The Ludovisi Sarcophagus
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Art on September 22, 2026
This was my script for a video I just posted on YouTube. I departed slightly from the script when I narrated, but it is close. The video illustrates all the points made in the text, so I see no point in grabbing a large number of stills from it to include here. Just watch the video; I think it came out well. I uploaded 4K video. You can select resolution with the video settings button to ensure you are getting full res.
The best guess is that the Ludovisi Sarcophagus was made in the third century, probably around AD 260.
We don’t know who the man in the middle is. That, beyond the fact that the thing is an incredible piece of art, is one of the reasons the sarcophagus gets so much attention.
He’s on horseback, bareheaded, no weapon, riding straight into a mass of Roman soldiers and defeated barbarians. Everyone around him is caught up in the violence. Men are falling, fighting, and dying.
And he’s pretty much untouched by it. His right hand is raised, as though he doesn’t even need a sword. He isn’t just another soldier. The whole composition points toward him. So naturally, we want to know who he was.
Answering that is tough. 1800 years has taken its toll on the evidence.
The sarcophagus was discovered in Rome in 1621, in a vineyard outside the Porta San Lorenzo. It was acquired by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi and became part of his remarkable collection of ancient sculpture. Eventually the collection passed into the Museo Nazionale Romano. You can see it in person at the Palazzo Altemps across the street from Piazza Navona.
Once you’ve concluded that the figure must represent somebody important, then you start studying the face. He seems important because an immense amount of precision work went into it. He has a triangular face, a broad cranium and narrow chin, smooth skin, prominent eyebrows, a moustache and a short beard. His hair is arranged in little comma-shaped locks across his forehead.
The hairstyle looks backward. It recalls earlier Roman imperial portraits the Julio-Claudians, Augustus in particular, and Trajan. But its closest parallels, according to modern scholarship, are in what is called the Gallienic revival, the renewed interest in classical styles during the reign of Emperor Gallienus.
That leads most scholars toward the imperial families of the middle of the third century. Two names in particular come up. Herennius Etruscus and his younger brother Hostilianus, the sons of the emperor Trajan Decius.
Herennius was actually killed fighting the Goths in 251. Hostilianus didn’t die in battle. He died of the plague later that year. And there is something particularly interesting about Hostilianus.
Some of those who’ve proposed that this guy is Hostilian see the curious mark on his forehead as a sphragis, a sign associated with the Mithraic mysteries
And that brings us to the curious mark on his forehead. It is a cross-shaped mark, cut deeply into the marble. It has been interpreted as a sphragis, a sign associated with the Mithraic mysteries. But that interpretation has a complicated history I’ll get to later.
Except for the beard, some coin portraits of Hostilian do look strikingly like the one on the sarcophagus.
More recent scholarship has tended to put the Ludovisi Sarcophagus around 260 rather than 251, partly because of the way its figures are organized across the relief and its relationship to other sculpture of the period. We have to accept that the young commander can’t be securely connected with any known emperor or general.
But I’m not sure nine years should have quite the authority that it sometimes gets. A date of around 260 is just an art-historical judgment.
A sculptor in 260 could have been looking at something made in 240. A sculptor in 251 could have been looking at something made a century earlier. A fashion can begin before we notice it, persist after we think it has ended, or simply refuse to fit neatly into the period labels we give it. The main figure’s face could have been carved forty years after the rest of the sarcophagus.
So I don’t think Herennius or Hostilianus can be dismissed simply because somebody has decided the sarcophagus belongs to 260. But I don’t think either can be identified solely from the resemblance.
It may be a portrait of a member of the imperial family. It may be an important military commander. Or we may be looking at a very wealthy Roman aristocrat whose name has disappeared completely. The quality of the sarcophagus tells us that its patron was somebody near the top of Roman society. But that’s about as far as the evidence can take us.
There’s another possibility we can’t rule out. Perhaps the face wasn’t intended to identify the deceased as a particular emperor or general at all. The sculptor may have been making an ideal Roman commander. He is bareheaded, carries no weapon, and yet he’s riding directly into battle.
Diana Kleiner compared him to the invincible general represented by Alexander the Great, particularly the famous mosaic from the House of the Faun at Pompeii, which itself copies a lost Hellenistic painting.
In that reading, the point isn’t that the subject was Alexander. It’s that he was being made to look like the kind of man who could be Alexander. The dead man didn’t necessarily need to have conquered the barbarians. He needed to be shown as the sort of man who would have.
And then there is the X. It doesn’t look to me like the work of the sculptor who carved the face. It could have been made later in antiquity. It could have been made centuries later. We don’t know when the sarcophagus disappeared from view, when it was buried, or what happened to it before it was found in 1621.
So we know roughly when the sarcophagus was carved. We know exactly when it was dug out of the ground, but we can’t date the X at all. We don’t really even know that it wasn’t added after it was dug up. And since we can’t know how long it was around before being buried we can’t rule out that someone in late antiquity added the X to ward off demons. There is evidence of that sort of thing, right up to modern times.
20th century scholars couldn’t let go of a Tertullian quote. He mentions Mithras in a passage attacking pagan religion. He says that the Devil marks his soldiers on their foreheads. That’s all he says.
Tertullian wrote about 200 AD, and he couches the claim with “if I remember Mithras,” not exactly the voice of a man presenting carefully verified ethnography. He is making a rhetorical point: Satan had preemptively counterfeited Christian sacraments in pagan religion.
Historian Franz Cumont, in 1899, interprets Tertullian’s mark as a “brand.”
