Old knowledge and new information in a funny story about a hapless traveller
And an announcement...
For reasons I’ll reveal later, I’ve been thinking this week a lot about a curious character I know quite well. I know him quite well in the sense that I wrote an article about him once (which you can find here, if you are interested). That doesn’t mean, however, that I, or anybody else knows much about him.
He may (or may not) have lived around 1700 years ago, perhaps in the late third century CE. For now, let’s assume that he did exist. Writing about what somebody may have done/have been thought to have done, have said/have been thought to have said, gets tiring pretty quickly. Still, do bear in mind that there is always an ‘or may have been thought to’ hanging over what follows.
He doesn’t have any name recorded in any source and nothing is known about his age, appearance or what happened to him before or after the odd story through which he exists as a historical oddity.
We know about him at all from a curious letter in Greek that has been dated to the mid-fourth century CE, by somebody called Palladius, who was a bishop. To make things a bit more confusing, there was a famous writer from around this period, also by the name of Palladius, whose writing we have quite a lot of. This is not that Palladius, though it took a while for scholars to work that out.
So, we have a letter, by a Palladius (who is not that Palladius) and as far as we know, this is the only letter by this Palladius to have survived. This Palladius says that he is replying to a previous letter from a friend, asking for information on ‘India’.
What Palladius produces, is, I think, a tour de force of wit, erudition and general showing off. I think that was the point, and I think that understanding that that was the point is kind of critical for understanding any of the information in the letter. It tells us a lot of things, but here, I want to think about what Palladius tells us about new information and old knowledge in a world with very different communication to our own.
Briefly, what Palladius does in his letter is this:
He offers three separate accounts of India, each longer than the next and each based on more reliable/prestigious information than the next.
He sandwiches them together in a blend of the factual and (I think) the funny.
He celebrates the shared culture, including stories and in jokes, that he and his reader, and indeed, educated Romans generally, were part of.
He passes a general comment about something, in this case travel, by way of some specific examples.
This matters because letter writing was an art in the ancient Roman world. People published collections of their own and other people’s letters, if they thought they were very good. People learned, if they were educated, how to write a good letter, and letters were hugely important to building and maintaining friendships and professional relationships. Palladius was using shared expectations about what a good letter should do.
How does he do all of this? He does it like this…
Step One: Palladius says, let me tell you about my own experiences of India. Personal eye witness was considered a valuable source of information in antiquity, as it is today. In this case, though, Palladius hadn’t seen that much. I went to India, once, he says. I travelled there in the company of an Indian churchman on official business, but I only got to the border and it was hot so I gave up and came home (literally, thank God!).
Lessons learned for Palladius and his reader: travelling is uncomfortable, India is hot but there are some Christians there. This was important because, by the fourth century when Palladius was writing, Christianity was rapidly becoming the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and there was a lot of interest in just how far Christianity had spread. This was new information!
Lessons learned for us, as modern scholars: in the fourth-century Roman Empire travelling to hot, distant places for fun wasn’t really a thing. It was uncomfortable and difficult rather than glamorous and exciting. Now, this could just have been Palladius, but actually isn’t. Travel being difficult, dangerous and uncomfortable is a pretty common theme in Roman writing. We also learn that India could mean quite a lot of places. In this case, the India that Palladius visited is pretty obviously, from what he says in the letter, East Africa, around what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, and which was then, the Aksumite Empire. Again, corroborated by other sources,. India could, in fact, mean anywhere south and east of Roman territory in the Red Sea.
Step Two: this isn’t much for Palladius’s correspondent to work with, but Palladius has more to offer. Next, he moves onto a different kind of reliable source – the account of somebody you have personally spoken to, who was themselves, an eye witness. In a world without photography, etc., getting reliable knowledge was often dependent on finding somebody who had seen it and asking them questions.
In this case, Palladius offers a story, told to him, he says, by the (anonymous) man himself. He was a scholastikos ( a mid-ranking civil servant in the third-/fourth-century Roman Empire), from the city of Thebes in Egypt - let us call him the Theban Scholastikos! (Everybody else who works on this text does, too.) The man, we are told, was not very good at his job and was not enjoying it that much, and so decided that he wanted to go travelling. He wanted to see India!
If this seems to contradict the point I made earlier about this being a world in which people generally didn’t go off travelling on a whim, well observed! Hold that thought, because it is important.
Off the scholastikos goes and, to begin with, he also goes to India=East Africa, where he hangs out for a while and meets a minor prince from India (which, we assume, means India=South Asia, since it clearly refers to somewhere else). Eventually, he goes with the princeling and his crew to visit India=probably South Asia, and a tragi-comic farce unfolds.
