Nathaniel Perrin

Fifth-century BC marble relief, a physician treating a woman (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via [Getty Images](https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/09/GettyImages_122226872-799601e.jpg?quality=90&webp=true&fit=620,413))

Paul Stephenson's phenomenal, recent history *New Rome: The Empire in the East* (2022) is a salvo not to the political or demographics changes that underpinned the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as we know it in the West, but the seismic convolutions by which the Eastern Roman Empire morphed into a new beast that would live on for another millennium. It is a masterful work in its level of detail and its breadth in combining political and economic history with urban studies and theology and, interestingly enough, climate studies.

The opening chapter of his work is a meticulous exposition of the role of lead both in the climate and health of Late Antiquity, and a suitable teaser for the book at large.

It begins with the Sun.

Solar emissions vary over broad periods of time causing shifts in temperature which have shaped the course of history. Some are familiar with the "Little Ice Age" between 1645 and 1715, others with the 
"Medieval Climate Optimum" from 950 to 1250 which kicked off the ventures of the Vikings among others historical escapades. 

The Romans had their own such warm period, the "Roman Climate Optimum" between 250 BC and 400 AD. It was at the end of this period that the Mediterranean world began cooling, dramatically enough to be arguably a factor in the population decline of the period as less rain led to weaker agricultural output.

But turning from the cosmic impact of the stars upon human civilization on Earth, we can see conversely the impact of human civilization upon our earthly landscape.

Roman metallurgy was simply monstrous in its scope and volume. Arms, coins, infrastructure, smelted across the far-long reaches of Roman geography. The smoke exhaust of lead production is far from clean, and it a testament to how well-developed Roman industry was that metallic compound contamination can be found as far afield as untouched lake beds and bogs of Ireland, Sweden, and Iceland. Most remarkably, even in deep ice layers of Greenland, we have found lead traces whose origin can be traced to Spain, one such metallurgical hotspot in Late Antiquity.

Lead pollutants would rapidly decline by the fifth century, and it would not be until 1700 AD that lead pollution would reach the same levels again.

Lead is a remarkable compound in that "it is malleable and resists corrosion when in contact with air and water (12)". The heights of Rome's trademark engineering were in many ways rooted in lead construction, in columns, roofs, rain gutters, plumbing, and most especially piping.  Because of its extensive use in the artifacts and infrastructure of everyday life, we still find lead in regions of the Roman empire where no such mining or production occurred.

Yet as we know today lead is dangerous to the human organism.

The relationship between lead and the madness of Nero and Caligula has already entered popular funfactdom, but ironically the argument that Romans ingested lead through their pipes and drinking vessels is largely a myth (at least so Stephenson claims). Rather, it was intentionally mixed into sauces, medicines, and for sweetening wine. The lead pollution crept into the flora and fauna of the Roman landscape, and studies show that honey bees absorb twice as much lead as drones from the plants they harvest. The Romans loved their honey and children were most often weaned on it. Maternal lactation too transferred the lead-crusted calcium of their bones into the breast milk and consequently the bodies of their infants.

In a morbid twist, archeologists can use lead-heavy skeletons to identify Roman settlements across the world, such as in Dorset where other non-lead populations lived before and after.

The Romans of the Lead Age were remarkably shorter in stature and life span than the Romans who lived before them and the various peoples who lived after them. On average, men were 5'5" and women 5'0".

In the Eastern Roman Empire of the fifth century, life expectancy had dropped below thirty years and even in some locales as low as twenty-three. Neonatal mortality skyrocketed but was not nearly as high as those on young children who were weaned off their mothers' milk and onto lead-heavy nutrition, compounded by other poor nutritional and sanitation. In this period, up to 40% of those born would die before reaching the age of eighteen.

The bones themselves of the residents of this time speak to the various diseases and weaknesses that had defined the new standards and norms of health at this time as deformities continued to abound, skeletal and dental.

And yet they prayed for health, some resorting to magic, as life continued to get worse until a new era could slowly erase the accumulated toxins of lead, though such a process took centuries and generations.

