Fours and nines and Roman numerals

At primary school, I took the leading part in a play written by one of the teachers. It was a pastiche of the then-current and popular TV series Up Pompeii, of which I (being around 10 years of age) was entirely ignorant (it being rather risqué) — but the parents would definitely have appreciated the homage.

The show was titled Up Wumpeii, after the nearby housing estate built by developer George Wimpey Limited.

A few lines stick in my mind, across the gulf of fifty years. I opened the show, striding confidently down the aisle in the assembly hall, and as I headed for the stage, I intoned the immortal phrase, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”, to which the chorus responded with “’ere, ’ere!”

At one point, a squad of ten Roman soldiers marched on and performed a gag about a roll call, which prompted a litany of baked products, including “baps, softies, MacKechnies” — a reference to the nearby bakery run by the firm of MacKechnie’s, where some of the parents may have been employed. The legionaries then proceeded to number off, Roman-style, to the amusement of the audience: “Aye, Aye-Aye, Aye-Aye-Aye, Aye-Vee, ...”, and so on, finishing with “Aye-Ecks, Ecks”.

How Roman numerals work

As school children the world over will tell you, the Romans did indeed form numbers by repeating symbols — thus, III (“Aye-Aye-Aye”) = 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 — though, in practice, only the symbols I (one), X (ten), C (one hundred), and M (one thousand) could be repeated — not V (five), L (fifty), or D (five hundred).

Some numerals can be seen on this graffito from Pompeii (CIL IV, 5380), which is probably someone’s expenses, scratched on the wall.

Lines 1, 5, and 12 are consecutive dates in an unknown month: VIII Idus (“the eighth day before the Ides”) — the S has a flamboyant tail that trails diagonally down the wall to the next day’s entry: VII Idus. And there is a fine selection of numerals on display (presumably the cost of each item in asses, the smallest commonly available Roman coin).

Fours and nines

It is widely believed that, when writing numbers, rather than repeating a given symbol thrice (e.g. IIII), an alternative method was employed, whereby the symbol was placed to the left of the next-greater symbol. Since, in the case of I, the next greater symbol is V, rather than writing IIII, the alternative form IV was preferred. We can certainly see this on the graffito. In line 13 (third from bottom in the picture), the entry reads puero pane IV (“bread for the boy, 4”, presumably referring to a slave). (Notice that the character E is frequently represented in Roman handwriting by two vertical lines, so pane — also on lines 2, 6, and 12 — looks like PAN||.)

As with IIII and IV, rather than writing VIIII, the alternative “subtractive” form IX was preferred. Hence, the ninth Roman soldier in Up Wumpeii chanted “Aye-Ecks” (IX, geddit?). Unfortunately, the graffiti artist didn’t purchase anything that cost 9 asses, so we cannot say for sure that he would have used this form.

Convention or preference?

I was reminded of all this by a remark made in one of the reviews of my book The Fate of the Ninth (I don’t recall which one). The author had suggested that the Romans preferred to write the number 9 as VIIII, and not IX. This is definitely something crying out to be fact-checked.

It is easy to find monumental inscriptions with numerals. Every Roman emperor advertised how many times he had held the consulship, or had been acclaimed as imperator (“conquering general”), or — more importantly — had held the tribunicia potestas (“tribunician power”, which made the holder sacrosanct, and was thus fastidiously renewed every year).

On the left is Septimius Severus, who held the tribunician power for the ninth time in AD 201 (CIL VIII, 10992). He was reigning jointly with his elder son, Caracalla, who appears here as TR P IIII. (The numerals are highlighted in red.)

It is interesting that the “subtractive” method is used for 9, but the “additive” method for 4. This may have been down to the stonemason’s personal preference. It’s true that there wouldn’t really have been space to write TR P VIIII while keeping Severus’s titulature within the first two lines. But equally, the stonemason could have saved a little space on line 4 by writing TR P IV there.

Here is Septimius Severus again, in the same year, with the same co-regent. It’s even from the same site — Bu-Njem in Tripolitania! Each inscription sat above one of the fort gateways.

But this time, the stonemason has used the “additive” method for Severus’ tribunician power: TR POT VIIII. Was it simply down to choice?

I have a nagging suspicion that, where monumental inscriptions are concerned, the stonemason could use his own discretion to lay out a nicely balanced panel. Sometimes VIIII would work, and sometimes it had to be IX.

Official Roman documentation

But there is one genre that, we know, was governed by the imperial chancellery at Rome: namely, military diplomas. These were strictly legal documents, produced under the emperor’s auspices in Rome and conferring certain legal privileges upon the bearer. Their wording would have been carefully controlled. Can we see a pattern governing the representation of the number 9 here?

