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

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Dan, James, Andy and Mary Beard discuss charioteers, Confederates, Latin and lovers.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

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 1 is Which Roman Emperor is Donald Trump So if you like the sound of Barry'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. We've had some correspondence from Zach Rosalinski, who says, In the intro to your most recent episode, you said astronauts on the ISS could not attend your forthcoming remote live show at the London podcast festival because they do not have Wi-Fi. 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 on to the International Space Station list of approved materials. And then they too will be able to attend on the 5th and 6th of September. And for a week afterwards, guys, you can buy your tickets a bit late and still stream the London podcast festival. No such thing as official live shows. They're going to be great. That's right.

We've got Jamie Morton of My Dad wrote a porno joining us on the 5th of September and then Richard Osmond joining us on the 6th. It's going to be awesome. But if you can't make it to those live shows, Guess what? We are announcing another live show. Our cup runneth over. Your cup runneth over. The cups are all too full. Come to Cheltenham on the 16th of October. We are playing the Cheltenham Literature Festival. And we have a special guest for that show, too. Who's the brilliant Rachel Paris. So it's going to be amazing. Details of all of this stuff, Cheltenham and the London Podfest are on no such thing as a fish.com slash live.

Say it with me, Dan. Cheldon. No such thing as a fish.com. No such thing as a fish.com slash live. That's right. Everyone's invited to Cheltenham except astronauts. We will not be letting any astronauts in. But everyone else, come along.

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 around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a 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 sportsperson 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 Apuleus Diocles. Is he also a golfer? Golf hadn't been invented when Diocles was around. Now 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 cestuses. Now, it's always kind of difficult saying, so how much is that in today's money then? Well, let me say that much, 35 million cestuses 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 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 you. than I was the highest paid sports star. That is, well, it's my inference is that he doesn't actually say I'm the highest paid sport star in Rome, and by the way, I'm going to be the highest paid sports star ever, you know. 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 charity of teams, and the total amount of prize money. I love it being on a tombstone, though. 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. Diagelees was very happy to boast, so don't be too modest. I guess one of the question 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 victory. 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, you know, 95,000 cestices 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 was just going to say, 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. That's so interesting, but he clearly didn't catch on, right? He probably thought this is going to be huge. Every tombstone is going to be stat-packed from now on. That's right. Well, there are a few others, but never quite this. I mean, it's, it looks really boring because all it is is the stats. It's like, you know, the football stats or cricket stats.

They're just saying, that's not boring. I can literally sit there and read that all day. Golfing stats. So I think, you know, we ought to rob Tiger Woods his nose in it, really. Oh, yeah, definitely. I didn't realise that chariot racing, I knew chariot racing happened in Rome. It's seen Ben Hur. Ben Hurd.

Yes. But I assumed that. 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 and 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 racehorses pulling the chariots and it is a phenomenally dangerous. Poor old Diocles, he died in his 40s where he's lucky to stay alive that. 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 turn round the corner. And they were called shipwrecks,

now fragia, that's a chariot that kind of crashes at the corners. And the fans were absolutely obsessive lunas. And there are accounts of the fans really looking after the racehorses, really looking out for them. And one of the things they used to do is they used to sniff their shit. Okay. 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 the right diet. I would try and check at the other end of the process. I would try and check the feet. You would have thought that was the easy. 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 on that year. 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 being 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, isn't it? Oh, God. I can imagine from 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 rights. So all of that's out the window. He joins. You have four. horses to your chariot in the Olympics. He shows up with ten horses, and then cuts a corner, flips over, loses the race, and still wins it. Just like Mr. Trump and golf, isn't it? 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 in them a lot is in cursed town. 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? You're like, who was going to enforce it then? Yeah, the gods, maybe.

You can't check the poo coming out of the cursor to see if they've done it, right? Like that's, you can do that silently. And it was, the circus maximus was clearly, unlike the Coliseum, which was rigidly, um, 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. Do you want to come with me and smell some horseshit?

You want to come with me? It's a little more subtle than that, actually. 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 quite interesting. Oh, very learned. Yeah.

That is the first time anyone said that to you. You were not editing that out of the show. That's stated. That's quote. That's your ringtelling that. You googled Roman horse and I found the October horse. I can't back up on it.

