From: Richard Rhodes' Hell and Good Company
Like thousands of others in republican Spain during the war years, Robert Merriman soon found his shattered shoulder, wound and all, immobilized in a plaster cast. His cast extended out at a right angle to his body like a broken wing so that the shoulder joint could heal unstressed. The surgeons called it an airplane splint. And because the hospital had run short of plaster of paris-the lightweight, fast-setting gypsum plaster named after the historic gypsum mines under Montmartre, whose tunnels became the Paris catacombs-Merriman’s cast was molded of much heavier lime plaster, the kind used in construction. He felt the weight.
Sealing open wounds such as compound fractures (the kind with exposed bone) under plaster was a major and lifesaving innovation of the Spanish Civil War. Earlier, during the Great War, a shocking 46 percent of American soldiers who suffered fractures were permanently disabled; 12 percent died. In contrast, in a series of 1,073 cases of infected fractures treated and tracked by the innovative Catalan surgeon Josep Trueta during the Spanish war, 91 percent healed satisfactorily, with a rate of 8.5 percent disabled and only six (0.5 percent) deaths.
Sealing compound, infected fractures in plaster rather than leaving them open for disinfection was a medical innovation out of Lincoln, Nebraska. A Nebraska surgeon, H. Winnett Orr, one of the pioneers of American orthopedics, devised the technique in the 1920s after serving as a medical officer in the U.S. Army at hospitals in Wales and France. “We had our eyes opened to the very serious character of the war wounds," Orr writes in a memoir of his first exposure to war casualties in Wales. “It was almost beyond belief to see how very extensive was the physical damage done. The infections were appalling. Large open wounds involving bones and joints were bathed in pus. In those who had survived, there were some fearful evidences of the destructive power of gas gangrene.”
Orr was an admirer of a colorful nineteenth-century Liverpool surgeon named Hugh Owen Thomas, the descendant of a long line of Welsh bone-setters. Thomas practiced among the poor in the Liverpool slums in Victorian times, when the standard treatment for arm and leg fractures was amputation. Thomas to the contrary emphasized immobilizing the broken limb-he invented the Thomas splint for that purpose-and his precept, “enforced, uninterrupted, and prolonged rest.” A direct line connected Thomas and Orr: Thomas’s nephew Robert Jones, who trained under his uncle in Liverpool, was appointed inspector of military orthopedics for Great Britain and Ireland early in the Great War, and recruited Orr among twenty American orthopedic surgeons who volunteered to help the British before the United States entered the war in April 1917.
Despite Jones’s implicit endorsement, Orr’s idea of cleaning, packing, and immobilizing compound fractures in plaster received a hostile reception from British and American surgeons in the military hospitals where Orr served. Covering an open wound with plaster, he was told, Would leave any infection untreated and risk killing the patient. Only a captain, he desisted. His chance came at the end of the war. By then he was chief of orthopedics overseeing the main American hospital at Savenay, France, the transfer point for all American sick and wounded evacuated back to the U.S.
Within a few days after arriving at Savernay" Orr writes slyly, " our supply of splints ran out.... With my own fondness for plaster as a fixative dressing it therefore came into extensive use. Even a great many of our spine and fracture cases were put into plaster of Paris for transfer to the United States... we never heard of any serious effects as a result of this method.
"If I had sent some thousands of men shipboard for transportation to the United States without making windows in the casts for the daily dressing of open wounds I should probably have been censured or worse and at that time I should not have thought of doing so. Yet later observations show that most of those men would have had less suffering, fewer complications. and better ultimate results if they had been prepared according to the method now advocated. put in closed casts and left undisturbed during the entire period of transportation to the United States or longer."
Perhaps because his courage had failed him Within the military. Orr began promoting his casting treatment after he returned to civilian practice in 1919. Most ignored his methods, but he made a decisive convert in Catalonia.
Josep Trueta was a surgeon on the staff of the Hospital de la Santa Creu in Barcelona. Among other duties he served as chief surgeon for an accident insurance company. In Spain such organizations maintained medical clinics for the workers they insured. Trueta thus treated ind lured factory workers and victims of road accidents, which is probably why ltc noticed Orr’s papers. He decided to try Orr’s method: aligning the broken bones to their normal position (“reduction"), cutting away bruised or infected tissue (“debridement”), packing the Wound with sterile gauze, and then casting the limb in plaster, covering the wound, and leaving the cast on for two months or more while the wound and the bones healed. “At first i treated only unimportant wounds this way," ’I‘ructa writes; “but encouraged by the results I used the method in severe compound fractures of the tibia and fibula with a very satisfactory outcome."
A practical advantage of the method was that it eliminated the daily nursing routine of dousing uncovered wounds with disinfectant. A disadvantage, Trueta notes. “was that the plaster cast soon stank unbearably from contamination" the wound draining its "products of tissue disintegration," as the surgeon delicately calls them, into the gauze packing and soaking into the east. Later, in the war. patients in Trueta casts would be banished together to stink up a dedicated ward or, in good weather, parked outside. They smelled like death warmed over. “but underneath," a prominent American surgeon discovered who toured the Barcelona hospitals in wartime, “when cleaned up. there were nice, pink, well-granulated wounds.” (Granulation is tissue matrix, the new growth that fills open wounds as they heal.)
By 1929 Trueta had treated more than one hundred cases, which he summarized in a report to the Surgical Society of Barcelona. Like Orr's, his exciting success story “did not get a good reception... . lo the seven Years before the beginning of the Spanish war, I could not persuade more than a few surgeons to try my method."
In the meantime, Trueta conceived of a further application that extended Orr's method beyond fractures. “Towards the end of 1929," he ”rites, “. . . I decided by simple reasoning that if this method of treating chronically infected bones nearly always worked there was no reason why it should not be successful as a preventive treatment of infection in recent open wounds.” Trueta realized he could use Orr’s method to treat large wounds regardless of whether broken bones were involved: clean up the wound, pack it with gauze, cast it in plaster, and leave it alone to heal. Later, after he escaped Spain ahead of Franco’s victory and found his way to England, a refugee stranger in a strange land, Trueta minimized Orr’s contribution to shine up his résumé (he eventually won appointment as professor of orthopedic surgery at Oxford University). He hardly needed to do so: his innovations were substantial and transformative.
The war tested Trueta’s new methods. As chief surgeon of the largest hospital in Barcelona, he applied his casting technique on a large scale, keeping a record of his results. He treated wounded militiamen and, once the bombing started, injured civilians as well; published two papers in Catalan medical journals; and wrote a textbook.
Even that wasn’t enough for Trueta’s fellow surgeons, however. It took the determined intervention of his colleague Dr. Joaquin d’Harcourt Got, chief of surgical services for the republican army, to command the use of Trueta’s methods in the Spanish Republic’s hospitals. D’Harcourt tested Trueta’s system at Teruel, a major battle fought between December 1937 and February 1938, where he and his assistants followed the Trueta protocol in treating around a hundred casualties. “On returning to Barcelona,” Trueta writes, “my friend told me how satisfied he had been with the results.” Before then, Robert Merriman worked at granulating under his massive airplane-splinted cast.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
The Last of the House of Caesar
From Tom Holland:
Proclaimed Augusta by a besotted Nero only a few months after their marriage, she blazed and glittered as neither Livia nor Agrippina had ever dared to do. Her mules were shod with gold; She bathed in ass‘s milk to preserve her perfect complexion; she gave her name to entire brands of beauty treatment. ‘I hope I die before I get old‘”-this prayer of Poppaea’s, uttered after catching herself at an unfavourable angle in a mirror, summed up everything that her husband most adored about her. It spoke to one of his profoundest convictions: that it was only shallow people who did not judge by appearances. Spectacle, illusion, drama: these were the dimensions of rule that truly mattered. Attentive though Nero might be to the grind of business, his true obsession was with a project that he felt to be altogether worthier of his time and talents: to fashion reality anew. in the summer of 64, be duly set himself to transforming his capital into a setting worthy of his hopes and ambitions for it. Rome’s public places became the venue for a series of spectacular banquets. ‘lt was as though the entire city were now to serve as Nero’s palace.’ Most extravagant of all was a party hosted by Tigellinus beside a lake on the Campus Martius. As he had done at the games held on the opposite side of the Tiber four years before, Nero gorged himself on a raft luxuriously outfitted with soft purple rugs and cushions. Boats adorned with ivory and gold towed him across waters filled with exotic sea beasts. The oarsmen, grouped according to age and specialisation, constituted the cream of Rome’s male prostitutes. Meanwhile, on the banks of the lake, the Roman people flocked to a sensational array of entertainments. The clamour for these was hardly surprising. Food and drink were provided indiscriminately, while on the quays stood brothels staffed by the most remarkable array of whores in the history of Rome. There were slaves and free; professionals and virgins; the dregs of the slums and the wives of eminent senators -and none was permitted to refuse a client who wished to sleep with her. It was, for the crowds who flocked to use them, a dream come true: a magical fusion of the pleasures of the street with those of the palace.
Nero, familiar with both, had recognised a profound truth about the Roman people: that in their fascination with the shocking and illicit there lurked opportunity as well as menace. Scandal was corrosive to the authority of a natural showman only if there were an attempt to cover it up. Flaunt it, revel in it, rub the noses of the dull. the dreary and the unfashionable in it, and the authority natural to a Caesar would grow only the more brilliant. A few days after Tigellinus’s great banquet, Nero was ready to put this thesis to an even more extravagant test. Like one of the Galli, he had himself painted and dressed as a woman, and then, amid a blaze of wedding torches. married to one of his freedmen. Far from veiling a ceremony that could not have been more perfectly calculated to outrage conservative opinion, he staged it in public ‘even the part that night hides when the bride is a woman’. It was all a sham, of course. That Nero meant nothing serious by it was precisely the point. Even his veneration of the Syrian Goddess was not what it had been. Time would see him urinate on her statue. As a comet glowed eerily in the skies above Rome, and those appalled by their ruler’s antics dreaded the worst, those with a keener understanding of fashion could not help but revel in the world of fantasy that Nero had conjured into being. It was one in which anything had come to seem possible.
And so it proved. On the evening of 18 July, two days after the comet had finally faded from sight, and as a full moon gleamed bright in the sky, fire broke out in Rome. It began at the southern end of the Circus, in shops packed with flammable materials. and in next to no time was raging out of control along the entire length of the valley. Soon it was spreading at terrifying speed through the cramped wooden tenements of quarter after quarter, and racing up the slopes of Rome’s hills. The Vigiles proved powerless to stop it. Panic swept the city.
Rome’s suffering citizens were sure of only one thing: that the arsonists, once they were identified, deserved to suffer a fate as monstrous and terrible as their crime.
All of which played to Nero’s strengths. Who better to devise a theatrical display of retribution than the man who had attempted to drown his own mother with a booby-trapped yacht? Sure enough, once the guilty had been successfully identified and arrested, they were subjected to deaths as grotesque as they were excruciating. Some, for the entertainment of spectators, were torn to pieces by hunting dogs; others were crucified in ways calculated to make them look ridiculous. The need to mock the arsonists as well as to punish them was a pressing one for otherwise they would have risked haunting the imaginings of the Roman people. The culprits turned out to be the embodiment of everything that decent citizens had always most feared about immigration: the adherents of a sinister, not to say sociopathic, cult. ‘Christians’, they were called, after their founder, a criminal who had been executed in Judaea back in the days of Tiberius. Worse even than the Jews whose teachings were at least ancient ones -they were motivated'by ‘a hatred for the norms of human society’: contempt for the gods, and scorn for all those not in their sect. Who could doubt, gazing at the smoking ruins of Rome, that they were the very embodiment of the enemy within? Now, though, thanks to Caesar’s tireless efforts, they had been identified, and all was well. Nero, ever the showman, devised a Particularly brilliant reassurance of this to his fellow citizens. Not all the Christians were hunted like wild beasts or nailed to crosses. Some, smeared with pitch and set alight, served as human torches: a punishment to fit their crime.* Erected in the Emperor’s private gardens, they illumined the flowers and grottoes which Nero had invited the Roman people to come and explore.
