599: No Such Thing As Julius Caesar's Plan B

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Hi, everybody.

Dan and Andy here, and we have an announcement of our exciting guest today.

And then we have an apology to make, and then we have another exciting announcement.

It's an excitement sandwich.

That's true.

So, joining us on the podcast today is one of our heroes, someone that we've been reading the books of for many years now, and who excitingly has just entered the world of podcasting herself.

And that is the historian Mary Beard.

Yes, Mary is one of Britain's best-known classicists.

She's brilliant.

She knows everything there is to know about the ancient world.

And excitingly, her new podcast, all about classics, has just launched.

It's called Instant Classics.

It's very funny and interesting.

Episode one is Which Roman Emperor is Donald Trump.

So if you like the sound of Mary's stuff and you'd like to learn a bit more about the ancient world, check out Instant Classics.

That's right.

She co-hosts it with a brilliant author called Charlotte Higgins.

It's a very funny show.

They're going to be doing a book club based on The Odyssey.

So do check it out.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Another thing that we need to say is, sorry, Andy.

This is not true.

He says, the ISS does have Wi-Fi, although it is more used for navigation and whatnot than downloading podcasts.

But astronauts do have an approved list of downloadable materials, so all we need to do is get onto the International Space Station list of of approved materials, and then they too will be able to attend on the 5th and 6th of September.

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We've got Jamie Morton and My Dad Rhoda Porno joining us on the 5th of September, and then Richard Osman joining us on the 6th.

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Come to Cheltenham on the 16th of October.

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So it's going to be amazing.

Details of all of this stuff, Cheltenham and the London Podfest, are on no such thingasafish.com/slash live.

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Okay, on with the podcast.

On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Mary Beard.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is Mary.

Right, my fact is the answer to this question:

Who was

or is the highest earning sports person

of all time measured in prize money?

Thank God.

I don't know if you know this, Mary, but I'm a massive golf fan.

The listeners will know that I love going on about golf and it's Tiger Woods.

Well, Dream On.

Dream on, because actually it's a man called Gaius Apulius Diocles.

Is he also a golfer?

Golf hadn't been invented when Diocles was around.

No, he is a Roman champion charioteer.

And his tombstone, let's assume it's reliable, tells us that over his career he earned, and I'm going to give you in Roma money first and then I'll tell you how much it is,

he earned more than 35 million sesterces.

Now, it's always kind of difficult saying, so how much is that in

today's money then?

Well, let me say that that much, 35 million sesterces,

would be enough to feed the whole population of the city of Rome, that's a million of them, in basic supplies for one year.

Okay.

Right, so we're dealing with billions of pounds.

How many people can Tiger Woods feed, James?

Himself and all his mistresses.

So what would that be?

Is that that's more than any sports star you're saying?

I'm saying that it's more than any sports star today

or any other that we have any historical record about.

Right.

So this was on he had this on his tombstone.

Can you just get my dates and tell them I was the highest paid sports star?

Well, it's my inference is that he doesn't actually say I'm the highest paid sports star in Rome.

And by the way, I'm going to be the highest paid sports star ever.

he just lays it out with number of victories amount of cash won what team he was playing for because he's in the transfer market in the charioteer teams

and the total amount of prize money I love it being on a tombstone though as in it is the equivalent of googling someone today because if you google any name you will get net worth on your tombstone andy would you like chortle award i don't like to boast i don't like to boast that didn't worry diocles diocles was very happy to post, so don't be too modest.

I guess one of the questions is: if it's on a tombstone, does that mean it's a more reliable source, would you say?

We do wonder where the info actually came from, because it's absolutely fantastically detailed.

It says things like, he had 870 victories when he started from the starting gates and never gave up first place.

He had

620 victories when he came from behind and made a last-minute dash.

And this is the amount of money he earned for each of them.

Now, one possibility is that Diocles was a real nerd and every evening he went home and wrote down one

95,000 sestices having come from behind with a last-minute dash and he kept it in his little notebook.

It's more likely that there's a kind of Wisdom's cricketer almanac.

Yeah, I'm just going to say that.

Like sports fans right now love statistics, don't they?

So, what's on the tombstone is what they've got from the stats.

Amazing.

I think it's like so interesting, but it clearly didn't catch on, right?

He probably thought this is gonna be huge because every tombstone is gonna be stat-packed from now on.

That's right.

Well, there are a few others, but never quite this.

I mean, it's it's looks really boring because all it is is the stats.

It's like,

you know, the football stats or cricket stats.

Okay, just saying that's not boring.

I can literally sit there and read that all day.

So I think, you know, we ought to rob Tiger Woods' nose, isn't it?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I didn't realise that chariot racing.

I knew chariot racing happened in Rome.

I've seen Ben-Hurt.

Ben-Hurt.

But I assumed that Rome used chariots in a military sense.

And it sounds like there's not really any evidence they did because chariots were an older thing.

And that in Rome they were for racing.

That's it.

There's a bit of military PR with chariots, you know,

just to frighten the enemy.

But essentially, you get these fantastic race horses pulling the chariots.

And it is phenomenally dangerous.

Poor old Diocles, he died in his 40s.

He's lucky to stay alive that long because you've got this really long track.

more than half a kilometre with terribly tight ends.

So you have to go up and down, you have to go round seven times and the ends are where you crash because you can't you can't turn around the corner and but they were called shipwrecks now fraggia that's a chariot that kind of crashes at the corners right

and the fans

were

absolutely obsessive loonies

and there is there are accounts of the fans really looking after the racehorses really look out for them and one of the things they used to do is they used to sniff their shit

because they were really anxious that they were being fed the right stuff because if you want to have a racehorse pulling the chariot really quick

then you've got to make sure that it's being given a right diet

i would try and check at the other end of the process i would try and check the feed

you would have thought that was the easiest but they knew that you wanted to know what came out i couldn't believe i was reading about nero so emperor nero he's on a tour of greece he is so into chariot racing that he decides to enter the olympics in 67 AD when there is no Olympics.

It's not meant to be a better chance.

You've got a much better chance of winning in a non-Olympic year.

No, because he moves it.

He moves it.

