Caroline Lawrence
Showing posts with label Caroline Lawrence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caroline Lawrence. Show all posts

What to Bring to a Saturnalia Feast

Our Saturnalia host, Steve Cockings
by Caroline Lawrence

For many years, my motive for studying Classics and writing historical fiction has been an intense desire to know what it would really have been like in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. So when I was invited to a Saturnalia banquet in Bedford around this time last year, I jumped at the chance. 

Steve Cockings is a re-enactor who loves to collect real and replica artefacts. He is a stickler for detail and has read several early drafts of my books, always coming back with valuable corrections.

Alisa, Simon, Caroline and Elizabeth

Alisa fights in many countries
There were five of us in all. Steve, his wife, gladiatrix Alisa and her husband Simon, also a re-enactor. We all dressed up in Roman garb. Although we didn't recline and there were no frescoes on the walls, we ate recipes from Apicius off real Samian plates with antique Roman spoons to the flickering light of oil-lamps. Roman music played softly in the background and Steve had prepared Saturnalia gifts for each of us: epigrams of the poet Martial, translated into English, written on papyrus, wrapped around a candle and tied with a thin strip of red-dyed leather.  

hard boiled eggs in sauce
The three course meal consisted of:
1) Gustatio (Starter)
• Hard boiled eggs in a sauce of honey, fish sauce, ground pepper, celery seed and chopped almonds.
2) Mensa Prima (Main Course)
• Chicken in Thyme (chicken, ground pepper, thyme, cumin, fennel, mint, rosemary, wine vinegar chopped dates, honey and olive oil)
• Leeks with Celery in a pepper honey sauce.  
• Mushrooms with a Rich Sauce of honey, olive oil, ground pepper and celery seed.
3) Mensa Secunda (Dessert)
• Poached Pears in a sauce of cinnamon, cumin, honey, sweet white wine, olive oil, egg yolks and nutmeg
• Walnut Cake
• Figs, grapes and apples

pears poached in sauce of honey, wine, olive oil and spices

The experience was illuminating in many ways. 

I saw what felt right. 

I saw what was very un-Roman.

I saw what might have been improved. 

It is traditional to give gifts on the Saturnalia. Next time I attend such a dinner I’ll know what gifts to bring. 

a thirsty bronze double-flame oil-lamp
I. Olive oil 
Oil-lamps guzzle oil and need to be refilled fairly often. I took one of my own replica oil-lamps one with a chariot design bought from the British Museum gift shop perhaps a decade ago. I had a piece of twine in it but Steve said it should be plaited linen. The thicker the wick, the brighter the flame. At one point I tried to ‘trim the wick’ with a tiny pair of real Roman tweezers and sent a shower of angry embers onto the linen tablecloth. 

linen wicks
II. Linen wicks
I should have brought some proper linen wicks. You can order them on Amazon, mainly in cotton. They are intended for use with kerosene lamps. 

III. A fan 
Every time a wick was replaced or oil replenished I got a lungful of smoke. A papyrus or silk fan would have discreetly dispersed the offending miasma.  

A loom woven linen napkin from Naples
IV. A napkin
Even using my dual-purpose Roman spoon (one end pointy, one end spoonish), my fingers quickly became very sticky. Most ancient Romans carried a napkin down the front of their tunics. This multi-purpose item can be spread over your clothes to avoid stains, used to wipe mouth and fingers, as a handkerchief for a runny nose and as a personal doggy bag. 

real and replica glass vessels
V. Wine
You need wine to wash down those strange Roman dishes. I bought the cheapest, blackest wine I could find: a £4 bottle of Australian Shiraz from my local Co-op. It was fabulous. 

VI. A replica beaker or jug  
In Roman times it was considered barbaric to drink wine neat. What with watering down the wine, you need as many beakers and jugs as possible. 