In 1959, German archaeologist Hilga von Heintze reads Cumont and starts the business about the Ludovisi Sarcophagus “X” being a Mithraic sign.
Beskow, in 1979, dismatles the long-standing academic belief that initiates of Mithras were branded on their foreheads.
Diana Kleiner, in 1992, accepts von Heintze, misses or dismisses Beskow, and claims, without citation, that coin portraits of Hostilian sometimes have an X. Kleiner did not reply to my inquiry about this.
Years ago I asked historian Richard Gordon, a leading scholar of Roman Mithraism. His answer was blunt. No evidence of Mithraic branding, particularly with an X.
That’s an extraordinary little piece of scholarly history. Because we can watch the idea being constructed, and watch counterevidence being ignored. We have zero evidence of such a Mithraic symbol. And the American Numismatic Society database knows of no Hostilian coinage with an X. So we have an argument that is not only circular, but rests on false starts that reinforce one another.
It also shows us just how self-referential academic scholarship can be. Bad scholarship gets cast in stone. People, especially those who must publish or perish, crave certainty. A Richard Feynman quote seems tailor-made: “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning.”
So here the Ludovisi Sarcophagus becomes interesting for other reasons. It tells us something about ourselves.
But there is one more thing I find interesting. In 1621 the sarcophagus entered a world in which ancient sculpture had enormous value. Cardinal Ludovisi was building one of the great collections of antiquities in Rome. It became famous.
There another unidentified Roman head, over in the Capitoline collection, with an X on his forehead. And he looks quite a bit like you know who.
Frontally, they look pretty similar, considering that one is life sized and one is miniature. When I photographed the two heads in profile and put them side by side, I was struck by an uncanny similarity. The Capitoline head has a reworked nose, so I’ve removed that part of the comparison, because the restoration may well have been based on the sarcophagus.
But look at the rest of the face: the forehead, the brow, the eye, the cheek, the mouth, the chin, the overall profile.
The resulting resemblance could then be taken as independent evidence that the two heads represent the same person. But regardless of the date of the Ludovisi “X”, the X’s are not independent evidence, given what we know of the antique market.
The heads are so similar that I wonder if somebody else noticed the resemblance long ago, possibly after the sarcophagus head got its X but before the Capitoline head did.
Max Vegner, writing in 1979, judged the head to have been extensively reworked. I read the surviving evidence as more superficial than he did. I agree that the X was added later, and that the head was polished after the X was added. When the head was polished by a restorer, the X was already there when that happened. Whether five minutes before, or a thousand years before, we cannot say. I disagree that the locks have been extensively reworked to imitate those of the guy on the sarcophagus. Follow them up to the top of the head. The extent of reworking Vegner proposes would make the thing the equivalent of a complete forgery, which it might be. If it is, it is a very good one.
I’m not saying the two heads portray the same man. They may, or the Ludovisi figure may itself be an idealization. It means only that the two faces are similar enough that someone restoring or selling the Capitoline head might have seen an opportunity to associate it with the much more famous Ludovisi portrait.
I’ve shot thirty thousand photos of Roman heads and have spent enough time looking at recut portraits that I am reasonably confident of that judgment. But it’s a judgment. And I’ve convinced museums to change their claims about recarving and revise their placards. But it’s still a judgment.
All this changes the way I look at the two objects, because there are now several histories to consider. There is the history of the Roman man represented by the sarcophagus. There is the history of the Capitoline head. And there is the history of what later people thought and did about the similarity between them.
We form theories, at least some of which are wrong. One might be right.
And some may be wrong in ways that are now very difficult to see, because they have been written down and copied so many times. The sarcophagus is eighteen hundred years old. The X might be 1,000 years old. The interpretation of the X is 130 years old. The confidence with which the interpretation is now 60 years old. Yet when we encounter the thing today, all those layers arrive simultaneously.
RIP Juro Martanovic
Posted by Bill Storage in Uncategorized on September 16, 2026
Jurai. Euro. Jurko. Incomparable.
Always handy on photo sets, and better at modeling than the pros. He reminded us not to pretend it mattered.
Deliberate abandonment of dignity and restraint – full football. Gorgeous.
2002:11:12 23:36:07
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Remembering Deep-Pocket 9/11 Marxists
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, History of Science on September 10, 2026
A couple of days after the World Trade Center attacks, posters appeared around San Francisco in astounding density. You couldn’t walk fifty feet on Market Street without seeing one. Their message, as I read it, showed some sophisticated Marxist reasoning: 1. American foreign policy produced conditions leading to anti-American terrorism. 2. Our prosperity was dependent upon an unequal global economic system. 3. Americans had moral responsibility for the violence directed against them. 4. Abandon capitalism.
There is certainly truth in number 1. Number 2 is arguable and has been argued and assumed true in university education, but remains highly contested. It seems to me less plausible today than it might have 25 years ago. Number 3 is the gut punch. It does not follow from 1 or 2. Number 4 is standard Marxist/Marxian bs.
And by that I mean this is typical Marxist reasoning. You prepare a bunch of academic-sounding whereas and then pull a therefore out of your butt.
Let’s take a detailed look. The language is pure Marx. Alienation, social conflict theory, exploitation.
Seven different posters, as follows:
1. Unprovoked?
2. Fighting alienation with alienated means
3. “Today is a great day for the people of Indochina” – Simone Weil
4. The issue raised by social-conflict theory is ine<…> Members of rich societies consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of the p<…>. That is, we maintain our affluent way of life by exploiting the poor of the less-developed countries <…>ning our planet in the process.
