The Vox Pop

Now we've seen the Gauls were more sophisticated than Caesar ever admitted to his adoring public - we have to wonder why he painted them as simple uneducatededs. After all, doesn't it make his victory even greater if he defeated a far more capable enemy than he writes about? The answer is not that simple. Firstly, this was a man with an estimated IQ of 181, so I'm not going to pretend I can get inside a head like that - all I can do is make some best guesses and hope they're not too far off the mark.

Firstly we have to consider the geopolitical situation in 58BC when the invasion of Gaul began. By this time Rome's previous threats, the Greek city states, Carthage and the Pontic Kingdom had all been warred into oblivion and their lands folded into the Roman Republic. The Gauls, and to a lesser extent, the Germans, were the only peoples left on the Roman frontier with the proven capacity to invade the Italian peninsular and threaten Rome. Destroying their ability to do this was the primary reason Caesar received so much unspoken support from the Senate.

The same logic had been used in the destruction of Carthage a century before - and so was the underlying belief that subjugating Gaul and destroying the Punic Empire (Carthage) was morally acceptable as both peoples were barbarians. In fact, with the possible exception of the Greeks, the Romans' greatest enemies were always labelled barbarians. Carthage is the best example of this 'labelling' or desensitisation of the Roman public. Despite inventing concrete, building the world's first 'high rise' apartment blocks, circumnavigating Africa and developing some of the most advanced water storage systems ever seen, Roman literature paints the Carthaginians as blood thirsty heathens who sacrificed their own children to Beelzebub (a name still seen as evil to this day). This process was repeated a century later when the Gauls were the new threat to Rome - suddenly the Druids were murdering their own countrymen to read their entrails...seeing a pattern here?

So it became important to the Roman sense of right that subjugating the barbarians could bring civilisation to these lessor peoples and make them new and upstanding citizens. But this only works if the Roman public are convinced these are, indeed, barbarians. If Caesar had written he'd fought an equally advanced and capable enemy, it is very likely he would have alienated his public supporters...after all, it would have been immoral to subjugate a civilised Gaul, parts of which had had long standing treaties with Rome prior to the Caesar's arrival there...treaties he chose to ignore. So in the end, we can see the book we still base most of our contemporary knowledge of Gaul on - Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul - is all about painting Caesar in the best possible light...not the Gauls. Proof again that only the victorious get to write our history. Remember that next time you're reading a former power broker's autobiography.

For more Roman History in Gaul - check out 'Vagabond' - live on Amazon and on YouTube

Roman diving helmets?

So if these 'gladiator' helmets were actually stylised versions of 'diving' helmets, how might a Roman diving helmet work? To be honest we have only hints. For one, we know divers were nicknamed 'Urinatores' - I'm pretty sure I don't need to supply a translation for that. It's generally accepted the term arose from divers using air-inflated animal bladders as buoyancy devices - these would allow a diver weighted with stones to dive to a greater depth and return to the surface faster when the stone weights were removed. But that's the accepted thinking. We know the larger diving bells the Romans used for underwater engineering could be fed by air pumped from the surface, which suggests that the Romans had a reasonable idea of pneumatic forces just as they understood hydraulics. So let's look at it this way. A Roman diver, wearing an air-filled helmet is standing on the sea-floor with pressurised bladders filled with air - could these have been connected to the helmet to equalise pressure and various depths and to supply several minutes of breathable air underwater? Modern bronze taps, spring-loaded pressure valves and piping were all available in the Roman tool-box - so methods to control the flow and storage of air in bladders and helmets was possible. But most of all, remember, there was an economic imperative to harvest half-a-billion sea sponges every year - an imperative that required someone to figure out how to maximise dive times and exploit as much of the seabed as possible. Roman diving helmets might be something we haven't heard of, but they shouldn't be something we should dismiss as impossible. If you want to read more about Roman diving helmets - check out a 'Body of Doubt' - live on Amazon now or on YouTube

Sponge Divers

We know the Roman sponge industry was a big business - face it, with 100-million Roman bottoms each needing a personal sponge, we can pretty much guess sponge divers needed to gather perhaps half a billion sponges (or maybe more) every year. Clearly an industry of that scale is going to drive new technology and increasingly sophisticated methods for sponge collecting. There's no doubt a lot of divers were free-diving, perhaps reaching depths of over fifty feet and staying a minute or two to collect a handful of sponges from rocky seawalls or the sea floor. But with a free-diver having only minute or two at a time to collect sponges, would that be an effective collection method? Beyond the sponge industry we can see a lot of Roman below-water engineering required extended periods under water preparing the sea-floor for new harbours and breakwaters - some of this was done with diving bells, but, like the sponge industry, there's a distinct possibility it was done using more sophisticated diving equipment. Where am I heading?

