by John Lloyd
According to some, he generally accompanied himself on the kithara (related to the lyre) but he also played the bagpipes.
Dio Chrysostom, a Greek writing around AD 100, noted: ‘They say that he can write, carve statues, play the aulos both with his mouth, and also with the armpit, a bag being thrown under it.’
Early in the sixth century, Procopius, a Greek historian, mentions that the bagpipes were the instrument of choice of the Roman infantry while the trumpet was used in the cavalry.
Nero also invented ice cream (runners brought mountain snow flavoured with fruit juice) and his personal poisoner Locusta was history’s first documented serial killer.
Locusta means ‘lobster’ or ‘locust’: Latin uses the same word for both.
What’s more likely: being killed by lightning or by an asteroid?
Absurd as it may seem, death by asteroid is almost twice as likely.
It is estimated that a large asteroid (nowadays known as a Near Earth Object or NEO) hits the Earth once every million years. Statistically, this event is now well overdue.
A ‘dangerous’ NEO is one more than 2 km (1.2 miles) in diameter. The shock of the impact would be equivalent to one million megatons of TNT. If it happened, the death toll would be in excess of a billion, so the chances of you personally dying in any given year are one in six million.
The chance of being killed by lightning in the UK in any given year is about one in ten million, roughly the same as being bitten by an adder.
Lightning is a giant electrical spark, with a brightness equivalent to 100 million light bulbs going on and off. Some strokes reach a peak current of 100,000 amps and 200 million volts creating a temperature of 30,000 °C, five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. A bolt of lightning travels at speeds of up to 100 million feet per second, or over 115 million kph.
Each ‘flash’ is really composed of several strokes, each lasting less than a millionth of a second. Because they are so short, the energy value of lightning is limited – a single stroke would only generate enough energy to run an average household for a day. Lightning strikes the Earth more 8 million times every day, or about fifty times every second.
Strikes are commonest in coastal areas, occurring at a rate of about two per square kilometre per year. They don’t seem to do much damage: the electricity dissipates rapidly across the surface of the sea and whales have been observed to sing quite happily through ferocious electrical storms.
Human beings, on the other hand, are struck by lightning ten times more frequently than they ought to be under the laws of chance.
Men are struck by lightning six times more often than women.
Between three and six Britons and a hundred Americans are killed by lightning every year, many of them because they are carrying portable lightning conductors about their person – golf-clubs, carbon-fibre fishing rods and underwired bras.
If caught in a thunderstorm in the open, the safest position is well away from any trees, crouching down with your bottom sticking up in the air.
How many people died in the Great Fire of London?
Five.
Despite destroying 13,200 houses, 87 churches, 44 Livery Halls and over 80 per cent of the city, fewer than half a dozen deaths were recorded.
The dead were: the maid of the baker who started it; Paul Lowell, a Shoe Lane watchmaker; an old man who rescued a blanket from St Paul’s but succumbed to the smoke; and two others who fell into their cellars in an ill-fated attempt to rescue goods and chattels.
The true death-toll may never be known. John Evelyn talks of the ‘stench that came from some poor creatures’ bodies’, and modern forensic evidence suggests that, given the intense heat, some corpses would almost certainly have been vaporised and thus not recorded.
However, the leisurely pace of the fire (it burned for five days) made it relatively easy for people to evacuate, and the five cited remain the only definite casualties.
The authorities’ response to the fire wasn’t overly speedy. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Bludworth, went back to bed on the first night claiming ‘a woman might piss it out’ and Samuel Pepys found time to safeguard his valuables by burying a ‘large parmazan cheese’ in his back garden.
In the previous ‘Great Fire’ of London (in 1212), 3,000 people died, and in the two years prior to 1666, the plague had killed 65,000. The fire stopped the plague by destroying the black rats and their breeding grounds but the cost of the damage was estimated at £10 million. With the entire annual income of the City of London running at £12,000, these costs would, theoretically, have taken 800 years to pay off.
Over 100,000 people lost their homes. Many of them camped out in a shanty town at Moorfields, or built shacks near their burned-out properties. But such was the speed of the rebuilding that by 1672 almost all had been rehoused.
The fire started in the King’s bakery run by Thomas Farynor in Pudding Lane. Farynor denied this at the time and a deluded French watchmaker called Robert Hubert claimed he did it. Although it was evident to judge and jury that he couldn’t have done, they hanged him anyway. His corpse was torn apart by an angry mob, suspecting a Popish plot.
Justice wasn’t finally done until 1986, when the Worshipful Company of Bakers claimed official responsibility and apologised for the fire.
How did Roman Emperors order the death of a gladiator?
Thumbs up.
Neither Roman spectators calling for the death of a gladiator, nor Roman Emperors authorising one, ever gave a thumbs down. In fact, the Romans didn’t use a ‘thumbs down’ sign at all.
If death was desired, the thumb was stuck up – like a drawn sword. For a loser’s life to be spared, the thumb was tucked away inside the closed fist – as with a sheathed weapon. This is expressed in Latin as pollice compresso favor iudicabatur, ‘goodwill is decided by the thumb being kept in’.
