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Notes from The Cradle of Humanity: How the changing landscape of Africa made us smart

April 4, 2018 – 9:42 pm

p. 31-35 Arguably the most important episode in hominin evolution occurred in East Africa around 1.9-1.8 million years ago, when hominin diversity reached its highest level, with species of the Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Homo genera all coexisting alongside each other. At the same time, the most important leap forward in human evolution appears to have occurred with the appearance of Homo erectus… which is associated with sweeping changes in brain size, life history and body size and shape. It is also the first species of hominin we know of that migrated out of the Rift Valley and into Eurasia. .. African specimens, and sometimes those from Dmanisi in Georgia, are described as Homo egaster… ‘workman’ in Greek and was used as the African specimens have all been found with stone tools… Its brain size was about two thirds of moderns humans’” .. the first hominin to have a delayed growth period during childhood… had many key adaptations required for long-distance running. More recently it has also been shown that the shape of the shoulder in H. erectus would have allowed the throwing of projectiles. H. erectus also produced a much more sophisticated set of stone tools than previous hominids, referred to as Acheulean tools. It has also been argued that H. erectus had learnt to control fire because … it is difficult to see how they could have maintained such a large, energy-intensive brain with such a small gut without access to cooked meat. [although] by by slicing meat and pounding vegetables and nuts they were able to improve the ability to chew by at least 40%. There was also a decrease in the masticatory force needed, which corresponds to the observed reduction in jaw size and strength. .. The control of fire and regular cooking was , as Rick Potts at the Smithsonian suggests, essential for the next significant increase in brain size between 600,000 and 700,000 years ago with the appearance of H. heidelbergensis and then Neanderthals and H. sapiens.”

p.152 “social groups are complex, with high stress levels, because the rewards are high. Hence, our huge brain is developed to keep track of rapidly changing relationships. My undergraduates come to university thinking they are extremely smart as they can do differential equations and understand the use of split infinitives. But I point out to them that almost anyone walking down the street has the capacity to hold the moral and ethical dilemmas of at least five soap operas in their head at any one time, and that is why we have a huge complex brain. … however many scientists think the human brain operates like a computer. However, Robert Epstein, a psychologist at he American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology, says this is just shoddy thinking and is holding back our understanding of the human brain. He points out that humans start with senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms. What we do not start with and never have are: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programmes, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols or buffers – which are key design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. .. “We are organisms, not computers. Get over it.”

p. 160 “One of the most interesting things about the complicated childbirth in later Homo is that mothers would have required help, called allomatermal care. So individual females who were more socially adept would get more help, and they and their infants were more likely to survive.”

p. 169 “after H sapiens evolved in Africa and spread out into Europe and Asia they seemed to do nothing special for the first 150,000 years … increasing records of symbolic behaviour, starting with microliths, shell engravings, ochre and shell beads. But it is not until about 50,000 years ago that consistent signs of creative thinking emerge – beautiful cave paintings in Spain, France and Indonesia, beautifully carved Venus figurines in German, the Czech Republic, Austria, France and Siberia, and shell beads in North Africa and Europe. Around the same time, modern humans appear that were more slender than their earlier ancestors, had had less hair and smaller, less robust skulls, they look basically like us .. the brow ridge became significantly less prominent and male facial shape became more similar to that of females … They think this must have been due to lower levels of testosterone… a second line of evidence comes from studying the relative finger lengths of our ancestors. There seems to be a strong correlation between the ratio of the length of the second and fourth fingers to aggression, promiscuity and competitiveness in humans … seems to reflect prenatal testosterone levels. A finger with a shorter index finger than the ring finger suggests higher testosterone levels. .. less likely to be reactively or spontaneously violent, and this would have greatly enhanced social tolerance. .. in early humans the smartest or the most creative people may have come to the forefront.”

p. 171 “violence within or between groups is almost non-existent among bonobos. As both these species have a common ancestor there must have been strong selection going on to feminize the bonobos. Hare and his colleagues suggest a process of self-domestication, whereby violent individuals are punished and prevented from reproducing.. on the eastern side of the Congo, where the chimps live, they are in direct competition with gorillas, whereas the bonobos on the western side have no competition.

p. 172 “it was only with the rise of agriculture that an imbalance between the sexes re-emerged, as individual men were suddenly able to concentrate enough resources to maintain several wives and many children. Indeed, the Robert Ciceri-led study does show slightly more masculine facial shapes emerging in recent agriculturalists relative to early humans and recent human foragers.”

