From Section 4: Domination and Dissociation

Social Self-Assembly

The lifestyles and social organizations that are commonly recognized as marking the dawn of the civilized world were not the products of eons of instinctive evolution. They emerged in the space of a geological eyeblink from populations that in some cases were only a few generations removed from ancestors who pursued quite different ecological and social strategies in situations that challenged them to adapt to various landscapes and living communities and encouraged them to keep on the move in small groups that tended to keep their distance from each other. This does not mean, however, that our nomadic ancestors had to invent everything associated with civilization overnight or from scratch. For one thing, like their present-day equivalents many ancient nomadic groups would have had experience in maintaining consistent and co-operative relationships with their relatives and neighbours, with whom they would have communicated, traded goods and exchanged group members from time to time (a necessary precaution against inbreeding). Neighbouring and/or related groups may also have participated in a variety of co-ordinated activities on occasion; for example evidence of mass animal killings indicate that sometimes several bands of nomadic hunters worked together to their mutual benefit, as they have been observed to do in historical times. These observations tell us that our nomadic ancestors were capable of extensive and sophisticated social interactions long before large, settled populations and societies appeared, and it is reasonable to assume that those societies were built upon established instincts and traditions. For instance if we could go back to the days when hunters were becoming herders and gardeners were becoming farmers we might expect to find ancient units such as families, ancestral social groups, clans and tribes coming together to form larger pastoral and agricultural organizations, within which we would expect to see reflections of even more ancient aspects of primate social behaviour such as dominance hierarchies.

We may not be able to go back to those times, but there is ample evidence available from the earliest societies and those that came after to show that they incorporated and preserved many ancient aspects of human sociality. Up until recently most of the inhabitants of the civilized world still lived in communities that were organized much the same as ancestral social and tribal groups, such as farming villages and nomadic pastoral communities. Many contemporary surnames also attest to the fact that when families, communities, groups, clans and tribes were incorporated into larger social organizations they did not simply merge into homogenous masses, rather many traditional units retained distinct identities as they assumed specific roles and responsibilities, and when new units were created they were modelled along traditional lines. For example in the great city-states of classical Athens and republican Rome, slaves and members of the servile classes were clearly distinguished from citizens, who sorted themselves according to their affiliations with clans, regions (the original Romans and Athenians were drawn from extensive networks of communities) traditional social classes such as landowners and plebs, and various other factors; for instance wealth and family connections would determine whether a volunteer soldier fought on foot, with armour or on horseback. Ancient societies also reflected some basic aspects of social behaviour that would have been familiar to many of our primate cousins. For instance it was common for prominent dominance hierarchies to emerge topped by leaders who made great shows of their power and fertility, such as the kings who built lofty palaces to house their enormous harems.

What all of this adds up to is the observation that the emergence of large social organizations involved the combination and creation of units that obeyed long-established principles of organization and interaction. As for the intellectual side of things, one of the main keys to understanding what went on arises from the observation that the fundamental social units of ancient humankind were also intellectual units - ancestral social groups functioned as collective intellects while groups within linguistic tribes shared distinctive cultural elements. It stands to reason that these ancient intellectual units would have retained many of their "precivilized" aspects as they were incorporated into larger organizations, and sure enough when we look inside early societies we find many examples of collectives consisting of a dozen or so brains working together within the context of a shared knowledge base in operational groups ranging from kings and their cabinets to village leaders and their elders, foremen and their work crews, abbesses and their nuns and soldiers at all levels of organization from infantry platoons to the high command. As in the social sphere, we also find that while some of the new intellectual units within societies are not directly derived from ancient ones - for example sisterhoods of nuns regenerate via recruitment rather than reproduction while army platoons, work gangs and management committees are often assemblages of individuals from many different backgrounds - they still conform to long-established organizational and operational principles; for instance working groups recognize similar limits on the number of people that can "think together" effectively.

These points may seem obvious, but when we consider them from an evolutionary perspective they point to some rather profound developments. Take the sharing of cultural elements, for example. The members of an ancestral social group are such intimate partners in the same ecological, social, cultural and intellectual unit that they can be considered to be partners in a common mind, which they may share to some extent with their tribal colleagues. When we look within a large society - especially one with strong traditional foundations - we also find groups and communities whose members share distinct identities, experiences and knowledge which may be shared among larger groupings to some extent, and we also find society-wide cultural elements such as language, customs, religion and a sense of national identity. Thus we can recognize an entire society by the cultural elements that all of its constituents share - the cultural overlay as it were - and we can also sort constituents according to the distinctive sets of cultural elements - or subcultures - that are unique to them. This compartmentalization, overlapping and layering would seem to have the potential to create some rather complex cultural, intellectual and social landscapes, and we might say that when compared to their nomadic ancestors civilized people had to learn how to participate in several minds - and perhaps several kinds of mind - at the same time.

