Astral Codex Ten

Greek

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Greek

Article

Greek is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 30, 2020 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “all those other Greek words about morality”; “Americanization of the Greek surname Economou/Oikonomou”; “it will say ‘Greek’“. It most often appears alongside America, Athens, Britain.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 30, 2020
  • Last seen: November 12, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today
August 30, 2020 · Original source
Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right", both in the senses of "natural rights" and "the right answer". And "order". And "arete" and "aristos" and all those other Greek words about morality. And "artificial", as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively "reign" and related words about rulership, and "rich" and related words about money.
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
From some quick googling it sounds like it's an Americanization of the Greek surname Economou/Oikonomou.
My Bet: AI Size Solves Flubs
June 07, 2022 · Original source
Marcus had previously shown that GPT-2 could reason accurately about the languages of well-known places and big countries. For example, if you prompt it with “I grew up in Athens, I speak fluent…”, then it will say “Greek”. Here he shows that it can’t do that with smaller, less obvious locales:
I grew up in Mykonos. I speak fluent Greek, and I'm also very good at English. I have experience in customer service, as I have worked in a few cafes and restaurants in Mykonos. ✔️
Inline links: ✔️
And when I do this, “Gary Marcus post talking about how some AI isn’t real intelligence because it can’t do X, Y, and Z” feels like a concerning sign. Like a character in a Greek tragedy saying that not even Zeus can harm him. Or a billionaire investor saying we’ve entered a new paradigm where recessions are impossible.
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
I think something simpler happened. Harvard became more exclusive. Prior to the mid-20th century almost anyone with the proper educational credentials could get into Harvard. The acceptance rate was around 80-90%. Now, some of this was because you had to prove you had certain aristocratic class markers like knowing Greek. But if you had them you basically got in. This is exactly how the Jews got in: they just studied the class markers. And that wasn't a problem until there were "too many" of them.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
Instead of being forced to attribute the Christians’ growth to miracles, we can pin down a specific growth rate and find that it falls within the range of the most successful modern cults. Indeed, if we think of this as each existing Christian having to convert 0.4 new people, on average, per decade, it starts to sound downright do-able. Still, how did the early Christians maintain this conversion rate over so many generations? Through The Social Graph This is another of Stark’s findings from his work with the Moonies. The first Moonie in America was a Korean missionary named Young Oon Kim, who arrived in 1959. Her first convert was her landlady. The next two were the landlady’s friends. Then came the landlady’s friends’ husbands and the landlady’s friends’ husbands’ co-workers. That was when Stark showed up. “At the time . . . I arrived to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger.” Stark theorized that “the only [people] who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to nonmembers.” I don’t think this can be literally correct - taken seriously, it implies that the second convert could have no other friends except the first, which would prevent her from spreading the religion further. But something like “your odds of converting are your number of Moonie friends, divided by your number of non-Moonie friends” seems to fit his evidence. History confirms this story. Mohammed’s first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith’s first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers. Indeed, in spite of the Mormons’ celebrated door-knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door-knocks results in a conversion, but “when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, this results in conversion 50% of the time”. 1 This theory of social-graph-based-conversation was controversial when Stark proposed it, because if you ask cultists retrospectively, they’ll usually say they were awed by the beauty of the sacred teachings. But Stark says: I knew better, because we had met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed, we could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd. I recall one who told me that he was puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about “some guy in Korea” . . . Then, one day, he got worked up about this guy too. Through Jews And Weajoos Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean even before the fall of the Temple. I don’t know why. We Jews tell ourselves that we left Israel only after the Romans kicked us out. But Stark cites plenty of historians who argue that no, it was well before that. Around the time of Christ, there were a million Jews in Israel and five million in the Diaspora, especially Alexandria, Antioch, Anatolia, and Rome. What were these Jews’ spiritual lives like? Without hard evidence, Stark supposes they were marginal. Throughout history, Jews have succeeded at keeping the Law only within tight-knit communities. If you want to keep kosher, it helps to have everyone around you keeping kosher and a local kosher butcher. If you want to keep the Sabbath, it helps to have an eruv and a synagogue within walking distance. But even more than that, the Law is strange and complicated, and unless everyone around you follows it too, you are likely to slip. Thus, when Jews were first emancipated and allowed to live among Gentiles in the 18th-19th centuries, a split emerged in the Jewish community. Those Jews who stayed in the ghettos and shtetls - or who founded new self-imposed-quasi-ghettos like Crown Heights - remained Orthodox. Those Jews who mingled with the Gentiles cast off the more difficult rules and became Reform. Only a sliver of Modern Orthodox remained in the middle, often with abysmal attrition rates. Stark asks whether the first great intermingling of Jews and Gentiles had the same effect. While the Jews in Palestine stayed religious and laid the foundations for the Rabbinic Judaism of future centuries, the Jews in the Diaspora - did what? Presumably Hellenized into some sort of