Bacaudae – thieves or social bandits?

‘The lunatic is easily recognised. Sooner or later he brings up the Templars’ (Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum) The Bacaudae are seen in a similar light.

On three occasions we find references to Bacaudae (or Bagaudae, or variants of that name) in Roman Gaul. The first time was in the third century, the second in the fourth and the final in the fifth.

They have been characterised in many ways, existing mainly in the political analysis of those discussing them. It does remind me of Umberto Eco’s maxim.

There has been much controversy over the name, which appears to be Gaulish. It’s possible that they did not know the meaning of the word either. There may have been groups calling themselves Bacaudae prior to this, but which we know nothing of.  We can’t even be certain this is an endonym (what people call themselves) as opposed to an exonym (what others call you, which the Romans were quite good at).

Bacaudae is of course a plural, and the singular form Bacauda. A man of that name was made Tribunus Voluptatum (minister for public amusement) at Milan by Theodoric (Cassiodorus Variae 5.25), a position to be held for life and an innovation at that time. This man was a Visigoth, so it is possible that the Bacaudae were followers of a Bacauda, a Germanic leader of some sort.

Why the Bacaudae were so prominent, because banditry and piracy were endemic in the Roman world? Julius Caesar had himself been captured by pirates. Lincoln Blumell in his article ‘Beware of Bandits! Banditry and Land Travel in the Roman Empire’ Journeys 8.1-2 (June-December 2007) points out that an expectation of banditry was commonplace, citing the plot of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (aka The Golden Ass).

Eric Hobsbawm refers to later ‘social bandits’ :

The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and the state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice . . .and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported  (EJ Hobsbawm 1969 Bandits)

We should consider as something close to that resistance figures such as the Lusitanian Viriatus, whom Diodorus Siculus refers to as ‘lord of all’; there are references to him also in Silus Italicus and Livy; he resisted Roman conquest of what is now Portugal in 147BC, the same year as Carthage and Corinth were burnt down by the Romans. Polybius sees him as using both war and theft to resist Roman conquest; even Romans could become social bandits, as in the case of Sertorius, who followed the example of Viriatus in the same area fifty years later.

Modern Statue of Viriatus, Portugal

Moreover in the era of Septimius Severus around AD190-210 we find references in Cassius Dio to Bulla Felix (‘Lucky Charm’) a semi legendary Robin Hood figure, who evaded capture for two years. Since Dio says he had a gang of 600 supporters, that seems incredible. If he existed at all (some doubt it) Bulla Felix would have found it impossible to navigate around Italy without being found, since he would have had to provide 1800 meals and fodder for 600 animals every day. A gang of 600 riders would have blocked the roads and been visible for miles. Dunbar’s Law (the so-called Law of 150) suggests that any number over 150 becomes increasingly difficult for one individual to manage. A Roman century had eighty men, and the double century  which headed each legion had 160, but there would always be absences and injuries to subtract from that.

Bulla Felix, 'lord of all'

Another liminal figure is Tacfarinas (Tiqfarin), a former Roman officer who deserted and led Berber groups into raiding Roman supply camps in north west Africa in the time of Tiberius, reported by Tacitus Annals). Unlike Juba and Jugurtha, he was not a local king with Roman tastes, but a non-noble Berber. We might also consider the case of Gildo, a rebel and former Roman soldier, who also used the Roman’s own fighting techniques against them in the 390s AD.

Mausoleum of Tacfarinas, North Africa

Galen, writing in the early third century AD, refers to what many might have considered normal reactions to banditry:

On another occasion we saw the skeleton of a bandit lying on rising ground by the roadside. He had been killed by some traveller repelling his attack. None of the local inhabitants would bury him, but in their hatred of him were glad enough to see his body consumed by the birds which, in a couple of days, ate his flesh, leaving the skeleton as if for medical demonstration. (Galen On Anatomical Procedures 1.2)

It’s hard to tell common thieves from Hobsbawm’s social bandits, as in the parable told by Jesus (Luke 10.30) ‘A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.’  Centuries earlier, Isaiah had commented that ‘Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.’ (Isaiah 1.23). Men who were supposed to be magistrates and heard cases were allying themselves with thieves and acting as rebels. In the east there were continuing reports of semi-political bandits (Strabo Geographika 16.2.18, Josephus Bellum Judaicum 1.304)

Galen

Bacaudae seem to be a product of social stress, since they are reported around AD289 by Claudius Mamertinus in a panegyric about Maximian; we know that Maximian hired barbarians to attack him so he could defeat them, so we should not be surprised if the original Bacaudae were invented for that same purpose. However, the name is associated with Gallic revolutionaries Amandus and Aelianus, both of whom, it should be noted, had fairly standard Roman names.

