A Lifeless Load, a Nameless Thing

The death of King Priam

I am currently reading Joseph Spence’s (1699-1768) Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (Oxford, 1966, “Anecdotes” for short). It is a large collection of table talk and backstairs gossip, harvested mostly from conversations Spence had with Alexander Pope and his circle. It contains some very funny anecdotes, one of my favourites being a story about the Duke of Marlborough’s legendary love of money. Shortly before his death, the old Duke was playing cards with Dean Jones one evening at Bath, and when they finished, he was up on his opponent by about sixpence. This obscenely wealthy magnate, the builder of that monstrous pile, Blenheim Palace, pestered Jones for that sixpence all evening. He claimed that he would be needing it to pay for a chair to take him home that night. Poor Jones told him he had no silver on his person, but he eventually broke down under Marlborough’s incessant nagging and somehow managed to make change from a guinea and thus paid the glorious Duke his sixpence. However, later that night it was observed that Marlborough opted to walk home instead, to save the cost of a chair (see Anecdotes #369).

Besides these entertaining biographical tidbits, much of Spence’s Anecdotes is filled up with conversations in which Spence and Pope nerd out over the technical and critical aspects of the poetical arts. At some point in early May, 1744 there occurred the following exchange between the two men:

“‘I did not use to like a verse in the Iliad,’ [said Spence,] ‘perhaps from its having a liquid in almost every word in it:

          He lies, a lifeless Load, along the Land.’

Aye [said Pope,] but that does not make it run on like a river-verse; it only weakens it. ‘Tis as the thing described, nerveless and yet stiff” (Anecdotes #399).

Now, the line that so bothered Spence was Book XV, line 507 in Pope’s translation of the Iliad, describing the dead Lycophron, slain by Ajax. As consummate an artist and critic as Pope was, I am nevertheless compelled to side with Spence here, though perhaps for other reasons than his.

First, despite Pope’s protestation to the contrary, the line does seem to run on in a slow meandering fashion. Indeed, the preponderance of “liquids” – the lack of hard consonants – does not merely “weaken” the line; it downright kills it. If Pope’s intent was to illustrate by sound the image of a “lifeless load”, he succeeded, though to ill effect in my opinion.

Second, the problem is not merely that there is a preponderance of liquids; rather, there is a preponderance of the same liquid. The alliteration of “L” is overdone, and the overall effect is to give the line the grating sing-song quality of Middle English alliterative verse, thereby destroying whatever sense of loftiness the line was meant to convey. The line’s subject matter should make it point to the reader and say “This terrible thing has happened: laugh if you can.” Instead, the line is practically a burlesque and is more apt to invoke laughter than suppress it.

Third, perhaps less importantly, the choice of “along” as a preposition is somewhat jarring. There seems to me to be an active quality to it that is out of keeping with something dead. One more often comes across the preposition “along” in tandem with an active verb, as in the following other examples from Pope’s works:

        “On which a mimic Serpent creeps along”
                                                      (Iliad, XI.50)

         “Flies o'er th' unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.”
                                                     (An Essay on Criticism, l. 373)

         “A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
          That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow Length along.”
                                                                          (Ibid. ll. 356-357)

A dead body neither creeps along, skims along, nor drags itself along. It just lies. And although I suppose it’s not grammatically incorrect to say a dead body may lie along something, it more typically lies upon it, as would a rock, a bag of sand, or some other weighty but lifeless object. These are passive things for which the default motivating force, if they can be said to have one at all, is the downward pull of gravity.

Ironically, the last example – “That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow Length along” – has a similar lazy dulling effect as the “lifeless load” line that disgusted Spence, except that here the effect is intentional; it makes a point.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about Pope’s lifeless line of lolling “liquids” is that in writing it, he knew of and was probably imitating a much better example. I refer to Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Æneid, II.560-561, describing the dead body of King Priam:

         “On the bleak Shoar now lies th’ abandon’d King,
          A headless Carcass, and a nameless thing.”
                                          (Dryden’s Æneid, II.762-763)

It is a haunting end to a great man, and my only quibble with the versification is that in the first line I would remove “now”, which really does no work, and expand the contracted second definite article, as in

         “On the bleak shore lies the abandoned King”

But this is a mere bagatelle. As they stand, the lines approach perfection, insofar as they most effectively evoke the terrible image of a great leader of men, whom “Monarchs like Domestick Slaves obey’d,” reduced to pointless carrion. The entire passage from which they are plucked raises up a sublime terror in the reflecting reader, who is left enveloped in a void silence.

Curiously, as Pope (unsuccessfully) imitated his hero Dryden’s lines, Dryden was himself imitating Sir John Denham (1614-1669). “Imitating” is putting it charitably. In 1656, Denham published The Destruction of Troy, his translation of the first 561 lines of Book II of the Æneid. In it, we find the following couplet (ll. 547-548):

         “On the cold earth lyes this neglected King,
          A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.”

If I may be allowed to end on a note of pettiness, mark that the King here lies on the cold earth, not along it.

