Thinking about ancient Rome again…
Even Zmyrina
There was a woman called Asellina who ran a snackbar in a small provincial town in Italy during the second half of the first century. One year she had plastered political messages all over the outside of her eatery in support of a fellow called Fuscus who was a political candidate.
“Vote for Fuscus,” one of the messages read, “Asellina’s girls ask this of you, even Zmyrina.”
It actually said this, “nec sine Zmyrina”, literally ‘not without Zmyrina’.
That is an interesting thing to say. Even.
This could mean:
- Zmyrina was a very particular woman and she would not just support any candidate.
- Zmyrina was a very popular waitress and an endorsement of her hit harder: ‘not just, but even’.
- Or maybe we are witnessing something rare, maybe opinions could hardly ever be extracted from Zmyrina.
- Most of the time, Zmyrina simply did not know.
- Zmyrina did not like Fuscus very much, except, as turns out now, for his politics.
- Zmyrina just needed a mention, as Maria and Aegle already had gotten theirs elsewhere on the building.
Other explanations are certainly possible.
Part of me is curious to know what Asellina meant and to find out what kind of person Zmyrina was, but an equal part, maybe even a fraction more, prefers to keep it a mystery.
Cicero teaches Pompey to abbreviate
One of ancient Rome’s richest people, Pompey, had his theatre built in the Campus Martius. He wanted a plaque that said who had paid for all of this splendour and this plaque would list among his achievements his three consulships. Apparently ‘thrice consul’ is difficult to write in Latin, it is either ‘consul tertium’ or ‘consul tertio’, so he asked a bunch of people for advice, and finally put the problem to the famous speaker, writer, lawyer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Cicero did not want to make the people who had been asked before him look silly and so he suggested: why not abbreviate it? Make it ‘Consul tert.’.
Later, eye witnesses declared that the text on the plaque ended up being ‘consul III’.
According to Aulus Gellius the matter is settled though:
- -o indicates an order: first, second, third.
- -um indicates a count: one time, two times, three times.
‘I am the third consul since so and so’: consul tertio. ‘I have been consul three times’: consul tertium. You won’t find these useful life tips on any other blog!
The inevitability of Rome
Rome used cheats; it had three books that foretold the future. They could have had nine books, but the king was not willing to pay the asking price, so the lady who had written them burnt six.
Strange 1000-year old women distributing prophecies to kings may not have been real, but they were the basis of a system of government, for the books were real and the Romans took them serious – at least until Christian terrorists destroyed them 900 years later.
The 15 keepers of the books were tasked by telling the senate on demand what to do in order to avert calamities.
After the books were destroyed, the Western Roman Empire declined rapidly. I am not saying, just saying.
[…] Let us examine the nature of prediction. The human mind is capable of seeing into the short-range future with reasonable accuracy. For […]