Great Names in History

I was puzzled by what the old Greek historian Herodotus wrote on the construction of the Great Pyramid.

He visited Egypt in about 450 BC and talked with the old priests there and heard their account of the construction of the pyramids. That was at least a thousand years after Pharoah Cheops had built his pyramid but it is the oldest account that has come down to us and has to be taken pretty seriously. Those stones weighed about two and a half tons and were transported for miles after they were quarried, by barge and then over land. How?

The Great Pyramid didn’t look then like it does now. It wasn’t a pile of steps but a perfect geometrical pyramid that shone in the sun. It was polished. After the big building blocks were set up as we see them today, they were covered with a layer of flat slabs and polished till they shone.
Herodotus had known that. What he hadn’t known, and what surprised him, was what he learned about the road the Egyptian engineers had built for hauling the stones to the construction site. IT TOO WAS POLISHED!

“For ten years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task only a little lighter than the building of the pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carved with figures. Those ten years went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers of the hill the pyramids stand on….” (Herodotus, pp. 425-426 Loeb Classical Library, translated by A.D.Godley)

Now, I had seen how men moved blocks in a stoneyard and I assumed that the Egyptians had done the same: that they hadn’t dragged those big blocks of theirs but used rollers and planks. The problem I saw was the rollers. Probably, though not surely, the huge stones would have crushed wooden rollers or logs. And I wasn’t even sure if bronze rollers could take that weight without being flattened. Later I learned that the Bronze Age hadn’t yet begun at the time of the building—that only copper instruments were used—so I had to throw out the idea of metal rollers altogether.

Then I read Herodotus and got the surprise, the same as he had. Why had they polished the road to the pyramid? It couldn’t be that they dragged the stones over that polished avenue—that they polished thousands of square feet of pavement with the aim of smoothing the dragging of the blocks—to reduce friction. Anyone, at any stage of human inventions, can see that to reduce friction you have to get the stone OFF the ground, not polish the ground. And if they used rollers of some kind and planks, the smooth surface of the road would actually hinder the hauling. You wouldn’t want the planks on the ground to slide around but stay put while the stone rolled over them. And how could the poor slaves and oxen that pulled the stones get a firm foothold on that slippery road?

But Herodotus seems not to have thought of the problem. What awed him was the vastness of the project and the results. Perhaps he took for granted what I discovered later while reading a modern study of the pyramids: that the Egyptians, like the people who carried the boulders to Stonehenge, must have hauled their stones ON SLEDS. That is how they reduced the drag and pulled their stones down that polished avenue. Only the tracks of the sleds were in contact with the pavement and its smoothness did make the pulling easier.

Yet then wasn’t the polish unnecessary? Wasn’t it still an impediment to the pulling? The men and oxen would slide all over the place unless they worked off the polished road, to one side of the stone. They would pull a little left and right of the block, the way mules used to pull barges on canals from the paths along the banks. But the road—ten “fathoms” wide—was no dinky canal or creek, so pulling from its shoulder or berm would have meant doing so at a great angle, thus losing effectiveness.

I re-read my Herodotus and found the solution:
“Cheops compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing to some to drag the stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile: and the stones being carried across the river in boats, others were charged to receive and drag them to the mountains called Lybian.” Ibid., p.425

I realized that the polished road leading up to the Great Pyramid was only the last bit of work, the last “mile”. The real feat was bringing—dragging—those blocks up and down the mountains, where the roads were surely not polished or even paved. If the workmen were able to perform that feat, using sleds or any other means, they had solved the problem of transporting big stones. Without polishing their roads until they were slippery.

Conclusion: the broad avenue leading up to the Great Pyramid was polished after the blocks were hauled through on sleds, just as they had been hauled for hundreds of miles on other, worse roads. The polish Herodotus saw on that road had nothing to do with reducing friction: it was there as part of the vast general design and meant to dazzle.

See Egyptologist Mark Lehner’s theory that the great blocks were quarried not in the mountains but right at the foot of the Pyramid.

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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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Who was the last to see Alexander, the greatest man of ancient times?
The Emperor Augustus, according to the Roman biographer Suetonius.
But how could that be? Augustus lived three hundred years later.

This way:
Augustus was in Egypt. He had just won the last battle, Accio, in his war against Mark Anthony and had chased and caught up with him in Alexandria. Cornered, Anthony told Augustus: “I think we could come to an understanding.”
“I don’t,” said Augustus. And he told Anthony to make his exit like a good Roman.

