The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part III)

Pompey was on top of the Roman world now, and all he needed to stay there was for his colleagues to stay out of sight. But his colleagues wanted a chance to earn some military glory on their own, too, so the three divvied up the Republic: Crassus was assigned Syria, Caesar got southern Gaul*. Pompey got Spain, which in practical terms meant he could stay in Rome and keep an eye on things. Pompey's ideal scenario was for his colleagues to stay busy in the provinces, enriching themselves and fighting minor frontier wars, while he ran the Republic.

Crassus obliged handsomely. For the first seven years of his term in the east he squeezed the place dry as he had done back west, and indeed as was typical for governors; but as his term grew old he grew impatient and eager for glory, and invaded Parthia with the entire Syrian army (53 BC). The Romans had had no real disputes with the Parthians since Pompey had conquered Syria a decade before; Crassus was indifferent, and started the war anyways, confident that Pompey would force the Senate into declaring war for him. But despite his involvement in the defeat of Spartacus in 71 BC, Crassus was no real general; he marched his army straight at Parthia, across the least hospitable corner of Mesopotamia, and when the Parthians finally met up with him (at Carrhae, just barely across the actual frontier) he dug his soldiers in and held steady under endless volleys of Parthian archery. By the evening Crassus was dead, killed in an ill-planned attempt to negotiate, and the few survivors of his army had surrendered, handing over their standards and legionary eagles with them. It was the greatest Roman defeat since Cannae, but it had surprisingly little effect - the Persians were content with prying Armenia out of the Roman orbit, and Pompey and the Senate hastily disavowed Crassus' attack. Pompey and the Senate had issues closer to home to deal with, anyways: at the age of 42, and to the amazement of just about everyone, Julius Caesar had turned out to be the military genius of the age.

In 58 BC the tribe of the Helvetii**, pressed by German migration from their north and east, tried to cross into Roman Gaul. Caesar met them on the Saone river and defeated them decisively. The next year, on the grounds that they had supported the Helvetii, he defeated the Belgae in the north of Gaul***; the year after that, the Veneti in Brittany on the grounds of supporting the Belgae; the year after that, across the Rhine to shock and awe the Germans. In 54 BC he invaded Britain, more for the mystique of that semi-legendary isle than for any real strategic aim. In 53 BC the Belgae rose against the garrisons Caesar left behind and Caesar put them down again; in 52 BC the entire country rose under the great chieftain Vercingetorix. Caesar eventually trapped Vercingetorix at Alesia in central Gaul and after Caesar defeated the Gallic relief force Vercingetorix surrendered. In six years Caesar had conquered all of Gaul, written a memorably unmodest book about it, and made himself the hero of the Roman world.

Well, most of it. The Senate was now far more scared of Caesar than it had ever been of Pompey and Pompey was getting worried too - glory fades quickly and Pompey's great conquests were a decade gone, now. The Senate voted thanks to Caesar but no Triumph, as such a massive victory would normally have been due. This was a distinct mark of displeasure (or fear) but an even more obvious one was their demand after Caesar's governorship had expired (50 BC), that he disband his army and return alone to Rome. Caesar decided that this was the obvious prelude to arrest and execution that it looked like and in 49 BC crossed the Rubicon River into Italy at the head of his most loyal legion.

Pompey, still confident in his reputation, had promised the Senate that he need only stamp his foot and legions would arise to defend them; instead, troops flocked to Caesar. Pompey and the optimates fled in some disorder down the Italian peninsula and then to Greece. Caesar swung around into Spain****, defeated an optimas army there, then came back again to Greece; at Pharsalus (48 BC) he decisively defeated Pompey and his army. Pompey fled again, to Egypt, where the boy-Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII, fearful of sheltering the loser of the civil war, had him assassinated as he stepped off the boat. Caesar, following again, supported Ptolemy's sister and rival Cleopatra VII in her struggle for the throne anyways. The reasons are unknown but perhaps fairly obvious: Caesar's only known son (Ptolemy XV Caesarion) was with her.