Actually, I will not quite end there. As far as I can make out (for the geography is not entirely clear), in Dryden’s Æneid, Priam was killed by Pyrrhus upon an altar, presumably somewhere in his palace. Now, how did his body get from there to “the bleak shore” upon which it lay? I don’t have an answer, but I can’t help thinking that a reader of Dryden’s day might have thought, perhaps subliminally, of a different sense of the word “shore” here, for at that time it was also a slang term for a sewer, as in the following obscene lines from Lord Rochester, writing about a notorious London prostitute of his day:

         “Bawdy in thoughts, precise in Words,
          Ill natur'd though a Whore,
          Her belly is a Bagg of Turds,
          And her C--t a Common shore.”
                          (“On Mistress Willis,” ll. 17-20)

The thought of great Priam’s corpse lying in such circumstances would make his death seem even more pathetic. Against this interpretation, however, is the fact that a body would normally lie in a sewer, not on it.

So here lieth the lesson: As I discovered when trying to learn German many years ago, those little prepositions can mean everything. Indeed, to paraphrase Wittgenstein (or was it Lichtenberg?), an entire metaphysics might be drawn from them.

A Bed of Ashes

In Homer’s Odyssey, 18.327-328, Odysseus has returned to his hall in Ithaca, disguised as a scruffy, aged beggar, and is plotting his revenge upon Penelope’s suitors. In a conference with Penelope, he is addressed thus by Melantho, one of Penelope’s faithless handmaids:

“Wretched stranger, you must be out of your mind, unwilling to go to a smithy to sleep, or to a place of public resort…”

Now, at first sight, one might think this a bit odd. Obviously, a beggar is presumably too poor to find accommodation at an inn, even assuming such a thing to exist in Homeric Greece. But why a smithy of all things?  Would we not expect him to resort to a barn or manger, as did the parents of our Saviour? However, after a moment’s thought, one is sure to come up with the answer: a blacksmith’s workshop was likely to be warm. But another question then arises: Why should a ragged beggar be any more welcome in a blacksmith’s abode than he was in the hall? The answer is that he wouldn’t be. We must not assume that the beggar would be inside, sleeping by the forge.

We get clarity on this passage from Daniel Defoe. Exhibit A is the following passage from Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722):

“Those who know the Position of the Glass-houses, and the Arches where they Neal the Bottles after they are made, know that those Places where the Ashes are cast, and where the poor Boys lye, are Caveties in the Brick-work, perfectly close, except at the Entrance, and consequently warm as the Dressing-room of a Bagnio...” (p. 16)

For the homeless children of Defoe’s London, a glass manufactory was similar to a smithy in ancient Greece, in that it relied on the constant operation of a furnace burning at high heat, and it used a lot of fuel, the spent remains of which would require to be regularly scooped out and disposed of. Homeless children would sleep in these still-warm piles of ashes, especially in the wintertime:

“in Winter we got into the Ash-holes and Nealing-Arches in the Glass-house, call’d Dallows’s Glass-house, near Rosemary-Lane, or at another Glass-house in Ratcliff-high-way.” (p. 9)

Actually, in these passages we see that it was not so much the ashes themselves, but rather the way they heated the surrounding brick enclosure, that created the ambient warmth. Although it’s not made entirely clear in the way Defoe describes it, it might be possible to surmise that the brickwork in question comprised the outer wall backing the forge itself, also providing warmth.

These homeless children in 18th- and 19th-century London came to be called “blackguard children” or simply “blackguards”. Consulting the OED and other sources, there seems to be some uncertainty around the origins of the term. It dates to the early 16th century, and seems originally to have been applied to the lower sort of servants who worked as scullions and kitchen knaves. But these sources also mention — without offering any evidence — that it may have originated from some military unit that wore black uniforms. That is taking the term too literally. More likely it was a mock-military term, which also had reference to servants’ livery.

The “black” part of the term “blackguard” should by now be obvious: kitchen knaves were grimy and sooty from being around fires, and homeless children would have been blackened by the ashes in which they slept. In the case of the latter, it also pointed to the fact that so many of them supported themselves as shoe blacks. Both of these reference points come together in this passage from Colonel Jack:

“As for my Person, while I was a dirty Glass-Bottle House Boy, sleeping in the Ashes, and dealing always in the Street Dirt, it cannot be expected but that I look’d like what I was, and so did we all; that is to say, like a Black your Shoes your Honour, a Beggar Boy, a Black-Guard Boy, or what you please…” (p. 7)

Of course, it was not just children that slept rough. We know from Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744) that the poet Richard Savage also slept in the ashes of glass-houses during his creditor-dodging rambles and frequent bouts of homelessness:

“He lodged as much by Accident as he dined and passed the Night, sometimes in mean Houses, which are set open at Night to any casual Wanderers, sometimes in Cellars among the Riot and Filth of the meanest and most profligate of the Rabble; and sometimes, when he had no Money to support even the Expences of these Receptacles, walked about the Streets till he was weary, and lay down in the Summer upon a Bulk, or in the Winter with his Associates in Poverty, among the Ashes of a Glass-house.” (p. 97)

Here, in the words “meanest and most profligate of the rabble” we have the makings of the primary meaning of “blackguard” as it was typically used in the 19th century: “a low, contemptible person; a scoundrel.”