This is a diploma (CIL XVI, 95) issued by the emperor Antoninus Pius on 29 February AD 148 to the men “who served in my praetorium in the ten cohorts” — in other words, the Praetorian Guard.

In the list of ten numerals denoting the ten cohorts (the long list of numbers highlighted here), it can clearly be seen that the forms IV (for four) and IX (for nine) have been used.

Interestingly, on line 5, at the end of Antoninus Pius’ titulature, he is COS IIII (“having been consul four times”)! The scribe has used the “additive” method, although the “subtractive” method was used in the numbering of the Praetorian cohorts.

For comparison, here (below) is a section of a badly bent and twisted diploma, issued (again, to men of the ten Praetorian cohorts) by the emperors Valerian and Gallienus on 7 January AD 254 (CIL XVI, 155). It is, incidentally, one of the last known diplomas.

The ten cohorts are numbered on the third line, and it can clearly be seen that, by contrast with the Antonine scribe above, Valerian and Gallienus’ scribe has employed the “additive” method for both IIII and VIIII.

(It even seems that the scribe preparing the outer text of the diploma may often have had different ideas from the scribe responsible for the inner text, as RMD III, 185 shows.)

Method in the madness?

Perhaps a more detailed critique would uncover a hidden method, but it certainly looks as if VIIII and IX were used interchangeably throughout Roman imperial history. Neither one was preferred over the other.

The whole question arose, I suppose, in connection with my book The Fate of the Ninth, and the original comment was presumably based on the supposition that the Ninth Legion called itself legio VIIII Hispana, by preference. So, is this true? Can this be demonstrated?

Probably the most famous inscription of the Ninth Legion is the building slab that presumably graced one of the fortress gateways at York (RIB 665). (There’s a better image on p. 21 of my book.)

Here, on the bottom line, the legion calls itself LEG(io) VIIII HI[SP(ana).

It appears with the same style of numbering (but without Hispana) on the tombstone of Lucius Duccius the signifer (RIB 673, on p. 18 of my book), and also on the career inscription of Titus Aninius Sextius Florentinus (CIL III, 14148¹⁰), the memorial to Lucius Aemilius Karus (CIL VI, 1333), and the dedication to Lucius Novius Crispinus Martialis Saturninus at Lambaesis (CIL VIII, 2747). A couple of early tombstones also use this form.

By contrast, it appears as LEG(io) IX Hisp(ana) on the career inscription of Lucius Burbuleius Optatus Ligarianus (CIL X, 6006), the career inscription of Lucius Roscius Celer (CIL XIV, 3612), and one or two early tombstones.

Perhaps (it might be objected) those men chose their own way of representing the legion’s title. Surely the legion’s own gateway inscription should decide the issue?

However, we should be wary of such an argument, remembering the gateway inscriptions from Bu-Njem (above). I wonder — if we found the inscription from a different gateway of the York fortress, would the numeral necessarily take the same form?

Finally, we may consider the legion’s own tile-stamps, produced at their own tile-works. Shouldn’t they carry the official form of the legion’s numeral? The tile from Nijmegen (illustrated on p. 122 of my book) certainly reads LEG VIIII. But the tiles from northern England (two of them are illustrated here) use the “subtractive” method.

In any case, the Roman soldiers’ gag doesn’t seem quite so funny with “Vee-Aye-Aye-Aye, Vee-Aye-Aye-Aye-Aye, Ecks”.

Pour la main gauche

The scene is Vienna, 1917, and a family are taking tea in the courtyard of one of their sumptuous homes.

They are the Wittgensteins, and they are enjoying the rich fruits of their (deceased) philanthropic father’s monopoly of iron and steel production in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The man seated on the right is philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He is shortly to return to the Italian Front, where he was decorated for bravery, before eventually relocating to Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his life.

Opposite him, the man on the left is his older brother Konrad, known as Kurt, also shortly to return to the Italian Front, where he committed suicide.

But the man sitting beside him — the man in the suit — is middle brother Paul, convalescing after he was seriously wounded on the Russian Front and held prisoner in Siberia for a year. He had been shot in the arm — his right arm — which was amputated in a Russian field hospital. We can see that, in the photo, he is taking tea with his left hand.

The concerto

Amazingly, this was the man for whom composer Maurice Ravel wrote his Concerto pour la main gauche pour piano et orchestre (“Piano concerto for the left hand”) in 1930, because Paul was a virtuoso pianist.

