Andrew Dalby

It's a good question! In national armies, the practice is often to mix up different ethnic groups so that they aren't tempted to go their own way. Either they have learned the national language at school, or they learn it, fast, during military service. In an army like Hannibal's, as with a mercenary army, it has to be different. You need leaders of each troop (or people attached to the leaders) to be bilingual and able to translate orders and reports. Since the Carthaginians had traded and settled in Spain, southern Gaul , Sicily, and had traded along the coast of Italy, there must have been some bilingualism. I think there's very little evidence of how much, but it must have been enough for communication in Hannibal's army ...

and 'dux legionis' will mean 'leader of the legion' (legionis is the genitive case of legio). That's fine. Imperator is also a good word. It means 'commander' and at certain periods it was a title that military leaders gained by acclaim from their soldiers.

Luckily, there is an almost perfect test case--the history of technology and industry in the United States, where slaves were held in southern states (like Georgia) but not northern states (like Ohio). As a result of cheap labor in the southern states, there was virtually no demand for labor saving devices. In contrast, there was an enormous demand for such devices in the north. Indeed, one of the most significant catalysts for industrial expansion in the northern states was the demand for farm equipment in the states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Not that the industrial output was limited to making farm equipment: many other industries were created to support the farm equpment business as well, including metalworks, mining, and railways. Thus, by the time of the civil war, the number of railways crossing the lands of northern states dwarfed the number in the southern ones. What makes this particular contrast so interesting, in fact, is that states like Ohio were not even settled by Europeans until long after states like Georgia and most of the slave owning states, yet due to its strong demand for labor saving devices, sparsely inhabited territories like Ohio and Michigan were able to quickly leapfrog the old colonial states. This is where one can see the real causal connection between technological backwardness and slavery. Thank you, Cato, you make a strong case there. Not being familiar with US history I wasn't aware of the north-south variation in industrial development. I'm persuaded.

That, Cato - is an excellent point ! Hmm ... It's the kind of argument called 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'. Be careful A.D., M.P. Cato will retort that it is the 'scientific' method and in my not so humble opinion , he will be correct. Yes, O future Augustus, I realize I'm wading towards a quicksand or in a hole and still digging ... OK, 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' means literally 'after this, therefore because of this'. It sort of sums up the historical (or forensic) argument that goes 'A happened, then B happened, therefore A was the cause of B'. I saw it (rightly or wrongly!) in Germanicus's statement above. Slavery was abolished (more or less world wide), technological advances were made (more or less world wide), therefore A caused B. And I'm not saying it's false in this case. No doubt there's something in it. It's just that it's difficult to prove or disprove, because we don't have a parallel world, available for comparison, in which A didn't happen. OK, you'll say, we do have the Roman Empire, look at that as your parallel world! But there are so many other differences between Rome and the 18th century world that I feel doubtful about the parallel.

Very useful word. It defines how far women have got in their attempt to civilize men (so far). As for how far men have got in the other direction: what's the Latin for 'nowhere'? Andrew

That, Cato - is an excellent point ! Hmm ... It's the kind of argument called 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'.

Could you give us title and more about this book. J. N. Adams, /Bilingualism and the Latin language/. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Very expensive ... (I don't remember the exact price, I got a review copy.) There was a review by Mary Beard in the /TLS/ (Times Literary Supplement) 13 June 2003; and I wrote a review in /The Linguist/ vol. 43 no. 4 (2004). You would probably find reviews on the Web if you search for the title. Adams is a specialist in the language(s) of Roman inscriptions, and examines in great detail a large number of inscriptions that provide some evidence of bilingualism. If the book has a fault, it is this: written for established classicists, some of whom have not the least familiarity with sociolinguistics or any sympathy with it (and that's not true of Adams himself), it starts from the assumption that the existence of bilingualism has to be proved. Of course, he does prove it; but in doing so very thoroughly from the documents, he hardly gets round to considering the likely extent of bilingualism in the Empire beyond the documents. I am writing this from memory now -- it is two years since I reviewed the book. It is a very impressive piece of work, and some of the individual documents are fascinating.

He can't take Camilla to the Holy Mountain.

Pliny says the smoke of Lupines kills gnats... :bag: Very nice explaination of the alkaloids Pertinax. Lupin seeds conserved in vinegar can be nice as an occasional alternative to table olives. You get them at markets round here, grown in southern italy I think. I never noticed any hallucinations -- I'll have another try.

This is a question I took on in chapter 2 my book Language In Danger (Columbia UP, 2003). My actual aim in that chapter was to see how many languages 'died' as a result of the spread of Latin and Greek at the time of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire. If you want the full details, and a map, and information about when each one is last heard of, look at the book! My conclusion was that over 60 local languages were spoken in the Empire, say in Claudius's time, and that fewer than 10 of these were still spoken when the Western Empire disappeared. Exact figures are difficult to give because some languages (e.g. Berber, Aramaic, Arabic, British Celtic) were spoken on both sides of the Imperial frontier. Also, the figure of 'over 60' is a minimum, because there will certainly have been some local languages of which nothing at all is now known. A much smaller number of these languages were customarily written. They, and the ones spoken on both sides of the border, were (surprise, surprise!) the ones likely to survive longest. In fact, in the West, the only eventual survivors that don't fall into one of these two categories are Basque and Albanian, if I remember rightly. To answer the question above: yes, Coptic is a straight descendant of ancient Egyptian, newly written in a Greek alphabet (with extra letters), and it was no doubt the majority language in Roman Egypt. Many people will have been bilingual in Coptic and Greek, some trilingual (with Latin or Aramaic or Nubian). In the first two centuries of the Empire there will have been a massive amount of bilingualism and multilingualism: J. D. Adams has recently written a splendid book on this.

