QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (16 page)

Thumbs up.

Neither Roman spectators calling for the death of a gladiator, nor Roman Emperors authorising one, ever gave a thumbs down. In fact, the Romans didn’t use a ‘thumbs down’ sign at all.

If death was desired, the thumb was stuck up – like a drawn
sword. For a loser’s life to be spared, the thumb was tucked away inside the closed fist – as with a sheathed weapon. This is expressed in Latin as
pollice compresso favor iudicabatur
, ‘goodwill is decided by the thumb being kept in’.

Before Ridley Scott agreed to direct
Gladiator
, Hollywood executives showed him the painting
Pollice Verso
by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the painting, a Roman gladiator waits while the emperor stretches his thumb down to give the death sentence. Scott was captivated by the image, and decided on the spot that he must direct the film.

Little did Scott know that the source of his inspiration was utterly wrong. The painting is single-handedly responsible for one of the greatest fallacies of the last two centuries, namely that ‘thumbs down’ indicated death.

Historians agree that Gérôme wrongly assumed that the Latin
pollice verso
– ‘turned thumb’ – meant ‘turned down’ when in fact it meant ‘turned up’.

If further proof were needed, in 1997 a Roman medallion of the second or third century
AD
was discovered in southern France. It shows two gladiators at the end of a battle and a referee pressing his thumb against a closed fist. The inscription reads: ‘Those standing should be released.’

The use of thumb signs can still be dangerously ambiguous in the modern world. In the Middle East, South America and Russia, a ‘thumbs up’ is considered to be a very rude insult, comparable to the Western V-sign. This has been problematic in Iraq, where American soldiers are unsure whether locals are welcoming them or about to blow them up.

Desmond Morris, author of
The Naked Ape
, traces the positive connotations of the ‘thumbs up’ in Britain to the Middle Ages, where it was used to close business deals. It found a new lease of life in World War Two when US airforce pilots adopted it as a signal to ground crews before take-off.

Ridley Scott was eventually told about the ‘thumbs down’ 
fallacy but felt obliged to have Commodus give the ‘thumbs up’ when sparing Maximus, in order ‘not to confuse the audience’.

Almost nothing is known about the birth of Julius Caesar, except that, contrary to the assertion in the
Oxford English Dictionary
and countless other reference books, it did not take place by Caesarean section.

Such operations did occur at the time, but they always involved the death of the mother, and Caesar’s mother Aurelia is known to have survived into his adulthood. The suggestion that he was born by C-section does not appear in any of the contemporary sources, and is first mentioned in medieval times. It was not used in a medical context in English before 1615.

The confusion probably started with Pliny the Elder who, in his
Natural History
(about 77
AD
) claims that the first Caesar was ‘cut from his mother’s womb’. This may well have been true, but it wasn’t the Caesar we know as Gaius Julius Caesar.

The Roman three-part naming convention meant that Gaius was his ‘given name’ and he was part of the ‘Caesar’ branch of the ‘Julian’ clan, so no one knows how many Caesars
there had been previously. Nor do we know exactly what ‘Caesar’ means – and none of the meanings are particularly apt to our man. There is Pliny’s ‘cut’ from
caedere.
Or
caeseries
meaning ‘hairy’ (but he was balding); or
caesius
‘grey’ (but his eyes were black) or even ‘elephant’ (from the Phoenician and perhaps applied to a Julian ancestor who had killed one).

The Romans pronounced ‘Caesar’ kaisar (hence the German word
Kaiser
and the Russian
czar
, both ultimately derived from the Latin name). Roman emperors usually included ‘Caesar’ in their long formal names.

Caesar Salad is no relation, however. It was invented by Cesar Cardini in an Italian restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1923.

Vomitorium, despite being derived from the Latin
vomere
, meaning ‘to spew forth’ isn’t the place where the Romans threw up after their meals. It was the name for the entrance or exit from an amphitheatre and is still used in that sense today in some sports stadiums.

The vomitoria of the Colosseum in Rome were so well designed that it’s said the venue, which seated at least 50,000, could fill in fifteen minutes. (There were eighty entrances at ground level, seventy-six for ordinary spectators and four for the imperial family.)

The confusion of the exit with a specialised vomit chamber appears to be a recent error. The earliest citation in the
Oxford English Dictionary
finds Aldous Huxley using the term in his 1923 comic novel,
Antic
Hay, but notes that the usage is ‘erron[eous]’. Lewis Mumford in
The City in History
(1961) compounded the confusion by saying the exits were named after the chambers where gluttons threw up ‘in order to return to their couches empty enough to enjoy the pleasures of still more food’.