Bibliography

DEFOE, Daniel. Colonel Jack. Samuel Holt Monk (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

HOMER. Odyssey (2 vols.). A. T. Murray (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

JOHNSON, Samuel. Life of Savage. Clarence Tracy (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Cicero on Rent-Seeking

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 - 43 BC

In 63 BC a Roman tribune of the people named Publius Servilius Rullus proposed an agrarian law to redistribute land. Agrarian laws were not new. The tribune Tiberius Gracchus attempted such a redistribution in 133 BC, and his brother Gaius tried again in 123 BC.

It should be noted at the outset, that agrarian laws did not propose taking privately-owned land away from current owners and redistributing it. Rather, the idea was to take some or all of the ager publicus, the public land. These were lands belonging to the Roman state, usually acquired through conquest. There was often resistance to agrarian measures from the nobility, as many rich Romans had acquired the use of such public lands, whether through corruption or fraud, for very nominal rents. Having possessed such rights to these lands long enough, many of them naturally looked upon themselves as rightful owners, even though at law they were not. Any attempt to redistribute public lands seemed to the nobility like an attempt to dispossess them of their property.

It is hard to have any sympathy with these nobles. They had used the public lands to build up huge agricultural estates (latifundia) worked by armies of slaves, while small farmers who could not compete with them lost their lands and flocked to the city. There were many needy poor crowded into the city of Rome, and preventing something from being done to better their condition seems, well, churlish.

However, redistribution became a political program for ambitious politicians to use for party purposes. There was a so-called “popular” party (the populares) who agitated for better conditions for the poor. They sought to turn mass appeal into electoral success. Opposed to them were the “better sort” (optimates), a senatorial class of wealthy, propertied and powerful citizens who preferred to rely on their traditional auctoritas and their networks of dependent clients. In reality, the leaders of the populares cared little for the poor. They were mostly led by men who could just as easily have sided with the optimates if it weren’t for the fact that they saw opportunities in playing the role of “men of the people”. By way of illustration, the wealthy patrician Julius Caesar was a popularis. And Publius Claudius Pulcher, a member of one of the most illustrious patrician families of Rome, had himself adopted by a plebeian family and changed his name to “Clodius” (reflecting the plebeian pronunciation) so that he could gain election as a tribune of the people. A man as unscrupulous as Clodius could have little real sympathy with the urban mob. The mob was simply a political tool, an alternative route to political success.

(Most of the so-called “left-wing” parties in today’s Western democracies are little different. Having worked in government relations for awhile, I’ve met many of my provincial legislature’s supposed tribunes of the people personally. I can tell you that they are all charlatans, possibly peppered with a smaller number of outright sociopaths. Calling these left-wing politicians “Champagne Socialists” would be giving them too much credit, implying as it does that they actually have a political creed in addition to their merely personal ambitions. To be fair, the right-wing politicians I’ve met are no better; they just haven’t sunk to the same depths of hypocrisy in order to cloak their moral bankruptcy. But I digress.)

It was in this context of a struggle between populares and optimates that Rullus’ agrarian law was introduced. From the populares’ point of view the introduction of the bill was a win-win situation. If it was passed, then they would get their way and gain great popularity with the plebs. On the other hand, if the optimates managed to defeat it, they would in the process have to make themselves look very bad in the eyes of the people. Cicero, who was one of the consuls that year, dared to oppose the bill. He had to walk a tightrope in doing so. He did have some small sympathy for the plight of the poor, but as a novus homo (a “new man” whose ancestors were not nobles and had never held high office) he lacked a powerful familial political base and could not afford to alienate the nobility, upon whom he was dependent for political support. But he also needed the support of the people if he were ever to be able to win another election. For someone less skilled than Cicero at tightrope-walking, to oppose Rullus’ agrarian law might have been political suicide. But Cicero opposed it.

Why did Cicero oppose the bill? In short, because it was dangerously flawed. What’s more important, it was flawed in ways that are instructive to the modern reader who wishes to contemplate various government measures that propose to do good works with other people’s money.

To begin with, Cicero noted the great secrecy surrounding the crafting of the legislation. When Cicero heard that the tribunes were planning an agrarian bill, Cicero, as consul, claimed to have sought to aid them with his political knowledge and experience. After all, he said, doing something to help the poor was a good idea (here Cicero is walking that tightrope, portraying himself as a man of the people). His overtures were rebuffed. Obviously those responsible for the bill did not wish the consul to see what they were up to.

Once the bill was introduced, many flaws became apparent to Cicero. It called for provincial public lands to be sold off, with the proceeds to be put toward purchasing (more expensive) lands in Italy. Colonies of landless poor would then be settled on them. However, the numbers didn’t add up. Cheap land would be sold (probably at a discount) to pay for more expensive lands. And large and profitable latifundia would be broken up into smaller and less profitable peasant holdings. Besides the loss in productivity (to use modern phraseology), the difference in purchase price would have to be made up from the public treasury, thereby likely bankrupting the state.

There were other problems. The sale, purchase, and distribution of the lands was to be entrusted to an elected board of ten men — the decemvirs. However, the arcane and highly unorthodox process for electing the decemvirs provided for in the bill would virtually ensure that none but populares could become decemvirs, Rullus and his cronies among them. In other words, it was a highly partisan piece of legislation. It also stipulated that any candidate for the board of decemvirs had to present himself in person for election. This was engineered to exclude Pompey from standing for election, since he was off campaigning against Mithridates in the East. Pompey was perhaps the only person in Rome at that time powerful enough to stand up to any nefarious designs of the populares.

