Histories of the Unexpected: The Romans

Sam Willis, James Daybell

• Verlag: Atlantic Books
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786497741
• Thema: History
• Thema: Roman Ancient History

Histories of the Unexpected not only presents a new way of thinking about the past, but also reveals the world around us as never before.Traditionally, the Romans have been understood in a straightforward way but the period really comes alive if you take an unexpected approach to its history. Yes, emperors, the development of civilisation and armies all have a fascinating history... but so too do tattoos, collecting, fattening, recycling, walking, poison, fish, inkwells and wicked stepmothers!Each of these subjects is equally fascinating in its own right, and each sheds new light on the traditional subjects and themes that we think we know so well.

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WALLS

Hadrian’s Wall at Walltown Crags

Walls are all about Roman subversion...

ROMAN WALLS

Walls were primarily built for protection and privacy – to keep people both in and out. Think here of the massive walls built to surround Rome as a front-line defence during the reign of Aurelian (emperor from 270 to 275 CE) or Hadrian’s Wall in the north of Roman Britain, built in the 120s to keep out the Picts.

In buildings, walls were key architectural features for the support of floors or roofs above, but they also delineated space within, and separated the inside world from what was quite literally ‘beyond’ its walls. Traditionally, then, walls can be viewed as authoritarian structures that sought to order and control, but this was not always the case, and in the Roman world walls and edifices of stone could be used for subversive acts – they were public spaces that could be conscripted for illicit ends.

The physical features of walls themselves – portals, windows, doorways and gates – all offered opportunities for clandestine meetings, while the shadows of high walls allowed people to go unseen. It was in shady corners such as those cast by walls that Seneca (c.4 BCE–65 CE) felt secret acts were to be found: ‘pleasure you will most often find lurking around the baths and sweating rooms, and places that fear the police, in search of darkness, soft, effete, reeking of wine and perfume, pallid or else painted and made up with cosmetics like a corpse’.

CLANDESTINE LOVE

It is in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, however, that the true subversive potential of walls becomes apparent, in his telling of the story of the star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. In the story, the tragic pair live in adjacent houses in the city of Babylon. They share a wall but are forbidden to marry by their respective families, who are at war with one another. The story has had many retellings, perhaps most famously in the play-within-a-play in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it is with Ovid that the key features of the tale were made available to the Latin-speaking world. The couple are introduced as:

A fresco depicting Pyramus and Thisbe, Pompeii, before 79 CE

the one the most beauteous of youths, the other preferred before all the damsels that the East contained, lived in adjoining houses; where Semiramis [the legendary queen of Babylon] is said to have surrounded her lofty city with walls of brick. The nearness caused their first acquaintance, and their first advances in love; with time their affection increased. They would have united themselves, too, by the tie of marriage, but their fathers forbade it. A thing which they could not forbid, they were both inflamed, with minds equally captivated. There is no one acquainted with it; by nods and signs, they hold converse. And the more the fire is smothered, the more, when so smothered, does it burn.

Separated by a wall, they are still able to communicate through a chink in its structure:

The party-wall, common to the two houses, was cleft by a small chink, which it had got formerly, when it was built. This defect, remarked by no one for so many ages, you lovers (what does not love perceive?) first found one, and you made it a passage for your voices, and the accents of love used to pass through it in safety, with the gentlest murmur. Oftentimes, after they had taken their stations, Thisbe on one side, and Pyramus on the other, and the breath of their mouths had been mutually caught by turns, they used to say, ‘Envious wall, why dost thou stand in the way of lovers? What great matter were it, for thee to suffer us to be joined with our entire bodies? Or if that is too much, that, at least, thou shouldst open, for the exchange of kisses. Nor are we ungrateful; we confess that we are indebted to thee, that a passage has been given for our words to our loving ears.’ Having said this much, in vain, on their respective sides, about night they said, ‘Farewell’; and gave those kisses each on their own side, which did not reach the other side.

This wall, then, far from keeping the pair apart, becomes a means of bringing them together, and provides a way in which they can communicate, court each other and fall helplessly in love. Through the chink in the wall they arrange a tryst, which goes terribly wrong, and ends with the pair tragically committing suicide: Pyramus mistakenly thinking his beloved to be dead takes his own life by falling on his sword, while Thisbe enters a short period of mourning only to end her own existence by stabbing herself with the very same sword that mortally wounded Pyramus.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

A masterpiece from antiquity. An epic poem consisting of fifteen books completed c.8 CE. The poem consists of around 250 separate myths from the Greek and Roman worlds, each linked by the theme of metamorphosis. It includes stories of men and women changing into various things – including trees, animals and stones – and becoming alien to themselves. Entertaining and charming even to modern audiences, it was written by a man who – seemingly correctly – predicted that his fame would live forever.

