generation,” and “thus cancer is better understood as a malfunction [or degeneration] of cellular mechanisms rather than an evolutionary process.”

This argument is wrong, or at best an appreciation of only half of the dual interacting principles that are at work in the onset of cancer.  In this regard, one might note that the authors of the foregoing Nature piece from which the earliest quotation was excerpted are highly experienced cancer researchers and thus hardly naive concerning this topic.  Beyond that mere “argument from authority,” however, though genetic “malfunctions” (aka mutation) do of course occur, the development of cancer goes way beyond a mere haphazard accumulation of defects — which would indeed be inherently far less dangerous — rather, the creation of cancer is propelled by true evolutionary forces.

The typically negative changes that the bulk of accidental genetic modifications to complex biological systems (known as mutations) introduce, subsequently get filtered in living environments by natural selection (random mutations in combination with natural selection being collectively known evolution), leaving only the advantageous (or at least neutral) results behind — advantageous, that is (in the context we're discussing), for individual cell lineages, if not for the body as a whole — which steadily improves the cells of those lineages' reproductive and competitive standing within the body's increasingly diverse cellular environment.

Beyond that, however, taking the above objection at face value would mean that whenever a new species evolves/arises out of another to fit the environment in which it presently finds itself (for instance, humans with their big brains evolving during the last few million years out of stupider hominids) — but which evolutionary alterations happen to ensure that the environment afterwards changes or even is disrupted or destroyed by the actions of the newer species (such as people blowing up the world or making it unfit to live in due to pollution or global warming) so that the species subsequently becomes extinct — that the earlier adaptive changes resulting in the origin of that species would therefore have to be deemed not to have been “evolution”!  Good to know; Creationists must therefore be right: humans didn't evolve!  (End sarcasm.)

Discarding sarcasm, it's important to realize that body cells which are progressing towards a cancerous variety as a result of the dual actions of mutation and natural selection (i.e., evolution) are “fitter” — in that those cells successfully out-reproduce and out-compete for a considerable length of time their more unassuming compatriots within the bodily environment.  It's not till much later (cellular time-wise) that the overall encompassing bodily environment could end up being destroyed as a consequence of the tumor that those cells may eventually grow into.  In the meantime, those cells are responding to real evolutionary forces that propel their progression — not mere haphazard “degeneration.”

It can even occur on occasion that a cancerous line does not get wiped out along with its host!  As it happens there is a variety of cancer in dogs known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT), also called Sticker's sarcoma (that one can learn about here ²), which, rather than being viral in nature as most infectious cancers are, actually consists of the mutated cells of the original dog that initially developed that variety of cancer, in the course of which somehow evolving the capability to survive and escape from its host, infecting other dogs thereafter in an endless chain, and thus as a result long outliving its original progenitor.

Ignoring the instance of the cancerous dog cell lineage that succeeded in escaping and outliving its bodily host whilst infecting dogs more generally — even more “ordinary” cancers that never manage to escape and live free of their host are remarkable as instances of the body's constituent cells (or rebel lineages of them) learning via evolution how to disobey the body's regulatory apparatus — in effect raising the “jolly roger,” taking up a life of independent piracy within the host, perhaps in the end by their free-wheeling activities killing off their formerly allied-to body.

A page at the University of California, Berkeley, titled “ Another perspective on cancer: Evolution within,“ puts the ultimate evolutionary origin of cancers succinctly: ³

[D]espite increased attention and funding, the cure for this and other cancers has remained notoriously elusive.  Viewing cancer through the lens of evolution helps explain why a cure seems to remain just out of reach and points the way toward new treatments.  Where's the evolution?  Iconic examples of evolution (birds evolving from dinosaurs, hominids evolving an upright posture, or a lineage of lobe-finned fish evolving four legs and moving onto land) might seem unrelated to the growth of a cancerous tumor, but the process underlying them both — natural selection — is identical.  We typically think of natural selection acting among individuals, favoring those carrying advantageous traits and making those traits more common in the next generation.  However, the key elements of this process — variation, inheritance, and selective advantage — characterize not just populations of organisms in a particular environment, but also populations of cells within our own bodies.  The cells lining your intestines, for example, are not genetically uniform; there is variation among them.  Some of those cells have incurred chance mutations as they have divided.  If one of those mutations (or a series of mutations) allows its bearer to evade cell death and reproduce more prolifically than others, it will pass that mutation on to its daughter cells, and cells bearing that mutation will increase in frequency over time.  Like organisms in an ecosystem, cell lineages within one's own body compete for resources.  A cell lineage that gains an advantage in that competition, accumulating mutations that allow it to grab extra resources and escape the body's control mechanisms, will proliferate and may evolve into a cancerous tumor.

One is reminded of renowned science fiction writer (as well as editor) John W. Campbell's chilling tale from 1938, “Who Goes There?” (subsequently made into the 1951 motion picture The Thing from Another World, remade as The Thing in 1982) in which a terrible alien menace, liberated from Antarctic ice, possessed (once unfrozen) the capability of taking over the substance of animal and man, incorporating it into its own flesh and being — whilst (contrary to eating and ingestion as we know it) continuing to present the devoured human or animal's semblance as a “doppelganger” or zombie of that individual.  Thus, an entire kennel of dogs or barracks of humans could, in the context of that story, be surreptitiously consumed one by one and thereby incorporated into the newly revived alien life form.

The thing (pun intended) that saved the folk in that story was that every such subsumed (semblance of a) human or animal, though now fully part of the alien species, was ultimately still an individual that would fight for its own survival when threatened — and simply separating a small part (such as a bit of sampled blood) of the creature whenever its takeover of man or dog was suspected, and then “threatening” that sample (with a hot wire perhaps), would cause the newly separated being to recoil in its own defense (unlike untransformed people's blood), thus revealing the doppelganger.

As a character in story put it, initially blurting out the idea: ⁴

“Blood is tissue.  They have to bleed; if they don't bleed when cut, then by Heaven, they're phoney from hell!  If they bleed — then that blood, separated from them, is an individual — a newly formed individual in its own right, just as they — split, all of them, from one original — are individuals!”

“Get it, Van?  See the answer, Bar?”

Van Hall laughed very softly.  “The blood — the blood will not obey.  It's a new individual, with all the desire to protect its own life that the original — the main mass from which it was split — has.  The blood will live — and try to crawl away from a hot needle, say!”

It's extremely interesting, I think, that our own body cells turn out to be rather like Campbell's hypothetical alien menace, as they evolve on their own as individuals within one's own body toward an independent, if piratical, existence.

Realizing that cancer results from an evolutionary progression amongst the cells within one's own body provides an illuminating perspective with regard to the fundamental nature of cancer, revealing just why it is that cancer so often proves resistant to treatment (as cancerous cells simply evolve away from a given regimen unless every last tumor-generating cell is thereby destroyed), as well as suggesting a number of avenues along which the phenomenon may be mitigated, obviated, and (one hopes) ultimately defeated.

^F1 Figure 1 from the Ref. 1 Nature article.

¹ Michael R. Stratton, Peter J. Campbell, P. Andrew Futreal, “The Cancer Genome,” Nature, Vol. 458, Issue no. 7239 (9 April 2009 [2009-04-09]), pp. 719-724.

² Carl Zimmer, “A Dead Dog Lives On (Inside New Dogs),“ The Loom, August 9, 2006 [2006-08-09].

³ “Another perspective on cancer: Evolution within,” October 2007 [2007-10], part of: “Understanding Evolution,” University of California, Berkeley.

⁴ John W. Campbell (under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart), “Who Goes There?”, August 1938 [1938-08], Astounding Science Fiction, Street & Smith Publications, Inc., New York.  Collected in: The Best of John W. Campbell, Edited with an introduction by Lester Del Rey, Nelson Doubleday, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1976, pp. 246-298; quote on p. 291.  Also collected in: John W. Campbell, Who Goes There?, Shasta Publishers, 1948.  Made into the motion picture The Thing from Another World, directed by Howard Hawks, Winchester Pictures, distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, 1951.  Remade as The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, distributed by MCA / Universal Pictures, 1982.

Labels: "John W. Campbell", "science fiction", cancer, evolution

The Earths of Alpha Centauri

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Figure 1.  Schema of the Alpha Centauri system

As a Board member of the Friends of the U.C. Santa Cruz Library, I was invited this year to assist in judging UCSC's annual Graduate Research Symposium, in which the university's graduate students present personal or poster presentations concerning their thesis research for prestige, prizes, and trophies.  The winner of this year's entire event was a female graduate student, Javiera Guedes of the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at UCSC, who presented a talk on “The Earths of Alpha Centauri,” concerning the likelihood that both principal stars of the binary Alpha Centauri system possess planets, which we should be able to start discovering (as detection technology has steadily improved, and given a determined search) within the next several years.  I wrote up a brief report on Guedes' talk for a mailing list, only to be subsequently invited by editor Kevin Langdon (also endorsed by Javiera) to expand that piece for the Mega Society's online journal Noesis's upcoming special issue on Astronomy and Space.

University of California at Santa Cruz astronomy and astrophysics graduate student Javiera Guedes (first author), together with her coauthors, have published a fascinating piece in The Astrophysical Journal titled the “Formation and Detection of Terrestrial Planets around α [Alpha] Centauri B” ¹ — which in my view deserves far wider audience and consideration than it can receive in that journal, however prestigious and renowned a scientific journal it assuredly is.

The subject of that paper, the binary Alpha Centauri star system (also known as Rigil Kentaurus or Toliman), at some 4.4 light years (or about 1.3 parsecs) distant from the Sun, is the closest extrasolar stellar system to our own Solar System and Earth.  The brightest star in that system Alpha Centauri A is quite similar to our Sun in mass (at ∼1.105 solar masses), and extremely similar in color and thus temperature (classed like the Sun as a spectral type G2 V, a so-called “yellow dwarf”), whilst its companion Alpha Centauri B is only slightly smaller (∼0.934 times the Sun's mass) and a bit redder and therefore cooler (spectral type K1 V) than the Sun.  One might note that the Alpha Centauri system (at about 5.6–5.9 Gyr) is between 1 and 1.3 billion years older than our Sun and Solar System, while it's about half again as rich in “metals” (as astronomers regard them: i.e., elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) as our own system.

Though it has a third, much smaller (∼0.1 solar mass) spectral type M “red dwarf” companion star known as Proxima Centauri — swinging at an enormous distance (perhaps a fifth of a light year) away from its principals — however ignoring Proxima, Alpha Centauri is essentially a close binary star system; and thus one might imagine that Alpha Centauri's two principal stars A and B's gravitational interference on each other would forestall prospects for any stable planets circling either star.  As it happens, however, those primary components of Alpha Centauri are not actually all that close, orbiting each other some 23 astronomical units (23 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, abbreviated AU) apart from each other — equivalent to B (or A) circling between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune (in our Solar System) with regard to the other — and as a result planets orbiting beyond what would be the orbit of Mars here, up to some 3 AU away from its primary (or well into our asteroid belt) are not ruled out around either star; moreover any planets (if they exist) are computed with high probability to be stable for the requisite billions of years time.  Moreover, planets have already been discovered orbiting other roughly similar binary stars (e.g., γ [Gamma] Cephei, HD 41004, and Gliese 86) having basically equivalent separations from each other.

Indeed, Alpha Centauri A and B would probably even have performed a positive perturbative role with regard each other's incipient planetary systems, similar to that which the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond are thought to have played in planetary evolution here in our Solar System, to wit providing “perturbations allow[ing] for the accretion of a large number of planetary embryos into a final configuration containing 3–4 bodies.”  (Note that we omit end-note references in all quotes from The Astrophysical Journal article.)

Alpha Centauri B, as a cooler, “quieter,” less variable and flare-prone star than Alpha Centauri A (or the Sun for that matter), as a result is somewhat easier than A to detect any planets circling round.  Thus it is on B that the authors concentrate their attention, estimating that after only about three years of “high cadence” observations (watching B on basically every night that there's good seeing, which could be close to 300 days a year), one could detect (using the so-called Doppler or radial-shift detection method) a planet of only some 1.8 Earth-masses circling within B's so-called “habitable zone,” while somewhat smaller worlds ought to become apparent in only a couple of years more.

Whilst it's also sometimes possible to detect extrasolar planets by observing their transit (or eclipse) across the disk of their primary star as seen from Earth, that method requires that the plane of any planets' orbits be closely aligned with the direction of our Sun with respect to that system — which is obviously extremely unlikely when attempting to locate worlds circling any particular star — and thus such an approach is suitable only for statistical surveys of a great many stars, not for finding the planets of any specific suns.

In addition to evaluating how Alpha Centaurian planets could be observed from the perspective of Earth, the authors conducted a number of computed simulations (eight in all) of possible routes to planetary system formation, starting from initial circumstances “mimic[ing] conditions at the onset of the chaotic growth phase of terrestrial planet formation in which collisions of isolated embryos, protoplanets of approximately lunar mass, dominate the evolution of the disk.  During this phase, gravitational interactions among planetary embryos serve to form the final planetary system around the star and clear out the remaining material in the disk.  At the start of this phase, several hundred protoplanets were presumed to orbit the star on nearly circular orbits.”  Each run of the simulation “populate[d] the disk with N = 400 to N = 900 embryos of lunar mass […].”

Simulation number 7 (see Figure 3), specially exemplified herein and in The Astrophysical Journal article (known as r600_1 there), started with 600 embryos.

All bodies in the simulations interact only through gravity and the evolution of their positions and velocities with time were calculated using the MERCURY code, designed for the presence of a binary companion and allowing planetary embryos to collide and stick together to form larger planets.

The investigators “focus[ed] on terrestrial planet formation around α Cen B […].”  As they note, “[P]lanet formation around α Cen A is expected to be qualitatively similar.”

Figure 2 illustrates how simulations of the evolution of a planetary system surrounding Alpha Centauri B typically progressed (using simulation 7):

Figure 2.  Simulated evolution of a planetary system (simulation 7) for Alpha Centauri B

The authors describe the foregoing figure thusly:

Figure [2] shows the late evolutionary stage of a protoplanetary disk initially containing 600 moon-mass embryos ([appearing in Figure 3 as simulation number 7]).  The radius of each circle is proportional to the radius of the object.  Bodies in the outer parts of the disk ([orbital semimajor axis] a > 3 AU) are immediately launched into highly eccentric orbits and either migrate inward to be accreted by inner bodies, collide with the central star, or are ejected from the system […].  In this simulation, ∼65% of the total initial mass is cleared within the first 70 Myr.  By the end of simulation [7], four planets have formed.  One planet has approximately the mass of Mercury and is located at a = 0.2 AU, two 0.6 [Earth mass] planets form at a = 0.7 and a = 1.8 AU, and a 1.8 [Earth mass] planet forms at a = 1.09 AU.