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Notes from Women and Liberty 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays

April 4, 2018 – 9:33 pm

p. 50 Gabrielle Suchon was born in Semur (in Burgundy, not far from Dijon), her parents were of minor gentry and there were numerous jurists in the family. Her father died when she was 13. At a certain point, she entered a convent, and at some other point she left it. Upon leaving the convent, she supported herself as a teacher while living with her mother, and led what has been described as a studious life. She died in 703 at 72…. In each of her major works, she inveighs against the institution of marriage and the harm marriage brings to women, so it might well be that she refused to marry. But she also attacks the oppressive conditions of convents, especially for those without vocation.

p. 51 Such authored two major works: 1 Treatise on Ethics and Politics Divided into Three Parts: Freedom, Knowledge and Authority, where it is shown that person of the [female] sex have a natural capacity that enables them to exercise these three prerogatives now denied them. It was originally published in 1693 under the pseudonym ‘GS Aristophile’ then reprinted in 1694, with a slightly modified title. And 2. On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen, or Life without Commitments was published in 1700 under her own name. The latter work was reviewed in print, and so, we can assume, read by others, if not widely read. Both works are striking in demonstrating a pointed concern with the situation and status of women, even while they aim to develop an ethical and political theory. That is, Suchon’s theoretical aspirations are intimately tied to her concern for liberating – this is, ensuring genuine freedom for – women.”

“… there are unanswered questions about Suchon’s influence on those who followed her. In her The Sex of Knowing, Michele Le Doueff suggested that perhaps Rousseau plagiarized Suchon. There are passages that support this suggestion. In the Treatise on Ethics and Politics, Suchon talks of women as essentially free, but constrained by chains which they have helped to forge by unthinkingly accepting the institutions and conventions which prescribe their conduct. Rousseau’s oft-quoted opening to The Social Contract that ‘man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’ echoes Suchon’s language. However, Rebecca Wilkin and Sonja Ruud have found no evidence that either Roussea or Madame Duplin, a woman for whom Rousseau served as secretary while she was writing her Ouvrage sur les femmes, concerning the equality of the sexes, reach Suchon… it might be possible for a thinker to have import without there being a well-established direct causal impact.”

p. 86 “In Hamburg, as the impact of the revolution in France led to civil unrest, Elise Reimarus published a pamphlet, Freihart, which was intended to demonstrate that genuine liberty is only available to those subject to civil law. … A little later, in Naples, the journal of the short-lived republican government of 1799, Il Monitore napoletano, edited by Eleanor Fonseca Pimental, declared: “Freedom consist in this, that every citizen can do whatever is not prohibited by law, and which does not harm others.”

p. 109 “Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 distinction between negative and positive right, which, upon examination, prefigures the famous distinction between positive and negative liberty.”

p.122 “Because Berlin only had an eye for the ‘fathers’ of the tradition, he failed to live up to the inclusive spirit that is characteristic of liberalism at its best. By ignoring De Grouchy, he failed to give the mothers of this tradition – De Grouchy and her friends Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Taylor, and so on – their due. This is not just a matter of accurate record keeping and historical justice. When the sons and daughters of a tradition are told only about the fathers, their (moral) education gives them not only a skewed narrative of reality, it also limits the possibilities available to the play of their imaginations.”

