Fall of the Alexian Empire

One thousand six hundred years ago last Tuesday, a very significant event occurred in the ancient world. An army of barbarian Visigoths sacked Rome in AD 410, storming in through a gate in the north-eastern city walls occupying the city for three days and grabbing a load of valuable commodities including gold, silver and silk, before making off again. It has been hailed as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.

Our understanding of this event has changed over the years. At first, I suppose the general picture was like something out of Conan the Barbarian – an unstoppable tide of hirsute warriors rampaging in with blood-stained axes, putting innocent citizens to the sword, smashing valuable vases and works of art, burning temples and libraries, spray-painting rude slogans on walls and carrying off comely maidens (I’m probably making up some of this.) Now we know that although some looting, burning and mayhem did go on, the situation was a little more complicated than had first been thought.

Alaric and the Visigoths had actually started out as Roman allies, the Empire having sub-contracted much of its army to its northern Germanic neighbours. Also, the Eastern Empire, based at Constantinople, was on the path to become increasingly more powerful and significant than Rome itself. Rome and the Western Empire had remained wealthy but had ended up fragmented and militarily feeble, propped up by subject peoples who were often treated with barely disguised contempt, if accounts from that time are to be believed.

According to Wikipedia, Alaric was a leader of foederati, companies of Gothic soldiers who fought for Rome and were paid for out of Roman taxes, the Romans being unwilling now to participate directly in their own military. He was in a good position to learn about the Empire’s weaknesses, and was also becoming increasingly disgruntled at his treatment at the hands of his Roman masters, being passed over for promotion. And he was not alone; according to Wiki, “the situation was ripe for rebellion”.

So the signs were there. I know about the fall of civilisation only too well, having been in charge of a few empires myself – not, it must be said, in what is usually known as the “real world”, where unlike my ancient Macedonian namesake I am a relatively modest and obscure individual. No, my imperial adventures have taken place in the magical and alluring realm of computer games.

World-building computer games are difficult, and normally my preference has been for games where you mostly have to run around and shoot people (Tomb Raider) or sneak around and steal things (Thief: The Dark Project). It takes a very different kind of mind set to play a game where you have to establish an entire civilisation from scratch, work out the best places to put streets and houses, always try to keep within a tight budget. This requires patience, fortitude, long-term planning and luck. It can be frustrating. There’s quite a steep learning curve – get it wrong, and you may fail and crash quite spectacularly. Even at the best of times, things are always going awry and you start to develop a terrible urge to run around and shoot lots of people. But you can’t! It isn’t that kind of game.

One of my civilisations, New Hounslow, doing quite well at the moment, is technically not really an empire but a modern metropolis in the game Sim City 3000. Plus I have another world-builder – Zeus: Master of Olympus – which is more complicated than Sim City, and which involves constructing an entire Bronze Age economy, complete with urban areas, farms and fortifications, and with gods, heroes and monsters thrown into the mix. My current civilisation, New Mordor, is a moderately successful and prosperous land; its predecessor, though – the Alexian Empire, or Empire of Alex – is the stuff of legend. It rose out of nothing, soared to dizzy heights of prosperity and splendour, then descended into a nightmarish welter of war, debt, plague, fire, devastation and utter and complete doom. Even now, it is a byword for, I don’t know, “chaos” or “Ragnarok” or some such doom-laden word.

It had started out so promisingly, too. Once upon a time in ancient Greece, a few peaceful sheep-herders settled along an unoccupied stretch of coast, building small settlements and roads that cris-crossed the tranquil pastoral landscape. After a while, more settlers began to arrive, setting up cottage industries and demanding amenities. Hamlets became villages, villages became towns, towns coalesced into a mighty city. Luckily there was a good supply of seed capital to get the whole enterprise under way, and I dipped into this many a time to fund this thriving and expanding boom town.

