The Emperor's Right Hand: The Urban Prefect of Rome

 Much attention is given to emperors, obviously, but after the changes made by Diocletian, the emperor became a distant figure and Rome ceased to be the imperial seat. If in Italy, the emperor lived mainly in Milan and Paris, Trier and Vienne were more likely to be imperial seats than ever Rome was, even if it remained the biggest city in Europe. It has been noted that Constantius II, emperor since AD337, did not enter Rome until AD356, following his defeat of Magnentius. Ammianus has a detailed description of the parades that greeted him there (Ammianus XVI, 10).

Once the emperor had left the city, the day to day administration was left to the Urban Prefect (praefectus urbis), an official who might claim the position more on his honour than on proven ability. Someone clearly thought that having writers like Quintus Symmachus (384-5), Sextus Aurelius Victor (389), Rutilius Namantianus (414) and Sidonius Apollinaris (468-9) do the job was a good idea, although Symmachus was involved in the controversial decision to remove the altar of victory; as a pagan, he was against it.

The Urban Prefect seems to have been subject to the Praetorian Prefect of Italy, who was in effect Prime Minister of the core of the Roman Empire. All Urban Prefects seem to have taken the honorific praenomen ‘Flavius’. There was no fixed term of office as there was for many such posts, such as Consul, which always ran from 1 January. We have many instances of new Urban Prefects taking on the role part way through a year, with others even returning to office for a short time as a sort of suffect prefect.  Two Urban Prefects also held the Praetorian Prefecture of Italy at the same time; as these two (Ulpius Limenius [AD347-9) and Hermogenes [AD349-51] followed one another, this may reflect the complex politics of the reigns of Constantius II and Magnentius, to ensure that Italy and Rome spoke with the same voice.

To take an example: Afranius Syagrius, a gallo-roman noble from Lyon. He was a notarius in AD369, but was sacked by Valentinian for incompetence; however he was brought back into favour under Gratian due to his friendship with Ausonius and made magister memoriae, then proconsul of Africa. In AD380 he became Pretorian Prefect of Italy, and simultaneously Urban Prefect and finally Consul for AD382. He was certainly collecting the full set of honours. We can’t trace him after that, and is is feasible that he was caught up in the rebellion of Magnus Maximus and killed. He may have been an ancestor of the Roman commander of the enclave of Soissons after the collapse of Gaul in the late fifth century. There is nothing to suggest that Afranius Syagrius was a Christian.

A certain Tanaucius Isfalangius held the role soon after and for two or three years (373-5). He certainly doesn’t sound very much like a standard Roman. Our only record of his is in re-erecting a status, of what we don’t know. He might even have been an Arab or other near-easterner, or maybe he was an Isaurian, like Tarasicodissa, later the Emperor Zeno.

The role of Urban Prefect was held by Christians in the fourth century, notably by Junius Bassus, who held the Prefecture for a few months in AD359. He clearly was Christian as his sarcophagus (see below), carved elaborately with Christian iconography (including a beardless Christ) can be seen to this day in the Vatican Museum. It’s extremely likely that Christians dominated the role after a while; Boethius held the position in AD486 just before he was made consul, something which is attested earlier, suggesting successfully holding the urban prefecture was a step towards the consulate.

Christian Sarcophagus of the Urban Prefect Bassus, 4th Century AD (Vatican Museum)

We do know something about Memmius Vetrasius Orfitius, who served two terms (December 353 to July 355 and January 357 to March 359, replaced by Bassus). Ammianus Marcellinus says of him:

Meanwhile Orfitus was governing the eternal city with the rank of Prefect, and with an arrogance beyond the limit of the power that had been conferred upon him. He was a man of wisdom, it is true, and highly skilled in legal practice, but less equipped with the adornment of the liberal arts than became a man of noble rank. During his term of office serious riots broke out because of the scarcity of wine; for the people, eager for an unrestrained use of this commodity, are roused to frequent and violent disturbances. (Ammianus XIV, 6.1). The Urban Prefect was in charge of Rome’s wine tax, according to the Notitia Dignitatum (see below), so there may have been a black market going on.

  

No urban prefect ever became emperor, but Priscus Attalus, the puppet who Alaric ‘made’ emperor at odd times when he felt like it, had been Urban Prefect in AD409.