Saturnalia scene from The Roman Mysteries TV series
VII. Pillei 
Professor Llewelyn Morgan, an illustrious Oxford Latinist, saw my tweets and asked, ‘Where are your pillei?!’ And he’s right. We should be wearing the conical hats that show we are free from the usual restrictions. A real pilleum would have been made of coloured wool or felt. For a cheap one buy a Santa hat at Poundland and take off the fake fur trim. After all, the origin of Santa hats are the Saturnalia. 

clay figurines of girls dicing
VIII. Dice
I should have brought dice. They can make everything fun. Roll the dice to see who gets the real Samian ware plate. Roll the dice to see who gets the antique Roman spoon. Roll the dice to see who gets the last poached pear in a sauce of honey, cinnamon and olive oil. 

CD of Roman Music
IX. Music
Ideally a live performance of lyre, tambourine, pan-pipes and aulos. But re-imagined Roman music will do nicely. Our host was playing the very well-researched CD Musica Romana Pugnate on a vintage boom box hidden behind a tapestry. But you could play tunes curated by Armand D'Angour as well, easily found on YouTube. 

X. Epigrams of Martial 
It is my personal theory that these were the origins of the mottoes in Christmas crackers. A little two-line poem that also served as a gift tag. Ideally on papyrus in both Latin and English.

Epigram of Martial on papyrus

And speaking of Martial, here is one of his Saturnalia poems: 

Unctis falciferi senis diebus
regnator quibus imperat fritillus
versu ludere non laborioso
permittis, puto, pilleata Roma. 

In these well-oiled days of scythe-bearing Saturn
When the dice box is king of all
I pray that all you cap-wearing Romans
Will permit me some playful poems... 

(Martial XI.6)
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Weaving Women's Stories

by Caroline Lawrence
I was going to post a different blog but have just been listening to a brilliant podcast for Classics Confidential. It was specially produced in honour of the Being Human Festival and in particular two events centred around ancient weaving: a poetry performance next Friday 16 November and a hands-on weaving workshop on Saturday 17 November 2018. 


Jessica Hughes with her book on Votives
Jessica Hughes the host of Classics Confidential starts out by interviewing Dr Emma Bridges (Institute of Classical Studies) who talks about the links we still make between weaving and storytelling in phrases such as ‘spinning a yarn’ and ‘weaving a tale’. The word texta, woven, gives us the word text. The ancient sources also used metaphors of weaving. For example, Odysseus ‘weaves a scheme’ in Homer’s Odyssey. 

Dr Ursula Rothe from the Open University talks about the different fabrics they used: wool, linen, cotton and silk, (which was a very expensive – and decadent – prestige product.) Camel hair and goat hair were used for bags and sacks and we know of felt workshops in Pompeii. 


Replica loom at Fishbourne Roman Villa
Because textiles were handmade – involving hundreds of thousands of hours of work – they were precious in both senses of the word. For many poor people their clothing would be the most expensive things they owned. This is why we have so many accounts of textiles being stolen, disappearing from baths and even being handed down in wills. (Many curse tablets are directed against the person or persons who stole a cloak, because this often served as a blanket as well as an article of clothing and could mean the difference between life and death.) 

Professor Mary Harlow from the University of Leicester is a Roman historian who specialises in textile production. Her own warp-weighted loom will be one of the focal points of the Being Human Weaving Women’s Stories performance and activity day. Mary started out dutifully researching all the literary and visual sources but it wasn’t until she went to Denmark to work at the Centre for Textile Research that she had a revelation about ancient textiles. ‘I had to rethink the whole process from the beginning,’ she says. ‘And in so doing I’ve also become a practitioner. I’m an avid hand-spinner and addicted to natural plant dyes… And most recently I’ve begun to learn to weave on a warp-weighted loom.’ One of her revelations was that the finished garment must have already been in someone’s head, because every stage is geared to the specific product. 


naturally dyed wool from Butser Iron Age Farm
‘Now I’ve started weaving,’ adds Mary, ‘the other thing I have begun to understand is the amount of inherent mathematics it takes to set up a loom…’ 

Almost all the ancient textiles we have are woven rather than embroidered. Weaving on a loom requires a huge amount of skill. When Mary considered the amount of mathematics involved, it led her to see the ancient texts in another way. ‘Philosophers use odds and evens to talk about the way the cosmos is developed… just like a warp-weighted loom.’ 