Some consider them to be social bandits, the term coined by Eric Hobsbawm for movements in Greece, Hungary and the Balkans in the early modern era which undermined the Ottomans in south-eastern Europe. The closest seem to be the Hajduk, who operated in that has recently been Yugoslavia, peasant Christian irregulars operating as small warbands of at most 100 men.

The crises which provoked the so-called Fall of the Roman Empire were mainly crises in Gaul.  Virtually every problem of territory and people in the later empire led to break-up involved Gaul at some point. Take Rutilius Namatianus’s comments in his poem De Reditu Suo (On his return home [to Gaul], Loeb translation, 1934)

the fields of Gaul summon home their native. Disfigured they are by wars immeasurably long, yet the less their charm, the more they earn pity. 'Tis a lighter crime to neglect our countrymen when at their ease: our common losses call for each man's loyalty. Our presence and our tears are what we owe to the ancestral home: service which grief has prompted ofttimes helps. 'Tis sin further to overlook the tedious tale of disasters which the delay of halting aid has multiplied: now is the time after cruel fires on ravaged farms to rebuild, if it be but shepherd's huts.

This is not just the invasions of Vandals, Sueves and Alans, but a protracted period of ‘wars immeasurably long’, with ‘fires on ravaged farms’.

Then there are the great complainers, Paulinus ‘of Pella’ and Salvian ‘of Marseille’. Paulinus (377-461) actually lived in southern Gaul and had only been born at Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia, when his father was proconsul there, leaving it forever at age nine months. Salvian (400-490) was actually from Trier in the Roman Rhineland, and left it for Marseille when Trier was evacuated in AD407.

The perils of being a landed noble in fifth century Gaul are ably told in Paulinus’s Eucharisticos (Thanksgiving), written when he was eighty-three in AD461 (born in 378). Paulinus was the grandson of Ausonius and his own father had been Proconsul of Africa. After a life of luxury and idleness, Paulinus was at 37 in AD415 made head of imperial finances by Priscus Attalus, the Visigoths’ puppet emperor in southern Gaul. This meant he was probably party to the treaty between the Visigoths in Gaul and northern Spain and the Romans, which lasted until the Visigothic leader Euric annulled in the 470s.

Professor Walter Goffart

Under that treaty, one third of all taxes were to be handed to the local Gothic commander in cash, while the remainder was to be handed to the Roman tax-farmer as before. The scheme is detailed by Walter Goffart in his groundbreaking Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton University Press, 1987). It must have occurred to the Roman taxpayer in Gaul that if he could be defended adequately on a third of his taxes, what were the rest of his taxes for?

This book will change your history

The invasion of Gaul and then Spain by Germanic groups from AD407 onwards led to an major outbreak of disease in Spain in 409 (Chronicle of Hydatius), famines in Spain in 410 (Hydatius) and Gaul in 411 (Gallic Chronicle of 452). Much of the reason for the famine must have been seizure of crops by the invading Vandals, Sueves and others; the invading groups had no provision for food, so they must have seized what they could each day. People are less likely to plant crops or rear livestock if there is a good possibility of it being stolen by a foreign army. The imperial government had to forgive much is its tax revenues in the second and third decades of the fifth century. Even in Britain, Gildas refers to a famine ‘the discomfited people, wandering in the woods, began to feel the effects of a severe famine, which compelled many of them without delay to yield themselves up to their cruel persecutors, to obtain subsistence’ (De Excidio Britanniae 20).