semi-assimilated proto-Reform movement. Although we have limited historical evidence about these Jews’ religious behavior, we know they spoke Greek and not Hebrew (otherwise why would they need the Septuagint?) and that many of them took Greek names. Of inscriptions on the Jewish catacombs in Rome, 76% are in Greek, 22% in Latin, and only 2% in Hebrew or Aramaic. Reform Judaism is unstable. The Law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith; relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what’s left. In America, Reform Jews are over-represented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33% of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background, and even the Moonies were 30% Jewish at one point! (they’re now down to 6%) As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews’ upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn’t take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without. The Bible and the historical record call them “God-fearers”, but by analogy I can’t help but think of them as “weajoos”. These weajoos would have been easy prey for the first semi-Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion. The Apostles and other early Christians, leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world, would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually-disaffected, half-assimilated pseudo-Reform Jewish communities of the Roman world, plus their half-assimilated-the-other direction Greek hangers-on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive Law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in-between communities, saying that Jews could join together with Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here, says Stark, were the early Christians’ first few million converts. Because, I Regret To Inform You, The Pronatalists Are Right About Everything We found above that the Christian population needed to grow at 40% per decade, and assumed this meant conversion. But you could also do this through a fertility advantage. If a generation lasts thirty years, and Christians have 3x more children than pagans per generation, they can get 40%/decade growth without converting anyone at all. In reality, it was probably a mix: some conversion plus some fertility advantage. Here I start to worry that some right-wing pronatalist organization bribed Rodney Stark to abandon his usual scholarly attitude and write some kind of over-the-top pronatalist fanfic. I was waiting for the part where the eagle named MORE BIRTHS perches on the blackboard and the childfree professor was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity. Still, let’s take it at face value and see what the fanfic has to say. By the Imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was because the Romans practiced sex-selective infanticide, there were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. (Male) Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn’t possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one. In 131 BC, the Roman censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus2 proposed that that the senate make marriage compulsory because so many men, especially in the upper classes, preferred to stay single. Acknowledging that “we cannot have a really harmonious life with our wives”, the censor pointed out that "since “we cannot have any sort of life without them,” the long term welfare of the state must be served”… As Beryl Rawsom has reported, “one theme that recurs in Latin literature is that wives are difficult and therefore men do not care much for marriage.” The Romans understood that this was long-term fatal for their empire, and tried all sorts of schemes to increase family formation. In the mid-first-century BC, Cicero re-proposed Metellus’ scheme to make marriage compulsory, but it failed once again. Augustus contented himself with punitive taxes and second-class citizenship for unmarried and childless couples, combined with subsidies and affirmative action for men with at least three children. Formal and informal social pressure eventually convinced most Roman men to take wives, but no amount of love or money could make them have children. Dense cities discouraged large families, Roman children were expensive (nobles would have to spend immense effort and political favors grooming them for high positions), and (the scourge of all nobilities) too many children risked splitting the inheritance. Also, if you had a girl you’d probably just kill her (she would consume resources without continuing the family line), and half of children died before adulthood from some disease or another anyway. It was just a really bad value proposition. Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes - despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs’ fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation. When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous silphium but also proto-condoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived despite these efforts, abortion was common albeit unsanitary (maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal-breaker for the Roman men making the decision). If a baby was born in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common: Far more babies were born than were allowed to live. Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. Tacitus charged that the Jewish teaching that it is “a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” was but another of their “sinister and revolting practices” . . . not only was the exposure of infants a common practice, it was justified by law and advocated by philosophers.” Christians followed the opposite of all these practices. They recommended that men love their wives, and held this as a plausible and expected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom. From Ephesians 5: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. The Christians banned adultery (and, unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth), meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives. They held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide (many of these bans weren’t active decisions, but carry-overs from the movement’s Jewish roots). Also, I regret to say I fell for the liberal meme that Republicans tricked Christians into being anti-abortion in 1960, and previous generations of Christian had thought abortion was fine. This is absolutely not true. The Didache, the first Christian text outside the New Testament itself, probably dating from about 90 AD, says that “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born”. The