[…]  All of our simulations result in the formation of 1–4 planets with semimajor axes in the range 0.7 < a < 1.9 AU […].  We find that 42% of all planets formed with masses in the range 1–2 [Earth masses] reside in the star's habitable zone (Fig. [3]), taken to be 0.5 < a_hab < 0.9 [AU].  […].  All of our disks form systems with one or two planets in the 1–2 [Earth] mass range.

Figure 3 illustrates the results of all eight Alpha Centauri B system evolution simulations that the authors performed.  The especially illustrated simulation used herein appears as number seven near the bottom, whilst for comparison our Solar System is shown to scale at top.

Figure 3.  Simulated planetary systems of Alpha Centauri B

We see that realistic astrophysical simulations predict that planets surrounding Alpha Centauri B (as well as a similar system circling A) are quite likely. What will it take to actually find such worlds, if they do exist?

As noted earlier, due to the extreme unlikelihood of any specific stellar planetary system's equivalent of our “plane of the ecliptic” (the plane in which its planets' orbits generally circle) exactly lining up on edge as seen from Earth, the transit method for detecting extrasolar planets cannot be applied (other than by the remotest chance) for locating worlds orbiting specific suns — leaving only the “Doppler wobble” approach available for finding planets in more particular circumstances.  Even for that method to work, the plane of a given star's planetary orbits must not directly face the Sun (i.e., the axis of that plane mustn't be oriented directly toward or away from the Sun), as there has to be some planetary radial velocity toward or away from the Earth for us to detect.  Inasmuch as theoretical considerations imply that the orbital plane of planets circling either star of a close binary system should in general be aligned with the orbits of the stars themselves as they revolve about each other — and since in the case of the Alpha Centauri system, its two stars' orbital plane can be observed to be inclined to the line of view from here in the Sol System by a mere 11 degrees (the axis of that plane being almost perpendicular to the line of sight from the Earth) — thus planets circling either A or B are nearly ideal for detection from Earth using the radial-velocity technique.

Indeed, as the authors of this study conclude:  “α Cen B is overwhelmingly the best star in the sky for which one can contemplate mounting a high-cadence [nightly] search” for extant terrestrial worlds, among other things because “α Cen B is exceptionally quiet, both in terms of acoustic p-wave mode oscillations and chromospheric activity.”

They note that “[t]he radial velocity [Doppler] detection of Earth-mass planets near the habitable zones of solar-type stars requires cm s⁻¹ [centimeter per second velocity] precision,” whereas Alpha Centauri A exhibits (rather Sun-like) oscillatory noise on the order of 1 to 3 m s⁻¹ (meters per second), which would effectively swamp attempts to detect planets circling A using near-term technology.  Alpha Centauri B, on the other hand, as a fundamentally quieter star, displays peak amplitude noise on the order of 0.08 m s⁻¹ (8 cm/second), which is also far higher in frequency than the periods of any potential terrestrial planets to be detected.  As a result, a “focused high cadence approach involving year-round, all-night observations would effectively average out the star's p-mode oscillations.”

Observations also reveal that Alpha Centauri B exhibits much less chromospheric variability associated with stellar flares than does A (the former modifying its x-ray brightness only within a factor of two over a couple of years time whilst A could be observably seen to vary by an order-of-magnitude factor of ten).

The paper further points out that:

α Cen B is remarkably similar in age, mass, and spectral type to HD 69830, the nearby K0 dwarf known to host three Neptune mass planets.  Both α Cen B and HD 69830 are slightly less massive than the Sun with masses 0.91 and 0.86 [solar masses] respectively.  Their estimated ages are 5.6–5.9 Gyr for α Cen B and 4–10 Gyr for HD 69830.  Both stars are slightly cooler than the Sun:  α Cen B is a K1 V with [an effective temperature] T_eff = 5350 K, while HD 69830 is a type K0 V star with T_eff = 5385 K.  The stars have also similar visual absolute magnitudes, M_V = 5.8 for α Cen B and M_V = 5.7 for HD 69830; however, due to its proximity to us, the former star appears much brighter (m_V = +1.34), allowing for exposures that are ∼60 times shorter.  One can thus use a far smaller aperture telescope, or alternatively, entertain a far higher observational cadence.

Moreover, Alpha Centauri A and B being so close to each other in space as well as physically similar to one another allows parallel observations of the two stars to reveal concurrent variations which, seen in both, allow identification of systematic artifacts in the observational process, that can thus be filtered out of any meaningful results.  Furthermore, as the study notes, the position of Alpha Centauri at about −60° declination in our southern sky is nearly perfect for virtually continuous night-by-night (“high cadence”) observations from two existing vantage points, the Las Campanas Observatory together with the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, both in Chile, either of which ought to provide up to almost 300 viewing days a year (60 days a year being basically unavailable while Alpha Centauri annually passes behind the Sun, plus a few more days lost as a result of bad weather).

Inasmuch as the proportionate density of binary, roughly solar-mass component star systems in this part of the galaxy is only about 0.02 per cubic parsec (1 cubic parsec = ∼35 cubic light years), since at this time the Alpha Centauri system hovers a mere 1.33 parsecs away from us, we're very lucky here in the Solar System having α Cen proceeding so close nearby during this era for us to perform this highly desirable search upon.

As The Astrophysical Journal paper concludes:  “All these criteria make α Cen B the ideal host and candidate for the detection of a planetary system that contains one or more terrestrial planets.”  Indeed, “our current understanding of the process of terrestrial planet formation strongly suggests that both principal components of the α Cen system should have terrestrial planets.”

Given that extremely tantalizing possibility, what will it take to find at least those worlds orbiting Alpha Centauri B, if they exist?  As the authors make note:

A successful detection of terrestrial planets orbiting α Cen B can be made within a few years and with the modest investment of resources required to mount a dedicated radial-velocity campaign with a 1 m class telescope and high-resolution spectrograph.  The plan requires three things to go right.  First, the terrestrial planets need to have formed, and they need to have maintained dynamical stability over the past 5 Gyr.  Second, the radial velocity technique needs to be pushed (via unprecedentedly high cadence) to a degree where planets inducing radial velocity half-amplitudes of order cm s⁻¹ [centimeter per second] can be discerned.  Third, the parent star must have a negligible degree of red noise on the ultralow frequency range occupied by the terrestrial planets.

In this paper, we have made the case that conditions 1 and 2 are highly likely to have been met.  In our view, the intrinsic noise spectrum of α Centauri B is likely all that stands between the present day and the imminent detection of extremely nearby, potentially habitable planets.  Because whole-Sun measurements of the solar noise are intrinsically difficult to obtain, our best opportunity to measure microvariability in radial velocities is to do the α Cen AB Doppler experiment.  The intrinsic luminosity of the stars, their sky location, and their close pairing will allow for a definitive test of the limits of the radial velocity technique.  If these limits can be pushed down to the cm s⁻¹ level, then the prize, and the implications, may be very great indeed.

At this point well over three hundred planets have been discovered circling other stars beyond the Sun — all thus far found, due to hitherto operative technical limitations, necessarily being much larger than Earth and thus far from being really terrestrial in type.  The Alpha Centauri system offers the opportunity to refine those limits downward towards worlds much closer in size, and thus potentially in habitability, to the Earth.

Figures 4 and 5 below illustrate how such a high-cadence search over a period of several years could zero in closer and closer towards identifying any planets of Alpha Centauri B that are truly terrestrial in scale.

Figure 4.  How the detection “periodogram” for a simulated Alpha Centauri B planetary system (simulation 7) evolves over 5 years of observations

Figure 5.  How nightly observations over 5 years build that periodogram for a simulated Alpha Centauri B planetary system

As the capability for detecting truly terrestrial-type planets circling round nearby stars approaches, we're on the cusp of an adventure grander by far than Columbus's voyages to the New World or other great discoveries of the age of exploration, not only for its tremendous scientific value (finding what variety of worlds so-called “terrestrial” planets can form, not to speak of the enormous significance of possibly discovering other independently evolved organisms inhabiting them), but also for the sake of the future history of mankind, along with the ultimate fate of all life dwelling on — but presently restricted to this single egg-basket of — our planet Earth.

In a discussion such as this of potential planets circling the component stars of the Alpha Centauri system, special recognition is due the late biochemist and most prolific science fiction and fact writer Isaac Asimov, for it was he who, just a half-century ago (in June, 1959), penned his far-sighted essay “The Planet of the Double Sun” ² concerning the possibility of just such worlds existing.  A quarter-century later, in 1985 he wrote another essay on the subject of life near Alpha Centauri called “The Double Star&rdquo ³; whilst in 1976 Asimov published an entire book on Alpha Centauri, The Nearest Star. ⁴

In regard to the intrinsic value of such planets, it's worth noting the ending of Asimov's affecting science fiction novel The End of Eternity ⁵, which serves as the introduction to his famous Galactic Empire and Foundation series of stories.  In the context of this tale, when it is realized that ready access to the universe is at hand for humanity (provided they take a critical step, namely make a certain change to the past), the principal protagonist wonders aloud what good it would really do if they should indeed accomplish it:

“And what would have been gained?” asked Harlan doggedly.  “Would we be happier?”

Whereupon his erstwhile enemy, more recent ally, and soon to be spouse replies:

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?  Man would not be a world but a million worlds, a billion worlds.  We would have the infinite in our grasp.  Each world would have its own stretch of the Centuries, each its own values, a chance to seek happiness after ways of its own in an environment of its own.  There are many happinesses, many goods, infinite variety….  That is the Basic State of mankind.”

Now, on the cusp of the fortieth anniversary of mankind's (as representative of all life on Earth) first visit in all the billions of years history of Earthly life to another planet, it's time to get on with it.  Let's find those worlds!

absolute magnitude	intrinsic visual brightness of an object as it would be seen from a fixed distance — in the case of a star this is established as being 10 parsecs or 32.6 light years away
AU	astronomical unit, abbreviated AU (sometimes symbolized ua): one AU is the average distance between Earth and the Sun — about 150 million km or 93 million miles
binary star system	star system consisting of two stars orbiting each other about a common center of mass
chromosphere	relatively thin (perhaps 2,000 km thick in the case of the Sun) semitransparent layer in a star which lies just above its opaque photosphere or visible “surface”
chromospheric variability	activity or variability in a star which occurs within its chromosphere
Doppler wobble	method for locating extrasolar planets by the radial velocity (as seen from Earth) perturbations they induce in the motions of the primary star they orbit
Earth mass	mass of the Earth: some 6 × 1024 kg or about 0.31% the mass of Jupiter
dynamical stability	long-term probabilistic stability of planets over gigayears time against perturbations that would eject them from the system, or throw them into their primary star or each other
eccentric orbit	an orbital path that is a highly flattened ellipse rather than being approximately circular
ecliptic	rough plane in which the planets of the Solar System (exception: Pluto) generally orbit
extrasolar body	planet, star, or other body which orbits or moves outside the realm of the Solar System
gas-giant planet	giant planet like Jupiter which is composed principally of the gases hydrogen and helium
Gyr	gigayears: billions of years
habitable zone	region surrounding a star where temperatures on an Earth-type planet circling within that zone are suitable for life as we know it — in our Solar System it is considered to lie between about 0.95 to 1.37 AU from the Sun
half-amplitude	absolute (positive) value of maximum amplitude, as opposed to amplitudes varying in sign between positive and negative over a continuous approximately sine-wave cycle
high cadence	astronomical observations conducted at a high frequency — e.g., nightly
Jupiter mass	mass of Jupiter: around 2 × 1027 kg, or about 0.1% the mass of the Sun versus 318 times the mass of Earth
light year	the distance that light travels in vacuum in a year: about 9 trillion km or 6 trillion miles
Mercury mass	mass of the planet Mercury: about 3 × 1023 kg or around 5.5% the mass of Earth
metals	metals as astronomers regard them: to wit, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium
microvariability	small amplitude variability
Moon (or lunar) mass	mass of the Moon: some 7 × 1022 kg or about 1.2% the mass of Earth
Neptune mass	mass of Neptune: close to 1 × 1026 kg, or some 17 times the mass of Earth or 5.4% of Jupiter's mass
parsec	the distance at which an extrasolar body's parallax with regard to Earth's orbit around the Sun subtends an angle of one second of arc — approximately 3.26 light years
periodogram	measured periodic radial velocity variations in a star over time that might indicate the presence of planets
photosphere	opaque layer of a star which constitutes its visible “surface”
protoplanet	Moon-sized or larger planetary embryos orbiting a star within its protoplanetary disk
protoplanetary disk	rotating disk of gas and dust surrounding a fledgling star which may accrete into planets
radial velocity	velocity component of an extrasolar star or planet directed toward or away from Earth
red noise	low-frequency random noise emitted by a star under observation
semimajor axis	one-half of the length of the long axis of an elliptical orbit — equivalent to a body's average distance from its primary
spectral type	classification system for stars based on a star's color and thus its surface temperature
spectrograph	instrument measuring an object's light output across a spectrum of optical frequencies
stellar flare	eruption of plasma from the surface of a star
Sun (or solar) mass	mass of the Sun: about 2 × 1030 kg or some 333,000 times the mass of Earth
terrestrial planet	planets consisting primarily of rocks (normally silicate rocks) at least near the surface; as opposed to gas-giant planets
transit method	method for detecting an extrasolar planet by observing the dip in its primary star's light output as the planet passes directly in front of the star's disk as viewed from Earth

Many thanks to talented astronomy and astrophysics graduate student Javiera Guedes for her support and suggestions as well as permission to use the figures (indeed her own modifications to one of the figures) from her and her coauthors' article in The Astrophysical Journal.  One might note that Ms. Guedes herself will personally be conducting observations of Alpha Centauri later on this year.  Kudos to her and the other investigators in this study, and best wishes in the great search!

¹ J. M. Guedes, E. J. Rivera, E. Davis, and G. Laughlin (all at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Astronomy and Astrophysics department), E. V. Quintana (SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA), and D. A. Fischer (San Francisco State University, Physics and Astronomy department), “Formation and Detection of Terrestrial Planets around α Centauri B,” The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 679, Issue No. 2 (2008), pp. 1581-1587; doi: 10.1086/587799.

² Isaac Asimov, “The Planet of the Double Sun,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1959-06, Mercury Press, New York.  Collected in Fact and Fancy, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, 1962; also in Asimov on Astronomy, Anchor Press, Garden City, NY, 1975.

³ Isaac Asimov, “The Double Star,” American Way, American Airlines, 1985-09-03.  Collected in The Dangers of Intelligence And Other Science Essays, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1986.

⁴ Isaac Asimov, Alpha Centauri, The Nearest Star, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., New York, 1976.

⁵ Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, 1955, p. 187.

UPDATE:  2009-07-19 19:40 UT:  Version 2:  Updated via suggestions from Javiera Guedes.

UPDATE:  2009-07-28 06:00 UT:  Version 3:  At the time of submission for publication in Noesis.

UPDATE:  2009-08-03 19:00 UT:  Version 4:  Further updates to the Noesis publication version, including adding the Glossary.

