Hello folks! My good friend Sophia Sarro is a fellow grad student in the Ancient Greek and Roman Studies program at Brandeis University. They are strongly committed to promoting scholarly engagement with the public and, for their master’s project, they decided to do something a little different; they’ve created a podcast about the history of fictional portrayals of the Roman emperor Claudius (ruled 41 – 54 CE), spanning all the way from his death to the present day, examining how portrayals of him have been shaped by their cultural and historical contexts, how they interpret him in different ways and convey radically different messages, and how they deal with major aspects of his life, including his disability.
Their podcast is titled “The Man, the Myth, the Pumpkin” and you can listen to it here. The first episode, which just came out yesterday, is about how the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BCE – 65 CE) portrays Claudius in his famous satire Apocolocyntosis Claudii or The Pumpkinification of Claudius, which he wrote not long after the emperor’s death. Sophia will be dropping more episodes of the podcast over the course of the coming weeks.
I’ve just listened to the first episode and I cannot recommend their work highly enough! Sophia has put an enormous amount of time and labor into making this podcast and it really shows. Their writing is excellent and witty, their research is thorough, and their dramatic reading is spot-on. The podcast is both educational and entertaining and I’m sure that those who enjoy my blog will enjoy it as well. I personally loved listening to every second of the first episode and I eagerly await the next one.
I really liked it – thanks!
I’m so glad to hear that you liked it and I’m sure Sophia will be glad to hear that you liked it as well!
That sounds really interesting! Claudius is one of my favourite Roman emperors (if one is to prefer anyone of that rather sorry list), so I will definitely give it a listen!
I’m sure Sophia will be glad to hear that you listened to it!
Also, remember that it’s just the first episode that’s out right now and more episodes will be coming out soon, so be sure to check back for more!
With the pre-scientific revolution intellectual resources that were available to them, could a philosopher in ancient Greece have arrived at the conclusion that love is chemical bribery? In other words, could an ancient Greek philosopher have figured out that love is mechanistic & instrumental, without being having been exposed to darwinian theory?
(Posting this again in case you missed it under the previous article. Apologies if you already read it, I’m not trying to be spammy.)
I find this observation trite even today. Big shock, “love” (whatever that means) is just chemistry in your brain. Literally everything we experience is chemistry in our brains. What’s even the alternative?
Unrelated message to our host: I enjoyed the episode and look forward to more! Your friend’s good at this podcasting business.
Thank you for your comment Gwydden, I appreciate it.
“I find this observation trite even today”.
That’s kind of my point — it’s trite to us today because we are standing on the shoulders of modern concepts like the chemical basis of neural functions and sexual selection. Would it be so obvious to an ancient greek who believed emotions were a function of the balance between yellow and black bile?
“What’s even the alternative?”
You name it. Dozens of theories have been put forward by scholars since time immemorial on the function of love. Consider Plato’s Symposium, where one of the characters argues that humans once possessed four arms and legs, before being split into two by Zeus as punishment for our arrogance — hence, our feeling of “love” arises from our craving to find our “other half”.
My question to Spencer — who has a self-professed scholarly interest in ancient greek gender and sexuality — is whether he knows of some ancient philosopher that got tantalisingly close to our modern, mechanistic understanding of love (sort of like Democriticus with the atoms).
Again, as I have already mentioned in my reply to your first comment above, I think that your claim that affection for other people is nothing but “mechanistic” “chemical bribery” is actually reductionist and cynical. I would not describe it at all as “our modern . . . understanding of love.” To the extent that what you claim is true, it is banal, and, as a model for understanding interpersonal affection and relationships, I think it leaves out quite a lot.