Something else that civilized people had to learn to deal with was the dynamism of their societies and the civilized world. As we saw in the example of the early Greek civilization, relationships among and within societies could change dramatically over time; for instance the ancient distinctions among the Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian peoples came to matter less as new patterns of cultural, military and economic affiliations developed among communities. It was not uncommon for tensions to arise within individual city-states as various groups developed distinct identities - such as nobles, commoners and factions thereof - and competed for influence, sometimes with revolutionary results; for example most of the Greek states started out as monarchies and some remained that way while others became democracies, oligarchies or tyrannies - sometimes switching from one form of government to another depending upon circumstances. Another phenomenon that was prominent within the early civilized world was what we can call social recombination, because it involved the constituents of different societies coming together in new arrangements. For example the early Hellenic centres emerged from the merger of pastoral invaders and settled populations, and in such circumstances it seems to have been common for the conquerors to become aristocratic rulers and landholders while the subjugated became land-tied labourers, itinerant workers or slaves. Similar divisions appeared in societies throughout the early civilized world and it was not uncommon for the distinctions between noble warrior rulers and their lands and subjects to become so clear-cut that the latter were treated as property which changed hands among the mighty as a result of high-level contests and diplomacy.

For the sake of completeness, it is also worth mentioning another aspect of social rearrangement which became increasingly common as the civilized world developed: the forceful incorporation of unrelated communities and societies into empires. History tells us of two basic types of empires. The first tended to follow developmental patterns characterized by rapid expansion followed by equally dramatic fragmentation. For example some people consider the high-water mark of Greek civilization to have been reached in the 4th century BC with the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, who assembled a vast and heterogeneous empire ranging from Greece to India and Egypt which subsequently broke up after his death, although Hellenic potentates continued to rule in several conquered regions. This rapid rise and fall is not surprizing since Alexander's empire was largely the product of a mass movement which under his charismatic leadership swept rapidly towards the attainment of its major goals - to gain revenge against the Persians, disseminate Hellenic culture and gather enormous amounts of loot - and then fizzled out without creating a cohesive social entity. The situation was rather different for empires that were assembled not by mass movements or charismatic individuals, but by entire societies. For example the Roman empire expanded in many stages over several centuries as its people acquired the habits and skills of conquest and rule which allowed them to extend their dominion over large areas of Europe, Asia and Africa and incorporate peoples of many different origins, such as Etruscan, Latin, Greek, Semitic, Persian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Gallic, Celtic, Slavic and Germanic - to name only a few of the major groups.

The mention of the great empires brings us back to the historical point we reached in the preceding section, which can be called the dawning of the secondary phase of civilization, since it was a time when the most significant developments were associated not with the invention of civilization but with the development of colonies, confederacies, trading networks, cultural matrices, empires and the beginnings of something that could be recognized as civilized humankind. As we have noted, these developments created many new opportunities and challenges; for example it became possible for mercenaries, colonists, explorers, teachers, pirates, traders, artisans and adventurers to sell their service and seek their fortunes throughout the civilized world alongside would-be conquerors and roaming tribes. The development of extensive social networks also allowed cultural elements to propagate independently of their origins; for example practical methods, philosophical concepts and religious insights could cross gulfs of distance and time via word of mouth and writings. Such developments helped the civilized world to become such a complicated place so fast that when we delve into its history it is easy to lose sight of our main interests in the development of social and natural relationships and their potentially malignant aspects. Once again the route forward requires us to step back for a moment to the Arcadian days before civilizations emerged onto the world's stage, and this time we will focus our attention on the kinds of things that no-one in the modern world should have any difficulty following: knowledge, power and wealth.

