The Golden Ass

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Book Reviews

February 2002




Good science on an ambiguous subject: Halton Apel "Seeing Red"
If only they had skipped the New Testament: The 1611 King James Bible
then it hit me, he is already dead! Joseph Brodsky: "Collected Poems in English"
Lord Byron "Don Juan" 
a talented writer: Douglas Coupland "Microserfs"
Was he for real? Descartes, "Discourse on the Method"
Truth or Fiction: Finkelstein & Silverman "The Bible Unearthed"
the bible fryed crispy: Northrop Frye "The Great Code"
Horace "Carmina"
James Joyce, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
Geoff Puterbaugh "The Crucifixion of Hyacinth"
Time to rewrite the Textbooks? "A Test of Time, Pharaohs and Kings" by David Rohl
innuendo, elevated to an art form, Tacitus: "The Annals of Imperial Rome"

Unfunny Comedy
"Don Juan" by Lord Byron (1788-1824)

I Think I owe my mother-in-law a big apology. You know, the poetry. The kind the older generation uses for birthdays and farewell luncheons ("We hope that God will bless / You with good health and happiness!"). You hate it, the forced rhymes and imperfect metrical structure (indeed, what metrical structure?). My mother-in-law used to write like that - volumes and volumes of such tripe. Sadly, she has departed from us, but not before leaving tons of this stuff all over the house, and a half-finished vanity press run of 100 copies (anybody want one?).

Now I know where she got the impetus for such poetry - Lord Byron! All of that generation's worst excesses of bad poetry come from Byron, I think. Embarrassingly forced rhymes, self-conscious commentary that frustratingly impedes the flow of the narrative, arch cuteness that threatens one's sanity - all there!! And he couldn't even finish it off properly.

Truly, a work only an academic could love - or find any value in. If you are attracted to this book, protect yourself: Try reading it aloud and making a stop at the end of every line (sing-song-like) so you can at least get the sense of the rhymes. I found the Penguin edition serviceable (as Penguins usually are). And don't bother with the footnotes, just let it flow. Now stop being so hard on the older generation.

* beautifully emulated
James Joyce: "A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man"

When I was much younger and naive, I had read every single line of Joyce, including his letters and poems and even Finnegan's Wake (what a waste of time). I can't help it, the man was an amateur for all his life, a typical tinkerer and home improvement guy who probably never really found the kind of subject matter that could have distracted him from his own precious self. His short stories would barely be remembered these days if there wasn't his name under the title. They are imitation pieces, ventriloquistic exercises, and pretty flat and lifeless if held against Chekhov and Kipling, or Salinger and Kathleen Mansfield.

Joyce had his fair share of difficulties like everyone of us and at some point threw a Manuscript of 2,000 pages into the fireside. Legend goes that his sister Eileen rescued parts of it from the fireside. (A similar legend surrounds the first draft of Nabokov's "Lolita.") Joyce re-edited the remainders and with the help of Ezra Pound it was published under the title of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Much later the remainders of the original draft appeared as "Stephen Hero." If it had survived in full it would probably have been a very long and rather insufferable autobiographical novel about a clever young man realizing that he's too good for the society into which he's been born.

An attitude the author never really changed: take for instance "Nausicaa," the notorious masturbation scene in "Ulysses." Superbly written as it is, it gives us the whole deficiency of Joyce in a nutshell. He imitates the presumptuous and pompous phrasing in certain fashion magazines of the period, but just tell me to what end? Is it to poke fun on the cliche beset thoughts of the crippled girl? Well I fail to see the joke, this is just cruel. Satire either attacks a subject that has the capacity to bite back, or it is merely an act of snobbery. Joyce, the writer, was a rather small character and in the sentiment of his period thought it to be cool to be "anti-Philistine."

Apparently "Dubliners" and "Portrait" and especially "Ulysses" were written by an author who went on a quest for his own style. "Finnegan's Wake" eventually was the place where the eagle landed. I don't think I am alone in my opinion that Joyce had landed on the most barren rock in the entire Universe. Joyce had tons of talent to burn, but something went seriously wrong here. I am all for modern art, and consider the term "postmodern" a phony contradiction in terms. But lesser talents accomplished more - Dos Passos, O'Neil, Kafka, Proust, Marianne Moore, Auden, Hemingway, Nabokov, they all have their moments, even clowns like Bukowski and Douglas Adams (who is a linguistic genius in his own right.) Borges could put in three lines what took a Joyce thirty strenuous pages without ever achieving a comparable impact. With one exception:

If we compare the "Portrait" with the leftovers from "Stephen Hero" we can see what good editing can accomplish. Joyce was very fond of copiously scribbling in the margins of the galley proofs, so the improvements in style are probably entirely his. The overall structure though (like that of T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland") might be based on suggestions by Ezra Pound. Pound also helped Joyce to find a publisher for the "Portrait." It was the time when Joyce had been in his Flaubertian phase and emulated the Frenchman's method to present events strictly from the protagonist's perspective and in terms of the character's faculties of perception. And what an emulation it is.

Style is the most direct access to an artist's temperament. Narrative style is a conveyor - only in essays and poems style is allowed to be a player. Approaching Joyce is an experience not dissimilar to "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim." After crossing through all the veils we step into an entirely empty room, like the Holy of Holiest in the Jewish temple. Beyond the private circle of his life, Joyce had nothing to say. Catholicism and Thomas Aquinas' philosophy leave you badly prepared, not only for the second law of thermodynamics and Special Relativity, but for democracy, a truly free Ireland, or sex with your wife, and life in general.

Only in the "Portrait" Joyce managed to bring all the pieces together, and though I must say, that the throes of adolescence in the clutches of Catholicism's screwed morality and hygiene make not exactly my favorite read, what counts is how Joyce brings across his story. And he does it brilliantly. The book is full of flavors and sensuality. We hear the dull thud of the wet leather ball on the rugby pitch, shiver in the clammy dormitory, feel the slight vertigo of Stephen's trance in the rocking train compartment. All this is fine writing except for the first part, when Joyce attempts to reproduce the mind-set of a small boy.

