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XIII. OSTIA INN
"Hurry!" says a familiar voice, and you blink twice before suddenly sitting up. This has got to be the most uncomfortable object you have ever slept on, and already your body feels entirely wrong. It’s night, and you panic, until a light flickers nearby. You nearly jump out of your skin. A stranger’s face hovers over you, transfigured like a goblin by the flickering tallow of a tiny oil lamp. Then you hear the voice. "Get up, because our time here is limited."
Everything smells different, feels different, is different. You rise from the sweaty pallet, brushing aside fleas that make your skin itch. As you set your naked feet on the stone floor, you hear a crackling noise, and realize the ball of your left foot just crushed a fat, juicy cockroach. "Oh God," you groan, "where am I?"
"Ostia in the Year 285," says the unmistakeable voice of Professor Darwin. "Come, we only have a short while, so let’s not waste time."
As you sit up, yawning, you realize that the impossible is really, really true. You have traveled back in time. Your journey in ancient Rome has truly begun. Which is the first shock? That there is no light switch? Here is your next introduction to the hardships of the good old days. Without matches, you’d have to find a flint of some sort to strike sparks into kindling, or perhaps run downstairs to the kitchen in the hope of finding a few embers still glowing in the hotel’s fornus. There is always one small oil lamp glowing, and you can light as many like it as you wish—each adds a tiny guttering flicker of light in the overpowering gloom. Several of these little reddish clay lamps hang high up, so you won’t bump your head, and their clumsily molded features add to the spookiness: one represents a goddess blessing flowers; another a formidable gladiator in armor with sword, helmet, and shield; and a third a Priapus with a huge penis from whose os the flame gutters. Already, a part of you wonders when it will be time to go home. Be brave, you tell yourself. Every traveler feels a little fear in a strange new place—you’ll get over it soon enough (you hope).
You walk to a window glowing faintly before your eyes. It is of rice paper in a wooden frame. You push it open, and inhale the night air with its jasmin and apple blossoms. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. You look out over the rectangular and cube shapes of buildings rising up a hill. You look out upon the long, factory-like warehouses along the wharves, where wine and grain and a thousand other goods are imported from around the world.
Speaking of this world, here and now, the full moon rides like a ripe orange amid light-yellow clouds, and the sea glitters with a million tiny waves. Galleys rest at anchor with their sails furled and their oars standing upright like rows of picket fences. Perhaps a fat watchman and his dog sit through the night on deck, while the sailors are off carousing in the tabernae (taverns) of Ostia, or across the Tiber in more modern Portus (‘the port,’ not the ancient one on the Tiber, in Rome itself, but the later port of Trajan sprawling on the Tyrrhenian coast, across the Tiber mouth from Ostia). The watchman is a slave, of course. In this world, at least a third of the inhabitants are owned by someone else. You have never met a living slave, but you are about to walk abroad in a world that thinks nothing of humans being the property of others. If slaves run away, they can be hunted down and punished, perhaps even killed. You can’t get your mind around the thought. It’s an abstraction, something you have read about in books, but not something real. Reality seems turned on its head here in so many ways. You pinch yourself to make sure it’s not a dream. Someone else’s body reacts with a twinge of pain. Of course! You couldn’t bring your own body, which lies peacefully slumbering in some cavern guarded by brigands and witches near 21st Century Lake Nemi. Transporting your actual body here might spread some deadly disease to which you are immune, but the people here could be helpless to resist; or vice versa.
"Where is Amalthea?" you ask.
The Professor is situated in a large, robust body much like his real one, only this one looks as if it’s healthy and pain-free. He says: "She’s run ahead on some errands. We’ll meet up with her later in the city. I have hired a guide for us, though. Are you ready to go?"
