romans – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

et tu, Brute?

“Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up
To such a sudden flood of mutiny.
They that have done this deed are honourable:
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
That made them do it: they are wise and honourable.”

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony’s speech in Act 3 Scene 2.

This week, although it is difficult to know why, I’ve been thinking about imperial assassinations. Goodness knows what has sparked these musings on rebellion, mutiny and the forcible removal of a leader, but something tells me that we have been here before and we will be here again.

Julius Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC because many Roman senators feared that he threatened the Roman Republic. After winning a civil war and famously crossing the Rubicon, Caesar looked rather too comfortable at the top and a group of senators, including some of his closest allies, formed a conspiracy to murder him. They believed that killing Caesar would protect Rome from tyranny and restore the power of the Senate. In reality, instead of saving the Republic, the assassination led to further and prolonged civil wars and ultimately helped to bring about Rome’s future under imperial rule.

Given that the Roman empire was one of the most powerful political systems in history, it is easy to forget just how tenuous an emperor’s grip on power truly was. Roman emperors supposedly held absolute authority, but their position depended upon the support of the senate, the army and the praetorian guard. If any one of those groups withdrew their loyalty, even the strongest ruler could be swiftly removed from office. These days, a man in such a position is forced to resign; in those days, you simply got murdered.

During the height of the empire, particularly from the first to third centuries AD, emperors were commonly assassinated. It’s one of the things that I find students are most puzzled by, perhaps because they have fallen for Roman (particularly Augustan) propaganda and see Rome as exemplary of stable governance. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most dramatic examples of an emperor being forcibly removed from office was the assassination of the emperor Caligula in AD 41.

Caligula began his reign with enormous public support. The Roman people celebrated his ascension because he followed Tiberius, who was viscerally disliked, and he was also the son of the wildly popular general, Germanicus, who died very young. At first, Caligula appeared to be generous and charismatic, but his true colours soon became more than apparent and his behaviour towards members of the governing classes became cruel, erratic and humiliating. While ancient accounts may possibly exaggerate his faults (and the stories really are wild), nevertheless his relationship with powerful political groups certainly deteriorated rapidly and beyond repair. His popularity with the Roman people may have maintained his position for a while, but it was the praetorian guard who decided his fate when they assassinated him in his own palace.

The praetorian guard were an elite military unit stationed in Rome, whose purpose was to protect the emperor. By the same token, precisely because they had direct access to the ruler and were always armed, they also had the ability to dispatch them most efficiently. Following the murder of Caligula, many members of the senate wanted to restore the Republic again and abolish the office of emperor altogether, but their power by this time was weakened by the fact that they had already proved themselves impotent in the face of imperial power: most crucially, they lacked control over the army, but they also lacked popular support: the senators’ power had originally been brought down by populist leaders, who had exposed the undeniably self-serving systems set up by the ruling elite to perpetuate their own wealth and power. The decisive factor that ensured the senators were finished in all but name was the praetorian guard, who required an emperor to sign their pay cheques and indeed to justify their position. After Caligula was killed, the praetorians found Caligula’s disabled uncle, Claudius, hiding in the palace and proclaimed him as emperor. Once the military had backed Claudius, following the lead of the praetorian guard, the senate had no leverage to object. The removal of Caligula therefore demonstrates that, although the senate could support or justify the overthrow of an emperor, the men who carried the swords were the ones who decided things.

Another good example of an emperor being decisively removed from office is the fall of Nero. By AD 68, Nero had ruled for fourteen years. Initially he had been guided by capable advisers such as the philosopher Seneca. Early in his reign, he was relatively popular with the people because he sponsored games, artistic performances and public entertainments. His relationship with the senate, however, steadily worsened. Nero executed or forced the suicide of several senators whom he suspected of conspiracy, creating an atmosphere of fear among the traditional ruling aristocracy. His extravagant spending and controversial behaviour also damaged his reputation. But the decisive factor in Nero’s removal was his loss of military support. In AD 68, the governor of Gaul turned against him and shortly afterwards the Spanish governor, Galba, declared himself emperor. The praetorian guard abandoned Nero after being promised rewards by his Spanish rival: as a result, Nero had no protection in Rome, so the senate took the opportunity to declare him a public enemy and authorised his execution. Facing arrest, Nero was forced to take his own life, which was the traditional way for a condemned Roman aristocrat to make a hasty exit: these days, it’s called resigning for the good of the party.

