Into the forest, at a time appointed by auguries of the Fathers, and in ancient terror of the sacred, ambassadors of the people, both of their name and of their blood, assemble, and in the public hewing down of a man, they celebrate their barbarous rites, horrible and primordial.
Stato tempore in silvam auguriis patrum et prisca formidine sacram nominis eiusdemque sanguinis populi legationibus coeunt caesoque publice homine celebrant barbari ritus horrendaprimordia.
Tacitus, On the Origin and Disposition of the Germans, XXXIX, 2.
Anne Johnson, in her highly detailed and well researched book “Roman Forts” (1983), provides us with a convenient and useful list of literary sources on ancient Roman fortifications, known in Latin as castra . The most familiar of these sources are the widely known works of Julius Caesar on his various military campaigns of the middle of the 1st century BC, the Jewish War by Josephus, and the 6th book of Polybius’ Histories. Caesar talks of camps, fortifications, sieges, and tactics throughout. Josephus remarks on castra in the context of the Jewish Wars during the Flavian dynasty (70s AD), most likely with regards to the sieges of Masada and Jerusalem. Polybius is noted for describing a ‘marching camp’ of the 3rd c. BC.
Less well known, but perhaps more illuminatingly detailed, are the following ancient sources:
Hygenius Gromaticus, de munitionibus castrorum.
Flavius Vegetius Renatus, epitoma rei militaris.
Flavius Arrianus, Tactica.
According to Johnson (3), Hygenius, describes the model auxiliary camp, its construction and siting for a variety of different unit types. Hygenius was believed to have written during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Of the three books, this is the most obscure and of poor availability, even within research libraries. There is, however, a new (2018) English translation available by a Duncan Campbell, but I do not know anything further about the material.
The second major detailed source is Vegetius, dated from the late 4th or early 5th century. Vegetius deals with legionary as opposed to auxiliary camps, and “provides a wealth of detail about the organisation and tactics of the legions, and also deals with the duties of the various ranks of officers, the selection and building of camps, and the training of recruits.” (4)
Finally we come to Arrianus who wrote a manual on cavalry and their training. For anyone seeking ancient literary sources on Roman military camp life, this brief list should provide a good place to start one’s research.
Works Cited: Johnson, Anne. Roman Forts of the 1st and 2nd Centuries AD in Britain and the German Provinces. Adam & Charles Black. London: 1983.
Of spectacles [they have] but a singular kind and at every gathering the same: naked youths, for whom it is a sport, hurl themselves a-leaping, amidst swords and threatening spears. Training procures skill; skill, grace. It is not so much for profit or pay, however much the audacity of the sportsmanship, [rather] the reward is the satisfaction of the spectators.
Genus spectaculorum unum atque in omni coetu idem: nudi juvenes, quibus id ludicrum est, inter gladios se atque infestas frameas saltu iaciunt. exercitatio artem paravit, ars decorem, non in quaestum tamen est aut mercedem: quamvis audacis lasciviae pretium est voluptas spectantium.
Tacitus, On the Origin and Disposition of the Germans, XXIV,1-2.
Sword Dance of the Cutter’s Guild, coloured pen drawing by an unknown artist, 1600; in the German National Museum, Nürnberg. Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nurnberg
An Exploration of Trade Along the Romano-German Frontier:
Part I: Introduction and Prehistory.
People who are in despair and unhappiness, carrying out hated tasks in a grudging spirit, do not take the trouble to raise magnificent monuments or make imposing dedications; they have not the heart for it. But a large portion of the Latin Corpus–-apart from the epitaphs–-is filled with the inscriptions of merchants who made votive offerings after successful voyages, gave splendid buildings to their native cities, and set up monuments to the emperor, sometimes as private individuals, sometimes as members of a guild or a corporation.”
M. P. Charlesworth, Trade-Routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire. 2nd Ed., Rev., New York: Cooper Square Publishers. 1970. xiv.
Even before her legions began marching northwards into the forests and fens of supposedly untrammeled Europe, Rome’s merchant men had visited beyond the Alps, perhaps as far as Scandinavia and Britannia. These merchants would play a significant role in exploring, contacting, and reporting on the northern barbarian tribes, their nature, and their lands. Well before the idea of conquest had arisen in the minds of Pompey, Caesar, and other ambitious men of the Roman elite, stalwart equites, corporate concerns, and other business interests, were spreading the currency of empire in the form of coin, wine, and other luxuries. Caesar made good use of these intrepid traders’ logistical skills and geographical knowledge during his invasions of Gaul and Britain, as we shall see. Similarly, Tacitus understood how this soft power could be used to undermine traditional tribal cultures.
