Great Names in History

In old Rome buildings collapsed all the time.  They were too tall for their base and the walls were too thin.  Hear that distant rumble?  That’s another rickety building going down somewhere in the City.

According to a census of buildings made at the time of Septimius Severus the usual city block (insula) was around 300 square meters—hardly broad enough to carry a structure twenty meters high, which was a typical height by then—three or four stories of shaky construction.   Greedy builders found ways of thinning the walls by adding rows of bricks to strengthen the concrete or the adobe; and they kept pushing skyward.

The poet Juvenal lived in a tipsy third-floor apartment but he had neighbors who had to climb higher to reach home. “Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy hills,” he whined,” was ever afraid of his house tumbling down?….But here we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats: for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, asking the boarders to sleep peacefully under the ruin that hangs above their heads.”

Augustus was so alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings that he issued an edict forbidding private citizens to construct an edifice higher than twenty meters.  But buildings kept growing tall and keeling over.  A hundred year later Trajan in desperation tried reducing the legal height to eighteen meters but he could not buck the greedy builders or the need for more housing.

By the fourth century Rome was world-famous for her tall buildings—many were five and six stories high.

And one skyscraper towered above them all: the legendary INSULA OF FECULA. That monstrosity was an apartment building so tall that it became a  tourist attraction, like Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon.  No one knows just how tall it was or how it met its end.  Maybe a storming Visigoth toppled it with a swat of his sword.

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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.

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

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

On July 8, 1994, a new species of man was discovered.
They found human remains 800,000 years old. That is so far back that no one could believe it.
They are by far the oldest human remains ever discovered in Europe. We knew about Neolithic man and his cave drawings. We knew about Neanderthal man. But those lived 150,000 years ago, not 800,000.

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

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

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

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

An artist’s conception of homo antecessor
(Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

UNESCO declared Atapuerca “Patrimony of Humanity” in 2000 and many countries have sent teams of scientists of all disciplines to work there. Funds roll in from all over the world.
Not everyone is pleased. “You can’t get any of those scientists to read a book or to study the great achievements of man in art, philosophy, or literature,” said an old humanities professor. “But the whole crowd will go running to see what the monkeys were doing.”

See this article in Nature Magazine

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The Roman Empire was a nice package of countries and peoples. But what happened if you didn’t want to become part of it?
The native Spaniards of a little town called Numancia decided that they were damned if they would be bullied by Rome. They were not damned, as it turned out, but they were annihilated. Rome itself admired them for generations.

Now from the top of a pretty hill the guide (also pretty) tells you to look one mile out. “See that red marker? That was where one of General Scipio’s camps were, with its tower.” Then she points a little to the left. “And that post marks Camp Two. If you look around you will see the other five.
“The camps were connected with a wall twelve feet high and a ditch ten feet deep. There were watchtowers every fifteen or twenty meters and something like 50,000 soldiers. Numancia was completely surrounded.”
Your imagination builds the wall up again and appreciates the neatness of it all. Then you remember where you are standing and that you are now a Numantino, and some of the old scare creeps in. You don’t stand a chance.

They must have told you that General Scipio, who commanded the army out there, didn’t horse around. He was the general who had wiped Carthage off the map. When he was done with it, the great city was just a charred, bumpy field. His plan for the subjection of your little burg was to reduce her by starvation. He wouldn’t even give you the chance to fight and die a warrior’s glorious death.

There was a weak point in Scipio’s wall where it had to jump over the stream at the foot of the hill. He had tried to block the stream but a commando of brave Numantinos slipped under the wall undetected one foggy night and ran to the Celtiberian towns around to ask for help. They were able to collect a band of patriots and prepared to attack the Romans from the rear and break the siege. But some old Celtiberians who were afraid of what would happen to their people if Rome wasn’t defeated, warned the Romans. What was Scipio’s punishment for the hundred brave Celtiberian youths who had promised to take part in the action?
“Cut their hands off,” was his order.

Miguel de Cervantes himself wrote a play about the heroic Numantinos. The legend was that they refused to surrender and that after first eating wood and leather, they ate their own dead. The few that were left when the Roman soldiers stormed into the town killed themselves rather than give the Romans the satisfaction of doing that. Skeptical historians think they were simply made slaves—the usual fate of defeated warriors. Of course Scipio saved the most presentable of them to take back to Rome for his triumph parade.
Needless to say, he razed the town.

Numancia is just outside the city of Soria. Archaeologists have brilliantly restored some of the old town and its walls and houses. There you can learn better than in any book or museum about those old times.

This is a postage stamp commemorating the Numantinos’ stubborn defiance of Rome.

(Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

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Miguel de Cervantes is considered the greatest Spanish author—the Shakespeare of Spanish letters.
People who go to England make the excursion, the pilgrimage, to Stratford-on-Avon, to see Shakespeare’s house. Who goes to see Cervantes’? Few.
Where is it?
Not far from Madrid, in a little town called Esquivias. It is an old farmhouse, with a pretty patio recently made into a theater, and a stable for a dozen mules that has been turned into an exhibition hall.
Shakespeare’s place was the fruit of a prosperous career. He bought it after retirement and settled down to enjoy himself. Cervantes didn’t build this old farmhouse or even buy it. It belonged to his wife’s parents. At the time of his marriage, Cervantes was broke. He had recently come back to Spain after five years of captivity in Northern Africa, with a left arm that made him useless for manual work. He had been a soldier and the maimed arm was a battle wound. Now he was trying to make a living as a writer in Madrid, and he wasn’t doing very well.

