The Philosophers' Stolen Castle

Matt Levine explains:

I have always kind of thought that a clever form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, we skim a percentage of the handle, and we use it to buy mosquito nets to save poor people from malaria.” I once suggested to Sam Bankman-Fried that this might be what he was up to at FTX, his crypto exchange. Just moving money from low-valued uses to high-valued ones, very neat and utilitarian.

A less clever — but faster? — form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, then we steal all the money and use it to buy mosquito nets.” Arguably that is closer to what Bankman-Fried was actually up to, though that’s not quite right either. FTX actually recovered most of the client money, but also it does not seem to have notably devoted a ton of customer money to effective charitable works on behalf of the world’s poorest.

“We build a giant casino for crypto gambling, steal the money and use it to buy a castle for effective altruist philosophers” is even weirder? Like that’s a good assignment for a philosophy class? “Explain, using utilitarianism, how this is Good.”

Because one of the things that was done with Sam Bankman-Fried's donations to the Effective Ventures Foundation was to buy Wytham Abbey (photo at top) in England for around $18 million. The plan, apparently, was to use the manor house as a retreat where the thinkers of effective altruism would meet with their billionaire funders and come up with ways to make the world better. Unfortunately for that dream, after FTX went bankrupt Effective Ventures decided to return the money Bankman-Friend gave them, and to do that they had to put the house back on the market.

Levine's blog isn't set up so you can link to individual posts, but this is part of his post dated May 9.

W.H. Auden, "If I Could Tell You"

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know. 

1940

The Danville Adventure, Conclusion

Finished out the fieldwork near Danville Friday afternoon and then drove home to Baltimore. The week was exhausting and physically rough but worth it. Above is an oak tree growing near one of our house sites. You can see how much older it is than the forest around it.

This impressive stone chimney looks quite old, certainly pre-Civil War. We suspect this was the home of a plantation overseer.

I tried to take a picture of this amazing little swamp every time I walked by, but none of them really come out. It was quite sublime.

Black rat snake in a recently logged area.

As I have said, the loggers mostly stayed away from the old house sites. But the first archaeological survey missed this tobacco barn foundation, which was a good two hundred yards form the house it probably belonged to. You can see the crumbled brick remnants of the hearth.

Two different signs of severely disturbed areas: subsoil that should be a foot deep exposed on the surface, and hummocks left by loggers in a forest.

Vultures nested in the top floor of this house earlier this year.

Collapsed 20th-century tobacco barn, built with wire nails and 2x4s.

Here I am at the old mill site I wrote about in Part I.

What an adventure it was.

Part I, Part II

The Danville Adventure, Part 2

Here's an interesting house foundation on one of our sites near Danville, originally built of stone but with repairs made using concrete block.

Nearby is this outbuilding foundation. You may be able to see that this "foundation" was made by setting a line of rocks on the surface of the soil, no digging at all. See, people in the past did not consider the needs of future archaeologists, so they often did important things in ways that left little evidence for archaeologists to find. This foundation only survives because nothing has happened on this spot since the owners moved away; almost any kind of activity (agriculture, logging, parking pickup trucks) would very quickly erase all traces of this structure. And many other ways peope have found to house themselves.

One thing that often does survive around house sites from the past 150 years is plants. These are blackberry lilies, the ancestors of which were probably planted between 1900 and 1920. We also find ornamental shrugs like mock orange, and of course many of these houses had a single big oak tree growing nearby.

Here's a screenful of nineteenth-century artifacts from one of these sites.

Here's a little surprise we stumbled on while crossing a creek; a previously unsuspected mill, likely dating to before the American Revolution. (Because the stones are an old style, and this property is well-documented in the nineteenth century.) We were just walking along when somebody said, "Wait, isn't that a millstone?" Why yes, it is. And there are other traces of the mill round about.

Like this second stone, sunken under the creek, which someone spotted the next time we came by.

