Reconstructing the Architecture of an Arabian Cathedral

Sometime around the year 567, an architectural exemplar was constructed in the region now known as Yemen, at the southwestern end of the Arabian peninsula. The governor Abraha caused it to be built. He claimed that “neither Arabians nor Persians have built anything equal to it.”

Abraha’s boast might have some merit: he’d corresponded with Emperor Justinain about the construction of this cathedral, and Justinian had contributed materials and skilled craftsmen to the project. Justinian wouldn’t have allowed himself to be associated with any building project that wasn’t spectacular.

This cathedral no longer exists, but historians Barbara Finster and Jürgen Schmidt have created a painstaking reconstruction of the church. Along with Justinian’s donation,

Daneben verwandte Abraha einheimisches Material, gurub-Steine für die Sockelzone, Steine vom Berg Nuqum, verschiedenfarbigen Marmor und vergoldete Ornamentfliese aus dem »Palast der Bilqis« in Marib.

Another historian, Werner Daum, estimates a slightly earlier date for the construction of the church, around AD 540. In any case, the cathedral lasted only until the mid 700s, when it was destroyed by invading Islamic armies. According to Daum, documents indicate that the church was still standing in 750/751, but was gone by 753/754, and so the demolition of the church is dated to around 752.

During the roughly 200 years that the church stood, it was a marvel, as Finster and Schmidt write:

Die Bekrönung der Außenwand erfolgte durch eine ebenfalls vorkragende Attikazone, aus vier (jeweils?) zwei Ellen hoch Zierbändern aus buntem, polierten Stein.

Finster and Schmidt refer to the fact that the joist ends overhung as did the meader at the top of the structure, an engineering feat.

The church built by Abraha in the city of San‘a’ was not only an architectural wonder, but also a reminder of a time when the Arabian peninsula was inhabited by a large number of Christians, who lived peacefully with anamists, Jews, and Zoroastrians. The landscape of Arabia was home to churches, cathedrals, and seminaries.

Starting in the mid 600s, Muslim armies conquered the peninsula, destroying the worship and educational places of the native populations. Numerous brilliant architectural examples were lost in this mass demolition.

Because of the linguistic ambiguities in transliteration, Abraha is also cited as Abreha, Abrahah, or Abrahah al-Ashram. San‘a’ is the city in which this edifice was located, a city also spelled Sanaa, San’a, or Sana.

The One That Started It All: Shevoroshkin and Nostratics

Can the family tree of the world’s languages be traced back to a single ancestor? It’s no surprise that Dutch, Danish, and German are part of a single language group and share a common ancestor language. Romanian, Portuguese, and French descend from Latin. This understanding of language genealogy is common.

The work of historical linguistics over the last several centuries has yielded several detailed family trees, each of which shows the relationships between some of the world’s currently-existing languages. Dutch, Danish, and German arise from one earlier language, and together with Norwegian, Flemish, Icelandic, and others, form a sibling group: the parent language which gave birth to all of them no longer exists, but can be reconstructed.

The patterns found in the contemporary languages give clues about the structures of the parent language. Working backward, linguists can discover the features of the now-extinct parent. In the case of German, Swedish, Dutch, etc., the original source language is called “Germanic” (not German!) or sometimes “proto-Germanic.”

Likewise, a proto-Italic language gave birth to Latin; Latin in turn produced Spanish, Italian, etc. A proto-Slavic language yielded Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, etc.

Moving a generation further into the past, linguists then sought a common ancestor for the Germanic, Slavic, and Italic families. Those three — together with a few others, like Celtic, Hellenic, and Indo-Iranian — are all the progeny of an original “Indo-European” language. This language would have been spoken up to around 2500 B.C., and perhaps even written, although no written evidence has been discovered.

As research moves back generation by generation, the postulation of these various ancestor languages is based on ever more indirect evidence. It is tenuous to reconstruct a language for which no written traces exist, and which has not been spoken or used for centuries or even millennia. Data is derived from the common features of the existing daughter languages.

It is even more shaky to reconstruct a mother language when the evidence is a collection of hypothetical languages which are themselves reconstructions.

The move from examining the vocabulary and grammar of Gothic and Old Icelandic to reconstructing a proto-Germanic language is at least justified by concrete examples from the daughter languages. But the move to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European is even more fragile, because the daughter languages themselves are hypothetical reconstructions.