"I suppose so." You would be content to stand for another hour, staring at the beautiful panorama that lies before you. It’s odd, how familiar it all looks, and yet how alien. It’s almost as if two realities were strobing on and off cross-grain to each other. Each glimpse makes you shiver and catch your breath. The warehouses resemble factories, but you remember they didn’t have industrialization, but depended virtually 100% on slave labor to get things done. No factories here, just warehouses and repair shops. Also, those figures on the cornices and pediments of those long buildings, gods and goddesses—they aren’t just a polite ornament like in Victorian times. Those are the real deities to which everyone going through the warehouse gates prays, for real.
It’s been remarked that the Romans were incredibly modern in some ways, so close to us in so many ways, and yet when you reach out to understand their society, they can suddenly seem distractingly alien. At some moments it’s like looking at a parallel civilization to ours, and at other moments it’s as though you have discovered a major, hitherto unknown continent on which thrives a civilization that has hallmarks of European and Asian cultures and yet is profoundly different in some details. Modern people for centuries have studied the Romans’ ruins, their writings, their history, and every time you think you understand them, that comprehension seems to slip away from your grasp
The truth is, the ancient Romans lived not only in a foreign country, as one might expect in journeying someplace many thousands of miles from home. They lived in a foreign time and a foreign culture. It’s a much farther trip from here to Rome during the early imperial years than the 10,500 miles between modern day New York and Melbourne, or the 12,000 miles between Shanghai and Buenos Aires.
No, they didn’t disappear because they had too much sex or ate too much. Those are the long-discredited misinformation of biased, primitive societies that sprang up in the ruins of the once-great cosmopolitan empire. The very fact that the ancient Romans lasted for over 1,200 years ought to suggest that they were doing more things right than they were doing wrong. What killed off the great Imperium? Inflation, for one thing. Same kind of thing that gives today’s Fed Chairman sleepless nights. The Romans understood something was wrong when the value of their money kept dropping relative to the price of products in their economy, but they didn’t have a chance to study the Dismal Science (Economics) and so did a whole bunch of things wrong, like water down their coinage with less gold and more base metals, to no real avail. What else brought the ancient Romans down after all those centuries? A huge bureaucracy; a huge military to constantly fight wars all over the edges of an empire covering most of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia; inefficient tax collection (guy comes to your house at 3:00 a.m. with a sword and says "Gimme all you got or else!"); lead in the water pipes leading to idiocy and people with two heads...there isn’t a simple answer. If you could ask a Diocletian or a Constantine, they might just tell you: "Got too big, too old, too tired." (And yet this world wonder survived yet another 1,000 years in the east, the Byzantine Empire.)
"Move it," Darwin says harshly but kindly. "We are going to take a trip to Rome, you’re going to enjoy yourselves, and you’ll be home to tell all about it. Sorry, no souvenirs."
"So who am I in this time zone?" you ask, looking about for a jacket. Instead, you find a wool cloak on the torn and dirty sack of straw stretched over a rigid and awkward wooden bed without springs. You can’t tell the cloak’s colors in the faint, flickering light whose yellow tongues flicker on the plain plaster walls.
Darwin explains that you’ll be temporarily housed in the body of a healthy 30-year old male with good walking shoes named Caius—his friends call him Meteor—who speaks fluent Latin. He should—he was born near the left bank of the Tiber and works as a bookkeeper in a grain warehouse in Ostia, Rome’s port city to the Tiber and thence to the Med. Boring job. Nice chap. In his spare time he makes a few denarii lending his body to us, and he gets to nod off somewhere in the back of his head for 24 hours while getting paid. Call it sleeping on the job. To hear him tell it, that’s what he does anyway with his styli and wax tablets all day at the Manilius Grain Company. Take good care of his body—he has a wife, two boys, and one elderly slave woman to look after and he can’t afford to have you wrench a leg or sit on broken glass or get thoroughly smashed in one of those roadside taverns and wind up in the slammer, or any of the other dumb things tourists do while away from home.
"And you?" you ask the stranger who stands before you.