And thus the Alexian Empire came into being, rising from its humble beginnings into a mighty and bustling metropolis. But soon a cascade of problems began to appear. For a start, unemployment was up. This was due to the fact that I was unaware of how to shift workers from one kind of workplace (threshing floor, carding shed, clothes emporium, etc) to another – it left growing numbers of citizens hanging around idly instead of engaging in productive labour.

And so GDP gradually began to falter. But spending went on unabated! Fires broke out, so I built fire stations (or their ancient Greek equivalent). People suffered from outbreaks of plague – I built hospitals. Houses crumbled into dust – I built lots of new ones! Some neighbouring states were unfriendly and hostile, demanding tribute – instead, I sent them a series of increasingly rude messages. Other states wanted to lend me money – I gladly accepted all offers, but never paid them back!

The Empire entered a grandiose new phase, as I kept spending my way out of difficulties and threw my funds into putting up a number of horribly expensive public buildings – a sports stadium and a score of vainglorious monuments to myself, which were about as useful as urban wind farms. Defence spending was non-existent, there being only a few (scandalously underpaid) soldiers and no city walls or fortifications. And still unemployment was rising, the mob was restless, my foreign creditors were starting to make threatening noises, and I was burning through money at an unbelievable rate.

The end came swiftly. Untended, the houses of my subjects burned down en masse and collapsed into heaps of rubble. Gangs of people roamed about, rioting and dropping dead of plague. My angry creditors then began to send army after army swarming across the plains and across the frontier into the beleaguered Alexian Empire. My puny squads of infantry were quickly overrun, and in desperation I started creating sheep and scattering them in the path of the oncoming enemy like landmines, in the hope that these woolly obstructions would buy me some time.

Sadly, the sheep ruse didn’t work. All was lost, and the Empire fell. It is long gone, but maybe in some forgotten corner of my computer’s hard drive are some ancient zeros and ones which represent the decaying ruins of my once magnificent Alexian People’s Sports Palace, surrounded perhaps by grazing sheep, descendants of those few who managed to survive that cataclysmic final battle. Nothing else remains.

So what lessons are there to be learned from the fall of the Alexian Empire? (And the Empire of the Romans as well, let’s not forget about them!)

1. Avoid getting into debt, and if you are in debt, get out of it as soon as you can.
2. If you find yourself in charge of a nation, better look after your military. Sooner or later, you will need them.
3. Think carefully before alienating people, as allies can become potential enemies.
4. In any civilisation, proper infrastructure is basic and essential – neglect it at your peril.
5. Be vigilant and never complacent – no Empire is too big to fail.

Are these rules sensible? I believe so, yes. Are they obvious? Again yes, pretty much no-brainers, really.

Are our current crop of leaders following them, in that case?

Well… I hope so.

Signs and Portents

Much has been happening out in the world this summer – quite a lot of it weather- and/or climate-related. Floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia, and an iceberg the size of Manhattan making its maiden voyage somewhere off Greenland. Global warming or climate silly season? I’m inclined to suspect the latter, but who can be certain, really?

(That is not to say I consider extreme weather events trivial – they can be very costly, both in terms of lives and money. As with many things in life, though, I think preparedness and the wise use of resources is key.)

We shall be approaching the Autumnal Equinox all too soon, and after that, any noteworthy meteorological events here in the Northern Hemisphere are likely to be on the chilly side, and thus will be put into the “just weather” category and nothing to do with climate doom. Much like the somewhat nippy conditions they’ve had recently down in Peru and Argentina, in fact.

But anyway, I wasn’t going to write about that, and instead was planning to mention, belatedly as usual, a centenary that came up this year on 20th April – the 1910 sighting of an old friend from the outer solar system, Halley’s Comet. Nothing directly to do with climate, so this cannot really be part of my “100 Years of Climate Change” series, but some of this story can be filed under “scary stuff” or “immanent doom”, so there is a connection of sorts.

