Mark: Welcome to the Endless Knot Podcast, Aven: where the more we know, Mark: the more we want to find out. Aven: Tracing serendipitous
connections through our lives Mark: and across disciplines. Aven: Hi, I'm Aven. Mark: And I'm Mark. Aven: And today we're going to talk
about swimming, a very appropriate topic for the middle of February. We are going to be speaking with Dr. Karen Carr today. Mark: Dr. Karen Carr is Associate Professor
Emerita in the Department of History at Portland State Univ
ersity. She holds a doctorate in
classical art and archaeology from the University of Michigan. Her research, making use of both
archaeology and texts, employs anarchist and feminist theory to reconsider the
ancient Mediterranean economy as a series of interlocking systems rather
than a government driven enterprise. She's considering what changes
when we recast Europe as 'strange', taking the older cultures of
Africa and Asia as the default. Aven: Dr. Carr is also in her second decade as
a Roman
pottery specialist for the Leptiminus Archaeological Project. Working in the modern
village of Lamta in Tunisia. Leptiminus was an important Roman port and
the excavation is one of very few from the Roman Empire to have excavated the kilns
where Roman pottery and amphorae were made, soon to be filled with fish sauce--
garum-- wine or olive oil, and shipped all over the Roman Empire and beyond. Mark: Dr. Carr's first book in 2002 was Vandals
to Visigoths, Rural Settlement Patterns in Early Medie
val Spain. But today we're mostly talking to
her about her recent book, Shifting Currents, A World History of Swimming. Aven: So let's get to the interview now! Mark: Hello. Aven: And welcome to the show. Karen: Hi, Mark. Hi, Aven. Aven: So we'll start as we always do
with our sort of beginning question for our guests before we can get
into the work you've been doing and are planning on in the future. Mark: So, can you tell us about an
interesting connection of link between your work and the res
t of your life or
different areas of your work, something that maybe unexpectedly led you in a a
different way of thinking about things? Karen: Yeah. I've, been thinking about your podcast
and its connection to connections. Right. And and then I was thinking about
the morning that I decided to write the swimming book, which basically
what happened was that I, have. I had at that time, but I still have a
big history website that I run at Quatrus, Q U A T R dot U S, and every day at that
time, I w
ould pretty much sit down and write a new article for the website. These articles, sometimes they took me a
week or two to write, but every day that I didn't have one in progress, I had to
think of a new one that I wanted to do. And so, one July, I thought, you know, I'm
taking the kids swimming this afternoon. Maybe I'll write an article about the
history of swimming for the website. And when, then usually I started
by, reading What there was to read, reading a recent book or
recent article on
the subject. But when I went to do that, I
realized there really wasn't anything. There was nothing respectable
to read that had been written, like, in the last 100 years. And so I started to think, well, maybe
that's an area that, you know, could could stand to be looked into more. So, in that sense, it's a connection. But as I thought that I realized that
it's actually a much larger connection, that Working on the website in general
changed the way I thought about history in a way that has I'm
just kind of realizing
now, has, bled over into my book, writing my articles, my more academic
work, because the website forced me to hyperlink everything to everything else. I mean, it didn't force me to, but
I did as in, you know, Wikipedia articles now although we actually
started before Wikipedia right. If they mentioned somebody else, then they
linked to the article on somebody else. So I was doing that. And one thing I was doing was very,
very carefully, if I linked from one article to an
other, I always
put a link the other direction. Oh, right. And, this kind of, it really changed the
way I thought about history in the end, because for example, if you're writing
about, Say the Native American group and what happens to that Native American
group is that Louis the 14th sends out a bunch of soldiers that end up killing
a bunch of them and taking their land In say, Louisiana or Detroit or something. It's common then to link from the page
about the Native American back to Louis XIV,
but it's pretty unusual to link from
Louis XIV back to the Native Americans. Right. To list that as one of the things Louis
XIV did, kill a bunch of Native Americans. Right. Aven: Right. So the direction of influence
or the direction of, priority. Karen: Right. I mean, we, we have a tendency to think,
well, Louis XIV did a bunch of important things, but we don't notice that he
also killed a bunch of Native Americans. And when you start putting all of
those things, not just what he did in North
America, but also his effect
on India or his effect on Iran. And vice versa. So that if you say Iran influenced Louis
the 14th in an article on Iran, you also say that in the article on Louis the 14th. Then you start to see a lot of
connections that you hadn't seen before. And I think that's kind of what led me
to write the swimming book as a world history, rather than, you know, focusing
on the Mediterranean where my training was, that over the years, first of all,
I had become very familiar wi
th a lot of the world from doing the website. And, and also I had seen that
there were all these connections. So I was thinking like, how do people
in the Mediterranean learn to swim? Who do they learn to swim from? Where did those people learn to swim? And it made the book much less
Eurocentric or Mediterranean centric than it might have been. And, the same thing is true
for the work I'm doing now. Right. Mark: that was actually something that
I was going to ask you about is that although your
training is in the field
of classics ,not only is the website, but the book is a world history of swimming. So that's a very broad net to cast. And how did you sort of go about
doing that kind of research? Because I imagine, it's an unusual topic
before the existence of your work on it. I can't imagine even searching for
something about swimming in the ancient world was easy to find a
lot of stuff on that topic, right? And then to open that up to all
kinds of different cultures and in all kinds
of different periods. So how did you go about that? Karen: Well, it took a long time. I mean, the book was about 10 years
between that morning when I started to think about it and publication. So, you know, it's not something
that happened immediately. One thing I would say is that I had
the benefit of having already been working on the website for like 15 Karen: years. And so things like when
is the Song Dynasty, were already pretty familiar to me. Aven: So you get the sort of
large timelines k
ind of in place and the global perspective. Right. Karen: You know, I, knew more
world history than most classicists already because I had expanded the
website to cover the whole world. And now I say, ashamed of myself,
that there's really very little on Australia, which I never really got
to, but whatever, most of the world. and at the same time, I think
the internet and the increasing digitization of texts had made this
possible in a way that it wouldn't have been possible 10 years earlier. Be
