Why Is Thebes Afraid of Seven?

Sooo, this is the result of me coming up with something very silly indeed. There is the well-known myth of the Seven Against Thebes and the Aeschylus play based on it. It’s all a follow-on from Oedipus doing his thing and the familial fallout that results. The upshot is that an army raised by the Seven, led by Polynikes, the son of Oedipus, attacks Thebes, which is being ruled by Eteokles, Polynikes’s brother, who defaulted on his promise to share rule with his brother. Hence the army. As per usual in Greek myth, nearly everyone ends up dying, the gods interfere, etc.

Anyway, what would the modern equivalent be? And if you only need Seven to take Thebes, how many would you need to take, say, Cambridge? Or London? The first thing to work out here is what the population of the Thebes the Seven attack is. The myth is nominally set a generation or so before the Trojan War, so the Thebes we’re interested in is Mycenaean Thebes, as opposed to Classical or Hellenic Thebes. Mycenaean Athens is estimated to have had a population of about 10,000-15,000, but that’s very much a maximum – Athens had very fertile territory in Attica and not much local competition for the land, so could always support a larger population than pretty much any other city in Greece[1]. Thebes, whilst being one of the oldest cities in Greece and historically dominant in its region of Boeotia, faced a lot more competition, so its resource base and population would have been correspondingly smaller. I’ve not been able to find any actual numbers on its population in the Mycenaean era, but I’m reliably informed that 5,000 is probably in the right ballpark. For the sake of making some maths easier, let’s actually call it 4,900.

What does this mean in modern terms? Pretty much that the Seven would be a good match for the combined forces of St Davids (1,800 people) and St Asaph (3,400 people). The Seven Against Saintly Welsh Cities isn’t quite as snappy, is it? Equally, the Seven would probably manage to conquer the Isle of Arran (4,600 people), but would probably be unable to take Kirkwall, Lerwick or Stornoway (all in the 8,000-10,000 range). In other words, the Seven would not exactly be terrorising the towns of Britain these days. Even modern Thebes, which isn’t all that major a town these days, would be beyond them, with over 20,000 people, though they could have a good go at some of the smaller Greek islands – Ithaca, Ios, Amorgos, Milos and Samothrace would all be vulnerable.

But let’s assume we can clone the Seven. How many would we need to take out some modern cities, if we assume the Seven scale linearly with population? If the Seven can take Thebes, with assumed population 4,900, that means any one of them is worth 700 population[2]. So, to return to modern Thebes, we’d need to rewrite the legend as the Thirty Against Thebes[3]. That’s not too bad. Thirty’s not a ridiculous number. And it alliterates, so, if anything, that makes it better than the original.

However, as I said, modern Thebes is not the regional powerhouse it once was. OK, it’s still the largest city in Boeotia, but it’s a small provincial market town, not one of the main players for control of all Greece. If we want a more reasonable modern Greek comparison to ancient Thebes, we’re probably looking at Patras (170,000), Larissa (145,000) or Heraklion (140,000). Which would give us the Two Hundred Against Heraklion or Against Larissa. Or the Two Hundred And Fifty Against Patras. Those numbers aren’t too bad and sound suitably legendarily epic, though the inflation from 7 to 250 gives you some indication of global population growth in the last 3,000 years…. If they wanted to menace Athens itself (3,000,000), though, we’d be talking about The Four Thousand Three Hundred Against Athens. Which is starting to get a bit silly. If the Seven were aiming to take out Greater London (9,000,000), as an example of a big world city, we’d be nearing The Thirteen Thousand Against London[4]. And, if they were feeling incredibly megalomaniacal and tried to take the whole of Greater Tokyo, the most populous metropolitan area in the world (37,000,000), we’d be looking at The Fifty-Three-Thousand Against Tokyo. We could test this empirically by sending the entire population of St Kitts and Nevis in a long-overdue expansionist war against Tokyo. In the interests of science, naturally.

To sum all that up: the Seven wouldn’t be much use nowadays – they could threaten isolated islands and small provincial towns, and that would be about it – but if we could clone them at will, we’d end up with the most cost-effective urban warfare force in the world. That’s what I like: an impractical solution to a problem that doesn’t need solving. Well done me[5].