Yet linguists have done precisely this.

So there is now a detailed account of the proto-Indo-European language, its daughter languages, granddaughter languages, and great-granddaughter languages. As the name ‘Indo-European’ suggests, the family includes many of the languages which are now spoken in a broad area from India to Europe. Sanskrit and English turn out to be cousins.

This same multi-generational family tree structure has been documented for other language groups — an Afro-Asiatic group, a Dravidian group, a Kartvelian group, and others. Eventually, any existing language is seen as part of a larger linguistic family.

The final step — a speculative and controversial step — is to show all these groups, in their earliest phases, as siblings, and to posit a single language as the ancestor of all known human speech. The ultimate source is called ‘proto-World’ or ‘proto-Human’ or ‘proto-Sapiens’ and corresponds to an intuitive understanding of human language. It is conjectured to have been common during the Paleolithic era.

The ‘proto-World’ hypothesis engenders both love and hate among linguists — those who do research in historical linguistics are also called ‘philologists’ — because it has only the most uncertain indirect evidence, and yet also seems to be probably correct. The response of many linguists is that it is likely to be true and likely never to be proven.

One step in the process of developing the proto-World hypothesis was the discovery — or invention, depending on how you view it — of the Nostratic language group. This super-family of languages includes the Indo-European group, as well as the Uralic and Altaic groups, and potentially other groups. The Nostratic macrofamily does not, however, include all languages. It is an intermediate stage of development between proto-World and Indo-European.

Among linguists, there are two extreme views: on the one hand, a confident assertion that proto-World and Nostratic had a concrete existence, were part of a clearly definable family tree of languages, and are properly the object of rigorous academic study and attempted reconstruction; on the other hand, a rejection of proto-World and Nostratic as purely speculative and conjectural, lacking any observable evidence, and not properly the object of academic investigation.

Given those two extreme positions, fiery and entertaining debate is guaranteed. There are, of course, many moderate scholars who see proto-World and Nostratic as reasonable hypotheses, but as lacking enough detailed evidence to fuel rigorous reconstruction.

One linguist in the Nostratic camp is Vitaly Shevoroshkin; author Robert Wright gives a glimpse of Shevoroshkin’s work:

The assertion that proto-Nostratic actually existed, though sufficient to inflame a number of American linguists, is innocuous compared with the second part of Shevoroshkin’s world view: the Nostratic phylum is itself historically related to the handful of other great language families Shevoroshkin sees in the world, which means that all of them are descended from a common tongue. This language — called, variously, proto-Human, proto-World, and the Mother Tongue — would have been spoken 50,000, 100,000, maybe even 150,000 years ago, probably in Africa, and then diffused across the globe. And here’s the kicker, the thing that gives Shevoroshkin a rock-solid basis for his bunker mentality: he believes not only that proto-World’s past existence is apparent but that proto-World itself is apparent, its primordial elements distinctly visible in modern languages, as refracted through eons of linguistic evolution. He says we can now begin reconstructing proto-World, the basic vocabulary from which all the world’s known languages have sprung.

While detailed descriptions of how, e.g., Old High German emerged from proto-Germanic have been thoroughly explored, and accounts of them ossified in a couple centuries’ worth of academic work, the details of Nostratic and proto-World are murky and research is ongoing. This will provide employment and heated debate among scholars for another century or two.

Picking up the Pieces: What Can Be Learned from the French Revolution

Prior to 1789, the world had certainly seen its share of brutal and excessively bloody wars, in which many people had died. But the French Revolution was something different: it wasn’t a war; it was the mass execution of unarmed and defenseless civilians.

The French Revolution was also a tragedy. It began promising freedom of speech and ended by murdering people who had simply dared to express an opinion. It began promising freedom of religion and ended by killing priests and brutally enforcing atheism upon the populace.

What went wrong?

The revolutionaries correctly identified a political problem — the absolutist Bourbon dynasty — but they incorrectly sought to fix that problem by changing, not the government, but rather the society.

One fixes governmental problems by changing the government. One fixes societal problems by changing society. The French Revolution attempted to fix governmental problems by changing society, and so was doomed to failure.

Having toppled the monarchy, the revolutionaries discovered that they had no thought-out plan to replace it. What followed was a series of ad hoc governments, hastily structured, quickly manifesting their weaknesses, and as hastily replaced by other equally impromptu governments.