But difficult questions remain about the merchants themselves, either unanswered or addressed only obscurely in the literary sources. Who are these merchants, thesemercatores: are they Roman or aboriginal, or else a mixture of the two? What is their social status; how do they capitalize on their activities; and how far and by what means do they travel in order to deal in their wares? Moreover, what was the nature of their trade, and what routes did they take?
German and Celtic trade with foreign merchants, that is, with the so-called civilized world of the Mediterranean basin, surely predated the rise of a Roman power in northwestern Europe. As Roman scholar Olwen Brogan has noted, “The conception of an illimitable forest primeval stretching unbroken from the borders of the empire into the furthest recesses of barbarism is very far from the truth.” [1] The Celts, and to some extent the more northerly Germans, had been modifying their environment, building tracks and roads, cultivating land, fortifying oppida, and trading, both among themselves and with the outside world, for centuries before the Romans appeared upon the Rhine.
One important demonstration of the trade links that existed between the Classical Mediterranean Cultures and the European interior is provided by the Hochdorf grave site, a Hallstatt culture burial from the Early Iron Age, circa 530 BCE, near modern Eberdingen, part of the Black Forest state of Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany. The burial hord, likely that of a local chieftain, consists of, among other grave goods, a large iron-trimmed carriage or cart, likely to have been used in the burial ceremony, several drinking horns, and, tellingly, an oversized–500 liter capacity–Grecian cauldron of bronze. [2]
Hochdorf’s location, far distant from any Grecian ports, indicates that the connection from Western Greece extended deeply into the interior of the country. The size and the difficulty that transportation must have represented, together with the richness of the other grave goods, shows that there must have been significant wealth and/or political power on the Celtic side of the exchange as well.
The sheen of precious metals, the vibrant colors of the cloth, the magnificence of the wagon and the bronze cauldron speak vibrantly to the power and wealth of the chief who had been buried.”
(Price, Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, Oxford: OUP: 2013. 311).
The Hallstatt period was followed by the La Téne culture of the Late Iron Age of Europe, a culture that is also considered Celtic, though it was present in many areas that would later be dominated by tribes speaking Germanic languages. This period is distinguished for its large scale cooperative organizational skills, talents that were brought to bear in the habitual construction of fortified towns known as oppida, which characterize the gradual urbanization experienced during this period. These oppida are, characteristically, large defensive settlements built on hilltops, defended by ditches and timber walls, and containing zones for manufacture of tools, weapons, and pottery. These fortress villages were also used to dominate and control the junctions of trade routes, river fords, and mountain passes. [3] Such oppida ranged in size from as little as 25 to as much as 1,500 acres. [4]
While there are few visible remains of such settlements, they were numerous throughout western Europe during the pre-Imperial Roman period. Photographs from San Cibrao de Las, a second century BC oppidum located in modern Spain, may give some indication of their scale.
The introduction of Roman trade goods into these economies has been credited with expanding the pace of iron production among these settlements from as early as the 2nd century BCE. [5] Trade with the La Téne provided Mediterranean cultures with access to “salt, tin and copper, amber, wool, leather, furs, and gold.” [6]
The long distance trade network necessary to provide amber as a luxury item to the Classical world was remarked upon even in antiquity. Pliny the elder notes the product’s origin–called ‘glaesum’ by the Germans–as having been located in the islands of the Northern Ocean: “It is conveyed by the Germans mostly into the province of Pannonia. From there it was first brought into prominence by the Veneti, known to the Greeks as the Enetoi, who are close neighbours of the Pannonians and live around the Adriatic.” [7]
In his On the Origin and Disposition of the Germans, Tacitus notes popular tradition that the Germans had been visited by Hercules in the distant past. Hercules being an inveterate traveler of the ancient world, it would be surprising if he had not visited Germany in myth. Another tradition he relates includes Odysseus as a former visitor. This time, however, Tacitus references a material artifact to bolster the claim, an altar to Laertes, father of the quick-witted sailor. Tacitus also remarks that German lands are said to possess “monuments and funerary barrows with inscriptions in Greek lettering.” [8]
Tacitus has been much criticised, it often being asserted that he never visited the homelands of the people he wrote about in his Germania, and that his ethnographic work was primarily a cribbed synthesis of a now lost ethnography belonging to the hand of Pliny. The archaeology must give one pause, however, before dismissing the possibility of an ancient Greco-German connection, whatever Tacitus’ failings as an ethnographer. Archaeology shows us that during the Iron Age, before the rise of the Roman Empire, and even back into the mythic period of the Roman Kings and beyond, German lands were in contact with the southern reaches of Western Europe. The Celtic and proto-Germanic cultures that thrived there were not isolated and primitive forest dwellers as it might be believed, but were capable of mobilizing resources and populations in a coordinated manner, constructing massive fortifications, and maintaining long-distance trade networks.
