Great Names in History

What if you are a great army but your enemy is a great navy?

You know how to march with fine discipline over hill and dale. You pitch a dandy camp, a real fortress with high walls and a ditch, that nobody is fool enough to attack. On the field, man to man, with your spear, your sword and your shield, you can beat any enemy that is brave enough to stand up to you. But your enemy is out there on the sea, floating on big ships, and just laughing at your predicament. You don’t have any warships, only a few barges and ferries. You can’t go out there and get him—you don’t even know how to swim.

That happened to Rome. The enemy out there calling him a landlubber was Carthage; and if anybody was a sailor, it was a Carthaginian. Those fellows had been sailing around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. They had even been brave enough to push on past the Pillars of Hercules into an unknown ocean, and south down the coast of Africa. They loved the mist and the smell of the salt-sea . At night when they lay down on the rolling deck, they felt as cosy as the Roman soldier in his square camp and pup-tent. They looked up at the same sky, though the Carthaginian liked to imagine the old heroes and figures he saw in the constellations, and the Roman wondered how he could organize that mess of stars a little.

Rome had been fighting its neighbors for five hundred years and chasing them around the peninsula. Rome was busy with the Gauls, the Etruscans, the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, and the occasional Greek. She worked her way south on the Boot and finally came to its toe. When the soldiers lifted their heads after the last battle, they saw the sea. No more Italy, no more neighbors to fight—they had conquered them all. They saw the sea and of course those grinning Carthaginian ships.

They knew Carthage controlled the Mediterranean but up till then they didn’t care about the Mediterranean. “You stay out of my hair and I’ll stay out of yours,” the Romans had told the Carthaginians, who signed a treaty or two with them about staying out of waters where Carthage had no intention of going anyway. “When we feel like it, we’ll go anywhere we want to,” the Carthaginians said to themselves, even while they signed the treaties and shook hands with those rude Romans who didn’t seem to understand the world.

The Romans weren’t sailors but they had always done some trade along the coast with the Greek colonies in the sole and the heel of their Boot and with Greece itself. Roman ships were barely sea-worthy—just barges and transport vessels like wooden boxes; but they were good enough to haul the goods as long as they watched for storms and hugged the coast and went slowly. The boats left Ostia, the port nearest Rome, sailed down the west side of the Boot, slipped between the toe and Sicily, which it kicks, and then headed east for the heel, Tarentum, or right on to Greece. And back.

That route, if it can be called a route, was the one Rome had taken for centuries. It was a very low-profile route: no one had ever tried to block it. Rome knew there was one very vulnerable point—just the place somebody COULD cause trouble if he wanted to. That was Messana—or rather, the Straits of Messana—the narrow sea between the tip of the Boot and Sicily. Block that and all trade would stop. No ship would get by. Life in Rome could get hard if the Straits were blocked for long. Every time the Romans looked out to sea and saw those cocky Carthaginian ships jumping up and down, they worried a little. “If we ever get into war with Carthage and Carthage blocks those straits, we’re going to have big trouble,” they warned each other. “What kind of sacrifices do you make to Pluto? Have to check up on those.” They knew what to do to make Mars happy; but, to be honest, they had neglected Pluto, who was the sea-god.

Reader: Where is the crow? I keep waiting for the crow to appear.

The crow will appear in a minute. First you need background. You saw that the Straits of Messana were the Achilles’ Toe of the Boot of Italy, if you will; and that the worst thing that could happen to Rome was a war with Carthage, who controlled the seas. Guess what is going to happen.

See The Crow (Part Two)

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At Appomatox, at the end of the American Civil War, the surrender of the Southern armies was unconditional.  There was no question of any terms.  Yet General Lee made two requests: that his officers be allowed to keep their swords; and that the farmers be allowed to keep their horses.

Grant in his memoirs doesn´t say if he was expecting these requests.  But he immediately understood their purpose and granted them.  They weren´t concessions; they weren´t even favors.  They were measures of sound common sense and leadership.  The swords the officers would keep were their dignity.  And the horses would be needed to get the men back to work, to re-build the ruined farms and countryside.
It was then spring.  There was still time to plow the fields and get a crop growing.  This was urgent.  Without that year´s cereals there would be certain starvation in the South by winter.

