#toynbee

House of Hades

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House of Hades One Man Versus All Principal Cities In Society 2017

Dedicated To The Complacent Mindset of U.S. Population At Large

"What if Alexander hadn't died" has been a popular question for ages. Livy (briefly) toyed with the idea of an Alexander-Rome match-up. (Guess who Livy thinks would win?) More recently renowned historian Arnold Toynbee wrote a long chapter in his Some Problems in Greek History, with his own hypothetical clash between Alexander and Rome, given what was actually going on in central Italy at that time. Unlike Livy, Toynbee saw Rome as weak, and suggested he'd have allied with them, and the Etruscans too, moving against the Samnites, then on to conquer Sicily and face Carthage--at that point, the Big Bad in the West, and for whom he had a bee in his bonnet for their earlier support of Tyre. It's an entirely probable scenario.

The only professionally published fictional alternate history about Alexander is Melissa Scott's A Choice of Destinies. She backs up the point of change from Alexander's death to some years earlier, when he was in Baktria, using a Greek revolt to bring him back home. Her picture of the Roman-Macedonian alliance owes to Toynbee, but isn't exactly the same, and yes, he goes after Carthage there, too. If you've not read it, I recommend it.

Some while back, for Gene Borza's birthday, I wrote a different "What if" that, instead of "What if Alexander had lived" to "What if Philip had died" at Chaironeia, the Macedonians lost, and Alexander was taken captive, then given to Demosthenes as his personal slave. Maybe I'll clean it up at some point and sell it independently on Amazon.

But the "What If" I'd really like to see is one of these:

* Alexander catches Darius during his flight from the Battle of Issos and takes him prisoner and/or kills him.

* Alexander catches Darius on the battlefield at Gaugamela and kills him.

No, I don't think either would have resulted in smooth-sailing for ATG. But it would have been a different set of problems.

If he'd killed Darius at Issos, the West might have gone over to him more quickly. BUT I expect Darius's brother (Oxyathres) might have taken the throne in his place. (The little boy Ochus was his only direct heir--now in Alexander's hands.) I don't think Alexander would have stopped with just the west, but it might have scrambled the lines.

A clean victory at Gaugamela might have brought Persia temporarily into line, but I expect the N/NE territories would still have revolted (Ekbatana to Baktria/Sogdia), and perhaps had more time to organize, especially without Bessus bearing the sin of "king killer." Would Alexander have been forced to live without these edges of Persia? The Baktrian Revolt really began after he was already in the region. If he'd faced a united opposition in very difficult territory... He might have decided to back off and claim "Mission Accomplished" with the taking of Persepolis, which he later used as the symbolic end of the Greco-Macedonian "Campaign of Revenge." Would he have gone back, plopped down in Babylon, and started contemplating war against Carthage? (And Arabia?)

HOUSE OF HADES ONE MAN VERSUS AMERICAN MEDIA IN SOCIETY 2017

“I USE AZROCK ASBESTOS TILE.”

YOU GUYS.

Okay, so given my general affinity for the odd/unexplained/mysterious, I have long been familiar with the strange phenomenon of the Toynbee Tiles. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re in for a treat. It’s an odd thing. 

Basically since the early 80s, these tiles have appeared in the streets, mainly concentrated in Philadelphia but also in other East Coast cities and some in South America.

[image from documentary “Resurrect Dead” which is on Netflix]

Most of them consist of the same four-line message: Toynbee Idea, in movie 2001, Resurrect Dead on planet Jupiter.

Some other ones included sidenotes, additional rants, one called the Manifesto Tile was a four-tile screed against journalists and reeking of paranoia.

The makers of the documentary think they have identified the tiler, but the matter is not settled by any means. 

Wellllll I was in Philadelphia last weekend. I thought I might see a tile and kept my eyes open as we walked down Chestnut Street (where a lot of tiles have been in the past - many have been lost or paved over). Lo and behold, I found one at 8th and Chestnut:

I wanted to submit it to the website toynbeeidea.com which keeps a map of the tiles, but I couldn’t remember exactly where it was, I hadn’t taken note of the cross street. Then I thought - I’ll look on Google Maps street view! If the image is current enough, it might be there. So off I went. Sure enough, at 8th and Chestnut in the northwest corner of the intersection, there it was:

It was for sure my tile - in the uncropped version of my picture you can see the edge of that crosswalk bar and the odd angle was the same. Note that my tile, over two years after the Google image was taken, is somewhat degraded from car tires and such.

I clicked around in street view looking for a better angle and WHAT HO...I moved onto 8th street a bit and the image shifted to one from an earlier time period. The image above was taken by Google in November 2017 - this one was dated August 2017:

THE TILE HAD JUST BEEN LAID DOWN. This is how the tiles work - they’re made of linoleum and sandwiched between two layers of tar paper and asphalt crack-sealing compound. The theory is that the tiler drops them through a hole in the floorboards of a car. They’re unobtrusive at first and as cars run over them and the sun heats them, they’re melded into the roadway and then the tar paper covering is worn away gradually, exposing the tile. You can see from comparing the two images that this process only took a few months. But the tiler must have just left that tile when the Google car went by! Like, within a few days or weeks.