UPDATE:  2009-08-04 15:30 UT:  Version 5:  A few corrections.

UPDATE:  2009-08-05 03:40 UT:  Version 6:  Minor fix.

Labels: Alpha Centauri, Apollo 11, Apollo Program, astronomy, extrasolar planet, planet

Fourth of July, 2008, aboard the W.W. II aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Hornet

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San Francisco Bay to the west of the Naval Air Station in Alameda, facing S.F. (photographer: Tamara Lynn Scott)

Fourth of July, 2008, aboard the W.W. II aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Hornet

There was concern arriving in the area that day that it would be thoroughly socked in (and thus cold and dreary) with San Francisco's famous fog, but even though great tongues of fog had pushed via the considerable onshore breeze some distance to the north and south of the U.S.S. Hornet's permanent home (at the Naval Air Station on the island of Alameda, California, along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay) — and while the city of San Francisco to be seen across the bay was almost completely enveloped in it, fortunately however the day actually experienced in the environs of the Hornet itself was beautifully sunny; though with the typical stiff cold onshore breeze emerging out of that fog bank (I wore an overcoat and was glad of it, many others there that day did too).

(In these shots, as usual, simply click on an image to link to a substantially larger version of it….)

The illustrious aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Hornet (CV-12), commissioned 1943 (photographer of these and all remaining shots: Michael Edward McNeil)

Even considering that there are much more substantial (and nuclear-powered) aircraft carriers operating these days, it's still amazing seeing, not to speak of hoofing it from one end to the other and back again (several times) on, this historic old warship: basically several city blocks' of artificial territory placed end-to-end, several high decks deep bearing huge aircraft-carrying elevators, mounting massive engines (wish I could have seen them), thereafter set afloat to steam as an artificial steel island mounting a powerful mobile naval airfield (the pinnacle in military technology during its heyday) round the world's oceans and seas. Impressive isn't the word for it.

Antiaircraft artillery emplacement along the edge of the mobile military airfield

The Hornet's bridge, together with its ship's decorations

The U.S.S. Hornet (CV-12) had an illustrious career. Its namesake predecessor, the seventh American Hornet (CV-8), fought in the Pacific war's desperate turning-point Battle of Midway, afterwards going down to the bottom in the Battle of Santa Cruz later in 1942. Launched in 1943, its replacement, the eighth, now Essex-class Hornet, the instance before us, as the ship's museum web site notes, accomplished the following:

• For 16 continuous months she was in action in the forward areas of the Pacific combat zone, sometimes within 40 miles of the Japanese home islands.
• Under air attack 59 times, she was never hit.
• Her aircraft destroyed 1410 Japanese aircraft, only ESSEX exceeded this record.
• Her air groups destroyed or damaged 1,269,710 tons of enemy shipping.
• 10 HORNET pilots attained “Ace in a Day” status.
• 30 of 42 VF-2 Hellcat pilots were aces.
• 72 enemy aircraft shot down in one day.
• 255 aircraft shot down in a month.
• Supported nearly every Pacific amphibious landing after March 1944.
• Scored the critical first hits in sinking the super battleship YAMATO.
• In 1945 launched the first strikes against Tokyo since the 1942 Doolittle Raid.

“A HERITAGE OF EXCELLENCE” is the ship's creed:

• Earned 9 battle stars for her service in WWII.
• Awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for her WWII operations (only nine carriers so cited).
• Flawlessly recovered the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 astronauts, the first men on the moon; 1969.
• USS HORNET (CVS-12) is designated a National Historic Landmark; 1991.
• HORNET opens to the public as an aircraft carrier museum in Alameda, California; 1998.
• USS HORNET is designated a State Historic Landmark; 1999.
• The F/A-18 strike fighter carries on the name of HORNET in today's NAVY.

The Hornet's extensive resume is also presented graphically within the carrier's high-rising hanger deck:

Battle resume of the U.S.S. Hornet (CV-12)

Emblems of some of the U.S.S. Hornet's World War II Essex-class sister ships

The kind of extreme action the Hornet and its sisters and kin experienced during World War II makes fond illusions about a “quagmire” in the present war in Iraq seem badly misplaced (especially now that the war there is winding down and nearly won). [Written in July of 2008; now of course that prognosis has simply been confirmed by an additional year's events.]

The Hornet's vast hanger deck serves today as a museum of naval aviation

After such notable and terrific service during World War II, the Hornet entered into a second life during the fifties and sixties (performing antisubmarine-warfare carrier duty during that period, for instance), then directly supporting the Gemini and Apollo Moon program, ultimately retrieving the first two expeditions to visit surface of the Moon — Apollos 11 and 12 — from the sea, following their fireball return to this planet.

Apollo lunar command module presentation, on the Hornet's hanger deck

Following their return from visiting the surface of the Moon, the Apollo astronauts spent a preplanned few weeks in a quarantine facility, as a precaution against the very remote eventuality that some dread malady could have been acquired by the astronauts during their visit to the (with little doubt) sterile surface of the Moon. As expected there was no such contagion.

NASA Mobile Quarantine Facility, for isolating lunar astronauts after their return

It looks like a modified “Airstream” trailer, actually — I wonder if that's what NASA did? (A fellow can be seen examining a display of a moon rock just in front of the entrance.)

Kids play on the Hornet's hanger-deck stage

In the relaxed atmosphere of the Hornet's hanger deck (where the hectic though pleasant vibes of the band up atop the flight deck seemed far away), Kids enjoyed playing at hamming it up on the Hornet's flag-draped stage — while their doting parents oftentimes stood out in the “audience” videotaping them against the starry-striped backdrop.

As a result of various instances of blurred motion, one can see that no was flash used anywhere during this visit to the Hornet — even in quite low-light situations — though the Panasonic DMC-FZ8 camera employed does possess a built-in flash, which generally works adequately well. Didn't turn out too bad, I'd have to say, though in retrospect I might have used the flash on a couple of occasions (such as for the fireworks -- just joking; actually what the fireworks could have used was turning off autofocus, while setting manual focus to infinity; along with mounting the camera on a tripod.)

For those occupying the stern end of the great aircraft carrier's hanger deck, folks enjoyed a relaxing (if bracing) view overlooking San Francisco Bay….

Looking out Hornet's hanger-deck stern overlooking San Francisco Bay

Thereafter, whilst angling through various narrow passageways and clambering up and down steep ship's stairs aboard the old steel warcraft, one closely encounters the antiaircraft cannon glimpsed from dockside before….

Antiaircraft artillery position on the U.S.S. Hornet

Ah, just the thing for an American gun-lover's back (or maybe front) yard! That ought to deal with all those naggling drive-by shootings! (/attempted humor)

One might note that in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision issued just the other day concerning the Constitution's Second (gun rights) Amendment, all nine Justices (including those appointed by liberal presidents) affirmed (with some variance from the majority 5-4 opinion concerning the extent of resulting legal protections, but unanimously as to) the basic individual rights interpretation of the original intent of the American founding fathers in composing the Second Amendment. As a result, the “collective rights” interpretation — whereby for decades legal “experts” solemnly intoned that when it said “the right of the people” it really meant “the right of the state(s)” — is now officially dead as a doornail. It is an individual right to keep and bear arms that the U.S. Constitution guarantees — though admittedly (and thankfully) that right does not extend to such things as personal WMD.

The command “Island” rises above the Hornet's flight deck

Once up on the flight deck, the aircraft carrier's commanding “Island” rises like an arcane metallic crag + treehouse, or vertical mandala, above the flattop “plateau.” (We're viewing the sternward-facing side of the island, opposite the bridge per se. The windowed area visible on this side isn't the ship's bridge proper but rather, I believe, controlled flight operations.) Hanging off the tower above, flags flap, and radar antennae rotate, like watchful eyes. On the left, today, kiosks provide refreshments.

Diagonal view of the Hornet's commanding Island

My ex-wife Tamara appears in the shot above, at lower right with her TV production camera, wearing my Ecuadorian poncho for warmth….

The Hornet's flight deck stretches out like a long, flat plateau

The bow of the flight deck on the Hornet

The bow of the aircraft carrier's flight deck, at the exact opposite end from where the band was set up, was a bit lonely during the celebration — until, later, the city of Oakland's fireworks commenced, that is!

Ascending into the Island into the Hornet's Bridge, one obtains great views looking down on the flight deck and surrounding terrain….

Looking out from the Hornet's bridge toward the bow of the great ship

In the captain's chair on the U.S.S. Hornet's bridge

“Captain James Cook,” er… “Kirk” issues an order on his communicator — “Warp factor eight, Scotty…!” (or should that be, “Full steam ahead!”).

In the bridge, the pilothouse receives some special armor protection, but the outer area, ringed by windows, does not:

Armor surrounding the pilothouse on Hornet's bridge

In Hornet's pilothouse on the bridge

Descending from the bridge, the sun was close to setting at that point in the bank of fog, whilst near the stern of the flattop, the band played on….

View from walkway leading to Hornet's bridge, of the stern, band, and bay

The band pavilion at the stern of the Hornet

As the sun set behind the fog bank and lights began coming on across the bay, the final band, the “Unauthorized Rolling Stones” — not a military or marching band, one might note, like the other bands playing that day — finished up its set. As their name implies, specializing in Rolling Stones compositions, and not doing too bad a job on them I'd say, they performed a number of oldies from other groups as well. (I don't recall them doing the Stones' “20,000 light years from home” though, which this ship certainly makes me think of — as an analogy to the “Starship Enterprise” in Star Trek — indeed, there is an in-commission U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier today called the U.S.S. Enterprise ….)

Lights alight across the bay as the band completes its set

Notice in the background of the last shot above how the Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper pokes up out of the top of the fog bank, above San Francisco's foggy cityscape.

Behind the band, at the stern end of the flight deck facing San Francisco Bay, a remembered flag flaps in the breeze…. Note the number and pattern of stars. This is the 48-star flag that the Hornet fought under during World War II — and in the fifties, during the Korean War.

A remembered flag waves in the breeze

The evening ended with spectacular fireworks in several directions — except the direction of San Francisco, whose own fireworks were lost in the fog — with just an occasional flash, like distant lightning, visible from that direction. Other points of the compass held greater wonders:

Fireworks over Oakland, from the flight deck of the Hornet

That one kind of looks like a Hubble Space Telescope photo, no? The Orion Nebula….

After that there was nothing to do but join the hour-long traffic jam getting off Alameda island and onto the freeway heading towards home.

Labels: aircraft carrier, Alameda, Apollo Program, Fourth of July, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay, US Navy, USS Hornet, World War II

Apotheosis in the American duumvirate

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In Impearls' earlier piece on the “Constitution of the Roman city-state,” notice was paid to the fact that the principal officers of the Roman civitas (city-state or county) were a duo who were typically termed duumvirs and the system was thereby a duumvirate (literally “two-man-office”); to the tail end of which I thereby tacked on a postscript, to wit:

I'm no fan of American paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan, but I almost fell out of my chair a while back when I heard him (on PBS's McLaughlin Group) refer to Bush/Cheney as “duumvirs.”  Somehow it had hitherto escaped my notice, but “duumvir” and “duumvirate” are actually English words (as well as Latin), and — along with triumvirate, etc. — are present in English dictionaries.

In the American Presidential system, the U.S. President/Vice-President clearly more closely resemble the Roman Emperor/Vice-Emperor (known titularly as the Augustus/Cæsar), wherein one member of the official dyad is institutionally superior to the other (though the U.S. President can't fire the Vice President) — as opposed to the Roman municipal (along with Roman Republican) system detailed heretofore, in which the duumvir (consul) magistrate pairs are institutionally equal in status and powers, each magistrate also possessing the power of vetoing his colleague's actions and decisions.  Either approach can presumably be properly termed a kind of duumvirate and its official magistrates duumvirs.

That then drew this reply from Impearls reader Circe:

Well, I wouldn't hold your breath for any posthumous deification of Bush.  Though if I see any depictions of Bush apotheosis, I'll let ya know.

(Laughing.)  That's pretty funny!  Taking the point semi-seriously though, I suspect — the malady known as “Bush Derangement Syndrome” being as prevalent as it is at present — quite a number of BDS-affected souls would like or at least fantasize treating the President of the United States as Nero was.  Bush, however, is fairly young and will in bit over a year (unlike Nero) voluntarily leave office; thereafter (barring untoward events) he's likely to live for a number of decades yet.  Given that, who knows how public opinion will shift by the time the matter truly is “postumous”?  Recall that Truman ended his term in office highly unpopular (locked in a stalemated war that cost nearly as many American lives as the Vietnam War did to boot), and yet look how he's regarded now.

The essential point, of course, is that the United States (in its executive branch) is a constitutional duumvirate — a feature in my view probably copied by the American founding fathers (I suspect principally James Madison) directly from the Roman model.  Certainly there's nothing among America's British and Continental political forebears (other than the Roman) similar to the U.S. President and Vice President.  (That and other resemblances between the Roman and American constitutional systems probably deserve a further posting one of these days to properly consider the matter.)

Beyond that, folks who disbelieve that America (as well as Rome) has “apotheosized” (honorarily deified) at least some past Presidents (as Rome did some of its Emperors) need look no further than the overlooming fresco encompassing the dome of nothing less than the Capitol of the United States (Congress's designated assembly hall, as the Roman Capitol was for the Senate in Rome), revealing emigre Italian artist Constantino Brumidi's stunning masterpiece “The Apotheosis of Washington”….

^f1

^f2

George Washington — General principally responsible for his country's independence, chairman of its constitutional convention, and first President of the United States — sits enthroned over a rainbow.  With a gesture at the Constitution/Law, flanked by the goddesses of Liberty (holding the traditional Roman fasces of authority) and Victory/Fame (cradling the palm of victory whilst flourishing the clarion of fame) — haloed round by a constellation of thirteen Starry maidens hoisting a banner proclaiming E Pluribus Unum — the apotheosized Washington regards us from on high as the Lord of Hosts.

^f3

^f1 Constantino Brumidi, “The Apotheosis of Washington,” 1865, Capitol of the United States.

^f2 Constantino Brumidi, Detail: George Washington as Lord of Hosts, from “The Apotheosis of Washington,” 1865, Capitol of the United States.

^f3 Constantino Brumidi, Detail: E Pluribus Unum, from “The Apotheosis of Washington,” 1865, Capitol of the United States.

¹ Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol (novel).

UPDATE:  2009-09-22 17:50 UT:  This piece was published nearly two years ago, but about a week back a mass of Google image searches pointing at Brumidi's “Apotheosis of Washington” fresco pictured in this article began bringing in a flood of thousands of visitors — on a daily basis almost an order of magnitude greater than Impearls' usual traffic — which is still ongoing.  Would one of these visitors please e-mail me or add a comment to the effect of what the source of their sudden inspiration for doing that search was?

