Astral Codex Ten

Colosseum

12 min read

Colosseum

Article

Colosseum is a recurring venue in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 06, 2021 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The seats in the Colosseum were regularly repaired”; “the games of the Colosseum and sacrifices of Tenochtitlan”; “a slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit”. It most often appears alongside Britain, Christianity, Constantine.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 06, 2021
  • Last seen: November 12, 2024

Appears In

None.

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.

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle
May 06, 2021 · Original source
Italy also remained somewhat prosperous. Italy peacefully moved from rule by an emperor to a Gothic king without the raiding and violence of other regions. The wealthy members of the Senate in Rome maintained many of the traditions and ceremonies of the old Respublica. The annona, the food ration system, was revamped and continued. There were still splendid villas on the hills of Rome, but “they now stood in the midst of deserted gardens and the emptied, charred ruins of former, even greater palaces.” Around the Senate House, the facades of buildings were maintained even after their insides were full of rubble. The seats in the Colosseum were regularly repaired. Games were still held, though gladiators no longer fought. The lay elites attempted to maintain Rome’s historic civic life. At the same time, the bishops and clergy of Rome reached out to the population in the form of relief to the poor.
Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
November 05, 2024 · Original source
Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.
Yet in the end, everything is so perfectly balanced that the sum total of these luminaries refuse to say which side of even we’re on. The nation balances on a knife’s edge. Eli Lilly stock moons. A red sun hangs over Philadelphia, where American democracy began and may yet end. A man walks into a diner just before closing time. He looks like a good tipper. The waitress was hoping to leave early and go vote. She decides against. Seven trumpets sound; seven seals are opened; there is silence in Heaven for the space of about half an hour. As George RR Martin put it, “God flips a coin and the world holds its breath.” Tomorrow - if we are so lucky - there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later. A red sun sets over DC. The marble monuments are stained crimson; the statues of Lincoln and Jefferson and the rest look like they writhe in hellfire. The people seclude themselves in their houses. A city where even the Christians are atheist kneels in prayer. On some level, they know - we know - it was never just about choosing a leader. It was all for this - the same urge that drove the games of the Colosseum and sacrifices of Tenochtitlan. The need for a single moment of unconditioned reality. For one evening, the people of the richest and most secure nation in history, fat off the spoils of six continents, will know the same fear as the starving Catalhuyuk farmer, staring at the sky, wondering if the rains will come. For one evening, everyone - rich or poor, religious or secular, Democrat or Republican - will join in the prayer of the poet: “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet Lest we forget - lest we forget!” Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Kodos Metaculus uses experimental “conditional forecasts” to determine the consequences of a Trump/Harris victory. How it works (example): you set up two forecasts: If Trump wins, will China invade Taiwan?
Inline links: the prayer of the poet, experimental “conditional forecasts”, example
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
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: 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