Romans – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The Roman origins of May Day

May Day, celebrated on the 1st of May each year, is a historical festival that marks the arrival of spring and honours the season of fertility, growth, and rebirth. While it is often associated with various modern customs and labour movements, the roots of May Day trace back to ancient Roman traditions that celebrated the cycle of life, agriculture and the divine.

In ancient Rome, the month of May was dedicated to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, spring, and fertility, who represented the renewal of life and the blossoming of nature. As a minor but beloved deity, she held a special place in Roman mythology for her association with the vitality and beauty of the natural world. Flora was believed to have the power to make plants bloom and crops grow, thus she played a crucial role in agriculture and the changing of the seasons. The Romans honoured her each year with the festival of Floralia, celebrating her gifts with flowers, games, and theatrical performances. Flora’s imagery — she was often depicted as a youthful woman surrounded by flowers — embodied the joys of spring and the promise of new life.

The Floralia took place between April 28th and May 3rd. It was a time of joyful celebration, characterised by processions, theatrical performances and the adornment of homes and temples with flowers. The Romans believed that Flora’s blessings ensured the prosperity of crops and the fertility of both land and people. During the Floralia, people engaged in dancing and feasting and the festival was not only a tribute to Flora but also a communal expression of gratitude for the renewal of life and the blessings of nature after the harsh winter months. The festival was known for its licentious and joyful atmosphere, with participants adorned in colourful clothing and floral wreaths. Offerings of milk, honey and other agricultural products were made to Flora, to ensure a prosperous growing season. Victorian depictions of these events imbue them with an elegant, somewhat idealised air, but in the ancient world they were notorious for lewd and chaotic behaviour. There was wild food-throwing as well as hares and deer released into the crowds as symbols of fecundity. It sounds like an absolute blast.

The transition from the Roman Floralia to the modern May Day can be traced through the influence of Germanic and Celtic traditions. In Germanic folklore, the night before May 1st, known as Walpurgis Night, was associated with witches, bonfires and rituals to ward off evil spirits. Over time, these celebrations merged with Roman customs, blending the ancient fertility rites with Celtic seasonal festivities. In the late 19th century, May Day took on additional significance, as a day to commemorate the struggles and achievements of the labour movement. In 1891, the first day of May was designated International Workers’ Day and was set aside for organised industrial agitation, so the energies of the spring festival turned to political ends. The May Day Bank Holiday was instituted by Michael Foot, Labour Employment Secretary, in 1978. I was five at the time, and just about remember it! The social justice aspect of May Day is still observed in many countries around the world, often with demonstrations, parades and speeches advocating for workers’ rights.

Across different cultures, May Day is celebrated with a variety of customs and traditions. In England, Morris dancing, the May pole and village fairs are common. In some Scandinavian countries, May Day festivities include singing traditional songs and crowning a May Queen. May Day has evolved into a multifaceted celebration of spring, labour, and community. From ancient rituals honouring deities of nature to modern demonstrations advocating for social justice, the essence of May Day reminds us of our deep-seated connections to the cycles of life and the enduring spirit of renewal. May Day perhaps stands as a testament to the enduring human quest for renewal, growth and solidarity in all its forms.

1st-century fresco from the Villa di Arianna in Stabiae, depicting Flora or an allegory of spring

The role of the translator?

The festive season would not be complete without an EduTwitter bust up, and this year there was more than one. Pleasingly, the one that’s rumbled on the longest is a controversy surrounding Homer’s Odyssey, striking a rare burst of attention for Classics in the broader world of education. The debate started with some people arguing about whether school-teachers have or should have read or taught this text in schools. Quite why anybody cares remains a puzzle. After a few days, however, the row spread amongst a much wider audience and mutated into reactions to a recent translation from the original Greek by Emily Wilson, who in 2018 became the first woman to publish a full English translation of the Odyssey, to much fanfare.

Predictably, people’s reactions to Wilson’s translation fall into clear political camps. The Guardian hailed it as “groundbreaking” and a feminist interpretation which will “change our understanding of it forever” while critics more right of centre breathed anxiously in and out of a paper bag and muttered dire warnings about the decline of the West. It’s all very silly, but in amongst all the hysteria has been some unintentionally thoughtful commentary: sometimes, people don’t even realise that they’ve said something interesting while they are trying to score a political point. “The job of a translator is not to attribute postmodern ideas of sex oppression to a writer who has been dead for 3000 years” raged Charlie Bentley-Astor. Broadly, I don’t disagree with her, but I found myself pondering: what is the role of the translator, exactly?

