I had a sheltered adolescence. Didn’t get out that much. So when I say I was seventeen when it happened to me for the first time, and that I still vividly remember it, there’s no cause for alarm.
I was in my bedroom, (keep the faith here), and it was late, near midnight. I had a term-paper to finish, and it was on the Roman poet Virgil. One of our requirements was to read part of his masterpiece the ‘Aeneid’, the First Book, in Latin. We were to be tested with a random passage of the original that we would then be asked to translate into English.
I was over halfway through. Aeneas, who has fled Troy after its sack by the Greeks, has been washed up in north Africa, near Carthage, where he comes across a temple to Juno being built by Dido, the local Queen. To his amazement he sees illustrated on the temple frieze the story of Troy’s destruction, a ‘tale of war now known by fame around the world’. He is transfixed.
He turns to his friend Achates. Even here, he says, our sorrows are known, even here
“sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”.
This will always be my favourite line of poetry. This is partly because what happened, for the first time, when I read it is that I understood it in Latin. I didn’t puzzle it out, translate it into English in my head, and find its meaning that way. I got it at once, in the original, as it was composed.
Now this is no great achievement because the Latin is not particularly hard, but it was an extraordinary sensation, made much the more so because of what it means.
‘There are tears for things, and what humans do touches the heart”.
I had to go back and be sure, the usual way, that I wasn’t mistaken. Translate each word into English. No, that’s it. It really was as simple – and sublime – as that.
It may seem a sad line, but it isn’t really. It’s got that elegiac tone, of course, because it’s Virgil, but the tears are not tears of grief, they are tears of compassion.
This is my final blog. We finish filming Friday and are getting ready to say our goodbyes. I’ve been thinking so much of my time here, and of why I love this city so much, and of why I love learning about and studying its past.
And that’s the reason. Very appropriate that it should be Virgil, the patron poet of Rome, who wrote the words for me. All those lives that have gone before, lives like ours.
“There are tears for things, and what humans do touches the heart”.
It was Sting who sang about being an Englishman in New York. “I’m an alien, I’m an English alien, I’m an Englishman in New York”, if I remember right. Who else but the English would celebrate being somewhere else in song? Most cultures sing about the joys of return - or of never leaving in the first place.
You can blame it on the food, the weather, the fact that it gets dark at 4.00 between October and May, whatever the reason most Englishmen are happy not to be at home, even if - perhaps because - an Englishman’s home is his castle.
But if it’s a liberation to be in NYC – and take it from me, for various reasons, it is – what’s it like to be an Englishman in the Eternal City, in Rome?
Well, it’s different. Wonderfully so. Even the most uptight Englishman, (is that a tautology?), can loosen up here and has been doing so since the days of the Grand Tour. One famous Grand Tourist, the poet John Keats, had a phrase for the special appeal of Rome, the city in which he was prematurely to end his life. A rather beautiful phrase actually, in the second stanza of his “Ode to a Nightingale”.
“O for a beaker of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim And purple-stained mouth”.
In other words, I’ll have a glass of red wine, and make it a large one.
For Keats the liberations of Bacchus, the Roman God of wine, stood symbolically for a life lived outside the Anglo-Saxon strait-jacket of northern Europe. But here, of course, there is a paradox. Because, while it is a commonplace to see people reeling through the streets of England of an evening, insensible with drink, here in Rome public drunkenness is frowned upon, and hardly ever seen.
This isn’t simply Christian influence at work. It has, almost always, been that way, even in pagan, and supposedly decadent Rome. Interestingly, there is one only period of ancient Roman history for which we have any evidence of fashionable inebriation. And that is the late Republic, the period in which ROME is set, and the early Empire, the period immediately following.
Perhaps it was because it was a time of change, of changes so profound that, as the most brilliant of the contemporary biographers of Julius Caesar Christian Meier put it, “This was a crisis in which it was not Roman society that fell apart, but Roman reality.”
The stories are legion. Mark Antony wrote ‘De ebriatate sua’, ‘Am I a drunkard?” Cicero’s son was reputed to be able to drink a gallon and a half of wine in a single draft, one Torquatus Novellius Atticus two and a quarter gallons, without drawing breath what’s more, and without leaving a drop behind in the sconce pot. The young Emperor Tiberius was so renowned for his love of wine that some wit turned his name from Tiberius Claudius Nero to Biberius Caldius Mero, which roughly translates as “Drunk up, Warmed up, Topped up.”
But the fad passed. As the Empire consolidated and equilibrium returned, self-control and sobriety were again the order of the day, for all the talk of orgiastic excess under the Emperors. By the time the Emperor Hadrian had brought beards back into fashion, drunkenness had gone out of it.
