the ides of march

and a serious & silly roman q&a

Come with me into the woods where spring is
advancing, as it does, no matter what,
not being singular or particular, but one
of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.
— Louise Glück, “Bazougey”

It’s been getting warmer in my corner of the world, and winter’s cloudy grey skies are starting to make way for clear, cloudless blue. Spring is my favorite season. I love watching bare branches erupt into green buds seemingly overnight, and I love the return of flowers—daffodils, tulips, pink petals crowding trees. The season usually brings a sort of blossoming for me, too, as I shed my winter gloominess and perk back up with the sun. This year has been different.

I’m not totally in the pit, but I’m not doing well either. The slew of Events being thrown in my face—national, international, and personal—are coming at such a rapidfire pace that I’ve kind of stopped being upset about anything and have sunk into a numb lethargy instead. A new thing will happen and I’ll just think, Well, of course. In a way this is preferable to my January state, which was crying all the time, but I would also like to feel some positive excitement once in a while and it just isn’t happening. March has been dominated by my mom’s admission into the hospital for the start of a three-week-long cancer treatment, and it seems like I’m always scrambling to take care of one problem or another, waiting for another axe to fall. Things aren’t good. I’m still afraid my days of experiencing good things are somewhat behind me. But I’ve been trying to carve out some contentment for myself, too, and trying to make an effort to attempt happiness before allowing myself to sink into moping. I’m trying to appreciate small, mundane things that make my mood a little brighter: conversations with friends, walks with my dog, matcha lattes. The sky turning blue.

I’ve also found myself drifting steadily into the arms of my most reliable distraction tactic: thinking about dead Romans. In that spirit, here’s a Rome-focused newsletter.

the ides of march

Happy Stabbing Day to all. We all know the reason for the season, but I’ve seen a few posts going around with misconceptions about how government worked during the Roman Republic and about the general situation surrounding Caesar’s death, too. I am going to be a bit of a pedantic hater and try to clear up some of those misunderstandings here:

• The modern use of “senator” throws folks off. Roman senators were not elected, and neither were they “representatives” of the people in the way that we would understand it today. Instead of being elected they were appointed, and they got appointed by being rich as fuck. In the late Republic, you needed a net worth of at least one million sesterces to be eligible for the Senate—as a benchmark, the average laborer earned a daily wage of around eighty sesterces. As another benchmark, most city-dwelling Romans lived in a relatively small apartment; Cicero, a senator, owned at least seven large villas.¹

• Caesar was legally appointed to the position of dictator. Just a few months before his death, the Senate had appointed him dictator perpetuo, dictator for life. Dictator is a Latin word that’s been absorbed into English and it has deeply negative connotations for us, but for the Romans a dictator was a real, legitimate position that had been held by multiple men throughout Roman history.² That said, the position was meant for emergencies and the term was supposed to last only six months. The audacious thing Caesar did wasn’t being a dictator; it was believing the title could belong to him forever.³

• Old-school, traditional senators in the Senate—the conspirators, of course, but also some other senators who weren’t in the conspiracy loop—weren’t fans of Caesar’s power grabs, but Romans as a larger group loved him. He was hugely popular among the general populace.

• Caesar didn’t really have a plan for what to do with his dictatorship once he’d gotten it, and he didn’t know what to do about the resulting political tension either—the vibes in Rome were so bad that he was planning to pull a Just Leave! skeleton meme and head north to fight a war instead of hanging around. Likewise, the conspirators didn’t have even a shadow of a post-assassination plan. If you aren’t good at strategizing, just murder is fine.

Well. Sort of, yeah

That’s off my chest. Let’s move on to the fun stuff.

q&a time

I solicited questions about Roman history on Bluesky and Tumblr—no seriousness threshold required, and no connection to the Ides of March required either. Thank you to everyone who indulged me and submitted something for me to yap about!!⁴

What is an interesting job that existed in the Roman Republic?

I was going to write about the Roman equivalent of dry-cleaning services for this but I don’t think anybody really wants to hear about nature’s most organic cleaning agent,⁵ so I am going to write about augury and haruspicy instead. Augurs read omens through the flight patterns and behaviors of birds, plus the eating patterns of chickens; a haruspex practiced divination by examining the entrails (usually the livers) of sacrificial animals. This wasn’t the kind of fortune-telling that tried to predict future events—rather, the goal was to understand the attitudes of the gods so Romans could respond in a way that would maintain the pax deorum, “the peace of the gods,” and ensure Roman prosperity. If the omens were bad, it was taken to mean the gods were displeased, and any planned actions were halted. Birds flying to the right side of the augur were lucky but the left side was unlucky (we get the English word “sinister” from the Latin sinister, “left”); if the chickens were released from their cage and started pecking at their food right away, it was a good sign, but if they refused to eat it was bad news.⁶ Although haruspexes were important for animal sacrifices, augurs in particular were extremely powerful: with the leverage of omen-reading, they could overturn legal processes and even declare consular elections invalid.

