Jesus-in-a-bottle - Michelle Lovric

I’m spending most of spring in Venice this year. For the first six weeks I carried the usual A6 spiral-bound notebook everywhere. I kept adding lines and stanzas to a long poem I was building inside it. Occasionally I thought of tearing out the pages to type them up for my poem larder. But I never quite did.

Instead, I left the notebook in my local supermarket and the staff were adamant that a cleaner must have thrown it out. 

I feel very edited.

Was the poem good? I can’t tell you. But the cleaner saved me the agonies of transcribing my terrible handwriting it, cutting the poem, rebuilding it, making it squirm into a fashionable form.  I never put that poem through a workshop, never heard the embarrassed silence when I finished reading it. I was never subtly or openly questioned for daring to create it or present it. I never had to struggle to justify its length or the extravagance of its language. I never had to hear someone suggest that I put it aside to work on something more lucrative.

On the whole, I am better off without that poem. Terminally edited, it cannot harm me anymore. Thank you to the cleaner at the supermarket. All power to his or her hardworking elbow.

 

It has been a spring like this. My plan was to spend time in the archives of the Scuola Dalmata, researching one Giovanni Lovric, perhaps even finding a connection between myself and this writer from Sinj who was in Venice in the 1770s. It was hard to get an answer from the scuola but they were obviously on my wavelength because the very morning I was choosing scholarly attire to front up in person, I finally received an email to say that they too are closed for restoration. (Picture of the Scuola Dalmata from Wikimedia Commons).

My two current novels for adults and children are also closed for restoration and I’d been hoping to find refreshment in Giovanni’s story. Instead, I have resorted to imagining him. I suspect the imagined Giovanni Lovric is having much more fun than his real inspiration, locked in the archives. For a start, he has a ferocious girlfriend with a bear who drinks beetroot beer.

I too have been closed for restoration after a couple of surgeries, with more to come. Some parts of me will never be restored. But I have found solace in a new collection of folk-art objects. 

I found these first two below at the mercatino in Venice’s Campo San Maurizio. As often happens, I then started to see them all over the place. And I have now acquired two more for my collection. (Picture by Déirdre Kelly, my fellow Companion of The Guild of St George).

 

By collecting, you learn: language, culture, folklore, faith.

So I have learned that people used to refer to a bottle like this as a ‘Bottiglia Mistica’ (‘Mystical Bottle’) or a bottle containing ‘Arma Christi’ (‘Christ’s Weapons’). It might also be called a ‘Bottiglia della Passione di Cristo’ or ‘Bottiglia della/di Pazienza’. A ‘pazienza’, I have read somewhere, can be a nun’s robe. And the bottles are sometimes described as ‘lavoro conventuale o monastico’ – convent or monastery work or ‘Klosterarbeit’ in German, where many of the bottles are for sale. So, like many articles now considered or sold as religious folk art, the bottles could have been put together by nuns or monks. (I have a collection of Christmas decorations hand-painted by Italian nuns and studded with coloured foil from chocolate wrappings). The description could also, of course, refer to the patience required to set up these little scenes, building them to be folded flat, inserting them in the bottle and then erecting them with threads pulled through the neck. 

I have also seen them called ‘Calvary Bottles’. Or ‘Impossible Bottles’ – though this title was also applied to the ships in bottles created by Venetian glass masters like Francesco Biondi in the early 19th century. I particularly like ‘God-in-a-Bottle’. And ‘Jesus-in-a-Bottle.’ (It sounds like a profane exclamation, doesn’t it? As in, ‘Jesus-in-a-bottle! I left my notebook in the supermarket and the cleaner threw it out!’)

The Bottles of Passion share many elements, most of which place them as folk-art objects. They use mixed media and sometimes found objects: carved wood, pre-made Victorian chromolithographs, fabric, bone, printed paper, even bread and rice. The bottles are often recycled: once used for common foodstuffs and even alcohol. Most date to the late 19th century or early 20th century when glass bottles became cheaply and commonly available.