His choice of words comes a tat too cute and betrays the condescending adult. Joyce was certainly not a Tolstoy, even not a Kipling. Nabokov's "Speak Memory" is a fine description of early childhood that respects the child. Joyce of course had no intention to glorify this particular childhood, or to be objective. He wrote out of his bitterness of something to be left behind, and the sooner the better. So the ventriloquism sometimes comes on a false note. Still with all these minor flaws, this is a major novel in the language and a must read for the aspiring author.

He missed Stockholm by two millennia
Horace (65-8 BC), Carmina - the Odes

"Poetry is but the metaphor of a mood" said a poet from the late 18th century, but Horace himself, instead of creating such metaphors, preferred to give us the prosaic interpretation of his moods, with exceptions of course: testimonies to a rare and complex talent:

Odes, I:9

Vides ut alta stet niue candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus
siluae laborantes geluque
flumina constiterint acuto?

Dissolue frigus ligna super foco
large reponens atque benignius
deprome quadrimum Sabina,
o Thaliarche, merum diota.

Permitte diuis cetera, qui simul
strauere uentos aequore feruido
deproeliantis, nec cupressi
nec ueteres agitantur orni.

Quid si futurum cras, fuge quaerere, et
quem fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro
adpone nec dulcis amores
sperne, puer, neque tu choreas,

donec uirenti canities abest
morosa. Nunc et Campus et areae
lenesque sub noctem susurri
composita repetantur hora,

nunc et latentis proditor intumo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo
pignusque dereptum lacertis
aut digito male pertinaci.

You see how, white with snows to the north of us,
Soracte looms; how snow's over everything;
the burdened pines no longer buoyant,
streams at a stand in the winter weather.

So, rout the cold! Load logs on the andirons
as good hosts should do. Logs! And no rationing
your wine, young fellow there! Your Sabine,
hustle it out from the crusty wine jars.

Then let the heavens see the rest of it.
When once they've lulled the winds at their weltering
ion whitened surf, no cypress quivers,
never a breath in the ancient alder.

What comes tomorrow, never you mind about.
Each day on waking reckon, Another!" and
chalk up your one more gain. Don't spurn the
pleasure of love in your time for dancing,

while youth's in bloom, while moody decrepitude's
remote. Now haunt the malls and the stadium.
When little whispers stir in starlight,
make very sure you arrange to be there,

where -- who's in hiding? -- giveaway laughter from
the dark, a girl's laugh, muffled... lovely...
her bracelet tussled for in fun, or
ring from a teasingly tightened finger.

tr. John Frederick Nims

Ode, I:5

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
cui flauam religas comam,

simplex munditiis? Heu quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
nigra aequora uentis
emirabitur insolens,

qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
qui semper uacuam, semper amabilem
sperat, nescius aurae
fallacis. Miseri, quibus

intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer
uotiua paries indicat uuida
suspendisse potenti
uestimenta maris deo.

What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,
'Pyrrha' for whom bind'st thou
In wreaths thy golden Hair,

Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he
On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire:

Who now enjoys thee credulous, all Gold,
Who always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee; of flattering gales
Unmindfull. Hapless they

To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd
Picture the sacred wall declares t' have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern God of Sea.

tr. John Milton (1608-1674)

Ode IV:7

Diffugere niues, redeunt iam gramina campis
arboribus comae;
mutat terra uices et decrescentia ripas
flumina praetereunt;
Gratia cum Nymphis geminisque sororibus audet
ducere nuda chorus.
Inmortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum
quae rapit hora diem.
Frigora mitescunt Zephyris, uer proterit aestas,
interitura simul
pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox
bruma recurrit iners.
Damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae:
non ubi decidimus
quo pater Aeneas, quo diues Tullus et Ancus,
puluis et umbra sumus.
Quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summae
tempora di superi?
Cuncta manus auidas fugient heredis, amico
quae dederis animo.
Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos
fecerit arbitria,
non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te
restituet pietas;
infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum
liberat Hippolytum,
nec Lethaea ualet Theseus abrumpere caro
uincula Pirithoo.

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, "Thou wast not born for aye."

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn, with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come 'we' where Tullus and where Ancus are,
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgement o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithöus in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

tr. A.E.Housman (1859-1936)

It is said, that even the greatest genius rarely produces more than six poems of outstanding quality in an entire lifetime - and these examples make already 50% of the required quota. However it can be quite a chore to slog through the whole lot of Horace's "Carmina." Not the poet for modern man's retarded attention span. Horace definitely was a poet for the mature reader - which is perfectly fine, I wouldn't have it any other way - but he also was sort of a schoolmaster for all his life. A very gifted and linguistically cultured schoolmaster; Friedrich Nietzsche - himself no mean latinist - praised Horace's poetry for "the power radiating from every word into every direction."

I came rather late to Latin; neither born nor bred to become a latinist, I picked up on the language initially only as a necessary tool for Roman history and law. It took me a while to appreciate the good stuff that came my way after the initial pains. Virgil is magical and often just perfect - but I am not quite so sure what Petronius meant with his praise of Horace's "felicitous care." I must be missing something. Even Casanova is on record for having learned by rote Virgil's "Aeneid," Ariost's "Orlando Furioso," and the complete poetry of Horace. He never ran out of pickup lines.

Horace has often been accused of pandering to an oppressive regime, but Wieland's commentary on Horace's Epistles and Satires from 1806 proves pretty conclusively the opposite. Horace was just not stupid enough to make himself a martyr. When the wind blows into your face you take cover. Rome's pagan opposition in the 4th century had thought so too, and thanks to their efforts to pass on the best traditions of a disintegrating culture, Horace came down to us almost intact. The ancient scholars and their senatorial patrons made Horace the emissary of Latin culture and the educator for cultured people in all ages.

In our time Horace would have made the grades for Stockholm - and probably, like so many Nobel laureates, for all the wrong reasons. If you ask me: a praised and praiseworthy author, the born essayist, but not really a poetic temperament. There are many translations going around - all of them not completely bad, non really good. Whether Milton shouldn't have wasted talent and time on his epic and instead given us a complete Horace, is a question how Horace compares with Milton's "Paradise Lost." It takes genius to translate a genius. The next best thing is a gifted translator with a lifelong passion for his object - like Houseman. He preferred not to risk his reputation on a complete Horace. What a pity.