The ideology of the revolution — ideologies lack nuance and complexity — tended toward an absolutism of thought and often of action. The demand for absolute freedom led predictably to chaos. The chaos led predictably to a demand for order, which led to tyranny. The absolute nature of the revolutionary ideology — critics of the French Revolution called it “metaphysical” — also led to oversimplification. Blanket edicts replaced subtle legislation.

A century earlier, John Locke had already pointed to the distinction between government and society. A decade earlier, Thomas Paine had pointed to the same distinction with fresh wording for a new circumstance. To its own detriment, the French Revolution failed to heed this insight.

While both society and legislation can be frustratingly complex, the Byzantine intricacies of governments and cultures are the way they are for a reason. Patient examination will reveal wisdom in the labyrinthine structures. Both natural structures — oysters or stalactites — and human structures — great architecture — require time to be built, and in this time, acquire a multitude of details and variations.

Impatient revolutionaries wish to sweep aside the complexities at once, and introduce an absolute simplicity. Impracticality is the least of the vices of such thinking: it soon turns deadly.

The Jacobins were an influential faction among the revolutionaries in France. The Benthamites in Britain were followers of Jeremy Bentham, originally gathered around his system of philosophical utilitarian ethics, but then broadening those principles and hoping to apply them to society and government. Both groups, while differing from each other, made the same mistakes.

Edmond Burke made insightful critiques of the French Revolution as it unfolded and even predicted its various developments before they happened. Writing about Burke, historian Russell Kirk explains:

Society is immeasurably more than a political device. Knowing this, Burke endeavored to convince his generation of the immense complexity of existence, the “mysterious incorporation of the human race.” If society is treated as a simple contraption to be managed on mathematical lines — the Jacobins and the Benthamites and most other radicals so regarded it — then man will be degraded into something much less than a partner in the immortal contract which unites the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, the bond between God and man. Order in this world is contingent upon order above.

Burke saw that humans have three great relationships: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those who will live after them. Any thoughts about the differences between government and society must account for all three.

The revolutionaries in France fell to one side or the other: either a legalism which found endless rules for people to obey, or an anarchistic nihilistic absence of any guidance.

The antidote offered by Burke was a morality which was not one of endless legislation, but which offered rather ethical guidance, as Russell Kirk reports:

There exists no simple set of formulas by which all the ills to which the flesh is heir may be swept away. Yet there do exist general principles of morals and of politics to which thinking men may turn.

The prudent thinker, Kirk writes, “is concerned with a number of” the same “primary questions” as the French Revolutionaries were, “and with a vaster array of prudential questions, to which the answers must vary with the circumstances and the time.” Contrary to the romanticized image of revolutionaries, the leaders in France from 1789 to 1799 were remarkably doctrinaire and rigid, unwilling or unable to allow for variances in legislation or morality, seeking simplistic universal rules to be applied mechanically to all people at all times in all places.

A century later, Burke’s thought would be echoed by Jacob Burckhardt, who referred to a class of thinkers, including those of the French Revolution, as the “terrible simplifiers.” Rather than having an ideology, Burke’s mission was to show that ideologies are doomed to fail, and in the process of their failure, bring misery.

John Locke Discovers Justice and Tolerance: The Integrated Aspects of Lockean Thought

The decades before Locke’s adulthood were grim: the Gunpowder Plot, the execution or assassination (depending on one’s view) of Charles I, the English Civil War, the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and the Thirty Years’ War, among other painful events. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes lived through these years, and his sinister assessment of human nature is perhaps colored by them.

By 1660, these episodes were over, and Locke would have been 28 years old.

For most of his adult life, Locke lived in an era which was still mixed, but perhaps slightly better. Locke was suspected of being involved in the Rye House Plot, a failed attempt to assassinate Charles II; Locke had to flee to the Netherlands in 1683.

But on a happier note, Locke also witnessed the Glorious Revolution, so called because it was accomplished without violence or casualties. The concepts of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy were developing during Locke’s life — indeed, he was involved in the development himself — and both of those concepts had an optimistic aspect.

Locke suspected that much of the world’s misery and violence had its roots in a distorted version of Christianity, as historian Joseph Loconte writes:

Conspiracy theories, nativism, militant religion, mob violence, a plot to topple the government — welcome to 17th-century England. English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) lived through one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in British history. At the center of the storm, he believed, was a degraded form of Christianity. “All those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions,” he wrote, “have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.”

