cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 40

I'm trying to use my other account at least occasionally so I posted about my Yuletide gifts there, including the salon-relevant 12k fic that features Fritz, Heinrich, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Saint Germain, Caroline Daum (Fredersdorf's wife), and Groundhog Day tropes! (Don't need to know canon.)

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Thanks to Selena giving you the who's who rundown, I am now free to give you the fandom primer! I.e. why this is my fandom, and what is fanon and what is canon.

First and foremost, everything derives from a single fact: my fandom source is Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

Gibbon, as you probably know, is 18th century. This means almost everything he says has been challenged or even refuted by modern scholars. Hell, much of what

selenak says has been at least challenged by modern scholars. The sources are so brief, biased (in one direction or the other), and otherwise unreliable that for almost every fact you will find a historian confidently stating, another scholar will claim the opposite, and a third will point out that the so-called "fact" depends on a single unreliable narrative source, or is contradicted by non-narrative sources or archaeological evidence.

For example, did the junior emperors marry the senior emperors' daughters as soon as they were appointed junior emperors, or did the marriages take place several years earlier and the senior emperors appointed their sons-in-law whom they'd had plenty of opportunity to observe at close range? You can make a case either way! Was Diocletian's reign really that sharp of a break with his predecessors? Has the extent of the 3rd century crisis and the extent to which his reign represents a "recovery" been overstated? Whose idea was it to retire, and when? Was there actually a conference at Carnuntum? Did Diocletian actually not like Rome? Was Maximian Caesar before he was Augustus? Did Diocletian divide up the empire amongst the tetrarchs? If so, how and when and how many times? And so on and so forth. For most things, we just don't know! And even where modern scholars have achieved a consensus, it took a lot of work and deciding what evidence to give more weight to.

So if you want to write a primer, you have to pick some things to state as fact (like Selena did), otherwise the summary will be impenetrable, and if you want to write a fanfic, you ~~should go with Gibbon's take~~ actually have a whole lot of flexibility!

The beauty of Gibbon's take is that he will give detailed personality descriptions of the people involved; modern historians correctly state that this is absolutely historically irresponsible. His description of Diocletian, for example:

It would not be easy to persuade us of the cowardice of a soldier of fortune who acquired and preserved the esteem of the legions, as well as the favour of so many warlike princes. Yet even calumny is sagacious enough to discover and to attack the most vulnerable part. The valour of Diocletian was never found inadequate to his duty, or to the occasion; but he appears not to have possessed the daring and generous spirit of a hero, who courts danger and fame, disdains artifice, and boldly challenges the allegiance of his equals. His abilities were useful rather than splendid - a vigorous mind improved by the experience and study of mankind; dexterity and application in business; a judicious mixture of liberality and economy, of mildness and rigour; profound dissimulation under the disguise of military frankness; steadiness to pursue his ends; flexibility to vary his means; and, above all, the great art of submitting his own passions, as well as those of others, to the interest of his ambition, and of colouring his ambition with the most specious pretences of justice and public utility.

And Maximian:

Maximian was born a peasant, and, like Aurelian, in the territory of Sirmium. Ignorant of Letters, careless of laws, the rusticity of his appearance and manners still betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction. War was the only art which he professed. In a long course of service he had distinguished himself on every frontier of the empire; and though his military talents were formed to obey rather than to command, though, perhaps, he never attained the skill of a consummate general, he was capable, by his valour, constancy, and experience, of executing the most arduous undertakings. Nor were the vices of Maximian less useful to his benefactor. Insensible to pity, and fearless of consequences, he was the ready instrument of every act of cruelty which the policy of that artful prince might at once suggest and disclaim. As soon as a bloody sacrifice had been offered to prudence or to revenge, Diocletian, by his seasonable intercession, saved the remaining few whom he had never designed to punish, gently censured the severity of his stern colleague, and enjoyed the comparison of a golden and an iron age, which was universally applied to their opposite maxims of government. Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants.

For historical purposes, all you can say is, "I mean, maybe?" Some of it might be true, but the level of confidence is just way overstated. For fanfic purposes, however, all I can say is, "Ship them with great shippiness!" :D

Another side-effect of me encountering them via Gibbon is that first I got a description of the lead-up to Diocletian, which meant a whole lot of rival candidates for the purple trying to kill each other. The thing Selena described where Maximian and his son Maxentius allegedly wrestled over the purple cloak? A hundred years earlier, you had two brothers, Caracalla and Geta, being co-emperors and living like this:

On their arrival at Rome, they immediately divided the vast extent of the Imperial palace. No communication was allowed between their apartments: the doors and passages were diligently fortified, and guards posted and relieved with the same strictness as in a besieged place. The emperors met only in public, in the presence of their afflicted mother; and each surrounded by a numerous train of armed followers.

Then Caracalla has his younger brother Geta killed so he can rule alone!

So of *course* when Diocletian appointed Maximian co-emperor, I was yelling, "No, don't do it! Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I'm several hundred pages in, and this never ends well!"

And I read Diocletian's entire reign waiting for Maximian to betray Diocletian...and he...didn't? Despite having the kind of headstrong and domineering personality where you'd totally expect him to? (See what happened post-retirement.)

And then he (somehow) got Maximian to retire! And then, somehow, even though being a retired emperor should make you entirely powerless, and Maximian had everything to lose and nothing to gain by agreeing, he did it again! Despite the fact that it didn't last--even that just proved to me that Diocletian had some kind of in-person influence over Maximian, because Maximian clearly had the kind of personality that did not want to give up power for one minute. Which made it all the more impressive.