* if only they had skipped the New Testament
The 1611 King James Bible

I was nine, when for the first time I had read the Bible from cover to cover, but I never read it in any other way than as a piece of imaginative literature. I was under no religious pressure and still thank my God every day that he made me an atheist. So consequently, after the grand sweep of the Hebraic Bible, the New Testament struck me, even in my teens, as something of a let down. I still think it should rather be left out. So let's not waste any more time on it. For readers at a loss where to begin, I recommend as an appetizer 1 Kings 13, a gem of Kafkaesque humor:

A "prophet" receives the calling to deliver a message to his king on condition that he doesn't tarry on his way and does not take food and shelter even on his way back. But an elderly colleague cheats on the man and lures him into accepting food and shelter under the pretense of a divine vision of his own. So how is the traveler to know that God hadn't changed his mind? The two prophets sit at their meal when suddenly the spirit seizes the lying host and from his mouth issues genuine prophesy and announces to his perplexed guest that lions will eat him for his disobedience. And so it happens. The lying prophet who had caused the calamity feels remorse, searches the road for the corpse and buries him his own tomb - "Oh brother!" The whole Bible in a nutshell.

We look at a nation's intellectual heritage: the older Isaiah, a near contemporary to Homer and truly a poetic genius of the highest order; the younger Isaiah, an independent mind and worthy contemporary of Heraclitus (c.535-c.475 BC), who dares to think the unthinkable. Jeremiah lived at Sappho's time and wrote the first autobiography in western literature (Jerem. 1:1-12; 11:18-23; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 20:7-12, 14-18) which became a model for Augustine's "Confessions." The "Song of Solomon" was composed either in Alexandria or Antioch, roughly at the time of the pastoral poet Theocrit.

Notice how the author (or authoress) has pillaged the entire Bible for set-phrases, allusions, and verbal references. It is ostentatious poetry, it is also a bit of a rabbinical crossword puzzle. (Logically the song itself cannot be earlier than the latest of these references.) Ecclesiastes is an early forerunner of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the monumental succession saga of kingship and betrayal and of love in every variety (1,2 Sam, 1,2 Kings), outshines Herodot's "Histories." King Saul is still my hero, and no matter how expertly the post-exile author has done the whitewash - David is definitely the villain.

The book speaks in a variety of voices:

"a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke to pieces the rocks but Yahweh was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but Yahweh was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but Yahweh was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. ... What doest thou here, Elijah?" (1 Kings 19:11-13).

Of course, mostly we look at fiction, not history. Characters and places do not match and the incidents are anachronistic projections from a later period. The impressive ruins excavated at Samaria and Dan rightfully belong to the "House of Omri," but "Chronicles" and "Succession" sagas had been written under a Davidic bias and credit Solomon, perhaps falsely, for the fortifications at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer.

As a matter of fact the Kingdom of Israel was the real deal. The house of David found itself delegated to a little backwater enclave around Jerusalem. Despite all the noises about "idolatry" and "abomination" it was the North that prospered, before it finally succumbed to Assyria's imperialism. Notice, that only after Yahweh's fundamentalists under Josiah and Hezekiah had pushed through their reforms, things began to go very wrong in Judah too and ended (at least temporarily) in complete annihilation of Hebraic statehood.

No matter how you look at it: grumpy old Yahweh had betrayed his people. Which is not surprising: at times, the genie or familiar spirit, who from Jethro's hearth fire (Exodus 3:1) set out to conquer the world , could show signs of a perfidious nastiness (perhaps "Yahweh" was really the incognito of Egypt's evil Seth - your enemy is my friend): see Exodus 4:24 etc. where "by the way in the inn, Yahweh met Moses, and sought to kill him." "Gods make dangerous company" says the Iliad.

And the further back we go into the past the more we lose ourselves in anachronisms. Numbers gives a real law code but assigns it to the wrong period. The narrator of Genesis 37:25 is familiar with the camel as beast of burden and the goods it is supposed to carry, but this is removed by more than a millennium from the Bronze age culture of Abraham and Joseph which knew only the donkey as beast of burden. So the story of Joseph has all the makings of a novel. Besides, one wonders what the Jewish Passover really celebrates. It is a chilling thought to ponder who in real life might have been this strangely selective "Angel of Death," who had murdered Egypt's first born. The fugitive terrorists around Moses might have had a lot to atone for.

For the faithful the Prophets are an endless subject of fascination. Yet from the context it is quite clear that the recipients of prophetic messages did not exactly expect a piece of fortune telling. Prophets received their commissions for casting spells - mostly nasty spells. The folk tale of Balaam's Ass (Num. 22) illustrates the method. The idea was to make things happen, not to predict them. So we see the Jewish prophet Ezekiel take a commission from the king of Babylon(!) and put a curse on Tyrus (Ezek. 26). Ezekiel performed as usual, (no other prophet could go so completely bonkers,) but the military follow up turned out to be difficult.

So Ezekiel was asked for a second installment. True to form, he promised Egypt that she will be the robber's recompense for the hardship he had suffered with his first victim. (Ezek. 29.) I have no idea whether prophets got paid in advance or based on "success," but obviously only reasonably successful spells were kept on record, which makes only a fraction of the large number of actual "prophecies." Ambitious prophets better had a good portfolio, (1 Kings 22; Jerem. 28;) because with so many competitors on the case, one of them might actually get it right.

If we start reading the book from the beginning, we should know that Genesis 1 is a late post-exile concoction which replaced and re-edited the original creation myth. We can still reconstruct it from all the relevant passages (Ps. 74:120-13; Ps. 89:9-10; Isaiah 51:9-10; Job 1:6, 2:3-6, 8:9, 9:5-11, 26:5-14, 36:27-30, 37:2-13; 38:4-12, 14, 17, 22-25, 28, 30-32, 35; 41:1-10, 18-34; Nahum 1:2, 1:3-5; Habakkuk 3:3-6; 2 Kings 19:24-28 and brief references in Jeremiah). What emerges, is the picture of a whole tribe of gods, who constructed their new order out of the pre-existing chaos, which was home to a monster. The priestly insertion Gen. 1:2 uses the term "Tehom" for "deep" which is the Hebraic (and Canaanite) equivalent to the Babylonian "Tiamat," the dragon of the watery chaos.

