ANCIENT PRODUCT BRANDING
"Miscenius Ampilatus makes [this] in Salonae" reads a baking mold found in modern-day Croatia that was used to make bread or cakes sold during gladiatorial games.
LITTLE DARLINGS
A prominent French historian, Philippe Ariès, has theorized that it was not until the beginning of industrialization—which boosted the standard of living in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries—that parents began bonding deeply with their babies. In earlier times, infant mortality rates were staggering, leading parents to distance themselves emotionally from babies who might perish from malnutrition or infection before learning to walk.
Intriguingly, studies of Roman tomb inscriptions lend credence to Ariès's idea. The British classicist Keith Hopkins has estimated, based on comparative demographic data, that 28 percent of all Roman children died before reaching 12 months of age. Yet epigraphists have found relatively few inscribed tombs for Roman infants in Italy: Just 1.3 percent of all funerary stones mark such burials. The statistical discrepancy suggests to many classicists that parents in ancient Rome refrained from raising an expensive marble monument for a child, unwilling to mourn publicly or privately.
Some Romans, however, could not and did not repress the love they felt for their infants. As many graffiti reveal, they celebrated a baby's birth in an openly sentimental manner recognizable to parents today. "Cornelius Sabinus has been born," announced a family in a message carved in a residential entranceway, a spot where neighbors and passersby could easily see it. Others went further, jubilantly inscribing the equivalent of baby pictures. "Iuvenilla is born on Saturday the 2nd of August, in the second hour of the evening," reads one such announcement; nearby, someone sketched in charcoal a picture of a newborn.
The epitaphs composed for infant tombs also disclose a great deal about the intense grief some parents suffered. One inscription describes a baby whose brief life consisted of just "nine sighs," as if the parents had tenderly counted each breath their newborn had taken. Another funerary inscription describes in poignant detail a father's grief. "My baby Acerva," he wrote, "was snatched away to live in Hades before she had her fill of the sweet light of life. She was beautiful and charming, a little darling as if from heaven. Her father weeps for her and, because he is her father, asks that the earth may rest lightly on her forever."
Other carved messages supply details about schooling. As children learned to write, local walls served as giant exercise books where they could practice their alphabets. On one, a young student scrawled what seems to be a language arts drill, interlacing the opening letters of the Roman alphabet with its final ones—A X B V C T. In another inscription, a Roman couple marveled at the eloquence of their 11-year-old son, who had entered a major adult competition for Greek poetry. The boy took his place, they noted, "among 52 Greek poets in the third lustrum of the contest, [and] by his talent brought to admiration the sympathy that he had roused because of his tender age, and he came away with honor." The young poet died shortly after his performance.
|
|
THE SPORTING LIFE
The Romans loved to be entertained, and few things riveted them more than the spectacle of gladiatorial combat. Sports fans fervently tracked the career records of the most skilled gladiators and laid wagers on their survival, while well-to-do female admirers stole into gladiator barracks by night, prompting one combatant, Celadus, to boast in an inscription that he was "the girls' desire." That most gladiators were slaves forced to fight to the death for an afternoon's entertainment of the public did not trouble most Romans: They believed that a demonstration of bravery in the arena brought nobility to even the lowliest slave and that the price—death—was worth it.
So ingrained were gladiatorial games in Roman culture that senior government officials dug into their own pockets and emptied public purses to stage them. To pack an arena, the sponsor often advertised the games with an edicta munerum, an inscription painted by teams of professional artists on walls near the local amphitheater. One surviving poster describes how Decimus Lucretius Satrius Valeris, a priest of Nero, and another prominent Roman sponsored a major event in Pompeii spanning five consecutive days before the ides of April. The expensive attractions included 20 pairs of gladiators, the "customary [wild] beast hunt," and "awnings" to shade spectators against the summer sun.
The gladiators steeled themselves for the battle ahead, practicing their deadly swordplay. The devout among them prayed to gods for a victory. In a North African barrack, Manuetus the Provocator, a gladiator who fought with a short, straight sword, made a last vow, promising to "bring Venus the gift of a shield if victorious." Outside the gladiators' barracks, scribes painted walls with announcements and programs for the upcoming event, listing the combatants' names and career records.
On the day of the games, raucous and bloodthirsty crowds flooded the arena. At Rome's Colosseum, each spectator held a tessera, a ticket corresponding to a number inscribed on one of the building's 80 arcades. Each arcade then led ticket holders to a staircase and a specific section of seating. As spectators waited for the bloody combat matches to begin, they snacked on bread or cakes purchased from stalls outside the arena. Local chefs baked breads especially for the games, employing molds bearing designs of dueling gladiators and the name of the baker.
At the end of each fatal match, stretcher bearers hustled out on the floor of the arena to collect the fallen gladiator and carry his body to a nearby morgue, or spoliarium. There officials slit the man's throat to ensure that he was truly dead: Roman bettors despised fixed matches. Friends and family members then claimed the body and, if they possessed sufficient funds, raised a tomb in his memory. "To the reverend spirits of the Dead," inscribed one grieving widow. "Glauca was born at Mutina, fought seven times, died in the eighth. He lived 23 years, 5 days. Aurelia set this up to her well-deserving husband, together with those who loved him. My advice to you is to find your own star. Don't trust Nemesis [patroness of gladiators]; that is how I was deceived. Hail and Farewell."
As studies of epitaphs show, skilled gladiators rarely survived more than 10 matches, dying on average at the age of 27.
ANCIENT PIPE DREAMS
Some of the humblest inscriptions shed surprising light on one of the glories of Roman technology, revealing just how close ancient metalworkers came to a major coup––the invention of printing. In the Roman waterworks, messages were raised in relief on the lead pipes that fed fountains, baths, and private homes. As a rule, these short texts recorded the name of the emperor or the municipal official who had ordered and paid for the expansion of the water system.
To form these inscriptions, workers first created small individual molds for each letter in the Latin alphabet. They then spelled out the name of the emperor or official by selecting the appropriate letter molds, placing them into a carved slot in a stone slab. Ensuring that the molds lay flush with the surface of the stone, they locked the type into place and laid the stone slab on a large flat tray. Then they poured molten lead across slab and tray, forming a large metal sheet. Once cooled, the sheet could be rolled into a cylinder and soldered at the seam. On the pipe's contour, the emperor's name appeared in elevated letters.
The pipemakers' ingenuity in using movable type to form a line of text is eerily similar to the method used by Johannes Gutenberg and other European printers more than 1,000 years later. As Canadian classicist A. Trevor Hodge has noted, this overlooked Roman technology "tempts one into speculating how close the ancient world was to making the full-scale breakthrough into printing." But the Romans failed to capitalize on this remarkable invention.
Perhaps they were simply too immersed in the culture of carved and painted words to see the future of print—the real writing on the wall.
