5 Things You Probably Didn't Know about Ancient Rome

5. There were as many lawyers in Rome as there are today.

The most interesting thing about reading Roman history is how weirdly familiar it all feels. The Roman court system was similar to today's: you got a summons to come to court, there were bailiffs, multiple levels of courts, if a verdict didn't go your way you could file an appeal to a higher court (which ended in the Emperor instead of a Supreme Court), and there were even lawyers.

Not only were there lawyers in Rome, some of them were even what we'd call "ambulance chasers," aided by the fact the Romans were the first civilization to invent the idea of the lawsuit. Lawyers in Rome drafted wills and needed to be on hand for contracts. Since most Roman lawyers were paid by the line, most really were blathery and wordy. Even the smallest village in Roman times had a lawyer.

Interestingly, their job seems very similar to today. Roman courts had cross-examination of witnesses, hearsay was rejected, proof in writing had greater weight over eyewitness testimony, and the burden of proof was on whoever was trying to make a claim.

Being a lawyer sometimes meant being a statesman, too. A famous Roman you've probably heard of, the articulate Cicero, was a lawyer by profession.



4. The Emperor Pertinax's Guard, after murdering him, sold his throne in an auction to the highest bidder.

Ancient Roman Emperors kept their power by a simple rule: keep the armies on your side, and to hell with everybody else.

The Emperor Probus (predecessor of the famous Diocletian), for instance, to keep his Legions occupied, assigned them the sort of busywork you might expect a substitute teacher to give an badly behaving class,  and for the same reason: to shut you up and keep you out of trouble. For instance, he ordered his soldiers to plant olive trees in the Sahara Desert. Overworked and upset about these petty indignities, when Probus said the Empire might be better off with volunteers instead of professional (well-paid) soldiers, it didn't take much for his own men to chase him to an empty tower and then stab him to death. Now, if only modern unions could pull off that kind of thing these days…!

The Praetorian Guard were a tremendously powerful faction in Rome, originally created by the Emperor Augustus as his personal "secret service" bodyguards. They were designed to do what modern day club bouncers do: block doorways, glower, and intimidate. But unlike the actual secret service, the Praetorian Guard had an awful lot of power over the Emperor for the simple and basic reason that if they weren't kept happy, when his back was turned, they had a lot of knives and could stab the Emperor with them.

This actually happened when the Praetorian Guard were annoyed by the Emperor Pertinax, who the Praetorian Guard stabbed repeatedly in 198 AD. The Praetorian Guard had no leaders, and were just an unruly mob, so they decided to auction off the throne of Rome to anyone willing to pay them. 

A rich, vain old man named Didus Julianus paid the Praetorian Guard to be Emperor after being convinced of it by his Mr. Smithers-like yes-men and lackeys. Didus Julianus paid a hefty amount to every single Praetorian Guardsman to do what Mitt Romney tried and failed to do: buy his way to the highest office in the world.

He had a party to celebrate becoming Emperor, but in the harsh light of day had a brutal panic attack: he had no allies anywhere, the people didn't support him because of the slimy way Didus got into office (would you?), the army generals didn't support him (I guess he should have paid them off, too) and on hearing what happened, the Senate sentenced him to death. His last words were, "but I didn't do anything!"


3. One Emperor was a crossdresser. 

I have to stop and emphasize here that I am not making any of this up. 

Even by the standards of psychotic Roman Emperors, Elagabalus was a piece of work. Taking the throne at 14, he ruled for four years where he wore women's cosmetics including eye shadow, and tweezed his eyebrows. At night, he often went out to work as a prostitute on the streets of Rome, even catcalling passerbys.

He married a muscular blond slave who drove his chariot, Hierocles, and apparently, Elagabalus was the woman in the relationship. He used to say "I am delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the Queen of Hierocles." 

Elagabalus offered a huge sum of money to any physician or doctor in the Empire who could take off his penis and give him a functional vagina.

And to top it all off, Elagabalus was a religious nut, too. He replaced worship of Jupiter with a Babylonian mountain god called Elagabal, which comes from Ilāh hag-Gabal, a damn weird cult centered around touching a meteorite.



2. Christianity was created by an act of "selling out."

In the beginning, in order to be a Christian, you had to be a Jew first.