Nero’s downfall once again highlights the importance of the army and the praetorian guard. The senate formally condemned him, but this action was only possible because he had lost the loyalty of the army in the provinces, who were demonstrating their growing political importance by supporting rival claimants such as Galba to the imperial throne. At the same time, the praetorian guard acted once again as chess-masters by switching allegiance when it suited their interests. Nero’s popularity amongst ordinary Romans may have delayed his downfall to some extent: ancient sources suggest that sections of the plebeians remained loyal to him because of his public entertainments and indeed because of his visible clashes with senatorial elite. But public support could not save an emperor once the military and political elite turned against him.

The emperor Commodus provides our final example of how imperial power could collapse. Commodus ruled from AD 180 to 192 and was the son of the respected emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Quite unlike his stoic father, Commodus became associated with corruption, extravagance and self-indulgence. He preferred gladiatorial games and personal luxury to responsible government and he increasingly alienated the senate by treating their traditional authority and governing experience with contempt. Commodus was quite the character and even participated personally in gladiatorial contests, something that aristocratic Romans found grotesque and degrading for a man of standing.

As Commodus became more paranoid and unstable, leading officials even feared for their lives and eventually members of his inner circle organised a conspiracy against him. An attempt to poison him failed, but ultimately the wrestler Narcissus was hired to strangle him in his bath. The senate immediately triggered the process known as damnatio memoriae, in which official images and references to a ruler were destroyed. This decisive removal of Commodus from public office again illustrates the weakness of emperors who had lost the support of the ruling elite. Although Commodus had attempted to maintain popularity with the masses through games and spectacles, this could not compensate for the hostility he faced among the senators and imperial officials. His death also demonstrates that conspiracies often emerged from within the imperial household itself. Following Commodus’s death, the empire descended into civil war, indicating that no ruler could govern successfully without military backing.

Throughout the height of the Roman Empire, the senate retained political importance but its power was limited compared to that of the army. Senators could legitimise or condemn emperors, as seen with Nero and Commodus, yet they rarely controlled events independently. The Roman army was ultimately the most significant force in removing emperors and the provincial legions frequently proclaimed their own generals emperor, especially during periods of instability. Military loyalty depended heavily on personal leadership and the promise of material rewards as a result of successful campaigns. Soldiers expected their leaders to provide financial bonuses as well as military victories: the two went hand in hand. If an emperor appeared weak, unpopular or incapable of expanding the empire, ambitious generals could and would challenge him. This military influence became even more obvious during the third century, when emperors rose and fell rapidly and the eventual collapse of the empire as we would recognise it became inevitable.

Within this monumental military might, the praetorian guard occupied a unique position due to their physical proximity to the emperor. Unlike distant legions, the guard was stationed in Rome and could intervene directly in palace politics. As seen in the case of Caligula, the guard was more than capable of assassinating the man with whose protection they were supposedly charged. Any passing similarities to UK cabinet members are, of course, entirely coincidental.

Together Forever?

soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Suns can set and rise again:
but once the brief light has set for us
there is just one everlasting night for us to sleep through.

Catullus, Poem 5

It has surprised me how many students have found these lines difficult to comprehend, a reminder that metaphors are not always obvious to students. One student recently hazarded a guess that Catullus was talking about the idea that he and his lover will be together forever in death. This not really what Catullus is saying at all: the poem focuses on the brevity of life compared with the yawning enormity of death, and uses this as an exhortation to make the most of the short time that he and his lover will have together. Furthermore, my student’s assumption that Catullus is talking about himself and his lover being united forever in the afterlife is an inherently post-Christian sentiment.