Gladiators.

It sounds bizarre, but gladiators might help me explain how sponge divers could spend more than a few minutes on the sea-floor. The heavy bronze helmets worn by the Murmillo and Hoplomachus gladiators bear no resemblance to any helmets worn on the battlefield by Romans or any of their enemies. They're hard to see out of, unnecessarily massive and frequently decorated with fish. Perhaps some gladiator agent thought they would look spectacular in the arena, but could they be more than that? Think about it, seal the face plates, put glass in the two eye-holes and suddenly these helmets look a lot more like a 19th-century diving helmet than something you'd take onto the battlefield.

So is it possible gladiator helmets could have actually been diving helmets? Only if you can get air into them, and that's what we'll look at in the next post. For more on Roman deep sea diving, check out 'A Body of Doubt' - live on Amazon now and on YouTube   

Roman toilet paper

Life is all about taking little things for granted. Little things go unnoticed and these are the little things that get lost to history. Here's one, toilet paper...or at least the Roman version. Bleached toilet paper seems to be an international standard today, and despite it's ultimate end, we seem to prefer our toilet paper to be bright and white rather than the dull browns of natural paper. Well, it seems the Romans liked their 'toilet paper' white too. Thanks to Pliny we know that sea sponges - collected in their millions for Roman toilets - were bleached white by being soaked in salt foam and then being laid out at night to dry slowly. As I said, it's the little things - but the sponge industry was worth tens of millions of dollars in today's terms, so maybe it deserves a little bit of modern historical attention. How were those sponges collected? That'll be coming to this blog soon. For more on Roman History, check out 'A Body of Doubt' - live on Amazon now or on YouTube

Take the lead

Like to be one for all things natural and organic? It seems the Romans had a taste for healthy living too. Now a lot has been written about how their lead pipes poisoned the bally lot of them - dulling their minds and delivering terrible premature deaths. Oddly, skeletal analysis doesn't seem to suggest much in the way of heavy metal poisoning for the ancients, and nor were they oblivious to the danger. The famous 1st-century BC architect, Vitruvius, began recommending terracotta pipes, writing, "Water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes - since lead is found to be harmful as white lead is derived from it, which is said to harmful to the human system." Something to think about next time you pour some water from your organic clay water filter.

Mind you, it has been suggested the levels of soluble lead fell as pipes aged as they tended to gain a crust of calcium carbonate from the concrete aqueducts - which then reduced the amount of lead leaching into the water. Either way, there are still Roman lead pipes carrying water to this day...and being used. For more on Roman History, check out 'A Body of Doubt' - live on Amazon now or on YouTube

Shameless self promotion

I'm guessing you've noticed me mention the name 'Calvus' a few times by now. Who is Calvus? I see him as the embodiment of the average Roman. He doesn't wage war on distant peoples, he doesn't work as a gladiator...he can't even afford a slave. Calvus is 99% of real Roman life, not the one percent we see in the latest Sword and Sandal drama from HBO. That doesn't mean he's boring. This guy's got all the issues any struggle-street character should have. He's an unemployed actor...enough said. Put him in a tweed jacket and he's Bored to Death's Jonathon Ames. An accidental detective who finds he discovers trouble and doesn't get the credit for it. We shouldn't forget Rome was just like New York on any normal day - full of complicated people who have...well, complications. For more about the adventures of Calvus, check out 'Ad Lib', 'The Hitherto Unknown' and 'Mischance and Happenstance' - all live on Amazon now

The food is in the eating

We probably think we're doing okay in the western world. Most of us have rarely gone hungry for long, and even with a few dollars in the hand we can usually find a filling meal...even if it's not the healthiest. In fact, I bet you think it's never been this good. But maybe it has...and maybe it's been even better. As hard as it to believe, the bones of Oplontis and the sewers of Pompeii are telling us that 1st-century Romans ate extraordinarily well. Two thousand year old sewerage suggests those who could afford their own toilets and those who had to go public were all eating just as well as the other - with fish, meat, fruit and nuts high on agenda. Leafy and root vegetables would have been in the mix too...but don't preserve quite as well. Meanwhile, over in nearby Oplontis a large collection of skeletons reveals slaves and owners shared similar levels of nutrition - the servants eating just as well as their masters. In fact, when spread across all levels of their society, the Romans ate better than us - getting more nutrition per bite and eating a whole lot healthier. And this was despite eating out for most meals and enjoying food on the run just like us. Food for thought maybe. For more on Roman History, check out 'A Body of Doubt' live on Amazon now and on YouTube