[1] This is one of the main reasons Athens was historically so dominant in Greece. Sparta, one of its big rivals, achieved something similar by absorbing Messene early and turning its population into helots. More people = bigger army, pretty much. And when everyone’s fighting with more-or-less the same equipment and tactics, sheer quantity is what’s likely to win.

[2] Yes, I know the Seven actually had an army and weren’t attacking Thebes single-handedly, but it’s more fun to assume it’s just those seven guys. If you’re really bothered about it, we can assume that each marginal One of the Seven spawns with some retainers or something. It doesn’t really matter.

[3] Technically, the Thirty-Two-And-A-Half Against Thebes, but we’re all friends here and I think we can be generous on the rounding.

[4] Incidentally, this gives you a good idea of how good the Seven were. If you wanted to actually besiege and potentially assault the whole of Greater London, you’d need a lot more than 13,000 troops. Because the circumference of cities doesn’t scale linearly with population (and thus area). But, we’re assuming the Seven, as Greek heroes, can sort of ignore that problem. Zeus/Athene/Poseidon/Aphrodite/Ares/Apollo/any or all of the above and all the others will intervene and sort it out.

[5] Also, feel free to come up with your own punchline to the title. I thought of ‘Because Seven Became Nine Thousand’ or ‘Because CLONES’. I didn’t say they were good. There’s a reason I left them out of the title.

Licence To…?

There is a lot of talk in the news at the moment about the concept of vaccine passports, by whatever name, both in the UK and the EU, as a way of getting things moving again now that increasingly large chunks of the population have been given a shot of the good stuff[1]. The general idea seems to be that people who have been vaccinated or have recently[2] recovered from an averred covid-19 infection[3] will get some sort of certificate that says ‘I’m clean, let me lick your face’[4] and everyone else…won’t…? There’s been some suggestion that people in the not-vaccinated-not-recently-recovered category might be able to take tests to do things, but a) tests aren’t necessarily cheap, b) they’re uncomfortable, c) who’s administering them and d) bye bye spontaneity[5], so it seems at the moment that it’s going to be something of a poor man’s substitute. And, of course, if it’s not, why bother setting up any kind of scheme in the first place if taking part doesn’t really achieve anything?

As you may have worked out by now, I’m not overly keen on the whole concept of vaccine passports, or whatever euphemistic term eventually gets agreed upon for them. As my straw man, I raise you the dubious ethicality of the whole process. There are two sides to this: it is clearly immoral to, now that there are plenty of people who are at very low risk of being nobbled by the naughty virus, not start getting bums on seats in cinemas, restaurants, hotels, theatres and so on, and start bringing some relief to a hospitality and tourism sector that employs millions and that hasn’t so much been laid low as interred in the Marianas Trench. On the other hand, it is also clearly immoral to achieve this by legally creating a two-track society. I’ve seen arguments that it’s no worse than a driving licence, but it is. Not having a driving licence just means you can’t drive; not having a vaccine passport may mean that you can’t do anything. The important point, though, is that you’re free to apply for a driving licence at any point; not having one is purely a personal choice[6]. This is not the case (currently) for covid-19 vaccinations: no matter whether you want one or not, you can’t have one until the government says you can – in another year, perhaps it will be purely a question of personal choice and then, if you’re not vaccinated, it’s your own fault if you can’t do anything – but right now, vaccine passports pretty much amount to the government deciding who gets to have a social life and who doesn’t. Which doesn’t feel terribly fair?

On top of that, of course, and to play devil’s advocate to the end, there’s also the decidedly dodgy ethical situation of inter-generational equity going on. As in, all these public-health measures have mostly (not entirely) been about protecting the old and vulnerable from the virus. And who’s got vaccinated first? The old and vulnerable. It seems a bit of a kick in the teeth, knee in the groin and fist in the solar plexus to the young and healthy to be told that, despite the fact that they’re at relatively low risk of suffering badly from covid-19, and have been all along[7], that they still have to sit around on their arses whilst Grandad can go around rubbing his face on door knobs to his heart’s content. Or would, if he weren’t in a care home and therefore couldn’t get out much anyway. As a healthy young person, this feels at best in distinctly poor taste, at worst, as if there’s a geriatric conspiracy embracing climate change, the property market, the jobs market, the 2008 financial crisis and now covid-19 to just do over everyone under 40 as much as possible[8].

