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Daily Life in Ancient Rome

Yesterday I walked down the Yonge-Bloor subway platform, trying not to dance to Frank Sinatra crooning “Fly Me to the Moon” in my ears. I was headed for a long red bench, where a seventeen year old boy was looking at the Toronto Sun. When he saw me coming, he quickly closed the paper. I thought it was because he was gawping at the Sunshine Girl (Mandy, 23, from Whitby) and I snorted to myself, because I am 78 years old, as I sat down.

I took out Daily Life in Ancient Rome and began reading, unable to stop my feet from flying, just a little bit. Then, during a pause in the music, I heard muttering. In Toronto, a seventeen year old kid is as likely to be a crackpot as he is to be reading Nietzsche on the subway - which I also saw yesterday - so I shushed Frank in order to listen more closely. (I kept my headphones on. People think you’re temporarily deaf if you’re wearing headphones.)

He was saying, in a very low voice, “When . . . word . . . got out all the . . . tur . . . keys . . . had been . . . sna . . . snap . . . snapped up . . . one . . . dis . . . dis . . . disgrumb . . . gruntled man . . . waiting in line began to . . . shout loudly . . . ‘What about us? What about us?’ to . . . no . . . bo . . . body in part . . . ic . . . ular.”

He was learning to read. This teenage boy, tall and menacing, dressed in expensive sneakers and in the latest street boy fashions, was sitting on a red bench in the middle of the most frequented subway platform in Toronto and he was practicing his reading. I threw myself across the bench and sobbed into his shoulder that he was one of the bravest kids I’d ever come across, and he should be so proud of himself for all the hard work he was doing while he patted me awkwardly on the shoulder and hoped I’d go away soon.

Okay, no. I didn’t. But I really really wanted to.

I’ve been curious about Rome for a long time. I’ve been hearing about the gladiators and the Roman Colosseum and the Bacchanalian orgies and the comparison to America since elementary school. But it wasn’t until America reached what I fear will be the apex of its collective sanity and then started down the steep hill to complete dementia that I began actively searching for what the hell happened to those people in the tunics and the swords.

To begin with, they were constantly at war. There was no patriotism, there were no protests - being for or against war would have been like having an opinion on breathing. You went to war and you took over other people’s land and enslaved the citizens and enlarged your empire because…well, for crying out loud, what ELSE are you going to do all summer?

But before the war, they made sure to consult the augurs to find out if it would be a good time to pillage. Despite their relative sophistication, the Romans were deeply, weirdly superstitious.

For military campaigns, the auguers had elaborated a special system for examining the auspices, which involved sacred chickens. On the morning of battle, they looked to see if the chickens were eating properly, letting food drop from their beaks. If they were, then the auspices were deemed favourable. If they were not, it was best to avoid engaging in combat. During the First Punic War, the chickens of Publius Claudius Pulcher, commander of the fleet, had no appetite - perhaps they did not like being at sea. In his fury, the commander threw them overboard, yelling, “If they won’t eat, let them drink!” After losing the battle, the people comdemned him. It was felt that his impiety had brought about the death of many citizens.

As summer turned to fall, the Romans usually headed home. The winter was too cold for living in tents, so they tromped back to their homes and reaped the benefits of the farms their slaves had worked for the past three months and gave lots of dinner parties. In fact, if you just think of the Roman nobility as exactly equivilent to the British aristocracy, circa 1925, you’d be right on track.

Woman on the bus, gazing at her two sons.