(According to St Jerome, the total number of Christians martyred by Nero was put at 979.)
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Without the. edge of genuine competition, after all, his victories would he worthless. Hence, just like any other entrant in the games. he was prey to stage-fright, bitched about his rivals behind their backs and lived in dread of the judges. Ruler of the world or no, he could not afford a performance that would make him look like a fraud ~ and everyone knew it. That the judges, at event after event. had little choice but to award him first prize did not diminish the genuine awe felt by many spectators at his feats. The greatest festivals in Greece had all been founded by gods or heroes of royal blood; and now, with the arrival of Caesar to headline at them, the ancient days of song and legend seemed renewed. Across the East, wherever theatres were to be found and sporting contests staged, the glamour of his achievements could hardly help but blaze. Senators in Rome might scoff, but Nero had his eyes fixed, not just on the capital, but on all the lands that he ruled.
In Greece, he could breathe more freely. Visitors to the great festivals there were attuned to his sensibility. Back in Rome, for instance, even Nero had hesitated to perform as an actor. Those who made a show of their bodies before the public gaze, draping themselves in exotic costumes and speaking other people’s lines, were regarded by upstanding citizens as little better than whores. It was this that explained their presence alongside adulterers and gladiators among the class of people defined by the law as infames. Disapproval of the theatre was a venerable Roman tradition. Moralists had always condemned it as a threat to ‘the qualities of manliness for which the Roman people are renowned’.86 Actors, it was sternly noted, were inclined to effeminacy. They rarely had due respect for the boundary that existed between male and female. Only strictness could serve to patrol it. An actor who had found it amusing to keep a married Woman as a page, her hair cut short to look like a boy’s, had been Whipped and banished from Rome on the personal instructions of Augustus himself. Those who played others in public threatened suh Version at every level. Even the most basic fundamentals risked being
No such anxiety, though. was likely to trouble Caesar. That Nero, like so many of the heroes who featured in the repertoire, was descended from a god, and wielded kingly power, gave to his appear« nice on the stage a quite exceptional heft. Acting came naturally to him. Back in the first days of his rule, addressing the Senate, he had delivered a speech composed for him by Seneca and been roundly mocked for it behind his back: ‘for those with long memories noted that he was the first emperor to rely on borrowed eloquence?“ Even then, though. Nero had penetrated to the heart of what it meant to be a Princeps. To rule as Caesar was to play a part. The performance was all. Now, arrived in Greece, Nero’s aim was to make this apparent to the entire world. Taking to the stage, sometimes his mask would be painted to look like the hero he was playing, sometimes to
look like himself. No one could mistake the point that was being made. The events of Nero’s life, its many trials and tribulations, were as worthy a subject of drama as anything conjured up from myth. To watch him star as Orestes was to know that the murder of Clytemnestra had been rivalled by a second, no less terrible act of matricide. When he played the part of a woman giving birth, who could not reflect on the tragedy that had seen him lose his heir? When he wore a mask fashioned after the features of Poppaea, who could not be reminded of the homicidal fits of madness sent by the gods upon many an ancient hero, and pity Nero likewise? It was a bravura vision, audacity, conceit: his performance boasted them all. Only Nero could have attempted it; only Nero could have pulled it off to such stunning effect.
Resurrecting Poppaea on the stage was only a beginning, though. Beyond the theatre too, Nero aimed to bend reality to his will. His sense of bereavement remained unassuaged. In the wake of Poppaea’s death, he had briefly considered marrying Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius; but when she. not surprisingly, had shown herself reluctant to wed her sister’s killer, he had opted instead to put to death for treason. Tellingly, his choice of a new wife had been a woman very like Poppaca. Statilia Messalina, lately married to a consul executed in the wake of Piso’s conspiracy, was stylish, beautiful and clever. Nevertheless, not even the fascination she shared with Nero for training and strengthening her voice could compensate, in her new husband’s opinion, for her one abiding drawback: she was not Poppaea. This was why, just as Nero had once delighted in sleeping with a whore who looked like his mother, he had ordered a hunt to be made for a doppelganger of the wife he had kicked to death. Sure enough, a woman with a close resemblance to Poppaea had been located, and delivered to his bed; but he had soon wearied of her. Then someone else had been tracked down: someone soft-skinned, amber-haired, irresistible. To Nero, brought this prize, it was as though his dead wife had been restored to him. So completely did he imagine himself to be gazing on her face again, caressing her cheeks and taking her in his arms, that Poppaea seemed to him redeemed from the grave. Nevertheless, there was a twist. For all the eeriness of the resemblance, it was not a woman who had been found for Nero nor even a girl. The lookalike, so perfect as to convince a grieving husband, was not perfect in every detail. The double of Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s greatest love, was a boy.
Nothing was more ephemeral than beauty of such a kind. Like the blossoms of spring, it afforded a delight that was all the sweeter for being so fleeting. It was this quality that rendered boys with exquisite looks such luxury items of merchandise. Rather like Lucrine oysters, they were prized highly by those who bought them precisely because they were so quick to go off. A slave-dealer, desperate not to lose value (in his merchandise, might use ants’ eggs to retard the growth of hair in a boy’s armpits, and blood from lambs’ testicles to keep his cheeks smooth; an owner, rather than accept that a treasured catamite had hit puberty, might dress him as a girl ‘and keep him beardless by smoothing away his hairs, or else plucking them out by the roots. The grim truth was, though, that there existed only one reliable option for preserving the springtime of a boy’s looks; and Nero had duly taken it.
Sporus. he had nicknamed his victim, ‘Spunk’. Even when mocking traditional values, Nero remained sufficiently a Roman to find eunuchs a bit of a joke. If not quite as sinister as the Galli, whose castration was self-inflicted, boys gelded on the orders of their mastery trailed after them the unmistakable perfume of the countercultural. Soft, infertile and indelibly associated with the harems of eastern despots, they could hardly have been less in tune with the stern Virtues of Roman manhood which was, of course, for those with an eye to fashion, precisely the point. Maecenas, while administering Italy during the Actium campaign, had scandalised conservatives by appearing in public with an escort of two eunuchs; Sejanus, confirming moralists in their loathing for him, had owned one called ‘Boy Toy’, whose record sale-price, even decades later, could still provoke gasps of wonder. Nero, though, as was his invariable habit, had gone just that little bit further in scandalising respectable opinion. Yes, Sporus had been gelded to ensure the preservation of his beauty but that was not the only reason for castrating him. It was not a eunuch that Nero was interested in taking to bed, after all, but his dead wife. He wanted Poppaea Sabina back.
And so that was the name given to her double. As his instructress in becoming an Augusta, Sporus was assigned a woman of high rank named Calvia Crispinilla, whose qualifications as a wardrobe mistress could hardly have been bettered. Modish and aristocratic, she had also won herself a notorious reputation as ‘Nero’s instructress in sexual pleasures’ . Delivered into Calvia’s hands, Sporus was duly arrayed in Poppaea’s robes, his hair teased into her favoured style and his face painted with her distinctive range of cosmetics. ‘Everything he did, he had to do it as a woman’” and a wife of Caesar’s at that. As Nero toured Greece, so Sporus travelled With him, borne in the litter of an Augusta and attended by a bustling train of maids. Only one thing remained to complete the transformation. The nuptials, when they were staged during the course of Nero’s sojourn in Greece, positively screamed tradition. The bride, veiled in saffron, was given away by Tigellinus; wild celebrations were held throughout the province; prayers were even raised to the gods that the happy couple would have children. Only one thing prevented the illusion from being complete: the new Poppaea Sabina’s lack of a woman’s anatomy.
Even that was not for want of trying. Nero, if he could have done, would have excised the maimed remnants of genitals from Sporus altogether, parted the living flesh of the wretched boy’s groin and opened up a passageway to an implanted uterus. The blatant impossibility of fulfilling such an ambition did not prevent huge rewards being offered to anyone who might achieve it whether by surgery, or else by darker means. The cutting of a channel where before there had been none was precisely the kind of project that had always tickled Nero’s fancy. Back in Italy, he had ordered the construction of a canal stretching all the way from Puteoli to the Tiber, a distance of some 150 miles. Then in Greece, rising to the challenge set by the oracles, he had no sooner arrived in Corinth than he was giving orders for a canal to be hacked out through the Isthmus. An engineering project designed to facilitate the flow of trade, it was also something much more. The ceremony which inaugurated the project could hardly have made this more explicit. Emerging from a sumptuous tent, Nero kicked things off by singing a hymn about sea nymphs; then, taking a golden pitchfork, he struck the earth with it three times. Snipping the Peloponnese from mainland Greece, he proudly declared, would be on a par with anything achieved by the heroes of legend. Fantasy and a spectacular infrastructure project; golden pitchforks and gangs of toiling prisoners; songs about sea nymphs and the sweat and strain of cutting through hard rock: it was all inimitable Nero.
But what if reality, rather than submitting to the dictates of his imagination, insisted on defying them? Sporus's groin remained without a vagina; the canal that was supposed to link Puteoli to the Tiber appeared stuck in the Bay of Naples; the excavations at the Isthmus prompted dark warnings behind Nero’s back that he was trespassing on the affairs of the gods.
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When Nero killed himself, and brought the bloodline of Augustus to extinction, many simply refused to believe it. Decades on, across the Roman world, people were convinced that he would come again. ‘Everybody wishes he were still alive.’
Even those who had suffered most terribly at his hands, and had every reason to execrate his memory, could not help but acknowledge the charisma of the House of Caesar. Some three decades after Nero’s suicide, a Christian named John recorded a Vision of the end days revealed to him by an angel. Out of the sea he had seen a seven-headed beast rise; ‘and one of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound’. What was the wound, so many who read John’s vision would wonder with dread, if not the sword blow to the throat with which Nero had ended his own life?“ The wound, so the angel had revealed to john, was destined to be healed; and the beast, which ‘was, and is not’, would rise from the bottomless pit. On its back would ride a woman; and the woman would be ‘arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication. Rarely before had the Rome ruled by the August Family been made to sound so glamorous. ‘What an artist perishes with me.’ So Nero, with his customary lack of modesty, had declared as he steeled himself to commit suicide. He had not exaggerated. He had indeed been an artist he and his predecessors too. Augustus and Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius: each, in his own way had fashioned something immortal.
* Victorinus of Pettau, a bishop from Pannonia who was martyred in AD 303. was the first Christian writer to interpret the wound to the beast’s throat as an allusion to Nero’s suicide. The Geneva Bible comments on it: ‘This may be understood of Nero, who moved the first persecution against the Church. and after slew himself, so that the family of the Caesars ended in him.’