Those who have not studied languages, particularly ancient languages, might find this question bizarre. The role of the translator, surely, is to reproduce the text as faithfully as possible in a different language? Well, yes. But you see, it depends what your priorities are and it depends what aspects of the text you believe are most important to remain faithful to. The spirit and mores of the times? The lyrical qualities of the original? Its readability? And what is the purpose of your translation? To support the study of the text in the original language? Or to open up the text to a wider audience, who will never have the chance to study it in the original Greek? These are just a handful of the questions that a translator must ask themselves. The translations that I produce for students who are studying a text in the original Latin are clunky and unsuitable for publication. This is because their sole purpose is to facilitate the students’ understanding of the Latin text in front of them, on which they will be questioned in an examination: I do not produce my work for the pleasure of a general audience, so I am not aiming at fluidity, readability or beauty, all of which are potentially important when publishing a translation for a wider readership, for people who want to enjoy reading a text for pleasure.

The power of the translator is immense, and those who are exercised by Wilson’s approach are upset by the fact that she has been credited with approaching the text from a more feminist standpoint, potentially imbuing it with a set of values that could not have been imagined by Homer himself. Yet I simply do not understand the hysterical reaction by some conservatives, who seem completely oblivious to the fact that this interpretative dance has gone on since the dawn of time. Every translator inculcates a text with his or her own priorities, and every translator knows that. If you are picking up a translation of an ancient text and you honestly believe that it will be giving you a faithful, full and accurate rendering of the original author’s meaning and intention then you are deeply naïve, for this is impossible. It is for this reason that I have never understood those who claim to understand the “word of God” when they have not studied their own religious texts in the original language in which it was written. So, Christians, off you go to learn Hebrew and New Testament Greek!

Let’s just take one very simple example of the problem. Imagine that I were producing a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. How would I render the phrase “imperium sine fine”, which is what Jupiter states that he will grant to the Romans? The word imperium has multiple meanings and can be translated as “power”, “command” or “empire”. It had some quite specific and technical meanings in relation to the command that a general had over a region but was also tied up with the Roman belief that the expansion of their dominion was a fundamentally good and noble thing: this included the exercising of power over other nations and the geographical expansion of their borders. The phrase sine fine could be rendered “without end” or “without borders” – it refers both to the physical extent of the Roman empire and to their belief that their domination was not only unlimited in terms of their relationship with the world, but that it would be unlimited in time. The phrase is therefore deeply resonant in the Roman mindset – that their empire, their military might, their control over the world was divinely-granted: it had no borders and it would last forever.

I would argue further that it is not only the layered meanings that such a phrase had for the Romans that have to be considered when translating this phrase now. As readers from a modern perspective, in the full knowledge of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the phrase imperium sine fine has a poignancy for us that Virgil could not have imagined. This does not mean that its meaning to a modern audience does not have value – quite the opposite. There would be little point in the survival of ancient texts if they were not to strike resonances within us as a result of the changes that have taken place since they were written.

The importance of capturing the spirit of a text over and above remaining faithful to its construction is a challenge faced by those who convert a classic novel into a film or a drama. The 1992 film version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, directed and produced by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich is – in my opinion – an absolute masterpiece of this spiritual capture. The opening scenes are entirely invented by the film-makers: a terrified woman in a torn red dress runs across farmland, then we see men on horseback who appear to be in pursuit of the woman’s assailant. Those of you who know the novel will understand exactly the background to George and Lennie’s situation that this represents and in my view it was a brilliant leap of imagination to transfer the information to film in this way.

Conservatives who fear “incorrect” interpretations of a text fail to understand that the enduring appeal of a text lies in its interpretation. Believe you me, Aristophanes did not have a feminist slant in mind when he wrote Lysistrata, a comic play poking fun at the incompetence of the Athenian political intelligentsia, who were doing such a God-awful job that even the women could probably do it better! That was the joke, for the Athenian audience. Yet Lysistrata is – inevitably – read and performed as a feminist play in the modern setting, and I have enjoyed productions that have rendered it thus. Thus, I do find myself chuckling at the rising hysteria expressed by many who seem so terrified by the fact that Homer has now been translated by a woman. I do wish they could understand that Homer will survive: he’s big enough and man enough to take it.

eligo, eligere, elegi, electus

Given the undeniable unfairness baked into Roman society, it might be a surprise to some that the Romans embraced a democracy of sorts. Only a small fraction of people living under Roman control could actually vote, but male citizens during the period when Rome was a Republic did have the opportunity to cast their vote for various administrative positions in government. The Latin verb “to choose”, which forms the title of this blog post, is what produced the participle electus and gives us the modern word election.

