Plenty of Nothing

Peutinger Table

The Peutinger Table is a map of the Roman world, 20 feet long by one foot wide, drawn schematically like a subway diagram, and just about the coolest thing from the ancient world.  The Germans published a colour facsimile of it about a century ago, and I used to like to lay it out on the library floor at university and walk up and down following the routes from India to Portugal.  I signed it out once with the hope of getting the reprographic center to make me a copy to wrap around my dorm room, but this was the 1970s and they didn't have colour Xerox machines in Sackville NB yet.  You can read about the Peutinger Table here and here, and view the whole map here.  Douglas

Pony Girl

If you had ancestors in the western Roman Empire who had anything to do with horses, they may well have venerated the horse goddess Epona.  She was a Gaulish deity who made the step up to Roman cult figure, probably because everyone loves horses and the Italians hadn't thought up a horse divinity of their own.  European culture is sprinkled with little Celtic survivals: throwing coins into fountains, counting in twenties (e.g. quatre vingt deux), carving human heads into cathedrals.  Chances are good we call small horses ponies on account of her.

Here's a whole Epona site.

Time and Money

Here's a picture of the bean crock full of foreign coins on the landing in our house.  (Note to potential housebreakers: it's worth about $2.)  The core of the collection is the hoard of copper British pennies and ha'pennies I accumulated during the family's trip to Scotland in 1970 when I was eleven.  My grandfather thought it was wasteful, though whether of time or spending money I'm not sure.  I remember I was very impressed that Queen Victoria was still in circulation after seventy years, and that her coins were appreciably thinner than more recent ones, from use.  In Britain they occasionally pull a crock of coins like this out of the ground, though the coins are Roman.  Victorian Britain is really just a later phase of Roman Britain.  Canada is Roman, too.  We have provinces, use Latin letters, spend coins with a ruler's portrait on one face.  Every year has a new coin, all the way back, and forward too.

Douglas

Aelian On Animals

The ancients didn't have Wikipedia but if they ever wanted to read doubtful information on the animal kingdom they had only to turn to Aelian (c. 170-230 AD).  Aelian's On the Characteristics of Animals, a compendium of animal lore taking up three volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, is a wonderfully entertaining collection of zoological hearsay situated on the credibility scale about midway between Bewick's sometimes faulty History of Quadrupeds (which conflates gorillas and orangutans) and Aesop's Fables.  Here's Aelian on the language comprehension of lions:

 

  A Lion will accompany a Moor and will drink water from the same spring.  And I am told that Lions even resort to the houses of Moors when they fail to find any prey and are overtaken by the pangs of hunger.  And if the master of the house happens to be there, he keeps the Lion off and drives him away, pursuing him vigorously.  If however he is out and his wife is left all alone, then with words that put the Lion to shame she checks his approach, restrains him, and admonishes him to control himself and not to allow his hunger to incense him.  The Lion, it seems, understands the Moorish tongue; and the sense of the rebuke which the woman administers to the animal is (so they say) as follows.  'Are not you ashamed, you, a Lion, the king of beasts, to come to my hut and to ask a woman to feed you, and do you, like some cripple, look to a woman's hands hoping that thanks to her pity and compassion you may get what you want?--You who should be on your way to mountain haunts in pursuit of deer and antelopes and all other creatures that lions may eat without discredit.  Whereas, like some sorry lap-dog, you are content to be fed by another.'  Such are the spells she employs, whereupon the Lion, as though his heart smote him and he were filled with shame, quietly and with downcast eyes moves off, overcome by the justice of her words.

    Now if horses and hounds through being reared in their company understand and quail before the threats of men, I should not be surprised if Moors too, who are reared and brought up along with Lions, are understood by these very animals.  For the Moors profess to treat lion-cubs to the same kind of food, the same bed, and the same roof as their own children.  Consequently there is nothing incredible or marvellous in Lions understanding human speech as described above.

Aelian, On Animals III.1 (tr. A.F. Scholfield)