cause I could open something
like a Chinese novel and search for the word swim. And, eventually I learned to also
search for words like dive and river. And people don't always call it swimming. They say he entered the water
or something, So I would, I would search for those terms and
gradually collect information. And I did that with ancient. Mediterranean texts also. So, I mean, it's really
primary research, mostly. you know, I read collections of
folktales, and, the Rig Veda, and just whatever
I could think of
that might be a fairly long text. A lot of sort of regulations and rules,
law codes regulations of how priests are supposed to behave turned out to be
very fertile you know, local law codes and stuff saying that people can or
can't swim in the local pond, lawsuits, Aven: and some, were there particular,
could you look for particular occupations, occupational, not sailor necessarily,
because I know we can talk about that later, but that doesn't necessarily
mean that they swim, b
ut, pearl diver, or, there's going to be a few areas. Karen: I mean, pearl diving, actually,
there has been enough interest in that there is a secondary literature. And so I was able to mostly rely
on secondary literature for that. but I tried to stay away from pearl
diving and professional swimming as much as I could, because I think That's
different if you're swimming for work. Aven: Right. So you were more interested in the Karen: book is really more
about social swimming. Okay. Swimming as a
pastime. So I tried to stay away from both
swimming as sport, as a competition where people are doing it for like
money prizes or something like that. and also swimming as. a job, often a coerced job
where people have to swim. I don't think Pearl divers are
really such great swimmers anyway. Aven: It's a very specific
thing they're doing. Yeah. They're not like, they're not
going to be able to do laps in a pool for very long or anything. Yeah. Karen: Right. Mostly they hold onto the rope and
th
ey have weights and they go down to the bottom and then they're kind of
walking around on the bottom and then they pull the cord and go back up and Aven: they can hold their breath. And that's the Karen: big thing. They have to swim a little like over
to the boat or whatever, but that. Very little. Mark: So lots of different kinds
of texts as you say, like laws and, and, and different types of textual
sources that you can work with there. What about non textual sources like
artistic representati
on of swimming or, or I don't know what kind of
archeology there might be associated with swimming, but what other
sources were you able to tap on? Karen: Right. I mean, my training is as
an archeologist originally. So I. I definitely thought about that. There's not a lot of
archaeology of swimming, though. To some extent, I looked at the,
imperial baths and that kind of thing. Like, one of the arguments I make that the
Romans were not particularly good swimmers is that most of the big natatoriu
ms are
only about three feet deep, a meter deep. You know, that's a depth that is
good for cooling off and standing around talking to your friends. But if you've ever tried to swim in the
kiddie side of the pool, it's actually a really irritating depth for swimming. it's not impossible to swim in
a meter of water, but it's hard, Aven: definitely not
optimized wouldn't choose it. Karen: yeah, there are deeper pools, but
there are not very many deeper pools. Most of the things that are represented
as
natatoriums, like you're going to swim in them are actually only about a meter deep. so that, that's one aspect of archeology
that, And then images, I think I just collected sort of gradually over time. Well, no, again, right. Searching museum catalogs. Now I remember how I did it. I would go to, like, the British Museum
catalog of images, and search for swim, dive, whatever, and see what came up. and similarly the Louvre,
and, the Metropolitan Museum. And that, gave me a lot of images,
but
also over a decade of being interested in it, just every time
someone had an image of someone swimming in something that I saw. I took note of it, so you sort
of gradually accumulate them. And people started
sending them to me, too. Yeah, Aven: that's always the thing, right? Become known as the person with
that particular obsession, and then people start finding it for you. Karen: yeah. I mean, a lot of times, obviously,
people send me the same image over and over again, and I would be
like, ob
viously, I've seen that one. But they did sometimes
come up with new ones. I think eventually I searched
Flickr for images of swimming too. and if I knew that there were
images of swimming on a particular temple or something, I could
search for images of that temple and find the images of swimming. Aven: So again, the digitization
of all of this makes this a Karen: Right. I mean, this is a book which
really would have been impossible to write even 20 years ago. Aven: Would have had a
very large
travel budget. Karen: Yeah, it just would have taken
me a lifetime to, you know, people who wrote books like this 50 years
ago, it was like a whole career of trying to collect this information. And I was able to do it in like
10 years because I could search everything pretty quickly. And I mean, It's a long day of
going through a novel and looking at everything that might have to do with
the water and determining whether it helps your argument or, you know,
how it affects your argument, but Aven
: at least it's doable. Karen: It's doable, right? I searched for drown. Aven: Oh wow. Yeah. That was . and I'm thinking of
all the metaphorical uses that must have come up all the time. Things swimming in
things and Oh yeah, sure. And diving into, and just
must have driven you. Karen: And then it's particularly
annoying that the past tense of swim is swam, right. So you have to search for that separately. . and Aven: dive and dove, which is also
a dove, which doesn't help and which Karen: is al
so dove and like the number
of times I've had to like, skip past people talking about is just incredible. So, yeah, I mean, basically that's sort
of the primary method that I used was just looking through them and finding. Like millions of references to it, Aven: and then try to get sort
of some patterns out of that Karen: sorting them. Yeah. Looking for patterns. I, you know, I actually learned how to
recognize the Chinese character for swim. So that I could look at
the Chinese text and see. if
the translation said bathed or,
something else splashed, like, does the original set use the character for swim? So I don't really read Chinese, but I
can read that character in Chinese, so I can, tell whether this verse of the, poem
or whatever actually uses the word swim. Aven: Can I ask, we sort of dove in. I mean, I'm just going to use the puns. We kind of dove into the meat of
this quite quickly, but maybe we can just back up for just a moment
and you can give a little bit of a capsule des
cription of the book. So we're talking now about your,
not your first book, which was about Visigoths and Vandals, but
your more recent book, The Shifting Currents, A World History of Swimming. So maybe you could just, you've sort
of talked a little bit already about. What your focus was, but if you could
just give a little capsule summary, so people can, know what they're. Yeah. Karen: I always say it's called Shifting
Currents for a reason, and it's because it catalogs the changing places that