To the scholastikos’s shock, nobody in India(=South Asia) speaks his language and a scene of wild gesturing unfolds. The local king, of a people called the Bisades, who are only mentioned in this one text, decides that our hapless scholastikos is a spy and sentences him to hard labour in the palace bakery. (It can’t be much of a palace, because the scholastikos says everybody was poor and even the king hardly had any clothing or goods better than the people around him, but hey, he had a bakery!).
After some time in the bakery, the scholastikos learned enough of the local language to find out more about where he was. Eventually, the over king of the Bisades, who was was based in the semi-mythical island of Taprobane(=probably Sri Lanka), found out that the king of the Bisades was holding a Roman citizen captive, panicked about possible Roman repercussions, had the poor king of the Bisades flayed for his troubles and sent the scholastikos home with his compliments. The end.
Step Three: After this rather peculiar story (weird on its face, I hope you’ll agree, but odder when you look more closely, as I will shortly), Palladius gets to the real meat of his information about India. For Palladius, and also anybody educated in the same way as Palladius, the most rigorous and reliable material available about India came from a Roman historian, Arrian, who around two hundred years earlier (in the 2nd century CE) had used older sources, now mostly lost to us, to tell the most complete historical narrative of the life of Alexander III of Macedon (sometimes called the Great, but not by me), who had lived around five hundred years earlier than that, in the fourth century BCE.
Alexander had travelled to the far north of South Asia, leading an army from the Aegean to the Indus, before turning back. He also sent a naval fleet from the mouth of the Indus back to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Palladius, therefore, provides a short summary of what Arrian said about India=South Asia.
For Palladius and his audience, this was the gold standard in reliable information: a credible and serious scholar (Arrian), collecting information from various eye witness accounts, recorded at the time of Alexander’s travels, or compiled later by other serious scholars, and validated by generations of trust. You will find in many studies about Roman knowledge that the Romans relied on knowledge like this, without updating it much with new information, and this is often presented as something perplexing, funny or evidence that they weren’t that sophisticated - certainly not brainy and scientific like us, even if they did invent waterproof concrete!
The thing is, this attitude to new knowledge actually made quite a bit of sense. Arrian’s account of Alexander's travels was a record of a journey, drawn from many sources, cross-checked and carefully combined. It included details recorded by men who had actually been there and, just as importantly, who were employed in many cases by Alexander to record what they saw, because they were already learned: they were educated people being paid to pay attention.
If somebody, like Palladius, let’s say, had wanted to update this reliable source with new information, such as accounts by travellers, what guarantee was there that new information was better information?
How could you check whether a sailor talking about one place meant the same as the place in your authoritative text, so that you were updating, not just introducing errors? How would you know if the sailor was reliable and what to do if he had just not paid much attention to the things you wanted to know? And, in a world in which travel was slow, difficult and infrequent, how many travellers would you be able to find to corroborate exactly the same details to make sure they really were better information?
We do see some updating of information, of course: Palladius does, as we have seen, tell us that India(=East Africa) was Christian. This was something he could corroborate with considerable confidence. He had been there himself. He had travelled there with an actual bishop. And the Christianising of East Africa was reasonably well known in the Roman Empire of the fourth century.
India=South Asia, though, was a lot further away, and a lot less familiar. Scholars have, at times, tried to use what Palladius says about the tale of the Theban scholastikos to ‘update’ our modern knowledge about South Asia in the fourth century, but we should be careful! Palladius doesn’t, after all. He offers the story, as an interlude, but then does nothing to try to integrate it into his summary of Arrian. Moreover, many of the details in the story are either so vague or singular as to be nearly useless. For example, there never was an overking of peninsular South Asia, where this story must be set, based in Taprobane=Sri Lanka, and even if there was, no king in South Asia in the first millennium CE would ever have had any reason to worry about political backlash from the Roman Empire. It was just far too far away.
These are some of the reasons for thinking that the Theban scholastikos might be either fictional, or a highly stylised account of a real core. There may have been a civil servant from Roman Egypt who, for whatever reason, ended up in South Asia for a while. Palladius may even have met him. But most of this story seems crafted, probably by Palladius, to make a number of points that are not really about India=South Asia. It served, I think, other purposes.
Things a Roman reader might have learned from the tale of the Theban Scholastikos:
Don’t go travelling, especially not outside the empire. It is difficult, dangerous and unprofitable. (What does the scholastikos come home with? Absolutely naff all!)