THE WRITING’S ON THE WALL

Walls were used in other subversive ways, disconnected from the primary function intended by those who first built them. Throughout history, walls have been surfaces for forms of written or illustrated expression, and the same was true throughout the Roman world, as stone surfaces were scratched, chipped and chiselled with graffiti. Pompeii alone has more than 11,000 examples of graffiti, one of which includes the delightful epigram ‘I’m amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers’. This example speaks to the myriad of people who used walls as sites of communication for a whole range of things: eroticism, political dissent, childish play, and messages to family and community.

Different groups – ordinary as well as elite – wrote on walls things with a range of subversive meanings, and it is here that we capture the everyday world of ordinary people living throughout the Roman empire. Graffiti was not simply to be written and then read – there is strong evidence of dialogue between people, usually in the form of an exchange of insults or jests, as in the following inscriptions recorded on the walls of Pompeii. The first reads (loosely translated):

Successus the weaver is in love with the slave of the Innkeeper, whose name is Iris. She doesn’t care about him at all, but he asks that she take pity on him.

A rival wrote this. See ya.

What appears to be a riposte to this verse translates as:

You’re so jealous you’re bursting. Don’t tear down someone more handsome—

a guy who could beat you up and who is darn good-looking.

Yet another riposte is then found on the other side of the door, in which the initial graffiti writer gives his name. It reads:

I said it. I wrote it. You love Iris,

who doesn’t care about you.

To Successus, see above.

Severus.

Clearly this was not the intended purpose of the wall when it was first put up, but through this jocular repartee we are almost able to capture the essence of the Roman conversation – a powerful reminder that walls were used for interactions between everyday citizens, rather than just the elites who wanted to contain them.

PROSTITUTION AND EROTIC WALLS

The subversive markings on walls were often of an erotic or overtly sexualized nature. A Cumbrian quarry first discovered in the eighteenth century and re-excavated in the early 1960s has turned up a range of interesting graffiti, which was made by the team drafted in to make repairs to Hadrian’s Wall in around 207 CE. Stone cut from the quarry was used to patch parts of the wall that had fallen into disrepair, and inscriptions by the men who worked there survived, visible to this day. Alongside various inscriptions of officialdom, connected with the third-century campaign to strengthen the border fortifications on the frontiers of the Roman empire, is carved a phallus, which is an erotic symbol of male virility but also a good-luck sign found everywhere across the Roman empire as a way of warding off the evil eye.

One of the most obvious sites for erotic imagery and graffiti, of course, was the brothel. The names and prices of prostitutes were written over the doors of their dwellings, and the remarkable remains of the Lupanar of Pompeii give us a glimpse of the Roman erotic world through the markings and art on its walls. It contains scores of paintings and almost 150 inscriptions, many of an explicit nature – including one that reads simply, and rather proudly, ‘I fucked here’. The paintings depict men and women in various sexual positions, one of which features a man encumbered by two large erect phalluses.

It is not uncommon to find the names of male clients and their activities etched into the walls as well: ‘Florus’, ‘Felix went with Fortunata’ and ‘Posphorus fucked here’; and one particular individual who describes himself as an ‘ointment seller’, which gives us a more precise idea of the kinds of male clientele who frequented such establishments. Elsewhere, it is possible to reconstruct pricing from the graffiti left behind, with one man etching that he ‘had a good fuck... for a denarius’.

THE HOUSE OF MAIUS CASTRICIUS

It is not simply on exterior walls on public streets or in brothels that we find graffiti, however; it also features on the inside walls of domestic dwellings, which were similarly used as sites for self-expression and subversion. An excellent example is the house of the elite Maius Castricius – a Pompeiian site that was excavated in the 1960s. Archaeologists discovered that this four-storey home, which would have overlooked the Bay of Naples, featured some eighty-five graffiti, which were cut into the stucco remains of the walls, around frescoes, in the stairwell, and elsewhere around the home. What emerges from analysis of the various writings and images is the eclectic range of people who seized the building’s walls as a site of social engagement and conversation, many of which challenged the formality of the building.

The graffiti depict a riot of interaction that is funny and sociable, while at the same time subversive. Poetic fragments and greetings sit side by side with other graffiti; frescoes alongside rough d...