The Dream of Apollo
Prophecy, literacy and Rome’s remaking of the world
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche first articulated his mythopoetic cultural history of the West as a dance between the dual forces of Apollo and Dionysus.
Apollo he characterised as the disciplined creative drive towards the harmonious and the beautiful, but one which tended towards an excessively rational, structured, and detached way of thinking; prone to crafting beautiful illusions. The solar god whose sharp shadows had enabled measurement and quantification from the earliest antiquity; “the light that measures all things” and “The god of individuation and just boundaries.” While Apollo, represents the “divine image of the principium individuationis” the principle of individual identity - Dionysus represents the breakdown of the individual, and a surrender to chthonian world of collective revelry and the vital, chaotic, and creative impulses necessary for true artistic and cultural flourishing.
Throughout the summer, Apollo’s oracle the Pythia would sit on the tripod in the sacred adyton chamber at the heart of the temple at Delphi, inhaling deeply the sacred vapours - either ethylene rising from deep within the earth, or burning cannabis similar to the Scythians or Indo-Iranians - and in an altered state of consciousness would speak in otherworldly verse in response to questions from pilgrims. Interpretation of this sacred poetry was conducted through priests, but was ambiguous, with the same prophecy to be applicable in various scenarios and contexts. Despite Apollo being the divine source of measurement and archer-god of precision, this uncertainly, as we will see, was a feature, not a bug of the consultation. For Nietzsche this dual nature of the god of measurement and symbolic illusion is the essence of the Apollonian principal of facilitating cultural hallucinations and waking dreams.
In Winter, as his solar light dimmed, they believed Apollo left Delphi to dwell among the Hyperboreans in the far north. Ritual activities then came to focus on Dionysus and collective drunken frenzy of communal singing and dancing, which reinforced community bonds by collapsing boundaries. Plutarch, a priest at Delphi for the last three decades of his life, went so far as to say that the two gods were in fact one; as Carlos A. Segovi put it, “with Dionysus’s symbolising nature’s becoming and Apollo’s symbolising being”. Both these forces - Apollonian discipline and Dionysian surrender - were necessary for true creation and comprehension, but by the 1st century AD, the two were becoming unbound. Writing at this time Plutarch wrote a troubled account of the voice of the gods of Delphi slowly retreating from the world, at a time when Rome’s Apollonian intellectualism was reigning triumphant, untethered and unrooted from Dionysian intuition and ambiguity.
Nietzsche singles out Socrates as the villain who first sewed discord between these two cultural forces. The “theoretical man” who, unlike the artist who is content with ambiguity and the veil which forever cloaks reality, instead follows “the guiding thread of causality” and where “thought reaches into the deepest abysses of being and is capable not only of knowing but also even of correcting being.” For Nietzsche, Socrates embodies the triumph of reason over life; for McLuhan, he symbolises the triumph of division over connection. Yet both of these are characteristics of a deeper duality; the pathologies of the left hemisphere with its fixation on abstraction and isolating the figure from the ground; in retreating to the workspace of abstraction and the gleaming “the inner fantasy world” of Apollo mistaken for the world itself, in all its Dionysian turbulence.
Nietzsche wrote the Birth of Tragedy in part as a polemic against the pathologies of rationalism and the devitalised culture of 19th century Germany, and it can likewise be read as a critique of our contemporary obsession with quantification, systematisation and analysis. This piece, however, is not a sequel but an origin story. A parable of the first time Apollo and the left hemisphere were unleashed in all their their imperious splendour, in a vast material reordering of the world. That while the Apollonian instinct to chart and measure and manipulate unleashed the bizarre proto-steampunk world of Pax Romana, its drive for deeper certainties in Apollo’s divine illusions drained the world of meaning, and paved the way for its collapse.