Something that was long known about this property was the existence of this large cemetery. (It is being preserved.) Most of the two hundred or so graves are now unmarked, which means they were probably marked with wooden posts. But several have these crude, unworked headstones; they bear no names or dates, but they testify to someone's desire to remember.

As we remember all who lived here, and recover what they can of their lives as the land they called home is transformed yet again.

Part I, Part III

Links 10 May 2024

Gustav Klimt, Apple Tree I, 1912

An Orangutan observed eating medicinal plants and rubbing their juice on his wound. Very cool, but the claim that this is the first such case observed by scientists is absurd; I have written about this myself several times.

Lump of Tyrian purple dye found in Cumbria, England.

Kevin Drum complains about the belief that women's health care is somehow slighted, when there is now a lot of evidence that this is not so.

Spitalfields Life chronicles Beltane among east London's neopagans.

Vox reviews recent developments in longevity research.

Major article titled "Frequent Disturbances Enhanced the Resilience of Past Human Populations" published in Nature. It argues, by estimating long-term human populations from the amount of datable charcoal, that over time societies that experience regular catastrophes get better at surviving them. Interesting but I am not impressed because I don't think the archaeological data is good enough. As I have explained here before, estimating the size of human populations from archaeological data is very hard, even for 600 years ago, so I find these long timelines unpersuasive. (NY Times, Nature)

Among the African objects kept in Belgian museums is the skull of Lusinga Iwa Ng’ombe, who was killed in 1884 resisting Belgium's conquest of the Congo. Seems to me like maybe that should be repatriated? On the other hand, he is said to have been a slave trader. (NY Times, wikipedia, Royal Museum for Central Africa)

Iron Age necropolis found near Rome.

Before he created The Twilight Zone, Rod Sterling was a paratrooper in WW II, and a story he wrote about combat in the Phillipines is now being published. Like many others, Sterling started writing about the war to get it "out of his gut."

Dmitri Alperovitch, who predicted Putin's invasion of Ukraine, says Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan within four years.

Sam Bankman Fried was sent to prison after the FTX crypto exchange collapsed, for various actual financial crimes but really because he was thought to have lost billions of his customers' money. Now it turns out that they will get almost all of it back, and some investors will make a profit.

What did Assyrian artists mean when they carved, repeatedly, a lion, eagle, bull, fig tree and a plow on various temple walls?

Another nuclear power plant went into service this month in the US. Meanwhile wind energy production declined last year for the first time since the 1990s. Right now developers much prefer solar, and big plans for offshore wind have been scaled back or abandoned.

Fewer and fewer childred read for fun.

Fictional portrayals of palentologists Richard Owen, who was a very controversial figure in 19th-century Britain.

Ben Pentreath on tulips in his garden, with a trip to Copenhagen.

The ideology of Putin's Russia from Austrian Youtuber Kraut, 54 minutes but very intelligent and sophisticated.

Videos on Twitter/X of Russian tanks covered with extra armor to deter drones, which people are calling Turtle Tanks. It strikes me that in peacetime armies often buy lightly-armored vehicles saying they have superior mobility, but when a war starts the soldiers all start bolting on extra armor.

Crazy thread analyzing how many infantry fighting vehicles and APCs Russia has pulled out of storage since the war started: more than 4,000. On the other hand, they still have 10,000 left, although nobody know what their conditions is.

The Danville Adventure, Part 1

Spending the week helping to close out a two-month field project on a big development site near Danville, Virginia. This area all used to be tobacco farms, down into the 1960s, but then that faded away and this country went to timber. Scattered through these hills are the remnants of homes where the tobacco farmers lived. Before the civil war, a majority were slaves; after it, some were sharecroppers, then cash tenants. Right now historians are devoting a huge amount of attention to Reconstruction and the transition from slavery to tenancy, so there is a lot of interest in these sites.

The ruin in the top photo is a collapsed tobacco barn, likely built in the early 20th century. Besides the general shape and size, we know this is a tobacco barn because of the small brick hearth for heating the barn to help the tobacco dry in damp, cool autumns. 

