Finished Business
Page 26
Regarding the lady herself. It may have surprised fans of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius – of which I’m very much one – that ‘my’ version of Messalina is about ten years older and had been married before, but this is probably so: her father, Valerius Barbatus, was dead by AD 20, and at the age of more than twenty-one it is more than likely that she had had a husband previous to Claudius – although who he was, and whether she was a widow or a divorcee, isn’t known, at least as far as I’m aware. When I’ve referred to him or the marriage in the text I’ve left things deliberately vague.
As for the assassination. ‘My’ Gaius, of course, dies offstage, but you may be interested in how Suetonius (writing, admittedly, eighty years after the event) describes things:
On 24 January at about the seventh hour [i.e. early afternoon], his stomach still being slightly out of sorts as the result of a heavy meal the previous day, Gaius was in two minds about leaving his seat in the theatre to take a lunch break; however, his friends persuaded him to go out with them. In the covered walkway which they had to pass through, he met a group of boys, sons of distinguished families, who had been brought over from Asia to stage a theatrical performance and who were currently rehearsing. He stopped to watch them and give them some encouragement, and if the leader of the troupe had not said that he was unwell, would have liked to take them back into the theatre with him and have them perform straight away. From this point on, there are two versions of what happened. Some authorities have it that while Gaius was talking to the boys Chaerea came up behind him, and shouting ‘Take that!’ struck him on the neck with his sword, wounding him seriously; and then that the tribune Cornelius Sabinus, another of the conspirators, stabbed him face-on, in the chest. Others say that Sabinus told his NCOs (who were also in the plot) to disperse the crowd before asking Gaius – as was the military custom – for the watchword. When Gaius answered ‘Jupiter’, Chaerea shouted ‘That’s confirmed!’ and on his turning round split his jawbone at a stroke. The emperor lay hugging himself on the ground and shouting ‘I’m still alive!’ but the other assassins finished him off, inflicting no fewer than thirty wounds, including sword thrusts to his genitals. For the word in everyone’s mouth was ‘Give it to him again!’ At the first sign of trouble, his litter men ran to his aid, using their poles as weapons; they were closely followed by his German bodyguard, who not only killed a number of the assassins but also some of the senatorial bystanders.
(Suetonius, Caligula 58; my translation)
Two last, general things that I’m often asked about, so perhaps some explanation is called for: purple stripes and time of day/dates. First, the stripes.
An ordinary male citizen would, on formal occasions, at least, wear a plain white toga (my ‘mantle’); hence my use, for the Roman-in-the-street, of the term ‘plain-mantle’. My broad-stripers are members of the senate, which was composed of magistrates who held, or had held, at least the rank of quaestor (junior finance officer). They wore togas with a broad purple stripe at the edge.
The second class of purple-stripers were the equites (knights) – my ‘narrow-stripers’, so named for obvious reasons. A good phrase to define them (which Michael Grant uses in his excellent translation of Tacitus) would be ‘gentlemen outside the senate’. The knights were variously Rome’s businessmen (senators were forbidden to engage in trade), imperial administrators (some important posts – e.g. Egyptian governor and commander of Praetorians – could only be held by an eques) and members of ‘senatorial’ families who for one reason or another had never held office: Corvinus would be one of these.
As to time of day and dates. The first is easy: the Roman day began at dawn and ended at sunset, and it was divided into twelve hours, as was the period sunset to dawn, where the hours were grouped into four ‘Watches’ of three hours each. This meant, of course, that the length of a Roman hour varied depending on the time of year, and it played merry hell with the calibration of any time-keeping device other than the sundial. Water-clocks (clepsydrae) were a particular headache.
Dates are more complicated, because the Romans didn’t use our consecutive numbering system. Instead, calculation was based on three key points in any given month (probably, originally, market days): the Kalends, Nones and Ides (because the Greeks used a different system, the Latin expression ‘on the Greek Kalends’ meant the same as our ‘never in a million years’). The Kalends were always on the first day of the month; the other two dates were normally on the fifth and thirteenth respectively, except that:
In March, July, October, May
The Nones are on the seventh, the Ides the fifteenth day
Which explains why Julius Caesar was murdered on the fifteenth, not the thirteenth of March.
Now, this is where it gets tricky, so take a deep breath before reading the next bit.
The Romans not only counted backwards from the next key date; they counted inclusively.
So 24 January would be – as I’ve given it in the text, rather tongue-in-cheek because I’m sure that mathematicians will jump on it as a mistake – nine (not eight) days before the Kalends of February.
Except when …
The system breaks down for the day immediately before a key date; so if it had existed, the Roman Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) would’ve been ‘the day before the Kalends of January’, while 30 December would be ‘three days before the Kalends’.
No such thing as ‘two days before’, you see …
I trust that’s all perfectly clear. You can now indulge in hours of innocent amusement working out the birthdays of your loved ones, pets and so on by Roman reckoning. Have fun.
I hope you enjoyed the book.
David Wishart