A warp-weighted loom at Butser Iron Age Farm
Mary mentions a friend of hers, the scholar Magdalena Öhrman, who is doing research on the sound a loom makes and the way the cadences of Ovid’s poetry possibly imitate this sound. 

Textile production was embedded in the ancient world. Everybody knew something about it and could use that knowledge. It would have been built in to everybody’s experience. ‘It’s a shame textile production is still not considered one of the very big themes of ancient history,’ concludes Mary, ‘because it feeds in to so much more.’ 

There are many other great revelations in the podcast. 


Penelope and her Suitors by J.W. Waterhouse (1912)
• Emma Bridges (again) shows how male poets like Homer and Ovid portray women who weave and also how the story of Penelope has been retold in more modern times. Emma points out that the loom provides a medium for women to express themselves when they are repeatedly silenced by men, e.g. the way Penelope is twice silenced by her son Telemachus in the Odyssey. Circe and Calypso both sing at the loom but Penelope is silent. So is Philomela, who is raped and then silenced by her abuser. Ovid has her ‘tell’ her story in her weaving. 

Emma talks about Waterhouse’s 1912 painting of Penelope and her Suitors and also an extraordinary art installation by Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass called Penelope. 
drawing of the Penelope-painter's name-vase

• Ellie Mackin Roberts (Royal Holloway, University of London) talks about the arrephorroi (the group of very young girls who lived on the acropolis for a year and wove a peplos for Athena’s statue) and what their sensory experience would have been. For example these girls of perhaps seven or eight might have been asked to card the wool. This would have made their hands greasy with lanolin this would have made washing at the end of the day a different experience than usual. 


Scene from Penelope (2009) by Ben Ferris
• Ben Ferris (Sydney Film School) talks about his 2009 feature film, Penelope, a fantastical treatment of Homer's tale of Penelope, depicting her psychological struggle as she waits twenty years for her husband to return from the Trojan War. 

• Anna Fisk (University of Glasgow) is a knitting practitioner and academic researcher in contemporary craft practices and implicit religion. One of her observations is that some women find knitting almost like entering into a prayerful state.

To hear the whole podcast either subscribe to Classics Confidential or listen on SoundCloud HERE. 

A performance of women reading original poetry inspired by weaving will take place on Friday 16 November 2018 and on the following Saturday there will be weaving workshops.  The afternoon session is sold-out but the morning drop in is free. 
I don’t usually emerge from my writer’s lair on dark winter nights but I’m making an exception for this and I am sure it will be worth it. I hope to see you there! 
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Writing Londinium with the Seven Senses

Trying a garland made by Patty Baker (Kent)
by Caroline Lawrence

[This is a shortened and edited amalgam of two papers I gave in early-October 2018, one for the University of Kent and one for a conference called Sensory Experience in Rome's Northern Provinces hosted by the Roman Society at Senate House in London. Go to #SERNP2018 to see lots more about this]

Archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones, a visiting fellow at Newcastle University recently said, ‘It wasn’t until I wrote a book from the point of view of a Romano-British woman that I started to think about things like where did she keep her house key?’  


This is what I have discovered. As I write characters who have adventures in the ancient world, I have to imagine them moving through space with the sights, sounds, smells, and all other sensory experiences in order make it seem real to my young readers. This is especially important for children who need to be grounded in a sensory world. 

Here is how I used the seven senses to portray Roman Britain in my most recent series of books for kids, the Roman Quests, and also in my new work-in-progress The Girl with the Ivory Knife, in which a 12-year-old London schoolboy travels back in time to 3rd century Londinium (Roman London). 