By contrast, Locke saw uplifting events in history as based on an authentic and accurate understanding of Christianity. He studied the New Testament carefully, and saw in it a source of tolerance and justice, as Joseph Loconte explains:

Locke’s response was to offer the world a new political vision: a liberal society based on a radical reinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus. The bracing message, contained in his Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, was about the liberty and dignity of every human soul. It would form the bedrock of the American political order.

Behind Locke’s embrace of majority rule is founded on the notion of imago dei — the idea that each human being carries an imprint of the supreme intelligence which oversees the universe. The principle of majority rule is attractive only if there’s some reason to believe that the majority of people will produce the right answer in the majority of cases. If each human being bears the imago dei, then it increases the chances that the majority of a group has likely chosen the correct course of action.

A similar logic provides a foundation for the concept of popular sovereignty.

Additionally, Locke sees God as valuing each human being. If God attributes worth to every human, then no human can deem another human to be worthless. The notion that God values people arises in part from the notion that He owns all people, having created them.

For Locke, the first order of business was to insist that every human being bore the imprint of an intelligent, personal, and purposeful Creator. No one must be treated as a means to an end, as someone else’s property. Rather, every individual belonged to God, and was designed for a noble and transcendent purpose. As Locke declared in his Second Treatise: “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one Sovereign Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.”

The work ‘workmanship’ alerts the reader to a New Testament passage:

Most of Locke’s audience, literate in the Bible, would have recognized his allusion to a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

Long before John Locke, authors such as Richard Hooker used the phrase “divine right” to describe royal authority in his book of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie published in the 1590s.

Against the notion of a “divine right,” Locke posed “popular sovereignty,” a concept which would appear often in American civilization after Locke’s death.

The political and religious leaders of Locke’s day invoked the “divine right” of kings to justify political absolutism. In contrast, Locke argued that only a government based on the consent of the governed could honor the divine prerogative. Here, in brief, is his religious argument for the right to revolution: If the political authority tries to oppress God’s servants — by threatening their life, liberty, or property — it becomes morally illegitimate.

There is a thoroughly Lockean sentiment in these words: The purpose of a government is to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens. Anything less is negligence; anything more is tyranny.

Locke’s search for the “why” of government — what is the purpose of government? — shifted the emphasis of the debate. The apologists for absolute, or near absolute, monarchy were busy explaining that the dynasty rightly held all the power. Locke is asking, not who holds the power, but for which purpose is the power held?

Once the purpose of the sovereign is clear, then it is also clear that imposing an arbitrary religion on the subjects does not serve that purpose. This is a reflection on the struggles between the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics in the British Isles: since the early 1530s, this had been a matter for the Crown and the Parliament to ponder.

But Locke is suggesting that neither the Crown nor the Parliament needs to busy itself with choosing between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. The task of protecting life, liberty, and property is indifferent to the question of religion.

In the century before Locke’s birth, the Protestant Reformation had opened the doors to religious pluralism throughout Europe. For his political theory to work in societies with competing religious traditions, another sea change in thinking was required. The state must stop punishing people for refusing to endorse the preferred national religion. Likewise, church leaders must stop trying to manipulate the levers of power to impose their sectarian values on an unwilling population. “No peace and security, no, not so much as common friendship, can ever be established or preserved amongst men,” Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, “so long as this opinion prevails . . . that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.”

The Lockean notion of tolerance was directed to the practitioner of a faith, not to the faith itself. Given this nuance, Locke was free to argue for the ‘toleration of the dissenters’ without committing himself to the truth of their faith; likewise, tolerance for the Jews or the Muslims, to the extent that they practice their faith without damaging the lives, liberties, or properties of citizens.

Spanning two centuries, a number of conflicts had been named ‘wars of religion’ — the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598, the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, and the fighting in Ireland. Locke saw that these wars were not truly about religion, but simply about political power. He also saw that the results of these wars left governments in place which failed to serve the purposes for which any and all governments are instituted.

Locke became an eloquent and modern champion of tolerance, as Joseph Loconte reports:

In the wake of the wars of religion, it was assumed that the best guarantee of civic peace and social cohesion was the rigid imposition of a national creed — Catholicism in France, Calvinism in Geneva, Anglicanism in England, and so on. Yet laws criminalizing dissent created a permanent underclass across Europe. Locke watched in anguish as religious dissenters were persecuted, jailed, executed, or sent into exile.