Anthony’s lover Cleopatra knew that Augustus wanted her very badly too. As yet another lover? No; as the star in chains of the triumph parade he was planning for Rome. So she decided to avoid that humiliation by making her exit like a good Cleopatra: with a snake—the famous asp. Augustus discovered her still warm and called in specialists to try to extract the poison and save her. But they were too late.

While he was in Alexandria, putting things in order, making Egypt into a better supplier of grain for Rome, the locals asked him if he’d like to see Alexander the Great.
This is how Suetonius puts it:

“…having placed before him the sarcophagus and the body of Alexander the Great, which was taken out of its tomb, [Augustus] honored him with a golden crown which he placed on his head and covered him with flowers….” (Suetonius, Life of Augustus, chapter XVIII)

“Do you want to see Ptolomeo, too?” the Egyptians asked. “We can show you him.”
“That’s enough,” said Augustus “I came to Egypt to see a king, not the dead.”

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What did a Roman wear?
Why, a toga, of course.

Wasn’t that an unwieldy garment to walk around in?
Yes, it was heavy and you had to readjust it constantly. Walking and talking with gestures messed it up.
How big was it?
6 meters of fine wool cloth cut in a circle.
In a circle?
Yes; that was one of its distinguishing features. The Greek himation was rectangular and its folds hung squared off at the bottom. The Roman toga-folds hung in curves.
Was it hard to put on?
It was best to have help. Doing it by yourself without a mirror (and no one had big mirrors) gave pretty bad results.
If it was such a troublesome thing why did people wear it?
Tradition. It became the symbol of Romanness and all her fine virtues. Only Roman citizens were allowed to put it on. People got sentimental about it.
How long was the toga worn?
All thoughout the Republic and the Empire. Give it a good seven or eight hundred years.

(I’m afraid a Roman would sneer at this Hollywood actor-friendly version of a toga. Compare it with the ones on these two Roman statues. Notice the tongue or flap hanging out above the belly, and the tail hanging below the ankles.)

So much wool cut in a circle—it must have been expensive. How could the common Romans afford one?
Do you know about patrons and clients? In those days everyone except the emperor served somebody. Everyone was somebody’s “client”. A client made common cause with his patron, voted for him when he ran for office, walked around with him when he needed to show his support, served him in any way he asked. In return, the patron protected his client and saw to it that he was provided for. Once a year he gave him presents. One of those was a new toga.
Was the toga ALL they wore? Did they put on anything under it?
During the Republic they wore only a loin-cloth—just a linen cloth with the corners tied, as you see on a lot of Crucifixion pictures of Christ. Later they wore a long shirt—or two when it was cold. Augustus always felt chilly and Suetonius says he sometimes wore three and four of those linen shirts under his toga.
A man like Caesar was always conscious of how he looked and was forever watching his toga, making sure it hung properly and the folds were pretty. When the assassins began to stab him, his first thought was for his toga. He arranged it so that when he fell it would cover him decently. He had nothing on underneath but the loincloth.

How did they finally do away with the toga?
It wasn’t easy. Remember that, as it represented Romanness and Rome had great prestige, it looked very attractive to people. In a provincial town like Segóbriga in Spain, the natives must have looked with very wide eyes at the real Romans strutting proudly around in their togas. The statues of all the great figures of the past in the theater of Segóbriga (and everywhere) wore togas. It was the dress of heroes.

There was a ceremony when a youth first put on a man’s toga. In his home, in the presence of his relatives, he shed his boy’s toga with a purple band, the toga praetexta, and solemnly donned the pure-white toga virilis. Not only the living relatives looked on. The ceremony took place in the atrium with the masks and busts of his famous forefathers. Afterwards they all went to the Forum where he inscribed his name on the list of Roman citizens and walked over to the Temple of Juventus and made an offering to thank the deity for safeguarding him until manhood.

But in time, yes, people wanted to get rid of it. Several emperors had to issue edicts ordering citizens to wear it every time they went outdoors. To go to the Colosseum, for instance. Privately, even the rich began to cheat a little and pull off their togas whenever they could. They felt comfortable only in a tunic.

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Most old towns are lost. Look at the maps drawn by Strabo and Ptolomeo: not one in ten is still around. What happened to them all? How can a whole town disappear?

