The Fall of Rome, VI: Flying Canoes and Revolutionary Santas

 

There's nothing to discourage a guy from amateur FallofRomeism than the "Men think about Rome a lot" thing of a few years back, for which reason I haven't visited this thread in a long time. I'd like to say that I was into the fall of Rome before it went mainstream, but, yeah, no. Gibbon  might be the most influential historian in history, and I will actually read Pocock's Gibbon if someone can make  a case that he didn't have Seventeenth Century precursors. What brings me back this week is, first of all, a Quora answer about Picts that reminded me of a small bit of loose ends, and second the fact that it's Christmas, and I am off to meet my first great-nephew in Campbell River on Boxing Day, which is anything but a guaranteed day off in my line of work. O. is six months old, so a bit young for Christmas, but soon! I, on the other hand, am totally ready for Christmas, which the visiting and the family reunions and the long walks with dogs and the Baldur's Gate 3 marathons . . .Oops, definitely shouldn't have said that last bit. 

It has also been suggested that for various more widely applicable reasons that we should lighten up and just enjoy a Christmas for a change. And I don't disagree, so here's a Christmas message calling for peace on Earth, good will to all, and a proletarian revolution!

Yeah, Angela didn't say that last bit.

Santa is not St. Nicholas. That's just reverse euhemerism. "Santa Claus" is "Sankt Niklaus" heard by someone brought up with Dutch, not in it, and the (more-or-less) Dutch speakers were the children undergoing ethnogenesis by passing through the Dutch filter from First Nations to American identities. Through this filter passed Santa Claus transformed from the shaman journeying back from the spirit world in a night-flying canoe with hunting magic into a jolly old elf with presents for good little children. 

Santa is all about Christmas,  and the folk cynical story is that Christmas originated as the Roman Saturnalia and was taken over as part of Constantine's scheme to incorporate all the good bits of paganism into the total social control system he made out of Christianity, or invented Christianity to serve, take your pick about how red-pilled you want to be.  This might be going a bit too far, in that you'd think that the idea of throwing a holiday at the Winter Solstice wasn't much of a reach anywhere sufficient off the tropics to have a winter hungry season, and we could even go a bit further and talk about seasonal light changes affecting mood (not controversial) and appetite ('somewhat more)

So, yes,  my hot take is that the embrace of Christmas during the transition of Roman society to Christianity is a bit  overexplained. But not the transformation of  St. Nicholas of Myra into the patron of Christmas. No sir, that's a bit of a story. The thing about St. Nicholas is that he was a well-known Third Century figure in the Anatolian church who is, nevertheless, surprisingly obscure, to the point that the main reason we think he exists is that his cult was so vigorous by the time of Theodosius (401--450). in general is is not surprising that a figure of the Roman Third Century would be a bit obscure, but the source difficulty does not extend to church history, which in itself strikes me as a tell, but does apply specifically to the Anatolian church, from whence in this period come not only St. Nicholas but Saints George and Christopher. 

The Herulian wall is associated with a third round of upheavals in 267 and
is famous for being built across the agora with borrowed sacred architecture. 

I don't know how much the random person is going to read into three examples of the Third Century Anatolian church being obscure, but we haven't got to my favourite,  a patriarch of the church at the time of the Heruli incursion whose activities ransoming slaves taken by the former might easily be construed as brokerage rather than charity. On the other hand, this particular guy is so obscure that I am having trouble putting my finger on the name in the vast field of words fertilised by the extraordinary episode of 267/8 in which what might have been a massive confederation of Black Sea barbarians invaded Anatolia and Greece by land and sea in the midst of the climax of the struggle to reunify the Roman Empire, divided into a triarchy for over a decade by Valerian's disastrous capitulation. 