The most powerful holder of the Urban Prefect role was however Gordianus Gregorius (born AD540), who became Urban Prefect in 573, then entered the Church and rose rapidly through being part of the papal delegation to the emperor in Constantinople to become Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ in AD590, dying in 604.

Tomb of Gregory the Great

We do know quite a bit about the tenure of Sidonius as Urban Prefect (AD468-9), because he refers to it in letters and poems. He came to the new emperor Procopius Anthemius and composed a panegyric to him on his consulate (he had previously praised Avitus and Majorian); the emperor made him a patrician, a senator, caput senati and praefectus urbis. Quite a haul for one smarmy poem (I’ve read it). Sidonius was able to use his close contacts with the emperor to get him to commute the death penalty for treason of Arvandus, pretorian prefect of Gaul, a position held by Sidonius’ grandfather and father, as well as his father-in-law Avitus. Arvandus had allied himself with Euric, the Visigothic leader, against Rome. That caused Sidonius to resign the prefecture rather than be sucked into its complex politics.

The Urban Prefect seems to have had the Roman police force (cohortes urbis) under his command, and as there were only three cities in the empire with police forces – Rome, Carthage and Lyon – this must have been a considerable responsibility; given the short tenure of the prefects, and their erratic terms of office, the police would have had to have been professionally led. So would the vigiles, who were a mix of nightwatchmen and fire brigade.

The Notitia Dignitatum lists the following as being under the Urban Prefect:

The prefect of the grain supply,

The prefect of the watch,

The count of the aqueducts,

The count of the banks and bed of the Tiber, and of the sewers,

The count of the port,

The master of the census,

The collector of the wine-tax,

The tribune of the swine-market,

The consular of the water-supply,

The curator of the chief works,

The curator of public works,

The curator of statues,

The curator of the Galban granaries,

The centenarian of the port,

The tribune of art works

The staff of the illustrious prefect of the city:

A chief of staff,

A chief deputy,

A chief assistant,

A custodian,

A keeper of the records,

Receivers of taxes,

A chief clerk (or receiver),

Assistants,

A curator of correspondence,

A registrar,

Secretaries,

Aids,

Clerks of the census,

Ushers,

Notaries

Obviously it’s hard to work out exactly what the gradations of rank and thus authority are, or what the boundaries of given domains may be. Some titles may have been traditional or set in a law otherwise half-forgotten. What the difference is between the Prefect of the Grain Supply and the curator of the Galban Granaries, I have no idea, since the horrea Galbana were brought into public ownership by Nero as revenge against Galba’s uprising (Rickman, G.E. (1971) Roman Granaries and Store Buildings, Cambridge: CUP). Possibly the grain in them was different (barley, not wheat, for instance), or had different owners; some grain was paid in tax, and some belonged to the Emperor and could be stored separately and accounted for in a different way, being used for imperial largesse, the grain dole (annona) being an obvious candidate.

Grain was not the only resource based there. An inscription refers to Aurelia Nais, pisciatrix (fishmonger) at the Galban Warehouse (CIL 6.9801), while another refers to C. Tullius Crescens, marble merchant at the same place (CIL 6.33886). Aurelia may have been an African, since that was a frequent name there while Crescens may have been descended from a freedman of Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero). These do not seem to be high-ranking operatives.

However, the Notitia clearly indicates that the Urban Prefect was (technically) responsible for all matters to do with foodstuffs, the river and port, and the beautification of the city. This brings us to the fourteen districts of Rome and the minor officials who ran them.

Each of the fourteen districts (vici) of Rome had a council of sorts, comprising 48 ‘district masters’ (vicomagistri) in each. It’s not clear exactly what a vicomagister did or how he was selected. It’s easy to see each district as a bit like a Parisian arrondisment with a council and a mayor, elected from notable citizens of the district and with a clear level of local authority within its bounds, perhaps with a sense of civic pride and responsibility. It would be easy, of course, but we have no idea if it resembles the truth.

The fact that each of the fourteen districts had the same number of vicomagistri irrespective of size, population and what lay within its vicus tended to make me think the role was set out with no actual authority. If we make a comparison with the decuriones found in provincial cities across the empire, these were not positions which people sought, but to which they were assigned by virtue of their wealth and local status.