Many years ago — I think I was around 13 or 14 years of age — I was privileged to play percussion in a performance of this concerto by a wonderfully talented music student named Gordon Murch. (As I recall, I played wood block — with my right hand.)

In this page from the score, you can see that the wood block line, indicated in red, is marginally simpler than the piano line, which can be seen just below it.

Other concertos

I was amazed that anyone could play such complex music using only one hand. I was even more amazed to learn, much later, that Ravel’s concerto is not the only one. For the affluent Paul Wittgenstein had been able to commission left-handed concerti from all manner of composers: Erich Korngold, Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and Paul Hindemith.

The piece written by Hindemith in 1924 was never heard and presumed lost — until it turned up amongst Paul’s possessions after his widow died. Evidently, Paul had never liked it, refused to play it, and refused to allow anyone else to play it!

On a happier note, it was apparently premiered in 2004 and has now joined the canon of Hindemith’s works.

Aesop, Aesop, tell us a story, do!

I am occasionally criticized for writing short books. (The Fate of the Ninth comes in at 140 or so pages, Phantom Horsemen at 160 or so.) Admittedly, if something can be said in ten sentences, I’ll probably find a way to do it in four: I dislike flabby or verbose writing and naturally lean towards brevity.

I recently found a beloved book from my childhood that may shed some light on why I’m drawn to short, sharp narrative.

The book is A selection of Aesop’s Fables, “rewritten especially for children” by Barbara Sanders, wife of illustrator Christopher Sanders, RA.

Of course, everyone has heard of Aesop, without (I imagine) quite knowing anything about him or where his fables come from.

In fact, although Aesop is supposed to have told his fables around 600 BC, our earliest collections date from the Roman period, preserved by writers named Babrius (143 fables) and Phaedrus (95 fables), and, by utilizing other anonymous sources, scholars (chiefly, Ben Edwin Perry in the 1950s) have brought the total of “Aesopic” fables to 725! But the important point here is that most fables are pithy single-paragraph tales in which an entire story is distilled down to half-a-dozen sentences.

The Lion and the Mouse

Here is Babrius no. 107 (quite long, at 15 lines of Greek):
“A lion caught a mouse and was about to eat him; as the little house thief patiently awaited his fate, he mumbled these beseeching words: ‘for you, it is fitting to hunt deer and horned bulls to fatten your stomach, but a meal of a mouse would hardly touch the edges of your lips; I beg you to spare me. Though I’m small, I shall repay the favour equally.’ Laughing, the beast allowed the suppliant to live. But when he encountered young hunters, he was caught in a net and tied down. But the mouse, scurrying stealthily from his hole and gnawing the stout mesh with his tiny teeth, freed the lion, granting repayment worthy of seeing the light, having saved his life.”
According to Babrius, the moral of the tale is to “preserve the working poor and do not give up on them”.
(I’ve translated Babrius’ word πένητες, penêtes, as “the working poor”; it’s the word for day-labourers who work to subsist. This is clearly the mouse of the story, who is said to be a thief and an οἰκότριψ, oikotrips, literally “one who is busy around the house”, perhaps implying that he survives by pilfering the houses of others, unless the word has been corrupted from οἰκοτριβής, oikotribês, “one who is ruinous for a household”.)

It is noticeable that, quite often, not a lot of Babrius survives in the retelling! For one thing, Barbara Sanders decides upon a new moral: “The least may help the greatest”. In older editions of Aesop, Vernon Jones (1912) chose the rather obvious “Even a mouse can help a lion”, while the original Penguin edition (1954) helpfully explains that “A change of fortune can make the strongest man need a weaker man’s help”. Thankfully, the Oxford Worlds Classic version of Laura Gibbs (2002) returned to something like the original with “Let no one dare to harm even the smallest among us”.

Everyone loves an animal picture

I must admit to being astounded by the sheer number of children’s illustrated treasuries of “Aesop’s Fables” — the WorldCat search engine claims to have located 6,800 versions, from Aesop’s Fables for Little Children to Aesop's Fables: the Classic Heirloom Edition or The Classic Treasury of Aesop’s Fables.

The selling point, of course, is always the illustrations. It was certainly Christopher Sanders’ drawings that made his wife’s version so memorable for me, as a child. (That’s his picture of the Lion and the Mouse, above — don’t you love the wee mouse rushing to the rescue — and this is another wonderful example of his craft: the Dog in the Manger.)

Likewise, it is the pictures that bring another often-reprinted classic alive: Vernon Jones’ 1912 version, illustrated by the incomparable Arthur Rackham. Even the 1954 Penguin edition translated by S.A. Handford (who also did Sallust, Cicero, and Caesar for Penguin) had wonderful pen-and-ink sketches by Brian Robb, the art teacher who taught Quentin Blake at the Chelsea School of Art.

