ET TU Part Four Gemma Nili

 

I tell you the Roman historian Plutarch always told a good story. His tale of the death of Pompey the Great is a perfect example. According to Plutarch, after losing at Pharsalus, Pompey sought refuge in Egypt, seeking out the son of an old debtor of his,  fourteen year old Theos Philopator, Pharaoh of Egypt, also known as Ptolemy 13. Interesting number, don't you think? 

You see, Ptolemy 13 was in Pelusium (above), the silt plagued port and fortress at the eastern edge of the Nile delta, because he was avoiding his two sisters, both of whom were trying to kill him. It was a great confused mess, and a very bad time to arrive in Egypt seeking help. But then Pompey's timing had never been very good.

Pompey's arrival on 29 September, 48 B.C.E., had presented Ptolemy 13's advisors with a bit of a conundrum. If they helped Pompey they would anger Julius Caesar, who had just defeated Pompey's army at Pharsalus. It they sent Pompey packing and he later won his civil war with Caesar, Pompey would make sure bad things happened to Ptolemy 13 and his advisers. There was a simple solution to this problem, and I am surprised it never occurred to Pompey. It did occur to Ptolemy 13's (above) advisers.

They sent a boat out to Pompey's ships, which were anchored just outside the harbor of Pelesium.

A Roman centurion named Septimius, who had been sent to Egypt by Pompey to reinstate Ptolemy 12, Ptolemy 13's father. Septimus stood up in the boat and assured his old commander that it was safe to come ashore. Then one of Ptolemy's generals, Achillas  called out that the Pharaoh was very busy but could give Pompey a few minutes of his time, right now, if he would just accompany them ashore at once. 

It smelled fishy, but Pompey really had very little choice. Pompey could see Ptolemy 13 waiting on his litter on the beach. Pompey needed water, and food, and somebody who knew the coastline down to Tunisia, where he had more legions and allies...So the old fool got in the boat.

He never made it to shore alive. According to Plutarch, as the boat passed the breakwater, Pompey was rehearsing his Greek greetings for the Ptolemy 13, when Septimius stabbed him in the back.

They dragged the boat ashore and then dragged Pompey up on the sand and chopped off his head  It was a cold and heartless thing to do, particularly since Pompey's wife was watching from the galley off shore. But it wasn't anything Pompey hadn't done to countless others. 

And that was the death of Pompey the Great, one of the most overrated generals in history, a man whose greatest sin was in believing his own press releases, which he had written.

That was one problem solved, leaving Ptolemy 13's advisers with the original problem, his elder sister and her hired army. She was hovering out in the Sinai desert.  It  looked as if she was about to be easily be crushed by Ptolemy 13's army when, just two days later- 1 October, 48 B.C. - yet another Roman annoyance arrived off shore. 

This time it was Julius Caesar (above), with a single Roman legion. Dutifully, the advisers of Ptolemy 13 sent a boat out to Caesar, carrying the head of Pompey.  But if Ptolemy 13's advisers expected Caesar to thank them for eliminating his enemy and sail off back to Rome, leaving them free to finish off their business without further distraction, they were sadly mistaken. Oh, Caesar did sail off from Pelusium. He just didn't didn't sail for Rome.

A few days later Caesar landed in Alexandria and took over the royal palace.

I honestly don't know if Caesar really cried when he saw Pompey's head. He said he did. But Caesar must have known the instant he looked into those foggy dead eyes that he had won his civil war. There was more fighting to be done, of course. He would have to move on to Tunisia, to finish off Pompey's troops there. But there was no longer any need to rush. 

With Pompey dead the Senate aristocrats had lost their champion and rallying point. Caesar could allow their army in Tunisia to wither on the vine a little, while he took advantage of an opportunity right here in Egypt. Ptolemy's army at Pelusium might be blocking his sister's army from entering Egypt, but Caesar's 5,500 man force in Alexandria was sitting on the Egyptian treasury, the gold used to pay Ptolemy 13's army. 

To paraphrase an American Vietnam War era general, grab them by their ingots and their hearts and minds will follow. Caesar now summed both Ptolemy 13 and both his sisters to Alexandria to settle their civil war. And to be honest with you, I don't think Caesar particularly cared if any of them showed up.

