Latin: New Sounds, New Letters, Same Old Problems

Latin is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was found at first in Latium (modern Lazio) in Italy, a region which includes Rome. Particular features of Latin suggest that it arrived before about 1200BC.

The languages closest to Latin are those of the Celtic and Germanic families. The language which became the Italic, Celtic and Germanic families arrived in Europe about 2000BC with bronze technology.

Germanic turned north and Celtic+Italic turned south. The first wave started when certain words contained a K or Q sound which was later replaced by a P. Latin and some other minor Italic languages are Q-Italic, while proto-Celtic speakers moved into Spain and later over to Ireland, probably by sea; Irish and defunct languages in Spain are termed Q-Celtic.

After the Iron Age (c.1200BC) a second wave arrived in Italy and France. By then, Q/K had become P; this can be seen in the Latin word Coquina (kitchen) which in the later arrival Oscan became Popina. Latin Quinque (five) is cognate with Welsh Pump (compare with Germanic fünf).

Latin was lucky that this was what the Roman rulers spoke. More people in Italy spoke Oscan than Latin. More people in the Roman Empire (29BC to 641AD) spoke Greek than anything else.

The Latin Alphabet

We still use the Latin alphabet. However, we have added extra letters: K was a Greek letter, only found when quoting Greek. All Cs in Latin are K sounds. J was separated from I only in the High Middle Ages so Julius Caesar was actually Iulius and Caesar was pronounced Keezer. Z is known, but mostly used for Greek words borrowed. U and V are the same character, used according to however pronunciation wanted, and W was just UU or VV. V is pronounced as W until the first century AD, when it starts to become a ‘bv’ sound and eventually a V. Y is known, but mostly in foreign words and names as an ‘eye’ . Some languages later added a character for ‘th’ such as ∂ (dropped from English in the 1400s), but Latin used ‘th’ as we do.

The emperor Claudius had a hobby horse about letters and introduced three new ones: antisigma (a C backwards plus a C, merged) to denote BS and PS), digamma inversum (an F upside down) and sonus medius, an H missing the right downstroke, a sort of schwa vowel. They ceased to be used when died, but could still be seem in the second century AD, when Suetonius notes it in inscriptions, books and official registers.

New Letters Invented by the Emperor Claudius

 The Frankish king Chilperic (r. AD561-584) also introduced four additional letters to Latin during his reign, according to Gregory of Tours. These too failed to survive his reign.

The King  also wrote books of verses following the style of Sedelius, but they were not at all compounds metric/poetic rules. He also added several letters in our alphabet, namely, ω of the Greeks, æ, the, uui, he figured in the manner as follows: ω, ψ, Ζ, Δ, and sent orders in all cities of his kingdom we should teach children in this way, and that the books were written previously erased pumiced out, and rewritten again.

The ego of kings and emperors knows no bounds.

Some characteristics of Latin

There were two types of Latin running alongside each other at the same time: Classical Latin, the speech and writing of the educated upper levels of society, and Vulgar Latin, mostly spoken and seldom written down. ‘Vulgar’ comes from ‘vulgus’, meaning a crowd (cf French ‘foule’), and does not have quite the level of disgust that the name would suggest. However, it is clear that since the elite were only a few percent of the population, a lot more people spoke the Vulgar variety.

In Classical Latin, there are two numbers: singular and plural and three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns follow three major groupings and two minor ones. Noun endings (‘cases’) change according to how the word is used in a sentence.

Nominative Subject

Accusative Direct Object

Genitive    Possessive

Dative      Indirect Object

Ablative  Instrumental

Words quoted in a dictionary are shown as Nominatives. When used in poetry, as in ‘O Caesar!’, this is called the Vocative and is often identical to the Nominative. There is a minor case called the Locative, used only with place names.

Adjectives follow the case, gender and number of the noun they are connected with.

The First Declension is feminine: nouns in the Nominative end in –a and this includes all females (femina, woman; puella, girl, etc.), female names (Olivia, Julia, etc.), most country names (Italia, Britannia, etc.) and most abstract words (philosophia, eloquentia, etc.) Oddly nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer) and incola (inhabitant) are feminine, although those are not particularly female activities, as well as other seemingly random words such as mensa, table. To give an idea of the declension, here is mensa:

Nom mensa

Acc mensam

Gen mensae

Dat mensae

Abl mensa

This is not that useful to a Roman as the Genitive and Dative are identical and the Nominative and Ablative seem to be so too (in fact, from poetry we can tell the –a in the Ablative was slightly longer).  The plural is odd too:

Nom mensae

Acc mensas

Gen mensarum

Dat mensis

Abl mensis

In the singular, Genitive and Dative were the same, but in the plural the Dative and Ablative are the same. To make things worse, pronunciation guides to Latin survive, and say things like ‘Don’t forget to include the –m in the Accusative; we may not say it anymore, but you have to write it’!