p. 141 Margaret Cavendish “Her natural philosophy shows the same creativity and willingness to go against the grain of her contemporaries’ views. For example, Hobbes, Descartes, Robert Boyle and other natural philosophers of the 17th century conceived of matter as naturally inert, capable of moving only when moved by some external force. In their view, the motions of this matter are governed by various deterministic laws of nature .. the corporeal world is fundamentally law-governed and predictable… For Cavendish, Nature is one fully continuous, infinite entity, composed of three intermixed types, or ‘degrees’ of matter. Two of these – the ‘rational’ matter and the ‘sensitive’ matter – are intrinsically self-moving, which Cavendish claims entails that they are also perceptive and knowing. The third type, ‘dull’ matter, lacks self-motion; it moves only because it is blended with self-moving matter. The three degrees of matter are completely intermixed, so that every part of Nature, no matter how small, will contain all three types of matter.”

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Notes from The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

March 20, 2018 – 10:50 pm

p. 19

“The famous saga of Eric the Red may be called so but it is really about a skorungur, which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his wife, and she lived in the 10th century.” ….Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea wings which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong … Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place… I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered. Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factor, a sugar beet factor and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a 30-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their gardens because the power station left radon in the topsoil.”

p. 268 Edmund Hillary the mountaineer climbed Everest because it was there. Astronaut Gene Cernan of Apollos 10 and 17, when asked why he thought we went to the moon, said because it’s there. When Tenzing Norgay the Sterpa got to the top of Everest he got on his knees, buried some biscuits in offering and prated to the goddess of the mountain for disturbing her. We should have gone to the moon like Tenzing Norgay. Maybe this really is the point in the age where everything changes, a rewriting of myths, a sort of coming-of-age of the human narrative. Remember that everyone mocked Copernicus at first when he said that maybe Earth did not sit at the centre of the universe, hey guys, maybe it does not all revolve around us. Which is what Lovelock and Margulis were saying too. These ideas do not instantaneously propagate. They resonate only once a situation occurs that prompts their germination.”

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Notes from Hypatia by Edward J Watts

March 20, 2018 – 10:48 pm

p. 1 “In the spring of 45, however, the Roman imperial machine in the great city of Alexandria seized up. The trouble began with the election of Cyril as Bishop of Alexandria in 412. After the death of Cyril’s predecessor, the Christian community in the city split in two camps with one side supporting Cyril and the other supporting a rival named Timothy. It took three days of street fighting and of the intervention of Egypt’s top military official to prevail… By 415 the confrontations … brought the Bishop into conflict with the Roman governor Orestes…. Cyril summoned a mob of monks to Alexandria. He hoped they would intimidate the governor into an agreement. But violent protests have unpredictable consequences. Instead of persuading Orestes to talk, one of the monks hit him in the head with a stone. Orestes had the monk arrested, tortured and killed…. Cyril and his associates began to blame their problems on the regular audiences that Orestes had with the female philosopher named Hypatia. The daughter of a prominent Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia had been Alexandria’s leading thinker for nearly 35 years. Philosophers had no formal authority in the later Roman world, but some of them enjoyed immense influence. They had traditionally advised cities and officials about policy while standing apart from the transactions that bound the Roman elite to one another. Concerned only with truth and uninterested in reputation or personal gain, these public intellectuals involved themselves political life only to the degree that their actions made cities more justly governed. If deployed at the right time and in the right way, their counsel could diffuse tension by adding a calm and rational voice to heated confrontations. Her status is a philosopher gave her tremendous symbolic power in a city that was struggling to hold itself together. Her presence at his side made the governor appear to be the reasonable party in the dispute…. Christians loyal to Cyril… began to murmur that Hypatia had bewitched the governor and used her magic to keep him alienated from Cyril. ..In March 415 this frustration led a member of the Alexandrian church named Peter to gather a crowd of Cyrillian supporters that could confront Hypatia. We do not know what Peter and his associates initially planned to do when they found her. Mobs gathered all the time in the Roman world. They usually screamed and yelled. Sometimes they vandalised property. In rare cases they even killed. It was however exceptional for a member of the Roman elite to be physically assaulted by a mob. This mob was different in it either went out with an uncommonly violent sense of purpose or had uncommon luck in finding Hypatia teaching in a public classroom travelling in one of Alexandria’s streets…. Peter and his partisans grabbed her. they shredded her clothes and her body with pottery fragments, tore out her eyes, drag her corpse through the streets of Alexandria, and then burnt her remains.”

