Read The Second Book of General Ignorance Online
Authors: John Lloyd,John Mitchinson
The Second Book of General Ignorance (16 page)
The Ptolemaic court spoke Greek and behaved as an occupying foreign power, rather like the British in India. The Ptolemies, like all Pharoahs in Egypt, were also gods and they were a close-knit bunch. All the male heirs were called Ptolemy and the women were usually either Cleopatra or Berenice. Brothers and sisters often married each other, to keep things in the family and reinforce their aloofness from their subjects. This makes the Ptolemaic family tree almost impossible to follow.
For example, the Cleopatra we know is Cleopatra VII (69–30
BC
), but her mother might have been either Cleopatra V or VI. Our Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII (117–51
BC
), married his sister, who was also his cousin. It was a tiny gene pool: Cleopatra had only four great-grandparents and six (out of a possible sixteen) great-great-grandparents. The sculptures and coins that survive make clear that she wasn’t as beautiful as Shakespeare painted her, but nor did she have the classic Ptolemy look – fat with bulging eyes – that resulted from centuries of inbreeding. And, though no one knows exactly which of her relatives gave birth to her, ethnically she was pure Macedonian Greek.
Despite this, she identified strongly with Egypt. She became queen at eighteen and ruled the country for most of four decades. She was the first Ptolemy to learn the Egyptian language and had herself portrayed in traditional Egyptian dress. She was ruthless in removing any threats to her power, arranging for the murder of two siblings and plunging the country into civil war to take on the third, her brother (and husband), Ptolemy XIII.
When senior courtiers backed Ptolemy, she responded by seducing Julius Caesar, recently elected as
dictator
(senior magistrate in the Roman Senate), and commander of the most powerful army in the world. Together they crushed all opposition. When Caesar was assassinated, leading to civil war in Rome, Cleopatra seduced his second-in-command, Mark Antony. In the midst of all this, she still found time to write a book on cosmetics.
The war ended when the Roman fleet under Octavian (later the Emperor Augustus) defeated Mark Antony at the battle of Actium (31
BC
). Antony committed suicide in the belief that Cleopatra had already done so and she poisoned herself (though the latest research suggests no asps were involved). She was the last pharoah. The Romans made off with so much Egyptian gold that the Senate was immediately able to reduce interest rates from 12 per cent to 4 per cent.
STEPHEN
Donkeys’ milk is very nutritious indeed; it contains
oligosaccharides, which are very, very good for you and have all
kinds of immuno-helpful things, don’t they, Dr Garden?GRAEME GARDEN
I’m sure they do, yes. Very good for bathing in,
too. Wasn’t Cleopatra in ass’s milk?STEPHEN
She was in ass’s milk, absolutely, and Poppaea, the wife
of Nero: 300 donkeys were milked to fill her bath.GRAEME
Big
girl, was she?
Not victory, but vanity.
According to the Roman historian Suetonius in
On the Life
of the Caesars
(
AD
121), Julius Caesar ‘used to comb forward his scanty locks from the crown of his head’ and was thrilled when the Senate granted him the special privilege of being able to wear a victor’s laurel wreath whenever he felt like it.
Caesar’s baldness bothered him a lot. During his affair with Cleopatra, she recommended her own patent baldness cure, a salve made from burnt mice, bear grease, horse’s teeth and deer marrow, rubbed on the head until it ‘sprouts’. Clearly, it wasn’t very effective.
Caesar wasn’t the only general with hair-loss problems. According to the Greek historian Polybius, the Carthaginian commander Hannibal (247–183
BC
) found a way to get round this: ‘He had a number of wigs made, dyed to suit the appearance of persons differing widely in age, and kept constantly changing them.’ Even those closest to Hannibal had trouble recognising him.
