Showing an Excessive Reverence for the Herb Silphium
We’ll never know how great silphium was: how it added untold pizzazz to chicken dishes, how efficacious it was against disease, how grazing herds couldn’t get enough of it. Because in a seven hundred year period, the Greeks and Romans – both having been driven wild by its flavour – managed to harvest the herb to complete extinction. All we have left is its relative, asafoetida – but the Romans dismissed that as a pathetic pretender to its throne.
The Romans believed that they’d hit upon a panacea. Regardless of your ailments, a bit of silphium would sort you out – either the juice, the resin, or just pushing the plant itself up your back passage. But when you’re fighting all your illnesses and seasoning all your food with the same plant, you’re eventually going to come up against a mismatch of supply and demand. And for some reason, only a small strip of land (120 x 30 miles) in Northern Africa (now Libya) was able to sustain the plant. All attempts at taking seeds or cuttings and planting them elsewhere failed dismally. So the neighbouring city of Cyrene flourished enormously as a result of the nearby silphium crop, but suffered badly when it finally ran out. Legend has it that Nero secured the very last silphium plant, and he ate it. Thanks, Nero. Now we’ll never know.
Cursing Enemies by Scratching a Message on Some Lead and Burying it
If you were up against someone else for a job, a fair maiden’s hand or glorious triumph in a sporting event, keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for the best was never going to be enough. Your best bet was to visit your neighbourhood curse tablet maker, for a combination of engraving and black magic that would all but ensure your victory. Their size belied their supposedly enormous power; rectangular and between just six and ten centimetres long, they were made out of soft lead or pewter-like material and engraved with the curse you wished to place on someone. “Marcus Antonius”, one might have read, “blind his eyes during our chariot race so he fails to notice a rapidly approaching obstacle, like a wall or something.” You’d then pop around to Marcus Antonius’s house under some fake pretext – perhaps borrowing a cup of silphium – and then, when he wasn’t looking, wedge the tablet under the floor or between some bricks. He wouldn’t stand a chance.
The more curses placed on the tablet, the more numerous the disasters that would befall its recipient – and extra damage could be caused by having the text written backwards. They were all ineffective, but perhaps the most tragic was the erotic curse tablet, which desperate men used to induce lust-crazed desire in women. It didn’t work – and women continue to be unimpressed by small bits of lead or pewter to this day.
Engaging Underage Boys in Sexual Relationships
It makes sense to us to shield our young sons from the sexual advances of older men, and report such activity to the relevant authorities. Not so in Greek times; fathers would be sought out for permission to have a fling with their male offspring, and like the unenlightened fools that they were, they’d often grant it.
The seduction techniques employed were as moon-eyed as any modern teenager’s; totally lacking in dignity, men would hang around the baths or the gym hoping to catch a glimpse of them, then in the evening they’d write reams of soppy poetry and sleep on their beloved’s doorstep. With dad’s permission, this would evolve into a relationship; not always sexual, but this was often encouraged, and particularly in Crete where they reckoned it was a brilliant idea to control the size of the burgeoning population. What was in it for the boys? Gifts, education, and when they passed into adulthood, a lifelong friendship, apparently. The Romans weren’t averse to a spot of pederasty, either, but as time went on it was seen as an effeminate Greek way of doing things, and by AD390 it had been made illegal. It’s unlikely that similar bans in place throughout the modern world will be lifted at any point in the near future.