It was with regard to the decemvirs that Cicero smelled a rat. Several rats in fact. First, the decemvirs were to be given wide discretionary powers. They could buy and sell whatever public lands they liked, to whomever they liked, at whatever price. Heck, they could even sell it to themselves if they wished, since their decisions were final and not subject to veto. It was all a recipe for near-certain corruption and public fraud on a massive scale.

The powers granted them would allow the decemvirs to buy land for a song, either for themselves or their friends. What was worse, Cicero saw the spectre of tyranny looming. Since the decemvirs could distribute lands to whomever they wished, they could strategically settle all their clients in colonies, providing garrisons and bases for future military operations against the state:

“Did you, Rullus, think that we should hand over to you and your engineers of all these schemes the whole of Italy unarmed, that you might strengthen it with garrisons, occupy it with colonies, and hold it bound and fettered by every kind of chain? For where is there any guarantee against your establishing a colony on the Janiculum [a hill just outside Rome, across the Tiber], against your being able to press and beset this city by another? ‘We shall not do that,’ says he. First, I am not so sure of that; secondly, I am afraid; lastly, I will never act so as to leave our chance of safety to depend more upon your kindness than upon our own wisdom.” (Cicero, De Lege Agraria, 1.5.16, Loeb edition)

The wide discretionary powers the bill would give to the ten land commissioners amounted for Cicero to a perfect blueprint for anyone wishing to grab absolute power to do so, which is why Cicero repeatedly referred to the decemvirs as “kings”:

“And from the first article to the last, Romans, I find that the only idea of the tribunes, their only scheme, their only aim in what they [the tribunes] do is that ten kings of the treasury, the revenues, all the provinces and the entire republic, or friendly kingdoms, of free nations — in fact, ten lords of the whole world, should be set up under the pretended name of an agrarian law.” (2.6.15)

Despite the many problems with the bill, it must still have been no easy task for Cicero to sway the people of Rome against it, for many of those people stood to benefit from it, or at least they thought they would benefit from it. He was in effect attempting to stop a bill the purported aim of which was to give relief to the poor. What kind of monster can have anything against helping the poor?

It is this dilemma that has always caught my interest in this speech of Cicero’s on the agrarian law, a speech which in the opinions of many classical scholars is otherwise not among Cicero’s major works. It fascinates me because it represents a problem that is faced by political systems today: many measures are proposed by politicians that are popular, in the sense that they purport to help some group that seems to need help, or purport to be of personal benefit (at least in the short term) to a broad plurality of voters. To oppose such a bill is to court accusations of being in the pockets of plutocrats, or of hating the poor, or of not understanding what is in the interests of the people. It takes political courage to oppose something that appears prima facie morally unassailable.

Sometimes such measures are proposed with the best of intentions by well-meaning politicians. Sometimes, less often, they are proposed with a hidden agenda that is anything but altruistic or aimed at the public good. But even well-intentioned legislation may grant administrative powers that can do damage when wielded by others who are less public-spirited. A few years ago the previous left-leaning mayor of my city, David Miller, demanded that he be given “strong mayor” powers to deal with some of the issues the city was facing. At the time it was a very popular proposal among “progressive” types, but I thought it was a very bad idea. I believed Mr. Miller was not very adept at using the powers he already had, and that little good could come of giving him more. However, putting my personal political bias aside for a moment, I ask supporters of Mr. Miller to imagine that he had been granted those enhanced powers. They would now be wielded by his successor, the right-leaning Rob Ford, who is much-despised by Mr. Miller’s “progressive” fan base. The measure would have thus cut both ways.

I am more comfortable with the general rule of thumb that administrative powers be granted by the people only very grudgingly, and only where they are clearly delineated and limited. They are sometimes necessary, but they are always a necessary evil. From this rule of thumb I am led to a syllogism that must make my “progressive” friends scratch their heads at my retrograde political views:

1.    The granting of enhanced administrative powers should generally be avoided.
2.    Activist government requires (almost by definition) enhanced administrative powers.
_____________________
3.    Therefore, activist government should generally be avoided.

I use the qualifier “generally” because there will obviously be problems that require some kind of coordinated effort by government to solve. However, I have come to the conclusion that such contingencies are much rarer than many people seem to think. At least, I propose that we use something like the following very general test to determine the necessity and extent of government activism:

1.   Is there a problem, and can it plausibly be solved? (The second part of the question is intended to eliminate administrative wild goose chases, such as “the war on drugs”, “the war on terror” and “the war on poverty”. The first part of the question is meant to draw attention to the fact that something is not necessarily a problem just because an activist or an entrepreneurial politician says it is.)

2.   Is government the appropriate or best-placed agency to solve the problem? Or alternatively: Is there a robust and exclusive rational connection between the nature of government as such and the nature of the problem?

3.   Does the government action proposed as a solution involve minimal impairment of rights?

4.   Are the enhanced administrative powers required by the solution (i) clearly delineated, (ii) accountable, (iii) revocable, and (iv) proportional?

5.   If the enhanced administrative powers necessarily include the exercise of discretion, is such discretion minimized as far as possible?

