Latin – Suffering The Benz

Remove the wool that binds Saturn’s feet. It’s time to party.

Saturnalia has fascinated me since 9th grade Latin class at St. Anselm’s, when Magister Switalla would tell us about the Roman holiday that Christians coopted for their Christmas holiday. For some reason, one of the details that stuck with me was the idea of gift giving, specifically the idea of giving a pencil to the magister (teacher) in honor of the holiday (humble gifts were considered to be an inverse reflection of the importance of the friendship between giver and receiver). Magister also demanded that for that day we students would teach and he would be the student in the type of role reversal common during the Roman holiday where masters would serve their slaves.

An excellent Wikipedia entry on Saturnalia notes that parrots sometimes were among the Saturnalia presents. So watch out for your Saturnalia Cockatoo. It will be arriving in the mail. It’ll be the squawking box with air holes …

“It is now the month of December, when the greatest part of the city is in a bustle. Loose reins are given to public dissipation; everywhere you may hear the sound of great preparations, as if there were some real difference between the days devoted to Saturn and those for transacting business. … Were you here, I would willingly confer with you as to the plan of our conduct; whether we should eve in our usual way, or, to avoid singularity, both take a better supper and throw off the toga.”
— Seneca (as quoted in Wikipedia entry)

So from today through Dec. 23, io Saturnalia, y’all. Do whatever it takes to bring light to these darkest days bracketing the winter solstice.

Saturnalia

Caesar I just finished Caesar: Life of a Colossus. I think my interest in things Roman dates back to St. Anselm Catholic school, where I survived two years of Latin (nomen mihi est Robertus) and stumbled across the Robert Graves masterpiece I, Claudius. In “Life of a Colossus,” Adrian Goldsworthy does an admirable job of breathing life into his subject. It’s pretty clear his writing is steeped in tons of academic research, but it doesn’t read like a doctoral dissertation.

A few points/observations:

The early part of the book is a bit of a slog as Goldsworthy goes into detail about the political machinations swirling around Caesar during his rise. It’s not awful, but it doesn’t move at the same clip as the portions of the book that describe his military campaigns.
After reading a lot of romanticized notions of the Republic, it’s great to see details on what a nasty, bleeding mess it really was. In some ways, a benevolent dictatorship would have been a vast improvement on the mess that was Rome in the first century BCE.
Caesar was ruthless, but there usually was method to his menace and he didn’t succumb to death and destruction for the sake of mayhem. “Caesar was entirely pragmatic — effectively amoral — in his use of clemency or massacre and atrocity,” Goldsworthy writes.
In a similar vein, it’s not really clear that absolute, tyrannical rule was his real end game.
Rome’s gift to us: “Roman laws tended to be long and complex — one of Rome’s most enduring legacies to the world is tortuous legal prose.” Thanks, Rome.
As a young man, Caesar was rumored to have been King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s lover, and those rumors dogged him throughout his life. Goldworthy presents a credible case that the rumors might have been true, though he refrains from drawing conclusions. It’s clear that these accusations where the one thing that could wound Caesar’s immense pride.