Bacaudae are mentioned in Gaul during this very period, specifically in the Loire Valley and Aremorica (today’s Brittany), and it seems the Alans, a Turkmen warrior group associated with the Vandals, but known for their attack on Orleans ,were used to suppress them. It has been claimed that Aetius hired the local Alans under their king, Goar, to do so (Constantius of Lyon, Vita Sancti Germani).

Aremorica was seized by British rulers around this time. Today’s Brittany  has ancient divisions known today as Domnonée and Cornouaille, which replicate Dumnonia and Cornovia, today’s Devon and Cornwall. It’s possible that some of the people displaced by the British takeover also ended up as Bacaudae. The invading Britons were not fleeing from the Saxons, because the Saxons never got there until the time of Alfred the Great in the late ninth century. Quite possibly the Britons crossed to Aremorica to take advantage of the chaos there. Many people had ceased to work on farms in the semi-bondage which had become normalised in the fourth century, but never accepted. Lands termed agri deserti were not actually deserted, but farmed only by tenants who were too small and poor to pay major taxes; it was their landlords who deserted their tax liability.

Leaders like Tibatto (Constantius and Hydatius, who calls him princeps rebellionis) and Basilius, (Hydatius, s.a. AD449), accused of killing federates troops in a church at Tyrasso. Spain) don’t seem to be either social bandits or oppressed workers.

Execution of bearded men, perhaps Bacaudae, by Roman soldiers

The Loire Valley seems to have been a dividing line between various authorities. It marked provincial boundaries in imperial times, and by the fifth century the polities into which Gaul had transformed used this navigable waterway as a boundary. The comic play Querolus (The Angry Man) includes a conversation between the titular Querolus and his lar familiaris, household god. Querolus asks for power without responsibility. The Lar says “I know! Go and live on the banks of the Loire… In that place people live by the law of nations. … capital sentences are issued from an oak tree and written on bones. … private persons act as judges:.

Salvian’s most famous work, De praesenti judicio, often renamed De gubernatione Dei, On the Governance of God, attacks the imperial government for the existence of the Bacaudae. He blames the harshness of the rich and the high taxes on the lower orders which has made people flee to the Bacaudae (DGD v.5-6). He comments over and over that the barbarians may be rough and uncouth, but at least they are honest and not hypocrites.

In the middle of the fifth century AD, the phenomenon of Attila the Hun stunned Europe. Priscus, a member of the Roman posse sent to negotiate with Attila,

As I waited and walked up and down in front of the enclosure which surrounded the house, a man, whom from his Scythian dress I took for a barbarian, came up and addressed me in Greek, with the word Xaire, "Hail!"… He considered his new life among the Scythians better than his old life among the Romans, and the reasons he gave were as follows: "After war the Scythians live in inactivity, enjoying what they have got, and not at all, or very little, harassed. The Romans, on the other hand, are in the first place very liable to perish in war, as they have to rest their hopes of safety on others, and are not allowed, on account of their tyrants to use arms. And those who use them are injured by the cowardice of their generals, who cannot support the conduct of war. But the condition of the subjects in time of peace is far more grievous than the evils of war, for the exaction of the taxes is very severe, and unprincipled men inflict injuries on others, because the laws are practically not valid against all classes. A transgressor who belongs to the wealthy classes is not punished for his injustice, while a poor man, who does not understand business, undergoes the legal penalty, that is if he does not depart this life before the trial, so long is the course of lawsuits protracted, and so much money is expended on them. The climax of the misery is to have to pay in order to obtain justice. For no one will give a court to the injured man unless he pay a sum of money to the judge and the judge's clerks."… My interlocutor shed tears, and confessed that the laws and constitution of the Romans were fair, but deplored that the governors, not possessing the spirit of former generations, were ruining the State. (Priscus Fragment 7)

We see here the sorts of circumstances the Bacaudae faced, repeated by Salvian and Priscus: severe taxes and injustice, which made Romans happy to consider viable alternatives. If the Goths charged only a third of the regular tax assessment, where was the rest going to? Many would have said the idle mouths of the rich and the Church.

In conclusion: rebellion against the empire was not new or confined to a limited area. What the Bacaudae did, antagonists like Viriatus and Bulla Felix had done before them: take advantage of Roman weakness along liminal areas; in the valley of the Loire, the fifth century Bacaudae could take advantage of fragmented jurisdictions to act like the Border Reivers of the Anglo-Scottish border did for centuries; sometimes making themselves available to either party in a dispute, as the medieval gallowglass would do. They don’t sound very different to Alaric’s Visigoths.

