Goodness knows there has been a lot to do lately, and I will explain some of it in a couple of posts—one of the things I have been doing is making more opportunities to write, which will shortly begin to arrive, I hope and trust—but a few weeks ago, before the maelstrom truly swallowed me, I found myself wandering back here and looking at my stubbed draft posts. I tell you, I don’t remember what all of them are about, or even what I was thinking, but this old one still has legs, and is quite like what I think I would mostly do if I did in fact move off WordPress and onto Substack as I have considered doing. That Substack would probably be called I Found a Thing, and this is one of the sorts of thing I would have found. I found this one while tracking uses of the monetary term follis through papryus databases for my 2022 article “Follis or Follaron“, in a paper by one Richard Alston.1 (The answer to my question, by the way, is follaron until at least the seventh century.) But first, before I tell you what I found, you need to see or remember this!
Roman soldiers searching the meeting place of the People’s Front of Judæa, in Terry Jones (dir.), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Handmade Films 1979)Now, you might easily think that this creative bunch of comics were, you know, making stuff up when they got to the bathos of the spoon. But that would be to forget that half this stuff, they started coming up with when they were Oxford students, and that the late Terry Jones, in particular, the director, also had a lot of fun in his career using what he’d learned then to upset medievalists and, presumably, also Classicists.2 Because hey, thanks to Dr Alston I found the source. Alston, while talking about the Roman enforcement of authority in Alexandria, invokes a story from the work of the first-century Egyptian Jewish historian Philo, which Alston reports as follows:
“Philo was complaining about the actions of the prefect Flaccus who had searched the Jewish area, using troops, in a most tactless way, breaking into the women’s quarters and causing a great deal of disturbance. All Flaccus obtained from his search was kitchen utensils. This failure is in contrast to his earlier disarmament of the Egyptians which had filled so many boats that the Nile had been congested.”3
“We found this spoon, sir!” Now, it could just be art imitating life unconsciously, of course. But if we could only ask Terry Jones, I’d wager he read Philo, or about this story in Philo, somewhere in his education, perhaps at Guildford Grammar rather than St Edmund Hall but who knows, and then, fifteen or so years later when scripting, remembered and went, “oh yes! I know where that goes!” And presumably anyone else watching the film since then who also knows Philo’s work has also spotted it and gone, “aha!” as I did. But on the odds that you, dear reader, were same as me not one of their number, here you are! I found it for you.
1. That paper being Richard Alston, “Violence and Social Control in Roman Egypt” in A. Bülow-Jacobsen (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Papyrologists, Copenhagen, 23-29 August, 1992 (Copenhagen 1994), pp. 517–521. My piece was Jonathan Jarrett, “Follis or follaron? The name of the Byzantine coin of 40-nummi” in Acta numismàtica Vol. 52 (Barcelona 2022), pp. 225–248.
2. When I was first teaching, the TV series which lay behind A. Ereira, Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives (London 2005), was new and my students were all over it as the ‘real’ medieval history their teachers hadn’t wanted to tell them, which is to say, of course, the muddy tropes of both the Victorian era and of Monty Python itself, which was of course taught to them at school by people themselves taught from Victorian-era scholarship… But much older, and much more evident a cat thrown among academic pigeons, is Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London 1980, 4th edn. 2017), which has, self-evidently, done pretty well, but whose research basis has, well, been questioned, and it has even been suggested that he was being deliberately misleading. The man who gave us Dennis the Socialist Peasant? Surely not!
3. Alston, “Violence and Social Control”, p. 517 n. 4, citing Philo, In Flaccum, 86-94 & 109-115, and of course because he is or was a Classicist he provides no idea what edition he was using.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
Great to see a new post from you Jonathan, and on something a bit more lighthearted too! (Though no less intellectually informative for that of course.)
Unfortunately, Substack has a bit of Nazi problem (both platforming and financing them), which, despite some vague gestures, doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. If you were to start a new blog, I’d suggest sticking with WordPress or exploring another alternative. A couple of people I know moved from Substack to Ghost or Buttondown. As someone who’s happy to be old-fashioned and stick with WP, I can’t say any more about either of those though.