Before the establishment of the Empire, Roman hair was worn simply. Only afterwards did hair styles become more elaborate and wigs more popular. The Empress Messalina (
AD
17–48) had an extensive collection of yellow wigs, which she wore when moonlighting in brothels. (By law, Roman prostitutes had to wear a yellow wig as a badge of their profession.) Wigs continued to be worn after Rome became Christian in
AD
313) but the Church soon condemned them as a mortal sin.
The tradition of a laurel wreath being given to the victor began at the Pythian Games in Delphi in the sixth century
BC
. These were held in honour of the god Apollo, usually portrayed wearing a wreath of laurels in memory of the nymph Daphne, who turned herself into a laurel tree to escape his amorous advances.
As well as indicating victory, the laurel had a reputation as a healing plant, so doctors who graduated also received a laurel wreath. This is the origin of the academic expressions baccalaureate
,
Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BSc). They all come from the Latin
bacca lauri,
‘laurel berries’.
No one knows where the Latin surname Caesar comes from.
Pliny the Elder thought it was because the first Caesar (like Macbeth) was ‘cut from his mother’s womb’ –
caesus
means ‘cut’ in Latin. Pliny’s idea is the origin of the term ‘Caesarian section’. But this can’t be true: such operations were only ever performed to rescue a baby whose mother had died, and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, is known to have lived for many years after his birth.
The most likely meaning of ‘Caesar’ is that it’s from the Latin
caesaries
, which means ‘a beautiful head of hair’.
Veni, vidi, vici
’?
Most of us think ‘
Veni, vidi, vici’
(‘I came, I saw, I conquered’) – Julius Caesar’s second most famous line after ‘
Et tu, Brute
’ – refers to his invasion of Britain.
In fact, as every schoolboy knows, he was summing up his victory over King Pharnaces II of Pontus at the battle of Zela in 47
BC
.
At the time the Roman civil war was at its height, with Caesar leading the Senate’s modernisers and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known as Pompey) commanding the traditionalist forces.
The kingdom of Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, had proved a troublesome enemy to Rome over the years. Knowing Caesar was preoccupied fighting Pompey in Egypt, King Pharnaces spotted his chance to regain some lost territory and invaded Cappadocia, in what is now northern Turkey. He inflicted a heavy defeat on the depleted Roman defence, and rumours spread that he had tortured Roman prisoners.
When Caesar returned victorious from Egypt, he decided to teach Pharnaces a lesson. At Zela he defeated the large, well-organised Pontic army in just five days and couldn’t resist crowing about it in a letter to his friend Amantius in Rome: hence the quote. Suetonius even claims Caesar paraded the famous phrase around after the battle itself. It was to prove a decisive moment in the civil war against Pompey and his supporters, and in Caesar’s career.
Caesar’s attempted invasion of Britain was a much less satisfactory affair. He invaded twice, in 55 and 54
BC
. The first time, he landed near Deal in Kent. The lack of a natural harbour meant his troops had to leap into deep water and wade towards the large British force that had gathered on the shore. Only the on-board Roman catapults kept the blue-painted natives at bay. After a few skirmishes, Caesar decided to cut his losses and withdrew to Gaul.
The following year he returned with 10,000 men and sailed up the Thames, where he tried to establish a Roman ally as king. He left shortly afterwards, complaining there was nothing worth having in Britain and that the locals were an ungovernable horde of wife-swapping, chicken-tormenting barbarians. No Romans stayed behind.
The whole invasion was staged for the Senate’s benefit: conquering the ‘land beyond the ocean’ made Caesar look good at home. This set the pattern for Rome’s involvement with Britain: trade and Roman influence continued to grow
without the need for full occupation. When that finally happened, ninety-six years later under the Emperor Claudius, it took four legions – 15 per cent of the whole Roman army – to do the job.
The phrase ‘
veni, vidi, vici
’ lives on today in the scientific name of the Conquered lorikeet, an extinct species of South Pacific parrot discovered in 1987. A member of the
Vini
genus, its full name is
Vini vidivici
.
Eighty.
