Nathaniel Perrin

Fifth-century BC marble relief, a physician treating a woman (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via [Getty Images](https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/09/GettyImages_122226872-799601e.jpg?quality=90&webp=true&fit=620,413))

Paul Stephenson's phenomenal, recent history *New Rome: The Empire in the East* (2022) is a salvo not to the political or demographics changes that underpinned the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as we know it in the West, but the seismic convolutions by which the Eastern Roman Empire morphed into a new beast that would live on for another millennium. It is a masterful work in its level of detail and its breadth in combining political and economic history with urban studies and theology and, interestingly enough, climate studies.

The opening chapter of his work is a meticulous exposition of the role of lead both in the climate and health of Late Antiquity, and a suitable teaser for the book at large.

It begins with the Sun.

Solar emissions vary over broad periods of time causing shifts in temperature which have shaped the course of history. Some are familiar with the "Little Ice Age" between 1645 and 1715, others with the 
"Medieval Climate Optimum" from 950 to 1250 which kicked off the ventures of the Vikings among others historical escapades. 

The Romans had their own such warm period, the "Roman Climate Optimum" between 250 BC and 400 AD. It was at the end of this period that the Mediterranean world began cooling, dramatically enough to be arguably a factor in the population decline of the period as less rain led to weaker agricultural output.

But turning from the cosmic impact of the stars upon human civilization on Earth, we can see conversely the impact of human civilization upon our earthly landscape.

Roman metallurgy was simply monstrous in its scope and volume. Arms, coins, infrastructure, smelted across the far-long reaches of Roman geography. The smoke exhaust of lead production is far from clean, and it a testament to how well-developed Roman industry was that metallic compound contamination can be found as far afield as untouched lake beds and bogs of Ireland, Sweden, and Iceland. Most remarkably, even in deep ice layers of Greenland, we have found lead traces whose origin can be traced to Spain, one such metallurgical hotspot in Late Antiquity.

Lead pollutants would rapidly decline by the fifth century, and it would not be until 1700 AD that lead pollution would reach the same levels again.

Lead is a remarkable compound in that "it is malleable and resists corrosion when in contact with air and water (12)". The heights of Rome's trademark engineering were in many ways rooted in lead construction, in columns, roofs, rain gutters, plumbing, and most especially piping.  Because of its extensive use in the artifacts and infrastructure of everyday life, we still find lead in regions of the Roman empire where no such mining or production occurred.

Yet as we know today lead is dangerous to the human organism.

The relationship between lead and the madness of Nero and Caligula has already entered popular funfactdom, but ironically the argument that Romans ingested lead through their pipes and drinking vessels is largely a myth (at least so Stephenson claims). Rather, it was intentionally mixed into sauces, medicines, and for sweetening wine. The lead pollution crept into the flora and fauna of the Roman landscape, and studies show that honey bees absorb twice as much lead as drones from the plants they harvest. The Romans loved their honey and children were most often weaned on it. Maternal lactation too transferred the lead-crusted calcium of their bones into the breast milk and consequently the bodies of their infants.

In a morbid twist, archeologists can use lead-heavy skeletons to identify Roman settlements across the world, such as in Dorset where other non-lead populations lived before and after.

The Romans of the Lead Age were remarkably shorter in stature and life span than the Romans who lived before them and the various peoples who lived after them. On average, men were 5'5" and women 5'0".

In the Eastern Roman Empire of the fifth century, life expectancy had dropped below thirty years and even in some locales as low as twenty-three. Neonatal mortality skyrocketed but was not nearly as high as those on young children who were weaned off their mothers' milk and onto lead-heavy nutrition, compounded by other poor nutritional and sanitation. In this period, up to 40% of those born would die before reaching the age of eighteen.

The bones themselves of the residents of this time speak to the various diseases and weaknesses that had defined the new standards and norms of health at this time as deformities continued to abound, skeletal and dental.

And yet they prayed for health, some resorting to magic, as life continued to get worse until a new era could slowly erase the accumulated toxins of lead, though such a process took centuries and generations.

One must consider when reading this chapter what we should think today if we were to replace the word "lead" for "plastic", how there is no intrinsic "nature will find a way" protection that will save us from poisoning ourselves to the brink of extinction, when we make our children too sickly, too weak, too decrepit to continue the human race, just because we want to feed our reckless luxuries.

The Lead Age: Climate Studies of Late Antiquity

Weber: The Vocation of Politics and Science

Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/williamcho-1724357/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2060093">Sang Hyun Cho</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2060093">Pixabay</a>

### Book Review
Gagarin, Michael. *Early Greek Law*. University of California Press: 1986.

> τόνδε γὰρ ἀνθρώποισι νόμον διέταξε Κρονίων
> ἰχθύσι μὲν καὶ θηρσὶ καὶ οἰωνοῖς πετεηνοῖς
> ἐσθέμεν ἀλλήλους, ἐπεὶ οὐ δίκη ἐστὶ μετ᾽ αὐτοῖς:
> ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἔδωκε δίκην, ἣ πολλὸν ἀρίστη
> γίγνεται:
>
> Hesiod's *Works and Days*, 276-280

### Summary

What is the nature of law in the world of classical Greece? Gagarin's monograph presents what could be considered a classicist's take on an anthropologist's question.

Classical Greece presents a unique case in the genesis of legal systems because its judiciary procedures evolved in conjunction with its writing systems, rather than before. This presents a new variant on the comparative anthrpologist's quest to abstract the development of law from oral custom, tribal observation, or purely archeological inference.

But to begin to answer this investigation, one must begin with the begged question: what is law?

H.L.A. Hart answered this by formulating an anthropological distinction between primary rules which impose obligations on the one hand and secondary rules on the other hand which govern the creation and operation of these primarily rules (most importantly rules of recognition).