They all show some combination of the symbols of Christ’s Passion:

  

- the whip and the whipping post

- the reed sceptre

- the crown of thorns

- the cross

- the dice with which the soldiers played for His robe

- the hammer that drove the nails into Christ’s hands and feet

- the ladder

- the shroud

- the cock that crowed

- the spear of Destiny

 - the sponge held up to His lips

- the pincers that removed the nails

 - the holy grail or chalice

- the sign INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews)

Some bottles add angels, Mary and Mary Magdalen. One of mine has three Christs, or two particularly holy-looking thieves. (Picture at right by Deirdre Kelly)

These Instruments of Passion, inside a bottle, might be believed to create a spiritual tool-kit that can be used to defeat Satan. Some were sold at religious shrines, such as that of the Black Madonna of Liesse in France. Some were filled with holy water – a portable blessing.

My own thought on this is that the stations of the cross are a journey, and that these little bottles provided the comfort of a portable shrine for those undertaking their own pilgrimages in hazardous times or places.

It is also said that these bottles forfended against particular superstitions about places where waters and roads meet, as it was thought that evil spirits lurked there in wait for the innocent traveller; such places also presented risks in the form of cross-currents, ambush or the possibility of taking the wrong way, physically or metaphorically.

Some times things go the right way. 

To those of you who kindly kept up with the Oceandiva saga in my various posts here at the History Girls, the threat has gone away. Five years after we first discovered the ambition of Europe’s biggest party boat to come to the Thames, the owners have announced they were fed up with the ‘regulatory system’ in the UK and were consciously uncoupling from London and happily going back to EU waters. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my tireless, hilarious colleagues in the campaign, the odd bunch of Londoners who sacrificed so much time and energy to keep the Thames more safe, less commodified and less greenwashed. There's plenty more for us to do. The Oceandiva has proved to be only symptomatic of problems that need addressing on the River Thames. 

More detail about this on the River Residents Group website.

What else am I thinking about? One thing is the anniversary of the terror attack on my London village on June 3rd 2017, when eight young people were killed and another 48 injured by three terrorists using large kitchen knives. For many days afterwards, residents were locked up inside their homes or excluded from them by a police cordon around our neighbourhood, which had become a crime scene.

I’ve been thinking about my friends and neighbours who were caught up in the attack or who witnessed it. I worry that the memorializing of the attack has not always happened in ways that are appropriate or disinterested. Indeed, it sometimes feels appropriated. I wonder to what extent we community members will be included in memorials this year, if at all. We're going to try something do-it-yourself, but heartfelt, I hope, instead. I am not going to say more. The point is, to do it away from publicity and photo-shoots. 

And there is one more thing that concerns some of us: just a few hundred paces from the attacks, a kitchen shop has put up a huge display of knives that are not protected by a case. It gives me a shiver each time I pass. Over many  months, my neighbours and I have protested to the shop, to their landlords at Borough Yards and to the police. But the display is still there, still far too easily accessible to anyone with violent intentions or to someone whose judgement is blurred by the beer with which the area is awash, this being the most intensive conglomeration in Southwark of premises that sell alcohol. It is sobering that, as the seventh anniversary of the attack approaches, we still can’t find anyone to care enough about the potential danger of this knife display to do something about it. 

Instead, there are plans to close a road or two, potentially marooning hundreds of residents, but no desire, it seems, to remove the bars' pavement licences that narrow the streets, causing serious bottlenecks for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into the narrow canyon-like streets of the Borough Market. The topography eerily recalls the photos of Itaewon, in Seoul, where 160 died in a crowd crush of 100,000 visitors in October 2022. In Borough Market, in fact, the crowds can be 50 percent larger than Itaewon. And they have nowhere to go if something were to go wrong. 