Do You Know the Way to St Tropez?

I recently saw a poster of Brigitte Bardot in the 1957 movie Et Dieu Créa La Femme (And God Created Woman). Besides presenting la Bardot, the film launched the town of St Tropez, which had not until then made the impact on tourists that Cannes had already for a century.

I was surprised to see that, even today, sixty years on, St Tropez has fewer than 6,000 inhabitants and has never been connected to SNCF railways. Clearly part of its exclusivity was that it was hard to reach.

I came then to wonder who this saint was. ‘Tropez’ is hardly a common name. He may have been a Roman, with a name given as ‘Caius Silvius Torpetius’, a martyr executed, it is said, by Nero on 29 April AD68. His martyrdom is connected with the port of Pisa. Pisa is held to be an Etruscan city, since it contains an Etruscan mausoleum, so ‘Caius’ would be Gaius, most common Roman praenomen; Etruscan has no letter G. Silvius, the nomen of the Gens Silvia, tells us little either. This was the name of the royal family of Alba Longa, but not one in existence in later times.

Torpetius is a useless cognomen, as it means nothing in Latin. I speculate that is might be a local pronunciation in P Italic of the same word which in Latin is Torquatus. This would tie us in to some very important people.  Two shared the name Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus. The elder, uncle to the younger, was praetor in AD48, but committed suicide on 1 January 49, having been accused by Claudius of incest with his sister. The nephew, descended from Augustus, was exiled as soon as Nero acceded to the throne and sent ‘to a country town’ where he died. Could this be Portus Pisanum?

The saint was supposedly either a gladiator or a member of the emperor’s personal guard. Well, it’s highly unlikely that he would be both a gladiator and have the Roman tria nomina. Roman citizens were forbidden to be gladiators and gladiators were denied the right ever to become Roman citizens. So we can scotch that.

It’s also highly unlikely that at that time an ordinary soldier in the imperial bodyguard would be a Roman citizen, not while serving anyway. The imperial bodyguard mostly comprised Germans. However, senior officers of the bodyguard would probably be equites, another relationship mentioned by saints’ lives of Torpetius.

Orthodox Christian Image of St Torpetius

The saint was beheaded and then placed in a boat with a cock and a dog, and sent down the River Arno to the sea, where, mirabile dictu, it floated all the way to southern Gaul. There are also claims that it drifted to Spain and even Portugal.

The boat with a cock and a dog, which, according to the miracula, didn’t touch the saint’s body but instead ran off once the boat landed in Gaul and had villages named after them, does strongly resemble the Roman punishment of poena cullei, in which the condemned man, often a parricide, was placed into a leather bag with snakes, a cock and a dog, who would injure him in their panic as all floated down the river (usually the Tiber) to certain death. The punishment was so peculiar that it was dreaded, and while it dated back to the Republic, it was used heavily by Claudius and Nero, was revived by Constantine and was still used in the era of Justinian.

So I suggest that St Tropez, Tropes in Provençal and Silvius Torpetius in local Latin, may have been Silanus Torquatus, killed by Nero for reasons unconnected to any supposed connection to early Christianity. Decapitation was not a normal Roman punishment, but one used by the Gauls (and Britons) to get rid of their political enemies. In the Christian era, pagan statue heads, like that of Apollo at Uley in Gloucestershire, might be buried as a damnatio memoriae.

If the fishermen of the unnamed Gaulish village had received a headless body in a boat, even with a cock and a dog, they would not have known it was a saint, would they? Tropez has no in vivo miracles attached to him. His vita, the Passio Sancti Torpetii, dates from the ninth century, which takes us very much into the Carolingian period, when this part of France was occupied by Arab Muslims. Subverting their tolerant regime by instigating and promoting a saint’s cult smack in the middle would be a typical piece of cultural theatre for the middle ages.

