The Root of All Evil

Just a quick etymological post.

Did you ever wonder why we call money ‘money’? Or how the Mint got its name despite its notable lack of peppermint fragrance (or taste)? It’s all because of the Romans.

When the Romans established their Mint, they did not set it up in its own building, but in a temple. This was probably to give the roots of their economy divine protection from robbers and other problems. The temple they chose was the temple of Juno who Warns, or in Latin, Juno Moneta. The little stamped metal discs which issued from the temple were called ‘Things of the one who warns’- monetae. Gradually these “monetae” took on a life of their own and spawned their own deities, the three Monetae, one for every type of metal used in coinage: gold, silver and bronze. They are always shown together, each holding a set of scales and a horn of plenty. Here’s a nice example issued by Commodus:

I find ancient money really interesting, but I’ll try and space out the posts a bit- I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea!

Going Postal, Roman Style

We’ve been struck lately here in the UK with postal strikes, and a friend of mine abroad asked how the Romans would have handled such a thing (thank you, R!). Thinking about the answer, I realized that I had no idea how the Romans dealt with post at all, so I got Googling ( actually mostly Wikipedia-ing) and I discovered the following:

The Romans were, of course, famous road builders. Many roads in Europe now still follow the paths of ancient roads built under the Empire- you can usually tell which ones they are because they tend to be amazingly straight. Having an Empire-wide course of well-built, well-maintained roads designed to keep them from becoming sticky mud tracks had many benefits: facilitating transport of supplies and troops to certain areas, ease of trade and, naturally, ease of communication.

Letters feature prominently in Roman history, as you would expect from a civilization without telephones. Augustus, that wonderful dictator, brought in a system called the cursus publicus, or ‘public track’, which acted as the Empire’s postal service for all its denizens. Presumably before that, post would have been handled by private firms or if you managed to find someone going to the same destination as your letter (this site has some relevant quotations to back this up from the greatest letter-writer of the Roman Republic, Cicero). Parallel to the public system was a sort of courier service, consisting of slaves available for a fee, like FedEx now (without the slaves).

So what about strikes? I don’t think it’s likely that slaves could go on strike without being severely physically punished, so it was probably rare. The public post was apparently run by citizens however, and ancient workers had guilds similar to modern unions, and they did occasionally strike. Despite this, I do not know if postal workers in ancient Rome ever went on strike, or how it was resolved if they did. Sorry to let you down, R! My guess is that there was no “standard approach”- sometimes the guilds won, sometimes they didn’t. I’m hoping that some sort of swift justice was administered, that might give us some precedent…

Poetry

I love seeing how the Classics were received by later generations, so I thought I would post one of my favourite examples of such reception- the poem ‘Menelaus and Helen’ by the talented English poet Rupert Brooke.

Menelaus and Helen

I

Hot through Troy’s ruin Menelaus broke

To Priam’s palace, sword in hand, to sate

On that adulterous whore a ten year’s hate

And a king’s honour. Through red death, and smoke,

And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,

Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.

He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim

Luxurious bower, flaming like a god.

 

High sat white Helen, lovely and serene.

He had not remembered that she was so fair,

And that her neck curved down in such a way,

And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,

And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,

The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.

 

II

So far the poet. How should he behold

That journey home, the long connubial years?

He does not tell you how white Helen bears

Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,

Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold

Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys

‘Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice

Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.

 

Oft he wonders why on earth he went

Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.

Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent,

Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name.

So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;

And Paris slept on by Scamander side.

I’ll Never Let Go, Jack

I was on a trip with a very dear fellow Classicist friend of mine to some Classical land a while back, and I was complaining about some aspect of the care given to some ancient structure and she said “Yes, well, you can’t hang on to everything forever.”

Blasphemy! Burn the witch! I was astounded. This, from the mouth of a Classicist! Classicists complain a lot about how such-and-such a monument is crumbling into the ground, or about how such-and-such an artifact is being neglected, blah blah blah (“How dare they leave this column base out in the rain! It might be important! Here give it to me…”). Ask me to whinge about Pompeii, and you’d better have a comfy chair and a few hours. Same with texts- we wring our hands at the thought of all those manuscripts carelessly neglected and denied to posterity. Discussions about ancient libraries usually end in long sighs and wistful staring into space.

This isn’t just a Classicist thing. I found this article on the BBC this morning, listing monuments ancient and modern which are “under threat” of slow, ignored destruction by time or human hands. Clearly society as a whole shares these concerns (yet then acts like we’re weird to be so interested in them).