I could probably add more, but that is a start. At the very least, Cicero would have said that Rullus’ agrarian law violates 3, 4, and 5. Depending on one’s view of the nature and causes of Rome’s urban poverty, it may have violated 1 and 2 as well.

Let us return to the tightrope I referred to earlier. Cicero had to avoid alienating the senatorial nobility. This he accomplished in the very act of opposing Rullus’ bill. However, he also needed to avoid alienating the populus, which was best accomplished by somehow positioning himself as a man of the people. As an extremely wealthy consul and member of the Senate, how was Cicero to pull off this latter task? His strategy was multi-pronged.

First, in pointing out the wide powers granted to the decemvirs under the proposed legislation, Cicero repeatedly deployed the language of kingship. He harped on the fact that the decemvirs would be kings in all but name, and maybe some day in name too:

“Thus I maintain, O Romans, that this admirable and popular agrarian law gives you nothing, but makes a present of everything to certain individuals; it holds lands before the eyes of the Roman people and robs them even of liberty; it increases the wealth of private persons and exhausts the fortunes of the State; lastly, the most disgraceful thing of all, a tribune of the people, a magistrate whom our ancestors intended to be the protector and guardian of liberty, is to set up kings in the republic.”(2.6.15, italics added)

To understand this rhetorical strategy, one must understand the Romans’ almost pathological dread of kingship. To be ruled by kings was alright for the peoples of Asia, who were natural slaves anyway as far as the Romans were concerned. But the Romans had overthrown their kings and founded a republic back in 509 BC. This made them free and therefore superior to other peoples. A Roman’s reaction to the word “king” was similar to — though possibly more visceral than — a modern American’s reaction to words like “communist” or “terrorist”. In short, Cicero was attempting to turn the tables on the tribunes of the people, by portraying them as agents of monarchy and himself as protector of the republic. In his references to kingship he was pressing rhetorical hot buttons.

Second, he acknowledged the poverty that many Romans were faced with, and affirmed a desire to do something about it, but not by the means suggested in Rullus’ bill. He even bestowed some praise on reforming tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, whose memory was beloved by many of the people, but was anathema to the optimates: “For, to speak frankly, Romans, I do not disapprove of every kind of agrarian law in itself…. I am not one of those consuls who, like the majority, think it a crime to praise the Gracchi, by whose advice, wisdom, and laws I see that many departments of the administration were set in order” (2.5.10). (It should be noted that Cicero was being less than honest here, for elsewhere in his writings he had little good to say about Gracchi.)

Finally, he adopted a line of argument that, in my opinion, does Cicero little credit, for it seems designed to pander to the people’s laziness. He argued that the agrarian law was a bait-and-switch manoeuvre that would take away from the people a privilege that they already enjoyed and replace it with something of lesser value. The people already received a free grain dole. If the agrarian law were passed, they would lose this handout and have to farm for their own grain instead. This seems a very base argument. If the people were disposed to respond favourably to it, then this might say as much about the people’s lack of integrity as it does about Cicero’s.

A more charitable view is that Cicero was speaking to an audience that had been dependent on the grain dole for so long that they wouldn’t know the first thing about farming a plot of land for their sustenance. Many may have been out-of-work artisans rather than farmers. A gift of land might have been of little use to such people. If this were the case, they would probably end up selling their allotments to landowners who could make better use of them. They would then end up back in the city, landless again, with no dole, while their lands wound up in the hands of the rich. This may be why Cicero was arguing that this scheme of the popular party would in reality be no help to the people, but was more likely to make them worse off, while the rich became richer in the bargain.

In the end, Cicero was successful. Thanks to his supreme rhetorical skill, he managed to walk the tightrope, portraying himself as a man of the people and the agrarian bill as a nefarious plot against the liberties and economic well-being of the poor. Cicero was the greatest orator of the age. Our orators are sad rhetorical punies by comparison. We could certainly use a Cicero.

Such quasi-agrarian measures are easy to find today. They are most commonly of three kinds. The first kind involves the proposed sale or privatization of public assets that are a net gain rather than drain on the public treasury. Such assets are often sold off in less than transparent deals without a competitive bidding process to parties who have connections with officials doing the selling, our modern-day Rulluses. As a case study, several years ago the university at which I work sold off a huge tract of its land — an endowment that had originally been granted to it by the taxpayers of Ontario — to a developer who, it turned out, was related to someone on the university’s board of governors. There was no Cicero to speak against it.

The second kind of modern agrarian measure takes the form of some proposal for tax cuts that will “help middle class families” or “create jobs”. Successive such bills make it into law, even though they have done nothing to help middle class families or create jobs. In fact, most of them were never intended to do these things. They were intended to enrich politicians and those who lobby them. Even worse, they are passed in the face of budget deficits, thereby bankrupting future generations who have no voice in the transaction. And again, there is rarely a Cicero to speak against them, because after all, who can be against middle class families or job creation?

The third kind comes in the form of various taxes, tariffs, and subsidies intended to help one economic party, usually at the expense of another. In these cases, government is put in the position of picking winners and losers in the economy, rather then being the representative of all. The “winners” that are picked are usually those who have lobbied hardest and given the most money or in-kind contributions to politicians (i.e. they offered the largest bribes, to call a spade a spade). The “losers” are those who either played by the rules and minded their own business or who failed to lobby hard enough or contribute enough money to those with non-market power.