Here is an interesting house. The core is a one-room log house made with ax-shaped logs, possible as old as 1840, definitely before 1880. But the core is almost completely surrounded by more recent frame additions in various stages of collapse. A squatter was living here as recently as a decade ago.

Nearby tire dump. One problem with digging on these sites is that many of them were used as dump sites at some point after they were abandoned. We have found bottle dumps, tire dumps, a refrigerator dump, and a pile of personal computers from the 1980s. Computers are easy to identify but when it comes to bottle glass it can be hard to tell the 1870s from last month.

Our location has been logged at least twice since tobacco farming ceased. The loggers have mostly stayed away from the house sites but the rest of the landscape has been, um, changed. Here is a typical stretch of forest now, just pines and young sweetgums.

And it is being logged right now, so a lot of it looks like this. The impact of this kind of logging is not just on the surface; if you tried to walk across this expanse, as I did, you would discover that under all that wood trash is just one deep rut after another, the soil churned up and nothing left that resembles topsoil. It makes for a bit of a surreal experience, hiking across these huge clear-cuts to little islands of trees where we step back in time a century or more.

But nature, you know, is pretty tough, and within a few weeks of what looks like devastation new life is emerging.

Areas that were logged last year have been taken over by wildflowers.

Including moth mullein, one of my favorites.

Plus, where the surface is bare we can find things like this stone scraper, undatable but surely more than a thousand years old. More to come!

Part II, Part III

"Jane Eyre" and the Rage of the Excluded

Seeking something classic to listen to, I found a free version of Jane Eyre, and thought, I haven't read that since I was 17, why not? I'm enjoying it, and I'm here to tell you that Mr. Rochester is a lot sexier and more interesting than Mr. Darcy.

But what struck me this time around was the attitude toward class and social distinctions.

When Jane Eyre was published in 1847 many readers found it a disturbingly radical book. Reviewers for conservative journals in particular attacked it, saying that is was an "angry book," seething with hatred of good society and proper morals. Here is an example, from wikipedia:

We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

In fact Charlotte Brontë was a Tory who had zero sympathy for anyone involved with labor agitation or radical politics.

I agree, though, that it is an angry book. It is full of scorn thrown at rich people who pose as better than the rest of us, but are in fact not. The mistake those reviewers made was thinking that because Brontë could be downright savage about particular rich people and their hypocrisies, she opposed economic inequality and the divisions of social class.

Not at all. She was perfectly happy about the existence of an aristocracy, she was simply mad that she wasn't an aristocrat.

Jane Eyre says over and over that she is just as good as all the rich people who are snotty to her. Not, mind you, that everyone is as good as they are, or that the average working person is, only that *she* is. There is, for example, a scene where Jane says that "nothing free born" would submit to be treated with insolence just because she is paid a salary. Mr. Rochester responds, "Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary." This is not challenged, so we are left thinking that it is true, and thus that Jane is not like "most things free born." If the rest of them submit to insolence, it is only what they deserve for their weakness. Jane will not, thus proving her superiority to them. A few lines later Rochester says, "Not three in three thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered me as you have just done." As a one-in-a-thousand girl, Jane surely belongs in the upper class.

Then there is a drawn-out bit in which Rochester seems on the verge of marrying a rich local beauty, Miss Ingram. This vapid personage is certainly his match in status and accomplishments. But she fails at love; she cannot win Rochester's heart. As a poor governess, Jane knows that she should not even think of competing for Rochester's affections, but she finds Miss Ingram so annoying she cannot help pondering how much better she would do. If, she thinks, "Miss Ingram had been a good and noble woman, endowed with force, fervour, kindness, sense", she could have retired from the field, but her sense that she is really the better woman keeps her watching and seething.

Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to draw so near to him? . . . When she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester’s breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart—have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won.