In the 6th century BCE, with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, the city-state of Rome was re-founded as a Republic and by the 3^rd Century BCE it had risen to become the dominant civilisation in the Mediterranean world. The ruling body known as the Senate was made up of the wealthiest and most powerful patricians, men of aristocratic descent. These men oversaw both the military campaigns that brought expansion and wealth to Rome and the political structures that managed its society. At the beginning of the Republic, only the Consuls were elected, but in later years Roman free-born male citizens could vote for officials in around 40 public offices which formed a complex hierarchical structure of power. Yet this public performance of voting did not really offer the citizens any kind of real choice. If you’re feeling depressed about the choices offered to you in your polling booth today, take heart: things were considerably worse two thousand years ago (even if you were a man).

Candidates for office under the Roman Republic were originally selected by the Senate and were voted for by various different Assemblies of male citizens. These Assemblies were stratified by social class and the weighting was heavily skewed in favour of the aristocracy. In the early years of the Republic, candidates were banned from speaking or even appearing in public. The Senate argued that candidates should be voted for on the merit of their policies, rather than through rhetoric and personality; in truth it meant the general public had no real opportunity to hear candidates’ arguments or indeed to hold them to account. In the later Republic the ban on public oracy was lifted and the empty promises so familiar to us today abounded, alongside some good old-fashioned bribery which – while theoretically illegal – was widespread. As the practice of electoral campaigning developed things did begin to change, with the pool of candidates no longer tightly limited to a select group of aristocrats under Senatorial control. In the long-term, however, this led to even greater misery for the citizens. They lost what little democracy they had during the Roman revolution, when what should have been a righteous and deserved uprising against the ruling oligarchy ended up turning into something arguably worse. Rome’s first ruling emperor, Augustus Caesar, claimed that voting was corrupt and had been rigged by the Senate for years in order to perpetuate the power of a handful of aristocratic families. His neat solution was to abolish voting altogether. Be careful what you wish for?

Once the early ban on public oracy was lifted, a key component of public campaigning during the Republic was canvassing for votes in the Forum. A candidate would walk to this location surrounded by an entourage of supporters, many of whom were paid, in order to meet another pre-prepared gathering of allies in the central marketplace. Being seen surrounded by a gaggle of admirers was hugely important for a candidate’s public image and was worth paying for. Once in the Forum, the candidate would shake hands with eligible voters aided by his nomenclator, a slave whose job it was to memorise the names of all the voters, so that his candidate could greet them all in person. The man running for office stood out in the crowd by wearing a toga that was chalk-whitened called the toga candida: it is from this that we get the modern word candidate.

To further attract voters among the ordinary people, candidates gave away free tickets to the gladiatorial games. To pay for such a display a candidate either had to be extremely wealthy, or to secure the sponsorship of wealthy friends. Cases are documented of men ending up in ruinous debt as a result of their electoral campaigning. Several laws were passed attempting to limit candidates’ spending on banquets and games, which evidences the fact that that the Senate didn’t like electoral corruption except when they were in charge of it.

Democracy under the Roman Republic was very much controlled by the select few male members of the aristocracy who held seats in the Senate. They essentially held all of the power, having been born into wealthy patriarchal families. The majority of people who inhabited the Roman world were not allowed to vote, including women and slaves. It is striking and not to say infuriating how many modern sources on Roman voting talk about “citizens” and “people” without seeming to feel any need to clarify that they are talking about male citizens and male people only. We do have evidence that women in the wealthiest families put their money and their energy behind their preferred male candidates, most usually because they were members of the same family. Electioneering in the form of visible graffiti in Pompeii evidences women’s support of their husbands, fathers and brothers but this is all produced by women of considerable means; what the poorest women in society thought and felt about the men who controlled their lives is anybody’s guess.