second-century church father Athenagoras wrote: We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion . . . for we regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care . . . and [we do not] expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder. The end result is that while pagans delayed marriage, cheated, had nonprocreative sex, used birth control, performed abortions, and committed infanticide, Christians did none of these things. This section gave me a new appreciation for conservative Christian purity culture: it was obviously suited for the environment in which it evolved, and it’s also obvious why its founders would etch it so deeply into its memetic DNA that it’s still going strong millennia later. But I’ll end this section with a note of caution - I’m not sure how relevant any of this is. Stark refuses to speculate on pagan vs. Christian fertility rates, but when I look up modern scholarship, they reasonably point out that pagan rates must have been around “replacement”, given that the Roman population stayed steady (or slowly increased) for hundreds of years. “Replacement” is in quotes because Romans were constantly dying of plague, warfare, fire, and a million other causes; since only a third to half of people survived to reproduce, “replacement” here is something like 4-6 children per women. This doesn’t sound like the antinatalist disaster Stark describes! I think Stark is mostly talking about Roman elites - the group who Augustus kept pestering to have at least three children - and more broadly about the urban population. These people were constantly dying and being replaced by commoners and villagers. Early Christianity was primarily an urban and upper-class movement (does this surprise you? Stark urges us to think of modern cults and new religions, like American Buddhism, which predominantly recruit disillusioned children of the upper classes). So perhaps it did better than its urban upper-class pagan comparison group. Still, since the urban upper-class pagans were constantly being replaced by village lower-class pagans as soon as they died out, how much, in numerical terms, can this contribute to Christianity’s growth? A possible synthesis: if you imagine a city as having a constant population (because it’s walled, plus its hinterland can only support a certain number of non-food-producing urbanites), and villagers as replacing urbanites on a one-to-one basis as they die, then greater Christian urban fertility rates can at least contribute to the cities and upper classes becoming Christian. And once the cities and upper classes are Christian, you get Constantine, and the lower classes can be forced to comply. Remember, “pagan” originally meant “rural”! Because Where Women Go, Men Will Follow One thing Stark did not mention discovering in his study of cults, but which I have heard anecdotally - a lot of male cult members join because the cult has hot girls. This seems to have been a big factor in the spread of early Christianity as well. Stark collects various forms of evidence that early Christians were predominantly women. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans greets thirty-three prominent Christians by name, of whom 15 were men and 18 women; if (as seems likely) men were more likely to become prominent than women, this near-equality at the upper ranks suggests a female predominance at the lower. A third-century inventory of property at a Christian church includes “sixteen men’s tunics and eighty-two women’s tunics”. The book quotes historian Adolf von Harnack, who says: [Ancient sources] simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces; although the details of these stories are untrustworthy, they express correctly enough the general truth that Christianity was laid hold of by women in particular, and also that the percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than that of men. Why were women converted in such disproportionate numbers? Again, Stark’s sociological background serves him well: he is able to find reports of the same phenomenon in modern religions: By examining manuscript census returns for the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bainbridge (1983) found that approximately two-third of the Shakers were female. Data on religious movements included in the 1926 census of religious bodies show that 75% of Christian Scientists were women, as were more than 60% of Theosophists, Swedenborgians, and Spiritualists. The same is true of the immense wave of Protestant conversions taking place in Latin America. But along with a general tendency for women to convert, Stark notes that Christianity was especially attractive to women. The pagan world treated women as their husbands’ property, and not particularly well-liked property at that. The book cites the Athenian laws as typical: The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages of her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she “belonged”. Meanwhile, Christian woman had relatively high status, sometimes rising to the position of deacon within a church. Christian men were ordered to treat their wives kindly, were prohibited from cheating on them, and mostly could not divorce. Christianity, unlike paganism, did not especially pressure widows to remarry (important since a remarrying widow lost all her property to her new husband). Christian women were only a third as likely as Roman women to be married off before age 13. Women noticed all these benefits and flocked to Christianity. Aside from all of this, the Romans were practicing sex-selective infanticide, reducing their female numbers still further, and making the Christians even more proportionally female-heavy. If the Christians, like many modern cults, were 65% female, and the Romans (as some sources attest) were about 40 - 45% female, this is a pretty profound difference. The Romans grumbled about marriage, but in the end most Roman men did want wives (if only to avoid government penalties). But 1.4 men per women - maybe even less among the upper classes - puts young men seeking wives in a difficult situation (for comparison, modern San Francisco is only 1.05 men per women, and dating is already hell). To any remotely heterosexual Roman men, the 65% female Christian community must have started looking pretty good. Meanwhile, the Christians had the opposite problem: too many women, not enough men. There’s an obvious solution, and it sounds like the pagans and Christians had also figured it out: From 1 Peter 3: Wives ... submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. History records many such intermarriages, almost always ending with the