When the Spanish Civil War ended (1939) there were no Republican generals around to surrender the armies and to make requests.  They had all fled to France and Portugal.  Honor and dignity were still around as a crutch to help men through the horrors of twentieth-century war, and to lean on while facing the firing squad when the war was over.  But they were a luxury from another age, not this one.

There was no dramatic surrender scene but the problems facing the country were the same. Tens of thousands of men had nothing to do and no food for themselves and their families.  Spain had never had much industry.  She couldn´t simply switch on the heavy machinery and start producing again.  There was no machinery.  She was an agricultural country with her fields in ruins.  Grain shipped in from Argentina saved thousands from starvation.  That was all the help there was.  From the United States there was nothing and there would be nothing for twenty years.  The Marshall Plan bypassed Spain.

Franco decided on a surprising government project to employ thousands of men: a mausoleum. It was to stand as a monument to his victory and as a tomb for himself and the soldiers of both sides who died in the war.
The country had no cash and its natural resources were used up.  Traditional projects such as dams and roads were out of the question because even cement was scarce.  A tomb, a kind of tunnel in a mountain, was probably the cheapest of Franco´s options. There were few overhead costs.  No steel was required, no heavy machinery—not even cement.  All the stone that was needed would be quarried in the mountains and hauled to the site of the great mausoleum.  They would be cut to size and lifted like the stones of the pyramids.   Most of the work would consist in chipping away a chamber under the mountain—a kind of negative sculpture.

And so thousands of men hammered away at the mountain and at the roads to the mountain—maybe more stone workmen than had been assembled since ancient times. They were full of ill-will.  The huge camps they lived in had the air of prison camps because of the post-war repression.  Most of the men had been on the losing side and were stained with guilt.  Trials and executions were going on at the time and there were rumors of murders and score-settling.  And the firm establishment of Franco´s reign made their future look very bleak.

The Valle de los Caídos, in the mountains near Madrid. The building complex is a Benedictine monastery

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The Priestess of Delphi by Hon. John Collier

There is endless fantasy writing on this subject. Writers have been outdoing each other for over two thousand years. Here are some unromanticized views.

H. W. Parke in his A History of the Delphic Oracle says the responses given by the oracles show that they were not in any way intoxicated or in a mediumistic trance.
The historian Plutarch, who was a priest of Apollo at Delphi, says the god did not possess the priestess. She remained herself. But she was trained to receive the “breath” of the god. That word “breath” ( pneuma or afflatus) has given rise to endless interpretation. One translation could be simply “inspiration”.

As to the vapors that rose from the crack in the floor (or fault in the earth’s crust), no ancient writer mentioned them.
Parke says this:
“Geologically it is quite impossible at Delphi where the limestone and schist could not have emitted a gas with any intoxicating properties.”

Plutarch in his Moralia does say this: “not often nor regularly, but occasionally and fortuitously, the room in which they seat the god’s consultants is filled with a fragrance and breeze (pneumatos) as if the adyton were sending forth the essences of the sweetest and most expensive perfumes.” This kind of affirmation is hard to substantiate; and in any case, the “fragrance” is a far cry from ethylene gas.

“Another misconception,” says Eloise Hart in an article quoted in Wikipedia, “is that the Pythia’s messages were ambiguous and incoherent….[What ambiguity there was] may have been put there…by the poets who at one time attended the sessions and wrote the responses in hexameter.” The poets are the ones, says Joseph Fontenrose, not the oracles, who “added the metaphors, riddles, and pompous phrasing.”
Plutarch says the prophetesses were moved each in accordance with her natural faculties, so some utterances were wise and some not so; some pretty, some awkward.

Were the priestesses pretty girls like the one in Collier’s painting or mature women? A Wikipedia entry ( Delphi) states that the oracles were in fact oldish women whose purity had been proven by their lives: “Apollo spoke through his oracle, who had to be an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area.” Eloise Hart says that “later” the priestesses were even married women.

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The crypt was chilly and musty. He remembered waiting for the oracle at Delphi, which was fragrant with bay leaves and barley.
His mind began to drift. He began thinking about the march that would begin that same afternoon and he wished he had brought along something to write with or could begin dictating orders to a scribe. A shame to be wasting time like this.

Finally the voice came. “Pilgrim, come forth!” This time it was a girl’s voice. It was cheerful, not lugubrious or trance-like as he had suspected it would be. Pilgrim, eh? So the old priest hadn’t forgotten that one and was directing the oracle. Damn!

