Referenda ad Senatum: November 1, 2024: Ancient Weapons, Lost Works and Roman Spooky-Stuff!
- WORDSWORTH WORDSMITHY
- Nov 1, 2024
- 16 min read
Welcome back! At last, the hiatus has ended and we are back to regular weekly posts. As we’ve done a few times before, this week I am breaking the hiatus by taking a chance to answer a few shorter questions posed by my patrons over at Patreon who are the Patres et Matres Conscripti of the ACOUP Senate. It’s been a while – too long, to be frank – since we’ve done one of these, so let me reiterate that as with previous responses, the answers here may not be as exhaustive or careful as they would be as a full feature post but reflect roughly what you would get asking the same question in my office hours or after class.
Just as a quick advisory before we dive in, one of these answers is going to involve discussing apotropaic (magic protective) objects, which are frequently *ahem* shaped like human anatomy, so if you read with little ones, you may want to give the final question-and-answer a read over before sharing it with them.
And of course if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; as mentioned patrons who join the Patres et Matres Conscripti get to propose questions that I answer here. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
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Onward to the questions!
Douglas Perrins asks, “What was the mechanic that brought weapons innovation back from the frontier to Rome? Was it ad hoc or systematized?”
This is actually quite an interesting question, although unfortunately the this is case where we’re mostly relying on what we can suppose rather than what we can know.
First, the background: Nearly every major weapon or weapons-system the Roman military uses by the Middle Republic was adopted from one enemy or another. Ovid’s quip that fas est et ab hoste doceri (“It is right to learn, even from an enemy,” Metam. 4.428) was clearly borne out in Roman equipment choices. The Roman sword of choice seems to have been a local Italic variant of the early La Tène sword, before it was overtaken by the adopted Spanish variant of the same, thegladius Hispaniensis, where it then served alongside the Roman adopted version of the late La Tène sword, the spatha. The Roman javelin, the pilum, was probably from Cisalpine Gaul, the Roman Montefortino-type helmet was also Gallic, as was Roman mail, the lorica hamata. Roman artillery (catapults) were Greek, as likely were Roman warships, although Polybius insists the Romans also copied the Carthaginians and they may well have done. In the imperial period, we see a new helmet type, which we call ‘Gallic’ because it was derived from Gallic iron helmets, and also the adoption of the famed lorica segmentata (segmented plate armor), probably picked up in the East from a Seleucid or Parthian source (their ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry had used that type of armor for some time). So almost no part of the Roman equipment set was indigenous to Rome or even Italy.
So how did they go about acquiring this stuff? In nearly all cases, the sources do not tell us; sometimes they are aware of the borrowing (the gladius, for instance) but do not detail how it was borrowed. The exception are the ships: Polybius twice notes (1.20.15 and 1.59.8) that the Romans copied Carthaginian ships they captured during the First Punic War – and ironically for one of the rare times we are told how they did it, I think most ancient historians doubt the story. For one, it’s a bit too neat and just-so, but more broadly it was almost certainly unnecessary: the Romans had socii specialized in ships (these were the socii navales, naval-allies) who seem to have mostly been Greek and would have been familiar with up-to-date warship designs. Notably, the names in the Roman navy for a ship’s specialist crew were Greek, not Latin, suggesting that the Roman naval tradition was Greek and that the Romans likely relied on Greek naval specialists, drawn from Greek socii in S. Italy to fill those key specialist roles.
So what can we suppose? Well, for most cases, we can probably dismiss the idea that there was any formalized, state-run system for this. For most of the Roman Republic, soldiers supplied their own equipment and likely had some discretion (within limits) on what they purchased. We continue to find, for instance, some La Tène-style swords in second-century BC Roman sites (Grad near Šmihel, the camps at Numantia near Renieblas) suggesting that not all Roman soldiers switched over to the gladius Hispaniensis. There may have been some regulations on this – we know, for instance, that fully body armor was required above a certain census requirement (Polyb. 6.23.14) – but within those limits, soldiers seemed to have a fair bit of choice.