Darwin looks a bit guilty, or sad, or both. "His name was Drusus, and he was condemned to die in the arena. Don’t ask me how he was chosen—Amalthea wouldn’t tell me. I don’t suppose it matters, because he would have been dead already. Not only that, but he suffers from high blood pressure, piles, and halitosis, so I might not last too long in this rack anyway. Let’s go, move on before I start to cry."
He shooshes you along with a wave of his hand. You feel your way down a steep flight of stairs so narrow you need to turn sideways. The wooden stairs creak loudly, and someone throws a shoe. Someone else curses violently in a mix of Latin, Greek, and Egyptian, and a woman starts crying. It sounds as if she cries every time the man yells, and you wish they could get counseling.
You are glad to step out on the uneven cobblestones of a little alley that passes for a street. You are to meet your local guide, Asconius, who, like Meteor, is moonlighting. Asconius, however, is a slave. A small, dark-haired man in a toga that’s maybe two sizes too big, Asconius is a pedagogue, sort of teacher meets nanny, and his job is to walk the two sons of his upper middle class owner, a buyer and seller of real estate, to and from school. Now if the owner were wealthier, he’d own the teacher. Instead, he rents Asconius (who is Greek by birth, like many pedagogues, and has a reasonable grasp of writing and the Classics). Asconius walks the boys to a small stall near the Baths of Caracalla; there, a rather mean little bearded teacher with a mean stick teaches them the basics they need to know so they can sound intelligent: grammar, rhetoric, Greek, logic, that whole ball of wax. Asconius hovers nearby, listening to the lecture, and takes the boys home where, after their nap and a snack, he helps them with their homework. Asconius, by the way, is lucky. He’s got a wife and a daughter, and he looks forward to the day of his manumission (manus, ‘hand’ + mittere, ‘send’)—when his owner will bless him and his family and set them free with a small gift of money, to join the growing stream of freedmen on the Roman streets. It’s been estimated that, by the late empire today, 285 A.D. (same as A. D., kind of, minus the sectarian slant), something like seven out of eight persons walking the streets in Rome either are slaves, are ex-slaves, or have ancestors who had been slaves.
Clever system, in a way—carrot and the stick, very effective. Harsh and cruel as the Roman system was, they had their bad experiences with slave revolts early on and learned you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. The sight of between 26,000 and 40,000 crucified slave warriors of Spartacus stretching along the Appian Way told them there had to be an easier way of doing things. If the slaves never forgot the lesson of Spartacus, neither did the Romans. Their legal system became filled with special punishments and protections for slaves. Sometimes, by your standards, it didn’t amount to much, but it’s the thought that counts. So, if you came from Britain or Africa or Russia or Germany or India or Arabia or...well, you get the idea—this was one huge whale of an empire—chances were you didn’t have it good where you came from, and so you were willing to tolerate being a pedagogue or a doctor or a lawyer (yes, slaves could do all those things) in return for the near certain reward of eventually becoming not only a freedman but also a Roman citizen. Often it was a cushier life than that of most freeborn men. That’s one reason why Asconius doesn’t load his wife and child into the next bireme (giant rowboat with sail and two banks of slave oarsmen on either side) and head back to Athens. His parents, both free Greeks living in squalor, sold him to a Roman merchant when he was a small child, and he has no idea who they were or how to find them. His story is fairly common. Far less lucky are the ones who are sold into the mines (lifespan: weeks, months) or onto the great plantations (latifundia), where they sleep in prison barracks at night and work chained seven days a week in the hot sun from dawn to dusk until they drop (lifespan: a year or two, at a guess). Another fate to be avoided is service as a galley slave, rowing away by day and by night in storms or hot or cold weather, always with the lash at one’s back—you’ve seen the movie, so why go on? Of course no movie depicts the fate of those slaves who spent all day with a sponge on a stick, taking care of customers in the public toilets where nobody has heard of toilet paper—don’t ask. Also unlucky are the ones who join a steady stream of criminals flowing into the empire’s great fighting arenas, where they become mincemeat at the hands of specialist gladiators as a sideshow between real combats. Or they get eaten by exotic animals like crocodiles while forced to read poems for the taunting crowd’s amusement. Or they are forced to fight in fake sea battles on real battleships when the arena is flooded for that purpose—and perhaps die in a flaming shipwreck within sight of the nearest Roman equivalent of a hot dog stand. One's lifespan under such circumstances: minutes if you commit suicide in the underground holding area by slicing your wrists with a castoff piece of metal; seconds, if you freeze up and forget how to fight once you get out on the sand before a 300 pound guy named Horror who isn’t wearing a mask—after you blink and look several times,you realize that is his real face.
