QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  When senior courtiers backed Ptolemy, she responded by seducing Julius Caesar, recently elected as dictator (senior magistrate in the Roman Senate), and commander of the most powerful army in the world. Together they crushed all opposition. When Caesar was assassinated, leading to civil war in Rome, Cleopatra seduced his second-in-command, Mark Antony. In the midst of all this, she still found time to write a book on cosmetics.

  The war ended when the Roman fleet under Octavian (later the Emperor Augustus) defeated Mark Antony at the battle of Actium (31 BC). Antony committed suicide in the belief that Cleopatra had already done so and she poisoned herself (though the latest research suggests no asps were involved). She was the last pharoah. The Romans made off with so much Egyptian gold that the Senate was immediately able to reduce interest rates from 12 per cent to 4 per cent.

  STEPHEN Donkeys’ milk is very nutritious indeed; it contains oligosaccharides, which are very, very good for you and have all kinds of immuno-helpful things, don’t they, Dr Garden?

  GRAEME GARDEN I’m sure they do, yes. Very good for bathing in, too. Wasn’t Cleopatra in ass’s milk?

  STEPHEN She was in ass’s milk, absolutely, and Poppaea, the wife of Nero: 300 donkeys were milked to fill her bath.

  GRAEME Big girl, was she?

  Why did Julius Caesar wear a laurel wreath?

  Not victory, but vanity.

  According to the Roman historian Suetonius in On the Life of the Caesars (AD 121), Julius Caesar ‘used to comb forward his scanty locks from the crown of his head’ and was thrilled when the Senate granted him the special privilege of being able to wear a victor’s laurel wreath whenever he felt like it.

  Caesar’s baldness bothered him a lot. During his affair with Cleopatra, she recommended her own patent baldness cure, a salve made from burnt mice, bear grease, horse’s teeth and deer marrow, rubbed on the head until it ‘sprouts’. Clearly, it wasn’t very effective.

  Caesar wasn’t the only general with hair-loss problems. According to the Greek historian Polybius, the Carthaginian commander Hannibal (247–183 BC) found a way to get round this: ‘He had a number of wigs made, dyed to suit the appearance of persons differing widely in age, and kept constantly changing them.’ Even those closest to Hannibal had trouble recognising him.

  Before the establishment of the Empire, Roman hair was worn simply. Only afterwards did hair styles become more elaborate and wigs more popular. The Empress Messalina (AD 17–48) had an extensive collection of yellow wigs, which she wore when moonlighting in brothels. (By law, Roman prostitutes had to wear a yellow wig as a badge of their profession.) Wigs continued to be worn after Rome became Christian in AD 313) but the Church soon condemned them as a mortal sin.

  The tradition of a laurel wreath being given to the victor began at the Pythian Games in Delphi in the sixth century BC. These were held in honour of the god Apollo, usually portrayed wearing a wreath of laurels in memory of the nymph Daphne, who turned herself into a laurel tree to escape his amorous advances.

  As well as indicating victory, the laurel had a reputation as a healing plant, so doctors who graduated also received a laurel wreath. This is the origin of the academic expressions baccalaureate, Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BSc). They all come from the Latin bacca lauri, ‘laurel berries’.

  No one knows where the Latin surname Caesar comes from.

  Pliny the Elder thought it was because the first Caesar (like Macbeth) was ‘cut from his mother’s womb’ – caesus means ‘cut’ in Latin. Pliny’s idea is the origin of the term ‘Caesarian section’. But this can’t be true: such operations were only ever performed to rescue a baby whose mother had died, and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, is known to have lived for many years after his birth.

  The most likely meaning of ‘Caesar’ is that it’s from the Latin caesaries, which means ‘a beautiful head of hair’.

  What was Caesar talking about when he said ‘Veni, vidi, vici’?

  Most of us think ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’) – Julius Caesar’s second most famous line after ‘Et tu, Brute’ – refers to his invasion of Britain.

  In fact, as every schoolboy knows, he was summing up his victory over King Pharnaces II of Pontus at the battle of Zela in 47 BC.

  At the time the Roman civil war was at its height, with Caesar leading the Senate’s modernisers and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known as Pompey) commanding the traditionalist forces.

  The kingdom of Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, had proved a troublesome enemy to Rome over the years. Knowing Caesar was preoccupied fighting Pompey in Egypt, King Pharnaces spotted his chance to regain some lost territory and invaded Cappadocia, in what is now northern Turkey. He inflicted a heavy defeat on the depleted Roman defence, and rumours spread that he had tortured Roman prisoners.

  When Caesar returned victorious from Egypt, he decided to teach Pharnaces a lesson. At Zela he defeated the large, well-organised Pontic army in just five days and couldn’t resist crowing about it in a letter to his friend Amantius in Rome: hence the quote. Suetonius even claims Caesar paraded the famous phrase around after the battle itself. It was to prove a decisive moment in the civil war against Pompey and his supporters, and in Caesar’s career.