The second declension comprises masculine nouns ending in –us (e.g. tribus, tribe) and –er (such as magister, master) and neuter nouns ending in –um (such as bellum, war). Endings are different from the feminine words, but follow the same pattern.

Adjectives follow the first two declensions in endings and gender. So for a man, someone might say ‘pulcher est’ (he is handsome) and for a woman ‘pulchra est’ (she is beautiful); people would use that of themselves too.

The third declension is where it all gets a bit weird, if you didn’t think it was weird already.

Third declension nouns can be either masculine or feminine and you often have to guess which. Many have a different Nominative/Vocative form to all other endings, so all are listed as two words, Nominative and Genitive (e.g. flos, floris = flower). Caesar is third declension.

Verbs take their meaning from the endings, which denote person (first, second, third) and number (singular or plural) and tense or mood. Personal pronouns do exist, but were only used for emphasis or contrast. Otherwise (as Italian and Spanish still do) they could be omitted.

In theory, in Classical Latin, words could be written in any order, because the ending would indicate the meaning. In English, John loves Jane can’t mean the same as Jane loves John because the word order determines the meaning. In Classical Latin, Julius Juliam amat means Julius loves Julia, whilst Julium Julia amat means the reverse.

In truth, few people reading a military report or a book on agriculture could abide this silly word play, so it was confined to poetry. The actual word order tended to be Nom, Dat, Acc, Abl, Verb.

There is no word for ‘the’ or ‘a/an’ in Latin (no definite or indefinite article) and no words for Yes and No; they had to use a phrase, which might be ‘sic est’ (it is so) or ‘non est’ (it is not).

The Romans were very aware of the oddities of their language, and a book De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) was written by a writer called Varro at the time of Augustus (29BC-14AD), trying to trace its origins and development.  A second century AD text, the Appendix of Probus (Appendix Probi) listed 227 words which were often given wrongly:

Vowel Lost	27
Vowel Changed	82
Vowel Added	2
Consonant Lost	11
Consonant Changed	42
Consonant Added	15
Word Ending Changed	29
Neologism	32

In summary, there were 111 changes to vowels (49%), 68 changes to consonants (30%), 29 grammatical changes (13%) and 32 dispreferred neologisms (14%). Essentially four-fifths of the changes were in speech and did not impact grammar or lexis. We do not know what community spoke the way Probus noted, the number of samples he took or how typical such variants were. A modern linguist would be expected to provide such metrics. But we can say that the variants in sound found acceptance in the local community or the speaker would not have been emulated and Probus would not have heard about them.

Vulgar Latin

We only get to see Vulgar Latin (VL) in chance survivals such as graffiti and in the comic phrases of lower-class characters in plays. VL used different words to Classical Latin (CL). So while CL called your head caput, capitis (whence ‘capital’), VL called it a testa, literally a pot, from which we get modern Italian testa and French tête. Likewise CL said equus (horse) but CL had caballus (nag) hence French cheval and Spanish caballo. Very often, when a modern Spanish, French or Italian word does not come from CL, it comes from VL.

Latin was at that time a living language and it does seem that many people spoke VL but wrote in CL. Some of the least VL is actually from the soldiers who wrote the Vindolanda Tablets, because they made almost no mistakes, even that pesky –m in the Accusative.

Latin had always changed. We are told by a Greek, Polybius, that in the 150s BC the Romans found an inscribed tablet about a trade treaty from 509BC, but which they were unable to read, c.350 years later.