This seems plausible but falls rather flat by Hart's own acknowledgement in the case of pre-literate societies. How can one speak of law in this case, especially when law often predates writing systems in many societies.

Gagarin would contend that preliterate law primarily originates in the peaceful settlement of disputes and establishing proper redress for violations between private parties.

This paradigm would solve the problem of how a law could be broken if it does not exist, as violations and suits can easily be brought against another party without some pre-established rule to govern the dispute.

This is further supported by legal realists such as Dworkin who point out that Hart's theory is based on a positivistic assumption that cases are universally determined on formalized laws, when it is clear that these laws may not exist.

And if this dispute resolution is understood as the basis of law, this does not consist of the peaceful resolution between two private parties exclusively but rather depends on the mediation of a third "public" figure to adjudicate between the two.

This suggests a three stage model in which originally no laws exist at all, then voluntary procedures were developed to provide conflict meditation, before finally compulsory rules were established to which all private parties are subject.


We can trace the beginnings of law in this sense to Herodotus 1.96-98 where he describes Deicoes the first king of the Medes.

Deioces allegedly was a zealous practitioner of justice (*dikaiosyne*) in the midst of lawlessness (*anomie*). Because of the turmoil among the Medes, Deioces was called upon to adjudicate in a wide range of disputes because of his profound reputation for relentlessly straight (*ithys*) and just (*dikaios*) rulings.

This was the nature of his kingship, as a judicial magistrate between voluntary disputants. By no means was Deicoes a lawgiver who recorded, implemented, and enforced legal codes but merely a decision maker in the settling of disputes.

Of course Herodotus "state of nature" story may in fact be more mythical than factual, but one finds convincingly strong parallels in Homer and Hesiod as well.

Hesiod remarks how one of the primary blessings of the Muses is the ability for a king to soothe conflict in the public agora (*Theogeny* 84-90). He also points to this as one of the distinguishing traits that elevates humans above beasts, the ability to have a law without crookedness (i.e. straight) that can rule fairly regardless of personal inclination or prejudice (*Works and Days* 27-39, 276-280).

In Homer, we see this in the famous *ekphrasis* of Achilles shield where two litigants submit their dispute for arbitration in a public forum (*Iliad* 18.497-508), in Minos' disputes over the dead (*Odyssey* 11.568-571), the contest over the arms of Achilles (*Odyssey* 11.543-551), and the chariot race dispute between Antilochus and Menelaus in *Iliad* 23.

Across these literary examples that look back upon previous generations, we see several common themes. The dispute is voluntarily submitted before a judge, generally holding a scepter. Each disputant believing themselves having a valid case accept the decision that will be made by this judge. The dispute is voiced publicly, and often redress of property and/or honor is expected in the settlement of this dispute.

What is key, as we see in Herodotus and Hesiod, is that the judge is known to be straight (*ithys*) in their decisions, not unfairly weighed by factors of blood, prestige, fear, or personal gain.

In the generations that followed, Aristotle describes how early *thesmothetai* recorded their judicial decisions as precedents that could be referenced in future disputes, though these magistrates maintained full authority to judge as they saw fit.

In the historical evidence, we see the emergence of written law across the city states by the mid seventh century BC, most notably by Zaleucus in Epizephyrian Locri around 662 BC and in Cretan Dreros a few decades after that.

These written laws were *public* inscriptions that are notably not privately guarded in secretive law codes as one may find in Mesopotamia but rather positioned in the public forum for all to see.

They certainly were not comprehensive legal codes in a modern sense which established moral codes of conduct nor a constitution (*politeia*) which defined the system of government, but were primarily legal procedures.

Draco established a new trends through his *axones* that did establish these rules in some sense which went one step beyond a record of decision (*thesmion*) which the earliest judges recorded, something Aristotle describes in *Athenian Politics* 16.10.

These laws generally fell into categories of (1) tort, such as Draco's homicide law, (2) family law which governed matters of marriage between relatives, inheritance, or adoption, (3) public law such as Solon's legislation which dealt with exports, land sales, and even who was required to dig their own private wells, and (4) procedural law which Gagarin argues is the lynchpin of the evolution of law as a whole.

To the last of these, we can turn to Solon specifically, and what Aristotle refers to as his three chief "democratic reforms" (*Athenian Politics* 9.1):

(1) the prohibition of debts as a surety on one's own body
(2) the right to seek legal redress on behalf of an injured party (even if someone else)
(3) the appeal (*ephesis*) to popular law courts as a decision maker

*Ephesis* is the method of prosecution by *graphe* an innovation which is unique in that it no longer requires that only the injured party may seek redress but allows any member of the polity to bring suit against an alleged perpretator for a crime.

Beyond what Aristotle describes, Gagarin also points to Solon's institution of the *dike exoules* as an important reform which attempted to respond to the problem of legal enforcement. Since Athens lacked a police force or other group that could enforce the legal decision on behalf of the *polis*, thus leaving enforcement up to private means, the *dike exoules* legitimated the doubling of a fine or redress by which the sum of the unpaid amount would also be owed to the public treasury, thus providing a mechanism for an injured party to seek help in acquiring the redress.

These written laws were not simply a recapitulation of unwritten traditional customs but true innovations that additionally also set fixed penalties for particular kinds of violations. By stipulating fixed punishments, this curtailed the sole discretionary power of the magistrates who could ostensibly abuse their position with overly punitive measures. Fixed penalties thus transitioned judiciary authority in part from magistrate authority to a written code that existed independent of figures like a Deioces.

This gradual restricting of magisterial authority seems to manifest itself also in the inscriptional evidence by which public inscriptions held magistrates accountable to a public code in their judicial decisions.