You don’t hear Robin Williams speak Latin too often. So when he does it’s worth mentioning. He’s not exactly fluent, in fact he only seems to know one phrase, but I shouldn’t think he’s bothered. He’s hardly about to apply for a job at the Vatican.
As the inspirational teacher Professor Keating in Peter Weir’s ‘Dead Poets’ Society” he loses his job in tragic circumstances for encouraging his pupils to ‘make their lives extraordinary’. In the central scene he leads them out of the classroom into the school’s chilly main corridor. Confronting them with the sepia photographs of generations past he urges on these teenagers a sense of their own mortality. Do what you can now, he says, because your lives will soon pass as theirs have done. Seize the Day. Carpe Diem.
As Mrs Doubtfire he tries an alternative version. When his false-teeth fall into a glass of water, temporarily undermining his – already unconvincing – drag disguise, he shouts to distract attention. Carpe Dentum. Seize the Teeth. Those who have already seen the Peter Weir film are in on the joke.
That you can make a joke out of a Latin tag at all testifies to its familiarity. The phrase, taken from a poem by the Roman writer Horace, is one of very few that have really passed into our language. It’s now most often used as a byword for irresponsibility and short-termism, as if the uncertainty of tomorrow excuses any behaviour today.
The original context is far subtler than that. The poem in question, the eleventh Ode in Horace’s First book of Odes, is a complex mixture of the fatalistic and the celebratory. ‘Don’t ask’, it begins’, ‘what end the gods have in mind for you and me...don’t go consulting Babylonian astrologers to find out.’ Here’s the fatalism, a chill tone that is intensified in the next few lines. ‘It could be that this is the last winter Jupiter has granted you, this winter that now pounds itself to exhaustion on the crags of the Tyrrhenian Sea’.
In the central part the celebratory tone cuts in. ‘Wise up, have a drink, stop making long-term plans’. And finally the poem turns lyrical.
‘Even as we’re speaking envious time escapes us: seize the day, trust as little as you may in the morrow.’
It’s a beautiful piece. So concise but so varied. An invocation to merry-making, but a melancholy merry-making. No wonder it’s endured.
For it captures the essence of the past and its hold on us, the pathos of the past, in a way that Peter Weir conveyed perfectly. That our mortality is always upon us, Horace argues, is not an invitation to recklessness nor a counsel of despair, but a call to cherish while we still can the deepest values of life: companionship, happiness and love. If something stands between you and those things, remove it. And don’t do so tomorrow, but today.
I like a good acronym. And heard a great one the other day. A script for a love-story, someone confidently told me, didn’t hold up because it lacked URST. Of course I had to ask. URST, he re-iterated. And then, somewhat pityingly, ‘You know URST. UnResolved Sexual Tension.’
I hadn’t seen the script, but it seemed plausible to me. I was confident, not even having read a line, that it didn’t fall down because it lacked CIL, another favourite acronym of mine. But then that’s because CIL stands for Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and not many scripts in Hollywood fail for lack of that.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, or Body of Latin inscriptions, is an immensely bulky, immensely tedious, and very wonderful thing. It cannot be read, it can only be dipped. It currently runs to 17 volumes in about 70 parts and is growing all the time. It contains every known Latin inscription from the entire Roman Empire, some 180,000 of them to date.
The CIL is stuffed with acronyms because that’s the way inscriptions worked. Carving on stone is a laborious business, and of course space is also at a premium. So everything was abbreviated. It’s worth knowing a few of the commoner acronyms because it’s surprisingly easy to decipher some inscriptions once you do, and that adds hugely to the fun of wandering around Roman ruins.
The best known of course is ‘SPQR’ which stands for ‘senatus populusque Romanus’, or ‘The Senate and People of Rome’. But you will also often see ‘VLMS’, which stands for ‘votum libens merito solvit’, or ‘he willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow’. This means that the writer promised to create the monument on which the inscription is carved as a gift to some god, in return for favour perhaps, and has now fulfilled that promise. A third formula I particularly like appears on tombstones, ‘STTL’, ‘sit tibi terra levis’: ‘may the earth lie lightly upon you’.
And herein lies the charm, and value, of the CIL. In amidst, literally, all the dry stones are hints of emotion and feeling we can find nowhere else. When surviving literature is dominated by the sentiments of the rich Roman male, inscriptions are a priceless resource for hearing other ancient voices.
One example: CIL 13.1983. Found in Roman France and dedicated by a labourer to his wife on her tomb. “To the eternal memory of Blandinia Martiola, a most faultless girl, who lived eighteen years, nine months, five days, Pompeius Catussa, a plasterer, dedicates to his wife, who was incomparable and very kind to him, this memorial which he had erected during his lifetime for himself and his wife...You who read this, go bathe at the public baths of Apollo for us, as I used to do with my wife. I wish I still could.”