Compartments, Controls, Competitions

Knowledge has been a prominent aspect of human existence ever since the days when our ancient ancestors began to use their cultural skills to adapt to their surroundings, and as those skills were supplemented by new capabilities for acquiring, processing, sharing and perpetuating information there was an explosion in the amount and variety of human knowledge, which came to include explicit cultural elements like dances, stories, plays, rituals and traditions. In the days of our nomadic ancestors such elements and the knowledge they embodied would have varied considerably from group to group, tribe to tribe and among larger aggregations, and when large populations and social organizations began to emerge there were new consequences for the acquisition, sharing and passing on of knowledge, such as the emergence of specialized social/intellectual units having their own traditions and subcultures. Take for example the specialists whose activities defined several of the major stages of the civilized world, the metalworkers. Metalcrafting traditions have been traced back over several thousand years in the orient, where the subspecialty of swordmaking reached its highest degree of technological and artistic refinement in feudal Japan with the crafting of blades used by elite warriors. Those blades were fashioned according to procedures that passed from master to apprentice for hundreds of generations via what were essentially technological rituals, where equal emphasis was placed on the artistic, practical and spiritual aspects of the manufacturing process - indeed there was no real distinction made among those aspects. As a result swordmaking traditions tended to be highly conservative, but innovations were introduced from time to time in the face of practical necessity. For example Japanese swords became long, single-edged and curved when the emphasis of warfare shifted towards fighting on horseback, and then later on the blades shortened when the emphasis shifted towards infantry battles and fencing duels.

The specialization, elitism and conservatism of Japanese swordmaking traditions were reflected by many aspects of traditional societies and indeed by the societies themselves, where the duties and knowledge of specialized groups often became incorporated into institutions like classes, castes, guilds and professions, which developed their own membership requirements, hierarchies, ethical standards, educational systems, rituals, lore and languages - including "medicalese" and "legalese." A common consequence of this compartmentalization and institutionalization of knowledge and responsibilities seems to have been conservatism; for example after an initial burst of creativity most aspects of life in ancient Egypt became institutionalized and then from that point nothing much changed. When innovations did appear in early societies they tended to have strong elitist connotations, as shown by the attribution of significant advances to exceptional individuals like Imhotep the architect (inventor of the pyramid), Lycurgus the lawgiver (originator of the Spartan social system) and Amakuni the sword-maker. Indeed major inventions were often taken out of the human sphere altogether; for example the Egyptians credited the invention of writing to the ibis-headed lunar deity Tehuti (also known as Thoth and Hermes).

Another aspect of the conservatism and elitism of traditional societies is linked to the historical observation that change within them was largely controlled by their uppermost levels. This is a rather tricky subject, because it stands to reason that the official histories of people who were willing to attribute major inventions to gods would have emphasized the importance of their earthly counterparts. However, even when we correct for such biases, the social elites and urban minorities of the early civilized world do seem to have had more influence over major developments, and the lack thereof, than the common and rural majorities. For instance the historian Karl Wittfogel noted that societies which depended upon large-scale irrigation networks for their success, like ancient Egypt, tended to develop highly institutionalized and rigidly hierarchical social systems that discouraged change. When major changes did occur in such "hydraulic civilizations" they were usually imposed from above and attended by considerable stresses. For example in ancient Egypt the incursions of invaders prompted the military and administrative innovations of the pharaohs who founded the New Kingdom, while a few generations on the pharaoh Akhnaten was strong enough to impose some major rearrangements upon the religious and political landscapes, but only at the cost of triggering a backlash that swept the innovations away after his death. Less rigid societies also showed prominent top-down trends when it came to major changes; for example a succession of emperors took on the tasks of reorganizing various aspects of Roman society, culminating with Constantine's revamping of the official religion and the relocation of the centre of government to Byzantium.

These observations are largely consistent with another well-known fact about traditional societies, which is that in apparent deference to our primate heritage most aspects of life within them were associated with hierarchies. For instance at all levels of organization the structure of ancient Egyptian society reflected its most famous geometrical form: the pyramid. The pharaoh was at the top, the agrarian population was at the bottom and in between were state institutions with their cadres of specialists such as the priests who carried out rituals in cult centres that were off-limits to common folk and the various ranks of administrators who were responsible for controlling the activities, interaction and movements of people and the production, harvesting and distribution of resources. The result was a highly stable and sophisticated social system that functioned without modern distinctions among the economic, political and spiritual aspects of life; there was no need for things like money, private property, social mobility, democracy or participatory religion in a society where the pharaoh controlled everything, owned everything and created everything through the generative and protective power that flowed from his unique relationship with the divine forces.