Humanity in general seems fixated on not losing anything, at least not completely. Because if something isn’t lost completely, it somehow makes it okay that the majority have vanished. Think about the story of Noah’s Ark- it is somehow “okay” with us that thousands of animals suffered and died in the flood, as long as enough remained alive to continue the species. Meat-eaters use arguments against vegetarianism which use the possible extinction of consumable animals as a justification for continuing to breed them for meat. We get anxious about endangered animals, shrinking forests, dying languages, and think that as long as at least some remain, then it will somehow be okay that everything else has gone (particularly if it was our fault that it vanished in the first place). We can’t let go.

Of course, I’m generalizing. But lots of houses are saved every year in Britain by the National Trust- for what? Why do we care if little Japanese wooden houses are replaced by big metal ones? Or if 17th-Century British farming practices are replaced by new ones? Or if Seville won’t look quite the same again? Isn’t this the way of the world? We replace old things with new (and often better) things and that is how it has always happened. Why should we stop now?

And yet I feel wrong even writing that. There is something about age which makes something holy, and something about extinction which makes us cringe, but what is it?

Emperor of the Variable Period of Time: Elagabalus

Sometimes I wind up reading strange things, and sometimes those things are about Romans. This is one such case. I bring you… EMPEROR OF THE VARIABLE PERIOD OF TIME AWARD, wherein I bring you one of my favourite emperors and explain what it was which made them so good/bad/bonkers (Hint: most recipients of the award will be in the latter two categories).

The first recipient of my “prestigious” award is the Emperor Elagabalus.

Elagabalus, our favourite rose-utilising murderer.

That’s a strange name, you may be thinking. Well, yes it is. He was born with the sensible name Marcus, but changed his name to Elagabalus when he was made the priest of the eponymous Persian sun god aged 14. Once he made it to the throne aged 15, he proceeded to surprise no one who knows a 15-year-old by ruining everything. At one banquet, he drowned his guests in rose petals for no obvious reason. He never wore a garment more than once, and allegedly would wear rings only once, then throw them away. According to the Historia Augusta, he used to get his friends so drunk that they passed out, then shut them up in a room and send his tame, but very much alive, lions and bears in to wake them in the morning.

His religious fanaticism resulted in his essentially equating himself with the god- on his coins sometimes he has a strange little horn protruding from his forehead. He caused scandal in Rome by marrying a Vestal Virgin (women who, in case you hadn’t guessed, were really supposed to stay virgins) named Aquilia Severa. He then made it all better by having a parallel marriage ceremony where the god Elagabalus married the goddess Vesta. The marriage between both couples apparently didn’t last, and Elagabalus married off his god to another goddess, Venus, when it suited him.

According to Dio, Elagabalus was so extraordinarily effeminate that not only did he wear garments entirely of silk but actually consulted physicians about making him biologically female (please note that I am not trying to deprecate the LGBT community, but Dio certainly was). He was told by an oracle that he would die violently, so he had some velvet nooses, gold swords and jewelled bottles of poison on standby at all times. Too bad he was murdered with his mother and both their bodies were dragged to the Tiber via the Roman sewer system. I wonder why…

I Do This All The Time

Ways that Classics has ruined me as a normal person Number 187:

When I walk, sit, dance, lounge, amble or saunter anywhere, I imagine what the place would look like if it was being excavated by archaeologists thousands of years later. The best part is using different disaster scenarios which would result in the  ”fixing” of the city like Pompeii. Floods, sudden Day-After-Tomorrow-esque freezes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, rock slides… I live in a low-lying area, so a volcanic eruption is much less likely than a flood, but hey, a girl can dream (though she probably shouldn’t).

Just imagine: Everything made of paper or wood has gone (depending on the situation- Herculaneum was destroyed at the same time as Pompeii but by boiling mud, which preserved lots of wood there), and unless perishable things have been clothed in pumice á la Pompeii, they’ve disappeared too.  Left untended, lampposts have buckled and bent, arches have slumped, columns have fallen, roofs have caved in. There are still road signs, glass objects, jewellery, stone objects and so forth, but the gardens have gone, as have the people and animals. Empty, and yet somehow full.