And when Rochester finally proposes marriage to Jane, he says, "My bride is here, because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"

I mention this because I feel that it is a theme that runs at least through modern European history and maybe far beyond. Very often the rebels against the status quo don't really want to change the system, they just want to join the elite, and often they are people close enough to the top to have a good idea what things are all about.

Not, mind you, that this is always true; there have been plenty of rebels who really did want to smash the system, and plenty who were of truly humble birth.

But how important has the rebellion of the almost-rich, almost-insiders been in history? 

I remember reading that in 1776 some British cynic said the whole American rebellion thing could be settled by handing out fifty knighthoods and making George Washington the Duke of Virginia. I suspect that by 1776 it was too late for that, but if such an approach had been tried in 1765, things might have gone very differently. (Unfortunately for that plan, George's court was willing to spend a million pounds and ten thousand lives to keep control of the colonies, but absolutely not to treat a colonial as an equal.) Welcoming rebel leaders into the fold has, I think, defused many revolts.

Anyway I see Charlotte Brontë as yet another in the long line of smart, capable people who criticized aristocratic society because it burned their hearts when ignoble idiots treated them as inferiors.

Links 3 May 2024

James Prader, Pan and Bacchante, 1834

At Crooked Timber, a discussion of culture wars and what they have to do with elite education and notions of "truth."

Surveys of how many children Chinese students want to have in the future suggest that the birth rate will keep falling from its current already low level. (Right now TNF is about 1.) According to official statistics, metropolitan Shanghai just recorded the lowest fertility of any major metropolitan area ever, around 0.61.

More Crooked Timber, an argument that 1) naval power is vastly overrated, and 2) China can't conquer Taiwan and isn't really trying. Relies on this survey of experts in Taiwan and the US; the respondents thought a blockade of Taiwan was much more likely than an invasion. I want this to be true but history says we should take seriously the statements of dictators concerning the places they want to invade.

Kevin Drum explains that the current police response to students occupying university buildings is not unusual, but has been pretty much the norm in 21st-century America. As my readers know, my general feeling is that intrusive, annoying protestesters almost always hurt their cause.

Something new to worry about: AI generated books about wild mushrooms, full of made-up information, are for sale online.

Archaeologists find evidence of the blessing ceremony for a Maya ballcourt.

The gang that has been stealing rare books from European libraries.

A new Italian project to digitize Michelangelo's drawings. Discussion at The History Blog.

Philippine Supreme Court bans golden rice, says the government did not consider safety issues when granting their approval. Golden rice has been genetically modified to produce beta carotene, the lack of which blinds about 500,000 children a year worldwide, including thousands in the Philippines. This in response to a lawsuit from Greenpeace, which has gone fanatical on GMO foods. Golden rice was developed by a non-profit and is free for everyone to breed and so on, so it doesn't come with the issues of corporate ownership that I think are serious for some other varieties.

Zooming into the Horsehead Nebula using Webb imagery, 90-second video.

Brutalist churches. Sets for your dystopian film. Or your nightmares. In a different vein, photographs of Europe's most famous libraries, from all periods.

Hungary's new, very generous pro-family policies – including a lifetime exemption from income taxes for women who have four children – have not budged the birth rate, which is declining in parallel to the birth rate in the Czech Republic. People say they aren't having children because it's too expensive, but when governments do all they can to make it affordable that has very little effect. Money is not the issue and therefore not the solution.

Theories about Roman dodecahedrons: Washington Post, Portable Antiquities Scheme, Reddit. One clue is that they are rather fragile and show no wear, which pretty much rules out anything but careful, occasional use. I think that use was ritual and people searching for practical uses are just silly. They probably think the same about me.

Kevin Drum summarizes a Washington Post study about a middle school that got positive results from using Yondr pouches to ban cell phone use during the school day.

Tyler Cowen interviews jazz musician Coleman Hughes, interesting about music, culture, and race.

How well do you actually remember works of art you love?

Last poems by dying poets.

A random past post from 2015, review of a book on the Highland Clearances.