Like Pertinax, I want more help on this. Dioscorides seems to have very little about mushrooms and nothing on hallucinogenic effects. Likewise Theophrastus. Celsus does not seem to mention them at all. Pliny does have a passage about them (22.92-99), well worth reading, but not a word about hallucinogens. I still have to check Nicander, but on present evidence I think this Christian Albrecht was high on something if he wrote about ancient Romans using hallucinogenic mushgrooms.

What was the Latin word for these products? Cannabis? Cannabis seed (as I noted in /Food in the Ancient World from A to Z/) was chewed after dinner as a sexual sedative. I think Dioscorides, among others, confirms this. Why? you may ask. Because the goings on at Greek and Roman banquets were sometimes rather exciting, and you might attend a banquet at a time when (because of a vow, or in preparation for a religious initiation, etc.) you were compelled to abstain from sex. The word kannabis is first recorded in Greek; cannabis in Latin. It means the hemp plant and its products. Hence cannabinum = 'made of hemp, hempen'. Hence also many words in modern languages, e.g. French chanvre 'hemp' and canevas 'canvas'; English 'canvas'. It's a very useful plant ... This one surprised me, I must say. If I gather correctly, it's a student paper, not a refereed academic article, but it's impressive. I have been interested myself in long-distance transport of medicinal herbs in prehistoric times. It's a very difficult area to research in.

This is new to me. So what did people use before 1600? Screw top seems so cheap. It would be nice though not to have to worry about getting the annoying paper wrap off the top or those little cork particles in your wine sometimes. I don't like a screw top for wine. Yet, for some reason, it seems quite acceptable on a bottle of Jack Daniel's. The cork idea, as we now know it, rather depends on machine-made bottles and machine-cut corks. Without that, you are much less certain of an adequate seal. Hence, before industrial times, it was generally necessary to help the seal with resin or sealing-wax. My guess is that the modern foil or plastic capsule (capsule is the French word for it, I don't know what the English word is!) is a sort of memory of the old-fashioned resin or wax sealing. I used to buy a Moldavian wine that had sealing-wax over the cork, and there is still at least one grower in Cahors (France) who bottles his wine with a red wax seal over the cork. My belief (on this very limited sample) is that the wine ages more slowly, and with slightly different results, when sealed in this way: whether this is good or bad depends on you and the wine. However, if this would also hold true of wine in amphoras closed with a bung and sealed with wax or resin, it might just help to explain why so many Italian wines, in Roman times, were said by connoisseurs like Galen and Pliny to be at their best after ten, fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years. That would demand really first-rate keeping conditions. If anyone wants to finance some long-term research in this area, I'm in the market ...

If it is 'corked', one shouldn't drink it! (actually, Octavius, if it is corked, the best thing is to get it uncorked as soon as possible ...) Well, let's say 'sealed with a cork' then. I'm sure Ludovicus is right, but, although the Romans didn't use corks, they did aim to seal their amphoras using a tight-fitting bung, with resin to complete the seal. But the amphora itself would have been somewhat more porous than glass. Others may know better than I do what detailed difference these things would make. Bear in mind that the Romans also used a quite different method, closely resembling the modern bag-in-a-box (but without the box). I mean, of course, the ox-skin or culleus, in which wine was transported in bulk, and the goat-skin in which you could carry a moderate quantity. These, again, would have added their own flavour qualities. The crucial similarity with what we do today is that, in both cases, the Romans were pretty well excluding outside air from the wine, except at the moment of transfer from one storage device to another. If they hadn't done that, it would fairly soon have begun to turn to vinegar, and they were perfectly well able to tell wine from vinegar!

The Greek form Saunitai seems to be first attested in the 5th century BC, at which date it was already being said that the land was held by 'Opikoi' (the Greek name for Oscans). However, that's not the same as saying that the word Saunitai/Safinim/Samnium is 'of Greek origin'. It doesn't seem to mean anything in Greek, and it's a bit hard to see how the Oscan and Latin names would derive from the Greek. On the other hand, the Greek form could derive from the Oscan, bearing in mind that Greek had no -f- sound at this time.

I believe that in some countries of the modern world men now demand maternity leave just like women. Plus

My thanks to PP and Pantagathus for their efforts on behalf of Norman Douglas. Yes, possibly he was thinking about the wine of Thurii ... and possibly, at the moment when he was checking his Pliny, he was distracted by 'a slender lad of unusual comeliness' like the one who had guided him across the heights of Montalto a few days before. On the wines of southern Italy, I have tasted some very good ones. I strongly recommend Aglianico del Vulture (fairly expensive); and red Corvo from Sicily (relatively cheap). Among dessert wines, Moscato of Pantelleria really is 'purest nectar'.