How tenderly and truly that comes across the centuries. Anyone who’s ever suffered a bereavement or a break-up can recognize that ineluctable sense of pain: ‘I wish I still could’.
‘Ambition’. A thoroughly admirable quality as the Romans saw it. In fact they invented the word. Its origins are revealing.
‘Ambitio’, the Latin original, had a very particular sense. It was derived from a Latin verb, ‘ambire’ which literally meant ‘to go about or around something’. It could, for example, be used to mean ‘encompass’ or ‘encircle’.
But it was also used to describe the activity of Roman politicians in the run-up to elections. Anyone running for office would ‘go around’ Rome, glad-handing voters in an effort to drum up support. (There’s another etymological link here incidentally. Those running for office were known as ‘candidati’ because they wore sparkling white togas to draw attention to themselves and the Latin word for a dazzling white is ‘candidus’. It is, obviously, the origin of the word ‘candidate’.)
Now interestingly the Latin word for ‘bribery’ was ‘ambitus’, a noun derived from the same verb, ‘ambire’. The Romans recognised that their fierce pursuit of individual glory left their political world always poised on a knife-edge between the acceptable and excessive, the legal and the illegal, and that fact was reflected in their language. It was a little etymological joke.
At the centre of their political culture was the giving of gifts. It’s a truism that the Roman people relinquished any real political influence in exchange for the gifts of ‘Bread and Circuses’. And all potential politicians were expected to be lavish with such giving. (Indeed one Roman wit suggested that anyone who wished to climb the greasy pole of politics had to be able to lay claim to at least three separate fortunes: the first so that you could bribe the people to elect you to the governorship of a rich province; the second so that you could bribe the jury when that province accused you of extortion; and the third actually to live on in comfortable retirement.)
Inevitably the line between legitimate ambition and bribery, between ‘ambitio’ and ‘ambitus’, was fine to say the least. As long as you were discrete and obeyed the unwritten rules you could probably get away with any number of handouts, and even those who were brought to book in court hardly faced severe penalties. (That second fortune again.)
After all while politicians were constantly bribing the people, they, at least the more powerful among them, were also bribing the politicians back. ‘Gifts’ were the oil that greased the machine in ancient Rome. It’s completely different now of course.
The unwritten rules of receiving gifts were neatly summarized by a Roman Emperor, (he of the famous and well-preserved public baths), Caracalla. He advised that one should take care to take ‘neither everything, nor every time, nor from everyone’. Very pragmatic. And by both parties, perfectly understood.
A far bigger problem for either party was taking and then not appearing to give back. This was an unforgiveable violation. One particular story exemplifies this.
One Verconius Turinus was attached to the court of the Emperor Septimius Severus, (he of the famous and well-preserved arch in the Forum.) He took immense sums from lobbyists who believed, because Turinus told them, that he had Septimius wrapped around his finger.
That was not the case and when word got to Septimius he had a fake lobbyist approach Turinus who duly took the bait. The Emperor, and all those Turinus had deceived, were present in the Forum when the fraudster got his come-uppance. He was tied to a stake under which was set a fire of wet logs and straw. Turinus suffocated in the smoke.
This was because the Latin term for feigning influence one did not possess was ‘fumum vendere’, or ‘selling smoke’.
That visit to the Subura, or what used to be the Subura, really got to me. I’ve been thinking about it a good bit since.
In my last post I wrote about the notorious district of ancient Rome called the Subura. It was where the vast majority of the city’s population used to live, but today there’s hardly a vestige of it.
It struck me that that is the reason that people who come here to Cinecitta and see the backstreets on our set respond so strongly to them, always more strongly than they do to the grand buildings in our reconstructed Forum. It’s because here they can for a moment connect with an ‘ordinary life’, a ‘Suburan’ life, that time has otherwise completely erased.
Monuments, or what is left of them, can – sometimes - astonish, but I think most people find it hard to be truly moved by them. You can see the faces every day in the Forum downtown, a little confused, a little tired, searching for an experience they that would like to have but that is eluding them.
But wandering our backlot streets here they find it. I’ve found in talking about all this with a great variety of people that what moves them is much more often the mundane than the monumental. It’s the frisson of putting yourself in another time and place with other people and connecting your reality with theirs.
The price of the latest must-have household accessory, pride in a child’s success at school, trouble with the in-laws, a birth, a bereavement; these, we know from inscriptions and scattered clues, are the concerns that filled Suburan lives just as they fill our own. There’s the promise of an emotional rather than simply an intellectual connection with the past here. And, for me at least, it’s that promise that makes studying the past worthwhile.