Trepanning: You need it like a hole in the head
“If it hurts, it’s working.” Well, if you’re talking about vigorous exercise on a rowing machine, perhaps. But if you’re referring to having a hole bored in your skull with a primitive drill well before the invention of effective anaesthetics, then probably not. Trepanation is the oldest known surgical procedure – there’s evidence of it having been carried out back in the Neolithic Age, some eight thousand years BC – and also the most persistently, gloriously unsuccessful. You can’t really blame self-proclaimed doctors from bygone ages for giving it a go if they had no access to ibuprofen capsules and were confronted with someone who had a headache; after all, if someone describes having pressure within their skull, it makes some kind of sense to let whatever’s causing that pressure escape through a hole. But all that tended to escape was blood, bone and tissue. If the person somehow got better, they were going to get better despite the trepanning rather than because of it. If they didn’t get better, additional holes would invariably be drilled or widened. At the height of trepanning’s popularity amongst the medical profession, it’s incredible that anyone bothered admitting to having a headache at all. And if they did make that error, they should surely have feigned a miraculous recovery when the drill was suddenly produced.
Hippocrates apparently returned from a trip to Marseille in the fourth century BC with news of the amazing head-drilling antics practised by the Gauls, and went on to mention the procedure in his rib-tickling laughter compendium On Wounds Of The Head. But he didn’t really shed much light on why and how it was deployed in Ancient Greece. By the Middle Ages, however, we know that it was used for all kinds of ailments – including, somewhat predictably, mental illness – and engravings of the time show unfortunate individuals with sunken eyes, tortured expressions and their heads clamped under a drill bit, looking for all the world as if they’d prefer to be attending a lovely birthday party instead.
You could say one thing only for trepanning, and that was the absolute consistency in the rate at which it despatched people to the grave: just a tad under a hundred percent. Some people lived to give other patients hope, certainly, but many more suffered hideous injury, brain damage or infection, and the ones who eagerly came back for repeat prescriptions – such as Prince Phillip of Orange at the turn of the seventeenth century – were few and far between.
Just when we appeared to have come to our senses in the twentieth century and finally abandoned the notion that pressure around the brain somehow needed to escape through holes, along came the concept of treating mental illness with frontal lobotomies, where the brain was once again probed with sharp instruments wielded by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing. Occasionally, violent tendencies were calmed. More often, it would just create a different problem: zombie-like patients requiring constant care. The advent of antipsychotic drugs saw that particular medical fad abandoned, too, and has since been described as “one of the most barbaric mistakes ever perpetrated by mainstream medicine”.
In the 1960s, trepanning was again mooted as a health benefit, mainly because of a Dutchman called Bart Huges who cited a supposedly successful trepanation that he had performed, somewhat bizarrely, upon himself. He believed that it increased “brain blood volume”, which in turn precipitated a return to a childlike state of consciousness. To which you might well reply, well, I prefer my adultlike state of consciousness, to be honest. Of course, the vast majority of us – including the entire medical profession – are keen not to become the kind of person who gets evangelical about Neolithic surgical practices and so the rehabilitation of trepanning has been restricted to a few odd people lurking in remote corners of the Internet. “It’s been around for ages,” said one, in a lame attempt to justify it. Well, so has slavery, but you wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to your mates.
Garnishing Food with Rotting Fish Entrails
Passing time travellers might well consider such supermarket fare as Marmite or Biltong as unpleasant, verging on inedible, but the Greek and Roman entry into the encyclopedia of inexplicable foodstuffs was garum . A mixture of fermented fish entrails and blood,
they’d spread it liberally on all kinds of foodstuffs, both savoury and sweet, like fussy children who won’t eat anything unless it’s coated in a layer of tomato ketchup.
The Greeks invented it – although why and how anyone would have ever been tempted to take an initial bite of decaying fish guts is anyone’s guess – but the Romans were the ones who fell in love with it; varieties ranged from liquamen (a high-class garum made from mackerel) to low-grade stuff called allec (whose contents must have been so rank as to traumatize the poor souls whose job it was to make it). Following complaints from local residents, the malodorous manufacturing process occurred well out of town – but that didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for eating the stuff. Because as we’ve learned from factory farming, the further away we are from the reality of the production process of food, the happier we are to shove it down our necks.