Early Christianity was an odd sect of reform Judaism, allowing only Jews, requiring circumcision and obeying kosher dietary laws. When did that change? Partially it was the work of St. Paul, but the earliest, most severe break point was a gigantic act of selling out in 135 AD.

A couple years before, the last of Jewish self-rule was eliminated when the Romans, who as usual didn't mess around: they crushed the rebellion of Bar Kochba, a man who claimed he was the Messiah and even delusionally printed his own coins to that effect.

Note to future Messiahs: don't print your own coins saying the Kingdom of Heaven has come unless you're absolutely sure.

With the end of military leader Bar Kochba, the political future of Jewish identity was a sinking star you'd be crazy to hitch your wagon to, especially for an up and coming new reform sect like Christianity drifting further away every day from its roots. On the other hand, the Roman world was looking more comfortable and hospitable, at its absolute high point under first class ruler Antoninus (one of the famous "5 Good Emperors," notable for their lack of insanity).

The break point came in 135 AD. The Emperor Hadrian built a city intended to be the new financial, Roman center of conquered Palestine right on Mount Sion, the Ælina Capitolina. The one rule was this: no Jews were allowed. Stop and think about that: Jerusalem was so totally destroyed by the Romans almost nothing was left, and no Jews were allowed on the new city built where it once stood. If this sort of thing keeps happening, I'm liable to start thinking the Jews can't buy a break.

In response to this "keep out" rule, the Nazarenes, who in truth were growing more different from the Jews every day, elected Marcus as a bishop – the first gentile to be Bishop of Jerusalem, who was either Italian or Latin, and Marcus persuaded the Nazarenes to give up the Mosaic law…all to buy entrance into Hadrian's business port! By the way, the office of the Bishop of Jerusalem continues in an unbroken line in today's Orthodox Church 2000 years later.

Not everybody agreed with the election of Marcus, though – they moved and became the Ebionites, one of the most eccentric groups of Christian-Jews. But all that notwithstanding, it was easily one of the most influential acts of selling out in world history.



1. Rome was once seriously close to being beaten by a warrior-queen. 

Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, was like a character out of a cheesy fantasy novel, except she really lived. She was so cool it's hard to believe she was a real person. She used to like to hunt with her men and officers, and could ride a horse, steer a chariot, throw a spear, and shoot a bow. She was described as darkskinned and dark-haired and was "more beautiful than Cleopatra," though unlike Cleopatra she was totally devoted to her husband and didn't sleep around.

Zenobia was not only warlike but literate: she spoke fluent Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and even Ancient Egyptian, and surrounded herself with poets and philosophers.  Zenobia said she was descended from Cleopatra, a claim that's nowhere near as farfetched as it sounds, because Cleopatra's family tree (the Ptolemies) did have many eastern branches that survived.

In a detail that might just be too good to be true, it's reported she was Jewish through her mother – not only Jewish, but an early Christian back when it was hard to tell the two groups apart… a member of an obscure Eastern version of Christianity, Paulianists, who believed Jesus was born a mortal man but God later "adopted" him as His son. Even if she wasn't a Jewish Christian, Zenobia was shockingly Jew-friendly: Rabbis came to her court to speak.

Zenobia ruled Palmyra, a Greek-speaking Eastern trading center in modern Syria, big enough and rich enough and Eastern/foreign enough to be a legit contender as a rival to Rome. When the Romans were tied up with the Gauls on the other side of the world, Zenobia seized her chance and created a break-off "Palmyrene Empire," taking Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. As all of Rome depended on Egyptian grain, this was a pretty serious threat to the entire Roman Empire: it meant Rome started to run out of food.

Unfortunately for Zenobia, the Roman Emperor at this time wasn't run by a teenage crossdresser, but Aurelian (the city of Orleans is named after him), a no-BS, serious fighting man who kept the Roman Empire from breaking up into three. He claimed a ghost appeared and told him to handle his enemies with kid gloves, which explains why, when Zenobia was inevitably captured, she wasn't put to death but instead lived out her life in a posh Italian villa comfortably, and her descendants were major historical and political figures.