  Caesar’s attempted invasion of Britain was a much less satisfactory affair. He invaded twice, in 55 and 54 BC. The first time, he landed near Deal in Kent. The lack of a natural harbour meant his troops had to leap into deep water and wade towards the large British force that had gathered on the shore. Only the on-board Roman catapults kept the blue-painted natives at bay. After a few skirmishes, Caesar decided to cut his losses and withdrew to Gaul.

  The following year he returned with 10,000 men and sailed up the Thames, where he tried to establish a Roman ally as king. He left shortly afterwards, complaining there was nothing worth having in Britain and that the locals were an ungovernable horde of wife-swapping, chicken-tormenting barbarians. No Romans stayed behind.

  The whole invasion was staged for the Senate’s benefit: conquering the ‘land beyond the ocean’ made Caesar look good at home. This set the pattern for Rome’s involvement with Britain: trade and Roman influence continued to grow without the need for full occupation. When that finally happened, ninety-six years later under the Emperor Claudius, it took four legions – 15 per cent of the whole Roman army – to do the job.

  The phrase ‘veni, vidi, vici’ lives on today in the scientific name of the Conquered lorikeet, an extinct species of South Pacific parrot discovered in 1987. A member of the Vini genus, its full name is Vini vidivici.

  How many men did a centurion command in the Roman Empire?

  Eighty.

  The actual number of soldiers in each Roman legion changed over time and in different places, and the army was always short of men. Legions were at first divided into ten cohorts, each consisting of six centuries of a hundred men, or 6,000 men in all. But well before Julius Caesar came along, and right through the Roman Empire that followed him, the full strength of a legion had settled at 4,800 men. Each cohort was made up of 480 men and each of its six centuries comprised eighty soldiers, led by a centurion.

  The smallest division of the Roman army was the contubernium, originally a unit of ten men who lived, ate and fought together. The word is from Latin con, ‘together’ and taberna, ‘a hut’ – military tents were made from boards, or tabulae. Such intimacy had the effect of transforming the soldiers into comrades, or contubernales, and it was the basis of the Roman army’s legendary esprit de corps. We know there were ten of them in each tent, because the man in charge was called the decanus, meaning ‘a chief of ten, one set over ten persons’. Each century was made up of ten contubernii.

  By Caesar’s time, though, the number of men in each contubernium had shrunk to eight, although their leader was still called a decanus. It seems that, although a fighting unit of ten men worked well enough when near to home, as the Romans expanded far beyond Italy military ex
perience in distant, dangerous and unfamiliar places found that an eight-man unit was the ideal size for close bonds between soldiers. So, because army rules had always decreed ten contubernii in a century, a century became eighty men.

  Another Roman official, who might have been in charge of 100 men but wasn’t, was the praetor hastarius, or ‘president of the spear’. Praetors were judges, and the spear was the symbol of property. The praetor hastarius presided over a court that dealt with property disputes and resolving wills. Court members were drawn from a pool of centumviri, or Hundred Men. But there were never exactly 100 of them. Originally there were 105 – three from each of the 35 Roman tribes – and this later grew to 180.

  A hundred of anything is rarer than you might think. The English language has, buried within it, a numbering system that used twelve rather than ten as a base. That’s why we say eleven (endleofan, which meant ‘one left’) and twelve (‘two left’) instead of tenty-one and tenty-two. The Old English word for ‘a hundred’ was hund, but there were three different kinds – hund teantig (a hundred ‘tenty’ is 100); hund endleofantig (a hundred ‘eleventy’ is 110) and hund twelftig (a hundred ‘twelfty’ is 120). These lasted for many centuries. The expression ‘a great hundred’ meant 120 well into the sixteenth century and a ‘hundredweight’, today meaning 112 pounds, was once 120 pounds.

  By coincidence, each legion of Roman infantry had a detachment of (much less important) cavalry. There were 120 of them in each legion.

  What language was mostly spoken in ancient Rome?

  It was Greek, not Latin.

  A lingua franca is a language used between two people when neither is using their mother tongue. Rome was the capital city of a fast and expanding empire, a commercial hub of over a million people. Although the native language of Rome (capital of Latium) was Latin, the lingua franca – the language you would use if you were buying or selling or generally trying to make yourself understood – was koine or ‘common’ Greek.

  Greek was also the language of choice for Rome’s educated urban elite. Sophisticated Romans saw themselves as the inheritors of Greek culture. Virgil’s Aeneid – the epic poem that tells the story of Rome’s foundation – makes it explicit that contemporary Rome grew directly out of the mythical Greece that Homer had written about. Speaking Greek at home was essential. Most of the literature that upper-class Romans read was in Greek; the art, architecture, horticulture, cookery and fashion they admired was Greek; and most of their teachers and domestic staff were Greeks.

  Even when they did speak Latin it wasn’t the classical Latin that we recognise. For speaking native Romans used a form of the language called ‘Vulgar Latin’. The word vulgar simply meant ‘common’ or ‘of the people’. Classical Latin was the written language – used for law, oratory and administration but not for conversation. It was the everyday version that the Roman army carried across Europe and it was Vulgar, not classical Latin that spawned the Romance languages: Italian, French and Spanish.