Not all societies developed like Egypt and few were able to avoid for long the chaotic and dynamic influences of the colonizations, migrations, conquests and social recombinations that became common features of the civilized world soon after its inception. Nevertheless, like Egypt most early societies seem to have been strongly hierarchical, with paramount rulers sitting above the institutions and ranks of aristocrats and administrators that extended down to the people and communities who produced the resources that kept everything going. This social model proved to be as resilient as it was popular. For example in the beginning Rome was ruled by hereditary monarchs who were eventually overthrown to create a republic that retained the hierarchical aspects of the society - including distinctions between patricians and plebs, knights and footsoldiers - and continued most of its traditional institutions such as the official cults and the senate. The executive and judicial branches of government were partially democratized by allowing citizens to elect judges and magistrates (initially from among the patricians, with plebeian tribunes admitted later), and the military also became more egalitarian as it evolved into a permanent institution dedicated to the defence and expansion of Roman domains. As the republic grew in size, influence and wealth over the centuries its positions of power naturally became highly desirable, and competitions among classes, factions and ambitious citizens eventually gave rise to a series of bloody insurrections and civil wars. The chaotic situation was eventually resolved by the reinstitution of a monarchy by the Caesars, who in deference to the republican heritage avoided passing their crowns from biological father to son.

Another aspect of the dynamism of early societies is evident in the development of their major population centres. In ancient Egypt such centres were mostly concerned with ritual and administration, but in other parts of the Mediterranean many cities owed their success to the development of economic networks which made it possible for well-placed communities and societies to thrive; for example many of the prominent early Greek cities were ports located along major trade routes. Such centres made it possible for individuals, groups and communities to gain economic influence that was at least partially independent of the formal command and control structures, although the latter also benefited from assorted taxes, tolls and extortions. The rise of trading networks and mercantile classes also encouraged the development of economic instruments like private property, money, credit, investment and incorporation, which made for some complex social relationships. For example the contestants for power in late republican Rome included patrician princes, politicians and entrepreneurs who had amassed fortunes so vast that they could tip the balances of power. Such a situation allowed Julius Caesar to use his political skills and ambition to rise from a modest patrician background to a point where he was able to borrow enough money to raise his own army, which was initially used to build his wealth and reputation in foreign pillaging expeditions and was then unleashed against fellow Romans in his final ascent to imperial power. Caesar did not invent any of these strategies, but he was singularly successful in implementing them.

Things are starting to get complicated again, so this might be a good place to pause and recap some of the highlights of our tour of the early civilized world. We have seen that right from the dawn of civilization social organizations showed some consistent developmental trends and tendencies, many of which appear to have arisen from ancient and/or innate aspects of human social and intellectual behaviour. One of the more prominent early trends was towards the compartmentalization of responsibilities, knowledge and identities within distinct groups, communities, classes and institutions, many of which appear to have been derived from and/or assembled and operated according to the long-established principles of more ancient social/intellectual units. Another prominent and apparently instinctive trend involved the emergence of hierarchical structures within and among the various components of early societies. These structures became especially robust and extensive in situations where populations, ecosystems, hierarchies and institutions expanded together to produce highly stable and inherently conservative organizations, such as the hydraulic civilizations of ancient Egypt and Asia.....

- discussion of emergence of civilized world, the rise of literacy and the development of literary traditions such as those of the Hippocratic authors, who:

.... stand out from their professional and literary predecessors and colleagues as proponents of what was at the time a rather novel approach to dealing with the world: rationalism.

A Brief History of Reason

What is the justification for the preceding statement? We can start with Hippocrates' literary predecessors, who in this case go right back to the father of Greek literature himself, Homer. The Homeric epics were derived from ancient stories that recount complex tales of contests and intrigues among mortals whose actions and destinies are moderately influenced by their intellects and personalities and strongly influenced by supernatural forces. Primary among those forces are the gods, who like the heroes they variously favour and frustrate are motivated by greed, jealousy, lust, fear, favouritism and mean-spiritedness as they indulge in intrigues and contests where they display an intimate familiarity with deceit in all of its forms. Their human qualities seem to have endeared the Homeric gods to the various peoples and communities who adopted them - for instance Athena was the goddess of Athens - and the gods also became associated with cult centres throughout a Greek world where most people seem to have been content with traditional religious practices. There were, however, some exceptions, especially among the intellectuals.

