It is a commonly held myth that the ancient Romans had rooms called vomitoria for the purpose of, well vomiting. The myth holds that the Romans would have lavish banquets and the guests would indulge in excessive amounts of food and drink and once full they would slip away to the vomitorium to purge enabeling them to continue the eating binge.
Barbara Kay recently wrote a piece for Canada’s National Post, “Chewing: A brief history.” I have to take issue with Kay’s perpetuation of the vomitorium myth. This causes one to doubt the historical veracity of the rest of the piece given this glaring error.
Rome was a custom-borrowing society, and elite Romans happily scooped up Greek food culture. But what we remember most about Rome, food-wise, is the period of its decadence, symbolized by disgustingly overwrought banquets and the vomitorium. We haven’t gone so far as to install vomitoria in the bathrooms of fast food restaurants (perhaps an idea whose time has come back?), but in many respects our society’s enslavement to the hyperpalatibility of junk food recalls the excesses of Rome in its self-destructive decline.
Rome’s decline was a bit more complicated than that. Now, the Romans were not above purging after a meal. Romans were known for their orgies which were lavish feasts lasting hours and purging did happen to keep the party going, but they didn’t go away to special room. They did it is style, right at the table. Describing such a feast, Seneca writes,
Cum ad cenandum discubuimus, alius sputa deterget, alius reliquias temulentorum subditus colligit.
When we recline at a banquet, one (slave) wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath (the table), collects the leavings of the drunks.
Sounds pretty gross. The mythological vomitorium sounds like a better idea, but why get up from the table if you have a slave to mop up the floor.
Now for the real vomitorium. The word does derive from vomitare, to vomit, but it was used in a different sense. In ancient Rome, the vomitorium was a passageway under the seats in an amphitheater that allowed spectators to access their seats. The Romans called them vomitoria because the people were”spewed out” to their seats. Our modern stadium ramps are architectural descendants of Roman vomitoria.
So there you go. The Romans did indeed purge and they had vomitoria but they didn’t do the former in the latter.
Remember Reggie Foster, the Vatican latinist who was featured in Bill Maher’s Religulous? Recently he has become ill and has been fighting it like a champ and is doing much better. He recently released a YouTube personal update in Latin and English.
The archaeologists have unearthed reception rooms, colonnades, mosaic floors and traces of a hot bath complex at a site in mountainous countryside near the town of Rieti, north of Rome.
The villa is close to the ancient Roman village of Falacrinae, where Vespasian was born in AD 9.
Its discovery coincides with events in Rome and elsewhere in Italy marking the 2000th anniversary of his birth.
“We’ve found a monumental villa with elaborate floors made of marble brought from quarries in Greece and North Africa,” said Dr Helen Patterson, of the British School at Rome, the archaeological institute involved in the excavation. “There’s also a very extensive bath complex which is just beginning to emerge. It’s the only large villa in the area, and the size and dating fits in perfectly with Vespasian.
“Until we find a stone or marble inscription saying ‘Vespasian lived here’, we can’t be 100 per cent certain, but it seems very likely. It’s in a perfect position, overlooking a river and the old Via Salaria trade route.”
The head of the team of 25 British and Italian archeologists, Professor Filippo Coarelli of the University of Perugia, said: “It’s a very important find. It’s a rich villa which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.”
Before becoming emperor, Titus Flavius Vespasianus had a successful military career, commanding the second legion in the invasion of Britain in AD 43 and penetrating as far as Devon and Cornwall in an attempt to subdue the south-west. He later became governor of the province of Africa and a trusted aide to the emperor Nero.
He is best known for ordering the construction of the Colosseum in Rome but is also remembered for his decision to tax the collection of urine, which was valued for its ammoniac properties. Even now, public urinals in Italy are known as “vespasiani”.
“The villa is in what would have been a very small, very remote village,” said Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School at Rome.
“He was a local boy made good. He was the first of a series of emperors who did not come from Rome itself. Given where he was from, to have risen to the position of emperor was amazing.”
The classics department at Western Washington University has set up the first Census of Worldwide Latin speakers.
To all my classicist friends out there, register! Quod V minuta ad summum requiret.
Exspectatus ad primum Censum omnium hominum quavis e gente oriundorum accessisti. Census ab Universitatis studiorum Vasintoniae Occidentalis (WWU) professoribus institutus est, auspiciis Academiae Latinitati Fovendae (ALF) sodalium, duobus praesertim propositis:
* Ut homines, qui nostra aetate sermone Latino utuntur, adnumerentur; * Quo melius Latini sermonis usus atque condiciones, quae nostra aetate sunt, intelligantur.
Huius census indiciis decursu annorum descriptis, rite ordinatis, inter se comparatis demonstrari poterit utrum sermonis usus increbrescat necne, quibus in orbis terrarum regionibus sermo Latinus maxime usurpetur, qui libri ad eius studium saepius adhibeantur et alia.
Census Latinus alternis annis ab eisdem professoribus instituetur, et indicia in eo collecta in publicum edentur. Ab illis, qui respondere velint, nihil poscetur, quod ad vitam privatam pertineat. Talia enim nullo iure in Rete Universali exhibentur.
The first mathematical use of the concept of actual infinity has been pushed back some 2,000 years via a new analysis of a tattered page of parchment on which a medieval monk in Constantinople copied the third century B.C. work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.
Infinity is one of the most fundamental questions in mathematics and still remains an unsolved riddle. For instance, if you add or subtract a number from infinity, the remaining value is still infinity, some Indian philosophers said. Mathematicians today refer to actual infinity as an uncountable set of numbers such as the number of points existing on a line at the same time, while a potential infinity is an endless sequence that unfolds consecutively over time.
Last month it was that nifty Forbidden City virtual tour. Today we have Ancient Rome in Google Earth. This view is a snapshot of Rome in 320 C.E. This was produced by the Univeristy of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and is based on their Rome Reborn model.
Before Reginald Foster there was Antonio Bacci, often regarded as the greatest Latinist of the 20th Century. This Catholic prelate composed the Lexicon Eorum Vocabulorum Quae Difficilius Latine Redduntur, a dictionary of modern terms in Latin. This was a standard reference for writers of Modern Latin, especially at the Vatican. It has since been superseded by the current Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis which gives us words like bracae linteae caeruleae for blue jeans, capitilavium for shampoo and tromocrates for terrorist.
From the 1930′s through the 1960′s Bacci was the Vatican’s top Latinist and held the title Segretario dei Brevi ai Principi. He and his team of three laymen translated all the official documents of the Vatican into Latin. Foster currently fits this role, however, with a much less illustrious title.
Anyone wanting to know more about Elvis Presley singing “Nunc hic aut nunquam” only has to put the words into Google’s little-known Latin search engine to not only get a translation but also to find a little more about the way Latin is re-surfacing in some curious places.
Sounds pretty gross. The mythological vomitorium sounds like a better idea, but why get up from the table if you have a slave to mop up the floor.