The next few years saw Caesar crisscrossing the Republic, putting down optimas forces in the East (47 BC)*****, Africa (46 BC), and Spain again (45 BC). In the following year he returned to Rome and celebrated a Triumph for his victory in the Civil War. The Senate, somewhere between terror of him and gratitude for his quite general amnesty, elected him dictator in perpetuity - an unprecedented and illegal title, if hardly unexpected at this point. But if his amnesty and patronage of the populares' causes made him the idol of the people, it left many alive who still hated him for his overturning of the Republic. On March 15, 44 BC, in the midst of preparations for an expedition to Parthia to avenge Carrhae, a group of optimas senators surrounded him in the Senate building and hacked him to death with knives.

The assassins had hoped their tyrannicide would restore the Republic, but within days the anger of the mob, whipped up by Caesar's longtime lieutenant Marcus Antonius, had forced them from the city. The stage seemed to be set for a replay of the Civil War of 49-45 BC, with Antonius facing off against the last remnants of the optimates; in fact, there was still one player left to take the stage.

*The south of Gaul (still called Provence after its Roman nickname, "the Province") was technically largely run by the Greek city-state of Massilia (present-day Marseilles); but in practical terms Massilia was the most devoted imaginable client-state to Rome, and Caesar was able to run things there almost as smoothly as he did in his own province of Transalpine Gaul ("Gaul across the Alps"). Cisalpine Gaul ("Gaul this side of the Alps") was the Po valley, inhabited by Gauls before the Roman conquest. It was annexed to Italy in 42 BC, at the very end of the Republic.

**The latinate name for Switzerland, Helvetica, comes from the name of this tribe, but they were essentially unconnected to the modern Swiss; they were Celts just like the Gauls were.

***Belgium is named after them - a consciously neutral choice in a heavily divided country - but again they were Gauls with no distinct ethnic successors.

****En route he took Massilia, which had finally guessed wrong by supporting Pompey and was subsequently incorporated into Transalpine Gaul.

*****His conquest of Pontus in this campaign was the victory that came so quickly he dismissed it as "veni vidi vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered).

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part II)

With the deaths of the Gracchii, the Senate had managed to stonewall reform attempts at the cost of most of its moral authority as a representative of the Republic, and with the even more worrying precedent of introducing legislation-by-mob-violence into the republican system. Troubling, too, was the fact that the Senate was no longer united - most of them, the optimates ("good men") were still in favour of the status quo, but some, the populares ("populists") desired land reform, if only as a safety valve. The optimates' nightmare scenario was a popularis general returning with his army to enforce his troops' demands; there would be little the Senate could do to stop such a combination.

In the actual event, the general was named Gaius Marius. The popularis Consul for 107 BC, he enacted a reform abolishing all land requirements for military service. This eased the manpower shortage that had been tightening around the army for the last half-century, but at the cost of setting up the army in utter opposition to the optimates. The Roman Legions of the fourth and third centuries had been composed of peasant farmers, really a (highly trained) militia. The legionary would go out to fight the Samnites or Epirotes; he would return in time for the harvest. The new army was recruited from the landless underclass springing up in Rome and its colonies, and what it wanted was cheap food for the cities, and land for the returning veterans. The soldiers, recruited direct out of the slums of Rome, would return to nothing if their generals couldn't get them land to retire on; and a general who promised this to his men was guaranteed their support in Republican politics. The Senate could not help but see the dangers of this, but their foreign enemies were on the move again and keeping the army up was vital.

Case in point: Marius' first two Consulships saw him overseas, putting down the Numidians, and then his next four saw him in northern Italy, stopping the invasions of the Cimbri and Teutones*. His unprecedented six terms as Consul, and the popularity he had gained in fending off the Cimbri and Teutones, deeply disturbed the Senate, which henceforth resolved to make the least possible use of his services. They managed to associate the credit for defeating Numidia to one of Marius' more conservative lieutenants, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and when Rome's Italian allies, looking to get a little more of fruits of empire, revolted in 91 BC, Sulla was put in charge of that too. The causes of the war were pretty straightforward to solve; once the Senate offered to grant all Italian allies Roman citizenship, the war was pretty much over, and the only real result of this "Social War" (apart from the widening of citizenship) was the enhancement of Sulla's reputation.