5. “The chickens are coming home to roost” – Malcolm X
6. “Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING”
7. “got milk?”
The reasoning, plausible in the premises, asinine in conclusion, entails that understanding why someone like Bin Laden hates you is exactly equivalent to accepting their moral judgment of you.
We can dig into their epistemic machinery.
Their conclusion was completely formed before 9/11 happened. Obviously. These things went up in the hundreds or thousands almost overnight. At what cost? Professionally printed – while feigning low-budget – fully adhesive-backed posters appearing immediately says this wasn’t a few Berkeley students on a Kinko’s binge. Somebody had resources, organization, and a preexisting political network capable of turning an event only a day old into a finished ideological product.
They started with a conclusion, then looked at 9/11 through the available vocabulary of their political worldview. Every road led back to capitalism, imperialism, consumption, alienation, exploitation. The remarkable thing is how little room there is in the seven captions for the actual agency of the attackers.
“Unprovoked?” is standard Marxist catechism. It invites you to supply the answer the poster-maker already knows. The question can mean “Did the United States have a history that helps explain al-Qaeda’s hostility?” That would be a charitable reading, and a legitimate historical question. Or it can mean “Was the United States morally responsible for this attack?” At best, the poster exploits the slippage and the grief.
In San Francisco, 9/11 wasn’t an abstract geopolitical event occurring to people somewhere else. The social distance was extraordinarily small. Many people I worked with knew someone on one of those airplanes or in the towers. I did. The Marxist posters immediately converted an intensely human catastrophe into an illustration of a preexisting theory of global political economy.
“Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING” is a straight-out accusation. The photo supplies the emotional force, the caption tells you who is to bear responsibility.
I have, or probably had, a couple of devout and honest Marxist friends, innocent, somehow able to partition belief from evidence in their minds, the way they assure themselves the Christians do. Beyond them, I see only academic capitalists who lie about following Marx. They lie for their own economic gain, just like Karl Marx did.
Hey, Tithi Bhattacharya, Richard Wolff, Vivek Chibber, David Harvey, and Nancy Fraser. Got Ben and Jerry’s?
Epistemic/epistemological horseshit. Marxists cannot be wrong.
Marxism, as is obvious to anyone who has opened Das Kapital, is immune to disconfirmation. If workers become revolutionary, that’s evidence for the theory. If they don’t, that’s also evidence, because false consciousness, ideology, and bourgeois institutions explain their failure to revolt. The theory has an answer either way.
Americans have a high standard of living and are attacked. That is evidence that capitalism and imperialism generate resentment. The quarter century following is equally accommodated: the system is exploiting people enough to prevent resistance, and American cultural dominance is suppressing awareness.
Poor countries resist: class conflict.
Poor countries don’t resist: alienation and false consciousness.
We see a conceptual system absorbing unexpected observations without allowing the observation to alter the system.
The posters ask: What if the attackers had reasons? They don’t allow: What if those reasons don’t explain the attack so well?
Beyond the epistemological issue of a theory being immune to disconfirmation (Karl Popper’s criterion), we can use another idea from History of Science: explanatory adequacy.
The posters did not ask, even implicitly: “What does 9/11 tell us that we didn’t know yesterday?”
They announced: “9/11 tells us what we already knew.” Of course you did.
Body Belay
Posted by Bill Storage in speleology on August 13, 2026
Body Belay
On July 1st, 1978, Mike Thornhill, Andrea Dakoski and I packed our personal gear and the day’s group gear into Boy Scout Yucca packs, including two aluminum-rung etriers given to me by Woody Stover after his return from Annapurna, a drill kit, a rack of pitons, and one hundred feet of Mammut Dynaflex – purple at a distance, but up close a tiny checkerboard of bright red and deep blue. To my eye, the most beautiful rope ever made. People stared at it. Got lost in it. To my hand, perfect. Supple, no kinks, the ideal spring rate.
It would be our second trip to the only significant infeeder to the 7600-foot-long Rubber Chicken Highway. On our first trip we’d gotten up a little nuisance climb where a small stream drops into the Highway at Station B51. Two hundred feet beyond it was an unclimbable waterfall twenty feet high, the first of what, forty-four years later, became known as the Dilation Domes. We wanted to know what was up there.
On this trip I’d do the climb. I traversed around a deep pool on ledges and climbed six feet on small, downward-sloping ridges. They would have been impossible to climb except for the slight curvature of the dome, which gave me opposing surfaces to bridge against. It was the limit of what I could straddle. That, plus the spray, made hand-drilling a bolt twelve feet off the floor awkward. I came down to rest several times.
I hung one of Woody’s etriers from the bolt and climbed to the second rung, where I could see cracks that might take a piton.
I had learned that Chouinard Knifeblades and the shorter Bugaboos were the only pitons that fit the cracks I encountered in West Virginia. Still, I’d been plagued by college poverty, so I carried other stuff I’d bought along the way.
The taper of the crack in front of me was slightly odd, in my experience. I tested the crack depth with my shortest Knifeblade. It was the right piton. I’d been carrying this Cassin “malleable” piton on my rack for five years. Malleable was what Cassin sold it as. And, sunk cost fallacy, though Woody had given it to me, I needed to use it.