Meanwhile, the fight against over-tourism goes on in Venice, with NoGrandiNavi unleashing a picturesque new protest against the latest moves to excavate the lagoon in order to speed the return of the monster ships to the Stazione Marittima in Venice. A demonstration took place at nearby Zattere, and I was there with some colleagues from our Thames River Residents Group to cheer them on. A few weeks earlier, several artist activists had crafted the banners you see below and created a marine creature to protect the lagoon - seen arriving below. 

You can hear NGN's Marta Sottoriva eloquently explaining the new battle and the locals' reaction to the tourist access tax in the first episode of BBC Radio 4's The Tourist Trap, an investigation into over-tourism all over the world. (You can listen again on BBC RADIO SOUNDS).

Banners created by artists for the demonstration

It took three boats to transport the symbolic creature 

Above, some if the River Residents Group contingent in Venice last weekend.

NoGrandiNavi website (donation page)

Michelle Lovric's website

River Residents Group websitewebsite 

Web-surfing and a C16th entrepreneur by Elisabeth Storrs

 

As an historical novelist, I encounter both joy and tribulation in researching via the internet. Surfing the web provides a plethora of reference articles with helpful hyperlinks to other pages. Woe betide the novelist who is tempted to click on one of these links! You can be transported down a wonderous rabbit hole but end up in the tarpit of research. Instead of writing your novel, you find yourself whiling away hours on fascinating sidetracks.

One example of this occurred when I was writing The Golden Dice, the second book in my A Tale of Ancient Rome trilogy. One of my central characters is Marcus Furius Camillus (pictured), the famous Roman stateman who came to be known as the ‘Second Founder of Rome’ (the metro train station ‘Furio Camillo’ in Rome is named after him). He initially gained fame as the general who besieged the Etruscan city of Veii for ten years, the legend of which forms the underlying story line in my series.

Researching Camillus involved reading classical sources such as Livy and Plutarch but, inevitably, I also surfed the web for other references to him. One page was illustrated by an image of a woodcut engraving in the form of a medallion depicting Camillus’ head. Underneath was a hyperlink to the source of the portrait…click! Down, down, down I went into the 16th century world of humanist, printer, bookseller and entrepreneur, Guillame Rouille.

Rouille was born in Tours in 1518, moving to Venice to complete his printing apprenticeship before returning to France and residing in Lyon. He is attributed as being the inventor of the pocket book format called sextodecimo with 16 leaves to the folio sheet. He gained prestige for producing iconography books which were popular in the C16th and C17th. Such books featured icons with mottos together with text explaining the connection between the two.

Rouille’s most famous book on iconography was Promptuarii iconum insigniorum à seculo hominum, subiectis eorum vitis, per compendium ex probatissimis autoribus desumptis or Promptuarium Iconum Insigniorum for short (roughly translated as ‘a compendium of icons of famous men across time’). Published in 1533, the book featured 828 woodcut engravings of famous people in the form of medallions. In 1577 a further 100 icons were added.

Frontispiece with Rouille's emblem

Promptuarium Iconum Insigniorum consisted of two parts bound into one tome but separately paginated. The first part included figures born before Christ starting from Adam and Eve. The second part featured people born after Christ ending with the French King Henry II. Examples are the biblical Abraham and Noah, the pagan deities, Janus and Vesta, together with heroes such as Romulus and Hercules. Even the minotaur scored a guernsey. Figures in the CE included Christ himself,  Pontius Pilate,  Roman emperors, Attila the Hun, Muhammad, early Ottoman sultans, and the Holy Roman Emperors.

Ever the entrepreneur, Rouillé published different language versions with an eye to courting favour with royalty by dedicating the editions to them: the Latin edition to Henry II of France, the Italian edition to Catherine de' Medici, and the French edition to Marguerite de Navarre.