Proclaimed Augusta by a besotted Nero only a few months after their marriage, she blazed and glittered as neither Livia nor Agrippina had ever dared to do. Her mules were shod with gold; She bathed in ass‘s milk to preserve her perfect complexion; she gave her name to entire brands of beauty treatment. ‘I hope I die before I get old‘”-this prayer of Poppaea’s, uttered after catching herself at an unfavourable angle in a mirror, summed up everything that her husband most adored about her. It spoke to one of his profoundest convictions: that it was only shallow people who did not judge by appearances. Spectacle, illusion, drama: these were the dimensions of rule that truly mattered. Attentive though Nero might be to the grind of business, his true obsession was with a project that he felt to be altogether worthier of his time and talents: to fashion reality anew. in the summer of 64, be duly set himself to transforming his capital into a setting worthy of his hopes and ambitions for it. Rome’s public places became the venue for a series of spectacular banquets. ‘lt was as though the entire city were now to serve as Nero’s palace.’ Most extravagant of all was a party hosted by Tigellinus beside a lake on the Campus Martius. As he had done at the games held on the opposite side of the Tiber four years before, Nero gorged himself on a raft luxuriously outfitted with soft purple rugs and cushions. Boats adorned with ivory and gold towed him across waters filled with exotic sea beasts. The oarsmen, grouped according to age and specialisation, constituted the cream of Rome’s male prostitutes. Meanwhile, on the banks of the lake, the Roman people flocked to a sensational array of entertainments. The clamour for these was hardly surprising. Food and drink were provided indiscriminately, while on the quays stood brothels staffed by the most remarkable array of whores in the history of Rome. There were slaves and free; professionals and virgins; the dregs of the slums and the wives of eminent senators -and none was permitted to refuse a client who wished to sleep with her. It was, for the crowds who flocked to use them, a dream come true: a magical fusion of the pleasures of the street with those of the palace.
Nero, familiar with both, had recognised a profound truth about the Roman people: that in their fascination with the shocking and illicit there lurked opportunity as well as menace. Scandal was corrosive to the authority of a natural showman only if there were an attempt to cover it up. Flaunt it, revel in it, rub the noses of the dull. the dreary and the unfashionable in it, and the authority natural to a Caesar would grow only the more brilliant. A few days after Tigellinus’s great banquet, Nero was ready to put this thesis to an even more extravagant test. Like one of the Galli, he had himself painted and dressed as a woman, and then, amid a blaze of wedding torches. married to one of his freedmen. Far from veiling a ceremony that could not have been more perfectly calculated to outrage conservative opinion, he staged it in public ‘even the part that night hides when the bride is a woman’. It was all a sham, of course. That Nero meant nothing serious by it was precisely the point. Even his veneration of the Syrian Goddess was not what it had been. Time would see him urinate on her statue. As a comet glowed eerily in the skies above Rome, and those appalled by their ruler’s antics dreaded the worst, those with a keener understanding of fashion could not help but revel in the world of fantasy that Nero had conjured into being. It was one in which anything had come to seem possible.
And so it proved. On the evening of 18 July, two days after the comet had finally faded from sight, and as a full moon gleamed bright in the sky, fire broke out in Rome. It began at the southern end of the Circus, in shops packed with flammable materials. and in next to no time was raging out of control along the entire length of the valley. Soon it was spreading at terrifying speed through the cramped wooden tenements of quarter after quarter, and racing up the slopes of Rome’s hills. The Vigiles proved powerless to stop it. Panic swept the city.
Rome’s suffering citizens were sure of only one thing: that the arsonists, once they were identified, deserved to suffer a fate as monstrous and terrible as their crime.
All of which played to Nero’s strengths. Who better to devise a theatrical display of retribution than the man who had attempted to drown his own mother with a booby-trapped yacht? Sure enough, once the guilty had been successfully identified and arrested, they were subjected to deaths as grotesque as they were excruciating. Some, for the entertainment of spectators, were torn to pieces by hunting dogs; others were crucified in ways calculated to make them look ridiculous. The need to mock the arsonists as well as to punish them was a pressing one for otherwise they would have risked haunting the imaginings of the Roman people. The culprits turned out to be the embodiment of everything that decent citizens had always most feared about immigration: the adherents of a sinister, not to say sociopathic, cult. ‘Christians’, they were called, after their founder, a criminal who had been executed in Judaea back in the days of Tiberius. Worse even than the Jews whose teachings were at least ancient ones -they were motivated'by ‘a hatred for the norms of human society’: contempt for the gods, and scorn for all those not in their sect. Who could doubt, gazing at the smoking ruins of Rome, that they were the very embodiment of the enemy within? Now, though, thanks to Caesar’s tireless efforts, they had been identified, and all was well. Nero, ever the showman, devised a Particularly brilliant reassurance of this to his fellow citizens. Not all the Christians were hunted like wild beasts or nailed to crosses. Some, smeared with pitch and set alight, served as human torches: a punishment to fit their crime.* Erected in the Emperor’s private gardens, they illumined the flowers and grottoes which Nero had invited the Roman people to come and explore.
(According to St Jerome, the total number of Christians martyred by Nero was put at 979.)
++++++
Without the. edge of genuine competition, after all, his victories would he worthless. Hence, just like any other entrant in the games. he was prey to stage-fright, bitched about his rivals behind their backs and lived in dread of the judges. Ruler of the world or no, he could not afford a performance that would make him look like a fraud ~ and everyone knew it. That the judges, at event after event. had little choice but to award him first prize did not diminish the genuine awe felt by many spectators at his feats. The greatest festivals in Greece had all been founded by gods or heroes of royal blood; and now, with the arrival of Caesar to headline at them, the ancient days of song and legend seemed renewed. Across the East, wherever theatres were to be found and sporting contests staged, the glamour of his achievements could hardly help but blaze. Senators in Rome might scoff, but Nero had his eyes fixed, not just on the capital, but on all the lands that he ruled.
In Greece, he could breathe more freely. Visitors to the great festivals there were attuned to his sensibility. Back in Rome, for instance, even Nero had hesitated to perform as an actor. Those who made a show of their bodies before the public gaze, draping themselves in exotic costumes and speaking other people’s lines, were regarded by upstanding citizens as little better than whores. It was this that explained their presence alongside adulterers and gladiators among the class of people defined by the law as infames. Disapproval of the theatre was a venerable Roman tradition. Moralists had always condemned it as a threat to ‘the qualities of manliness for which the Roman people are renowned’.86 Actors, it was sternly noted, were inclined to effeminacy. They rarely had due respect for the boundary that existed between male and female. Only strictness could serve to patrol it. An actor who had found it amusing to keep a married Woman as a page, her hair cut short to look like a boy’s, had been Whipped and banished from Rome on the personal instructions of Augustus himself. Those who played others in public threatened suh Version at every level. Even the most basic fundamentals risked being
No such anxiety, though. was likely to trouble Caesar. That Nero, like so many of the heroes who featured in the repertoire, was descended from a god, and wielded kingly power, gave to his appear« nice on the stage a quite exceptional heft. Acting came naturally to him. Back in the first days of his rule, addressing the Senate, he had delivered a speech composed for him by Seneca and been roundly mocked for it behind his back: ‘for those with long memories noted that he was the first emperor to rely on borrowed eloquence?“ Even then, though. Nero had penetrated to the heart of what it meant to be a Princeps. To rule as Caesar was to play a part. The performance was all. Now, arrived in Greece, Nero’s aim was to make this apparent to the entire world. Taking to the stage, sometimes his mask would be painted to look like the hero he was playing, sometimes to
look like himself. No one could mistake the point that was being made. The events of Nero’s life, its many trials and tribulations, were as worthy a subject of drama as anything conjured up from myth. To watch him star as Orestes was to know that the murder of Clytemnestra had been rivalled by a second, no less terrible act of matricide. When he played the part of a woman giving birth, who could not reflect on the tragedy that had seen him lose his heir? When he wore a mask fashioned after the features of Poppaea, who could not be reminded of the homicidal fits of madness sent by the gods upon many an ancient hero, and pity Nero likewise? It was a bravura vision, audacity, conceit: his performance boasted them all. Only Nero could have attempted it; only Nero could have pulled it off to such stunning effect.
Resurrecting Poppaea on the stage was only a beginning, though. Beyond the theatre too, Nero aimed to bend reality to his will. His sense of bereavement remained unassuaged. In the wake of Poppaea’s death, he had briefly considered marrying Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius; but when she. not surprisingly, had shown herself reluctant to wed her sister’s killer, he had opted instead to put to death for treason. Tellingly, his choice of a new wife had been a woman very like Poppaca. Statilia Messalina, lately married to a consul executed in the wake of Piso’s conspiracy, was stylish, beautiful and clever. Nevertheless, not even the fascination she shared with Nero for training and strengthening her voice could compensate, in her new husband’s opinion, for her one abiding drawback: she was not Poppaea. This was why, just as Nero had once delighted in sleeping with a whore who looked like his mother, he had ordered a hunt to be made for a doppelganger of the wife he had kicked to death. Sure enough, a woman with a close resemblance to Poppaea had been located, and delivered to his bed; but he had soon wearied of her. Then someone else had been tracked down: someone soft-skinned, amber-haired, irresistible. To Nero, brought this prize, it was as though his dead wife had been restored to him. So completely did he imagine himself to be gazing on her face again, caressing her cheeks and taking her in his arms, that Poppaea seemed to him redeemed from the grave. Nevertheless, there was a twist. For all the eeriness of the resemblance, it was not a woman who had been found for Nero nor even a girl. The lookalike, so perfect as to convince a grieving husband, was not perfect in every detail. The double of Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s greatest love, was a boy.
Nothing was more ephemeral than beauty of such a kind. Like the blossoms of spring, it afforded a delight that was all the sweeter for being so fleeting. It was this quality that rendered boys with exquisite looks such luxury items of merchandise. Rather like Lucrine oysters, they were prized highly by those who bought them precisely because they were so quick to go off. A slave-dealer, desperate not to lose value (in his merchandise, might use ants’ eggs to retard the growth of hair in a boy’s armpits, and blood from lambs’ testicles to keep his cheeks smooth; an owner, rather than accept that a treasured catamite had hit puberty, might dress him as a girl ‘and keep him beardless by smoothing away his hairs, or else plucking them out by the roots. The grim truth was, though, that there existed only one reliable option for preserving the springtime of a boy’s looks; and Nero had duly taken it.
Sporus. he had nicknamed his victim, ‘Spunk’. Even when mocking traditional values, Nero remained sufficiently a Roman to find eunuchs a bit of a joke. If not quite as sinister as the Galli, whose castration was self-inflicted, boys gelded on the orders of their mastery trailed after them the unmistakable perfume of the countercultural. Soft, infertile and indelibly associated with the harems of eastern despots, they could hardly have been less in tune with the stern Virtues of Roman manhood which was, of course, for those with an eye to fashion, precisely the point. Maecenas, while administering Italy during the Actium campaign, had scandalised conservatives by appearing in public with an escort of two eunuchs; Sejanus, confirming moralists in their loathing for him, had owned one called ‘Boy Toy’, whose record sale-price, even decades later, could still provoke gasps of wonder. Nero, though, as was his invariable habit, had gone just that little bit further in scandalising respectable opinion. Yes, Sporus had been gelded to ensure the preservation of his beauty but that was not the only reason for castrating him. It was not a eunuch that Nero was interested in taking to bed, after all, but his dead wife. He wanted Poppaea Sabina back.
And so that was the name given to her double. As his instructress in becoming an Augusta, Sporus was assigned a woman of high rank named Calvia Crispinilla, whose qualifications as a wardrobe mistress could hardly have been bettered. Modish and aristocratic, she had also won herself a notorious reputation as ‘Nero’s instructress in sexual pleasures’ . Delivered into Calvia’s hands, Sporus was duly arrayed in Poppaea’s robes, his hair teased into her favoured style and his face painted with her distinctive range of cosmetics. ‘Everything he did, he had to do it as a woman’” and a wife of Caesar’s at that. As Nero toured Greece, so Sporus travelled With him, borne in the litter of an Augusta and attended by a bustling train of maids. Only one thing remained to complete the transformation. The nuptials, when they were staged during the course of Nero’s sojourn in Greece, positively screamed tradition. The bride, veiled in saffron, was given away by Tigellinus; wild celebrations were held throughout the province; prayers were even raised to the gods that the happy couple would have children. Only one thing prevented the illusion from being complete: the new Poppaea Sabina’s lack of a woman’s anatomy.