What could then ask what the early Greeks thought of justice (*dike*) in a practical, legal sense that is abstracted of the theological connotations of mythological poetry on the one hand and before it was imbued with philosophical significance by philosophers such as Plato on the other.

This generation of Greeks were not concerned with the question "What is justice?" but rather how justice operates.

And we perhaps see this best defined as the peaceful resolution of conflict between private parties.

Take for example the chariot race dispute in *Iliad* 23 where Antilochus pulls off a dangerous maneouvre to slip past Menelaus and thus acquire the second-place position in the race. Menelaus is offended because his horses are swifter and he is the better racer, so he feels that he should receive the second-place prize instead of the upstart Antilochus. It would be a stain upon Menelaus' honor (*arete*) to receive a lower ranked prize.

This contest is resolved by Antilochus' verbal acknowledgement that Menelaus truly is the better racer of the two who deserves second place, but he himself is granted the second-place prize. Both parties accept this as resolution of what could potentially devolve into a violent conflict.

A failure of this dispute resolution mechanism can be seen in the opening of the *Iliad* where Agamemnon and Achilles fail to have their dispute over Briseis resolved, though it does not escalate into a physical contest of violence. The implicit resolution of this conflict is that Achilles receives the greater honor for his role in the Trojan conflict through the poem whereas Agamemnon receives far less heroic a portrait in how the events play out.

This is not to say peaceful resolution was viewed as the exclusive option. Odysseus' vengeance on the suitors is a clear rejection of peaceful arbitration as his prerogative. But nonetheless, the Greeks did seem to prefer peaceful resolution to conflict over violent competition when possible, such as in the *Odyssey*'s negative assessment of the race of the Cyclopes as they had neither councils (*agorai*) nor judgments (*themistes*).

But at what point did a policy of voluntary legal arbitration transform into a compulsory, mandatory resolution for disputes? Gagarin argues Draco's homicide law was the gateway for this development.

Draco's law stipulated that once a murderer was identified by the victim's family, the murderer had three options. (1) They could choose to go live in exile and thus implicitly acknowledge guilt. (2) They could submit to trial and be provided with protection by the *polis* from private revenge parties. Or (3) they could ignore this proclamation of guilt which meant the victim's family or the *polis* had free license to kill or arrest (*apagoge*) the perpetrator, even in public or sacred spaces.

It is not clear if this law was carried out on these terms or enforced because it does seem rather complex, and Athens lacked a formal police force that could carry out an arrest.

However, this homicide law remains a significant innovation because it is the first formally codified mechanism whereby an individual could be compelled to be tried in a public, legal setting so as to avoid exile or death. A precedent which would only expand over the years.

Thus, *apagoge*, *graphe*, *eisangelia*, and *episkepsis* (the formal notification of intent to prosecute) provided new procedures by which access to legal courts were expanded to the broader public.

On the question of written law, scholars have offered several theories to explain how it developed, none of which Gagarin finds persuasive. One view contends that written law was a democratic innovation to prevent abuses by aristocratic governments, yet this would assume the people believed there was a prior, secret oral law that was already codified but merely needed to be transcribed to writing.

Another view in a similar vein argues this was intended as a check on tyrants. Yet there is little evidence to support this and it seems that many lawgivers who created these written laws were also tyrants. Even the tyrant Pisistratus inherited the laws of Solon and Draco without any indication of overturning them.

A third view contends that written law was a cultural import from the Near East. Yet Gagarin contests there is no evidence beyond coincidental timing to suggest any influence between the two, particularly as the two kinds of legal codes remain so structurally dissimilar. Furthermore, there is little else that seems to have been imported from the Near East.

A fourth view suggests written law was developed to support the needs of colonization and establish a law code common to both parent cities and their colonies. This seems logically plausible, but the historical evidence indicates that the earliest written laws were not developed in colonies at all, and when colonies did adopt written, it was far later than their parent cities.

Gagarin believes that the rapid growth of cities across the Greek peninsula created a considerable level of social and political friction, and written law was implemented as a solution to the requirements of scaling legal and judicial decisions.

As a result, these laws propagated by Solon and other reformers brought about a considerably increased level of political control over families and households. Whereas before all matters were sorted privately through mediation or violence, the *polis* became an orchestrating agent in offering a public space for those seeking conflict resolution.

This is a powerful tool to possess, and it is this set of legal protections which perhaps partially gave birth to the initial incentives of citizenship.

Some like Geoffrey Lloyd have argued that the Greek *polis* was so unique and fertile in its cultural, artistic, and scientific output because of the special nature of its political institutions which lend themselves to openness and democratization.

However this would not explain why despotic Greek governments were also so fruitful, and Gagarin would contend that it is rather the unique development of Greek jurisprudence and its mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution which played such a crucial role.

Writing was not universally a tool for democratization nor for despotic oppression, as it served a variety of functions on a case-by-case basis across the Greek city-states. What can be generally said about written law is that it reduced the discretionary power of magistrates and increased the role of public forces and opinion in conflict resolution.

When interpretation of the written law and words and arguments play such a critical lynchpin in the functioning of the social order, it is no wonder that the Greek mind would be so uniquely fascinated with the investigation, exploration, and uncovering of all matter and phenomena.

### Thoughts

As an amateur classicist at best, I find Gagarin's study to be a richly original analysis with a fresh angle in an area of scholarship often bogged with scholarly perspectives so frequently repeated they grow stale and uninteresting.

The monograph itself may have problems with organization. The presentation alternates between a historical presentation of evidence at times on the one hand with a topical analysis on the other which leads to the uneven recapitulation of previous quotations and evidence.

The observations of the introduction and closing chapters don't quite align, and the depth of evidential analysis seems to level off considerably. For example, the Homeric Hymns and Aeschylus are cited once in the second chapter, yet Greek drama nor other facets of the larger Greek canon are mentioned again.