Cicero denounces Catiline in the Senate by Cesare Maccari (1840-1919 CE) .
Palazzo Madama, Rome

On bugbears and juxtaposition

An old Head of Department from many years ago used to start his Year 7 German course in the same way every year. Every year he would ask students to name any famous Germans they could think of. Every year he hoped to hear names like Michael Schumacher or Boris Becker, or perhaps one of the countless famous German composers from over the centuries. Every year he was given Hitler. It never seemed to occur to this lovely man that perhaps there was a better way of starting off his first German lesson. Something made him do the same thing over and again and I think a bit of him somehow relished the inevitable disappointment. We all have our crosses to bear in our chosen subjects.

For anyone who teaches or touches upon Roman culture, for us it’s waiting for the inevitable moment when a child will inform us that the Romans used to eat so much at their dinner parties that they would go and make themselves sick so that they could eat more. I’ve even overheard the guides at Pompeii help to perpetuate this myth by mischievously telling tourists that any random passageway that they can’t account for is a “vomitorium”, where guests would relieve themselves to create space for more gluttony. They know that this is nonsense. The confusion seems to have come from the word vomitorium itself (which actually was used by the Romans to refer to any passageway leading crowds out of a public building) combined with satirical pieces such as Trimalchio’s Feast, sometimes called The Millionaire’s Dinner Party, which describes the imagined excesses of dinner parties held by the nouveaux riches. We also have the disapproving remarks of authors such as Seneca, who wrote of slaves cleaning up the vomit of drunks at banquets and criticised what he saw as the excesses of Rome. It’s a depressingly familiar picture for anyone who has worked in a hotel or similar establishment in modern Britain; wealthy Romans were no more or no less gluttonous than the comfortably-off in any society, especially those societies which have alcohol at the heart of their culture.

Eye-roll inducing as this was, my personal bugbear of misinformation I simply cannot wait to hear is different. I tell myself I have to go there to prevent students from getting it wrong in their exams, but in truth there’s a bit of me that cannot resist it for my own torture. When working on the literature, I always ask every GCSE candidate what they think the term juxtaposition means. Almost without exception, students will tell me that the word means “contrast”. On an exceptionally good day, they will tell me that it means “putting things next to each other in order to create a contrast”. In actual fact, it means “putting things next to each other” and this may be done in order to highlight a contrast.

While I hate to be a massive Latin bore, I’m afraid this is yet another case where a simple knowledge of the Latin roots of words can help. To juxtapose has its origins in the Latin words iuxta (which means “next to”) and iungo (“to join”, also notable in derivatives such as join, conjunction, conjugation, conjugal) alongside the Latin word positus (“place” or “position”). It quite literally means “a placing next to”: there is no mention of the notion of contrast in the original etymological meaning of the word. The frequency with which the technique is used to highlight a contrast means that it is arguably justifiable to include this in the definition, but the etymological roots of the word really must be prioritised. Fundamentally, juxtaposition is placing a word or phrase next to another word or phrase, often but not exclusively to highlight a contrast.

Unfortunately, students (and teachers) Googling the word will find an avalanche of quotations using the word to mean simply and exclusively “contrast”. Just this morning I spotted a horrendous meme quoting American guitarist Dean Ween of all people: “the juxtaposition of fishing and touring couldn’t be greater”. Sigh.

Another part of the problem with this misunderstanding is that English really isn’t very good at doing juxtaposition. Our language requires too many supplementary words to make sense, plus we cannot muck about with word order in the way that Latin can without a serious change in meaning. Word order is sense-critical in the English language: “man bites dog” means the opposite of “dog bites man”. Latin, being an inflected language (i.e. one where the endings of the words dictate their meaning and role) has the advantage in that an author can place words next to each other with ease – certainly to highlight a contrast or frankly to do whatever he wishes.

The good news is that once a student realised what juxtaposition means it becomes much easier to spot in Latin. Once a student understands that it simply means placing words next to each other, they can assume that an author as adept as Virgil has always done so for a reason – it does not have to be limited to the concept of highlighting a contrast. An author may juxtapose a string of sounds, for example, or indeed words with a similar rather than a contrasting meaning. It’s entirely up to him.

Photo taken in Athens by Alexandra on Unsplash

Julius Caesar and the longest Leap Year in history

When it came to taking charge of chaotic situations, Julius Caesar did not mess about. The stories surrounding his courage on the battlefield, his talent for strategic thinking and his downright tenacity are countless, but did you know that tackling the hopelessly disorganised Roman calendar and introducing the concept of the Leap Year was also among Caesar’s claims to fame?