One might also note that December 14 of this year 2009 local time (Earthdate 2009-12-15 03:00 UT) will be the 210th anniversary of George Washington's death (apotheosis) in 1799.  Impearls plans another article on Washington for that occasion.

UPDATE:  2009-09-28 02:00 UT:  Reader Kaitie Marie responded to my appeal for information concerning how the recent flood of visitors to Impearls as a result of web searches for the Apotheosis of Washington got their inspiration to do so, posting a recent comment:

The Apotheosis of Washington is mentioned in Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol. ¹  The book describes what the frescoe looks like and mentions some of its symbolism.  When you google search for the piece under images, this website is in the first two or three results and this is probably the reason that you've been seeing such an influx of new visitors.  That said, I'm glad that I came across this blog and look forward to reading your other posts.  The diversity of subject matter and obvious research that you've put into your posts is impressive.

Thanks, Kaitie!  No doubt you're right that that's the explanation, and thanks too for your kind words about Impearls.  One might note that the rate of visitors has continued to rocket up over the last few days, reaching a new (at least recent) record of 820 visitors just during the last day.  Welcome, everybody, and I hope that many of you, like Kaitie, will continue to stop by.

As mentioned in the earlier update above, in December of this year (2009) Impearls will publish a more in depth memoriam concerning the character of George Washington for the 210th anniversary of his death (or “apotheosis”), for which numerous additional images of paintings and sculpture by Brumidi and others are planned revealing the depth of the acclaim that Washington has earned in the minds of the American people.  In the meantime, folks might like to check out this fascinating book about the artist Constantino Brumidi including many more images of paintings by him which appear in the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere, available on-line at the U.S. Government Printing Office.

UPDATE:  2009-10-08 19:50 UT:  A site named Mahalo: Human-Powered Search, in a posting titled “Apotheosis Of Washington,” has linked to this article.  Also, the blizzard of visitors searching for the images in this posting, referred to in earlier updates above, reached a peak on Earthdate 2009-09-28 with 971 visitors arriving that day.

Labels: American history, apotheosis, constitution, George Washington, Roman law

Photo album – lunar eclipse

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After the demise of an earlier digital camera (an old 1 megapixel), I resisted buying another (due to its supposed high cost) for some time.  However, following a death in the family, I was suddenly catapulted last August back to my home state of Montana — whereupon I ended up using up six throwaway cameras (some of whose results will appear in a forthcoming Impearls’ piece on the mountains of central Montana), but which results were of mediocre quality at best, one whole (camera’s) set of shots of which being massively out of focus, while the overall cost including developing added up to a not-so-trivial $120.

Following that sad experience, I decided “never again,” and after doing a small amount of research (such as perusing Instapundit’s couple of recent digital camera carnivals), and applying a handful of criteria — e.g., I wanted a high degree of available optical zoom, together with image stabilization — I settled on a 7 megapixel Panasonic “Lumix” model DMC-FZ8, which along with a high-speed (required for full-motion video) memory chip, set me back just shy of $300 (I see the two are even cheaper now some two months later).  Considering what I’d spent earlier on mere throwaways, vis-a-vis a camera that can take excellent (7 MP!) shots indefinitely for basically no further expenditure, that sounds like a bargain.  (I just wish I’d made the determination to buy it before I left on my trip — I’d have come back with more and better photos, and spent less to boot.)

This week we’ll christen and celebrate this new acquisition for Impearls by engaging in a little photo blogging, bringing forth for display a selection of the initial results of this endeavor.
 
 

One of the first things I experimentally unlimbered the new camera upon was the lunar eclipse of 2007-08-28, which, despite the fact that it was not really designed for astronomical applications, I think actually turned out rather well.  Below we see a sampling of the results.

Following the final (fourth) shot below, the Moon was close to setting (it was after 03:00 here local time in a tall redwood forest on the northeast side of a northwest-trending mountain) — but by that time the eclipse was so near to totality anyway (and the Moon thus so dark) that I found it was getting almost impossible to find on the camera’s finder screen — which was obviously nearing the limits of its capability in this regard.

Despite this relatively minor drawback near the extreme edge of its applicability, I’d judge that the camera turned in a rather impressive performance given the rather unconventional application for it.
 

 

(And in case you need ask, no these weren’t taken handheld!)

Labels: astronomy, eclipse, photography

Photo album – looking up a cathedral grove

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Located just outside Impearls world headquarters.  (Click on each image to see it full scale.)
 

Labels: photography, redwood

Photo album – my fiddle

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Labels: photography, violin

Constitution of the Roman city-state

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^f1

Impearls’ earlier piece on the autonomy of cities and provincial peoples in the Roman Empire deserves a more thoroughgoing follow-up, in my view.  To answer the implicit question posed in that preceding piece — namely, how did those cities do it? — we’ll spend the remainder of this essay (organized as usual in such cases in Impearls, as an associated set of postings occupying a single archive page) considering the matter.

Turning once again to historian G. H. (George Hope) Stevenson’s (Fellow and Praelector in Ancient History, University College, Oxford) oddly fascinating work Roman Provincial Administration (1939, which we’ve referred to before) for pertinent details, we draw from (the entirety — at least for now excepting most footnotes — of) Prof. Stevenson’s final Chapter VI: “The [Roman] Municipal System in the Provinces,” to explain how all those splendid, autonomous cities spangling the diverse extent of the vast empire, organized their own affairs to accomplish the job of self-government. ¹

To accompany the chapter from Stevenson’s book, a Foreword to the beginning as well as an Afterword providing ex post facto observations have been attached, bracketing Stevenson’s essay.  In a subsequent posting to follow on later we’ll also try to add further illuminating comparisons that can be undertaken with regard to these Roman provincial self-governing states.

Now, forthwith the hypertext Contents to G. H. Stevenson’s “The Roman municipal system in the provinces” (including fore and after commentary).

The Roman municipal system in the provinces   by G. H. Stevenson

• Foreword   by Michael McNeil
• The situation in the provinces
• Types of provincial city
• Civitates Foederatae
• Liberae Civitates
• Civitates Peregrinae
• Latin Rights
• Municipia et Coloniae
• Constitution of the Civitas
• Municipal revenues and expenditure
• Interference of the central government
• Verdict
• Afterword   by Michael McNeil
• References
• End

Labels: ancient history, ancient Rome, constitution, Roman law

Foreword   by Michael McNeil

For each of our own personal political and historical edifications, in my view we oh-so-sophisticated moderns might want to glance, at least once in our lives, over the constitution(s) of ancient Rome — particularly that (or those) which held force among the panorama of multitudinous, autonomous republican local statelets that persisted for long (centuries) under the Roman Empire system (among which Calleva Atrebatum, aka Silchester in modern England, illustrated above [^f1, see also ^f2], will serve as our exemplar du jour).

Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) — seat of the Atrebates tribe in the Roman province of Britannia (some 10 miles [17 km] southwest of Reading in modern England) — is a perhaps typical Roman provincial civitas (city-state) capital.  As the (Google Maps) aerial image incorporated within the foregoing map of the ancient site reveals (^f1: click on it for a larger version), Calleva Atrebatum was abandoned in the post-Roman era and, for basically the last millennium and a half, has subsisted as simply a walled farm (lately including an archaeological dig — visible in insula [city block] IX on that same map).

Thus, unlike other cities in the Roman Empire and Roman Britain such as London and York (not to speak of Rome itself) which have remained vigorously alive and active ever since ancient times (all that activity brilliantly succeeding in obliterating most of the remains of eras prior to the modern), Silchester, rather like Pompeii (though the latter was annihilated and thus placed into a sort of archaeological time stasis far more abruptly), has preserved much of the evidence of times (Roman) when it was a living city.

Indeed, the Kingdom of the Atrebates, centered on Silchester, has an illustrious history.  Since Cæsar’s ephemeral invasion of Britain during the first century (55-54) b.c., the Atrebates had been longtime traditional allies of Rome, whilst around the turn of the next century they were locked in dynastic strife with the neighboring Kingdom of the Catuvellauni (resident north of the Thames; capital Verulamium, now St. Albans, today a distant suburb [northwest] of Greater London) — the twists and turns of which conflict had much to do politically with providing the ultimate stimulus for Claudius’ invasion of Britain (commencing in a.d. 43) in the first place.  After the Roman conquest, following an interval as a federated client kingdom, the Atrebatean realm subsequently became a self-governing civitas within the Roman province of Britannia. ^f2

For those who’d like to learn more about the Roman age in Britain and Silchester in particular, the University of Reading hosts a worthwhile web site providing information not only about Silchester Insula IX, otherwise known as the Town Life Project, encompassing the archaeological excavation of insula (city block) IX within the city (visible on the Silchester map at top ^f1), but the site also provides a nice set of web pages known as A Guide to Silchester, conveying much information about its early, middle, and later history along with a description of the local environs.

I also highly recommend checking out books like Prof. Sheppard Frere’s (of Oxford University) history of Roman Britain Britannia, as well as Prof. Peter Salway’s (at the Open University) history Roman Britain — both of which works are extremely interesting — for a completer picture. ^{2, 3}

Moving from the specific to the general, we’re not concerned at present with the structure of the antique Roman Empire at its uppermost level(s) (particularly since, following the demise of the Republic and advent of the Empire, the government on the national stage was a kind of monarchy), but we’ll focus instead on the continuing republican constitutions extant during the so-called “Principate” period (that is, the first couple centuries) of the Empire, as constituting the fundamental unit of Roman civilization (in a sense similar to way that the fundamental unit of American civilization is the state) — to wit, the Roman city-state, known as the civitas, plural civitates.

Even following the transformation the Roman state from a Republic into an Empire governed by a (distant) Emperor, even then for centuries thereafter the individual localities of the empire remained self-governing republics, fundamentally republican in character, responsible for their own affairs and devices.  While the, theoretically all-powerful Emperor (as the Roman constitution — Republic or Empire — included hardly any modern-style guarantees of human rights and the like) governed, chiefly aloofly and disinterestedly, from afar, the Imperial Greco-Roman world continued for centuries (during the Principate) to ensure a practical right of republican self-government, at the local level, to the spectrum of diverse cities spangling the empire, in whose internal affairs the central government with the emperor at its head for long sought to interfere as little as possible.  The constitutions of these local statelets or counties were generally quite similar to those of old Republican Rome.  Thus, in that sense, the Roman Republic never ended (or was a very long time in passing).

It was the thriving urban life of a great constellation of these autonomous cities that was the glory of Rome during the first couple centuries (the Principate) of the Empire — as Edward Togo Salmon (Professor of History at McMaster University) strikingly observes, writing in Encyclopædia Britannica’s article “Rome, Ancient.” ⁴  (The following text was largely included in Impearls’ earlier piece about the autonomous Roman civitates, but in this case the quoted material has been somewhat expanded to fit the differing occasion, so it’s not all repetition!  It’s worth repeating anyhow….)

In the empire at large, Flavians and Antonines, like the better Julio-Claudians, aimed at stability in order that its inhabitants might live in security and self-respect.  In this they largely succeeded.  Gibbon’s famous description of the 2nd century as the period when men were happiest and most prosperous is not entirely false.  Certainly, by then men had come to take for granted the unique greatness and invincible eternity of the empire; even the ominous events of Aurelius’ reign failed to shatter their conviction that the empire was impregnable.

The empire was a vast congeries of peoples and races with differing religions, customs, and languages, and the emperors were content to let them live their own lives.  Imperial policy favoured a veneer of common culture transcending ethnic differences, but there was no deliberate denationalization.  Ambitious men striving for a career naturally found it helpful, if not necessary, to become Roman in bearing and conduct and perhaps even in language as well (although speakers of Greek often rose to exalted positions).  But local self-government was the general rule, and neither Latin nor Roman ways were imposed on the communities composing the empire.  […]

Where possible, the emperors kept direct administration from Rome to a minimum (except perhaps in Egypt), and the 2nd century was the most flourishing period of urban civilization that the empire ever knew.  Administration everywhere was in the hands of the local well-to-do, who alone could afford the costs attaching to it.  […]  It was from these local worthies that the emperor often found his candidates for the Senate at Rome, an honour that was eagerly sought by individuals but that was a mixed blessing for their local communities, which stood thereby to lose prospective benefactors.

It is impossible not to be impressed by the spectacle of the Roman Empire in its 2nd-century heyday, with its panorama of splendid and autonomous communities.

The situation in the provinces   by G. H. Stevenson

We will now turn once again to historian G. H. Stevenson’s (Fellow and Praelector in Ancient History, University College, Oxford) strangely fascinating work Roman Provincial Administration — from which will be drawn the entirety of Prof. Stevenson’s final Chapter VI: “The Municipal System in the Provinces” — detailing how those splendid, autonomous cities spangling the diverse reaches of the vast empire organized their own affairs to accomplish the task of self-government.

It will be clear from what has been said in previous chapters that from the earliest days of Rome’s hegemony in Italy till the time when her rule extended from the Atlantic to the Euphrates she did much to foster the survival and creation of autonomous cities.  Until late in her history Rome shrank from centralization.  In the period when her authority was mainly confined to Italy she concluded treaties with other cities which merely secured for her their assistance in times of war, and at a later stage when she had extended her citizenship over the whole peninsula this incorporation was consistent with the retention of a considerable amount of local autonomy by individual cities.  The Romans deserve great credit for grasping so clearly the distinction between central and local government, a distinction which had not been appreciated by the Athenians, whose rule was unpopular because of its interference with the internal affairs of the cities of their Empire.  Even under the Principate Rome herself retained much of the machinery of the city-state, and preferred to deal with communities whose institutions bore some resemblance to her own.

In Italy itself it was not till late in the republican period that political units other than the city disappeared.  Rome’s opponents in the Social War [90-89 b.c.] were to a large extent still organized in tribes, and one of the consequences of the gift of citizenship which followed was the extension of the municipal system to the whole peninsula.  It is probable that by the beginning of the Principate every Italian south of the Alps was, if not a full member of a city, at least connected with one by attributio.

In the provinces Rome had to deal with areas who past history had been very varied.  In those parts of the Empire which had come under Greek or Carthaginian influence she found cities more or less of the kind to which she was accustomed in Italy.  The Greek fringe of Asia Minor contained many whose history went back for centuries, and even further east the successors of Alexander had created famous towns.  In the provinces of Africa and in those parts of Spain which had been ruled by Carthage cities were numerous.  At the beginning of the Principate southern Spain (Baetica) was almost entirely a land of cities, while elsewhere most of the inhabitants were organized in small tribal units with no well-defined urban centre.  Even in Asia Minor, which had for so long been subject to Greek influence, city life was by no means universal.  A large section of the population was accustomed to tribal life, or was attached to great estates belonging to private individuals or to temples.  Many provinces, notably Africa, contained extensive saltus, which were the property of the crown and were administered by imperial procurators, and which generally owed their origin to the expropriation of the original owners.  The mining community of Vipasca in southern Spain, of which mention has been made above [previous chapter, not quoted], was probably not unique.  It was entirely devoid of self-government, and was controlled by the procurator metallorum.