[1] Olwen Brogan. “Trade between the Roman Empire and the Free Germans,” The Journal of Roman Studies, col. 26. pt. 2. 1936: 195 [2] T. Douglas Price, Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, Oxford: OUP: 2013. 307-311 [3] Price, Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, Oxford: OUP: 2013. [4] Bruce Bower. “Iron and Industry: Ancient Links.” Science News135, no. 11 (1989): 170-71. 170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3973238. [5] ibid. [6] Price, Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, Oxford: OUP: 2013. 290. [7] Pliny, Natural History, XXXVII, 42-43. [8] Tac. Germ. 3
In the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, the king of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, is notoriously killed by a boar during a royal trophy hunt. While Game of Thrones clearly draws on medieval imagery, myths, and histories to build its world, there are also many ideas and tropoi drawn from the ancient lore of the classical era. The idea of a deadly boar hunt with dreadful consequences was, in fact, a set piece in ancient literature dating all the way back to the time of Homer. The subject of ancient hunting is one that still fascinates and plays upon our imaginations. The idea of men, armed with little more than spears, their wits, and superior organization, confronting raw nature, armed of tooth and claw, is one that engages our sense of drama and fair play, even if such notions exaggerate the danger and rawness represented by the reality of these situations.
Many such stories can also be difficult for modern readers to access. The social dynamics that underlie such hunts are often invisible, poorly documented, and difficult to relate to, whereas the natural environment in terms of flora, fauna, its ruggedness in general, has been radically transformed by the modern industrial age and uncounted generations of urban living. Such dramatic changes in lifestyle and environment can make understanding the conventions that rule the ancient hunting narrative seem alien and exotic. Add to these obscurations a few thick layers of mythological allusion and technical jargon, and the result is a specialist literature, existing within an already specialized field, that few casual readers will find easy to parse.
Molossian Hound. The version is sometimes known as “Jennings Dog”. On display in the British Museum.
Few sports or activities carried the same weight and reputation for nobility as hunting did for the antique mind. Xenophon, in his essay on hunting, the Cynegetica, charges the gods Apollo and Artemis with the invention of the art of hunting as well as with the use of hounds. He goes on to describe how these arts passed from them to the pedagogic centaur, Cheiron, whom he credits with having taught the art of coursing to many numerous and well-named heroes and demigods. In the end, he concludes that hunting is a noble activity worthy of the aristocratic curriculum of noble youths: “Therefore I charge the young not to despise hunting or any other schooling. For these are the means by which men become good in war and in all things out of which must come excellence in thought and deed” (Xenophon, “On Hunting,” Scripta Minora. E. C. Marchant, trans.: I, passim, & 18. ).
Therefore I charge the young not to despise hunting or any other schooling. For these are the means by which men become good in war and in all things out of which must come excellence in thought and deed.
Xenophon, “On Hunting,” Scripta Minora. E. C. Marchant, trans.: I, 18.
Though there is no doubt about the popularity and enthusiasm with which the ancients greeted Olympic games, arena combats, and displays of horsemanship, hunting myths and stories seem to occupy their own special register within the antique canon. Such pastimes are ones to which, perhaps, the lower classes need not have paid much heed. Certainly, the need for the acquisition of specialized equipment like expensive and labor-intensive nets, leather gear, spears and weapons of all sorts, as well as specialized hunting animals such as hounds and even horses, would have put thes grand chases beyond the reach of the typical peasantry, or even the middle-classes of well-heeled land-owners. The kinds of hunting described in Xenophon and Homer was the special province of old-money, the newly rich, and their favored hangers-on.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that the impoverished hoi polloi of antiquity never hunted, only that their game and means of acquiring it were more modest than those detailed in the grand tales of kings, heroes, and their retinues. The more mundane stories didn’t make it past the cutting room floor. Ancient writers and bards knew where their bread was buttered. There was proportionally more at stake for the nobility, as well, at least from the aristocrat’s own point of view. Honor in deeds was clearly far more important in the grand scheme of things than any such vague and unlikely circumstance as starvation.
