From Nero To Domitian

We are currently reading fiction and non-fiction in parallel:

"Galba succeeded Nero."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 242.

For the first twelve Roman Emperors and the conflict between Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian after the death of Nero, see Caesars.

For Poul Anderson's additional reference to Vespasian's son and successor, Titus, see Another Caesar And Synagogues.

For Anderson's reference to Domitian, see Domitian.

Thus, Anderson's "Star of the Sea" refers to the last seven of Suetonius' twelve "Caesars."

I have been to the gym today and will shortly go to a meeting. Staying here and blogging would make me lose my reason!

The heavens opened this afternoon but fortunately there is a local bus service from the Bus Station to near here. Civilized life continues in Lancaster.

Some Miscellaneous Remarks

(i) If you had a Time Patrol timecycle and if you realized that you had left your wallet lying on a park bench yesterday afternoon, then you would be able to return instantly to that park and that afternoon and to retrieve your wallet a microsecond after your younger self had left it there. Suddenly all of space and time becomes like your backyard. The Time Patrol exists to prevent abuse of this unprecedented freedom of movement - or does it? Would the Patrol care about crimes that were committed with time machines but that did not violate causality?

(ii) "Nero felt no ambition to extend the Roman empire; he even considered withdrawing his forces from Britain, yet kept them there because such a decision might have reflected on the glory won by his adoptive father Claudius."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 216.

Such a Neronic withdrawal from Britain would have altered the beginning of Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy which opens in Roman Britain centuries later.

(Augustus had a reason for curtailing imperial expansion, according to Neil Gaiman.)

(iii) Suetonius catalogues Nero's acts:

"...in order to segregate them from his follies and crimes, which I must now begin to list." (ibid.)

- as with Caligula.

Nero: a ruler who blustered when things went badly. Assassinations were common among early Roman Emperors.

Modernity And Futurity

To Turn The Tide.

In 165 CE, everyone is superstitious:

"...apart from a tiny handful of philosophical rationalists." (p. 95)

(They would have been at home in University Philosophy Departments where I have studied.)

"Even they mostly believed in the Gods, they just thought the Olympians didn't interact with humans, so you could discount them." (ibid.)

(The last stage before full atheism.)

Paula Atkins thinks:

"Because I'm black I'm a curiosity here, but it isn't important. I'm black but I'm living before the concept of race was even invented. And that feels just as odd as the rest of it." (p. 109)

This new timeline will have no trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Paula is creeped out both by the fact of slavery and by everyone around her taking it for granted. That it has nothing to do with skin colour demonstrates a lot about how ideas, assumptions, expectations etc are historically conditioned. We keep asking: what will the future of the new timeline be like?

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. 

Time Travellers' Technological Innovations

To Turn The Tide.

Innovations:

wheelbarrows

stirrups

harnesses

horseshoes

a threshing machine

spinning wheels

paper

printing

a nineteenth century plough

gunpowder

These are happening or planned in the opening chapters. There is considerable technical discussion to which I am unqualified to contribute.

I am more inclined to theology than to technology. In fact, we are informed that it is illegal to invoke Jesus but that Jeremy McCladden, supervising the threshing machine, the plough and the planting of potatoes, feels self-conscious invoking Jupiter, Mars or Venus. Imagine coping with that while simultaneously inspiring an industrial revolution. This is a time travel novel inspired by its predecessors but going further.

Manse Everard thinks that attempts to change history make things worse...

Gods And God

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER SEVEN.

"'Stop the goddamned mules!' Jeremy McCladden screamed...

"What he'd actually said was: damned by the Gods mules." (p. 85)

So that could have been: godsdamned mules.

There is a ritual in Lancaster where we chant, "Grant gods send us a thumping good crop." However, if some among us chant, "Grant God send...," there is no way to hear the difference.

I knew a Unitarian who appreciated Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. He commented, "He says, 'the gods,' you know, but you could easily replace that with 'God.'" I would no longer make that substitution, now regarding the gods as traditional and mythical. I can in good conscience invoke gods or Bodhisattvas, understood as personifications, because no one insists that we recite a creed affirming their literal existence.

The two ways from polytheism to monotheism are: "There is only one god" and "All gods are one." But many gods remain in myth and literature. The time travellers would get used to referring to them. Manse Everard of the Time Patrol finds that they are a miserly lot.

Time Travel Theory And Practice

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER SIX.

SM Stirling avoids having to explain time travel theory by having the inventor of the time machine die when the team departs for 165 CE! He dies because parts of his body are left behind.

The team leader thinks:

"This feels more like being in uniform again than being an academic. Or some weird combination of both." (p. 81)

That is the best kind: theory and practice combined.

They can find out whether the past can be changed only by trying to change it. And, if something is going to prevent them, then the simplest way for this to happen would be their deaths which are all too possible in any case. The inventor, Fuchs, seems to have thought that causality violation was possible but it is not known how much he knew about it. In some ways the characters know no more than we do. It is all a steep learning curve for all concerned.

Here

"This wasn't faked up for tourists...

"He was here. People lived in this, and worked in it, as generation followed generation. He could smell their woodsmoke and their roses."

-To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER FOUR, p. 62.

"This was the first moment when the realty of time travel struck home to Everard."

-For more of this passage, see Reality And Interpretation.

Everard reflects that he is in a hansom cab that is "...not a tourist-trap anachronism..." And it hits him "...with full force that he was here." (ibid.)

This is how we would feel if we could be there.

A Town In Two Timelines

Agrippina was the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius.

"...what moderns would have called Cologne...was Colonia Agrippina now."

-To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER FOUR, p. 56.

"Now" is 165 CE.

In about 69 CE but in a different timeline:

"...the road from Old Camp...was a military road, paved and arrow-straight, running south along the Rhine to Colonia Agrippensis."

-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 4, p. 503.

"In the reign of Claudius [Oppidium Ubiorum] was made a Roman colony and named for his wife. Eagerly Latinizing themselves, the Ubii changed their own name to the Agrippinenses. The city waxed. It would be Koln - Cologne, to French and English speakers - but that was far in the future."

-Anderson, op. cit., 8, p. 535.

Far in the future - but it is good to find a familiar name among the twisting timelines.

Caligula

Reading about Romans in fiction by Poul Anderson, Neil Gaiman and SM Stirling motivates us to read some Roman history and I must quote here one sentence from Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars. We have all heard of Caligula whose full name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also called Gaius and Caligula, and listed by Suetonius as "Gaius Caligula."

Suetonius writes:

"So much for Gaius the Emperor; the rest of this history must needs deal with Gaius the Monster."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 156.

Suetonius pulled no punches and told it like it was. 

Fortunately, SM Stirling's time travellers do not arrive during the reign of either Caligula or Nero. However, this is not a  accident. Their destination date was carefully chosen for them both by their author and by the fellow character who is responsible for their "temporal displacement." They benefit from the experience of earlier (fictional) time travellers. (A logical way to write sf.)

Amazing

To Turn The Tide.

All five time travellers have read L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and one, McCladden, is familiar with Marvel superheroes. (There was a reference not to a Marvel character but to their competitor, Clark Kent, in a very different time travel novel, There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson.) It is a safe bet that Marvel will still be making films in 2032.

Here is a completely unexpected (to me) piece of merchandise for a time travel team: a solar-charging kit for phones, tablets, laptops with a translator AI and their external drives. With equipment like that in addition to their own knowledge and skills, this team just has to make a difference. The powers that be have to learn that these are guys to work with, not to enslave, brutalize etc. Maybe they have been sent to just the right destination date? Only time will tell.