Dear Dr. Boli: I gather that botany is one of your many interests and areas of expertise, so I turn to you with this question. The prophet Amos claimed to be “a dresser of sycamores.” Can you explain this profession? It’s about the most bizarre way of making a living I’ve ever heard of. —Sincerely, Regina Terrae.

Dear Madam: The dressing of sycamores strikes us as odd; yet, in our own country, the trackless suburbs of the Middle West nourish a vast industry devoted to dressing concrete geese. The fashions of bygone ages invariably seem ridiculous, while those of our own era seem quite ordinary and rational. If the ladies of suburban Samaria and Jerusalem liked their sycamore trees with a bit of crinoline and lace, we modern Americans ought not to judge them, lest our concrete geese be judged. We read of vine-dressers in the Bible as well, so the fad for horticultural costuming was evidently quite popular among hobbyists. It was not popular enough, however, for Amos to make a living at it; he had to keep a bunch of grubby sheep around for his primary income.

It should be noted that the sycamore of the Bible is a species of fig (Ficus sycomorus), not the common sycamore tree of our American forests (Platanus occidentalis). The American sycamore, with its chronically flaking bark, would make a poor subject for dress-up games.

Dear Dr. Boli: I was talking to some guy who said he was a professor of history at some university in Georgia (the name escapes me at the moment), and he was saying that the Civil War was never about slavery. What did he mean by that? —Sincerely, A Woman Who Thought the Civil War Was About Slavery.

Dear Madam: The average ill-informed yokel often supposes that the American Civil War was fought mostly on account of slavery, but such risible ignorance would be unpardonable in a serious historian. In fact there were many questions that divided North and South, of which the existence of slavery was actually one of the least important.

Foremost among these questions was the question of states’ rights. Did the Southern states have the right to take their ball and go home like a bunch of whiny spoilsport crybabies the first time the country elected a president who publicly opposed slavery? On this question the North and South could not agree. The Southerners insisted that the individual states had the absolute right to withdraw from the Union whenever they desired to do so, and in general took an uncompromisingly strong stance on states’ rights.

There was also the question of enforcement of federal laws. Did the Northern states have the right to pass laws that hindered the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act? Here again there could be no agreement: the Southerners insisted that the federal law must be supreme, and in general took an uncompromisingly strong stance against states’ rights.

Then there was the question of the territories. Should slavery be allowed in them or not? Should they be admitted to the Union as slave states or free states? Many Southerners vehemently opposed the Missouri Compromise, which roughly divided the territories between free in the North and slave in the South, on the grounds that each newly admitted state should be allowed to decide the question of slavery for itself. Likewise, Southerners were appalled when California, at its own request, was admitted to the Union as a free state, on the grounds that the admission violated the Missouri Compromise.

So you can see that slavery was in fact the least of the difficulties dividing North and South.

Second Series.

Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, by Gainsborough.

Gainsborough, Thomas. Even at the height of his fame, Thomas Gainsborough, the great portrait and landscape artist, and perhaps the most talented English painter of his generation, could not draw a tree to save his life.

Second Series.

—

Mikado. The term “Mikado,” once used in English to refer to the Emperor of Japan, comes from a Japanese phrase meaning “I said ‘Emperor,’ you stupid foreigner.”

CHAPTER 10.—CHRISTIANITY RUINS EVERYTHING.

“Now it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be enrolled.” So writes a first-century historian, and doubtless his first-century audience knew what he was talking about. But what was this “enrollment”? Modern historians believe it may have been a loyalty oath that every resident of the Empire was required to take, because if there was one thing Roman history had shown, it was that, if you make a man swear loyalty to you, he will never betray you as long as he lives. (This is a literary device known as “sarcasm.” How do you like it?) But whatever it was, it was carried out in typical bureaucratic fashion, with the maximum possible inconvenience to the ordinary citizen. You could not just report to the local district loyalty office, fill out the form, and pick up your loyalty card. No, you were required to report to the city of your birth and swear the oath there. Doubtless some sound administrative reason was alleged for this requirement, but one suspects that the innkeepers’ lobby may have had a good deal to do with it.

One of the many inconvenienced citizens frantically making travel plans was Joseph of Nazareth, a town in Galilee that was proverbially backward. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” was the favorite sitcom catchphrase throughout Palestine. Joseph had been born in Bethlehem, also a small town, but one with a more distinguished history. “Birthplace of King David” was written prominently on the city-limits sign donated by the Lions Club.