I remember thinking about this climb, that if I were ever to take a fall because a pin popped out on me, this would be the place to do it: overhung, no ledges or spires, clean fall. I did the math. My last piece was four feet down: a Number 4 “Long Thin” Bugaboo, 5/32, bombproof, sitting twelve feet off the floor. An eight-foot fall on paper. But with stretch and whatever slack was out, it would be close. The ground was a pool two or three feet deep with a smooth gravel bottom. If I hit, it wouldn’t be hard.
The belief about malleable pitons was that soft steel would deform to fit the particular shape of the crack. The reality was that soft steel lacked spring. I knew that, at least on paper, but it took a good bit of hammering to set and was fully in the crack.
I hung the second etrier. One mantle move and I was done.
Except that the piece of junk popped out as I fully loaded it.
Mike Thornhill, God bless him, saw the fall in progress and performed the body belay perfectly. Thought on his feet, to be precise. It was a short but consequential fall, and the risk of hitting the ground was real. Mike understood that the problem wasn’t the force in the rope. It was the total distance I had to fall before I hit. He jumped backward and leaned way back, his body almost perpendicular to the rope as it went tight.
Mike Thornhill, God bless him, saw the fall in progress and performed the body belay perfectly. He understood that the problem wasn’t the force in the rope, it was the distance I had to fall before I hit. He leaped backward, digging his heels in and throwing his weight low.
I stopped with my feet skimming the water. My carbide lamp flew into the pool. His skid marks stopped inches from the edge.
“Did ya fall?” Mike asked.
We fished the lamp out with a loop of Dynaflex.
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Seven Holes in the Head
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Science on July 21, 2026
Galileo, Order, and the Persistence of Reasoning through Aesthetics
Sunflowers follow the sun across the sky, and the moon controls the tides. Move a magnet over iron filings and the iron responds. You’ve already accepted action at a distance and celestial influence. Why dismiss planetary influence on human disposition outright?
In 1610 Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius, announcing discovery of four moons of Jupiter, which he called the Medicean Stars to flatter his patron. Scholars were divided. A contemporary astronomer, Francesco Sizzi, authored a small treatise in response, Dianoia Astronomica.
No summary of Sizzi’s reasoning does it justice. You need it in his words.
Just as in the microcosm there are seven ‘windows’ in the head (two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth), so in the macrocosm God has placed two beneficent stars, two maleficent stars, two luminaries (sun and moon), and one indifferent. The seven days of the week follow from these. Finally, since ancient times the alchemists had made each of the seven metals correspond to one of the planets; gold to the sun, silver to the moon, copper to Venus, quicksilver to Mercury, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn.
From these and many other similar phenomena of nature such as the seven metals, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven… Besides, the Jews and other ancient nations as well as modern Europeans, have adopted the division of the week into seven days, and have named them from the seven planets; now if we increase the number of planets, this whole system falls to the ground… Moreover, the satellites [of Jupiter] are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.
There’s reasoning for you. Seven planets. Seven holes in the head. Case closed.
Today we know how the sunflower works. We know about phototropism, auxins, differential growth rates. We understand the mechanism. Francesco Sizzi didn’t.
His world system was built on regularities, from which he inferred relationships. He saw a universe whose underlying order could be read from recurring patterns.
For Sizzi, the universe was built upon sevens: seven planets, seven metals, seven days of the week, seven openings in the head. The cosmic order was complete. Galileo’s discovery was disruptive.
For a 16th century investigator of natural phenomena, the burden of proof was on the skeptic of long-held astrological knowledge. One reason astrology hung on so long was that no one came up with a satisfactory account of causation itself. In the 18th century, philosopher David Hume demolished the notion that we directly perceive causal necessity. We still debate what causation ultimately is. Like Sizzi, we observe regularities. We infer causes.
Sizzi was not defending ignorance. He was defending a conception of reality – and giving a nod to Pragmatism, a philosophy that wouldn’t emerge for another 300 years. The cosmos, as he understood it, was a web of correspondences. Harmony was the evidence. Symmetry meant something. The recurrence of patterns across different domains was evidence of a cosmic order. Rejecting those patterns in favor of four pinpoints of light visible only through a novel instrument did not seem rational.
We hold up Galileo as an example of speaking evidence to power. But most of us don’t reason as Galileo did.
We, like Sizzi, are drawn to elegant theories. Modern folk admire symmetry. We take pleasure in explanations that unify diverse phenomena. We find beauty persuasive. Often we discover reasons for believing something only after we have fallen in love with the shape of the idea.
We can’t blame Sizzi for seeking order. But he trusted the order he had already found more than the anomaly staring back at him from the telescope. The uncomfortable possibility is that we are usually closer to Sizzi than to Galileo.
We inherit the results of the scientific revolution, but not always its habits. Given a choice between a beautiful system and an inconvenient observation, the temptation remains as it was in 1610. The telescope has merely changed shape.
Bungee Disaster Reality Apathy
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Uncategorized on June 15, 2026
The viral footage shared under headlines like “Bungee Jumping Horror: Terrifying Safety Lapse Caught On Camera In Brazil” by WION is real, not AI-generated. The incident was verified by law enforcement.
The tragedy involved a 21-year-old woman named Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas. It occurred at the Ponte Esquelética in São Paulo, Brazil.
Legal and news investigations confirmed that in gross negligence the crew responsible for the jump failed to secure the bungee before she went over the edge and died. Men running the bungee jumping activity were arrested.
The footage is surreal due to the total lack of standard safety protocol it shows. AI suspicion is understandable. The footage is captured simultaneously from multiple angles. The announcer badly mispronounces “ravine” and “untethered.” The announcer’s cadence is way off. The reason people are skeptical of the story is that the announcer seems fake.