The priests who invented the saint also created a holy woman called Celerina, who had had a vision of the arrival of St Tropez, and who retrieved his body and dealt with it. Assuming this to be a Christian figure, it would be anachronistic, since there were almost certainly no Christians in Gaul at that time. Her name is a female version of Celerinus, considered a saint and ‘martyred’ by the emperor Decius at Carthage in AD250. He died of natural causes so he ought to be a confessor rather than a martyr, in that he was willing to be martyred, but wasn’t. He did have an aunt called Clerina who was a martyr, so maybe she is the Celerina in question, a mere 200 years later. Again, the Church would look for kudos for France based on this early martyrdom and an early saint. Many Gaulish female saints are Christianised versions of pagan goddesses anyway.

One source of the myth may have arrived from Spain. Liutprand of Cremona, the notoriously bad-tempered priest who worked for the Emperor Otto I and who rubbished Byzantium, recorded that Muslim converts called Muwallad, Latin speakers, landed at St Tropez (Heraclea was its ancient name) in 889 and rebuilt Fraxinet, anciently Fraxinetum, making it an important settlement. They were expelled by the forces of Count William, Margrave of Provence, because they had kidnapped the Abbot of Cluny. Losing the Battle of Tourtour in AD973, the Andalusis were killed or enslaved, and this marked the point at which all local and immigrant Muslims left that area of Francia.

Inventing a major saint, one with a Roman pedigree and international appreciation, is exactly what rulers did to win control of territories.

Les Bravades de St-Topez, Catholic Ritual in France

If Torquatus is the Torpetius/ Tropez of the martyrologies, he was unlucky to die on 29 April, in that Nero committed suicide on 9 June AD68, just a few weeks later.  Maybe he was merely exiled by Nero, since there is little to be gained in exiling someone just to kill them. If you’re emperor, you just kill them. If, as is suggested, Torquatus was a relative, Nero exiled him, and it was Galba who had him killed. By 29 April, the army revolt against Nero was in full spate.  The emperor was too busy trying to persuade his bodyguards not to run away and leave him to his fate (described by Tacitus Histories and Suetonius Twelve Caesars) to worry about early Christians (the claim that Nero executed SS Peter and Paul dates to Lactantius On the Death of the Persecutors (Chapter 2) in the early fourth century; earlier claims had been that they were executed during his reign, but not at his command).

Rococo image of the martyrdom of St Tropez

In summary, I consider that Saint Tropez was invented out of scraps of ancient texts  about Silanus Torquatus, with a dash of Lactantius and a pinch of grand guignol for the counts of Provence, to use as a justification to expell the hard-working and popular Muslims from the Fraxinet-Heraclea.

We’ve come a long way from Brigitte Bardot, but her life has at least been less fictionalised than St Tropez himself.

Sixty Over the Bridge: Growing Old as a Man in Rome

A common howler among my weaker students is the delightful Rome had a high mortality rate. I think I know what they mean: more people died young. The mortality rate, then as now, was 100 per cent. The Greek myth of Endymion, granted immortality but not eternal youth, would have made the concept unwelcome to those who knew of it.

Bust of an Old Man

 More people died young. For Roman citizens, especially in the Republic, death in a military context would have been a good possibility for males, while childbirth and post partum disease would have cut a swathe through the young female population as it did well into the twentieth century and still does in poor countries. Women are too important to be a footnote here and need to be dealt with in their own blog piece, to follow.

Many diseases we face today are those of old age. When people died younger, they died of different things. Diseases of human degeneration hardly existed. We do read of certain individuals dying of cancer – the emperor Constantius III had what may have been bowel cancer over several months in AD421. He was 51. The empress Theodora also died of cancer at the age of 48 (Victor of Tonnena, Chronicle s.a.548). As Cancer Research UK has often commented, 75% of cancer cases are in people over sixty, and if very few people made it to sixty in antiquity, we should expect the incidence to be lower anyway.

Most ancient societies found a role for those (mainly men) who didn’t die young. The Roman Senate emerges in the semi-legendary period following the expulsion of the kings (Regifugium). Consuls of the Roman Revolution, Lucius Junius Brutus and Titus Lucretius Tricipitinus had grown-up children. It is given that the rape of the latter’s daughter, Lucretia, provoked the rebellion, while the sons of Brutus, as in the famous modern painting, were executed for fighting alongside the ex-king. So the Consuls were probably in their forties or fifties.