That's almost enough to make up for the fact only one movie was ever made about her, the Sign of the Gladiator, a cheesy 60s peplum uplifted by the gorgeous Anita Ekberg in the title role (and featuring Chelo Alonso in a dance number, who I wrote about here).

John Maddox Roberts

John Maddox Roberts may be one of my favorite historical novelists. When he wrote about Rome in his SPQR series, I always had the feeling that, of all the versions of Rome we've seen or experienced, that JMR's was the closest to how it really was: noir before its time, bustling with criminal cartels, prostitutes that knife-fight each other over turf, where even a Senator's life was cheap if he went into the wrong part of town at night, a place of pug-nosed gladiators, where the line between being a gangster/mob boss and being a politician was so thin, the two jobs were practically interchangeable. John Maddox Roberts's Rome was not a nice place to live, but it was cool.

And best of all, JMR always had sense of humor about things. This was in great contrast to many other stories about antiquity that take themselves way, way too seriously. In general, Sword & Sandal and Roman epics are dead serious, with dead being the operative phrase.

JMR also wrote some speculative (what-if) history with his book "King of the Wood," and it's a real relief to read an alternate history that somehow doesn't involve the Nazis. In "King of the Wood," the Vikings reached America, but this time they came to stay. The northern kingdom, from Canada and so on, was Treeland, whereas the southern kingdom was Thorsheim, founded by pagans fleeing religious persecution.

It doesn't surprise me that John Maddox Roberts wrote Conan novels, because the main hero of "King of the Wood" was basically a Conan-type hero that did Conan-type things. A noble from Treeland, he was cast out from his country for the crime of kin-slaying, becoming a "Wolf's Head." The hero is pretty boring, although there is one sequence where he trips balls-out on hallucinogenic drugs that is all the more entertaining because I can imagine it happening to Conan.

Along the way, he encounters the inhabitants of the Americas, including the Aztecs, who are presented, as usual, as a profoundly sick society fascinated by imagery of stillborn babies and human sacrifices in retch-inducing industrial quantities. From what I understand of history this is not that far off the mark.

The book is overall entertaining and chock full of alternate historical goodies in a world that Roberts obviously thought through, but if it is guilty of anything, it's guilty of taking a bit to get to the point. The Mongols are the heavies of the book, and they don't show up until two-thirds of it are done. To JMR's credit, the Mongols are scarier here than anywhere else: imperious, commanding, tactical geniuses in hordes of tremendous size that dwarf lesser armies, with advanced technology for the age and brute toughness...it's great to see the Mongols as history's most frightening villains, a real world hyperpower, as opposed to the goonish cartoon barbarians seen elsewhere.

The Myths of World War II: How We Learned all the Wrong Things

One of the most frustrating things about history education in the United States is that it seems like our history courses start in 1939 and end in 1945.

This is reflected in our popular culture and discussion about world affairs, where every enemy is seen as the Nazis and it is always 1939, and those that strive for diplomatic solutions to problems are tarred as "Chamberlain-like appeasers" despite the fact that the situation is frequently different.

What's worse is that almost everything Americans know about World War II is either wrong, or a simplification of a complex situation. It's all to create a huge national myth about World War II and the Greatest Generation.

A few things to keep in mind about the narrative of World War II that we think we know, but we actually don't:

Chamberlain and the French. Chamberlain's name in the United States is synonymous with appeasement and cowardice before the power of the Nazis, a starry-eyed idealist that was tricked and bamboozled. In reality, if Chamberlain really believed in "Peace in Our Time" he would not have been re-arming and re-militarizing Britain. Chamberlain was a smart guy that saw the writing on the wall: in any battle that the British fought with the Nazis, Britain would have been totally creamed. In fact, the ability of Britain to even fight owes more to Chamberlain than to Churchill. This brings me to my next point...