Joseph was even more inconvenienced than most of the other travelers because his young wife, Mary, was pregnant and really in no condition to travel. Since the child she was carrying was the long-prophesied Messiah, Joseph expected that he could at least get a discount on hotels; but instead the Holiday Inn Bethlehem lost his reservation, and every other hotel was booked up solid. It was late at night when Joseph finally found one innkeeper who was willing to let him and Mary sleep in the stable out back, billing his MasterCard at the regular room rate, plus the 20% convention surcharge.

The birth of this child, under such inauspicious circumstances, came very near to undoing everything that civilization had so carefully built up over more than three millennia; indeed, it would have done so, if civilization had not fought back vigorously and for the most part successfully. For this child would grow up to be the most dangerous revolutionary the world has ever known, and it would take all the wisdom, all the courage, and all the chutzpah of the forces of civilization to stand up to his revolution and destroy it before it could do irreparable damage.

Jesus Christ first came to the notice of the civilized powers when he began drawing big crowds of shiftless riffraff to hear his anarchic and superficially appealing ideas. “Love your enemies,” he told the crowds, planting a stick of dynamite at the very base of civilization. If we do not hate our enemies, how can there be war? And if there is no war, how can there be government? “Blessed are the merciful,” he said, threatening the entire basis of the criminal-justice system that keeps government in power; for if there is mercy, how can there be justice? “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” What does “rich” mean if not “materially rewarded in accordance with one’s virtue”?

For three years the wily street-preacher eluded the authorities, but at last he was captured and publicly executed by crucifixion. And that would have been the end of his revolutionary movement, except that he very inconsiderately refused to stay dead.

Now the followers of Christ began to multiply at a truly alarming rate, especially when a strange little man named Saul or Paul began holding revival meetings all over the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Paul took the implications of Christ’s revolution to even more absurd extremes, actually telling his followers that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free.” How were responsible citizens to keep Jews, women, and slaves in their place if Paul was running around spouting such dangerous gibberish?

Soon the “Christian” movement had infested the big cities in the east; then it spread to Rome itself, where it caught the attention of the wise and prudent emperor Nero. Casting about for a solution to the Christian problem, Nero discovered that, if you coat a Christian with pitch and set him on a pole, he makes an excellent torch for a refined garden party. Here was yet another full-employment program that was misunderstood and resented by its chief beneficiaries.

In spite of the best efforts of enlightened and artistic emperors like Nero, the Christians would not be discouraged; on the contrary, the strange and dangerous cult grew by leaps, and in some cases by bounds. Most of the new Christians were slaves and women and other worthless detritus, but an alarming number of citizens and intellectuals were seduced into the underground Christian movement as well. And once they were Christian, they seemed to lose all ability to reason. For example, they refused to worship the emperor Domitian as a god. One of the fundamental principles of imperial law was that, if the emperor says he is a god, you believe him. After all, who would know better than the emperor himself whether he was a god or not? Yet the Christians were stuck on this idea of a single deity that they had inherited from the theology of Abraham, which was already two thousand years out of date. Not even for emperors would they make an exception, even when the alternative was death. That was not just unreasonable: it was rude.

For a while the imperial government tried rooting out the Christians by means of paid informers, who would receive the property of the Christians they turned in. It soon became apparent, however, that the Christians, who were mostly poor, slipped through this net easily, whereas rich citizens of unimpeachable paganism were in constant danger of being denounced as Christians. Informing was a profitable business, and like any well-run business it had to put the interests of the stockholders above other considerations.

Thus the emperor Trajan instituted a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy to take the profit out of the informing business. It seemed eminently reasonable to any unbiased observer, but the problem was that the stubborn Christians could not keep themselves from telling. The government simply couldn’t win with these people: if it left the Christians alone, the cult grew exponentially; but if it went after the Christians with the full force of the law, the public executions only brought the disreputable cult the attention it craved, and it still grew exponentially. The Roman government was learning by experience the truth of that ancient maxim, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” What was worse was that some of the most public trials and executions involved women and slaves, whose examples encouraged others like them to think for themselves when they had no business thinking at all.

Meanwhile, the Christians, who had seemed so naive and ignorant, had actually been plotting a devilishly clever demographic conspiracy against the very basis of Roman society.

Pagan families naturally wanted sons. A son would carry on the family name and honor; a daughter, on the other hand, was worse than useless. You would have to feed a daughter until she was eleven years old or so; then you would have to pay an enormous dowry to some cretin just for taking her off your hands. Most girl children, therefore, were discarded like the rubbish they were. It was not necessary to resort to infanticide (not that there was anything wrong, in the very rational Roman view, with infanticide); one could simply “expose” the child, leaving it on the rubbish heap, where its fate was in the hands of the gods—who could, after all, send a she-wolf to take care of it if they wanted to. Most of the time, the gods did not send she-wolves, but theoretically it could happen.