I often wonder whether the dozens of “children’s retellings” are simply that — a freewheeling spin on what the writer thinks the fable should be, rather than true translations. Be that as it may. But I notice that The Classic Treasury’s version of the Lion and the Mouse bears very little resemblance to Babrius, and teaches us that “Little friends may become great friends”. This last point is important, as there is also a tendency to sanitize the original moral for the consumption of children.

The stag slaughtered at the pool

One of the most haunting tales, I find, is “The stag drinking at the pool”, preserved by both Babrius and Phaedrus. (Handford calls it “The irony of fate”, and unaccountably throws a lion into the mix.)

This is the tale of the stag who, gazing at his reflection, admires his antlers and finds his sinewy legs disappointing. (Babrius has him disparage his “hooves and feet”, but it makes no odds.)

However, having used his legs to escape from a band of hunters, he is subsequently caught in some branches by his beautiful antlers, and falls victim to the pack of hounds. Yet, according to The Classic Treasury, “his antlers came untangled and he bounded away to safety”.

I suppose their version still illustrates Babrius’ moral: “Do not presume reliability beforehand, but neither give up nor lose hope”. (Barbara Sanders went in a different direction with “Beauty can be a very powerful gift, but it can be a dangerous one”.)

But the original moral was that we should not suppose that anything can be relied upon. Don’t take things for granted? Handford’s version was that “It often happens, when we are in danger, that the friends whose loyalty we doubted prove our saviours, while those in whom we put implicit trust betray us”. Odd. But then, he also added a lion.

The gritty intimacy of the Roman army

Sometimes a tiny element of something is so irritating that it colours our view of the whole thing.

I have been reading a book in which the author repeatedly uses the meaningless phrase “by far and away”, when he means either “far and away” or (more likely) “by far”, but not a fusion of both. Silly, isn’t it?

But this is the least of the problems that I encountered in my spirited attempt to plough through Guy de la Bédoyère’s 500-page 2020 book Gladius, subtitled “The World of the Roman Soldier”. (Incidentally, I see that, in the latest reprint, this has already changed to “Living, Fighting and Dying in the Roman Army” — presumably to match the same author’s Populus: Living and Dying in Ancient Rome.)

Definitely not a handbook

The author opens by excusing himself from writing a handbook or a history in favour of presenting a rather impressionistic image of what he imagines “it was like to be a soldier in the army that brought the Romans their vast empire”. A three-page listing of Roman emperors takes the timeline from Augustus in 27 BC to Valens in AD 378, although the author claims to “focus mainly on the Roman army up to the time of Constantine I”. So it’s quite definitely a book about “the army of the emperors” (although page after page is devoted to the Republican army, presumably to boost the page count).

Missing provinces

The accompanying map of the Roman Empire is, unfortunately, an unintended mish-mash of periods. As we glance from left to right, we travel back through time — part of the map belongs to the mid-2nd century AD, since Pannonia has been divided and the Antonine Wall built, but part is still in the 1st century AD, since Arabia does not exist and Judaea has not yet become Palaestina, and part even seems to predate Augustus, since the only “Major Battles” shown are Trasimene, Cannae, Zama, Carrhae, and Actium. Curious and confusing.

As clear as a cloudy day

The text is all a little vague, a little woolly. Ideas parade as facts, and I worry about the impression of the Roman army that the average interested reader will gain. We should brace ourselves for a slew of factoids generated by this book. Nothing is stated precisely. Everything is rather cloudy, rather nebulous. Redundant phrases are added for padding. “The Roman army reached its most coherent and consistent form under the emperors”, we read in the Introduction, “especially from the time of Augustus until the middle of the third century AD”. So, let’s be clear: the author is saying that the army of the emperors reached its most coherent form during the period of the emperors. Very informative.

Apparently, “auxiliary organization varied wildly”. I beg to differ. Three basic unit-types, available in two generalized sizes, doesn’t seem overly “wild” to me. And yet, we are informed that “they were in a constant state of flux”. How so? The author believes that “it is impossible to say how many legions and auxiliary units there were in the Roman army at any point in Roman history”, owing no doubt to this “flux”. This kind of statement is, at best, unhelpful, or (let’s speak plainly) just wrong.

Spurious facts

It would be tedious to fact-check absolutely everything (perhaps the University of Chicago Press editor should have done this?) but I was taken aback by just how many statements are incorrect, just how many assertions are untrue.

