Scribal Terror

The latrines of the rich and famous, and the pisspots of the poor

 

From from Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino.

The Roman jorica was public in the full sense of the term, like soldiers' latrines in war time. People met there, conversed, and exchanged invitations to dinner without embarrassment.  And at the same time, it was equipped with superfluities which we forego and decorated with a lavishness we are not wont to spend on such a spot. All round the semicircle or rectangle which it formed, water flowed continuously in little channels, in front of which a score or so of seats were fixed. The seats were of marble, and the opening was framed by sculptured brackets in the form of dolphins, which served both as a support and as a line of demarcation. Above the seats it was not unusual to see niches containing statues of gods or heroes, as on the Palatine, or an altar to Fortune, the goddess of health and happiness, as in Ostia;  and not infrequently the room was cheered by the gay sound of a playing fountain as at Timgad. . . .  [Yet in]Rome . . . even the latrines of the imperial palace, as majestic and ornate as a sanctuary beneath its dome, contained three seats side by side . . . .

The public latrines were not the resort of misers or of the very poor. These folk had no mind to enrich the conductores joricarum to the tune of even one as. They preferred to have recourse to the jars, skilfully chipped down for the purpose, which the fuller at the corner ranged in front of his workshop. He purchased permission for this from Vespasian, in consideration of a tax to which no odour clung, so as to secure gratis the urine necessary for his trade.  Alternatively they clattered down the stairs to empty their chamber pots (las ana) and their commodes (sellae pertusae) into the vat or dolium placed under the well of the staircase. Or if perhaps this expedient had been forbidden by the landlord of their insula, they betook themselves to some neighbouring dungheap. For in Rome of the Caesars . . . more than one alley stank with the pestilential odour of a cess trench (lacus) such as those which Cato the Elder during his censorship paved over when he cleaned the cloacae and led them under the Aventine. Such malodorous trenches were extant in the days of Cicero and Caesar; Lucretius mentions them in his poem, De rerum natura. . . .

There were other poor devils who found their stairs too steep and the road to these dung pits too long, and to save themselves further trouble would empty the contents of their chamber pots from their heights into the streets. So much the worse for the passer-by who happened to intercept the unwelcome gift! Fouled and sometimes even injured, as in Juvenal's satire,  he had no redress save to lodge a complaint against the unknown assailant; . . . Roman jurists did not disdain to take cognisance of this offence, to refer the case to the judges, to track down the offender, and assess the damages payable to the victim. . . .

When in consequence of the fall of one of these projectiles from a house, the body of a free man shall have suffered injury, the judge shall award to the victim in addition to medical fees and other expenses incurred in his treatment and necessary to his recovery, the total of the wages of which he has been or shall in future be deprived by the inability to work which has ensued.

 

Life in the big city

By day there reigned intense animation, a breathless jostle, an infernal din.  The tabernae were crowded as soon as they opened and spread their displays into the street. Here barbers shaved their customers in the middle of the fairway. There the hawkers from Transtiberina passed along, bartering their packets of sulphur matches for glass trinkets. Elsewhere, the owner of a cook-shop, hoarse with calling to deaf ears, displayed his sausages piping hot in their saucepan. Schoolmasters and their pupils shouted themselves hoarse in the open air. On the one hand, a money-changer rang his coins with the image of Nero on a dirty table, on another a beater of gold dust pounded with his shining mallet on his well-worn stone. At the cross-roads a circle of idlers gaped round a viper tamer; everywhere tinkers' hammers resounded and the quavering voices of beggars invoked the name of Bellona or rehearsed their adventures and misfortunes to touch the hearts of the passers-by. The flow of pedestrians was unceasing and the obstacles to their progress did not prevent the stream soon becoming a torrent. In sun or shade a whole world of people came and went, shouted, squeezed, and thrust through narrow lanes unworthy of a country village . . . -- from Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino

Watch the green dot

The one that isn't there.

Bathies

Via Arbroath

PJ O'Rourke on being diagnosed with a highly treatable cancer

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? -- From "Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death"

The door is open . . .

Come on in and talk.  Or drop off one of your random bursts of verbal energy -- poem, limerick, story, top ten list, clerihew, essay, alliterative poem, rant, Surrealist or or Dadaist poem, parody, cento, dirty joke, amusing  syllepsis, haiku, dirty haiku . . . to share.   

Ghost story

There was at Athens a large and roomy house, which had a bad name, so that no one could live there. In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains, distant at first, but approaching nearer by degrees: immediately afterwards a spectre appeared in the form of an old man, of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and dishevelled, hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands. The distressed occupants meanwhile passed their wakeful nights under the most dreadful terrors imaginable. This, as it broke their rest, ruined their health, and brought on distempers, their terror grew upon them, and death ensued. Even in the daytime, though the spirit did not appear, yet the impression remained so strong upon their imaginations that it still seemed before their eyes, and kept them in perpetual alarm. Consequently the house was at length deserted, as being deemed absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some tenant might be found who was ignorant of this very alarming circumstance, a bill was put up,   giving notice that it was either to be let or sold.  Athenodorus,  the philosopher, came to Athens at this time, and, reading the bill, enquired the price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heard the whole story, he was so far from being discouraged, that he was more strongly inclined to hire it, and, in short, actually did so. When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the forepart of the house, and after calling for a light, together with his pen and tablets, he directed all his people to retire within. But that his mind might not, for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises and apparitions, he applied himself to writing with all his faculties. The first part of the night passed with usual silence, then began the clanking of iron fetters; however, he neither lifted up his eyes, nor laid down his pen, but closed his ears by concentrating his attention. The noise increased and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked round and saw the apparition and recognized the ghost exactly as it had been described to him: it stood before him, beckoning with the finger, like a person who calls another. Athenodorus in reply made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers; the ghost then rattled its chains over the head of the philosopher, who looked up upon this, and seeing it beckoning as before, immediately arose, and, light in hand, followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along, as if encumbered with its chains, and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made a mark with some grass and leaves on the spot where the spirit left him. The next day he gave information to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was found there; for the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the fetters. The bones, being collected together, were publicly buried, and thus after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted no more.--Pliny the Younger, in a letter to Sura, written around 100 A.D. (Supplemented by the edition at VROMA.)

Pliny the Younger says, "I told you so"

Amazing. Pliny the Younger said Vesuvius erupted on August 24,  79 AD, and rotten fish entrails prove he was correct.

Remains of rotten fish entrails have helped establish the precise dating of Pompeii's destruction , according to Italian researchers who have analyzed the town's last batch of garum, a pungent, fish-based seasoning.

Frozen in time by the catastrophic eruption that covered Pompeii and nearby towns nearly 2,000 years ago with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the desiccated remains were found at the bottom of seven jars.

The find revealed that the last Pompeian garum was made entirely with bogues (known as boops boops), a Mediterranean fish species that abounded in the area in the summer months of July and early August.

"Analysis of their contents basically confirmed that Mount Vesuvius most likely erupted on 24 August 79 A.D., as reported by the Roman historian Pliny the Younger in his account on the eruption," Annamaria Ciarallo, director of Pompeii's Applied Research Laboratory told Discovery News.

Hand in hand

The dancers are Ma Li and Zhai Xiaowei, choreography by Zhao Limin.