The Christians, however, told their followers that it was murder to leave a child to die, so they refused to do the socially responsible thing and kill off their girl children. Worse than that, they would actually pick up the baby girls the decent pagan citizens had discarded and raise them as their own.

At first, this apparently irrational behavior of the Christians seemed like a harmless peccadillo, one that brought them all the inconvenience of raising multiple daughters without any compensating reward other than cultish smugness. But in a few generations, the peccadillo revealed itself as nothing less than a fiendish plot. Pagans had all the sons they wanted, but whom would those sons marry? The Christians had all the women! A young man looking for a wife would find he had two choices: he could marry a girl raised by Christians, or he could marry a girl raised by wolves. Either way, she would probably raise their children in the same way she herself had been raised.

As the Christian threat grew ever more dire, the beleaguered pagan government attacked the problem on a larger scale. The one thing you could count on with the Christians was that the truly fanatical ones would not offer sacrifice to any god but their own. The mandate went out, therefore, that every good Roman must demonstrate his loyalty by making an offering to the genius of the emperor. It was not a burdensome requirement: you could offer as little as you liked. You could offer a tiny pinch of incense, incense in homeopathic quantities, and the government would even provide it for you. Yet thousands of the fanatical Christians refused and were executed in entertaining and picturesque ways. Even so, the cult still grew, until it was very possible that the Christians were the single biggest religious group in the whole empire.

Meanwhile, the government was having a few minor troubles of its own, the sort of troubles that always lead to half a dozen emperors with enormous armies beating each other up all over the landscape. Under such conditions, each one of the rivals was naturally on the lookout for anything that would give him the slightest advantage over the others; and finally it occurred to one, who had been declared emperor by his soldiers in the mythical land of Britain, that everyone else was ignoring the Christian demographic. In the year 312, just before moving in to take the city of Rome, Constantine declared himself a Christian.

Was this the end of everything civilization had so laboriously built up over the past three or four millennia? Would the Christian revolution succeed in eliminating greed, hatred, violence, and all the other things that make civilization possible?

Well, fortunately, civilization proved to be a lot more resilient than that.

—

It should be noted that Dr. Boli is indebted to Mr. Rodney Stark for his very clever demographic analysis of the rise of Christianity. Mr. Stark, however, is not in any way responsible for what Dr. Boli has done with that analysis.

ON THIS DAY in 1779, Tekle Giyorgis I became Emperor of Ethiopia. He became Emperor of Ethiopia again in 1788, in 1794, in 1795, and in 1800. To have become an emperor once may be regarded as a significant accomplishment, but to become an emperor five times is mere tasteless ostentation.

Flag of Abkhazia. The seven stars represent the seven historical regions of the country; the green and white stripes represent the friendly coexistence of Islam and Christianity; the upraised hand represents the Abkhazians’ traditional opposition to jaywalking.

—

Dear Dr. Boli: So I found out that July 4 is Independence Day in Abkhazia, which meant that I had to find out what an Abkhazia was, and then I started to notice how many other countries celebrate their independence in July. Why is that? Oh, and also August. —Sincerely, A Professor of Agriculture, but with an Interest in History.

Dear Sir or Madam: July and August, the hottest months of the year, are the times when people are at their most irritable. Minor inconveniences, such as a rise in parking-meter rates, are then perceived as monstrous injustices. A wise government will learn from your observation to make its most unpopular decisions in the spring or fall, when the weather is most pleasant.

CHAPTER 9.—WHILE ROME CONQUERS THE WORLD, GREECE CONQUERS ROME.

LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE in classical history, the foundation of Rome was traced back to the Trojan War. It seems that, while the victorious Greeks were finding their way home past the various cyclopes and sirens that stood in the way, the defeated Trojans were scattering to the four corners of the earth and founding every non-Greek nation that would later aspire to a civilized antiquity. One of those Trojans was Aeneas, who made it past Dido, Queen of Carthage (apparently a more formidable obstacle than all the mythical monsters of the Odyssey put together), to found a little Trojan colony in far-off Italy. And if you ask why he did so, instead of staying in Carthage where he could have had a prosperous kingdom and a beautiful queen, the answer you will receive is that he did it because it was his destiny. Unlike modern politicians, who generally discover their destinies only after the sordid details of their corruption and immorality have been made into a mass-market paperback book, Aeneas could count on friendly gods to explain his destiny to him with a helpful PowerPoint presentation. There is nothing more inconvenient than missing one’s destiny; and it is sincerely to be regretted that, owing to the laxness of the Olympian gods in recent centuries, many a destined founder of an empire is probably frittering away his life as a county commissioner somewhere in the trackless Midwest.