Even that was not for want of trying. Nero, if he could have done, would have excised the maimed remnants of genitals from Sporus altogether, parted the living flesh of the wretched boy’s groin and opened up a passageway to an implanted uterus. The blatant impossibility of fulfilling such an ambition did not prevent huge rewards being offered to anyone who might achieve it whether by surgery, or else by darker means. The cutting of a channel where before there had been none was precisely the kind of project that had always tickled Nero’s fancy. Back in Italy, he had ordered the construction of a canal stretching all the way from Puteoli to the Tiber, a distance of some 150 miles. Then in Greece, rising to the challenge set by the oracles, he had no sooner arrived in Corinth than he was giving orders for a canal to be hacked out through the Isthmus. An engineering project designed to facilitate the flow of trade, it was also something much more. The ceremony which inaugurated the project could hardly have made this more explicit. Emerging from a sumptuous tent, Nero kicked things off by singing a hymn about sea nymphs; then, taking a golden pitchfork, he struck the earth with it three times. Snipping the Peloponnese from mainland Greece, he proudly declared, would be on a par with anything achieved by the heroes of legend. Fantasy and a spectacular infrastructure project; golden pitchforks and gangs of toiling prisoners; songs about sea nymphs and the sweat and strain of cutting through hard rock: it was all inimitable Nero.
But what if reality, rather than submitting to the dictates of his imagination, insisted on defying them? Sporus's groin remained without a vagina; the canal that was supposed to link Puteoli to the Tiber appeared stuck in the Bay of Naples; the excavations at the Isthmus prompted dark warnings behind Nero’s back that he was trespassing on the affairs of the gods.
++++
When Nero killed himself, and brought the bloodline of Augustus to extinction, many simply refused to believe it. Decades on, across the Roman world, people were convinced that he would come again. ‘Everybody wishes he were still alive.’
Even those who had suffered most terribly at his hands, and had every reason to execrate his memory, could not help but acknowledge the charisma of the House of Caesar. Some three decades after Nero’s suicide, a Christian named John recorded a Vision of the end days revealed to him by an angel. Out of the sea he had seen a seven-headed beast rise; ‘and one of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound’. What was the wound, so many who read John’s vision would wonder with dread, if not the sword blow to the throat with which Nero had ended his own life?“ The wound, so the angel had revealed to john, was destined to be healed; and the beast, which ‘was, and is not’, would rise from the bottomless pit. On its back would ride a woman; and the woman would be ‘arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication. Rarely before had the Rome ruled by the August Family been made to sound so glamorous. ‘What an artist perishes with me.’ So Nero, with his customary lack of modesty, had declared as he steeled himself to commit suicide. He had not exaggerated. He had indeed been an artist he and his predecessors too. Augustus and Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius: each, in his own way had fashioned something immortal.
* Victorinus of Pettau, a bishop from Pannonia who was martyred in AD 303. was the first Christian writer to interpret the wound to the beast’s throat as an allusion to Nero’s suicide. The Geneva Bible comments on it: ‘This may be understood of Nero, who moved the first persecution against the Church. and after slew himself, so that the family of the Caesars ended in him.’
Friday, February 24, 2017
British history
From the estate of a University History professor:
On why a book was titled "The Age of Equipoise"
The validity of my title, The Age of Equipoise, remains to be proved but what I sought was a generation in which the old and the new, the elements of growth, survival and decay, achieved a balance which most contemporaries regarded as satisfactory. Inevitably there are risks in using any title which includes “The Age”. Of what or of whom shall it be The Age? Sometimes a material symbol is chosen and here it might be “The Railway Age” or “The Gas-Lit Age”. Neither title would be completely indefensible. England was proud of the evidence of progress and the promise of comfort which gas-lighting and railway transport afforded. But neither of them was, by the middle of the century, a novelty. The Gas, Light and Coke Company . ‘ had been granted its charter as long ago as 1812; William Murdock, who could reasonably claim to be the pioneer of coal-gas as a source of light, had died in 1839 at the age of eighty-five. Railways no longer evoked, in the midcentury, the same degree of enthusiasm or suspicion or dislike which they had originally met with. Landowners were coming to look on them as convenient sources of profit rather than as disturbing innovations: Charles Dickens, the socially rootless man, sentimentalized the stage-coach but R. S. Surtees, in private life a Durham squire, had no regrets for its passing. Moreover, neither the gas-lamp nor the railway was omnipresent. The oil-lamp and the candle illuminated far more houses, if increasingly fewer public buildings, than gas. The horse, Whether for transport, exercise, display or sport, was still of vast importance in English life. “Carriage-folk” was a sufficiently exact description of a class in English society. With the production of elliptic springs at the beginning of the century and the improvement of roads the craft of carriage-building had flowered. They are gone now, all the carriages, gone with their forgotten names-berlin, barouche, caleche, coupé, Clarence, daumont, landau, phaeton-but the age in which such craftsmanship and ingenuity were lavished on them was not the Railway Age alone. Other possible titles for such a book as this are available but each suffers from being pre-selected from a particular angle of vision. To the historian of architecture the age might be that of the neo-Gothic; to the historian of painting, that of the pre-Raphaelites; to the social historian, the Age of Drains and Sewers; to the administrative historian, the Age of the Inspector. Each title, though none is without some degree of appropriateness, is insufficiently comprehensive.
On why a book was titled "The Age of Equipoise"
The validity of my title, The Age of Equipoise, remains to be proved but what I sought was a generation in which the old and the new, the elements of growth, survival and decay, achieved a balance which most contemporaries regarded as satisfactory. Inevitably there are risks in using any title which includes “The Age”. Of what or of whom shall it be The Age? Sometimes a material symbol is chosen and here it might be “The Railway Age” or “The Gas-Lit Age”. Neither title would be completely indefensible. England was proud of the evidence of progress and the promise of comfort which gas-lighting and railway transport afforded. But neither of them was, by the middle of the century, a novelty. The Gas, Light and Coke Company . ‘ had been granted its charter as long ago as 1812; William Murdock, who could reasonably claim to be the pioneer of coal-gas as a source of light, had died in 1839 at the age of eighty-five. Railways no longer evoked, in the midcentury, the same degree of enthusiasm or suspicion or dislike which they had originally met with. Landowners were coming to look on them as convenient sources of profit rather than as disturbing innovations: Charles Dickens, the socially rootless man, sentimentalized the stage-coach but R. S. Surtees, in private life a Durham squire, had no regrets for its passing. Moreover, neither the gas-lamp nor the railway was omnipresent. The oil-lamp and the candle illuminated far more houses, if increasingly fewer public buildings, than gas. The horse, Whether for transport, exercise, display or sport, was still of vast importance in English life. “Carriage-folk” was a sufficiently exact description of a class in English society. With the production of elliptic springs at the beginning of the century and the improvement of roads the craft of carriage-building had flowered. They are gone now, all the carriages, gone with their forgotten names-berlin, barouche, caleche, coupé, Clarence, daumont, landau, phaeton-but the age in which such craftsmanship and ingenuity were lavished on them was not the Railway Age alone. Other possible titles for such a book as this are available but each suffers from being pre-selected from a particular angle of vision. To the historian of architecture the age might be that of the neo-Gothic; to the historian of painting, that of the pre-Raphaelites; to the social historian, the Age of Drains and Sewers; to the administrative historian, the Age of the Inspector. Each title, though none is without some degree of appropriateness, is insufficiently comprehensive.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
The Spanish Civil War
From Richard Rhodes' Hell and Good Company:
The Spanish Filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who participated in the defense of Madrid in the first days of the rebellion, recalls another and larger oddity, one that opens a window into the depths of the conflict. “Certain exploits,” Bunuel writes of that time, “seemed to me both absurd and glorious--like the workers who climbed into a truck one day and drove out to the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus about twenty kilometers south of the city, formed a firing squad, and executed the statue of Christ.” The London Daily Mail published a photograph of that exuberant “execution” on 7 August 1936, claiming it illustrated “the Spanish Reds’ war on religion.” Within a month, workers with Chisels and explosives had destroyed the ninety-two-foot statue at the geographic center of the country in Getafe as they were destroying similar religious monuments throughout republican Spain.
The demolitions had more to do with lighting oppression than with warring against religion. The Getafe monument had been unveiled by Alfonso XIII in May 1919, at the end of the Great War, when he reconsecrated Spain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a long-standing Roman Catholic cult associated with royalty since before the French Revolution. With the king’s endorsement, Sacred Heart statues and plaques had proliferated all over Spain. Many of Spain’s urban and rural poor lived from season to season in abject poverty, on the raw edge of starvation. The Spanish school system in the 1930s was 17,500 schools short,
More than 30 percent of Spanish men and an even higher percentage of Spanish women were illiterate. To that exploited population, the proliferation of monuments meant no escape from the presence of a corrupt church that Haunted its wealth and power.
When the people voted for a republic in 1931, the new government Went to work reclaiming public spaces; removing religious symbols from schools, streets, and cemeteries; and opening secular equivalents. A new constitution decreed the separation of church and state and the dissolution of some religious orders and prohibited religious orders from Engaging in commerce, industry, and teaching. The Church fought its increasing disenfranchisement with new lay organizations, political action, and lawsuits. Processions, festivals, and retreats became demonstrations, which leftist groups in turn found ways to interrupt. In those years, the historian Hugh Thomas writes, the Getafe monument “became the spiritual and physical centre of Catholic mobilization.” Whatever else they were doing, the young militiamen who executed Christ at Getafe were expressing a commitment to social transformation.
With the challenge of the generals’ rebellion to the existence of the secular Spanish state, a challenge that Franco elevated to the status of a religious crusade, churches were burned, icons destroyed, religious vestments cut up and resewn into militia uniforms. More radical anticlericals went beyond slapping idols. They exhumed the desiccated bodies of priests and nuns from church crypts and put them on pub« lic display to expose their fetid mortality. In a period seemingly free of legal constraints, with bullets flying in both directions and artillery shattering buildings, the anarchist militias began killing priests, the living idols of a church that had conspired with their class enemies to oppress them. Four thousand, one hundred eighty-four priests. 283 nuns, and 2,365 other religious would be murdered in republican territory in the course of the war- significantly, half during the first six weeks. Lluis Companys, the president of Catalonia, told a French journalist that the killings represented “the explosion of an immense store of wrath, an immense need for vengeance, which had been gathering force from very early times.”
The Spanish Filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who participated in the defense of Madrid in the first days of the rebellion, recalls another and larger oddity, one that opens a window into the depths of the conflict. “Certain exploits,” Bunuel writes of that time, “seemed to me both absurd and glorious--like the workers who climbed into a truck one day and drove out to the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus about twenty kilometers south of the city, formed a firing squad, and executed the statue of Christ.” The London Daily Mail published a photograph of that exuberant “execution” on 7 August 1936, claiming it illustrated “the Spanish Reds’ war on religion.” Within a month, workers with Chisels and explosives had destroyed the ninety-two-foot statue at the geographic center of the country in Getafe as they were destroying similar religious monuments throughout republican Spain.
The demolitions had more to do with lighting oppression than with warring against religion. The Getafe monument had been unveiled by Alfonso XIII in May 1919, at the end of the Great War, when he reconsecrated Spain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a long-standing Roman Catholic cult associated with royalty since before the French Revolution. With the king’s endorsement, Sacred Heart statues and plaques had proliferated all over Spain. Many of Spain’s urban and rural poor lived from season to season in abject poverty, on the raw edge of starvation. The Spanish school system in the 1930s was 17,500 schools short,
More than 30 percent of Spanish men and an even higher percentage of Spanish women were illiterate. To that exploited population, the proliferation of monuments meant no escape from the presence of a corrupt church that Haunted its wealth and power.