Caesar walked forward a few paces and saw an open niche on the wall. A cloth like a curtain hung on the other side and blocked his view of the oracle.
“Blessed is the man who comes to the god,” she said. “Welcome!”

The girl spoke very slowly and clearly in faultless Greek. She had been chosen to be an oracle as a child and educated by other, older oracles in a school for priestesses. They all spoke Greek and their model was the Delphic Pythia or perhaps the oracles at the Temple of Apollo in Athens. Hearing such competent Greek charmed Caesar, who loved language and good diction. He had expected to hear an ignorant girl talk clumsily. This oracle spoke classical Greek better than he himself. That was the way a god would speak, all right. Now that was a start!

He reached up and moved the curtain aside to see the girl. A woman of about his own age sat on a tripod, so high her head nearly touched the ceiling. She wore a simple tunic and her blonde hair was cut short. She looked intelligent. She didn’t notice Caesar. He looked around the room where she sat and was relieved to see she was alone: the High Priest had gone. Caesar quietly closed the curtain again.

“Child of the gods,” began the oracle. “Caesar!” She had learned his name. “Do not be troubled. Fortune has favored you above all other men. She will assist you and protect you until your work is accomplished here above. You must have faith—She will not abandon you, though now it seems that you have been cast aside. Do not complain, as you did yesterday after seeing the statue of Alexander. Yes—by your age he had conquered the world. But his place in Fortune’s plan was less important than yours.”

“Less important?” said Caesar. “Less important than being a tax-collecting quaestor in Spain, two thousand miles from Rome? Less important than collecting debts from Pompey’s clients here? It is Pompey whom Fortune has favored, not Caesar.
Caesar is nobody. My military career went nowhere. Sure, at Mytilene I won the the civic crown but so have half the centurions in the army. Compare that to my Uncle Marius’s record. He beat King Jugurtha and saved the country. Then he beat the Cimbri and the Teutons and saved it again. He was consul seven times. Even my father was praetor.
And as a lawyer I did no better. I showed promise—promise! They told me I spoke as well as Cicero—very helpful! But that didn’t help me win my first case against Dolabella. I had to leave Rome to protect myself afterwards. Between Sulla’s people and the oppositon of the Optimates, I simply can’t get anywhere. Or rather, I get to Hispania Ulterior.”

“You were sent here by the gods.”

“Then they must have no use for me either,” whined Caesar.

“Man of little faith! You are not to presume to know more than they, Caesar.
Don’t you even believe the words that you yourself pronounced at your Aunt Julia’s funeral last year—that you are descended from a hero-king and a goddess? Do you dare to be cynical even here, in the presence of the god?”

Caesar accepted her scolding. For the last time in his life he became the serious child his mother and his Aunt Julia had brought up.
“I was so moved at Julia’s funeral because I was ashamed of myself. She had so much faith in me. I spent half my boyhood at Aunt Julia’s. My Uncle Marius was the consul. They loved me and believed they were bringing up a future consul. I sat at table with them and listened to all the great men of Rome—all the great men who were not Optimates, of course, and whom Marius had forced out of Rome. Sulla was in Asia with his army and we all knew that there would be trouble, probably a civil war, when he came home. But during those years Rome belonged to us, to the people. I was sure I was going to have a brilliant future. Then Sulla came back, he took terrible vengeance and the Optimates got back into power. Since then they have been foiling every plan I ever had. Aunt Julia’s education was not enough. All my talents are not enough. It was only with much bribing that I was able to become quaestor.”

“You speak as though your life were through,” said the oracle. “The best you are meant to do lies ahead. What was the dream the gods sent you?”

“A nightmare, Oracle, a dream full of troubled, unnatural, vicious acts.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the girl. “Perhaps the vicious acts were not so at all.”

“In the dream I slept with my mother,” said Caesar.

“And you possessed her?”

“I raped her.”

The oracle never hesitated. “That wasn’t your mother but the very Earth, Gea. You possessed the earth itself, the common parent of all mankind. The name of Caesar will live for thousands of years, long after those of Marius and Pompey have been forgotten. You are the man who has been chosen to save your nation from destruction. Because of you, Rome will continue to rule and to civilize the earth until it is ready for another kind of empire and a greater design of the heavenly Creator.”