people have swum or not swum over time. And so it shows that in probably
during the last ice age, sorta, it's hard to say, people in cold
Northern places forgot how to swim. The last ice age was the first one
that people toughed it out in the North instead of just moving South. And you know, it was just unattractive,
I think, to swim for like 30, 000 years. Unattractive or fatal. Aven: Yeah, those were your options. Karen: Well, I mean, it was
warmer in the summer, right? It wasn't like. Ice bo
und all year round, but it
never really got warm enough to be attractive to go in the water. And a lot of the water is
also tied up being ice. And so there aren't as many ponds
and things as there are now. and people forgot how to swim. And then in after the ice age, when
they encountered people in the South. they were like, wow, that is weird. You guys are swimming . And they
made up a lot of reasons why they themselves did not swim other than
they, they were afraid of the water, well, it wasn'
t cold anymore, so they
didn't know why they weren't swimming. Right. so they said like the gods didn't
like it and like it was immodest and like It was dangerous. It would make you sick. They came up with a lot of reasons. And then gradually they did learn to swim. The Europeans in particular learned
to swim, I think, from the Egyptians, along with learning a lot of
other things from the Egyptians. And then gradually that gets turned around
so that Europeans, as they're colonizing the world, fi
rst, they approach it by
saying that all of the Indigenous people they meet who are really good swimmers. It's because they're like animals. They're not really people, like,
horses can swim and like black people can swim in the same way naturally. And 19th century, they developed
this idea that white people can swim. But like scientifically, not naturally
like indigenous people, right? Of course. And so you got like the Olympics and
people trying to refine strokes and make them as powerful as po
ssible
and have competitions with timers and, and they're trying to show that
they're very scientific swimmers and not like those natural swimmers and
then eventually they push all the natural swimmers out of the water. And swimming becomes something
that we now think of as primarily done by white people. Right. And Aven: when swimming as leisure,
because leisure activities are restricted and all the rest of it. Yeah. A little bit I imagine there's some
parallels, especially in the 19th century,
what you're talking about
with people running, for instance, running becomes a scientific and a
gentleman's sport where you run specific timed races and all of those things. And that's different than people
who are just good at running. You have to run the right
way in the right, right. And you have to Karen: wear Aven: special clothes, the right kind
of strides, do it in special places. Karen: Exactly. Right. You have to do it on a track and you
have to be wearing shorts and a little number on
you and special shoes, right. Aven: And so if you're just good
at running barefoot, then that's just like, that doesn't count. Exactly. Right. Okay. Karen: So that's, that's kind of to
show how white people first can't swim and then gradually take over swimming. Aven: Well, that doesn't sound
like a terribly predictable and depressing narrative that I've heard
before in other contexts at all. Karen: Everybody laughs at me because
they say I'm incapable of writing books that anybody wants to rea
d. All my books are always,
like, very depressing. What Aven: I meant, but nonetheless, it is a
sort of overarching truth about the world. no, I mean, I think it's
a fascinating topic. And I think it's fascinating that
I mean, on the one hand, sort of not surprising that other people
hadn't done it just because it is a very kind of niche specific thing. On the other hand, it's not like
swimming is weird and unusual and people don't do it now. So it's interesting that it hadn't been
talked about
in this kind of context. I think it's, Really
cool, personally, even if Karen: slightly depressing. Yeah, I mean, what you got was a
lot of sort of Julius Caesar was a great swimmer and also Byron. Aven: But that, of course, is just part
of the extraordinary man narrative, right? Because he's extraordinary, he
can do extraordinary things. Karen: Exactly. And that's what you get a lot of in
Europe in the ancient world and also later on is that ordinary people can't
be expected to swim, but heroes
can swim. So like Odysseus can swim, but
nobody else in his crew knows how. Mark: And of course, you know, since my
background is, middle ages, the, classic medieval example of the swimming hero is
Beowulf, who, achieves these impossible feats of swimming, like swimming for,
many days while carrying weapons. Yeah, right, right, exactly. But his. The other people that he's like
king of, they can't swim either. Aven: Because he's special, and he
can dive to the bottom of a pool. Right. It's a Kar
en: mark of being special. Right. It's not something everybody can do. Aven: Yeah. And then as you say, Julius
Caesar, and it's not made clear. And so if people don't know
that story, that's him he... Karen: has to cross the bay and he has
to swim across the bay, holding the important papers that have to be saved. And so he can only use one arm
and he's like 52 when he does it. but there are also other episodes
in his own account, of himself in the Gallic Wars where he sends out
scouts to figur
e out where they're going to set up camp and stuff. And then he beats them to the location
because they have to figure out how Get across the river, but he can just swim. Aven: Right. So even in his own account,
he's making himself out to know something they don't know how to do. I guess. Yeah, exactly. Karen: But then you can see that in
the, 19th century school children who are reading Caesar's Gallic
Wars are like, Oh yeah, swimming. That's a really upper class activity. Right. So that's why
Byron
wants to do it because. He wants to mark himself as
a very upper class person. Aven: And then the other famous, I
mean, there are many, and I'm going to ask you to talk about some of
the ones I don't know, because the only ones I really know are mostly
European and classical examples. But the other romantic one that I
imagine is in Byron's head is the Hero and Leander story as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Crossing the Hellespont. Karen: Yeah, I mean, that's why
he chooses the spot,
but Leander again is, well, first of all, the
story of Hero and Leander is super interesting because there are other
similar stories from around the world. There's one that the Maori people
tell in New Zealand, for example. And in the end of that story,
first of all, it's the girl who swims across to the boy. And second, she makes it. Like the end of the story is, they
get married, live happily ever after. Aven: But the Greeks, they
don't like happy endings. They're against happy endings. Karen:
Yeah, and I think they find it
particularly appropriate to take this swimming story and give it a sad ending
because they actually still think swimming is kind of dangerous and weird. and so when they hear a story in which
people heroically swim across water out of love, They turn it into a tragedy. Aven: It sort of has an element of
hubris to it in that like, but at bottom, should we really be swimming? That isn't really a
sensible thing to be doing. It shows the madness of love
that he would