The same year the Social War ended (88 BC), a new war began in the east. The century of instability in Anatolia that had followed the defeat of Antiochus was coming to an end; the Kingdom of Pontus, under Mithridates VI, had conquered most of the surrounding kingdoms, including a few that had been put under Roman protection. But - distracted by the Social War and its own rapidly mounting social stresses - Rome's warning to him was uncharacteristically soft-spoken. Encouraged, Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia** in 89 BC and Greece in 88 BC.

This demanded a Roman response, of course, but the Republic was divided on who to send. The Senate voted for Sulla but the Popular Assembly - still remembering him as the saviour of Italy a decade earlier - voted for Marius. Sulla took matters into his own hands, took command of the army, and - to the horror of everyone, including the optimates - marched it into Rome. Marius attempted briefly to defend the city, failed, and barely managed to escape to Africa while Sulla's troops massacred Marius' supporters. Sulla's command of the army was hastily confirmed, and he marched back out again to Pontus. But, for the first time, Roman troops had fought each other in the field, and even more ominously, a Roman general had used his army to enforce his will on the city. It was all downhill from here for the Republic.

Sulla's war in the East ran smoothly, with Mithridates being pushed out of his new conquests in a couple of short campaigns; but the treaty they signed in 85 BC was again notably lax; Mithridates was required only to disgorge the Roman protectorates he had conquered and was permitted to keep the enlarged Kingdom of Pontus independent. Sulla swung his army around and sailed back to Italy: while he had been off fighting Mithradates, Marius had returned to Rome.

Marius' coup - enforced by an army he had raised in Africa - was surprisingly bloodless; he proscribed*** a few of the more conservative senators but for the most part kept his troops in check. But only a month after his return to Rome, he died of a stroke and without the great general his troops were easily defeated by Sulla's. Sulla's takeover (82 BC) was far bloodier than Marius' had been. Hundreds of Senators and thousands of people in total - anyone of any prominence whatsoever who could plausibly be connected to Marius or his rule - were proscribed and executed. Sulla was made Dictator for life by the cowed Senate****. He extensively revised the government, stripping away most of the reforms that had outlived the Gracchi and greatly reducing the power of the Plebeian Tribunes. With everything the populares had ever accomplished destroyed, along with most of their membership, Sulla retired (79 BC) and then died.

Sulla's retirement (and, even more, his death) restored Senatorial rule. But even compared to the half-century after the Gracchi, it was an unstable, tottering thing. Marius and Sulla had opened the door and now the Republic was a prize for anyone with an army and the ambition to use it. The most the Senate could reasonably do now was appoint conservatives as often as they could and hope none of them got too ambitious anyways.

While Sulla had been conquering the Republic, the situation out overseas had been deteriorating again. There was a general, Quintus Sertorius - not so much popularis as Marian - holding Spain in opposition to the Senate; Mithradates was on the move in Anatolia agian; and there was piracy. The Republic had long since removed any opponents capable of policing the seas but with its attention turned inwards, piracy now ran rampant. This was a particular problem as Italy had long since become insufficient for supplying the food needs of Rome; the city was now fed from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt. For dealing with these, the Senate turned to the competent (and more importantly, loyal) Gnaeus Pompey. Pompey reconquered Spain (helped along quite a bit by Sertorius' convenient assassination) in 71 BC; returned to Italy to mop up the rebellion of Spartacus (along with a man named Marcus Licinius Crassus, more on whom later), then headed east to deal with the pirates. In three months in 67 BC he cleared them out; he was then given command of the army facing down Mithradates. He defeated Mithradates (64 BC) then moved south, conquering what was left of the Seleucid Empire and making a protectorate of the little Jewish Kingdom (63 BC; the Jews had become independent in the chaos following the Syrian War a century before).

Pompey returned to Rome again, having, in his words, "made the center of the Republic what I had found as its frontier". But in the course of the war he had promised his soldiers lands on their return***** and in any event his reputation was now too much for the Senate, who were now as afraid of him as they had been of Sulla. They waited for him to disband his army, then turned down his soldiers' demands and even refused to ratify his settlement of the east. Pompey took this smiling, and then mounted a constitutional coup. He got Crassus on his side for funding: Crassus was the richest man in Rome and more than ambitious enough to side with Pompey. For a front man, he picked a middle-aged playboy Senator named Gaius Julius Caesar, who was in charge of what was left of the populares. Between the three of them, they took the Consulate of 59, handed out offices to their supporters, and generally ran the Republic: much to the surprise of the Senate, which suddenly found itself powerless.