SIGHT is the first of the five senses. For my Roman Quests I wanted to get an overview of what Roman London would have looked like. 
Model of London's port at Museum of London Barbican 
• Ruins aren’t so helpful to me… I need more
• Museums are useful, with their statues, inscriptions and artefacts. The Museum of London and it’s archaeology department MOLA gave me tons of material. 
• Models are very special. Storytellers know the power of the miniature.  
• Interactive maps like the one produced by MOLA are super.
superb Bath Roman Baths
• 3D computer walk-throughs on YouTube are too clean but often introduce light effects. 
• Google maps and Google Earth help me get a birds’ eye view of the terrain or walk along a road from Chester to Leicester, for example. 
• Alan Sorrell’s marvellous paintings and drawings. See my blog about him HERE. 
• Visiting sites like Butser Ancient Farm, Bath Roman Baths & Fishbourne provide 3D spatial and sensory experiences especially when they are peopled by re-enactors. 
Hard to Be a God (2013)
• Re-enactment events provide an abundance of unexpected revelations especially when they are performed by those who are passionate about getting details right. I particularly admire the members of Britannia, the Ermine Street Guard and Leg II Augusta. 
• Watching movies. For my book set in Roman London, a place you would NOT want to visit, I watched Hard to Be a God (2013), like Fellini Satyricon only with more mud, excrement and chickens. 
• Film sets can give you inspiration, too. 

London’s Mithraeum hadn’t reopened when I was writing the Roman Quests and besides, those books are set in the late first century. But I could use the Mithraeum for my new work in progress about the boy travelling back in time.

For my Time Travel book, I tried to think of things we don’t see today that would have been commonplace then. 
• A sky full of stars
• Crucified man on a cross
• People in rags and barefoot
• Indoor darkness – a world with no electricity
• Someone carrying a torch, a very symbolic object
• Someone with a staff (Main purpose? To beat off dogs!)
• The different stages of animal sacrifice
• A mind-boggling array of diseases & deformities
• Especially eye infections, skin disorders and toothache

For the first time I could relate ancient objects to modern ones. E.g.
• A tunic could be described as a big T-shirt and a toga as a blanket
• Mithras’ Persian cap is like a Smurf hat
• A Mithraeum initiation could be described as a flight simulator 
• And the seven grades as ascending levels of a video game...


Sophie Jackson on what smells to put in the Mithraeum
SMELL is one of the most evocative senses, and one of the hardest to convey in words. Giacomo Savani, one of the organisers of the conference, started with a quote from Rosemary Sutcliffe in which she speaks of the ‘blue reek of wood-smoke’. Evidence hints that my time travelling boy Alex might have  smelled burning pine cones in London’s Mithraeum, which he will use as the site of a portable portal to third century Londinium. However, Sophie Jackson (above), one of the key archaeologists involved in recreating the Mithraeum Experience, said the smell of men, cooked chicken and damp might have drowned out any pine freshness! 

A Saturnalia dinner with Stephen Cockings
Other scents from Roman London:

• To Alex, a girl smells like apple pie (clove oil for her aching teeth) and church (frankincense perfume)
• Someone’s breath smells of garlic
• Alex gets headache from breathing oil lamp smoke 
• He also smells the peaty smell of outdoor braziers
• And the roast pork smell of body being cremated 
• With an undercurrent of incense burned against demons


Smelly and Tasteable things
TASTE is one of the easiest of the senses to tap into.
• Posca, water with a splash of vinegar, was often drunk by soldiers.
• I make mine with red wine vinegar but you could use white, too.
(Adding even a little wine or vinegar to water kills bacteria. The Romans didn’t know about bacteria, germs or viruses but somehow they knew adding vinegar to water was good.)
• Honey was a hot food, prescribed for those of a phlegmatic humour. 
• Olives, especially the little bitter black ones are ‘a taste as old as cold water…’ (Lawrence Durrell in Prospero’s Cell)
ELMA mastic gum from Chios
• How did they serve a hot sausage in Roman London? Probably with a cabbage leaf wrapper. A clever idea I got from a fast food stall at a Reenactment event.
• Mastic gum. One of the sniffable objects at the Museum of London’s Roman Dead exhibition (on until 28 October) is something called mastic. I first discovered mastic while reading the first century AD epigrams of Martial. He talks about a man who picks his teeth with a mastic toothpick. But it was mainly used as gum to be chewed to freshen the breath. In fact, we get the word ‘masticate’ from mastic. Read more HERE.