do such a thing Karen: And actually the Islamic
story of Zal and Rudava, which we know from a medieval version is the
origin of our story of Rapunzel. Ah! Okay. And the water has just been elided
out of the story completely, and her name, Rudabba, means river girl. Okay. And her hair kind of replaces the river Aven: as a sort of a strange
medium to be conquered. Right. Karen: As it sort of ripples. Right. But it, because Islamic people in
West Asia also were not swimmers. And, so they just elimi
nate, they're
telling basically the same story. The hero has to save the girl you
know, he has to reach her even though she's been shut up in a tower. It's the same story again, but the water
is taken out of it, which allows him to survive and, reach her, not get killed. Aven: Yeah. Yeah. Mark: So I guess, from these kinds
of stories, then swimming must appear as a kind of folktale motif or a
number of different folktale motifs, I suppose, you find the same story
pattern in lots of different cul
tures. Karen: Right. But often with different
endings, depending on people's attitude towards swimming. Aven: Right. So it's like a mechanism in the story, but
not necessarily the same plot every time. Right. Karen: Right, right. in places where people swim as sort of
a regular part of their everyday life. Mm-Hmm. , they swim and then they
get across the river. and live happily ever after. it's European and West Asian
stories where people try to swim across the river and then drown. Right. Aven:
Yeah. I imagine Polynesian stories are filled
with people who are perfectly capable of swimming because people swim. Karen: Like, there's a, East African
story, I think maybe Ethiopian where In order to win the girl, the boy has to
swim out to an island and spend the night there and get the special plant and then
swim home, which, you know, he does. And then he marries her. Aven: Cause he's not lost at sea. Karen: Cause he's not. And then there's an Indian version
of that story where it's told
in terms of a goat because it's from
something kind of like Aesop's fables. Where the goat mom tells the
boyfriend that he has to swim out to the island to get the whatever. And he's like, there are
lots of girls out there. I'm not going to swim out
to the island to get it! Because India is also
not a swimming place. And he just gives up the girl completely
rather than swim out to the island. Aven: I just like that in general as
a story type, that's entertaining. Right. Oh, well that sounds hard
. Okay, forget it. Be a lot fewer great hero narratives,
if we had that, but on the other hand, it might be more sensible for us all. Karen: Yeah, it's kind of like, an Aesop's
Fables thing about the fox and the grapes Aven: or whatever. A different decision. Yeah. As soon as you talk about all these,
who makes it across or not, I'm suddenly thinking about how very many stories there
are about bridges in European folklore. bridges and boats going across. Rivers. Because the basic assumption
is t
here's no other way. To get across the river and I've never
really sort of thought about that. Oh Karen: Yeah, there's a story in
Boccaccio where the boy has to rescue the girl from the tower, but
Boccaccio just gives him a boat. He goes over in a boat and
rescues her, which works better. Aven: I mean, perfectly sensible, the
big point there is that you need the bridge or the boat, because if you
don't have it, it's unthinkable that you would just cross by swimming. Which, in fact, it's not nece
ssarily
an unthinkable thing, we've just been trained to assume it's unthinkable,
but, you know, lots of people cross rivers by swimming all the time. Yeah, Horatio at the bridge. Yeah. Interesting. Mark: So I imagine, a lot of these
stories It's probably the majority of them, I don't know, focus on
swimming in rivers and lakes. But what about ocean swimming? Does that appear very much? Karen: Oh, yeah. There are some great stories by
early like conquistador type people, people who are, going to
the Native
Americans, I think Columbus himself says when they get within about a mile
of shore and they can see the boat. People swim out to them, just to
kind of see what's going on, right? So even though the Spanish feel like
this is an impossible amount of distance. Like, no sane person would swim
out that far away from shore. But a lot of them do. It's not like they send
their best swimmer. It's like, everybody's like, Hey,
let's swim out there and see what's up. Aven: So yeah. Island natio
ns, one imagines islands
in the southern areas where it's warm, it's gonna be in normal Right. Part of life. Yeah. Karen: So in, in the Caribbean in Hawaii. Mm-Hmm. In Brazil, there's a similar story in
Brazil where the, Spanish, see some people, maybe the Portuguese, I guess,
see some people bobbing around in the water way offshore and they send
a lifeboat to like go pick them up. And when the lifeboat arrives,
the Brazilians laugh at them and are like, we're just like hanging
out, like having
a good time. This is just what we do for fun. we don't need rescuing. Aven: I'm feeling very February
suddenly and imagining, feeling very Northern European in the cold. Karen: Right. They're in warm places where it's, warm
most of the time and they're like, we don't get tired hanging out in the water. We can float if we get tired. We don't need rescuing. Aven: Well, that's yeah, cause the heroes,
when you think about those European hero narratives too, they're always about. The hero is the swim
mer who can battle
the elements, who can conquer, right? Beowulf has this feat of endurance. And so does Odysseus after his raft
breaks, it's a feat of endurance that he only manages through divine aid. Karen: I mean, he
actually has a magic veil. So like, in case you thought it was even
possible to swim without a magic veil. Aven: No, he was going to
give up until that happened. And yeah, it's a feat of manliness and
proof of their heroism or whatever. Not just a thing you do for fun Karen: fo
r fun. Yeah, right. Yeah. Europeans almost never have stories where
people swim for fun or if they do, then the story ends in somebody drowning. Aven: So the one thing
I can think of that. It's not quite counter to that,
but the one place that I do think of Romans swimming, but I don't
know, maybe they're not actually swimming, is the Bay of Naples. We get that sort of pleasure villas
with the swimming there, right? I'm thinking of the Cicero
story of Lesbia, or sorry. Claudia and you can tell
I
read too much Catullus. And she's she watched the men. She goes down and likes to
watch the men swimming, her young men's friends swimming. And there's another, there's a Horace
poem about the young boy, the young man that he likes and how beautiful he is
when he's swimming or something like that. There's a sort of, so it
seems to be a trope that it's a way of showing off anyway. I Karen: think it's a way of showing
that you're upper class, and so these people at these very upper class villas
o
n the Bay of Naples, they probably do do some swimming, like Plato says,
an ignorant person can't read or swim, Aven: right. Karen: The way we would say
they can't read or write. He says they can't read or swim. And, you know, so I think there
is like Agrippina can swim. Right. Aven: Which is why she
doesn't die in immediately in Karen: Right. When, Nero tries to kill her in
the lake, she swims to shore. Aven: I don't think you
know that story, Mark,. Or she swims to the boat or something. Yeah.