One must consider when reading this chapter what we should think today if we were to replace the word "lead" for "plastic", how there is no intrinsic "nature will find a way" protection that will save us from poisoning ourselves to the brink of extinction, when we make our children too sickly, too weak, too decrepit to continue the human race, just because we want to feed our reckless luxuries.

The Lead Age: Climate Studies of Late Antiquity

Weber: The Vocation of Politics and Science

*Giambattista Vico* Encyclopedia Britannica. [Source URL](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giambattista-Vico#/media/1/627497/201787).

Giambattista Vico is an often overlooked voice in the philosophy of history and politics. Though he enjoyed a brief revival via Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss, Vico remains outside the canonical limelight of early modern thought, though he remains an astute voice of the Counter-Enlightenment to this day.

Vico's *La Scienza Nuova* (1734) is a peculiar magnum opus which offers a idiosyncratic synthesis of abstract, universal historical principles with concrete examples grounded in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc. alongside philological analysis of the etymology of terms across ages and languages.

I was first introduced to Vico in 2015 via literary theory which snags an excerpt from this book where Vico describes the giants who lived around the time of the Flood and what it means for human history. I was indelibly struck by both how simultaneously outlandish and poignant his mode of thought was and have been an ardent admirer of Vico ever since.

I am now re-reading the book through Robert Miner's new translation, hoping that seven years have given me a keener eye to recognize more of its depth than when I first read him in full in college.

Among a panoply of insights into civilization and human nature, Vico breaks down the cycle of history into the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Language, class structure, and even agrarian law reflects this tripartite division. Though we may not be able to access much if any of this first age of the gods, its vestiges live on in every human society.

Vico is a true humanist through and through, and this is deeply reflected in his project. The universal can only be understood in concrete human culture and language, driven particularly by the Greek and Roman heritage.

This emerges most clearly in his focused attention on the etymology of words. Centuries before Heidegger repopularized the practice, Vico takes many opportunities to analyze how the evolution and formation of concepts helps us understand their true meaning. As an example, the Greek term for theory emerges from those who gaze at the star and seek to understand their meaning, an abstraction from that which makes little immediate sense to us.

But beyond this, Vico was deeply committed to reacting to what he saw as the political atheism of Hobbes or Machivalli, those who believed that there was no intrinsically meaningful language but rather the mechanistic interaction of forces. Against this view, Vico was dedicated to developing an outlook which accounted for both natural law and language with arbitrary symbols, the interplay and evolution of social classes. How refinement emerges from a feral way of life, and how it can sink back into it.

The following is a list 114 axioms that Vico presents in Book I of the 1744 edition of *La Scienza Nuova*. In the vein of Spinoza and Hobbes, Vico believed these could be foundations for understanding all human affairs, much as certain axioms undergird the foundations of geometric knowledge, and give us certain access to truth.

Most of these are direct quotes from the Robert Miner translation (pp. 74-109) while others paraphrase for sake of clarity or brevity.

---

# On the Elements

1744 edition, §119-329.