Thanks, Ricky, and nice to hear from you too. The problem I am having with WordPress, other than its steadily more robotified writing interface, is that my audience here shrinks by the month. (Of course, I don’t post any more; but this is an older problem.) If I were to stay here I’d have to come up with something pretty dramatic to bring the audience back up towards where it used to be, and I don’t know what that is. However, the few people I know on Substack have exceeded my current views and subscriptions here within six months of starting from cold. I don’t know if any of the other platforms can offer that. Ghost appears designed for coders, as in it seems set up to work best for people writing in Markdown, and Buttondown really is just a newsletter platform, with no homepage worth speaking of. I can see how it’s a great alternative to Substack but not to WordPress. So the question is as so often one of how much principle triumphs over advantage.
Of course, and I completely understand all that. I’m not trying to be the moral police (I follow a few Substacks despite my concerns). I just wanted to make sure you have all the information available to make an informed decision.
No, I absolutely understand that, and thankyou; you have prompted me to do the work of digging into it at least a bit. I was a bit surprised because the few Substacks I was following were very much coming from the other side of the political-ideological map. But I will be thinking more about it now.
Whatever you decide, I’ll follow with interest!
Be skeptical about any numbers that a VC-funded private company shares. Substack is in the “spending investor money to look big” phase, in 2020-2022 this took the form of <a href=”https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/has-substacks-net-revenue-nearly-flat-lined/“>paying something like $3 in advances for every $1 of revenue they received</a> from the blogs in question (they also have a good PR team which must be expensive). These days they are trying a False Twitter and a Pivot to Video. Even if the owners’ and investors’ politics were not shady, that is not the sort of company that I would expect to be a good partner for the next ten years. Remember tricks like how other sites automatically subscribed people to pages to boost follower counts, then throttled the number of posts from those pages that subscribers could see, because following twice as many people does not give you twice as much time to consume their content?
I ignored the one pitch email I got from Substack.
This, unfortunately, sounds all too realistic, and has given me serious pause. Thanks for the words of wisdom, Sean. Lots to think about. Can it really be that this here set-up is as good as it gets for my wishes?
Anton Howes and Joumana Medlej both do good history on Substack, but both are doing more marketable things (Howes’ long essays on the Rise of England are catnip to a type of SoCal software developer). Bret Devereaux has written about how he got popular by being on Twitter after it was popular but before it started hiding tweets with links offsite. Email delivery has advantages if you post infrequently but the writing business is a very unstable business and the way to move forward today may not work tomorrow.
Yes, I have also noticed the terrible popularity of any kind of historical development studies that lead to ‘us’ and make ‘us’ ‘best’. That’s sadly not unique to Substack or even the age of the Internet. A developer friend of mine from whose eyes the scales have slipped a bit calls it ‘the Church of Progress’.
I have a blog post in the pipeline which proposes thinking of Substack as the site for things that people at certain social events in San Francisco think are worth talking about. The occasional Canadian, Lithuanian, or Italian makes money on the site but it really helps if a blog is framed to reach at an audience in a few US cities.
Yup, this too. When I first started following Substack it was easy to see that US matters mattered most in their recommendations. I mean, that’s just demographics to some extent: given the concentration of Internet access and Anglophones, the US is always likely to be the biggest market for an English-language blogger and thus English and US history the biggest spheres of interest in my area. I am not seriously expecting to make bank telling Anglophones about 10th-century Catalonia, or even telling Catalans about it in English. But there are some people apparently making some kind of living just by being interesting—my first sample was Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History, which I still think is really good even though primarily psychology not history, though he reads history himself—and that has a great temptation, since though it starts in a corner of tenth-century Europe I do think some of my stuff has that kind of reach. But I can’t write that every post!
I think Mastroiani is a good example: PhD Harvard in psychology (a very American field), writes self-help essays (a deeply American genre), seems connected to subcultures popular with the Bay Area software crowd. He would not have a big audience if he were not also an entertaining writer, but lots of writers just as skilled will struggle because they don’t produce what that site rewards.
Once again I do see your point. Hmm.
This is all heading towards "try and do better here somehow", isn’t it. But I was pretty much out of ideas for how to do that except posting more often…
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