Nobody knew it then, but the Senate had now exercised its authority for the last time; the clock was ticking down fast on the Republic.

*Despite the fact that "Teutonic" has long been a synonym for "German", the Cimbri and Teutones were both Gallic, not Germanic, tribes.

**Consisting of westernmost Asia Minor, this had formerly been the kingdoms of Pergamum and Bithynia.

***Think "Stalinist purge" and you won't be far wrong.

****The Roman constitution actually contained a position for a Dictator (lit "one who speaks", since his every word was law). However, he was explicitly limited to a single term of six months; Sulla's unlimited Dictatorship was essentially a suspension of the constitution and Republican rule. (Just to note, the last Dictatorship had been during the Second Punic War, when it was feared Hannibal would attempt to take Rome.)

*****This rapidly became a necessity for post-Marian generals; even Sulla had done it (and, as dictator, was able to get it for them in the Po Valley).

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part I)

Why? Because I wanted to.

As the third century BC came to a close, the Roman Republic was the power to watch in the Mediterranean world. The preceding quarter-century had seen it engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Carthage, the other great power of the Western Mediterranean, and after 17 years of close-run fighting, Rome had emerged absolutely triumphant. Indeed, the Second Punic War* may well be considered the Republic's high point; through crushing defeat after crushing defeat, the Republic had never faltered in its efforts for absolute victory, or in its confidence that it would achieve it. Hannibal, the greatest general Carthage ever produced, could defeat the Romans in the field time after time after time, but the Romans never ceased fielding new armies and by 201 BC they had forced Carthage to a humiliating peace. Rome took all Carthage's overseas empire; Carthage itself was reduced to a dependency.

Rome had acquired by this time a rather patchwork empire. Italy from the Alps to the heel and toe was Roman, or subservient allies; Sicily, Corsica-Sardinia, and Near and Far Spain** were all provinces. In between, the tributary Greek colony of Massilia held Provence; on Africa, the Roman ally of Numidia ruled most of what is now northern Algeria, and Carthage was left with Tunisia. The strange thing was, the Republic had not particularly wanted any of this; Italy had been picked up piecemeal in the process of defending the city itself, and the other provinces had been taken from the Carthaginians during the wars. But the Empire proved so profitable - Sicily alone was almost as rich as Roman Italy - that more expansion suddenly seemed more attractive to the Senate.

The Senate - despite its name, the Roman Republic was a rather oligarchic state. The Senate, an unelected council of the richest and most noble citizens, held the legislative power. The people of Rome, through their popular assemblies, held the power to elect most officials, particularly the executive, the two co-Consuls, but in practice most of these were from the Senatorial class. The one real check the plebeians had was the office of the Plebeian Tribune, a position which held the power of veto (from the Latin veto, "I deny") over the Senate and Consuls; but in the first years of the second century, even they tended to at least passively support the aristocratic program.

However oligarchic it was in effect, though, the Roman Constitution supported the of separation of powers, at least within the Senatorial class. Early on, the Senate held less of the power; the Consulship, with the power to lead armies and the responsibility for the administration of government, was where the real interest lay. But the acquisition of empire changed this; the people might have the ability to elect the magistrates of Rome, but the Proconsular*** military commands and provinces - and the opportunities for wealth and power they provided - were the gift of the Senate. And the Senate suddenly had a plethora of military commands to hand out.

With the western Mediterranean at Rome's beck and call, the direction Rome looked now was east. Right next door to the new Roman empire was the Hellenistic world, the richest and most cultured part of the Earth. In the century or so since the death of Alexander the Great, the Greeks had spread across most of the eastern Mediterreanean, which in turn was now divided amongst a number of Greek principalities of varying size and power. First up on Rome's list was Macedon. The state which had once conquered the known world was now reduced to the confines of Greece, but it was still bar none the most powerful state there. Macedon's king Philip V ruled, more-or-less directly, most of the peninsula; and after a brief war in the 200s, he took most of the Aegean too. The last few states left outside Philip's hegemony - the Ionian city-states of Pergamum and Rhodes, and the mainland Greek Aetolian league - appealed to Rome for help. The Senate, always eager to pick up a new causus belli, agreed; but there was another reason, too. Philip had been an ally of Carthage in the last war; Rome had a score to settle.

