Great Names in History

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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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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There is nothing harder than old Roman concrete. Around the former empire you still see their walls and constructions of all kinds made of poured concrete.

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This is a Roman cistern from the town of Segóbriga, Spain. It has been standing in the open for two thousand years. Try to scratch it. Try to pick out one of the little stones.

Poured concrete was a Roman invention.

People had known about lime for a long time. They whitewashed their dirt walls to seal them from the rain. They still do that in much of Spain and Africa. And the Greeks mixed sand with the lime, trowelled it onto their walls, and painted it sometimes. It dried very hard and was even waterproof—perfect to seal the brick walls of cisterns.

Everyone also used the lime, sand, and water mixture to cement stones together for building. They continued to do that all through history until the nineteenth century. Look at what holds the big stones of a castle wall together: a thin layer of lime and sand. It is a wonderful glue.

At first the Romans used lime like everyone else. Then, at a time that must have been around the second century BC, they began to make walls by pouring the lime, sand, fine stones (aggregate), and water mixture into molds: concrete (they called it opus caementicium). Until then, they had made their walls by laying down two parallel rows of stones and then filling the space between them with rubble. That was fine until the rain or ground moisture got into the rubble and made it swell.
Someone now had the idea to strengthen the rubble pile by pouring the mixture of lime mortar on top of it. That strengthened it very well: the rubble became a hard mass and got harder and harder over weeks as it dried. If you took away the big stones on either side, the rubble kept its shape.

Pouring the mix into molds was an obvious next step. You could make a wall any thickness or shape you wanted to. When the concrete had dried, you simply kicked away the mold.
From then on, the Romans began building walls with poured concrete.

The most outstanding Roman building made of poured concrete is the Pantheon in Rome. It also happens to be one of the most beautiful works of architecture ever made.

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The dome is a virtuosistic creation of poured concrete. All the edges of the squares are still sharp after two thousand years and there are no little holes from air bubbles, difficult as that is to achieve with concrete.

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Outside the old Roman town of Segóbriga, across the creek and where the woods start, is a mysterious shrine. On a rock wall, in a place that´s hard to reach (basically you have to skin your hand and ruin a pair of pants), there is a relief, now almost worn away, of DIANA (the goddess of Nature and Fertility) and her hunting dogs. Under it are Latin inscriptions (all by women), thanking Her for granting the favor they had asked (conceiving a child?) or for curing them.

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[This is an old etching of the votive iinscriptions. Today they are nearly illegible.]

And just a few feet below is an old well which surely “goes with” the shrine. Those women must have considered its water curative or blessed.
The place was a SACRED WOOD.

See A Lost Roman City to learn more Segóbriga.

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Segóbriga, near Madrid, is a textbook Roman city. Now that it is being excavated seriously or scientifically, you can see the ruins of the old Roman buildings. It had one of each, and a good one. There is a theater, an amphitheater, a circus, a basilica, a temple, baths, a cistern and sewers, a cemetery—all the standard pieces of a Roman city. It might almost be a modern re-creation for educational purposes. But it is the real thing! There were gladiators in its amphitheater, old Latin plays in its theater, emperor worshippers in the temples, magistrates walking around in togas, and slaves.

And what is even better, so you don’t have to merely speculate about what happened, there are ancient references to her with information and stories enough for a good novel. Pliny the Elder talks about her—he was there! And what does he say?

Segóbriga was a mining town. The mines brought her great wealth and made some of the local families rich, and they built the monuments for their hometown.
Mines? What Mines? Is there coal or some mineral around there?

No coal, no metal. Plaster.

How can you get rich on plaster?

Plaster, or rather GYPSUM, in its crystal state (selenite) is transparent. Rocks of it split into fine sheets. What can you do with those?

Selenite blocks from the Roman mines

In ancient Rome buildings had windows (wind eyes—square or rectangular holes in walls to let in light and air) but no glass panes. To let in the light you had to let in the cold or the heat. Probably most of the time people kept those windows blocked with a curtain or a shutter.
The idea to use the sheets of crystal gypsum for window panes came to someone around the turn of the millenium. An architect imported some big ones from Spain and used them as skylights to light the public baths in Rome. Then the rich started doing the same for their houses and villas. In time, the gypsum was used as window-glass.

It was a fad. It coincided with the big economic boom of the first century. Buildings, private and public, were going up everywhere. “The best lapis specularis in the world,” says Pliny, “comes from an area of 100,000 paces around a little town in Spain called Segóbriga.”

If you are lucky enough to make friends with a young enthusiast from the nearby town of Osa, you may put on a miner’s helmet with its carbide lantern and crawl down into one of the long-since abandoned mines to see the endless galleries and the pick gouges made 2000 years ago by Latin-speaking slaves. That mine will soon be open to the public.

Inside one of the lapis specularis mines near Segóbriga, Spain, with ancient graffiti

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Segóbriga, Spain

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Even if there weren´t a buried city underneath, this hill would be a nice place to climb for the view. A creek runs on one side and beyond that is the original evergreen oak forest. The rest in every direction is rolling farmland.

Segóbriga´s heyday was the time of Christ. That theater and the amphitheater (where gladiators fought) were built just during Christ´s life, when the economy was booming in Hispania.

See how the earth and grass have grown over the ruins? They have made a nice rounded hump of her, with a fur of fine little grass that in winter dries brown and looks like lionskin.

People lived here for about A THOUSAND YEARS!

The ground is strewn with pottery fragments, most of them as small as postage stamps. That is the sure sign of an ancient town or settlement. After just a little bit of observation and book study you can date the fragments. Every culture has its own style. In the case of Segóbriga there´s pottery from the Celtiberians, the Romans, and the West Goths.

Rome declined and fell. Then the barbarians came and settled here. They were Christians and Segóbriga was one of the first dioceses. There are 300 years of bishops on record (and at least one saint) and the ruins of a very early basilica where some of them were buried.

Finally the Arabs invaded Spain, came through with fire and sword, and Segóbriga was destroyed and abandoned. That was the end of her. The only thing left of any interest to anybody were the many squared stone blocks that were part of the Roman buildings and walls. They were carted away and used to build a nearby castle or two in the Middle Ages. New cities were built up and new roads led to other places. Segóbriga was by-passed and forgotten. Completely. By the 18th century scholars were arguing about its possible location.

Like Segóbriga there are dozens of buried cities in Spain. Most of them are still unexcavated. They are wonderful to wander around. Segobriga itself can now be visited with guides.

See the next posts for some very curious things about Segóbriga.

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