In the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius, Emperor Caligula greets his horse, Incitatus, at a
wedding reception. “He’s never been to a wedding before,” Caligula tells the other
guests. “His life has really opened up since I made him a senator.”
Appointing his horse to public office has long been cited as a prime example of just
how deranged Caligula was. But look, if I had the chance to make my dog a member of
Congress, I probably would. Or any dog for that matter. Nowhere in the Constitution does
it say...sorry, I’m getting off track. The question at hand is, did Caligula really give
Incatatus a seat in the government, or is that story about as credible as my spec script
for a prestige political drama, Boston Beagle?
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and today we’re traveling back to the time of togas to get to the bottom
of some prevalent misconceptions about the Roman empire. They did wear togas, right?
Real quick before we start breaking down these misconceptions, I’m going to be using the
standard English pronunciations of names going forward, not the Latin pronunciations that
would ultimately just confuse everyone except for like five people at Oxford. Great, let’s go.
Caligula’s reign lasted all of four years and was characterized by so much corruption
and cruelty that people thought he suffered from insanity. Officials put a stop to the
tyranny by assassinating him in 41 CE. In other words, Caligula was unpredictable enough
that it wouldn’t be totally surprising if he did give his horse a government position.
Robert Graves’s 1934 novel I, Claudius, alleged that Caligula not only made Incitatus
a senator, but that he planned to nominate him for consul—the highest political rank.
Graves likely got this idea from earlier historical works. In the The Lives of the Twelve Caesars,
published in 121 CE, the historian Suetonius punctuates a description of Caligula’s love
for Incitatus by stating: “It is even said that he intended to make him consul.”
Suetonius doesn’t specify who said it, and modern scholars agree that Caligula probably
never followed through on this plan, if it ever was a plan. According to historian Mary
Beard, it’s possible that Caligula proposed it as a joke. Aloys Winterling, the author
of Caligula: A Biography, thinks it could’ve been the emperor’s way of mocking his fellow politicians.
“To destine [the emperor’s horse] for the consulship satirized the main aim of aristocrats’
lives and laid it open to ridicule. Caligula placed his horse on the same level as the
highest-ranking members of society—and by implication equated them with a horse.”
Honestly? I don’t see the insult. Horses are athletic, people love them, and they have
nearly unlimited access to sugar cubes. We'd be lucky to be horses.
Even if Incitatus was never meant to be a consul, he did live like one. Caligula supposedly
kept him in a marble stable, dressed him in jewels and fine fabrics, and gave him an entourage
of servants to wait on him hand and foot. Er, hoof and...hoof. I’m telling you. HorseLife.
Since the suffix -orium denotes a place and vomit means, well, vomit, the word vomitorium
seemingly speaks for itself. But while vomitoriums did exist in ancient Rome, they weren’t
chambers where gluttonous revelers could empty their stomachs to make room for more food.
The earliest known mention of a vomitorium comes from Saturnalia, written by Macrobius
in the 5th century. It’s possible that Macrobius actually made the word up. Romans already
knew the Latin verb vomĕre, meaning “to vomit,” and its corresponding adjective
vomitus. And according to University of Iowa classics associate professor Sarah Bond, Roman
writers were known to slap -orium onto the end of an existing word to name a new place.
That’s how I christened the “crying on the floorium,” which just refers to...any
room in my apartment.
In Macrobius’s case, the newly christened place in question was an amphitheater passage.
These halls gushed large hordes of people into their theater seats and then back out
to the streets so quickly that it seemed like the crowds were practically being vomited
through the doorways. Macrobius was being metaphorical, but later audiences interpreted
the word literally.
In his 1871 book Walks of Rome, August Hare called vomitoriums “a disgusting memorial
of Roman imperial life ... whither the feasters retired to tickle their throats with feathers,
and come back with renewed appetite to the banquet.” Other writers regurgitated—sorry—similar
descriptions through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This rather revolting mix-up might’ve been easy to swallow because upper-class ancient
Romans already had a reputation for feasting ad nauseam. As Seneca wrote circa 42 CE, “They
vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit.” Seneca was famously against
excess of all kinds, so he may have been exaggerating for dramatic effect. That said, since wine
flowed freely at every banquet, some party-goers probably did puke on occasion.
Romans did wear togas, and they also promoted themselves as a toga-wearing civilization
in art and literature. In Virgil’s Aeneid, he even describes Romans as “the race that
wears the toga.” But it wasn’t the go-to garment for everyone, and certainly not all
the time.
For one, generally only Roman citizens were allowed to wear them, so they were off-limits
to conquered peoples, expats, and whoever else set foot on Roman soil. And though kids,
women, and lower-class men did wear short togas early on in Roman history, the toga
became more and more of a status symbol as time progressed.
At the height of imperial Rome, a toga cloth could be nearly 20 feet long, so it wasn’t
cheap, and putting it on usually took the help of another person—say, a servant. And
if you’ve ever fashioned a makeshift toga out of a bedsheet for a college toga party,
you know what it’s like to try to move around in one … not easy. In other words, togas
were most common among rich men who didn’t have to do any manual labor. People mainly
donned them for important ceremonies and other public appearances, and otherwise stuck to
tunics and poncho-esque apparel.
As University of Cambridge classic professor Caroline Vout puts it, “If we asked, ‘What
do the Scottish wear?’ the answer would be ‘the kilt.’ But we would not expect
to go to Edinburgh and find all but foreign tourists clad in plaid.”
Thanks to Shakespeare, everyone remembers what Julius Caesar said as he succumbed to
his stab wounds on the senate floor: “Et tu, Brute?”, Latin for “And you, Brutus?”