That being said, Demokritos of Abdera (whom you have mentioned here) famously held nothing but disdain toward sex and equated it with scratching an itch. In his Fragment D249 (= B127), he says: “ξυόμενοι ἄνθρωποι ἥδονται καί σφιν γίνεται ἅπερ τοῖς ἀφροδισιάζουσιν” (“Human beings experience pleasure while scratching themselves and they become just like they are having sex”). I don’t know if that’s the sort of idea you’re trying to get at or not, but you might find it interesting. I can’t think of any Greek writer off the top of my head who ever claimed that love is nothing but “mechanistic” “chemical bribery.”
Lastly, I notice that you called me “he,” but I’m actually a she. I’m guessing you probably incorrectly assumed I was a man based on the fact that the name Spencer is more common for men than for women, so this is just a gentle correction.
Thanks for your reply, Spencer.
My deepest apologies for using the incorrect pronoun when referring to you. Indeed, it was the result of a erroneous deduction based on your name.
I now regret using the term “chemical bribery” in my initial comment. I can see how it might be charged with a bleak, cynical view of human nature. And I never meant to suggest that the feeling of love is unimportant because it can be reduced to chemicals.
In fact, I never wanted to suggest that love can be reduced to chemicals. Rather, what I meant is the idea that love appears to be partially propelled by arbitrary chemical factors outside of our conscious faculties.
We like to think that we experience love because we positively appraise another person. For instance, we might feel love because we find another person attractive or because we think our personalities are compatible. Yet we now know that isn’t the entire picture. Love is also awakened by fickle, subconscious biological mechanisms. For instance, women have been shown to prefer men with odours indicative of an immune system unlike their own (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619763-100-darling-you-smell-wonderfully-different).
Disturbing at this finding may sound, it fits neatly with our Darwinian conception of mate selection. But could an Ancient Greek intellectual have arrived at this idea — that arbitrary, subconscious chemicals were tampering with our romantic judgements? It would take an astonishing imagination, but I believe that if Democritus achieved this feat by applying his deductive firepower to the physical world, a philosopher of a similar calibre could achieve something similar with respect to the psychological underpinnings of love.
Sorry for the long-winded response…
Look, I’m not even entirely sure what you mean when you keep saying “chemical bribery.” It sounds like what you are describing here is just a deeply cynical and reductionist view of interpersonal relationships. Yes, human feelings and emotions are essentially chemical and electrical processes in the nervous system—but that doesn’t mean that we don’t genuinely feel and experience them.
Spencer –
I think that’s exactly what Stan means and is describing. In my opinion it is a deeply cynical view, but I think the question pertains not to the validity of the “chemical bribery” model of love, but rather whether ancient Greeks could have come up with such a view on love hypothetically, or indeed, whether any of them did.
No discussion of the phenomenology of the love-as-chemical-and-electrical-processes view is necessary to answer the question. I mean, it could be as simple as some ancient philosopher pissed off at their lover for leaving them for a taller partner, and the philosopher maybe writes something lamenting how the lover just valued having taller children more than any connection they had with the philosopher. The hypothetical philosopher concludes, therefore, that love isn’t real in any sense other than being reducible to other impulses, such as wanting fit children, gaining wealth or power, etc..
I wouldn’t be particularly impressed to learn ancient Greeks thought many couples have purely transactional relationships with no love involved, but I’m very interested if we today know of any ancient thinkers who expanded upon this idea to some extreme. Perhaps universalizing the notion to the point of denying the existence of love altogether – a sort of romantic nihilist.
Or, relating back to chemicals and electricity, a sort of romantic naturalist. Someone who, despite having no notion of neurons and brain chemistry, believed all love to be reducible to an underlying natural cause, even if the cause they came up with involved wacky ideas like humors.
As an aside, this sort of question has fascinated me ever since I learned ancient Greeks came up with the concept of Atoms. As Stan alludes, pretty mind boggling imagination seems to me required to conceive of Atoms without even so much as a magnifying lens at one’s disposal, and I often wonder if I would myself be capable of similar logical leaps if I lived thousands of years ago. What other improbable conclusions did Ancient philosophers draw with only primitive tools and their reasoning to go off of?