What reminded me of this missed centenary was the arrival (the weekend before last) of the Perseids, as Earth crossed the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, as it does every summer. (Swift-Tuttle, according to Wikipedia, has been described by somebody as “the single most dangerous object known to humanity”, by the way, being a) a big comet, b) travelling very fast, and c) having an orbit which takes it regularly just a bit too close to the Earth for comfort. I’d like to write more on this in a future article.)

Now from a modern perspective, Halley’s Comet is rather low on the ominousness (ominosity?) scale, compared to Swift-Tuttle. However, back in 1910, a threat of a very different kind was mooted. During the late 19th century, astronomers had discovered, by dint of spectroscopy, that comets contain cyanogen gas, which is poisonous. So the announcement that Earth’s atmosphere might be brushed by the tail of Halley’s Comet, on its 1910 return, set in motion a scare!

Astronomical opinion was divided, actually, Percival Lowell stating that the gas would be “so rarefied as to be thinner than any vacuum”, Camille Flammarion claiming, on the other hand that it “would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.” Guess which version the mainstream media of the time plumped for!

American newspapers reported panic in many cities at the cometary tail’s approach. As the dread moment grew near (May 18th), people prepared to barricade themselves in rooms and cover the keyholes with paper. Others flocked to buy gas masks, umbrellas and “comet pills” that would help to protect them against this poison attack from space. One man, reportedly, planned to sit out the coming apocalypse at the bottom of a deep well with a suitably large bottle of whisky. Others held rooftop parties, setting out to eat, drink and be merry while they could. A newspaper article from the time described a “submarine boat” for hire, which could stay underwater for 3 days and surface once all the pestilence had dissipated (presumably its occupants could then repopulate the Earth, if representatives of both sexes had the forethought to be on board.)

One episode that strikes a chord is an AP news story which mentions Chicago schoolchildren requesting the day off school “for fear of some untoward happenings for which Halley’s Comet may be responsible” – this brought a smile to my face because of the motivation of children throughout history to avoid being at school, and also because of the wording, which is eerily reminiscent of today’s Health and Safety culture (the Safety Elves, bless them, must have been whispering their sweet nothings into people’s ears even in those days.)

Well, as we know, the world didn’t end. The perilous voyage through the poisonous tail of Halley’s Comet was a complete and utter non-event. Still, the scare didn’t go to waste – for a start, some people had become richer, having sold plenty of gas masks and comet pills. (I was going to write that HG Wells was inspired to write his novel In the Days of the Comet, which gives the poison gas idea an intriguing twist, but then realised he had written it – prophetically! – beforehand in 1906.) And the episode provides us with another chapter in the long and fascinating history of scares (of which, more anon.)

Another interesting fact about the 1910 visitation of Halley’s Comet is that many of those who, in later life, vividly remembered it blazing in the sky were actually confusing it with the earlier coming of a far brighter and more dramatic comet – the Daylight Comet of 1910, which had arrived at the beginning of the year (hence its other name – the Great January Comet.) I got my comets mixed up too, while writing this piece, quite clearly remembering the sight of Swift-Tuttle in the night sky in 1992, only to realise later that I was actually remembering Hale-Bopp in 1997.

We might laugh at the folks back in 1910 with their comet-pill silliness, but we shouldn’t, really. There are people these days who fall for scares as readily as ever, be they to do with salmonella in eggs, the threat of satanic ritual abuse or the significance of a Russian heat wave. We are the same human beings after all, just with television sets and the internet.

I enjoyed the Perseids this year, despite the light pollution over West London, which is considerable, and spent much of the evening of 13th August on the hunt for shooting stars out by Cassiopeia. There were some nice bright ones, too. It is good to know that Earth’s defensive shield is still holding up.

The Cargo of the Altavia

This story caught my attention last week. On Wednesday 14th July, the Liberia-registered cargo ship M.V.Altavia docked at the Pacific island of Guam, carrying building materials (insulation and beams, we’re told) from South Korea for use in a massive new project to house construction workers at the village of Dededo.