Exalted Administrators
Literacy within the armies of the Roman Republic were unusually high by the standards of the ancient world. While not all soldiers were not budding essayists, they could read and write orders and understand rosters and schedules, giving them a logistical and tactical advantage over illiterate enemies. Importantly though, literacy was incentivised within the power structure of the detachment itself, recognised as a key to social mobility within the unit and in Roman society more broadly. Exalted standard bearers the aquilifer (“eagle-bearer”), draped in bear skins and elevating the aquila of the legion, could earn double the salary of a regular soldier. This sacred duty could only be eared by achieving a high degree of numeracy and literacy, as they also acted as administrators and treasurers of the unit.
Fabri were specialist units of assorted craftsmen and engineers who also required high levels of literacy, and were responsible for the astonishing feats of construction and logistics for which the Romans are famous. Not just the castra military forts which were formed from forests every single day while on the march, fabri allowed the Romans to innovate in battlefield situations to outmaeuver enemies, examples of which were chronicled by Caesar himself, such as the two-walled fort made during the siege of Alesia, or the ad-hoc bridge built over the Rhine in 10 days. While seen as remarkable engineering accomplishments today, one can only imagined they were perceived by the Gauls and Celts as a power approaching the supernatural. This type of fusion of high-literacy and engineering prowess within the military and high society was to be a hallmark of Rome's expanding imperium.
During its initial period of expansion during the Republic, literacy amongst the armed forces of Rome enabled domination over its foes, leading to an autocatalytic feedback loop in which as its imperium grew, so did the gravity of centralisation and a hunger for greater glory. As argued by Harold Innis in Empire and Communication, as information flowed back and forth from battlefield to “boardroom”, it created a dynamic that led to state centralisation and weakening the power of the Senate.
The problem of government over large areas compelled an emphasis on bureaucratic administration… With the growth of administration the power of the emperor was enhanced and in turn used to secure new support.
Literacy enhances the traits of the brain’s left-hemisphere, which is specialised in toolmaking and manipulation, a characteristic it extends to language itself. Literacy also has a bias towards fragmentation, abstraction and sequential thinking that occurs almost below the level of awareness, as it rewires the literate mind’s perception of the world. In McLuhan’s view the written word privileges the explicit, linear, and literal forms of knowledge over the holistic, simultaneous, and often ambiguous knowledge of oral cultures that preceded them. In Rome, its imperium was visible in constellations of parchment and wax tablets. From this abstracted administrative centre, what Caesar and his engineers achieved on the banks of the Rhine would now be achieved by his successors across all of Europe.
Celestial signals
During Caesar’s funeral games in 44BC, a comet appeared in the sky lasting seven days. Visible in broad daylight, it was by some estimations the brightest such object seen in recorded history. Such rare celestial events were symbols of foreboding in antiquity, and given the instability in the aftermath of the dictator’s killing, could easily have been perceived as a cataclysmic omen.
It is unclear where the alternative explanation came from, though subsequent events attributes it to canny propaganda on behalf of his heir and adopted son, the young Caesar Octavian. Contemporary understanding of comets is that they originate from the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system or the abysmal void of interstellar space. But knowing not of such things, in the turbulent days following the assassination a widespread belief developed that the heavenly spectacle was the Caesar’s soul ascending the realm of the Gods. In time, a temple would be build to worship him, at the back of which was a huge statue with the deep space object radiant on his forehead.
In antiquity, the environment was a primordial medium in which one could sense the presence of forces beyond our comprehension. This could be felt in the form of dramatic public spectacles such as comets or earthquakes, but also starling murmurations and the inner world of dreams. Determining meaning from the noise was the discipline of an ancient expert class with sophisticated inductive and abuctive techniques.
In 36BC, a bolt of lightning struck land on the Palatine Hill owned by Octavian, a portentous omen for a people so sensitive to signals from the gods. From the Etruscans, the Romans had inherited an elaborate system for interpreting these atmospheric events, involving multiple subject matter experts who consulted sacred texts called the Libri Fulgurales or “Lightning Books” which outlined established methodologies of interpretation. First the augur would take into account variables such as which 16 sectors of the sky the lightning came from and returned to, as well as the structure and form of the thunderbolt to determine which deity was making its will manifest. Afterwards the site of the strike was then investigated by another type of specialist, the fulguratores who looked at the entry and exit points of the bolt, the type of damage done and the nature of the object or place struck. On completing the analysis, the consultants concluded that there was nothing to fear. That the lightning was in fact a sign from the gods that the space should be dedicated to new temple. But rather than founding a temple to Jupiter, as was traditional, they made the decision to dedicate it to a foreign deity; Apollo, god of prophecy and the guiding light of the sun.