SOUND is harder to replicate than taste in my opinion, especially music. Armand D’Angour has been doing fun experiments into ancient Greek music and I often listen to Indian music to try to get an idea of how exotic Roman music might have sounded. We do know about other sounds, such as: 
interactive sound at Museum of London Docklands
• The crowing of a rooster or cluck of chickens in the street
• Dogs barking in the night 
• The wailing of bereaved, more common and more audible then? 
• The shouts of peddlers, bread sellers, a rag-and-bone woman...
• Tepidarium echoes with the sound of slaps and grunts of masseuse
• Blacksmiths hammering
• Door hinges squeaking
• Bells and rattles to frighten off demons and cover unholy sounds

TOUCH can be experienced not just with fingertips and lips, but also with our bare feet. Here are just a few a time traveller might have encountered in Londinium. 

interactive touch at Museum of London Docklands
• Wet grass against bare legs in a tunic
• Bare Feet on a muddy, gravel-studded road
• Or on a mosaic floor or on London brick
• Glutinous mud of the south bank foreshore
• Warmth of a kiln and hard-baked earth around it
• A piglet snuffling at someone’s armpit
• Itchy mosquito bites on bare legs
• Stepping in squishy, still-warm manure
• loom-woven linen & woollen belt pouch
• Carbantinae (one-piece leather shoes) rub top of feet
(The Roman Dead also has a display where you can touch a replica hobnail boot, top and bottom.)

KINESTHETIC means the awareness of the position and movement of the body. Many of the objects I’ve been talking about are interactive. You have to engage with them in a kinesthetic way. 
Richard and Caroline Lawrence in Nimes
• Wearing the clothes including hobnail shoes on the cobbled streets of a Roman town like Nimes.
• Playing with an oil-lamp or a pigskin lamp
• A Saturnalia Dinner
• Leather bikini bottoms as worn by girl acrobats
• NO Bogus Roman Handshake
• NOT using a sponge stick
• Trying out a wax-tablet
• Using a strigil and oil


Tom, Giacomo and Patty try out a strigil and scented oil
At the Sensory Archaeology Conference, co-presenter Tom Derrick brought homemade oil-based Roman perfume. To demonstrate the difference of smell in the bottle and on the skin he borrowed my replica strigil to let people rub his scented olive-oil on their arms and then scrape it off. One conference member, Mr. Colin Gough, observed, One thing that surprised me was the amount of oil left after a good strigiling (is that even a word?). Unless the Romans were a lot better at it there must’ve been a lot of sticky people leaving the baths plus the oil slick on the water! 

THE SIXTH SENSE is the final sense I want to think about. 


A double flame lamp at a Saturnalia dinner
Have you ever meditated about your site, your text, your historical character, your artefacts, your bones? By meditation I mean a contemplation of your world, characters, etc using your non-verbal visual imagination. It's like a virtual reality game but with added sounds, smells and things you would feel? If you meditate, try it. If you find meditation hard, try writing a fictional piece about your subject. Maybe not the main subject but something peripheral. Someone or something on the edges of your topic. You can even do a poem or haiku. 

At the moment I’m involved in a marvellous project based around the archaeology of the House of Amarantus in Pompeii. I had the idea to write a scene from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old slave girl who has recently arrived in Pompeii from Britannia. She sleeps on a mat in the doorway of her mistress’s bedroom. My idea of showing not telling the kids about the layout of the house is that she wakes up one night in pitch black and has to grope her way to the loo. 

So close your eyes for a moment and imagine waking up in the peristyle walkway of a fairly posh Roman house. Think of five different things your fingers might encounter as you push yourself to your feet and start to grope your way along the corridor. Think of five different things you might hear. Think of five different things you might smell. Where do you have to avoid evil spirits in the house? Think of five different ways your body is reacting to this night-time grope. 


Whether we are scholars, writers, historians, teachers or all of the above, let us study the past not just with our heads but with our hearts and with all the senses.