Because I was reading, going, "Yeah, okay, I see that on a political level Diocletian did not have the whole going into retirement and smoothing over the succession thing down, but on a personal level he clearly he had some kind of hold over Maximian! Tell me more!"

Because my entire ship here is based on the complementary skills and personalities that allow them to do things together that they couldn't do alone (I loved their good-cop bad-cop act as described by Gibbon), plus the absolute loyalty. It's very much the dynamic of the Duc de Belle-Isle and his brother. In fact, you could call Maximian Diocletian's "other self". ;) A contemporary panegyric pretty much did:

[Your brotherhood] even conquers your difference in age, and with care for each other renders equals the older and younger...For although you are different in age, most sacred emperors, we understand you have a twin accord...Neither of you favours his own nature more; each wishes to be what his brother is.

This is also,

cahn, one of the ships where I have always imagined loyalty gestures like kneeling, swearing, etc. Like even leaving aside the part where Diocletian became emperor and thus everyone was performing gestures of submission, it's impossible for me to believe there weren't some special gestures between those two.

ALSO. From the same panegyric, which focuses on Diocletian and Maximian meeting in Milan after years apart ruling different parts of the empire, describes the end of the meeting where they had to go their separate ways again:

What were your feelings at that time, what were your expressions! How incapable were your eyes of disguising the evidence of emotion! Of course, you looked back frequently, and this is not an empty fiction made up about you--you exchanged such assurances since you intended soon to return to see each other.

Modern scholar Rees describes this as "the presentation of the Dyarchs' meeting in Milan almost as a lovers' tryst."

Note for historiographic purposes, there's no reason (that I know of) to believe this was an eyewitness report, and it was definitely propaganda meant to be over the top. But for fandom purposes, it's catnip!

Also, I should point out that, yes, they spent most of their reigns separated by half of Europe and only meeting up a couple of times and they retired separately (Italy for Maximian, modern-day Split, Croatia for Diocletian). So my personal headcanon has always been to ship them non-romantically, but like Karl XII and Görtz, or Belle-Isle and his brother: doing things together that they couldn't do separately, trusting each other, and bringing a lot of intensity to their working relationship, but not having a typical romantic or sexual relationship.

HOWEVER. I am deeply grateful to my mystery author for this line:

When you said we’d retire together, I thought you meant TOGETHER.

Because it is giving me more traditional shippy feelings like whoa! GUH. <3

Also, speaking of retirement, Diocletian's palace still stands! This is where he grew his cabbages in his post-retirement life (again quoting Gibbon):

His answer to Maximian is deservedly celebrated. He was solicited by that restless old man to reassume the reins of government and the Imperial purple. He rejected the temptation with a smile of pity, calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power.

Sadly, when I was in Croatia, I hadn't yet discovered my love for Diocletian, so I did not go to Split. Actually, it was that trip (which was largely to Italy) that caused me to think, "You know, my Roman Empire history is non-existent, I should fix that," and as soon as I came back, or maybe even on the last couple days, I started reading Gibbon. Then I immediately wanted to go back! But of course I haven't.

Edited Date: 2022-12-27 06:32 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Here is a video tour through Diocletian's palace in Split. Incidentally, the APs and I wanted to go to Croatia in May 2020, which was nixed for obvious reasons, and we might try again in 2023. If so, I'll put Split in the list and make some photos for my friend who is a scholar of the ~~the Katte family~~ the Tetrarchy.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Hahahaha! Well, I wouldn't go so far as "scholar" with the Tetarchy, ahem, but pictures definitely appreciated! <333

Where else in Croatia are you thinking of going?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

When you said we’d retire together, I thought you meant TOGETHER.

Btw, I still have a tab open to this line in my browser, and I keep rereading it. Turns out it's my favorite line. <3

From:

cahn

So, um. Since we're discussing this fic, my reading (once I went back to read it, armed with my New Knowledge, and leave another comment :) ) was that it wasn't actually (AU)Maximian who wrote that line, but Theodora and Fausta writing it for Maximian as their conspiratorial plot to get them together. (which I thought was AMAZING, btw.) I got the impression from your comment that this wasn't your reading?

But of course I suppose they were only writing what he was thinking anyway, which is why it worked! And it's a GREAT line either way, possibly my favorite too <3333

From:

mildred_of_midgard

No, that's my reading too! It's wildly out of character for Maximian. (Or at least, you know, my reading of same.) But the POINT is that SOMEONE wrote ME, a Diocletian/Maximian shipper, that exchange, and it's been giving me FEELS all week. !!! I don't know who would know me so well, but we'll find out soon and be very surprised. :P

Much of the reason it's giving me so many feels is that I always *wanted* them to retire together, and sometimes I would go off and imagine that they did. And now that line has given my imagination full rein and it's galloping off.

I actually always imagined historical Diocletian might have been down for it and that it was Maximian who was extremely not interested. Which is entirely consistent with this fic, and, you know, now that I think about it, the fact that Diocletian falls for it here (assuming our reading is correct)...he wants to believe. More awwww!