For example, Zosimus did not “dismiss Valerian as ‘effeminate and indolent’”, but gives rather the opposite impression. Diocletian did not divide the army into a fixed frontier defence force and four “highly mobile forces that could race to trouble spots”. The Praetorian Guard was not called the Cohortes Praetorianae, and the Germani corporis custodes were not “hired by some emperors”. The eques singularis Augusti Aurelius Martinus (pictured here) did not belong to “the cavalry attached to the Praetorian Guard”.

Victor, the Moorish freedman of the cavalryman Numerianus of the ala I Asturum (depicted below, reclining on a funeral couch), did not serve at South Shields, and the author does not explain (beyond wishful thinking) how “the text makes it clear that the two were engaged in a same-sex relationship”. Our primary evidence does not “include writing tablets preserved in bogs in northern Britain” (presumably an allusion to the Vindolanda tablets, and a phrase I have had occasion to query before, when Jonathan Roth, in his 2009 book Roman Warfare, informed his readers that Vindolanda “was built, inadvertently, on a bog. When it began to sink, it was abandoned”).

Errors abound

The inscription listing the legions under Marcus Aurelius does not “list all the legions and the provinces in which they were stationed”. (This latter error probably arose as a result of using Brian Campbell’s ‘translation’ of the inscription, which adds the names of provinces in brackets, rather than consulting the primary evidence, as he claims to have done in the Foreword.)

It is nonsensical to suggest that “Legio XXX was supposed to be the first of a new series of legions, starting with XXX”. The word vexillationes for legionary detachments does not mean “wings”. The fact that auxiliary cohorts numbered approximately 500 men was probably not because “anything bigger might have risked creating a potential rebel force of dangerous size”, and probably has more to do with logistics and provisioning.

As for the parade held by Gallienus in Rome, probably in AD 263 (not “in around 261”), far from being “a publicity stunt to divert attention for (sic) the military disasters and troubles that had afflicted his reign”, this was none other than the emperor’s decenalia, celebrating ten years in power, no mean feat and definitely deserving of a parade. And Valens was certainly not “the first Roman emperor to be killed in battle by a barbarian force” — that distinction must go to Decius.

Arrant nonsense

It is also irresponsible for the author to inform his general readership (without reference to any evidence) that “even the word Rome itself was derived from the Greek word ῥώμη, which means ‘strength’ or ‘might’”, when this was nothing more than a folk etymology amongst Greek writers intrigued by the similarity of the words. Every schoolchild, Roman or modern, knows that Rome (Roma) was named after Romulus.

The author claims that “the evidence shows that, whatever the position [viz. regarding the military establishment] at one date, it was different at others, and usually in ways we cannot now resolve”. Didn’t an editor, at some point, ask what on earth the author thought he was saying here? (I keep hearing the Rumsfeldian “known unknowns, that we don’t know, and unknown unknowns, that we don’t know we don’t know”.) Is this the “flux” we read about earlier?

When he writes that “It is extremely unlikely that the Romans themselves ever knew the army’s size with any precision”, he is just plain wrong. No two ways about it. This is nonsense. Half-a-dozen or so pages earlier, he just told us that “the army was the Roman world’s biggest bureaucracy”, alluding (I suppose) to the almost fanatical fact-recording evident from the Dura-Europos papyri and elsewhere. Of course they knew exactly how big their army was. They even knew every soldier’s name!

There are many questionable opinions on show, as well. Was the legionary legate really “approaching the climax of his senatorial career”? It might be another decade before he had a shot at the consulship, which opened up the possibility of a major provincial governorship like Britain or Syria. Wasn’t that more likely to be the climax? Then again, we are told that optio is “a word that meant ‘assistant’”, but actually it probably derives from the verb opto, “to choose or select”, meaning that the centurion chose him (which is what Polybius implies, in any case).

Dodgy Latin

The author’s Latin is a little dodgy, too. The word contubernium does not mean “with a tent”; it is the tent, as Tacitus makes clear. The men who sleep in it are the contubernales. An evocatus was not just any soldier “who voluntarily signed on again”, but specifically a Praetorian. It is odd to translate valetudinarium (a hospital) as “place of health/sickness”, and it was not necessary for a vexillum (a flag or banner, normally carried by a detachment of soldiers) to be “erected in the ground to mark the presence of soldiers”. We are told that a centurion placed in charge of a unit was called a princeps praepositus, but this tautology (a man could either be princeps, “chief”, or praepositus, “placed in charge”, but not both) is only found (as far as I’m aware) on a single inscription from Dura Europos (illustrated above), where it occurs, heavily abbreviated, on the bottom line (princ(eps) pr(aepositus) ve[x(illationum)); the same man elsewhere calls himself simply princ(eps) vexill(ationum), which is the normal term.