These are all forms of rent-seeking. In this sense, much of Cicero’s De Lege Agraria can be read as an early contribution to the political economy of rent-seeking. Cicero, it turns out, was a proto-public choice economist, providing insights into non-market decision-making. In fact, the insights offered by Cicero are at the heart of much traditional republican political theory, so perhaps we ought to say that public choice economics is in reality a branch of republicanism. It may be anachronistic to call Cicero a public choice economist, but he was most certainly a republican, one of the greatest who ever lived.

Publicans and Sinners

The Tax Collector

As a child sitting in church on Sunday mornings during one of those episodes when my parents temporarily found religion, I would occasionally hear Scriptural references to “publicans and sinners” (in Luke 15:1, for example). I remember my confusion about what a “publican” was. I had it in my head that it must be some sort of a tavern keeper or bartender. I plausibly associated it with the word “pub”. And I also associated such drinking establishments with “sinners”, not yet being old enough then to have discovered the peculiar charms of grape and grain. And interestingly, from around the 14th century, this really was the sense in which “publican” was used. And since back then, such keepers of public houses also often acted as pimps, well…

However, much later, when I became interested in Roman history, I found out that a publican was originally a tax collector, from the Latin publicanus. St. Paul was once a publican, before he had his vision on the road to Damascus. But learning about Roman publicani led me to a new mystery. You see, the publicani were not civil servants of the Roman government. Rather, they were private businessmen who had bid on contracts to collect taxes for the government. They would loan money to the government (at interest), and in exchange they would receive a franchise to collect taxes in a given area. In addition, they got to keep whatever they could extract over and above what they had to pass on to Rome. The publicani really came into prominence around the first century BC, as the Roman empire expanded and great profits were to be made in the tax farming business.

This system of public finance seems a very alien practice from our modern point of view, and it is not difficult to picture the abuses to which it would have given rise. Imagine that at tax time, a privately-contracted agent of the IRS or Revenue Canada knocks on your door (perhaps with a couple of large and threatening men beside him) and demands money. He demands not only what you owe the government, but also an extra “collection fee” to pay him for his trouble. Imagine that the only upper limit to his income is what he can extract from citizens like you. Even worse, imagine that — as sometimes happened — the government mistakenly (or corruptly) lets contracts to more than one such tax collector in your area. Now you have to cough up money to two people. Of course you could always appeal your case later, but that would take a lot of time and money, and Washington or Ottawa is a long way away, especially if there is no phone or internet.

In addition, publicans would often receive payment in kind rather than coin; they might undervalue the goods they receive from you and then sell them on at a profit. Tax collection abuse by publicani was the cause of many a provincial uprising. The Roman government knew exactly what these tax farmers were up to. It was expected that these publicans would be trying to earn their commissions; after all, they weren’t acting pro bono, out of a pristine sense of civic duty. The government only intervened if a publican overreached himself and caused a local disturbance that couldn’t be ignored by the powers that be. In any case, the publican was a byword for greed, which is why he is classed among the sinners in Scripture. He was, in effect, an extortionist.

But why would a government resort to a system that seems so inefficient? After all, the government would receive an initial loan from the publican that was less than the money available to be collected in taxes, and the loan would have to be paid back with interest. Why did it not occur to the Romans (and other tax-farming societies) to have taxes collected directly by government agents rather than by profit-taking middlemen? Well, for one thing, the Romans didn’t have highly developed economic theories, so they were only dimly aware that over-extraction by publicans might curb investment and economic growth, leading to a declining tax base in the long run.

But that alone doesn’t explain it. After all, the Romans weren’t completely stupid. They knew that the tax farmers were going to make their end somehow on the deal, otherwise they wouldn’t have bid on the contracts. And whatever profits the farmers made represented potential money that in theory could have, but never would, end up in Rome’s coffers. The publicani captured value that wasn’t being captured by the state. If we assume that all parties were self-interested, we must assume that the Roman government assessed that it was not cost-effective to catch the crumbs it knew were falling from its table.

A very old but classic paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase entitled “The Nature of the Firm” (Economica 4 (1937), 386-405) can perhaps shed light on why Rome chose to rely on tax-farming rather than a public, centralized system of tax collection. Coase envisioned private market firms as being faced with a choice very similar to that of the Roman government’s: whether to internalize or externalize (i.e. contract out) one’s business activities.

Let’s say I come up with a product that I would like to produce and sell. There are two ways I might do this (with a large number of ways intermediate between these two along a spectrum). On the one hand, I might internalize all my production. For example, I might purchase the machines I need to build my product (or even design and build the machines myself), purchase the land and buildings in which to put the machines, and hire employees to work directly for me on-site in my new factory. I may also buy trucks to ship my product to customers. I may even decide to own the retail outlets that will market my products exclusively. In other words, I could have an ownership stake in every aspect of the process of production and marketing. This pure-type of internalized production is very rare: many businesses will, for example, rent rather than own their production space, which is a kind of contracting out. As I said, there is a spectrum of possibilities.