Ah, wait, now that I reread my AO3 comment, I see what you mean: I wrote, "Maximian breaking out the Diocles name of their youth." Okay, this is where I have to explain how I write comments: for the same reason I can't write summaries (same cognitive process, same brain noping out), comments are excruciating unless I liveblog my reactions as I go. Normally I just paste the liveblog reaction into the box and that is my comment, but this time I decided to try cobbling together the reactions into something resembling a normal-person comment. (ETA: This is also how the Prussian Doll comment got written, if anyone is wondering.) So yes, when I hit the "Diocles" line, I had not yet gotten to the part that I feel is OOC, and so I attributed "Diocles" to Maximian. And that part is entirely in-character, I maintain. :P It had never actually occurred to me Maximian might do that, but now I totally think he did, in the same way that I think we can all agree Fredersdorf sometimes called Fritz "Fritz". <3

But of course I suppose they were only writing what he was thinking anyway, which is why it worked!

ETA: Honestly, my take, now that I've given it more thought (previously I stopped at, no, Maximian would never), is that they were writing what *Diocletian* was thinking, which is why it worked. Here's my take:

Diocles

As noted, I totes think this is in-character and probably got Diocletian in the right mood to hear what he wanted to hear.

remember when it was just the two of us, being no names under Aurelian? Those were the days.

I mean, not that Maximian can't have complex feelings, and maybe that's what our mystery author intended? But it strikes me as more plausible for Diocletian, the voluntarily retired and exhausted by years of stress, than Maximian the power-at-all-costs. I have a hard time buying this, and I think it says a lot about Diocletian that he did.

Look, maybe I overreacted to certain things

Again, not that Maximian can't ever apologize, so this could be what he's thinking, buuuuut...Who really wants to hear this?

but it comes down to the subject line. I do. I really do.

Well, *I* like to think this is true, and I hope it is, but not as much as Diocletian would like to think it's true. :P

When you said we’d retire together, I thought you meant TOGETHER.

So, upon reflection, I love the idea that this may have been how Maximian got talked into retirement in the first place, and then when he realized that wasn't going to be the case, he went, "Well, fuck this!" and decided there was no reason to be retired at all. And I could see the two of them not communicating this at aaallll. BOYS!

But my first reading was Diocletian silently hoping that Maximian would be more interested in hanging out, and Maximian being totally unable to tolerate retirement and being solely interested in getting back in power, and Diocletian being silently disappointed. And then he's so relieved to get the message that Maximian does actually miss him, that he doesn't question the "those were the days" line. (I think the Diocletian who bought "those were the days" from Maximian is the same Diocletian who let Galerius make the succession arrangements, i.e. no one can be "on" all the time. :P)

But either way, for this exchange to work at all, they have to have had the kind of relationship where one, it would be plausible for Maximian to want to continue a personal relationship after retiring, and two, Diocletian would want to hear it. Which is giving me more traditional shippy feelings, because let's just say that for all I miss working under Best Boss Ever (the one now at Facebook), and I want him to found a company so I can work with him again, we are not going to have an exchange like this, not even if someone hacks our emails. ;)

Edited Date: 2023-01-01 12:27 am (UTC)

From:

cahn

Ahahaha okay so for this person who has only met these people these post, basically, I didn't think (or realize?) the text was out of character for Maximian, exactly -- like, I think in the world of the AU he DID miss Diocletan. But I do think sending an email like that would have been out of character, because that would have been, like, communication! Which is where our girls step in :D

(I think the Diocletian who bought "those were the days" from Maximian is the same Diocletian who let Galerius make the succession arrangements, i.e. no one can be "on" all the time. :P)

I mean, in this AU the Diocletian who let Galerius make the succession arrangements was arguably the one who was boffing him, which honestly I think is brilliant on the part of the writer, it posits a reason for him making those not-great decisions, and at the same time gives Maximian a motivation as well for suddenly throwing his weight behind Maxentius.

My reading of the AU is that explicit Diocletan/Maximian (in AU) was how Maximian got talked into retirement in the first place (per Lactantius's blog), then post-retirement, there MAY have been some sort of Diocletian/Galerius hijinks, but regardless of whether anything DID happen (which I think it probably did, because as Maximian says, Diocletian never denied it! Now, perhaps, like we think may have been the case with Fritz and Fredersdorf, he maybe didn't do much, but emotional affair, sure!) Maximian thought something happened, which is how he decided yeah screw this retirement for Diocletan thing! And then both of them are too mad at each other to take the first step, but once Theodora/Fausta do, they're both like "...yeah, I miss you :( "

(But the great thing here is that some of my evidence is from Lactantius' blog, and both you and Selena would be the first to tell me that Lactantius can't be trusted as far as one could throw him... ;) )

ETA: I wanted to reply to this as well:
Normally I just paste the liveblog reaction into the box and that is my comment, but this time I decided to try cobbling together the reactions into something resembling a normal-person comment.

This is basically what I do as well :) So, like, if one was wondering what was in that liveblog mentioned in I waited until she woke up to read it so I could liveblog my reactions at her in our time-honored Yuletide tradition (she did hers at me yesterday), it basically became my "Prussian Doll" comments, with more explanatory remarks added :)

Edited Date: 2023-01-01 05:14 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ahahaha okay so for this person who has only met these people these post, basically, I didn't think (or realize?) the text was out of character for Maximian, exactly

To be fair, I don't know if this is what the author was thinking either! But that's the fun of fiction, you get to bring your own interpretations. :D

My read on his characterization is definitely skewed by historical!Maximian (and Gibbon!Maximian, which is not exactly the same, as discussed). For example, getting into an undignified wrestling match over the purple cloak in real life was a bid for power, the red velvet jacket not so much. (Unless it was exclusive Roma Eterna (Inc.) branded swag, which, lol. :'D) So historical!Maximian may have been more power-hungry, fair.