This sensation, which struck me so powerfully when I wandered the streets of the modern Subura a week ago, was what I wanted to put into words in this post. And then I vaguely remembered something written by a British historian called GM Trevelyan that I had read years and years ago. I checked it on-line and realized he had put it into words for me:
“The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them...The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cock-crow.”
Exactly.
We get a fleeting sense, by contrast, of the quality of life in the Subura from a grave inscription found on a tomb outside Rome. “Welcome to my new premises”, it reads. “A great improvement on my old ones. These are private, quiet and free”.
And the striking thing is that it is now all gone. That’s the thing about Rome, for all its monumental splendour, so much more is lost than remains. And it’s a reminder of just how much we’ve lost to walk up the Via Leonina or Via Madonna di Monti, (two modern streets that follow exactly the line of the ancient clivus Suburanus), and for there to be absolutely no physical vestige that remains. The atmosphere of those streets today may be reminiscent of their ancient ancestors - still lined with craftsmen’s workshops and high tenements - but it’s only the atmosphere, and only a hint at that.
The jerry-built wooden insulae of the Subura could scarcely stand up while they were still populated. As Rome’s population rapidly declined after the sack of the city in 410CE, they were abandoned and would have quickly collapsed. The wood turned to dust and scattered in the wind. That world, the world which most Romans would have recognised as their own, vanished leaving scarcely a trace. Just the cart-ruts in the Forum of Nerva.
Went up to one of the most fascinating sites in Rome at the end of last week, the Basilica of San Clemente. It’s just up the road from the Colosseum and in its own way an equally fascinating landmark.
The thing about San Clemente is that it allows you to time-travel. There are three visible layers you can visit, all for a single 5 Euro ticket, and they take you back about two thousand years. As you descend the stairs, from one level to the next, you quite literally go back in time.
First level is the church itself. Re-built, probably in 1108, after it was extensively damaged during a sack of the city by the Normans. It was re-furbished during the eighteenth century, so it’s a mixture of styles, but the main effect is still twelfth century.
You can descend directly beneath that church to the next level, only excavated about 150 years ago. This is the site of the original church, which was certainly in existence by the end of the fourth century. St Jerome refers to a ‘church in Rome that preserves the memory of San Clemente to this day’, and that was around 390CE. This makes the second level one of the earliest known churches in Rome. After all open Christian worship had only been tolerated in the city since the Edict of Milan in 313, not much more than seventy years earlier.
The sense of being in one of Rome’s earliest churches is electric enough, but beneath that there is still another level. You descend by another set of stairs at the south east corner, (the staircase was built during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, as the brick-stamps attest), and you arrive in the first century CE. There are the remains of two houses, one quite grand, down there, divided by a narrow alley.
The really intriguing aspect is that the two represent two different – and very potent – kinds of religious experience in the first century after the birth of Christ. One had been converted into a Mithraeum, a place for the worship of the god Mithras. The other was a house in which clandestine Christian meetings took place, at a time when Christianity was still a prohibited cult. They are separated by no more than a narrow alley.
Mithras was originally a Persian god, and his cult was particularly popular with Roman soldiers who traveled to the eastern Mediterranean and came in contact with it there, subsequently bringing it back to Rome. The Roman version of Mithras was probably very different from the Persian original. It was a ‘mystery cult’, into which a select few, (men only), could be initiated. In its view of the world there was a struggle between good and evil, which would eventually be resolved with a victory for good, whose benefits the initiated few would enjoy for eternity.
Much has been made, (both recently and at the time), of the similarities between Mithras and Jesus. Both were born on December 25th, and the birth of both was witnessed by shepherds. The ritual meal of those who worshiped Mithras consisted in bread, water and wine. Both were said to have died and then been re-born ‘out of a cave’.
The similarities remain contentious, with some using them as evidence to argue against the unique claims of Christianity. This is not an issue that can ever be resolved. What is certain is that the two co-existed for several centuries in Rome, until Mithraism eventually became defunct, (about the time that the first church of San Clemente was built.) And at San Clemente you can sense how close that co-existence was, no more than twenty meters apart.
We’re starting to move toward the shooting of our final episode and had our last extras meeting the other day. One of our favourite groups of extras came up – lictors – and we decided we’d give them a good send-off by featuring them prominently in one of our scenes. The scene is a big ceremonial one so they merit their place.
Lictors were the special group of attendants who processed with certain Roman politicians, when they were out in public. They were a sort of bodyguard but their real purpose wasn’t providing protection, it was conferring status.