I don’t do this as a macabre what-if-everyone-was-dead exercise, like ‘28 Days Later’, but more from the point of view of the archaeologist arriving to analyse the situation. I did a paper this year on the archaeology of the prehistoric Aegean, which is the area including Greece, Asia Minor and the Greek islands, and almost every essay I wrote concluded that we needed more evidence before we could say anything definitively on the subject. This was true for just about everything- Mycenaean religion, Minoan human sacrifice (or not), the development of civilization… Anyway, most of the course involved us looking at objects such as rings, frescoes, bits of gypsum and such like, postulating their use and what they could tell us about how people lived over 3000 years ago. Not surprisingly, the way to shove an artifact under the archaeological carpet was to say “er, um, probably for religious use”.

What sort of things nowadays would be completely misunderstood? Would every Neoclassical building be thought to be a temple through analogy with Classical ruins? What would they make of McDonalds? I bet subway systems would blow their minds. Buses? High heels (granted they survive)? I wish so much that I could travel to the future, go to a museum and see how they deal with some of the more bizarre stuff we take for granted- fashion mannequins, bookends, tea strainers, bumper stickers…

You’re Welcome

As a self-appointed Classics ambassador, I obviously feel it my duty to defend my subject whenever the opportunity arises. Most of the time, this is in situations when the “use” of my subject is questioned. Admittedly, Classics has very few practical applications outside of academia, just like quantum physics or advanced mathematics. However, sometimes I find aspects of life where the use of Classics becomes clear (and no, I’m not just talking about columns, sewer systems or arches), and on such occasions I would just like to say “You’re welcome, world”.

• Great Medical Terminology.  Today, for various reasons, I was reading about Marfan Syndrome, a disease which elongates the bones and causes heart problems. Two famous sufferers of this disease were Abraham Lincoln and the Pharaoh Akenaten (maybe). Anyway, the medical word for the elongation of limbs (according to Wikipedia, anyway) is dolichostenomelia. Now, I’m a strange sort of person who likes knowing what words mean, so out came my Ancient Greek dictionary. When you break down the word “dolichostenomelia”, it means literally “long-narrow-spearshaft”. Now that’s a much more beautiful image than “long-bony-ness”.
• Shakespeare. Ok, admittedly, Shakespeare wasn’t an ancient, and I’m not referring to the fact that the Greeks invented theatre (though, again, you’re welcome). However, Shakespeare wrote at least four plays on Classical topics (Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus) and he cleverly used Classical names to the maximum in other plays. For example, in ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’, the character Proteus (whose affections are changeable, to put it nicely) is named after the Greek god of the same name, who was known for shape-shifting. Squirmy character, squirmy deity.
• Great Scientific Terminology. This is slightly different from the medical entry above. Again, Wikipedia is my “source”. In Europe there are no hummingbirds, but they do have hummingbird moths, which resemble hummingbirds in almost every way except for the fact that they are not, of course, birds. Now, the scientific name for such a creature could have been “hummingbird-ish thing”, but instead it’s Macroglossum stellatarum, which means literally “long-tongued-starry-creature”. How beautiful.
• Planet names. I know that people realize that the planets of our solar system are named after the Roman pantheon, but they are named such for a reason. For example, Jupiter, king of the gods, has the biggest planet, and its moons are named after his various conquests (though not his wife…). But it gets even more clever! Mars, for example, has two moons, named Phobos and Deimos. In Greek mythology, the god Ares (Greek name for Mars) had two horses named Fear and Panic. The Greek for fear and panic? Phobos and Deimos. Also, the moon of Pluto is called Charon, the ferryman of the dead across the River Styx.
• Unintentionally Funny Names. I mentioned the lap-dancing club named ‘Medusa’ a few posts ago, but there are some more. For example Trojan condoms, or really anything named after the Trojans (USC, I’m looking at you here). Does no one remember that the Trojans lost the war because they allowed a breach in their walls to be opened for a suspiciously hollow horse, and were slaughtered en masse by Greeks? Not the best image for a condom designed to protect… Ajax cleaning powder, named after a man who went mad and killed a load of sheep thinking they were people, then killed himself. If anyone needed cleansing it was him… Achilles Global, whose motto is “Services for Sustainable Procurement”, when nothing about the original Achilles was in any way sustainable… And my favourite, the use of Medusa, the ugliest woman in the world punished for her vanity, as the logo of Versace. 

Anyway, enough gloating. No doubt I’ll be making new lists of things to thank Classics for as they occur to me.