Aeneas succeeded in planting the little Trojan colony, but it was not his destiny to found the city of Rome himself, so he wisely stuck within the limits of what the gods had told him to do and left the rest to future generations.

In the fulness of time, Romulus and Remus, descendants of the great Aeneas, were born and, to set the standard of Roman child care for centuries to come, were immediately discarded as of no use to anybody. Fortunately for the future destiny of Rome, a friendly she-wolf mistook the infants for a curiously hairless pair of cubs and reared them as her own. Romulus grew up to found the city of Rome; Remus grew up to be murdered by his brother, which is just as well, since nobody wants to read the story of the Reman Empire.

When we call Rome a “city,” of course, we must admit that we are playing fast and loose with the term. At first Rome was nothing more than a crossroads with two farmhouses and a Circle K. Even after Rome grew to several streets of scraggly houses with its own Rite Aid, it was still such a no-account place that it could not produce its own kings: it had to import cut-rate kings from the Etruscans next door, who seem to have had more kings than they knew what to do with. In 509 B.C., however—at just about the time the Athenians were deciding that a war with Persia might be fun—the Romans threw out the last of their Etruscan kings and decided to do without kings altogether. The last king had made himself so unwelcome, in fact, that “king” was a bad word for most of the rest of Roman history. Kings were evil: they were the people who told you what to do, even if you didn’t want to do it, and Rome was better off without them.

But if Rome was not a kingdom, then what was it? The Greeks had a word for everything, but Latin was still a young language. The Romans had no idea what to call their new government. Whenever they had to talk about it, they scratched their heads and spoke of “the public…um…thing.” And so it was called for the rest of time, because the Romans never did come up with a name for it. Even into imperial times, the Romans continued to call their government the res publica or republica—the public thing.

There were, of course, the usual dire predictions that a state with no king could not survive without tearing itself apart. These predictions proved absolutely correct. The Roman public thing could never hold itself together, and the next five centuries present us with a spectacle of constant class struggle and civil war that would have meant the end of any other state.

What the naysayers did not predict was that the public thing turned out to be fabulously good at conquering other better-run governments. The Romans could not build a government to save their lives, but they could put together the best armies in the world. They had a special knack for starting fights and winning them. Soon what had been the little village of Rome was the greatest city in the Italian peninsula, grown fat on the spoils of its neighbors. Each conquest brought piles of gold into Rome, enough to keep even the dysfunctional public thing going for a while longer. And whenever it began to look as though the whole fabric of Roman society was about to unravel, there was always another fight to get into.

Soon the expanding Roman public thing had become one of the two great powers of the western Mediterranean, which of course meant that it was time to pick a fight with the other great power. That power was Carthage, the Phoenician New York in North Africa, which had been busy carving out its own empire and was not at all keen on having the Romans chip away at it.

The conflict with Carthage was so valuable to the survival of the public thing that the Romans managed to keep the fight going for more than a century. It helped that the Carthaginian generals were not always the brightest bulbs. Hannibal, for example, tried to bring elephants over the Alps to attack Rome, which is almost as foolish as… well, actually, there really isn’t anything stupider than trying to bring elephants over the Alps. Yet Hannibal was considered quite brainy among the Carthaginian elite.

Indeed, the Romans might have won much earlier if the conflict had not been so useful in the internal politics of Rome. Politicians in the Roman Senate, the legislative body of the public thing, discovered that they could get virtually any measure passed by adding “and Carthage must be destroyed” as a rider: “A zoning variance for the construction of public rest rooms on the Aventine shall be granted, and Carthage must be destroyed.” As long as Carthage remained the great bugbear in the Roman imagination, the public thing could be administered as poorly as its greediest administrators desired. This happy state of affairs might have gone on for many more centuries if the Romans had not got a bit overenthusiastic and actually destroyed Carthage.

It is a curious principle of Roman history that most of Rome’s conquests were unintentional collateral damage. Rome intentionally went after Carthage; but, when the dust had settled, she discovered that she had accidentally become mistress of Spain and Greece as well. Rome had not really intended to absorb most of the civilized world: it just sort of happened, and now the public thing, which had proved itself utterly incapable of governing a moderately prosperous city-state in the Italian hills, was stuck with the task of administering the greatest empire in the world. Naturally, it made a big fat mess of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the city of Rome itself, now the biggest and most prosperous in the Mediterranean if not the entire world, was paralyzed by the sort of political disagreements that always end with somebody’s head on a stick. The Roman politics of those days had a bracing vigor to which future ages would look back with nostalgia. “Remember the glorious days of the public thing,” future Romans would say to each other, “when the Forum was always gaily festooned with severed heads, and gangs of roving thugs fought each other in the streets every night? Ah, those were the good old days.”

