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From The Inns of Greece & Rome, and a history of Hospitality from the Dawn of Time to the Middle Ages, by W. C. Firebaugh, with an Introduction by Wallace Rice and Illustrations by Norman Lindsay, Chicago: Pascal Covici; 1928; pp. 126-141.
THE INNS OF GREECE AND ROME
126The fate of the Arcadian merchant — Dangers lurking in inns — Petronius and Giton — Drunken flute girls and Gaditaman dances — Scenes of debauchery — Edicts grant absolution — Liquor situation under Domitian — The Syrians and Levantines — Looseness of their women — Courtesans and their arts of pleasing.
There would be little difficulty in citing a thousand instances of thefts and murders perpetrated in the cauponae of the ancient world, but we shall content ourselves with two, Cicero and Valerius Maximus shall supply the narrative, and we shall reserve for ourselves the easier task of the commentator. First, let us begin with the tragic fate of the Arcadian merchant; a study in telepathy and crude psychology. It is true that the thing took place in Greece, but it might as easily have happened in Italy. It is one of the selections from the works of the great orator which in the past were used by the instructors to give their pupils a thrill and to show them, perhaps, that not all Latin classics were as dry as a too thorough going knowledge of grammar and prosody would have them seem.
“Two Arcadians who were intimate friends, were travelling together; and, arriving at Megara, one of them took up his quarters at an inn, but the other went to lodge at the house of a friend. After supper, when both had retired, the Arcadian who was staying at his friend’s house received a visitation from the apparition of his fellow traveller at the inn, the specter besought him to come immediately to the assistance of his friend, as the innkeeper was bent upon murdering him. Alarmed at this intimation, he started from his sleep, but, on reflection, thinking it nothing but an idle dream, he lay down 127 again. Presently the apparition reappeared to him in his sleep, and entreated him, that though he would not come to his assistance while yet alive, that he would not leave his murder unavenged, at least. The spectre told him further, that the innkeeper, after having murdered him, had cast his body into a dung-cart, where it lay covered with filth; and begged him to go early to the gate of the town, before any cart could leave the town. Much wrought up by this second visitation, he went early next morning to the gate of the town, and met with the driver of the cart, and asked him what he had in his wagon. The driver, upon this question, ran away in a fright. The cadaver was then discovered, and the innkeeper, the evidence being clear against him, was brought to punishment.” (Cicero De Divinatione, Lib. I, 27.)
In commenting upon this passage it is my belief that here is related one of those sombre and sordid chapters in Criminal Law, used as an illustration common to human experience: in other words, history of inns and taverns was, in ancient times, an integral part of the history of brigandage and thuggery; and many of the hospices in Western Russia and the provinces bordering that great frontier are strikingly akin to this little inn at Megara.
In another work Cicero relates an affair of the same sort as an example of conjecture, or question of fact in a criminal matter, and for that very reason it lends weight to the case itself as a corollary thereof. The passage occurs in the treatise on Invention, Lib. II, chap. 4:
“At present, let us begin with the conjectural statement of a case of which this example may be sufficient to be given.
“A man overtook another on his journey, as he was going on some commercial expedition or other, and carrying a sum of money with him. As men often do, he entered into conversation with his new acquaintance on 128 the way, the result of which was, that both proceeded together, with some degree of friendship, and, when they had arrived at the same inn, they proposed to have dinner together and to occupy the same apartment. Having dined, they retired to rest in the same room. But when the proprietor (for that is what is said to have been discovered since, after the man had been detected in another crime), after the proprietor had scrutinized one of them closely, that is to say, the one who had the money, he came in the night, after having assured himself that both were sound asleep as men usually are when worn out, drew from its sheath the sword of the one who had not the money (he had the sword lying by his side), murdered the other man with it, took away his money, replaced the bloody weapon in its sheath, and returned to his bed.