P 51 As the 380 s gave way to the 390s, Hypatia faced many of the same professional and personal challenges encountered by mid-career professionals in the modern world. By her 35th birthday, Hypatia had created a distinctive brand of philosophical teaching that combined the rigor of the leading Alexandrian mathematicians with the sophistication of Plotinian and Porphyrian Platonism. … [but] steady expansion of Iamlichian teaching into leading centres of scholarship like Alexandria and Athens mean Hypatia’s teaching began to look increasingly dated. .. The emergence of a militant anti pagan tendency among some Alexandrian Christians early years of the decade presented a different challenge. The non-confessional intellectual middle ground that Hypatia cultivated continued to draw elite Christian students like Synesius who valued traditional education. The wider world, however, was increasingly polarized in the 390s by a toxic combination of anti-pagan imperial legislation and aggressive actions against pagans by Alexandria’s Christian leadership destablised the city.”

p. 92 Female philosophers were not particularly rare in antiquity. as early as 1690, Gilles Menage collected the names and identifying details for over 65 female philosophers. it’s now includes figures ranging across time from Aspasia and Theano in the fifth century BCE through 6th century CE figures like Theodora, the woman to whom Demascius dedicated his Life of Isiodore. .. Hypatia had four significant female contemporaries who were trained as philosophers, philosophy or mathematics, played a public role like the one she assumed. three of these, Panrosian of Alexandria, Sosipatra of Pergamun, and the wife of Maximus of Ephesus, are older than Hypatia. The fourth woman, Aschlepignia of Athens, was the daughter of Hypatia’s younger rival, the Athenian philosopher Plutarch.

 

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Notes from The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nisey

February 23, 2018 – 8:49 pm

p. 18 But however alarming the demons of fornication may have been, the most fearsome demons of all were to be found, teeming like flies on a corpse, around the traditional gods of the empire. Jupiter, Aphrodite, Bacchus and |Isis, all of them in the eyes of these Christian writers, were demonic. In sermon after sermon, tract after tract, Christian preachers and writers reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the ‘error’ of the pagan religions was demonically inspired. … As Augustine thundered: ‘All the pagans were under the power of demons. Temples were built to demons, altars were set up to demons, priests ordained for the service of demons, sacrifices offered to demons, and ecstatic ravers were brought in as prophets for demons. The demons’ motivations in all of this was simple: if they had human followers, then they would have sacrifices, and these sacrifices were their food. To this end, Christian writers explained, demons had created the entire Greco-Roman religious system so that ‘they may procure for themselves a proper diet of fumes and blood offered to their statues and images’.”

p. 19 Christian preachers began to exhibit a new, almost hysterical, desire for purity … one had to avoid all contact with the blood, smoke, water and even the smell of other people’s sacrifices. .. At the close of the 4th century, a fitful Christian wrote an anxious letter to Augustine. May a Christian use baths which are used by pagans on a feast day, he asked, either while the pagans are there or after they have left. May a Christian sit in a sedan chair if a pagan has sat in that same chair during the feast day celebrations of an ‘idol’? If a thirst Christian comes across a well in a deserted temple, may they drink from it? If a Christian is starving, and on the point of death, and they see food in an idol’s temple, may they eat it?