The ensuing war was short, sharp, and decisive. The Macedonian phalanx had been a war-winning weapon on its lonesome a century before, but times had changed; the Roman legion was the new military trump card. At the battle of Cynocepahalae in 197 BC the Roman swordsmen got in amongst the tightly packed Greek spearmen and from there the victory was quick. Philip sued for peace, with the end result that he was restricted to Macedon proper (northern Greece) while the rest of the Greek states formerly under Macedonian hegemony were now under Roman. The Aetolians - who hadn't started the war just to trade one set of masters for another - promptly called in the next power over, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III.

The Seleucid kingdom was the largest - and as a result, the most troubled - of Alexander's successor states. Like the others, it was the creation of one of Alexander's generals, in this case, Seleucus; and its name tells its story. The domain of General Ptolemy, Egypt, is sometines referred to as the Ptolemaic Kingdom; the domain of the Antigonid Dynasty was never called anything but Macedon. By contrast, the Seleucid Kingdom - most of Asia Minor, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau - was never called anything but the Seleucid Kingdom, because there was nothing behind it but "that area currently ruled by the descendants of General Seleucus". Its history is nothing but the struggle against the centripetal forces slowly ripping it apart. Antiochus III had, in his 31 years on the throne, proved particularly capable holding it together. When, in 192 BC, he entered Greece at the plea of the Aetolians, he had no doubt he could successfully add Greece to his domains.

The Romans, of course, had other plans; and the fact that Antiochus had given refuge to Hannibal after his Roman-enforced exile from Carthage only added fuel to the fire. In the event (Magnesia, 190 BC) Antiochus' phalanxes proved no more able to defeat the legions of Rome than Philip's had; at the treaty in 188 BC he was forced to renounce all interest in the Aegean and hand over most of western Anatolia to Rome's loyal allies Pergamum and Rhodes. The treaty was not unduly harsh - Rome's direct domains expanded not at all**** - but the fact of his defeat undid Antiochus' life-work. The Parthians overthrew his rule in the east and rapidly overran most of the Iranian plateau; Anatolia disintegrated into a mess of principalities, largely Greek but none of them Seleucid. Antiochus was left with merely Mesopotamia and the Levant.

In less than two decades, then, Rome had defeated most of the states of the Mediterranean world and put the fear of the Republic into the rest. Of the fully-independent states remaining, Ptolemaic Egypt was a Roman ally paralyzed under a series of weak kings and regencies, the Seleucids were still trying to salvage what little they could of their humbled Empire, and the Anatolians were too small and unestablished, the Parthians too far away, to pose much of a threat. The next two generations would see mainly peaceful consolidation overseas and violent instability at home.

For the famous partnership between Senate and People, which had handed Rome control of the western Mediterranean world, was coming undone. The backbone of the early Republic had been the yeoman farmers of Latium, who had formed the army in its early wars and whose implacable determination had won them. But as time went on the Senatorial class became more and more powerful, and more and more rich, and began to acquire larger estates, at home and abroad, in the process squeezing out the smaller landholders, who moved discontentedly into the cities. This process also began to erode the army; without the farmers from which it had traditionally recruited, its manpower pool began to slowly dry up.