I thought Pliny said there was still some Vinum Opimianum in existence in his day? Consistancy of goo... I'm glad you said that, Pantagathus! You're quite right, but Pliny added that, in his day, the remaining supplies of Opimian were no longer used for drinking. It was used in small quantities for doctoring other wines, to give them 'age' I suppose. Not a very honest practice ... 'Opimian' is also served at the feast of Trimalchio, but that, of course, is fiction. I have a question for avid readers of Pliny on wine. Here's a quotation from Norman Douglas, /Old Calabria/, 1915. He is sitting at a restaurant at Cotrone in Calabria, watching the world go by, and says: "This wine of Cir

As to Falernian, Galen (imperial physician to Commodus I think, anyway quite a celebrity in 2nd century Rome, and no mean wine-taster himself), doubted that all the Falernian washing about in the Empire could possibly be genuine. Galen was, I think, the last person to report tasting Caecuban (which had, as someone said earlier, ceased to be made in Nero's time). He said it was 'too old'. That's life ... Oh, and another 'last taste'. The last banquet at which it's reported that wine of the Opimian vintage (121 BC) was served, was one at which Caligula was a guest, in AD 39. He went mad shortly afterwards.

Must have been tough on the elbows. When on their stomachs, hope no one was under them! :wub: Even if not directly one-on-one, as Octavius is suggesting, there was apparently the opportunity for a bit of byplay under the togas etc. Ovid, I seem to remember, claims to have brought a girl to climax while lying next to her at dinner. Unfortunately, as so often with ancient history, the evidence is incomplete. We know what Ovid said, but what would the girl have said about it?

That's a really excellent list, PP, I agree. I might have one or two additions for you, though ... Do you want me to send them in any particular format? Or is there maybe a way I can add to the list directly?

Thanks, Viggen, for the mention! C. Octavius's question is a good one. But since the Iliad and Odyssey are each about 24 times too long to have been sung at a banquet, it's necessary to develop a different theory about how they were actually composed. Those descriptions of how songs were sung at banquets cannot really give the picture of the making of these particular poems. Now, these days, anthropologists and folklore collectors often find their best informants, the best actual composers of songs, are women -- who normally perform, not in taverns and cafes for men, but just in the family circle, completely unnoticed till someone like an anthropologist is invited home and asks the right questions. I started from that observation, and began to work out afresh how it might have been. The evidence begins to look different ... Quintus is not bad (though I don't like Combellack's translation much, and I think there is now a new one). The stories of the Fall of Troy etc. had previously been told in epics of about the same period as the Iliad and Odyssey, but now lost. Quintus either rewrote them, or tried to reconstruct them if they were alreay lost in his day.

Two prayers are carefully specified in Cato's /On Farming/ (see my translation, on which there's more information at ... http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/books/CatoFarming.html One tells you what to do and say when you clear and begin to farm a new piece of land. Naturally, you have to pray to the unknown spirits who have possessed the land up to now. The other tells you what to do and say when you sacrifice a sow before beginning the harvest. In this case you are making the offering to Ceres and you are addressing Janus, Jupiter and Juno. Although clearly expressed, these two prayers are in a distinctly older form of Latin than the rest of Cato's text, and they have some links with formulaic phrases in other early Indo-European languages -- on this, and for a studies of early prayers and rituals in related languages, it's worth looking at Calvert Watkins's book, /How to Kill a Dragon/.

Another point maybe. It's difficult now to think back to that time, but in the early 19th century a lot of scholars had concluded that even the background of the Homeric stories -- the importance of Troy and Mycenae, the existence of kings and kingdoms many centuries before the recorded history of Greece began -- was pure fiction. You can't blame them entirely, because other similar tales -- Aeneas's journey via Carthage, the settling of Britain by Brutus, the voyage of Joseph of Arimathea to England, etc. -- really were fiction. Because Schliemann saw a difference in the Iliad (and he was right there) he went and proved that there was something in the stories about Mycenae and Troy after all. The result: a huge change in attitudes. It was accepted, and still is today, that at least some of the background to the Iliad is true. There really was a Mycenaean civilization.

You are assuming that their was enough 'money' circulating to effect all economic transactions. This was not the case. The Code told you how many units of 'this' representing X amount of 'money' could be 'traded' for how many units of 'that' representing X amount of 'money'. This Code was set up to effect 'honest' business and of course to collect taxes in kind. No, I'm making no assumption. Nor was Hammurabi. Even if the items concerned (which we can call 'money') aren't in hand, it is possible to calculate the value of other things against them, and to buy and sell, using this 'money' as a standard. That's what we do (nearly always!) when we buy a car or buy a house or pay our taxes. 'Money' (which means coin or banknotes, in our case) does not change hands. I don't call it barter, though. Do you? Yes, to be precise, they were an attempt to set the maximum prices at which supplies would be bought by the Roman army. And, no, they didn't work. But they provided employment for a lot of stonecutters ...