But imagine, and I'm not naming any particular president of the United States, but imagine the president of the United States arrives in some country and wants to participate,

but it's not actually been quite timed.

Well, they just move it, don't they?

Yeah.

That's what you do.

Yeah.

The next World Cup football is in America.

Oh, God.

I can't imagine them turning out.

But that story is extraordinary because back then the Olympics were tied into religious connotations.

They had it in a specific year, the religious rites.

So all of that's out the window.

He joins.

You have four horses to your chariot in the Olympics.

He shows up with 10 horses and then cuts a corner, flips over, loses the race, and still wins it.

Just like Mr.

Trump and golf.

Yes,

absolutely the same.

One thing you know is you don't want to beat the emperor.

Yeah.

But there was some underhand tactics that went on.

I read, I don't know if this is true, that the white team and the red team, we don't really know much about them in literature.

But one place that we do see them a lot is in curse tablets.

Yeah.

Because a lot of the cheating was cursing your opponents.

Is that right?

Yeah.

But it was against the rules to curse people.

Really?

Like, who was going to enforce it then?

Yeah, the gods.

Maybe.

Yeah, how do you?

You can't check the poo coming out of the the car to see if they've done it right?

Like that's, you can do that silently.

And it was this the Circus Maximus was clearly, unlike the Colosseum, which was

rigidly sex segregated,

men only,

until you got to the really bad seats at the top when the women could sit.

For most of the time, the men and women sat together in the Circus Maximus.

And it's absolutely clear that it was a prime

flirt location,

a pickup joint.

Ah, do you want to come with me and smell some horse shit?

It's something more subtle than that, actually.

It's like, you know, do you mind terribly if I pass you by to get to my seat?

Oh, did I rub your knee?

I'm just terribly sorry.

Well, they have the October horse ritual, which is

very learned.

Yeah.

So

that is the first time anyone said that to you who are not editing that out of the show.

that's your retail

you googled roman horse and have found the octopus

back up on it

was that was good now sorry i'd be no it's that's that's a very interesting idea that it was part of a ritual that you'd sacrifice a horse to the gods and there would be a race a chariot race where two people would race against each other whoever won the right-hand horse of the two horses would have its head taken off and then the winner yes because it was was for the gods.

So you were sacrificing to the gods right there.

And then a fight would happen between two people to see who could keep the head.

And then that would be displayed outside of a house.

But that must be a slightly distressing moment when you know you need your horse for another race and you win that one.

No, it was worth it because

of the prestige.

What about Siniska, the Spartan female chariot winner?

Yes.

So what I read is that she won the Olympic golds, but maybe she wasn't on the chariots.

Yeah, I mean there is a problem about

not in Rome, I can tell you, in Rome Diocles was on the chariot and a winner.

In Greece, in traditional Greece, before Nero, it's not clear whether it's the chariot owner.

who is the winner or the charioteer.

So sometimes when people say, oh, so-and-so, female, won the chariot race,

that is because she owned the chariot.

This is like the queen winning the grand national.

The queen winning the grand national.

She's not, she's not

going over beaches in the saddle.

She was never on the horse.

She's just patting it when it finishes.

Yeah, right.

That's an important job, actually.

But maybe this woman might have trained the horses, is that right?

Might have done.

We just don't know.

But you don't know.

You don't know.

So then finally, Diocles, he retires, does he?

He's a billion, billion billionaire.

What does he do?

Does he like take over the country or God only?

Well, we have no clue.

Just disappears.

What he does, where he lived.

He probably starts life as a slave in modern Portugal.

Actually, that's where we think he comes from.

But makes it big in Rome.

You know, if he's got 35 million sestases,

then...

he can afford a palace.

Yeah.

But we don't have no clue where he lived.

Perhaps he just lived very modestly and gave his winnings to the people.

But if he did, he didn't tell us on his tombstone.

You'd put that up, yeah.

I think I might say, and he gave it all away.

I didn't know he was from Portugal because that must hurt for Cristiano Ronaldo, who's currently.

I was going to say

Ronaldo.

Yeah.

Not even the richest sportsman from Portugal.

Do we know why he was so good?

What made him so good?

Luck.

I'd say luck.

He didn't flip over.

It's got to be largely.

I know that's the result.

I'm asking why.

One stage back.

Yeah, but I think of Stephen Bradbury, the Australian figure skater,

speed skater, who won the Olympic gold because in the semifinals, everyone in front of him fell over and then he won.

And then in the finals, exactly the same thing happened.

What if Dikles was just terrible and he just kept coming up the back and everyone was shipwrecked?

He just kept going.

You just didn't give up.

Yeah.

But I think he probably had a good fan base, though.

Yeah, sounds good.

They were were cheering him on.

We should move on, guys.

Can I put one myth to bed before we

this is something we get sent all the time in the fish inbox and thank you very much to everyone who sent it in but it's not true and it's about chariots and it's about Roman horses.

It's that the size of the

Space Shuttle rocket boosters was directly based on the size of Roman horses.

Like the Apollo missions, you mean?

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

So there's this thing that gets sent in all the time, and it's that the standard railway gauge on British railways and American ones is four foot eight and a half inches, and that is because the railway gauge was based on trams, and those were based on wagons, and wagons were based on wheel ruts on old roads, roads that were built by the Romans that were based on the size of two Roman horses walking next to each other

because of chariots.

Great fact.

No.

No.

It's time to move on.

It's just not true.

It's cobblers.

It's cobblers.

No, you've got, you know, you've done the research.

Why is it cobblers?

I just know it's cobbler's brick.

It's like, well, it's like saying that actually all clothes are based on ancient clothes because they're roughly the same size.

Like, it happens to be the case that if you're building a road, you don't build it so it's 200 feet wide.

Like, it's just,

it's sort of, it's either indirectly true in a trivial way or it's not really true.

But there's no evidence of that specific size being used in between the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

And there you go.

Well, stop sending it into us.

Thank you.

He comes into work very upset, everybody.

Very time.

Stop the podcast.

Stop the podcast.

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Okay.