But for the time being, the process wasn't seen as a threat by the Senators, who were more concerned with their own aggranizement. From the end of the Syrian War with Antiochus, through to the end of the century, there were no major wars either, which helped. In the Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC), the Republic finally reduced Macedon to a province; they did the same to the rest of Greece in 148 BC, Carthage in 146 BC*****, and Pergamum in 133 BC. But for the most part the trouble Rome was going through was internal. The decades of peace in the mid-second century saw the Senatorial classes accumulate more and more land, at the expense of the traditional yeoman farmers that had supported the early Republic. The impoverished and the dispossessed filtered into the cities, where, in 133 BC, they elected a Plebian Tribune in support of them. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a member of one of Rome's more prominent families - his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, had been the one to finally defeat Hannibal in 202 BC - started on a program of land reform, breaking up the Senatorial estates and distributing it amongst the landless. The Senate blocked this, Gracchus used his veto to effectively shut down the government, and then was murdered by a senatorial mob. His program was revived a decade later by his brother Gaius; Gaius added cheap food for the rest of the urban poor and tried to bring the middle classes onboard by offering to widen the qualifications for magistracies and provincial positions. But in 122 BC he too was killed in mob violence and most of his reforms were shut down by the Senate.

A crisis was now inevitable.

*Second, because of a first some three decades before; "Punic" is a synonym for Phoenician, from whom the Carthaginians were descended.

**Despite the name, "Far Spain" is not the Atlantic coast or even the interior, but merely the southern half of the Mediterranean coast, roughly the valley of the Guadalquivir. Near Spain is the valley of the Ebro.

***Literally "for the consul"; a military command assigned by the senate to someone who acts in place of the actual consul. As the frontiers moved out, the consuls tended to stay at home more and let the Senate delegate generalships to professionals. More on this later.

****The Senate, despite all the opportunities for personal aggrandizement annexation provided, were never actually that big on it; they always preferred to set up tributary allies. The Republic then tended to squeeze their allies until they revolted, and only then would they set up provincial governments.

*****The defeat of Carthage tells a lot about Roman feelings towards that city. It was the pet project of Marcus Porcius Cato, an early-second century politician best-known for the phrase "Carthago delenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed") which he famously ended his every speech with, no matter its subject. He pushed for war for most of his career, but it was not until 151 BC that the notoriously legalistic Senate was provided with an excuse. The treaty that ended the Second Punic War held that, amongst other things, Carthage could not go to war without Rome's permission; in 151 BC the Roman ally of Numidia finally upped its raiding of Carthage to the point where the Carthaginians felt obliged to respond. The Senate seized upon this as a breach of the treaty; the ensuing war amounted to a siege of Carthage in which the city held out for three years but the final outcome was never in doubt. In 146 BC the Romans breached the walls, sacked the city, burned it to the ground, sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery, and plowed salt into the ashes.

English - older than you think

So, when we left off, we'd just discovered that despite the use of Lorem Ipsum elsewhere, the full-size style preview on Blogger is actually filled with, well, regular English.

Specifically, the first couple of lines of Book II of John Milton's Paradise Lost (Satan vowing to wage eternal war on Heaven) and the start of Belial's speech on the same subject from a bit later in. (For no reason I can tell, Belial's speech is the second sample post, followed by the rest of Satan's speech. My best guess is they initially wanted to have a series of posts with one of each of the demons'  speeches from Book II per post, got two posts in, and then decided to just copy the text in sequence out of the start of the book.) This works in the narrow sense that the text is fairly arbitrary and so not particularly distracting, but in the more general sense of adding in spacefiller gibberish it is an utter failure: the text is recognizable and readable English.

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshon the wealth of ORMUS and of IND,

Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand

Showrs on her Kings BARBARIC Pearl and Gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd

To that bad eminence; and from despair

Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires

Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue

Vain Warr with Heav'n, and by success untaught

His proud imaginations thus diplaid.

It's not quite modern English but it's comprehensible. ("Satan sits on his shiny throne, and, despite the fact that he can't win, is planning to go on fighting Heaven.") Paradise Lost was published (in its final form) in 1674, which means it falls into a century-long slot of not-quite-modern English most popularly exemplified by Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Despite complaints about it, Shakespeare is eminently readable. It is, after all, written at the same time as the KJV (there are even some - unsubstantiated - theories that Shakespeare contributed to the 1611 KJV) and most people nowadays can still fake a passable King James. Taking (for example) the opening lines of the Book of Esther:

Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces:)

That in those days, which the king Ahasuerus sat on the throne of his kingdom, which was in Shushan the palace,

In the third year of his reign, he made a feast unto all his princes and his servants; the power of Persia and Media, the nobles and princes of the provinces, being before him:

When he shewed the riches of his glorious kingdom and the honour of his excellent majesty many days, even an hundred and fourscore days.