That being said, Gagarin's work does prove exceedingly useful in considering the general abstractions of "what is law?" within the historically concrete context of classical Greece. All the more so as the history of Western law tends to give almost exclusionary focus to Roman law as a starting point.

I was also deeply intrigued by the implications of the symbiotic relationship of writing and procedural law, particularly as a foundation for a broader analysis of the nature of the "public forum" in the Greek context.

Aside from that, I found it simultaneously intuitive and yet radically alien to frame the origin of law within the context of dispute resolution, something traced back to the very first book of the *Iliad*.

Perhaps this is due in part, as Marx has noted, to the general historical trend by which the state has expropriated power from the private family, most especially the right-to-violence.

Yet it also serves as a double reminder, both how a working legal system is a protection from unrelenting violence, but also how the surrendering of a right-to-violence entails a surrendering of one's fate to a court authority, no matter how hostile such judges may be to you as a litigant.

Hence the eternal risk of the show-trials which emerge in ages of heightened societal frenzy such as in the French Revolution or the Soviet era. A false parading of "public" due process that is only meant to certify predetermined outcomes and ill-will.

It is because of this that the neutrality of the judicial system is of the utmost importance, particularly in heavily legally-driven societies such as modern America.

And the key evaluation of such neutrality is, as Hesiod describes, straightness (*ithys*) of the judge's ruling. They do not rely on crooked words but establish a fair decision with full firmness. They are not turned to left or right by prejudice, ideology, personal incentives, or anything extraneous to the dispute at hand.

It is this trait alone in the Greek imagination that separates civilization from the feuding, barbarian hordes, or the beasts of the field. It is a fragile thing, this thing called justice, and we should not take it for granted in this age or any other, when law itself comes under question.

The Origins of Western Law: Early Greek Jurisprudence

Photo by [Rana Obaid](https://www.behance.net/robaid).

Science fiction is a genre with a unique capacity to encompass the wide panorama of the highs and lows of human writing. The most elaborate and imaginative scenarios on the one and and some of the flattest, most contrived characters and dialogue on the other, often within the same book. *Dune* being a classic example of this.

I had a science fiction phase in younger times, primarily characterized by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov.

It is a phase I have long since departed, and my reading journeys have taken me to many places since then. Only recently have I returned to this genre which so pricked my interest as a child. First through Houellebecq a few years ago then through Liu Cixin's *Remembrance of Earth's Past* trilogy, one of the most thoughtful blendings of Clarke and Asimov's imagingings of the distant future.

Now as I read through Jack Vance's tetralogy *Tales of the Dying Earth*, I am rediscovering a new aspect to the world of science fiction.

One expects early-mid century science fiction to be rather pulpy, so I was quite astounded by the masterful quality of Vance's work, particularly his firm grasp of human nature and the cycles of history in his sharply paced prose. His psychological analysis is fathoms deeper than the engineer-brain characters of Asimov and those who primarily write people to be the levers of their logic puzzle stories with near-zero interiority.

Vance's outlook carries a heavy weight of cosmic dread that few writers can properly convey. The feeling that the world, or at least the human race is old and dying, that there is no future, at least one worth speaking of.

When each layer of the cosmos has been tarnished from the home to the village to the city to the kingdom to the world to the fields to the trees to the waters to the very air itself. When the human organism itself is disintegrating either through mental decay or reproductive sterility. The world itself is tired and weary.

These physical, tangible displays being symptoms of a deeper spiritual, world-bound sterility and lifelessness. That we are are all bound on a ship destined for annihilation within the next generation or two. 

This is dying earth literature. One may call it melancholic romanticism. The Germans aptly call the root of its feeling *Weltschmerz*. And it is this subgenre and a foray into its history that has compelled me to gather these thoughts here.


## Le Dernier Homme

A genealogy of dying Earth literature can take many paths. Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, and H.G. Wells's *Time Machine* were certainly definitive shapers of the genre. But if you trace the strands further and further back, you arrive at the very first modern work of dying earth literature with Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's *Le dernier homme* (1805).

De Grainville (1746 - 1805) was not a professional writer, nor in fact do we have any other writings from him except the manuscript for *Le Dernier Homme* which he wrote after leaving the priesthood during the French Revolution and was only published after he committed suicide.

*Le Dernier Homme* takes its cue from Milton's cosmic epic *Paradise Lost*. As Milton explored the mythology of the first human couple Adam and Eve, de Grainville regaled a prose romance of the adventures of Omegarus and Syderie, the last human couple. It is a fascinating universe that blends Greek tragedy, biblical apocalypticism, and environmental despair.

## The Frame Narrative

The narrative opens in the (18th century) present day as the French explorer narrative explores a cavern of the dead in Syria. These ruins belong to the Palmyrene Empire, a clever little nod for the reader.

The Palmyrene Empire was a short-lived breakaway state that emerged and fell during the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), a political crisis which almost permanently disintegrated the Roman Empire. A proper analogue to the chaos of the French Revolutionary era as well as to this end of world scenario where the greatest empires of the world are crumbling into seeming oblivion.

Inside this cavern, the narrator is enraptured in a vision of the style of Revelation including graphic imagery such as an old man whose shoulders are mutilated and bloodied wings lie at his feet.

In this vision, the narrator is told that the last man will have no posterity to honor his sufferings, to sing of his trouble, to commemorate his spirit. The language of epic is deeply concerned with rendering proper honor to its subjects so that all descendants may properly honor the deeds of Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf et al.

The task of the epic's audience is to hear and remember these stories, and thus carry on the memory. But if there is no audience that lives after the hero, then who is there to remember his deeds?

Their deeds must be retrojected back into the past, through an apocalyptic vision of the future so that those in the past may remember what is to come. A vision in the style of Revelation.