Locke never set foot in America, but his formulation of religious tolerance both shaped and expresses an American point of view:

Locke decided to turn conventional thinking on its head. The key to political stability was not conformity through coercion. Rather, a government that protected — with equal justice — the rights and freedoms of people of all faith traditions would enjoy widespread support. Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, Jews, even Muslims — no one, according to Locke, should be denied his essential civil rights because of religion. “The sum of all we drive at is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” (Locke is routinely accused of having denied toleration to Catholics, but a close and contextual reading of his Letter strongly suggests otherwise.) Here is a revolutionary application of the Golden Rule, one of the pillars of Christian morality.

The creation of the United States leaned on many thinkers: Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, Cicero, and others — but perhaps on Locke most of all. Yet Locke’s influence on the U.S. can be misunderstood. He advocated for a truly revolutionary level of religious tolerance; yet he understood that act of tolerance itself as a Christian act.

Locke might say that extending tolerance to a Jew or to a Muslim is itself a distinctively Christian act.

The American Founders, supported by the nation’s clergy, thoroughly absorbed Locke’s political principles — from the separation of powers to the separation of church and state. Nevertheless, many on today’s religious right reject Lockean liberalism for supposedly opening the door to relativism and “radical individualism.” Progressives, on the other hand, applaud his commitment to individual rights but rip it from its religious foundation.

An examination of Locke’s writings reveals the detail and seriousness of his study of theology, and the depth to which his theological studies shaped both his political and his philosophical texts.

In fact, Locke’s political outlook was saturated with Christian assumptions about justice, equality, freedom, and natural rights. Like no thinker before him, Locke combined Whig political theory with a gospel of divine grace and mercy.

God’s omnibenevolence was, for Locke, a foundation for popular sovereignty, majority rule, and the idea that each and every human life has value and is therefore to be protected.

A lifelong student of the Bible, he searched the scriptures for examples of God’s indiscriminate love. He founded a philosophical society that required prospective members to affirm their love for “all men, of what profession or religion soever.” For many years he kept notes from a sermon based on Galatians 5:6, “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” — a theme that appears throughout his writings and personal letters.

The text of the New Testament was, for Locke, a roadmap to the goal of ensuring that every human life is valued and protected. It is debatable whether Jesus is moderately pacifistic or radically pacifistic, but in either case, Locke saw in Jesus the principle of protecting lives, liberties, and properties.

The life and teachings of Jesus were his lodestar. Jesus never bullied people into becoming his followers, never used force, and scolded his disciples when they were inclined to do so. Christ came into the world, Locke believed, to bring life and peace to those who had become God’s enemies. To Locke, Jesus was “our Savior,” “our Lord and King,” “the Captain of our Salvation,” and “the Prince of Peace.”

By 1695, Locke had expressed his religious views in detail. He was solidly Anglican; he devoted care to the precise study of Scripture, and he did all of this in a way which nonetheless won him admiration from Deists and Unitarians.

Tolerance was, for Locke, not an option but a duty:

Thus, the moral economy of the Christian story must inform the ideals of a political society: The gospel offered a path by which people could live together with their deepest differences. “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the genuine reason of mankind,” Locke wrote, “that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind, as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”

Locke’s texts may be sorted into three main groups: political, religious, and philosophical. In addition, there are other writings about the natural sciences or about economics. Yet Locke himself might have argued that such distinctions are not justified. He might have seen his political, religious, and philosophical writings as related and interconnected. The legal concept of a jury trial might be based in part on his empirical epistemology and in part on the concept of each human possessing the imago dei.

The Three Phases of the Roman Empire and Their Corresponding Military Strategies

The Roman Empire began around 27 BC, replacing the Roman Republic. During the five centuries of its existence, the empire would expand significantly. While expansion is success, it also creates a need for military strength — and that need is continuously changing.

Historian Edward Luttwak describes the geopolitical history of the empire in three phases, in order: the growth, maintenance, and defense of the empire:

The first expansive, hegemonic, and reliant chiefly on diplomatic coercion; the second meant to provide security even in the most exposed border areas, in part by means of fortified lines whose remains are still visible from Britain to Mesopotamia; and the third a defense-in-depth of layered frontier, regional, and central reserve forces that kept the western empire going till the fifth century and the eastern empire for much longer.