But that’s as maybe. Ethical questions are always difficult to agree on and intensely subjective. What I think is inarguable and really annoys me about vaccine passports as a concept is that they undoubtedly create a perverse incentive. I’m young and healthy, I want to get out and do things, a vaccine passport scheme has been introduced. What do I do? I can’t actually get vaccinated for a few more months, so that’s out the window. I really don’t want to sit around on my own with nothing to do for any longer than I have to, because I’m not a sociopath. What does this leave me with? That’s right: deliberately get infected, most likely recover without too much trouble – maybe have an unpleasant week with a heavy cold, that kind of thing – and then get the government imprimatur that means I can actually do things again. Certainly, if I were a Rational Economic Person, this would be an absolute no-brainer. Fortunately for the whole of society, very rarely do people actually act like Rational Economic People[9], but I would be extremely surprised if, should a vaccine-passport scheme be introduced shortly, there aren’t headlines almost immediately along the lines of ‘Police break up illegal covid party attended by 500 young people’.

In other words, vaccine passports may very well prolong this whole sorry state of affairs if introduced prematurely by encouraging the unvaccinated to expose themselves to the virus, thus keeping it in active circulation. By all means, once everyone’s had a chance to get a shot, bring these licences to chill in. But, if they’re introduced in their current putative form before then, I suspect they may ultimately do more harm than good. Perhaps not quite a licence to kill, but certainly a licence to become ill[10].

[1] Which, despite all the negative coverage about blood clots and everything, it undoubtedly still is. The risk of developing one is tiny and considerably less than, say, the risk of developing something similar if you’re a woman on the contraceptive pill. Which says something about our priorities as a society. Not a good something.

[2] For some to-be-determined value of ‘recently’. You can already see this isn’t as simple as it looks. There’s also a question of how long after vaccination you’re actually given the green light – you’re not fully immunised until a few weeks after your second dose, but do you get the certificate then, or immediately after your first dose or or or….

[3] Presumably, the idea is this will have been determined by a PCR test, but you can just tell that different countries are going to want different levels of proof here, can’t you? As well as setting different time limits. As well as….

[4] I may be paraphrasing slightly.

[5] Look, even I, Mr Planning, never planned my pub trips that much in advance. Obviously, people will adapt, but my point is that there seems to be a strong chance that current formulations of the scheme will turn wanting to do anything until you’ve got the Golden Vaccination Ticket into an administrative headache of such magnitude that you effectively remain trapped in your domestic bubble.

[6] OK, it may also be that you’re too skint to afford lessons, but, even then, you can still get a provisional licence. Or just get a moped and annoy everyone by whizzing around with gay abandon at a billion rpm.

[7] So, according to the official UK government statistics [accessed 19.04.21], the combined mortality rate for everyone under the age of 40 from June 2020 to January 2021 from covid-19 works out at 2.08 per 100,000 people. Or a chance of dying of 0.002% (for a healthy person under 40, it’ll actually be lower than that, because a large proportion of these deaths will have been people with underlying health conditions. Also, it’s likely that the total number of infections is under-estimated, because a lot of people in this age group will be asymptomatic or only mildly affected, so we can regard that 2.08 as an upper limit). If you just look at the January 2021 figures, when death rates were higher, with new variants and everything, it sky-rockets to a whole 7.4 per 100,000 people, or a percentage chance of death of 0.007%. Now, some proportion of people in this age group who catch covid and don’t die will, of course, have long-term symptoms and be pretty badly affected, but just focusing on deaths, this means covid-19 (using 2019 population figures here and 2018 all-causes mortality data here) is broadly equivalent to deaths from road traffic accidents (mortality rate of 1.77 per 100,000 0-34 year olds in 2019), accidental poisoning (2.81 per 100,000) and suicide (4.82 per 100,000) for young-ish people. In other words, I and all my friends are about as likely to be run over by a car as we wander around town every day as we are to die of covid, and yet the government hasn’t banned cars and neither do we sit around inside all day because of our fear of them, so you can see why young people might be feeling a little hard done by. Before you write in, I know it’s not that simple – long covid is a real problem that affects lots of people – but I want to make the point that it’s very easy to look superficially at the numbers and conclude, as a young person, that the restrictions are all rather unnecessary and, consequently, get very angry.