And so as if speaking to a muse, the narrator invokes Omegarus and Syderie to inspire his spirit, so that he may sing of their lives.

## Punished Adam

The inner story begins with an extremely aged man head bowed low equally from age as from the suffering he endures. This ancient patriarch is none other than Adam himself who still lives. As punishment for his original sin, Adam is forced to stand and watch for millennia as every single one of his children enters the gaping mouth of Hell and witnesses the torment they must endure. 

Though Adam sings of the beauty of creation and the life of the world which after all these years has not grown lost on him, he simply cannot bear to witness the eternal torment of all his children.

It is a weight that has crushed his spirit so completely that he no longer even feels any desire, even for this punishment to end.

It is a punishment reminiscent of Prometheus or other Greek figures such as Sisyphus who must endure endless cycles of their particular torment through the end of time.

But at this moment the angel Ithuriel (an angel likely coined by Milton and only appears in Book IV of *Paradise Lost*) arrives and announces the end of Adam's punishment.

The Almighty Most High has ordained that the human race must be brought to an end, and as no more new humans can enter Hell, Adam will be released from his punishment, but so long as he can assist in God's mission to extinguish the human race.

Adam whose misery has been so great is grateful for the chance to assist in this annihilation as he has no wish to see any more of his children created only so that they may be bound to eternal torment, if this is the only way that both he and his race may be freed.

Ithuriel transports Adam to late France where Adam immediately observes how desolate the land has become. All greenery has been stripped to barren rock. The trees have degenerated into moribund, white bark. Though there are no clouds in sight, even the sun itself casts a pale, eerie light on the world as if it were a gloomy day. Though the season is summer, the landscapes looks worse than winter.

It is from this strikingly modern environmental despair that Adam receives interior inspiration (*lumière intérieure*) that he must start a global revolution that will annihilate the human race.

And so he sets off to visit Omegarus, as Ithuriel had directed him.

## The Tale of Omegarus

What Adam soon comes to learn is that the human race has already been bound toward destruction for many years now. He arrives at the palace of Omegarus and his young wife Syderie. Omegarus greets Adam lavishly and relates to him his own tale of the state of the world and how he found his own wife in these last years.

In this world, human fertility has dropped to zero and no one has been able to reproduce for decades now (the same scenario as in *Children of Men*). The earth grew deserted and depeopled. As Europe grew sterile, so too the climate degenerated, forcing people to live increasingly remote and separated as the land could only support a few in any given place.

Omegarus was born a miracle child to the king of France in this sterile world to the king of France. The first child in twenty years.

The whole realm celebrated Omegarus' birth with manic fervor, crowding the capital city, all hoping just to touch this messianic child. The Savior, the child who will be the father of a new race.

As Omegarus himself puts it, "I remained the only [unique] son in the agedness [vieillesse] of the Europeans."

France had reverted to a Greco-Roman style where classical temples had been erected to Yahweh and sacrifices made to restore the human race, to bring hope again. Some in these times were religiously seized by the hope that Omegarus would be God's instrument of this change, others had no hope or belief in God and wished merely to waste away in hedonism.

Still the faithful prayed.

But a young man cannot continue the race alone. Omegarus recounts his childhood, the training and education he received, how he had been prepared to lead and propagate a new human race.

But there was no woman for him.

"L’ennui me consumoit lentement, et ma jeunesse se fletrissoit". Ennui, that French term which cannot be reduced merely to boredom as it covers the feelings of isolation, dissatisfaction, loneliness, the sense that you simply do not belong, and there is nothing for you. This ennui slowly consumed Omegarus, and his youth withered. The seed slowly matured with no hope of fulfillment.

One day Omegarus is told he is must visit the sage Idamas who lives in the Rouen (the city where Joan of Arc died) who has had visions of the end of the world and where Omegarus may find a bride able to conceive.

Omegarus travels to Rouen, on the way hosted by Policlète et Céphise. Céphise is the second youngest human who remains, but who is now middle-aged. She recounts the birth of Omegarus when she herself was twenty years old, "You were to be, they said, the savior of the world". How all these years she has prayed for him How she holds on to a steadfast hope, even now as she herself enters the age of menopause, that Omegarus will save them all and found a new race.

The monologue is surprisingly touching and heartfelt, to see such genuine hope and tears for such a gripping world crisis. Especially for a generation such as ours so jaded and corroded by irony that it is unable to express itself as earnestly as we see here.

The sage Idamas himself lives in a "madness", gripped by a manic hope that the human race will be reborn, through his countless sleepless nights of prayer. He believes that God has spoken to him of the Earth's rejuvenation through his instrument Omegarus. 

He adjures Omegarus and his party to join him on a tour of the world, to find the chosen bride for God's mission.

They travel to the capital of Normandy where a great, golden airship awaits them for this voyage. A ship which can travel over any sea and trespass any mountain. An airships whose sides were painted with elaborate historical and apocalyptic scenes, so perfect "that all the characters seemed to live and breathe".

Image of earthquakes and abysses. Of the battles of legions of angels whose slaughter and carnage is so great that their blood has reddened the trees beneath this aeriel confrontation.

It is on this ship that Omegarus embarks to begin his journey.

To be continued...

Omegarus: The Last Man


Easter marks one of the two high points of the church calendar. As Christmas celebrates the advent and birth of the Messiah, so does Easter commemorate his death and resurrection. And yet Easter is one of those odd holidays that moves around each year seemingly by the arbitrary hand of some higher power.

What is not so commonly known today is that the date of Easter proved to be the subject of bitter, and sometimes violent debate in the history of the church, with implications both political and cultural.

## Etymology

But first an etymology.