Remember that those old towns, sometimes called cities, were no more than villages by our standards. They were a little cuddling together of maybe fifty houses. Most didn’t have a wall around them, so there’s no big orderly pile of rocks to signal archaeologists. And the houses themselves were made of adobe, which after they were abandoned became just a heap of dirt.
It actually helps excavators locate them if an enemy had razed the town because then they find a nice, even, layer of ash as they uncover the mound.

But some of those long-gone cities meant a lot in ancient times and were the scenes of great battles and the hometowns of famous emperors and other famous people. Trajan was from Itálica, now a vast marble junkyard near Seville, and Hannibal’s wife was from Cástulo, a mound just south of Linares.

To look for old Iberian towns like Cástulo archaeologists refer to the maps by the Greeks mentioned above—Strabo and Ptolomeo.

For Roman towns they use two good sources: the Antonine Itinerary and the Vicarello Cups.

The Antonine Itinerary was probably made at the beginning of the third century. It charts thirty-four main roads and all the cities and towns, with the distance between them in Roman miles (1481 meters). And even better, it records partial distances between mansio and mansio, that is, between points that represented a days’ march and which served as resting stops and places to change horses.

The other great source, the Vicarello Cups, are four silver cylinders engraved with all the stops on the trip between a shrine in northern Italy (the Aquae Apollinares) and the temple of Hercules in Cadiz, Spain. The cups are exvotos offered by Spaniards who made the pilgrimage about the end of the first century. Like the Antonine Itinerary, the cups list all the towns and cities on the way, plus the mansioni and the distances between them.

Already in prehistoric times, there were two main roads around the peninsula. At first the Romans used and improved those. The oldest and most travelled was precisely the route on the Vicarello Cups: the route through the Pyrenees and down the western and southern coasts all the way to Cadiz.

That they called the Via Herculea or later, the Via Augustea.

The other famous road was the Via de la Plata, which paralleled the modern Portuguese-Spanish border. It went from Mérida to the rich mineral mines in Galicia.

The road along the Portuguese coast and a northern route straight to the gold mines and Galicia were the other Mother Roads.

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The last people to leave the town of Segóbriga had to pack up in a hurry and head for the fortified town of Uclés, eight miles away. There was no time to lose because the Moors were coming. The Moors would kill or enslave them all. The last anyone knew, the Arab army had taken Toledo itself and if Tariq, its commander, wanted to he could be in Segóbriga in a day.

Luckily for these last Segobrigenses the Moors had better things to do, better towns to attack and pillage. The old Roman town of Segóbriga was nothing anymore—just a hill full of unintelligible marble ruins. People now lived on the flat ground below the hill and just let the old town fill up with thistles and mud. No one had lived there for two hundred years and earth had filled the old marble rooms and covered or half-covered the baths and the temples. Shepherds brought their sheep there, children used it as a playground. It was full of rabbits. The little collection of huts where people lived now was of no interest to invaders.

What would bring the Moors to Segóbriga was the Christian basilica three hundred yards from its walls. That they would want to destroy. It was the seat of a diocese and the tomb of several of its bishops. There were no cathedrals in those days—where would the money to build them come from?—but this basilica was a beautiful temple, more splendid than any of the churches around. Segóbriga in the old days had been a showcase of fine marble buildings and there was a long tradition of good stonework. The pillars in the basilica, the capitals and other stone adornments, were carved with particular skill.

The bishop—call him Sefronius—was the leader of the little community. There were no civil authorities, no police force, no protection. The Christian King’s army had been annihilated at Guadalete a few weeks after the Arabs crossed over from Morocco. There was no one to defend the Segobrigenses and they huddled around the old bishop and prayed before setting out.

Sefronius came from an old Visigoth family. The Visigoths were the nobles of those times, not the native Spaniards. Two hundred and fifty years earlier they had come into Spain with fire and sword just like the Moors now, and had become its leaders. They were still the leaders in all the communities.

He ordered the people to take down the brass lamps and to hide the crucifix that hung above the altar. But there was no time to consider how to save things like the frescoes or the beautiful filigree carvings on the pillars and the altar.

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When the Moors galloped into Segobriga a few days later, they headed straight for the basilica and started smashing everything in sight. When they had finished, the building was just a shell. Their leader told them not to burn it down, in case he got orders to make a mosque of it. That was sometimes done. But he got no such orders and so the Moors used some of its good stones to build a watchtower on the acropolis of the old town.