p.44 “There was a strong strain of scepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God is – provided there is a God … he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.” Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists, emperors were even deified after their death and their ‘genius’ (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: ‘Gah, I think I’m turning into a god.’ But Romans were not all cynics… it was a commonly held belief that Rome’s great success depended on the goodwill of the gods. As a character in a Roman history observed: “All went well so long as we obeyed the gods, and ill when we spurned them… Religious they may have been: dogmatic and unbending they were not. Like the Roman Empire, the Roman pantheon could happily expand. Rome was not a paragon of religious pluralism. It had no scruples about banning or suppressing practices – whether Druidic or Bacchic or Manichean – that seemed for any reason pernicious. But equally it could admit foreign gods – though as with so much else in Rome a bureaucratic process had first to be observed. To ignore this process and worship a foreign god that had not been accepted was a socially unacceptable act; it risked upsetting the contract with the incumbent gods and spreading disaster and pestilience.”

p. 68 Pliny (governor in Bithnyia under Trajan) letter 10.96 is nothing less than the very first record of the Christians by a Roman writer… Pliny’s problem with all of this is not religious. He is not upset because Jupiter has been neglected, or Hera has been slighted: he is upset because the citizens of his province are becoming disgruntled by the Christian’s behaviour. Anonymous pamphlets, containing the names of local Christians, have started to appear. Whoever it is who has been writing these, Pliny is now obliged to react. Not because he is fervently religious – he is not – but because it is his job as governor to keep the province calm .. Discontented locals had to be taken seriously; if they were not listened to, a situation might develop where riots could break out – for which Pliny would be held responsible. Pontius Pilate might have been the first official to be reluctantly pressed into action against Christians by local agitators – but he was certainly not the last. Even the locals who were forcing Pliny’s hand might not have been complaining about Christians for religious reasons. It has been speculated …Local tradesmen were angry because this surge in Christian sentiment had led to a drop in the sales of sacrificial meat and their profits were suffering: anti-Christian sentiment caused less by Satan than by a slow trade in sausage meat.”

p. 70 “all over the empire, Romans were frustratingly unwilling to play their role as bloodthirsty martyr-makers. Many even refuse to execute Christians when they arrive in front of them. Arrius Antonius was a Roman governor of Asia who in the late second century had executed a number of Christians in his province. He was perhaps unprepared for what came next. Instead of fleeing, local Christians suddenly turned up and , in one large mob, presented themselves before him. Antonius did indeed dutifully kill a few (presumably there is only so much temptation a Roman can stand) but rather than despatching the rest of pleasure, he turned to them with what, even with the passage of almost two millllennia, sounds unmistakeably like exasperation: ‘Oh you ghastly people,’ he said. ‘If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hand yourself with….

Other Christians who were deprived of execution turned instead to suicide. In 4th-century North Africa, locals watched in horror as faithful and ‘deranged men, … because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves’. The methods of suicide varied but drowning, setting oneself on fire and jumping off cliffs were among the most popular. Whatever the method, the aim was always the same: martyrdom,l eternal glory in heaven and eternal fame on earth – or so it was hoped.”

p. 74 “When a young girl called Eulalia presents herself before a governor he struggles to dissuade her. Think of your future marriage, he begs. ‘Think of the great joys you are cutting off … The family you are bereaving follows you with tears .. you are dying in the bloom of youth…your rash conduct is breaking their hearts.’ Eulalia…ignores him. … Realizing that Christians found full meat sacrifices repellent, officials also tried to tempt them with smaller acts of obedience. Just put out your fingers, Eulalia’s judge begs her, and just touch a little of that incense, and you will escape cruel suffering.”

p. 76 “Maximus, having offered that bribe to the soldier and soon-to-be martyr Julies and been rebuffed… comes up with an almost Jesuitical solution to the problem. ‘If you think [sacrifice] is a sin,’ he suggests, then ‘let me take the blame. I am the one who is forcing you, so that you may hot give the impression of having consented voluntarily. Afterwards you can go home in peace, you will pick up your ten-year bonus and no one will ever trouble you again.”