1. Man, on account of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever that mind is overthrown by ignorance, makes himself the measure of all things.
2. Whenever men are unable to make out some idea of things that are distant and unknown, they evalute them relative to things that are known and present.
3. Every nation has the vanity to consider itself earlier than all other nations in discovering the conveniences of human life and of preserving a memory of the things of their own back to the beginning of the world.
4. To this vanity of nations is joined the vanity of the learned who want what they know to be as ancient of the world.
5. Philosophy, so as to benefit humankind, must raise up and support fallen and weak man, not uproot nature or abandon him in his corruption.
6. Philosophy considers man as he ought to be and so cannot be fruitful except to the few who wish to live in an elevated society.
7. Lawgiving considers man as he is so as to make good use of him in human society, as from ferocity, avarice, and ambition--the three vices of humankind--from which it makes the military, the market, and the court.
8. Things outside their natural state do not adapt or persist there.
9. Men who do not know the truth of things take care to hold fast to the certain. If the intellect cannot be satisfied with knowledge (*scienza*), the will can at least repose in consciousness (*conscienza*).
10. Philosophy contemplates reason and is the science of the true. Philology observes authority in human choice which is consciousness of what is certain.
11. Human choice is by its nature most uncertain but can be given certainty and be made determinate by common sense concerning human necessity or advantage. These two are the sources of natural law of gentile peoples.
12. Common sense is a judgment without reflection sensed in common by a whole society or all of humankind.
13. If the same ideas emerge across peoples not in contact with each other, it provides a common impetus for its truth.
14. The nature of things is its coming into being (*nascimento*) at certain times in certain ways. These times and ways always belong to a particular way things must play out.
15. The intrinsic properties of subjects must be produced by the modifications or fashions by which the things come into being; it is through this that we are able to establish as true that the nature or coming into being of those things is of such a kind.
16. Folk traditions must have a public impetus for what is true which is why these traditions first came into being and are preserved by entire peoples over long periods of time.
17. Common ways of speaking should be thought to offer the weightiest of testimony about the ancient customs of peoples, which had currency at the time when their languages were formed.
18. The language of an ancient nation that preserves itself as regnant until it arrives at its perfection should be a great testimony about the customs of the earliest times of the world.
19. If the Law of the Twelve Tables (Rome) were the customs of the gentiles of Latium, then this law offers a great testimony about the ancient natural law of the gentiles of Latium.
20. If the poems of Homer are civil histories of the ancient Greek customs, then they are two treasures of the natural law of the gentile peoples of Greece.
21. The Greek philosophers hastened the natural course that their nation must make, progressing swiftly to the peak of refinement while simultaneously holding onto their mythical history of gods and heroes (unlike the Romans who lost their gods and only held onto their heroes).
22. It is necessary that in the nature of human things, a mental language common to all nations uniformly attends to the substance of things achievable within the sociability of human life and articulates that substance with as many different modifications as these things are able to have throughout their many different aspects. This is what we experience as true in proverbs.
23. Sacred history is more ancient than all the most ancient profane history. It speaks of the history of the state of nature in a familial state.
24. The Hebraic religion was founded by the true God upon a prohibition against divination. Divination is the root of all gentile nations.
25. The Universal Flood is demonstrated across the myths of all nations.
26. The giants possessed by their nature huge bodies from partly physical and partly moral causes rooted in the feral education of their children.
27. Greek history takes its beginning from the flood and from the giants.
28. Two great fragments from Egyptian antiquity: (1) The whole time can be divided into the three ages of gods, heroes, and men. (2) Each of these ages has its own spoken languages: the sacred (hieroglyphic), language of likenesses (symbolic), and language of conventional signs (vernacular).
29. In five passages, Homer alludes to the language of heroes.
30. Varro enumerated thirty thousand names of gods which correspond to all the needs of human life.
31. Whenever peoples have become so savage because of arms that human laws no longer have a place among them, only religion is powerful enough to tame them.
32. Men ignorant about natural causes who are unable to explain them will instead explain phenomena as happening according to their nature (the magnet is in love with the iron).
33. The physics of the ignorant is a commonplace metaphysics by which they render the causes of things they do not know to the will of God without considering how divine will actually operates.
