Great Names in History

Getting around in Roman times was hard.

Few had a riding animal. Travel meant walking. Everywhere there were processions of men and women, groups of three or more, trudging along with a knapsack and a walking stick, just as the pilgrims still do on their way to Santiago in Spain.

Shoes were bad. Most people wore rope or leather sandals with rope soles. It must have been usual to see a tired traveller adjusting the straps of his sandals, loosening them or removing his sandals to rub his feet.

The roads were terrible. Most were only wide paths, muddy or hard and bumpy with wagon tracks. There were few inns, so travellers often had to spend the night outdoors. Travelling alone or with just one companion was dangerous because of highwaymen, so if you could you joined up with a group of travellers going your way.

A few rich men had horses or mules to ride. Though there were saddles and bridles, there were no stirrups, so riders had to mount by jumping up and dismount by sliding down. At many post stations there were platforms with steps for the women and the elderly.
There were no horseshoes yet either—at least nothing was nailed to the horse’s hooves. Animals with injured feet were shoed with metal sandals called soleae but healthy horses wore no protection.
Stirrups and nailed horseshoes were not invented until the Middle Ages.

Travelling by horse-drawn cart was much faster but very uncomfortable. The big box carrying the passengers sat right over the wheels—there were no springs or leather straps or suspension of any kind, so every unevenness in the road was transmitted directly to the seats above, which were mere benches. Passengers were constantly jolted and tossed left and right, as well as up and down. Sleep was impossible except after exhaustion.
The dust and dirt the horses raised came into the cabin and soon covered everyone. Carriage windows were only square holes—glass panes hadn’t yet been invented. Consequently the wind and rain blew in unless the shutter was closed, in which case the carriage was totally dark. People who were sensitive to draft or dampness suffered very much in a carriage.

The horses or mules that pulled the carriages had the harness straps around their necks, which choked them a little or a lot, depending on the weight of the load they had to pull. The U-shaped collar, which transferred the thrust to the horse’s shoulders and off his his neck and throat, wasn’t invented until the twelfth century. When it was, the animals could pull much greater loads without tiring.

(A Roman carriage. Notice how the horses pull from their neck)

A trip from Rome to Cadiz in southern Spain took two or two and a half months, though Julius Caesar, riding in a coach and using the efficient army network of roads and mansiones (places for the military to rest and change horses) once made the trip in 28 days. They say he wrote much of his Gallic Wars in carriages on his way to army camps. Caesar didn’t waste time.

..

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.

..

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

..

Last week Curro Romero, a bullfighter, became a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Wasn’t that going very far?  Is a bullfighter an artist?

Curro Romero was. He fought bulls the way a great dancer dances or a great painter paints: struggling to reach some ideal in his head. He happened to do that in front of crowds but you’d have thought he was working alone in his room.

For years he was both an idol and a joke. His admirers said he was the greatest bullfighter of modern times; and his detractors said he was a charlatan—a fraud who lived off a fake reputation.
How could they say that? Was he good or not?

He was usually bad—scandalously bad. While fighting his bull in the ring he would suddenly become afraid and run away or only flap his cape at the bull from a save distance. Many times he refused to kill the bull, which is the most dangerous part of the fight, and it had to be led out of the ring with the help of oxen to be done away with in the corrals. Curro was booed and cursed and rained on with seat cushions and of course fined heavily for breaking the rules that required a bullfighter to kill his animal. This kind of performance of his became proverbial. The police often had to protect him from angry spectators when he left the ring. He hung his head in real contrition—you could see he had disappointed himself too—the real artist.

Few had seen the rare times when Curro was great. His fans said when he “uncorked the little bottle of essences” and you were there, it was like going to heaven. There was nothing like it in this world. If you saw it, you knew you had seen something angelic. Curro hypnotized with his slow capework and the dignity of his poise. The bull charged as though he too were trying with all his might to reach perfection, to “get it right”.

Bullfighters traditionally practice their passes for hours at home in their livingroom. They hold the muleta and concentrate. They call the imaginary bull. They watch it come as in a dream and lead it on with the muleta, so slowly only a dream bull would pass without stopping. When the real bull in the ring did stop and jerk his horns at Curro, it woke him from his dream of perfection and scared him. But when that real bull was “noble”—that is, charged straight and with bull-like determination—and gave Curro the chance to show what was in his soul, he did something that made the crowds at first solemn and then delirious.  As he walked out of the ring amid garlands and kisses and oaths of affection and worship, he looked better than when he was led out by the police, but not much better. You saw he was going over the faena in his mind and maybe had discovered a flaw.

..

Every Roman town had its bathhouse.
People went there not only to wash and use the toilets but to socialize.
There were halls and dressing rooms and usually three pools of water: A cold one, a lukewarm one, and a hot one. How was the water heated?

There were three bronze boilers in the basement of the building, one on top of another. A fire was started under the lowest one, and the hot water went out through a lead pipe to the calidarium, the pool of hot water. The middle boiler received some of the heat from the one underneath it and sent its water to the tepidarium, the lukewarm pool. The top boiler with the cold water supplied the frigidarium, the third pool and the one the bathers dipped into first.

The building itself was heated by a system called the hypocaustum. The floor was two feet off the ground, supported by rows of brick pillasters. The hot gases from the fire that heated the water were directed through the space under the floor, up through clay pipes in the walls, and out chimneys in the roof.

Hypocaustum was so successful that it was copied in private mansions like the one in Carranque, Spain, and used all through the Middle Ages. Some rural houses in Castile used this system, which they called a gloria, until recently.

This is an illustration of a hypocaustum, though without the boilers.

And this is a photograph of the recent excavations of a huge bath-house at the “lost” Roman town of Clunia, near Aranda de Duero, Spain. Notice the stacks of bricks which supported the hanging floors.

In his treatise on architecture written at the time of Augustus, Vitruvius advises builders to give the ground under the floor a slope towards the furnace, “in such a way that, if a ball is thrown in, it cannot stop inside but must return of itself to the furnace room; thus the heat of the fire will more readily spread under the hanging flooring.”

..

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)

..

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)

..

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)
..

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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Good bullfight aficionados watch the bull as closely as they watch the bullfighter. They spend time at the corrals and speculate on the bull’s character and look for defects. And especially, when he breaks into the ring, they watch him as closely as you might watch a famous personality—one you will see only at a brief public appearance—for the smallest sign of a character trait, good or bad.

People who have no experience with animals of any kind would be surprised to learn that they are all different—that no two cats or dogs or even turtles are the same. Aficionados train themselves to become bull psychologists and veterinarians. Seconds after a bull appears in the ring the call might go up from the grandstands “Lame!” or “Blind in the left eye!” or “A coward!” or “Watch that left horn!” They see very quickly where each bull chooses to make his stand and how. They have no use for a bullfighter who fails to see those things or to take them into account while he fights. Many aficionados are called TORISTAS (as opposed to TORERISTAS) because they seem interested only in the bull, considering that it is the bull that determines the success of the fight. The bullfighter merely has to understand his bull and act accordingly. But understanding a bull is not easy. “I don’t think even the cows understand them,” the famous bullfighter Miguel Dominguín used to say.

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