That was good now. Sorry, I'd be able to happen. 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 for the gods. So you were sacrificing your best horse, right? 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 of, you know. What about Siniska, the Spartan female chariot winner? Yes. So what I read is that she won the Olympic goals, 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, darkly's 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 wasn't going over beaches. She was never on the horse now. She's just patting it when it finishes. Yeah, that's an important job, actually. But maybe this woman might have trained the horses, is that right? I 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, 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 cestises, then he could afford a palace. Yeah. But we don't have no clue where we live.

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 there. I think I might say, and he gave it all the way. I didn't know he was from Portugal. because that must hurt for Cristiano Rinaldo, who's currently... I was going to say, you know, Ronaldo,

not even the richest sportsman from Portugal. Do we know why he was so good? What made him so... I'd say luck, but... Yeah, it didn't flip over. Like, that'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, who, oh, speed skater, who won the Olympic gold, because in the semi-finals everyone in front of him fell over and then he won and then in the finals exactly the same thing happened. What if Diakles was just terrible and he just kept coming up the back and everyone was shipwrecked. He just kept going.

He just didn't give up. But I think he probably had a good fan base though. They 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 fishing box 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 And 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. It's time to move on. It's all right. It's just not true. It's coblers. It's coblers. No, you've got, you know, you've done the research.

Why is it cobbler? I just know it's cobbler's. 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, I think. Thank you. He comes into work, very upset every morning. Every time. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. Just wanted to let you know this week's episode of Fish. It's sponsored by Squarespace. Yes, you know Squarespace. It is the one-stop shop to set up your online platform, build your website and make it so that you can run an entire business without having any of the troubles that a lot of big businesses have functioning it because it's so damn easy to use.

Yes, it's all in one place. That's the brilliant thing about it. So if you are trying to sell things, you're trying to attract clients. If you're trying to grow your business, Squarespace has all the tools you might need. There's fantastic design so you can make something that looks brilliant and professionally designed. There are SEO tools which allows your website to show up more and bring in more of your ideal customers. There are donations. If you're fundraising, you can do it directly through the website. All of these tools exist on Squarespace. Yeah, it really is the perfect place. Most of the websites that you'll go to these days probably are a Squarespace website. So why not get on board with that if you want to get your own company on the go or just a personal website to showcase your stuff, and you can do that by heading to Squarespace.com slash NSTAAF, and you will save 10% off

your first purchase of a website or domain. That is right. And you can get a free trial, by the way, if you go to the website Dan named there, Squarespace.com slash NSTWAF. You get the free trial, and then when you're ready to launch, you get that 10% off that he mentioned as well. Perfect. Do it now. Okay. What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? Well, finish the end of the show. Finish the end of 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 we seen any pictures of him?

Like, obviously not photos, but are there, like, are there are photos? There are photos? There are 1860s, that would be an early. And he 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? Big arm, yeah.

A big arm. Couldn't he just measure it? It seems he was, like, I mean, he could just, I mean, it's not Rocky size, isn't it. I think he felt, he felt that it was larger as well, just generally. He felt like maybe there was. less muscle than more blood. That's hypochondri. 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 in a second. 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 got shot. Because he was friendly fired. Yeah. This was in 1860, certainly 1860 something, wasn't it? 63, yeah. Thank you. So this was 1863.

He was shot because he was outdoing a bit of reconnaissance, and 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 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 At his arm, cut off Yeah, certainly arm roll

I think it was the sniffle that killed him It was all N pneumonia It was him being shot related Absolutely Absolutely But they said to his wife Would you like us to get the arm back

And she said no It's had 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 prayer was his constant 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, Rother? 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. It's just completely stupid. You don't want to be shut in your head. No, you're right. No, it's better. Okay, alright. You're right. In fact, what you would probably do is put a hat on it to seem like you're really tall. And a little suit around. Okay, you're

I think if you've got a reputation as an eccentric already. Just go for it. Go for it. Yeah. Actually, speaking of clothing, he was well known amongst his other generals for not wearing flamboyant clothing. Okay. 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 colour 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 thought it was a bit suss really. I think it was very poor, wasn't he as a young man? He grew up extremely poor and scrabbled his way up through... So how did he become a general? I think... Talent. I think he was... A sheer talent, yeah. And a funny arm.