The Oryx count of Russian equipment lost in Ukraine has reached 15,000 systems: 2,948 tanks, 4,184 other armored vehicles, 725 self-propelled artillery, 369 multiple launch rocket systems, 68 radars, 80 electronic warfare systems, 109 jet aircraft, 137 helicopters, 3240 trucks and jeeps, 23 naval vessels, and 1 submarine. Those are mimimum figures. Meanwhile at least 4041 Russian officers are confirmed dead, and estimates for overall Russian war dead start at around 50,000 and go much higher, so probably at least as many as the US lost in Vietnam (58,000). Despite all of this, Putin is determined to push on to "victory."

Doing Honor to African History

These days most American and European historians of Africa want to do honor to Africans. But they take very different approaches to doing this.

One school hopes to lift up Africans by blaming all their problems on outsiders. If Africans participated in the slave trade, that must have been because outsiders somehow forced them to. If their politics were a mess, that is because Europeans (or, earlier, Arabs) ruined them. For example, one theory holds that Europeans got Africans to sell so many of their people abroad by creating an arms race that forced all African leaders to spend heavily for imported weapons.

John Thornton thinks that such theories are first, wrong, and second, make Africans out to be much weaker and stupider than they really were. In Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (1992) he set out to show that Africans were not overmastered by Europeans in that period, but chose to do what they did for their own reasons. He is, in one way of putting this, restoring agency to Africans in the slave trade era.

Thornton points out that when Europeans tried to conquer pieces of mainland Africa in this period they almost always failed. European ships and canons allowed them to seize offshore islands but taking even coastal islands was beyond their capability. The one exception was the Portugese seizure of part of Angola, and that only happened because they intervened in an African civil war, helped one side win, and got a substantial territory as their reward. Their attempts to extend that territory in the 1600s were defeated.

Thornton notes that in the period he covers European manufacturing was not much more advanced than it was in Africa. Europe's most valuable exports in that period were cloth, metal goods, and horses. Horses, of course, were hardly any kind of European innovation; they just happen to breed more readily in cooler places. European cloth was valued in Africa, not because it was better, but because it was different, and the African elite liked to have new and different ways to show off their status. The Portuguese also made money by carrying African cloth from one region to another, and to Brazil, so they certainly saw African textiles as something worth dealing in. And, says Thornton, European exports never amounted to more than 5% of the African market, even in coastal kingdoms. 

As for metal, African smiths could make crucible steel, so they could equal the finest European products; not until after 1750 or so did European metallurgy acquire any real technical advantage over the rest of the world. Africa did have something of a metal shortage, because they were short of charcoal for smelting, but even so European imports did not control a large share of the market until the 1800s. 

Nor did the traditional, trans-Saharan trade routes ever die out. For horses in particular the cross-Sahara route remained viable, and Thornton says some African merchants positioned themselves to be able to draw on whichever source had more and better product that year. African merchants, both native and creole, were big operators who could deal on equal terms with European traders.

One major advantage the Europeans did have was in certain weapons, notably canons and armor. But the pope forbade selling weapons to Africans, and the European powers do seem to have been reluctant to sell advanced weapons for the first few centuries. Even when they began to acquire muskets in the 1600s, African armies did not make much use of them; our accounts of African battles in this period show the use of a few canons for attacking forts, but otherwise a lot of spears and swords. (Even so, they regularly defeated European forces, for example by swarming ships with bowmen in canoes.) So, says Thornton, there was no sense in which Africans were forced to trade with Europeans.

Unfortunately Thornton's book ended just when the worst period of the slave trade was getting going, so I don't know what he has to say about the 1680 to 1750 period. But it certainly remained true that African kingdoms and African merchants were independent operators who made their own decisions and defied Europeans who tried to boss them around.