I wish I could believe that, thought Caesar.
In fact, he did believe it. He had always felt his own superiority to the men around him. He took it for granted. He could never simply watch or suffer the circumstances of his life: his clear vision of them made him intervene. Wherever he went it seemed to him that men needed the direction apparently only he could give them. That was what he could never understand. Most men seemed so helpless—was he the only one who saw the obvious? Why was it his duty to stop and take the world by the hand?
“I can’t possess the world from this end of it,” said Caesar.
“You can possess the world wherever it pleases the gods to give it to you. Go back to Rome,” said the oracle. “Speak to the propraetor and ask for a discharge. Your work here as quaestor is finished. Today—now—your mission has begun.”
“And today’s march north? I can’t simply leave. I am so deeply in debt, I…”
“In Rome you will find help. There is a wealthy man there who will aid you. Go now. The god is with you.”

Caesar walked up the dark stairs of the cellar and out into the open courtyard of the Herakleion. It had stopped raining. The cloud cover had torn open in places and let the sunlight through. His lictors were waiting with the horses. He liked the oracle’s order to ask for a discharge and return to Rome and he was already planning what he would say to the propraetor. He was impatient to begin. Caesar never did learn patience—maybe the gods who had made him impatient, never meant to correct the fault.

Before leaving for Rome he bribed one of the priests to allow a sculptor to make a mold of the temple door reliefs. They were cast in bronze and packed on a ship out of sight of the Herakleion. They would have been a wonderful and surprising—a unique—adornment to his house in Rome. Unfortunately, it was not part of the gods’ plans to allow the reliefs to reach Ostia, the Roman port. They sent a storm to sink the ship.

Return to Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part One)

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The next morning a temple acolyte came to the Roman camp with the news that the oracle was ready to receive the quaestor. The acolyte wore the same white alb as the temple priests, and his head was shaved, which made his eyes seem enormous. He had never seen a Roman camp or any camp of soldiers, and he seemed so fascinated that the guard let him peek in through the gate. A bugle sounded. “What’s that?” he asked the guard, his eyes all full of wonder.
“That’s the call for breakfast.”
“Is the food good?”
“Chah! Coom see, coom sah.”
“Which tent is the quaestor’s?”
“See that big one in the center, with the red flag flying?”

The boy looked at the guard’s armor, his shield and his sword.
“Can I touch your sword?”
“Touch all you want,” said the guard. “I can’t unsheathe it for you, though, kid: we’re not allowed to do that only for the hell of it.”
“Are you going to go fight soon?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Did you ever kill anybody?”
The guard nodded. “Hey, kid, you’d better get back to the temple. They’re going to think you got lost. Or some floozy got her hands on you.” He started laughing as he pictured the floozy getting her hands on the big-eyed boy.

Caesar rode to the temple on horseback, with four military lictors. He was better on a horse than any of them.
It was raining when they reached the Herakleion. A young deacon walked towards Caesar as he jumped down from his dripping horse. Roman riders had no stirrups—there was no stepping down, only jumping. And Caesar was as agile as a boy, though he was thirty-one now.

The deacon showed them where to shelter their horses and he led Caesar alone to a cellar beside the temple. A sickening smell of rotten flesh and incense hung in the air; and as Caesar descended the cellar steps, the smell of mold became strong. There were small oil lamps burning in niches along the stairs to light the way.
The cellar itself was lighted, not very effectively, with two torches on the wall. The place might have been a tomb. Caesar didn’t like to be enclosed that way. He had had to hand his sword over to one of the lictors before coming down and now he felt trapped. Where was the darned oracle anyway? Was she going to pop out of a niche in the wall? Caesar decided this was the last time he played their silly games. Couldn’t these prophets talk to a fellow face to face in a normal room? Such cheap histrionics! “Oracle!” he shouted out. Who gave orders to who?

A voice answered from the wall at the far end of the cellar. But it wasn’t a girl’s voice. It was the voice of the High Priest. “The priestess is in deep meditation, preparing herself to receive the spirit of the God. You must do the same. Without the proper disposition you will learn nothing from the God. Humility, Excellency. You are in the crypt where the body of our Lord lies.”

So the High Priest is going to whip me into obedience, is he? thought Caesar. Does he mean to coach the oracle?

Caesar tried to meditate. Did he feel awe? Did he really believe that the God Herakles would speak to him through the ignorant girl on the other side of the wall?