But even AU!Maximian did not want to retire in the first place, and then was desperate to stay involved in power politics, which leads me to not see him as the kind of person who would be nostalgic for the days when he didn't have power.

Now, I foresee Selena (or maybe even you!) pointing out that Fritz and FW both longed for quiet retirement in days when they had power, and Fritz even when he was engaged in an all-out struggle to hang on to power at all costs, and that they were not alone among power-hungry men in this. And I concede this point! If all you had on Fritz was the kind of sparse documentation that we have on Maximian (either historical or AU), you would never see him as the kind of person who would say that Rheinsberg was the only happy time of his life, and yet he did.

So this email may be entirely what AU!Maximian was secretly thinking after all! And the author, if they were to see this, might be thinking, "WTF do you mean, OOC? People are complex, Mildred!" :D

But the Maximian in my head, which, okay, is being influenced by Gibbon, is not the kind of guy who is going to miss a time when he didn't have power. And I would point out that Fritz a) had hobbies that he could have enjoyed in retirement, b) never said, "Remember when Dad was king and I was a nobody? Those were the days." :P It was, "Remember when I had time for all my hobbies? Those were the days."

And if Maximian had those kind of hobbies, well, AU!Diocletian could have said something like "Come on, now you'll have time for X!", which is what you would have said to Fritz if you were trying to talk him into retiring. Yes, all right, that's an argument from silence, and also partly an argument from Gibbon, who heavily implies that Maximian did not have hobbies, but still, AU!Maximian strikes me as a type, one of those men who don't know what to do with themselves outside of work and don't long survive retirement (for different reasons than historical!Maximian didn't long survive retirement, lol).

As for why I think AU!Maximian would never send that email even if it was exactly what he was thinking--yes, admitting he missed Diocletian would be *communicating*, but that I think he might eventually come around to. For me, it's more because talking about wanting to retire might set in motion a chain of events that would lead to him losing a chance at power. And my read was that he would *never* initiate that.

TLDR: When I said "OOC" and "Maximian would NEVER!", I meant I read the email as partly what he was actually thinking but would never admit (so your read, basically), and partly what he was not thinking.

I think in the world of the AU he DID miss Diocletan

Oh, sure! Like I said, I think he did! And they 100% have to have had some kind of personal relationship for sending this email to make sense at all. (Plus, of course, his outrage at Galerius does mean he has a vested interest in who Diocletian's been sleeping with.)

But I'm not sure he misses him in a way that would lead him to write, "I thought we were going to retire together" as opposed to "I miss doing the CEO thing with you, come ON!"

But, like I said, I could come around to the idea that the prospect of hanging out with Diocletian is how AU!Maximian got talked into retiring in the first place, and that getting mad at Diocletian is why he unretired! It's fun that there are so many possible interpretations. :)

I mean, it's still possible the author is going to come along and tell us that Maximian totally sent that email and meant every word, the girls hacking was in relation to something else!

Anyway, the reason I have a tab open to that line is so I can *imagine* Maximian saying that to Diocletian with all the <3s that entails, and for that I am forever grateful to the author. And also, I have such a big grin on my face right now from this whole fic and this whole discussion, you have no idea. :D :D :D

(Also still laughing to myself and going, "No one is that impressed with the cabbages, Diocletian!")

From:

selenak

Okay, since the anonymouos period is over I can confess I did start to sweat, Mildred, when your original comments made it sound like you thought it was Maximian who'd written that email, and I thought, argh, how do I tell Mildred her favourite line wasn't from Maximian (though it was definitely what he thought/felt)? So I was pretty relieved to hear otherwise.

Anyway: I figured that modern!Fausta has non lethal options to think of re: solving this conflict (and getting Dad out of her hair because Maximian living with her and Constantine clearly can't have been fun in any version) and that it would be entirely ic for her to forge this mail, and ensure via Theodora that one way or the other, Diocletian replies in kind until the two old guys are back together. As to whether Maximian will stay retired in this AU the second time around, I have no idea, but I'd say the odds are better if he's living with Diocletian than if he's not.

And I would point out that Fritz a) had hobbies that he could have enjoyed in retirement, b) never said, "Remember when Dad was king and I was a nobody? Those were the days." :P It was, "Remember when I had time for all my hobbies? Those were the days."

True enough, but I would point out that sentimentalizing one's youth isn't unheard of, and while Maximian would not want to be some no name soldier from the Balcans serving in the army again in any universe, I could see him being nostalgic about the befriending Diocletian, rising with Dioclectian through the ranks, knowing who the enemies were and getting rid of same, talking with each other about how every Emperor after Aurelian (and before Aurelian) sucked and surely, if those idiots made it to the top a capable man could, too, parts of it.

ETA: Almost forgot: I see your Fritz and raise you a Heinrich writing ever so cryptically he pretends the last twelve years didn't happen to Ferdinand, as on one level, surely Heinrich wouldn't want the time back when he was under Fritz' thumb, and had to beg for permission to travel, but otoh, at least then he had someone to spar with and was occasionally listened to...

Edited Date: 2023-01-02 01:36 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Okay, since the anonymouos period is over I can confess I did start to sweat, Mildred

Lol, sorry, this is what I get for cobbling Frankensteinian comments together out of notes written in real time!

As to whether Maximian will stay retired in this AU the second time around, I have no idea, but I'd say the odds are better if he's living with Diocletian than if he's not.

<3 I am happy to imagine the modern AU going better and them being more shippy!