Attempting to Give Clothes that Bluey-white Freshness by Using Urine
The marauding Goths that Roman soldiers spent a significant amount of time battling against had worked out how to make soap. They mixed fat with potash to create a substance that could lift off stubborn dirt, be it from their bodies or their bloodied tunics. The Romans preferred to oil themselves up and scrape off grime with a piece of metal called a strigil, but when it came to cleaning clothes they made one critical alteration to the Gothic recipe. Instead of using fat, they used urine.
Urine is something that we try quite hard to keep well away from our clothes. We’re taught from a very young age that wetting ourselves won’t do our trousers any favours, and there’s a reason for that: urine doesn’t smell great. This didn’t seem to deter the Romans, however, and convinced of its ability to restore freshness to linen, they’d collect urine in pots on the street from anyone who felt able to donate. One can only imagine the state of the clothes after they’d been soaked in piss, stamped on and wrung out – but the Romans never really stumbled across a better method, despite evidence that they knew about the existence of soap. Quite why they never tried fresh water, rather than wait for said water to pass through the human body, is something of a mystery.
Celebrating Each Year by Swapping Places with your Employees
Most of us would love to try swapping places with our bosses for a bit, and dish out the kind of brutal criticism that they subject us to on a daily basis. So it’s no wonder that the festival of Saturnalia was embraced so enthusiastically by Roman slaves, who were exempted from punishment for its duration, given the opportunity to show “disrespect” to their masters, and eat lordly feasts while being waited upon. Originally one day long, it ended up spanning six days of social chaos, where roles were reversed and general japery was perpetrated.
It would have been a miserable time for any slaves whose Scrooge-like masters chose not to observe Saturnalia for health and safety reasons, but there were aspects of the festival that everyone could enjoy; the giving of small gifts, the rare opportunity to gamble legally, and, according to Lucian, there was “singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands and occasional ducking of [faces] in icy water”, which sounds like a good party by anyone’s standards. Indeed, people had such a riotous time that Augustus attempted (unsuccessfully) to shorten it. Its position at the end of December saw it form the basis of modern Christmas celebrations once Christianity had taken hold in Europe. But don’t ask to swap places with your boss this coming Yuletide, because he won’t let you, the curmudgeonly sod.
Vomiting Copiously at Mealtimes without Saying Sorry
If you find yourself mopping up pools of vomit from under your dinner table this weekend, you’ll probably reflect ruefully that your dinner party has not been the roaring success that you’d hoped. Not so at Roman banquets, where the size of the feasts required you to “make a bit more room”; as a result, any bowls of vomit lying around were a clear indication of the enormous success of the event rather than a sign that the chicken supreme hadn’t been adequately heated through. As one source described Roman dining habits: “They vomit so they may eat, and they eat so they may vomit”.
One can barely imagine the unpleasant scenes at such banquets, one person tucking into honeyed cakes while the next says “ooh, could do with a vomit” before retching violently. Not least because as primates we’ve evolved the wonderful act of sympathetic vomiting, where if our dining companions are doing it, we’re likely to follow suit. Today it’s considered polite to run rapidly from the room before heaving, and cycles of binging and vomiting are treated as a mental illness. Go figure.
Using Elephants to Fight your Battles for you
If you were a soldier in Ancient Greece, the weary regularity of scrapping with your neighbours might have left you bored with the standard battlefield scenario – men, weapons, blood, the occasional tree. But when the Greeks confronted the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, they would have been utterly startled to see a deployment of elephants on the front line. It didn’t work that well (the Greeks won) but Alexander the Great was mightily impressed by the psychological tactic, and adopted it for himself.
They’re big. They look scary. They can carry loads of stuff. And by sitting on top of one, you get a great vantage point over the area. Over the next few hundred years, elephants were increasingly likely to find themselves lumbering onto the battlefield with slight concern etched on their grey faces – and particularly the Sri Lankan variety, who were adjudged to be the most suitable for fighting alongside. But once the element of surprise had worn off, elephants started to become something of a liability. Someone discovered, for example, that they were rattled by the sound of squealing pigs, so by pouring oil on pigs, setting them on fire and unleashing them at the enemy, the elephants would begin stampeding and laying waste to their own side. Then, when gunpowder revolutionized the battlefield, elephants became such hilariously easy targets that they were finally allowed to retire gracefully to some leafy part of the Sri Lankan countryside.