Later Latin

From Donatus we know that the -m which ends words when they are the Direct Object of the sentence (the Accusative Case) was no longer pronounced, so that Mensa (table) was not pronounced ‘Mensam’ in the Accusative, but just ‘Mensa’. Donatus says that people should not forget to write ‘Mensam’, even if the -m is not actually spoken. Certain difficult clusters of consonants were simplified in speech, but not in writing, so for example ‘Mensa’ was actually pronounced ‘Mesa’, just as it is in Spanish today. It seems that the -us ending was weakened to an -o, so that ‘Marcus’ was actually pronounced ‘Marco’, as in modern Italian. The Emperor Constantine was therefore not ‘Constantinus’ but ‘Costantino’. In languages derived from forms of Latin, consonantal clusters are not preserved; either they are cut down, abandoned or have added vowels to make them easier to say.

After Latin

When the Roman school system collapsed in the fifth century AD, local preferences and quirks took over, the Church (a big user of Latin) started changing meanings and pronunciations. Complex sentences began to disappear. The sixth century Latin writer Gregory of Tours, who was Archbishop of that city and primate of France, comments that nobody understands a speechifier, but everyone understands a plain speaker.

By 800AD, the situation had become that everyone still wrote in Latin but spoke in something quite different. The French ruler Charlemagne had documents written for his government in ‘lingua latina rustica’ (rustic Latin), while the bulk of people spoke something that was no longer Latin, but wrote it down in Latin,

The first document to appear in writing in something that was clearly no longer Latin was the Oaths of Strasbourg (843AD). These were oaths given in front of soldiers by two kings, Charles of France and his brother Louis (Ludwig) of Germany to cooperate to fight another brother (Lothar) of the bit in-between and Italy, Charles swore in German and Louis in French, so their soldiers could understand:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunant, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradei salva dift in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui, meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

For the love of God and for the Christian people and for our common salvation, from this day forward so long as God gives me knowledge and power, I will help this my brother Charles both with my aid and in everything as by right one ought to help one's brother, on condition that he does the same for me, and I will not hold any court with Lothar, which, of my own will, might cause my brother Charles harm.

While it seems to have the odd Latin word (nunquam) in it, this proto-French contains many different things. ‘Romance’ as it is often called looks a bit like French and Italian, but is a long way from either and just as far from CL. The vocabulary is still rather closer to Latin than to ModFr (Deus, not Dieu, di not jour, podir not pouvoir, fradre not frère, cosa not chose, etc). Some Latin words (pro, nunquam, ab) survive unchanged in writing. Grammatically, Romance at this stage did not yet requirer je as French does today – meaning was still given through a case ending.

The important thing is that this is a supposedly accurate rendition of precisely what was spoken in front of an army of ordinary West Frankish people. It has not been glossed or dressed up, and therefore shows that Latin had changed massively to the point where a CL speaker could not have understood the vast majority of it in speech, although a CL speaker might have followed it in writing. But nor does it much resemble VL, having gone much further in the abandonment of case and the overall morphology of any variety of Latin.

In conclusion, it can be argued that CL was an artificial construct, used for specific purposes, namely oratory and literature, and hence an elite, prestige social dialect, that was used as the basis for military language, as evidenced from Vindolanda and Bu Njem (in North Africa), but which did not form the everyday speech of the vast majority of Romans, that is, those outside of elite circles. The fact is that many VL words formed the basis of later Romance languages whilst CL ones did not, or were borrowed much later from classical literature as prestige forms.

What did the Romans wear?

If you said ‘a toga’, go to the back of the class; well, part-way, anyway. Very few Romans wore togas. Women in the later Republic and Empire, for a start, and children of any sort; slaves couldn’t wear them, nor could any male who was not a Roman citizen (cives) as opposed to a Roman subject (peregrinus), until that distinction was abolished in AD212 by Caracalla. Lastly, any soldier or later in the empire, any civil servant, as they dressed like soldiers. This leaves a small group of elite males.

Horace says in one of his Satires ‘let’s face it: outside Rome, the toga is seldom worn’. Even in Rome, people were often not kitted in their toga. Suetonius tells a story about Augustus that he was on one occasion walking through the Forum Romanum, when he saw a group of men talking and all were wearing Gallic-style cloaks (braccae). He went to them and berated the group, then went home and promulgated a law  that men in the Forum must always wear a toga. In other words, you wore a toga to perform being Roman (Suetonius, Augustus 40.5).

In earlier times, Roman adult citizens of both sexes wore togas of undyed wool; this could be homespun with relative ease, and a simple warm garment fits the Roman self image of toughness and simplicity; after all, Romulus and the earliest settlers had been shepherds.