In politics Caesar was cynical. He would say one thing and do another. He bribed. He schemed, he threatened. He spent fortunes on games and shows to win the vote of the Roman rabble. He was religious in the legalistic Roman way though not at all superstitious. He performed the prescribed sacrifices and observed the religious laws but he never let a so-called divine warning—a faulty liver, a bad omen—keep him from undertaking a battle or a trip. He was known to invent an omen to bring fearful soldiers his way.

And yet an oracle was another matter. The oracle was a god speaking directly, using the girl for his voice. The greatest men of antiquity had consulted the Delphic Oracle in Greece, and her predictions and other utterances had formed part—had determined part—of history. Who could forget the Oracle’s declaration that Socrates was the wisest man in the world? Or her sound political advice to Lykurgus and Solon? Or her advice to Croessus, the vain Lydian king, to know himself?

Caesar had been brought up on Greek myths and the beautiful stories of Greek heroes. He could recite whole passages of the Illiad and the Odyssey. His head was filled with the deeds of Achilles and Ulysses and Agamemnon. Ever since he could remember, Caesar had considered himself one of the heroes.
Not twenty-four hours ago he had puzzled a comrade by complaining that he, Caesar, was getting nowhere. “By my age Alexander the Great had conquered the world.” Was that the career Caesar was dreaming up for himself?
Alexander had consulted the Delphic and other oracles. He had made a pilgrimage to the temple of Isis in the Egyptian desert. He believed the gods spoke through their messengers. Why shouldn’t they?
In any case, Caesar thought he could himself judge by the oracle’s dictum whether it came from an ignorant peasant girl or a god.

See Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part Three)

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Caesar went straight to the Herakleion in Cadiz. It wasn’t just tourism: he had some business for the oracle there. His visit had been announced beforehand—he was coming with the Roman propraetor—and the priests turned out in their white robes and welcomed the two Roman officers on the steps of the temple.

The Herakleion, the most famous shrine in the West, looked from the outside like a Greek temple. The facade was a triangular pediment supported by four columns. You walked up the steep steps, passed through the two central columns and entered through enormous bronze doors.

Caesar stopped to look at the sculpture that covered the doors. “I see you appreciate art,” said the eldest of the priests, smiling. He spoke Greek, not Latin.
“The Twelve Labors of the God,” said Caesar. Caesar’s Greek was fluent. “Very beautiful. Could a reproduction of these doors be made and sent back to Rome?”
“I’m sorry,” said the old priest. “Our rules don’t allow even drawings to be made.”
Caesar nodded. He decided to repeat his question to the priest when he made his donation to the sanctuary. He could just see those beautiful reliefs on one of the doors of a Roman palace he was always mentally designing for himself.

The temple was only partially roofed, so inside it wasn’t dark like Roman temples. The altar at the far end was open to the sky. Even so, the place smelled a little. Every day priests sacrificed a lamb or a dove and sprinkled its blood on the altar. A fire burned on a tripod but there was no statue of the god. The Phoenicians, who had founded the temple a thousand years before, didn’t allow images of their divinities. They had not dedicated it to Hercules but to their own god Melkart, whose famous temple they had left behind in Tyre at the other end of the Mediterranean. Since those days the Phoenicians and even their descendents in Carthage had disappeared and the Greeks had come and Melkart had become Herakles, a Greek god who was so similar to the Phoenician one that everyone just let one do for the other. To the Romans Herakles was Hercules—they were all names for the same god-hero.
He was buried in a crypt under the temple—the mortal remains of him.

“You will notice the various chapels or side-altars,” said the old priest-guide. “This one is dedicated to Old Age; the others are to Poverty, to Art, to Death, to the Month, and to the Year.”
They looked like old attics, filled with strange wax exvotos and dried cloth, wooden and metal undefinables (weapons?), covered with the dust of ages. Each had an altar and each stank with the sacred stench of blood sacrifice.
“If either of your Excellencies would like to make an offering to one of the……..”
“Not right now, Reverend,” said Caesar. “I’d like to consult the oracle.”
The young priests looked at each other in confusion and embarrassment. The old priest said: “The oracle is on retreat right now. She will be unavailable for……”
“Tell her this is urgent,” said Caesar.
“I have no way of reaching her,” said the old priest. “She is in the mountains twenty miles from here in a sanctuary.”
“That’s no problem,” said Caesar, “I’ll send one of my tribunes after her.”