Also, for those of you who may not have seen Selena's reply to my AO3 comment:

Diocletian, reality check: NO ONE is that impressed with your cabbages!

Well, Gibbon was. :) It's a good line for posterity.

Quoted for truth! (I snorted.)

ETA: Re Heinrich, fair! (Though at least there we know *exactly* what he was missing, because under FW2 he had less of what he wanted more of under Fritz: meaningful work.)

From:

cahn

I can confess I did start to sweat, Mildred

hee, that's why I brought it up! :)

I would point out that sentimentalizing one's youth isn't unheard of

I will relate to you an actualfax conversation that I was part of in grad school.

Tenured top-of-field professor #1: Professor #2, remember the good old days when we were grad students and didn't have responsibilities and didn't have to write proposal grants? We could just do research without worrying about stuff like that!
Tenured top-of-field professor #2: Ah yes, those were the days! Grad students, pay attention: you're so lucky! you're living through the best days right here!
All the grad students in the room, including me: Uhhhhhhh. Noted.

(I mean, writing proposal grants IS pretty annoying, and a lot of grad school I DID find awfully fun. But...)

and raise you a Heinrich writing ever so cryptically he pretends the last twelve years didn't happen to Ferdinand

Aww <3 :(

From:

selenak

hee, that's why I brought it up! :)

And I am very grateful, since I went mentally back and thro whether or not I should because I didn't want to destroy Mildred's joy!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I can confess I did start to sweat, Mildred

hee, that's why I brought it up! :)

I too am glad you brought it up, because poor Selena! I will try to do better about editing my comments in future.

All the grad students in the room, including me: Uhhhhhhh. Noted.

I mean, my big complaint about grad school at the time was that it was too easy and they needed to raise several standards, but I do gather I was in a minority*, and also complaining that school or work is too easy and/or standards are too low has pretty much been the theme of my life (minus isolated cases like "teach physics without the math background").

* Although there was the part where I heard via the grapevine there was a scandal that you could get a PhD in German Studies at UCLA without knowing German, because the German department (which I was not in, obvs) let students do everything in translation, and there was a big investigation...

Edited Date: 2023-01-04 04:17 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

I mean, my big complaint about grad school at the time was that it was too easy and they needed to raise several standards

Yeeeeah my grad school experience was very different from yours, in the sense that those words do not compute for me? Like, it would not occur to me to rank grad school as "too easy" or "too hard" or anywhere on that axis (and I don't think I ever heard anyone else do that either); it was about doing research, and the research was always both too easy and too hard, because if it was easy you weren't working on a problem that was hard enough and so you obviously should be doing the harder problem, but if it was hard you weren't making any progress so it meant you had to simplify the problem to something you could actually do. (The old joke is, if a mathematician can solve it, it's "trivial.") I can recall only once in my grad school career where everything came together and I was actually solving things in a way that wasn't too easy or too hard, though that once was glorious. (I suspect this is a difference between hard science and other fields, because it does occur to me that I don't think I would have felt that way about doing a Ph.D. in Medieval Welsh lit. I would have had other different issues, mind you, but not that particular one.) And then of course in grad school, once one is doing research, this is the start of comparing not just to one's class cohort but comparing one's research to all the other research that's ever been done by anyone, and most people are bound to come off a bit poorly in that comparison :)

There were classes too, I guess, but no one really took those seriously, and I guess there were qualifying exam standards in my program as well, which no one really paid attention to except as annoying hurdles that had to be overcome to get to the real part of grad school (or, if one decided one didn't want to do that, to take the consolation master's). (I do think the exam standards were pretty reasonable; I failed one of the exams the first time because I got cocky, and I knew at least one person who failed out totally, but they were designed to be passable if one studied, and not if one didn't, and not as "weed-out" exams as some other places use them.)

But, like, research-always-being-too-hard-and-too-easy is physics academia in general; I don't imagine that changes between grad school and being a professor. The parts of physics grad school that would be drastically better as a tenured professor (or for that matter not being in academia):

a) not knowing where one's money was coming from - I fortunately had a fellowship and didn't have to worry so much about this, but that wasn't the case across the board
b) being very much subject to the vagaries of one's advisor (of course, this varied greatly from advisor to advisor, and was generally much more of an issue in lab environments because of the way labs work (the two professors in the above story had associated labs) -- my (non-lab) advisor was extremely hands-off, others were not; my institution tended to be pretty reasonable in general, but let's just say that I heard stories about extreme control-freak advisors not at my institution)
c) not having very much money -- which was fine at the time as a young single person without expenses but I certainly very much like making more money
d) knowing that one's life was going to be uprooted every couple of years or so if one stayed in academia
e) being at the bottom of the academia pecking order (again, generally worse for lab students as this means they had to do all the lab grunt work)
f) often having all the grunt work of grading/etc. for a class, without having any of the control of the class or fun parts of teaching (I didn't have a TA-ship so not my problem, but a constant complaint)
g) worrying one isn't good enough to make it in academia (not everyone worries about this -- there is some evidence my advisor never did -- and I suppose that tenured professors at the top of their field also maybe feel this way to a certain extent, buuuuut there's a lot more evidence that the answer is "yes" at this point)

So, basically, the same kinds of lack of money/power/autonomy/control that, presumably, also to a certain extent characterized Diocletan and Maximian under Aurelian (especially in AU). Now, I fondly remember grad school and had a lot of fun and am glad I went, and as is somewhat clear from the above I had some reasons why I had a pretty good deal, and also the lack of responsibility that comes along with the lack of money/power/autonomy was a large part of that, and part of me would say "those were the days!" -- but when I think about it rationally, I wouldn't really want to do it again now. :P

All that to say, I could understand Maximian (even if he normally doesn't miss the old days) being struck by a sudden gust of nostalgia -- and even more so, in the world of the fic, Theodora seizing inspiration from hearing Maximian tell stories about "the olden days when..." :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yeah, see, in my PhD program, which was about mastering a bunch of facts about languages, it was *all* about the classes and qualifying exams. After you did a few years of those, you got a couple of years to work on research to finish off your PhD, and okay, some people did take many years on their dissertation, but I only took two and was told I had a first-rate dissertation, and I was hyper-successful in the program.