34. *Mobiles ad superstitionem perculsae semel mentes* (Tacitus *Annals* 1.28.2). Minds struck by fear tend toward superstition.
35. Wonder is the daughter of ignorance, and the greater the effect admired, the more the wonder grows in proportion.
36. The more vigorous the imagination, the weaker reasoning is.
37. The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to things without sense, just as children imagine life in inanimate objects.
38. Idolatry originates in the human tendency to call someone a god either by their exemplary virtue or by the scope of their power.
39. Curiosity is a proper connatural to man, the daughter of ignorance who begets knowledge. Wonder makes our minds open, and curiosity takes its custom to think what such a wonder signifies.
40. Witches are replete with terrifying superstitions and are exceedingly savage and brutal.
41. For hundreds of years after the Universal Flood, the earth was too damp to emit the dry exhalations that generate lightning.
42. Jove flashes lightning and fells to the ground the giants. Every gentile nation has a Jove.
43. Every gentile nation has its own Hercules, the son of Jove.
44. The first wise men of the Greeks were the theological poets who flourished prior to the heroic poets. Just as Jove is father to Hercules.
45. Men naturally tend to preserve memories of the laws and of the orders which hold them within their own society.
46. All barbarian histories have mythical beginnings.
47. The human mind naturally tends to take delight in uniformity.
48. It is the nature of children that the first names and words they know are the foundation from which they come to know all other things.
49. As the Egyptians observed, all discoveries advantageous or necessary for human life to come from Hermes Trismegistus.
50. Memory is most vivacious and the imagination most lively in children.
51. Every faculty that man does not possess by nature may be acquired through persistent study of art. Except for poetry, which is only accessible to those who have the poetic faculty by nature.
52. Children mimic whatever they are capable of apprehending.
53. First, men sense without noticing. Then when they notice, it troubles them. Finally, they can reflect and understand it with a clear mind.
54. Men who are confronted by things they do not understand but which are pertinent to them, naturally interpret them in keeping with their own nature, that is with their passions and customs.
55. For the Egyptians as for other gentile peoples, the first theology is a history dressed up with myths. Subsequent generations then imbue these myths with mystical significance.
56. The first writers are the poets.
57. The mute explain themselves through gestures and objects which have a natural correspondence to the ideas they signify. (Hieroglyphics which give ways ot poetic imagery and metaphors).
58. The mute issue unformed sounds while signing.
59. Men vent great passion through song.
60. Languages start with monosyllabic words, just as children start in monosyllabic vocabulary.
61. Heroic verse is the most ancient of all. Spondaic verse is the slowest.
62. Iambic verse is the one most similar to prose.
63. The human mind is naturally inclined to see itself with the senses. Only with great difficulty can it come to understand itself in itself.
64. The order of ideas must proceed in accordance with the order of things.
65. The order of human things proceeds first from forests, to lodges, to villages, to cities, and finally to academies.
66. Men at first sense what is necessary then tarry with what is advantageous, then what is convenient, later delighting in what is pleasurable, then become dissolute in luxury, and lastly go mad in wasting their substance.
67. Nature of peoples follows this course: crude, strict, benign, refined, dissolute.
68. Within humankind, the huge and gullish are the first to arise. Then arise the magnaimous and haughty. Then the valorous and just. Then the morose and reflective. Lastly, the mad and the dissolute.
69. Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.
70. In a lawless world, only the very few form families and estates (the patriarchs). It is only later that the many come to occupy these cultivated estates.
71. Native custom does not change instantly but in stages and over long periods of time.
72. If all nations start from the worship of divinity, then the familial state must have depended upon divination and priests, and subsequently the kings who enforce divine law over families.
73. There is a folk tradition that the first to govern the world were kings.
74. There is another folk tradition that those worthiest by nature were created as the first kings.
75. There is a third folk tradition that the first kings were wise men.
76. There is a folk tradition that the first form of government in the world was monarchy.
77. Taking into account Axioms 64 and 67, the patriarchs exercised a monarchical power subject to God alone and unrestricted over all beneath them.
78. The families could not have been the original families except as derived from familial servants of the Fathers in the state of nature.
79. The earliest associates (*socii*) who were companions with a common advantage could only exist in seeking refuge from the patriarchs.
80. Men naturally come to a system of benefits when they discern that they might maintian or gain a good and great part of their advantage, the hopes of civil life.