p. 119 “At the end of the 4th century, the orator Libanius looked out and described in despair what he observed. He and other worshippers of the old gods saw, he said, their temples ‘in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing, and their property divided up between a crew of rascals.. It is thought that when Constantine had come to the throne, 10 per cent of the empire, at most, were Christian… by the end of that first, tumultuous century of Christian rule, estimates suggest that this figure had been reversed: now between 70 and 90 per cent of the empire were now Christian. One law from around that time declared, entirely untruthfully, that there were no more ‘pagans’. None. The aggression of the claim is remarkable. Christians were writing the wicked ‘pagans; out of existence…. If some of these millions were converting not out of love of Christ but out of fear of his enforcers? No matter, argued Christian preachers. Better to be scared in this life than burn in the next.”

p. 142 “it was felt that Greek and Roman authors should be ignored when they talked about their gods ‘and especially when they represent them as bring many’ – which was basically all of the time… Better, Basil wrote, to avoid dangerous works altogether. “Just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious’. As Basil explained, such ecclesiastical censorship was not illiberal; it was loving. Just as Augustine advocated the beating of heretics with rods out of fatherly care, so Basil advocated the removal of great tracts of the classical canon as an act of ‘great care’ to ensure the soul was safely guarded.”.. Later generations would present Basil as a liberal intellectual.. That is nonsense. Supremacy was precisely what Basil wanted – and he got it.”

p. 146 “This was a new literary world and a newly serious one… The power of this Christian talk was produced by many things, among them a remorseless horatory pedagogy, a hectoring moralising of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious word.

p. 147 “For many hardline Christian clerics, the entire edifice of academic learning was considered dubious. In some ways there was a novel egalitarianism in this: with Christianity, the humblest fisherman could touch the face of God without having his hand stayed by quibbling scholars. But there was a more aggressive and sins=ter side to it, too. St Paul had succinectly and influently said that ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’.”

p. 148 “Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect.”

p. 152 In the third century their had been 28 public libraries in Rome and many private ones. By the end of the 4th they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut”. Was Christianity’s rise cause or mere correlation in this? Christian emperors would later struggle to increase literacy to ensure that the state even had enough literate functionaries. Certain fields of enquiry start to become not only off-limits but illegal. As a law of AD388 announced: “There shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel’… Philosophers who wished their works and careers to survive in this Christian world had to curb their teachings… Any theories that stated that the world was eternal – for that contradicted the idea o Creation – were, as the academic Dirk Rohmann has pointed out, also suppressed. The stated aim of historians also started to change too. … the last of the pagan historians, Ammianus Marcellinus.. posterity ought to be an “impartial judge of the past”. Christian historians took a different view. As the influential Christian writer Eusebius – the ‘father of Church history’ – wrote, the job of the historian was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read.”

p. 153 “the shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a goo deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead, it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder… Some writers were highly critical – even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatory in the city’.”

p. 162 One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers tool place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the 4th century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals… As Ammianus describes it [he was there], “the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, .. A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded… the burning of books on bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter .. they were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. Many intelllectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books.”

p. 127 Hypatia .. always dressed in the austere and concealing uniform of a philospher’s cloak. .. It is said one of her students fell in love with her and ‘not being able to control his passion, confessed his feelings’. Hypatia responded briskly ‘ She brought him some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him, and said. ‘You love this, young man, and there is nothing beautiful about it.

By the early 5th century AD, Hypatia had become something of a local celebrity. Alexandria was a city that had, for hundreds of years, been in thrall to its intellectuals…. ..

p. 129 Library … the number of scrolls that it held is contested, .. there were perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls…. Even the major monastic libraries of the 12th century contained no more than 500 or so… by 1338, the library of the Sorbonne in Paris, the richest in the Christian world, offered a theoretical 1,728 works for loan – 300 of which as its registered noted, it had already managed to lose.  t wasn’t only books that Alexandria collected but intellectuals. Scholars here were treated with reverence and to some marvellous facilities. .. the Great Library and the Musaeum provided them with a charming existence: there were covered walkways to stroll through, gardens in which to rest and a hall to lecture in. .. academics were also given a stipend from public funds, board and lodging, and meals in an elegant, domed-roofed dining hall. There may also have been, somewhat incongruously, a zoo.”