The problem with this theory is that no Roman writer ever refers to them, nor have any purpose-built rooms that fit the bill been found. Romans certainly threw up on purpose. Indeed, in ancient times vomiting seems to have been a standard part of the fine-dining experience. The orator Cicero says in
Pro Rege Deiotaro
(45
BC
) that Julius Caesar ‘expressed a desire to vomit after dinner’ and elsewhere suggests that the dictator took emetics for this purpose.

But where did they do it, if there was no special room? Some sources suggest the street or garden; others are adamant it was at the table. In his
Moral Epistles
the Roman philosopher Seneca writes: ‘When we recline at a banquet, one slave wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath the table, collects the leavings of the drunks.’

In another passage, in a letter to his mother Helvia he links this to the decadent pursuit of the new and the exotic: ‘They vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit, and they do not deign even to digest the feasts for which they ransack the whole world.’

Sandals, probably, laurel wreaths from time to time, but definitely not togas.

The basic toga was a huge semi-circle of undyed wool so unwieldy that it took two other people to help put it on and, once on, the only way to stop it falling off was to camp around with the left arm crooked. Most Romans hated them.

The toga was an ornate, overblown Roman version of a kilt: a form of dress that started out as a practical garment but ended up as a symbolic form of national costume and definitely not the kind of thing you’d wear at home.

The early togas were based on an Etruscan garment called the
tebenna
, a rough oblong of wool that doubled as both a tunic and a cloak. They were very popular with farmers. By the second century
BC
, it had become a vast semi-circular garment involving 200 square feet (20 feet wide x 10 feet high) of thick wool: useless for doing anything other than standing around in and about as sexy as a hessian sack. Despite the plethora of ‘How to Wear a Toga’ websites, there is no agreement as to the ‘correct’ way to put one on.

What we do know is what they were for. Wearing a toga showed that you were a Roman (Virgil refers to them as the ‘toga people’ in the
Aeneid
), a citizen, and a man. The historian Suetonius tells the story that, when the first Emperor, Augustus Caesar, noticed a group of men loafing about the city centre in lightweight practical cloaks – the Roman equivalent of a shell suit – he lost his temper and passed an edict making the toga compulsory anywhere in and around the Forum.

A positive hindrance in battle, soldiers never wore them, so they also became a symbol of peace. Foreigners or slaves weren’t allowed to wear them, and finding a woman in a toga meant she was either a prostitute or an adulteress (nice ladies
wore a gown or robe called the
stola
).

Being a man’s uniform, of course, they came in a huge range of styles and shades. There was the
toga pull
a (dark toga) for funerals; the
toga praetexta
(toga bordered with purple) for magistrates; the very fancy
toga picta
(patterned toga) for generals; and the brilliant white
toga candida
(bright toga) worn by those put up for election to political office (which is where we get the word ‘candidate’ from).

So rather like a pinstriped suit or a tuxedo, togas were for business, fancy occasions or for getting buried in. Most of the time, Romans wore the far more practical combination of tunic and cloak.

Toga parties were first mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 story,
The Pump House Gang
, and popularised by the 1978 film,
Animal House
, starring the late John Belushi. The togae featured in the film bear about as much resemblance to the original Roman garment as a thong does to a set of Victorian ladies undergarments.

They were acquitted – and even if they had been found guilty they would have been hanged, not burned.

According to Malcolm Gaskill, in his detailed history of the seventeenth-century witch-hunting craze,
Witchfinders
(2005), the popular perception (encouraged by Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
) that five
million women were burned at the stake for witchcraft in Europe between 1450 and 1750 is a massive overestimate. He believes, like most historians of the period, that 40,000 is closer to the true figure, and that a quarter of those executed were men.

There are only 200 known executions in England directly resulting from an allegation of witchcraft. Nearly all of those were hangings. The Scots, French, Germans and Italians did all burn witches but, even then, it was more usual to strangle them at the stake and then burn the body afterwards, rather than burn them alive.

In Britain, from 1440 to 1650, only one ‘witch’ was burned per century.

Margery Jordemaine, the ‘Witch of Eye’, was burned at Smithfield on 27 October 1441; Isabella Billington was burned at York in 1650 (although she was hanged first); and Isabel Cockie was burned in 1596.

An accusation of witchcraft in England by no means necessarily led to a death sentence. The Church – often blamed for persecuting witches – took no part in prosecutions. Accusers had to prove a witch had harmed them and English juries were surprisingly reluctant to convict. Seventy-five per cent of all witch trials ended in acquittal.

Contrary to the popular perception of baying mobs, it appears there was a good deal of resistance to the idea of witch-hunting, shared by both judges and ordinary people – the practice was regarded as superstitious, prejudicial to public order, and unnecessarily expensive.

Isabel Cockie’s funeral pyre, for example, cost 105
s
. 4
d
.: the equivalent of more than
£
1,000 in today’s money.