A cabinet of Roman curiosities : strange tales and surprising facts from the world's greatest empire

261 Pages·2010·5.729 MB·English

by  J C McKeown

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CURiosiTieS
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A cabiNeT

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CuRiosiTieS
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Strange Tales
and
surprising facts
from the
world’s greatest empire
vvvvv
J. C. McKeown

2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKeown, J. C.
A cabinet of Roman curiosities : strange tales and surprising facts
from the world’s greatest empire / J. C. McKeown.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-539375-0
1. Rome—Civilization—Miscellanea.
2. Rome—History—Miscellanea. I. Title.
DG77.M425 2010
937—dc22
2009043574
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and institutions, long gone
and often almost entirely forgotten, should be assessed by the reader on a
case-by-case basis. Errors of fact are, for the most part, not attributable to
the author. As Pliny the Elder wisely says, n ec tamen ego in plerisque eorum
obstringam fi dem meam potiusque ad auctores relegabo : “I generally give no
guarantee of the truth of what I say, preferring to leave that responsibility
with the authors whom I quote” (N atural History 7.8).
(cid:1)(cid:2)
For Mark and Matthew, Stevie and Annie
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PReface
T
he Romans have left us far more information about themselves
than has any other Western society until much more recent times.
Most books about ancient Rome sift and assess this material to present
as coherent and accurate a picture of life and thought at that period as
is possible at a distance of two thousand years. Extraordinary acumen
and subtlety are required for such a task, since we so often have only
an opaque and partial view of the broad context within which to judge
this surviving evidence.
Th is is not such a book. Essentially, it is a collection of observations
about ancient Rome, for the most part culled directly from Latin and
Greek texts, which strike me as interesting, curious, or simply amusing,
and which I hope will appeal to others in the same way. I am not an
expert in ancient history and have rarely presumed to express an opin-
ion on the validity, intention, or importance of statements made by the
Roman and Greek writers quoted or cited in the book. As it happens,
I personally fi nd it hard to believe that a six-inch fi sh could have held
back Mark Antony’s fl agship during the Battle of Actium, or that
Milan was founded because a woolly pig was seen on the future site of
the city, or that the phoenix appears every fi ve hundred years, or that
touching the nostrils of a she-mule with one’s lips will stop sneezing
and hiccups, or that fi sh sauce is an eff ective cure for crocodile bites, or
that any Roman emperor was eight foot, six inches tall. I strongly sus-
pect that goats do not breathe through their ears, and that there are no
islands in the Baltic Sea inhabited by people whose ears are so enormous
that they cover their bodies with them and do not need clothes. I do not
myself wear a mouse’s muzzle and ear tips as an amulet to ward off fever,
nor do I know precisely how one might attach earrings to an eel.
• vii •
viii • preface
Not all the material presented in this book is quite so bizarre. It
seems worth noting that a gladiator could earn more by winning a
single fi ght than most schoolteachers earned in a year; this may invite
comparison with the disparate earnings of a football coach and a pro-
fessor at the same college. When a dictator and his deputy were being
appointed to deal with a national emergency, a shrew was heard to
squeak, and this omen forced both of them to withdraw from their
command; some readers may be struck by the diff erence from pres-
ent-day methods of making senior military appointments. Cleopatra
drank a priceless pearl to win a bet with Antony; this gesture may
seem the more splendid when contrasted with the sad modern fad for
gold leaf desserts and cocktails containing carefully appraised dia-
monds. After assassinating his younger brother, with whom he had
ruled jointly, an emperor destroyed all images of him and removed his
name from public records; is that not how the Orwellian Big Brother
would attempt to control thought? Th is book does not often attempt
to draw modern analogies of this sort.
Th e material has a superfi cial ordering (particular topics or people
or historical periods), but this principle of arrangement is not observed
consistently nor is it important. Th ere is no argument being compiled
as the book progresses; nearly every item in each section can be read
in isolation. I am relying on classical precedent. As Aulus Gellius says
in the preface to his A ttic Nights, a miscellaneous collection of facts,
anecdotes, and discussions ranging over a charmingly wide and unpre-
dictable variety of topics, “I have presented the material in the same
casual way as I gathered it; that is to say, whatever Greek or Latin
book I took up to read or whatever I heard that was worth remember-
ing, anything at all that caught my fancy, I noted it down without
regard for system and order.”
Our information about ancient Rome comes from material objects
such as buildings, coins, pots and pans, and other such artifacts from
everyday life, but also, and far more signifi cantly, from written texts.
Latin and Greek are the only two ancient European languages that are
not only almost fully comprehensible but are also blessed with a wide
spectrum of surviving written texts, ranging from poetry to history,
preface • ix
from legal, medical, scientifi c, and other technical treatises to inscrip-
tions and graffi ti. Although the classical era of Greek literature was
over before most Greeks had even heard of Rome, and although the
Romans never came close to matching the Greeks in the quantity of
their literary output, most surviving Greek texts were nevertheless
written after the Roman conquest, and very many of them are more
informative about life in the Roman world than they are about life in
a Greek city-state. It will not therefore be surprising that Greek writ-
ers such as the historians Polybius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio, the
geographer Strabo, and the doctor Galen are cited so frequently in
this book.
Th e same story has often been preserved in several diff erent ver-
sions. I refer either to the best-known source, or to the most coherent,
or simply to the passage in which I happened to note it. Frequently, to
avoid cluttering the text and to ensure that the reader does not sup-
pose that this book has academic pretensions, I do not cite sources at
all. When ancient authorities are quoted directly, this is indicated
either by italicization or by quotation marks. Such quotations should
not, however, be assumed to be verbatim: details not relevant to the
point being made are often omitted, and extra information is some-
times added to clarify the context.
Th e book started out as a serendipitous miscellany of short pas-
sages quoted directly from ancient authors, which were fi rst collected
to accompany the electronic exercises to C lassical Latin, my introduc-
tory course in Latin (Hackett Publishing Company [2010]). Learning
vocabulary and word forms is a necessary part of language acquisition,
but it can sometimes be rather boring. To reward students for doing
the online exercises, a new quotation appears every time a fi le is
opened. Th is principle is sound and has a good classical model: the
great Epicurean philosopher-poet Lucretius declares that he will try to
make his diffi cult teachings more palatable by giving them a veneer of
poetic charm, just as doctors trick children into drinking bitter medi-
cine by smearing honey round the rim of the cup (O n the Nature of
Th ings 1.933–950). Unfortunately, however, as soon as the exercises
were posted online, students told me that they preferred clicking