The number was the key. The higher the status, the larger the number. Praetors, (a middle-ranking Roman political office with legal and military responsibilities) got two, Consuls, (the effective Head of State), got twelve. Dictators, (who were normally only appointed for specific emergencies and a limited period, but had extraordinary powers), got a whopping twenty four. This public, dramatic display of status is quintessentially Roman.
The lictors carried a bunch of wooden rods, either of elm or birch, bound together with red thread. When outside the sacred boundary of Rome, the so-called pomerium, axes with their blade projecting outward were attached to the bundle. This symbolized the power of execution that resided with the politician whom the lictors attended. Within the city boundary the axes were customarily removed.
A further symbolic significance was that the bundle of rods possessed a strength that a single rod lacks. When individually fragile rods are unified they became unbreakable.
The Latin word for the bundle was fasces, whence we derive the word ‘fascist’. It was coined as ‘fascismo’ by Mussolini and his followers in the 1920’s. They deliberately aligned themselves with the Roman past, and adopted the fasces as a symbol of their fledgling political party.
The symbol also appears on the official seal of the US Senate, as well as on either side of the flag of the United States in the House of Representatives.
At the Colosseum the other day with a group of people from the set and one of the questions that came up, as we talked through the realities of the games put on there, was, ‘Were the Romans an especially cruel people?’ that they could take pleasure from watching displays of this kind as entertainment.
Questions of this kind are singularly difficult to answer, involving as they do evaluative judgements that are tricky at the best of times, and the more so when they are made across a distance of so many centuries.
There is also the impossibility of assessing what the thoughts and feelings of the Roman crowd that watched these spectacles actually were. Much of our evidence is from Christian sources that inevitably have a particular point of view, and one that is hardly representative.
Yet even if it’s beyond us to answer the question in the specific context of the Colosseum, I think it’s still possible to say something in general about Roman attitudes to the infliction of physical suffering – or what many would today define as cruelty. I think a sensibility emerges that is peculiarly, and revealingly, Roman and one that had for them its own logic.
The central point is that the Romans didn’t see any act as in itself intrinsically cruel. Everything depended on context. I think that the Romans viewed values in this way generally, as relative rather than absolute.
An example is provided by the speech that Cicero made against Gaius Verres, the famously corrupt governor of Sicily. In the course of the speech Verres is arraigned for a variety of acts of physical brutality – flogging, execution without trial - but Cicero’s characterization of these acts as cruel hinges on the fact that they were perpetrated on Roman citizens. Cato the Censor, in his accusation of Quintus Minucius Thermus, likewise emphasizes that the flogging he meted out to a group of local magistrates was cruel because it was inflicted on ‘men of substance’, who by that token suffered more.
In other words the cruelty consisted in infringing upon the dignitas, to use the Latin word, of those involved. For an act to be considered cruel it had in some way to challenge the Roman sense of hierarchy. It had to be ‘inappropriate’ as well as simply violent.
This is one indication among many of how deeply the perception of social status mattered to the Romans. Perhaps it also contributes some understanding of how Roman audiences could watch the sorts of games that were displayed at the Colosseum. Gladiators, condemned criminals, deserters, rebels and slaves – the men, and more rarely women, who ‘performed’ at the games – were all people without formal status who had, in that sense, also forfeited their status as human beings in Roman eyes. Their suffering could be exploited – in ever more ingenious and, to a modern sensibility, sadistic ways – without it ever being regarded as cruel.
For some reason the Vestal Virgins always raise a laugh. Every time I do a tour of the backlot at Cinecitta people will ask which is the distinctive rounded temple in the corner of the Forum. And when I reply that it’s the Temple of Vesta, the shrine tended by the famous Vestal Virgins, the reaction is amusement. A wry smile admittedly, rather than a guffaw, but always amusement.
Maybe it’s the catchy alliterative name, which sounds to a modern ear as though it’s been devised by a marketing department. Maybe it’s the idea that anyone could make a career out of professional celibacy. Whatever it is it’s a reaction that would have shocked the Romans because for them the Vestal Virgins were a very serious business indeed.
It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that no temple in Rome – not even that of Jupiter – was more important than the Temple of Vesta. The reason was the Temple guarded the sacred flame of the goddess Vesta, and it was believed that if that flame were allowed to go out then Rome would fall.
Every Roman house had its hearth, a symbol of protection, belonging and warmth. The god of the hearth was known as a Lar and was the most important of the many Roman household gods. And the Lar for the whole city, Rome’s symbol of protection and well-being, was the Lar of the hearth in the Temple of Vesta, with its eternal and sacred flame.