The Latin word Senatus derives from senex/ senis ‘Old Man’; for a modern reader, learning that you could be considered an old man at just forty is sobering. But even in the supposedly stable period of the High Republic, Titus Flamininus was elected consul directly from quaestor at the age of thirty. Since men were not considered fully adult until twenty five, this was rapid and shown how narrow a window Roman males had for advancement – not below 25, over at 60.

Bust of an Old Man (looking remarkably like Iggy Pop)

We have few statistics for lifespan in antiquity; social order differences, whether you lived mostly in the city or on a country estate, occupation, all would make for major differences. Even the life of a slave could range from those working as field hands on Roman latifundia (nasty, brutish and short) to the high-status slave of a rich owner (probably living longer and better fed than a free person of the social underclass at Rome depending on bread doles in the Subura).

As Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence point out, we know more about the life stages of slime moulds than we do of people in antiquity (Growing Up and Growing Old in the Roman Empire, 2001). As humans have not changed genetically since long before the Roman period, the lifespan of people should be identical to what it was in (say) 1750, before we started inhaling coal smoke on a large scale. And in general it is. However, antiquity had few cures for childhood disease and frequent famines.

When we get inscriptions on tombstones and other monuments in the ‘pagan’ era, there is a lot of precision given much of the time, with dates and precise ages provided, not just years and months, but also days and hours of life. However, Christians scorned precise ages. ‘He was about fifty’ is the Christian style, designed to suggest that such things don’t matter, because, hey, the world’s going to end very soon. Early Christian millennial thinking is however undermined because the concept of any kind of monument is contrary to it.

Roman culture, backed up in some instances by law, specifies the age of sixty for old age. Men aged sixty and above weren’t eligible for military service or jury duty; while that may have been welcome, they also lost the right to vote in elections under the Republic. There was a saying ‘Sixty over the bridge’, the bridge being the passage through the voting booths on the Campus Martius. Once the empire was established, few things were voted on anyway and the Campus Martius was built over.

Senators aged sixty were no longer obliged to attend the Senate, and the same rule applied for decurions and their local curia in the various cities of the empire. That age seems to have been adopted as a norm across the empire.

Full length statue of an Old Man

We have two major Roman texts on old age: Cicero De Senectute (On Old Age), a work from the middle of the first century BC, and the Letters to Lucilius of Seneca, some 110 years later.

Cicero’s work is phrased as a conversation among Cato the Elder, Laelius and Scipio (son of Africanus). Cato praises influence as a benefit of old age, since the Senate called members to speak in order of their age, so those who were oldest spoke first (De Senectute 18).

Marcus Tullius Cicero; contemporary bust

Physical decay is acknowledged as an issue in a speech given to Cato:

But, the critics say, old men are morose, troubled, fretful, and hard to please; and, if we inquire, we shall find that some of them are misers, too. However, these are faults of character, not of age. Yet moroseness and the other faults mentioned have some excuse, not a really sufficient one, but such as it may seem possible to allow, in that old men imagine themselves ignored, despised, and mocked at; and besides, when the body is weak, the lightest blow gives pain. (Cicero De Senectute 18.65).

But this is a philosophical tract, dedicated to Cicero’s friend Atticus. It doesn’t pretend to be read as reality.

Seneca writes more tellingly:

Wherever I turn, I see evidences of my advancing years. I visited lately my country-place, and protested against the money which was spent on the tumble-down building. My bailiff maintained that the flaws were not due to his own carelessness; "he was doing everything possible, but the house was old." And this was the house which grew under my own hands! What has the future in store for me, if stones of my own age are already crumbling? I was angry, and I embraced the first opportunity to vent my spleen in the bailiff's presence. "It is clear," I cried, "that these plane-trees are neglected; they have no leaves. Their branches are so gnarled and shrivelled; the boles are so rough and unkempt! This would not happen, if someone loosened the earth at their feet, and watered them." The bailiff swore by my protecting deity that "he was doing everything possible, and never relaxed his efforts, but those trees were old." Between you and me, I had planted those trees myself, I had seen them in their first leaf.