The plural of signifer is not signifer (this, at least, may be a typographical error), nor is the plural of imaginifer (the standard-bearer responsible for carrying the emperor’s imago or “image”) imaginiferes. (The plural of both words ends in -feri.) The speculatores appear in the text as “the emperor’s personal mounted bodyguard”, but in the Glossary as “scouts”; neither seems quite right. The position of subpraefectus is glossed as “an under-prefect”, chiefly it seems to enable the career of the imperial freedman Tiberius Julius Xanthus to be mentioned, but this seems to have been a shadowy sinecure associated with the imperial fleet, whereas readers are in danger of assuming incorrectly that all praefecti were supplied with a deputy. The non-military term tractator (here, erroneously, tractatorus) is included for the same reason — Xanthus apparently performed this “handling” function (Seneca suggests that it means “masseur”) for the emperors Tiberius and Claudius, presumably before being rewarded with his sub-prefecture.

Unreliable testimonials

Apart from errors of fact and judgement, there are referencing issues, as well. The end note for the career of Tiberius Claudius Maximus, famous as the man quod cepisset Decebalum et caput eius pertulisset Traiano (“who caught Decebalus [King of the Dacians] and delivered his head to Trajan”), refers us to Cassius Dio’s story of the heroism of a badly wounded cavalryman and (inexplicably) a dedication by the townsfolk of Carnuntum for the good health of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. We actually want Dio 68.14.3 for the capture of Decebalus, and AE 1969/70, 583 for the impressive tombstone of Maximus. Incidentally, it is this tombstone that gives us the only instance (again, as far as I’m aware) of a soldier missus voluntarius honesta missione (“released voluntarily with an honourable discharge”). Although we are informed, in the Glossary, that voluntarius indicates “a veteran who volunteered to fight again after retirement”, it rather seems, on the contrary, that Maximus was making the point that, having served for thirty years, it was his decision to call it a day.

The University of Chicago Press copywriters must have been dreaming about a different book when they wrote: “Gladius gives us a portrait of an ancient society that is unprecedented in both its broad sweep and gritty intimacy”.

Likewise, the New York Times reviewer (quoted by the publisher) knows little about Roman studies if he believes that this book “collects pretty much every fact known about what it was like to be in the military arm of the Roman empire”. No, it really doesn’t. But then, this is precisely the danger I alluded to at the start. Brace yourselves for those factoids.

The Roman army was full of men’s bodies

Against my better judgement, I have been reading a veritable word salad of impenetrable jargon, allegedly advancing the study of the Roman army.

Sentences like these — “the rapid and violent expansion of the Roman empire was accomplished through the reterritorialisation of geographical terrain and, likewise, of bodies and identities. Yet, this reterritorialisation did not generate perfectly ‘Roman’ simulacra, rather a synthetic, mass-produced military mutation which purported the illusion, and enforced the sovereignty, of Romanness” — are an unnecessary affront to plain English, in my opinion.

There is more like this, much more, in “The military step: theorising the mobilisation of the Roman army”, a 25-page article by Dr Hannah-Marie D Chidwick.

Chidwick lectures in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol, where (her “Research Outputs” on the university web site suggest) she specializes in Lucan. I cannot imagine that hers is a straightforward appreciation of the poet, but I cannot be sure, as neither her doctoral thesis nor any of her published papers have been made available to the reading public — with the single exception of this one, for access to which Taylor & Francis charge £41.00 per 48hrs (which thankfully is quite long enough to form a sound opinion).

Unnecessary obscurity

It’s not an easy read. It’s not an entertaining read. I must admit to harbouring mixed feelings about published work that, even when read by a native speaker, requires frequent consultation of a dictionary. I immediately wonder if perhaps the commonplace is being stylistically disguised to appear profound. (And none of this is helped by an overabundance of poorly-placed commas.)

Here is an example: Chidwick contends that “The Roman empire’s rapid expansion was, of course, made possible by a fluctuating body of men’s bodies, revered as the most ruthless military force in the ancient world”, for which she cites Cicero. (But the Cicero passage, De Re Publica 3.36, simply says “But our people by defending their allies have gained dominion over the whole world” — no mention of rapidity, no mention of ruthlessness.) Here is the plain English version: the Roman army was responsible for the expansion of the Roman empire.