Picture the scene. You’re a farmer in the 1st century BC and – according to the calendar, which circled around the ritual of state religion – you ought to be doling out ripe vegetables ready for the festivals of plenty. Yet to you and any of your slave-labourers, for whom the passage of the seasons are essential, it is clear that those harvests are months away from fruition. How did this end up happening? Well, the Roman calendar had become so out of sync with astronomical reality that annual festivals were starting to bear little resemblance to what was going on in the real world. Something had to be done.

Julius Caesar wanted to fix the mess but this was no mean feat: to shift the entire Roman empire and all its provinces onto a calendar that was properly aligned with both the rotation of Earth on its axis (one day) and its orbit of the Sun (a year). Caesar’s solution created not only the longest year in history, adding months to the calendar during that year, it also anchored the calendar to the seasons and brought us the leap year. It was a phenomenal task. We are in 46BC, otherwise known as “the year of confusion”.

Centuries prior to Caesar’s intervention, the early Roman calendar was drawn up according to the cycles of the Moon and the agricultural year. The origins of the calendar being focused on agriculture gave rise to the phenomenon of a calendar with only 10 months in it, starting in spring, with the tenth and final month of the year roughly equivalent to what we now know as December. Six of the months had 30 days, and four had 31 days, giving a total of 304 days. So what about the rest? Well, this is where it gets really weird. For the two “months” of the year when there was no work being done in the fields, those days were simply not counted. The Sun continued to rise and set but – according to the early Roman calendar, no “days” officially passed. As far back as 731BC people realised that this was a little unhinged, and King Numa, the second King of Rome tried to improve the situation by introducing two extra months to cover that dead winter period. He added 51 days to the calendar, creating what we now call January and February, and this extension brought the calendar year up to 355 days.

If you think that 355 days seems like an odd number, you’d be right. The number took its starting point from the lunar year (12 lunar months), which is 354 days long. However, due to Roman superstitions about even numbers being unlucky, an additional day was added to make a nice non-threatening 355. At the same time, and for the same reason, the months of the year were arranged in such a way that they all had odd numbers of days, except for February, which had 28. February, as a result, was considered to be unlucky and became a time during which the dead were honoured as well as a time of ritual purification.

This all looks like good progress, but it was a situation that still left the Romans around 11 days out from the Solar year and even with all the improvements made, it remained inevitable that the calendar would gradually become more and more out of sync with the seasons, which are controlled by the Earth’s position in relation to the sun. By the 2nd century BC things had got so bad that a near-total eclipse of the Sun was observed in Rome in what we would now consider to be mid-March, but it was recorded as having taken place on 11th July.

Increasingly unable to escape the problem, the College of Pontiffs in Rome resorted to inserting an additional month called Mercedonius on an ad-hoc basis to try to realign the calendar. This did not go well, since public officials tended to pop the month in whenever it suited them best politically, without sufficient focus on the goal of re-aligning the calendar with the seasons. According to Suetonius, if anything it made the situation worse: “the negligence of the Pontiffs had disordered the calendar for so long through their privilege of adding months or days at pleasure, that the harvest festivals did not come in summer nor those of the vintage in the autumn”.

During 46BC – Caesar’s year of confusion – there was already an extra Mercedonius month planned for that year. But Caesar’s Egyptian astronomical advisor Sosigenes, warned that Mercedonius wasn’t going to be enough this time and that things were getting drastic. On the astronomer’s advice, Caesar therefore added another two extra months to the year, one of 33 days and one of 34, to bring the calendar in line with the Sun. These additions created the longest year in history: 15 months, lasting 445 days. Caesar’s drastic intervention brought the calendar back in line with the seasons, meaning that the practice of the ad hoc extra month of Mercedonius could be abandoned.

Of course, getting the calendar to line up with the Sun is one thing; keeping it that way is quite another. As an astronomer, Sosigenes was well aware of the problem. The issue arises from the inconvenient fact that there aren’t a nice round number of days (i.e. Earth rotations) per year (i.e. Earth orbits of the Sun). The number of Earth rotations on each of its trips around the Sun is – I am reliably infomed – roughly 365.2421897. Hence the problem and hence the need for a leap year. The Earth fits in almost an extra quarter-turn every time it does a full orbit of the Sun. Sosigenes therefore calculated that adding an extra day every four years – in February – would help to fix the mismatch. It doesn’t completely solve the problem forever, but it was a jolly good stop-gap.