It turned out they all did - Ptolemy 13 and his two sisters, Asinoe 4, and Cleopatra 7. Ptolemy 13 had the easier time getting to the Alexandria, but even Cleo made it, even though she had to first slip around her brother's army and be smuggled into the palace in a rolled up carpet - if you believe Plutarch. But once she was there, Caesar was required to protect her since he had summoned her. And as Caesar was a heterosexual (mostly), he quickly fell under the spell of this extraordinary young woman.

She was 21, and he was 52. He came from a world where women were not allowed to compete with men. The only thing that had kept her head on her shoulders to this point was her brains. A modern Egyptologist described the lady this way, “Cleopatra was a mistress of disguise and costume. She could reinvent herself to suit the occasion, and I think that's a mark of the consummate politician.” 

Was she a great beauty? Plutarch, who was born a half-century after she died, wrote that she was not. But he also consulted every word written about her by people who had known her, and the consensus was that “her presence...was irresistible.... (Her) character...was something bewitching.” Wrote another Roman historian, she was “...brilliant to look upon and to listen to, with the power to subjugate every one, even a love-sated man already past his prime.” By all indications, the love-sated old man succumbed the very first night.

The advisers of Ptolemy 13 saw which way the perfumed wind was blowing, and they did not like it.

They formed a secret alliance with Cleopatra's younger sister, Asinoe 4. She slipped out of Alexandria and hurried to join Ptolemy 13's army at Pelusium. 

But, once there she started calling herself Pharaoh, and when the commander of the Army, General Achillas, the man who had helped trick Pompey to his death, protested her use of the title, she had him killed. Well, turn about is fair play, isn't it? The army did not approve of the lady's ego trip, and offered her in trade for Ptolemy 13. For some reason Caesar accepted the deal, probably because Ptolemy 13 swore he would surrender his army to Caesar. But once back with his army, Ptolemy 13 and his advisers chose to lay siege to Caesar in Alexandria in December of 48 B.C.

Caesar was trapped in the city, with just one legion, and that was not enough. But he had already called for reinforcements, and when they arrived in early January of 47 B.C. they smashed Ptolemy 13's army. 

On January 13, the fifteen year old Ptolemy 13 was drowned in the Nile, maybe by accident and maybe by a bribed Egyptian. But however the boy died, Cleopatra 7 was now the Pharaoh in Egypt. Caesar had Asinoe 4 placed under arrest, probably to protect her from Cleopatra – the lady had an understandably heightened sense of self preservation.

Just 8 months after Cleopatra 7 first rolled out of a carpet at the feet of Julius Caesar, on 23 June, 47 BC, she gave birth to a son. It was observed that as the boy, who Cleo 7 named Caesarian, grew, he greatly resembled Caesar. He was one of two males who may have been Caesar's sons. The other was the child of Caesar's widowed girlfriend, Servilla. That boy, whom Caesar never officially adopted, was Marcus Junius Brutus.  Yea. Him too.

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ET TU Part Two alea

 

I have no doubt there were spies in Ravenna on 11 January, 29 BCE. There are always spies in border towns.  And traveling north out of Roman territory, the first town you reached in Cisalpine Gaul was the little fishing village of Ravenna, a quarter way down the western shore of the Italian boot.  Here, a man could be a dictator.  

But just fifteen miles to the south in Ariminum, he could command no soldiers. He would be governed by the politicians 200 miles to the southwest, in the self described center of the civilized world, in Rome.  And the man the spies from Rome were watching this winter day was the governor of both CisAlpine and TransAlpine Gaul - Julius Caesar.

Caesar's stated reason for being in Ravenna was to check up on his investment in a gladiator's school (above).  That was logical - given that the tens of thousands of slaves Caesar had captured in his conquest of TransAlpine Gaul (i.e. France) and during his recent invasion of Britain. Those human beings now had be converted into cash. Laborers and house servants could quickly be sold, but Gladiators always sold at a premium. So, of course, Caesar was here to inspect the construction of his Gladiator School, and to witness a display of his gladiators in training. Then, after a light lunch, Caesar went to the baths -  another public appearance for a Roman politician.

And in the evening he sat down for a banquet, the kind of thing public officials are still expected to do.  And, according to Plutarch,  as the sun set, “...he left the company, having desired them to make merry till his return, which they would not have long to wait for."  The predictability was enough to lull most spies to sleep. But the Romans were about to learn what the Gauls had learned before them - if you want to know what Caesar is about to do, you did not watch Caesar. You watch his troops.