And she is. This highlights a major trend in how media is being repackaged. The video makes the story seem a hoax because it is cheap corporate automation overlaid on top of real tragedy.
Outlets like WION no longer use human voice actors for quick-turnaround news scripts. They scrape local text (in this case, Brazilian Portuguese news), run it through an auto-translator, and feed it into AI voice generators like ElevenLabs.
The reason there is simultaneous multi-angle footage, which usually screams “staged hoax”, is a heartbreaking byproduct of social-media performative adrenaline culture.
The victim was highly active on social media and had just posted a joking caption to her Instagram stories (“Who was the crazy person who let me jump off a bridge???”). (Indiatimes)
The bridge is a notorious hotspot for social-media thrills.
A spotter looks right at a giant, dead-weight coil of unattached bungee rope and then proceeds to help launch a human being. It defies basic human survival logic. Three operators pick up a human being and hurl her of a bridge without doing a single mechanical check.
On the AI angle, constant exposure to deception should train people to question everything, right? Like how forgeries in art sharpened authentication skills. Instead what is emerging is a kind of collective indifference where distinguishing real from fake seems pointless.
There’s a feedback loop here.
In 2016 Aviv Ovadya predicted we’d see reality apathy. Healthy doubt requires effort, literacy, and motivation. Indifference requires none.
In Chuck Klosterman’s 2019 Reality Apathy, deepfake videos, holograms, and fabricated media are so pervasive that distinguishing reality from fiction is too much work. Two hipsters discuss horrific news while emotionally numb and dismissive.
Reality apathy is here. But what Ovadya and Klosterman didn’t imagine was a time when reality would be packaged to look fake – to lure viewers who are perfectly happy consuming fiction packaged as truth.
When a real human tragedy is edited by an automated script, voiced by a robotic clone, and visually framed to look like click bait, it detaches us from the genuine horror of the event. It forces us to analyze pixels and phonemes rather than contemplate safety, techniques, and criminal neglect.
I have friends on Facebook who post videos of hot chicks in low-airspace cave crawlways wearing sleeveless spandex and no elbow pads. 👍
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The Lancellotti Discobolus
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Art on June 9, 2026
Engineering meets art history
The Discobolus of Myron is one of the most famous sculptures in the world, despite the fact that it no longer exists.
What you see here are two Roman marble copies of an original Greek bronze, made perhaps four hundred years earlier. As I stand in Palazzo Massimo, looking at the famous Discobolus Lancellotti and the more damaged version to its left, It seems to me that “copy” doesn’t tell the whole story.
How do we know it’s a copy if the original is lost? We don’t. Not really. But a few pieces of evidence support it. Multiple Roman statues survive showing nearly the same composition with variations. Ancient writers, especially Pliny the Elder, mention a famous Discobolus by Myron. From this, scholars infer a lost Greek prototype.
But that inference depends on assumptions. That Roman versions derive from a single famous original. That the literary references correspond to these sculptures. That the similarities are too strong to be coincidence,
and that Roman sculptors were reproducing admired earlier works rather than improvising freely and copying each other.
Reasonable conclusions, but not certain. Classical archaeology, seems to me, often speaks with a certitude that conceals how inferential the whole enterprise is. The “original Myron Discobolus” is a scholarly composite. The original survives as an intellectual reconstruction.
The nearly-complete Discobolus Lancellotti looks so perfect that people instinctively assume it must be the “best” copy. But the fragmentary version beside it in some ways preserves more truthful structural details. In particular, traces of the massive support on the hip show how difficult the pose really was in marble. Bronze could suspend limbs in space. Marble – not as much. The cleaner version partly hides the engineering problem.
The first thing that strikes you about the Discobolus is motion. Or rather, suspended motion. The body is wound tight, almost like a spring under torsion. The torso twists against the hips. The shoulders oppose the legs. We see stored rotational-energy.
But the face remains calm, almost indifferent. Modern athletes grimace and strain. Our culture likes that. Greek classical sculpture often suppresses it. The ideal athlete is not simply powerful. He is self-controlled. Emotionally disciplined. The body may be near maximum exertion, but the face refuses to surrender composure. It feels uncanny to modern viewers. Pliny criticized the lack of facial expression. Cicero wrote that “Myron’s works are not yet very close to the truth.”
The Discobolus doesn’t look like someone throwing a discus. He looks like the idea of controlled effort. I’m guessing that’s what Myron intended. This pose is deeply awkward in marble. The original bronze allowed limbs to extend freely into space. Thin structures are possible in bronze.
Marble is less forgiving. It wants support, and mass underneath the stress points. Roman sculptors adapting Greek bronzes had to add engineering solutions into the composition. Tree trunks, struts, and short connecting bridges. The damaged copy exposes more of that hidden problem. It looks slightly less like a perfect Platonic form and more like a negotiation with gravity.
We are taught to think of these sculptures as serene embodiments of timeless ideals, floating above ordinary technical concerns. But ancient sculptors were also engineers. They had to deal with leverage, fracture points, and concepts like center of mass.
A Roman copyist translating bronze into marble was solving a physics problem, and altering the sculpture in the process.
And we should clarify this idea of Roman copyists. By the imperial period, elite Roman culture was saturated with Greek art, Greek education, Greek teachers, Greek craftsmen. Many sculptors working in Rome were ethnically Greek, culturally Greek, or trained in Greek workshops and traditions. Some even signed their works with Greek names.
So when we say “Roman copy,” don’t imagine a guy in a toga photocopying ancient Greece. He might speak Greek, train in Athens, and sculpt Italian marble for a Roman patron.