There were six Vestal Virgins whose job it was to tend it. They were the only female priestesses in the Roman religious system, and they were chosen young, between the ages of six and ten. Initially they came only from Patrician families, Rome’s social elite, but it wasn’t the most sought after job and with time it became necessary to trawl more widely. First girls from Plebeian families were admitted. Eventually even the daughters of freed slaves could get in.
Once admitted you had thirty years of service in front of you, and a vow of chastity to take, though not before you had had all your hair cut off. You’d be chosen by Rome’s chief priest, the Pontifex Maximus, with the words, “I seize you, beloved”. The first ten years were as a trainee virgin, followed by ten years in service. The last ten were spent as a teacher, advising the new intake.
Vestals had special honours – best seats at the Colosseum for the games, and a swanky palace in the Forum with all the luxuries – but were equally liable to terrible punishments for dereliction of duty. Letting the flame go out or breaking the vow of celibacy were both punishable by death. The records show that 22 vestals were guilty of the latter offence during the eleven centuries that the Temple was in service.
Executing a Vestal, however, was a tricky business. Sacred tradition decreed that their blood could not be spilt, so they were buried alive instead. There was a special underground chamber near one of the city gates. The Romans also needed to preserve the legal fiction that the guilty Vestal went willingly to her death. So she was buried with a few days food and water. This allowed the law to hold that she was simply descending ‘into a habitable room’, from which, quite incidentally, she would never be able to get out.
Just as the fable of the flame predicted, the fall of the House of Vesta closely shadowed the fall of Rome herself. When a late Emperor, Elagabalus, actually married a serving Vestal the writing was on the wall. Eventually it was the Christian Emperor Theodosius I who closed the Temple, as part of a set of edicts banning all pagan worship.
That was in 394AD. Many still debate the moment at which ancient Rome finally fell. If you’re looking for an exact date, you could do worse.
It is a cliché to point out that the ancient world isn’t lost and gone, but survives into and informs the present. But like all clichés it contains an essential truth. The presence of the past is something we experience every month of the year, and every day of the week. In a literal sense.
The calendar we use is the ancient Roman one. It was Julius Caesar who, on the advice of Egyptian sages, rationalized the Roman calendar and introduced a year of 365 ¼ days. And our months too all have names with Roman origins.
January is named after Janus, the Roman god who had two faces, one on one side of his head, and one on the other. This gave Janus the capacity to look forward into the future at the same time as looking backward into the past: the perfect patron deity for the beginning of a new year.
February is named after Juno Februata, whose festival was held was held in the middle of that month. The Latin word ‘februare’ means to cleanse oneself, and the festival was one concerned with cleansing oneself of past wrongdoing. It survived into the Christian calendar as Lent. March, with was traditionally the beginning of the fighting season when the Romans began their campaigns, is named after Mars, the god of war.
April is the month of ‘opening’ and ‘appearing’, as life begins again after winter. It derives from the Latin word, ‘aperio’. May is possibly derived from ‘maiesta’, or ‘majesty’, as that process nears fruition. June is named after Juno, wife of Jupiter.
July and August are the ‘political’ months. Named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, his adopted son and heir, respectively. Needless to say they were themselves responsible for suggesting this innovation.
Thereafter the months are named for their position in the year. At the earliest stage of their calendar the Romans used to count the months from March, the beginning of the war season. Counting inclusively this makes September the seventh month, from ‘septem’, the Latin word for ‘seven’. By the same token, October is the eighth month, from ‘octo’, ‘eight’, November the ninth, from ‘novem’, ‘nine’ and December the tenth, from ‘decem’, ‘ten’.
In English the days of the week also betray their Roman origins, albeit more subtly. They are named after Roman deities, although not under their Latin names but their Germanic equivalents, reflecting the influence of Germanic culture on the origin of the English language.
However, in languages more directly derived from Latin, such as Italian and French, the connection with the Roman past is more obvious.
For example, in Latin the first day of the week used to be called ‘dies solis’, the day of the sun, which survives directly in English as Sunday. In Christian Rome this day was renamed ‘dies Dominica’, or the day of the Lord, which survives in Italian as the closely related word ‘Domenica’ and French as ‘Dimanche’.
The second day was dedicated to the moon. The Latin word is ‘luna’, which gives ‘lunedi’ in Italian and ‘lundi’ in French, (‘di’, the last part of the word in both cases derives from the Latin word ‘dies’, which means ‘day’.) In English it became Monday.
The third day was dedicated to the god of war, Mars in Latin. This becomes ‘martedi’ in Italian and ‘mardi’ in French. Mars’ equivalent, the Germanic god of war was called Tiw, which gives us Tuesday.