Three years earlier, in December of 53 B.C., a member of the ruling First Triumvirate, the primary ally of Caesar, Crassus (above), a had been killed in Parthia. At about the same time another Caesar supporter, Tribune Publious Clodius Pulcher, had been killed in a staged brawl – something which had become common in the dying Roman Republic. 

The Tribune's angry supporters had built Plucher's funeral pyre in the Senate House, which resulted in the Senate House burning down. The Senate aristocrats used this act of vandalism as justification to elect the second member of the Triumvirate, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (above), as Sole Counsel, with powers to put down what was described as an insurrection. When some nervous Senators hinted that there were few soldiers in Rome to protect them, Pompey reassured the nervous Nellies, by saying, “I have only to stomp my foot to raise an army”  And while he began to arrest Caesar's supporters, on 7 January,  49 B.C.E.,  the Senate voted to order Caesar to disband his own legions and return to Rome for trial. That law was vetoed by the two Tribunes who were were still loyal to Caesar, Mark Antony and Quintus Cassius Longinus. They were promptly driven out of the Rome at sword point.

Caesar (above), was just across the border, in CisAlpine Gaul.  When informed of the Senate's move against him,  he offered a compromise.  He was willing to give up  command of his army and return to Rome, if Pompey gave up his post as Sole Counsel.   Caesar also requested the Senate allow him to stand for re-election as Counsel while he was still in Gaul, with, presumably, Pompey standing for re-election as co-Counsel at the same time.  It seemed a fair compromise. If elected both men would have immunity from prosecution in the courts, and would jointly rule the city of Rome for a year. 

Pompey and the aristocrats in the Senate rejected the deal out of hand. Caesar's ten year term as Governor of both Gauls was about to run out, and as soon as he was no longer legally protected by the law and his legions, the Senate could deal with him. So Caesar's enemies in the Senate thought they could afford to wait and watch

Caesar could not, and did not.  His 6,000 veterans of the 12th legion had been in winter barracks near present day port of Trieste, Serbia, at the head of the Adriatic. Early in January, before the Senate had even rejected his compromise, Caesar had ordered these men to sail for Ravenna. The advance elements had arrived at the little fishing village a week later. And on the afternoon of the 11 January,  5,000 infantry and 300 cavalry marched out of the “Rimi” gate, headed south.

After dusk, having slipped out on his dinner party, Caesar made his way on foot to a mill on the outskirts of the Ravinna.  Here his aides had a hired carriages, which were waiting for Caesar.  Pulled by four mules he followed a back road across the surrounding marshes.  In the dark he got lost, and his carriage got stuck in the mud. Dawn found the great Caesar on foot, asking for help from a lowly farmer. By mid morning he had re-joined his men, on the banks of the River Rubicon (or the red river),

the traditional northern border of Rome. 

Beyond, in the village of Rimi, was the end of the 200 year old great “Northern Road”, the Via Flaminia (above), which wound its way across the Apennines, the central mountain spine of Italy, through narrow gouges and bridging rushing torrents, to the Field of Mars, then through the Flaminia gate in the city's walls, right to the base of Capitoline Hill, the central citadel of Rome itself. Crossing this border at the head of an army had been forbidden for a Roman general for two hundred years. Crossing this border would brand Caesar and his soldiers as outlaws, subject to execution by any citizen at any time. So this called for a bit of theatre.

The veterans of the 12^th legion  had followed Caesar from conquest to triumph across Gaul, had even crossed the Rhine and invaded Germania. But this was something different, this was an assault on the Senatus, Populusque, Romanus - the Senate and the People of Rome, symbolized by the S-P-Q-R atop every banner the soldiers followed, on the very coins they were paid with. Nervously the legionaries awaited the stirring speech they expected Caesar to give before asking them to commit an act of treason.

Instead, a common soldier suddenly grabbed a trumpet from one of the musicians, raced across the shallow stream blowing “the advance”.  Caesar turned to his officers, and said, “We can still retreat. But once we pass this little bridge, there is nothing left but to fight..”  Then he turned toward the bridge, and called out, “Let us go where the omens of the Gods and the crimes of our enemies summon us”   As he crossed the stream  himself, he is supposed to have said, almost to himself, "Alea iacta est”, the Latin phrase usually translated as “The die is now cast!”