The provincial decurion was the sort of man who would have been a chieftain in earlier times, largely from inherited status. He was obliged to be on the local curia and if he did not, he could be compelled to attend. Exemption could be made for great age, current military service away from the area and such things, but the tax assessment made by the staff of the provincial governor had to be met by the decurions collectively, and they in turn were loaned the money by the publicanus in order to meet their obligation, and he in turn was given his head to extort the sum plus his staff wages and profit margin from the citizens. Decurions had the idea of joining the Church in the late empire, so they are particularly forbidden to take holy orders as a means to avoid their decurial obligations.

So were the vicomagistri in that situation? Nicholas Purcell in the Oxford Classical Dictionary gives their responsibilities as largely reactive, meeting at a crossroads (compitum), running local rites to lares and presumingly praising the emperor and running games (ludi compitalicii) in honour of the lares at set times. There is a frieze showing people carrying a lar in their hand found of a base of altar and now in the Lateran Museum. Here's view of that.

Vicomagistri carrying lares in procession

Purcell considers them to have constituted a local council, able to own property, run the vigiles in their district (mentioned in Cassius Dio) and so on; as there were seven cohorts of fire fighters with 500 men assigned to each, each cohort covered two districts, at least in theory (somehow the district with the imperial palace and great houses probably had at least one cohort of its own, while poorer neighbourhoods had to share one) .  They seems to have some authority over staff through supervisors (hepimeloton in Dio).

We have some indication as to when they took office (1 August) but none as to how they were picked, under what obligation they operated or how long they lasted. In their processions they were appointed two lictors. The Description of Rome in the Chronicle of AD354 refers to them at full strength, but the Christian terror implemented by Valentianian and Valens will have removed the pagan vestiges; indeed Theodosius in AD394 banned everyone but Christians from holding any public office.

Between the upper level of the praefectus urbis and the lower level vicomagistri seems to have been a selection of aediles, tribunes and praetors, their names drawn from the republican cursus honorum, but their functions quite mundane; Vespasian had been a district aedile and was accused by Gaius of failing to keep the streets clean (Suetonius Vespasian 5.3). Some firefighters were slaves of the local aedile, supervised on his behalf by the vicomagistri.

The Urban Prefect’s role predated the empire and outlived it, continuing under the kings and last mentioned in AD879 under later Carolingian rule; the pope may have taken on the civic responsibilities at some point. We know Alfred the Great visited Rome twice as a child with his father; the Urban Prefect was still going strong then.

There does not seem to have been much work done with regard to the Praetorian Prefects or vicarii in the Prefecture of Italy. Then there are ‘castellans’ an innovation of the later fourth century; a ‘castellan of the sacred palaces’ for the eastern and western provinces.  That will be for a later posting, I suspect.

Moving Through the City

In the city

There’s a thousand things I wanna say to you

(Paul Weller, The Jam, ‘In the City’, 1977, Polydor Records)

Don’t step on the lines or the bears will get you

(Often said to children walking in cities cf. ‘Lines and Squares’ by AA Milne, When We Were Very Young, 1924)

Rome was a very outdoor city, still is, as you can tell when trying to find somewhere outdoors to eat late on a summer evening. Cities are places of opportunities (as Weller tells us) or of dangers (as the warning to children suggests; in Milne’s poem, bears hang around street corners waiting to pounce; we might read an early suggestion of ‘stranger danger’ there). But then again, as Aristotle commented with regard to Athens, those who live outside the city are either Gods or Monsters.

Christianity in the Roman rite is often performed outdoors with parades, autos da fe, presentations of saints’ images, through to pilgrimages to cult centres.

But Rome itself was always like that and what we see performed today in Christian culture derives from that, not only in Rome but throughout the Roman world. I am indebted to the excellent chapter (Power Walks: Aristocratic Escorted Movements in Republican Rome) by Ida Östenberg in The Moving City, eds Östenberg et a;, London Bloomsbury, 2015.

Processions were always a political tool, witness the progress of the republican Consul through the city preceded by lictors and heralds. Below see a coin of Brutus, showing his reputed ancestor L Junius Brutus, the first ever consul of the republic. 

Coin of Brutus, showing procession with lictors and accensus

The consul is shown third from left with two of his lictors fore and aft and an accensus (herald) clearing the way.  We cannot tell if these were meant to be the same lictors who returned the bodies of his sons in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of 1789, a year in which a lot of movement ran through Paris.