Comparing this to the New International Version of 1978, we have

This is what happened in the time of Xerxes, the Xerxes who ruled over 127 provinces stretching from India to Cush:

At that time King Xerxes reigned from his royal throne in the citadel of Susa,

And in the third year of his reign he gave a banquet for all his nobles and officials. The military leaders of Persia and Media, the princes, and the nobles of the provinces were present.

For a full 180 days he displayed the vast wealth of his kingdom and the splendor and glory of his majesty.

There's not a terribly great difference. Apart from the occasional out-of-order phrasings and the even more occasional archaic vocabulary (the only real example above being the use of "power" for "generals") it's just about as readable. Shakespeare is a little more flowery than the KJV in general, since he's not restricted to translating a preexisting text, but even then reading it (or better still, listening to it) you can understand what is being said.

Going back eighty years or so to the Coverdale bible of 1535 (Tyndale is the more popular version, but he was executed before getting around to the book of Esther) we find that the spelling takes a sudden hard hit but it still remains understandable, especially read aloud:

In the tyme of Ahasuerus, which reigned from India unto Ethiopia, over an hundreth and seven and twentye londes,
What tyme as he sat on his seate roiall in the castell of Susa
In the thirde yeare of his reigne, he made a feast unto all his prynces and servauntes, namely unto the mighty men of Persia and Media, to the Debites and rulers of his countrees,
That he mighte shewe the noble riches of his kingdome, and the glorious worshippe of his greatnesse, many dayes longe, even an hundreth and foure score dayes.

The phrasing is a little strange but spellcheck it and drop the occasional very weird word ("debites"?) and it's pretty much the same as the KJV. But Coverdale wasn't even the first English translation of the Bible: that credit goes to Wycliffe, around 1380.

In the daies of kyng Assuerus, that regnede fro Ynde til to Ethiope, on an hundrid and sevene and twenti provynces, whanne he sat in the seete of his rewme,

The citee Susa was the bigynnyng of his rewme.

Therefor in the thridde yeer of his empire he he made a greete feeste to alle hise princes and children, the strongeste men of Persis, and to the noble men of Medeis, and to the prefectis of provynces, bifor him silf,

To schewe the richessis of the glorie of his rewme, and the gretnesse, and boost of his power in myche tyme, that is, an hundrid and foure scoor daies.

The spelling is terrible, and the language falls into what is generally called Middle English, but if you read it out loud it is still legible. ("In the days of king Assuerus, that reigned fro' Ind 'til to Ethiop, on an 'undred and seven and twenty provinces, when he sat in the seat of his rewme [realm]...") It's not until you hit Old English, pre-Norman invasion, and more than a thousand years ago, that the language becomes sufficiently different to be incomprehensible (not Esther but the Lord's Prayer, c. 1000, due to lack of a complete Old English Bible):

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, Si þin nama gehalgod. to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. soþlice.

Note that the language, for the first time, is completely incomprehensible even read aloud: "Fader ure thu the eart on hyofonum, si thin nama gehalgod..." (The þ and ð are called thorn and eth respectively, and both pronounced more-or-less "th".)

Jumping back to the 17th century, Paradise Lost - being in verse - is in fact even less legible than most writing of the time. The Pilgrim's Progress, written only four years later (1678), is in practically everything but style completely modern:

As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed with Raggs, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his Back. I looked and saw him open the Book, and Read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled: and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry; saying, what shall I do?

And fifty years after that Gulliver's Travels (1726) is, in effect, a rather formally-written piece of modern English:

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years.

So what do we know about English? Well, definitely modern English goes back a long time - at least three hundred years, with another hundred of iffy-but-comprehensible modern English before that. Then there's another three or four hundred years of very strangely spelled but still recognizable English before that. You need to get back before Piers Plowman in the mid-14th century - that's six and a half centuries and it's still on the good side of legibility. You have to go back the better part of a millennia, to a time when English hadn't even really come together out of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon, when even the alphabet wasn't the same (thorn and eth were both dropped around 1300) before you genuinely run out of English. And despite the rapid changes in spelling and style (especially in the 16th and 17th centuries respectively) English has been surprisingly stable for a long period of time. If you want Lorem Ipsum text that's illegible to a modern English-speaker, you need to go a lot further back than John Milton.