The fourth day is an anomaly. The Romans dedicated it to the messenger god Mercury, which gives ‘mercoledi’ in Italian and ‘mercredi’ in French. For the same day the German calendar opted for Wotan, who was a god of hunting rather than carrying messages. From Wotan we derive the word Wednesday.
The fifth day reverts to type, with the same god being honoured under different names. The Romans dedicated the day to their god of thunder, Jovis, (another name for Jupiter.) In Italian this became ‘giovedi’, in French, ‘jeudi’. The Germanic god of thunder was Thor, whence we get the word Thursday.
The sixth day also conforms to the pattern. It was dedicated by the Romans to the goddess of love, Venus. This gives ‘venerdi’ in Italian, and ‘vendredi’ in French. The Germanic goddess of love was called Freya, whence Friday.
The final day was dedicated to Saturn. This survives directly into English as Saturday, and into French as ‘samedi’. The Italian, ‘sabato’, is a variation, deriving from the Christian rather than the ancient Roman interpretation of the seventh day, which was as the original Sabbath, or day of rest. The association of the Sabbath with Sunday was a later Roman Catholic innovation.
It was an attack directed at a prominent target, to generate maximum publicity. It was an attack directed at a civilian target, specifically to inspire terror. It was prepared in secret and it was carried out with perfect co-ordination. It proved that even a Superpower, previously thought invincible, could be caught off-guard.
It was the summer of 88BC and Rome had been having problems with Mithridates for some time. Charismatic, bold, elusive, King Mithridates, was no ordinary opponent. Of many legends told about him one of the most colourful is that he experimented on himself endlessly with poison, until he developed an immunity against all its forms. His kingdom was on the coast of the Black Sea in what is now northern Turkey. It bordered the Roman province of Asia, which had by then been for fifty years the most lucrative corner of the burgeoning Roman Empire.
Asia yielded wealth in many forms – precious metals, precious stones and above all precious tax. Its huge population was taxed until the pips squeaked. This was the way of Rome, to acquire land through conquest and then enrich herself through taxation of those newly conquered: a military-fiscal complex. Roman aristocrats queued up to get a provincial governorship in Asia, knowing that a three-year term there would make you rich beyond your dreams.
In 89BC it had been the turn of one Manius Aquillius. Recognising that Asia was nearly sucked dry Aquillius started to eye up opportunities for expansion and his eye settled on Pontus. That summer he created a pretext for an invasion and sent in the army of a local client king to drive Mithridates out.
He miscalculated. Mithridates beat off the attack with ease, but the matter didn’t end there. Not only did Mithridates beat off the invader, he decided to come after Rome herself.
This was not a decision to be taken lightly. Rome, the world’s unquestioned Superpower had proven many times what a ruthless and terrifying opponent she could be. So, instead of a full frontal assault Mithridates opted for stealth. He crossed secretly into the province of Asia and made for the rich cities on the eastern Mediterranean coast. There he found two things: a local population exploding with resentment against what it saw as Roman exploitation, and a Roman garrison of a single legion – 5,000 men – far fewer than he had anticipated. After decades of military success the Romans had taken their eye off the ball. For as long as they could remember the Roman army had been on the offensive. It simply didn’t consider the possibility that it might be attacked.
Mithridates organized secret cells within all the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, prosperous cities where Roman businessmen had traded for two generations. And on one fixed night they struck. Hired assassins rounded up not just the men, but women and children too and massacred them in a terrifying, unforeseen and sycnhronised attack. According to one source, the Roman author Valerius Maximus, 80,000 people were slaughtered at a stroke.
The effect in Rome was electric. Outrage at the violence perpetrated against a civilian population, and shock at this startling evidence of vulnerability was followed at once by a desire for revenge, and they poured troops into the Middle East. But revenge was to be more than twenty years coming. Several great Roman warlords, including Lucius Lucullus and Cornelius Sulla, tried in vain to effect Mithridates’ defeat. In the end it was Pompey who did so, destroying the army of the Pontic King in 65BC. Mithridates himself, however, was never taken. Unable to kill himself by poison because of his immunity he ordered one of his slaves to stab him with his own sword.
You didn’t tell a true Roman man he was good in bed. Not if you wanted to compliment him that is. Sexual prowess, with its implied surrender to sensuality and assumed concern for the pleasure of one’s partner, was not a sign of machismo. In fact the very opposite was true. It could be taken as a sign of effeminacy, as Julius Caesar himself found, or at the very least as an indication that your appetites were in control of you, not you of them, the charge leveled against another legendary lover, Marc Antony.
Cato the Elder, that most Republican of Roman Republicans, boasted that he never made love to his wife except during a lightning storm. Difficult to be certain as to the point of this boast, but it seems fair to presume he was celebrating not doing it very often. And expecting to be admired for it too.