At the other end of the spectrum, I may decide to contract out just about all of these processes to other parties to do on my behalf. For example, I might pay someone else with machines and factory space to produce the goods for me, with workers to be hired by them. I may rent trucks rather than own them, or simply hire a trucking company to ship goods for me, thereby not having to hire drivers either. I may be the only person directly employed by my firm. Again, this is an imaginary pure-type: unless it were a very simple and small business (e.g. selling homemade pet rocks) it’s hard to imagine a scenario where I could externalize literally the entire process. But in theory at least, much of it could be.

The point is, neither internalized nor externalized production is a priori more natural than the other. So instead of being surprised by the choice of the Romans to externalize much of their public finance, we should rather ask why they chose that route rather than a more internalized bureaucracy.

According to Coase, if the market were perfectly efficient there would never be such a thing as a firm, because in an efficient market it would always be easier to contract out. However, the market is never perfectly efficient. There are always transaction costs to bargaining, costs such as time spent in procurement, in seeking and communicating information, in bargaining, in enforcement of contracts, etc. There are also risks, that other parties won’t perform their end of a contract, or will make mistakes, or will divulge trade secrets. Many of these transaction costs can be avoided or minimized by internalizing them within a firm. It then becomes easier, for example, to monitor workers, to control the flow of information, or maintain standards of quality.

Generally speaking firms tend to become larger — more of their production relationships are “contracted in” — when such contracting in will lower transaction costs and/or stabilize them, or when doing so will reduce the likelihood of production mistakes, or will lower the cost or raise the supply of factors of production.

However, there are limits to the process, and it can move in the other direction, towards greater contracting out. This might happen, for example, where overhead costs increase, or where a firm becomes too big or its geographical area of operations too widespread for effective oversight or decision-making, leading to mistakes and poor resource allocation.

Returning to the Roman situation, in the Republic and early Imperial periods, tax collection and other services were contracted out to publicani. It may simply be that in early times, the Romans were culturally averse to centralized government. By later standards the early Romans had a relatively weak state. Even firefighting was privately run, and there wasn’t even a public prosecutor. Later, there was an increased movement towards internalization, with many tasks that were once performed by government contractors being performed by a growing imperial bureaucracy. With regard to tax collection, perhaps part of this process was driven by the government’s inability to effectively control the “entrepreneurial” methods of the publicani. The mismanagement of the latter would have added significant costs to the government in the form of military resources deployed to quell provincial tax revolts. As expensive as the imperial bureaucracy was, it may have become (for a time at least) more cost effective than the system of publicani, especially at first, when the profits accruing to the publicani began to accrue to the government instead.

In our time, contracting out rather than in seems to be the general trend in both the public and private sectors. For example, my city has started to contract out its garbage collection. And in 2006 the IRS started contracting out its taxpayer debt collection to private debt collection services — the new publicani of our age. Presumably, with the salaries and benefits of government employees increasing faster than those in the private sector, a point is reached where contracting out results in significant savings for government agencies like the IRS. If history is any lesson, perhaps we can expect stories of tax collection harassment and abuse to become more prominent?

As a side note, Ron Paul has announced that he will seek the presidency in 2012. Since he is on record as advocating the abolition of the IRS altogether, perhaps under his administration the government of the United States would completely revert to a tax farming system. Vanitas vanitatum, there truly is no new thing under the sun.

Honour Killing, Again

Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old. She wished to adopt a more Western lifestyle. In particular, she refused to don the hijab and traditional Pakistani garb her father insisted that she wear. Eventually, tensions in the family reached a climax, and on the morning of December 10, 2007 Aqsa’s father and older brother strangled her in the basement of their Mississauga home. They confessed to the crime on June 15, 2010.

The crime is usually referred to in the media as a case of “honour killing”. I have written about honour killing before in this blog, and my musings were inspired by Aqsa's murder, although I didn’t name her then. I’m giving this courageous girl the respect she deserves by naming her now. I am not naming her murderers, because they deserve to pass shapeless and nameless from the earth.

Since I am seeing exactly the kind of misguided commentary around the case ― now that it is back in the news ― that I saw and discussed then, I felt the need to re-post my previous piece, since the argument I offered there seems still to be pertinent.

*****

Honour killing is not new. Nor has it been, historically speaking, peculiar to non-Western cultures.

In the seventh century BC, Rome was at war with the neighbouring city of Alba Longa. It was agreed between the warring parties that the outcome of the contest would be decided by a battle of picked champions. The champions were unusual: two sets of triplets, the brothers Horatii on the Roman side, and the brothers Curiatii on the Alban side.

The Horatii won, although only one of the brothers survived. Horatius brought home his spoils in triumph, but upon seeing him, his sister broke out into lamentations. As it turned out, one of the dead Curiatii was her fiancé. Enraged that she rained on his parade, Horatius slew his sister on the spot, proclaiming, “So perish any Roman woman who mourns the enemy.” He was condemned to death for the murder, but was let off after his father appealed to the people. It seems that the Roman people did not altogether disapprove of Horatius’ conduct. For form’s sake, the family were required to expiate the crime by performing certain sacrifices.

As the old saying goes, “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.” In a somewhat similar vein, one could say that honour killing is neither done by someone honourable, nor necessarily done to someone honourable, nor does it really serve to restore lost honour. As such, it is a puzzling term.