Then I turned to the door and asked: "Who is that broken-down dotard? You have done well to place him at the entrance; for he is outward bound. Where did you get him? What pleasure did it give you to take up for burial some other man's dead? But the slave said: "Don't you know me, sir? I am Felicio; you used to bring me little images. My father was Philositus the steward, and I am your pet slave." "The man is clean crazy," I remarked. "Has my pet slave become a little boy again? But it is quite possible; his teeth are just dropping out." (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Letters to Lucilius 12)

Seneca; probably contemporary

He returns to the physical impairments of age in another letter:

Nevertheless, I offer thanks to myself, with you as witness; for I feel that age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution. Only my vices, and the outward aids to these vices, have reached senility; my mind is strong and rejoices that it has but slight connexion with the body. It has laid aside the greater part of its load. It is alert; it takes issue with me on the subject of old age; it declares that old age is its time of bloom. (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Letters to Lucilius 26)

Seneca died at his own hand aged 68, at the instigation of Nero. It is quite likely that he would have lived in to greater old age without that impetus. Again, this is philosophy to console someone in old age.

Plutarch

Similar sentiments can be read in one of Plutarch’s Moralia essays:

For granted that nature seeks in every way pleasure and enjoyment, old men are physically incapacitated for all pleasures except a few necessary ones, and not only as Euripides says, but their appetites also for food and drink are for the most part blunted and toothless, so that they can, if I may say so, hardly whet and sharpen them. They ought to prepare for themselves pleasures in the mind, not ignoble and illiberal ones like that of Simonides, who said to those who reproached him for his avarice that, since old age had deprived him of all other pleasures, he was comforting his declining years with the only one left, the pleasure of gain. (Plutarch ‘Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs’ 5).

This is of course an entirely aristocratic view, and of the 100 million souls in the Roman Empire, only a couple of thousand ever had the wealth to contemplate the merits of old age. Most were working till they dropped.

How many people in the empire had read the works of Cicero, Seneca or Plutarch?  Probably very few indeed. It would be generous to say one per cent; only a tiny number had the leisure time (otium) to do so. Probably a larger number had read the Sayings of Publius Syrus, a popular work because it comprised simple maxims written or compiled by a first century BC Syrian author, known and admired by Julius Caesar. Here’s a selection:

1. As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

55. He has existed only, not lived, who lacks wisdom in old age

68. What greater evil could you wish a miser than long life?

105. A death that ends the ills of life is a blessing.

158. He who longs for death confesses that life is a failure.

324. Man’s life is a loan, not a gift.

566. There is no more shameful sight than an old man commending life.

1087. Man’s life is short and therefore an honourable death is his immortality.

Publius Syrus

There are maxims ranging from the profound to the frankly bizarre, and while they offer cracker barrel philosophy, they were more likely to be known to ordinary people than ever the works of the greats.

This is also a male view. The worth of women dropped once they had passed childbearing age. The wergilds of Dark Age women reflected that, so it may be the case that they were following common imperial practice. The life course of women is better the subject of its own blog piece.

Turn Left to Triumph: The Meta Sudans of Rome

The Meta Sudans is one of the oddest monuments in the city of Rome. I’ll bet most have never heard of it. It’s hard to think what purpose it served. The word /meta/ can mean finishing-point, goalpost, turning point and similar terms. It’s connected with the Greek word ‘meta’ (μετά) where it has the sense of being the end-point of something. But the Greek is a bound morpheme, usually used as prefix, where the Latin is a simple noun. There is some indication that the Etruscans had metae before the Romans, and, as they had an orientalising culture, the connotation of the word may have shifted somewhat, from abstract to concrete.

The Meta Sudans – the sweating cone – stood in Region IV ‘Templum Pacis’, the Temple of Peace. This was a mixture of monumental architecture and down-at -heel housing. It included the ancient Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Subura, one of those areas referred to today as ‘bustling and colourful’ when they mean ‘dangerous’. The district also included the Colossal Statue, but not the  Flavian Amphitheatre (amphitheatrum qui capit loca LXXXVII), which is in Region III ‘Isis et Serapis’, so the boundary of the two regions of the city must have been between the two locations. Quite probably the Meta Sudans was used as a boundary stone.