Glory, timé, was the quarry sought by ancient hunters, not base sustenance. Thus, if some wild animal could be cast as a ferocious monster gleefully frightening children, threatening livestock, and rooting around destructively in precious acreage, then, all the better. Such natural or prodigious disasters constituted a need for action and engendered the necessary endeavor, the hunt—fortuitously a means, as well, to proudly display one’s excellence, one’s areté, in defense of the thankful populace.
The famous episode of the Calydonian Boar hunt is the epitome of just such noblesse obligé in action. Featured in not just one but two of the great epic poems of antiquity, Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the tale relates just such an expedition of the aristocracy defending the land from a monsterous quarry.According to the blind poet, Artemis had sent down an evil upon the city in the form of a “fierce wild boar with the shining teeth, who after the way of his kind did much evil to the orchards of Oineus. For he ripped up whole tall trees from the ground and scattered them headlong roots and all, even to the very flowers of the orchard …” (Homer, Iliad. 9, 539-542. Lattimore trans.). Ovid’s description of the beast is even more dramatic:
… And the goddess Loosed over Calydon a great avenger, A boar as big as a bull, with blood-shot eyes, A high stiff neck, and the bristles rising from it Like spears along a wall, and hot foam flecking The shoulders, dripping from the jaws that opened With terrible grunting sounds; his tusks were long As an Indian elephant’s, and lightning flashed Out of his mouth, and his breath would burn the grasses.”
That the creature was destructive of the orchard was a fitting punishment for Oineus’ failure to appease the goddess huntress with a proper offering of his and its first fruits. Appropriately, too, Artemis would send discord to the whole polis, using the spectacle of the hunt itself, her special provenance, as its vector.
Meleager, Oineus’s son and prince of Calydon, is credited with dispatching the beast, but only after setting forth with a hunting party mustered on a military scale. Ovid provides a whole catalog of heroes invited along on the expedition. Homer warns us that the Calydonian boar had killed already: “so huge was he, and had put many men on the sad fire for burning.” (Homer, Iliad. 9, 546). The fire was a funeral pyre.
Even heroes, it seems, are subject to the stab and thrust of ivory tusks. In Ovid’s account of the battle Eupalamus and Pelagaon are knocked down and must be rescued by their companions, Enaesimus suffers worse, being hamstrung by the beast, and Hippasus is gored in the thigh. Ancaeus, ‘a man from Arcas’ is fully gored in the abdomen,”… and the ground was soaked in blood, Smeared with his entrails.”(Ovid, Metamorphoses. 8, 328ff. Rolf Humphries, trans., 192-3).
… and the ground was soaked in blood, Smeared with his entrails.
A wild boar could. in fact, be dangerous, even if the epics exaggerated the risks. Boars have long fierce tusks, and will turn and fight if threatened, more so to defend their young. All the better a vehicle, then, for the pursuit of much desired glory, and a good reason, too, for vaunting and boasting about one’s martial prowess, assuming one has, indeed, brought home the bacon. It was a dispute over honors, over who deserved the hide and head as trophy from the gigantic swine, that led to the war in Calydon, at least this is how the poets spin it. Even though Meleager had killed the beast, the recipient of the prince’s favor in the form of the hide, would be endowed with great renown. Thus, the means to the end of the creature, an assembly of “many hunting men out of numerous cities with their hounds,” also become the source of discord that completed the design of Artemis’ cruel punishment (Homer, Iliad. 9,454-45).
Homer assumed that his readers already knew the story. He reveals few details about why the Aitolians and the Kouretes have taken to “slaughtering one another about the city of Kalydon,” only that the Kouretes are laying siege to the city (cleverly mirroring the Achaean siege of Troy) and that they are warring “over the head of the boar and the bristling boar’s hide…” (Homer, Iliad. 9,530; 548). Ovid gives us more. Meleager, the prince of Calydon, having killed the beast, has given the trophies, head and hide, to the woman huntress, runner, and archer, Atalanta; her having drawn first blood. That such prizes, the very essence of timé, should have been offered to a woman, was more offence than the proud and arrogant Kouretes could bear. The result was a protracted siege lain against the prince and his people.