Here in 285 A.D. Ostia, you stand on a quiet side country road on a night of the full moon, and for a few moments it almost seems as if you could be anywhere in Mediterranean Europe or Southern California of your time . This is really where the fun begins. Throw your textbook over the hedge. This is all different.
As you wait for Asconius to arrive, you are a bit apprehensive. Suddenly visiting ancient Rome doesn’t seem so tame anymore. This is serious business, and you sense the awesome power of the state and the society all around you. For one thing, you get a sense of how huge is this thing we’ve stepped into. Picture a clock overlaid on a map of the ancient world, with Rome at the center. Mickey’s big hand, moving counter-clockwise around the empire at its height of 285 A.D., points north to western Germany, northwest to Britain and Scotland, west to Spain, southwest to today’s Morocco, south across all of North Africa, southeast and east through all of Arabia and Judea, and northeast to today’s Turkey, the Balkans including Greece and Macedonia, and most of those former Soviet states around the Black Sea.
About this time, the population of the Roman Empire is 40 to 100 million, versus maybe 10 million for the rest of Europe consisting of Germany east of the Rhine and Russia, compared to China’s 50 million about this same time. You also have a fairly good idea today how those millions of Roman subjects were distributed with about 7.5 million in Italy, five million in Egypt, six million in Turkey, eight million in Gaul (today’s France, Benelux, and Switzerland), and maybe one mil in Britain. Compare that with today’s European Union, which has approaching 400 million sardines, or the U.S.A. with about 300 million, and you get the idea that the world was less tromped on. That’s not quite correct, because it’s been estimated that ancient smelters and coal burners like the Etruscans and the Romans produced enough pollution to keep Europe under a permanent layer of smog from one end to the other for centuries, as witnessed from sooty soil layers.
You’re also feeling overwhelmed because not only are you long from home (as opposed to far from home) but this entity, Rome, spans over a thousand years in the west. It lasts another thousand years for the Byzantines in the east, but that’s for another journey, another day. That’s a long time period, and that means a lot of different political movements, ladies’ hairstyles, shifts in how people ate and drank and thought and spoke, and how they fought. For example, the original Romans of the Republic (519-46 B.C.) were mainly foot soldiers led by a few guys on horses. When the call went out "Hey, we’re having a war, everyone come!" then everyone showed up pretty much with whatever he had to wear. If you had a horse, you were a noble—hence your word ‘equestrian’ for someone with bucks (moneta). In the 21st Century if you have an expensive sports car, it’s about the same status thing. Most of the real fighting was done by the famed Roman infantryman wielding a short sword and a large shield. The Romans also disdained anyone wearing trousers—a barbarian custom—and yet, in the late Empire, the primary fighting is done by foreign mercenaries on horseback wearing—you guessed it—pants instead of skirts. You see that one of the reasons the Romans lasted so long was their adaptability, though they resisted wearing those trousers until the bitter end.
"Barbarian" was a word coined by the ancient Greeks and used by the Romans to describe foreigners, particularly those wearing trousers. If you came from somewhere beyond the hills and spoke in a funny language, the Romans thought you were saying "barbarbarbar" or some such nonsense, and hence you were called a barbar-ian. That’s kind of as if we, today, called furriners "blah- blah-blah-ians" or worse yet, yadda-yaddans. Of course that story isn’t much different than why modern-day yadda-yaddans are called babblers. That comes from the Biblical story (Genesis 11:1-9) of Babylon or Babel, an ancient city in modern-day Iraq, then one of the greatest cities in the world; God allegedly smote the inhabitants with a plague of linguistic diversity (‘babbling’) so that they couldn’t understand each other. You wonder why this was necessary, since people speaking the same language often don’t understand each other, but then you’re not acting as a marriage counselor on this trip, and we move on.
