Hello, plus Porphyrius

Hello!

So, what's this blog?  Really, I'm not yet sure.  Maybe I'll post a lot, or maybe I'll never post again.  Maybe it'll have some clear focus, maybe it will remain eclectic.  And why did I name it Porphyrius?  Again not totally sure, but read below to learn about the whale Porphyrius.

I enjoy reading and learning about a variety of topics in math, history, linguistics, music, etc..., and occasionally something really piques my interest.  My original idea for this blog is to record some of these things and explain them here, partly to share them with my (probably quite small) reader base, but mostly to better understand them myself.  For today, I'll just share a little bit about some history I like.

Porphyrius?  (with lots of historical rambling, too)

The Roman empire of the 6th century CE saw explosive new conquests accross the Mediterranean world as well as some of the largest and most ambitious building projects in the empire's history, but it also witnessed a subsequent cataclysm of internal instability, territorial overextension, and natural disaster.  By this time, the empire of the west had ceased to exist; Italian political authority in Britain, Gaul, and Hispania had long since disintegrated, and a string of ethnically Germanic conquerers controlled the old Roman heartland in central Italy.  The Eternal City itself had now been sacked twice: once rather lightly in 410 by the Visigothic king Alaric (once a Roman aligned leader of foederati, or non-Roman mercenaries in service of the empire), and again in the far more destructive 455 sack by Vandal king Genseric.

Despite the abdication of the western Emperor in Ravenna -- recall that Ravenna in north-east Italy had been the political calital of the West since some time during the reign of Honorius r. 395-423 --,  aspects of Roman culture and civil society endured.  During the reigns of the Germanic king Odoacer and of Theooric who deposed him, the city of Rome functioned on a local level much as it had for generations.  It was of course much depopulated, having lost maybe ~25% of it's peak one million-strong population of the imperial period, and full of neglected temples to obsolete gods and extravegant amphitheaters for games now too expensive for any king or nobleman to sponser.  But the senate still endured, rubber-stamping the edicts of Visigothic kings much as it had for the emperor-autocrats of the past.  And or course the Pope remained as well, the Patriarch of Rome,  primus inter pares or first among equals of the Orthodox patriarchs.

So for Justinian, who came to the throne in Constantinople in 527, Rome was lost but by no means long gone.  And we should remember that Justinian though of himself as Roman rather than Byzantine.  In fact, the citizens of Constantinople would call themselves Romaioi right up until the Ottoman conquest in 1453.  So the young Macedonian emperor of a Rome without Rome set his sights on reconquest, and by all accounts he succeeded tremendously.  Under his star general Belisarius, the Romans of Constantinople requonqered all of North Africa and Italy in a series of conflicts known as the Gothic Wars.  It was really these wars, ironically, that doomed the city of Rome.  After being taken back and forth several times between Belisarius and his Gothic adversary Totila, the population of Rome further plummeted.  Many of its remaining treasures were looted, many of its standing monuments knocked down.  By the end of the wars, Justinian had eventually secured control over Italy and North Africa in what looked like a glorious Roman revival; he completed a building spree that included the church of holy wisdom, the Hagia Sophia, which still marks the Istanbul skyline untill today, albeit repaired over the following centuries and now with a set of Islamic minarets.

But especially the latter years of Justinian's reign were a disaster.  Already in 532, discontent had shown itself in the streets of Constantinople.  The chariot-racing scene in the city was broken into two opposing factions: the Blues and the Greens.  Each had their own charioteers and fans (or should I say hooligans).  The two factions became not just sports teams but social and even political groups with their own street gangs and whose discontent threatened the stability of the state.  Justininian had years earlier been steadfastly on team Blue, but he now tried to appear impartial so as not to anger the Greens.  But the Greens didn't buy it, and their anger with the Blue Emperor catalysed discontent around lots of other political and even religious issues until the city erupted into mob rule.  Rioters burned down entire neighborhoods, and Justinian supposedly even planned to flee the city until convinced to stay by his wife Theodora.  He eventually regained control and commanded the army to massacre 30,000 of his own citizens where they stood in the street.  The uneasy calm lingered for nearly a decade, until plague arrived in 541 that killed some unknown but large portion of the city, maybe more than half.  The remainder of Justinian's reign was an attempt to consolidate what he had conquered abroad and to stabilize what he supposedly ruled over at home.

Justinian's reign is polarizing for these reasons and others.  He is seen as a great conquering king, a foolhardy glory-seeker, a tyrant, an enlightened emperor, a defender of Christianity, a fundamentalist bigot, and much more.  After his reign, however, it is clear that the empire continued to tire itself out for the next hundred years until the mid 7th century, when after one final and devastating war against the Persians, the empire lost more than half its territory in a single decade to the new Muslim state that burst unforseen from the Arabian desert.

We are in the very fortunate position of knowing a whole lot about Justinian's Gothic Wars in intricate detail thanks to the historian Procopius.  The Procopius, who lived in the early and middle parts of the 6th century CE, is probably our most important and detailed historical source for the whole period.  He is most famous for two works: his A History of the Wars and his Secret History.  The former was an official history of Justinian's glory, while the latter was a private work and one that desparaged Justinian as an incompetent despot.  But it is Book VII of the History of the Wars that we're interested in today.  After Procopius chronicles the 13th year of the Gothic Wars, he tells us in the final lines about a very different sort of problem faced by the people of Constantinople.

Procopius tells us that late in the year 547, "the whale, which the Byzantines called Porphyrius, was caught. This whale had been annoying Byzantium and the towns about it for fifty years, not continuously, however, but disappearing sometimes for a rather long interval."  Apparently, Porphyrius used to sink ships and drown traders before disappearing again under the waters of the Bosphorus.  Porphyrius was some 30 cubits (about 15m) long and 10 cubits (5m) wide.  Justinian failed for years to capture the whale before one day while chasing a pack of dolphins, Porphyrius ran himself aground at the mouth of the Black sea.  The locals gathered up axes and tried to hack Porphyrius to death but apparently could not.  But after hauling it further inland, they did finally put down the creature and collected its meat, some supposedly eating it right then and there.  Procopius tells us that the superstituous townspeople connected the appearence and death of such a great animal with the disastrously high Nile floods of that year, but he tells us little else about this poor creature or its gruesome end.

We can speculate that Porphyrius might have been a sperm whale, since its size comes in at about the average size of a sperm whale if we believe Procopius's measurements.  But it could have just as easily been a large orca or some other species.  We can wonder about the name, too.  Perhaps the whale's name (Greek Πορφύριος) comes from the similar Greek word for the color purple, as a reference to the whale's color.  The color purple was also a regal color, so maybe the name was some humorous reference to the whale's power over the city or even a sign of reverence for such a force of nature.  Or maybe Porphyrius was named after contemporary chariot-racer of the same name by fisherman sports fans.  (In fact, the charioteer Porphyrius was one of only a select few charioteers beloved by both the Blues and the Greens.)  Whatever the case, we will almost certainly never know anything more about that whale or about the lives of the everyday Romaioi who sailed through his terriotry, christened him Porphyrius, or ate him raw on the beach in the winter of 547.

Sources:

Paul Stephenson, New Rome: The Roman Empire in the East

Procopius, the History of the Wars (translation at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Procopius/Wars/home.html)

John K. Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo, A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World.  American Journal of Archaeology , Apr., 2002, Vol. 106, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 187-227