As most know, Easter is the Christian reinvention of the Jewish holiday of Passover (פֶּסַח - Pesach). Passover was instituted in Exodus 12 at the culmination of the Ten Plagues in Egypt where the angel of death would pass over the households of Egypt and slaughter the firstborn of each household, except for those households of Israel who painted lamb's blood upon the doorway. This symbolizes not only the fulfillment of liberation of slavery but also protection from death through the blood of an innocent sacrifice.

The parallels with Christ's sacrifice are striking, and it is not without reason that it was ordained that Christ was tried and put to death on Passover weekend.

The Hebrew name of Pesach was thus used to refer to the celebration and for most Western languages continues to be used so today.

The Greeks transliterated it into Πάσχα and the Romans carried the name into Latin as *Pascha*.

This name for Easter is maintained in modern Romance languages as Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and Pasqua in Italian.

Even many Germanic languages have maintained this name with Dutch using Pasen and Swedish using Påsk.

Strangely, English and German are the two outliers which do not use the same "Passover" name for Easter.

For English, we first see reference to this Easter name in the chronicler Bede's *De Temporum* (725) where Bede refers to the Saxon name for what we call April as "Eosturmonath". He claims that the name "Eostur" refers to the ancient Saxon goddess "Eostre". This seems plausible at first sight as so many of our months and day names come from Germanic pagan deities. However, there simply is no other reference to or mention of this goddess in any other literature or archeological sources. It is completely possible that Bede merely speculates on this.

Another possible explanation is that Easter occurs around the time of the spring equinox. Because spring equinox festivities generally focus on longer daylight hours and earlier sunrises, and the sun rises in the East, the name is merely a reference to this. Like how the date of Christmas is tied to winter solstice festivals. This idea can be corroborated with a comparison to German who call the holiday *Ostern* and East *Ost*, both from the High German word *ōstarun*. 

## The First Easter Controversy - Quartodecimanism

The first Easter controversy emerged very early on in the history of Christianity, during the apostolic generation, and was concerned with the question whether the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection should happen on the day of his death (the Passover) or on the Sunday of his resurrection. Those who pushed for the Passover date were referred to as Quartodecimanism, because Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth (*quarta decima*) of the Jewish month Nisan.

The very first mention of Easter as a holiday in fact comes from the 2nd century when Melito of Sardis wrote an essay "On the Pascha" arguing for this Passover celebration date. The Western tradition, the generation following the apostolic ministry of Peter and Paul tended toward the Sunday celebration while Eastern Christians following the Apostle John tended toward the Friday date.

It became such a tenuous issue that Eusebius attests (V.23-24) the early church father Polycarp traveled from Anatolia to Rome in part to hold discussions with his Western counterparts on this Easter date issue. However, at the time they decided to practice their customs separately but remain reconciled within a single faith.

At a high level, the issue boils down to questions of theme and identity.

The first few generations of Christianity struggled to establish itself as an independent faith not attached to Judaism. Many external writers of the time referred to Christianity as a Jewish sect (as there were many), and even within the first generation Christ-followers would attend synagogue in cities where there was no establish presence.

This led to an internal tension within Christian communities as to the degree to which Christianity should be a Jewish faith. This is a large theme in the Pauline epistles, as he strove to disconnect Christian practice from "Judaizing" influence which he argued re-introduced legalism that undermined the very core of Christian doctrine.

By celebrating Easter in the same way as the Jewish faith, Christianity seemed to merely be a subset of Judaism.

On the other hand, other Christians felt it extremely important to reclaim the theme of Passover and definitively state that Christ's death is a repetition of the original Jewish Passover tradition. To disconnect the holiday from this historic event was to undermine the definitive theological connection between the two and also to deny that Christ was reclaiming and reinventing the Passover tradition through the new covenant, as much of the Christian tradition frames itself as a new iteration against the old version of Judaism.

Eventually, this conflict came to a head by the close of the 2nd century as several synods were convened to rule on the question of the date of Easter. As Eusebius recounts, these synods ruled that Sunday would be the official day of Easter, placing greater emphasis on the resurrection of Christ and his triumph over death as the real essence of the holiday.

Those who remained stoutly in favor of Quartodecimanism such as Polycrates of Ephesus were briefly excommunicated by Pope Victor I until other Western bishops such as Irenaeus pressed the Pope to re-admit Quartodecimans. We have other testimonies of others like John Chrysostom simply denying Quartodecimans admittance to church at all. This was an issue not taken lightly.

What is not clear after is what point Christians all shifted to celebrating the Easter date on Sunday, though we do know this was very nearly universally adopted following the Council of Nicaea if not before then. However, Nicaea was itself concerned with another aspect of the Easter controversy.

## The Second Easter Controversy - Jewish or Roman Calendar

So it had been established by the end of the second century that doctrinally at least Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the issue as there were different calendars at play here.

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, consisting of 29-30 days each month, with an extra lunar month added each year to average out the days.

By contrast, the Julian calendar introudced by Julius Caesar is a purely solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year.

So while Christians were agreed that Easter would fall upon the "Sunday" following Passover, it was not definitively clear whether this meant adherence to the Jewish calendar for reckoning the date of Passover or if some corollary date in the Roman calendar should be used.

This again sparked dispute and debate depending on the apostolic heritage of various church communities.

In fact, it was of such significance that it was a primary point of discussion during the first ecumenical council of Nicaea which is known today for "writing the book" on core Christian doctrine across various branches and denominations, with regard to the divine and human nature of Christ, and other key theological questions.

Emperor Constantine I took more executive action in this decision and ruled that the date of Easter simply could not be celebrated according to the Jewish calendar because that meant that there would be some years in the Roman calendar where Easter would be celebrated twice.