When the people voted for a republic in 1931, the new government Went to work reclaiming public spaces; removing religious symbols from schools, streets, and cemeteries; and opening secular equivalents. A new constitution decreed the separation of church and state and the dissolution of some religious orders and prohibited religious orders from Engaging in commerce, industry, and teaching. The Church fought its increasing disenfranchisement with new lay organizations, political action, and lawsuits. Processions, festivals, and retreats became demonstrations, which leftist groups in turn found ways to interrupt. In those years, the historian Hugh Thomas writes, the Getafe monument “became the spiritual and physical centre of Catholic mobilization.” Whatever else they were doing, the young militiamen who executed Christ at Getafe were expressing a commitment to social transformation.
With the challenge of the generals’ rebellion to the existence of the secular Spanish state, a challenge that Franco elevated to the status of a religious crusade, churches were burned, icons destroyed, religious vestments cut up and resewn into militia uniforms. More radical anticlericals went beyond slapping idols. They exhumed the desiccated bodies of priests and nuns from church crypts and put them on pub« lic display to expose their fetid mortality. In a period seemingly free of legal constraints, with bullets flying in both directions and artillery shattering buildings, the anarchist militias began killing priests, the living idols of a church that had conspired with their class enemies to oppress them. Four thousand, one hundred eighty-four priests. 283 nuns, and 2,365 other religious would be murdered in republican territory in the course of the war- significantly, half during the first six weeks. Lluis Companys, the president of Catalonia, told a French journalist that the killings represented “the explosion of an immense store of wrath, an immense need for vengeance, which had been gathering force from very early times.”
More on the Roman Empire
From Tom Holland:
Meanwhile. beyond its walls, in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome, as Claudius had reminded the Senate in his speech, had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. Street names still bore witness to the settlement of foreigners on them in ancient times: the Vicus Tuscus, where Etruscans had once congregated, and the Vicus Africus. Yet even as many Romans saw in their city’s diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ‘In the capital, appalling customs and disgraceful practices from across the world are forever cross-pollinating and becoming fashionable.’ A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman.
Such an anxiety was nothing new. Back in the first century of the Republic, a mania for outlandish cults had seen the Senate legislate to ensure that only the traditional gods be worshipped, and only with traditional rites. Since then, there had been numerous attempts to purge the city of alien ways. In 186 BC, the Senate had even launched a campaign of suppression against the worship of Liber, on the grounds that a Greek soothsayer had perverted its rituals and fostered unspeakable orgies. Egyptians and astrologers from Mesopotamia also tended to be regarded by most right-thinking citizens with profound suspicion. More alarming yet were the Syrians, with their devotion to a goddess, lion-flanked and jewel-adorned, whose cult, sinister as only a Syrian cult could be, had long been a thing of revulsion to every decent Roman. There was no value so fundamental, no propriety so settled, that her worshippers might not trample on them, and howl in exultant frenzy as they did so. Appearing to slaves in visions, the
Syrian Goddess had been known to encourage them to rebel; driving mad her most frenzied devotees, she would inspire them to make a sacrifice of their testicles. Galli, these self-castrated priests were called: matches who, abandoning the privileges and responsibilities of manhood, had willingly chosen to become women. With their painted faces and their feminine robes, their depilated bodies and their braided hair dyed blonde, they could not possibly have been more offensive to Roman sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, then, the authorities had done all they could to prevent their fellow citizens from joining their ranks, banning the practice of self-castration outright at first, and then, from 101 BC, permitting it only under the tightest of regulations. Yet this had done nothing to diminish the popularity of the cult: disturbingly, it had turned out, some Romans quite fancied living as women. By the time that Claudius, surrendering to the inevitable, finally lifted all legal restrictions on citizens becoming Galli, processions in honour of the Syrian Goddess, complete with flutes, tambourines and spectacular displays of self-laceration, had become a common sight in Rome. Naturally, those who held fast to traditional values continued to find it all revolting. ‘If a god desires worship of this kind,’ Seneca declared flatly, ‘then she does not deserve to be worshipped in the first place?“ For those on the cutting edge of fashion, however, a protestation of devotion to the Syrian Goddess had become an easy and entertaining way to shock. Rumour had it, for instance, that she was the only deity for whose cult Nero had any respect.
Yet when it came to sheer jaw-dropping weirdness, not even the beliefs of the Syrians could compare with those of their near neigh~ hours, the Jews. Immigrants from Judaea had been settling in Rome for two centuries, mainly in the cheap housing on the far side of the Tiber, where the principal temple of the Syrian Goddess was also to be found; and in all that time, they had never lost their distinctive ness. No people in the world had customs more perverse or ludicrous. They abstained from pork; they took every seventh day off; they obstinately refused to worship any god save their own. Yer Jewish practices and beliefs, although self-evidently grotesque, were not without a certain glamour. Like the cults of the Egyptians or the star charts of the Mesopotamians, they were capable of seducing those with a taste for the exotic. This was why, from the moment that Jews had first settled in the city, the authorities had periodically sought to expel them. The policy, though, had never proven effective. Whether in 139 BC, when the Jews had been banned from Rome ‘for trying to corrupt Roman values’, or in AD 19, when Tiberius had repeated the measure, or thirty years later, when Claudius had banished them yet again for making trouble at the instigation of a sinister-sounding agitator named Chrestus they had always crept back.
(( It is possible, indeed probable, that this is an allusion to arguments in Rome‘s Jewish community about the claims to messianic status of Jesus. (Chrestus. it is true, was a common name, particularly for slaves; but against that. there is no recorded instance of a Jew in Rome ever being called
up number of scholars have suggested that Suetonius might have derived his info from a police
report. and that Chrestus’ is mistransliteration of Christus. The truth, though, is ultimately unknowable.
A decade on from their expulsion by Claudius, they had once again returned to Rome. The fascination that they were capable of exerting, and the corresponding sense of alarm that they provoked in those contemptuous of foreign rituals, reached to the very top. ‘They are the most wicked of peoples."’ Seneca’s mistrust of the Jews would only have been confirmed for him by the reported interest of Poppaea in their teachings. The appeal of alien superstitions, it seemed, reached even into Caesar’s bedroom. Many in Rome, when they contemplated the slave quarters of their own homes, or the shrines in the streets raised to mysterious gods, or the tenements crammed with immigrants from every corner of the world, dreaded what loathsome practices might be brewing in their city. Nervousness about mass immigration and the peculiar cults that it had brought to Rome came to a head in 61, when the City Prefect, the man charged with the maintenance of order in the capital, was stabbed to death. His killer was one of his own slaves -and this, by the terms of a stern law passed half a century before, required that every slave in the murdered mans household be executed. The savagery of the penalty generated widespread revulsion; and it seemed in a debate on the matter in the Senate House, that clemency might prevail. In the event what swung senators into backing the execution of hundreds of slaves owned by the murdered Prefect was a bloodcurdling reminder of the numerous alien practices that had been imported into Rome. (Nowadays, the slaves in our households come from across the world, and engage in every kind of weird cult- or none at all. Terror tactics alone can serve to keep this rabble in check. The law was duly upheld, the death sentence confirmed. Out on the streets, where many of the protestors were themselves freedmen, or else the descendants of slaves, furious demonstrations were held. Crowds armed with stones and torches sought to prevent the sentence from being carried out. Nero, rather than permit agitators to override the law, issued them with an official rebuke, and ordered soldiers to line the route along which the wretched slaves were led to their deaths. Yet there were limits to the vindictiveness that he was prepared to sanction. When it was proposed that the freedmen of the murdered Prefect be rounded up and deported, Nero vetoed the motion. ‘What mercy has failed to moderate,’ he declared, ‘should not be aggravated by savagery.
Meanwhile. beyond its walls, in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome, as Claudius had reminded the Senate in his speech, had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. Street names still bore witness to the settlement of foreigners on them in ancient times: the Vicus Tuscus, where Etruscans had once congregated, and the Vicus Africus. Yet even as many Romans saw in their city’s diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ‘In the capital, appalling customs and disgraceful practices from across the world are forever cross-pollinating and becoming fashionable.’ A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman.
Such an anxiety was nothing new. Back in the first century of the Republic, a mania for outlandish cults had seen the Senate legislate to ensure that only the traditional gods be worshipped, and only with traditional rites. Since then, there had been numerous attempts to purge the city of alien ways. In 186 BC, the Senate had even launched a campaign of suppression against the worship of Liber, on the grounds that a Greek soothsayer had perverted its rituals and fostered unspeakable orgies. Egyptians and astrologers from Mesopotamia also tended to be regarded by most right-thinking citizens with profound suspicion. More alarming yet were the Syrians, with their devotion to a goddess, lion-flanked and jewel-adorned, whose cult, sinister as only a Syrian cult could be, had long been a thing of revulsion to every decent Roman. There was no value so fundamental, no propriety so settled, that her worshippers might not trample on them, and howl in exultant frenzy as they did so. Appearing to slaves in visions, the
Syrian Goddess had been known to encourage them to rebel; driving mad her most frenzied devotees, she would inspire them to make a sacrifice of their testicles. Galli, these self-castrated priests were called: matches who, abandoning the privileges and responsibilities of manhood, had willingly chosen to become women. With their painted faces and their feminine robes, their depilated bodies and their braided hair dyed blonde, they could not possibly have been more offensive to Roman sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, then, the authorities had done all they could to prevent their fellow citizens from joining their ranks, banning the practice of self-castration outright at first, and then, from 101 BC, permitting it only under the tightest of regulations. Yet this had done nothing to diminish the popularity of the cult: disturbingly, it had turned out, some Romans quite fancied living as women. By the time that Claudius, surrendering to the inevitable, finally lifted all legal restrictions on citizens becoming Galli, processions in honour of the Syrian Goddess, complete with flutes, tambourines and spectacular displays of self-laceration, had become a common sight in Rome. Naturally, those who held fast to traditional values continued to find it all revolting. ‘If a god desires worship of this kind,’ Seneca declared flatly, ‘then she does not deserve to be worshipped in the first place?“ For those on the cutting edge of fashion, however, a protestation of devotion to the Syrian Goddess had become an easy and entertaining way to shock. Rumour had it, for instance, that she was the only deity for whose cult Nero had any respect.
Yet when it came to sheer jaw-dropping weirdness, not even the beliefs of the Syrians could compare with those of their near neigh~ hours, the Jews. Immigrants from Judaea had been settling in Rome for two centuries, mainly in the cheap housing on the far side of the Tiber, where the principal temple of the Syrian Goddess was also to be found; and in all that time, they had never lost their distinctive ness. No people in the world had customs more perverse or ludicrous. They abstained from pork; they took every seventh day off; they obstinately refused to worship any god save their own. Yer Jewish practices and beliefs, although self-evidently grotesque, were not without a certain glamour. Like the cults of the Egyptians or the star charts of the Mesopotamians, they were capable of seducing those with a taste for the exotic. This was why, from the moment that Jews had first settled in the city, the authorities had periodically sought to expel them. The policy, though, had never proven effective. Whether in 139 BC, when the Jews had been banned from Rome ‘for trying to corrupt Roman values’, or in AD 19, when Tiberius had repeated the measure, or thirty years later, when Claudius had banished them yet again for making trouble at the instigation of a sinister-sounding agitator named Chrestus they had always crept back.
(( It is possible, indeed probable, that this is an allusion to arguments in Rome‘s Jewish community about the claims to messianic status of Jesus. (Chrestus. it is true, was a common name, particularly for slaves; but against that. there is no recorded instance of a Jew in Rome ever being called
up number of scholars have suggested that Suetonius might have derived his info from a police
report. and that Chrestus’ is mistransliteration of Christus. The truth, though, is ultimately unknowable.