My student’s misinterpretation of Catullus’s musings on life and death came not long after I had finished another novel by RF Kuang, an author whom I have blogged about before. Her novel Katabasis is both grim and entertaining, following the travails of two research students who make a trip down to hell in an attempt to retrieve the soul of their academic supervisor. In the same way that Kuang’s previous novel Yellowface was a side-swipe at the publishing industry, Katabasis takes a highly critical look at the competitive world of academia. It also takes a spectacular tour of the ancient underworld, as seen through a variety of cultural lenses.

The way a culture imagines the afterlife reveals much of what it believes about life itself. For the ancient Romans, death was not a doorway into a joyful reunion with loved ones, nor a promise of restored relationships and perfected bonds. Instead, it was a shadowy continuation of our current existence, stripped of vitality, and warmth. The afterlife, even at its best, was a lonely and inadequate shadow of life.. The later Christian vision of the afterlife, especially the idea that death reunites individuals with those they love, rests on a fundamentally different emotional and philosophical foundation. Where Christianity tends to offer hope, restoration and intimacy beyond death, Roman thought leans toward distance, melancholy and an almost unsettling persistence of separation.

To understand this difference, it helps to look at how Romans conceived of the underworld. Deeply influenced by earlier Greek traditions, the Roman afterlife was typically imagined as a vast, dim realm beneath the earth, populated by shades, which were faint, insubstantial echoes of their living predecessors. These shades were not vibrant souls enjoying a new form of life, but diminished versions of their former selves. They retained memory (forgetting comes before reincarnation and a return to the upper world), but not vitality. Existence in this realm was often described as monotonous and emotionally flat, a place where the dead lingered rather than lived.

In this context, the idea of joyful reunion with loved ones has no place. Even when the dead encounter one another, their interactions are rarely depicted as comforting or restorative. Instead, such meetings often emphasise loss and regret, or the impossibility of truly reconnecting. The emotional tone is strikingly different from the Christian expectation that relationships will be healed and perfected after death. For the Romans, death did not mend what was broken in life; if anything, it froze those fractures in place.

Stories set in the underworld illustrate this vividly. When heroes descend into the realm of the dead, they often seek out lost loved ones, but what they find is not solace. Encounters are fleeting, strained and painful. The dead may recognise the living, but there is an unbridgeable gap between them. Attempts at physical contact fail, as the shades cannot be grasped. Words may be exchanged, but they carry a weight of finality rather than hope. The living leave with a deeper sense of loss rather than reassurance.

One of the most telling patterns in these stories is how often reunions are marked by emotional distance. A deceased loved one may turn away and refuse to engage or speak, displaying a kind of weary resignation that underscores the permanence of separation. Even when affection remains, it cannot be acted upon in any meaningful way. The relationship exists only as memory, not as a living bond. This is a far cry from the Christian idea that love transcends death and is fulfilled in eternity.

The Roman view is rooted in a different understanding of the self and its continuity. The soul, in Roman thought, does not necessarily retain the full personality or emotional richness of the living individual. It becomes something quieter, dimmer and more detached. Without the body, the soul’s capacity for connection is limited. Relationships, which in life depend on physical presence, shared experiences and emotional exchange, cannot fully survive in this diminished state. What remains is a kind of echo, not a continuation.

This helps explain why Roman literature often portrays the dead as solitary figures, even when surrounded by countless others. The underworld is crowded yet profoundly lonely. Each shade exists in its own muted sphere of awareness, unable to truly engage with others. Even when groups of the dead are described, they do not form communities in the way the living do. There is no sense of shared joy, no collective celebration, no renewal of bonds. The crowd does not alleviate loneliness; it deepens it.

The Christian concept of the afterlife places relationships at the centre of its promise. A stroll through my local graveyard reveals a multitude of 19th century graves that celebrate a family being reuited: their bodies are laid to rest together and the assumption is that their souls have reunited. Heaven is imagined not just as a place of individual salvation, but as a community of the redeemed, where love is perfected and reunion is assured. The idea that one will see loved ones again, recognise them and be reunited in a meaningful, joyful way is a powerful source of comfort to many (although as a child I often used to ponder how it would work for someone who remarried after their partner’s death: would they all hang out together in the afterlife?) Death, in the Christian framework, is not the end of a relationship but its transformation into something more complete.