While popular culture likes the image of uniform Roman soldiers, they were never uniform in that way. Even into the imperial period, if you saw a Roman legion marching down the road, you’d likely see soldiers wearing mail (lorica hamata), segmented armor (so-called lorica segementata) and scale armor (lorica squamata) all in the same unit. It’s also possible you might see an officer wearing a Greek-style muscle cuirass and I wouldn’t be shocked if, at least early on, one might see Greek-style textile armor, though the evidence for its use by the Romans on the regular is almost non-existent.
So we generally suppose that the adoption of personal equipment was probably ad hoc: Roman soldiers might start by looting enemy equipment they thought performed well or filled a niche. What’s clear is that then we have Roman artisans – in the Republic, still very much private concerns, not state fabricators – copying what they are seeing. We can tell because while they match the form, they don’t always make them the same way (for instance, Roman Montefortino helmets aren’t manufactured the same way, structurally, as their Gallic forebears). At some point – in some cases, this clearly happened within a few decades (mail, in particular, takes off quick)422 – the adopted equipment becomes ‘standard’ as more and more soldiers use it and pressure to conform kicks in. That may in turn have been codified by changes to regulations implied by Polybius’ claim that, by perhaps 216, mail was required for the First Class of Roman heavy infantry.
The pace of military change certainly slows during the early and high imperial periods, but it does not stop. As Ian Haynes notes in Blood of the Provinces (2013) the auxilia – units recruited of non-citizen residents of the empire – seem to have have played a role, presumably informal, in the dissemination of weapons and tactics. Cohorts of auxilia were often recruited from particular ethnic groups within the empire, at least initially, and expected to fight in local style with local equipment, but we rapidly see both the auxilia adopting a lot of Roman-style kit and also weapons used by the auxilia drifting into more common usage in the Roman army, either in the legions or in other auxilia cohorts. As a result, while these cohorts tend to keep a distinctive combat role – a cohort of archers or cavalry or horse archers or light infantry remained as such – their ethnic and equipment distinctiveness declines over time as tactics and equipment normalize. That probably wasn’t the intended purpose of the auxilia, but it was a long-term effect.
Matthew Planchard asks, “What is your system for annotation, note-taking and synthesis of all of the content you read and see?
Ah! This is far scarier than our upcoming spooky Halloween question!
So the fact is, I am terrible at taking and keeping notes and always have been. A major top-down overhaul of my note-taking method has been on my to-do list for a while and I hope to implement that in my next big project. I haven’t been able to do it yet for the current book project precisely because this project is built atop my dissertation research.
For the dissertation, I kept the bulk of my notes in OneNote (part of the MS Office suite). The biggest chunk of this was keeping track of all of the artifacts I was collecting data on, since the core of the project was considering a whole bunch of arms and armor – I ended up with something like 400 pieces for the dissertation (and the figure has gone up somewhat for the book project). To keep track of that, I created a standard ‘template’ note-card with a header that gave each piece a unique numbered ID, along with an easily searchable identifier (so “110 – Roman – Gladius Hispaniensis” for instance, is one of the Grad near Šmihel swords) and then the card for each piece includes all of the measurements I had for it, scanned images of it, date, findspot, bibliography, and any notes. I originally spaced the numbers out so each initial digit was a category (0xx was pre-Roman Italic, 1xx was Roman and so on) but several categories (Spain and Gaul) burst their edges, requiring me to replace this system for the final catalog of artifacts in the dissertation.
Alongside that, I had a OneNote folder in the same notebook for each chapter and if I hit something I thought was useful, I could create a card or add it to an existing card, organized topically. I didn’t hew as tightly to that system as I ought to have done and so also ended up with quite a few miscellaneous word documents with scattered notes as well. But each chapter got its own drafts folder, so those notes were at least sorted that way (along with each chapter’s ‘bitx box,’ my term for paragraphs I’ve written but either pulled out of the draft or not yet placed in them; I never delete anything – it just gets pulled over into what is basically a ‘holding bin’ document, one for each chapter).