The legendary characters (such as Camillus) were drawn from Rouille’s imagination based on his ideas about the person’s deeds and personality. As for the real personages, the portraits reflected images on paintings, coins, seals and intaglios. Unfortunately, there were was one glaring error. Rouillé mistook the portrait of the goddess Athena on the obverse side of a Macedonian stater coin as Alexander the Great.

Amazingly, the engraver’s name is, unfairly, not mentioned. Indeed, Wikimedia Commons still lists the images as ‘artist unknown’. Instead, it is Guillame Rouille who stands first and foremost. He saw the book as an entertaining collection of succinct illustrated lessons for a general audience. It became a bestseller in its era outstripping rival iconography books. And because the medallions had the appearance of coins, Rouille quipped in his preface he included fictitious images of individuals before the biblical account of the Flood so as not to be accused of spreading counterfeit money to the public!

Medallions featuring Adam, Dante, Olympias (Alexander's mother), 

Charles II de Orleans, Andromache, King Priam, Clovis, Cornelia Sinna and Camillus

Guillame Rouille may have faded into obscurity but I wonder what he would think about his book still being available at Abebooks for $1,000+ or Amazon for a more affordable prize. I imagine he’s grinning. If you’re interested in seeing more of the medallions, please visit here.

As for being diverted by hyperlinks, I will confess this blog post was supposed to feature Cornelia Cinna Minor, wife of Julius Caesar and daughter of Cinna, but when her Rouille medallion appeared on a search, I knew it was the C16th entrepreneur who beckoned me to tell his story first!

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the A Tales of Ancient Rome series and founder of the Historical Novel SocietyAustralasia. www.elisabethstorrs.com

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, in particular, Jenny Kirby History

A Dark Plot by L.J. Trafford

Death of an Emperor

On the 18th of September in the year 96 CE, a young Imperial slave boy was attending to the shrine to the Lares, the gods of the household, that resided in the bedchamber of the emperor Domitian. Domitian paid very serious attention to religion and proper adherence to it. He favoured the god Jupiter and goddess Minerva, rebuilding the temple of the former after it had been burnt to the ground and holding a special festival at his Alban villa for the latter. Elsewhere in his now 15-year reign he had overseen the trial of a Vestal Virgin accused of breaking her sacred chastity. Found guilty he had her entombed alive as both the law and the gods insisted upon.

The Emperor Domitian. Getty Open Content.

 
As the boy went about his job, no doubt anxious that the notoriously short-tempered Domitian might find fault with his work, word was brought to the emperor that outside the chamber there was a man named Stephanus who sought an urgent audience with him. What could possibly be so urgent as to disturb the emperor in his private bedchamber? A conspiracy, Stephanus was claiming, a grievous conspiracy to murder the emperor and what’s more he had the proof of it.


That was all Domitian needed to hear, he told his guards to let Stephanus in. It was unlikely that the emperor recognised the man who now entered his most private of rooms. Although, an Imperial freedman, Stephanus was new to the palace. He’d previously worked as a steward in the household of Domitian’s niece, Domitilla but had been absorbed into the emperor’s own household after Domitilla had been banished by her uncle. He stood in front of the emperor with the scroll clasped in his right hand that he claimed named these conspirators. As he handed over the scroll to the eager emperor, perhaps Domitian noticed that Stephanus’ left arm was heavily bandaged. Perhaps he did not. The chance to remove yet more men wanting to murder him was of more importance than how some random slave’s injury came about.


As Domitian unfurled the scroll Stephanus ripped off his bandages and pulled out the dagger he’d concealed beneath them. Then he stabbed the emperor in the groin. Domitian getting to his feet yelled to the slave boy to fetch him his dagger that he always kept under his pillow. The slave boy diving onto the bed, lifted the pillow and found nothing underneath. As the emperor grappled with Stephanus, he shouted again for the boy to get help. Running to a door the boy found it to be locked, as were all the other doors to the emperor’s chamber.