That's, Karen: Oh, yeah. Nero, the Emperor Nero is
trying to kill his mother. As you do when you're an Emperor. He tries a bunch of things. and it's actually a hysterical series
of stories, because, like, first he, like, cuts a hole in the ceiling of
her bedroom to make the bedroom fall on her, like he was a Looney Tunes cartoon. And it fails. And that fails. She notices. And then and then he invites
her to a party on the other side of the lake from her house. And then when she goes back,
he li
ke, Sabotages the boat. I don't know how. He makes holes. Somehow the boat becomes defunct in
the middle of the lake and sinks. And, she's supposed to drown,
but instead she swims to shore. And, and then he just
sends people to stab her. Yeah. She dies. But she clearly knows how to swim. I mean, or at least, or at least
Suetonius thinks we're going to believe that she knows how to Aven: swim, but yet at the same time was
clearly expected not to know how to swim because he thought it would Kill h
er for
her boat to sink in the middle of a lake. Karen: It's a little mysterious. Nero doesn't know whether his mother
knows how to swim or not , but clearly at least Suetonius' audience
didn't think it was incredible that she would know how to swim. Right. Aven: But also not a given. It was sort of a possible either way. Karen: But to take a really
interesting different example of the lower classes, not swimming, think
of the Battle of Lake Trasimene. Right, right. Hannibal surrounds the Roman
army, which has gotten itself into a really stupid position. It's like 30, 000 men or something. I forget exactly at least 10,
000, like a lot of people. And he traps them on the shores
of Lake Trasimene in Northern Italy in April, I think. And they go into the water as far
as they can go without having to swim, As far as they could stand
right up to their shoulders in water. And then they can't escape any further. And he sends the cavalry into the water
on horses and they kill all of them. And
so Livy and Polybius both
say that it was impossible for any of them to save themselves by
swimming in that enormous lake, but. Like these are, this is the
flower of the Roman army, right? These are not like 50 year olds, right? These are a bunch of 22 year olds, 25
year olds in excellent condition, right? And the nearest island in the
lake is about a mile away. if you look at the lake Is it really
credible that none of them out of whatever it is to several tens of thousands
of guys could make
it to the island? None of them even tried? Aven: I think that's the key, right? It's that they're portrayed as not even
making the effort because it's just so incredible and impossible that they could. I mean, you could say, okay,
they've been fighting and they're tired and they're in armor, sure. But like, surely, if you thought
you could swim, you would try. Karen: Yeah, I mean, they're in
armor, but like it takes a while to kill 30, 000 guys in the water. You're like, surely you have
time to
take off your armor. At least some of them do. And, and if you compare that to the
Brazilian guys that we just saw bobbing around in the water being like, well,
yeah, we could just swim for days. Like nobody even thought
they would try it. I think most ordinary
Romans couldn't swim. Aven: Yeah. So that it was not even like, it
wouldn't even cross their mind. It's like standing on the edge
of a cliff and being told, well, why don't you just try flying? Right. You might be able to make
it, you kno
w, exactly. It seems entirely impossible to you. Then you wouldn't even, it just
wouldn't occur to you to try. Karen: Like, even if
they just swam out, like. 40 feet further. So it was over the horse's Aven: heads. And then, you know, maybe Hannibal's maybe
that would be enough, but yeah, it's just, it's not even discussed as a possibility. Yeah. Karen: When I was on my first ever
excavation in Cyprus, we used to go to the beach and, you know, Cypriot
guys would come and harass us on the beach a
nd we used to go into the
water and just swim out of our depth. And they would stop where they
could stand and sort of yell at us that it wasn't fair. And we were like, well, but, you
know, if you, if you picture the guys at Lake Trasimene, like, you know,
why didn't they at least do that? They don't have to swim a mile. They could just swim like out of reach. You know, these are guys who are
about to have their heads cut off. Yeah, you'd Mark: think, Out of
desperation, they'd try Aven: anythin
g, right? Yeah, you'd think, right. But they don't. But they don't. Yeah. And it just shows it as a, as a
complete non starter for them. Karen: And there, there I sort of did
feel like, you know, how many gallons of ink have been spilled on the Battle
of Lake Trasimene without anybody pointing out that it's kind of weird
that none of them try to save themselves. Mm Aven: Well, and I guess it just
because enough, a lot of the people reading it probably also don't swim. Yeah. Mark: Thinking back t
o that, story
about Nero's mother, it occurs to me, like, how is swimming gendered? Is it, is it unusual for
women to also swim or? Aven: That must differ surely across Mark: different cultures. Yeah. Karen: People want me to gender it maybe
because I'm gendered in their minds, people are always asking me that question. And the answer I think is
no, it's not very gendered. It's, race and class are far more
important to swimming than gender. in places where everybody can
swim, women can also swim
. And in places where only very elite
people can swim, elite women also swim. I mean, maybe guys have more opportunity,
they're, less supervised, right? So they're more able to sort of go
to the local quarry and take their clothes off and swim where girls
typically have to stay closer to home and are, more occupied in their day. Right? They have to take care of their little
brothers and sisters and stuff, but they know how at approximately Aven: equal rates. Right. And I guess, in the ones we w
ere
talking about, where it's only heroes who swim there, you're going to
see it gendered, but only because. heroism is also gendered. if swimming is a marker of your
extraordinary hero and your super manly man in Greek myth, then sure,
you're going to see it only in the men, but that's because you're
only going to see men as heroes. So Karen: yeah, if you're only using it
to demonstrate that someone is a hero, obviously you're going to see women
swimming less, but in terms of practical. Practi
cal situations where we
actually see real people swimming. It's just as likely to be women as men. Mark: What about age? Are people typically learning to
swim in childhood or is it something that you can come to later in Karen: life? Well, in places where everybody
swims, everybody swims. If you can walk, you can swim. You know, people are like, tossing their, Aven: toddlers into the water, Karen: six month old into the water and,
you know, encouraging them to paddle a little before they pick th
em up again. because it's important if everybody is
socializing down by the water all the time, you want them to know how to swim. Yeah, it's a safety issue. And they want to know Aven: how to swim. Cause they want to be out there