In terms of synthesis, this helps for what a historian is often expected to do, particularly in footnotes, which is to document previous works, especially where their positions conflict: so-and-so (1999) says X but such-and-such (1987) says Y, to which what’s-his-face (2012) agreed, building on the work of that-old-fellow (1935). Ideally, my notes put those positions next to each other, so I can see the contrasts. That said, when I write, I almost always want to have the things I am citing – books, articles and primary sources – in front of me (as you might imagine, this means when writing, my office is a mess – stacks of books, often with index cards holding pages, all over). That’s an option for an ancient historian in a way that it wouldn’t be for a modernist who, after all, cannot remove documents from an archive and can probably only scan or photocopy so much.
That is, to be frank, not the best system and if I was a more modern historian dealing with archival records, it would be woefully insufficient. But as an ancient historian with a relatively smaller collection of sources which I can more easily check back on, I can get away with the disorganization. Still, I am trying, as I spin up book project to, to lay the groundwork for being much more systematic.
Tom Roeder asks, “What are the largest gaps in the literary evidence in antiquity? Where do you wish you had more information?“
This is a question that we could go a few ways with, depending on how we’re thinking about gaps and how wide a net we’re casting for ‘literary evidence.’
Taking the sort of broadest possible brush to this question while confining myself to the Mediterranean, my first answer would be Iron-Age Phoenician Literature, especially Carthaginian literature. We have a little bit of Bronze Age mythology but from the Iron Age, we have very little – basically just scraps. This was a literate society and we know from the Greeks and the Romans that they were writing history, mythology, poetry, agricultural treatises, philosophy and all sorts of other stuff, functionally none of which survives except in tiny fragments or references. That leaves us almost entirely reliant on the Phoenicians Greek and Roman enemies to understand their culture, which is a sad state of affairs indeed.
If we want to get into specifically Greek and Roman literature, I think we need to start with missing genres. Greek Comedy, for instance, was broken into periods: Old, Middle and New. We have some Old Comedy (Aristophanes, in particular), but only snippets of New Comedy (Menander) survive, although a papyrus with big chunk of one of his plays, Dyskolos, gives us some window into New Comedy – that said, most of what we know comes from Roman adaptations of Greek New Comedy by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. Greek Middle Comedy, however, wasn’t so adapted and survives only in scattered fragments, leaving us not knowing a lot about it as a transitional literary form between the other two.
We can also talk in eras, because there are also clear chronological preferences and gaps. We’ve talked about this before, but preserving works was expensive and not every era’s authors were viewed as quite so indispensable. The clear ‘winners’ of this process of preservation were the Classical period in Greece and the Late Republic in Rome, in part because they have a dense concentration of authors considered ‘the best’ and thus used as school-texts for teaching (which ensured lots of copies). The ‘losers’ here were the Greek Hellenistic period and the high and late Roman imperial periods: both periods where we know there is a lot of writing going on, but which don’t excite the same sort of attention and as a result, preservation is a lot thinner. One of my hopes with the prospect of ‘unrolling’ the carbonized papyri of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (this is the ‘Vesuvius Challenge‘) is that because of the date of the library (destroyed in 79 AD) it might have a lot of Hellenistic literature, although given the purpose of the library, it is likely to be a lot of Epicurean philosophy. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but hardly bad to have more texts!
Finally, we can think about specific works that would be particularly transformative to have. Every classicist has their own lost works they’d love to have. I think my first choice would have to be Claudius’ (yes, the emperor; he was a historian too!) histories of Carthage and the Etruscans, two societies about which we are poorly informed. Likewise, Aristotle reportedly wrote down descriptions of the government of 158 governments, of which only one – for Athens – survives. Almost any of these would be amazing to find – the Athenaion Politeia was a revelation on its discovery in 1891 – but the crown jewel would almost certainly be the Constitution of Carthage that was in that collection of 158. Smaller-ball stuff, but a complete copy of Livy or Polybius – we are missing most of both – could pretty radically reshape the study of the Roman Republic and the broader Hellenistic world.