The persistence or creation of such communities as have been enumerated is an admirable example of that adaptability of Roman rule which it has so often been necessary to emphasize.  The Roman government preferred that its subjects should belong to cities of the Greco-Roman type, but was prepared to tolerate or even create other forms of organization if for any reason this seemed desirable.

This feature of Roman administration can be illustrated from Gaul, a province in which Roman methods are seen at their best.  Readers of Cæsar will remember that at the time of its conquest Gaul was simply a geographical expression, and that its inhabitants owed allegiance not to Gaul as a whole but to tribes, such as the Sequani, Aedui, or Arverni, between which no permanent political ties existed.  “Until it came under our rule,” says a speaker quoted by Tacitus, “there was nothing in Gaul but despotisms and wars.  All that we have done is to keep the peace.”

This disunion did much to facilitate Cæsar’s task, and his successors fully realized that the discord which normally existed among the Gallic tribes was an asset which should not lightly be destroyed, provided that it did not actually lead to civil war.  So long as it existed there was little danger that the whole country would rise against its Roman rulers.  Accordingly when Augustus reorganized the newly-conquered part of Gaul he decided to make no change in the political system and to allow the tribes to survive.  The cities of modern France, such as Paris, Rheims and Soissons, take their names from the tribe of which they were the leading community.  Each of these tribes had a well-defined form of government, aristocratic in principle, with which it was possible for the Romans to enter into relations, and which could make itself responsible for the payment of taxation.  The leaders of these tribal aristocracies, who had held all the offices in their own state, as the inscriptions so often record, met each year outside Lugdunum to participate in religious ceremonies at the altar of Rome and Augustus and elected one of their number to be sacerdos and to preside for the year over the concilium Galliarum.

In this way Rome secured the loyalty of the most influential men in Gaul, many of whom were citizens of Rome and who from the time of Claudius could even aspire to membership of the Senate.  It is worth noting that in spite of this unwillingness on the part of Rome to interfere with tribal organization the official terminology of municipal towns was taken over by the Gallic tribes.  We find duumviri and quaestors among such tribes as the Aedui and Sequani, and the word ordo could be used to designate the governing body.  On the other hand if a tribe wished to employ old titles, such as Vergobretus, for its magistracies it was at liberty to do so. 

In Spain, the municipal system was at first confined to Andalusia and the coastal districts which had been under the rule of Carthage.  But in her Spanish provinces Rome pursued a less conservative policy than in Gaul, and encouraged the growths of town.  The small Spanish tribes possessed less vitality than the larger tribes of Gaul, and there is no reason to think that the gradual municipalization of the country was resented.  When once it was conquered no province gave Rome less trouble than Spain.  In the statistics quoted by Pliny, which were probably derived from Agrippa, we find that under Augustus Hispania Tarraconensis contained 179 towns and 114 non-urban communities.  The gift of Latin Right to the whole peninsula by Vespasian must have led to the disappearance or transformation of many of the latter, for Ptolemy, writing under Antoninus Pius, enumerates 248 towns and only twenty-seven communities outside the municipal system.

^f2

The policy of Rome was to foster municipal life in those parts of the Empire where it was welcome to the inhabitants, and to wait for the “psychological moment” before introducing it into regions where it was not familiar.  Thus Britain retained a tribal organization throughout the Roman occupation, and possessed only a handful of regular municipalities.  Many cities of some importance, e.g., Silchester [Calleva Atrebatum] and Wroxeter [Viroconium Cornoviorum], remained merely tribal capitals.  That the British, like the Gallic tribes, adopted some features of municipal organization is proved by an inscription which mentions the ordo of the civitas of the Silures in South Wales.

Thrace again was almost devoid of cities in the early Principate, and it was not till the time of Trajan, who founded seven cities, that any serious action was taken to municipalize the province.  Galatia retained throughout its tribal organization, and its few towns “remained mere islands of urban life in their vast territories, where the Gallic and Phrygian peasants still maintained their primitive village economy, hardly affected by Greek civilization.”  When after his defeat of Mithradates Pompey drafted the Lex Provinciae of Bithynia and Pontus he was hampered by the absence of local government.

In these districts “the Roman republic was for the first time brought face to face with a system of administration totally alien to its traditions and unsuitable to the scheme of provincial government which it had built up.”  In order therefore that it might be possible to entrust the government of the province to a proconsul quite unqualified to control a centralized bureaucracy he founded several self-governing cities.  That city-life was at a later date highly developed in Bithynia is clear from Pliny’s letters to Trajan, but it is probable that even in his time part of the province was not included in the municipal system.

It would be beyond the scope of this work to attempt a detailed account of the growth of city-life in the more backward parts of the Empire.  It was an inevitable result of the process of romanization.  The status of a Roman colonia or municipium within a province was an enviable one, and it was natural that districts which preserved an older type of organization should so re-organize themselves that they might hope one day to attain the status of these favoured communities.  In order to do this it was necessary to acquire a constitution similar to that which belonged to cities in which the municipal system was of long standing. 

A considerable number of cities throughout the Empire owed their origin to the army.  It was to be expected that settlements would grow up in close proximity to a military station, inhabited by those who provided for the needs of the soldiers, and these canabae often developed into regular towns.  There was such a settlement at Vetera on the lower Rhine by a.d. 69, which according to Tacitus almost amounted to a municipium, and which was given the status of colonia by Trajan.  A similar community existed at Troesmis on the lower Danube, closely connected with Legion V. Macedonia, and presided over by magistri and aediles.  Legionary headquarters like Lambaesis in Africa, Lincoln and York in Britain, and Carnuntum in Pannonia became important towns.

Each city in a Roman province was responsible for administration of a considerable surrounding district, part of which was inhabited by men who were not regarded as being qualified for full municipal citizenship, and who were grouped in units “attributed” to the city concerned.  This device of attributio was known in Italy under the Republic, and was employed in Cisalpine Gaul when it was organized as a province after the Social War.  Such cities as Tridentum, Verona, Brixia, and Mediolanum were made responsible for the administration of Alpine districts not yet fully romanized.  In the south of France certain cities exercised authority over many small communities, and in Asia Minor the large territories of cities contained paroeci whose status was inferior to that of full citizens.  The interesting document which records the recognition by Claudius of the claim of the Anauni to the full citizenship of Tridentum, suggests that in practice no very sharp line was drawn between the attributi and their fully qualified fellow-citizens.  Some of the Anauni had served in the Prætorian Guard or even as iudices in the Roman courts.  Men who had earned these distinctions might well claim the right to attend the not very important meetings of their local assembly.

Types of provincial city   by G. H. Stevenson

As was pointed out in the first chapter, the policy which Rome pursued in dealing with provincial cities was very different under the Republic from what it became when Cæsar had set the example of founding colonies overseas.  In Italy the possession by a city of full Roman rights brought with it such obvious advantages that the allied communities were bound in time to demand inclusion in the Roman state, even if this inclusion involved a certain loss of autonomy.

In the provinces of the Republic the situation was quite different.  The provincials were definitely subjects of Rome, and paid tribute in token of their submission.  Even in provinces where city-life existed and where the level of civilization was high citizenship was conferred only on a few selected individuals and not on communities as a whole.  At this period the highest privilege which a provincial city could possess was to be regarded as an ally of Rome, and to be included in the small class of treaty-states (civitates foederatae), of which three existed in Sicily and a few in other provinces.

There was a certain unreality about this status even under the Republic, when Rome was much more than an ordinary city-state.  The terms of an alliance which happens to be preserved between Rome and the tiny Greek island of Astypalæa are almost ridiculous.  The people of Rome and the people of Astypalæa swear to assist each other in war, and not to permit the enemies of the other to make use of their respective territories.

In spite of this, however, the status of a civitas foederata was considered to be a desirable one, and it survived even into the Principate.  Towns possessing it were exempt from the ordinary taxes and the jurisdiction of the governor, and were subject to their own laws.

Under the Republic what provincial cities wanted most was to be free from Roman rule, while in the Principate the greatest privilege which they could receive was to be fully incorporated in the Roman state.  Citizenship came to be regarded by provincials, as it had been regarded by Italians, as preferable to the “freedom conferred by a treaty” [Cicero], and many treaty-states, e.g., Tauromenium, Messana, Gades, and Saguntum, became at a later date Roman colonies or municipia.  The treaties made with them seem to have varied in their terms; thus Tauromenium in Sicily was not required to provide ships, while this obligation was imposed on Messana.  The number of these cities would probably have been greater had republican Rome been willing to make full use of provincials in her army and navy, but she could not trust their loyalty and was forced to raise armies in Italy which to a large extent were paid for out of provincial taxation.

Some of these treaty-states survived into the Principate, though their status was then even more of an anachronism than it had been.  Trajan treated with great respect the privileges enjoyed by the federate city Amisus in Bithynia and exempted it from the rule forbidding the formation of clubs which was rigorously enforced in other cities of the province.  Certain important Gallic tribes described themselves as civitates foederatae, but in this case the title must have been purely complimentary and can scarcely have involved financial or other privileges.

Somewhat similar was the status of the free towns, the so-called civitates sine foedere liberae et immunes, which were much more numerous.  Their status was more precarious in that it was not based on a sworn treaty but on the free gift of Rome.  In other respects, however, they enjoyed the same advantages as the treaty-states.  An extant inscription referring to Termessus in Pisidia in the last century of the Republic shows that it could make its own laws and levy customs-dues.  They were exempt from the jurisdiction of the governor, and Cicero can bring no more serious charge against Piso than that he infringed the privileges of the free cities of Macedonia.

Though at first liberae civitates were normally immunes (exempt from taxation), it is certain that at a later date freedom and immunity were distinct privileges which might or might not be combined.  There is no reason to think that the numerous free cities of the eastern provinces were exempt from taxation any more than the free or federate tribes of Gaul.  In the decree by which Nero conferred freedom on the cities of Greece immunity is mentioned as an additional favour.

Before the change of Roman policy which led to the foundation in the provinces of colonies and municipia these two classes of federate and free cities occupied the highest place among the provincial communities.  Below them stood the ordinary “stipendiary” towns whose inhabitants had no claim to exemption from taxation.  Little is known of the details of their constitutions, but it is clear that they enjoyed a good deal of autonomy, the amount of which was determined by the Lex Provinciae and the edicts of the governors.  The names of their magistrates and the general character of their constitutional arrangements seem to have varied considerably.

In Asia Minor, at least, some of the cities were at the end of the Republic extremely democratic, and even under the Principate the Roman tendency to encourage oligarchy was less successful there than elsewhere.  This tendency is illustrated by Pliny’s statement that it was better that new members of the local senates in Bithynia should be the sons of honesti rather than members of the plebs.  At a period when it was the great ambition of a provincial town to be come a colonia or a municipium it was necessary to have a constitution which conformed fairly closely to the Roman model.

An intermediate position between these non-Roman towns and the coloniae and municipia of Roman citizens was occupied by the cities possessing the so-called Latin rights.  This status, which, as we have seen, had existed in Italy under the Republic, is found in the western provinces from the age of Cæsar.  It provided a stepping-stone to full citizenship, and its conferment on whole provinces is a sign that they were ripe for romanization.  Cæsar proposed, at any rate, to grant it to all the cities of Sicily; Nero gave it to the Maritime Alps, and Vespasian to the whole of Spain.

Two surviving charters of towns which benefited from this last grant are our chief sources of information on the details of provincial municipal organization.  The ordinary citizens of such towns remained peregrini, though they received certain privileges, e.g., the ius commercii, denied to other provincials, but the governing class were given means of acquiring the franchise.  All men who held a magistracy became Roman citizens together with their parents, wives and families, and in the second century a.d. this privilege was extended to all members of the municipal senate, whether they had held a magistracy or not.

Thus a well-defined aristocracy was created in these towns and a stimulus given to the competition for municipal honours, which, as will be seen, were sometimes regarded as a burden.  The title of municipium, which in Italy had been confined to purely Roman towns, was in the provinces freely employed by these Latin cities.

Municipia et Coloniae   by G. H. Stevenson

We now come to the communities which occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of provincial towns, the Roman colonies and municipia.  The distinction between them was based rather on their origin than on any great difference of constitution.  In Italy a municipium was an existing city on which the citizenship had been conferred, and which was probably allowed to retain some traces of its original constitution {Footnote:  The chief magistrates of Arpinum were three aediles in the age of Cicero.  […]}, while a colony was a new foundation or a community to which Roman settlers had been added.  In the earlier days of Roman rule the Italian municipia had received the citizenship in a modified form (civitas sine suffragio) but by the end of the Republic the restrictions had been removed.

In the provinces the status of a colonia was undoubtedly regarded as higher than that of a municipium.  The former title suggested a close connection with the imperial city, while the name municipium recalled an alien origin.  Hadrian, we are told, professed to be surprised that the people of his native town of Italica in Spain wished to become a colony.  “He wondered that, when they could employ their own customs and laws, they wished to change their status for that of a colonia.”  This remark implies that municipia still in theory possessed a fuller measure of self-government, but, as Aulus Gellius says, cities preferred to be colonies “because of the dignity and prestige of the Roman people.”  Things had changed since the days when the greatest advantage which a provincial city could possess was to be independent of Rome.

The earliest Roman colonies had been purely military settlements, armed garrisons in districts whose loyalty was doubtful, and traces of this conception survived into the Principate.  Though colonies were most numerous in peaceful provinces, many were planted in districts like Mauretania and Pisidia which were only half civilized.  Good examples of this type of colony are Colonia Agrippinensis (Cologne) on the Lower Rhine and Camalodunum (Colchester) in Britain.  Cologne, the old capital of the Ubii, was given colonial status in a.d. 51, and Tacitus’ account of the German rising against Rome twenty years later shows that it had almost entirely lost its national character and had become a centre of Roman influence.  Many of its citizens were veterans of the Rhine armies who had settled in the region where they had served and had married German women.  Similarly in a.d. 61 Colchester suffered in the rising under Boudicca because it was a “citadel of Roman domination” and contained a temple dedicated to the deified Claudius.

It was, however, in the more civilized parts of the empire that most colonies were to be found.  The disbandment of the armies of Cæsar and Augustus led to the foundation of many provincial cities, some of which retained in their title the name of the legion to which the original settlers had belonged.  This was particularly so in Narbonese Gaul, where Narbo recalled its association with the Tenth Legion, Fréjus with the Eighth and Arles with the Fourth.  When the new military system of the Principate was fully established this mass emigration came to an end, though soldiers continued to be sent to colonies.  Tacitus contrasts the days when “whole legions were settled with their tribunes and centurions and soldiers of every rank to form a society based on unity and affection” with the state of things under Nero, when soldiers of various units and strangers to each other were sent to colonies where they found life dull and from which they drifted away.