with their parents and their friends and their siblings. Or they want Karen: to be out there
with their friends, right? They want to be able to do the
things their friends are doing. Romans seem to have taught their
kids to swim more or less at the age that they learn
to read. So like six, seven. Okay. As we do. Aven: Right, So it's an
acquired skill rather than one you grow up knowing Exactly. Karen: So it's a foreign thing, right? Not something that is a natural
part of growing up, like running or learning to walk Aven: or whatever. Yeah. Karen: And then in the renaissance,
there's a whole thing of like young men learning to swim, you know, who've
grown up in a non swimming culture, but are now like, oh, it would be
really hip to learn how to swim. And they
're all like, 15 to 20 or
something learning how to swim. And then there's actually a whole
series of, sarcastic cartoons in the 19th century as swimming spreads to the
middle class and there's all these middle class grown up people who are like,
Oh, I have to be in the swim, right? And they're trying to learn to swim
suspended from ropes on land and, and using all these sort of gimmicky
flotation devices and stuff because Aven: it's become a fad. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, then you get a
ll that,
all the bathing costumes and all of that, because that's the piece that
probably is one of the things that leads people to think it must be gendered is
the, the intersection of modesty and nudity with swimming because I assume
most people swim naked for a long time or in, very little clothing, if any. Yeah, Karen: I mean, historically, yeah,
swimming is one of the things that Europeans have against it is that you
take off all your clothes to do it. And then, yeah, Europeans,
basically,
in order for it to spread to the middle class, they
have to invent the bathing costume. Aven: Yeah, so that you can do
it and still be respectable. Karen: But women are, you know,
right out there in the front of it. I mean, people are always like, well,
women couldn't really, but if you think about the bathing carriages that,
bring women out into the water in these like sort of covered wagon things. So that they can be in the water
without having to walk across the beach. It's all women. That's
all women. It's not men who are doing Aven: that. Yeah. No, the Victorians You definitely
like yeah there are men in their funny bathing costumes, too. We all can all immediately imagine
remember what those pictures look like But they're all women too and then certainly
in the 20th century the most of the famous Karen: A big feminist thing to swim. Mm-Hmm. Mark: I imagine it sort of
follows also the, growing trend for women getting more exercise. Mm-Hmm. Once you get into the 20th century. Into
the, the late 19th century
and into the 20th century. Mm-Hmm. .
Aven: Right. Yeah, yeah. one of my favorite intersections of
swimming culture and the classics is, of course, those extremely historically
accurate swimming centered movies about the ancient world, like the one about
Hannibal that has a, who's the, swimming sensation that's in all of those movies? Esther Williams. That's right. Esther Williams. Esther Williams. Yes, that's it. There's, she's Neptune's daughter. Neptune's daughter.
That's right. And there's, there's a couple of them,
actually, there's at least two or three where, where there's all these big
underwater swimming sequences and stuff. And they're with classical themes. It's, it's, they're astonishing. Karen: Well, I think that is, I mean,
that's how people preferred to see the Greeks and Romans as good swimmers. Right, because they wanted to
see themselves as swimmers and they wanted to see themselves as. Greeks and Romans. And so they just kind
of mashed that
together Aven: so could probably keep talking about
swimming forever, but I want to ask you, that was the book that came out already. So of course it's in your work life,
I'm sure, a thing of the distant past. And I know you've been
working on another project. And I think I'd like
to ask you about that. And I think I also want to tie that back
to your earlier, the way you started off with, talking about the connections,
And I just wanted to mention something that crossed my mind when you were
talking about, you know, linking back to that we have this tendency to think
of this sort of web of connections as always having a center, right? Like you're talking about Louis
XIV might be the center and everything goes out from him. And I think, if I understand correctly,
that some of what you're trying to, you were trying to do with the swimming book
and are trying to do again now with your new work, which I'd like to talk about
in a moment, is sort of say, well, what if it's not actually li
ke one node and
a bunch of stuff circling around it, but these connections are reciprocal? And like, what if we start with
a different thing as our center node that isn't the people we
always start with as the center? Is that a fair representation? Karen: Yeah, yeah, that, that is
absolutely and, and absolutely this, this new work also grows out of this sense that
Europe is overly likely to be the center node that we grow everything out of. I always think of the 19th century
geography books wher
e you had to memorize the principal products of each place
that were exported to Europe, right? Like, so the only important thing about
Kenya is what it exports to Europe. And the only important thing about
Iran is what it exports to Europe. And I'm trying to overcome that. I'm trying to say, what if we saw
the people of Kenya as people and not people who just export to Europe? And, similarly in Iran. And so the book I'm writing now
is about what if the sort of rich, important cities of antiquit
y are in
Asia and not in Europe, which they are: Alexandria, Antioch, Babylon. You know, the cities of India and stuff. It's, just much wealthier than Europe. Right. And so what if they're actually the
ones that are kind of driving decision making and Europe is responding to that? And so in particular, I'm
looking at silver exports where. we sort of see, it's accepted,
it's generally accepted that Europe becomes a lot richer when they
start exploiting their silver mines first at Laurion and then
in Spain. Right. Right. Laurion outside Athens and then when
the first the Carthaginians and then the Romans start getting silver
from the huge silver mines in Spain. And that Rome and Europe in general
becomes poorer again when those silver mines run out of silver, right? why would digging up all this
silver make Europe richer? And typically people have said things
like, well they, develop coinage and then monetizing the economy makes the
economy a lot more efficient and so they're able to be
more productive
and that's how they get richer. And I think that's just wrong. I think it's too centered on Europe. It's blind to what's
going on anywhere else. I think instead what Europe is
doing is digging up all their silver and selling it to Asia. And it's Asia that needs all this
coinage to make their economy more productive and more efficient and whatnot. Europe isn't really a monetized economy. They don't need that. they're not producing anything. All they're really producing is silver.