My Roman Quests are perfect for kids studying the topic of Romans in Key Stage 2. My first time travel book, The Girl with the Ivory Knife, is out early April 2019. It is based on real bones and sites from Roman London. 
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Virgil and the 9/11 Memorial

by Caroline Lawrence

The 9/11 Memorial Museum opened to the public in 2014. It is impressive on many levels but what interests me most is a quote from Virgil on the wall of the Memorial Hall, deep underground: No day shall erase you from the memory of time.

The capital letters of the quote are just over a foot tall, forged from steel recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Centre. The quote is surrounded by 2983 squares of paper, one for each life lost, in shades of blue ‘trying to remember the colour of the sky on that September morning’.

When the memorial first opened there was some controversy about the use of the quote based on its original context. 

So when did Virgil say No day shall erase you from the memory of time?

And why?

He didn’t actually say it in a speech, like a Caesar or a Cicero. 

He wrote it down in a poem, his great epic poem: the Aeneid. 

And yet in a way he did say it. 

Here are the two verses from which the 9/11 quote was pulled:

Fortunati ambo! writes Virgil, si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo... Literally: ‘Lucky pair! If my verses have any power, no day ever shall remove you (plural) from the memory of time.’ Aeneid IX.446-7


Modern bust of Virgil at his tomb in Naples
These words are not put into the mouth of a character in the poem, they are the words of the poet himself. This is one of the few places where Virgil steps out of the story, as it were, to utter this prayer: if my poem lasts, so will the memory of what you did.

So who are the lucky pair? And what did they do?

The short answer is that they are two teenage refugees from a war torn city who die in a failed raid against the inhabitants of the land they hope to settle. 

For the longer answer, we have to go back to the sack of Troy.

Remember the story of the Trojan Horse?

How it wasn’t really a Trojan Horse but a Greek Horse, full of soldiers?

How they sneakily smuggled themselves into the city they had been besieging for ten years?

How the Greeks dropped out of the giant horse’s wooden belly in the middle of the night and set about burning Troy and killing everyone in it?

Well, the Greeks didn't kill quite everyone. Aeneas was a hero who had fought in the Trojan war escaped with his aged father and young son. 


Trautmann 'Burning of Troy' 1759
Once safely outside the town walls, Aeneas hides on the slopes of Mount Ida among the trees of a sacred grove. Over the next few days and even weeks he receives a steady trickle of refugees from the sacked city, many of them probably traumatised orphans. Aeneas is conscientious, responsible and also reputedly the son of a goddess (Venus). So he soon became their natural leader.

For various reasons, Aeneas decides to seek a new place to live rather than rebuild the old one. So he cuts down the trees of the sacred grove, uses the wood to make a dozen ships and sets off in search of his ‘New Troy’. 


'Where Aeneas Disembarked' restaurant in Ostia
For seven years Aeneas and his twelve boatloads of refugees sail the Mediterranean. The children grow up. The older refugees die and are buried on strange soil. This is the fate of Aeneas's father. Aeneas’s young son Ascanius, probably about seven when they fled Troy is fourteen when they finally find the place to build their new city: on the banks of the River Tiber in Italy, eight hundred miles west of Troy.

Virgil famously modelled the first six books of the Aeneid (the sea voyage) on the Odyssey and the last six (land battles) on the the Iliad. 


When Aeneas sails up the river Tiber, it seems to him that there is enough space for them to settle. One of the local kings is even happy to marry his daughter to the Trojan. But other Latin tribes are unhappy, especially the Rutulians, whose leader Turnus was engaged to the princess now promised to Aeneas. 


The Rutulians threaten to attack
The refugee Trojans hear rumours that Turnus is planning to attack them, so they build a wooden fort on the banks of the Tiber. When Aeneas hears that Turnus is on his way, he leaves his fourteen-year-old son Ascanius in charge and goes off with a couple of scouts to seek additional forces from an Etruscan a few miles upstream. 