For roughly the first century of its existence, the military policy of the empire was expansion. The empire was birthed in the midst of the collapsing republic. One of several reasons for the end of the republic was that it was a form of government suited to ruling the city of Rome and the surrounding territories in central Italy, but it was not suited to ruling a world empire. Although the empire would ultimately rule more territory than the republic, the republic, during its last years, had control of millions of square miles, including the areas of present-day Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa.

Maintaining effective military control of occupied regions, and mounting campaigns to gain control of still more land, was a task which required quick and consistent decision-making and a clear chain of command. The Senate, which was the main governing body during the republic, was a deliberative institution which engaged in debate. Military commanders in the field, sending requests for instructions to Rome, couldn’t wait for the Senate’s thorough discussions.

“The first system of imperial security was essentially that of the late republic, though it continued” until around 68 AD, when Nero died. This first system operated “under that peculiar form of autocracy we know as the principate.” The principate was a legal fiction created by Octavian, designed to retain the appearance of a republic while concealing the fact that the actual machinery of government was functioning as a dictatorship.

The empire was born in war, and kept a martial flavor for most of its existence, as Edward Luttwak explains:

Created by the party of Octavian, himself a master of constitutional ambiguity, the principate was republican in form but autocratic in content. The magistracies were filled as before to supervise public life, and the Senate sat as before, seemingly in charge of city and empire. But real control was now in the hands of the family and personal associates of Octavian, a kinsman and heir of Julius Caesar and the ultimate victor of the civil war that had begun with Caesar’s murder.

That war had been an internal power struggle between the three members of the Second Triumvirate: Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. In 36 BC, Lepidus was defeated by Octavian and sent into exile, where he lived safely and died of natural causes around 13 BC or 12 BC. That left Octavian and Mark Antony to face each other. Mark Antony had Cleopatra as an ally, but the war ended in 31 BC “with the final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra.”

Octavian now had all the power which was originally divided among three men: the separation of powers was destroyed, the Senate largely powerless, and Octavian, becoming emperor, chose a new name: Augustus.

Octavian-Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, then Caligula, and later Claudius. At the death of Claudius, Nero became emperor.

Nero’s tyranny and excesses provoked rebellion. In part because Nero failed to clearly identify a successor, and in part because any successor named by him would likely not have been acknowledged, there was an open question about who would be the next emperor.

“When Nero died,” writes Luttwak, it was under mysterious circumstances. He had been obliged to flee the city of Rome because of uprisings against his tyrannical rule. Some historians write that he committed suicide; other write that the governor of a Greek island discovered him living in disguise and ordered that he be executed. Most of the evidence points toward suicide. In any case, when Nero died in 68 AD, “another had already claimed his place.”

On June 8, 68 AD, the Senate, seeing that Nero was unlikely to retain power in the face of the rebellion, named Galba to be emperor. Most evidence points toward Nero dying by suicide on June 9 in Rome. Galba, however, had been in Spain when the Senate named him emperor, and was not yet in Rome.

But the new emperor, Galba, did not arrive in Rome until October and did not live beyond January 69. M. Salvius Otho, an ex-governor of Lusitania, though in Rome as Galba’s follower, procured his murder at the hands of the Praetorians and was acclaimed emperor in turn. By then yet another had risen to claim the office, Aldus Vitellius, governor of Lower Germany and master of its four legions. So far, contention had been resolved through suicide and murder; now there was to be civil war also.

The lower levels of the Roman bureaucracy trundled along, keeping the empire running, while at the highest levels, open warfare among would-be emperors manifested itself in a string of assassinations. After Nero’s death, Rome would have four different emperors within a year.

The military, especially those units on the frontiers, had no steady source of instructions. It engaged largely in holding actions during this time. The era of grand expansion was over.

The outstanding virtue of the principate, the constitutional device invented by Augustus, was its reconciliation of republican forms and traditions with autocratic efficiency. Its outstanding defect was that the succession was dynastic, but without any mechanism to secure it as such, or to replace an unfit dynast. When a tolerable emperor chose a capable successor and made him a son by adoption, all was well. Adoption satisfied the dynastic sentiments of the army and the common people without offending the anti-dynastic prejudice of the Senate. But if there were no adequate son and none were adopted, he became emperor who could make himself emperor; usually by force.