Outside the empire are uncomfortable places full of people who don’t know Greek or Latin and aren’t very rich or civilised. (What does the scholastikos do while he is away? Get arrested and enslaved by a king who hardly dresses better than this own people!)
And everybody thinks that the Roman Empire is awesome and terrifying. (How does the scholastikos get home in the end? Not by being good at anything, like a latter-day Joseph advising Pharaoh, from the Bible; not by learning the language and negotiating for himself. Nope. By being Roman. Just being Roman was enough to terrify a mighty overking into letting him go!)
If we assume, then, that the tale of the Theban Scholastikos was not really about India=South Asia at all, what might we, as modern scholars, learn from it? Here are a few thoughts:
what an educated Roman bishop thought about travel and being Roman.
What an educated Roman thought another educated Roman might find funny, which in this case, is a kind of anti-Alexander narrative about a nameless functionary, as opposed to perhaps the most famous named individual in history who did not become the foundation for a world religion, who travelled to India, but as a failed civil servant instead of a warrior emperor, became a slave instead of a victor, met kitchen staff instead of great philosophers and was ultimately dispatched home because of where he was from not who he was. This is a kind of parallel play that Romans loved, because they all knew the same stories and texts, and the parallels between Alexander and the scholastikos are too numerous and too obvious to ignore. Alexander is glorious, the scholastikos is ridiculous.
And that, more than anything, is perhaps what this letter is really about: how Romans understood the world beyond their world. Were there adventurers in the Roman Empire, who travelled for their own reasons? Probably! But they were not elite, their ideas were not considered fashionable or stylish and they have not left their stories behind. For an educated Roman intellectual, travel to far flung places was risky, probably unrewarding and, in any case, unnecessary, because there was good, reliable information about those places readily to hand anyway.
All of this I find useful for building up a picture of the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE, a time in which lots of people did travel but in which understanding their societies and attitudes can be tricky.
I also find it useful as a reminder that how we experience the world, including what we enjoy or find exciting, our ambitions and our ideals are fundamentally shaped by our societies, and by our collective best efforts at any given time to make our way in the world. For a lot of human history, that has looked for lots of people like not making their way very far at all, because the risks far outweighed the rewards.
And that is all useful to remember because it is not the world in which I find myself. For that I am very grateful, but nevertheless, I find myself in some of the places the Theban scholastikos (if he existed) may have done, and wondering if I, too, will end up a funny story, or, I hope, just having a few of my own to tell. I said I had an announcement:
Well, I, too, am a kind of civil servant (this is a stretch, but in Germany being a university lecturer would make me a civil servant, and besides, in its more literal sense of one who has had schooling, I could count as scholastic…).
I do not find myself enjoying my job as much right now as I might wish. (I love my students and have some wonderful colleagues, and I’m not setting this up as the prelude to a moan. I’m just really in the mood for a new adventure.)
I am, I think, pretty good at my job, but I’m also a great believer that new experiences can make one better at the things one seeks to do.
And I, too, am off to India!
My employement visa is sitting in my shiny new passport, my contract is signed and, around June 14th Clio will be off to teach for a year at Woxsen University, just outside Hyderabad. This is one of my favourite cities in the world, and I’m getting excited as I start preparing new courses for a very different style of teaching, and a very different curriculum.
There will be language misunderstandings. (I’m learning Telugu and having a lot of fun, though anybody who ever told me that, if you know some Tamil, Telugu is easy, was either lying or is a much better linguist than me! I’m also learning Hindi and have been promised coffee and language lessons by a colleague.).
I hope not to spend any time working in kitchens - I’m an okay cook, but definitely not up to any kind of commercial standard -, but certainly do hope to pick up a few recipes.
And most of all, I look forward to taking you with me, with reflections, inspiration and excitement straight from South India. What you do with that new information is up to you. I can only try to be a reliable source, having just reminded you, and myself, of some of the many ways that even the most apparently personal (e.g. liking travel), factual (e.g. ‘India’ meaning ‘India’), or everyday obvious (e.g. new information being better than old information) things might actually be much more complicated than they seem.
I know I’m not the only one who thinks you are more than ‘pretty good’ at your job. You taught the first class on the very first night of my undergraduate studies at Birkbeck College and are a big part of the reason I stayed on for four years doing BA then MA and have now signed up for another four for PhD - such was the way you made me feel about history right from the start. And your post above sums it all up; the story you tell, the conclusions you come to from such limited information, and the thought and discussion it provokes – this is why I do history. You started me off on my adventure and I wish you all the best on yours!