The word colonia soon lost its association with the army, and came to designate a status which might be conferred as an honour on communities which had hitherto occupied a lower place in the municipal hierarchy.  In Gaul the name was applied to some towns which lacked the usual municipal organization and were merely the capitals of tribes, e.g., Trèves [Trier] and Langres.  In the whole of the Three Gauls the only colony of the normal type was Lugdunum [Lyon].  Another example of the careless use of technical terms in this region is the strange title of colonia Helvetiorum foederata, which is found in an inscription.

As early as the time of C. Gracchus overseas colonization had been suggested as a means of dealing with the problem of unemployment in Rome and perhaps other Italian cities.  The efforts of Gracchus were thwarted by the objection which was still felt to the foundation of Roman cities outside Italy, but Cæsar, who shared his liberal views, is said to have settled 80,000 citizens in overseas colonies.  Many of these were sent to Corinth and Carthage, which he refounded, and we possess part of the charter of the colony of Urso in the south of Spain, which was certainly not a military settlement, and in which municipal office could be held even by freedmen [ex-slaves].  It is doubtful, however, whether this policy was followed by Cæsar’s successors, under whom emigration from Italy to the provinces was encouraged in other ways.

Much of what has been said about these Roman towns applies primarily to the western provinces.  East of the Aegean, while many cities were granted Libertas, colonies were much rarer than in the west, and the status of municipium was unknown till very late in the Principate.  The leading cities of the province of Asia, for example [located in the east], retained their Greek constitutions, while in such provinces as Hispania Baetica and Gallia Narbonensis [in the west] they received the rank of colonia quite early in the Principate.  Even there, however, the privileged status belonged to a small minority of the cities.  Baetica [in southern Spain] contained only nine colonies among its 175 towns in the reign of Augustus, and it is doubtful whether the number was increased till Hadrian added the city of Italica [his home town].

Constitution of the Civitas   by G. H. Stevenson

The most detailed information which we possess about the organization of provincial cities is derived from the charters of three Spanish communities, two of them Latin towns and the third a Roman colony of an unusual type.  Enough, however, is known of the municipal system as it existed elsewhere to make it certain that the institutions which we find at Salpensa, Malaca, and Urso were fairly typical.  Even in cities devoid of full Roman rights the municipal constitution was modelled on that of republican Rome, and possessed popular assemblies, senates, and magistrates.

The popular assemblies during the first century a.d. in the west, and for considerably longer in the east, exercised the power of electing magistrates and of accepting or rejecting proposals brought before them.  Their members were organized in curiae or less often in tribes.  But the same tendencies which in Rome had strengthened the Senate at the expense of the people operated in the provinces.  Many of the voters must have lived in outlying parts of the extensive territories belonging to their city and have found it inconvenient to attend meetings of the Assembly.  From the time of Trajan [at the beginning of the 2nd century] the people seem to have ceased to exercise the right of electing magistrates, who were now nominated by their predecessors [just as Roman emperors nominated their successors –Impearls] subject to the approval of the decuriones, and to have met only for the formal purpose of passing complimentary decrees in honour of magistrates or benefactors.

Apart from the attributi or contributi mentioned above, who had no voting rights, we find frequent mentions of incolae, who were domiciled in a city of which they were not full members.  They seem to have shared the privileges and the burdens of the citizens, but to have had only a limited right of voting.  At Malaca a single curia was selected in which they might give their vote.  We know, however, of a few cases in which they even entered the municipal senates.  Pliny found in the Bithynian senates some whose right to be there was extremely doubtful.

Far the most important body of men in a municipal town were the decuriones or ordo, who corresponded to the Senate at Rome, though they rarely used this title.  Their number was usually fixed at a hundred, and they were sometimes called centumviri, though honorary members, e.g. patroni of senatorial or equestrian rank, might be added.  In the west at least membership of the ordo was for life, and its members, as in Rome, consisted mainly of ex-magistrates.  Every five years vacancies were filled by officers corresponding to the Roman censors, who regarded magistrates not already members as having the first claim.

As the magistrates held office only for a single year it was inevitable that they should pay great respect to the wishes of the decurions, but it is surprising to find on how many trivial matters it was necessary, at Urso at least, for the ordo to be consulted.  A magistrate was liable to a fine of 10,000 sesterces if he acted in contravention of any decree of the decurions.  Only in judicial ma[tt]ers did he possess any discretion, and even here his power was limited.

As in Rome, the municipal magistrates were elected in pairs, and most cities possessed two duoviri iure dicundo, two aediles, and two quaestors.  {Footnote:  Praefecti might be appointed to take the place of duumviri in their absence, or to represent the emperor if he were elected honorary duumvir.  […]}  In Italian municipia, as opposed to colonies, the first four of these were commonly grouped together as quattuorviri, but this title was rarer in the provinces, where its occurrence cannot be used to distinguish a municipium from a colonia.  Each member of a pair could veto his colleague’s decisions, and the lower magistrates were subject to the authority of the higher.

As the name implies, the chief duty of the duumviri iuri dicundo was the administration of justice in such cases as were too unimportant for the intervention of the [provincial] governor.  But, as has been said, even in this department their power was limited.  “If the person on whom a fine is imposed, or another person in his name shall demand that the matter be referred to the decurions or conscripti, the judgment shall lie with the decurions or conscripti.”

Apart from their judicial work the duumviri presided over meetings of the decurions or the assembly, and were responsible for public games, religious observances, etc.  Every fifth year they bore the title of quinquennales, and exercised certain censorial powers such as holding a lectio of the ordo and letting out public contracts.

The aediles, like their Roman namesakes, were concerned with the upkeep of the streets and public buildings, and perhaps with the food-supply of the city.  They had the right of inflicting fines subject to the approval of the duumviri.  The quaestors, where they existed, had duties connected with municipal finance.

Municipal revenues and expenditure   by G. H. Stevenson

It is clear that no poor man could aspire to a magistracy or to membership of a local senate.  Even at Urso, where at first at least the standard of wealth cannot have been high, magistrates had to contribute 2,000 sesterces to the cost of public shows, and more was probably expected of them elsewhere.  Though Pompey, when he drafted the Lex Provinciae of Bithynia, had enacted that no entrance fees were to be paid by decurions, by the time of Trajan the custom had grown up of expecting them to pay considerable sums on their election.  At Comum a decurio had to possess 100,000 sesterces, a quarter of the equestrian census, but the sum required was probably lower in the provinces.  Municipal magistrates do not seem to have received any salaries, and it is unlikely that a man could be a decurion unless he belonged to the leisured class.

In a letter addressed by Hadrian to the magistrates and council of Ephesus asking that a friend should be admitted to the municipal senate he mentions not only the payment in money which was required of new members, but the docimasia to which a candidate had to submit.  Not only were certain age limits fixed, but certain qualifications other than wealth were required.  Probably in the provinces, as certainly in Italy, men who had practised degrading occupations were excluded from office.  Free birth was normally essential, though freedmen found some compensation in membership of a corporation called the ordo of Augustales, which spread from Italy to the western provinces.  It was vaguely associated with the worship of the emperors, and consisted mainly of freedmen, who were granted certain insignia and privileges, in return for which they were expected to put some of their wealth at the disposal of the community.

The prejudice against direct taxation characteristic of antiquity existed in provincial cities, and there is no evidence that regular “rates” were paid by their inhabitants, though more was done for them by the municipal authorities than was the case in England till fairly recent times.  It is clear that the cities possessed considerable sources of revenue.  In Bithynia under Trajan they had so much spare money at their disposal that Pliny was led to suggest that the decurions might be forced to take it on loan, whether they wished to do so or not, a proposal for which he received a snub from the emperor.  The main source of municipal revenue was land, the occupiers of which paid rent to the community.  Some of this land was not in the immediate neighbourhood, and Italian cities might even own land in the provinces.  Less important were fines, monopolies, and the fees paid by magistrates and decurions, the last of which were quite an important item in the budget.  Pliny mentions a Bithynian city which devoted the money derived from newly-appointed decurions to the erection of a public bath on an unsuitable site.  There is some evidence for a water-rate paid by those at least who made an unusually large use of the supply.  To what extent money was raised by octroi dues is doubtful, and the elaborate tariff imposed by Palmyra on goods entering its territory was probably abnormal.  The portoria were imperial taxes levied at the frontiers of provinces.

On the side of expenditure the cost of administration must have been a small item, as the officials were unpaid and menial work was performed by public slaves.  Even the cost of the public games was defrayed to a large extent by the magistrates and by public benefactors.  Pliny’s letters to Trajan show that enormous sums were spent on buildings, often very wastefully.  At Nicomedia three million sesterces had been expended on an aqueduct which had to be abandoned, and Nicæa had spent ten millions on an unsatisfactory theatre.  We need not assume, however, that such waste of money was typical.  Enough remains of Roman provincial towns to-day to show that public buildings were often of admirable construction.  The city authorities considered themselves bound to provide an adequate water-supply and facilities for bathing which can only be paralleled in quite modern times.  {Footnote:  Plin., Ep. IV, 13, suggests that schoolmasters were sometimes paid by the city authorities, but there is no evidence that this was often done.}

The generosity of private individuals did much to assist the finances of Roman cities, and hundreds of inscriptions record gifts for such purposes as the erection and repair of halls, theatres, baths, and aqueducts.  In the early days of the Principate these gifts seem to have been mainly voluntary, though the donors may have been influenced by thoughts of the statues and votes of thanks which they frequently received from grateful communities.  The generosity of Pliny the Younger to his native city of Comum, parallels to which may be found in the provinces, were inspired primarily by loyalty and affection.  But there is good reason to think that from the second century a.d. at least these gifts were not so spontaneous as the inscriptions suggest.  Men who held certain official positions or who were obviously wealthy were expected to perform definite munera, which could scarcely be distinguished from honores.

In the east ever since the great days of Athens the “liturgies” imposed on wealthy individuals as a kind of surtax had formed a regular part of the municipal revenue.  Though these “liturgies” or munera were not such a heavy burden as they became later, it is probable that even before the age of the Antonines there was some unwillingness to enter the governing class in municipal towns because of the financial demands which such membership involved.  Even the charter of Malaca, which belongs to the reign of Domitian, makes provision for a shortage of candidates for municipal magistracies, and Pliny’s letters from Bithynia show that in that province some entered the city-councils against their will.  How far this tendency had gone in the first two centuries a.d. it is difficult to say.  It was not till later that exemption from the burdens of the decurionate was regarded as the highest favour which a man could receive, and so long as the municipal system was allowed to function freely there was probably no great difficulty in finding men able and willing to undertake the duties and expenses which it involved.

Interference of the central government   by G. H. Stevenson

A word must be said in conclusion on the relations which existed between provincial cities and the imperial government.  Rome was, as we have seen, familiar with the principle of “indirect rule,” and, indeed, could not have governed her provinces unless they had contained communities capable of managing their own affairs and of assisting the government in the collection of taxes.  Roman policy was to interfere as little as possible with the autonomy of these communities, and, indeed, to foster the development of self-governing cities in areas where they had not previously existed.  The absence of an imperial civil service under the Republic and its slow development under the Principate would have made any other system quite unworkable.  It was, however, inevitable that provincial governors should interest themselves at least in the financial side of municipal administration.  Cicero was much exercised about the misgovernment of the cities of Cilicia during his governorship of the province (51-50 b.c.), and sought to check excessive expenditure on such purposes as embassies to Rome.

By the end of the first century a.d. there had been considerable development of the bureaucratic machinery which made its first appearance under Augustus, with the result that the central government came to expect a fairly high standard of administrative efficiency throughout the empire.  This tendency led to an interference with the affairs of the cities both of Italy and the provinces which had hitherto been unknown.  The control exercised by the emperors and their agents over municipal government was almost certainly beneficial in this period, though in the following centuries it robbed self-government of most of its reality.

The wastefulness and inefficiency which Pliny found in Bithynia, examples of which have been quoted, cannot have been confined to that province, and may well have diminished the yield of imperial taxation.  It was therefore with the best of motives that Trajan dispatched Maximus to Greece “ad ordinandum statum liberarum civitatium,” and that Hadrian followed his example in the same province and in Syria.  In his mission to Bithynia Pliny had a wider scope, and we find him investigating the finances not only of free cities but of Apamea, a Roman colony of the highest class.  His correspondence makes it clear that previous governors had interested themselves to some extent in the financial affairs of the cities, but that no such thorough investigation had been undertaken before.  Certain regulations had been made by the government, e.g., that grants should not be made to individuals from municipal funds, and it is probable that from this time the consent of the governor was required for any extraordinary expenditure.  An inscription of a rather later date records the permission given by the governor of Asia for the distribution of money to the citizens of Ephesus who attended the celebration of the emperor’s birthday.

A further stage in the control of the municipalities by the central government is marked by the appearance of curatores reipublicae (called logistae in the eastern provinces) in the reigns of Nerva and Trajan.  These men, who were nominees of the Emperor and often of senatorial or equestrian rank, differed from Maximus and Pliny in exercising their authority over a single city or a small group of cities.  They did not supersede the ordinary magistrates till the third century [by which time Rome was entering the so-called “Dominate” period, a time as the term suggests of military dictatorship –Impearls], when the curator became a kind of mayor.  In the earlier [Principate] period they were merely advisors whom the magistrates were expected to consult on financial matters.  As early as a.d. 113 we find the decurions of Caere asking for the consent of the curator to the grant of a piece of land for the erection of a hall for the meetings of the Augustales.  The institution originated in Italy, but traces of it are found in the senatorial provinces before the end of the second century.  Curatores were also appointed by the emperors of this period for some special purpose, e.g., the supervision of the municipal calendar or of public works.

Verdict   by G. H. Stevenson

The brief account which has been given of the Roman municipal system seems to justify us in passing a favourable verdict upon it.  It was based on the generous assumption that the subjects of Rome were capable of managing their own affairs, and that the main function of the central government was simply to provide the peaceful conditions under which such self-government was possible.  Rome hoped to find among her subjects public-spirited men prepared to devote themselves to local activities without hope of gain, men of the type which she had herself produced under the Republic and continued to produce in the Principate.  On the whole she was not disappointed.  There is every reason to think that in the period with which we are concerned the provincial cities did not lack men who were ready to employ their time and their wealth on public service.  If the system shows signs of decay before the end of the period the reason must be sought partly in a desire for efficiency which is often fatal to free institutions, and partly in the external dangers which threatened the Roman state and disorganized the system of government created in the preceding period of peace.

Afterword   by Michael McNeil

As G. H. Stevenson observes above, well meaning but ever increasing imperial interference with local government and civic autonomy over the years led to the gradual decay of this once-vibrant urban scene.  Edward Togo Salmon well summarizes this aspect of Roman history, as we return to his narrative, from where we left off before: ⁵

[B]efore the [2nd] century was over, there was growing difficulty in maintaining flourishing municipal life in a world where the ordinary man was encouraged to regard the emperor as a sort of terrestrial Providence and where the emperor himself with responsible earnestness accepted the role of universal dispenser of justice.  The letters of the younger Pliny and of Marcus Cornelius Fronto reveal how seriously the 2nd-century emperors took their duty and strove for orderly government everywhere.  But the emperors’ very conscientiousness led inevitably to interference with local autonomy.