It's like Saudi Arabia
selling oil to the U. S. Aven: They don't really need it for
themselves beyond a certain base. Right. I mean, maybe they Karen: use some of it. But the reason oil made the Saudis
rich isn't that they're using it to develop their economy, it's
that they're selling it to us. Aven: Right. It's not that they became a sudden
industrial powerhouse, right? Saudi Arabia is not
a , they didn't use it to Karen: build factories, right? They used it to sell oil to us. It's a commodit
y. And I think the Romans similarly Become
rich by selling silver to Egypt and Syria and Iran and whatnot, India for
goods and And they get goods in return. So the reason suddenly they have tons
of papyrus and linen clothing and glass and all kinds of steel is that they're
importing them in exchange for the silver. And the reason they become poor
when they run out of silver is that they can't buy those things anymore. Right. Aven: They don't have something that
anybody wants because the rest of
the rest of what Europe is producing is basically
subsistence economy stuff, right? Like producing enough grain for themselves
and they're producing enough wood for themselves, but not really in surplus. Exactly. Yeah. Karen: And, they make pottery and stuff
too, but basically for themselves, they're not exporting, they're not making it
in quantities that would support the lifestyle that they would like to have. really the only thing that they
have other than, they export a little bit of, timber
, right? Because they have tall trees that have
all been cut down in Asia by that time. Right. But the only other thing
they have to export is women. And I think there's a lively slave
trade in women from Europe to Asia, particularly that really gets
going in the early middle ages. Michael McCormick has a book showing
that there's a lively slave trade of women in the early middle ages. And I think that's an attempt to make
up for the loss of income from silver. Aven: A commodity they still have.
Yeah, I mean, kind of. Well, yeah, no, sorry, I mean, sorry,
that probably came out more brutal than I meant it to, but I mean, like,
when you think about the ancient world, you do, unfortunately, get used to
thinking about humans as commodities, because they, I mean, they are treated
that way, obviously, in case anyone didn't know, I disapprove of that,
but in case it didn't come across. But yeah, no, I mean, I can
see the logic there, yeah. Karen: Yeah, and then Europe really
doesn't recover
from that until they discover silver in South America
and Mexico a thousand years later. And then they do the same thing,
they basically become rich again. Aven: Yeah. And they do the same thing, right? I mean, they're basically
selling it to the East. That's, that's what they're doing
in exchange for the commodities from China, mostly, basically. Yeah. Right. Karen: Right. And you see the same arguments being
made that, oh, then they're able to monetize the early modern economy and
that's, but
you also see people saying, no, they're just selling it to China. That's really the reason
they're getting riches. Aven: Interesting. and we Karen: still do it today. The, the end of the book is we
don't do it with silver anymore, but we have miraculously managed
to convince the world that the. Paper dollars or now electronic
dollars that we sell are just as good as the silver. Yeah, and that's a lot of
what we export is, currency. Aven: Yeah, from the U. S. in particular, yeah. Karen: We still
have nothing,
you know, it's not like we really export manufacturing or anything. We still mostly export
dollars and mostly to Asia. Aven: So what is, what's
the title of the book? Karen: Yeah, it doesn't
really have a title yet. I don't get to decide the title. So what I call it is
Women, Clothing and Money. Aven: Right. Karen: But they've already told
me that probably won't be it. I think it'll be something like " money
and gender in the ancient world." Aven: Okay. It might be something like
that. Right. So, because when I saw the, saw
that title on, on your website I was thinking about textiles as money. Is that, part of what
you're talking about? Or is that a, yes. Karen: Yeah, because I start from
what is Asia using for money before they start getting Europe's silver. And I think a lot of that is trade
cloth, beads and cowries and trade cloth. and so. There's kind of a change in the
way people think about women that goes along with them changing
the way they think about money. Wh
en we start thinking of money as silver,
rather than say trade cloth or beads at the same time, we start thinking of women. Not as valuable commodities who
produce trade cloth, the source of all trade cloth but instead we start
thinking of them the way the Greeks and Romans do as parasites, as consumers. Right. which will sound familiar to anyone today
that men make money and women spend it. Aven: Right. Whereas they literally made money. When money is textiles,
women literally make money. Right
. Karen: But when money is silver,
people start to think of women as consumers rather than producers. Aven: Right. Interesting. I just happened to like three days
ago, read an old backdated issue well, I mean, like it's from last year or
something, of Scientific American that had a whole article, I'm sure you read
it, I imagine, because this is something that must be of interest to you, but a
whole article about reconstructing and learning more about Icelandic trade cloth. If you didn't, I will
send it to you,
but it was at least a year ago, maybe two years ago, so I'm very slowly
working through a backlog of magazines. it was about archaeological findings,
it was reminding us of how important in this case in Iceland, which is European
where cloth was the main unit of exchange. Even when they started to have coinage,
they still used, it was like measured in cloth and, it also made that argument
about the political importance of women and how that changed once they
stopped using the cl
oth and how they stopped being able to do business. Karen: Yeah, no, I think I have seen that. Right. I mean, one of the things the
book emphasizes is that the other currencies don't go out of use. You know, European ships are still
carrying trade cloth and cowries. to deal with Native Americans and
Africans into the early 1900s. Well, you know, as long as people
are using silver, they're still using trade cloth and cowries, right? It's the same, roughly the same time that
we stopped using silve
r coins that we also stopped using cowries and trade cloth, Aven: right? We start using dollar bills
that are made out of cloth. They're actually made out of cloth, Karen: technically. And even though we call that
paper money, it's actually cloth Aven: money. In Canada, we now have plastic
money that's not like credit cards. I mean, the actual bills are now
plastic, but that's fairly recent. Karen: Yeah, but American dollars
are still made out of cloth. And I think that's important. I think it's
part of why
they're acceptable as money is that they're actually cloth. Aven: Well, that sounds very fascinating
and again, like I like very much your approach of sort of saying, well,
but what if we just take this back to first principles and don't take
the assumptions that we have about how, power and, things flow, say, what's the proof of any of that? how do we know that? Karen: If we don't assume that the