But when Roman officials came to Tarantum to demand that city’s surrender in 282BC, which led to the Pyrrhic Wars, the Tarantines thought they looked so ridiculous, they not only laughed at them, someone actually shat on one of the delegation’s toga (Cassius Dio 9.39, discussed in Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome, pp.4-6; also in Dionysius). Tarantum was the source of the best regarded wool, which was, we should assume, why Rome wanted the city and why they turned up dressed in wool. Most wars are about the control of resources.

We can see a distinction between clean and dirty in the production of clothing; wool and leather were dirty trades. Raw wool is laden with lanolin, and must be fulled, which involves soaking the fleece in noxious but effective products, notably human urine, which was taxed. This was a commercial industrial process performed in a fullonica, illustrated by the Fullonica of Veranius Hypsaeus at Pompeii, where we can see pieces of wool being hung up to dry on tenterhooks.

Fullonica of Veranius Hypsaeus, Pompeii

 Leather, used for belts, shoes and helmets, is also a dirty trade. Anciently, human faeces were used, along with brain material from animals. Both trades were therefore located away from where people lived, down wind where possible and certainly downstream from where water was extracted for clean trades and agriculture.

Roman women stopped wearing togas around 200BC and changes to the men’s toga, with denotations of social rank, also took place This seems to coincide with the moment the Greeks first paid attention to Rome, and probably for the same reason: the Battle of Zama. The defeat and annexation of mighty Carthage made many Romans very rich for the first time. Their women could afford to stop making their own clothes and buy fashionable Greek styles. The Romans at the same time stopped writing their literature in Greek and stopped wearing shapeless, styleless clothes; there was a change to both text and textiles. Cato the Elder complained (in Latin) that when he was young, women made the family’s clothes, but now they just bought them, and consequently the world was going to the dogs.

It did remain a potent symbol of citizenship marriage that a married woman (matrona) should be portrayed as someone who spun wool. Maybe some of the poorer ones still did, but the rich dropped that as soon as finances permitted. Women are regularly depicted on monuments spinning clothes as a sign on modesty and acceptance of the mos maiorum. This was clearly an ancient mode: ‘cloth’ derives from Greek ‘Klotho’, the spinner, one of the three Fates.

Klotho, one of the Fates, with her distaff

We can see the trope of woman as spinner on the tombstone of Regina, found at South Shields, County Durham. You can see she is portrayed spinning, with balls of wool by her left foot. But she probably never  did it; as the wife of a wealthy Syrian merchant she wouldn’t have considered it worthy, but it was a symbol of respectability.

Tombstone of Regina of the Catuvellauni, as a Roman matrona, spinning wool

From Carlisle comes this devotional statue group of three mother goddesses, all in short dresses and offering refreshments, including what look like half baguettes. This is from a Roman civitas capital not far from the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, and so quite marginal, but it does show alternative forms of dresses for females.

Three mother goddesses from Gaul, with short skirts 

Slaves wore loins cloths for outdoor work; most slaves worked as field hands. We can see this on a terracotta tile showing two slaves roped together around the neck and held by some kind of overseer, who from his trousers was probably a Gaul or German. Urban male and female slaves wore a tunic (tunica) to the knees with short sleeves. This was a practical garment, but by contrast, the toga, being rather impractical, was a marker of citizen rank. No doubt rich Romans dressed body servants quite well as a form of potlatch (Wow! If they dress their slaves better than I can clothe myself, how rich can they be?).

Slaves in loincloths, with overseer in trousers

The toga could be embellished with a wide purple stripe (toga laticlava), worn only by senators and certain magistrates. Purple dye, extracted from the murex, a small mollusc found in the Levant. Its rarity and the difficulty of its extraction made it a perfect symbol of wealth. In Greek ‘Phoenicia’ meant ‘land of purple dye’, and the Punic name for the same area ‘Canaan’ meant the same. While a senator might be able to afford a toga with a wide purple stripe, all-purple togas (toga trabea) were reserved for statues of gods and emperors.

The word togatus carried connotations of civilian status as soldiers wore a sagum cloak of unwashed, lanolin-rich and thus waterproof wool, dyed red.

Some senior priests wore a toga picta, possibly of Etruscan origins (although it does seem that anything we can’t understand about the Romans is dumped in the bin marked ‘probably of Etruscan origin’). This had coloured patterns sewn on to it and seems to have resembled the ornate robes of High Church Anglican and Roman Catholic priests.