81. Men of fortitude do not relinquish in idleness what they gained by virtue. They vield as little as possible and only through necessity and advantage.
82. All nations had some forms of clientship between vassals and fealty.
83. The first agrarian law of the world distinguishes the three kinds of persons and domains in civil life: the bonitary domain for plebeians, the quiritary domain for nobles, and eminent domain for the patriarchs.
84. As Aristotle observes, the heroic regime is a form of republic.
85. He also observes that ancient republics did not have laws for private punishment. Barbarism lacks domestication by private laws.
86. Yet again he observes that in ancient republics the nobles swore themselves to be the eternal enemies of the plebeians.
87. Aristocratic republics are extremely temperate about going to war so as to not train the multitude in warfare.
88. Aristocratic republics keep wealth among the nobility for wealth contributes to the power of this order.
89. Honor is the noblest stimulus to military valor.
90. People will necessarily conduct themselves heroically in war if they train themselves over honor in peacetime.
91. Sparring for equality with respect to justice, which trains the orders of the city is the most powerful means to aggrandize the republics.
92. The weak want laws, the powerful withhold them. The ambitious promote the laws to create a following among the weak. Princes protect the laws to make the powerful equal to the weak.
93. Honor is diluted in popular republics where the avaricious multitude can give decrees without value. The many pass decrees to enrich themselves, and thus these governments dissolve in civil war.
94. Natural liberty is fiercer as its good are connected to the body, and civil servitude binds with goods of fortune that are not necessary for life.
95. Men love to escape from subjection and desire equality. This is how aristocratic republics become popular republics. Later they are forced to surpass their equals. Finally, they put themselves above the laws as tyrants. It is at this point plebeians once again put themselves into submission under a monarch.
96. Because nobles were originally living in lawsless liberty, they were relucant to take on the burdens of law. However the balance of power with plebeians cause them to submit to laws. Finally, they tend toward subjection under a monarch to preserve their own power and life of convenience.
97. After the flood, the first men resided in the mountains then descended to the plains and finally came to the shores.
98. According to Plato, after the floods the sons of Polyphemus lived in mountainous caves, the earliest paterfamilias in the world. Later they descended to the plains and built Troy. Troy was then moved to the sea [and it was from the sea that it was conquered.]
99. There is another tradition that Tyre was also founded inland before moving to the sea.
100. Men cannot be induced to abandon their own lands except by what is ultimately necessary for life or by greed and covetousness.
101. The Phoenicians were the sailors fo the ancient world.
102. Barbaric nations were impenetrable and could only be broken out by war or commerce.
103. Some Greek colony was formed in Latium but was buried in the shadows of antiquity by the Romans.
104. What is customary is like a king, and the law is like a tyrant. What is customary is reasonable and the law is not necessarily animated by natural reason.
105. The natural law of the gentile peoples comes from the customs of nations which conform to a uniform human common sense. This common sense is arrived at without reflection or imitation of other nations.
106. Doctrines must start from when the matters which they treat start.
107. There are gentiles who had a start before the cities, these are the ancient noble households from whom Romulus composed the Senate. There are also noble households founded after the city which Junius Brutus used to form the new Senate after expelling the kings.
108. There is also this distinction between the gods. Gods of the greater gentiles pre-exist cities while there are gods of later peoples.
109. Men with limited ideas deem the law to be only as much as what is said expressly by its words.
110. Civil equity is a kind of probable reasoning not naturally familiar to all human beings but to those few who preeminent in practical wisdom, practice, or learning teach what is necessary for the preservation of human society. This is the reason of state.
111. The certain, as it pertains to laws, is an obscurity of reason sustained solely by an authority which we experience in practical application as harsh, but whose practical application is necessary so that the laws remain certain. The laws are individuated through application.
112. Men of intelligence deem the law to include the whole of what is called "equal advantages in cases".
113. The true as it pertains to laws is a certain light and splendor by which natural reason illuminates them, whence the same jurists used to say *verum est* for *aequum est*.
114. The natural equity of a human reason, fully expressed, is a practice of wisdom for the doing of what is advantageous (*faccende dell'utilità*).


Foundations for understanding humanity and its history

The Lead Age: Climate Studies of Late Antiquity

Weber: The Vocation of Politics and Science

Vico: 114 axioms for the New Science