Here is the floor plan of the basilica (46 meters long) as drawn from its ruins in about 1800 by a priest who was an amateur archaeologist.

He found at least four bishops’ tombs and copied the epitaph of this one.

The bishop was Sefronius, who died in 580. The epitaph speaks of “that enemy Death who snatched Sefronius from his people.” This tombstone is on display at the site of the basilica now in Segóbriga.

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Excavators slowly unearthed the mysterious mansion and the basilica of Carranque, Spain. Meanwhile, Dimas Fernandez-Galiano, the head archaeologist, worked in the National Library digging up information on Maternus Cynegius, its possible owner. He found some juicy facts.

In the Consularia Constantinopolitana, a kind of almanaque of imperial events, there was an obituary of Maternus Cynegius, Theodosius’ General Prefect. “He restored to all the provinces, affected by long years of ruin, their pristine state and travelled as far as Egypt, where he destroyed the idols of all the towns and cities. And it was from there, amid the general grief of the people that his body was brought to this city [Constantinople] and buried in the Church of the Apostles on the nineteenth of March, 388. After a year his bereaved widow Acantia disenterred his remains and took them on foot to Spain.”

The Church of the Apostles! What an honor! Only emperors were buried there. Why did his wife have him removed from such a prestigious grave? Why did she take him back to Spain? And where in Spain?

Dimas checked other sources. Libanius, a great enemy of Maternus, complained in his Pro Templis about his cruelty and lack of foresight in destroying the pagan temples of Egypt. “Cynegius was a slave to his terrible wife Acantia,” said Libanius. “She was a religious fanatic, a friend of radical monks. And she put her husband up to much of the evil that he did.” He hates Cynegius: “He was hostile to the very country where he was born….”

Maternus Cynegius was born in the Orient? He wasn’t a Spaniard? Then why did his wife go to the trouble—and some trouble! —of disenterring his body from the greatest tomb imaginable, and of carrying it thousands of miles “on foot” to Spain?

Dimas was worried. This was a real setback for his Maternus Cynegius theory. If Theodosius’ Prefect Maternus Cynegius wasn’t born in Spain and died in Syria, then he couldn’t be the owner of the villa in Carranque. There would be no reason for him to have anything to do with Spain.

He left the library reading room and went down to the cafeteria to mull everything over. He couldn’t get the woman out of his mind—Acantia, the wife and religious fanatic….. Suddenly he had an idea: what if she were Spanish? What if after her husband’s death Acantia decided to leave the Orient which she perhaps hated as much as it hated her, and go back to good old Spain, along with her dead husband. To hell with the East and all its Byzantine hypocrisy!

Next he remembered the bedroom portrait of a lady. The mosaic on the bedroom floor of the villa in Carranque had as its center the picture of a woman. Could that have been Acantia?

At the entrance to the room, like a kind of welcome mat, were the words: Enjoy this room, Maternus. Could the entire mansion have been a gift from Acantia?

Meanwhile the excavators kept handing Dimas their puzzling findings. Take this one: The mansion was built on top of an older, much more modest, villa. It was constructed all at once according to one clear general plan, without regard to expense. There were mosaic floors in all the rooms, most of them with pictures of mythological scenes. At least two different teams of foreign craftsmen had worked at the same time to lay them. There was running water and a heating system (hypocaustum) for several of the rooms; a fountain with the beautiful image of Oceanus; a patio; an octagonal triclinium or dining room with heated walls and a high dome; servants’ quarters. The furniture was imported from the East. BUT THE HOUSE WAS NEVER INHABITED.

And it was becoming more and more obvious as the digging went on that the huge basilica, just four hundred yards away, was built at the same time as the mansion—AND AS PART OF THE SAME GENERAL PLAN.
The basilica was built solidly on great granite foundation stones. The walls were covered with costly marble imported from Asia Minor. A long colonnade led up to the door of the basilica and the columns bore inscriptions from Emperor Theodosius’ own Eastern quarries in Egypt and Greece.
The church was surrounded with graves, beginning in late Roman times. Burial seems to have been its purpose. It was a good guess that the whole complex was conceived as a mausoleum/cemetery for some great personage or saint. Who? Maternus Cynegius?

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This is the tower of the Castle of Oreja.

It can’t have long. Already in the eighteenth century a traveller wrote in his journal: “… any day now it will collapse.” The cracks in the walls are big enough to put your arm in. And after a good rain whole shoulders of the great gypsum cliffs come crashing down. One that fell some years ago shaved away the very ground in front of the tower, so that just left of the main door—watch your step as you look inside the tower!—there is a drop of two hundred feet.