He did not look over his shoulder. He knew his men were following him.

On the southern shore waited Mark Anthony and Cassius Longinus, physical evidence of the arrogance of the Senate.  Here Caesar drew the troops into a square, tore his robes in a show of humility, and led the soldiers in a personal pledge of fidelity to himself, to Caesar.  The Roman Republic was now dead. The only thing required was to bury it. According to Suetonius, his legion now “marched so fast the rest of the way that he reached Ariminum before morning and took it.”

Rome was electrified by the news.  And it quickly became clear that the Senate's arrogance had turned Caesar's march down the Via Flaminia into a triumphal parade. So great was the frustration with the Senate that city after city threw their gates open to Caesar. Forces sent to stop him, went over to his side.

Senator Favonius suggested it was high time that Pompey (above) stomped his foot. But Pompey's own legions were in Spain. The city had raised two legions and was assembling a third, but they were new recruits, and Pompey was not interested in matching them against Caesar's veterans from Gaul. Pompey did not increase his popularity when he informed the aristocratic members of the Senate that they should get out of town. Many denounced Pompey as a coward. But they still followed Pompey and their fellow aristocrats when they grabbed their wealth, and ran for Brundisium, the traditional exit port at the heel of the Italian boot. In their haste they left behind the treasury of Rome, the horde of gold and silver looted from Carthage, stolen from Egypt, taxed from Spain and Macedonia. It was the first place Caesar went, when he got to town.

They couldn't find the keys to the vaults. Caesar sent for locksmiths. A Tribune reminded Caesar he was violating the law. Caesar suggested, “If what I do displeases you, leave.” The doors were forced open, and Caesar had enough money to pay his soldiers.  But his own murder stepped through that door, right next to him.

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Toilet Humor - Chapter One

 

“I advise you, if you are anxious to be read of, to look for some boozy poet of the dark archway who writes verses with rough charcoal or crumbling chalk which folk read while they shit”.

“Marcus Valerius Martialis” Rome, 70 C. E.

I am assured the average healthy human produces an ounce of poo for every 12 pounds of body weight, dropping a log anywhere between 3 times a day to once every three days. Our foul, stinking meadow muffins are so putrid a blind leopard with a head cold could track a human through a stink weed swamp. The only reason we were not hunted to extinction is that we used to live in the trees, where our “stinkies” magically disappeared when dropped.

“What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?’ Answer: A key.”

Sumarian joke, 2, 500 B.C.

This “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” hygiene worked until about 3 million years ago when we started to spend time on the ground. It must have been a short transition, as proved by our still smelly merde. But as long as our populations remained mobile we could usually outrun the lions and tigers and bears, and defecate away from where we hunted and gathered. When the ice ages restricted our outings, our Cro-Magnon siblings filled so many sheltering caves with aromatic and putrescent paleo-feces, we drove our Neanderthal roommates to prefer the cold outdoors to our proximity.

Strepsiades ; “Do you see this little door and little house?...This is a thinking-shop of wise spirits....

These men teach, if one give them money, to conquer in speaking, right or wrong.....They are minute philosophers, noble and excellent.”

Act I, Scene I. The Clouds by Aristophanes 424 B.C.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, humans settled down in settlements and started farming. Human populations mushroomed, as did our fecal matter. This led to the first great invention to deal with scheisse – sewage. 

Whoever was running things in the palace at Knossos on Crete 3,000 years ago, could pass a BM without ever having to see or smell it, as the constantly running water in the palace pipes instantly removed the royal turd from proximity to the royal nose. This may be the origin of the Robert's Supreme Court legal precedent that rich people's poop don't stink.  But, of course, the palace pipes had to end somewhere, and the property values just downstream must have plummeted, along with the the owner's odor and ardor.

“Eat lettuce and soft apples eat: For you, Phoebus, have the harsh face of a defecating man."

Marcus Valerius Martialis 70 C.E..

It was King Tarquin in 600 B.C.E. who first mixed socialism and sewage, when he built Rome's 16 foot wide Cloaca Maximum, aka the central sewer, aka “the big poop hole”, atop the cities' 100 foricae, public latrines, where King and commoner alike could discharge a brownie without having to give it a second thought. 

