Andrew Dalby

Dude, they're stoned!!! Pass the dutchie on the left-hand side... This sounds a bit like the 'Libertine Sauna' which Mrs Dalby pointed out to me on the outskirts of Poitiers. Maybe they are all steamy Scythians inside there. We'll check it out.

Well, you know I always default to your judgment on linguistics Andrew, I just appreciate you indulging my short ventures 'outside the box' By the way, I'm trying to find it but do you know off hand what term Herodotus used when describing the Scythian use of blinded captives in butter making? I wonder if he just called it 'oil of milk' or something of the like? You come up with some amazing quotations. I had completely forgotten that one ... (hedges while trying to check reference) ... It's book 4 chapter 2. He talks about mare's milk put into the churn, the blinded captives who churn it, and the 'part that floats' (to epistamenon) and the 'part that sinks' (to ypistamenon). He doesn't use any more specific words. According to How and Wells's commentary on Herodotos, a similar description is given by Hippokrates /On Diseases/, and in that text the words are 'boutyron' and 'hippake' respectively, hippake being the specific Greek word for 'mare's milk cheese'.

Geographically, yes, it was closest to the probable locality of pIE (proto-Indo-European) origins. Linguistically, it's hard to know, because practically nothing of Scythian survives, and I think most people would say that Vedic Sanskrit is slightly closer linguistically to pIE than any other recorded language. But if you want to trace the word for butter (and therefore the making of butter) back to proto-Indo-European, you might be on a sticky wicket. The word really looks like a classical Greek compound, and a neologism of the classical period, though I don't deny it has been argued that it is borrowed from Scythian.

Nevertheless he still controlled some cities and never abdicated the throne. For exemple at the time of war between Murtzuphlus and crusaders, "he was in a city called Messinopolis, with all his people, and still held a great part of the land" (Geoffrey de Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, 266). This is true. I would knock him out of the list in November 1204, when, having traipsed around the ruins of the Empire with his serially polygamous daughter Evdokia, he was captured at Corinth by Bonifacio of Monferrato and sent off to captivity in Monferrato. He never ruled anything after that, but lived at least till 1211, the date when he was captured again by his son-in-law Theodoros Laskaris, emperor of Nikaia, and consigned to a monastery. I expect he had some praying to do. Monferrato (south of Turin) is a new DOC wine, well worth tasting.

Not on shipboard, that's all I'm saying ...

Yes, I have heard that said before. The usual view, though, is that boutyron is a native Greek compound word. You can pick it apart and it means 'cow cheese'. I feel this makes a lot of sense, as a name invented by people who, themselves, got their milk from sheep and goats and were in the habit of making cheese with it. The logic is: this stuff seems vaguely like cheese, and it's made from cows' milk by those cattle-keeping people up north, so let's call it 'cow cheese'. The Latin word is borrowed from the Greek, and modern words like English butter, French beurre, etc., are derived or borrowed from the Latin. The Romanian word for butter has a different (but Latin) origin: it is unt, from Latin unguentum. This seems to confirm the point that Pertinax makes, above, with his quote from Galen. When classical authors say that central and northern Europeans used butter in place of olive oil, they really did mean to imply that they used it not just as a food but also as an unguent: 'in bathing' as Galen puts it.

AD, I shouldn't have abridged the quote as much as I did. Here is what came right before it and is why when I first read this in Strabo I had assumed he meant it was used with bread: "For two-thirds of the year the mountaineers feed on the acorn, which they dry, bruise, and afterwards grind and make into a kind of bread, which may be stored up for a long period." Here i'm just making an inference because 2/3rd's of the year is a long time to eat the acorn bread without any thing else. I heartily agree with that! /I/ would certainly put butter on it.

I'm curious about this report and look forward to hearing more. Yes, I thought tracing of gold and silver sources for coins was not that new. Also the concept of 'economic value' mentioned in the report seems to pose a question that an archaeologist couldn't expect to answer: you would need social historians (or even economic historians!) for that.

Thanks for the Strabo quote. I agree with you about ghee, and when the author of the /Periplus Maris Erythraei/ talks about the trade in butter in the Indian Ocean he certainly must mean ghee. But I never came across any source saying that ghee was made in Italy or Greece. Considering how many ways olive oil was used by Italians and Greeks, the question you raise is interesting. Strabo seems to be talking about food uses (not fuel or body-cleansing or stored wealth, therefore) but he might mean as a cooking medium (perhaps the most likely one -- this difference between northern and southern Europe still exists) or a dressing for vegetables and other foods, or a vehicle for sauces, or, yes, as a dip for bread. Or all four, and there will be others I've forgotten. But whichever he means, he is confirming in effect that butter was not used in these ways by Greeks and Romans. And I still think that the idea of spreading butter (or anything) on bread was alien to classical peoples. Can you find a text that proves me wrong there?

The nail & hair trimming or the sex? Depends what you consider important.

If you combine this with the fact that military success was an essential part of a full Roman political career, you have some structural reasons why Rome was so expansionist, all the way to the end of the Republic.

Christians were, perhaps, sometimes more concerned about slaves than others were. I seem to remember a Roman Christian author saying you should only buy a slave 'to save his soul'. But does this mean to set him free, or to convert him to Christianity while keeping him as a slave? I don't know. Can anyone confirm or correct this?

Very interesting. Agreed, it's impressionistic, but it seems that all the impressions are tending towards Heraclius for one reason or another!