The Lictors Return to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons by Jacques-Louis David, 1789

Under the Republic, candidates for office were expected to walk through the city meeting and greeting voters. This was sometimes a disagreeable event for Roman aristocrats, famously C Marcius Coriolanus, who today we see largely through Shakespeare’s dramatic version of Plutarch’s life. It was a commonplace of candidates for office to process to the Roman Forum with an entourage of supporters and there to meet voters and canvass their votes. By the first century BC, there were over 900,000 people eligible to vote and we have a reference to it taking over five hours to conduct the voting for consul.

On reaching majority, a Roman boy would celebrate his toga day and process with his father and entourage from the family home to the Forum. The family also took part once, sometimes twice, a year as part of the Compitalia to honour the lares and penates, household gods; the drawing below shows a procession carrying a lar, held aloft by a young woman.

Young woman carrying a Lar in procession; Lateran Museum

We know quite a lot about Roman funerals of the leading citizens from Polybius (book 6). The surviving family of recently dead member would assemble at the family home, where death masks in wax, depicting famous ancestors, were kept in the atrium. Members of the family would wear these and process through the streets carrying the bier of the deceased to the family tomb site.

Many of the religious rituals of the classical era involved movement through the streets of Rome. Among the most famous was the twice yearly procession of the Salii, the jumping priests of Mars, who paraded in bronze armour, chanting doggerel so obscure that neither Ovid nor Cicero could understand it. Surviving Fasti indicate which days were permitted for trade (fasti), which were not (nefasti) and so on. As processions, which in later times might involve emperors and would certainly have involved the great and the good, heads covered and in certain religious robes. Nothing was allowed to delay or damage the ritual or else the ceremony had to be repeated on a new, auspicious day. Animals to be slaughtered would have to be selected from markets and taken to the temple in question.

Roman triumphs, originally celebrated for successful generals (imperatores) but in imperials times by the emperor, took the form of massive processions through the streets, the most famous being those of Julius Caesar, who marked a triple triumph in as many days. Domitian was infamous, according to Suetonius, for celebrating not only triumphs in which he had played no part, but those to mark battles which had not happened.  As well as the triumph, lesser celebrations such as the ovatio, involved the successful general walking through the streets in a toga praetextata as part of a major entourage of supporters. Aulus Plautius received an ovation in Rome on completion of his conquest and term of office in Britain, and Claudius walked beside him to and from the Capitolium, as Tacitus tells us (Agricola 14).

Carriages were banned in the city on purely pragmatic grounds. The Chronography of AD354 lists in Regio I Porta Capena both public areas where carriages might be left (area carruces) and a storage place for imperial carriages (mutatorium caesaris). Litters were used for private travel within the city and Region XIII (Transtiberim, i.e. Trastevere) contained the barracks of litter bearers (castra lecticariorum). As always, there were members of the elite who managed to ignore such rulings, especially if their houses were in better areas. According to the Chronography of AD354, there were 1,790 houses, but 46,602 insulae blocks of flats.

With 256 bakers and 290 grain warehouses in the city there would have been considerable movement of cereals. As Rome came to import most of its grain from Egypt, Asia Minor and Sicily into Ostia and Portus, there would have been massive traffic upriver to the wharves at the foot of the Aventine, from which the trade proceeded into the city. Oil and wine too, as the huge mound of the Monte Testaccio testify.

Two types of live creatures would have needed to move through the city: livestock for both ritual use and human & animal consumption and slaves and captives, the former for sale and the latter for public shows and triumphs.

We might also think about the impediments to such movements. These would have been many, ranging from discarded babies to stray animals, runaway slaves to buildings placed outside of official street lines, as can be seen in cities like Antioch. In Athens, the former exercise of voting was hardly helped by the original Agora being used to house temples from across Greece. That’s one way to snuff out democracy: build in it. At Rome too, the Campus Martius, where Roman citizen armies had mustered and people voted, was built over with a memorial district in favour of the new emperor, including the Ara Pacis Augustae.

Experience of public routes in the provinces might not always be positive: the Babylonian Talmud reports a discourse among three rabbis.