Etruscan diagram of a sheep’s liver. Haruspicy originated with the Etruscans, who dominated the Italian peninsula before the Romans.

What is something about Rome that you find incredibly funny?

The Romans LOVED penises and thought they were lucky. This kind of feels a juvenile answer, but the sheer amount of surviving phallic art delights me. Do you want to spruce up your table with a penis-adorned drinking vessel? Here you go. Amulets? Yes, even for babies. Wind chimes? They made those. Drinking cups? They made those, too. There are multiple sculpted penises on walls in Pompeii, and the road there even has a stone phallus laid over one of the regular stepping stones. In response to a question about why on earth a stone penis was part of the pavement, archaeologist Sophie Hay said, “Who knows… a Pompeiian thought to wish a bit of good luck on those who passed it.” So true, random Pompeiian! But perhaps best of all are these two penises sculpted onto a wall in Sardinia, accompanied by a pretty rude quip: [Vides d]uas berpas / tertius qui lego, “Do you see two phalluses? You who reads this is the third!” What an efficient way to call someone a dick from two thousand years in the past.

If you could fight one Roman historian in a parking lot, who would it be and why?

There are two ways to interpret this question and I’m going to choose the second one, which is to name an ancient Roman historian (as in, someone who was a historian during Roman times, as opposed to a modern historian of ancient Rome), because I don’t want to accidentally start academic beef with my small potatoes newsletter and also I have an answer ready. I am going to fight Livy in a parking lot because he dissed Cicero pretty badly one time and I still resent him for it.⁷

Do you have a favorite fresco or mosaic in Pompeii?

Yes! I think my favorite fresco of all time is this one from the House of Julia Felix:

Is there any food from Rome that you really want to try?

Savillum! It’s basically cheesecake, flavored with honey and poppy seeds. Max Miller did a Tasting History video about it last year and I would like to try following his recipe one day.

What’s the best epic—Iliad, Odyssey, or Aeneid? You can only pick one!

This is a betrayal of my Latin literature roots and my good pal Vergil, but it’s The Iliad. I am thinking forever about this part from Emily Wilson’s introduction:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

Do you have any introductory book recs for someone interested but quite unfamiliar on the topic?

I got two questions like this! I love giving book recs and I especially love getting the chance to promo Emma Southon. Her books are wonderfully informative for new-to-Rome readers, but they’re also so accessible and she is wildly funny. A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is all about death in Roman society, from murders and poisoning attempts all the way to the grim, horrifying cogs of Roman slavery; and A Rome of One’s Own focuses on women, starting from Rome’s mythological beginnings and ending with the fall of the Empire. I also think Mary Beard is a pretty decent starting point—not quite as accessible as Emma Southon, but still not too overwhelming. Emperor of Rome is good if you want a closer look at the Roman Empire and emperors in particular; SPQR goes over Rome’s full history. And I would be remiss without mentioning Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy if you want a fiction option—it’s quite historically accurate for fiction, it provides a decently critical look at the Roman slavery system, and it makes vivid a very exciting and dangerous time in Roman history as they teetered on the brink between republic and empire. (The Cicero characterization is also top-notch.) And as always, I am happy to give more specific recommendations anytime!

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Thank you for being here and for reading! The next newsletter is one that I’m very excited to put out there—another entry for the Abbreviated Life & Chaos series (apparently it’s a series now).

The header art for this post is The Assassination of Julius Caesar by William Holmes Sullivan.

1. Another note about Roman elections: even when elections were held—for political offices like consuls and aediles—they favored the wealthy. If you were the top 1%, you got to vote first, and so it went down the line until a winner was called, by which point the majority of people in line hadn’t even gotten to vote.

2. After Caesar, the most famous is probably Cincinnatus, who peacefully retired after his dictatorship term was over and went back to plowing his farm fields. The U.S. cities of Cincinnati, Ohio and Cincinnatus, New York are named after him.

3. This was pretty close to being a king, and Romans hated kings—until, of course, they got their first emperor around 20 years later, which was basically the same thing, and then they spent a hundred years pretending that the emperor wasn’t really a king, merely the princeps, the first citizen—but I digress.

4. I also want to acknowledge that I got one question I will not being answering, merely because I am shamefully ignorant about Asterix the Gaul and I would like to do some more research before writing about it. But based on my preliminary searching, the answer to your question is: not very accurate.

5. It’s urine. They used urine.

6. During the First Punic War in 249 BCE, the Roman commander Publius Claudius Pulcher (an ancestor of my favorite chaos agent Publius Clodius Pulcher) sought an omen from the chickens right before a naval battle to check whether the gods would give him the go-ahead to start fighting. Upon being released from their cage, the chickens were completely uninterested in their food: this meant Claudius wasn’t supposed to engage in battle, which really pissed him off. He tossed the poor chickens overboard, allegedly saying, “Since they refuse to eat, let them drink!” But the chickens were right. In the ensuing battle, 93 out of his 123 ships were sunk or destroyed.

7. He’s allowed to be depressed about his daughter dying, Livy.