And, incidentally: try Paradise Lost. It's interesting both historically, culturally, and in and of itself, entertaining, and if you weren't convinced by my claims of legibility ("High on a throne of royal state which far. Outshon the wealth of ormus and of ind... what is this stuff?") Isaac Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost provides helpful vocabulary and metaphor references, as well as the rather interesting story behind its writing (short version: 2008 was not the first time a government changeover caused the religious right to flame out, although Milton was a far, far better writer than Rush Limbaugh is). 

A friend of mine from university called it "biblical fanfic", which is just about right, but it's very very good fanfic. Give Paradise Lost a try.

Lorem Ipsum

This is my blog, with which I hope to entertain and edify the world. The current blog subjects are"whatever I feel like" and the schedule is "whenever I have time". Which of course makes it no different from half the other blogs on the internet, but with any luck it should prove to be interesting. For lack of a better first subject, I'm going to write about... blogging, which probably sets some kind of a fourth-wall-busting speed record.

One of the things involved in making a blog on this site (Blogger) is creating a "theme" (eg, shape and colour scheme of the page). You can make your own if you have the html skills, but it also conveniently provides a couple of premade themes that you can choose from if you're too unskilled and/or lazy to bother making one yourself. (The fact that pretty much any randomly chose blog will use one of the out-of-the-box themes probably says... something.) Anyways, here's the choose-a-sample page:

The theme options are all illustrated, with some sample posts and text. What sample posts and text? Well, if we blow the Sand Dollar theme (the one I'm currently using) up really large, we get

Sample Blog, My Profile, and some posts consisting of... gibberish. Latin gibberish. Actually, if you know Latin, you'll realize it's gibberish there too: it's a couple of posts full of pseudo-Latin gibberish (with a little Pig Latin thrown in). Which is... pretty weird, when you think about it. Why the nonsense?

Well, the answer is a couple of centuries old. Back in the day - the day, in this case, being "since the invention of typography" - a popular way of showing off new typefaces was with sample sentences: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ being a popular one, of course, but others - like the famous "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" - were used as well. The obvious benefit of these is that, since the hypothetical typeface customer is interested only in what the font looks like and not what any particular piece of text looks like in it, you can get away with using nonsense text like the above to show it off. (The quick brown fox has the slight advantage that it looks a little more like actual text than the alphabet, and so demonstrates the legibility of the font a little more.)

Related to this problem is the problem of page design. If you want to show off your typesetting skills, you can make a similar sample page with your headings and columns and paragraphs and so forth. The problem with this is you need something a little more text-like than just the alphabet or the quick brown fox. (Look at the famous "all work and no play" scene from The Shining - even before you can read it, the weird repetitive patterns in the text give away that it's not real writing.) But at the same time you don't want the reader to be distracted reading actual text - you want him concentrating on your layout. So back around 1500 or so, someone took a chunk of Cicero's finibus bonorum et malorum, grabbed about every every third syllable, and created a piece of pseudo-text, beginning "lorem ipsum dolores sit amet" that resembled real text pretty closely but made no sense whatsoever, even to people who knew Latin. (Insert Alan Sokal joke here.)

This sample text hung around for a couple of hundred years as exactly that: a spacefiller text used for typsetting examples, or occasionally just for filling space.

In the 1960s and 70s, as computer typesetting came into its own, lorem ipsum remained popular - just because you're typesetting by computer rather than by hand doesn't change its marketing needs - and then in the 1990s it got another big boost with the arrival of web design companies. Selling your web design skills is, at some level, a lot like selling your typesetting: you have to show off the design without distracting the user with, well, actual text.

So lorem ipsum moved smoothly into the net age and has remained there to this day. (See also.) Which is why the layout for the blog themes on Blogger are full of pseudo-Latin.

Well, probably. The thumbnails are a little small to make out more than the titles and a very little of the text, but fortunately you can look at the actual preview and see...

Something entirely different: English. More on this next time.