Here is another: “The review of Roman sources in this article therefore has at its philosophical heart this perception of the army as a state operated, territorialising machine – a force mobilised for the safeguarding of sovereignty and the continuance of government power”. Here is the plain English version: the Roman army was employed by the Roman state to protect and enlarge it.

And another: “Roman military praxes can be read as mechanistically deterritorialising recruits of their ‘original ethnicity and social level’ on many overlapping strata, reterritorialising them as Roman military”. This one serves to illustrate Chadwick’s often shaky grasp of Roman military studies, as she is suggesting that new recruits shed their old identities to become Roman soldiers, which is manifestly untrue. The same error is clear later on: “Whether Roman or ‘barbarian’, the body had to be overcoded, reterritorialised, from citizen to soldier, from head to toe”.

One final example: “Military presence disrupts spaces that were formerly rural or civic with the potential of becoming a base or battleground, a potential manifested in modes geographical and human”. Here, Chadwick (pictured at Hadrian’s Wall milecastle 39) is saying that the movement of large armies and their periodic requirement to encamp tends to devastate terrain and displace inhabitants.

Often, Chidwick’s prose is so ambagious (a lovely word from the Latin ambagiosus, referring to the twists and turns of a labyrinth) that her meaning remains obscure. Here is an example: “This article contends that the activity of being-Roman-army exemplarily makes manifest philosophies of territorialisation, in terms of the dynamic interrelation between movement, space and identity”. Sometimes, we must throw up our hands and admit that life is too short to waste another moment on deciphering such banalities.

Back to the sources

Leaving aside her verbose articulation, Chidwick’s command of the ancient sources is not always sure. She cites Tacitus, Annales 13.40–41, as evidence of Roman “scorched earth” tactics, but this passage describes Corbulo’s attack and capture of Artaxata (Annales 15.27 would have been a better choice, where the Romans advise their Parthian enemies not to provoke an attack but to accept a “kingdom untouched by devastations”).

And again, to support her contention that “The devastation of armoured territorialisation was not lost on Roman writers like Lucan, Cicero, or Sallust”, she cites Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 10.6, but this passage is a diatribe against the evils of avarice and a desire for power. It’s not about devastation, or armour, or territory. But then, she also informs us that Frontinus’ Strategemata “survives only in fragments. It is mentioned in Aelian’s Tactics, a Greek work on the Hellenic military”, but neither of these statements is true. (Chidwick is perhaps confused by the fact that Aelian briefly met Frontinus and mentions the fact in his Taktika.)

To conclude: quite frankly, I am baffled by the whole thing. If it advances our understanding of the Roman military in any way, then I am none the wiser. And on that note, let us give the last word to Dr Chidwick: “Thinking with philosophies of territorialisation reconfigures how activity is environment, how bodies are territories, and their actions generate these landscapes as much as the ground beneath them”. Hmm.

Bad bad beef dis!

I have finally made my peace with The Bafut Beagles. It has taken fifty years, but I have laid the ghost to rest.

As a young teenager — probably a twelve-year-old, I think — I was made to read The Bafut Beagles at school by a terrifying old walrus who went by the name of Mister Porter. It was the prescribed book for Second Year English class.

I did not enjoy the experience.

Not even the charming line drawings by animal-illustrator Ralph Thompson could persuade me to like this book (and the rather creepy cover did not help).

So for half a century, I have avoided thinking about it entirely.

Now we walka good

I recently came across a copy and decided to give it another chance, and — I must admit — I really don’t know why I disliked it so much.

Besides the interspersal of largely unintelligible pidgin English (“If we go meet bad beef how we go kill um if we go lef’ our gun for dis place?” — “I go take gun. Den if beef go kill me it no be your palaver, you hear?”), the story is simple and engaging.

Gerald Durrell arrives in Cameroon in 1949, in order to collect exotic animals to sell to British zoos. He bases his operation in the remote and picturesque setting of Bafut, a traditional kingdom ruled by a Fon, and hires a small team of four local hunters, who are inordinately proud of the new name he gives them (“you no savvay dat I be Bafut Beagle?”).

Naturally, for a book written about Africans by an Englishman in the 1950s, there is an unconsciously racist undercurrent.

The Fon of Bafut, who rules the area, is a caricature of a gin-drinking fogy with several wives who are “all naked except for meagre loin-cloths”; his people are simple-minded folk who mistake western medicine for sorcery. The scene of an old woman berating a Bafutian man for beating a young woman in the road is dismissed as “an ordinary domestic upheaval with the usual ingredients of an erring wife, a hungry husband, an uncooked dinner, and an interfering mother-in-law”.