conversion of the pagan husband. If you are a Christian of English descent, you may owe your religion to Queen Bertha of Kent, who convinced her husband, one of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, to take her faith. But Ruxandro Teslo has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, who disagrees with all of this. Salzman has a database of 400 aristocratic Romans during the 4th century period of Christianity’s fastest growth. She finds few intermarriages, few examples of women converting their husbands, and equal (or slightly male-biased) conversion ratios. Granted, this is only a small sample from one period. But it makes us question how good our evidence really is. Doesn’t all this hinge on one passage from Paul which, technically, named more men than women, plus one inventory of tunics which was so female-biased that it couldn’t possibly have been representative of even a very woman-heavy church? Are we sure that we can make the leap from “Christianity promised women more rights” to “Therefore, women flocked to Christianity?” Wasn’t that the same argument that pundits used last week to predict a blue wave for Kamala? Didn’t white women actually go for Trump, 53-46? Salzman has one more concern, which is that women had so few rights in ancient Roman society that it’s hard to see how they could have converted at all. When unmarried, they were under the care of their father, who would hardly have let them go out visiting churches full of strange men. When married, they were under the care of their husband, who likewise. A typical Roman man wouldn’t have cared about his wife’s religious opinions, which is maybe why so many of our stories about intermarriages and conversions come from later periods like the Anglo-Saxons. I don’t know enough about history to referee this dispute, except that say that I think the answer could easily have been different for each of early Romans, late Romans, Hellenized-Jewish-Romans, pagan Romans, upper-class Romans, and lower-class Romans, plus all combinations thereof. Because Of The Testimony Of The Martyrs The martyrs are one of the most dramatic parts of the early Christian story. Men and women would endure seemingly-unbearable tortures, continuing to praise God the whole time, sometimes in spite of Roman officials who promised to let them go free if they would just make the tiniest concession to praising Jupiter. These martyrdoms impressed their contemporaries as much as they impress us, and were a major factor driving pagans to Christianity. The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, by Jean-Leon Gerome (maybe slight nominative determinism?) Stark is writing in the 1990s, and martyrology c. 1995 does not exactly cover itself in glory. At the time of writing, the most popular theory among scholars (claims Stark) was that the martyrs were masochists. He considers this dumb and offensive theory a natural consequence of historians being reluctant to accept anything that sounds too miraculous or amazing, and there being few other hard-headed rational explanations of the martyrs’ behavior (for some reason, the obvious one - that they believed in God and Heaven - impresses neither Stark’s foils nor himself). He sets out to build an alternative theory: the martyrs were rationally seeking the approval of their community. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of intense, face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch … Ignatius was condemned to death as a Christian. But instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody of ten Roman soldiers. Thus began a long, leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity in Asia Minor on its way to the West. At each stop Ignatius was allowed to preach to and meet with those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger although their Christian identity was obvious. Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations in cities bypassed along the way, such as Ephesus and Philadelphia … As William Schoedel remarked, “It is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on part of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a ‘transient traveller,’ noting that ‘even churches that do not lie on my way according to the flesh went before me city by city.’” What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning Christians might gain him a pardon…He expected to be remembered through the ages, and compares himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, “in whose footsteps I wish to be found when I come to meet God.” It soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp, contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomelium. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who was burned alive in about 156. After the execution his bones were retrieved by some of his followers - an act witnessed by Roman officials, who took no action against them. The letter spoke of “his sacred flesh” and described his bones as “being of more value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold.” The letter-writer reported that the Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp’s bones every year “to celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of his martyrdom.” The letter concluded, “The blessed Polycarp ... to whom be glory, honour, majesty, and a throne eternal, from generation to generation. Amen.” It also included the instruction: “On receiving this, send on the letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes choice of his own servants.” In fact, today we actually know the names of nearly all of the Christian martyrs because their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for their very great holiness. I don’t know, I’m not putting too much effort into writing up this section, because it doesn’t feel like as much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996. But since then, we’ve seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian martyrs were more impressive - a slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war - but it hardly seems like as much of a leap. Honestly, Stark’s “social approval” theory seems only slightly less objectifying than the masochism theory. Some people just have a tendency towards self-sacrifice. I know many effective altruists who, for example, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research. If someone told them a way that they could help the neediest people in the world by feeding themselves to lions, the lions would no doubt eat well. Because They Survived The Plagues However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That’s almost ten times denser than modern New York City, two thousand years before anyone invented the skyscraper3. How did they do it? By cramming people together in unbearable filth and misery: Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multistoried tenements…”there was only one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments”. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme - the tenants rarely had more than one room in which “entire families were herded together”. Thus, as Stambaugh tells us, privacy was “a hard thing to find”. Not only were people terribly crowded within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their window they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices… To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat; since tenements lacked chimneys, the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be “closed” only by “hanging cloths or skins blown by rain”, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and “dread of fire was an obsession among rich and poor alike.” Packer4 (1967) doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters so cramped and squalid. Thus he concluded that the typical residents of Greco-Roman cities spent their lives mainly in public places and that the average “domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions.” These tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street, often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells; if you were out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about 30,000; the total population of Rome was about a million; in practice, the upper classes used the “public” baths and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a century or two earlier but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies, mosquitos, and other insects. It would be eighteen hundred years before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed, killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. How did people survive? Mostly they didn’t. Cities were destroyed regularly - multiple times within a single human lifetime! - then rebuilt and replenished with rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city which was a center of early Christianity. During “six hundred years of intermittent Roman rule”, he finds: It was conquered 11 times
Inline links: 1, abysmal attrition rates, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CDZA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd8fbb7c8-0789-4b71-b84f-6f93a7949ee7_595x401.png, 33% of American Buddhists, 30% Jewish, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IMoJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F248a87ba-7893-48a8-bb24-f9be9f30d355_893x720.png, has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EGFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F81ea23c2-1c9b-4d43-8d31-2c4b74990be5_1024x597.jpeg, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research, 3, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WKib!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F398aa36d-4d66-44e5-b035-fa3a20e457da_1858x1696.png
Of inscriptions on the Jewish catacombs in Rome, 76% are in Greek, 22% in Latin, and only 2% in Hebrew or Aramaic. Reform Judaism is unstable. The Law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith; relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what’s left. In America, Reform Jews are over-represented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33% of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background, and even the Moonies were 30% Jewish at one point! (they’re now down to 6%) As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews’ upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn’t take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without. The Bible and the historical record call them “God-fearers”, but by analogy I can’t help but think of them as “weajoos”. These weajoos would have been easy prey for the first semi-Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion. The Apostles and other early Christians, leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world, would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually-disaffected, half-assimilated pseudo-Reform Jewish communities of the Roman world, plus their half-assimilated-the-other direction Greek hangers-on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive Law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in-between communities, saying that Jews could join together with Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here, says Stark, were the early Christians’ first few million converts. Because, I Regret To Inform You, The Pronatalists Are Right About Everything We found above that the Christian population needed to grow at 40% per decade, and assumed this meant conversion. But you could also do this through a fertility advantage. If a generation lasts thirty years, and Christians have 3x more children than pagans per generation, they can get 40%/decade growth without converting anyone at all. In reality, it was probably a mix: some conversion plus some fertility advantage. Here I start to worry that some right-wing pronatalist organization bribed Rodney Stark to abandon his usual scholarly attitude and write some kind of over-the-top pronatalist fanfic. I was waiting for the part where the eagle named MORE BIRTHS perches on the blackboard and the childfree professor was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity. Still, let’s take it at face value and see what the fanfic has to say. By the Imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was because the Romans practiced sex-selective infanticide, there were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. (Male) Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn’t possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one. In 131 BC, the Roman censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus2 proposed that that the senate make marriage compulsory because so many men, especially in the upper classes, preferred to stay single. Acknowledging that “we cannot have a really harmonious life with our wives”, the censor pointed out that "since “we cannot have any sort of life without them,” the long term welfare of the state must be served”… As Beryl Rawsom has reported, “one theme that recurs in Latin literature is that wives are difficult and therefore men do not care much for marriage.” The Romans understood that this was long-term fatal for their empire, and tried all sorts of schemes to increase family formation. In the mid-first-century BC, Cicero re-proposed Metellus’ scheme to make marriage compulsory, but it failed once again. Augustus contented himself with punitive taxes and second-class citizenship for unmarried and childless couples, combined with subsidies and affirmative action for men with at least three children. Formal and informal social pressure eventually convinced most Roman men to take wives, but no amount of love or money could make them have children. Dense cities discouraged large families, Roman children were expensive (nobles would have to spend immense effort and political favors grooming them for high positions), and (the scourge of all nobilities) too many children risked splitting the inheritance. Also, if you had a girl you’d probably just kill her (she would consume resources without continuing the family line), and half of children died before adulthood from some disease or another anyway. It was just a really bad value proposition. Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes - despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs’ fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation. When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous silphium but also proto-condoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived despite these efforts, abortion was common albeit unsanitary (maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal-breaker for the Roman men making the decision). If a baby was born in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common: Far more babies were born than were allowed to live. Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. Tacitus charged that the Jewish teaching that it is “a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” was but another of their “sinister and revolting practices” . . . not only was the exposure of infants a common practice, it was justified by law and advocated by philosophers.” Christians followed the opposite of all these practices. They recommended that men love their wives, and held this as a plausible and expected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom. From Ephesians 5: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. The Christians banned adultery (and, unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth), meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives. They held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide (many of these bans weren’t active decisions, but carry-overs from the movement’s Jewish roots). Also, I regret to say I fell for the liberal meme that Republicans tricked Christians into being anti-abortion in 1960, and previous generations of Christian had thought abortion was fine. This is absolutely not true. The Didache, the first Christian text outside the New Testament itself, probably dating from about 90 AD, says that “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born”. The second-century church father Athenagoras wrote: We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion . . . for we regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care . . . and [we do not] expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder. The end result is that while pagans delayed marriage, cheated, had nonprocreative sex, used birth control, performed abortions, and committed infanticide, Christians did none of these things. This section gave me a new appreciation for conservative Christian purity culture: it was obviously suited for the environment in which it evolved, and it’s also obvious why its founders would etch it so deeply into its memetic DNA that it’s still going strong millennia later. But I’ll end this section with a note of caution - I’m not sure how relevant any of this is. Stark refuses to speculate on pagan vs. Christian fertility rates, but when I look up modern scholarship, they reasonably point out that pagan rates must have been around “replacement”, given that the Roman population stayed steady (or slowly increased) for hundreds of years. “Replacement” is in quotes because Romans were constantly dying of plague, warfare, fire, and a million other causes; since only a third to half of people survived to reproduce, “replacement” here is something like 4-6 children per women. This doesn’t sound like the antinatalist disaster Stark describes! I think Stark is mostly talking about Roman elites - the group who Augustus kept pestering to have at least three children - and more broadly about the urban population. These people were constantly dying and being replaced by commoners and villagers. Early Christianity was primarily an urban and upper-class movement (does this surprise you? Stark urges us to think of modern cults and new religions, like American Buddhism, which predominantly recruit disillusioned children of the upper classes). So perhaps it did better than its urban upper-class pagan comparison group. Still, since the urban upper-class pagans were constantly being replaced by village lower-class pagans as soon as they died out, how much, in numerical terms, can this contribute to Christianity’s growth? A possible synthesis: if you imagine a city as having a constant population (because it’s walled, plus its hinterland can only support a certain number of non-food-producing urbanites), and villagers as replacing urbanites on a one-to-one basis as they die, then greater Christian urban fertility rates can at least contribute to the cities and upper classes becoming Christian. And once the cities and upper classes are Christian, you get Constantine, and the lower classes can be forced to comply. Remember, “pagan” originally meant “rural”! Because Where Women Go, Men Will Follow One thing Stark did not mention discovering in his study of cults, but which I have heard anecdotally - a lot of male cult members join because the cult has hot girls. This seems to have been a big factor in the spread of early Christianity as well. Stark collects various forms of evidence that early Christians were predominantly women. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans greets thirty-three prominent Christians by name, of whom 15 were men and 18 women; if (as seems likely) men were more likely to become prominent than women, this near-equality at the upper ranks suggests a female predominance at the lower. A third-century inventory of property at a Christian church includes “sixteen men’s tunics and eighty-two women’s tunics”. The book quotes historian Adolf von Harnack, who says: [Ancient sources] simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces; although the details of these stories are untrustworthy, they express correctly enough the general truth that Christianity was laid hold of by women in particular, and also that the percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than that of men. Why were women converted in such disproportionate numbers? Again, Stark’s sociological background serves him well: he is able to find reports of the same phenomenon in modern religions: By examining manuscript census returns for the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bainbridge (1983) found that approximately two-third of the Shakers were female. Data on religious movements included in the 1926 census of religious bodies show that 75% of Christian Scientists were women, as were more than 60% of Theosophists, Swedenborgians, and Spiritualists. The same is true of the immense wave of Protestant conversions taking place in Latin America. But along with a general tendency for women to convert, Stark notes that Christianity was especially attractive to women. The pagan world treated women as their husbands’ property, and not particularly well-liked property at that. The book cites the Athenian laws as typical: The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages of her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she “belonged”. Meanwhile, Christian woman had relatively high status, sometimes rising to the position of deacon within a church. Christian men were ordered to treat their wives kindly, were prohibited from cheating on them, and mostly could not divorce. Christianity, unlike paganism, did not especially pressure widows to remarry (important since a remarrying widow lost all her property to her new husband). Christian women were only a third as likely as Roman women to be married off before age 13. Women noticed all these benefits and flocked to Christianity. Aside from all of this, the Romans were practicing sex-selective infanticide, reducing their female numbers still further, and making the Christians even more proportionally female-heavy. If the Christians, like many modern cults, were 65% female, and the Romans (as some sources attest) were about 40 - 45% female, this is a pretty profound difference. The Romans grumbled about marriage, but in the end most Roman men did want wives (if only to avoid government penalties). But 1.4 men per women - maybe even less among the upper classes - puts young men seeking wives in a difficult situation (for comparison, modern San Francisco is only 1.05 men per women, and dating is already hell). To any remotely heterosexual Roman men, the 65% female Christian community must have started looking pretty good. Meanwhile, the Christians had the opposite problem: too many women, not enough men. There’s an obvious solution, and it sounds like the pagans and Christians had also figured it out: From 1 Peter 3: Wives ... submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. History records many such intermarriages, almost always ending with the conversion of the pagan husband. If you are a Christian of English descent, you may owe your religion to Queen Bertha of Kent, who convinced her husband, one of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, to take her faith. But Ruxandro Teslo has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, who disagrees with all of this. Salzman has a database of 400 aristocratic Romans during the 4th century period of Christianity’s fastest growth. She finds few intermarriages, few examples of women converting their husbands, and equal (or slightly male-biased) conversion ratios. Granted, this is only a small sample from one period. But it makes us question how good our evidence really is. Doesn’t all this hinge on one passage from Paul which, technically, named more men than women, plus one inventory of tunics which was so female-biased that it couldn’t possibly have been representative of even a very woman-heavy church? Are we sure that we can make the leap from “Christianity promised women more rights” to “Therefore, women flocked to Christianity?” Wasn’t that the same argument that pundits used last week to predict a blue wave for Kamala? Didn’t white women actually go for Trump, 53-46? Salzman has one more concern, which is that women had so few rights in ancient Roman society that it’s hard to see how they could have converted at all. When unmarried, they were under the care of their father, who would hardly have let them go out visiting churches full of strange men. When married, they were under the care of their husband, who likewise. A typical Roman man wouldn’t have cared about his wife’s religious opinions, which is maybe why so many of our stories about intermarriages and conversions come from later periods like the Anglo-Saxons. I don’t know enough about history to referee this dispute, except that say that I think the answer could easily have been different for each of early Romans, late Romans, Hellenized-Jewish-Romans, pagan Romans, upper-class Romans, and lower-class Romans, plus all combinations thereof. Because Of The Testimony Of The Martyrs The martyrs are one of the most dramatic parts of the early Christian story. Men and women would endure seemingly-unbearable tortures, continuing to praise God the whole time, sometimes in spite of Roman officials who promised to let them go free if they would just make the tiniest concession to praising Jupiter. These martyrdoms impressed their contemporaries as much as they impress us, and were a major factor driving pagans to Christianity. The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, by Jean-Leon Gerome (maybe slight nominative determinism?) Stark is writing in the 1990s, and martyrology c. 1995 does not exactly cover itself in glory. At the time of writing, the most popular theory among scholars (claims Stark) was that the martyrs were masochists. He considers this dumb and offensive theory a natural consequence of historians being reluctant to accept anything that sounds too miraculous or amazing, and there being few other hard-headed rational explanations of the martyrs’ behavior (for some reason, the obvious one - that they believed in God and Heaven - impresses neither Stark’s foils nor himself). He sets out to build an alternative theory: the martyrs were rationally seeking the approval of their community. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of intense, face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch … Ignatius was condemned to death as a Christian. But instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody of ten Roman soldiers. Thus began a long, leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity in Asia Minor on its way to the West. At each stop Ignatius was allowed to preach to and meet with those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger although their Christian identity was obvious. Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations in cities bypassed along the way, such as Ephesus and Philadelphia … As William Schoedel remarked, “It is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on part of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a ‘transient traveller,’ noting that ‘even churches that do not lie on my way according to the flesh went before me city by city.’” What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning Christians might gain him a pardon…He expected to be remembered through the ages, and compares himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, “in whose footsteps I wish to be found when I come to meet God.” It soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp, contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomelium. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who was burned alive in about 156. After the execution his bones were retrieved by some of his followers - an act witnessed by Roman officials, who took no action against them. The letter spoke of “his sacred flesh” and described his bones as “being of more value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold.” The letter-writer reported that the Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp’s bones every year “to celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of his martyrdom.” The letter concluded, “The blessed Polycarp ... to whom be glory, honour, majesty, and a throne eternal, from generation to generation. Amen.” It also included the instruction: “On receiving this, send on the letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes choice of his own servants.” In fact, today we actually know the names of nearly all of the Christian martyrs because their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for their very great holiness. I don’t know, I’m not putting too much effort into writing up this section, because it doesn’t feel like as much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996. But since then, we’ve seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian martyrs were more impressive - a slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war - but it hardly seems like as much of a leap. Honestly, Stark’s “social approval” theory seems only slightly less objectifying than the masochism theory. Some people just have a tendency towards self-sacrifice. I know many effective altruists who, for example, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research. If someone told them a way that they could help the neediest people in the world by feeding themselves to lions, the lions would no doubt eat well. Because They Survived The Plagues However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That’s almost ten times denser than modern New York City, two thousand years before anyone invented the skyscraper3. How did they do it? By cramming people together in unbearable filth and misery: Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multistoried tenements…”there was only one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments”. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme - the tenants rarely had more than one room in which “entire families were herded together”. Thus, as Stambaugh tells us, privacy was “a hard thing to find”. Not only were people terribly crowded within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their window they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices… To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat; since tenements lacked chimneys, the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be “closed” only by “hanging cloths or skins blown by rain”, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and “dread of fire was an obsession among rich and poor alike.” Packer4 (1967) doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters so cramped and squalid. Thus he concluded that the typical residents of Greco-Roman cities spent their lives mainly in public places and that the average “domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions.” These tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street, often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells; if you were out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about 30,000; the total population of Rome was about a million; in practice, the upper classes used the “public” baths and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a century or two earlier but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies, mosquitos, and other insects. It would be eighteen hundred years before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed, killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. How did people survive? Mostly they didn’t. Cities were destroyed regularly - multiple times within a single human lifetime! - then rebuilt and replenished with rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city which was a center of early Christianity. During “six hundred years of intermittent Roman rule”, he finds: It was conquered 11 times
Inline links: 33% of American Buddhists, 30% Jewish, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IMoJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F248a87ba-7893-48a8-bb24-f9be9f30d355_893x720.png, has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EGFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F81ea23c2-1c9b-4d43-8d31-2c4b74990be5_1024x597.jpeg, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research, 3, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WKib!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F398aa36d-4d66-44e5-b035-fa3a20e457da_1858x1696.png
Judaism did better. God has a sort of love-hate relationship with His people Israel, but at least there are clearly strong emotions involved. Still, Stark thinks it was Christianity that really pioneered the idea that God loves individuals. From that, everything else flows. You should love your fellow man (and nurse him during plague). You should love your children (and not commit infanticide or abortion). You should love God back (and be willing to die a martyr for Him). From God’s love flows naturally the promise of Heaven (instead of the shadowy semi-naturally-forming underworlds of the Greek and early Jews). Pagan priests were people who were skilled at the relevant rituals; Christian bishops/priests/deacons were people who loved God especially much. Aside from all the individual ways that Christian love provided an advantage, Stark thinks that paganism just couldn’t compete.