Not only is it puzzling, but some would say that the term obscures what is often really going on when someone kills a — usually female — relation who has supposedly shamed the family. I was led to some reflections on “honour killing” by an interesting exchange I heard recently on a radio program.

One of the participants in the discussion was making the case that we should stop thinking of the phenomenon in terms of “honour killing” and instead view it under the category of “violence against women”. To a certain extent, one can see her point. After all, most honour killing does tend to be perpetrated against women. She was also concerned that the concept of honour killing, as portrayed in the media, tends to vilify immigrant communities, particularly Muslims — a group already labouring under unfair prejudice by much of mainstream North American culture. Again, point taken. Furthermore, many so-called “honour killings” have little or nothing to do with honour at all. Rather, “honour” provides a convenient pretext for disputes over money and property. Again, I don’t disagree with her point.

However, honour killing of women is quite different from, say, “run-of-the-mill” North American spousal violence in at least one crucial respect. Much like in the story of Horatius, an honour killer’s reprehensible action too often garners the (tacit) approbation of his community. Horatius' father defended his son's action, and in two recent local cases of honour killing, sons assisted fathers in murdering female relations. As long as there is broad cultural support — or at least nodding indulgence — of the practice, these men will lack a certain external source of restraint on their behaviour. On the other hand, North American wife beaters do not normally garner our support. They are correctly seen by most right-thinking people for the brutes they are. And they certainly do not get assistance from other family members.

If mainstream society treats honour killing as plain violence against women, our disapproval of the act is directed only at the perpetrator himself; the minority community may still indulge the practice. But by treating it as a culturally-embedded phenomenon, we are enabled also to direct our disapproval at those communities that lend support to it. If those communities wish to avoid such disapproval, they will have an incentive to enforce new internal norms that forbid the practice. Only once this is achieved can honour killing be treated as violence against women as such.

Tall Poppies

The poppy, as a symbol, has a special resonance in the Canadian psyche, for a few reasons. First, Canada came of age, at least militarily speaking, in the First World War. This nation’s sacrifice and the bravery of its soldiers in that war were second to none. Every year in the days leading up to November 11, Canadians duly wear a small artificial poppy pinned over their hearts (although we are not the only nation to do so). Almost every Canadian school child has for one Remembrance Day or another had to recite “In Flanders Fields”, the 1915 poem written by Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, though most of us only remember the first line or two. Although I am loath to admit it, the whole poem is rubbish, from an artistic standpoint:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing,
flyScarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The poppies that grow in the fields of Flanders are the red-flowered Corn poppy (Papaver rhoeas). Canada is now fighting a different war in Afghanistan, and that land too is filled with fields of poppies, but of another kind, and part of Canada’s job is to exterminate them. These are Opium poppies (Papaver somniferum). Incidentally, in Latin, somniferum means “bringer of sleep”, and they have indeed been the indirect cause of final sleep for many a Canadian soldier there, and the more direct cause for many a drug addict.

Leaving war aside, the poppy has another more proverbial meaning for many Canadians. There is a common conception (or misconception?) that Canada is a fairly egalitarian place. We do not like to see people become too successful. Whereas in America there is no shame in flaunting one’s wealth and success, in Canada this tends to be frowned upon. In Canada, those who get too big for their breeches will be cut down to size. As the saying goes, Canadians like to “lop the heads off the tall poppies”. This tendency is often called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome”.

Whether this is true or not, I don't know. I think it might have been the case once, but my suspicion is that now this aspect of our culture is changing. It’s probably not even strictly a Canadian characteristic. Apparently, it is a common phenomenon in places with a colonial legacy, like Canada. What I am more interested in is the imagery itself. I don’t know who coined the phrase “Tall Poppy Syndrome”, but it is based on a classical story.

The first time I came across the story was while reading Livy (1.54). Tarquin the Proud (Tarquinius Superbus), the last king of Rome received a messenger from his son Sextus, asking what he should do with the people of Gabii now that he had taken the city. Tarquin made no reply to the messenger, but while walking through his garden, he waved his stick across the poppies that were growing there, thereby lopping the tallest of them. The frustrated messenger returned answerless to Gabii and described the incident to Sextus. The son could take a hint, and he had all the prominent citizens of Gabii executed.

I didn’t realize that Livy ― or the source he used ― lifted this story from Greek history until I read Aristotle’s Politics, 1284a3, where the story of Periander is told. The original story is apparently to be found in Herodotus, but not having read Herodotus since I was a teenager, I didn’t remember it. Periander, the 7th century BC tyrant of Corinth received a messenger from Thrasybulus, the tyrant of Miletus, who needed Periander’s advice on the best way to secure his rule. According to the legend, the messenger approached Periander as he was strolling in a wheat field. After hearing the messenger, Periander remained silent but cut the tallest stalks of grain (although we are not told what he cut them with). The messenger related Periander’s behaviour to Thrasybulus, who took it to mean that if he wanted to remain secure in power, he should eliminate the most prominent citizens.

I think I prefer Livy’s version of the story because there is something terrible in using a pretty flower like the poppy for such dark counsel. Incidentally, the story of Tarquin is also related in Ovid’s Fasti (2.701-708), but there it is lilies that he lops.