Official in a toga picta

Roman prostitutes sometimes wore togas, once respectable women dropped them. It enabled shoulders and legs to be seen and was easily removed, a sign of sexual availability. Women at toga parties in the US (dating back only to 1953 and popularised by the movie ‘Animal House’) would appear to use it for much the same purpose.

In truth, a typical Roman male would wear a tunica, with a woollen cloak (laena) over it.

Man in tunica and laena, buying a potion from a rather Chinese looking sorceress; from Pompeii

In the following scene from Pompeii of customers buying loaves at a bread shop, they appear to be wearing a longer laena and leather shoes, perhaps hobnailed boots. The boy on the right is barefoot.

Bread shop in Pompeii; note the laena and hobnail boots

Women’s dress became more complex as Roman women became less the helpmeet of their husbands or fathers and more trophies to be exhibited, with the principle that the more elaborate the clothing, the less likely the wearer was to do actual work in it. Typically over a tunica, a woman wore a floor-length stola, over which was a palla, a kind of shawl. Her only underwear would be a strophium, a breast band. Layering was very In, even then.

Underwear (induti), seems to be cognate with the Indian ‘dhoti’, which derives from Sanskrit for ‘clean’. What your mother said about going out in clean underwear seems to have been universal. Kilt-wearing soldiers regularly wore them for practical reasons (unlike the Scots regiments of the 19^th century, so took pride in not wearing underwear, an early instance of ‘going commando’).

Romans wore sandals with hobnails (solea, hence the sole of a shoe) much of the time, alternatively the soccus, a laced shoe without hobnails, which shows you how technology has hardly changed in 2000 years. The calceus was a hobnailed boot, worn only by Roman citizens. A Roman citizen would often be buried in his hobnailed boots, and so they became a marker to archaeologist that the person buried was a pagan. Heavy-duty ones worn by soldiers were called caligae, from callus, hardened skin.

Solea with hobnail soles

Egyptian socks

Calceus

Supposedly barbarian people wore trousers, and in colder climates, so did the Romans. The Roman army by the fourth century AD is described in detail by Ammianus when parading before Constantius II on one of his rare visits to Rome. They wore trousers. However, trousers were considered barbarian wear and often (as in  Persian trousers) effeminate. Honorius took time out from losing to the Goths to pass laws against men wearing trousers when in Rome (Theodosian Codex 14.10.2-3).

Sumptuary laws (Sumptuariae leges) assigning types of clothing to rank and citizenship were frequently passed and just as frequently ignored. It is always the marker of an oppressive society that laws are passed on such matters. Officially, this was to stop the numerous lower levels of society from bankrupting themselves in social competition. But when the question is how many purple stripes do you have on your toga it’s about social repression.

Summanus, whoever he may be

Summanus, whoever he may be

Summanus is the god who everyone almost forgot. The tile of this blog comes from Ovid, “The temple is said to have been dedicated to Summanus, whoever he may be" (quisquis is est, Summano templa feruntur): Ovid, Fasti 6, 731, translation by Sir George Frazer.

The temple in question is on the Aventine Hill, which was originally outside the Pomerium, the sacred notional bounds of the city. The cult seems to be from Gallia Cisalpina in what is now north Italy, centred on and around the Mons Summani (today’s Monte Summano) near Vicenza in the Veneto, anciently Vincentia.

Monte Summano Today

Summanus is credited as a god of nighttime thunder. Many years ago I experienced such an event while staying in Como, the loudest thunder and the heaviest rain I have ever experienced; the sudden rise of the Alps and rapid cooling of humid air seem to the reason for such electrical storms.

The cult centre on the Aventine seems to have been an attempt to keep his following confined to the margins of Rome. The Euganei that area seem to have been a pre-Italic people who merged with Gaulish Venetic tribes around 500BC.

Roman authors seem all to have viewed Summanus as a chthonic god, a god of the nighttime and underworld, a god to be propriated. They variously associated him with Jupiter (Iuppiter Summanus), with Pluto and by Martianus Capella as the greatest of the Manes, the divine ancestors (Summus Manium).

Varro in the first century BC thought he was an Etruscan god (De  Lingua Latina 5.74) and Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia 5.23) says ‘The Tuscan books inform us, that there are nine Gods who discharge thunder-storms, that there are eleven different kinds of them, and that three of them are darted out by Jupiter. Of these the Romans retained only two, ascribing the diurnal kind to Jupiter, and the nocturnal to Summanus; this latter kind being more rare, in consequence of the heavens being colder’. Ovid, in his piece on the Fasti, comments that two black wethers (castrated rams) were the designated sacrifice to Summanus, supporting the idea of him being a chthonic god.