What are you waiting for what are you waiting for well finish the episode the show finish the show all right on with the podcast on with the show

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that because the Confederate General Stonewall Jackson believed that one of his arms was much larger than the other, he used to walk around with it held in the air just so that he could redistribute all of the blood it was hogging.

So

this is written about quite a few times.

I'm holding my hand up for some reason as I was telling that fact.

You can put it down now.

Yes, Dan.

Yes, thank you.

Stonewall Jackson.

He was called Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson, 1824 to 1863.

He was a Confederate general, military officer, and he was seen as one of the most gifted tactical officers of that period.

Even people like Lincoln, who obviously did not like him, said, well, that guy was good.

You know, they all sort of acknowledged it.

But he was also a bit of an eccentric, a hypochondriac.

And one of the things was he believed he had one incredibly long arm and that it was basically sucking up all the blood that he needed for the rest of his body.

Have you seen any pictures of him?

Like, obviously, not photos, but are there?

Oh, there are photos.

There are photos.

1960s.

Yeah.

Any with really long arms?

No, they sort of cut it off at the sort of neckline, so you don't really get to see it from what I've seen.

What's he hiding?

A big arm.

Couldn't he just measure it?

It seems you come out.

Yes, you could just.

It's not rocky side.

I think

he felt that it was larger as well.

Just generally, he felt like maybe there was less muscle and more blood.

Yeah, exactly.

Once you've got it into your head, there's no...

You know that thing where you put your arms out and then you put one of them over the back of your neck and then it's shorter again, shorter than the other.

Oh, wow.

No, I didn't know that actually.

Well, maybe he did that one day at school and then he just got it into his head.

Well, apparently he did do it at school, but not school as a student.

As a professor, students used to say it was pretty weird seeing the professor sitting there with his hand up like he had a question and it turns out that's what he was doing and he would ride into war with his hand in the air in fact he got shot through the hand when his hand was up in the air like a target and almost had his hand amputated but it healed that was the battle of bull run wasn't it because he was in loads of battles during the civil war yeah but he then had a hand related

I mean, his death was hand injury related, but I can't find which hand it was.

Exactly.

It's so weird that we don't know, or at least from a cursory reading of a lot of sources, they don't say if it was the big arm that uh got shot

because he was he was friendly fired yeah uh he was this was in uh 1860 certainly 1860 something wasn't it 1863 yeah thank you so this was 1863 um he was shot uh because he was out doing a bit of reconnaissance and um some some of his own troops some confederate troops saw an approaching party opened fire he then had to have his arm amputated and that was given a full Christian burial because it was about to be thrown on the tent on the the pile of limbs outside the surgical tent.

But the military chaplain thinks, look, this is a heroic arm.

This is a general's arm.

We should keep it and bury it.

And he died several days later.

We think he had pneumonia.

You know, certainly.

Well, he had his arm cut.

Yeah, certainly armed.

I think it was the sniffle that killed him.

He had pneumonia.

It was him being shot-related.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And they said to his wife, would you like us to get the arm back?

And she said, no, it's had a a Christian burial, so it should stay where it is.

Because that was one of his other defining characteristics was he was extremely religious.

Apparently, he would pray before having a glass of water or before opening an envelope or before writing a letter.

I mean, prayer was his constant thing.

And anyway, so he's never been reunited with his arm.

And it's there to this day with a tombstone above it.

And he's got, yeah, it's got the writing on it that says, what does it say?

It says he earned more than any other Confederate general.

It just says arm of Stonewall Jackson.

And that's been moved around a couple of times.

So it might be directly above his arm now.

It might not.

But the arm was moved a bit.

Interesting.

Didn't he draw attention to himself, Rotha?

I mean, if you're kind of going into battle and you're the lead general, if you've got your hand up.

Yeah, I mean, they literally shot through me.

Yes.

But isn't that stupid?

It's completely stupid.

You don't want to be shot in your head.

No, you're right.

Okay, all right.

You're right.

In fact, what you would probably

put a hat on it to seem like you're really tall.

And the little suit

around.

Okay, you're arm.

I think if you've you've got a reputation as an eccentric already

go for it

yeah actually speaking of clothing he was well known amongst his other generals for not wearing flamboyant clothing okay right because in the war like the officers had to pay for their own clothes you didn't get a uniform and you had to kind of wear things that are about similar to the other guys like a similar color and stuff but the richer people in there and often the officers were rich they would just buy the most flamboyant thing they could get away with but he didn't do that and people people thought it was a bit sus really i think it was very poor wasn't he as a young man he grew up extremely poor and and scrabbled his way up through so how did he become a general i think talent i think he was sheer talent oh yeah and a funny on i think he was

he was who wants to be a general yeah yeah i can see you over there yeah he was i mean apparently he was you know the like the politics of the civil war aside he was a brilliant tactician you know and i think after he died not long after that came the battle of gettin' which obviously he missed having just died and that is one of the certainly the huge military turning points of the war was the battle of gettin' and his absence from it was cited by a couple of other generals at the time yeah so it could have changed how did you become a general in like the roman army or the greek army was it the rich was it rich yes i mean there's there's kind of two strands one is the career soldier right and you can go up the ladder a career soldier you know squaddie and then you you become a centurion, and you might kind of go up to the sort of what we call

the commission tracks, right?

But the guys who were leading it, they bypassed all that.

Right.

And God knows if they're any good or not.

Yeah.

Or, you know,

I kind of, you know, you guys have been talking about, you know, all this brilliant tactician stuff.

You sort of wonder.

what it is to be a brilliantly tactical general.

I mean, I've spent a long time looking looking at Julius Caesar's campaigns because, you know, Caesar is always in America.

You know, he's on the syllabus at military academies.

You know, how you, you know, because of his brilliance as a general, you know, like old Stonewall.

But I started looking and he only had one tactic, which is he went round the back, right?

You get face to face with the army.

the opposing army.

And what you do is you then pen him in from the back.

That's what he does all the time.

You must have felt like such an idiot when you're going, he won't do it this time.

He won't do it this time.

He wants us to think he's going to do it, but he's not.

And in fact,

it seemed to me, and I've got terrible kind of attacks on social media for saying this because there's an awful lot of people very, very invested in Roman military tactics.