R. Jehudah opened the conversation, saying: ‘How beautiful are the works of this nation [the Romans]). They have established markets, they have built bridges, they have opened bathing-houses.’ R. Jose said nothing, but R. Simeon b. Johai said: ‘All these things they have instituted for their own sake. Their markets are gathering-places for harlots; they have built baths for the purpose of indulging themselves in their comforts; they have built bridges to collect tolls from those who cross them.’ (Babylonian Talmud, p.56-7, around the time of Antoninus Pius).

This was reported to the Roman governor and Rabbi Simeon was condemned to death by the governor for this ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ statement, but went and lived in a cave for twelve years and the governor died. It does indicate that Simeon saw no advantage in a Roman bridge, but Rabbi Jedudah was rewarded. Cities have long been repacked to suit the authorities. As has been pointed out, the grands boulevards of Paris built by Baron Haussmann during the carnival empire of Napoleon III were built wide and straight to enable protestors to be fired on. Likewise Mussolini cut a wide road through the clutter of the medieval Borgo (the Burgus Anglorum where English visitors to Rome stayed in the middle ages to open up a grand vista of St Peter’s.

Christianity took over many Roman rituals and parades, such as the Lupercalia, which was transformed into the Easter Parade. Cities, including Rome itself, gradually came to bury people in and around churches and other holy sites, rather than in the mausolea outside Rome’s notional pomerium.

Take for example the rogation that Sidonius Apollinaris and the citizens of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand) performed  in AD474 to insulate the city against attack by the Visigoths; they did this because the actual city walls were so ancient and unrepaired that they had fallen down (Ep. 7.1 ‘Our only present help we find in those Rogations which you [Bishop Mamertus of Vienne] introduced’, cf. Ep. 7.8 ‘Alas! penned as I am within the narrow enclosure of half-burned and ruinous walls, with the terror of war at the gates’). Gregory of Tours recalls in the Miracles of St Martin that people prayed for the Visigoths to bypass their town and if they were lucky ‘the Goths passed by on the other side of the road’.

So when we write about the creation and definition of public space, we should always remember that public space was designed to be crossed and defined by human movement through it.

A Very Merry Unbirthday to Rome

 Today a number of tweets have been posted wishing Rome a happy birthday, on the assumption that today is the day and that 753BC is the date. Neither of those is demonstrably true, and both can be argued as false.

The year is clearly untrue, as there is no consistency in Roman sources. In fact, 753BC is the year that the Athenian republic was founded, and that year was not suggested until the time of the linguist Varro in the time of Augustus. Several other foundation years have been proposed, some as late as 728BC, proposed by Cassius Dio c.250 years after Varro.

Attempts have been made to tie the birth of Romulus, the foundation of Rome and the death of Romulus to eclipses Rather a coincidence, that.  Efforts to tie the foundation of Rome to Egyptian and Greek calendars appear to be post-hoc by many centuries, since Rome was completely unknown to both Egypt and Greece. There is no reference to Rome in Herodotus, and he knew about the Etruscans and may have performed his Historie in Sicily. There are no extant references to Rome in the Greek world before the time of Aristotle (c.340BC).

Accurate remembrance of the foundation year, assuming that to have been knowable and important to early residents, would have been hampered by total illiteracy. The first known works in the Greek alphabet date to c.750BC, so it is highly unlikely that the tiny village of Rome would have been literate almost instantaneously.

Having cast doubt on the foundation year, let’s turn to trashing the supposed date. The argument for 21 April is that all extant sources agree. Well, all extant sources agree that there was a King Arthur, but that is not generally accepted as proof.

The Roman year began on 15 March, the infamous Ides of March, which is why Caesar was murdered then. This seems to be simply the start of Spring in middle Italy, rather earlier than in more northerly climes. That does mean however that 21 April has only one significance: lambing season. I see no reason why shepherds would breaking off from their most busy season to found a new settlement. It would be ruinous to do so.

There were a number of attempts to reform the complicated lunar calendar of Rome with the solar calendar necessary to perform religious and agricultural rituals. As Rome moved from worship of Chthonic deities (festivals performed at night) to those performed in daytime, a complex series of intercary months and odd days were added, subtracted, messed around with and generally screwed up for political reasons. People then lied about the antiquity and origins of such measures, assigning them to Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the second (or perhaps third) king of Rome.