Now, while all this conquest and chaos was going on, a strange thing was happening to Roman culture. The Roman upper classes, who had once looked on “culture” as the sort of thing effete intellectual snobs liked to talk about, were falling under the spell of Greece. The Greeks might not have been able to resist the unstoppable force of the Roman legions, but they still kept their old unshakable conviction that Greeks were better than other people, and their curious knack for passing that conviction on to the other people. When the Roman upper classes were not beheading members of the rival political party, they were busy sucking up all the Greek literature and art they could get their hands on. They judged their own efforts by how closely they met the Greek standard; indeed, a Roman who had any ambition of making an impression on the intellectual world would write in Greek. Latin was for hicks. One might have been forgiven for supposing that Greece had conquered Rome instead of the other way around.

Thus Rome had become both the most sophisticated city in the world and the most violent. It was only a matter of time before she produced a man who, in his refined and sophisticated violence, was the perfect image of his city.

Julius Caesar began his political career as one of those compromise candidates who are drafted into a high position less because of their talent than because all the talented people have made too many enemies. The real political powers in Rome decided to stick him in front of an army, even though he had never held any significant command, on the theory that he was unlikely to do any real damage if he was given a relatively easy assignment well away from the real theater of war, which was in the distant east.

But Caesar was a man whose fertile imagination never lacked an excuse for a fight. If a war was not provided for him, he could provide it himself. Expecting him to hold the frontier against the Gauls with passable competence, the Roman Senate was soon informed that he had conquered all three parts of Gaul, and Britain as well, which was a place so far away that most Romans probably regarded it as mythological.

This was not at all what the powers in Rome had had in mind. They had quite enough heroes to deal with already. The last thing they needed was a really competent general messing about with their plans. So the Senate sent Caesar a pink slip.

It was, however, more difficult than the senators had anticipated to fire the most popular general the public thing had ever produced, especially when he was headed straight for Rome with the same invincible army that had flattened western Europe. The Senate therefore drew a line at the river Rubicon. “Do not cross this line,” the senators said, “or we shall be very cross.”

Caesar sat down by the river to think it over. “Alea jacta est,” he said at last: “The die is cast.” But just then some of his most trusted officers appeared and persuaded him that Rome could be his if he would stop playing Monopoly and continue the march.

Once Caesar had taken Rome, the Senate assured him that it had just been kidding about the pink slip and offered him the position of dictator for life. From here Caesar went from success to success. He made an alliance with Cleopatra of Egypt that was so friendly it produced a son, and he published his memoirs of the wars, setting a standard of dull competence in Latin prose that is still held up to yawning schoolchildren as the acme of style today.

The one thing the conservative party in Roman politics could never forgive him for was that Caesar seemed to be bringing stability to the public thing. It had been far too long since there was bloodshed in the streets of Rome. Instead, for the first time in history, the public thing was simply doing its job of keeping the people safe to go about their business unmolested. Was all this competence and prosperity any way to run a government? No, Caesar must go; and so the men who considered themselves most attached to the rule of law in Rome decided to murder Caesar. “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more,” as the conspirator Brutus famously put it. “Though actually, if it comes to that, I didn’t really like Caesar very much.”

The murder of Caesar was even more effective than the conspirators had dared hope in bringing back the glories of the old public thing. Soon blood was flowing not only in the streets of Rome, but from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, as rival gangs of thugs surrounded themselves with some of the largest armies the world had ever seen. Even now the strange luck of the Romans did not fail them; part of the collateral damage of this gigantic civil war was Egypt, which somehow sort of accidentally ended up subject to Rome.

Finally, when the dust had settled and everybody was good and tired, the gang that had followed Caesar’s adopted son Octavian found itself sitting on top of the heap. By promising to restore the dignity of the public thing, Octavian won over the Senate, which gratefully gave him the title Augustus.

Now, at last, there was peace throughout the Roman world. The only difference from the old days of the public thing was that now there was one more line at the top of the org chart, a line that was definitely not labeled “king,” because Rome was governed by a public thing that most certainly had nothing to do with kings, but a line that nevertheless made all the difference. The Senate continued to govern the public thing exactly as before, but now there was an Augustus to tell the Senate what to do, relieving the senators of the burdensome responsibility of thinking, which history had shown was not the thing they were best at.

And everything would have been just peachy from there on, except that, just as Augustus was settling in for a long and prosperous era of peace, something was happening in the backward province of Judea that would ultimately ruin everything.

—

Next:

Chapter 10.—Christianity Ruins Everything.