I think it's all like that.

It's all kind of pen them in from the back.

And

was he also helped by being in charge of the Roman army as well, which was presumably the biggest and best at the time?

In his rise to power, he sure was.

I think they're only the biggest and the best because there's more of them.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, you can't defeat the Romans in a war.

You can defeat them in a battle.

They lose battles all over the place.

And they're hopeless at some things.

I mean, they're laughing stock when it comes to navies, but they've always got more men.

Yeah.

So they can't lose a war.

They can lose a battle.

Interesting.

So is there not kind of technical brilliance?

Well,

you know,

when this goes out, out, I shall no doubt get more of it.

This, you know, offensive, war, you fucking moron, you don't understand Marybeard.

It doesn't give any credence to the bullying.

Which legends do you have?

But if you ask me,

it's one trick ponies, really.

Wow.

So, Caesar, just to go back to chariots,

he describes, in his

diaries, his account of

commentaries on the British invasion.

It's one of the only references we have contemporary to British tribes using military chariots.

And

they'd gone out of fashion in Rome for centuries by then, but we were still using them.

And they were like an uber across the battlefield.

And one really important myth to Bost is they didn't have scythes coming out of the wheels.

Oh, okay.

Why not?

So if you go to look at Boudica on the Thames embankment, her statue, she's got a great set of scythes about,

but I am told by my archaeological friends that this is a myth.

Okay, absolutely gutted.

I'm a bit gusted about that.

That's my chariot myth busted.

There we go.

And I've been sending that in to other podcasts already.

Jumping back to the modern, just very quickly.

So

he was responsible for winning a lot of battles.

To Stonewall Jackson.

Stonewall Jackson.

Modern day.

Certainly more modern than the time of Caesar.

But one of the places that he won was Fredericksburg in Virginia, and he beat the federal general, who was Ambrose E.

Burnside, friend of the podcast.

We've spoken about him before.

Inventor of sideburns.

Inventor of sideburns.

At some point, Burnside, people went, I love it, and I love the name, but not quite.

And they changed it round.

But yeah, two.

Because he had a real set, didn't he?

Yeah.

I think I linked up to his moustache.

They weren't really sideburns.

It's interesting.

He was an innovator of the four, but he hadn't perfected it.

You know what?

On this subject, I was reading about hypochondria.

And modern-day hypochondria was invented kind of or defined by an American neurologist called George Beard who didn't have a beard.

And no relation.

No relation.

No relation.

What about Frank Beard of ZZ Top?

Sorry, you must get that all the time.

Oh, no relation.

On the tactical side of things, and sort of like, does the skill exist or not?

Or did Jackson have a gift for it?

Because he was a military instructor at

Virginia Military Institute for a while.

And his students did not like him at all.

And the reason they didn't like him was that he was an unbelievably dull lecturer.

So

he would compose a lecture, he would recite it from memory,

he wouldn't deviate at all.

And if anyone asked him a question, he would simply spool back in his head to the bit of his pre-remembered lecture that he thought answered the question and just recite that again verbatim.

While subtly just reaching out his massive long arms.

Yes, I'm going to say that.

What did he do with the arm at this point?

In 1856, a group of his own alumni tried to have him sacked for poor teaching.

And they must have 1856.

I know, they must have felt so stupid just five years later when he is the like pride of the Confederate Army, you know, one of the greatest, blah, blah, blah.

There were a lot of rumors that were about him.

I think this is one of the things where people would say stuff about him.

And then if they were, if other sources were asked, they would say, no, he never did that.

We never saw that.

One of the things was that he was constantly chewing on lemons, eating lemons, just absolutely love lemons.

And that was written in a biography.

And then everyone who read that went, I never saw him with a lemon.

I have no idea where that comes from.

I know where it comes from.

Yeah.

It's based on a single account of him eating a lemon on the 27th of June, 1862.

That's bad.

But three separate people saw him eat it, and they all wrote it up in their memoirs.

And so you've now got three sources saying, oh, he loved a lemon, did old Stonewall.

That's like when I went to my ex's family for the first time and they offered me dessert and I didn't really want any and they had some strawberries.

I'm like, oh, I love strawberries.

So I had a couple of strawberries and every dessert I ever got the strawberries

present, like a t-shirt with strawberries on it.

Yeah.

Trips to strawberry fields.

Is it true that he didn't eat pepper because he thought it weakened his legs?

Well, that was another thing that was said about him.

Yeah.

It's a past.

Don't know.

I mean, is it true that he wouldn't let his back touch the back of a chair because it jumbled his organs up?

This man is sounding more and more completely barking.

The more you talk about him,

I have not done my research like you clearly have on Stonewall Stonewall Jackson, but frankly, I'm quite glad I have.

He believed a lot of stuff and he has become...

He was a definite hypochondriac.

Definitely.

And he's become, because he was tactically skilled, he's become an emblem of the kind of lost cause of the Civil War and people saying, oh, we could have won it.

And, you know, we were in the right, actually, and all this.

They said he was a champion sleeper as well.

He could sleep so brilliantly that he could even, as he was eating a meal, fall asleep with the food in his mouth just straight away because he could just get into it that easy.

And that's tough with a lemon because they're quite tart as well, aren't they?

I read about an hypochondriac with, I don't know if you know about this person, Mary, called Aristides.

Aelius Aristides.

Aristides.

Sorry, I'm not as learned as

a great friend of mine.

And he writes book after book after book on his hypochondriac symptoms.

This is in the second century AD.

This is an ancient hypochondriac.

He's an old friend.

Yeah.

An old friend.

An old friend.

He just goes on and on and on.

But loads of posh Romans were terribly hypochondriac.

Marcus Aurelius, famous Stoic emperor, you know, when he is a kid, teenager, he's always writing to his tutor

about his symptoms.

I get letter after letter between these two guys saying, I do hope your tummy is feeling a bit better this morning because my neck, I thought it was getting better in the night, but now I wake up, I appear to have a jabbing pain going through the shoulder blade.

Later, Marcus Aurelius, he employs a doctor who is very keen on getting the proper sort of

pesters, anal pesseris.