I hope you’re impressed that I looked this all up, by the way. If I really cared, I’d actually get everything to line up properly in terms of age groups and years, and average things over multiple years, but this is close enough to give you an idea. Also, I should do my actual job some time.

[8] Obviously there isn’t. But it sounds a damn sight more plausible than most of the rubbish people on the internet appear willing to believe in.

[9] As much as anything, just because people would be so dull if that were the case.

[10] This is possibly one of the very very few occasions where I came up with the puns after writing the post, rather than writing the post purely to justify the puns I’d already come up with. Though, oddly, I had decided on the title before writing everything; I just hadn’t fully considered the pun-related possibilities until the end.

Quizzing Alone

I would like to thank Robert Putnam for writing a quizbowl chestnut of a book that allows me to make this terrible title joke.

So one thing I decided to put some time into whilst the vast majority of leisure activities remain impractical or actively forbidden was signing up to one of these online individual quiz league jobbies that are all the rage[1]. I’d known of such things for ages, but I’d never felt terribly interested in them. It seems I should have backed that feeling to the hilt, because I can’t say I enjoyed myself hugely. This isn’t meant as a criticism of the individual-league format or those who enjoy it, just that, for me, it was all rather dull.

Part of the problem was certainly that the questions were very US-focused. I neither know nor care about US sport, minor politicians[2] or ad campaigns. And, playing against mostly Americans, this effectively handicapped me by a question or two every time. Which was very annoying. But that wasn’t the main problem – after all, I’m aware there are less US-centric organisations out there. No, the main problem was just that it was really quite boring. It seems that one of the main things I enjoy about doing quizzes is the social aspect – you’re there with a team, hanging out, having fun[3] – and sitting answering questions on your own in a void doesn’t do that at all[4]. If I’m really honest, the loss of the vainglorious aspects of quiz – showing off how much you know to your friends[5] – also get flushed round the U-bend.

Instead, you’re just sitting there on your own answering questions, which, given I’m in academia, is pretty much what I do all day, so I suppose it’s fair enough that I don’t want to do it in my free time as well. This probably also relates to my general attitude to knowledge: I’m not hugely interested in facts devoid of context, but in understanding the wider framework and how those facts fit together. So my brain tends to just skip over things that I don’t have a wider view of, because it doesn’t know where to put them. Which means that I don’t tend to learn much from having a few questions fired at me, so the end result of all these sorts of things for me is pretty much that I affirm that I know the things I know I know and that I don’t know the things I don’t know; and that I don’t really end up transferring anything from the latter category to the former. And that I now have less time to go and read a book that might actually allow me to do some transferring.

But still, I’m glad I gave it a go, if only to prove to myself that it’s not really the thing for me.

[1] For anyone who cares, this one was LearnedLeague.

[2] By which I mean everyone who isn’t President. I don’t know who the Senator for Missouri was in 1975. Why would you, unless you’re from Missouri?

[3] Well, hopefully. You may be just depressed that you’re getting beaten into the dirt by the opposition, but hopefully not.

[4] I think I’d dislike it more if it were actively adversarial, rather than being effectively correspondence quiz. As in, if it were one-on-one over video or similar, rather than being sending in answers and getting scores back the following day. Sure, actually meeting your opponent is nominally social, but that just seems unnecessarily antagonistic. I’m talking about being with people you’re not trying to beat.

[5] I’m less bothered about showing off to random strangers. I don’t know them and I don’t really care what they think. Though, of course, I assume my friends probably think I’m OK, so I’m not quite sure why I feel the need to occasionally show off like that in front of them. I’m probably just insecure.

Maradmin Man

Rebranded since 1990 as Box-Ticker Man[1]. Anyway, moving on from terribly dated puns, after 7 MONTHS of living here my admin saga may be more-or-less at an end. In a remarkable coincidence, both my residence permit and social-security number have finally been resolved in one 24-hour period. This is so coincidental that I’m tempted to believe that the processing of my social-security number was deliberately kept on hold until my residence permit application had advanced and was being finalised. But this would imply that different departments of the bureaucratic monstrosity that is the French state are very co-ordinated, which seems to require not so much a suspension of disbelief as a wholesale skydive of incredulity[2]. So it may just actually be a coincidence.