But that was not all that it carried. As soon as the items began to be unloaded, huge numbers of spiders were reported to have been sighted, both on the cargo and in the ship itself – hundreds of large ones with bodies the size of a quarter (which is 24.26 millimetres in diameter, according to Wikipedia) and thousands of smaller ones.

The unloading was stopped at once, and the ship forced to move off to a quarantine anchorage, further out into Apra Harbor, while a few of the spiders were analysed by the Department of Agriculture lab. Once it was established that the spiders were not native to Guam, and that they were simply too numerous on the ship for fumigation to be a success, the M.V. Altavia was turned away and forced to return to Korea. A second cargo ship, the M.V. STX Alpha, also containing construction materials and also sailing from South Korea to Guam, was then told to turn back, even before it had reached its destination.

I’m interested in this story for several reasons.

Firstly, when I was in Japan last December, one of the major and long-running news stories was the dispute and negotiations between Japan and the US over the American airbase in Okinawa, which has been the cause of much local friction over the years. The upshot of all that has been the planned withdrawal of 8,000 US Marines from Okinawa, which will lead to Guam increasing in importance as a major hub for the American military in the western Pacific (the airbase stays on Okinawa, though, but will be moved from the city to the coast.) Hence the plans for marshalling an 18,000-strong army of construction workers on the island, and hence the need for accommodation for said workers – the Ukudu Workforce Village, which is basically a temporary housing project of giant proportions.

The language in the original report (Pacific Daily News) is also worthy of note, as other internet commentators have already mentioned, as it includes the word “stevedores”, which has a sort of lovely old-world, age-of-sail ring to it. I’m imagining a crew of tobacco-chewing roughnecks on the docks at Guam, hauling on ropes and manhandling crates – only to leap back with many a startled oath as the cargo began to disgorge hordes of spidery invaders. Which was probably nothing like the real situation at all, as I’m sure all that sort of work could be done by a handful of blokes in hard hats, sitting at the controls of machines. I rather like my version, however.

Of course, I’m also interested in the spiders. What species do these belong to? For a moment, when I was first aware of the case, I wondered whether these might even be of a previously undiscovered kind, but on second thoughts this would be very unlikely (although to date, there doesn’t seem to be any confirmation yet of what exactly these interlopers are) and they’re possibly of a type that is native to Korea. (By the way, I was reminded somehow of John Wyndham’s posthumously published novella Web, and have been prompted finally to write a review of that rather curious work, which you can now find on my Planet Bookworm site.)

And what of the crew? What, one wonders, did they make of that situation – alone (as it were) on the high seas on a ship overrun by eight-legged horrors? Can you imagine having to venture down into the darkness of the hold to inspect the cargo, armed only with a flashlight (the one with the dodgy batteries, naturally)? Being moderately arachnophobic myself, I would have been inclined to start sending frantic and incoherent mayday signals as soon as the full predicament was known, and would have been sorely tempted to jump ship at Guam, despite the threat of prison.

Or cast myself adrift in a lifeboat perhaps, mid-voyage, if driven to the edge of uncontrollable gibbering madness. But the nightmare might not have ended there, oh no. Overcome with hunger, I might have opened my container of emergency rations at last, only to find – guess what.

UPDATE

As of the Friday before last, an entomologist at the University of Guam, Dr Aubrey Moore (with the help of Dr. Seung Tae Kim, who is an arachnologist at the Seoul National University) has apparently identified two separate kinds of spider, from the samples. Both are orb weavers, one large, the other small; both are common to Korea and both are harmless to humans. Orb weavers I’ve seen in Japan, and yes – they can get pretty large. Apparently, spiders are very plentiful on Guam, due to the abundance of insects and the lack of birds. So maybe it isn’t the sort of place where an arachnophobe would be advised to jump ship; a case of out of the frying pan…