I mean, our main official requirements were:

- Coursework in Indo-European linguistics, archaeology, and mythology.
- Qualifying exams in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, another language, and Indo-European linguistics.
- Reading proficiency in French and German.
- Dissertation.

And then there were the unofficial expectations, like linguistics coursework, TAing, conference talks, as many language courses as you could find time for, etc.

There were people who went crazy with stress over the classes and exams, and some people even had to repeat exams, and then there was me, who kept going, "But I can do this in my sleep?" And then there was the time a grad student from Harvard was visiting for a conference, and he complained about grad school being hard, and one other student in our program (he was one of the only other students who I think also found it too easy) said something like "???" They stared at each other, and then Harvard!student went, "...Right! State school."

:P

But even with my research, i.e. my dissertation, one reason I think the standards were too low was because I was trying to do quantitative linguistic research and I was allowed to do that without learning statistics. And I don't think it's Dunning-Kruger syndrome but actual low standards that has me saying, "No, I should have been made to learn statistics and do it properly." Even at the time, I was getting that feedback from other scholars, that this was not responsible research, but from my own university I just got, "First rate dissertation! What is this statistics of which you speak!" I really needed the bar to be held higher there. And I knew it at the time and that was why I complained.

Not to mention they let us come out of that program with requirements for "French reading proficiency" and "German reading proficiency" the results of which you have seen in salon, i.e., I could not read a paragraph of either. But somehow I got an A+ and was the top student in the class that was supposed to evaluate our ability to read German for academic research purposes!

I mentioned the problems with the French and German standards the last time I interacted with a couple people I went to grad school with, and one of them started making exaggerated faces and going, "I can read French just fiiiiine!" in a sarcastic "This is fine" meme style.

On the other hand, my Latin experience teaches me that if the way they want you to learn a language is to look up every word in a dictionary and grammar and never move on to the next word and sentence until you know every single thing about this word and sentence, you will never get to the point where you can read a paragraph on your own, at least not until you have a PhD with a focus *in that language*. So I guess if you're going to insist your students use these methods on research languages like French and German, you have to hold the bar really low. (And then you complain your students don't learn Russian because there's important research that's being done in Russian and not translated, but then you've taught them the only acceptable way to learn a language is to look everything up one word at a time, and then they quite understandably balk at doing this exercise in a non-required language.)

In the Indo-European historical linguistics courses, which were not language mastery but linguistics, people used to freak out and study for hoooours and super stress over the exams, and I was super confused because the prof would tell us which questions were going to be on the exam and what the answers were? Like they were essay questions and he would give us an outline of what he wanted us to cover in the essay, how much easier do you want it to be? But I guess being a third-year when the other students were first- and second-years helped: I had seen much of the material before just from existing as a student in the Indo-European program, and the other students were largely getting it for the first time in this class.

I remember one time we had a study group the night before the exam, and as we headed out, one student went, "Okay, we're going home to study until bed, and then we'll meet again in the morning and study together right up to the exam, right?" and everyone went, "Right!" And I went, "...It didn't occur to me to study more. Am I over-confident?" And then I got a 100% on the exam. :P All my grades in those classes were 97% or above.

And in Medieval Welsh, since you mention that, we were supposed to take 3 quarters to read the Mabinogi, and I had read the entire thing on my own outside of class before the end of the 1st quarter. And in 3rd quarter, Royal Patron said he was spending 5 hours a week on the reading assignment (which was like 2 pages) for this class and it was so exhausting, and I was like, "It's 2 pages. I spend 45 minutes a week on this class. I'm not sure the course should be worth this many credits." And we each stared at each other like the other was some kind of alien. (Yes, it is a problem that in the third quarter I was still taking 45 minutes to read 2 pages, but [insert pedagogy rant here].)

And then there was the undergrad "Intro to Indo-European linguistics" class that was for some reason required of me as a grad student. Halfway through, the prof gave an exam that everyone failed, except I got a 100%, and so he had to re-adjust the structure of the class so that the first half of each class period was new material and the second half was review, and I was excused from the second half.

And the archaeology course where I managed to make 100% plus full extra credit on all the quizzes, a 100% on the midterm, and a 100% on the essay, and so I was going into the final basically just needing to show up. And so on. A lot of grad school was like just being an undergrad again but with additional years of coursework.

And so it was that grad school was too easy for me. Although everyone else except for about 2 or 3 other students seemed to find it very hard and stressful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, the only time I was glad they lowered the bar for me was when the one time there was a non-alphabetic writing system involved. My brain struggles with visuals like writing systems and fonts. I was given a pass on the Sanskrit exam with a note that said, if I read between the lines, that the pass was only because they knew I was never going to look at Sanskrit again and so they were not unleashing an incompetent scholar onto the world of research. They were effectively allowing me to climb onto a chair and step through the one hoop I couldn't jump through in order to complete the requirements. Mind you, I had told the head of the program that if I couldn't pass Sanskrit, I was going to drop out of the program and switch to Classics, and I don't think they wanted to lose their top student, so there was that...

