Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [145]
People often wrote with a reed quill on sheets of papyrus, using sponges to erase text and clean the quill. When Augustus tried his hand at a tragedy about the Greek hero Ajax, who went mad and killed himself with his sword, he was dissatisfied with the result and destroyed it. When some friends asked: “What in the world has become of Ajax?” he replied: “Ajax has fallen on his sponge!”
Augustus seems to have been slightly dyslexic. Uninterested in correct spelling, as determined by grammarians, he preferred to write words as they were pronounced, and often transposed syllables and letters or omitted them. When he wrote in cipher he used the same very basic code that Julius Caesar did; he simply wrote “B” for “A,” “C” for “B,” and so on (using “AA” for the last letter of the alphabet).
The mornings of fasti (lucky) days were devoted to public business: meetings of the Senate (which, in theory at least, could last until sunset but no later), court cases, and religious ceremonies. So the princeps would often find himself out and about in central Rome.
Senior Roman officials not only commanded political authority, they also dispensed justice in the courts. Augustus attended assiduously to his legal work, often staying in court until nightfall. If he happened to be unwell, he had his litter carried to the open-air judicial tribunal in the Forum. As a judge, he was conscientious and lenient. He speeded up the legal process, striking off the lists lawsuits that were not promptly pursued. Once he tried a case of parricide, the punishment for which was being sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cockerel, a snake, and a monkey and thrown into a river or the sea. Anxious to save the guilty man from this terrible fate, he asked him: “I take it, of course, that you did not kill your father?”
When appearing in public Augustus liked to present himself as being no more important than any other leading senator. He did his best to avoid leaving or entering Rome in daylight hours because that would have compelled the authorities to give him a formal welcome or send-off. When he was serving as consul, it was inevitable that he was seen in public as he moved from Senate meeting to law court to temple ceremony and sacrifice. He usually walked from one engagement to another through the streets of Rome, although sometimes he was carried about in a closed litter.
Although Augustus was perfectly capable of speaking extempore in public, he was always afraid of saying too much, or too little. So he not only carefully drafted his speeches to the Senate and read them out from a manuscript, but he also wrote down in advance any important statement he planned to make to an individual, and even to Livia (it says something of her own clerical tidy-mindedness that she kept and filed all Augustus’ written communications with her).
Most Romans had lunch, a snack much like breakfast, about midday, but Augustus seldom observed regular mealtimes, eating as and when he felt hungry. “I had some bread and dates while out for my drive today,” he noted in a letter, and informed another correspondent: “On the way back in my litter from the Regia [the “Palace,” a tiny and ancient building in the Forum, the official headquarters of the pontifex maximus], I munched an ounce of bread and a few hard-skinned grapes.”
He was a light eater and preferred plain food to gourmet dishes. He especially liked coarse bread. This was made of crushed or ground wheat (if the latter, it often contained bits of grit from the stone mill, which could grind down the eater’s teeth), and could be cooked without leaven or kneading. The resulting loaf was as hard as rock. Other favorite foods were small fishes, hand-pressed moist cheese (probably like today’s Italian ricotta), and green figs.
Augustus drank little alcohol. His limit was a pint of wine-and-water (ancient wine was strong and rich and was almost always diluted); and if he went beyond that he made himself vomit it up. He seldom touched wine before the main meal of the day. Instead he would quench his thirst with a piece of