During the next two centuries, succession was not always as chaotic and violent as it was after the death of Nero. But the flaws in Augustus’s precedent had been visible, and succession remained a point of contention for the remainder of the empire.

Although there would be occasional bursts of expansion, the empire energy and focus could not be as devoted to conquest as it had been earlier, because some amount of attention was continuously absorbed by the matter of succession.

Babylon: Military, Political, and Cultural Grandeur Come Eventually to Naught

In the Ancient Near East, Babylon had a central role: it was both conqueror and conquered. It lay at a crucial location on the Euphrates River, where the river had been divided into a number of trenches and canals which flowed through and around the city both to provide water, mainly for agricultural irrigation, and to provide defense in a system of moats.

The Tigris River was not far from Babylon, and together the Tigris and Euphrates gave the region both moisture for crops as well as transportation in the forms of ships and barges which moved up and down the waterways.

The earliest written documentation of the city seems to be from around 2250 B.C., and the cities importance waxed and waned: during its highpoints, the city was the political center of the Babylonian Empire; during its low points, it was a vassal to other empires.

The word ‘Babylonia’ refers to the larger region controlled by the city of Babylon, i.e., the Babylonian Empire.

During one of its last glory days, Babylonia conquered Israel and brought most of that nation’s citizens to Babylon as slaves: this would have happened approximately during the time from 598 B.C. to 586 B.C.

The military defenses of the city were formidable. The captured slaves would have been impressed, and probably depressed, by the structures of the city, as described by historians Joachim Marzahn & Klaudia Englund:

Babylon was situated on both sides of the Euphrates, the old town to the east, another half of the town to the west of the river. It was protected by a double ring of walls, the inner wall being some 6.5, and the outer wall 3.5 meters thick. At distances of 17-18 meters, towers of, respectively, 11 and 4.5 meters width formed part of the defenses. At least 8 double gateways stretching 50 meters afforded entrance to the city. The old town alone comprised an area of ca. 2¼ km², a large part of which was occupied by palaces and temples. Further protection was offered by the eastern wall spanning some 8 km, which also protected buildings beyond the inner city, for example, the Summer Palace in the north.

This system of walls and gates was not only a military defense system, but rather also an impressive work of art and architecture. The famous Ishtar Gates featured bricks with a glossy blue glazed finish. Accents of gold or yellow were mainly in the form of lions.

Beneath the walls and gates, the foundations extended downward even further than the walls above ground extended skyward: This was to prevent an attacking army from tunneling under the walls.

The physical strength and architectural grandeur of the walls of Babylon was paired with the intellectual resources of the city, which was a center of both literary and scientific work.

In 539 B.C., Cyrus of Persia conquered the city with little actual fighting: the city seems to have surrendered quickly. Babylon was incorporated into the Persian Empire, but retained some importance as a regional administrative and cultural center.

Cyrus died around 529 B.C., and various kings succeeded him as rulers of Persia. One of those later kings was Xerxes.

In 482 B.C., the city revolted against Xerxes. He put down the rebellion and, as historian Henry W.F. Saggs writes, the uprising

led to destruction of its fortifications and temples and to the melting down of the golden image of Marduk.

(Marduk was a major figure in the Babylonian polytheistic system.)

Although the city remained in existence for several centuries after this, it was never again a major player in the politics of the Ancient Near East.

The Ethics of Capitalism: The Moral Side of the Free Market

Arguments against capitalism often take a moral tone, and accuse capitalism of deifying avarice: of making greed into a virtue. Who wants to defend an economic system which amounts to codified selfishness?

Such attacks are misguided on multiple fronts.

A polemic against capitalism, if it does not further specify what it is condemning, is fundamentally ill-founded, because the word ‘capitalism’ possesses multiple distinct, different, and mutually exclusive definitions. On the one hard, there is ‘crony capitalism,’ in which a small number of companies develop relationships with the government, in the process inducing the government to so regulate trade and commerce that only these companies have the advantage, and that the majority of companies are burdened by regulation and unable to effectively compete: such “crony capitalism” is opposed to any intuitive sense of fairness.

On the other hand, there is “free market capitalism,” which seeks precisely to correspond to this intuitive sense of fairness: the job of the government is to be a neutral referee or umpire, allowing companies to compete fairly by offering various products at various prices.