Roman culture, for all its emphasis on family, duty and social bonds in life, did not project those values into the afterlife in the same way. Instead, the Romans believed that death severs the active dimension of those bonds. Memory may persist, but the relationship itself does not continue in a fulfilling sense. The finality of death is not softened by promises of reunion.

Even the rare exceptions in Roman thought, such as the idea that particularly virtuous individuals might enjoy a more pleasant afterlife, do not fundamentally alter the overall gloomy picture. These individuals may dwell in more favourable regions of the underworld, but the emphasis is still on individual reward rather than relational restoration. The joy, if it exists, is not primarily about being reunited with loved ones, but about relief from suffering or recognition of virtue. Relationships remain secondary, if they are present at all.

Another important aspect is how the Romans viewed grief. In a culture where the afterlife did not promise reunion, mourning had a different character. The dead were honoured, remembered and ritually maintained through practices that acknowledged their continued existence in some form. Yet these practices did not imply that the dead were waiting to embrace the living again in a future life. Instead, they reflected a desire to maintain a connection across a boundary that was understood to be fundamentally unbridgeable. This creates a poignant tension. On the one hand, Romans cared deeply about their loved ones and sought to preserve their memory. On the other hand, their worldview offered little hope that these relationships would be restored after death. The result is a kind of restrained sorrow, an acceptance that loss is permanent in a very real sense. The dead are not gone entirely, but neither are they truly present.

In stories of the underworld, this tension often reaches its most dramatic expression. A living visitor may be filled with longing, eager to see someone they have lost, only to discover that the person they remember is no longer fully there. The encounter becomes a confrontation with the limits of memory and the reality of change. The loved one is both present and absent, recognisable yet unreachable. The emotional impact is not comfort but a deepened awareness of loss. Death remains a boundary that cannot be undone. The afterlife is not a continuation of life’s relationships but a separate, diminished mode of existence. Encounters between the living and the dead, when they occur, serve to reinforce this boundary rather than dissolve it. They remind us that what has been lost cannot be recovered.

For the Romans, the afterlife was not a place where you would run into the arms of those you missed. It was a place where you might see them again, but only as shadows, only at a distance, and often only to feel more acutely the separation that death had created. Reunion, when it occurred, was not a resolution but a reminder of what once was. It attests to a fundamental difference in mindset and attitudes to death that I find endlessly fascinating.

Felix Nativitas

Christmas did not begin its story in a vacuum. It arose within the vast and vibrant Roman Empire, a place where countless gods, rituals and traditions were already woven into the rhythm of everyday life. When early Christians eventually shaped their own celebrations, they did so whilst living among people who already marked their calendar with festivals, feasts and customs. Christmas was a celebration which developed in conversation with the pagan world around it, and echoes of ancient Roman festivities can still be heard to this day.

Before Christmas ever graced a church calendar, the month of December belonged to Saturnalia, the most beloved festival in the Roman year. Dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture, Saturnalia was a season of feasting, public merriment, exchanged gifts and an inversion of ordinary social rules. Slaves were permitted to dine alongside their masters, ordinary citizens dressed in colourful clothing and laughter filled the streets. For the Romans, Saturnalia was a cherished invitation to joy and generosity, when daylight was at its shortest.

As Christianity spread across the empire, its followers could hardly avoid the fact that they were living beside these exuberant customs. They worked, traded and travelled among people who had long found comfort in Saturnalia’s festivities. Even while Christians rejected the worship of pagan gods, the rhythms of the culture around them could not simply be dismissed. The earliest believers did not yet celebrate Jesus’s birth. Easter, with its promise of resurrection, held far greater importance at that time, and still does in many parts of the world. But the season of Saturnalia left a deep imprint on the Roman imagination, an imprint that would shape the Christmas period in centuries to come.