From:

luzula

I would say that grad school took me from the knowledge that I was one of the best of the math students in my year, to knowing that I was a mediocre mathematician. So although I came out of it with better skills in math, I had a worse self-confidence in that area. This is probably a common experience, and not strange, because as a student you're working with small, self-contained problems. By contrast, as a grad student you're working with large, open-ended problems that take years to solve. So it sounds like my experience was more like

cahn’s. I do, however, think that I am a pretty good university math teacher.

From:

cahn

luzula has much more succinctly phrased what my graduate experience (and the experience of most people I know in physics and mathematics, in fact) was like. You are right that it's not strange! Though I can see why it is different for people not in the hard sciences.

(Though,

mildred_of_midgard, I am starting to see though why we have some different opinions on high school math pedagogy. For me, I would have liked my math education sometime before grad school to have taught me at least the basics of sitting with larger problems without knowing the answer -- maybe not the kind one works on as a grad student, but at least I think I would have benefited from more experience with throwing myself against problems without knowing how to solve them, and making incremental progress over at least days, if not weeks or months as it can be in grad school. But I suppose if one isn't going to grad school in math or physics, maybe it's not so important to have those kinds of experiences.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, is that what you meant by not knowing how to solve a problem? Having a longer time to solve it, as opposed to solving or not solving it and then handing it in? I mean, I and my classmates definitely took an entire week to solve homework problems, making incremental progress, but I don't think we were ever given weeks or months to solve a problem, that's true.

But I suppose if one isn't going to grad school in math or physics, maybe it's not so important to have those kinds of experiences.

I *wanted* to go to grad school in math or physics, but my education did not equip me to do this. I think if I'd had the math pedagogy I wanted, I might have been *able* to go to grad school in math! I was taught to do math in a way that meant I was a top student through my bachelor's degree, but I knew I was not equipped to survive at a graduate school level.

But somehow I also knew I had the intelligence and math ability to get at least a master's and maybe more, I was just missing something and I didn't know how to make up the lack. At the time I thought it would maybe help if my tuition waiver had been for 5 years instead of 4, that that extra year might have made a difference, but now I'm pretty sure I know what I was lacking: pedagogical alternatives to the received method.

I only knew how to study math the way I was taught, and I couldn't do it on my own. Starting in about 5th grade, I was always frustrated that I could never teach myself math on my own, and I never understood why. I knew that was going to be important at some point, and that real mathematically successful people could do it, and also that it would relieve so much of my intellectual frustration if I could...and yet I never could. Not until after my PhD did I figure out what went wrong.

I succeeded up through undergrad by being trainable when it came to solving problems and figuring out proofs as you put them in front of me, but there was a bit of a "trained monkey" and "studying for the exam, then forgetting" aspect. I frequently didn't have the concepts down as well as I needed to, and for that reason, as well as others, I struggled to retain math from one year to the next (another thing I knew I needed to be able to do to move to a more advanced level).

The whole problem was that I was taught to study math one page at a time, one sentence at a time, and never move on to the next thing until you understood the current thing. When understanding the next thing frequently makes the current thing easier to understand!

What I needed was to be able to do breadth before depth. I needed to understand how a bunch of concepts related and helped make sense of each other, and I needed to have a good grasp of the relevant concepts before I started getting bogged down in making sure I had remembered to carry the 1. If I had felt I was allowed to do that (you know, the thing they actually punish you for in school, and the opposite of the way books are written), I could have 1) taught myself math, 2) understood what I was doing at a deeper level, 3) retained concepts after the exam.

Once I had the ability to do all that, I suppose being given problems that took longer than a week to solve would have been useful too, but until I had the ability to do 1-3, there was no chance I was going to grad school in math or physics at all.

Also, if you're saying you never ever had to sit with a problem without knowing how to solve it (???)* and it never took you longer than a day to solve it incrementally? That is probably why you went to grad school in physics. I and everyone I knew, except possibly the people who went to grad school in math/physics/astronomy, had the experience on a regular basis. :P It sounds like we have different priorities pedagogically because graduate school selects for people who had no difficulty solving the assigned problems, and those of us who had the kind of difficulties you wanted were discouraged from attending grad school because it would be too hard.

* ETA: "???" because "I would have benefited from more experience with throwing myself against problems without knowing how to solve them" does not compute and never has, that's why that sentence has always confused me so much whenever you say that. :P

Edited Date: 2023-01-08 11:58 pm (UTC)

From:

luzula

The whole problem was that I was taught to study math one page at a time, one sentence at a time, and never move on to the next thing until you understood the current thing.
That's definitely not how I read a math text, anyway! I start by identifying what the main theorem is, and reading whatever definitions and preliminaries I need in order to understand the theorem, and also the bits about why the theorem is important. Then I identify what theorems/lemmas are needed to prove the main theorem, often by drawing a diagram showing how the different theorems/lemmas hang together and lead to each other. And then after that I dive into the proofs (if I actually need to--sometimes you just need to use the theorem).

I don't know that I necessarily needed to have harder problems in high school, or early in my university education. It might have been good, but actually I think we got a fairly okay progression. The master thesis was a sort of mini-graduate project, after all, and before that was various smaller projects. I think I just hit...well, it was partly about my abilities (I don't think I have it in me to be a brilliant mathematician), but also about my interests. I'm often serially geeky, and I had moved on to other geeky interests.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

That's definitely not how I read a math text, anyway!