Not much real evidence known to me. You hear of generals who preferred to eat like the men, which no doubt boosted morale, but I bet that wasn't the case all the time. In military documents there may well be evidence for the importing of luxuries for officers who could afford it: I suggest a close look at those from Vindolanda that mention food, wine, etc. -- Vindolanda has cropped up on other threads here.

I know the years of Heraclius` reign, but I asked the year when the greek language was made an official language of the Empire. It was /an/ official language under the Roman Empire. I suppose the question would be when it became /the only/ official language. Others may know better than me, but I wonder whether it is possible to give a date at all. I looked in L R Palmer's /The Greek language/ and in R. Browning's /Medieval and Modern Greek/. No answer to your question, but I see that Browning highlights (as I did above) the loss of the East to Islamic conquest, which made the Empire more predominantly Greek-speaking than it was before; thus Browning (like Aphrodite above) makes the reign of Heraclius a turning point. We can use the concept of official language, but I can't think what the ancient Latin or Greek for 'official language' would have been. In my own book /Language in Danger/ I highlighted the French Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets in 1539 as one of the earliest rulings in any state that a certain single language must be used in official business (and I wasn't the first to say this!) Before that date, you can find lawyers under the Roman Empire talking about which languages can be used for written contracts (two languages only, Latin or Greek) and which languages for verbal contracts and lawsuits (several regional languages of the Empire could be used). You can also find people saying e.g. that Senators ought to be able to speak Latin. But it's really difficult to pin down legal rulings about an official language.

There's now some basic information about Empire of Pleasures on my website, with a few extracts (including Martial's advice on where to bathe when in Rome), and, for avid readers, some up-to-the-minute additions, including a very important note about what you mustn't do during a Mediterranean sea voyage ...

It's a good one. I can imagine a fantasy series based on this ... Seriously, I'm not sure if you can have slavery without some form of racism, though admittedly it depends on your definition of racism. Were Romans racist not because they discriminated on grounds of colour, which they don't really seem to have done, but because they discriminated against 'barbarians' or non-Romans and were prepared to buy and sell the outsiders? By the way, the major scientific reports and discoveries resulting from Columbus's voyages were all published in Latin (some originally in that language, some translated into it for wider circulation) ... so your idea is not quite all fantasy!

For anyone who's interested in Roman trade and exploration, the 'Periplus' is a fascinating read. The best translation and commentary is by Lionel Casson (Princeton Univ Press). Given the choice among Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling and the anonymous author of the Periplus, I'll choose the latter as my desert island companion. Not only is he a better writer than the other two, he also might know the way home.

LOL! Where is it quoted? I was afraid you'd ask that, Favonius. I swear to the accuracy of it, but I haven't got the reference handy. My search starts now. Someone may soon want to use the original words in a tattoo (but I hope not)

So... When exactly? I mean the year. Heraclius (or Herakleios) reigned 610-642. He reorganized the administration, defended the Empire successfully against the Persians, lost and regained the True Cross ... and then lost the whole of the East (permanently) to the first wave of Islamic conquest. The latter event, too, will have had a big linguistic effect, because it removed Aramaic and Coptic, the two largest regional languages, from the Empire, making it less multilingual.

The big and most famous baths in Rome were given to the city by emperors or other major figures (e.g. Agrippa). They were therefore built out of private funds (the original source of those funds? That's a more complicated question!) and any fees for bathers must have been intended to pay running costs. There were also privately operated baths -- Martial mentions them in his poems. I've put one of the poems, with a shortened translation, on my Latin blog this morning -- here it is -- http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/ephemeris/blog.html#101 Baths like these, I suppose, must have been run on a commercial basis. Incidentally, the 'raw Virgo' and the 'Marcia' mentioned in this poem are the cold water supplied to the baths by these two named aqueducts.

I find it hard to think of any people who have been more brutal and barbaric than Europeans.

OK, I admit it, I was avoiding your real point. Beer is completely out because so far as we know it wasn't even made anywhere near where your Senators are having their convivium, and there would have been no way of transporting it to Italy from northern/central Europe (if anyone wanted to). So unless they travelled far from Italy, they would never encounter it. Butter was also a rare thing in Roman Italy (without refrigeration it would be difficult to keep and to market it in Italy during much of the year) so it wasn't used much in cooking. No one in the whole ancient world, so far as I know, had the idea of spreading butter on bread or serving it with any other prepared food. That's not just an un-Roman idea, from the ancient point of view, it's completely alien. Looking at this matter from the producer's point of view, the only sensible long-term thing to do with milk was to make cheese from it. Cheese keeps. (How long? I'm off to Melle market tomorrow, and if the man from Saint-Romans is there with his four-year-old tomme de montagne I shall certainly buy another slice from it.) Milk is different. It was marketed in the streets of Rome: the way to do this, without refrigeration, is to drive cows or goats through the streets and milk them on the spot. But I'm not too sure who would buy it and for what purpose. I never read of its being served at a City banquet, and it doesn't crop up much in recipes so far as I remember. Not so much un-Roman as rustic, countrified. Romans were proud of their farms and the very fresh produce they could get from the farm, but it wouldn't be possible to transport milk very far.

I agree. And there are some surprising well-documented survivals. Here's a non-Greek example: the bog body recently discovered in Somerset (SW England). DNA samples from some local people were compared, and a teacher living a few miles away proved to be a member of this Iron Age victim's family. This in spite of the Saxon invasion of the 6th century AD, which used to be thought to have completely driven out the local population. If DNA samples become available from ancient Greeks, I'm sure the same would prove true.