Domitian continued to fight his assailant, lacerating his fingers trying to grab the dagger off the steward. Both hit the floor, with Domitian on top of Stephanus and attempting to gouge out his eyes. This was when the doors finally opened and in ran other members of the Imperial household: Clodianus, Maximus, Satur and an unnamed gladiator from the imperial training school.


However, these four were not there to help or at least not help Domitian, they were plan b and they set about their allocated task, unsheathing their own weapons and adding seven more blows to the ones Stephanus had already inflicted upon Domitian. Although he had made good work of fighting off Stephanus, Domitian could not fight off five of them. The emperor was dead. Every detail we know about the killing of Domitian comes from that one terrified slave boy. Although none of the historians who use his story ever bothers to give him a name.

The Aftermath

Domitian’s death had been a brutal, sustained attack, a noisy one too what with the emperor yelling for his dagger and for help. him and Stephanus rolling on the floor crashing into the furniture amd perhaps the little slave boy screaming in terror. Help came too late to save the emperor, but it was in time to catch the murderers bloody handed standing over their victim. We are told Stephanus was killed ‘when those who had not shared in the conspiracy made a concerted rush upon him’.Cassius Dio. I think we can assume that Clodianus, Maximus, Satur and that unnamed gladiator were also run down by the still loyal servants of the emperor.

The palace that Domitian built but was also murdered in. 
Photo by Scott Rowland

The emperor was dead, his assassins were also dead. However, this was potentially a combustible situation, for the childless Domitian had left no heir. In 41 CE after the Emperor Caligula had been brutally stabbed to death in a corridor there had been a clash of intentions as the Senate declared the restoration of the Republic at the exact same time the Praetorian Guard had found Caligula’s uncle Claudius cowering behind a curtain and proclaimed him emperor. The Guards being the ones with swords they easily won the argument that day.

In 68 CE when the similarly childless Nero had committed suicide a brutal civil war had been unleashed as four men: Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Domitian’s father, Vespasian battled each other to become emperor. People still remembered 69 CE, the year of those four emperors, and they feared a bloody sequel to it. But that didn’t happen. There was no clash of intentions between the different power brokers in Rome, there were no battles between competing would be emperors because by the end of the day, the very same day that Domitian was killed there was already a new emperor in place. His name was Nerva and he was the first of what Edward Gibbon, author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, christened the Five Good Emperors.

Anyone who knows anything about the assassination of Roman emperors has probably just spat out a mouth of coffee and half a masticated hobnob across their lounge. Because the aftermath of Domitian’s death, the ease at which we move from one dynasty to another is quite unusual in the ancient Roman political sphere. I’d go as far as to say it is unprecedented.

The most violent act that follows Domitian’s assassination is dished out by the Senatorial class on the many images of the now dead emperor that littered the city. ‘It was our delight to dash those proud faces to the ground, to smite them with the sword and savage them with the axe as if blood and agony could follow from every blow. Our transports of joy – so long deferred – were unrestrained; all sought a form of vengeance in beholding those bodies mutilated, limbs hacked in pieces, and finally that baleful, fearsome visage cast into fire, to be melted down, so that from such menacing terror something for man’s use and enjoyment should rise out of the flames.’ So says a rather surprising vandal, the lawyer and prolific letter writer, Pliny the Younger.


There is a reason for this orderly transition of rule. There had been a plan. A well thought out plan that considered the before, the during and both the immediate aftermath and the longer-term implications of murdering the emperor.
Stephanus, Maximus, Clodianus, Satur and the gladiator may have undisputably stabbed Domitian to death, but they weren’t the ones who’d set in motion the plan.
The instigators of this most successful of plots, the hatchers of the conspiracy, the planners of the assassination were clever men who’d kept well out of the way of the bloody murder they’d set up, avoiding the fate of Stephanus and co. Their names were Entellus and Parthenius and they were a Chamberlain and Head of Petitions, the highest ranking, most trusted of all of Domitian’s staff.