“Roman copy of a Greek original” is misleading shorthand. By the imperial period, elite Greco-Roman culture was deeply entangled. Roman aristocrats consumed Greek art as cultural legitimacy. Entire chapters of Greek visual culture survive because wealthy Romans liked decorating their villas.
This all contributes to why art historians argue about copies. Every copy contains interpretation.
From different angles, this composition changes radically. One viewpoint produces clarity and balance. Another produces compressed confusion. Limbs overlap and his body seems almost tangled. Greek sculpture was increasingly designed for controlled viewing angles.
This Discobolus was discovered in 1781 on the Esquiline Hill. It emerged during the great age of aristocratic Roman collecting, when antiquities were prestige objects.
Like other classical sculptures, the Discobolus was recruited into political ideology. It was in the first load of artwork confiscated during Napoleon’s Italian campaign. Nazi aesthetics seized upon these athletic bodies as evidence of racial ideals, despite the obvious inconvenience that the sculpture was Greco-Roman.
Hitler personally admired the Lancellotti Discobolus. Hermann Göring purchased it in 1938 from Prince Lancelotti. It seems every era reinvents antiquity in its own image. The statue somehow survived.
See it in moving pictures:
Whirled War II and Lexical Parsing Errors
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on May 18, 2026
The “World War Eleven” incident is now famous on Fox News, invisible on the New York Times. Evidence of astonishing stupidity? Or a harmless verbal stumble inflated by fascists.
Beyond the matter of Ilhan Omar’s aptitude, it raises a structural issue. What competencies should a representative have just to function as a representative?
In a republic, especially one with public hearings, media immersion and symbolic gestures, representatives are usually expected to embody a certain minimum civic literacy. Not expertise, but enough historical and cultural wits to communicate competently with constituents.
The Second World War is one of the organizing events of modern political consciousness. The UN, NATO, the Cold War, Europe’s borders, the American federal state, and noise about fascism and democracy all orbit around it. If someone genuinely doesn’t know there was no “World War Eleven,” you might naturally wonder where the floor is. It is less the mistake itself than the uncertainty it introduces.
One tradition says representatives should be broadly educated, rhetorically skilled, historically informed, capable of judgment beyond “light and transient causes” as the founders called them. That’s the old republican ideal. Think James Madison. The risk of minimum standards is oligarchy. Once you impose competency filters, who designs the test? Jim Crow era literacy tests famously became tools for exclusion, with test questions like: “In the space below, draw three circles, one inside (engulfed by) the other.”
I love that question because it is a philosophy of language seminar. Ludwig Wittgenstein would enjoy it. Meaning depends on use, shared practice, and cooperative context. Remove the cooperative context and language becomes radically unstable.
Case in point, the phrasing “one inside the other” becomes contradictory when applied to three circles collectively. “The other” grammatically implies a pairwise relationship, not a three-level nesting. Meanwhile “engulfed by” suggests total enclosure, yet only one circle can directly engulf another in a simple nested structure.
With three circles, “one inside the other” breaks down. The construction presupposes a binary relation. English idiomatically uses “the other” when exactly two relevant objects are in play. Once there are three, the grammar can no longer specify an arrangement. And, even if you judge it to mean concentric, you’d need the outer circle be inside the inner, as a literal reading would require. Non-Euclidean space?
A literal-minded reader, especially one primed to interpret carefully, reasonably concludes the instruction is malformed. It generates referential nonsense. Which circle is “the one”?
Other questions on the test are clearly designed to be obtuse. “In the first circle below write the last letter of the first word beginning with ‘L’.” What? It reveals the enormous gap between practical language use and formal precision. Interestingly, it flunks the ignorant and logicians alike.
I digressed, but I’ll return to philosophy of language in a moment.
The competing democratic ideal – competing with the republican belief that voters should be literate and their representative more so – says representatives should resemble the people, including their imperfections. Technocrats cease to represent ordinary citizens. Credentialed elites speak eloquently while understanding little.
Still, there’s a distinction between being non-elite and being uninformed. Few American warehouse workers think there was a World War Eleven. In ancient Rome, someone publicly fumbling a basic historical reference would have been seen even by illiterates as a fool diminishing the dignity of office.
If you ignore, for the moment, that matter of what should be required legally, there’s the question of what it takes to actually do the representing – to represent a constituency effectively. Representation requires some degree of shared cultural vocabulary. If representatives no longer possess historical references assumed by the public, communication between government and governed is impossible – in the Wittgenstein philosophy of language sense.
So the incident may matter less as evidence that Omar is stupid and more as a symptom of uncertainty about what democratic competence means today. We no longer agree on the minimum cultural equipment expected of public officials, or even whether such expectations are legitimate. Does the community Omar represents know about WW II?
If you’re a CNN libtard, you probably don’t even know about Omar’s WW Eleven utterance. If you’re a Fox fascist, you probably don’t know that she immediately corrected herself:
“The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, it was used to detain and deport German, Japanese, Italian immigrants during World War Eleven. Oh, Two. Sorry.”
If you’re interested in language and semantics, you might still wonder how she could make that goof, even if reading from a prompter, even if she immediately corrected it. Reference to Alien Enemies Act and deportation shows familiarity with the subject matter. Knowing that Italians were also deported exceeds median citizen knowledge. Then WW Eleven. Is the author of the words the same person who performed them? Could someone write out her thoughts about WW II and then have a memory lapse deep enough to read the words as if a stranger wrote them? Could a politician fail to review their speech-writer’s work before delivering it? Does “Sorry” acknowledge a reading error? Or that she “misspoke,” as Newsweek reported it, blaming The AP Style Guide preference for Roman numerals, “which could easily be misread as an 11,” Yahoo says.