This sanitation reduced the city's death rate to a mere 30,000 a year, allowing the population to top one million during the first millennium. But that didn't last. After the Romans threw out the Etruscan Kings, they privatized new additions to the sewer system, producing some very rich crap merchants – from the Latin “crappa” meaning chaff, or rejected material. But squeezing every ounce of profit from the poop populi left the sewers leaky and often in disrepair and disconnected. Thus Rome suffered a series of plagues that killed over half the population every few decades. Where upon the patricians took their money and fled to the suburbs, like Ravenna and Constantinople, where they didn't have to smell poor people's poop.

“Apollinaris, doctor to the emperor Titus, had a good crap here.”

Graffitti on a wall in Herculaneum, Italy 79 C.E.

The fall of Rome brought on the dark ages, which meant even royalty were reduced to making night deposits in a chamber pot, a sort of portable latrine. Of course the wealthy had servants to dump their “cacha” (Latin profanity for poop) , usually in the nearest street, which became a sewer, from the old French “seuwiere”, meaning a drain cut in the ground. This was also the origin of the “High Street”, as the most valuable address, because, as any populist will tell you, shite runs downhill.

“With your giant nose and cock, I bet you can with ease When you get excited, check the end for cheese.”

Marcus Valerius Martialis 70 C.E.

By the 16^th century, the 200,000 subjects living in the fetid putrid sewer of London, then the largest city in Europe, were dropping dead daily from anthrax, measles, whooping cough, strep throat, syphilis, child bed fever, malaria, polio, tetanus, and cholera, to name but a few of the infectious endemic illnesses. In addition there was an epidemic of influenza from 1557 to 1559 that killed 5% of  the city. The first half of the century saw five waves of the “Dreaded Sweats” or “English Sweats” that killed tens of thousands within 24 hours of affliction. The Black Death or Bubonic Plague swept through London in 1563 (17,000 dead), 1578 (3,700 dead), 1582 (3,000 dead) and 1592 (11,000 dead). And the cause was obvious, even without a viable germ theory.

“This Nicholas just then let fly a fart, As loud as it had been a thunder-clap, And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap; But he was ready with his iron hot, And Nicholas right in the arse he got.  Off went the skin a hand's-breadth broad, about, The coulter burned his bottom so, throughout, That for the pain he thought that he should die, And like one mad he started in to cry, "Help! Water! Water! For God's dear heart!”

The Millers Tale – The Cantabury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1478

By 1600, the largest tributary of the Thames, the Fleet River (old Anglo-Saxon “fleot”, a tidal inlet), once called “The river of wells”, had been an open sewer for two centuries. Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary, penned a tribute “On the Famous Voyage”, praising two lads who dared to boat down the 100 yard wide “ merd-urinous” stream. In the stone lined channel “Hung stench, diseases, and old filth, their mother...pills and eke in potions, Suppositories, cataplasms and lotions...the grave fart, late let in parliament.” At last a dead cat floats to the surface and curses the travelers. “How dare Your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season, When every clerk eats artichokes and peason, Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat) Tempt such a passage? When each privy's seat, Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat Urine and plasters?” But the waters of the Thames barely noticed the Fleet's filth, so contaminated were its own. The only thing more dangerous than being a child raised in sewage soaked Elizabethan London, was being Elizabeth in the the same place.

“In vain, the Workman showed his Wit, With Rings and Hinges counterfeit, To make it seem in this Disguise, A Cabinet to vulgar Eyes...So Strephon lifting up the Lid, To view what in the Chest was hid...So Things, which must not be expressed When plumped into the reeking Chest; Send up an excremental Smell, To taint the Parts from whence they fell. The Petty coats and Gown perfume, Which waft a Stink round every Room.”

Jonathan Swift “The Lady's Dressing Room” 1732

After years of living under the constant threat of a charge of treason, Elizabeth Tudor put on the crown in 1558 as a 25 year old paranoid anorexic, subject to panic attacks. Living just above the level of common sewage, the nobility survived eating slightly spoiled food, prepared by unwashed hands, unevenly cooked in polluted water. This lead to repeated bouts of stomach cramps, mild fevers, headaches, watery diarrhea and vomiting, which lead to dehydration. This gastroenteritis would rarely prove fatal to an otherwise healthy adult like Elizabeth, but it killed one in four of all infants and a quarter of all surviving children by the age of 10. However salvation from this rising tide of poo was offered in 1595 when a member of Elizabeth's court invented “The John”. Except he called it the “Ajax”, for a very punny reason.

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