The men who really killed Domitian

The lives of imperial slaves and ex-slaves are generally of no interest to Roman historians who all hail from the elite classes of Rome. Snobbery likely plays a part in this omission no doubt, a distaste for the stench of slavery on the now freed. But also jealousy probably played a part too. Imperial freedmen had unique access to the emperor far beyond any Senator had, they were thus first in line to receive the material benefits of the emperor’s pleasure and certainly many palace freedman became enormously wealthy as a result.

Freedmen could also control access to the emperor, which was bound to put Senatorial noses out of joint. The Senate had never disabused itself of the notion that it was the most important and wisest body of men in the whole empire and was so owed oodles of respect, even from the emperor. That many emperors chose to rely on slaves who lacked a family tree that went all the way back to Romulus was an eternal mystery to them.
That such powerful and influential men in their own time as Imperial freedmen go largely unrecognised and un-noted demonstrates just how deeply Roman class divisions went. However, we do know a little about the brains behind Domitian’s murder from an unlikely source: the poet Martial.

Martial is the author of what is my all-time favourite poem from ancient times. ‘You ask what I get out of my country place. The profit gross or net, is never seeing your face’
Glorious, isn’t it? Martial paints a unique portrait of Rome through his poems as crowded, smelly and overwhelmed with people he found grievously annoying.
However, Martial had a clear ambition to be more than a scribbler of scurrilous slander. He fancied being a court poet with all the fame and fortune that came with the post (if you were any good at it).

This wasn’t a job you could simply apply for, you needed a way in, a contact on the inside who could convince the emperor that he really very much needed another poet in his entourage. Martial’s contact on the inside was Parthenius, Domitian’s chamberlain.

We see how Martial seeks his influence from his own work. There are several of his poems that feature Parthenius; a verse written for Parthenius’ son Burrus’ fifth birthday, a thank you for a snow-white toga gifted to the poet by the chamberlain ‘You surpass in whiteness the lily, the budding flower of the privet, and the ivory which glistens on the hill of Tivoli. The swan of Sparta and the doves of Paphos must yield to you; and even the pearl fished from the Indian seas.’ Gushes Martial.


This flattery in friendship has a point, as becomes apparent in later poems, Martial wants Parthenius to put his poems in front of the emperor.

The Senate House. Photo by Scott Rowland.

 
Whither, my book, whither are you going so much at your ease, clad in a holiday dress of fine linen? Is it to see Parthenius? certainly. Go, then, and return unopened; for he does not read books, but only memorials; nor has he time for the muses, or he would have time for his own.’

‘And if by chance (but for this we must scarcely hope) he shall have a moment to spare, beg him to present with his own hands our verses to the emperor; and to recommend this little book, so humble and so small, with merely four words: "This your Rome reads."

Evidently this nagging by poetry worked for Martial does end up praising the emperor and his many wonderful actions in verse form. Credit to Martial for managing to make a poem out the mundane subject of Domitian widening of the pavements and his anti-castration legislation.

To you, chaste prince, mighty conqueror of the Rhine, and father of the world, cities present their thanks: they will henceforth have population; it is now no longer a crime to bring infants into the world. The boy is no longer mutilated by the art of the greedy dealer, to mourn the loss of his manly rights.
Err quite.

As well as forming a useful connection in Parthenius, Martial was also buttering up or at the very least taking a paid commission from Parthenius’ fellow Imperial freedman, Entellus. Who it appeared had a very nice garden.
‘He who has seen the orchards of the king of Corcyra, will prefer the garden of your country-house, Entellus. That the malicious frost mar not nip the purple clusters, and the icy cold destroy the gifts of Bacchus, the vintage lives protected under transparent stone; carefully covered, yet not concealed. Thus does female beauty shine through silken folds; thus are pebbles visible in the pellucid waters. What is not nature willing to grant to genius? Barren winter is forced to produce the fruits of autumn.