Making Major Life Decisions Based on how Birds Fly Past
The auspicium, or auspices, were the Roman equivalent of a cost-benefit analysis. Before any important decisions were taken, they would shun such laborious processes as weighing up pros and cons, and instead call on the services of the augur, whose readings of the patterns of birds in the sky would largely dictate the subsequent course of action. Wars were fought, unnecessary journeys embarked upon, inadvisable marriages entered into, all because of something as random and unpredictable as the direction in which deeply unintelligent birds chose to travel.
Of course, the augur would wield a huge amount of power as a result, and his pronouncements could be massively influenced by bribery, or indeed his own opinions. (Augurs would be fairly unlikely to predict their own executions, for example.) Those mistrustful of the augur might instead look to haruspex for guidance – an equally unreliable fortune-telling process, whereby the livers of sacrificed animals would be analyzed for bad omens. Unsurprisingly, no haruspex ever revealed that paying too much attention to the offal of a sheep might cause you to make incorrect life choices.
Disguising Foods as other Foods to Create an Element of Surprise
Of all the emotions you’d want your dinner guests to experience, shock and disorientation come pretty low on the list. But the irritating Roman habit of disguising food as other food would turn a simple meal into a test of nerve, where items you expected to be eggs actually turned out to be cakes, and vice versa.
It’s a trick we still play on kids for their own benefit – placing healthy ingredients into child-friendly arrangements, such as happy smiling faces or unthreatening burger shapes. But when Roman chefs disguised pork as chicken, or ham as doves, the only real reason for them to do so was to show off. They might take a date, remove the stone, then stick a cinnamon-covered almond back into it to make it look like a stone. A neat trick, until everyone refuses to eat the almond, because they think it’s a stone, and you have to inform them that the stone is in fact an almond. About the only item that should have been reconstituted
into a different form was the dormouse; Romans may have enjoyed snacking on them, but they’d have been an even bigger hit if they’d been molded into lozenge shapes and called Mouse Bars.
Picnicking Gaily in Graveyards
The festival of Parentalia – the honouring of the dead – took place in the gloomy month of February. Romans felt that this time of year portended all kinds of doom, and Parentalia gave everyone a chance to placate any spirits from beyond the grave who might have become irritated with them for some reason or other.
The final day of this festival was Feralia, on 21 February, where families would decamp to the graveyard and share a meal with their deceased relatives. Literally. A “libation pipe” led down to where the body was buried, and, despite the fact that the corpse was long past appreciating honey, milk or wine, they poured it down there regardless, in the hope of refreshing them for their subsequent year of death. No murmurs of “thank you kindly, I’ll have another” came back up the pipe, but the Romans assumed they were enjoying it, and continued the custom. Today, the only people who picnic in graveyards are goths – and not the marauding tribes of central Europe, just kids who listen to too much Marilyn Manson.
Showing Muted Interest in the Welfare of One’s Own Children
Contraceptives in Roman times were rubbish (see Contraceptives that either didn’t appeal to us, or just didn’t work) and abortion was pretty dangerous, so, instead, family planning measures were implemented after the child had actually been born. This doesn’t seem to have been particularly controversial, either; fathers had the right to kill any inconvenient offspring if it interfered with their inheritance plans, or if they were going to be away fighting and unable to bring it up, or if it had been inconsiderate enough to be born a girl. Of course, murdering one’s own child in cold blood isn’t the most pleasant of activities, so they’d just leave the baby somewhere remote and wander off. Babies, tending not to be able to fend for themselves in the wild, or still less find they own way home, generally perished.
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