At least one more reason to feel uncomfortable as you wait for Asconius: It’s all so strange here, and that’s a feeling you’re going to have throughout this trip. If you’ve done a lot of traveling, you’ll know the hazards of being in strange and distant cultures without knowing all the rules. This is a society in which a large number of persons are slaves. People here tend to have shorter and far harsher lives than First World people do in the 21st Century. In 1900 A.D. the average citizen of the United States had a life expectancy of 48.5 years as opposed to more than 76 years in your lifetimes in the 21st Century. Maybe the moderns of 1900 are closer culturally to the Romans of 300 A.D. than to us.
Waiting for Asconius, you sort through impressions. Visibly missing are automobiles. You feel at home with the high garden wall, the overhanging willow trees, the olive trees and cypresses rearing up in the garden. The full moon shines down on the red clay roofs of the villa where you wait, and you are struck by many little touches like Spanish-style roof tiles. You smell flowering night jasmin, lavender, and other herbs. Amid the strangeness of your surroundings, you get a feeling of home particularly when you catch an occasional whiff of lush grass growing by a roadside ditch, or clumps of wild wheat growing on the low, rolling hillsides. You catch the piney bite of the blue juniper and the Italian cypress. For a moment, it almost seems as if you are home. Then, in the next moment, you hear a crash of dishes from a kitchen, the laughter of slaves speaking Latin or Greek or Teutonic or Keltic, or they could be Africans, Spaniards, Arabs, any of a thousand vassal peoples living within the world’s largest empire. You hear the whinny of horses in the barn and hear the clatter of their hooves muffled on straw, a reminder that you are visiting a time before the automobile. That whinny, by the way, is also a pungent reminder of the authority of the dominus, or lord, of this domus, or house. To give you an idea of the man’s power—sorry, women had none, officially anyway—the father of the household had virtually absolute right over life and death of his family members including slaves and servants. He had the right, furthermore, to expose (abandon) unwanted children, and this seems to have been a fairly common practice in the Republic—leaving your unwanted child in a field near the house to be snatched up by some passing fox or wolf (possibly human). Just when you think you can reach out and touch someone, you find that they are—well, aliens.
So you get the idea—Rome at its height commanded an empire of about two million square miles (two thirds the size of the lower 48 United States), with a third of the world’s population, and it lasted a thousand years (that’s just the part in the west, the other part, cranked merrily on for another millennium). It’s huge. You’re just going to be able to dip a toe in the water. Think of it this way. Put the sandal on the other foot. Say some chap named Caius came to the your modern country in twenty-something and you had him waiting in a driveway behind a condominium down the street from where you live. He doesn’t speak the lingo, he doesn’t know how to make change or order a Big Guzzle or hail a taxi, and he’s terrified. He’s never worn pants and he has a rash from boxer shorts. He has just hours in which to get a meaningful impression of your whole big civilization before returning to his toga. He could be arrested on suspicion of selling drugs, or shot by gang members, or run over by a beer truck. He’d find no garum. Now that’s a major blow, because one cannot be Roman without soaking their food in this stuff.
Garum is fish sauce, which the Romans put on everything. If you’re Asian, you probably put something similar to the Vietnamese nuoc mam on everything, so you’ll understand. Garum came in many varieties, but it was basically made by fermenting rotting fish parts in a mix of olive oil, vinegar, and spices, like garlic, until it reached the desired potency. With a lot of pepper, that could be enough to burn the roof of your mouth and make your cold go away. Put that on your dormouse and blow on it.
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