Another celebration, emerging later but carrying immense symbolic power, prepared the ground for what would eventually become Christmas Day itself. On the 25th December, the Romans honoured Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. This was the moment in the year when the sun, having reached its lowest point in the winter sky, began its slow ascent once more. Light returned, day by day, and darkness lost its hold. As a sufferer of mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, I am still somewhat obsessed with this, and track the progress of the sun’s re-emergence quite obsessively on an app on my phone. The emperor Aurelian was perhaps a fellow sufferer, for he elevated the sun god to renewed prominence in the third century, building a temple in his honour and giving the festival the stamp of imperial authority. The symbolism was unmistakable: the rebirth of the sun signalled renewed strength, hope and the promise of triumph.

The imagery of light returning to the world resonated with early Christians. Long before Christmas existed, the early Christian writers were already describing Jesus as a radiant presence — a light that shines in the darkness, a sun of righteousness. When the time came to choose a date to mark the birth of Christ, an alignment with the festival of the Unconquered Sun carried a poetic logic. Winter solstice celebrations already existed across many cultures and Christians, surrounded by a world that already rejoiced at the return of daylight, found in them a natural metaphor for their own faith.

Yet the decision to celebrate Christmas on December 25th did not happen quickly. For centuries, Christians debated whether Jesus’s birthday should be celebrated at all. Some early theologians went so far as to criticise such birthday celebrations as pagan excess. In the end, theological reasoning blended with cultural reality, and a compromise was reached. The celebration of Christ’s nativity was drawn into the orbit of Rome’s winter festivals.

Once Christianity gained legal recognition under Constantine in the 4th century, church leaders faced the challenge of guiding a vast and diverse population into a new religious identity. The empire still had the legacy of the customs of Saturnalia, the reverence for Sol Invictus and countless other local traditions. Abolishing such celebrations outright would have caused confusion and led to civil unrest. Instead, Christian leaders chose the path of least resistance: they recast familiar festivities with new meaning. They did not graft pagan worship onto Christianity, but they repurposed cultural habits — gift-giving, feasting and decorating homes — to fit the story that they wanted to tell. In doing so, they allowed people to continue the customs they loved whilst shifting the spiritual focus.

Christmas grew within this climate of adaptation and reinterpretation. Many of the customs that now feel inseparable from the holiday were once part of Roman winter traditions. The exchanging of gifts, once associated with Saturn’s festival, found a new home in the tale of wise men bearing offerings for a newborn child, and in the Christian emphasis on charity and care for the poor. Feasting and joyful gatherings continued, now wrapped in the language of celebration for Christ’s birth rather than Saturn’s agricultural blessings. Lights and candles, once meant to honour the returning sun, became symbols of the divine light that entered the world in Bethlehem according to Christian belief. Even the greenery that adorned Roman homes during winter — a symbol of life persisting in the cold — persisted in later centuries as wreaths, boughs and eventually the Christmas tree.

Such continuities do not make Christmas a pagan holiday in disguise. Rather, they reveal how cultural transformation naturally unfolds. Christianity, growing from a small sect into the dominant religion of a sprawling empire, had to find ways to speak to the hearts and habits of its people. In Rome, this meant placing the celebration of Jesus’s birth in a season already rich with meaning, then slowly reshaping that meaning through worship, stories and symbolism. As centuries passed, Christmas continued to evolve. Medieval Europeans added their own layers of traditions of plays, feasts and symbolic foods. Later still, modern customs from Victorian England and American culture reshaped the holiday yet again, giving us carols, cards, Santa Claus imagery and the commercial bustle that now defines the season, for better or for worse. But beneath all these layers, the ancient Roman foundations still flicker like candlelight. The joy of gathering with others in the dark of winter in anticipation of the increasing daylight to come; the encouragement to be generous and think of others in need; the glow of lights that promise warmth and renewal. All these traditions echo the old festivals that once marked December long before Christ was born.

Understanding this intertwined history should not diminish Christmas for anyone, Christians included. The holiday stands as a testament to humanity’s enduring desire to find meaning in the dark months, to celebrate hope’s return, and to bring warmth into the coldest part of the year. Through Christianity’s encounter with Rome’s festivals, the season became a bridge between worlds — between old gods and the new faith, between ancient customs and evolving traditions, between winter’s chill and the promise of returning light. In that sense, Christmas is not merely a date on the calendar, but a centuries-long story of cultural evolution, a process that is still unfolding each time December rolls around.