A decade on from their expulsion by Claudius, they had once again returned to Rome. The fascination that they were capable of exerting, and the corresponding sense of alarm that they provoked in those contemptuous of foreign rituals, reached to the very top. ‘They are the most wicked of peoples."’ Seneca’s mistrust of the Jews would only have been confirmed for him by the reported interest of Poppaea in their teachings. The appeal of alien superstitions, it seemed, reached even into Caesar’s bedroom. Many in Rome, when they contemplated the slave quarters of their own homes, or the shrines in the streets raised to mysterious gods, or the tenements crammed with immigrants from every corner of the world, dreaded what loathsome practices might be brewing in their city. Nervousness about mass immigration and the peculiar cults that it had brought to Rome came to a head in 61, when the City Prefect, the man charged with the maintenance of order in the capital, was stabbed to death. His killer was one of his own slaves -and this, by the terms of a stern law passed half a century before, required that every slave in the murdered mans household be executed. The savagery of the penalty generated widespread revulsion; and it seemed in a debate on the matter in the Senate House, that clemency might prevail. In the event what swung senators into backing the execution of hundreds of slaves owned by the murdered Prefect was a bloodcurdling reminder of the numerous alien practices that had been imported into Rome. (Nowadays, the slaves in our households come from across the world, and engage in every kind of weird cult- or none at all. Terror tactics alone can serve to keep this rabble in check. The law was duly upheld, the death sentence confirmed. Out on the streets, where many of the protestors were themselves freedmen, or else the descendants of slaves, furious demonstrations were held. Crowds armed with stones and torches sought to prevent the sentence from being carried out. Nero, rather than permit agitators to override the law, issued them with an official rebuke, and ordered soldiers to line the route along which the wretched slaves were led to their deaths. Yet there were limits to the vindictiveness that he was prepared to sanction. When it was proposed that the freedmen of the murdered Prefect be rounded up and deported, Nero vetoed the motion. ‘What mercy has failed to moderate,’ he declared, ‘should not be aggravated by savagery.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Tom Holland's Dynasty
On the House of Augustus.
Excerpts:
Augustus preferred a perpetual play of radiance and shadow to be evident across his face. His image was as tightly controlled as it was charged with ambivalence. The portrait of him fashioned by sculptors offered to the Roman people a fitting reflection of the infinite subtleties and paradoxes of the man himself. In the jug ears of his statues it was possible to catch the glimpse of a thoroughly human Princeps: one whose eyebrows met above his nose, whose teeth were bad, and whose anxieties about his height were such that he wore platform heels. Yet he was a handsome man for all that; and it was his conceit, one that plenty were willing to flatter, that he had only to fix people with ‘his clear and brilliant gaze for them to lower their eyes, as though before the sun. In his statues, the jugeared Princeps appeared as beauteous as Apollo. Suspended midway between youth and maturity, between melancholy and triumph, between the mortal and divine, he was a Roman in every sense.
There was certainly to be no place in his portraits for the thinning hair and sagging jowls that once, in the heyday of the Republic, had served as the markers of high-achieving statesmen. What need for Augustus to emphasise his experience? All stood in awe of his achievements. He had accomplished more than any number of senators scored with wrinkles. The close association between ugliness and virtus, always cherished by conservatives, was hardly one to appeal to Augustus. The Princeps, rather than reining in his taste for self-promotion, aimed instead to mould tastes to the contours of his own. Never before in history had so many portraits of a single man been manufactured, disseminated and put on public display. A new orthodoxy was being marketed to the Roman people: that power should be good-looking. Evident to all those who gazed upon the statues of Augustus, it could increasingly be read as well in an even more prominent sphere: the fabric of the city.
and
Or did it? There was, perhaps, for those up to speed with the times, something just a little bit provincial, just a little bit musty about an antique sexual taboo. ‘How like a rustic, to get upset when your wife cheats on you.’ So Ovid, a man with his finger on the pulse of high society, observed with practised smoothness....The various prohibitions and perils erected by custom in the path of the adulterer were liable to strike the seasoned connoisseur of erotic pleasure less as deterrents than as incentives, spicing up the fun. ‘We always want what we’re not allowed.’ Ovid, in offering this sage observation, was putting his finger on a mocking truth, Forbidden fruit tasted the sweetest. ‘Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour. This, in a city as addicted to gossip as Rome, was a paradox that plenty were prepared to swallow. Speculation as to what might be going on in the city’s most exclusive bedrooms naturally transfixed the public. That adultery was regarded by the upper classes as one tremendous game, in which the rules were there to be broken, and the measure of cool was to smuggle a lover into the marital bed, was widely taken for granted. No smoke without fire, after all. Proofs of the adulterous and effeminate character of Rome’s fast set were everywhere to be seen. In the dandyishly loose way they wore their togas; in their clean nails, sprucely clipped nasal hair and sinister lack of body odour; above all, in the oiled sheen of their limbs. For a man to shave his armpits was, everyone could agree, simply good manners; but to do as Augustus was said to have done, and depilate the legs, was disgusting, plain and simple. Body hair was the mark of a man. Everyone knew, though, that adulterers cared nothing for that. Smooth skin, not a pelt, was what they brought to seduction. It was all most deviant and alarming. Even Ovid might sometimes be provoked to pontificate: ‘Men are all such fashion victims these days that, really, we can hardly blame women for feeling the pressure.’
None of which stopped the poet himself from cheerily offering grooming tips to his male as well as his female fans. Ovid, though did not have the care of Roman morals in his charge. Frivolous metrosexuality, in the opinion of the man who did, was part of the problem, not a solution. Augustus, who had brought order where previously there was chaos, who had lavished on his fellow citizens the riches of conquered kingdoms, who had transformed their city into a capital of unrivalled beauty and splendour, did not care to think that his labours might merely have contributed to a softening of their ancestral virtues. Such a prospect was too appalling to be borne. The Romans were either the heirs of their upright forefathers or they were nothing. The Princeps’s ambition was simple: that his fellow citizens should be true to all that was best about their past. They were the Romans: the lords of the world, the people of the toga. This, in the mirror that he had set up to his fellow citizens, fashioned out of monuments, and festivals, and all the various fruits of peace, was the reflection that he wished them always to catch of themselves.
Yet what if they caught something else? Perhaps there lay a warning in a recent scandalous development in the field of interior decoration. In bedrooms across Rome, walls and ceilings were coming to be lined with mirrors. Even beyond the limits of the city, out in his rural retreat among the Sabine hills, Horace had signed up to the craze. Notoriously, so had a billionaire by the name of Hostius Quadra. The mirrors on his walls boasted a particularly distinctive feature: everything reflected in them appeared larger than .it actually was. ‘So it was that the freak made a show of his own deviancy.’As one girl gave him a blow-job, and he licked out a second, so his anus, in a hideous desecration of all that a Roman should properly be, was shafted by a man with a giant cock -which, seen in the mirror, appeared possessed of truly gargantuan size, ‘larger than his capacity to take’ To groom, depilate and titivate like a woman was one thing; but to be fucked like one was a hideous extreme of degradation. What else was it, after all, but the willing surrender of everything that made a Roman a man?
and
‘lt takes courage to advance into a forbidden realm of shadow.When Drusus, on his final campaign, had found himself hundreds of miles east of the Rhine, on the banks of a second mighty natural barrier, a river named the Elbe, a spectre in the form of a colossal woman had materialised before him and forbidden him to cross it. That the lands of the north were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters came as no surprise. In the gloomy forests which covered vast reaches of Germany, giant bull-like creatures roamed, and mysterious entities named elks, without ankles or knees; in the icy waters of the Ocean, which would retreat and then advance twice a day, tearing loose oak trees and engulfing entire plains beneath their flood-tides, there shimmered ‘the outline of enigmatic beings half-men, half beast’.Just as Ovid, peering askance at the Tomitans, had fingered them as lycanthropes, so in the savage reaches of Germany were the borders between animal and human even more unsettlingly blurred. Chieftains who wished for a policy briefing, it was reported by Roman scholars who had made a close study of German customs, were likeliest to consult a horse. Conversely, ‘the towering stature of the Germans, their fierce blue eyes and reddish hair’ spoke of a nature barely less bestial than that of some steel-clawed bear, padding over mountain slopes. Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape. weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.
Or was it? Much the same after all could be said Gauls. Bad memories of them in Rome ran very deep. Back in 390 BC, a Gallic horde had erupted into Italy, annihilated six whole legions and sacked the city itself. Only with the conquests won by Augustus’s deified father had Gaul finally ceased to be a place of dread. Now, fifty years on. great changes were afoot beyond the Alps. Roman rule had brought to a people once notorious for their trousers and their gravy-soaked moustaches, their drunken brawling and their taste for collecting heads, a very different way of life. The grandsons of Chieftains who had hurled themselves half-naked against the invading legions now draped themselves in the toga and rejoiced in the name of ‘Julius’. Rather than guzzle wines indiscriminately, they were coming to develop a nose for the classiest Italian and Eastern grands crus and even, remarkably, to plant the odd vineyard themselves. Most promisingly of all, dotted across a landscape that had previously boasted only villages and rough stockades perched on hills, cities were starting to appear: islands of civilisation complete with flashy monuments and street-grids.
and
Bad enough as it was to be trapped on the wrong side of the Rhine, how much more terrifying was the prospect of being stranded on the wrong side of the Ocean. Few knew much about Britain --but what they did know was deeply off-putting. The natives were, if anything, even more barbarous than the Germans. They painted themselves blue; they held their wives in common; they wore hair on the upper lip, an affectation so grotesque that Latin did not even have a word for it. Nor were their women any better. They were reported to dye their bodies black, and even on occasion to go naked. Savages capable of such unspeakable customs were clearly capable of anything; and sure enough, just as it was part of the terror of the Germans that they practised murderous rites in the depths of their dripping forests, so did the Britons have priests who, in groves festooned with mistletoe, were reported to commit human sacrifice and cannibalism. These ‘Druids’, as the priests were called, had once infested Gaul as well, until their suppression on the orders of Tiberius; but across the Ocean, beyond the stern reach of Roman law, they still thrived. ‘Magic, to this very day, holds Britain in its shadow.’ No wonder. then ordered to embark for a land of such sorcery and menace, that many soldiers should have blanched.
and
The art of attracting an emperor’s attention was a fine one.
When Calpurnia came into Claudius’s presence, she was accompanied, for good measure, by a second of his concubines. Those who wanted his ear often made sure to exploit his sexual tastes, for everyone knew that he only ever slept with women. Like his concern that people should feel free to break wind at table, or his insistence on adding three new letters to the Latin alphabet, the complete lack of interest he had always shown in forcing himself on male partners marked Claudius out as a true eccentric. Not that people particularly disapproved for it was the way of the world that different men had different foibles, and just as some might prefer blondes and others brunettes, so were there a few who only ever fucked females, and a few who only ever fucked males.“ That Galba, for instance, was the mirror image of Claudius liking as he did ‘mature, hard-muscled men never did any harm to his standing as a model of martial rectitude. Seasoned soldier that he was, he well knew what it was to seize control, to thrust hard, to take possession.