Unless a date can be confidently observed with relation of another calendar, it is in fact simply impossible to fix a date for anything before the time of the Julian calendar reform, and indeed the use of dates ab urbe condita originates from use made by Varro and Livy in those days. The problem with using a Greek cross-reference is that there were eight different Greek calendars at use at the same time. The month of Badromios was Dec/Jan in Boeotia and Sep/Oct in Delphi; the months of Athens, our best source for Greek information, bear almost no coincidence in name or start date with any other part of the Greek world.

If there is a day, I would propose 21 June, which is midsummer day; it was an easy day to remember, a pragmatic choice (good weather and a point in the agricultural cycle after the end of the livestock rearing and selling cycle and before the harvest season) and takes into account the odd fluctuations of a 13 x 28 day lunar cycle (364 nights, 365 if you count like a Roman (and like the French still do) and a 365/6 day solar year of twelve months (inherited from earlier civilisations). The vagaries of the early Roman system mean that the foundation date of Rome is in fact unknowable.

If we can believe Livy, the Roman kings had no succession. They were elected for life, and on their death an official known as the Interrex (appointed for five days only) conducted an election in which he could not be a candidate. A Popular Assembly of adult male citizens made a choice.

This does appear in other societies, and seems to have been an Iron Age norm, because the Irish High King (Airdrie) was elected by the hundreds of petty kings in a special conclave held on the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath; he too served for life.

If we examine the Latin word rex (3^rd declension) we see that it’s cognate to Gothic reiks, to Anglo-Saxon rice, to Irish ri and Hindi rajah. Less obviously it’s cognate with Greek archon. This indicates an Indo-European term, but not of course a commonality of approach.

Year	King	Years
753–717 BC	Romulus	36
716–673 BC	Numa Pompilius	43
673–642 BC	Tullus Hostilius	31
640–616 BC	Ancus Marcius	24
616–579 BC	Tarquinius Priscus	37
578–535 BC	Servius Tullius	43
535–509 BC	L. Tarquinius Superbus	26

It does seem highly unlikely that a Roman king would serve as long as 43 years, given ancient life expectancy levels. Lucius Tarquinius supposedly became king 43 years after his father’s death and to have served for 26 years, which would have made him at the very least 69 years old at the point when he lost the throne; despite this, in Livy, drawing on the Roman traditional dates, he is portrayed as a man in vigorous middle age, say forty, trying to regain his throne.

If we can for a moment consider the reigns of the British monarchs since 1837, we have the following data: Victoria (63 years), Edward VII (9), George V (26), Edward VII (less than 1), George VI (15), Elizabeth II (64 and counting). This real data shows a much greater variation.

It strikes me that later annalists possessed accession dates for seven kings and made up narratives to make them fit. After Romulus, there are six kings, three good, followed by three bad, totalling seven and Rome has seven hills. It’s all a bit too pat. Somewhere in the cracks there may lie several other, less successful kings, erased from memory in a generally illiterate society.

The alternative is that Rome is a lot younger than it has always claimed to be, and Tim Cornell of Manchester University would bring the Romulus figure forward to about 625BC. The Tullus Hostilius figure (with a unique praenomen) seems to duplicate deeds previously assigned to Romulus. That certainly would not chime with any of those eclipse dates, which seem increasingly to be spurious.

The second and fourth kings are said to have been Sabines and the final three to have been Etruscans (although Livy says Priscus was half-Greek). As Romulus had a co-king, Titus Tatius, we could well be looking at two or more parallel monarchies of Rhames (Romans), and of Sabines, succeeded by Etruscans; perhaps the two ran in parallel.

The myth of Romulus and Remus is a copy of that of Parrhasius and twin Lycaon, founders of the kingdom of Arcadia in southern Greece, whose city Parrhasia, was destroyed in the 370s BC to promote use of the new capital, Megalopolis. This was spotted in antiquity by Plutarch and discussed in Parallel Lives 36.

I suspect that virtually everything about the Roman kingdom was invented around 360BC, recycling the foundation myth of Parrhasia, newly removed, perhaps with some Arcadian refugees in Italy. If the Roman kingdom was created long after its supposed dates, then we can put no trust in its idealised methods of election.

So, a very merry unbirthday (as Disney had the Mad Hatter say to Alice, although it was Alice to Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll) to you, Rome.