This dragon had sought to drown the deities. So the most warlike of the gods, Yahweh, rode against Tehom in his chariot of fire, bombarded her with hail and lightning, and then destroyed her vassal, Leviathan, with a mighty blow to the monster's skull. Then he thrust his sword into the heart of Rahab. The waters subsided, Yahweh shouted in triumph and dried up the floods. Tehom's carcass would provide the material, to create a new world. Simply by speaking the word, the Elohim created the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. The skies stretched out like a tent cloth, shrouding the deep, and the Elohim placed their secret court above the waters of high. Moon and Sun were set to divide the seasons and separate day and night. The morning stars sang and the gods shouted with joy. Thus the work of creation was completed.

It is a familiar pattern from many mythologies - the Norse deities had had killed a giant and his wife who were the first sentient beings even before the gods and created the world from their flesh. Interestingly even the late Gen. 1 preserves the plural in Elohim which is of course no accident. The Hebraic religion had originated from a polytheistic affair not unlike their Canaanite neighbors (Jer. 44:18), although certain dietary customs had set apart the Hebrews from early on. The Yahweh cult was a comparably late arrival and for the longest time its supporters remained in the minority. Only exile completely changed the picture.

Northrop Frye in "The Great Code" proposed to read the Bible not as an anthology of discontinuous texts but to appreciate the editorial unity of the collection. (This applies even to the The New Testament where all the gospels and epistles are building up to the book of "Revelations." The church councils originally had hesitated to accept Cerinthus' "Revelations" in the developing canon, because Cerinthus was a Gnostic and deemed a heretic. So the way to make "Revelations" acceptable, was to falsely ascribe authorship to John the Evangelist (Eusebius "Ecclesiastic History" III. xxviii. 1-2). It shows how important "Revelations" was thought to be for the canon's editorial make up.) I have to admit that in Frye's suggestion the Biblical text acquires an additional dimension, not in religious terms, but in terms of fantasy and imagination.

Bible translations have become for many nations something like the generator (if not beginning) of literacy and good use of language. This alone should assure the King James its place of honor in English literature. But even from the point of accuracy it still remains to be the outstanding achievement. "Modern" translations use to come with all sorts of claims for "improvement" and unsubstantiated snide-remarks at the King James. But the committee of translators did not just use the Latin "Vulgate" but all the sources available, including Origin's "Hexapla" and the "Masoretic Bible." There is an easy test. Check the modern translator's rendition of the term "love" in Paul's letters. Only the King James seems to be aware that there is a difference between love and charity.

* Truth or fiction?
"The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts" by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman

F. & S. have all the credentials and scientific credibility one could ask for, especially Finkelstein is a specialist on Meggido's archaeology. All the excavation data are correct and up to date, these people know what they are talking about. And yet there is a distinct possibility that they got it wrong whenever their dating depends on Egypt's regal data, because it possibly places evidence in the wrong context (see my review on Rohl's "Pharaohs and Kings"). What exactly is the issue here? Well, apart from questions of chronology (1), we need to grasp what "anachronisms" seem to indicate (2), and find an answer to the question of who had written the biblical texts, why, and when (3)? Unlike F. & S. I consider the bulk of the Old Testament as an exile and post-exile production.

(1) The question of chronology:

David Rohl, who incidentally refers to Finkelstein's excavation results as one of his primary sources, proffers an excellent argument for re-dating the findings as far as they depend on Egypt's regal data. Such adjustment would push the Tell el-Amarna letters up from 1352-1327 BC to c. 1010-970 BC (the Merentptah stele moves from 1208 BC to 862 BC), while Joshua's conquest would become an event sometime in MB IIB (ca. 1490-1410 BC), when the archaeological signatures of destruction on the Palestinian map correspond well with the biblical campaign track of Joshua's conquest. Without such adjustment, the book Joshua appears to be sheer fiction. The archaeological evidence for the traditional date of conquest (1220-1230 BC) reveals scarcely populated hillsides and impoverished small towns without walls ducking meekly in Egypt's backyard; this is hardly the mighty confederacy of Palestinian city-states we remember from the text. But then this traditional date exists only, because exodus, for no good reason, had been linked to the traditional date of Rameses II (1290-1224 BC)!

If re-dated, the Tell el-Amarna letters could become the most important extra biblical source for the Palestinian situation at the time of Saul, David, and Solomon, and confirm the archaeological findings of a Hebraic principality under Egyptian suzerainty (2 Chron. 8:11 and 1 King 9:16). Seen from a Judaic perspective, the new Hebrew kingdom might have looked impressive enough, but its archaeological remains apparently cannot compare to the achievements of Omri's dynasty after the breakup. (That is, if Rohl's dating for Solomon in late Meggido VIII has to be rejected for lack of corroborating pottery finds.) In fact the Davidic bias of the biblical historian in 1 Kings 9:15 may have falsely attributed to Solomon many building projects of the northern Kingdom. So F. & S.'s attribution of Meggido IV, Gezer and Hazor to Omri's dynasty would remain intact as far as these data do not depend on Egypt's regal chronology.

(2) Anachronisms:

F. & S. make a big production of anachronisms, but we have to attend to the detail: the camels in the Joseph's novel (Gen. 37:25) are honest mistakes of a late narrator who simply doesn't know any better. Still this doesn't tell us anything either way about the veracity of Joseph's story. Solomon's building sites (1 Kings 9:15) might be a fantasy of the biblical historian's patriotism, but the geographic and demographic anachronisms in Joshua, are deliberate presentations in such terms as were current at the time of the book's composition. If I told you that after 876 the Vikings had built a stronghold at Eburacum, the expression on your face will probably turn politely bland. If I tell you that the Vikings had fortified York in the North of England, everything becomes clear for the modern reader, despite the fact that neither England as a state nor "York" as the name of that settlement had existed at the time. Anachronisms can be informative rather than misleading.

(3) Date and authorship of the texts:

F. & S. try to establish an intellectually vibrant southern Kingdom. I wonder. Where do we see an opposition, educated enough, that it required convincing? Judah's elite of literati had barely enough card carrying members to fill a modern school yard and was certainly not in a habit to care much for illiterate pastoralists and peasants. Besides, of all the fundamentalist reform movements I am aware of, none strikes me as particularly creative. Except for a common iconoclastic fervor (in biblical times the continued whining about "high places") and libels against opposition (that's where all those "prophets" come in) such movements appear to be rather stagnant when it comes to their basic manifestos. So who else, apart from the political threat across the border, was there around to challenge the Yahweh-cult intellectually? Except for the occasional "told you so" there simply was no need to explain or defend the cult during Josiah's reforms (621-605 BC).