On Fish

Some local lads have started fishing on the canal. The likelihood of these young scallywags having a licence to do so is slim, but likewise their level of success when it comes to catching anything seems equally dubious. I have observed them occasionally, waving rods across the water to no success, but this week I came across three of them at the side of the water, making loud retching noises and shouting.

As someone not long out of the mainstream classroom, it is something of a habit to pause and query the antics of young teenagers, so I stopped and observed the melodrama.

“We’ve caught a carp!” one of them shouted, somewhat unnecessarily, given the fact that I was standing less then a metre away from the unfortunate creature. It looked more like a pike to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. Whatever the species, it was very, very dead.

“Okay,” I said, cautiously.

“It STINKS!” said another boy, in between making gagging noises.

“Well, boys,” I said. “If it smells bad, I wouldn’t eat it if I were you.”

“We’re not going to eat it!” said the first boy, his tone making it clear that the very suggestion was utterly ludicrous.

“So what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Take a picture of it and then throw it back,” said one of them, like this was the most obvious thing in the world and I was from outer space.

“Well, I’m not sure I approve of this,” I said, in my best middle-aged woman voice. “You’ve just killed a creature for no good reason.”

“We didn’t kill it!” said the first boy, incredulously. “It was already dead!”

I sighed. Of course it was. The boys had somehow dragged a long-dead, semi-rotten fish out of the canal and were very excited about the whole business. How else does one spend a Sunday afternoon when one is thirteen, I suppose? Ah, those halcyon days. I decided I had little to contribute to the situation and I left them to it.

Pike or carp? I pondered absent-mindedly, as I made my way home. Fish names are something of a sore spot for me. There is an interminable list of them that crossword setters like to make use of in their clue-constructions. Whenever I see the word “fish” embedded in a clue, my heart sinks. I swear, you can string any handful of letters together and it will turn out to be an obscure species of fish: from ayu to ziega, amur to zingel, if there’s a fish involved in a crossword, then I’m on a hiding to nothing.

Whether the unfortunate beast was indeed a pike or a carp, it seemed obvious on reflection that it had been dead for some considerable time. Not only were the boys’ fishing skills and equipment highly unlikely to have extended to such a princely catch, the creature itself was stiff and motionless. Do fish go through rigor mortis like mammals? I wondered. Now, there’s something to Google. In a flash, I remembered that the treatise on which my PhD was based at one point likens something to “a fish out of water”. I recall going down something of a rabbit hole, as I found myself pondering how much the ancient writers knew about what happens to fish when they’re out of water. Sure, they would have observed what a fish does when this happens, but what did they conclude was going on? I remember asking Professor Bob Sharples, an expert in the field of ancient thought and something of a walking encylopaedia, whether he knew of any mentions of the topic in the Greek and Latin corpus. “Indeed!” he said. “In fact, Theophrastus wrote a whole treatise called On Fish. I wrote an article about it five years ago.” Of course he did. How foolish of me not to know this.

There seems to have been something of a discussion in the ancient world about how fish respire. Aristotle observed that fish died quickly when removed from water and inferred that water must contain a life-sustaining substance that was analogous to air on land. He noted that fish possess gills instead of lungs and correctly proposed that these organs play a role similar to breathing in humans and other land-based animals. Aristotle also distinguished between different aquatic animals, and seems to have understood that creatures such as dolphins and whales have to surface for air, whereas fish use their gills to extract what they need directly from the water. The much less famous Theophrastus (the subject of my Professor’s article and Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum) seems to have taken quite an interest in fish. He observed that fish depend on the continuous flow of water through their gills and that stagnation or poor water quality can harm them.