Before Ridley Scott agreed to direct Gladiator, Hollywood executives showed him the painting Pollice Verso by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the painting, a Roman gladiator waits while the emperor stretches his thumb down to give the death sentence. Scott was captivated by the image, and decided on the spot that he must direct the film.
Little did Scott know that the source of his inspiration was utterly wrong. The painting is single-handedly responsible for one of the greatest fallacies of the last two centuries, namely that ‘thumbs down’ indicated death.
Historians agree that Gérôme wrongly assumed that the Latin pollice verso – ‘turned thumb’ – meant ‘turned down’ when in fact it meant ‘turned up’.
If further proof were needed, in 1997 a Roman medallion of the second or third century AD was discovered in southern France. It shows two gladiators at the end of a battle and a referee pressing his thumb against a closed fist. The inscription reads: ‘Those standing should be released.’
The use of thumb signs can still be dangerously ambiguous in the modern world. In the Middle East, South America and Russia, a ‘thumbs up’ is considered to be a very rude insult, comparable to the Western V-sign. This has been problematic in Iraq, where American soldiers are unsure whether locals are welcoming them or about to blow them up.
Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, traces the positive connotations of the ‘thumbs up’ in Britain to the Middle Ages, where it was used to close business deals. It found a new lease of life in World War Two when US airforce pilots adopted it as a signal to ground crews before take-off.
Ridley Scott was eventually told about the ‘thumbs down’ fallacy but felt obliged to have Commodus give the ‘thumbs up’ when sparing Maximus, in order ‘not to confuse the audience’.
ALAN Now, were the Romans the only … really the only people who had that kind of … men killing each other thing for sport?
STEPHEN The Greeks didn’t do it, no, they … they had naked wrestling instead, which is much more the thing.
What was interesting about the birth of Julius Caesar?
Almost nothing
is known about the birth of Julius Caesar, except that, contrary to the assertion in the Oxford English Dictionary and countless other reference books, it did not take place by Caesarean section.
Such operations did occur at the time, but they always involved the death of the mother, and Caesar’s mother Aurelia is known to have survived into his adulthood. The suggestion that he was born by C-section does not appear in any of the contemporary sources, and is first mentioned in medieval times. It was not used in a medical context in English before 1615.
The confusion probably started with Pliny the Elder who, in his Natural History (about 77 AD) claims that the first Caesar was ‘cut from his mother’s womb’. This may well have been true, but it wasn’t the Caesar we know as Gaius Julius Caesar.
The Roman three-part naming convention meant that Gaius was his ‘given name’ and he was part of the ‘Caesar’ branch of the ‘Julian’ clan, so no one knows how many Caesars there had been previously. Nor do we know exactly what ‘Caesar’ means – and none of the meanings are particularly apt to our man. There is Pliny’s ‘cut’ from caedere. Or caeseries meaning ‘hairy’ (but he was balding); or caesius ‘grey’ (but his eyes were black) or even ‘elephant’ (from the Phoenician and perhaps applied to a Julian ancestor who had killed one).
The Romans pronounced ‘Caesar’ kaisar (hence the German word Kaiser and the Russian czar, both ultimately derived from the Latin name). Roman emperors usually included ‘Caesar’ in their long formal names.
Caesar Salad is no relation, however. It was invented by Cesar Cardini in an Italian restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1923.
ALAN Stephen Wright said he was born by Caesarean section. It doesn’t really affect him except when he goes into a room, he leaves by the window.
What’s a vomitorium for?
Vomitorium, despite being derived from the Latin vomere, meaning ‘to spew forth’ isn’t the place where the Romans threw up after their meals. It was the name for the entrance or exit from an amphitheatre and is still used in that sense today in some sports stadiums.
The vomitoria of the Colosseum in Rome were so well designed that it’s said the venue, which seated at least 50,000, could fill in fifteen minutes. (There were eighty entrances at ground level, seventy-six for ordinary spectators and four for the imperial family.)
The confusion of the exit with a specialised vomit chamber appears to be a recent error. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary finds Aldous Huxley using the term in his 1923 comic novel, Antic Hay, but notes that the usage is ‘erron[eous]’. Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) compounded the confusion by saying the exits were named after the chambers where gluttons threw up ‘in order to return to their couches empty enough to enjoy the pleasures of still more food’.
The problem with this theory is that no Roman writer ever refers to them, nor have any purpose-built rooms that fit the bill been found. Romans certainly threw up on purpose. Indeed, in ancient times vomiting seems to have been a standard part of the fine-dining experience. The orator Cicero says in Pro Rege Deiotaro (45 BC) that Julius Caesar ‘expressed a desire to vomit after dinner’ and elsewhere suggests that the dictator took emetics for this purpose.
But where did they do it, if there was no special room? Some sources suggest the street or garden; others are adamant it was at the table. In his Moral Epistles the Roman philosopher Seneca writes: ‘When we recline at a banquet, one slave wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath the table, collects the leavings of the drunks.’
In another passage, in a letter to his mother Helvia he links this to the decadent pursuit of the new and the exotic: ‘They vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit, and they do not deign even to digest the feasts for which they ransack the whole world.’