But forced exile opened a whole new ball game. The Hebrews had lost statehood and now their nationhood was under siege. This is a strong motive to redefine one's own identity. Literacy increased among the emigrants and refugees and with it the spirit of debate and enquiry. From the old days, they had brought with them Judges, Amos, Hosea, the older Isaiah, Jeremiah, the rest of the minor prophets, and perhaps one or another psalm plus personal memoirs and national epics now lost to us, as referred to in Nu. 21:14 or 2 Kings 22:8. So the rest of the Old Testament is exile and post-exile. But unlike the hodgepodge of Judges, the exilic authors thoroughly edited and redesigned their sources in a "modernized" prose, in order to address the needs of a specific audience.

Apart from the cult, Moses couldn't have meant a lot for Josiah's period, yet to people living in actual exile, Exodus and Deuteronomy read like blueprints to regain their statehood. Also notice the references between Ex. 32:25ff or Nu. 25:1-8 and Nehemiah 13:23 or Ezra 9:2,3; 10:3,9ff. The exile author who created the rousing memoir of Joshua's campaign certainly did some research on his own. Who knows what hopes he had, or what use he anticipated for his work - not every expatriate expected a peaceful return, and there is a certain Machabeean flavor to the book Joshua. And this adds another dimension to the "anachronisms" mentioned above.

* Time to rewrite the textbooks?
"Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest" by David M. Rohl

It seems our chronologies for the late Bronze- early Iron Age call for an overhaul; 270 years need to be taken out. Mr. Rohl's deductions have earned him the unfailing hostility of the curators for Egyptology at the British Museum. Just think of it: the number of exhibits go in the ten thousands. If Rohl is right, 80% of the material needs to be relabeled. Every textbook would have to be rewritten; current term papers be reevaluated - it would be chaos. It is good to recall these purely practical aspects before jumping to conclusions of an academic conspiracy against new findings. Overturning an established consensus can be good science, but should be done with prudence. For instance Big Bang may very well be on the wrong side of new astronomical discoveries, but before we really abandon the idea, we better make darn sure that what is going to take its place, will account for all the facts and reasons that made us developing the older theory in the first place. Rohl has all the academic credentials and he knows what he is up against, so he makes every effort to produce a solid case, and as far as I am concerned, he has succeeded.

However the farther back we go, the murkier become his conjectures. "Joseph's" statue on the cover of the English edition, is a brazen speculation on the books marketability. Although Rohl himself prefaces part four of the book as "a change of evidence" - meaning: scarce on evidence and ample on speculation - an illustration depicting "Joseph's palace" and conjectures on "Prince Moses" campaigning the Ethiopians clearly send the wrong message and should have no place in a paper of otherwise immaculate science. Somewhere down the line one has to strike a balance. There are biblical texts that allow for chronological deductions, even require it, because they are meant to be history in the first place. And there are other texts that are not, because they were initially concocted to explain the etiology of things, like the opening chapters of Genesis or the Joseph's novel, (which in the Babylonian exile must have been an especially uplifting read.) People ask why is the man lord over woman? Why is agriculture so hard? Why do people speak in so many different tongues? Why did Jews live in Egypt? "Because" God made Eve from Adam's rib, "because" Cain rose against his brother, "because" Yahweh destroyed the tower of Babel, and "because" Joseph became Pharaoh's prime minister and invited his brothers to stay with him. ("Oh tell us more about Joseph!" - "Well that's a juicy tale: Joseph was pursued by Madame Potiphar but rose from slavery to power.")

Our oldest literary sources in the entire bible (apart from Judges,) Amos (in 2:10; 3:1; 9:7) and Hosea (in 11:1; 13:4), testify to a common awareness of Moses and the deliverance from Egyptian bondage. We have reached the murky area where etiology gradually shifts to legend. For all we know, the original stories about Moses, the sly fox, who not only had defied Pharaoh's might, but even outwitted Yahweh himself when he came to claim Moses' firstborn (Ex. 4:24ff), may had originally never had put in writing. It is a common motif of oral folklore all over the world. We will never know for sure, but it probably formed a cycle of formulaic litanies ending in pithy sayings, like Zipporah's "Surely a bloody husband art thou to me," or the Ten Commandments. Inevitably, after only a few generations, the material must have yielded to the dynamics of oral transmission and the formulas and litanies took on a life of their own. So nobody can expect any degree of historical accuracy. Likewise abductions by pirates and raids against townships in Anatolia were long known to occur, but every single detail in the Iliad has turned to formula and fiction. Virgil's Aeneas may never have existed, but the fact remains that Etruscan immigrants had brought early statehood to Italy. Moses may indeed have outfoxed Egyptian authorities in a protracted campaign, even struck a deal with Jethro's genie of the fire - Yahweh - but the author of Exodus completely transformed Moses' character from a sly guerrilla leader to a slow witted prophet, inflated the narrative with inserted laws of a different period, and added those extravagant census figures, which however might reflect a real census of all the Jews from a much later period, when Cyrus' edict permitted the descendants of the Babylonian captives to return home.

Rohl's revised chronology of regal data goes a long way. It places Judges in the neighborhood of Homer's Iliad (which according to Thucydides calculations for Homer's lifetime had been composed about 800 to 750 BC, but is recollecting legends from about 1048 BC.) It puts the post-exile account of Joshua's campaign in the right place at the right time in the middle Bronze Age; even if the biblical historian refers to the campaign's geography in such terms as were current at the time of the book's composition. (If I told you that after 876 the Vikings had built a stronghold at Eburacum, the expression on your face will probably turn politely bland. If I tell you that the Vikings had fortified York in the North of England, everything becomes clear, despite the fact that neither England as a state nor "York" as the name of that settlement had existed at the time. Anachronisms can be deliberate and informative rather than misleading.) In the end, here as elsewhere, everything comes down to text analysis. What was the author's objective? Who did he address? Are genre and form comparable to known traditions? Does language and the use of anachronisms provide clues for the time of authorship? A story can be true despite the lack of supporting evidence. It also can be a piece of fiction despite all the archaeological evidence going for it. Having said all this, strictly as an Egyptologist, Mr. Rohl has made an excellent argument.