But this almost certainly wasn’t Caesar’s final utterance. It isn’t even Caesar’s
final line before he dies in the play—after that, he says “Then fall, Caesar!” Yeah,
the last thing he ever did was refer to himself in the third person. I don’t know, I’m
starting to think this Caesar guy has a bit of an ego problem.
In real life, Julius Caesar may have said nothing at all. In Suetonius’s The Life
of Julius Caesar, he wrote: “[Caesar] was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering
not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when
Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, ‘You too, my child?’”
It wouldn’t have been unusual for a Roman to occasionally speak Greek at the time—it’s
been called “a sort of universal language even among non-Greeks” of the era. Shakespeare
may have chosen Latin for any number of reasons, but it’s not just the language that may
mislead audiences about the true nature of Caesar’s assasination.
In the context of the play, “Et tu, Brute?” suggests that Caesar can’t believe his closest
friend was in on the murder plot. But according to modern historians, Brutus was by no means
Caesar’s closest friend—that was Decimus, whom Shakespeare only mentions as a side character
named Decius. Decimus was sort of Caesar’s right-hand man during his reign, whereas Brutus
had opposed him in the past. In the civil war from 49 to 45 BCE, for example, Brutus
actually fought for Caesar’s adversary, Pompey. Of course, in the context of the play,
it makes good dramatic sense.
So why would Caesar have spoken directly to Brutus as he bled out? The operative word
in his purported question might’ve been child. Caesar could’ve simply been surprised
that he was betrayed not just by the old-timers, but by his younger cohorts, too.
Kathryn Tempest lays out a different theory in her biography of Brutus, drawing on the
work of James Russell, who analyzed curse tablets—didn’t know that was a thing—leading
to a different understanding of the supposed Greek utterance, Kai su, teknon. “And you,
too, child?” is one understanding of that phrase, but it’s also the beginning of a
Greek proverb that means something like “you, too, will, have a bite of my power.” Some
have taken the phrase to be more of a curse than a heartfelt expression of betrayal, something
along the lines of “back atcha!” or even “see you in hell!” And any of those interpretations
are predicated on the belief that Caesar even said the Greek phrase at all, and that it
wasn’t made up somewhere along the line to add a dramatic flourish.
History can be messy, but you can be confident that “et tu, Brute?” wasn’t Julius Caesar’s final question.
Hollywood epics like Russell Crowe’s Gladiator have given us a skewed view of Colosseum combats
in more ways than one. Early fights did often involve enslaved or conquered people convicted
of crimes, but the sport soon attracted voluntary combatants. By the first century, many showdowns
were between career gladiators, usually former soldiers or poor citizens looking for a lucrative,
if dangerous, opportunity. A large group of gladiators would train in a school called
a ludus. There were even labor unions that organized funerals and offered financial support
to the families of fallen combatants. Basically, being a gladiator was a full-fledged profession—albeit
an extremely dangerous one.
But it wasn’t always a duel to the death. Since we don’t have any comprehensive records
of the fights, historians have relied on tombstone inscriptions and graffiti to estimate how
many people perished in the arena. According to certain graffiti found in Pompeii, a set
of 23 fights resulted in eight gladiator deaths. Not an advisable career path, but not exactly
Thunderdome, either. Nineteenth-century historian Georges Ville compiled stats from 32 fights
from the first century and found that only six gladiators died—that’s about a 90-percent
chance of survival for that particular pool of combatants. Your odds went down the more
often you fought, of course, and tombstones reveal that many gladiators only made it to
their early twenties.
There was financial incentive to prevent every bout from ending in death. Training and funding
elite athletes was (and is) a costly endeavor, and sponsors would’ve had serious cash flow
issues if they constantly had to replace their charges. Often, the referee would call the
fight when one participant was wounded.
In the summer of 64 CE, a terrible fire began near Rome’s chariot-racing stadium, the
Circus Maximus. High, dry winds carried it through 10 of the city’s 14 districts over
several days. As the blaze leveled whole sections of Rome, Emperor Nero was supposedly watching
from a palace tower. Oh yeah, and he was playing the fiddle.
This is impossible for two simple reasons. One: Nero was about 35 miles away, safe at
his villa in Antium for much of the fire. Two: fiddles weren’t invented until the
Middle Ages. Now, Nero was skilled at playing other stringed instruments, like the kithara,
which is sort of a cross between a handheld harp and a small guitar. “Skilled” might
be generous to describe his musical abilities, Suetonius says that supposedly his singing
was so bad, people would fake their own death to be able to leave his performances. Yikes.
Several ancient Roman historians claim he did launch into some kind of performance during
the Great Fire. In 109 CE, Tacitus wrote that Nero “appeared on a private stage and sang
of the destruction of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity.”
About a century later, Cassius Dio alleged that Nero was wearing “lyre-player’s garb”
while staging his solo ode to Troy.
So is calling the widely spread story a “misconception” just a case of pedantic semantics? (Which are my favorite
kind of semantics, incidentally, and also the name of my lo-fi hip-hop collective.)
While it’s true that Nero was criticized for his response to the fire—some Romans
actually thought he had purposely set it, himself, because he wanted to rebuild his
palace to look more modern, of course—it’s also misleading to say that he dithered away
any opportunity to respond to the disaster.
The cause of the fire remains a mystery, but the emperor did oversee some relief efforts.
Nero returned to Rome and let people take refuge in his private gardens and the city’s
remaining public buildings. He also slashed the price of grain and had food shipped in
from the surrounding areas. According to Tacitus, these gestures didn’t improve his reputation,
since the rumor about his one-man show had spread nearly as fast as the fire.
Thanks for watching Misconceptions. I hope you understand those high and mighty ancient
Romans a little bit better now. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a comment telling me your
muppet down below, and I’ll see you next time.