The Cult of Personality of Winston Churchill. A British friend of mine was always amused by the American valorization of Churchill. When I asked him how most Brits felt about Churchill, the response was along the lines of, "the war was fought between two lunatics. Thank God that our lunatic won!" As I said before, any scenario where the Nazis outright invaded Britain (Operation: Sea Lion) would have resulted in a Nazi victory. The real reason that Britain survived was not due to Churchill and his oratory ability and determination to fight, but to the fact that Hitler was insane, refused to attack his racial brothers, and believed that Britain would support him once he attacked the Soviet Union. If the Germans actually did invade, Winston Churchill's woofing and posturing would have been revealed for what it was: "We will fight on the streets...for five minutes. We will fight in the field...for five minutes." This goes to show that Americans have a terrifying preference for woofers prancing in cowboy boots over actual heroes. How it was that a real war hero like John Kerry was presented as the anti-military candidate while a cowboy-hat wearing pansy like Dubya I'll never understand...or, in the interests of being bipartisan, how a real honest to goodness American hero like George Bush Sr. that delivered the only real decisive American victory since WWII, Gulf War I, was eliminated in favor of a guy that talked and looked like my high school class president.

The role of the Russians. Ask most Americans in which country most World War II battles were fought, and they probably wouldn't answer Russia, but it is true. What's more, Russia suffered more casualties and suffered the greatest financial losses of any country in the entire conflict. In the long-term, the seige of Stalingrad and the Russian winter did much more to destroy the Nazis than the D-Day landings did. In fact, if World War II could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be "Germany vs. Russia." It's only natural to take pride in our very crucial American role, however, the presence of Russia is inconvenient to the American narratives of World War II: it was a time when the world faced a great evil and the world united to destroy it. The idea that World War II was a grimy, ugly conflict that was the story of a bully that was beaten because it met a bigger bully destroys all the high-minded mythology that Americans have developed around a morally gray conflict between two equally genocidal and vicious combatants.

If you were to ask me why these myths persist, I would say that they are very, very attractive to authoritarians. A country united and with purpose, speaking in one voice instead of the rabble, must be absolutely fascinating to people that view disagreement as a weakness instead of as a strength.

In many ways, the conflict that has much more practical, applicable and useful lessons to us today is actually World War I, which is far less understood by Americans. Kennedy, a president that whatever else can be said of him was actually brilliant and read extensively, managed to avert the Cuban Missile Crisis because of Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August.

In brief, the lessons of World War I are:

If you believe that war is inevitable...it becomes inevitable. Lots of Germans and British wrote books with titles like "The Moral Right to Make War." Indeed, what made an unecessary and nearly accidental conflict like World War I possible was the assumption on the part of everyone that everyone else's motives were hostile, aggressive and belligerent. The fact this lesson wasn't learned by anyone but John Kennedy really makes me wonder how the world survived the Cold War. As Carl Sagan frequently pointed out, a comet hitting the earth in either the United States or the Soviet Union would be indistinguishable from a nuclear First Strike.

This self-fulfilling prophecy nature of warfare and hostility also explains the single biggest foreign policy boner of the entire bonerrific Bush years: the creation of a nuclear missile shield in Poland near Russia, which soured a potential ally to the United States for an entire generation for no real reason that I can detect. In fact, considering the role Russia played in supplying the Chavez government, there is a real question of how this boneheaded and unecessary act of hostility led to greater world instability and anti-US sentiment. There was a wonderful article in The Economist that argued that the only role of a missile shield in Poland would be to give the U.S. first strike capability. All this a decade after the end of the Cold War! People often whine that Obama got his Nobel Prize in the field of not being Bush, but dismantling that shield actually has resulted in a much safer world.

Wars inevitably lead to other wars. This is something to keep in mind when any general or politician calls a conflict "decisive."

It's possible to have a war where all sides involved lose. This is even more true when it involves nukes. And it is further possible to have a war that destroys even the winner - a place as a world superpower is not eternal or guaranteed, but is contingent on sane and rational decision making.

The 13th Century Ebstorf Map

Now this is something that is downright fascinating.

It's a map of the world, but from the Middle Ages, which is interesting because it showed the structure of the world as medieval people saw it.