My favorite part of this book was the short chapter on Christianity in pagan Africa. Thornton says that Africans and Europeans Christians easily understood each other's religious ideas, because they were similar: both posited a spiritual world to which certain people had access, and from which revelations might come. The biggest problem many Africans had with Christianity was that its key revelations took place too long ago and far away; they wanted messages closer to themselves in space and time. Thornton says Africans were more impressed by immediate signs. For example, the Jesuits drew large audiences when they used Christian divination to decide which saints to dedicate their new churches to. In the period Thornton covers many Africans "converted to Christianity" to the extent that they attended Christian services and consulted priests for magical aid, but without giving up other sources of spiritual assistance.

Thornton's book is also eye-opening on the vast scale of the documents available for the study of African history in this period. Most of them were written by Europeans, but they were written by a wide variety of men working from a dozen nations, giving us a rich potraryal of these lands at least as they related to trade and coastal governance. The number of African polities Thornton was able to map and describe frankly astonished me. The African trade was highly politicized and always required managing local governments and local power brokers, so European traders made very careful notes on who those people were and how best to deal with them.

African history is intimidating because the space is so huge, the numer of independent states so great (hundreds), the vocabulary so strange and varied, the sources scattered across two continents in dozens of languages. Most of us also lack the basic framework for understanding that we acquired in school about the European past. Getting entrance to this mysterious kingdom of the past is not easy, but after a dozen books I feel like I am at least starting to idle around the threshold.

Augustine on Friendship

Augustine will never be alone. When he returned to Thagaste, he formed a core of abiding friendships. Boys who had grown up with him as fellow-students now rallied to him. They were a singularly intelligent and priggish group of young men. . . . Augustine, who had lapsed into monogamy, was a rarity among these celibates. They thought that music was a divine gift; they would discuss together the nature of beauty; they felt themselves above the circus. Augustine knew to perfection how to keep such friendships "on the boil from the heat of shared enthusiasms." "All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company – to talk and to laugh, and to do each other kindnesses; to read pleasant books together; to pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; to differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when, most rarely, dissension arose, to find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; to teach each other and to learn from each other; to be impatient for the return of the absent, and to welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these, and such-like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and by a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls together, and, of many, made us one."

–Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. Quotations are from The Confessions.

Baiae

We humans have strange ideas about risk. For example, the ancient Romans were perfectly aware of the risk posed by the volcanic features around the Bay of Naples. After all, people regularly died by falling into holes full of boiling water or being overwhelmed by bursts of poisonous gas, not to mention occasional eruptions. But people flocked there because of the harbor, the weather, and the splendid soil, making it one of the most densely inhabited regions of Italy. The earth rumbled and belched, but life went on. Buildings were regularly destroyed by earthquakes, then rebuilt even more splendidly. Not even the vast destruction wrought by Vesuvius in 79 AD discouraged people for long.

Consider the modern geological map above, which shows the density of volcanic features in the area called by the ancients the Phlegraean Fields, in the northwest corner of the Bay. The whole region is within the caldera of an ancient supervolcano, and there are at least six craters left by smaller, more recent eruptions. 

I find it startling to peruse an aerial photograph that shows dense neighborhoods pressed up against all these features. Italian geologists have lately been monitoring rumbles deep under the bay, and some of them think the supervolcano might erupt within the next fifty years. Fifty years? say the Neapolitans. Plenty of time to keep partying!

Which is great for archaeologists. Besides the unbelievable riches of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the neighboring villas, the whole region is full of stuff that was collapsed, buried, abandoned when poisonous vapors surged over it, or sunk under the sea. Which brings me to today's subject, the seaside resort town the Romans called Baiae, Baia in modern Italian, smack in the middle of the Phlegraean Fields supervolcano. This once rich and famous place was largely abandoned after half of it sank beneath the waves in the 3rd century AD.

Baiae may have been founded as a port for Cumae, perhaps around 300 BC, although none of the online sources seem very certain about that. It entered the historical record around 80 BC when it became a fashionable place for the sybaritic elite of the late Republic. Caesar and Pompey both had villas there; there ought to be a special, obscure word for "civil wars between men who vacationed in adjacent villas."