Perhaps the civil service that Augustus founded would have burgeoned in any event and encroached on the self-governing communities that made up the provinces; but the well-meaning efforts of the Antonines hastened such a development.  The ultimate effect was to dampen civic ardour and to foster listlessness.  Faced with the prospect of increasing direction from above, municipal notables began avoiding local office.  Inability to pay the cost involved may also in part explain the growing reluctance of men to undertake municipal responsibilities; although the provincial bourgeoisie remained generally prosperous, economic recession had set in before the 2nd century ended.  For whatever reason, local officeholders became less easy to find; and, well before 200, men were being compelled to accept local office.  This boded ill for the future.

There’s a lesson (and caution) there, I’d say, for us moderns.

P.S.  I’m no fan of American paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan, but I almost fell out of my chair a while back when I heard him (on PBS’s McLaughlin Group) refer to Bush/Cheney as “duumvirs.”  Somehow it had hitherto escaped my notice, but “duumvir” and “duumvirate” are actually English words (as well as Latin), and — along with triumvirate, etc. — are present in English dictionaries.

In the American Presidential system, the U.S. President/Vice-President clearly more closely resemble the Roman Emperor/Vice-Emperor (known titularly as the Augustus/Cæsar), wherein one member of the official dyad is institutionally superior to the other (though the U.S. President can’t fire the Vice President) — as opposed to the Roman municipal (along with Roman Republican) system detailed heretofore, in which the duumvir (consul) magistrate pairs are institutionally equal in status and powers, each magistrate also possessing the power of vetoing his colleague’s actions and decisions.  Either approach can presumably be properly termed a kind of duumvirate and its official magistrates duumvirs.

References and Figures

¹ G. H. (George Hope) Stevenson (1880-1952; Fellow and Praelector in Ancient History, University College, Oxford), Roman Provincial Administration, Chapter VI: “The Municipal System in the Provinces,” 1939, G. E. Stechert & Co., New York; pp. 156-179.  (Occasional paragraph and section breaks have been added to the original text by the Impearls editor.)

² Sheppard Frere (Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire, University of Oxford), Britannia: a history of Roman Britain, Third Edition, 1987, Pimlico, London, 1991 (ISBN 0-7126-5027-X).

³ Peter Salway (Professor of Archaeology and the History of Roman Britain, Open University), Roman Britain, 1981, Oxford Paperbacks, Oxford University Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-19-285143-8).

^{4, 5} Edward Togo Salmon (1905-1988; Messecar Professor of History, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 1954-73; author of A History of the Roman World from 30 b.c. to a.d. 138), “Rome, Ancient,” Section IV: The early Roman Empire (31 b.c.-a.d. 193), Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Edition, 1974, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago; Macropædia Vol. 15, pp. 1116-1117.
 

^f1 Sheppard Frere (Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire, University of Oxford), Britannia: a history of Roman Britain, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, Figure 13: Map of Roman Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum), facing p. 432.  (“By courtesy of the Director of Reading Museum.”)

^f2 Sheppard Frere (Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire, University of Oxford), Britannia: a history of Roman Britain, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, Figure 1: Map of Roman Britain, facing p. 1.

(End)

Looking in the right direction – towards the future – with regard to global warming

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This article utilizes a number of slides/charts deriving from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and their journal Science magazine's 2004 symposium on global warming, Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, that was held in Washington, D.C., on June 15, 2004 (earthdate 2004-06-15) — which in addition to providing valuable presentations in their own right (notably not walled-off behind Science’s typically high subscription barrier), have proven fruitful as illustrations of basic science on the topic.

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In my view a lot of the argumentation — on both sides — in this great global warming debate has things (at least the overall direction in which folks ought to be looking) precisely backwards.  Those people who are generally opposed to the idea that anthropogenic (human caused) global warming is occurring or might be about to occur (anti-AGW aficionados, shall we say) insist that there’s little evidence as yet that what warming has thus far been observed was caused by human activity, and note that the extent of the warming isn’t beyond our historical experience of post ice-age climatic deviations (e.g., the “Little Ice Age” of late medieval/early modern times) which were notably not caused by anthropogenic emission of fossil (formerly sequestered carbon-based) greenhouse gases.

The trouble is, the anti-AGW folks are right; but, unfortunately, the issue having been framed in those terms, scientists who are open-minded about whether anthropogenic global warming is occurring (or at least starting or likely to start occurring) are left scrambling trying to support their hypothesis in a situation where there really is (so far) relatively little such concrete evidence of a long-term global warming trend.  Indeed, how could there be?  It hasn’t yet gone on for very long.

However, as I say, in my view that’s backwards thinking.  The reason, I think, why many researchers believe (or ought to) that AGW is beginning to occur in earnest isn’t because much such warming has occurred so far, but rather because human activities are indubitably releasing exponentially increasing quantities of (formerly sequestered) carbon dioxide — a known insulating gas — and other such “greenhouse” gases into the atmosphere.

Figures 1 and 2 at top (^{f1 f2}) illustrate how the insulating capacity of greenhouse gases is exhibited:  The Sun’s light and heat pours in at a temperature near 5,800 kelvins (i.e., white hot: a thermal frequency band in which greenhouse gases are necessarily transparent), heating up the Earth (located some 150 million km away) to a typical temperature of 288 kelvins (15° C. or 59° F.), which heat must then be re-radiated away to outer space within a far lower (higher wavelength) frequency band — where, fortunately or unfortunately, gases like CO₂ lie draped like increasingly heavy blanket curtains over the “window” through which the Sun’s heat must escape — lest the planet warm.

Of course, some extraordinary heat retention is a good thing.  Sherwood Rowland (University of California, Irvine) points out in a slide (No. 24, which we haven’t included) from his presentation (pdf) at the aforementioned AAAS symposium, the natural greenhouse effect due to traditional, historic levels of CO₂ and other such gases in Earth’s atmosphere is worth a temperature “increase” to our planet (over its blackbody temperature) of some +32° C. or +57° F. — lacking which the Earth would subsist at about 255 kelvins (−18° C. or 0° F.) — on average, well below the freezing point of water.
 

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One canard I think can now safely be dismissed:  the oft-repeated suggestion which holds (while sweeping the exponentially increasing proportion of CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere figuratively under the carpet) that the warming of the planet seen towards the end of the 20th century and early into the 21st has been entirely (or almost so) due to variations in, and in particular increased radiative insolation from the Sun.

While it’s certainly possible that variations in solar output have influenced climate on Earth (indeed physical theory predicts that the Sun’s average output has increased by about 25% over the span of the last few billion years), that theoretical possibility is quite a distinct matter from the question of whether such changes occur on the Sun on a short enough time scale and moreover that it did in fact occur and was/is the driving force behind what warming has been seen during the last few decades.

Now a study reported in a recent (July) issue of the journal Nature reveals that, contrary to this oh-so-pat hypothesis, solar output has actually observably declined over the last score years, following a peak seen between the years 1985-7. ¹  As a result, though some sort of “impedance” effect (whereby the Earth might continue to be seen to warm for a time after the peak of insolation) can be said to be still slightly conceivable at this point, that hope obviously gets increasingly dim the longer (more than twenty years at this point) since the high point of solar output passed.

Beyond that, though one can always imagine scenarios wherein larger heat retention (as a result of increased greenhouse gases) by the Earth might generate, say, greater cloud cover which in the end could actually reflect away more of the Sun’s heat from the Earth — resulting in a cooler climate in general over much of the planet — however, the onset of such a cloudy regimen over great swaths of the Earth would itself imply profound climatic changes, such as would already severely affect extensive regions and populations.

Furthermore, I would adjudge that such suggested scenarios (where “global warming” generates an overall cooling) — while possible — begin to strain likelihood and credibility, as generally in physics when one applies heat to an object (by, say, wrapping an insulator around a heat source, or, equivalently, by erecting a “greenhouse” conveying an insulating effect round about an object which is in range of a radiant heat source), that targeted entity tends to warm up, not cool off.  (Ever get into your car after it’s been exposed for a while on a hot sunny day?  Same thing, in principle — though it would take a long time for a planet like Earth to approach anything like equilibrium.)

Thus far, I venture to suggest, we’ve progressed insufficiently far up the sharp upwards-pointing “hockey stick” leg of that exponential increase (and a planet like Earth carries a lot of thermal inertia) to see much yet in the way of actual temperature hikes — but the thing about any exponentially increasing function is that, however great a level has been thus far attained, in not too long a time (a few decades to a century or two in this case) it will rise enormously higher still.
 

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The very idea that dumping vast and exponentially increasing quantities of known insulating gases into the atmosphere isn’t going to (eventually) have drastic effects on world climate (even if we don’t understand as yet what all those effects are going to be) is in my view absurd as well as reckless.  Even if, as some idly hope, global warming might turn out (for the moment anyway) to partly counterbalance (or be counterbalanced by) some other effect(s) (such as a possible inclination towards a new ice age at the close of the present “interglacial” epoch), all one must do is simply pour yet another exponential increase in insulating gases into the atmosphere — as will occur unless that exponential trend line is broken — and the result is essentially certain to eventually tip world (and many local areas’) climates into a direction one is generally not likely to like.
 

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For a concrete illustration as to how far we’ve already gotten up that “hockey stick” exponentially rising slope, one might consider the manner in which many anti-AGW folks often express skepticism with regard to the theory by asserting that any great volcano, such as Mt. St. Helens, ^f7 or Mt. Pinatubo of late dramatic vintage, must, “of course,” vent many times more carbon dioxide and other such greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all man’s activities put together.

While observing the monumental spectacle of incredible volcanic eruptions such as these might make that seem obvious, in actuality, however, the reverse is true.  It turns out that all “subaerial” (surficial) volcanoes on the planet put together only spew forth some one four-hundredth (!) the rate of present-day anthropogenic CO₂ emissions into the Earth’s air.

(Getting into the nitty-gritty of comparative numerology, according to this research report ² [see also ³], “subaerial” [surficial] volcanoes on Earth annually produce an average of 34 × 10¹² grams of carbon dioxide from “passive degassing,” together with 31 × 10¹² grams per year resulting from active eruptions, for a total volcanic emission rate of 6.5 × 10⁷ [65 million] metric tons of CO₂ per year.  That sounds like a lot, but per the indicated piece that amounts to a mere 0.22% of present levels of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide — which annual anthropogenic contributions may therefore be calculated to lie in the vicinity of 29 or 30 gigatons of CO₂.

We may bring forth another value for anthropogenic CO₂ emissions, according to this source, to wit:  “Fossil fuels account for most of the 6.5 billion tons [gigatons] of carbon — the amount present in 25 gigatons of CO₂ — that people around the world vent into the air every year.” ⁴  Twenty-five gigatons is 2.5 × 10¹⁰ metric tons of carbon dioxide released every year as a result of human activities, indicating via this figure that volcanoes produce a mere 0.26% of the CO₂ that mankind vents into the Earth’s atmosphere.)

According to either value we see that modern-day anthropogenic activities exhaust into the air something like 400 times as much CO₂ as all the surficial volcanoes of the world put together. *

Now can folks begin to get a glimmering as to why, with that vast venting of heat-trapping gases, formerly sequestered for millions of years outside the biotic cycle — which human beings are now spewing into the Earth’s atmosphere for basically the first time in the planet’s existence — responsible scientists looking at this situation conclude that the consequences will eventually pose a grave hazard for our earthly environment?  Humans truly are now affecting the entire planet in toto.

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^f10

 

* While undersea volcanoes also contribute somewhat to total planetary volcanic emissions, that isn’t likely to significantly affect the huge disparity between volcanic and anthropogenic volumes of CO₂ emitted, not to speak of the large likelihood that most or all carbon dioxide exhaled by volcanoes into the (deep) oceans, remains dissolved in the oceans.
 

¹ Quinn Schiermeier, “No solar hiding place for greenhouse skeptics,” Nature; Vol. 448, Issue No. 9149 (5 July 2007 [2007-07-05]), pp. 8-9.

² Stanley N. Williams, Stephen J. Schaefer, Marta Lucia Calvache V., and Dina Lopez, “Global carbon dioxide emission to the atmosphere by volcanoes,” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (Journal of The Geochemical Society and The Meteoritical Society); Vol. 56, Issue No. 4 (April 1992 [1992-04]), pp. 1765-1770.

³ Richard E. Stoiber, “Volcanic Gases From Subaerial Volcanoes on Earth,” Global Earth Physics: A Handbook of Physical Constants, AGU Reference Shelf 1, American Geophysical Union, 1995.

⁴ Robert F. Service, “The Carbon Conundrum,” Science (journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science); Vol. 305, Issue No. 5686 (13 August 2004 [2004-08-13]) (“Toward a Hydrogen Economy” special issue), pp. 962-963.
 

Thanks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and their journal Science magazine for the symposium on global warming, Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, that was held in Washington, D.C., on June 15, 2004 (Earthdate 2004-06-15) — which in addition to providing valuable presentations in their own right (notably not behind Science’s typical high subscription barrier), have proven fruitful as illustrations of basic information on the topic.

^f1 Sherwood Rowland (University of California, Irvine), “Earth’s Atmosphere: Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming” (pdf), Slide 02 — Charts thermal ‘blackbody’ radiation emitted by the Sun to the Earth, and in turn radiated away (at a far lower temperature) by the Earth to space.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f2 Sherwood Rowland (University of California, Irvine), “Earth’s Atmosphere: Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming” (pdf), Slide 05 — Chart illustrating blanketing effect that the greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, and water) have on the spectrum of thermal energy radiated away by Earth.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f3 Thomas Crowley (Duke University), “Global Temperature History: The Last Thousand Years” (pdf), Slide 12 — The Sun, as imaged by SOHO (earthdate 2003-07-03).  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f4 Daniel Schrag (Harvard University), “What Earlier Warm Periods Can Tell Us About the One We’re In” (pdf), Slide 02 — Charts where atmospheric CO₂ levels have been for the last 400,000 years, shows where it is now (2004) and will be in 2040-2060.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f5 Sherwood Rowland (University of California, Irvine), “Earth’s Atmosphere: Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming” (pdf), Slide 04 — Charts monthly mean world carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, between the years 1960 and 2000.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f6 Daniel Schrag (Harvard University), “What Earlier Warm Periods Can Tell Us About the One We’re In” (pdf), Slide 14 — Charts potential carbon dioxide concentrations from 1990 through 2100 according to various scenarios.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f7 Phreatic eruption, “Mount St. Helens,” Wikipedia.