An example of the range of attitudes that developed among ancient Greek intellectuals is provided by two men who left their homes in Asia Minor in the mid-sixth century BC, most likely owing the incursion of invaders from Persia. The more famous of the pair is Pythagoras, who migrated from Samos to Croton in Italy, where he established a philosophical school cum Orphic cult that combined reason with revelation. For instance the Pythagoreans interpreted mathematical and geometrical relationships - such as those underlying the famous right triangle theorem - as reflections of a universal harmony and order, which being perfect and immortal allows for motion and cyclicity (as in the orbits of celestial bodies) but not genuine change. That viewpoint led the Pythagoreans to conclude that what we see as change is actually an illusion arising from the limitations and deceptions of our senses, perceptions and thought; for example we think we see animals and people being created and destroyed every day but their essence is never destroyed, rather it migrates from form to form (much the same theory appears in contemporary Indian texts and it was poetically summarized somewhat later in the Bhagavad Gita).

The Pythagoreans were as much a cult as an intellectual school, which likely explains why much of their secret lore has been lost and what we know about them comes indirectly from the writings of literary commentators, as is the case with the wandering poet Xenophanes, whose verses and opinions persist only as fragments quoted in other works. Xenophanes rejected Pythagorean mysticism, physical theories based upon anything other than direct observation and most aspects of traditional Greek culture and religion, such as superstitions, mystery cults and the Homeric pantheon. He dismissed the latter by arguing that the similarities between the appearance and behaviour of gods and men arose from the gods being reflections of their earthly creators rather than the other way round, hence the gods of the Greeks looked and acted like Greeks, the gods of the Ethiopians looked and acted like Ethiopians and if cows could conceive of gods their gods would look and behave like cows. In place of Homer's morally bankrupt deities Xenophanes envisaged a benign consciousness that pervaded all of nature, which left him open to charges of atheism, since a universal god is rather difficult to distinguish from no god at all.....

- discussion continues through the emergence of Greco-Roman civilization and concludes with -

Evolution is about change, and throughout our survey we have seen many things change, including the emphasis of various kinds of changes. Most of the changes associated with the emergence of our unique lineage and the subsequent development of the ancient hominine world could be traced to genomes, but it was primarily cultural changes that allowed early modern humans to respond to challenges and exploit new opportunities with unprecedented speed, flexibility and success as they created a new world populated by people like us. There were of course many genomic and physical changes associated with the emergence of modern humankind and some of the more prominent changes appear to have been associated with our unique abilities to communicate and co-operate within the context of the social groups that also served as the primary intellectual, cultural and ecological units among our nomadic ancestors, although this situation began to change as our ancestors' interactions with each other and their natural surroundings led to the emergence of ecosystems and new kinds of social, intellectual and cultural organizations. The changes were especially dramatic within those ecoconverting populations that rapidly reached unprecedented degrees of size, density and complexity as their expansion and social, cultural, intellectual and ecological elaboration gave rise to the first large societies. The rise of societies and the civilizations had profound impacts upon many aspects of life within them and the civilized world they created, and one of the more significant developments was the emergence of literacy, which in addition to facilitating the preservation of information supported the development of new approaches to organizing, analyzing, acquiring and applying knowledge. Some of those approaches and the knowledge they generated made further profound contributions to the emergence of new ways of looking at, thinking about and changing various aspects of the human situation - aspects ranging from individual morality to the organization of empires.

This summary can serve as a reasonable recap of our evolutionary survey up to the Hellenic era, provided we remember to read between the lines. For instance the overall story may give the impression of relentless progress but what it actually presents is a highly compressed account of one of many journeys that unfolded within a vast evolutionary landscape where countless other possibilities were explored. New varieties of ancient bipedal hominoids continue to show up in the rocks of Africa, and those that have already been studied seem to have followed a variety of lifestyles long before some took to looking for meat on the savannah, where a few went on to become big, smart, well-organized and technologically adept hominines. Some hominines stayed in Africa while others wandered farther afield. Some perfected bodies, tools, tactics and lifestyles that served them well for countless millennia as they stuck with situations they were familiar with, while others explored the farthest frontiers of their physiological tolerance and adaptive potential. Many perished regardless of the strategies they adopted and some of those who went into the empty spaces of the ancient world learned how to think and adapt in ways that allowed their progeny to claim all of humankind's ancestral domains and extend them to the ends of the Earth. Those pioneers adopted a variety of lifestyles in a wide range of situations, where some had the opportunity and inclination to become active rearrangers of their natural surroundings and a few landed up in locations that allowed for the rapid emergence of the large, dense and complex combinations of ecosystems, populations and social organizations we recognize as societies and civilizations. Early civilizations followed unique developmental paths with regards to their expansion, organization and adaptation to local challenges and opportunities, and for modest communities and mighty empires alike the reward for success often came in the form of new challenges within the hurly-burly of an increasingly crowded and competitive civilized world. That crowding and competition encouraged and facilitated a variety of novel developments, with one of the more significant innovations being literacy, which despite its limited use had a considerable impact upon everything from the preservation of everyday information to the perpetuation, celebration and illumination of traditional knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and conceptions. Within some literate societies established wisdom was not only preserved and extended, it was challenged and superseded as powerful new visions of the world and ways of explaining, exploring and changing it were developed, which in some instances resulted in rapid and radical changes in many aspects of life.

