49

49. On ancient customs

[This is doubtless one of the chapters written early: its lists of ancient customs became the raw material for deeper reflections on the relativity of much that passes as natural in various societies. As it stands it has something in common with earlier works, such as the Officina (‘Workshop’) of Ravisius Textor or the Ancient Readings of Richerius Rhodiginus, which, with their successors, were appreciated especially by readers who had access to few books and enjoyed compendia.]

[A] I am prepared to forgive our own people for having no other model or rule of perfection but their own manners and behaviour, for it is a common failing not only of the mob but of virtually all men to set their sights within the limitations of the customs into which they were born. I can accept that a man, if he met them, should find the appearance of Fabricius or [C] Laclius [A] barbaric,1 seeing that they did not wear clothing tailored to our fashion, but I do complain of his singular lack of judgement if he lets himself be so thoroughly taken in and blinded by the authority of contemporary modes that he is capable of changing his mind and his opinions every four weeks if fashion demands it, and of making mutually exclusive judgements about himself. Even if the waistband of his doublet were worn high up the chest he would heatedly maintain that that is where it ought to be; then, when it was lowered a few years later down below his thighs, he would ridicule the other fashion and find it absurd and intolerable. Today’s fashion leads him immediately to condemn the old one with so great and universal a certainty that you could say there was some species of mania making his mind do somersaults.

Because changes of cut are so quick and sudden and the inventiveness of all the tailors in the world insufficient to provide enough novelty, it is inevitable that styles once despised should come back into fashion, only to fall out of fashion again a little while later.

I also complain that one and the same mind should, for a period of some fifteen or twenty years, hold with such unbelievable and frivolous inconstancy two or three opinions which are not merely divergent but incompatible. [C] None of us is so clever as not to be made a mockery of by such contradictions, allowing our sight and our insight to be dazzled without realizing it.

[A] I intend here to make a pile of a few of the customs of the Ancients which I have stored in my memory, some of them resembling ours, some of them different, so that by keeping in mind the continual changes in human affairs, our judgements on them may be more firm and more enlightened.

Fighting with cloak and sword (as we call it) was already the custom among the Romans; Caesar says: ‘Sinistris sagos involvunt, gladiosque distringunt.’ [They wrap their garments over their left arms and draw their swords.] And he already comments on one of our national failings (which is still with us): that we stop any travellers we meet on the road, require them to tell us who they are and take it as an insult and as a pretext for a quarrel if they decline to answer.2

The Ancients used to bath every day before dinner; it was as usual as our washing our hands; at first they only bathed their arms and legs but subsequently (by a custom which lasted several centuries among most of the peoples in the Roman world) they stripped naked and washed in a mixture of water and perfume (so that to mean that someone lived very simply they would say that he washed in water). The more elegant and refined among them perfumed their bodies three or four times a day. They removed all their hair with tweezers (just as French women, some time ago now, started to pluck out the hairs on their forehead) –

Quod pectus, quod crura tibi, quod brachia vellis;[You tweeze out your hairs from chest, thighs and arms;] –

despite having had special ointments for that purpose:

Psilotro nitet, aut arida tatet oblita creta.[She glistens with a depilatory and hides behind a mask of dry plaster.]3

They loved to lie softly and took sleeping on a palliasse as a sign of toughness. They reclined on beds for their meals, in more or less the same posture as the Turks of today:

Inde thoro pater Æneas sic orsus ab alto.[Then, from his lofty bed, Father Aeneas spoke.]4

It is said of Cato the Younger that, after the battle of Pharsalia, grieving for the lamentable state of public affairs, he adopted a more austere way of life and always took his meals sitting down. They kissed the hands of the great to honour them and to show their devotion; friends greeted each other with a kiss as as Venetians do now:

Gratatusque darem cum dulcibus oscula verbis.[I would wish you well with kisses and sweet words.]5

[C] When greeting a great man or begging his favour, they would tap him on the knee. The brother of Crates, Pasicles the philosopher, instead of placing his hand on the knee placed it on the genitals. The great man thus addressed pushed him rudely aside. ‘Come now,’ Pasicles replied, ‘are they not as much yours as your knees are?’6