He particularly likes things you put up your bums.

Suppositories, okay.

Yeah, suppositories are.

Pesseris is a different.

Oh god, am I getting it?

I am learned in some ways Mary

suppositories

I think they'd know what I meant

I don't think I'd have any trouble getting anyway there's old Marcus Aurelius you know saying oh I want trust suppository I thought he was all about disregarding the pain and discomfort of the world I mean I've read the what is it the meditators

don't believe all you read in the don't believe all you read in the meditations it gives you only one side of how he might like to be seen well because i have quite a bad shoulder and i put it down to like looking at my phone or my screen all the time but that can't be true for him he'd have had a tablet very good thank you um can i just

talk about aristides he is aristides

so he was basically an orator and he got nasal congestion a sore throat and then couldn't really do his oratory anymore and so he went to see the priests and they told him to lie down and allow Asclepius, the god of medicine, to appear in his dreams.

And then, whatever happened in his dreams, he had to do them to make him feel better.

So, one of them was like smear mud on his body and run around the temple three times.

The suppository trick as well, the suppository trick, I'm sure.

Yeah, an enema of honey, and to swallow a goose liver sausage.

I mean, that's a bad dream, isn't it?

That's a bad dream.

And there are books and books and books of this rubbish.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is, in 1845, there was an exhibition in London where for a shilling, you could pull a lever on a giant machine, which would produce a brand new line of poetry for you in Latin.

Wow.

Yep.

Popular?

So popular.

I think it was popular, actually.

I think the inventor supposedly retired on the proceeds of this amazing machine.

And it is, I have to add, making a line of Latin poetry is really complicated.

Oh, right.

Because it's not just like, you know, what you can get out of Chat GPT if you say, write me a poem on the spring, you know, and it comes out.

Because Latin poetry is done to a very, very fixed format of meter.

So you have to have the right stress and rhythm through the line so it's damn difficult I mean I've enough I can't write a word of Latin verse so this machine

did better than I can I can sort of see how it's done but I can't write a word that is stunning that makes it all the more impressive because apparently there were 26 million permutations of line that you could get off this machine.

So it's six, it's six feet, Latin hexameter, so six different feet in the line.

What's a feet?

A foot is like an individual unit.

So, a pentameter is a iambic pentameter, is the sort of famous Shakespearean meter, which is da-da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da.

So, it's like a beat, is it?

Yeah, but a foot will have different numbers of syllables,

different numbers of syllables, and it's not actually by stress like our verse is, it's by the length of the syllable.

So, it's long, short, short, kind of ah.

So, it's really difficult.

I mean, it's what

in the 19th century they kind of crucify little boys on doing, you know, to write Latin hexameters with the absolute echelons of posh education, but also a complete nightmare.

Right.

Interesting.

So this machine, bloody amazing.

It's stunning.

It was created by a print shop worker called John Clark, and he was an inventor, obviously.

And I think this took him about 13 years.

Sources vary, but it took a long, obviously.

And do you know how it worked?

It had six cylinders, and when you pull the lever.

Wow, like a a fruit machine.

It was exactly like a fruit machine, except instead of some boring old cherries, you got a beautiful line of Latin verse.

And he had arranged it so that it was adjective, noun, adverb.

So it's a matter of money.

So it actually meant something.

It's actually, each line is not, yeah, it's not word-salad.

It does, it might be an eccentric meaning.

You might not be able to get a huge amount of sense.

It's not

like a lot of Latin poetry.

And he was just a really interesting guy.

So he was born in 1785, died in 1853.

The machine still exists today, which is very exciting.

I thought you might have been to see it even.

I have never been to see it, but I've read about it even before I saw that you were going to talk about it.

Oh great.

It's down in Somerset now, and it's in a collection of items that used to be the Clark's Shoe Museum, because John Clark

of Clark's,

his relatives were the shoe empire people.

While he was working in feet in poetry, my God, they were working to put feet in shoes.

That's amazing.

And yeah, they held it for a while, and still it still exists i think it was going to be zhuzhed up and and renovated a bit recently but it's it apparently played god save the queen while it was working this collection who own it the alfred uh gillette trust they they own in their collection this machine 25 000 shoes and a significant collection of somerset ichthyosaur fossils wow i mean what a collection whereabouts is it in some set you know it's i think it's literally there yesterday it's a village called street i think oh i know that yeah right it's not far from glastonbury that's right that's where where it is.

Yeah, yeah.

Can I ask about the machine?

Just jumping back to the Latin machine.

So it would give you this line of poetry, but it wouldn't print it on, say, a little ticket, right?

So you would just see it on the screen, as it were.

I don't know.

You could take a photo of it with your phone.

You could take a photo of it.

So my question is, is how good was everyone's Latin back then?

And did someone permanently stand translating your line of poetry for you?

I think we imagine that they were all terribly Latinate back then.

Okay.

But actually, there'd been no period of British history after the Romans left when more than a relatively small section of the elite had known Latin.

They've known a lot about classical culture, but a Latin, more particularly Greek, but even Latin education was still largely for boys and largely for the rich ones.

So, I mean, there were some clever autodidacts who taught themselves Latin, but who this machine was for, why would anybody who didn't know how difficult it was to compose Latin poetry be remotely impressed?

And some people have thought that it was actually a kind of piss take,

rather expensive, very long-term piss take.

13 years of my life.

13 years of my life on a joke, right?

This is going to be great.

I don't think this is correct, but some people have argued that the 1840s, this is when these, you know, these little little boys, private schools, were spending hour after hour after hour learning how to compose this Latin poetry.

And what this bloke is saying, what Mr.

Clark is saying, is look, I can get a machine to do it.

Yeah,

it's actually undercutting some of that.

But then that's still true.

Like now, like my school, we had one Latin teacher for the entire school of a thousand kids.

Right.

Well, that's a lot more than many have.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's like there was a report in 2021 that said that staff in the British Civil Service are routinely telling jokes in Latin to exclude lower class colleagues.

So it is quite an elitist thing still, isn't it?

Learning Latin or Greek.

And is that a problem?

And should we be teaching everyone it or shouldn't we be teaching anyone it?