“Misreading her notes”? Misreading the Roman numeral “II” as “11” in the context of World War seems roughly as plausible as misreading a stop sign to say “Spot” after having grown up in America. We dyslexic types might misread the letters s-t-o-p, but not on a red octagon. Could someone read aloud so mechanically, so disconnected from meaning, that the act of converting text to speech could block out a commonplace phrase? It’s not a phonological substitution, not a case of semantic familiarity without lexical capacity. No, it’s a visual parsing error that was not caught and prevented by fluency with the subject matter.
France, Italy, the Netherlands and Canada require applicants for citizenship to demonstrate knowledge of national history. No one regards such requirements as equivalent to Jim Crow. Requiring officeholders to meet minimal common-culture standards is hard to dismiss as an unfair standard. Democracy need not require voters to possess deep civic literacy but could plausibly require public officials to possess enough shared knowledge to communicate coherently within the civilization they govern.
History of Science in ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Christianity, History of Science on May 14, 2026
“Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.” – Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott
Walter Miller wrote the cyclical-apocalypse science fiction, A Canticle for Liebowitz, in 1959. Whoa. The novel’s structured in three major chunks spanning thousands of years. Despite the passage of time, each section mirrors the previous:
Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done): Civilization reaches technological heights again. And repeats the original sin of hubris and annihilation.
Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man): Humanity struggles to recover lost knowledge after nuclear apocalypse.
Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light): Knowledge is rediscovered, science flourishes again, and, yeah, you know what happens. 1960 readers didn’t.
Humanity learns nothing that sticks through each cycle of apocalypse. The monks capture and retain some history but fail to understand. The Church’s continuity is the thread stretching through the cycles.
Monks preserve knowledge as relic. Sacred texts like blueprints and purchasing orders are copied and illuminated with zero knowledge of their meaning. Preservation gets ritualistic reverence. Monks maintain continuity, its content opaque. It echoes the pre-enlightenment attitude that the past is authoritative, and the best we can do is safeguard it.
The book is too long and complex for a guy like me to summarize and interpret. My goal is smaller and more particular. Miller obviously knows history of Christianity. He seems to know history of science well and he weaves epistemology into it.
He uses two characters, Brother Kornhoer the monk and Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, a secular scholar. Kornhoer is a scientific-minded experimentalist, self-taught and deeply religious. He has a reverent awe toward natural phenomena. He invents an electrical dynamo and powers an arc lamp with it. Fellow monks deem it hellish.
Taddeo has immersed himself in electrical theory, which he is redeveloping, but has failed to demonstrate experimentally. He’s analytical, formal, and initially condescending to Kornhoer. Then seeing Kornhoer’s experimental progress, he praises him for his intuitive breakthroughs, commenting that it would have taken him, Taddeo, decades to discover this on his own.
Taddeo discusses Brother Kornhoer’s work with officials at the abbey:
“No, no, not the lamp. The lamp’s simple enough, once you got over the shock of seeing it really work. It should work. It would work on paper, assuming various undeterminables and guessing at some unavailable data. But the clean impetuous leap from the vague hypothesis to a working model—” Then thon coughed nervously. “It’s Kornhoer himself I don’t understand. That gadget—” he waggled a forefinger at the dynamo “—is a standing broad-jump across about twenty years of preliminary experimentation, starting with an understanding of the principles. Kornhoer just dispensed with the preliminaries. You believe in miraculous interventions? I don’t, but there you have a real case of it. Wagon wheels!” He laughed. “What could he do if he had a machine shop? I can’t understand what a man like that is doing cooped up in a monastery.”
On reading this, it hit me that Miller is quietly teaching History of Science. This is James Clerk Maxwell the theorist upon seeing the work of Michael Faraday, the self-taught, deeply religious experimenter associated with the Royal Institution – whose humility and faith mirrored the fictional monks’ values. And whose epistemic humility Maxwell took a lesson from.
Taddeo’s “wagon wheels!” exclamation is perfect. It grounds Kornhoer in practical mechanics rather than abstract scholarship. Faraday came from a bookbinder’s background and retained a craftsman’s relationship to apparatus. He manipulated coils, magnets, glass, wires. Maxwell then mathematized what Faraday felt.
Miller doesn’t name these references outright, but he seeds enough clues to suggest he’s fictionalizing them as archetypes of scientific discovery. This has to be common knowledge, I thought. Miller has put a a thin fictional veil on Faraday and Maxwell. Web searches find no discussion of the parallel.
Miller’s move here is shrewd. He’s not writing historical fiction per-se, but he’s dramatizing patterns from the history of science by pushing them into sci fi. Fiction as a tool for History of Science. (And here you’re supposed to understand that History of Science isn’t about names and dates.)
Miller has captured the tension between religious custodianship and scientific curiosity. He’s reminded us of the fragile transmission of pre-scientific knowledge through manuscripts and oral culture. He’s highlighted the way technological discovery (or recovery, here) precedes theoretical understanding (my Project Hail Mary review). He’s nailed the irony of having faith communities preserve secular knowledge better than secular institutions, especially post-catastrophe. The Jesuits, Aristotle’s Physics, and all that.
He’s hit on epistemology, that meeting of philosophy and science that genius nitwit scientists like Hawking and Dawkins are unable to grasp.