Who wants to be a general? Yeah, I can see you over there. He was... I mean, apparently he was you know, 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 Gettysburg, 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 Gettysburg. And his absence from it was cited by a couple of other generals at the time. So it could have changed. How did you become a general in like the Roman army or the Greek army? Was it rich? Was it rich? Yes. I mean, there's kind of two strands. One is the career soldier, right? And you can go up the ladder, a career soldier, I get in a squatty and then you become a centurion and you might kind of go up to the sort of what we'd 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 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 at, you only had one tactic, but 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 them 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 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. 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, you 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 they're not kind of tactical brilliance? Well, you know, when this goes out, I shall no doubt get more of this, you know, I've been to, oh, you fucking moron, you don't understand Marybeard, doesn't he doesn't give any credence to the brilliance?

How many legions do you have, Maryby? That's right. But if you ask me, it's their one-trick ponies, really. Wow. So, Caesar, just to go back to chariots, he described, he's in his, not his diaries, there's a count. Commentaries on the British invasion. It's one of the only references we have contemporary to British tribes using military chariots.

And they've gone out of fashion and rhyme for centuries by them, but we were still using them. And they were like an Uber across the battlefield. And one really important myth to bust is they didn't have sives coming out of the wheels. Oh, okay. If you go to look at Budaica on Thames Embankment, her statue. She's got a great set of sides about it. But I am told by my archaeological

friends that this is a myth. Okay. I'm absolutely gutted. I'm a bit gutted about that. That's my chariot myth busted. There we go. And I've been sending that in to other podcasts for ABLE. Jumping back to the modern just very quickly. So he did, he was responsible for winning a lot of battles. Who's Stonewell Jackson? Stonewall Jackson. Modern day. Oh, well, more, certainly more modern than the tiny. Caesar. But he, 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 sidebirds. At some point, Burnside, people

went, I love it, and I love the name, but not quite, and they changed it round. But yeah, too. Because he does, he had a real set, didn't he? Yeah. I think I linked up to his mustache. They went really sideburns. It's interesting. He was an innovator of the 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. Oh, what about Frank Beard of Zeezy Top? Sorry, you must get that all the time, but... I have no relations. 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 suddenly just reaching out his massive long arm and slapping him across the head. 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. In 1856? They must have felt so stupid just five years later when he is the pride of the Confederate army. You know, one of the greatest, blah, blah, blah. There were a lot of rumours that were about him.

I think this is one of the things where people would say stuff about him and then 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. 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 in every dessert. The strawberries came out. Every present, like a T-shirt with strawberries on it. Trip 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. Andy, pass. 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. bark, the more you talk about him. I have not done my research. Like, you clearly have on Stonewall

Jackson, but frankly, I'm quite glad I haven't. 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, you know, 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, up there. I read about an hypochondriac with, I don't know if you know about this person, Mary,

called Aristides. Elias Aristides. Sorry, I'm not as learning. Can't all be. A great friend of mine. Oh, yeah. 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. An old friend. He just goes on and on and on. But loads of posh Romans were terribly hypochondriot. Marcus Aurelius, famous Stoic emperor. When he is a kid, a 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's 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 pestereous, anal pasturys he particularly likes thinks you put up your

bum suppositries okay yeah suppositries is a different oh god am I getting it different a whole

I am I'm learning I am learned it in some ways Mary suppositries oh shit oh shit where are the

anal peser I think they'd know what I meant I don't think I'd have any trouble getting them anyway there's old Marcus

Aurelius you know I'm saying I want to 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 meditation? Meditation.

Yeah, well, don't believe all you read in the meditation. It gives you only one side of how he might like to be seen. Because I have quite a bad shoulder and I put it down to like looking at my phone on my screen all the time, but that can't be true for him. He'd have had a tablet. Very good. Thank you. Can I just talk about Aristides?

Elius Aristides. Irisides again. 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. Oh. I mean, that's a bad dream, isn't it? That's interesting. And there are books and books and books are this rubbish. Yeah, right.

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. Yeah. 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 what you can get out of chat, GPT, if you say, write me a poem on the same. 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 can't write a word of Latin verse. So this machine did better than, I can sort of see how it's done, but I can't write a word. But that's stunning. That makes it all the more impressive, because. apparently there were 26 million permutations of line that you could get of this machine. So it's six feet, Latin hexameter, so six different feet in the line.

What's the feet? A foot is like it's an individual unit. So pentameter is an iambic pentameter is the sort of famous Shakespearean meter, which is da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, but a foot will have different numbers of syllables. It's got 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, uh, uh, uh. Got it.