“As Stan alludes, pretty mind boggling imagination seems to me required to conceive of Atoms without even so much as a magnifying lens at one’s disposal, and I often wonder if I would myself be capable of similar logical leaps if I lived thousands of years ago.”
Not really. Spencer knows far more about ancient Greek philosophy than I do, I’m sure, so she may correct me, but the idea that if you keep dividing objects into their component parts you will eventually reach the smallest possible unit of matter is pretty intuitive and common sense—and also wrong. I don’t think even us twenty-first century folks, with all our fancy science, know for sure what the smallest unit of matter is, or whether one even exists. The universe is not obligated to make sense to our tiny ape brains; it could be turtles all the way down for all we know.
Bold sentiments for someone resting upon the laurels of over two and a half millennia of recorded human reasoning.
But seriously, you don’t find a casual reading of the wikipedia page on Atomism incredible?
For all the ways in which it is strictly speaking wrong, Democritean atomism manages to be so much more right than any other prevailing view of its time. This fact is made all the more striking because of just how unintuitive it is, and here I disagree with you strongly. When you say “[…] the idea that if you keep dividing objects into their component parts you will eventually reach the smallest possible unit of matter is pretty intuitive and common sense […]” I would even agree with you, if we are speaking about someone born this or last century who is properly immersed in scientific literature.
It is not even remotely intuitive to the typical human, especially a blank slate who would sooner not conceive of the relevant questions, but if confronted with them, would probably intuit first personified agents [1] and assert acausal phenomena which would have nothing in common with the distinctly mechanistic and objective view put forward by Atomists. Not only that, but I think you don’t appreciate how radical this reasoning was for its time, making it that much less likely to have been produced. Far from a blank slate, Democritus would have been laden with the cultural trappings of antiquity, and even as he would eventually come to reject the superstitious anthropocentrism that was implicitly understood to be true by his society, he did so only alongside a few exceptionally insightful individuals.
Individuals, who, as it turned out, heavily disagreed with him. “Plato (c. 427 – c. 347 BCE), if he had been familiar with the atomism of Democritus, would have objected to its mechanistic materialism. He argued that atoms just crashing into other atoms could never produce the beauty and form of the world.”, “Sometime before 330 BC Aristotle asserted that the elements of fire, air, earth, and water were not made of atoms, but were continuous. Aristotle considered the existence of a void, which was required by atomic theories, to violate physical principles. Change took place not by the rearrangement of atoms to make new structures, but by transformation of matter from what it was in potential to a new actuality.” [2]. Even some of the foremost thinkers of ancient Greece did not find Atomism to be common sense, let alone the commoners themselves.
I will agree with your position in this way, however: The apparent multitude of views on the workings of the world in ancient times and their disagreement with each other doesn’t necessarily make Atomism all the more wondrous. In fact, in a way Atomism is made out to be completely unremarkable amidst a sea of wild and unsubstantiated claims. As important as it is to acknowledge this perspective, there are two things to be said. Firstly, I still consider Atomism to be extraordinary, not just because of how much closer to the truth it came, but because of how much it escaped the mold of its time in rejecting comfortably familiar and even less evidenced ideas such as the four elements, and in so doing pioneered a line of reasoning eerily reminiscent of the enlightenment that would come only some two thousand years later. Secondly, I expand my claim to say all of these ideas, including those of Plato and Aristotle, seem to me extremely imaginative! There is something about picturing these dudes strolling around tackling questions about the functioning of the universe they had no right to be able to answer that I find utterly romantic and captivating. They just set aside doubts about “the universe [not being] obligated to make sense to our tiny ape brains” and did the best they could.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism
Hello Spencer,
I don’t know how else to appropriately contact you so I’ll just ask here (I’m also assuming but don’t know for certain that you personally moderate the blog).
I left a comment under Gwydden’s comment to a comment of mine, do you know what happened to that comment? Should I post it again?
Sorry, I just hadn’t approved your comment yet. I’ve approved it now.
Thanks!