It was deeply unusual that Apollo, a deity of music, archery and foresight in faraway Greece, should be exalted in such a way in the heart of Rome, given his relative obscurity with the general public. Yet it was also said that Octavian’s mother, Atia, received a divine visitation from the god in the form of a snake following a visit to his Temple, exactly nine months before he was born. The contemporary view is that these stories of divine parenthood are myths concocted by imperial propagandists to justify Augustus’ legitimacy at autocrat, but one can see why Octavian the man - an organisational genius with an instinct for precision and detail - might be drawn to the archer God of steady aim and precision. Why the god of transcendental harmonies should appeal to the orchestrator of the largest army Rome had ever seen.
High-born Octavian was immersed in Greek culture throughout his youth, having been educated from a young age by a Greek slave called Sphaerus, who ostensibly was there to teach him reading, writing, arithmetic and the Greek language. Octavian had such fondness for him that he not only freed him from bondage but gave him a full state funeral when he died - a very unusual fate for a mere maths tutor. Before his assassination, Caesar also sent Octavian to Apollonia to study philosophy, rhetoric and military engineering. Alongside him was Marcus Agrippa, a youth from a relatively low-born family who Caesar seemingly saw potential in. An altogether more salacious theory, proposed by the classicist F.A Wright, is that Agrippa was in fact Caesar’s illegitimate son and fruit his libidinous lifestyle (“a man of notorious virility” and “every man's woman and every woman's man”). Not only did it explain a variety of circumstantial oddities, such as Agrippa quietly dropping his family name, but that “in all Roman history there is only one man who equals Agrippa in organising ability; in military skill, and in unlimited capacity for work.”
Perhaps even more than Octavian, Agrippa manifested the Apollonian qualities of order and instrumental power, and would become an outstanding engineer and military strategist. Agrippa’s technical ingenuity was matched by his relentless drive for efficiency and innovation. In the campaign against Pompey, he not only oversaw the construction of a new fleet but also engineered the harpax — a revolutionary catapult-fired grappling device that allowed Roman ships to seize and draw in enemy vessels for boarding. Agrippa was naval general in Octavian’s titanic final showdown against Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, which saw the co-ordination of 200,000 legionaries and 450 warships; at this point in time the largest army ever assembled in Europe. Supposing it destiny, Octavian attributed his victory to Apollo, for whom there were several major temples in the region.
It was for these reasons that it was Apollo would take centre stage on the Palatine Hill on the site of the thunderbolt, elevated to the level of Jupiter and associated with an array of new characteristics, including leadership, knowledge, the maintenance of social order. Suetonius also wrote that Atia had a prophetic dream that her entrails would be “borne up to the stars and spread over the whole extent of land and sea, while Octavius dreamed that the sun rose from Atia's womb” (Suetonius, c.121). Dreams, we are to suppose, that marked out the fate of Octavian and Rome to bring the quantifying light of Apollo to the entire world.
Extending Literacy, Extinguishing Uncertainty
Much has been written of Augustus’ skill at propaganda in his association with the solar god, yet this metamorphosis of Rome from Republic to Empire represented not just a work of the imagination or simply a political transformation, but what looks like the crossing of cognitive boundary due to the widening of literacy and organisational threshold in the complexity Roman society. These new aspects can also be seen as a manifestation of the impact the written word was having on Roman society at large, and the unleashed left-hemisphere’s hypertrophied sense of order reflecting itself in divine form. In Apollo’s migration from Delphi to Rome, he was in a certain sense reborn and rebooted, as was Rome itself. Yet he was untethered from the counterbalancing force of Dionysus, and uprooted from the oracle at Delphi.