Oreja is nothing special. There are more than a thousand ruined castles and fortresses in Spain. Many like Oreja are now out in the middle of nowhere because the roads they guarded are no longer used.
Oreja watches over a ford of the Tagus River. She has been guarding the ford for well over 2000 years. The Romans called her Aurelia. There must have been at least a watchtower on the cliffs in ancient times.

The present tower that is ready to fall is all that is left of a huge complex of defense works built by both Moors and Christians. There were fierce battles here and at the foot of the cliff, in the river valley. The Moors took the castle away from the Christians in 1113; and the Christians didn’t get it back until 1139. King Alfonso VII sieged Oreja with a huge army but still it took him more than nine months to force the Moorish defenders to surrender the castle. Afterwards he handed it over to the Knights of Santiago (St. James) to defend for him.

That’s one of the famous battles Oreja saw, and that one is fact. But there is another one that would make Oreja more famous if anyone could be sure it happened here. Both Livy and Polybius mention it. Somewhere on the Tagus about where Oreja is Hannibal defeated a big army of native Iberians—Olcades and Carpetani—before he started off with his troops and his elephants for Rome. He made the enemy army cross the river to come after him and then cut them down with his cavalry while they were swimming. “It was certainly here at the foot of the castle,” said a nineteenth century writer. “For years farmers have been finding in the fields and on the banks of the river old battle detritus, spearheads, clay sling pellets, even a Carthaginian helmet and an old sword.”

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1. Take the initiative, keep the initiative. This gave Hannibal a tremendous advantage. His enemy had constantly to try to guess his intention and defend himself against several alternative attacks. The enemy Roman consul was forever on the defensive, waiting, wondering, guessing, bracing himself for the blow.
When the consul Longus, bent on making Hannibal stand and fight him, lined up his army for the battle, Hannibal ordered his men to go back to camp. He refused to fight. At that time he was not prepared for a general battle, says Polybius, “and made it a principle never to be drawn into a decisive engagement unless by deliberate choice, and certainly not on a casual impulse.”

2. Be quick. Surprise. Hannibal decamped by night from Capua and got to Rome before the Romans in Capua ever realized he was gone. He crossed Etruria through a swamp because that was the way everyone assumed he wouldn’t go.

3. Be crafty, lay a trap. Hannibal’s plans were always ways of fooling his enemy, misleading him, enticing him into combat, surprising him with hidden forces, seeming to be somewhere else. Everyone remembered the way he got out of the difficult pass in Campania, with Fabius’s army all around him. Along a path that paralleled the only road out, which was heavily guarded by Roman troops, he stampeded a herd of cattle at night with lighted torches on their horns. The guards, thinking the cattle were Hannibal’s soldiers, rushed to confront them, abandoning their positions on the mountain. While they were dealing with the bulls, Hannibal quickly sent his amy through the pass. That was his most ingenious trick. But all his tactics were ploys and ruses and feints, even when not outright traps.

4. Be flexible. Have a plan but be able to alter it or even drop it as circumstances change. Bad generals believe they will one day meet the enemy squarely on the field and have a nice pitched battle. Those generals toy in their minds with troop dispositions—where to put their cavalry, where to stand their light-armed soldiers, how deep to build their phalanx, and so on. “That will be the decisive day,” they tell themselves, and hope for good luck.
For Hannibal every day was that decisive day. The great battle was now, it was always going on. He didn’t merely march until he came to a perfect situation for battle. He created the situation or took advantage of one. He was stubborn only about his objective, not about his means.
He was at every moment aware of his advantages and disadvantages. And of the enemy’s.

5. Fight for tomorrow as well as today. Think two steps ahead, not just one.

6. Understand your enemy; learn his weaknesses. Hannibal always sent out spies to learn the enemy’s plans. He interviewed prisoners and guides to get information. As soon as new Roman consuls were given command, he sent informers to find out who they were. Was the new general a hothead? Had he ever led troops in battle? What was the result? Was he cocky or impatient, did he like to tip the bottle?