To close out, I do want to note since we’re bringing up preservation, one planned series for the blog probably some time next year is going to be How Did They Make It: Books, covering the production of the codex (probably with an addendum on papyrus scrolls), which will give us some space to also talk about preservation.
Finally, in an appropriately Halloween mood, Laura Fox asks, “With October closing in, What did the Romans think about “spooky” stuff – ghosts, monsters, witchcraft, etc.? If they saw such things as threats, what did they do to mitigate the danger?“
This is actually a really neat question, because on the one hand, Greek and Roman literature feature a fairly robust set of ‘spooky’ stories, often where it’s clear that the story is all in fun and no one is expected to take its supernatural elements particularly seriously, but whereas for us moderns there is often a sharp divide between spooky stories and religious belief, for the Greeks and Romans this is something more of a continuum from frivolous stories all the way to well-evidenced religious practice.
On the more frivolous end, you have, for instance, some of the stories in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses(often known in English as The Golden Ass) which features a number of stories concerning witches – often from the perspective of unreliable narrators, though the main character and narrator, Lucius, eventually dabbles in witchcraft and turns himself into a donkey, with the rest of the story relating his efforts to get transformed back into a human. The reader isn’t really expected to take these stories particularly seriously: they’re mostly for humor value. Likewise, in Petronius’ satirical Satyricon(62-3), the characters Niceros and Trimalchio trade spooky stories, first a werewolf story from Niceros about a soldier who visited a graveyard with him and transformed into a wolf, then a story from Trimalchio about witches who could curse with a touch and stole children, replacing them with bundles of straw, though we really don’t take any of these characters seriously in the novel.
Shifting to something slightly more serious, the Romans also told ghost stories. Pliny the Younger tells such a story in a letter to Lucius Licinius Sura (Plin. Ep. 7.27), complete with a ghost haunting a house in Athens, complete with a ghostly apparition appearing with rattling chains, though in the story the haunting is found by the philosopher Athenodorus to be caused by the improper burial of a body, wrapped in chains, beneath the house. The stories Pliny tells are basically harmless, but unlike Apuleius, he seems to credit their truthfulness.
Of course these stories blend into mythology proper. As recalled in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (and elsewhere), a collection of myths related to transformations Zeus/Jupiter punished some evil-doers with being transformed into wolves, particularly the mythical figure Lycaon. Both Odysseus (in the Odyssey) and Aeneas (in the Aeneid) visit the underworld and Aeneas is also visited at one point by the ghostly apparition of his dead wife Creusa. As reflected in Pliny’s story, it was thought that one consequence of improper burial was the potential that the angry dead might haunt the living (something that also occurs in Mesopotamian religion, by the by).
But of course Roman religion is one in which the whole universe is alive with divine and semi-divine powers, which are controlled and channeled by ritual, so naturally all of this blends into small-scale religious practice. The Romans believed in a few supernatural perils: not only could hostile spirits potentially do harm, so too could human individuals who, intentionally or inadvertently, drew on spiritual powers. For both the Greeks and the Romans, curses were real things one individual could call down on another and spoken or written curses could thus have real power that needed to be counter-acted or warded off. Not only was a spoken curse a problem, but the evil eye – a glare with evil intent – could also project harmful spiritual energy; in the Roman thinking this was closely connected with invidia, usually translated as “envy.” But the etymology here is telling: invidia comes from invidere, which in turn is in+videre (‘to see, perceive, discern) – it is a intense looking into or indeed, looking against. And so invidere can mean “to envy, to loath” but also “to cast the evil eye upon,” a hateful glance intended to harm. Someone looked upon with powerful envy was themselves at risk of a sort of curse.