Nero (of course) built a villa there; Hadrian is supposed to have died there. This wall painting from a nearby villa may depict Baiae.

The Aphrodite of Baiae, recovered in the 18th century and restored by Canova. When you think about European sculptors of the 16th to 18th centuries, you should recall that they were not "influenced by" ancient art in some vague sense, but spent much of their early careers restoring ancient works, crafting pieces that perfectly matched the original. They knew ancient work in a very deep sense.

Suetonius passes on an interesting story about Gaius Caligula and Baiae:

Besides this, he devised a novel and unheard of kind of pageant; for he bridged the gap between Baiae and the mole at Puteoli, a distance of about thirty-six hundred paces,​ by bringing together merchant ships from all sides and anchoring them in a double line, afterwards a mound of earth was heaped upon them and fashioned in the manner of the Appian Way. Over this bridge he rode back and forth for two successive days. . .   I know that many have supposed that Gaius devised this kind of bridge in rivalry of Xerxes, who excited no little admiration by bridging the much narrower Hellespont. But when I was a boy, I used to hear my grandfather say that the reason for the work, as revealed by the emperor's confidential courtiers, was that Thrasyllus the astrologer had declared to Tiberius, when he was worried about his successor and inclined towards his natural grandson,​ that Gaius had no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding about over the gulf of Baiae with horses.

Seneca (of course) left us a famous denunciation of the place:

Baiae is a place to be avoided, because, though it has certain natural advantages, luxury has claimed it for her own exclusive resort. "What then," you say, "should any place be singled out as an object of aversion?" Not at all. But just as, to the wise and upright man, one style of clothing is more suitable than another, without his having an aversion for any particular colour, but because he thinks that some colours do not befit one who has adopted the simple life; so there are places also, which the wise man or he who is on the way toward wisdom will avoid as foreign to good morals. Therefore, if he is contemplating withdrawal from the world, he will not select Canopus (although Canopus does not keep any man from living simply), nor Baiae either; for both places have begun to be resorts of vice. At Canopus luxury pampers itself to the utmost degree; at Baiae it is even more lax, as if the place itself demanded a certain amount of licence. We ought to select abodes which are wholesome not only for the body but also for the character. Just as I do not care to live in a place of torture, neither do I care to live in a cafe. To witness persons wandering drunk along the beach, the riotous revelling of sailing parties, the lakes a-din with choral song, and all the other ways in which luxury, when it is, so to speak, released from the restraints of law not merely sins, but blazons its sins abroad — why must I witness all this?

Seneca even blamed Hannibal's defeat in the Second Punic War on the winter he spent in this region, which softened and corrupted him.

One of Baiae's main attractions was its baths, which left the most impressive on-shore ruins.

The larger chambers of the baths were roofed with concrete domes, one of which was probably the largest in the world until the Pantheon was built in Rome.

It's an amazing place, somewhat ignored because if you have two or even three days in Naples you're probably still better off spending it all at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

I have been thinking about Baiae because of the convergence of two themes. First is all the reading I have done about the surging volcanism around Naples. Second is Graham Hancock. I know I should just get Graham Hancock out of my head instead of letting him have all that space rent free, but it seems like no matter what cool archaeological discovery I look into somebody is citing Hancock to denounce the official archaeological explanation. One of Hancock's recurring gestures is to attack archaeologists for ignoring all the evidence for ancient civilizations drowned by rising seas. But archaeologists love drowned cities! There are hundred of publications about Baiae. The submerged part of the town is an archaeological park, and thousands of people dive or snorkle there every year.

Archaeologists are not dour scholars who hate fun; on the contrary they have, as a group, a love of adventure and a contempt for desk-bound fuddy-duddies. To me the weirdest thing about Hancock's Atlantis schtick is his insistence that archaeologists don't accept his cool version of the past because we are sinister grouches who feel threatened by everything new, different, cool, or meaningful. That is exactly the oppsite of archaeology's real problems.