These qualifications make our evolutionary story more complete but they do not entirely remove the air of progressiveness - indeed we may as well face the fact that it persists even when we reduce the tale to its most basic Darwinian elements. There may once have been several lineages of bipedal hominoids, hominines and humans walking the Earth but there is only one left. Our modern human ancestors may once have been nomads wandering the Earth in small groups and tribes in search of sustenance, but ever since the emergence of ecoconversion-based lifestyles it is likely that most of the people alive at any given time have depended upon ecosystems for survival, and the prodigious fecundity of large societies would have ensured that for the past few thousand years the civilized world has accounted for the bulk of the global human population. It also seems to be a historical fact that during that time the civilized world has served as both the main source and the primary evolutionary context for most of the significant developments concerning how people think about and deal with each other and their natural surroundings, given that civilized humankind has rapidly spread to all corners of the globe while it has absorbed, displaced and eliminated those following other lifestyles and civilized people have replaced, encroached, disrupted and destroyed living communities and landscapes throughout the biosphere.

Once again I have used the rather clumsy trick of allowing our story to run ahead of itself, but the plot does seem to flow along quite naturally. This observation has an important implication, which is that most of the elements required for the creation of the world we live in today were already in place by the Hellenic era. This is does not mean that everything that came after led inevitably to us, or that we represent the ultimate product of an onward and upward progression. For instance as we have already noted Imperial Rome can be seen in many ways as an intellectual and cultural regression relative to classical Greece (Roman art was also slavishly derivative), and aside from some notable developments in the area of hypocrisy there has been little change in civilized politics since Alexander's day. History also tells us that within our corner of the civilized world the past twenty-odd centuries have seen a multitude of options explored by a wide assortment of people and societies with varying degrees of success, yet when we view things from the overall perspective of human evolution and our specific interest in the roots of macromalignancy, it seems that all of the critical developments separating us from our ancient ancestors had already been taken by the time a surly Roman soldier lost his patience with a certain dawdling mathematician.

It may seem an obvious romantic device to use Archimedes as a fulcrum for the history of the civilized world that many of us live in today, but there are some practical justifications as well. For one thing, by Archimedes' day Mediterranean civilization had already provided ample proof of its potential for generating rapid and radical changes in aspects of life ranging from basic ecology to esoteric intellectual inquiry, and those changes were already being driven and shaped by forces that were peculiar to civilized humankind and its unique concerns with things like power, wealth, fame, truth and novelty for its own sake. Many of those elements are evident in the story of Archimedes himself, who took greatest pride in his efforts to extend the realms of esoteric thought while allowing his search for more practical knowledge and applications to be shaped by real-world problems and challenges. The most serious of those challenges arose from an attack on his home town that was instigated by a clash between the great empires of Rome and Carthage, which became locked in such an intense conflict that the eventual winners - the Romans - were satisfied with nothing less than wiping their competitors from the face of the Earth. That was certainly a harbinger of things to come, and it can be reasonably argued that by Archimedes' day all of the elements were in place to produce the major developments that have occurred since, with the major determinants of the timing and unfolding of those developments having been chance and circumstance; for instance if Syracuse had not been overrun Archimedes may have sparked an industrial revolution two thousand years before the one that finally emerged in Europe. I realize that may be a radical idea to some and I would be reluctant to put it forward were it not for the fact that by Archimedes' day the luminaries of Mediterranean civilization had already figured out what the future would look like, with the most prescient among them being not the philosophers, scientists or historians, but the comedians.