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 he's, I think it 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 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 would make sense. It actually meant something. It actually meant something. It 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. Like, you know, it's not profound. Like a lot of Latin poetry. Right. 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.

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. 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 they were working to put feet in shoes

that's amazing and yeah they held it for a while and it still exists I think it was going to be juzed up and renovated a bit recently but it apparently played God Save the Queen while it was working this collection who owned it the Alfred Gillette Trust they own in their collection this machine

25,000 shoes and a significant collection of Somerset Ictheasaur fossils. Wow. I mean, what a collection. Whereabouts, is it? And Somerset, do you know? It's literally there yesterday. It's a village called Street, I think. Oh, I know that.

It's not far from Glastonbury. That's right. That's 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.

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 have been no period of British history after the Romans left when more than a relatively small section of the elite, unknown Latin. They've known a lot about classical culture. But a Latin, more particularly great, but even Latin education, was still largely for boys

and largely for the rich ones. So, I mean, there were some, you know, 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? Yeah.

And some people have, thought that it was actually a kind of pistake, a rather expensive, very long-term piss-takes. 13 years of my life. 30 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 in the 1840s, this is when these 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't get a machine to do it. Yeah, I see. 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? 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 stage. 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 you also said it's not like when you start introducing french or German, whatever, you suddenly discover that, you know, misprivileged year is going on 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 for the week. And she said it was really levelling. That's really good. 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 it, because there would be like a quiz at the end of each lesson and there'd be ten 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 round the class never went sex sex sex wow you know what's great about Latin though is everybody remembers their Latin lessons

and their Latin teacher and 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'd never forget it. I learned it until I was 18. Did you? Yeah. And so how is it? My Latin?

You're still doing it on to a lingo, aren't you? That's right. That's only so I can tease my civil service colleagues, though, you know. It was, yeah, it was great. Yeah, we had to go to lunch times. You can either play football or do Latin. And you chose, did you choose Latin? It was chosen for me.

I see, I see. And do you regret it? No, I loved it. I really loved it. It was mega fun. We never did it. But I was in Hong Kong, so I don't think it was an option. 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, law was all in Latin. So 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. Look at the whole Catholic church. It 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. Oh, too. 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 there. Who can 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 Zinnit, 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 near it.

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, sold. As long as you don't make it, just posh boys only. Yeah. You never did Latin. 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 Law Bird Laws quite like that yeah 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. Right. 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. By 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. Bam's term four. And that word is push wailing. So W-A-I-L-I-N-G, push-wailing. Push-wailing. Force crying. So faking emotion. Faking emotion. That sounds like labor, giving birth.

Good guess. You're pushing and you're whaling? No. You're pretty much close. But it was, the definition in the OED is W-Barns term for a pram. Oh. Bram-Layser. And that's still in the OED today.

That's amazing. Push-wailing. As preparation for today I'd listen to a bit of Cuomodo dicita 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 there used to be a set of you know slightly eccentric people in Finland

who did the news in Latin You know, each week, I think it was. And you think, what's the point? You know, what is the point? It was fun. Coimeda Dicketer 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 Finns 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? This is 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 work around.

Yeah, yeah. They haven't started living like Romans to make it more effective. You know, 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? Oh. They give you a Latin option. You can use ATM machines in most language. You don't need to be able to speak a language. I'll jab until numbers come up and then our selection.

Prima. What you do is you look at all the numbers and you don't understand the currency and you choose the second smallest number. And you go for that, because that's probably about 10 quid. Because that's probably doable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you pull the big handle. Yeah. 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, the first, didn't include a list of his lovers because, they said, it would make the book too long to read. same I'm waiting I'm 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

this is very funny is that the biographer trying to praise Daggerbear by saying how marvellous he was No not really I don't think so I don't think it was

very positive thing so I read this in BBC History magazine. It was part... Well, it must be true, then. And I have subsequently checked it. I love you, Mary. We're going to get letters from geography teachers.

BBC history. If you are going to send a letter in about this episode, if it's not in Latin, we're not going to read it. 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 Merivinjians?

Which I think is a question. We're always asking. ourselves, aren't we? And it turns out these Merovingians, they were a group that came after the Romans, right, 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 Merovingtians.