[A] Like us they ate fruit at their last course. They wiped their arses with a sponge (we can leave silly superstitions about words to the women). That is why SPONGIA is an uncouth word in Latin. The sponge was fixed to the end of a stick: that is shown by the account of the man who was being led off to be thrown to the beasts in the sight of the plebs and who asked permission to answer a call of nature; having no other means of killing himself he thrust stick and sponge down his throat and suffocated.7

They wiped their cocks with perfumed wool after they had had a go with them:

At tibi nil faciam, sed lota mentula lana.[I’ll do nothing to you till you’ve washed your tool with wool.]8

At the street-corners in Rome they kept jars and demijohns for passers-by to piss in:

Pusi sæpe lacum propter, se ac dolia curtaSomno devincti credunt extollere vestem.

[And sleepy children often dream that they are lifting their robes and pissing in the public urinals.]9

They used to eat between meals. In summer there were men who sold snow for cooling the wine. Some even used snow in winter too, not finding their wine cool enough even then. Great men had their servers to carve and to bring them their wine, as well as fools to amuse them. In winter dishes were brought to the table on food-warmers; they also had portable kitchens – [C] I have seen some myself– [A] in which they carried about everything needed for preparing a meal:

Has vobis epulas habete lauti; Nos offendimur ambulante cæna.

[Keep your old feasts you gluttons; we dislike your portable food.]10

They had fresh clear water flowing along small aqueducts through the basements beneath them in which they kept live fish which guests chose and caught in their hands and then had them prepared to their taste. Fish always did enjoy their present privilege of having the great take trouble to find out how to prepare them; their flesh has a more refined taste than meat, at least to my liking.

We certainly do our utmost to equal the Ancients in every sort of ostentation, in debauchery and in the devising of gratifications, in comforts and in luxuries, for our wills are as vitiated as theirs were but our ingenuity cannot bring it off. Our powers are no more capable of competing with them in vice than in virtue, both of which derive from a vigour of mind which was incomparably greater in them than in us: the weaker the souls, the less able they are to do anything really good or really bad.

For them the middle place at table was the most honoured. No order of precedence was entailed in putting names first or second, either in speech or writing; that can be seen clearly from their books: they will as readily say ‘Oppius and Caesar’ as ‘Caesar and Oppius’, or indifferently say, ‘me and you’ or ‘you and me’. That is why I was once struck by a passage of the Life of Flaminius in our French Plutarch in which, treating of the rivalry between the Aetolians and the Romans over who deserved the glory for the victory which they had jointly won, Plutarch attaches some weight to the fact that in the songs of the Greeks the Aetolians were named before the Romans – unless, that is, there is some ambiguity in the French.

Ladies in the public baths would receive men and even got their men-servants to rub oil into them:

Inguina succinctus nigra tibi servus aluta Stat, quoties calidis nuda foveris aquis.

[Whenever you take your naked bath a slave stands by, girt with a black leathern apron above his groin.]11

They sprinkled a kind of powder over themselves to stop the sweat.

Sidonius Apollinaris says that the ancient Gauls wore their hair long on the front of their heads and shaved close at the neck; that is precisely the hairstyle which has been brought back into fashion by the slack and womanish mode of our own century.

The Romans used to pay their boatmen for their ferries as soon as they came on board: we do it only when we have reached harbour:

dum as exigitur, dum mula ligatur, Tola abit hora.

[what with collecting the fares and tying up the mules, a whole hour is wasted.]12

Women used to sleep on the side of the bed nearer the wall: that is why Caesar was called ‘spondam Regis Nicomedis’ [King Nicomedes’ wall-side bed-frame].13

[B] They took a gulp of breath when they drank. They watered their wine:

quis puer ocius Restinguet ardentis falerni Pocula prætereunte lympha?

[what slave-boy will swiftly temper the bowls of fiery Falernian wine with water from the flowing stream?]14

Those insolent looks we see on our lackeys’ faces were known to them too:

O Jane, a tergo quem nulla ciconia pinsit, Nec manus auriculas imitata est mobilis albas, Nec linguæ quantum sitiet canis Apula tantum!

[O Janus, behind whose back no mocking gestures are made and no quick hands form signs of asses’ ears and no tongue is poked out, long as a thirsty dog’s from Apulia!]15

The women of Argos and of Rome used to wear white for mourning, as was once the custom of our women – and would be still if I were listened to. But there are whole books on that question.16