It was determined that Easter should be celebrated **on the first Sunday after the first full moon following spring equinox** and that decision in 325 AD is how we still determine the date of Easter today. This was based on the Alexandrian method of measuring years, as Alexandria was one of the largest scientific centers of the period and was seen as most precise in calculating time. This ensured that Easter would follow a 19-year cycle before it was celebrated on the same day again, as it continues to this day.


## The Third Easter Controversy - Ireland versus Rome

However, this did not mark the end of Easter's controversies, as trouble reared its head again a few centuries later.

This third one originates with St. Patrick, whose own festival is just now behind us. While we generally picture the spread of Christianity across early medieval Europe as the emanation of concentric circles going from France to England and Germany and from there to Scandinavia and Poland, etc. there are exceptions to this rule.

Ireland is one such exception as one extremely early adopter of Christianity for the region, especially as it was never occupied or controlled by the Romans. St. Patrick is notable for establishing one of the only centers of Christianity north of Mediterranean that was so completely independent of Rome.

Because Ireland was such as an early adopter, Irish missionaries would cross the Irish Sea to evangelize peoples of England. We even have the Irish monk Columbanus traveling to modern-day Belgium as a missionary and founding one of the most popular centers of monastic learning and teaching on the European continent, Luxeuil Abbey in France and Bobbio Abbey in Italy being among them.

On the other hand, we have the famous missionary St. Augustine (no connection to *Confessions* Augustine, the bishop of Hippo) who was sent from Rome to evangelize England. Because of this there were two separate Christian influences in Saxon England, the Celtic and the Roman strain.

This was not problematic earlier on as they shared the common goal of converting pagans on the British Isles to Christianity. However as paganism began to disappear from English shores, the cultural tensions between the Celtic and Roman variants became more pronounced, as is only natural when two cultures come in contact with one another.

Ironically, the one single issue which was the breaking point between these two Christian elements was the date of Easter.

Because Ireland never had a Roman presence, it never had adopted the Roman calendar. Irish monks at the isle of Iona had adopted the practice of celebrating Easter on an 84-year cycle which had been the general practice in Celtic Gaul and even for some Romans prior to the Council of Nicaea. However, this clashed with the 19-year cycle ruling established by the Council of Nicaea.

This proved one of the most politically significant disputes in the episodes of Easter controversies as bishops, priests, and even political appointees were chosen, passed over, dismissed, and even exiled based on their positions on this issue in medieval English lands.

The most notable of these situations involves the kingdom of Northumbria, in Northern England today. While Roman Christianity had gained a strong foothold in Northumbria, a man named Oswald gained the throne in 633, and he was incidentally educated and raised in part by Irish monks. Oswald invited many Irish monks to positions of prestige and influence in his kingdom, and he was one of the most proactive rulers of Northumbria to promote a general conversion to Christinaity.

Following Oswald's death, Oswiu came to power in Northumbria which had grown very largely divided between Celtic and Roman Christianity. The issue of the date of Easter was coming to a head not only because it proved logistically challenging for lords to arrange feast days in mixed communities, but also because it was an indicator of which side possessed true hegemony, and neither side wished to back down.

To resolve this, Oswiu called the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD to rule once and for all on this date of Easter question. The other prime issue of this synod was whether monks were to shave their heads (tonsure) in the Irish or Roman style. After long and tenuous debate, it was ruled that Northumbria would align itself with Roman Catholicism on both issues. By all accounts, Oswiu merely attended and presided over the synod without intervening directly, but this was also politically convenient for him to align himself with Roman Christianity as it gave him more leverage to wage war against the Britons to the West and the Scottish peoples of the North who were more Celtic than Roman.

In either case, this synod incidentally spelled the beginning of the end for Celtic Christianity as a cultural hegemon as the major English kingdom of Northumbria swung to the side of Rome, and over time all of the British Isles would slowly align themselves to Roman Catholicism for the following centuries until the Reformation came nearly a millennium following the Synod of Whitby.

## The Date of Easter Today

One would think the matter definitively settled by this age, considering how many controversies have existed over the date of Easter.

However, many Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different day than Western churches. Again this boils down to the divergence of calendars.

The Julian calendar was the universal Christian calendar for quite some time, but it is not the calendar we use today.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, the central pope of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, also implemented a new reformed calendar that added precision to the Julian Calendar. This Gregorian Calendar added exceptions to leap years in order to keep the calendar better aligned with the solar cycle. For the Gregorian Calendar, leap years would be celebrated every four years except on a century year unless that century year was divisible by 400. So for example while 1600 and 2000 were leap years, the years 1800 and 1900 were not. 2100 will also not be a leap year.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was very gradual and unique to each country, but it was adopted across the British Empire in 1752 when a few days were "erased" from history. This also is one of the last British reforms to have taken root in colonial America before the American Revolution severed ties between the two states.

So while the Western world today celebrates Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, the Eastern Orthodox church uses the original Julian calendar and Alexandrian method as ruled by the Council of Nicaea. However, with the Western and Eastern churches already split by the time of this divergence, there was no need for further controversy.

--

One cannot help but reflect that this was certainly was one of Christ's chief concerns when he died on the cross and rose again, and one can only hope that Heaven is keeping its calendar in line with ours, lest there should prove to be a Fourth Easter Controversy when Christ returns and there is a calendar desync between the new heavens and new earth.

The Easter Controversy (x3)

[Photo by Sebastian Voortman.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-white-concrete-statues-covered-by-dust-566641/)

*I wrote this originally five years ago for a former iteration of this blog.*

> the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
> excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
> o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
> with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
> me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
> What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
> how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
> express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
> in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
> world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
> what is this quintessence of dust? - Hamlet

It is hard to write about a human condition. Single line platitudes invariably fall into some mixture of sentimental contrivance and egregious myopia. It just sounds repulsive to the modern ear. Perhaps this is due in part to advertising and its unrelenting recycling of banalities. Motivation taglines that reduce the universal human to a universal consumer.