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 previously married his step-sister 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 organising at 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 Merivindians. So it's a moral tale, really.

It really is. Yeah, it seems like that, doesn't it? And the biographer links his sort of personal lust with his lust for ecclesiastical lands. You know, it always starts with persons. 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 Merivindian kings as we all know that anyway I have never come across the Merivindians before It's kind of a word you hear Like the guy of 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've heard of them The Romans are fine The Carolingians are fine But it's the Merivindians which The Merovingians when you look 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. Rules had long hair, and there's a... I'd be all right, then. 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 it's not going to 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 that 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 the monk Can I say if you're like the next in line for the Merovingians and you start going bold is that you done? Well yeah

there's no hair transplants in those days no exactly there's weeks though ah okay there we go but it was a tool of state power that one of the queens

was called clotild and she was 6th century queen widow of king Clovis And Clovis, by the way, is where we get Louie 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 Clotild, 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 life. Big decision.

Yeah, that's hard. And the Carolingians, when they came and 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 have conjured that in my head. Here's one thing I found about Daggerbert, 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, it's like an X-shaped legs and then almost like a cloth bit, but it was actually made of. Sort of like a director's chair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but without a back. But without a back, yeah. And they were made of one, and they were huge in ancient Egypt. There was one in the British Museum.

Tutankham was buried with two of them. And now it's mostly people watching golf. The kings of our age. The Emperor Augustus took one to the opening of a rather posh theatre, and he fell off his very bad. Bad signs. He fell off his fault. I bet no one laughed at that.

Well, only it was a bit of a risk to turn off it. Wow. There is a quite famous. ruler of this period Dago Boat the Second. Oh yeah Don't get me started at him. Oh boy. Here we go again. Dan's on his hobby horse.

Well, you never know how history is going to replace you and your story into new light. And that's what happened with Dago Boat the second 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 Sion, 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. So 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. And 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 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, there was, have you heard of a, I think your cabs here, Mary. Oh, come, have you heard of a quinator? Like a minotaur, but not. Exactly. But with Quinn, so with five horns.

Horns. The quinator 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 Merovetch, where we get Merovingian, it means C-bull. Oh, of course. I forgot. So the Quivertor supposedly is the ancestor. This is head like one of those.

You know those ring-toss things that kids have? Exactly like that. Exactly like that. Yeah, and they're different colours for different prizes. Oh, wow. It's so embarrassing when he was trying to give a good talk and just a hoop would land on his... Guys, come on, five minutes. A big speech, they did it.

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, you had to say really nice things about the person you're biographizing, 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. 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 honest. Nero's really looking forward to seeing a proof. And half the advance, yeah, it's not. I'm sorry, the last chapter's taking me a bit longer than I think but I thought he was going to, 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. Yeah. The other thing about the biographers is how much of it was true, right? You see, probably very little, particularly if you're dealing with the concupines of Dacabar, I suspect. But when I was a student, it was 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 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 realised 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? 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 stuff.

And do you know that goes right back to the ancient world? No. Because there's a story about the kitchens of Anthony and Cleopatra. And kind of next to eyewitness visits the kitchens. And there's eight bores 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 boiled eggs. It's so funny. I have 12 microwaves in my house and I've got one frozen lasagna at each one.

But 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.

Wow. They were for the staff. Everybody said, so it's not true then, you know what? But the point where you're saying is the fact that we think that about the wealth family tells us a lot more about life today. Yes. And sort 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 balls. I feel a bit sorry for Dagobert the first though. You know, because if you're a monarch, 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. 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 reputation? That is always a reputation. That, you know, 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.

Okay. And she won, of course. She fell off halfway through, but the judges decided that she had, Right. 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 Bonois d'Agobert, the good king Dagobert.

And it's basically the ultra-basic nursery rhyme that French children learn and are sung by their parents. Like old King Cole is a merry old soul. exactly like that. And it's all, there's a French revolutionary song, Le Bonre Roy d'Agobert, because that was a way of making fun of kings and monarchy without actually making fun of King Louis the 16th. It was two years before the revolution

this song was written as a way of satirising 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 normal skips. That's when he calls

for his fiddlers 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 Shreiberland, on Instagram, James. I'm on TikTok, no such thing as James Harkin. Andy. I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter. 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. 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 Clubfish, which is our special. secret members club. If you want to get access to that, just go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.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.