Better known obscurities of personal identity, if that is a helpful way of putting things, are associated with a history by a contemporary, an Athenian patrician who led the militia of that city in defending it against the 267/8 incursion, and who wrote a history of the period, which, although long lost, has been excerpted and used as a source of the histories that do survive. Strangely, coming out of Dexippus, we have the impression that the "Scythians" that Dexippus identifies as the enemies of Rome in what seems to have been three separate episodes of invasion or unrest in the Balkans, in 255/6/ 261, and 267/8 were named Cniva and Ostrogoth. The former presents some problems since it is an authentic Gothic name but does not appear in the histories of, or involving, the Goths prepared over the next two centuries by Classical writers. Presumably "Cniva" is lost to the oral histories from which these accounts were prepared, and the cynic might suppose that this was deliberate on the part of the tale tellers. Even more bizarre is a king named "Ostrogoth," since a century later it appears as a tribal name and to have a straightforward meaning as the counterpart of "Visigoth." A  palimpsest of Dexippus has now been found and deciphered and confirms the ,chronology of this Ostrogotha's life. We might find the name odd, but it was known to contemporaries long before the "Goths," much less "East" and "West" Goths were known.

So much for Goths; there is more. Prominent in the incursions were a people designated "Elouri." The name was subsequently attached to the "Heruli," a Germanic people sufficiently well known as to provide auxiliaries within a few decades. On the other hand, it is my crackpot notion that "Elouri" seems at least at a stretch identifiable as "Helot." There is something of a controversy  as to whether the institution of a land-bound peasantry similar to Sparta's existed in the other "Dorian" city states; but if we take it seriously, it strikes me as authorising adding a dimension of peasant's revolt to the story of the Third Century Crisis in the Balkans such as been the subject of endless controversy in connection with the "Bagaudae" of the west, who sure sound like rural social revolutionaries. I will take this one step further here, mainly in the interest of driving traffic to a worthy Youtube creator, and point out that when the Emperor Decius was trying to bring the invading Scythians to bay, one of his concern was the large number of Roman citizens being herded towards the Danube frontier.

Or, of course, as Kyle suggest, "herded." 

To bring this back, at last, to Santa, it's not just "Scythians" (or Goths) suddenly spawning "Elouri/Heruli. When I began thinking that this might be a blog post, it was my intention to go from the "Picts," as the example to hand, to the Saxons and Franks, as better known participants in the Crisis of the Third Century, and, of course, to the Jugunthi/Alamanni, who have showed up here before on the conceit that "Jugunthi" can be rendered into "cowboys," and their incursions into the Empire effectively job action by the herding communities which had been moving livestock across the Alps (a well known trade of medieval times) from Germany to Italy until things suddenly fell apart in the central years of the Third Century. 

We do not, however, have to dwell on tinfoil hattery. All of these groups do appear in the textual sources in this period, and even the Classicist writers were aware that the Scotti were people who used to be called "Irish," that the "Franks" and "Saxons" had emerged from existing northwest German communities, that the "Goths" and "Heruli" were in some sense new creations from a Scythian matrix (this part is more debatable since it is traditional to say that the Classicists writing about "Scythian" invasions in the Third Century are just archaicising), and so on at much greater length. I was, for example, completely unaware of the emergence of the Peuci from the well known Bastarnae. 

Many of these usages are obscure. "Saxon" is traditionally from a form of shortsword, and once the identifications of "Frank" and "Scotti" with "free" were  recognised as circular, the former was tentatively identified with a word for "javelin," while the latter might be a form of aristoi." "Pict" is perhaps more likely to a form of "British" than "Painted One," as traditionally said, but "Britain" might be derived from "Land of the Painted People."

I say "obscure" but I don't really mean it; It's all just ethnogenesis. The Crisis of the Third Century is a period when a great many people felt the need to take on new collective identities, or in which observers felt the need to create new identities to make sense of events. Why this happened is only mysterious in detail. No-one is arguing that times weren't rotten. St. Nicholas became Santa because the Third Century Anatolian saints are the best saints, polymorphic miracle workers who can be anything you want them to be, because they were created in the context of deliberately obscured identities. 

I guess my point, my sole point, is that new collective identities were a response to bad times once, and that applies to "people who believe in Santa" as much as it does to people who for some reason feel the need to name themselves after a design of short sword.  

It doesn't land the same way now that we care about the war in Ukraine, but I'm still ending on a bit of public engagement. Eighteen hundred years ago there was some kind of limit to the crap people would take in order to maintain their Roman identity. I now look forward with some anxiety to the possibility that we're about to discover modern humanity's break point. (If you become a new person you can't flee across the Danube any more, but your credit card balance will belong to another person, and that's a kind of freedom, too!) 

Merry Christmas and a Happy, debt-free New Year.