Which was, it went without saying, the responsibility of every citizen who chose to have sex. Nothing was more shocking to Roman sensibilities than the man who, as Hostius Quadra had so notoriously done, submitted for his own pleasure to being fucked. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course. precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive: but the male body too was not lacking in orifices. Pay obeisance with the mouth or the anus to another man’s cock, and a citizen was doubly shamed. It was not just that in was playing the part of a woman (although that was of course bad enough) it was also that he was playing the part of a slave. Just as it was the privilege of the free-born. male and female alike. to have any violation of their bodies condemned as a monstrous crime. so was it the duty of slaves to serve a master‘s every conceivable sexual need. For some, indeed, it might be their principal responsibility. Pretty boys, long-haired, smooth-shaven and glistening with oils were must-have accessories at any fashionable soiree and all the more so if twins. One senator, in the time of Augustus. had abandoned subtlety altogether, employing waitresses who served entirely in the nude. Every slave knew, as a matter of course. that the threat of rape. like that of corporal punishment. might he realised at any moment. This did not mean that a master was necessarily incapable of tenderness: Lucius Vitellius, for instance. ended up so besotted with one of his slavegirls that not only did he free her. but he took to mixing up her spit with honey and using it as a throat medicine. Such eases. though, were the exception that proved the rule. In general. the right of a master to glut his sexual appetites on a slave. rather as he might blow his nose or use a latrine, was taken for granted. It was a perk of ownership, plain and simple. ‘No sense of shame is permitted a slave.“ Except that freedom itself, in a city where even senators had been subjected to the rack and whip was no longer all it had been. The implications, even for the grandest, were unsettling in the extreme. In AD 47, a year before Calpurnia came calling on Claudius at Ostia. one of the Senate’s most flamboyant and charismatic figures had been destroyed. Valerius Asiaticus, charged with a variety of crimes, had been arrested in the pleasure resort of Baiae and hauled hack to Rome in chains. His prosecutor had been an old associate of Germanicus's. a man as opportunistic as he was remorseless. by the name of Publius Suillius Rufus. His talent, given a victim. was for sinking his jaws deep and sure enough, at a private trial attended by both Claudius and Lucius Vitellius, Suillius had done just that. Rounding off the various charges, he had accused Asiaticus, for good measure, of the very ultimate in deviancy: of being ‘soft and giving, like a woman’. The prisoner, silent until then, had found this particular slander too much. ‘Ask your sons, Suillius,’ he had yelled. ‘They will confirm that I am all man.’ Desperate, aggressive banter -but also something more. The scorning of Suillius, a father to sons used by Asiaticus as women, had been the scorning too of an order so rotten that it had given power to such a man. Later, once Asiaticus had been sentenced to death, but permitted, on the recommendation of Lucius Vitellius, to choose how he died, he had made his contempt for Claudius’s regime even more explicit. He would rather, he had declared, have perished at the hands of Tiberius or Caligula than on the say-so of the smooth-tongued Vitellius -whose mouth was rancid from his addiction to lapping at genitals. And then, having made sure that the flames of his pyre would do no damage to the trees of his beloved garden, Asiaticus had slit his wrists.
Defiant assertion of his own masculinity and suicide: no other means had been available to him, in the final reckoning, of maintaining his dignity as a citizen. That Claudius, paranoid and insecure, had feared to let him live was clear enough; but that was hardly the Whole story. Senators, convinced as they were that the Emperor was mentally deficient, saw in Asiaticus’s fate confirmation of all their darkest suspicions: that he was the gullible plaything of perverts, and Even worse. ‘He, more conspicuously than any of his peers, was ruled by slaves -and by women." Certainly, when it came to identifying the person ultimately responsible for the downfall of Asiaticus, the consensus was clear. Messalina had envied him his gardens and wanted them for herself. Worse: he had died to satisfy her passion for Mnester, former paramour of Caligula and Rome’s most famous actor, who was rumoured to have been conducting affairs with both Messalina herself and an equally high-ranking beauty named Poppaea Sabina. The prosecution of Asiaticus had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone: for among the charges levelled against him had been one ofadultery with Poppaea. Messalina, far from keeping discreetly to the sidelines. had been present at his secret trial; and she had deployed her agents, even as Asiaticus was being condemned, to bully her rival into suicide. Nothing, in short, could possibly have been more demeaning or grotesquely sordid. One of the most eminent senators in Rome, a man who had once aspired to rule the world, had been sacrificed upon the altar of a woman’s jealousy.
‘How shaming it is to be submissive to a girl." Ovid’s maxim was one that Roman moralists had always taken for granted. Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, so clearly had men been intended by the gods to hold the whip-hand that very few of them ever thought to question it. ‘An unhappy state indeed it would be which saw women usurp masculine prerogatives -be it the Senate, the army or the magistracies!" The very prospect was incredible. Nevertheless, in a city where a feminine tiff over an actor appeared to have ended up destroying a two-times consul, it was clear that something had gone badly wrong. That women of wealth and breeding might exploit their influence on behalf of their menfolk was one thing; that they should openly flaunt it quite another. No matter the rumours whispered of Livia, she had always made a point, before ascending into the heavens and taking her place beside Augustus on his celestial throne. of operating from the shadows. Certainly, she had never thought to play her husband for a fool. That, though, it seemed -if the increasingly feverish swirlings of gossip were to be trusted -was precisely what Messalina was doing. A few days after the suicide of Poppae Sabina, Claudius had invited her husband to supper and asked him «here his wife was. Told that she was dead, he had simply looked bemused. Messalina, it seemed to those who despised the Emperor had him wrapped around her finger. As gullible as he was besotted. he had delivered the great and the good into her hands. Consuls, a Praetorian prefect, the granddaughter of Tiberius: all had been eliminated as a result of her manoeuvrings. Those who prized their skin5 made sure to crawl to her. Lucius Vitellius, that veteran trimmer, had even begged permission to take oil her shoes, ‘and once he had removed her right slipper. he slipped it between his toga and tunic. Carrying it round with him the whole time, and every so often kissing it'. Not merely degrading. it was emasculating in the extreme.
And perhaps, for that very reason, truth be told, just a bit erotic, Ovid, had he lived to see the former governor of Syria raining kisses on a woman's slipper. would not have been unduly surprised. He had always enjoyed exploring the paradoxes that hedged propriety about.
Don ’t be ashamed (though shameful it is which is why it's fun)
To hold a mirror in your hand as though you were a slave
As with adultery, so with role reversal: the greater the taboo, the more of a thrill it might be to break it. The pressure on a male always to take the lead, always to exact submission, served to close off whole dimensions of pleasure. That it was the responsibility of a respectable matron, while being fucked, to lie back passively and leave the action to her partner, was taken for granted by moralists; but that did not prevent some women, greatly daring, from spicing things up during sex by actually moving -almost as though they themselves were the males. Shocking, yes, and threatening to the masculinity of any self respecting citizen, to be sure; but there were, for the man who found his partner bucking her thighs in time to his thrustings. or grinding her buttocks, or sucking and licking his cock, undeniable compensations. That a woman might be so sexually aggressive as to play the role of a man was certainly, for any self-respecting citizen. a most unsettling possibility; but there was rarely anything so deviant that some would not find it exciting. A woman such as Messalina was pie tamed to be, predatory in her ambitions and demonic in her taste to: blood, was a figure fit to stalk fantasies as well as fears. Young. beautiful and dangerous. she was the very stuff of pornography.
Excerpts:
Augustus preferred a perpetual play of radiance and shadow to be evident across his face. His image was as tightly controlled as it was charged with ambivalence. The portrait of him fashioned by sculptors offered to the Roman people a fitting reflection of the infinite subtleties and paradoxes of the man himself. In the jug ears of his statues it was possible to catch the glimpse of a thoroughly human Princeps: one whose eyebrows met above his nose, whose teeth were bad, and whose anxieties about his height were such that he wore platform heels. Yet he was a handsome man for all that; and it was his conceit, one that plenty were willing to flatter, that he had only to fix people with ‘his clear and brilliant gaze for them to lower their eyes, as though before the sun. In his statues, the jugeared Princeps appeared as beauteous as Apollo. Suspended midway between youth and maturity, between melancholy and triumph, between the mortal and divine, he was a Roman in every sense.
There was certainly to be no place in his portraits for the thinning hair and sagging jowls that once, in the heyday of the Republic, had served as the markers of high-achieving statesmen. What need for Augustus to emphasise his experience? All stood in awe of his achievements. He had accomplished more than any number of senators scored with wrinkles. The close association between ugliness and virtus, always cherished by conservatives, was hardly one to appeal to Augustus. The Princeps, rather than reining in his taste for self-promotion, aimed instead to mould tastes to the contours of his own. Never before in history had so many portraits of a single man been manufactured, disseminated and put on public display. A new orthodoxy was being marketed to the Roman people: that power should be good-looking. Evident to all those who gazed upon the statues of Augustus, it could increasingly be read as well in an even more prominent sphere: the fabric of the city.
and
Or did it? There was, perhaps, for those up to speed with the times, something just a little bit provincial, just a little bit musty about an antique sexual taboo. ‘How like a rustic, to get upset when your wife cheats on you.’ So Ovid, a man with his finger on the pulse of high society, observed with practised smoothness....The various prohibitions and perils erected by custom in the path of the adulterer were liable to strike the seasoned connoisseur of erotic pleasure less as deterrents than as incentives, spicing up the fun. ‘We always want what we’re not allowed.’ Ovid, in offering this sage observation, was putting his finger on a mocking truth, Forbidden fruit tasted the sweetest. ‘Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour. This, in a city as addicted to gossip as Rome, was a paradox that plenty were prepared to swallow. Speculation as to what might be going on in the city’s most exclusive bedrooms naturally transfixed the public. That adultery was regarded by the upper classes as one tremendous game, in which the rules were there to be broken, and the measure of cool was to smuggle a lover into the marital bed, was widely taken for granted. No smoke without fire, after all. Proofs of the adulterous and effeminate character of Rome’s fast set were everywhere to be seen. In the dandyishly loose way they wore their togas; in their clean nails, sprucely clipped nasal hair and sinister lack of body odour; above all, in the oiled sheen of their limbs. For a man to shave his armpits was, everyone could agree, simply good manners; but to do as Augustus was said to have done, and depilate the legs, was disgusting, plain and simple. Body hair was the mark of a man. Everyone knew, though, that adulterers cared nothing for that. Smooth skin, not a pelt, was what they brought to seduction. It was all most deviant and alarming. Even Ovid might sometimes be provoked to pontificate: ‘Men are all such fashion victims these days that, really, we can hardly blame women for feeling the pressure.’
None of which stopped the poet himself from cheerily offering grooming tips to his male as well as his female fans. Ovid, though did not have the care of Roman morals in his charge. Frivolous metrosexuality, in the opinion of the man who did, was part of the problem, not a solution. Augustus, who had brought order where previously there was chaos, who had lavished on his fellow citizens the riches of conquered kingdoms, who had transformed their city into a capital of unrivalled beauty and splendour, did not care to think that his labours might merely have contributed to a softening of their ancestral virtues. Such a prospect was too appalling to be borne. The Romans were either the heirs of their upright forefathers or they were nothing. The Princeps’s ambition was simple: that his fellow citizens should be true to all that was best about their past. They were the Romans: the lords of the world, the people of the toga. This, in the mirror that he had set up to his fellow citizens, fashioned out of monuments, and festivals, and all the various fruits of peace, was the reflection that he wished them always to catch of themselves.