Maxwell deeply admired Faraday and treated his experimental insights as foundational. Though Faraday lacked formal mathematical training, his visual and experimental grasp of fields, lines of force, and induction profoundly shaped Maxwell’s work. Maxwell wrote:
“We are all, like Faraday, standing on the shoulders of giants, but the giant in this case is Faraday himself.”
More specifically, Maxwell’s 1856-65 work translating Faraday’s lines of force into a coherent mathematical model (culminating in Maxwell’s equations) was often accompanied by personal statements of humility and admiration. Maxwell saw his own equations as expressing Faraday’s intuitions in a generalized form, not as surpassing them.
In Canticle, Miller has distilled a real epistemological relationship: intuition feeds analysis, practice feeds theory. He dramatized it in a collapsed world where the expected roles are reversed. Instead of Cambridge and the Royal Institution, we get Kornhoer and Taddeo. One touches reality through experiment, another systematizes it. They recognize each other’s genius.
There’s another, less obvious, parallel. Taddeo’s reaction to Kornhoer also recalls Einstein’s attitude toward Georges Lemaître, a priest. Lemaître showed Einstein mathematically wrong. He derived an expanding universe. Einstein replied, “your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable,” but was forced to concede.
Miller seems aware of a recurring pattern in the history of science. Posterity compresses the process of experimentation preceding theory into a clean but false narrative. He resists the “great linear progress” rational-reconstruction version of scientific progress and its history. In some ways, Miller preempted Feyerabend and Kuhn.
A final Feyerabendian point, which I don’t think I’m simply reading into Miller: “What’s a man like that doing cooped up in a monastery?” Miller undermines the modern belief that scientific brilliance belongs in institutions – secular or otherwise.
Taddeo questions the reliability of historical knowledge from the pre-apocalypse civilization. Someone challenges him along the lines of: if you doubt the old accounts, why study the ancient Leibowitz documents at all? Taddeo replies:
“Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.”
Amazon Goes to Brazil
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on September 15, 2026
I’m trying to add a book to my Amazon Seller’s account. Amazon, as you may know, sells books.
It asks me to upload an image of the book. So I upload the images supplied by the publisher. This seems right, almost suspiciously right.
Amazon rejects it.
I read the instructions. They want photos of the front and back cover, the title page, and they want the ASIN number. Maybe a photo of the ASIN number.
“Only real-world images are accepted. Scanned or digital images, or images that have been amended, are not acceptable.”
Ah. I have entered Brazil.
Digital images are not acceptable. Amazon wants me to upload an image, a non-digital one. Am I to shoot with film? No, that would require scanning. Unacceptable.
And “amended” seems a bit bureaucratic here. An amendment ordinarily means a change made to a document, agreement, law, or record. You amend a contract. You don’t amend a photograph. Since 1990, when Photoshop came out, the word has been “edited.”
I think Amazon means it wants an unedited picture.
“Edited” isn’t merely more familiar. It’s semantically better. Does Amazon object to every possible edit? If I photograph the book, crop away my kitchen table, square up the perspective, correct white balance, and save it as a JPEG, have I “amended” the image? Apparently so; they rejected mine.
Photo of real-world object vs. “real-world photo.” It would be a start.
The striking thing is that the problem isn’t simply terrible writing. It’s a failure to model the user’s situation. Someone had a budget.
It’s as though the world’s most sophisticated bureaucracy has hired a clerk who communicates exclusively through fragments of an ISO 9001 manual. Here we, its customers, are given the perspective of its internal compliance system.
I, a seller and customer, encounter it from the perspective of a person thinking: I have a book. The publisher gave me excellent cover art. Amazon wants a picture of the book.
Eventually, I surmised that what they mean is that, for this particular step, they want a photograph of the physical book, not marketing copy. They probably want to know the seller actually possesses a copy, rather than downloading the publisher’s cover art and claiming to have a warehouse full of books somewhere. And no fraudster would think of buying one physical book and shooting an unamended photo.
Proof of physical product? Why not say so.
“Please upload an unedited photo of the physical, paper book. We use this to verify that you possess the physical product. Publisher-supplied cover art can be uploaded later but won’t be accepted at this step. ”
Three sentences. That would transform the entire interaction. “Suddenly “Real-world,” “scanned,” “digital,” and “amended” become intelligible. The seller need not reverse-engineer it from vocabulary created by a particularly inarticulate compliance department.
Amazon is an extraordinarily sophisticated technological enterprise. Somewhere behind this little dialog box are probably image-recognition systems of astonishing complexity, databases containing billions of objects, fraud-detection algorithms, and artificial intelligence capable of doing things that would have looked like science fiction last week.
And yet we have “real world unamended image.”
Oh, and the dropdown box for book category has 100+ unsorted items in it. And if you pick one, it doesn’t stick. All books are category Books/Economics.
It’s very Brazil, which is almost a great movie, available on Amazon.
Terry Gilliam had one terrific idea: what happens when bureaucracy becomes so elaborate that the machinery intended to serve people becomes the thing people have to serve?
Unfortunately, Gilliam had several other ideas he tried to put in the same movie – a Kafkaesque slapstick comedy, a dystopian political satire, a parody of mid-century futurism, and something about terrorism and state violence.
Amazon, on the other hand, seems to have gotten Gilliam’s terrific one exactly right.
Update 9/16:
“the images you provided did not meet our image guidelines it mismatch the author name.”
Update 9/17:
books, humor, publishing, self-publishing, writing
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