The residence permit (or titre de séjour) was actually really quite a simple, if lengthy, process. After making the initial application way back in October, which only really required me to prove I actually live in France and that I had a British passport, I got an appointment in early March, where I had to go to the préfecture[3] and provide a passport-style photo and my fingerprints. Three weeks later, I received a notification that I could go and pick up the actual document, and so I did. And that means I can now legally reside in France for the next five years, independent of whether I’m employed or anything. And, if I’m still here after five years, I could apply for citizenship by naturalisation, which might be worth doing….

But the process was pretty smooth – both appointments lasted barely five minutes, and the préfecture being conveniently in central Grenoble, I didn’t have to dedicate a lot of time to getting there and back or anything. I can imagine, if you lived out in the sticks, it would be quite inconvenient, but then, nearly everything is quite inconvenient if you live in the middle of nowhere, so that’s on you. What did surprise me was, being in the queue with lots of other people doing the same applications, that lots of them barely seemed to speak French. If you’re going to move to another country and are trying to deal with its state admin system, it seems to me that it’s incumbent on you to be at least vaguely competent in the local lingo. But that’s me being persnickety[4].

The social security number was a bit less straightforward. To start with, I had to mess around with getting my birth certificate translated and everything, and then I was just waiting, while I accumulated all kinds of bits of paper and delayed reimbursements for various health things. My GP was surprised I hadn’t heard anything by Christmas. So was the man who’s the local person responsible for making sure that people have access to their health rights[5], not that he could do much to help – he pretty much said I just had to wait and something would happen eventually. And, eventually, it did. The letter with my exciting new number on also came with the paperwork to apply for my carte vitale, the national health smartcard, and the acquisition of which will greatly simplify all my health-related admin. So, I filled that in, in what I hope is the last major bit of admin I need to do[6], and that should turn up towards the end of the month. I shouldn’t incur any additional health-related expenses in the meantime, so I can look forward to my next appointment or prescription being considerably simpler on the admin front.

At last, therefore, I’m a real person as far as the French state is concerned. I enjoy feeling considerably more settled, at last! There is only one cloud on the horizon: my driving licence. In theory, I should be able to simply exchange this for a French licence before the end of the year, which is when, as a French resident, it won’t be valid here any more[7]. But, the French and UK governments haven’t actually signed any kind of agreement on how to treat each other’s driving licences, so all applications for exchange of a UK licence are just being rejected automatically at the moment by the fancy new online French system. So, until the governments sort their act out, there’s nothing doing on that front. And, again in theory, if I don’t get it exchanged before the end of the year, the only way I’d be able to get a French licence would be by doing the French driving test. Which is not something I want to do unless I absolutely have to. I certainly don’t need a car at the moment, so this is more of a notional problem than a real one, but it would be nice to get it sorted or at least have some clarity on what I actually need to do. But, temporarily at least, I would appear to be major-admin free! Until all the 12-month contracts for utilities and so on come round for renewal in the summer, but I’ve got a few months before that….

[1] I don’t even remember Snickers being called Marathon, but I’m aware that many older people care about this. If you’re under 35, join me in just going *shrug* and complaining instead about how Freddos used to be 10p. If you’re under 25 and don’t remember this, just go back to Tiktok or whatever it is you Youth are obsessed with these days. And if you’re not British and have no clue what any of this means, replace with some sort of nationality-appropriate nostalgic trope of your own.

[2] For a UK equivalent, imagine the Home Office and the Department of Work and Pensions talking to each other and working effectively together. You can’t, right?

[3] County hall would be the UK equivalent, pretty much.

[4] This isn’t meant to be a further deliberate pun on Snickers. But it could be.

[5] I suppose in the UK he’d be something like a health ombudsman.

[6] It wasn’t that major. I just had to provide a passport-style photo and a scan of one of a long list of ID documents.

[7] If I were here just as a tourist or short-term visitor, I’d be able to drive on it. Or if we were still in the EU.