Worchestershire Sauce 2000 Years Ago?

At a Roman banquet guests asked the waiter for a little garum. No fear of insulting the host. He was proud to have the best condiments money could buy.
Some loved their garum (also called liquamen)—fish sauce—and poured it on everything from meat to vegetables. Some even used it a third time on their dessert.

It must have been good. How did they make it?

Here is the recipe according to Gargilius Martialis, a third-century writer:

“Take fatty fish (salmon or sardines or eels), dried aromatic herbs, and salt. Lay down a layer of those strong-smelling herbs at the bottom of a big tub or barrel. Which herbs? Wild fennel, coriander, cultivated fennel, celery, savory, sage, rue, wild spearmint, levístico (?), thyme, marjoram, hedge-nettle, poppies. [In Europe these are common wild herbs.]
On top of that herb layer lay your fish—whole if they are small; in pieces, if big. Now cover the fish with a layer of salt two fingers thick.
Fill the barrel up to the top alternating these three layers: the herbs, the fish, and the salt. Cover the barrel and let it sit for seven days.
Then for twenty days stir the mix from time to time. Then pour off the liquid at the bottom of the barrel and strain it.” That’s your garum.
The first liquid collected was called gari flos—virgin garum—and it was the most prized. Liquid collected on later days was considered of lower quality and priced accordingly.

And the solid remains of those fish in the barrel—did they throw those away?

No: they made allec from them. Allec was a poor man’s food. Cato, the great Roman, used to feed allec to his slaves when he ran out of olives.
Something like allec was what two hundred years earlier Pliny the Elder had called garum. And to him it wasn’t the putrefied mush of fish but of their entrails. The contents or the quality of the sauce changed over time. After all, garum was around for nearly a thousand years. The Greeks invented it, but it was the Romans who really ate it up.

As long as Rome lasted men sprinkled garum on their food. It was the decisive element in all great Roman cuisine. It was used as an ingredient of many dishes, in most sauces, and to give taste to fried foods, soufflès, boiled meat. There was garum wine and garum vinagre. Water garum was army feed during the first century. Garum cured too. Dioscorides says you couldn’t beat it to heal sores of all kinds.

Hispania was the biggest exporter. There were factories all along the east and south coasts of the Peninsula. Because of the booming garum industry towns grew up, some of them big, like Baela Claudia (Bolonia), near Cadiz.

Here is a map showing the old salted fish and garum factories along the Spanish and North-African coast:

Garum disappeared mysteriously with the Empire. Today there are a few restaurants near Cadiz that sell their version of it for you to try. The brave put it in their mouth. The heroes swallow it.

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Homo Antecessor

Atapuerca, near Burgos, Spain, is the greatest dig of modern times. Everyone is excited.

What is all the fuss about? What’s so special about Atapuerca?

On July 8, 1994, a new species of man was discovered.
They found human remains 800,000 years old. That is so far back that no one could believe it.

They are by far the oldest human remains ever discovered in Europe. We knew about Neolithic man and his cave drawings. We knew about Neanderthal man. But those lived 100,000 years ago, not 800,000.

Scientists had to give the creature a new name because his bones weren’t like those of any of the known kinds of hominids. They dubbed him HOMO ANTECESSOR. The current theory is that Homo Antecessor was an ancestor of both Homo Sapiens (us) and Homo Neanderthal. Precisely after him the species developed in two directions.

What was Antecessor like?
He looked like us. His face was surprisingly similar to ours, though his forehead slanted back at a sharp angle.
Did the archaeologists find out anything else about him?
Yes, two VERY SURPRISING things so far.

The first is that he had no fire. The nice picture you have of the warm cave with the eternal fire that someone had to keep burning to ensure light, warmth, and safety—that’s wrong. In the caves of a million years ago—even of 200,000 years ago or less—there is no evidence of any fire. No inventor had come up with the idea of using it, no Prometheus had brought it to Man.
So they ate their food uncooked. The piles of bones have scratches from flint tools but no scorching, no signs of cooking.

The second thing is even more astonishing. The sweet, stinky, brutes were cannibals. They ate people the same as they ate deer and bears. And afterwards they threw all the bones on the same heap. Which is how the scientists found them, all mixed, now 800,000 years later. There didn’t seem to be a ritual of any kind. No sacrifice to any gods. No conscience, no scruples. Just eat your neighbor or your enemy or any baby that looks good.

(Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

This  artist’s conception of homo antecessor appears in a brochure published by the Atapuerca Foundation and given to visitors at the excavation site. The artist is Mauricio Antón.

UNESCO declared Atapuerca “Patrimony of Humanity” in 2000 and many countries have sent teams of scientists of all disciplines to work there. Funds roll in from all over the world.

Not everyone is pleased. “You can’t get any of those scientists to read a book or to study the great achievements of man in art, philosophy, or literature,” said an old humanities professor. “But the whole crowd will go running to see what the monkeys were doing.”

All the illustrations in this post belong to the Atapuerca Foundation.

See this article in Nature Magazine

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Why Did They Kill Caesar?

If Caesar was such a brilliant general and wise leader, why did they kill him?

Because with his army he overthrew the Roman Republic and set himself up as dictator.

Shakespeare, taking off on Plutarch’s biography, makes him into a megalomaniac:

“…I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place:
So in the world; ’tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak’d of motion: and that I am he…”  Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1

Shakespeare (and Plutarch) didn’t know Caesar but Cicero knew him well.   This is how he summed up Caesar in his Second Philippic:

“His character was an amalgamation of genius, method, memory, culture, thoroughness, intellect, and industry. His achievements in war, though disastrous for our country, were none the less mighty.  After working for many years to become king and autocrat, he surmounted tremendous efforts and perils and achieved his purpose. By entertainments, public works, food-distributions, and banquets, he seduced the ignorant populace; his friends he bound to his allegiance by rewarding them, his enemies by what looked like mercy. By a mixture of intimidation and indulgence, he inculcated in a free community the habit of servitude.”

That is why Cicero applauded when he heard they had killed him.

How did Caesar himself explain what he had done?

“I did not leave my province [and cross the Rubicon with my legions in defiance of the Senate] with intent to harm anybody. I merely want to protect myself against the slanders of my enemies, to restore to their rightful position the tribunes of the people, who have been expelled because of their involvement in my cause, and to reclaim for myself and for the Roman people independence from the domination of a small clique.” Civil War, Book 1, 22
By “a small clique” he meant the Roman senators.

But once he had established himself in Rome, he never took any step to restore the Republic. On the contrary, he had himself proclaimed dictator for life and some believed he even wanted to be crowned king. That is when his opponents decided to assassinate him.

See what has been said in his defence in Why Did They Kill Caesar 2

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