I think that you should be giving everyone the opportunity to learn it.

And Latin's always in crisis.

I mean, in the early 20th century, they were saying Latin was about to die, right?

Well, you know, it's taken a very long time to do so, if that was the case.

But I was talking quite recently to a teacher at an ordinary state comprehensive school where she had reintroduced some Latin for the kids.

And she said, what was great about it was two things.

First of all, you didn't have to speak it, right?

So you could, it wasn't that it was, it helped you with necessarily with other languages or whatever that it might.

It was that you didn't have to spend all your time learning, you know, how to ask for a pizza in it or whatever.

So you were just looking at the language.

She also said, it's not like when you start introducing French or German, whatever, you suddenly discover that, you know, Miss Privileged here is going off for a week, weekend at half-term to get her French better at mum and dad's French chateau.

No one's going off to the Vatican.

No one is going off to the Vatican for the week.

And she said it was really levelling.

That's really good point.

Because anybody could be good at it and nobody had that kind of built-in advantage.

You know what?

Everyone in my school was equally good at at it because there would be like a quiz at the end of each lesson and there'd be 10 questions and then you'd have to shout out your score and everyone got six out of ten because the Latin word for six is sex.

And so literally, we all deliberately got six out of ten.

So he just went around the class and everyone went, sex, sex, sex.

You know.

What's great about Latin though is that everybody remembers their Latin lessons and their Latin teacher.

Now people tend not to remember their geography teacher, you know, but Latin, it has, you know, it really,

really kind of gets to you.

And you remember how you took the piss out of the teacher or whatever, but you never forget it.

I learned it until I was 18.

Did you?

Yeah.

And so how is it?

My Latin?

You're still doing that on Tuolingo, aren't you?

Andy?

That's right.

That's only because so I can tease my civil service colleagues though.

It was, yeah, it's just.

Yeah, we had to do it at lunch times like instead of playing football you could either play football or do latin and you chose did you choose latin i was it was chosen for me i see i see and do you regret it no i loved it i really loved it yeah it was mega fun we never did it but i was in hong kong so i don't think it was an option um it's useful in weird ways i do think it's useful for other languages as in it's genuinely you sort of see how things fit together but the thing i can't get is this time where it was so common like law was all in latin so people in ordinary ordinary people in courtrooms couldn't really understand what was going on because courtroom business was all conducted in Latin until 1362.

Lots of church services were in Latin.

Lots of church.

The whole Catholic Church existed on Latin until relatively recently.

Yeah, grammar schools were founded to teach Latin to members of the clergy because it was important to have good Latin.

In primary school, we would have to sing Latin hymns.

Would you?

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I remember the journalist who got the scoop that the Pope was stepping down because he delivered it in Latin and she was the only one who could could understand it.

You could understand it.

There's also, there's such good stuff written in it.

You're actually there with what someone wrote 2,000 years ago and it's still bloody amazing.

It transports you, I guess, right?

It is.

It's about time travel.

I mean, something like Virgil's Aeneid, right?

His first century BC poem on the foundation of Rome.

What I'm going to say is it's a bit of an exaggeration, or at least I couldn't prove it, but I'm pretty certain it's true.

That there hasn't been a day since 19 BC when Virgil popped his clogs when someone in the world hasn't been reading the Aeneid.

It's been read and recited and studied without a gap for 2,000 years.

So I think it's, you know, I think it's just great.

Okay.

So

as long as you don't, as long as you don't make it just posh boys only.

Yeah.

One person.

One person who didn't agree with you was a guy called William Barnes, who was a linguist who taught himself Greek and Latin because he didn't want any Greek or Latin words in the English language.

And so he started coining new words to do away with the Latin.

So like, for instance, instead of the word grammar, he called it speechcraft.

Instead of ornithology, he called it bird law.

I quite like bird lore.

Birdlaw's quite different.

These are all quite good.

Instead of flexible, he wanted people to say Benson.

And he was like basically saying that people should speak English as an Anglo-Saxon language, not as a Greek/slash.

Which I think even he thought it was just a bit of fun, to be honest.

When was he around?

He was around the 19th century.

About the same time as your Latin machine.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But there's only one thing that's still in the OED, which the definition says W baum's term for.

And that word is push wailing.

So W-A-I-L-I-N-G, push wailing.

Do you know what that is?

Push wailing.

Force crying.

So faking emotion.

Faking emotions.

That sounds like labour giving birth.

Good guess.

You're pushing and you're wailing?

No,

you're pretty much close, but it was the definition in the OED is W Barnes term for a pram.

Prambla.

And that's still in the OED today.

That's amazing.

Push wailing.

As preparation for today, I'd listen to a bit of Quomodo Dicito, which is the Latin podcast.

And it's a few, it's really fun.

Like, it's a few very nerdy people who've well-versed in it and made a study of it.

And they do it at a kind of

slow enough speed that you can just about sort of cling on to it.

And it's fun, it's really interesting because you never hear it spoken normally.

Well, thank God.

I mean, I think there used to be a set of, you know, it's like the eccentric people in Finland who did the news in Latin

each week, I think it was.

And you think, what's the point?

You know, what is

fun.

Cuimo Dicata is fun.

It's fun.

But I want to read things that the Romans wrote.

I don't want to sit listening to the news read by some batty fins in Latin.

Is your podcast about the modern day, but in Latin, Andy, the one you're talking about?

Yeah, they start with how, what have you been up to?

It's not difficult, like, because there isn't a Latin word for you know, telephone, for instance.

Yes, I think they do.

They have had to find a lot of workarounds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They haven't started living like Romans to make it more effective.

Yeah, yeah.

The effort-reward ratio does not seem to me too.

Is your Latin good enough that if you went to Vatican City, you could use their ATM machines?

Or they give you a Latin option?

You can use ATM machines in most languages.

You don't need to be able to speak the language.

Yeah, I'll jab until numbers come up and then I'll select the media.

Yeah, yeah.

What you do is you look at all the numbers and you don't understand the currency and you choose the second smallest number.

Yeah, you go for that because that's probably about 10 quid.

Because that's probably doable.

Yeah, yeah.