In addition to those two types of capitalism, one can even make the counterintuitive argument that Marxist communism or socialism is a type of capital: it argues that the “means of production” should be jointly owned by all the people, in the form of government ownership — and the means of production is nothing else than capital. Marxism, in the form of socialism or communism, can be characterized as “state capitalism.”

If one is to find fault with capitalism, then one must specify which type of capitalism one is vilifying.

Crony capitalism is easy game: it is almost universally seen as unfair, to the extent that even those who engage in it take pains to hide their activity. Beyond that, crony capitalism is of no utility to the citizens: the market is provided with goods of low quality at high prices, and shortages are frequent. Consumers have fewer options and choices in such a system.

State capitalism is sometimes advocated by people of good will, as a route to social justice. Other times, it is cynically implemented by those who see it as an opportunity for personal power. In either case, it leaves the citizens with fewer choices, higher prices, less quality, and shortages.

A free market system, on the other hand, can achieve the social justice which state capitalism claimed to seek. As economist Ludwig Erhard phrased it:

When I speak of a social market economy, I do not mean that the market needs to be made social. I mean that the market is intrinsically social.

A free market corresponds to an intuitive notion of social justice: a market economy is socially conscious because, as suppliers seek to sell to every demand, then every consumer benefits from the competition to offer better products at a lower price. Everyone is a consumer, and everyone is part of the economy’s aggregate demand. In a competitive market economy, every supplier wants to meet as many demands as possible, and suppliers will lower their prices and raise quality in order to sell to those demands.

Because suppliers want to sell to as many consumers as possible, they find ways to offer products at lower prices. Because suppliers compete with each other, they find ways to offer better quality at those lower prices. As consumers are able to obtain better products at lower prices, the goals of social justice are attained.

Ludwig Erhard showed that market economies lead to social justice, and that property rights lead to civil rights. He showed that when suppliers are free to creatively meet demands and consumers are free to choose, all parties in the marketplace benefit.

As a brilliant byproduct, free markets also give consumers more choice and more abundance.

Efforts to censure capitalism as immoral are effective against crony capitalism and against state capitalism, but gain no ground against free market capitalism, as Russ Roberts writes:

A lot of people reject capitalism because they see the market process at the heart of capitalism — the decentralized, bottom-up interactions between buyers and sellers that determine prices and quantities — as fundamentally immoral. After all, say the critics, capitalism unleashes the worst of our possible motivations, and it gets things done by appealing to greed and self interest rather than to something nobler: caring for others, say. Or love.

It is plausible to make moral arguments against greed. But in a free market, the retailer is working simply to feed his family: this is not greed, it is responsibility. How he would be chastened if he did not attempt to provide for his family!

Buyer and seller function as a couple dancing: each plays a part. Buyer and seller function as teammates in a sport: one would hardly accuse the player who caught a teammate’s pass as greedy because he received the ball.

In any discussion of the various forms of capitalism, it is good form to quote from the writings of Adam Smith, whose The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776 and became a foundational text in economics:

Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

If capitalism were merely greed cloaked in the equations of economists, it would be morally suspect, as Russ Roberts recites:

Capitalism, say its critics, encourages grasping, exploitation, and materialism. As Wordsworth put it: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” In this view, capitalism degrades our best selves by encouraging us to compete, to get ahead, to win in business, to have a nicer car and house than our neighbors, and to always look for higher pro.ts and advantages. In the great rat race of the workplace, we all turn into rats. Is it any wonder so many want to kill off capitalism and replace it with something more just, more fair, more humane?

But he goes on to point out that only in a free market system does the retailer have a motive to treat his customers honestly and fairly. Only in a free market does the employer have a reason to pay his workers well. The freedom of the marketplace means that the consumers can go elsewhere if they perceive that they’ve been given a bad deal. Workers can go elsewhere if they feel unappreciated.

This is why people who live in countries with even a partially free market inevitably have a better standard of living than those who live in “command economies” or “planned economies.”

The political freedom and personal liberty which accompany a free market are pleasant byproducts of the laissez faire economic system.

Endless tirades have been made — and will be made — against “capitalism,” but when those attacks are carefully analyzed, they fail to undermine the results obtained by a free market system. Those who benefit the most from a free market are not the wealthy capitalists — for such people will enjoy a high standard of living in any economic system — but rather the working-class people, who obtain a level of prosperity not available to the working class in nations governed by other economic doctrines.