Roman naturalists, including Pliny the Elder, inherited and popularised this understanding. They also observed that gills serve as the essential respiratory structures of fish and that water somehow provides the equivalent of atmospheric air. While none of these men could have known about oxygen or understood the biochemical processes of respiration, they did accurately describe the observable mechanics: water passing over the gills. These observations laid the groundwork for the later scientific recognition of the fact that fish extract dissolved gases from water. The ancient thinkers demonstrated a surprisingly advanced understanding for their time, the kind of understanding that comes from empirical observation and underpins the modern scientific method.

To conclude my canalside meanderings, it is coincidental that fish are something of a hot-button topic inside our own household this week, as my husband is currently resurrecting our long-disused fish tank. It already looks marvellous, a veritable panorama of underwater plants, but is yet to welcome its piscine resident as the water quality needs to be perfect and the tank needs to be a properly functioning eco-system before it can sustain life reliably. My husband is not the kind of man to bung a fairground fish in a plastic bag: he takes his responsibility as the prime mover very seriously. I am told that we will have one solitary fish, because it will be one of those fish that likes to fight other fish. A pugnacious pollock. A bellicose barracuda. I am looking forward to seeing it, staring out of the tank like a prize boxer eyeballing his opponent before the fight.

Searching for Eboracum

As I write, my husband and I are spending a few days in the city of York. To my shame, and despite the fact that it has been on my bucket list for a considerable number of years, this is my first ever visit to this wonderful city. It is impossible not be awe-struck by York, which oozes tradition and culture from every corner. It also comes across as notably affluent throughout, which is perhaps unusual for a city; even the local Wetherspoons looks classy.

York feels like a place where multiple periods of history are jostling for your attenion. There are Viking streets and Georgian terraces, but York’s Medieval past and how this ties in with the history of the Church of England is most obviously dominant in its architecture. What is perhaps least obvious to the casual viewer is the city’s Roman origins, yet York was indeed one of the most important military and administrative centres in northern Britain, a legionary fortress and city called Eboracum.

A Roman presence in York began in the late first century AD. The ill-fated ninth legion, which has a mysterious history all of its own, established a large fortress on the north bank of the River Ouse in around the 70s AD. The fortress followed the distinctive plan of a typical Roman castra used across the empire: a defended rectangle with internal streets, command buildings, barracks, workshops and administrative areas. Over time, the original timber-and-earth defences were rebuilt in stone and a civilian settlement grew up adjacent to the military base. This, in fact, is the origin story of most Roman towns in Britain, and like all of them, York’s Roman origins can mostly be viewed piecemeal, woven into the fabric of what stands today.

York thrived continuously, from Roman times to the present. As the centuries slid by and when later builders needed stone, many Roman structures would have been pillaged for materials to support newer building projects. Most of the stones from the original fortress would have been removed and repurposed, but the Roman foundations remain: ramparts became the bases for medieval walls, Roman drains and sewers were incorporated into later systems and Roman roads turned into medieval carriageways and were given new names. My husband and I, both struck by the apparent affluence of the city, in which we found almost no disrepair, paused to ponder the single area of disuse we had come across: a large complex of buildings with boarded up windows. All became clear when we noticed a sign referencing an archaeological project attached to the railings around the area; it seems that a local building project must have come across something exciting beneath the surface, rendering the building works halted for now.

This indeed is what happened to the inn now called the Roman Bath pub in St Sampson’s Square. In around 1930, while work was being carried out in the cellar of the pub then called the Mail Coach Inn, which had suffered fire damage, builders uncovered a series of old stone structures and channels, which turned out to be part of a Roman bathhouse. Archaeologists confirmed that the remains were connected to the nearby garrison of Eboracum, and concluded that they were built by its soldiers for their own use. Thankfully, the man who owned the pub at the time was interested enough to preserve the remains, and today visitors can descend down to the cellar to see the original surviving hypocaust system. So, on entering the pub, you are greeted with the choice to visit the bar or the baths — or indeed, you can of course do both!

York has other places where one can poke one’s nose into its Roman origins. The Multangular Tower in the Yorkshire Museum Gardens is the most striking standing remnant of Roman occupation. It marks part of the south-west corner of the original legionary fortress, but what survives is a multi-period structure: it has Roman stone at its base, but evidences later reworkings (you can see the point of change in the picture below). There are also small stretches of the original Roman walls that are visible in the city, but York’s famous surviving city walls are of course Medieval. The Yorkshire Museum houses a collection of Roman artifacts, but to be honest it’s not exactly exciting unless you’re into looking at hunks of masonry. I know, I know. I’m a rubbish Classicist.