Allegedly a statue to Summanus

 From the little that anyone seems to know about this, Summanus seems to be an early version of Pluto. Hades/ Pluton in Greek myth, the god of the underworld, is of course connected with the abduction of Kore, daughter of Demeter. I’ve always thought this odd, as in Mycenaean Greece, Poseidon, their top god, was god of the underworld, not of the sea (that was Proteus); this would make the abduction incest. Poseidon seems to be an avatar of Hades/Pluton; from the local legends about a shepherdess vanishing in a cave on Monte Summano, it is possible that Summanus acquired some of the myth of the abduction very early, and by a landward route.

How did this cult get to Rome? The temple to Summanus on the Aventine, towards the Circus Maximus, was built in 278-6 BC, but fell into disuse after a bigger and better temple to Jupiter was built. It suggests that some of the allies of Rome in the Veneto, probably the earlier Euganei merged with the Gaulish Veneti, ended up living at the margins of Rome. The Aventine was an area under Plebeian authority, and with temples already to Ceres (the bread dole wheat was milled there) and Liber (Bacchus), so a god with an alimentary aspect would be welcomed there. On the day of his festival, 20 June, Summanus was propriated with summanalia, wheel-shaped cakes of flour, milk and honey. This suggests that this was a meal for the god who had been moved – perhaps the shepherds on the Mons Summani ate these while working, and gave some to the god.

Twin Peaks of Monte Summano

 One aspect that has not been mentioned elsewhere is that Monte Summano has twin peaks, one lower than the other, and so does the Aventine Hill in Rome; perhaps the people who chose it for a cult centre did so because it resembles their sacred mountain.

Rome and India

Someone in India forged a coin of Augustus. It was found near Pondicherry on the Bay of Bengal, which is the ‘wrong’ side of India for Romans. But the real coin must have had considerable value, because you don’t forge a coin that’s worthless. Likewise a coin from India with Greek words on one side and Sanskrit ones on the other, deriving from a Hellenistic kingdom with Greek rulers, turned up a few years ago in a field in Hampshire, England. Whoever deposited that was the last holder of a token of value which was created several cultures and many thousands of miles away.

We are too used to the medieval idea of a farm labourer who never left his manor to recognise that the world was not always as ignorant as it later became. From the time of Alexander in the 330s BC to the rise of Christianity in the 330s AD, Greeks and Romans were often well-versed and familiar in the oriental trade.

While there are several Roman bases in India, mainly in Tamil areas of the south, there are no known Indian bases on Roman territory. But since the Romans in Egypt had Red Sea shipping bases such as Berenice, there could have been entrepôt cities where exotic animals and precious cargoes could have been received for onward shipment.

We are fortunate to have a surviving guide to this trade, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. This tells us about Roman trade with India up to the second century AD. You might consider it to be a briefing note for a merchants’ guild on the prospects for successful trade in that area. Such peripli were part of a long-running tradition of Greek writing about foreigners (xenoi), who were generally to be classified by the Greeks as Dangerous Foreigners and Useful Foreigners. The Indian peoples were definitely the latter, as the text relating to India has none of the common warnings about hostile people which can be seen in the section relating to East Africa.

There is evidence for long-term contact between Europe, North Africa and India. Zeus and his Italian version Iuppiter (Jupiter) are derived from Dyaus Pita, a senior god from the Rig Veda, the father of Indra in Hindu theology. Indra has the thunderbolt later assigned to Zeus. We have no idea how the people who became Greek came across these Hindu gods, but they were worshipped in Tamil lands. It does seem that Zeus only became chief god of the Greeks after the collapse of Bronze-Age Mycenaean culture and the rise of highland people like the Dorians, the so-called ‘Sons of Heracles’.

Ambrosia, the food or sometimes drink of the gods, the substance which gives them immortality, is a word taken from the Sanskrit ‘Amrita’ which is the same substance and the same word, essentially a- (non-) mer (death, the same root as ‘mort’ and ‘murder’). It has been claimed as a survival in Indo-European religion, in which case it survived remarkably well. Amrita also appears in the Rig Veda.

