Richard Carrier: Culture Clash about Eclipses in the Roman Empire
Richard Cevantis Carrier (his blog and a big collection of his articles) has been doing work in ancient history, more particularly, in ancient history of attitudes toward science and related subjects. He is now doing his Ph.D. thesis on a comprehensive study on that subject, a thesis that he will likely publish some time next year.
But in the meantime, he has published his master's thesis, Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Early Roman Empire (pdf of scanned pages), in which he discusses an interesting culture clash about science. One might ask why eclipses, but RC chose them deliberately because that was a triumph of the science of the day in explaining a fearsome phenomenon: the Sun and the Moon seemingly and inexplicably being eaten away.
There is a very widespread bit of folklore that states that lunar eclipses are caused by some "Moon monster" eating the Moon, either some monster living in the sky or some malicious sorcerers closer to home trying to make the Moon go away. And true to form, many people in the Roman Empire, and in later centuries also, would make a lot of noise to try to stop a lunar eclipse, hitting metal objects and blowing horns.
Many people even considered eclipses to be evil omens; an eclipse happens, and something bad is sure to follow. During Athens's Peloponnesian War with Sparta (431-404 BCE), the Athenian general Nicias led in 413 BCE an expedition to conquer Sparta's ally Syracuse in Sicily. He was less-than-successful, and he eventually decided to retreat. But on August 27, he saw a lunar eclipse and became very spooked, sure that it was some bad omen. He asked his priests what to do about it, and they advised waiting 27 days. He did, and the Syracusans fought and eventually defeated his army, thus making that prophecy a self-fulfilling one.
And many historians would describe eclipses as occuring around battles and deaths of prominent people and so forth -- such "literary eclipses" were common.
But what did educated, upper-class Romans think? We look back to 350 BCE for an answer. Back then, Rome ruled only central Italy, but in Athens, Greece, the philosopher Aristotle wrote On the Heavens, in which he explained that the Earth is shaped like a ball and that eclipses are shadow effects. But during the Empire, the shadow theory of eclipses was well-known among educated people, along with the predictability of lunar eclipses, which follow regular cycles.
Many educated Romans deplored such gross superstition; some even tried to educate the common people about the causes of eclipses, though without much success. Many of the common people disliked those ivory-tower eggheads' fancy theories; Seneca in a fragment from On Superstition depicts someone as saying "Am I to put up with Plato or Strabo the Peripatetic (Aristotelian), of whom the one makes god without a body and the other without a soul?" And Plutarch noted that the shadow theory of eclipses, first discovered by Anaxagoras (around 450 BCE) was accepted only very gradually, "with caution rather than confidence, for they did not exalt the physicists and stargazers, as they were called then, because they let god vanish into reasonless causes, improvident forces, and deterministic necessity." Evidently, a universe governed by some very distant sort of god or entirely impersonal causes seems like a cold and lonely place compared to a universe governed by the whims of gods and demons and ghosts and monsters and sorcerers and the like.
Some other people would try to manipulate people by coming up with interpretations of eclipses as convenient omens, and still others would claim to be able to cause eclipses with their sorcery.
If we are to believe Plutarch, a certain Aglaonike (around 200 BCE) would work out when an eclipse would happen, and at the appropriate night, she would come out, say something like "Ph33r m3! Ph33r |\/|y 1337 sk1llz! I will make the Moon go away!" and then do some flim-flam supposedly to do that. And as it does so, she would think "Right on schedule.
"
Plutarch also stated that education is good for women as well as for men, because if one can learn the truth about eclipses, one will no longer take seriously anyone who claims to be able to cause one. And he mentioned Aglaonike as a notable example of such a charlatan.
Richard Cevantis Carrier (his blog and a big collection of his articles) has been doing work in ancient history, more particularly, in ancient history of attitudes toward science and related subjects. He is now doing his Ph.D. thesis on a comprehensive study on that subject, a thesis that he will likely publish some time next year.
But in the meantime, he has published his master's thesis, Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Early Roman Empire (pdf of scanned pages), in which he discusses an interesting culture clash about science. One might ask why eclipses, but RC chose them deliberately because that was a triumph of the science of the day in explaining a fearsome phenomenon: the Sun and the Moon seemingly and inexplicably being eaten away.
There is a very widespread bit of folklore that states that lunar eclipses are caused by some "Moon monster" eating the Moon, either some monster living in the sky or some malicious sorcerers closer to home trying to make the Moon go away. And true to form, many people in the Roman Empire, and in later centuries also, would make a lot of noise to try to stop a lunar eclipse, hitting metal objects and blowing horns.
Many people even considered eclipses to be evil omens; an eclipse happens, and something bad is sure to follow. During Athens's Peloponnesian War with Sparta (431-404 BCE), the Athenian general Nicias led in 413 BCE an expedition to conquer Sparta's ally Syracuse in Sicily. He was less-than-successful, and he eventually decided to retreat. But on August 27, he saw a lunar eclipse and became very spooked, sure that it was some bad omen. He asked his priests what to do about it, and they advised waiting 27 days. He did, and the Syracusans fought and eventually defeated his army, thus making that prophecy a self-fulfilling one.
And many historians would describe eclipses as occuring around battles and deaths of prominent people and so forth -- such "literary eclipses" were common.
But what did educated, upper-class Romans think? We look back to 350 BCE for an answer. Back then, Rome ruled only central Italy, but in Athens, Greece, the philosopher Aristotle wrote On the Heavens, in which he explained that the Earth is shaped like a ball and that eclipses are shadow effects. But during the Empire, the shadow theory of eclipses was well-known among educated people, along with the predictability of lunar eclipses, which follow regular cycles.
Many educated Romans deplored such gross superstition; some even tried to educate the common people about the causes of eclipses, though without much success. Many of the common people disliked those ivory-tower eggheads' fancy theories; Seneca in a fragment from On Superstition depicts someone as saying "Am I to put up with Plato or Strabo the Peripatetic (Aristotelian), of whom the one makes god without a body and the other without a soul?" And Plutarch noted that the shadow theory of eclipses, first discovered by Anaxagoras (around 450 BCE) was accepted only very gradually, "with caution rather than confidence, for they did not exalt the physicists and stargazers, as they were called then, because they let god vanish into reasonless causes, improvident forces, and deterministic necessity." Evidently, a universe governed by some very distant sort of god or entirely impersonal causes seems like a cold and lonely place compared to a universe governed by the whims of gods and demons and ghosts and monsters and sorcerers and the like.
Some other people would try to manipulate people by coming up with interpretations of eclipses as convenient omens, and still others would claim to be able to cause eclipses with their sorcery.
If we are to believe Plutarch, a certain Aglaonike (around 200 BCE) would work out when an eclipse would happen, and at the appropriate night, she would come out, say something like "Ph33r m3! Ph33r |\/|y 1337 sk1llz! I will make the Moon go away!" and then do some flim-flam supposedly to do that. And as it does so, she would think "Right on schedule.
"Plutarch also stated that education is good for women as well as for men, because if one can learn the truth about eclipses, one will no longer take seriously anyone who claims to be able to cause one. And he mentioned Aglaonike as a notable example of such a charlatan.
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