In the “office” of his wife’s house, now conditioned with furniture from his time to look just as it must have looked in 1584, he wrote a novel, now unreadable, and some plays, now never staged. He didn’t stay long in Catalina’s comfortable house. Seeing that he wasn’t going to become a famous playwright, he decided to go south and look for work as a tax collector.
It would be twenty years before he wrote the first part of his great Don Quijote.

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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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The first explorers sailed carefully through the Gates of Hercules (Gibraltar and Dschebel Musa) and a little beyond.
What did they find in that New World? It was reputed to be a land of warriors. They watched from the deck of their ship, their eyes wide.
Suddenly through the fog the coast came into view. They could see cultivated fields! The hills were covered with olive trees. There were fishing boats everywhere.
The country was busy with trade!

Trade with who? They went ashore and tried to find out. They saw barges coming and going up a big river—the Guadalquivir. They were carrying olives and fish and metal.
Their eyes widened. Metal? GOLD?
Copper. “It comes from a mine not far from here,” they were told.

No need to explain to those explorers what to do with copper. It was what you needed to make weapons, bronze weapons. Everyone was always looking for good copper. Back home in Tyre at the other end of the Mediterranean—and everywhere!—people would pay very good money for copper ore. Copper wasn’t gold but it was the next best thing.

They hurried to see the mine. It was just a two-day trip north from the coast, following a stream that got redder and redder. That was a curiosity but it didn’t yet mean to them what it would mean to people soon afterwards. Iron wasn’t yet discovered. They were still in the Bronze Age.

The mine itself was like no copper mine they had ever seen. The copper ore gleamed everywhere you looked. They dreamed about that mine on their way back to Tyre.
And on their next trip to Spain they bought it from the natives.

The Riotinto (Red River) Mine is no legend. It was so rich that it helped turn Carthage into the rival of Rome. Its copper and Spain’s silver and gold deposits paid for Carthage’s mercenary armies and financed her three wars with Rome. Then they made Rome rich too.

And the Riotinto mine never ran out of copper. IT IS STILL IN OPERATION—the oldest mine in the world.

(click twice on thumbnail to enlarge)

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This is the beautiful beach of Cadiz, on the south coast of Spain. Cadiz is the oldest town in Europe.

Who would guess that near this beach used to stand the most important sanctuary in the Western Mediterranean?
Tradition said the god Hercules was buried there. Some of the most famous men of ancient history came as pilgrims to ask its oracle for advice:

Hannibal stopped in to consult the oracle before he set off across the Alps with his army.
Julius Caesar asked the oracle to interpret a dream he’d had that troubled him. (He raped his mother. “Not to worry,” said the oracle in perfect Greek. “That wasn’t your mother but the world. The dream means you will conquer the world.”)

Pliny was there, Polybius, Dio Cassio, many of the Roman emperors like Trajan. The Emperor Caracalla had the proconsul Aemilianus murdered for asking the Cadiz oracle who the next emperor would be.

The Temple received donations, legacies, and votive offerings from all over. Its treasury must have looked like Uncle Scrooge’s money-silo—gold all the way up to the top. Hannibal’s relative Magón was the first to loot it in 206 BC.
Bogud, the king of Mauritania, tried to loot in in 38 BC.
The unscrupulous Roman consul Varron did loot it; but Caesar had the treasure restored.

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There is a natural gate at the end of the Mediterranean, a place where it nearly closes. Spain and Africa almost touch. On each side stands a promontory or tall cliff: the Rock of Gibraltar on the Spanish side and Dschebel Musa on the African one. The old sailors called those two rocks the Pillars of Hercules. The legend was that he had set them up to mark the limits of the world. And the sailors held their breath while they went a little beyond because the sea was uncharted.

One of the first things those sailors did after passing through the Pillars was to set up a shrine to the god—to Hercules. They used to stop there to thank him for a safe voyage or to ask him to protect them on their long trip back to home. Sometimes they left votive offerings, including money. In time the shrine became rich. Very rich.

At the time Hercules was famous all over the Mediterranean world.

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The first explorers, the ancient Phoenicians, found to their surprise that there was a lively commerce already going on in southern Spain.

Around the modern Seville and the river Betis, now called the Guadalquivir, barges came and went upriver, where there were many towns. The local people of Cadiz caught a fish called sisisis and dried and salted it. The Phoenician explorers filled their ships with it to sell around the Mediterranean. They also loaded them up with good Spanish olives and olive oil, and Spanish wine.

And it didn’t take long for their prospectors to find even better stuff. Just north of Gades there was an enormous copper mine—the modern Riotinto mine—already in operation. The whole Betis region was full of minerals: there were iron mines, silver mines….and gold mines! It was true: Spain was full of unbelievable wealth! The Greek geographer Strabo writing as late as the time of Christ can’t restain himself:

“One might be surprised at so much wealth in agriculture and fishing; but he won’t be less surprised—on the contrary—when he learns of the generosity of her mines; because the land of the Iberians is full of them. It is rare to have both resources; but it is rare too that the same land is full of so many different minerals in so small an area. …..The region around [the mouth of the Betis] leaves one absolutely speechless—you can’t find words to praise her great wealth. No place on earth has ever produced such an amount and of such quality of gold or silver or copper or iron.”

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