Given my day job, it was obligatory that to go looking for the Roman origins of York, despite my limited penchant for chunks of broken stonework. But to be honest, it is impossible not to be more intrigued by its Medieval history and by the things that mark out the city as unique: its glorious plethora of quirky ale houses, its equally notable profusion of churches, chapels and shrines and — perhaps most striking of all — its surviving city walls. Built originally to defend the city from rebellion, these structures were no longer used as a mechanism for defensive by as early as the 1800s. Parts of the walls from this point on became nothing more than a curiosity and began to be used as a walking route, so the surviving stucture was adapted to suit this new leisure pursuit. A new walkway was built inside the city walls to create a promenade and it is upon this walkway that you can survey the city today. In a world where it’s all too easy to convince ourselves that everything is always getting worse, I find it rather wonderful that what used to be an essential defence structure is now simply a place to pass the time and ponder.

Vox populi

The Roman intelligentsia never really understood the rise of the demagogues. Those who saw it coming were those who viewed Rome as in decline, at the mercy of mob rule; they never understood the needs and legitimate frustrations of the ordinary people, who counted for little as far as they were concerned. Those caught by surprise had only a hazy grasp of their own handle on power.

The authority of the Senate was based on custom and consent rather than upon the rule of law: it gave advice, but could not enforce its rulings. The Senate thus had no legal control over the people or their magistrates. This uneasy rule by consent lasted for a while, but complacency and arrogance ultimately led to the Senate’s authority being dismantled in all but name.

The Optimates were the dominant group in the Senate, those with families dating back to the mythical good old days and the easy confidence that aristocracy brings. They consistently blocked the wishes of others, who were thus forced to seek support for their measures via the tribunes, who led the tribal assembly. These men were called the Populares or “demagogues,” by their opponents. The Optimates tried to uphold the oligarchy and thus maintain their aristocratic stranglehold on power; the demagogues sought popular support against the dominant aristocracy, sometimes in the interests of the people but also to further their own personal ambitions. To be clear, both groups of men were eye-wateringly wealthy: this was in no way a rise of the working man. The demagogues achieved some success via purely political means, but ultimately the generals who commanded military forces in the provinces (also fabulously wealthy) began to realise that there was an opportunity here. The Roman elite found out the hard way that those who win the hearts and minds of the military are the ones who hold power. And it was still all about money – you didn’t make it in this battle for power without it.

It is difficult and not to say puzzling to watch the existential crisis being experienced by Democrats and their supporters across the Atlantic. Rarely has a nation been so divided and so unable to listen, although I am experiencing uncomfortable flashbacks to our own country during the fallout after the Brexit vote. I cycle through news channels on an endless loop and find person after person talking, talking, talking. Talking to each other, talking at each other, talking over each other. Nobody’s listening. Although a passionate supporter of people’s right to protest, I am beginning to lose my faith in even this simple kind of expression, for in today’s world it seems always to descend into people screaming at each other, nose to nose across the barricades. But you can scream as hard as you like. It doesn’t matter if nobody’s listening.

I do not claim to know why the American people voted as they did. I have my own pet theories, but these are shaped and coloured by my own peculiar interests and passions, and therefore too biased to be of relevance. I can only say what I see, and what I see is a population that feels betrayed by politics. I see people who are sick of being told what to think or – even worse – being told that they don’t think, that they are incapable of it. That their small-town lives don’t matter, that their values are old-fashioned and need to be consigned to history, that they need to get with the programme, wise up, wake up, listen up, sit up and shut up.

The trouble with democracy is you ask people what they want and they tell you. It may not be the result you were hoping for. Winston Churchill no doubt thought when he saw his country through the second world war that the next election was in the bag. In fact, he and his party were voted out of office. To quote the man himself: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

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.

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.