  But Vulgar Latin was only the daily language of Latium, not the Empire. Greek was the first language of the eastern Empire, based around Constantinople and of the cities in southern Italy. The name Naples (Neapolis in Latin) is actually Greek (nea, new, and polis, city). Today, the local dialect in Naples, Neopolitana, still shows traces of Greek and the Griko language is still spoken by 30,000 in southern Italy. Modern Greek and Griko are close enough for speakers to be able to understand one another. Greek, not Latin, was the popular choice for the Mediterranean marketplace.

  Lingua Franca was originally an Italian – not a Latin – term for the specific language that was used by people trading in the Mediterranean from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. Based on Italian, it combined elements of Provencal, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, French and Arabic into a flexible lingo everyone could speak and understand.

  Lingua Franca doesn’t mean ‘French language’, but ‘Language of the Franks’. It derives from the Arabic habit of referring to all Christians as ‘Franks’ (rather as we once referred to all Muslims as ‘Moors’). Franji remains a common Arabic word used to describe Westerners today.

  Where is English the official language?

  There are many countries in which English is the Official Language, but England, Australia and the United States aren’t among them.

  An official language is defined as a language that has been given legal status for use in a nation’s courts, parliament and administration. In England, Australia and over half the USA,English is the unofficial language. It is used for all state business, but no specific law has ever ratified its use.

  Bilingual countries such as Canada (French and English) and Wales (Welsh and English) do have legally defined official languages. National laws often recognise significant minority languages, as with Maori in New Zealand. Sometimes, as in Ireland, an official language is more symbolic than practical: fewer than 20 per cent of the population use Irish every day.

  English is frequently chosen as an alternative ‘official’ language if a country has many native languages. A good example is Papua New Guinea where 6 million people speak 830 different languages. In the USA the campaign to make English the official language is opposed by many other ethnic groups, most notably the Hispanic community who account for more than 15 per cent of the population.

  Perhaps the most interesting case of an English-speaking country that doesn’t have English as its official language is Australia. As well as large numbers of Greek, Italian and South-East Asian immigrants, Australia is home to 65,000 native Maltese speakers. There are also 150 aboriginal languages which are still spoken (compared to the 600 or so spoken in the eighteenth century). Of these, all but twenty are likely to disappear in the next fifty years. Attempting to declare English the official language risks looking insensitive.

  The Vatican is the only country in the world that has Latin as an official language.

  When did Parliament make slavery illegal in England?

  6 April 2010.

  With a few minor exceptions, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, but it wasn’t thought necessary to outlaw it at home.

  In 1067, according to the Domesday Book, more than 10 per cent of the population of England were slaves. The Normans, perhaps surprisingly, were opposed to slavery on religious grounds and within fifty years it had virtually disappeared. Even serfdom (a kind of modified slavery) became increasingly rare and Queen Elizabeth I freed the last remaining serfs in 1574.

  At the same time, Britain was becoming a colonial power and it was the height of fashion for returning Englishmen to have a ‘black manservant’ (who was in fact, of course, a slave). This unseemly habit was made illegal by the courts in 1772 when the judge, Lord Mansfield, reportedly declared: ‘The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe’, with the result that thousands of slaves in England gained their freedom.

  From that moment, slavery was arguably illegal in England (though not in the British Empire) under Common Law, but this was not confirmed by Parliament until the Coroners and Justice Act.

  Previous acts of Parliament dealt with kidnap, false imprisonment, trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour, but never specifically covered slavery. Now, Section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act (which came into force on 6 April 2010) makes it an offence in the UK, punishable by up to fourteen years’ imprisonment, to hold a person in ‘slavery or servitude’.

  ‘Servitude’ is another word for serfdom. A serf is permanently attached to a piece of land and forced to live and work there, whereas a slave can be bought and sold directly like a piece of property. It’s a fine difference: in fact, the English word ‘serf’ comes from the Latin word servus, ‘a slave’.

  Until now, the lack of a specific English law has made it hard to prosecute modern slave-masters. There’s a difference between ‘abolishing’ something and making it a criminal offence. Although slavery was abolished all over the world many years ago, in many countries the reality only
changed when laws were introduced to punish slave owners.

  You might think slavery is a thing of the past and isn’t relevant to modern Britain, but there are more slaves in the world now – 27 million of them – than were ever seized from Africa in the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. And forced labour, using migrant workers effectively as slaves (and also outlawed by the Act), is widespread in Britain today.

  Under the Criminal Law Act 1967, a number of obsolete crimes were abolished in England including scolding, eavesdropping, being a common nightwalker and challenging someone to a fight.

  It is odd to think that, in the year England won the World Cup, eavesdropping was still illegal but slavery wasn’t.

  ALAN I bet it was one of these odd little New Labour laws in about 1996, 7, 8 …

  STEPHEN What an odd law, to outlaw slavery. It’s political correctness gone mad!

  Why doesn’t Britain have a written constitution?

  It does have one.

  The idea that Britain has an ‘unwritten constitution’ has been described by Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the country’s leading constitutional expert, as ‘misleading’.

  The rules setting out the balance of power between the governors and the governed are written down. They’re just not all written down in one place.