No sooner has Aeneas is gone, than Turnus arrives with many allied troops. The Trojans retreat to the safety of the fort and although Turnus calls them cowards, they refuse to come out and fight. But the fort on the banks of the Tiber is wood, not stone, and Turnus threatens to burn it down in the morning. He wants to force them to come out and be slaughtered. Having burned the Trojan ships so that they can’t escape by river, Turnus and his troops surround the fort and settle in for the night. They celebrate their anticipated victory with food, wine and dicing.  


Euryalus and Nisus
Meanwhile in the fort, Ascanius assigns guards to patrol the ramparts and watch for a night attack. At midnight guards are changed and two youths come up together. Their names are Nisus and Euryalus. Virgil's description hints that Euryalus is about Ascanius’s age, fourteen, and Nisus is about seventeen or eighteen. They may be lovers or just good friends, but they are devoted to each other. In my retelling of their story in The Night Raid, a book for teens, I have them meeting during the sack of Troy when Nisus is seven and Euryalus ten or eleven. I try to imagine how traumatic it must have been for the two boys to flee the burning city.

Now, seven years later, they are once again besieged with a threat of burning and destruction. As the two friends pace the lofty ramparts of the wooden fort and look down on the sleeping enemy, the older boy has an idea. If just one of them could creep unseen through the sleeping enemy troops, he might reach Aeneas and bring back reinforcements before dawn, thereby saving his comrades and winning glory for himself. Euryalus won’t hear of Nisus going on his own; they will go together. They have hunted together in the woods and think they know the way. This is something they feel they can do.

They take their proposal to young Ascanius who is standing by a campfire with some of the older Trojan leaders, worrying about what to do. They eagerly agree to Nisus’s plan and promise the two friends great rewards if they succeed. Without offering sacrifice or taking the omens, they almost push the two friends outside the fort. Nisus and Euryalus go down into a ditch and when they come up they are among the sleeping enemy soldiers. 


At first all goes well as they sneak through the snoring enemy. Then they discover how easy it is to kill drunken and sleeping enemy soldiers. Soon they forget the urgency of their mission and start to loot as well as kill. Euryalus, the younger boy, takes a shiny helmet and puts it on. This is their fatal mistake. A band of enemy allies have just arrived on horseback to join Turnus. They see the moonlight flashing on the bright metal of the helmet and chase the youths into the dark and tangled woods.  

Confused by the limited visibility and unaccustomed weight of the helmet, Euryalus stumbles into the open and is surrounded by the enemy. 

Nisus has been hiding in the woods, but when he sees his young friend surrounded by enemy troops, he runs out of the woods crying ‘Me, me! Kill me instead!’ But Euryalus is already mortally wounded. He falls like a white poppy beaten down by rain. Instead of turning around and running for safety, Nisus makes a suicidal rush into the heavily armed soldiers. Pierced by several swords, he falls dying on top of his friend to protect his body from mutilation. 


This is when Virgil steps out of the poem to state that the two will never be forgotten if his verses have any power. 

The quote shows one thing common to humans in the past two thousand years: the desire not to be forgotten. And more than that: the desire to be well-thought of. This is true not just of the warrior and his victim but of the artists who help us remember.


You can read the original Latin HERE. It starts at line 175 and our quote is at line 447. You can read the English poet Dryden’s translation HERE. You can read what various scholars have said about the controversy HERE. And you can read my version of the story in The Night Raid. 

A version of this post first appeared on the now defunct Wonders and Marvels blog in 2014...
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Roman Dead for Kids

With its skeletons, skulls, tombstones and ashes of the dead, some will find the current Roman Dead exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands disturbing. For this reason it is not recommended to bring children 8 years old or under. But many children will find it as fascinating as I do. I recently attended several school workshops at the Museum of London Barbican where children aged 8-11 engaged in activities about bones and grave goods with a real skeleton in the room. They were told not to touch the real remains but to treat them with respect and they seemed to accept this as perfectly normal. 

(For more info about these FREE workshops go HERE)

If you think your child or grandchild might be interested in the fascinating customs of Roman Dead, here are my tips for making the most of your visit.  