^f8 Joyce Penner (University of Michigan), “Complexities in the Temperature Signal: Aerosols and Trace Gases” (pdf), Slide 16 — Charts carbon dioxide, sulfate, and temperature record over the last thousand years, and projects temperature increases for the future.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f9 Richard Alley (Pennsylvania State University), “The History of Abrupt Climate Change” (pdf), Slide 26 — Charts temperature change from 1760, extending into the future to 2100 according to various scenarios.  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

^f10 David Battisti (University of Washington), “The Synergism Between Ocean and Atmosphere” (pdf), Slide 03 — World map charts anticipated climate change by the end of the 21st century according to two different scenarios (SRES A2 and B2).  Qs and AAAs About Global Climate Change, hosted by AAAS and its Journal, Science, earthdate 2004-06-15.

Labels: carbon dioxide, global warming, science

Autonomy and the trajectories of Rome vs. Athens in history

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Volokh Conspiracist Ilya Somin has an interesting post on the question of “How Federal is Star Trek’s Federation?”, which you can read here.  (See also my other post deriving from Ilya’s piece, which you can find here, or use up-thread/down-thread controls in the navigation panel above.)

Ilya gets into (and the comments further explore) questions like whether the Federation was socialistic (and during which period), while commenters raise the issue of just how the presence of technological replicators affects — perhaps even eliminates the meaning of — the Federation’s (or perhaps just humanity’s within it) economy.

Going in a completely different direction, however, this time I’d like to explore the applicability and consequences of a statement that Ilya made (in the context of making an analogy between it and the Federation), having to do with the ancient “Athenian Empire,” otherwise known as the Delian League.  As Ilya asserted in that piece:  “As long as the allies paid their tribute, Athens mostly left them alone and did not try to influence their domestic policies.”

I suggest this wasn’t true.  On the contrary, Oxford professor of ancient history G. H. Stevenson wrote a book with the (seemingly boring) title Roman Provincial Administration (which actually was very interesting), in the first chapter of which a striking comparison between the Athenian Empire (aka Delian League) and the Roman Empire (including the Republic) is made.  Stevenson writes: ¹

At a time when Rome was an obscure Italian city an attempt had been made by Athens, the most brilliant city-state of antiquity, to found an empire in the Aegean, and to extend it as far west as Sicily.  No state in history may seem to have been so well qualified as fifth-century Athens to embark on a career of Imperialism.  Her efforts had been largely responsible for saving Greece from incorporation in the Persian Empire.  She represented the best qualities of the Greek race, and counted among her citizens men of the highest intellectual and military ability.

But her attempt to found an empire was unsuccessful.  Though no one cause can be given for her failure, it must in the main be attributed to the fact that she was merely one city state among others.  So long as each Greek city was content with nothing less than complete autonomy no political union which aspired at creating more than a system of alliances was possible.  The cause of the failure of Athens was not so much that she was a democracy, as Cleon said in the speech attributed to him by Thucydides, as that she was a city state.  Oligarchical Sparta was even less successful than democratic Athens in uniting the Greeks under her leadership.

Athens and Sparta alike were unable to refrain from an interference in the internal affairs of Greek states which even the smallest of them bitterly resented.  Athens favoured the democratic parties against the oligarchs, and sometimes even imposed a democratic constitution on her so-called “allies.”  She deprived the local courts of much of their power, and insisted that important cases should be tried at Athens.  Finally, the tribute, which at first had been willingly paid as a contribution to the defence of Greece against Persia, came to be regarded as an imposition when peace was made with Persia and the revenues of the League were expended on the beautification of the Acropolis or on a war with Sparta with which many of the allies felt that they had little concern.
 

As a result, Athens’ empire possessed little inherent cohesion and staying power, and when push came to shove, it simply fell apart.

Contrast that (as Stevenson does) with the Roman experience, where first under the Republic the Italian allied cities of Rome were granted full membership together with autonomy within the Roman State.  (Those Italian “allies” actually went to war against Rome — in the so-called “Social War” of 90-89 b.c. — in order to obtain, not their independence, but to force Rome to admit them into the Roman State!  And they won, or rather lost, whereupon the Republic did ultimately admit them, as autonomous cities, into full-fledged inclusion within Rome.)

During the Empire, this autonomy principle was extended further across the whole empire (without necessarily including Roman citizenship — rather, each city-state possessed its own citizenship), to such an extent that Edward Togo Salmon (Professor of History at McMaster University) could write, in Encyclopædia Britannica’s article “Rome, Ancient”: ²

In the empire at large, Flavians and Antonines, like the better Julio-Claudians, aimed at stability in order that its inhabitants might live in security and self-respect.  In this they largely succeeded.  Gibbon’s famous description of the 2nd century as the period when men were happiest and most prosperous is not entirely false.  […]

The empire was a vast congeries of peoples and races with differing religions, customs, and languages, and the emperors were content to let them live their own lives.  Imperial policy favoured a veneer of common culture transcending ethnic differences, but there was no deliberate denationalization.  Ambitious men striving for a career naturally found it helpful, if not necessary, to become Roman in bearing and conduct and perhaps even in language as well (although speakers of Greek often rose to exalted positions).  But local self-government was the general rule, and neither Latin nor Roman ways were imposed on the communities composing the empire.  […]

Where possible, the emperors kept direct administration from Rome to a minimum (except perhaps in Egypt), and the 2nd century was the most flourishing period of urban civilization that the empire ever knew.  […]  It is impossible not to be impressed by the spectacle of the Roman Empire in its 2nd-century heyday, with its panorama of splendid and autonomous communities.
 

Thus we see an origin, perhaps, for the radically differing trajectories of Rome and Athens in history.
 
 

¹ G. H. Stevenson (Fellow and Praelector in Ancient History, University College, Oxford), Roman Provincial Administration, G. E. Stechert & Co., New York, 1939; pp. 4-5.

² Edward Togo Salmon (d. 1988; Messecar Professor of History, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 1954-73; author of A History of the Roman World from 30 b.c. to a.d. 138), “Rome, Ancient,” Section IV: The early Roman Empire (31 b.c.-a.d. 193), Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Edition, 1974, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago; Macropædia Vol. 15, pp. 1116-1117.

Labels: ancient Athens, ancient history, ancient Rome

Replicators in a robust capitalist economy

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Volokh Conspiracist Ilya Somin has an interesting post on the question of “How Federal is Star Trek’s Federation?”, which you can read here.  (See also my other post deriving from Ilya’s piece, which you can find here, or use up-thread/down-thread controls in the navigation panel above.)

Ilya gets into (and the comments further explore) questions like whether the Federation was socialistic (and during which period), while commenters raise the issue of just how the presence of technological replicators affects — perhaps even eliminates the meaning of — the Federation’s (or perhaps just humanity’s within it) economy.

I certainly agree with those in the thread who maintain that the mere advent of replicators per se isn’t going to eliminate economics nor an economy.  In this regard, I was surprised no one (but me) recalled perhaps the granddaddy (SF) story concerning replicators’ possible effects on a vigorous capitalist economy — to wit, Ralph Williams’ (pseudonym of Ralph W. Stone) “Business As Usual, During Alterations,” from the grand old days (1958) of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction — which delves into many of the issues considered here.

In the story an alien interstellar society decides to bring down human civilization (then at a more or less mid 20th century stage of development) — quietly, without much of a fuss, so they can simply take over — by providing humanity with several instances of a functional replicator device, capable of replicating most anything (’cepting your baby or pet), including notably the devices themselves.  In addition to brief instructions on their use, an inscription provides fair…  “Warning!  A push of the button grants your heart’s desire.  It is also a chip at the foundations of human society.  A few billion such chips will bring it crashing down.  The choice is yours.”

So, naturally, as anybody would expect, the carefree capitalist society of the West (along with the rest of the world) immediately snatches up the new technology, oblivious to all warning (and all doomsayers), replicating everything in sight.  But — funny thing — at least in the story, Western capitalist society and its economy doesn’t collapse.  Oh, it goes through major changes, the basis of the economy turning on its head in only about a day, but it survives and thrives.

As the tale goes, from within the midst of the upheaval: ¹

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, he’s right, you know, not very many people will buy beans and chuck roast, when they can eat wild rice and smoked pheasant breast.  So, you know what I’ve been thinking?  I think what we’ll have to have, instead of a supermarket, is a sort of super-delicatessen.  Just one item each of every fancy food from all over the world, thousands and thousands, all different—”

“It won’t work,” George said with weary kindness.  “That’s what I’ve just been explaining to John here.  Why should I buy my pickled hummingbird tongues from you, when I can keep a can on my own shelf and duplicate it ad nauseam?”

“Ad nauseam, that’s why,” Simond said earnestly.  “Beans, you can eat every day.  Pickled hummingbird tongues, you can’t.  You know, when we first started selling these frozen TV dinners, we ran into something funny.  The first couple of weeks, they’d go like crazy.  Then they’d die.  We’d change suppliers, same story.  Hot, then cold.  Finally, somebody got an idea.  You take the Mexican dinner, that’s a good seller, I like it myself.  You taste the first one, it’s delicious.  The next, not quite so good.  The third or fourth one, eating’s a chore, and by the tenth you can’t stand the sight of even the wrapper—”

“C rations,” I put in.

“That’s it, same thing.  The trouble is, each one is as exactly like the other as they can be made.  You eat one, you’ve had them all.  So, we passed the word to our supplier.  Now, he changes the formula every week, a little more pepper, a few less beans, a different cut of meat, so forth.  People think they are getting the same thing, but it’s just enough different to keep them coming back for more.”

“I see what you mean,” I said thoughtfully.  “In the past, we’ve sold standardization because it was a scarce commodity.  Now, the shoe is on the other foot, we’ll sell diversity.  Instead of offering the customer as choice of GE or Westinghouse refrigerator, we’ll offer a choice of any refrigerator built, anywhere—”  a sudden thought struck me.  “Damn it,” I said unhappily.  “We still can’t get away from suppliers.”

“Not only that,” George offered helpfully.  “Those samples you’re going to offer a choice of are practically all going to be hand-made models, remember that.  Also, you’re not going to get away with duplicating them for nothing.  I think you already broke the law when you duplicated the trademarks on those cartons.  Even if you didn’t, it’s not going to take much extension of present legislation to make it illegal to copy any manufactured article without paying royalty.”
 

Not bad foresight from half a century ago into the stage we’re at now, I’d say, as a result of the advent of “replicators” in the computer software, game and media industries, not to speak of such things as automobiles that one can now have built incorporating a wide variety of individually tailored options.

Also, as longtime readers of Impearls are aware, farsighted physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a terrific piece concerning the likely impact of replicators (of a kind, both mechanical and biological) in his fascinating essay “The World, The Flesh, and The Devil,” which very much rewards perusing in its own right.
 
 

UPDATE:  2007-10-07 12:00 UT:  A reader on another thread points to this site (scroll down to “The Duplicators” and “replicator”), which does mention Ralph Williams’ story.  However, they then get it fundamentally wrong (kind of like Microsoft vis-a-vis the UNIX filesystem), missing one of the major lessons of “Business As Usual, During Alterations.”

As the site asserts:  “Lacking that” (i.e., “some substance that cannot be replicated”) “there is no way to prevent either currency or cheques from being counterfeited.  Counterfeits so good they cannot be distinguished from genuine money.”

This is incorrect, as Williams insightfully realizes.  On the contrary, while currency as such immediately becomes valueless with the advent of high-quality replicators, cheques (and charge cards) do not.  As the author points out, one can already (pre-replicators) write just as many bad cheques as one wants, and still end up in prison over it — that won’t change with replicators.  Thus, in his story the entire economy flips over instantaneously to consist solely of cheques, credit card and like transactions — no cash.
 
 

¹ Ralph Williams (pseudonym of Ralph W. Stone), “Business As Usual, During Alterations,” originally published in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s (editor) Astounding Science Fiction, July 1958 [1958-07].  Reprinted in Prologue to Analog, edited by John W. Campbell, 1962, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York; pp. 230-258.

Labels: economics, replicator, science fiction

America’s strong arm, wielding the Sword of Iraq, slays the multi-headed Hydra of Al Qaeda

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On-site blogger Michael Totten’s recent piece concerning his visit to Ramadi — capital of Anbar Province in Iraq and formerly capital of Al Qaeda’s self-declared “Islamic State of Iraq” — describes the great convulsion that occurred earlier this year in that city which finally turned the people of that locale and region firmly against Al Qaeda in Iraq:

“Al Qaeda said they would mess him up if he got in their way.  He called their bluff and they seriously fucked him up.  They launched a massive attack on his area.  All hell broke loose.  They set houses on fire.  They dragged people through the streets behind pickup trucks.  A kid from his area went into town and Al Qaeda kidnapped him, tortured him, and delivered his head to the outpost in a box.  The dead kid was only sixteen years old.”  […]

“One night,” Lieutenant Markham said, “after several young people were beheaded by Al Qaeda, the mosques in the city went crazy.  The imams screamed jihad from the loudspeakers.  We went to the roof of the outpost and braced for a major assault.  Our interpreter joined us.  Hold on, he said.  They aren’t screaming jihad against us.  They are screaming jihad against the insurgents.”

“A massive anti-Al Qaeda convulsion ripped through the city,” said Captain McGee.  “The locals rose up and began killing the terrorists on their own.  They reached the tipping point where they just could not take any more.  They told us where the weapon caches were.  They pointed out IEDs under the road.”

“In mid-March,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “a sniper operating out of a house was shooting Americans and Iraqis.  Civilians broke into his house, beat the hell out of him, and turned him over to us.”  […]

“One day,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “some Al Qaeda guys on a bike showed up and asked where they could plant an IED against Americans.  They asked a random civilian because they just assumed the city was still friendly to them.  They had no idea what was happening.  The random civilian held him at gunpoint and called us to come get him.”

“People here tacitly supported Al Qaeda,” Captain McGee said, “because Al Qaeda was attacking us.  But they took control of the city.  They forced girls to stay home from school.  They dragged people outside the city and shot them in the head.  They broke people’s fingers if they were seen smoking a cigarette.  They forced men to grow beards.  Once they started acting like that they could only establish a safe haven by using terrorism against the local civilians.”

“Al Qaeda struck out three times,” said Major Peters.  “Strike One:  They killed a Sheikh and held his body for four days.  Strike Two:  They executed young people in public.  Strike Three:  They attacked the compound of another sheikh.  The people here said enough.  They aligned with us because they realized Al Qaeda was the real enemy.  They didn’t like Al Qaeda’s version of Islam at all.”
 

Read the whole thing.

Emblematic of this convulsive wholesale turning away by the people of Ramadi and Anbar Province from Al Qaeda, and their strange new alliance with the United States, Totten presents us with the above affecting drawing by an Iraqi child of Ramadi — an image of the strong arm of America symbolically wielding the Sword of Iraq to slay the evil, multi-headed Hydra of Al Qaeda….

Not a bad image with which to commemorate September 11th, and the immolation alive of 3,000 innocent folk by that same organization of Al Qaeda six years ago.

Labels: Al Qaeda, Iraq war