Apollo was not the only god who gravitated to Rome. As the imperium of the late republic grew, it absorbed many new deities and cults from across the Mediterranean and Europe, who brought with them their own traditions and means of interpreting celestial signs. For this reason, foreign cults were often viewed with suspicion by Roman elites, dismissed as founts of superstitio, characterised by Cicero as “empty fear of the gods” as they were perceived as an unending source of panic and portentous omens. After twenty years of Civil War, Octavian recognised the danger of this, and in establishing the foundations of the empire, set out to suppress these sources of chaos as one might suppress fire hazards. As such, the new Emperor decreed that divination and astrology, subversive source of uncertainty in decision-making, needed to be regulated.
On its consecration in 28BC, the sacred Sybilline texts were moved to the spectacular new temple of Apollo on the Palatine, which was to become the single source of truth on all prophetic and divinatory matters. To consolidate this monopoly, the First Citizen made illegal to consult astrologers in private, and had freelance diviners subject to trials and persecutions. Over 2000 proscribed books of divination were burned. Under the radiance of Apollo and under the eternal watch of the celestial Caesar, uncertainty was to be extinguished in this new age of Augustus.
Literacy was a key objective in this new era. Historically, libraries in Rome were located in the private homes of the Senatorial elite, and inaccessible to the public. Keen to change this, Augustus built two public libraries in Rome, one of which was the new Apollo temple complex, with texts in both Greek and Latin. As the god of knowledge it made sense for Apollo’s impact site to become the epicentre of learning.
Rome never experienced a print revolution in part because it didn’t need to. During the age of Augustus books were, remarkably, almost as affordable as they were during the time of Gutenberg. At its height, the steady flow of Papyrus from Egypt and slaves from its iterative conquests provided everything it needed to fuel a written economy and maintain a vast centralised bureaucracy. The Scriptores Librarii were a specialised class of slaves whose role it was to duplicate books by hand as well as maintain libraries, dictate letters and in later centuries, physically bind books. Through their toil a highly educated reading public could emerge to enjoy retail works of epic poetry, history and encyclopaedia, not to mention proto-fictional travel journals.
Literacy also altered the physical environment as regular reading became an established social norm. Vitruvius served as a military engineer under Julius Caesar and Augustus, specialising in artillery construction and other ad-hoc spectacles of Roman engineering. In peacetime, he turned his talents to architecture, and, of course, wrote The Book on classical architecture. Within which he instructs how structures should be built to maximise the light required for reading.
The sleeping rooms and libraries should face towards the east; for their utilisation demands the morning light; also the books in the library will not decay.
Agrippa too, in peacetime, turned his organisational talents to a massive overhaul of Rome’s water system. He repaired existing aqueducts such as the Aqua Marcia and built new ones, including the Aqua Julia and Aqua Virgo, the latter of whuch still supplies water to Rome’s fountains today. He constructed Rome’s first large-scale public baths, the Thermae Agrippae, which set a new standard for engineering and public hygiene, and built the original Pantheon; a temple to all of the gods. Agrippa’s engineering influence also extended beyond to the provinces, particularly Gaul, where he founded new towns (such as Colonia Agrippinensis, modern Cologne) and improved existing cities with theatres, temples, and other civic amenities.
The Vindolanda Tablets, discovered in Hardian’s wall in Scotland at the furthert extent of the empire, give us a vignette of how the literacy played a role in the function of the Empire at its height, and are a microcosm of Rome’s administrative structure. Thin, postcard-sized slices of locally-sourced birchwood on which were messages in cursive Latin, penned in ink which used ingredients from distant parts of the Empire. Some of the contents of them feel relatable, such as a birthday party invitation, and a request to a superior officer for a fresh supply of beer. But they also provide a vignette of how literacy offered a profound advantages over the Brittunculi hordes. As economist William Bernstein writes in Masters of the Word;
The Vindolanda Tablets provided historians with a remarkable window on Roman rule, particularly how a few scattered literate legions could co-opt and control a vastly larger native population. These records minutely detailed unit rosters, supply purchases, construction of weapons and buildings, and communications with other units and with the central command in newly founded Londinium (London), hundreds of miles to the south.