The poet Lucretius, who muses on sex in the course of his poem “On the Nature of the Universe”, put his version of the female case when he stated definitively, “A Roman matron has no need of lascivious squirmings”. So not only was sex supposed to be rationed, it wasn’t supposed to be much fun either.
I’ve already written about the ubiquity of prostitution in the Roman world, but here too the traditional view counseled restraint. In one story a Roman aristocrat saw the son of a colleague emerging from a brothel. He congratulated him for gratifying ‘the needs of his virility’. When he passed the following morning and saw him emerging again, he took him to task. ‘When I congratulated you yesterday’, he said, ‘I was not suggesting that you took up residence here’.
Self-denial. Self-control. These were the ascetic values that had made the Republic strong.
At least that was the official line. In reality of course people lived their lives, and the extent to which those lives had ever been affected by these stated norms is difficult, perhaps impossible to determine.
What can be said is that the years of the late Republic, the years in which ROME is set, witnessed a sort of ‘sexual revolution’ in which those values were turned on their head.
Independent women, like Sempronia and Clodia, actively and scandalously used their sex-appeal to win friends and influence people. Ambitious men - I’ve mentioned Caesar and Antony above - flaunted their status as lovers.
The new sensibility was given voice by a new wave of poets, who wrote love elegies about the follies and confusions of passion. Catullus, the most famous of them, celebrated the very lack of control that one felt when in the throes of love. WB Yeats was to describe Catullus’ work as ‘rhymed out in love’s despair’.
A generation later the poet Ovid made a living out of his reputation as a Don Juan. He wrote an entire work on the Art of Seduction. Ovid wasn’t interested in marriage, only in conquest, the more risky the circumstances the better. In one section he describes how to make love to your inamorata while covered with a cloak and reclining on a couch with other guests at dinner. For Ovid the ultimate compliment would not have been that he was good in bed, but good on the sofa. A far cry from Cato and his lightning storms.
Was talking the other day about sources and clues. Where to look for answers to the ‘everyday life’ questions that ROME poses every time we shoot. The first source I mentioned was the ‘throw away’, a passing reference in a letter, or a speech, a background detail included when the writer is really talking about something else. These can give us momentary, but vivid and unique glimpses into the houses or onto the streets of ancient Rome.
But another incredibly rich resource is the stuff that is thrown away in a much more literal sense. In the ‘thrown-away and left on a rubbish dump’ sense in fact. And when you’re talking ancient rubbish-dumps there’s only one place to start: Oxyrhynchus.
100 odd miles south west of Cairo, it was founded after Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great. ‘Oxyrhynchus polis’, which literally means, ‘Town of the sharp-nosed fish’, was a local administrative capital and became one of the biggest towns in Egypt.
As an administrative capital, and because of the Egyptian love of bureaucracy, the town generated papyrus documents by the ton. For 1,000 odd years, in the absence of a shredder, the inhabitants habitually took these documents when they were no longer needed and dumped them in the desert.
Oxyrhynchus was on a canal, not the Nile proper. When the town was effectively abandoned the canal dried up. The water-level dropped. There was no rain to replenish it. It never rains in the western desert, the only storms are of sand. The sand drifted, covered the papyrus dumps. They, and the towns, were forgotten.
Until the late nineteenth century when excavations began. Two British academics, named Grenfell and Hunt, were among those who directed them. They weren’t too excited at first. ‘The rubbish mounds were just rubbish mounds’, remarked Grenfell.
But they weren’t. The uniquely arid desert conditions had preserved the papyrus, which normally rots at the merest presence of water. Grenfell and Hunt began to realize that they had discovered a unique trove and set about reading it.
It took all their lives, and they had just begun. Work continues today. What everyone hoped to find were some of the great lost works of antiquity. And some have been found: Greek works by the playwrights Euripides and Sophocles, the comic writer Menander, the poets Pindar and Sappho.
But only 10% of the finds are literary. The rest are a random selection worthy of a bureaucratic hub: accounts, tax-returns, contracts, wills, census materials, invoices, receipts.
Written without any literary pretension, unselfconscious and unregarding, and all the more revealing for it.
There are hundreds of thousands of examples. One is a contract for a slave sale concerning a female slave called Dioscouros. It quotes her price, specifies that she is free from scars, enumerates the number of days off she can have per year, (8), and contains the striking phrase, “She is non-returnable, except for epilepsy or external claim”, (meaning that if she has been stolen or run away her previous owner can still legally lay claim to her and the present contract will be invalidated.)
“Non-returnable”; there’s a detail it would be hard to make up. That’s the sort of clue you find at Oxyrhynchus.