A few things to notice:

• Jerusalem is at the center of the world
• The earth is divided into three parts, just like the Classical Greek view
• Africa is circular. Come to think of it, nothing about Africa is even close to right: from magical animals like the manticores and mirmicaleons (what the hell is that?) to Meroe, the land of midgets that ride crocodiles. Don't forget the dog-headed men, the people with four feet, and cave-dwelling giants. I guess it goes to show that wildly making shit up about Africa was a time-honored tradition centuries before the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• The Garden of the Hesperides is in Africa, marked by a winged serpent guardian
• The location of the Garden of Eden is marked, watered by 11 rivers
• Up around the Caucasus, you can see the homeland of the terrible cannibal giants Gog and Magog
• If you look in Northern Asia, you can see where the mapmakers wrote in the homeland of the Amazon Women
• Colchis, the city on the Black Sea that was the legendary home of the Quest for the Golden Fleece, is clearly marked
• In Israel, you can see the Tower of Babel and Mt. Ararat, where Noah's ark landed
• Mostly the map of Europe is right, but it's fascinating to see things like ant-dogs on the map, to say nothing of the total absence of anything like Switzerland.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Piltdown Man

A while back, I said that the magical view of the process of reason and investigation in Sherlock Holmes stories, were intimately connected to Sir Arthur’s own personal irrationality and incredulity, which led him to be suckered by one spiritualist after another.

Perhaps it comes from growing up in the photoshop generation, but I find it hard to believe anyone was ever convinced by something as silly as the Fairy pictures.

But if a few scientists and historians are right, Sir Arthur’s crimes against rationality may go a lot deeper than even I suspected. There is a hypothesis that Sir Arthur played a role in, and perhaps even masterminded one of the greatest scientific frauds in history!

The case of Piltdown Man is a great example of the self-correcting nature of science, in that a cunning fraud was eventually exposed. It’s also comforting proof that even experts can be bamboozled by a con-game. The reason Piltdown Man was as successful as it was, was because it gave paleoanthropologists exactly what they wanted (a humanlike skull with an apelike lower face) so they were all the more likely to fall for it because they wanted it to be true. Boule, for instance, theorized that a large braincase came before the loss of apelike dentition and jaws, so Piltdown Man met expectations perfectly.

In short, “Piltdown Man” was a skull of a prehuman discovered in 1916 at the Piltdown quarry that pushed a lot of smug self-congratulatory buttons because of the idea that the missing link might have been English (take that, France!). The fossil was everything scientists expected and then some: a human brain and noble brow with an apelike jaw. As the picture of human evolutionary history became more complete with the 1924 discovery of Australiopithecus Afarensis by Raymond Dart and more fragments of “Java Man” (Homo erectus) were found, Piltdown Man was pushed to one side, ignored, and thought by most reputable scientists to be a forgery after only a few years of its discovery. Eventually, Potassium-Argon dating resolved the matter for good and found that Piltdown was the skull of a normal human with the altered, filed jaw of an Orangutan, both of which were only a few decades old.

Boy, it must really have stuck in the English’s craw during those heady nationalist days: all the prehuman fossil remains were found in places like France, the Pyrenees, Austria, and Germany.

It also helped to sell the hoax that, at least in the 1920s, the picture of human evolution was woefully incomplete. As Creationists (another group of professional bullshit peddlers) would later discover, the secret to selling your weak scam is to lunge on an area that science knows very little about and make outrageous claims about it, like the idea the Cambrian fossil explosion was miraculous and happened overnight. Likewise, Piltdown Man is another example of two other all-too-familiar bane to science: a sensationalist-seeking and scientifically illiterate press that overhypes and misrepresents a discovery, which results in an end-run around the traditional system of peer review.

A few scientists (like a John Winslow article in Science magazine) have floated the hypothesis that Sir Arthur played a role in the Piltdown Man fraud. He certainly had a motive: he was extremely bitter about science debunking his favorite psychic, and he often railed about how the scientific establishment didn’t know as much as they think they did, and pretty soon someone would show them up.

It helps that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the next door neighbor of Charles Dawson, the discoverer of Piltdown Man. And the very year that Piltdown Man was discovered, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, which contains a scene of scientists leaving a prank faked fossil for others to find. What’s more, Doyle was one of the few people in Britain that could have obtained a 500-600 year old Orangutan jawbone, and a few months prior to the discovery, Doyle’s personal museum had received an extensive gift of fossils from Malaysia.

Personally, I always found the idea Doyle pulled Piltdown Man to be an interesting idea, but the thought that anyone other than Charles Dawson did it was something of a stretch. It's hard to imagine even a single other suspect. In real life, as opposed to Sherlock Holmes stories, the person that did it is usually the MOST likely to have done so in almost all cases.