STEPHEN What’s a vomitorium for?
PHILL Is it London’s least successful tourist destination? It’s just next to the planetarium.
What did the Romans like to wear?
Sandals, probably, laurel wreaths from time to time, but definitely not togas.
The basic toga was a huge semi-circle of undyed wool so unwieldy that it took two other people to help put it on and, once on, the only way to stop it falling off was to camp around with the left arm crooked. Most Romans hated them.
The toga was an ornate, overblown Roman version of a kilt: a form of dress that started out as a practical garment but ended up as a symbolic form of national costume and definitely not the kind of thing you’d wear at home.
The early togas were based on an Etruscan garment called the tebenna, a rough oblong of wool that doubled as both a tunic and a cloak. They were very popular with farmers. By the second century BC, it had become a vast semi-circular garment involving 200 square feet (20 feet wide x 10 feet high) of thick wool: useless for doing anything other than standing around in and about as sexy as a hessian sack. Despite the plethora of ‘How to Wear a Toga’ websites, there is no agreement as to the ‘correct’ way to put one on.
What we do know is what they were for. Wearing a toga showed that you were a Roman (Virgil refers to them as the ‘toga people’ in the Aeneid), a citizen, and a man. The historian Suetonius tells the story that, when the first Emperor, Augustus Caesar, noticed a group of men loafing about the city centre in lightweight practical cloaks – the Roman equivalent of a shell suit – he lost his temper and passed an edict making the toga compulsory anywhere in and around the Forum.
A positive hindrance in battle, soldiers never wore them, so they also became a symbol of peace. Foreigners or slaves weren’t allowed to wear them, and finding a woman in a toga meant she was either a prostitute or an adulteress (nice ladies wore a gown or robe called the stola).
Being a man’s uniform, of course, they came in a huge range of styles and shades. There was the toga pulla (dark toga) for funerals; the toga praetexta (toga bordered with purple) for magistrates; the very fancy toga picta (patterned toga) for generals; and the brilliant white toga candida (bright toga) worn by those put up for election to political office (which is where we get the word ‘candidate’ from).
So rather like a pinstriped suit or a tuxedo, togas were for business, fancy occasions or for getting buried in. Most of the time, Romans wore the far more practical combination of tunic and cloak.
Toga parties were first mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 story, The Pump House Gang, and popularised by the 1978 film, Animal House, starring the late John Belushi. The togae featured in the film bear about as much resemblance to the original Roman garment as a thong does to a set of Victorian ladies undergarments.
What happened to most people accused of witchcraft in England?
They were acquitted – and even if they had been found guilty they would have been hanged, not burned.
According to Malcolm Gaskill, in his detailed history of the seventeenth-century witch-hunting craze, Witchfinders (2005), the popular perception (encouraged by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) that five million women were burned at the stake for witchcraft in Europe between 1450 and 1750 is a massive overestimate. He believes, like most historians of the period, that 40,000 is closer to the true figure, and that a quarter of those executed were men.
There are only 200 known executions in England directly resulting from an allegation of witchcraft. Nearly all of those were hangings. The Scots, French, Germans and Italians did all burn witches but, even then, it was more usual to strangle them at the stake and then burn the body afterwards, rather than burn them alive.
In Britain, from 1440 to 1650, only one ‘witch’ was burned per century.
Margery Jordemaine, the ‘Witch of Eye’, was burned at Smithfield on 27 October 1441; Isabella Billington was burned at York in 1650 (although she was hanged first); and Isabel Cockie was burned in 1596.
An accusation of witchcraft in England by no means necessarily led to a death sentence. The Church – often blamed for persecuting witches – took no part in prosecutions. Accusers had to prove a witch had harm
ed them and English juries were surprisingly reluctant to convict. Seventy-five per cent of all witch trials ended in acquittal.
Contrary to the popular perception of baying mobs, it appears there was a good deal of resistance to the idea of witch-hunting, shared by both judges and ordinary people – the practice was regarded as superstitious, prejudicial to public order, and unnecessarily expensive.
Isabel Cockie’s funeral pyre, for example, cost 105s. 4d.: the equivalent of more than £1,000 in today’s money.
What is the Number of the Beast?
616.
For 2,000 years, 666 has been the symbol of the dreaded Anti-Christ, who will come to rule the world before the Last Judgement. For many, it’s an unlucky number: even the European Parliament leaves seat no. 666 vacant.
The number is from Revelation, the last and strangest book in the Bible: ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’
But it’s a wrong number. In 2005, a new translation of the earliest known copy of the Book of Revelation clearly shows it to be 616 not 666. The 1,700-year-old papyrus was recovered from the rubbish dumps of the city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and deciphered by a palaeographical research team from the University of Birmingham led by Professor David Parker.
If the new number is correct, it will not amuse those who have just spent a small fortune avoiding the old one. In 2003, US Highway 666 – known as ‘The Highway of the Beast’– was renamed Highway 491. The Moscow Transport Department will be even less amused. In 1999, they picked a new number for the jinxed 666 bus route. It was 616.