Topper and Ashby’s Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929) suggests it was the common marker for Regions I, (Porta Capena) II, (Caelemontium) III, IV and X (Palatium). There are many places in England where several counties conjoin, and there are ten ‘three shire stones’, so it may have served a similar function. Indeed, it may have served a number of functions; we can imagine the senior vicomagister of each city district affected by a Triumph meeting here to plan the events. There may have been other metae in Rome, for it to need an adjective to determine it.

We can see it newly built in a coin of Titus (r. AD79-81), just to the left of the Flavian Amphitheatre (the Colosseum to you and me).  On the coin, it is spurting water rather than sweating or oozing it. By AD354, when the Chronographer itemised the things to be seen in Rome, it certainly had the name (metam sudantem, in the Accusative case).

Sestertius of Titus, showing the Meta Sudans, left

The term ‘meta sudans’ existed before it was built under the Flavians, since as Bill Thayer points out in his as always first rate Lacus Curtius site, it’s referred to in a letter from Seneca to his friend Luculius (aut hunc qui ad Metam Sudantem tubulas experitur et tibias, nec cantat sed exclamat; Seneca Epistulae Morales 4.56) with regard to one at Baiae. This does not mean that the one in Rome was created with that name, as it might have inherited it when it changed to a slighter flow later in antiquity.

There not being such a monument during the life of Seneca (and thus of Nero), yet it was already functioning during the brief reign of Titus, suggests that it was constructed during the decade of Vespasian’s reign. Perhaps it can be related to the Domus Aurea of Nero, which included an artificial lake, created by the engineers Celer and Severus to create a delightful rus in urbe; we could not rule out a purely functional purpose, to regulate hydraulic pressure for Nero’s lake. As that was rapidly dismantled, perhaps the Meta Sudans as we had it until 1936 was prettified and made to be part of a monumental assemblage, because it could not be removed without flooding the area.

The Cloaca Maxima in 1814, oil painting by CW Eckersberg

We can see from nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs than there wasn’t much left. The coin of Titus suggests a high-pressure flow, which did not exist in later centuries, and which was heavily reduced in antiquity. One possibility was that it was used as a safety valve for the water flows from the nearby hills; with heavy rains and rising groundwater flowing off, it could be opened to produce the column of water seen on the coin.

Colourised (perhaps hand-tinted) scene in 1890; maybe a postcard

Victorian photograph of a distant Meta Sudans by the Arch of Titus

Meta Sudans seen through the 250 years later Arch of Constantine

Any large city depends utterly on water flowing, and this was as true for Rome as it was for Los Angeles in the film Chinatown. Rulers, to be seen as benefactors, will want to mark their munificence by a flow of water beyond the level of need. It may have been intended primarily to impress people, in the manner of the Emperor Fountain at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. This was created by constructing a lake in the Peaks seen behind the house, generating enough water pressure for the fountain to reach nearly 300 feet on demand.

Emperor Fountain (1844) with the South Face of Chatsworth House, the Derbshire home of the Cavendish family, Dukes of Devonshire

The valley in which the Meta Sudans is (or was) located was the original thoroughfare of Rome, the via sacra. The various communities which made up early Rome used that road for processions, notably for funerals; Polybius comments on how important those were. By the time the Meta Sudans was built, processions along the via sacra would have passed underneath the Arch of Titus and then turned left past the Colossus (which the Chronographer notes as ’The colossal statue, 102 feet high. On its head are 7 rays each 22 feet long’.  This was a crowded, low-lying poor area area, which in AD354 had 2,757 insulae and only 88 houses. The water pressure had to process 75 bath houses, 78 cisterns and the Baths of Daphne; the latter may be associated with the statue of Apollo (Apollinem sandaliarum) in that district; Daphne was a water nymph pursued by Apollo, and is one of the first myths Ovid recites in his Metamorphoses.

Computer Reconstruction of the Meta Sudans (see the coin of Titus)

Sadly, the Meta Sudans was demolished at the orders of Mussolini in 1936; by then, as can be seen in these illustrations, it had collapsed into a small stump. There is no sign then of cultural protests like those against ISIS for attacking Palmyra today.