* Was he for real?
Descartes (1596-1650), "Discourse on Method"

The father of modern philosophy was also an innovative mathematician. But his philosophical enquiry was committed just to one question:

"Is there anything we can think of, which by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things, if not, not" (Bertrand Russell).

Descartes, when prodded to it by his critics, was gracious enough to acknowledge his debt to St. Augustine's 'Siloloquia,' but pointed out that he had shifted the Saint's argument from the mere acquisition of knowledge to an existential statement, perhaps the only in its kind that can be created to establish an empirical fact by mere thinking:

"In dubito, in cogito, ergo sum."

This first premise led Descartes to a number of valid deductions. Since he now was completely sure about his own existence, the former or eminent cause prior to his present state had to be equally real, and so all the causes prior to that. This of course is a sneaky way of saying, that, if the first cause argument should hold water, then it would lead to something as real as myself. But does it? Why should the chain of prior causes ever come to a halt? After all

"Causation is not like a hired cab which one dismisses once it has arrived at its desired destination" (Schopenhauer).

On the other hand, how can we be sure that there is any cause that would precede the present state of existence? As every dreamer and hypnotist will tell us, consciousness comes in a discontinuous series of moments of awareness. We all might be operating under a hypnotic suggestion, such as: "whenever you awake, your memories will refer to a past that never was."

Such train of thought can become very confusing, so Descartes decided to keep things simple and proposed that thinking would "prove" the existence of an immortal and immaterial soul. He didn't say exactly how. However this compelled him to devote a lot of attention to animal intelligence. Because if animals can think, they too would have immortal souls. And this could have spelled serious trouble for the philosopher. The Holy office was still in the habit of barbecuing heretics alive! So Descartes had to prove that animals cannot think and therefore advanced the usual arguments, that animals cannot use language, that their behavior is not terribly adaptable, that their seeming exhibition of intelligence is actually guided by instinct, etc. But by addressing animals as "soulless" machines he opened the gate for materialists like LaMetrie, who elicited from Descartes's own principles the concept of "Man as a Biological Machine."

However for the moment, Descartes felt he had covered all his bases and proposed his famous proof for the existence of God:

"... recurring to the examination of the idea of a Perfect Being, I found that the existence of such Being was comprised in the idea in the same way that the equality of its three angles to two right angles is comprised in the idea of a triangle,

(sic! We shall remember that!)

... consequently it is at least as certain that God, who is this Perfect Being, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can be."

Now, this raises a question: Did Descartes really mean what he said? Because just one sentence before this "proof" we read this:

"I perceived that there was nothing at all in these demonstrations which could assure me of the existence of their object: ... for example, supposing a triangle to be given, I distinctly perceived that its three angles were necessarily equal to two right angles, but I did not on that account perceive anything which could assure me that any triangle existed ..."

Strange proof, that begins with its own refutation. I can't imagine that any of Descartes's numerous correspondents had failed to spot this slight of hand. But only Hobbes was rude enough to touch the sore. He shouldn't have. Giordano Bruno, screaming and percolating his life juices, as his feet slowly turned to charcoal, was still a fresh memory. It was impressive enough for Galilei. After a quick glance at the thumbscrews, he took out his pension and went into early retirement. So Descartes had every reason to keep a low profile and found it not beyond his dignity to secure his position with a few symbolic genuflections towards Rome. Thus he became the founder of modern philosophy, but leaving it to the reader to figure out what he really had meant to say.

good science on an ambiguous subject
"Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science" by Halton Apel

How come that quasars, previously thought to be the most distant objects in the visible Universe, are to be found in our galactic neighborhood? It was assumed that quasars belong to an early phase in the evolution of the universe since Big Bang, but now the observations show them lingering in the vicinity of much more recently developed galaxies. And what are we to make of the axial plasma jets emitted from the galactic centers which seem to mark a trajectory towards quasars in their neighborhood? Could it be quasars are actually galaxies in their infancy, galactic nuclei, which had been expelled from the center of older galaxies in an act of violent labor? And if that is so, where does this surplus of mass come from, and how does our idea of "black holes" at a galaxy's rotational center fit into the picture? And how is it that quasars, sitting close to a recent galaxy are so much more red-shifted than the surrounding objects?

Apel is doing good science. You don't like his equations? By all means, prove him wrong - this is science and not the oracle of Delphi. On a personal note, I don't feel comfortable with his notion of a variable electron mass. But this seems to be the backbone of the whole argument. Just a hunch. My education in quantum physics is woefully patchy and I lack the expertise to prove him wrong, let alone to propose an alternative. (Perhaps we can postulate an accelerated and hence red-shifted stream of electrons trapped in an electrical field, a sort of a plasma medium, jetting out from the central axis of a galaxy - which incidentally happens to be the trajectory for the near by quasars in Arp's observations. I base this suggestion on a proposal for the formation of galaxies by the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén. It is regrettable that Arp doesn't even notice Alfvén's existence, but this is very telling for the sorry state of interdisciplinary communication.)

The overall cosmological picture looks very appealing to me. The real problem with cosmology is, that, no matter which theory anybody champions, in the end it comes down to ambiguities in the observational data themselves, which allow to be interpreted in a number of different ways. And when it comes to that, the bean counters usually get the last word. It's not a conspiracy, just the usual story of human vanities, of subsidies and academic clouts. But this is not the main body of the book. The main body are observational data and their interpretation. A book worth studying.

* innuendo elevated to an art
Tacitus: "The Annals of Imperial Rome"

Tacitus, the historian, was neither sloppy nor a conscientious researcher. He was a senator. He believed to have suffered a hard time under Domitian and bore a grudge against emperors in general. So he picked up on every piece of malicious gossip he could lay his hand on. His recollection of Augustus' funeral is a masterpiece of calumny. First he gives the official eulogy, then he suddenly says "but there are those who say ..." etc. and pours out all the dirt without ever qualifying who "those" might be. We need to understand, that the Senate considered itself traditionally as the regime's opposition, regardless of its merits.