Greeks and Romans are the leaders in anything that happens, but might be more
sort of
the victims or the, you know. Or the Aven: auxiliaries sort
of that kind of like. The auxiliaries. Karen: Right. How do things look different? And I, do think that grows out of having
worked on the website for so long. Yeah. Aven: Sorry. I'm just thinking about it. It's all very interesting, but I also
don't want to like, ask you to tell me the whole story of your book when
you are still working on the book. The book Karen: mostly exists. even though it's probably going to
be another couple of y
ears before it's actually on anybody's shelf. Right. You know, writing these books takes
forever and there, there's actually been a complete draft of it since last summer. Right. And what I've done since last
summer is cut it down to less than half as long as it was. Aven: Yeah, that's a big topic. Karen: Again, it's a big topic
and I wasn't sure what I really needed to include in the beginning. So now I'm kind of Okay, I don't
absolutely have to say this. So I'm taking it out. I'm trying to mak
e it as short as I can so
it'll be easier for people to read it then the next stage is I'm going to go through
and like check all the footnotes and make sure everything is right and then it goes
off to readers and, then there's like copy editing and printing and, you know,
it's going to be a couple of years, but that doesn't mean I haven't written it. I actually, it exists in more or
less, almost its final form already. Mark: But nevertheless,
when the book does come out. You have to come on the
podcast again to talk about it. Karen: I will be very happy to. Aven: I should say, by the way,
for people, people reading that. So the first book was with Reaktion
Press and this is with is it Liverpool? Liverpool. and I, bring that up because I think
it's important to point out that that's not, it's not that these
aren't academic books, but they're not academic books quite either, right? Like the, these are books that are not
aimed solely at graduate students working in the field or anything
like that. So I want people to know that,
that these are books that are, are meant to be readable. Yeah. I don't know if you can
always take that for granted. Yeah. Karen: I mean, I think the swimming
one in particular is very readable. they're both readable. They're not. Yeah, I mean, I've written other
things that were like, you know, the Roman pottery of Leptiminus, where
like, yeah, unless you're a Roman pottery specialist, like, don't try. There is nothing here for you. Aven: Even the pictu
res aren't
going to make any sense to you. Yeah, no, I mean, it's all Karen: like Aven: cross sections. Literature person. Trust me on that. Karen: You, you don't want to read
the details of whether there's a. Subset of this kind of amphora
that was produced in this decade. You know, that's not for you. but both of these books are
books, which really anybody who knew a little bit about. History could pick up and, and read. Yeah. I'm not making any assumptions
about what you know. Aven: Yeah. No,
I wanted to bring that out because
I, you know, we obviously talk to people who write all sorts of different
books and sometimes they are very much for specialists, but, but I
don't think you're, you're writing on Karen: these ones. These are not, there's no jargon
in them that's only available to people who write about ancient
coinage or anything like that. Yeah, I hope people will buy it. In fact, that's why I'm working
so hard to make it as short as possible in the hopes that, that Aven: pe
ople will read it. That's an approachable and sort
of manageable book for people. Yeah, for sure. Now, so the, the swimming book is
available for those who want to read it. We'll of course have a link, of course. And then as you say, who knows what
exactly the timeline is going to be for the, for the other one, but it will be,
within the next year or two, shall we say? Yes. Yeah. Karen: Yeah. Probably. Aven: Yeah, I know. We don't want to make any promises
about anything, especially in publishin
g right now. It can be quite a. There's a lot of
bottlenecks to that process. Mark: karen and I both take
part in the same writing group. So, you know, I'm in there every week
encouraging her as she does all the rest of us to you know, get the writing work Aven: done. Yeah. And you can keep us updated
as to the progress too, yeah. Karen: I will, I will. Thank you so much for having me. This has been great. Aven: Oh, no, it's been tons of fun. And in the meantime, as you say, you
do have the blog
the, the website. And I know you're on various social media. I know social media is
in such a flux right now. Nobody wants to sort of say where,
you know, who knows where we all are. Karen: I'm mostly on Blue Sky right now. And I am. very slightly still on Twitter. Aven: Well, I'll put your
handles and people can find you. And, Quatrus is, is how to
find you in various places. Yeah, and there's also the website. So if you, if anyone is, you know,
wanting to read more from you, but waiting for
the next book. You can go to the website
in the meantime, right? Karen: Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead. Read the website. There's a lot, there are
like 2, 500 articles on Aven: the website. Yeah. No, there's enough to keep
you going for a long time. We never even got to, I had down
as, things to talk about was, you know, how did you get into classics? And what was, what were you doing
before you wrote these books? But we'll just have to save that
for the next time you come on to talk about your next
book, because
swimming is Yeah, I'm sorry. No, no, it's I'm really Karen: so much more interested
in talking about the books than in talking about myself. Aven: Well, and the topics
are really fascinating. So, you know, it's not a
problem to talk about them. That's, that's fine. The conversation went
where we wanted it to. It followed its own currents. Karen: I will say, if you're ever
tempted to write a book about swimming, the metaphors write themselves. Aven: Well, I imagine to a certain ext
ent
clothing and coins do that for you too. We'll do that as well. We, we have a They do. They do, yeah. Fairly rich metaphorical
language of those two realms. Yeah. Thank you so much, and we'll point
people to all the places that can find you online, and we will have you
back when the next book comes out. And it was a real delight
talking to you, so thank you. Karen: Yeah, thank you very much. Aven: For more information on this
podcast, check out our website, www.alliterative.net, where you can
find
links to the videos, blog posts, sources and credits, and all our contact info. Mark: And please check out our Patreon
where you can pledge to support this show and our video project. You can go directly to the videos
at youtube.com/alliterative. Aven: Our email is on the
website, but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter. I'm at @AvenSarah, A V E N S A R A H, Mark: and I'm @alliterative. To keep up with the podcast,
subscribe on your favorite podcast app or to the feed on the
website. Aven: And if you've enjoyed it,
consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It helps us a lot. We'll be back soon with more musings
about the connections around us. Thanks for listening. Mark: Bye.
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