p. 131 y Hypatia’s time the library had gone, the last of it with the Christian destruction of the great temple of Serapis. “Whenever anyone new and notable visited Alexandria, one of the first things they did was to pay Hypatia a visit. Orestes, the aristocratic governor of Alexandria, and on eo fthe most important men in the city, had become a confidant, friend and a powerful ally – and, as it would turn out, a dangerous one. In a world that was becoming increasingly riven along sectarian lines, Hypatia was determinedly non-partisan in her behaviour, treating non-Christian and Christian with meticulous equality.

p. 132 “In the spring of the year 415, relations between Christians and non-Christians in Alexandria were tense. … the city had a new bishop, Cyril. After the zealot Theophilus, many Alexandrians must have hoped that their next cleric would be more conciliatory … he was, after all, Theophilus’s nephew. And true to family form, her was a thug…

p. 134 “the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around 500 monks descended from their shacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates admits, men of a very fiery disposition.” Confrontation between them and the governor…

p. 135 “And then the whispering began. It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn… Fanned by the parablani, the remours started to catch and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men, truly abdominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of philosophy and mathematics, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell.. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. One day in March AD 435, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot … the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – a ‘perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the cloths from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say, that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

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Notes from Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper by Andrew Martin

February 23, 2018 – 8:39 pm

p. 23 “I travelled on Eurostar on the second the day of its operation. It was November 1994.  I picked up a leaflet headlined ‘What Next’ which boasted ‘In early 1997 night trains will be introduced travelling from Scotland, the North West , South Wales and the West into Paris. .. Passengers can enjoy a good night’s rest in comfortable accommodation and arrive refreshed in the morning .. The Nightstar never materialised, although they were built, with both day and night carriages -and a new service depot at Manchester sprouted a billboard reading “LE Eurostar est icic”. But the business case was killed off by the budget airlines … The trains were eventually sold to Canada… their journey south would have taken them via Stratford in east London and the only reason Stratford station was built – and the reason it is called Stratford International – was to serve these trains.”

p. 75 In 2010 another sleeper train began running between Moscow and Nice via Warsaw. The Nice Express is operated by Russian Railways, RZD: it provides the longest continuous train journey available in Europe, and runs only in summer. The second longest is also provided by RZD; from Paris Gare de l’Est to Mscow, which runs all year round, and started in 2011. Russia has a broad gaueg and both trains switch gauges at Brest.

p. 134 “ On 4 October 1883, the first Express d’Orient – as the train was known until 1891, when its name was changed to the Orient Express, in acknowledgement that the British and Americans were its main customers – departed from Gare de l’Est (or the Gare de Strasbourg, as it was then known.) This very first trip was oner a special, provisional route. It went Strasbourg-Munich-Vienna-Budapest-Bucharest, then to Girgiu on the Danube in Romania. Passengers would cross the Danube by ferry to Rustchuk in Bulgaria, where they took a train to Varna on the Black Sea … from there they would begin a 14-hou voyage to Constantinople…the journey took 81 hours and 40 minutes eastbound and 77 hours 49 minutes the other way… The rail connection between Paris and Constantinople would not be completed until 1889.

p. 153 “Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2015, Jean Seaton, official historian of the BBC, said that George Howard, who was the BBC chairman from 1980 to 1983, had claimed expenses for using a prostitute on the Orient Express. The expense form was found in a safe by a newly appointed secretary. The previous incumbent, Jean Seaton said, had suffered a nervous breakdown, and he (this was a male secretary) had deliberately left the expenses form lying about as a warning that his successor ‘would have to deal with the chairman and he had to be managed around these young women’.”p. 195 The Sud Express “The service started by Nagelmackers in 1887, running from |Calais to Lisbon via Irun in northern Spain. .. Nagelmackers also inaugurated the Nord Express from St Petersburg in 1896 with the idea of connecting it to the Sud, the fulcrum being his home town of Liege, but the through link was never forged into one train, and the Russian Revolution, and the descent of the Iron Curtain, would kill the project.

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