In Defense of ‘Gladiator’

Recently I read on this website that Commodus, the emperor most famous for being killed by Russell Crowe in the film ‘Gladiator’, hardly resembled his film persona. Here’s what the site says:

Commodus, the hare-lipped Roman Emperor who lusted after his sister in the film, was in real life held in high esteem by the senate and ruled for a successful 13 years (rather than the ineffectual few months depicted in the film). Also, though the Emperor did, in fact, have an enthusiasm for gladiatorial combat (he did so incognito), he didn’t get his ticket punched in the arena. He was killed in the bath by a wrestler named Narcissus to prevent him taking office as consul.

Admittedly, the film ‘Gladiator’ has a lot to answer for. For instance, they get the geography of Rome wrong; Marcus Aurelius probably would never have addressed his son as ‘Commodus’, as his first name was Lucius; he was indeed killed by a man called Narcissus (no relation to the Narcissus of Echo and gardening fame); he ruled from 177 to 192 AD, not a few months or weeks, and he probably wasn’t incestuous (though he wouldn’t be the first…). However, I feel this misguided website needs a spot of correction.

1. I doubt very much that the emperor was held “in high esteem” by the Senate. The Roman Senate was in the practice of handing out awards to emperors for just about no reason, so the awards he accumulated were about as reflective of their “esteem” as giving him someone’s collection of pocket lint. Also, when he died, the Senate issued a ‘damnatio memoriae’ against him, which involved erasing his name from inscriptions, destroying or altering his statues, and sometimes pulling down buildings which he built. So much for “high esteem”.

2. As for his rule being “successful”, define success. He did stop the Second Germanic War, but what else? According to my source (which is, surprisingly, not Wikipedia, but a book called ‘Roman Coins and Their Values’ by David Sear), he retired from public life and left the daily running of the Empire to various favourites.

3. “Enthusiasm for gladiatorial combat” doesn’t quite cut it. He was so keen on fighting beasts in the arena that Sear says that he “disgraced the purple”. Also, Roman emperors are notoriously bad at doing anything incognito, and there would have been little point in fighting wild beasts incognito- if the ringside assistants don’t know you’re the Emperor, how will they know when to save you, rather than letting you be ripped apart for entertainment?

4. The article fails to mention that Commodus was quite, quite mad. The picture of Commodus used by the website for this article is a statue of him as Hercules, the super-strong god, and the likeness isn’t just for artistic effect. Sear says that Commodus believed himself to be Hercules reincarnated, and made people worship him. Statues of Hercules-Commodus were set up in public places to remind the people what was what (or who was who).

So there you have it. It turns out that you can’t believe what you see on the cinema or read on the Internet. Except here- here you are safe. Relatively.

The Joys Of Complexity

I was thinking as I was on the train this morning: Life is so wonderful. Life in general as well as my life in particular. We live in such an amazing, complex world, and I adore the complexity of it all. Not just the biological complexity, though of course that is also astounding- how do trees get water to go up so high?- but the complexity of human society and how we learn and enjoy things.

I loved (and sometimes hated) university  for that reason: we spent all of our time wallowing in the complexities of things. Why was this written this way, how did this idea evolve, and so forth. We take so many things in this life for granted, and it’s wonderful to see underneath the shell of that simplicity to the machinery underneath- the fears, the misconceptions and the sheer art of how we compose and present ideas, like taking the back off of a computer or popping the hood of a car. 

I recently saw the new Quentin Tarantino film ‘Inglourious Basterds’ [sic], and before seeing it I read an interesting essay about the strange rise in “revenge dramas’ which had happy endings. The author of the piece pointed out that traditional vengeance stories ended in a strong message to avoid seeking revenge at the risk of losing yourself: the Oresteia of Aeschylus all the way through to The Godfather. Perhaps, the essay postulated, revenge was okay as long as it was against such clearly evil forces like Nazism, hence the production of this new film. However, when I went to see it, it was so much more than just a simple ‘Kill the baddies’  film. It could also be a delicate discussion of what made someone human, why we think violence against Nazis (or perhaps against Germans in the 1940s in general) is acceptable, though when they massacre us it’s somehow barbaric for them to glory in it.

See? Life can be so beautiful when it’s complicated! Embrace complexity! I am coming up with a new motivational phase: “Pop the hood of life!” Let me know if it catches on.

It probably won’t- it sounds a bit like there’s been a breakdown…

A Funny Story

*** Temporarily removed, apologies***