A motion could become law only after it had passed the floor of the house; this was the senatorial prerogative. So at every new accession there was a period of haggling and arm twisting between the new emperor and the Senate over the most important piece of an emperor's executive power - the "tribunicia potestas" - his veto power. Only a senatorial vote could bestow it on the emperor, but of course it came for some sort of political quid pro quo. So one had a situation of permanent tension between even the best of the emperors and the Senate.

The Senate was an extremely conservative club of plutocrats, a clearinghouse for perks and prestige of dynastic clans, the highest court of appeal, the Roman legislative, and the Roman equivalent for the modern stock exchange, all rolled together in one enchilada. This could easily put an emperor in the position of a defender of the people's rights. Think about Peron - same thing. So even a Nero was extremely popular, and the spot of his assassination became a shrine to which people continued to bring flowers for many years after.

Tacitus' depicted Nero as something like an inane rockstar. But there was more to the man. Histories I:78 is an indirect admission. Why else should later emperors try to emulate Nero's appeal to the public? In fact, had Nero not lost his nerves, the army would have remained loyal to the end. His popularity was based on public works - channels, aqueducts, that sort of thing - sound fiscal policies, and generous relief from the imperial treasury for cities afflicted by catastrophes. So when after his death an imposter impersonated Nero at the Iranian court, it took years of diplomacy to get this con-man extradited; but Nero's myth continued to live on - see Rev. 9:14, 16:12.

We have inscriptions of Nero's pan-Hellenic address, which returned administrative autonomy to Greece. The Greek people liked him for that, the Senate, who had Greece assigned to his own domain, did not. At least nominally, Emperor and Senate still used to share in the administration of the realm. In most provinces the imperial regime had installed legates and kept 17 legions at its own disposal, while the Senate awarded governorships to ex-consuls in a few selected "proconsular" provinces with the backing of 8 legions. Of course, when push came to shovel, then the emperor alone was the undisputed commander in chief of all armed forces.

Nero could even afford to order Corbulo, his most prestigious general, to commit suicide, and the order was obeyed, no questions asked. So we can gauge the Senate's powerless despair from the hysterical pitch in Tacitus' litany of imperial atrocities. Nero had been more than fifty miles away from the capital, when after a series of recent arson attacks on Marseilles and Ephesus a fire broke out in Rome as well. After the news had reached his court, Nero immediately initiated relief measures and opened to the public his own estates for temporary shelter.

Subsequently, criminal investigations prosecuted on arson charges Jewish or Christian extremists. To stamp out the source once and for all, Nero ordered a campaign against Jewish insurgents in Palestine. It eventually led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple! Terrorism is not a modern phenomenon and Christians of the period used to pray that the end of this world should come real soon. There is a political side to the theological concept of "parousia."

Nero's suicide momentarily stopped the campaign and left Vespasian in charge to finish the job. Which eventually he did. But would he have, if he had reason to disagree with the policies of Nero's administration? In our days we look at Afghanistan, and history seems to repeat itself. A reader of Tacitus is required to look through the subtle subterfuge of an extremely biased senator and conservative with an outstanding talent for malicious gossip and sardonic sarcasm, who also was one of the most gifted story tellers of the human race.

He is all about style and innuendo, Tacitus' narrative doesn't merely report on facts, the facts are created by the method of their presentation. The medium is the message and even the massage, as illustrated in Tacitus' exposition of the Jewish religion. As well as everybody else, Tacitus knew that the inner sanctuary of the Jewish Temple was empty, but he wouldn't be Tacitus if he had missed to treat us to every bit of slanderous misrepresentation he could find on the subject, including the head of an ass as the object of Jewish worship.

All this is presented with an air of objectivity - as if the author himself is just comparing opinions and otherwise twiddles his thumbs in innocence. But when Tacitus spars another round on his favorite subject - the evil of empire and emperors as an evil - his monumental narrative can reach the heights of truly aristocratic indignation The danse macabre of the final days under Tiberius' rule has the power of a medieval morality play.

The actual events must have left barely a dent in the awareness of Rome's half-literate public. People went on with their lives. Now they are gone, but Tacitus is still with us and for better or worse, it is his perspective that has prevailed.

then it hit me - he is already dead!
"Collected Poems in English" by Joseph Brodsky, Ann Kjellberg

Lately I haven't paid much attention to American Poetry. Provincial minds who spill their prosy guts over America's kitchen sink or worse and who belong into one of Ophra's spirituality binges. So it completely slipped me by, that the US had a Russian as poet laureate; the name was not familiar.

Then I found his collected poems. Critics point to howlers in the translation, especially if committed by the author himself: it is true, there is space for improvement. But to blame it on the justified demand that translations of poetry have to be faithful to content and structure, rather points to inhibitions in the critic's judgment. As for me: I found at long last another poet of stature and rank. And yes he deserves a better presentation. (It can be done!)

I became interested in his biography - born 1940 ... and then it hit me: he is already dead. And I felt sad, as if I had missed the arrival of a long lost relative.

a talented writer
Douglas Coupland "Microserfs"

My standard method of gauging a new read is to open the book at random in the middle, read a page or two, and if I feel like going on from this spot or going back a few pages, then the book is promising enough to consider buying it. I bought Microserfs, and I didn't regret it. Obviously, in a narrative, I am not after "messages" (who gives a hoot on opinions? Everybody has opinions and dogs have fleas.) And of course I don't share this obsession with "plot" plot is a crutch for authors with inferior talent. Besides, in a novel, a good plot is the outcome of a good character development. (For very short stories, this rule may not apply - but then read Book 9, chapter XIII of Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Amazing how much character development can take place on only two and a half printed pages!)