That's now how anyone should read a math text, in my opinion. What I needed was someone to tell me I could look at later chapters at a high level to just grasp what they were about and what we were building up toward, instead of going, "No, Mildred, you're getting ahead! We must go line by line or it's not rigorous."

...Yes, if you're writing a proof. There is a difference between a rigorous proof and a rigorous pedagogy. The needs are different.

(My math and physics profs seemed to think that if they walked you through proofs line by line that was the same thing as teaching you, and you would then be able to 1) grasp the concepts, 2) apply the concepts to concrete problems without further effort. Maybe that works for the

cahns of the world, but the Mildreds need "This pointless-looking lemma is building up to Galois theory, which is covered three chapters from now, and the point of Galois theory is blah blah," before learning the proof for each pointless-seeming lemma in isolation.)

actually I think we got a fairly okay progression

More evidence you went to school in Sweden!

From: (Anonymous)

Agreed! I often emphasize that written proofs are an after-construction--nobody solves a problem the way a proof is set down on the page. The written proof is the result of taking your messy process and setting it down in as concise a way as possible. And when teaching a proof, I do not just go line by line. First I talk about the ideas of the proof, then I go line by line, then I go back to the ideas so that the students can (hopefully) see where the assumptions in the theorem are used and where other tools are used, and whether the proof is straightforward or requires some non-obvious trick. And yeah, of course it's important to motivate why we're doing the theorem at all.

Also useful when teaching theorems and proofs, is to let students try and find examples where one or more of the assumptions in the theorem is not met, and what then happens with the result. (Example theorem: a continuous function on a closed interval has a maximum and a minimum value. What happens if the function is not continuous, does it need to have a maximum and minimum value? Does it necessarily need NOT to have a maximum and minimum value? Where does the proof fail? Etc.)

Re: Grad school

From:

luzula - Date: 2023-01-16 12:46 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

cahn

it never took you longer than a day to solve it incrementally?

Well, not until college, certainly, except that I used to do the USAMTS which really did give you weeks to play around. But I got a different idea from what you've previously said: I got the impression that it took you a week to do the problems because you hadn't been taught the material you needed to solve the problem.

This is not what I'm talking about. I mean, yes, I've had plenty of problems like that too, especially in college, and, sure, they took me the entire week to solve, but that's not interesting or useful to me pedagogically because the solutions are either "beg the TA to teach us what we need to know to solve the problem" (which I have done) or "learn this thing by myself or with the help of B, College Partner in Crime" (which I have also done, for whole classes even, with varying degrees of success in actually learning and retaining things), but in both cases it's still "once I know the material then I can solve the problem." (I mean, I guess it's... helpful in some ways... that I got crash courses in teaching myself things?)

I'm talking about the kind of problem where you do know everything you need to know to solve the problem, you just don't know yet how to put it together, and you have to keep thinking about it and trying different things and playing with it, many of which might not work. Or where you might not see how to do the whole problem, but you might see how to do a little part, and you have to play around with that part, then maybe once you've done that part you can see how to do another part, but you won't be able to see it until then.

I had a little of that in college, but the pedagogical system of classwork isn't really set up to foster that (except maybe in Sweden :) )

From:

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2023-01-23 12:36 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

cahn

Heh. Yeah, you should have been made to learn statistics :P But I think it's pretty common not to because people don't understand statistics. I think I've told this story before (maybe I told it to

luzula), but the lab group I was loosely associated with had a journal club where we talked about scientific articles, and the guy in it who had done some biology in a past life would always bring up a bio/med paper and talk through their misuse of statistics, and it was horrifying.

On Medieval Welsh: Yeah, that's bizarre. I was in a first-year (UNDERGRAD) program for Medieval Welsh language/lit for one trimester, and we did Branwen in that trimester (after doing a couple of weeks of grammar), and it was fine? I don't remember the language portion being particularly taxing nor did I spend much time on it (I spent much more time on the lit part, which I found fascinating, and my teacher was a kindred spirit who would give me more books to read, which made us both very happy (except when we did Dafydd ap Gwilym, whom I disliked)). On the other hand, the class did not do the appalling thing where we were discouraged from seeking out other translations! (That would also have been weird, because all of us had probably read it in translation before taking the class, and I remember reading a bunch of Mabinogion lit articles which would have been sort of weird to read if one wasn't familiar with the text in translation at least.) This was not a US graduate language program, though, so I suppose not subject to the terrible pedagogy you have described to me before.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Heh. Yeah, you should have been made to learn statistics :P

SERIOUSLY.

(after doing a couple of weeks of grammar)

I think that's more time than we did on grammar. I think we had 2 days of grammar? No homework, just the prof lecturing from Evans' Grammar of Middle Welsh. And then it was "dive right in and figure it out as you go." I survived partly because I had found a textbook online, one that I kept secret so as to keep my edge over the other students.

These days, I am facepalming *so hard* at the idea of secret textbook, omfg. The goal was apparently to keep us from learning anything!! Or as I've started saying about keeping us away from translations or context, like not having us do Cicero's Catiline when we did Sallust's Bellum Catilinae: "Lest we accidentally learn something."

This was not a US graduate language program, though, so I suppose not subject to the terrible pedagogy you have described to me before.

Well, the undergrad programs do the same thing! I suspect you got lucky because it was a lang/lit course.