How did one protect against such evil energies? We call any sort of ritual or superstition intended to ward off evil spirits or energies or just bad luck an apotropaic practice from the Greek ἀποτρέπω, ‘to turn [something] away.’ The usual way to make sense of Roman superstition in this is that the Romans regarded the evil eye as fundamentally feminine and feminizing in its nature (it is not hard to note that the folds of the eye might somewhat rather resemble the folds of some feminine anatomy), so the response was to counteract this force with something masculine, generally phallic. Indeed, one still sees in some modern Mediterranean cultures, including in Italy, the sign of the horns (corna) used to ward away bad luck: the symbol evoking the horns of a bull, a symbol of masculine energy.
Roman practices could be more explicit than this. Priapus, a Greek and Roman fertility god marked by his enormous phallus, appears sometimes as an apotropaic device, with paintings or statues of the god (frequently in gardens, with which he is also associated) thought to ward off the evil eye. Young boys seem to have been thought particularly vulnerable to the evil eye, presumably because they hadn’t yet fully developed their own masculine presence, and young Roman boys as a result wore an amulet called a bulla, a small container which generally contained a carved phallus (a phallus-shaped charm is called a fascinus), a sort of protective magical phallic booster, as it were. An interesting trend I recall from a conference paper I listened to – but alas, cannot currently find the reference – is that while Roman boys left behind their bullae when they became adults, we sometimes find these amulets in Roman legionary contexts on the frontier, where they seem to be worn not by boys but perhaps by the soldiers themselves.423 The thinking seeming to be that Roman soldiers stationed out on the Rhine or Danube, in a strange country with strange gods, might well require a bit more extra spiritual protection.
Likewise, a general in a triumph was clearly the target of a lot of invidia – the triumphing general, after all, was achieving and being lauded for the greatest possible achievement in Roman society. In part to ward off that envy, his soldiers sang baudy, often insulting songs (humor was thought to diminish invidia), but Pliny the Elder also notes (HN 28.4.7) that a fascinus was hung beneath the general’s chariot as an apotropaic device. There’s also a suggestion that a triumphing general might have worn a bulla during the triumph, but the evidence on that is thin.
Now you may well ask what exactly women and girls were supposed to do and my sense is that part of the answer is that the Romans didn’t really know. Magic, witchcraft and the evil eye are generally female-gendered in their legends and thinking. Roman girls are sometimes shown wearing a crescent-shaped amulet, the lunula (‘little moon’) in place of the bulla, but we also have references to girls in Roman literature (Plautus’ Rudens 1171) having bullae and my understanding is that some bullae have been recovered in burial contexts were the deceased was female. So in some cases, a Roman woman might, like a Roman man, try to ward off evil with a phallic apotropaic device. On the other hand, though they’re quite rare, my understanding is we also sometimes find amulets shaped like female genitalia, which may well have had a similar sort of logic to their function, boosting a woman’s feminine energy to resist the evil eye.
For evil spirits, the other approach was to attempt to ward them off with something frightening. By far the most pervasive form of this in antiquity was the gorgoneia, a stylized depiction of a gorgon’s head (that is, a creature like Medusa). That approach – something scary to frighten away evil spirits – appears in quite a lot of cultures the world over, so it isn’t surprising to see it in Greek and Roman practice. Notably, both the Greeks and the Romans tended to regard what we’d call ‘liminal spaces’ (the limen is the threshold of a door) – places halfway between two states of being – as particularly vulnerable to evil spirits: doorways, crossroads, graveyards.424 We tend to see apotropaic devices in these contexts more often: for instance the Greeks often put up hermai (or herms) at crossroads: a plinth with a sculpted head (of Hermes, the god that protects travelers) usually with a prominent phallus on the lower part of the sculpture; those gorgon-faces often protect entryways for similar reasons.
In any case, Happy Halloween! My hope over the next few weeks is to cover a few of the longer ACOUP Senate requests, starting with the ‘afterlife’ of the Roman Republic’s institutions, alongside some Tolkien content, some related to season 2 of Rings of Power and some not.