And you pull the big handle and then a line of poetry comes out.

That's great.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the biographer of 7th-century French king Dagobert I didn't include a list of his lovers because they said it would make the book too long to read.

Same.

I was waiting.

I was staring at Andy.

Waiting.

There's not a gravestone big enough.

Oh dear.

It's just a bedpost, your tombstone full of notches.

Oh my god.

Sorry.

No,

it's very funny.

Is that the biographer trying to praise Dagobear by saying how marvelous he is?

No, not really.

I don't think so.

I don't think it was a very positive thing.

So I read this in BBC History magazine.

It was.

And I have subsequently checked it.

God, I love you, you mary we're gonna get letters from geography teachers from their letters

if you are gonna send a letter in about this episode if it's not in latin we're not gonna read it right

um so it's part of their q a section where they answer questions that someone might ask about history and the question was how responsible was king dagobert the first for the decline of the merovingians which i think is a question we're always asking ourselves aren't we

uh and it's turns out these merovingians they were a group that came after the romans right mary Mary?

So maybe you don't like them so much because...

I know nothing about them.

I was delighted that you were going to take us into the Merovingians because, you know, I've always been...

busting to know a bit more about them.

Well, they were very big around the 5th century AD.

They ruled in what's now France, Germany, Belgium.

And Dagobert came along, and he was a bit of a black sheep.

And he was dogged by scandal.

He moved the court to Paris because he was a bit of a playboy, and there was lots of fun happening in Paris.

He lived in loads of luxury, tried to get as much gold as possible.

And he'd previously married his stepsister to cement the monarchy, as was quite common in those days.

But he divorced her as soon as his father died because his father was the one who was kind of organizing it all.

He got in charge, divorced his wife, and then just went through loads and loads of affairs.

And basically, all this debauchery was the beginning of the end for the Merovingians.

So it's a moral tale, really.

It really is.

Yeah, it seems like that, doesn't it?

And it's

the biographer links his sort of personal lust with his lust for ecclesiastical lands.

You know, it always starts, it starts with personal, and eventually, you're on the ecclesiastical lands, that's what you lust after eventually.

And this all comes, I should say, from the Chronicle of Fredegar, which was the 7th century Frankish chronicle written about the Merovingian kings.

As we all know that, anyway.

I have never come across the Merovingians before.

That's kind of a word you hear, like the guy in the Matrix.

Yeah.

But they were the ruling family, weren't they, of the Frankish kingdom?

And they were the ones who came before, like Charlemagne.

Yeah, and we can hear them.

The Romans are fine.

The Carolingians are fine.

But it's the Merovingians, which the Merovingians, when you look them up, there's one thing that comes up on a lot of pages, and it separates them from the Romans and the Carolingians, which is long hair was seen as power in their society.

Rulers had long hair, and there's a um

yeah, there's a professor called James Palmer who said that basically if there was someone who was an heir to the throne that they thought is not gonna be quite good enough, they would shave their head, pop them into a monastery like a monk, but have them on standby because they haven't gone bold, they can grow back right.

And if the person then who's been put in power was seen as bad, they can knock that person out and bring back.

Can I say if you're like the next in line for the Merovingians and you start going bold, is that you done?

Well,

there was no hair transplants in those days.

No, exactly.

It was weeks, though.

Ah.

Okay.

There you go.

But it was a tool of state power.

One of the queens was called Clotilde, and she was sixth century queen, widow of King Clovis.

And Clovis, by the way, is where we get Louis from.

Clovis, knock off the sea, you got Lovis.

That's why so many French kings are called Louis.

Okay.

It was all from Clovis, yeah.

Anyway, her grandsons were meant to be crowned.

They were, you know, slated, next up, all of this.

And then some plotters in the family abducted them and dispatched a henchman to Queen Clotilde saying, we've got a pair of scissors here and a sword here.

Which do you want for your grandsons?

And the idea was either we can execute them as royals or we can cut their hair, which means their life won't be worth living.

They'll be living as non-royals.

And she said, sword please.

Sword please for my grandsons.

Wow.

I'd rather that than a haircut, which means a non-royal body.

Big decision.

Big decision.

That's hard.

And the Carolingians, when they came in, had to separate themselves from the whole long hair thing so they went for the mustache yeah that was their big thing yeah charlemagne picture his long mustache lovely yeah i couldn't tell you what charlemagne looked like i must say what's weird is i'm not actually sure i've seen a picture of him i just conjured that in my head

here's one thing i found about dagobert which i'd never heard before he was the first french king to be crowned on a folding chair like a fishing chair.

And I was reading about these folding chairs.

And apparently, like, it was one of the best things you could have for quite a lot, like in ancient Rome.

What I mean is like an X-shaped legs and then almost like a cloth belt, but it was actually made of sort of like a director's chair, yeah, yeah, yeah, but without a back, but without a back, without a back, uh, and they were made of wood, and they were huge in ancient Egypt.

There's one in the British Museum, Sutta Camoon was buried with two of them, and now it's mostly people watching golf.

The Emperor Augustus took one to the opening of a rather posh theatre and he fell off his very bad, bad size.

He fell off his hobby.

I bet no one laughed at that.

Well, only it was a bit of a risk to get off it.

Wow.

There is a quite famous ruler of this period, Dago Boat II.

Oh, yeah.

Don't get me started on him.

Oh, boy.

Here we go again.

Downs on his hobby horse.

Well, you never know how history is going to place you and your story into new light.

And that's what happened with Dago Boat II because he disappeared and no one quite knows was he murdered what was the end of his story cut to many many years later this hoax is set up this thing called the priory of scion where the idea is that they are looking after the bloodline of the merovingians and then that gets picked up by the writers of a book which is all about the bloodline of christ and bought into that.

The Merovingians are the descendants of Christ.

Exactly.

The Da Vinci Code is largely.

Do you want to retract your very learned comment from earlier, Mary?

It's not my theory.

But I made sure this fact was last at the show.

So if Mary walked out, we'd have enough in the tank.

Do you want to know the truth about the Merovingians, Dan?

This is the truth.