We have here two of many links between Europe and India. This points not to chance religious survivals but towards enduring cultural contacts. The Roman priests known as Flamines (singular Flamen) have a title that is etymologically and functionally close to Brahmins, a high-status priesthood forming part of the Rig Veda culture.

The third had been the invasion of western India by the army of Alexander the Great, and the subsequent Indo-Greek kingdoms, which endured for centuries, helped by the relative weakness of Persia after his destruction of  the Shahs. It took Persia some 450 years to recover its status, so until the recovery, the Romans had land routes to India and beyond. The Periplus dates from the second century AD, the time when sea routes to the east had become more useful.

Rome was familiar with the east during the Principate; after all, Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia had written extensively about Brahmins. Pliny’s great interest in minerals served him well too.

One very definite reason to otherwise invisible Indians in the Roman world is the use of elephants in warfare. Hannibal used elephants against Rome in 218BC as everyone knows, and African elephants are impossible to train. The only elephant to survive Hannibal’s attack was his own mount, Surus, ‘the Syrian’, suggesting it was an Indian elephant brought via Syria. Claudius arrived to mark his conquest of (some of) Britain in AD43 with elephants. An elephant eats 400 pounds of food a day, presumably more when in a cold climate. It requires careful handling, which does suggest a squad of trained Indian mahouts, with some men to spare, in case of injury or death, as well as a team dedicated to providing its diet, and a mobile latrine team to prevent animal-borne diseases spreading to the army. Just as a medieval knight needed his support team of squires and grooms, the mounted Indian war elephant must have required a strong support base.

What did the Romans trade with India? They had plenty of things to buy from the East, but what did they sell? There was it seems an export market for gold and silver coin, as well as copper, cloth, wine, and of slightly darker impact, singing boys and young women for the harems of Indian lords. Beasts for the amphitheatre and arena seem to have been a Roman import. Trajan is recorded as importing large numbers of beasts, including tigers, something not seen before in Europe.

Why did the trade decline? It seems to have flourished under Augustus, as heir to the Ptolemies; he sent 120 ships a year from one Egyptian port alone to India, a huge increase on the Hellenistic kings’ levels of trade. Indian political visits became more frequent, and continued into the reign of Justinian; however the revival of Persia and later that of Islam seem to have closed that route for good.

  

Secret Agents of Rome and the Performance of Justice

Secret Agents of Rome and the Performance of Justice

We can identify two sorts of secret agents within the Roman world, with some specialist groups alongside them. These are the frumentarii, created by Hadrian, and the agentes in rebus created by Diocletian and particularly active after AD357, when their purpose was modified by Constantius II. Among the agentes were an investigative branch, the curiosi.

Rome had no police force and no prisons for most of the classical period. When L. Sergius Catilina was arrested and charged with treason, in 63BC, he was lodged in a private house of a friend, a sort of bail bond. The lawyers for and against him no doubt used whatever means they could to secure information. We have Cicero’s speeches In Catilinam, but of course not the defence side. The whole process was handled by magistrates. Rome had only two cells, used for lodging accused persons who didn’t have the benefit of rich friends.

Since imprisonment was not used as a punishment, only to hold prisoners before trial, all our information relates to holding, not punishment. For the most part, unless an accused person was cleared, probably due to a bribe, the outcome was a fine for minor offences, execution and exile (social death to anyone who lived in Rome where the right contacts made all the difference). The only quasi-imprisonment available was hard labour in the mines, which was a type of death sentence, since few survived such heavy, dangerous and often poisonous work, and such sentences were reserved for slaves and low-status citizens.

As republican law broke down, anyone could kill almost anyone else with impunity. Julius Caesar had forbidden people in Rome to carry weapons (Lex Julia de vi privata). But he was after all the one who had crossed the Rubicon under arms to conquer Rome in the first place. Under the second triumvirate, anybody could denounce anyone and have them put on the proscription list.

The ‘prison’ at Rome was the Tullianum, originally a spring house, later the site of the medieval Mamertine prison and sometimes referred to as the Carcer (hence ‘incarcerate’), which seems to have included an oubliette from which it was hard to escape and inconvenient captives could be quietly starved to death. There were quarries nearby used to pen prisoners and to one side a long staircase, the Gemonian Stairs (Scalae Gemoniae) down which captives were hurled to their deaths as a form of public execution. It is notable that the Tullianum was across the street from the Senate House and at the top was the Tabularium, where accounts were lodged, suggesting that this was a zone of punishment and death for political and financial crimes.