After Hannibal had beaten his first consuls, along came another one called Flaminius with his army. Hannibal learned from his informers that this Flaminius was “on fire with ambition” and that he believed in his own good luck. “Here’s a man after my own heart,” thought Hannibal and arranged a trap for Flaminius’s army. He knew the man would attack with his whole force at the first opportunity, good or not, so Hannibal lured him along a narrow road between a mountain (where his own army lay hidden) and a lake. Flaminius was fool enough to believe that HE had the advantage and sent his whole army into Hannibal’s trap, where it was annihilated.

7. Be daring. Come down with your army across the Alps with elephants and attack Rome on Roman ground, far from your own country and without logistic support except what you can steal.

8. Keep your mouth shut. Hannibal never told anyone what he was doing.

9. Be all of the above except when you are faced with an enemy who is all of the above. In that case, be like Fabius, the Roman general. Cautious, prudent, unrisking, defensive, back-holding. No war manual ever told anyone to be like Fabius. But under the circumstances his was the winning strategy.

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Dimas Fernandez-Galiano, the head archaeologist, had a theory. The luxurious Roman villa he was excavating near Madrid had belonged to Maternus Cynegius, the right-hand man of the emperor Theodosius.
A bit far-fetched, no?

Well, to a rich man named Maternus it had certainly belonged.
The floors of the villa were all covered with mosaics. One of them had this writing on it—the words formed with colored marble tessels:
Ex Oficinam M………Pincit Hirinius…Utere Felix Materne Hunc Cubiculum.

“What does it say, Professor?” asked Dimas’ student, who was more curious to know than ashamed of his Latin. He had had three years of Latin in college but didn’t understand much.
“That the mosaic was made in the shop of somebody whose name begins with an M; and that the painting it was copied from was by Hirinius. All that might help us find out a few things but it’s the rest of the inscription I like.”
“It’s not obscene, is it, Professor?” The little brat looked to see if his classmate had heard the joke. “Something about the maternal uterus and the little cubicle.”

Dimas was a good guy and just laughed. “You need just a little more Latin study, my boy. No—it has nothing to do with the maternal uterus: it is vocative form of the name of the owner of the house: Maternus. It says: ‘I hope you enjoy this room, Maternus’—it is addressed to him. Judging by the location of the room, its size, and the subject of the mosaics on the floor, this is the master bedroom of the villa. This is Maternus’s bedroom.”
“And those are his pin-ups on the floor. Pretty cool.”

The mosaic pictures were ambitious—too much so for the skill of the craftsman who had copied them. In the center was the portrait of the lady of the manor, with love scenes from Latin and Greek mythology in bright colors all around her like planets around the sun.

“Do you know any famous Maternuses?”

“Just one,” said Dimas. “The relative and right-hand man of the Emperor Theodosius, who was a Spaniard. His hometown was Coca, just 80 miles upriver from here.
“When did he live?”
“Late fourth century. Theodosius was the last emperor of the whole Empire: after him it broke in two. He himself spent most of his life in Constantinople, fighting pagans. And so did Maternus, of course.”
“Do you think this could be that Maternus?”
“It’s a hypothesis,” said Dimas, with a sigh. “It will have to stand a hell of a lot of testing. It is suspect that we know only a few names of people from those times and one of them is Maternus and now that we find a mansion built for a Maternus, it just has to be the guy we know. On the other hand, who else but a rich and powerful man could afford a place like this? Those were hard times. Spain itself was relatively peaceful—the barbarians hadn’t come storming through yet—but it was already feudal. There was no money around. There were only a few rich men and their estates. There might have been plenty of Maternuses, of course. Maybe ours had a relative with the same name.”

But Dimas kept reading up on our Maternus. And the more he dug, the better things looked for his theory. The mythological scenes on the mosaics were clearly in the childish style of the fourth century, similar to mosaics from the same time in northern Africa.

Then there were the bits and pieces of imported furniture that turned up—imported from the East. Chair and table feet in porphyry marble, carved to look like eagle claws and lions’ paws. The latest coin found belonged to the fourth century too. Then there were delicate pieces of jewelry in filigrano, impossible to get here in Hispania at the time.

But the strongest support came from the ruins of other buildings found near the mansion; and one of them was as if conjured up to support Dimas’s dreamy theory: there was a giant basilica four hundred yards from the house, with a ground plan like those of basilicas in the East! And it was built with rare marbles from Turkey and Egypt and Asia Minor. And there was a wonderful colonnade leading up to the temple with pillars of marble inscribed with the names of the Emperor’s quarries in Turkey: the Emperor Theodosius.

See  A Roman Villa (Part 2) 

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