This was a claim made at the time, not by the kings themselves, but I think by people around them, that they were descended from a sea monster.

Not from a god, but a specific.

Have you heard of a...

I think a cabs here, Mary.

Have you heard of a quinotaur?

Like a minotaur, but not

But with quins with five horns.

Horns.

The quinotaur is the most ridiculous-looking animal you'll ever see.

It's a half bull, half fish, but it's got five horns up front.

It's because the word merovech, where we get merovingian, it means sea bull.

Right.

Oh, of course.

I'd forgot.

I'd forgotten.

So the quinotaur supposedly is the...

Is his head like one of those, you know, those ring toss things that kids have?

Exactly like that.

It looks like that.

Exactly like that.

Yeah, and they're different colours for different prizes.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Must have been so embarrassing when he was trying to give a good talk and just a hoop would land on his.

Guys, come on, five minutes.

Big speech.

So, this fact was about biographers and stuff.

And I want to know what I read is that it was quite dangerous to be a biographer in ancient times because you basically had to

say really nice things about the person you're biographising, but you couldn't go over the top because it would seem like you were being too obsequious.

But then, on the other hand, if you said anything bad, you could basically be put to death.

Right.

There was an obvious answer to this.

You wait till they're dead before you write the biography.

Okay, that's good.

Your publishers are going to be

Nero's really looking forward to seeing a proof.

And you're half the advance.

Yeah, it's not.

I'm sorry, the last chapter's taking me a bit longer than

I thought it was going to be.

I'm working on it.

Interesting.

You just, you know, one thing you never want to do is to talk about the emperor while he's alive.

The other thing about the biographers is how much of it was true, right?

You see, probably very little.

Yeah, particularly if you're dealing with the concubines of Dacoba, I suspect.

But

when I was a student, a long time ago, we were always taught now you've got to go through all these biographies and you've got to get your blue pencil out and

you've got to put a line through all the bits that can't possibly be true.

So you do that and then you come to some bits and you think, could it be true?

Well, maybe it could.

You put a question mark.

and I spent years of my life doing that really it's only in the last few years I've realized it's not the point the point is that people believe this stuff

you know it's taking you a bit into the kind of way we think about monarchs and celebs etc we tell these stories about their excesses which are not true but they certainly tell us about how we envisage

you know it goes right down to the kind of innocent king charles doesn't it you Do you know he has someone who puts toothpaste on his toothbrush for him?

The story about King Charles is that he had like 12 different eggs made every morning of different hardness, and he would choose which one to eat.

And do you know that goes right back to the ancient world?

No.

Because there's a story about

the kitchens of Antony and Cleopatra.

And a kind of next to eyewitness visits the kitchens, and there's eight boars roasting, right?

And the guy says to the cook,

God, you must be expecting a large party to dinner tonight.

And the cook says, No, it's just we don't quite know when they're going to sit down to eat.

So we put them all on at different times

so that one will be ready when they want it.

And that's just like the boars eggs.

It's so funny.

I have 12 microwaves in my house, and I put one for us and lasagna in each one.

But I went, I was brought up with the idea that the Queen's corgis, the late Queen's Corgis, ate out of silver dishes.

And I once went to do some filming in Windsor Castle with a film crew, and we had to go quite near the sort of more domestic apartments.

And as we passed the door to the pets area, we all looked at each other because lined up by the door were a load of very nasty plastic bowls.

And we all looked at

everybody said, so it's not true then, you know.

But the point what you're saying is the fact that we think that about the royal family tells us a lot more about life today.

Yes.

But whether it's true or not.

Because of what we want to believe as well.

Yes.

About how we imagine power, how we imagine wealth.

What would we do if we had unlimited wealth?

Well, my dog would eat out of silver bowls.

I feel a bit sorry for Dagobert I, though.

Yeah.

You know because if you're a monarch the one thing they always get you for is

too much sex isn't it?

It's always we couldn't possibly fit the names of all the concubines in.

You know one of the definitions of a monarch is that they have more sex than everybody else

and that's partly about power but then it gets used against them as they're absolutely lurid bastards who you can't trust.

And in Rome, of course, it's the the wives are having too much sex as well.

Is that the slander or the...

That's what is always being, that is always a reputation that

the Emperor Claudius's wife, Messalina, one story about her, cannot possibly be true, but it's a real revelation, is that she's supposed to have challenged the prostitutes of Rome to a competition of who could sleep with most men in one night.

And she won, of course.

She fell off halfway through, but the judges decided.

The judges decided that she had won.

And you think, you can't win with your sex life

if you're a ruler.

When the truth is, they were all having it once a year, like the rest of us.

In a very boring way.

Dagobert's reputation has recovered, because now in France,

there's a phrase,

le bonrois dagobert, the good king dagobert, and it's basically the ultra-basic nursery rhyme that French children learn and are sung by their parents.

Old King Cole is a merry old son.

It's exactly like that.

And it's all, there's a French revolutionary song, Le Le Bonrois d'Agobert, because that was a way of making fun of kings and monarchy without actually making fun of King Louis XVI.

It was two years before the revolution this song was written as a way of satirizing the monarchy.

But now that's survived and it's one of the absolute root one lullabies.

I bet they don't tell them about his sex life, though.

I don't think that's a later verse.

It's normally skipped.

That's when he calls for his fiddle as three.

That's what that's all about.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on social media accounts.

So I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram.

James.

I'm on TikTok.

No such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter M.

Mary.

Are you online?

Look up Instant Classics podcast.

Yes.

And you'll find me.

Yeah, nice.

Yeah, they can't speak back to you, but they can listen to you.

There's some socials all listed there so they can speak back to you.

Great, awesome.

Okay.

And if you want to write into us, go to podcast at qi.com.

That's an email address where you can send all your stuff, and Andy will read it.

Send in your facts, send in anything that you want to say to us.

And we might use some of those as part of our bonus episode, which is called Drop Us a Line, but

that's in a very special place called Club Fish, which is our secret members' club.

If you want to get access to that, just go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

You'll also see links to live tickets, bits of merch, all that stuff.

Otherwise, just come back here next week after you've listened to Mary's new podcast and then check out our next episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.