Yet what if they caught something else? Perhaps there lay a warning in a recent scandalous development in the field of interior decoration. In bedrooms across Rome, walls and ceilings were coming to be lined with mirrors. Even beyond the limits of the city, out in his rural retreat among the Sabine hills, Horace had signed up to the craze. Notoriously, so had a billionaire by the name of Hostius Quadra. The mirrors on his walls boasted a particularly distinctive feature: everything reflected in them appeared larger than .it actually was. ‘So it was that the freak made a show of his own deviancy.’As one girl gave him a blow-job, and he licked out a second, so his anus, in a hideous desecration of all that a Roman should properly be, was shafted by a man with a giant cock -which, seen in the mirror, appeared possessed of truly gargantuan size, ‘larger than his capacity to take’ To groom, depilate and titivate like a woman was one thing; but to be fucked like one was a hideous extreme of degradation. What else was it, after all, but the willing surrender of everything that made a Roman a man?
and
‘lt takes courage to advance into a forbidden realm of shadow.When Drusus, on his final campaign, had found himself hundreds of miles east of the Rhine, on the banks of a second mighty natural barrier, a river named the Elbe, a spectre in the form of a colossal woman had materialised before him and forbidden him to cross it. That the lands of the north were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters came as no surprise. In the gloomy forests which covered vast reaches of Germany, giant bull-like creatures roamed, and mysterious entities named elks, without ankles or knees; in the icy waters of the Ocean, which would retreat and then advance twice a day, tearing loose oak trees and engulfing entire plains beneath their flood-tides, there shimmered ‘the outline of enigmatic beings half-men, half beast’.Just as Ovid, peering askance at the Tomitans, had fingered them as lycanthropes, so in the savage reaches of Germany were the borders between animal and human even more unsettlingly blurred. Chieftains who wished for a policy briefing, it was reported by Roman scholars who had made a close study of German customs, were likeliest to consult a horse. Conversely, ‘the towering stature of the Germans, their fierce blue eyes and reddish hair’ spoke of a nature barely less bestial than that of some steel-clawed bear, padding over mountain slopes. Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape. weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.
Or was it? Much the same after all could be said Gauls. Bad memories of them in Rome ran very deep. Back in 390 BC, a Gallic horde had erupted into Italy, annihilated six whole legions and sacked the city itself. Only with the conquests won by Augustus’s deified father had Gaul finally ceased to be a place of dread. Now, fifty years on. great changes were afoot beyond the Alps. Roman rule had brought to a people once notorious for their trousers and their gravy-soaked moustaches, their drunken brawling and their taste for collecting heads, a very different way of life. The grandsons of Chieftains who had hurled themselves half-naked against the invading legions now draped themselves in the toga and rejoiced in the name of ‘Julius’. Rather than guzzle wines indiscriminately, they were coming to develop a nose for the classiest Italian and Eastern grands crus and even, remarkably, to plant the odd vineyard themselves. Most promisingly of all, dotted across a landscape that had previously boasted only villages and rough stockades perched on hills, cities were starting to appear: islands of civilisation complete with flashy monuments and street-grids.
and
Bad enough as it was to be trapped on the wrong side of the Rhine, how much more terrifying was the prospect of being stranded on the wrong side of the Ocean. Few knew much about Britain --but what they did know was deeply off-putting. The natives were, if anything, even more barbarous than the Germans. They painted themselves blue; they held their wives in common; they wore hair on the upper lip, an affectation so grotesque that Latin did not even have a word for it. Nor were their women any better. They were reported to dye their bodies black, and even on occasion to go naked. Savages capable of such unspeakable customs were clearly capable of anything; and sure enough, just as it was part of the terror of the Germans that they practised murderous rites in the depths of their dripping forests, so did the Britons have priests who, in groves festooned with mistletoe, were reported to commit human sacrifice and cannibalism. These ‘Druids’, as the priests were called, had once infested Gaul as well, until their suppression on the orders of Tiberius; but across the Ocean, beyond the stern reach of Roman law, they still thrived. ‘Magic, to this very day, holds Britain in its shadow.’ No wonder. then ordered to embark for a land of such sorcery and menace, that many soldiers should have blanched.
and
The art of attracting an emperor’s attention was a fine one.
When Calpurnia came into Claudius’s presence, she was accompanied, for good measure, by a second of his concubines. Those who wanted his ear often made sure to exploit his sexual tastes, for everyone knew that he only ever slept with women. Like his concern that people should feel free to break wind at table, or his insistence on adding three new letters to the Latin alphabet, the complete lack of interest he had always shown in forcing himself on male partners marked Claudius out as a true eccentric. Not that people particularly disapproved for it was the way of the world that different men had different foibles, and just as some might prefer blondes and others brunettes, so were there a few who only ever fucked females, and a few who only ever fucked males.“ That Galba, for instance, was the mirror image of Claudius liking as he did ‘mature, hard-muscled men never did any harm to his standing as a model of martial rectitude. Seasoned soldier that he was, he well knew what it was to seize control, to thrust hard, to take possession.
Which was, it went without saying, the responsibility of every citizen who chose to have sex. Nothing was more shocking to Roman sensibilities than the man who, as Hostius Quadra had so notoriously done, submitted for his own pleasure to being fucked. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course. precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive: but the male body too was not lacking in orifices. Pay obeisance with the mouth or the anus to another man’s cock, and a citizen was doubly shamed. It was not just that in was playing the part of a woman (although that was of course bad enough) it was also that he was playing the part of a slave. Just as it was the privilege of the free-born. male and female alike. to have any violation of their bodies condemned as a monstrous crime. so was it the duty of slaves to serve a master‘s every conceivable sexual need. For some, indeed, it might be their principal responsibility. Pretty boys, long-haired, smooth-shaven and glistening with oils were must-have accessories at any fashionable soiree and all the more so if twins. One senator, in the time of Augustus. had abandoned subtlety altogether, employing waitresses who served entirely in the nude. Every slave knew, as a matter of course. that the threat of rape. like that of corporal punishment. might he realised at any moment. This did not mean that a master was necessarily incapable of tenderness: Lucius Vitellius, for instance. ended up so besotted with one of his slavegirls that not only did he free her. but he took to mixing up her spit with honey and using it as a throat medicine. Such eases. though, were the exception that proved the rule. In general. the right of a master to glut his sexual appetites on a slave. rather as he might blow his nose or use a latrine, was taken for granted. It was a perk of ownership, plain and simple. ‘No sense of shame is permitted a slave.“ Except that freedom itself, in a city where even senators had been subjected to the rack and whip was no longer all it had been. The implications, even for the grandest, were unsettling in the extreme. In AD 47, a year before Calpurnia came calling on Claudius at Ostia. one of the Senate’s most flamboyant and charismatic figures had been destroyed. Valerius Asiaticus, charged with a variety of crimes, had been arrested in the pleasure resort of Baiae and hauled hack to Rome in chains. His prosecutor had been an old associate of Germanicus's. a man as opportunistic as he was remorseless. by the name of Publius Suillius Rufus. His talent, given a victim. was for sinking his jaws deep and sure enough, at a private trial attended by both Claudius and Lucius Vitellius, Suillius had done just that. Rounding off the various charges, he had accused Asiaticus, for good measure, of the very ultimate in deviancy: of being ‘soft and giving, like a woman’. The prisoner, silent until then, had found this particular slander too much. ‘Ask your sons, Suillius,’ he had yelled. ‘They will confirm that I am all man.’ Desperate, aggressive banter -but also something more. The scorning of Suillius, a father to sons used by Asiaticus as women, had been the scorning too of an order so rotten that it had given power to such a man. Later, once Asiaticus had been sentenced to death, but permitted, on the recommendation of Lucius Vitellius, to choose how he died, he had made his contempt for Claudius’s regime even more explicit. He would rather, he had declared, have perished at the hands of Tiberius or Caligula than on the say-so of the smooth-tongued Vitellius -whose mouth was rancid from his addiction to lapping at genitals. And then, having made sure that the flames of his pyre would do no damage to the trees of his beloved garden, Asiaticus had slit his wrists.
Defiant assertion of his own masculinity and suicide: no other means had been available to him, in the final reckoning, of maintaining his dignity as a citizen. That Claudius, paranoid and insecure, had feared to let him live was clear enough; but that was hardly the Whole story. Senators, convinced as they were that the Emperor was mentally deficient, saw in Asiaticus’s fate confirmation of all their darkest suspicions: that he was the gullible plaything of perverts, and Even worse. ‘He, more conspicuously than any of his peers, was ruled by slaves -and by women." Certainly, when it came to identifying the person ultimately responsible for the downfall of Asiaticus, the consensus was clear. Messalina had envied him his gardens and wanted them for herself. Worse: he had died to satisfy her passion for Mnester, former paramour of Caligula and Rome’s most famous actor, who was rumoured to have been conducting affairs with both Messalina herself and an equally high-ranking beauty named Poppaea Sabina. The prosecution of Asiaticus had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone: for among the charges levelled against him had been one ofadultery with Poppaea. Messalina, far from keeping discreetly to the sidelines. had been present at his secret trial; and she had deployed her agents, even as Asiaticus was being condemned, to bully her rival into suicide. Nothing, in short, could possibly have been more demeaning or grotesquely sordid. One of the most eminent senators in Rome, a man who had once aspired to rule the world, had been sacrificed upon the altar of a woman’s jealousy.
‘How shaming it is to be submissive to a girl." Ovid’s maxim was one that Roman moralists had always taken for granted. Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, so clearly had men been intended by the gods to hold the whip-hand that very few of them ever thought to question it. ‘An unhappy state indeed it would be which saw women usurp masculine prerogatives -be it the Senate, the army or the magistracies!" The very prospect was incredible. Nevertheless, in a city where a feminine tiff over an actor appeared to have ended up destroying a two-times consul, it was clear that something had gone badly wrong. That women of wealth and breeding might exploit their influence on behalf of their menfolk was one thing; that they should openly flaunt it quite another. No matter the rumours whispered of Livia, she had always made a point, before ascending into the heavens and taking her place beside Augustus on his celestial throne. of operating from the shadows. Certainly, she had never thought to play her husband for a fool. That, though, it seemed -if the increasingly feverish swirlings of gossip were to be trusted -was precisely what Messalina was doing. A few days after the suicide of Poppae Sabina, Claudius had invited her husband to supper and asked him «here his wife was. Told that she was dead, he had simply looked bemused. Messalina, it seemed to those who despised the Emperor had him wrapped around her finger. As gullible as he was besotted. he had delivered the great and the good into her hands. Consuls, a Praetorian prefect, the granddaughter of Tiberius: all had been eliminated as a result of her manoeuvrings. Those who prized their skin5 made sure to crawl to her. Lucius Vitellius, that veteran trimmer, had even begged permission to take oil her shoes, ‘and once he had removed her right slipper. he slipped it between his toga and tunic. Carrying it round with him the whole time, and every so often kissing it'. Not merely degrading. it was emasculating in the extreme.
And perhaps, for that very reason, truth be told, just a bit erotic, Ovid, had he lived to see the former governor of Syria raining kisses on a woman's slipper. would not have been unduly surprised. He had always enjoyed exploring the paradoxes that hedged propriety about.
Don ’t be ashamed (though shameful it is which is why it's fun)
To hold a mirror in your hand as though you were a slave
As with adultery, so with role reversal: the greater the taboo, the more of a thrill it might be to break it. The pressure on a male always to take the lead, always to exact submission, served to close off whole dimensions of pleasure. That it was the responsibility of a respectable matron, while being fucked, to lie back passively and leave the action to her partner, was taken for granted by moralists; but that did not prevent some women, greatly daring, from spicing things up during sex by actually moving -almost as though they themselves were the males. Shocking, yes, and threatening to the masculinity of any self respecting citizen, to be sure; but there were, for the man who found his partner bucking her thighs in time to his thrustings. or grinding her buttocks, or sucking and licking his cock, undeniable compensations. That a woman might be so sexually aggressive as to play the role of a man was certainly, for any self-respecting citizen. a most unsettling possibility; but there was rarely anything so deviant that some would not find it exciting. A woman such as Messalina was pie tamed to be, predatory in her ambitions and demonic in her taste to: blood, was a figure fit to stalk fantasies as well as fears. Young. beautiful and dangerous. she was the very stuff of pornography.
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