The actual number of soldiers in each Roman legion changed over time and in different places, and the army was always short of men. Legions were at first divided into ten cohorts, each consisting of six centuries of a hundred men, or 6,000 men in all. But well before Julius Caesar came along, and right through the Roman Empire that followed him, the full strength of a legion had settled at 4,800 men. Each cohort was made up of 480 men and each of its six centuries comprised eighty soldiers, led by a centurion.
The smallest division of the Roman army was the
contubernium
, originally a unit of ten men who lived, ate and fought together. The word is from Latin
con
, ‘together’ and
taberna
, ‘a hut’ – military tents were made from boards, or
tabulae
. Such intimacy had the effect of transforming the soldiers into comrades, or
contubernales
, and it was the basis of the Roman army’s legendary
esprit de corps
. We know there were ten of them in each tent, because the man in charge was called the
decanus
, meaning ‘a chief of ten, one set over ten persons’.
Each century was made up of ten
contubernii
.
By Caesar’s time, though, the number of men in each
contubernium
had shrunk to eight, although their leader was still called a
decanus
. It seems that, although a fighting unit of ten men worked well enough when near to home, as the Romans expanded far beyond Italy military experience in distant, dangerous and unfamiliar places found that an eight-man unit was the ideal size for close bonds between soldiers. So, because army rules had always decreed ten
contubernii
in a century, a century became eighty men.
Another Roman official, who might have been in charge of 100 men but wasn’t, was the
praetor hastarius
, or ‘president of the spear’. Praetors were judges, and the spear was the symbol of property. The
praetor hastarius
presided over a court that dealt with property disputes and resolving wills. Court members were drawn from a pool of
centumviri
, or Hundred Men. But there were never exactly 100 of them. Originally there were 105 – three from each of the 35 Roman tribes – and this later grew to 180.
A hundred of anything is rarer than you might think. The English language has, buried within it, a numbering system that used twelve rather than ten as a base. That’s why we say eleven (
endleofan
, which meant ‘one left’) and twelve (‘two left’) instead of
tenty-one
and
tenty-two
. The Old English word for ‘a hundred’ was
hund
, but there were three different kinds –
hund teantig
(a hundred ‘tenty’ is 100);
hund endleofantig
(a hundred ‘eleventy’ is 110) and
hund twelftig
(a hundred ‘twelfty’ is 120). These lasted for many centuries. The expression ‘a great hundred’ meant 120 well into the sixteenth century and a ‘hundredweight’, today meaning 112 pounds, was once 120 pounds.
By coincidence, each legion of Roman infantry had a detachment of (much less important) cavalry. There were 120 of them in each legion.
It was Greek, not Latin.
A
lingua franca
is a language used between two people when neither is using their mother tongue. Rome was the capital city of a fast and expanding empire, a commercial hub of over a million people. Although the native language of Rome (capital of Latium) was Latin, the
lingua franca
– the language you would use if you were buying or selling or generally trying to make yourself understood – was
koine
or ‘common’ Greek.
Greek was also the language of choice for Rome’s educated urban elite. Sophisticated Romans saw themselves as the inheritors of Greek culture. Virgil’s
Aeneid –
the epic poem that tells the story of Rome’s foundation – makes it explicit that contemporary Rome grew directly out of the mythical Greece that Homer had written about. Speaking Greek at home was essential. Most of the literature that upper-class Romans read was in Greek; the art, architecture, horticulture, cookery and fashion they admired was Greek; and most of their teachers and domestic staff were Greeks.
Even when they did speak Latin it wasn’t the classical Latin that we recognise. For speaking native Romans used a form of the language called ‘Vulgar Latin’. The word vulgar simply meant ‘common’ or ‘of the people’. Classical Latin was the written language – used for law, oratory and administration but not for conversation. It was the everyday version that the Roman army carried across Europe and it was Vulgar, not classical Latin that spawned the Romance languages: Italian, French and Spanish.