I read Microserfs from cover to cover in one sitting, which doesn't happen too often these days. Everything in the book is likable except for the soapy and over sentimental ending. Perhaps this was meant to be satirical, but that's not how it hit me. The author doesn't give the impression of making fun of his characters. But it is fun to read. The sequence on menstrual bleeding has an almost Rabelaisian quality. Pity that there wasn't more of this. But then this is exactly the point: computer geeks have no life. An author has to have real talent to create a captivating read from such material.

the bible fryed crispy
Northrop Frye: "The Great Code"

In order to live up to the late Mr. Frye's ideal of a reader, one is required of an encyclopedic erudition and the knack to read into any given text an archipelago of implicit meanings and mythological references from the hypothetical substratum of cultural traditions and collective lore over the ages. Should any author have the audacity to think, that he or she actually has a word to say in this matter, then hard luck lads and lasses, no consultation hours today! (see my review on 'Anatomy of Criticism')

Yet sometimes, even over Toronto's campus rises the Sun. Suppose on a given text there is very little matter of fact knowledge available. Suppose the very nature of such text is mythological. Suppose this text happened to set up the imaginative framework of an entire civilization, "a mythological universe" within which a large section of this planet's literature had operated all the way up to the 18th century. Suppose a confused anthology of badly established "little books" (= 'ta biblia') had been for generations the fare at the foundation of the Western mind-set. Then, what kind of perspective would be most suitable to investigate this phenomenon?

Mr. Frye always had a preference for authors who were exceptionally biblical, like Milton or Blake. Understanding the Bible obviously helps understanding them, and this here is not an enquiry into the Bible's actual meaning but as it is perceived and interpreted by countless generations of readers. Which means that the confusion of largely anonymous and almost always apocryphal texts no longer matters, because what matters is: "that "the Bible" has traditionally been read as a unity, and has influenced Western imagination as a unity." (Northrop Frye)

This is not a book on biblical scholarship, though it incorporates many tasty morsels of it. Frye has his moments of delicious irony, but he is not irreverent to his subject and speaks with the voice of a humanitarian. As was to be expected from him, he approached his subject from four different angles: the language, myth, metaphor and typology. Nothing to worry, Professor Frye lectured on English literature "language" refers exclusively to the King James Bible. Still what he quotes from his sources on the evolution of verbal forms and discursive writing, is still valid.

If something is written in heroic verse it most likely belongs to an old stratum, prose always points to late provenance, exile or post exile, a highly argumentative and discursive prose is even later. This aside, it is truly amazing to see how many cross references and anchor-points to a wider mythological cosmos Mr. Frye manages to establish. If applied on Marcel Proust or Tolstoy, this "method" would be unadulterated bogus, but the Bible can take it and in a positive sense it gains perspective and point. Nothing here is foggy or presumptuous; for once we see Mr. Frye at his best.

The only thing I have in common with Northrop Frye is, that we both have read the Bible from cover to cover. What he got out of it, we can read in the 'Great Code,' what I got out of it, is a slightly different matter. For starters, I would seriously question Frye's premise, that the Bible except for a few exceptional readers has influenced anybody as a "unity." Just remember your last encounter with a Bible thumping evangelist or Jehovah's Witness: these people have their quotes off pat and pick them all over the place, regardless of historical context and intended meaning. I would even say, that for many serious readers, the Old Testament, for all practical purposes, is non-existent.

As for me, 'Leviticus' and 'Numbers' are an education in folklore and specimens of real life legal customs from a distant era, though not the era the text claims to represent - an aspect lost, not only on Mr. Frye. And from a perspective of pure literature, it is very telling for Frye's brand of literary criticism that for me exactly those documents stand out which are of least use for Mr. Frye's commentary such as 'Ecclesiastes,' 'Solomon's Song,' and the succession stories. (1 King 13 is a gem of a truly Kafkaesque humor.) On the other hand, there can be very little disagreement on Isaiah or Jeremiah.

more than just a "homosexual Issue"
"The Crucifixion of Hyacinth: Jews, Christians, and Homosexuals from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity"
by Geoff Puterbaugh, Wayne R. Dynes(Preface)

Mr. Puterbaugh's assessment of Plato and Socrates, is, by and large, based on Popper, but I think Plato was too much of an aristocrat ever to leave the boys alone. Only after Viagra couldn't have done its thing anymore he wrote the "Laws" and turned completely into a fascist prig, who not only frowned on homosexuality, but recommended inquisitions, star chambers, secret trials, censorship and euthanasia. And this is a connection which should concern everyone of us: A sexually intolerant legislation always comes with some sort of totalitarian agenda. How the historical Socrates fits into this picture is a matter of opinion. This smug enemy of Athens' democracy has never been my favorite saint, and on his trial the court jester and protege of the 30 tyrants had it coming. (Just imagine, you mind your own business and suddenly find yourself cornered by Socrates and a street-gang of aristocratic loafers who jeer him on when he humiliates you in a dialectical cat-and-mouse game of leading questions. It was payback time.)

On the whole Mr. Puterbaugh's exposition of pederasty and homosexuality as an accepted practice from Homer's time up to the closing of Roman male-brothels is accurate, very true -- and nothing new. Which is a shame: after two centuries of competent scholarship on the subject, the facts still need to reach a wider audience, and this is what the author had set out to do, before he could move on to his indictment of the one agent who has caused the modern homophobia in legislation and public perception. So Puterbaugh's attack on Philo and Clement struck me first as unfairly hostile. The reason is something, I should be ashamed of: I have read of Philo only "De Legatione" and of Clement only a few Gnostic bits and pieces of a more benign nature. So it is easy to be tolerant simply out of ignorance. Things look different if you speak for a mistreated minority.

But the last quarter of the book really wraps it up. The evidence from late Roman legislation and its enforcement is the darkest thing I have read for a long time. Of course it was part of my job description to know these things, but they use to come in a more diluted form, in the dissipated details of a wider picture, easily overlooked in a flood of trivia. And after all, empires don't fall for simple causes, or do they? Laws and regulations tell us what people think and fear, and sometimes it is good to remember what "history" meant for a Roman: the "custom of nations." When bundled up in this concentrated form as presented here, I really wonder how anybody can propose that history would have taken a similar turn if there had been no Church and no Christian religion?

This was more than an instrumental coincidence, this was the ecclesiastical impact on actual legislation, for crying out loud; it motivated perfectly decent people to commit atrocities on a colossal scale and then successfully anesthetized the conscience of the perpetrators. Times were different then, true enough, but what we see here is a deliberate effort to switch off the lights, and from the result, one must say, they succeeded. Ancient civilization may have ended anyway, but not like this. If you expected a quick review on ancient sexual practices and what changed it, prepare yourself for more than you had bargained for - a barrage of facts on 177 pages.

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