The Carcer or Tullianum at the foot of the Capitoline Hill

Frumentarii were also used by Balbinus and Pupienus to warn cities across the empire not to support Maximinus Thrax (Hist Aug ‘Balbinus’ 10) 

Maximinus Thrax, emperor AD235- 238

and Gallienus to pick up rumours against him (‘Claudius’ (Gothicus) 17). These had originated as grain buyers for the army, hence the name. Everyone needs to eat, so what could be less conspicuous than a grain merchant? Since the poor of Rome lived for centuries on grain handouts, the frumentarii were a good way to pick up news and gossip.

The system of spies was clearly not very successful, since in the third century many emperors faced rebellions and conspiracies, with the average reign of an emperor being 2 years and 6 months. It is reasonable to assume that everyone knew who the legion’s frumentarius was and to feed him false information.

Diocletian of course reformed much else, so the invention of a system of agentes in rebus would be a priority for him to retain his throne unchallenged. 

Diocletian

In border regions there seems also to have been a system of double agents; these are known from two sources from Britain. The first is a reference in Vindolanda Tablet 162 to a ‘Miles Arcanus’, a secret soldier. As Vindolanda was abandoned before the creation of Hadrian’s Wall, the system of secret soldiers may have been replaced by the frumentarii, or merely supplemented by it. The idea of a secret soldier is, we assume, to remain secret.


During these outstanding events the areani, who had gradually become corrupt, were removed by him [Count Theodosius, father of the later emperor] from their positions. This was an organization founded in early times, of which I have already said something in the history of Constans [Note: that reference did not survive]. It was clearly proved against them that they had been bribed with quantities of plunder, or promises of it, to reveal to the enemy from time to time what was happening on our side. Their official duty was to range backwards and forwards over long distances with information for our generals about disturbances among neighbouring nations (Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 28.3.8)

Since Latin has no definite article and was not punctuated by commas, it might be that the Latin means ‘areani who had gradually become corrupt’. Areani may be a misreading in the surviving MSS for ‘arcani’; the two seem too alike.

In certain places law and order were maintained by urban cohorts (cohortes urbanae), under the control of the urban prefect, the mayor. Only three places in the western empire seem to have received them, and perhaps they were the ones that needed them: Rome itself, with three cohorts, Carthage and Lyon. Since there were no such bodies in Spain or Britain, it is possible that Carthage (the leading city of Roman North Africa) and Lyon (the capital of Gaul) were headquarters for the Praetorian Prefect and that they relied on the security systems handled by the various frumentarii, later agentes in rebus, the curiosi and arcani, which taken together were probably deemed to be sufficient.

We do not know if the three urban cohorts in Rome were organised by area, by function, or both. There would need to be some idea of ‘the patch’ in which cohort operated, as it would need a building; the urban cohorts were considered to be soldiers and would need to store arms and captives, and possibly recovered loot. The urban prefect would allocate tasks at the highest level and make sure each of the three cohorts knew the others were conducting operations which might cross into the others’ patches.

Operationally, the functions would be catching thieves, stopping disorder and attempted coups, as well as dealing with internal matters such as fraud and unauthorised murder. The one thing they didn’t do was patrol the streets, which was the job of the vigiles, the ‘vigilant ones’, who doubled as nightwatchmen and a fire brigade. Presumably paid fire fighters with a financial incentive to be loyal were preferred to amateurs; Trajan forbade Pliny the Younger from allowing the citizens of Nikopolis (in Bithynia-Pontus) from starting a volunteer firemen’s department on the grounds that such things led to uprisings (Letters of the Younger Pliny, Book 10). 

Trajan

At that time (early second century AD) control over such groups was maintained by the provincial governor, but after Septimius Severus or Caracalla stopped governors having operational control over the army, presumably the same applied to all such groups and the vigiles were controlled by the local army commander.

Local jails did exist; St Paul was arrested and locked up in one on Malta (See Acts 27 and 28; also for his shipwrecks 2 Corinthians 25, which also speaks of him being beaten with iron rods). Acts 28.21 has the Roman authorities say to him ‘We neither received letters out of Judæa concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came shewed or spake any harm of thee’. This suggests that a system existed for people to condemn criminals discreetly, either by direct testimony or by letter.

This has been a brief exposition of the role of secret agents in the Roman world. I would welcome any comments.