So there we have it, two ex-Imperial slaves who have spent decades no doubt working their way up the palace staff lists to positions of such height and influence that poets are banging at their doors seeking their patronage. One man who once gifted the poet a beautiful toga and another who was so proud of his garden he sought to have it immoratlised in verse. And then they both involve themselves in a conspiracy to brutally murder their boss. Jarring doesn’t cover it. What on earth had happened to propel these two men to that point?

The Darkness

Cameo of Domitian by Josiah Wedgwood
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Reading any book about Domitian you will come across the fact that he fell out with the Senate big time and that his treatment of them veered towards the cruel. And although many scholars try to argue that Domitian’s reign of terror wasn’t nearly as terrible as the reigns of terror other emperors inflicted upon that class, it still wasn’t a great time to be a Senator. We know this because we have two eye witness accounts of what it was like to serve Domitian from lawyer and letter writer Pliny and the Roman historian, Tacitus.

‘The worst of our torments under Domitian was to see him with his eyes fixed upon us. Every sigh was registered against us; and when we all turned pale, he did not scruple to make us marked men by a glance of his savage countenance.’ So says Tacitus.
Pliny makes several references to Domitian’s rages ‘Domitian was besides himself with fury’ he says, ‘he was infuriated by the hatred he had incurred for his cruelty and injustice.’

Domitian was an intimidating boss. He knew it and he capitalised on it, most notably in the tale of the black banquet to which he invited the foremost senators and equestrians. This is what the party guests arrived to find: ‘He prepared a room that was pitch black on every side, ceiling, walls and floor, and had made ready bare couches of the same colour resting on the uncovered floor; then he invited in his guests alone at night without their attendants.  And first he set beside each of them a slab shaped like a gravestone, bearing the guest's name and also a small lamp, such as hang in tombs. Next comely naked boys, likewise painted black, entered like phantoms, and after encircling the guests in an awe-inspiring dance took up their stations at their feet.’

Having made it home alive after such a terrifying evening, the party guests must have thanked the gods profusely, at least until there came a knock at the door and a messenger from the emperor was announced. The messenger had come with a gift from the emperor, but his real mission was to further mess with their minds. No wonder those senators smashed Domitian’s statues to pieces when he died.

Alongside a general mental terrorising of the Senatorial class, there were also arrests, trials and executions. At which point you may be wondering what indeed my point is. How does Domitian’s treatment of the Senate impact on the actions of Parthenius and Entellus? It doesn’t. But I think it raises a revealing point, if this was what the emperor was inflicting upon the elite class of Rome, men with means, money, influence and connections that might be of some use to them (Pliny and Tacitus make it through the entirety of Domitian’s reign mentally scarred, true but also higher in rank than they started it) what might he be inflicting on his household of slaves and ex-slaves who had nothing to protect them and no one to write down their tales of suffering. They were constantly at the emperor’s side, unlike the Senators who at least had homes to escape to and breathe a sigh of relief they weren’t for the chop that day.

If Domitian could create such an oppressive atmosphere during a standard meeting with his Senatorial advisors, what was the atmosphere like for those living at the palace with the increasingly paranoid emperor. ‘He used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.’ Suetonius.
In fear of the conspiracies he could not prove Domitian had the palace floor polished so that he could see any would be assassin reflected as he snuck up on him. He had executed Epaphroditus, a now elderly Imperial freedman, because twenty-five years previously Epaphroditus had been present with Nero when that emperor had committed suicide. In Domitian’s head Epaphroditus had allowed the death of his master, an emperor no less. Epaphroditus’ own death was to serve as a warning to Domitian’s own staff.

Coin depicting Emperor Nerva
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jupiter knows how many of the imperial slaves found themselves summarily executed for similar imagined crimes in the emperor’s head. How many found themselves, like Tacitus and Pliny, terrorised by the emperor’s rages. We shall never know. But it had to be darker than the black banquet up there at the palace. So dark that two freedmen who were friends to a poet, one of whom had a nice garden and the other a giver of snow-white togas saw no other way but to set up a conspiracy to murder the emperor that they had both prospered under.