Samo Burja, consultant and Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation, believes this era of high empire is also a wholly different reality from the Republic in terms of technological and organisational complexity. Rather than contemplate what the Roman Empire would look like if it had industrialised, he concludes that in important ways, they did industralise. The water-based infrastructure pioneered by Agrippa and Augustus was used not just for bathing and milling flour, but also for tasks like ironworking, sawing wood, and even cutting marble at industrial scales.
Under the eye of the solar god, measurement became standardised across the Empire. Agrippa himself is credited with standardising the Roman mile (mille passus), and the era of the empire is characterised by standardised mass-produced goods —pottery, glassware, statues, and military equipment with interchangeable parts — supporting a sophisticated consumer economy with a substantial middle class. Burja maintains that the level of organisation and technological sophistication in this era is unprecedented and unappreciated. Not swords and sandals but “swords, sandals and weird mechanical devices” describing an almost steampunk world of strange contraptions including steam-powered doors and proto-robotic automata.
Yet in the move to Rome from Delphi, what was lost in this new age of Apollo was the balancing power of his entangled force of Dionysus. The lack of vitality lamented by Nietzsche in 19th century Germany had also afflicted the people of Rome. As Apollo’s brilliance blazed, Delphi, already in decline, became less relevant to the decision-makers of the day. Delphic priest Plutarch, writing around 80 years after the death of Augustus, lamented that the type of questions being asked the oracle had become so trivial. No longer did kings come to contemplate the fate of nations, now the questions are of;
slight and commonplace matters, like the hypothetical questions in school: if one ought to marry, or to start on a voyage, or to make a loan; and the most important consultations on the part of the State’s concern the yield from crops, the increase of herds, and public health.
But what disturbed Plutarch the most was not the low quality queries that pilgrims would bring, but that the oracle itself had lost her connection to the divine (Something Milton would cite as related to the coming of Christ). Part of this faded role is due to the fact that if one wanted to get guidance on grand strategies, one would travel to Rome and the, not Delphi. Who needs the mystical guidance of the Pythia when we have the vast instruments of state to plan and predict? They would see the future not in the ambiguous utterances of the oracle, but in the scrolls and wax tables in imperial offices and archives; the archaic equivalent of the spreadsheets and PowerPoint. Yet this vision of the world in complex abstraction was what blinded the later rulers of Rome to the realities of their own decline.
Writing was central to Rome’s rise and martial dynamism, but that as literacy hardened into bureaucratic husk, also played a role in its downfall. Burja, who has made a career of studying how civilisations decline, describes how when the mechanisms of state are operating at full capacity, the “these were factories of symbol manipulation, where things such as tabulating taxes or ensuring logistical supplies for armies or undertaking the necessary preparations for public works in a city and so on.” But when they begin to break down, when institutional knowledge is lost, it leads to a “persistent long-term failure to understand reality”. Roman administrators, whose understanding of the world and their wealth and power existed only on paper, while barbarians were establishing parallel legal and tax systems in reality.
Rome eventually reached the limit of what information technology allowed in terms of storing and processing of information, having failed to maintain institutions and mechanisms for long-term knowledge preservation. And as the extent of the empire reached its geographic maximum the supply of slaves dried up, leading to a decline in the number of books and an increase in their cost. The reading public shrank. The Library of Apollo on the Palatine was still in use by the 4th century AD, but fell into gradual disuse and decline alongside Rome itself, and like other libraries, succumbed to the entropy of fire and the withdrawal of imperial support and maintenance.
Even in the military, as the empire struggled with manpower shortages, especially from the 3rd century onward, it increasingly relied on recruiting non-Roman, often non-Latin-speaking “barbarian” auxiliaries and mercenaries. These recruits were less likely to have any Latin literacy, and the army’s ability or incentive to teach them declined as organisational standards slipped, and the instrumental organisational power of Caesar and Agrippa became the thing of memory.
Boundaries, so clear to the discriminating eye of Apollo, is dissolution and disorder from the plural perspective of Dionysus. So while the exact date and time when Rome “fell” is forever debated - for now - the waking dream of Apollo was over.