Caesar didn’t ask whether the shrine rules allowed the oracle to be fetched from her sacred prayers. Caesar was like that. Rules were for people who had no choice but to obey them—not for him. He wasn’t going to let an oracle keep him waiting. He had seen oracles in Greece and Asia and he had no illusions about them. He had walked away from the Delphic Oracle in anger because she didn’t seem to understand who he was. She seemed to think he was just another rich Roman student and predicted “a successful career” for him, and “lots of children”—that idiot.

The old priest now at the Herakleion didn’t care for Caesar’s pushiness. Romans thought they could go anywhere and order people around. Everyone else came to the Herakleion with a little humility. “Our rules require the oracle to spend a complete week fasting and praying. That is part of her purification. This is the most sacred time of year and under no circumstances can her duties to the God be interrupted.”
“Don’t you have a substitute?” asked Caesar.

The priest glared at him without answering. He knew what was coming next.
“I would be willing to make a very substantial offering to the temple,” said Caesar.
“Men don’t make offerings to the temple, Excellency, but to the immortal God.”
“I will make one to the immortal god and another to the temple,” said Caesar.

The High Priest was quiet for a while. He was sorry the other priests were hearing this conversation, which seemed to show them that there could be negotiations on such matters as the Holy Rule.
“In any case you couldn’t see the oracle immediately,” he finally told Caesar. “Pilgrims to this sanctuary must spend an entire day in fasting and prayer before their consultation with the oracle. No one is sinless before the God.”

“That’s the first I ever heard of that rule,” said Caesar, beginning to swell. “I have friends who have seen your oracle and no fasting was required of them. I have been to Delphos and to Athens and, though they recommend preparation before seeing the oracle, they don’t insist on it. Besides, I am not a pilgrim.”
“Not a pilgrim?” frowned the old priest. “Then what are you, Excellency?”

The pro-praetor, who had come with Caesar, didn’t like the turn of this conversation. It should have been friendly or at least cordial. He decided to try to re-direct it:
“You must forgive my colleague’s impatience, Holy Father,” he said. “He will take command of an army within a few days and cannot stay here in Gades long. Privately he has told me of a troubling dream and an interpretation by your oracle would ease his mind and allow him to work better. He is a devout man who fears the gods and means no disrespect. But he has the fault of impatience.”
“Perhaps it is time he corrected that fault.”
“He has come here because he believes in the world-famous wisdom of the Herakleion Oracle. That faith alone shows his earnestness and his respect.”

“I will fast and say the reglamentary prayers while on the march to Portugal,” said Caesar. “After I speak with the oracle.”

That afternoon Caesar sent the priest his offering—two talents. That was a huge amount for a consultation with an oracle. On a talent the entire community of priests could live for a month. Caesar borrowed the talents—he didn’t have that kind of money. In fact he was one thousand three hundred talents in debt to Roman bankers. He had borrowed their money to pay for his campaigns as military tribune and quaestor.
How would he pay it all back?

With the booty he proposed to get from the wars he was about to start with the Portuguese. With a little luck he should get those one thousand three hundred talents and much more. With a little luck (and the forcing of luck) he would become a rich man. What would he do with his wealth? Buy his way into the most powerful office in Rome. He didn’t want wealth—he wanted power.
See Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part Two)
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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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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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Caryatides are marble statues of women that take the place of columns in some famous Greek temples, such as the Erechtheum.

Somebody’s good idea—to use a pretty woman to hold up a roof?
Somebody’s MEAN idea.
Vitruvius, the Roman architect, explains the origin:

“Caryae, a state in Peloponnesus, sided with the Persian armies against Greece; later the Greeks, having gloriously won their freedom by victory in the war, made common cause and declared war against the people of Caryae. They took the town, killed the men, abandoned the State to desolation, and carried off their wives into slavery, without permitting them, however, to lay aside the long robes and other marks of their rank as married women, so that they might be obliged not only to march in the triumph but to appear forever after as a type of slavery, burdened with the weight of their shame and so making atonement for their State. Hence the architects of the time designed for public buildings statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and punishment of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity.” Vitruvius, Book I, 5

Yet scholars say the device is older than those Persian wars. These may be statues of priestesses of the temple. Here is the one Lord Elgin brought to England two hundred years ago and so saved from further deterioration.

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