They very nearly got away with it too. With Stephanus and the others slain there was no one to point the finger at Parthenius and Entellus as ever having been involved. Except there clearly was because nearly two years after Domitian’s death the palace was overrun with soldiers demanding that Nerva hand over the culprits. A sword pressed against his throat, Nerva felt he had no choice but to give into the guards’ demands. We know not what happened to Entellus. We do know what happened to Parthenius. The Guards sliced off his testicles and shoved them in his mouth, suffocating him.
Nerva, who owed his position to Parthenius, was allowed to die of natural causes a few months later.

L.J. Trafford is the author of several books on Ancient Rome including Ancient Rome's Worst Emperors

and Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Rome

Spies, Lies & Deception - Celia Rees

 Being interested in spies and all things spying, I just caught the end of this fascinating exhibition at The Imperial War Museum. 

I first visited the IWM in the Sixties and have been a regular visitor over the decades. In recent years, my visits were often focused on a particular exhibition which had direct relevance to something I was writing. Fashion On The Ration was really useful when I was writing Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook; Lee Miller: A Woman's War was invaluable as one of my characters was an American photojournalist. I like exhibitions. The mix of images: photographs, paintings, sketches, postcards, newspaper cuttings and the objects that people used, owned, carried and valued tell you a great deal about those people and their lived experience. To a writer of historical fiction, these things provide invaluable reference, enabling us to more accurately re-create and re-imagine past lives. 

I've also spent time in the Imperial War Museum Research Room, doing Real Research, reading contemporary accounts of life in Post War Germany for Miss Graham: diaries, letters, journals, log books and official documents. It's not just information, these documents provide really valuable details of people's lives. These are the 'nuggets' we depend on as writers to make our characters authentic to their time and make them come alive, details that it would be impossible, otherwise, to find or imagine. Even the paper, the handwriting, the writing instruments, pencil or fountain pen, the browning paper, the courier font of the manual typewriter are evocative echoes of past lives. 

The Imperial War Museum is also a place of inspiration. I was in another Spy Exhibition when I had one of those powerful moments when disparate strands of an idea come together and coalesce into something that you know will be a book, in this case Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook. 

Spies, Lies & Deception covered more than a hundred years of espionage through 150 different objects, photographs and interviews. It began with spying in World War 1 and went on to the interwar period and World War II: the deceptions, inflatable tanks and Operation Mincemeat; the gadgets dreamed up by MI9 the precursors of Q and the heroism of agents like Noor Inayat Khan who had to use those gadgets for real. 

Noor Inayat Khan

The exhibition continued through The Cold War period with the Soviet double agents, Cambridge spy, Kim Philby and  Karl Fuchs, the spy who gave away the secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviets. One of my favourites from this period is Melina Norwood, an 87 year old great grandmother, another atomic spy, who wasn't uncovered until 1999. As a woman, she was not considered a threat. 

Melina Norwood - great grandmother - and spy

The exhibition continued to the present, ending with the Salisbury Novichok poisonings and the role of Bellingcat, the online investigators, in uncovering the real identities of the two men responsible, both officers in the GRU,  Russia's Foreign Military Intelligence Agency. 

Matchbox containing secret messages.

We've come a long way from messages hidden in matchboxes to Bellincat's combing of open source data. In a world of deepfakes, where it is hard to tell fact from fiction, their investigation of the Salisbury poisonings proved it is harder now to hide and keep secrets. Just like mobile phones have made any citizen a potential news photographer, online open source intelligence organisations, like Bellingcat, keep an eye on clandestine developments in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.  

Celia Rees

http://www.celiarees.com  

 Miss Graham’s War, Formerly Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook), Harper Collins. Paperback publication, June, 2021