The “Beagles” get into various scrapes as they attempt to fulfil Durrell’s wish-list of animals, in return for “dash” and cigarettes. And when Durrell finally ships his menagerie home, he doesn’t seem too perturbed that all but one of his pygmy flying squirrels have perished from starvation en route, owing to their specialized diet.

A curious book, all in all. Definitely a product of its times. But quite why the Scottish Education Department of the 1970s thought that this was suitable literature for teenaged children is baffling.

A troublesome diploma

I have been reading Bürokratie und Politik in der römischen Kaiserzeit by Werner Eck, Emeritus Professor at Cologne University. I only just became aware of it, although it appeared in 2012.

It’s a short book. Although supposedly 100 pages long, I calculated that there are actually only 58 pages of text, owing to the positioning of the 21 illustrations and the generous allocation of “white space”. And to my considerable dismay, after I parted with £23.99 for the privilege of reading it, I discovered that the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library has made the book freely available online!

On the plus side, Professor Eck usually has something interesting to say, and he doesn’t usually charge 40 pence per page to say it. However, he is also guilty of that irritating crime, republishing the same material repeatedly under different guises.

A mysterious provincial governor

The bulk of the book, as it turns out, is a discussion of the curious events surrounding the elevation of the emperor Trajan in AD 97/98. It is a fascinating story, but it’s one that Eck already told in 2002, first in more popularizing style in the lavish Traian: Ein Kaiser der Superlative am Beginn einer Umbruchzeit? volume, and second (in English) in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin. And it’s one that he continues to tell, this time in Italian, in Epigraphica Volume 84 (2022). The latter is freely available online.

Research marches on, of course. Although the tale remains the same, I did notice that the Epigraphica version (written 10 years after the book) sports another piece of evidence for the extraordinary honorific title exercitus Germanicus pia fidelis — p. 149 note 49, if you’re interested — and on p. 152, Professor Eck has quietly acknowledged that he jumped the gun in placing Tiberius Julius Candidus Marius Celsus in Lower Moesia in AD 97.

Don’t we deserve an explanation?

To be fair, he never explained this properly in Bürokratie pp. 68–69, where he simply cited CIL XVI 41, a small diploma fragment of January AD 97 naming the governor of “[Moesia inferior]e” as “Julius Mar[--”. It should be plain to everyone that (a) this might not be Lower Moesia, and (b) this might not be Julius Candidus Marius Celsus. However, there was clearly much more going on at the back of Eck’s mind in 2012 than he let on.

When the godfather of diploma studies, Herbert Nesselhauf, published CIL XVI 41 in 1936 (see picture at right), he only suggested Lower Moesia because the diploma had been discovered in the territory of that province. But as for Julius Mar[--’s identity (IVLIO MAR in line 1), Dr Leiva Petersen, compiling the J fascicule of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani in 1966, invented “Lucius Julius Marinus ..?”, whom she suggested as the father of the homonymous consul of AD 101.

It was only some years later, in 1985, that Karl Strobel (then a 30-year-old researcher, now an Emeritus Professor) suggested that the governor might actually be Tiberius Julius Candidus Marius Celsus. He had reasonably good grounds for this. The word placing on the fragment suggested to him that the scribes had been obliged to squeeze the required information onto the bronze plate. In this case, it seemed reasonable to suppose that the polyonymous governor’s name might have been drastically abbreviated to “Julius Marius”, perhaps with “Candidus” on the next line. Eck tells us none of this.

But which province?

At around the same time, the province was thrown into doubt, as the governor of Lower Moesia in the mid-90s was known to have been Sextus Octavius Fronto, attested there in June AD 92 and in September AD 97. (Remember, our diploma is from January AD 97.) Upper Moesia was then suggested, which would fit “[Moesia superior]e” equally well, and there is a gap in the later AD 90s where the governor remains unknown. However, by 2005, another diploma of Upper Moesia dating from AD 97 had come to light, casting doubt on this new attribution, since it would have been highly irregular, not to say downright impossible, for two diploma issues for the same province within the same year.

As early as 2006, Paul Holder had suggested that our Julius Mar[-- could only have governed Upper or Lower Germany, being the only two alternatives that, in the context of AD 97, would fit the name of a province ending in E: “[Germania superior]e”, for example. And yet, Trajan himself is known to have been governor of Upper Germany in AD 97, while his colleague Lucius Licinius Sura is known to have been in charge of Lower Germany at the same time. The problem seemed intractable.

Currently, the only solution seems to be to return to Upper Moesia and to assume that something unusual had happened, occasioning the granting of privileges to soldiers twice in one year. Perhaps Eck will tell us in a future (hopefully not as expensive) publication.