That a quarrel over a big game trophy could be accused of starting a full fledged war reveals the importance attached to hunting and its prizes among the ancient nobility. As a means of establishing social credibility as leaders, as a demonstration of protection provided and worthy of the allegiance of the people, as a mark for establishing social status among their peers, the hunts provided tangible evidence. Rank was everything, shame unendurable, in the aristocratic world of antiquity. These aristocratic engagements were, as time would show, remarkably stable in function, descending down from ancient times into the middle ages and beyond. In many ways these events became the forbears to the fully ritualized bloodletting of the aristocratic fox hunts, only recently banned in the United Kingdom. It is no surprise then that a boar hunt could turn the world on its head, given the stakes for which it was undertaken – it represented the very rights to rule, authority, and power. And that, readers, is no tame or dim unwary beast.
No other race is so profusely kind in feasts and entertainments. To deny a mortal shelter is considered a sin among them, and each, according to his fortune, welcomes guests with the provision of sumptuous dishes.
Convictibus et hospitiis non alia gens effusius indulget. quemcumque mortalium arcere tecto nefas habetur; pro fortuna quisque apparatis epulis excipit.
Tacitus, On the Origin and Disposition of the Germans, XXI,2.
As a long time avid reader and someone who has always prided himself on vocabulary, the study of ancient history and culture has been a humbling experience. The number of words that I didn’t know I didn’t know is staggering, and since I have begun to read as much in Greek or in Latin as in English, I now have a whole new set of languages to be surprised by.
Dictionaries proliferate.
Nowadays, I find that I am never very far from some sort of dictionary when curiosity and or ignorance strikes. This slows down my reading in terms of words per minute considerably, but also increases comprehension and interest as I let myself be swept along by the history of the words themselves. Philology; no wonder!
So, in acknowledgement of my new slower reading methods, this feature, Note Bene, is going to be about unusual or interesting words that I come across in my reading. It may be about words in other languages or words in English or words that cross over between languages. I cannot promise you will find them interesting, only that I have.
To start with I would like to use the title of this feature itself as subject: Nota Bene, or NB for short. Now, I have seen this quite a lot in academic writing, especially that of the more old fashioned variety, my special interest, but knew only that it meant ‘to note’ before looking it up properly. As some of you likely know, NB is an abbreviation for the Latin, ‘Nota Bene‘, which simply means, in English, to ‘note well,’ or as the Shorter Oxford puts it: “Mark well, observe particularly.”[1] It is also marked as “alien, or not naturalized,” [2] so perhaps more clarity might come from looking at the Latin.
The question that occurs to me is one with regard to nota itself: is it a verb, a noun, or what, exactly? Ending with an a suggests that it is a common 1st declension Latin noun—indeed nota is a Latin noun defined by Lewis & Short as, in its first definition, as “a mark, sign, note“[3]—but the English seems to be being used as if it were an imperative verb, or perhaps, as a participle. At the very least ‘good note’ seems pedantic or artificial compared to ‘(I am) noting well,’ a participle; or ‘(you) note well,’ as if an imperative verb. This supposition on my part would seem to be borne out by the fact that bene is not an adjective for good or well—that is bonus—but is, rather, an adverb.[4]
In Latin, the imperative is one of the three moods of Latin verbs, the other two being subjunctive and indicative. Looking at the Lewis and Short entry for the noun nota I found that its etymological root was from the verb nosco which, given its antique form of GNOSCO, appears itself ro be related to or cognate with the Greek γνῶσις or gnosis: knowing, knowledge.[5]
Following the verb nosco, however, proved to be a red herring when looking for the imperative form. Nosco, it turns out, is a 3rd form conjugation verb, so the imperatives would work out to be either nosce or noscite, neither of which looks much like nota. Another possibility, of course, was always the participle, which can work out to nota in either the feminine or the plural neuter form, but then either the gender or the number of the form is ill-explained. What is needed, it seems, is a 1st conjugation verb, not nosco.[6]
Fortunately I am stubborn enough to keep looking ahead for what must be, I surmise, a verb of the form noto. And sure enough, there it is. Noto itself is derived from nota which in turn had originated in nosco. Noto, the 1st conjugation verb, works out perfectly to nota in the imperative, and means appropriately “to mark, or designate with a mark.” [7] So mark it well, this is the origin of the designation NB or N.B. in antique academic books.
Now, what was it about 1721 that led to this notation being used in English?…
[1] Little, Fowler, and Coulson.”Nota bene.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press: 1968. [2] Ibid. [3] Charleton Lewis. “nota.” A Latin Dictionary: Lewis and Short, 1st ed. Oxford University Press: 1879; 1993. [4] Ibid., “bene.” [5] Franco Montanari. “γνῶσις.” The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, 1st ed. Brill: 2015. [6] Robert Henle. Latin: Grammar. Layola Press: 1958. [7] Lewis. “noto”.
Mundus Patet 