But fortunately a phrase such as "quintessence of dust" has not yet been co-opted by the marketing machine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Quintessential is a term that has fallen out of usage. To be quintessential is to be classic in some sense. The diner, for example, is quintessentially American.

But let's pick apart this term etymologically. "Quintessence" derives from the scholastic concept of *quinta essentia* which is recognizably translatable as the "fifth essence". It is a Latinization of a Greek term we recognize as "element".

These elements are, for Greek science, what we remember as fire, earth, water, and air.

There is something we have lost with our modern periodic table ranging across 200 distinct entities.

When you say something is elemental, something is essential to the very thing, there is a lot more meaning when you liken the heart to fire than to carbon or nitrogen. Something more visceral when you have four elements to choose from.

The entire cosmos from droplets of dew to the burning of the stars to the sinewing of the flesh to the rock formations torturously sundered into the face of the earth, all these are derived from four base elements.

The world cannot exist apart from these four. Or so it was told.

Then Aristotle comes along as he does, and he theorizes that fire, water, earth, and air don't quite capture the totality of the universe. There must be a fifth element out there: aether.

So he coined it. And so aether entered scientific discourse for a very long time. So long in fact that it was tossed around as a hypothetical until Einstein definitively put it to bed in 1905.

Aether as a concept is significantly older than gravity, electricity, waves, particles, fluids, and planets.

So what is aether?

Though it had a long shelf life in the scientific world, there was never quite a firm agreement on what aether is. Is it the force of life? Some light-bearing invisible substance that passes through the vacuum? 

This fifth element aether became a mysterious silhouette that coul potentially answer many leading scientific questions across disciplines such as optics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and others.

It was the theoretical missing link that could potentially unify all of natural science.

So, if you will permit some creative reading for the sport of it, what if Hamlet's idea is taht the fifth essence of the universe--something on the level of aether--is dust. Dust as the missing link.

And not dust as we typically imagine it. But what we are. Humans, transmogrified from the dust.

Dust itself is a primary theme throughout the Hebraic telling of things. The word "עָפָר֙" appears over a hundred times across the Old Testament: it refers to lowliness as in the case of *Job*, ephemerality as in the case of *Ecclesiastes*, or as a metaphor of innumerable abundance as in the promise made to Abraham of his descendants.

It first appears in the Creation myth when God forms man out of dust and breathes life into him. While the rest of creation is spoken into being, the human race is culled out a pre-existing material substance. Dust.

Hence the cliche "From dust you came and to dust you will return" coined either by Kansas or *Ecclesiastes*, take your pick.

This image should give us pause. What it is to be made of dust.

Consider the last person you held in your arms, how they could simply evaporate into a sooty, powdery pile of dust through your fingers. In fact they will invariably end up this way.

Consider how much of your past self lies as sheets of dust under bed. The more you cast off of yourself, the more there is to haunt you. Dust as a specter, your past self as a voyeur of the future.

Consider old houses abandoned by dead relatives or strangers. Shelves and furniture and books caked in the flesh of the dead.

This is what dust is. This what you were, and this is what you will become.

We forget how appalling such an image should be. To call ourselves dust.

But that is not the end of the story. This isn't some ode to rejoice in the meaninglessness of life.

We are not mere dust but the quintessence of it.

We are not derivations but elevations. Whether as the Hebraic says by the breath of God or as the Hellenic says by the possession of *logos*. Or as others in the West have gone on to name as the soul or free will or consciousness. All of these as some label to distinguish the animating force that exalts us from the dust.

These various terms do not capture such a quintessence in its entirety. There is something indeterminable, ineffable about the human being that these concepts can barely taste.

It is because of this unnamed thing that we are raised from brute materialism to pure determinism.

With the assiduous encroachment of sciences social and physical into all spheres of lief, there is a strong temptation to parse out every single occurrence into a predetermined cause-and-effect. Genetics, economics, sociology, psychology, among other disciplines whose langauge games we widely employ to rationalize the problems of our lives. It is the tool of identitarianism (a term whose meaning also is revealed in etymology) to cast blame on the forces of determinism.

Those whose personal conceptual space is determined by political ideology are often guilty of this. Concocting general patterns and statistics as pre-emptive authorities over their own lives. To explain the crumble or enfetterment. 

This all depends upon a logic of determinism that all has been decided already in the lot of one's own life. That there is no free will or fate to fight for or overturn. A whole retinue of externalities has totalistic control over our personal lives.

Unfortunately, the extent to which someone assigns an aspect of themselves to this mode of thinking is an extent that has been cordoned off to mental slavery. Enslavement to ideas and thought patterns that increase learned helplessness, anxiety, misery, despair, and those factors. To give the perceived enemy more control and power than they probably even have.

To reject determinism is to recognize this little ineffable, quintessential blip and what it does for us, whatever this blip is. It allows us to strive and to overcome the problems set before us. To contest the roll of the dice. To play the game.

The unpredictable choreography of time, uncountable as dust swirling in a sunlit hallway. Too intricate and random for any finitude to calculate. 

Even in this age, human beings still possess this glint of spontaneous vitality, no matter how insistently other forces have tried to suffocate it. For two millennia, aged scientists with baggy eyes and an aversion to the real world have hunched over lifeless texts to try to determine and control the fifth element ether. To put it into a closed off box.

But vitality can never be captured by science. All you get is an ossified shadow. The residual glow of its power.

And for as long as there is a sliver of the human essence in us. Soemthing that can escape the constricting noose of scientific causality, there is hope. Hope that we are not thoroughly enslaved to external forces. That we do not need to subject ourselves to the prisons of the mind.

That our quintessence, as humble dust, is that we can never be fully determinable.

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The Easter Controversy (x3)

The quintessence of dust