A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (34 page)

44
. Charles Laughton, convincing as a Roman emperor, played Claudius, perhaps unintentionally, as a homosexual, in a movie which was never made. A
series of ‘takes’ shows him fluffing his lines just when he is supposed to condemn a good-looking young man (Sabinus?) to death for taking part in the assassination of his precessor,
Caligula. The episode, though touching, is historically unsafe since the real Claudius actually spared Sabinus (who, tactfully, later committed suicide) and easily consigned Chaerea and co. to
execution, with that limp wave of the wrist which was to become so notorious, on the grounds that such men could become a nuisance to himself.

45
. His tribe, the Allobroges, had prospered through collaboration with Julius Caesar.

46
. This brilliant if anachronistic description is from
Claudius
by Barbara Levick, Batsford, 1990.

47
. The original waterworks there were functioning in the first century
AD
during the Anaradhapura kingdom, and the
Sinhalese, who used trigonometry in their hydraulic engineering, were invited to Rome by Tiberius for his coronation.

48
. Pallas lived on for another seven years on his enormous estate, but his wealth was too great for the then greedy Emperor to endure and he was
quietly poisoned.

49
.
Nero,
Batsford, 1984.

50
. The personnel of this originally Ptolemaic institution also invented weapons of war and were therefore encouraged to emigrate to Rome, rather
than to Parthia, like German scientists before the Second World War going to the USA rather than the USSR.

51
. Before which the language of physics, for instance, was German; now, an Italian, lecturing to an audience in Milan in that discipline, must
speak in English if he wishes to be reported in learned journals.

52
. So was Nero. He wrote a poem about the effeminacy of one Afranius Quintianus which so offended the subject that he joined the conspiracy of
Piso (see p. 142).

53
. I am indebted to a former Provost, Lord Charteris, for this remark by the late Claude Aurelius Elliot.

54
. Not uncommon in the ancient world; besides, the pose of ‘heroic nudity’ in statues only allows a little tuft of hair above the
genitalia.

55
. Nor does his most recent biographer. I owe this slice of high-republican Roman mores to Donald Earl in
The Age of Augustus,
Elek,
1968

56
. The building we see today is the creation of the Emperor Hadrian, a greater builder even than Augustus, who modestly had it inscribed
M.
AGRIPPA COS. TERTIUM FECIT.

57
. Suetonius comments: ‘His simple taste in fittings and furniture is apparent in the couches and tables that are still preserved, most of
which hardly reach the standard of elegance to be expected from a private person.’

58
.
Food in History
by Reay Tannahill, Stein & Day, New York, 1973.

59
. The young Julius Caesar was one.

60
. The
domina,
at least in Roman literature, was more bossy than bossed. Juvenal, a misogynist, warns against marriage: ‘No present
will you ever make if your wife forbids; nothing will you ever sell if she objects; nothing will you buy without her consent.’ One wife was so mean with the cash that her husband gave a
friend his silver shaving bowl while she was asleep and pretended it had been stolen. A wife with a large dowry was in a strong position because she could take it with her to the next husband
– and the next and the next . . . (some women had five). Divorce was easy. The husband said to the wife:
‘Tuas res tibi agito’
(‘Take your belongings with you’)
and she answered with the same (legal) formula:
‘Tuas res tibi habito’
(‘And you keep yours for yourself!’).

61
. ‘It required unremitting attention if the balance of the toga was to be preserved in walking, in the heat of a discourse, or amid the
jostlings of a crowd. The weight of it was an intolerable burden.’ (Jerome Carcopino,
Life in Ancient Rome,
Routledge, 1946.) One of the joys of summer was that it could be abandoned
the moment one reached the villa.

62
. Some officials did not return; the earliest (legible) inscription in England is on the tombstone of a
praetor
who died in office,
erected by his loving wife and recently discovered by Tower Hill Underground station, where there is a copy.

63
. We have to wait till the sixteenth century for forks.