When you first arrive, go straight to the welcome desk and pick up a Family Trail sheet. This can be folded to make an origami ‘Quiz Machine’ which poses questions to get you thinking. It is fun and interactive and addresses four different categories: Bones, Rituals, Imports and Cremations. For example, IMPORTS Objects found in London graves are made from materials from the furthest part of the Roman Empire and beyond. Can you find the case with these artefacts?  Match their materials to where they came from. 1. Ivory leopard-shaped knife 2. Tortoiseshell bracelet 3. Gold-in-glass beads. Answer- 1 = C, 2 = A, 3 = B


Once you are in the exhibition keep an eye out for the Family Trail cards, down at kids’ eye level. They have a jolly skeleton and look like the one on the left. The exhibition is laid out so that you can go around the perimeter and not have to confront any skeletons close up (apart from some skulls). In the central area, seven full skeletons are laid out in glass cases in the middle of the dimly lit space so you can either approach or avoid them. Chances are your kids will be fascinated!


One of the first things you see upon entering the exhibition is a map of Roman London showing the locations of the several cemeteries we have found. In Roman times, cemeteries are always outside the main area of habitation. In London proper, north of the Thames, they were outside the town wall. In marshy South London where there was no town wall, burial areas were demarcated by canals or ditches. 


APOTROPAIC – This is a big word but a useful one. It is Greek for ‘turns away evil’. Because the Romans didn’t know about germs and viruses, they thought many illnesses were caused by evil spirits and demons. For this reason they had lots of different ways of turning away evil. Bad smells, loud noises and staring faces were all apotropaic. I wonder if fierce animals like stone lions and ivory leopards also protected the person who owned them against evil spirits or tomb raiders. 


SMELL – What did an ancient funeral smell like? Take the circular lids off three different containers and see if you can tell Frankincense and Bay apart. Mastic is a gum from the Greek island of Chios. It was used to flavour drinks as well as make things smell nice. It was also a kind of ancient chewing gum, used to freshen the breath. We get the word ‘masticate’ from mastic. Bad smells were used to drive away demons but these are all nice smells, perhaps to attract protective gods. 


SOUND – Roman funerals were often noisy, not just with tears and wailing but often with music and rattles to keep away evil spirits. Your kids can try out an iron rattle just like some on display, found in and around the cemeteries of Roman London.

TOUCH – You can touch replicas of items in the exhibition: a hobnail shoe (bottom as well as top), a copper-alloy wrist torque and a clay jar. Each one feels different. Be sure to bring some wet wipes for after, or wash your hands! 


SIGHT – I love some of the tiny objects like the die made of Whitby jet and the teenie-tiny glass bottle. I also like to think that the bones of a chicken in a child’s grave were those of a beloved pet rather than a last supper. And don’t miss the jar with a face on it. That face is probably apotropaic. So is anything made of Whitby jet. Because it generates static electricity when rubbed, it was thought to repel evil spirits. 


BIZARRE - There are some real mysteries in the exhibit. Why does a woman have a skull over her hips? Why do some bodies have iron rings that can’t be removed? Why are parts of the bodies missing, like the heads? Perhaps Romans thought some of these things would keep the spirit of the dead person from haunting the living. Perhaps some involved black magic. But we’re not sure. It’s a mystery. I am currently writing a book about the girl who owned the ivory leopard knife. Her bones are not in the Roman Dead exhibition but back at the Museum of London Barbican site for those free workshops I told you about. 


INTERACTIVE – Near the end of the exhibit you will find a foam skeleton. Kids can put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. 

THE GIFT SHOP – Afterwards, kids can buy a replica oil lamp to try out at home (under parental supervision!). There are also other little souvenirs and lots of good books, some factual and some fiction. 

The Roman Dead is a wonderful kid-friendly exhibition. I hope you and your young relatives enjoy it as much as I did! 

I will be giving a sneak preview of my work in progress, ‘The Girl with the Ivory Knife’, at the Museum of London Docklands on Saturday 18 August. My new book is inspired by an exotic and mysterious ivory knife on display in the Roman Dead exhibition. The event is family friendly and free but you must go HERE to book your place. See you there, I hope! 
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