But the man with whose sword the murder had been committed, arose long before dawn and called his companion over and over again; he thought that because he did not answer he was overcome with sleep, so he took his sword and the rest of the things he had with him, and departed alone on his journey. Not long afterwards, the innkeeper raised a hue and cry that the man was murdered, and in company with some of his lodgers, set off in pursuit of the man who had gone away. They arrest him on his journey, draw his sword out of its sheath, and find it bloody. The man is brought back to the city by them, and is put on trial. On this comes the allegation of the crime: “You murdered him,” and the denial: “I did not murder him,” and from this must be gathered the statement of the case. The question in the conjectural examination is the same as that submitted to the judges; “Did he murder him or not?“
This conjectural statement serves but to instruct us in the dangers that lurked in ancient inns, more sinister, for all their covering screen of creeper roses, than those gaunt 129 and ill reputed hospices of Calabria and the Roman Campagna.
Although nocturnal gullet slashers practiced their calling until it became a crime of habit, the thief and the fence were even more frequently guilty of derelictions which savoured of habitude, and a rascally steward or some slave trusted with the keys to cellar and storehouse was the surest and best purveyor of supplies. Rarely did the good host neglect an opportunity so opportune to get such useful tools completely into his power; a custom that still thrives in certain parts of Italy. His larder was stocked with wines and supplies from the estates of wealthy patricians who knew not the extent of their holdings, but who would have unhestitatingly punished robbery with flaying, if not with actual crucifixion. In connection with expert methods in buying, let us again cite William Savage.
“The innkeeper at Tavolato,” says he, “serves no vintage other than that which the waggoners smuggle, or frequently steal from their masters and carry to the town; this is well known to every Roman. In exchange, the landlord gives them food. The innkeeper at Porta San Pancrazio furnished his cuisine in that way with fish brought by the fishermen who stole them and smuggled them into the town.”
Should we then wonder that the tavern-keepers of the ancient world gave such commodities a welcome none the less cordial because of the sources from which they came? And then, they were very cheap! Did not the Romans have a market for stolen goods, and did not Ascyltos and Encolpius determine to sell there the mantle which they had come by in the same devious manner in order to redeem the ragged tunic with the gold pieces sewn into its hem, and thus at a small sacrifice, procure for themselves a handsome profit? What difference if they knew 130 themselves forced to buy back their own property. Ascyltos plumbed the situation when he manifested so little stomach for the law, and the night prowling shyster lawyer who would sequester the spoil in hopes that the owners would not dare claim it for fear of being charged with crime, is a final touch as eloquent as it is penetrating. Let us not hesitate to speak the truth of these lowly financiers, in any case they cannot invoke the law of libel.
As their profits were never equal to their avarice, they invoked other expedients to eke out their gains, expedients not more elevated than the natures and individuals whose needs they were to satisfy; thus a lucrative sideline was added to their vile calling and served to accentuate it, as they were always ready, for a price, to lend their assistance and establishments for purposes of entertainment. It is at the door of an inn at the corner of a deserted cross-road that Petronius has Encolpius discover Giton, that classical prototype of all the fairy god-children who have come after him, it is in an inn that most of their relationships are consummated, it is in an inn that Giton confesses to Encolpius his suspicions of Ascyltos, and his reasons for them, pressing the tears from his eyes with the balls of his thumbs; and that narrative furnishes us with proof positive that the deversorium was an excellent counterpart of the lupanar of Sotades. The boys attached to the inns were ordinarily accomplices, though sometimes the victims of these frightful debauches. On this account we find in Plautus that the puer cauponarius has all the attributes of Hylas and Giton, and out of the fullness of experience one might have spoken for the other.
Much is to be said of the different kinds of hospices and inns, their arrangements, and the life which went on in them, but the best source of information lies in the names they bore. Of the deversorium we have already 131 spoken; it was a stopping place. There is little doubt that these institutions catered to demands other than mere lodgings and food (which was generally bought by the guests themselves), but their principal custom was probably derived from transients and strangers, rather than from the natives. The caupona and the taberna meritoria, in addition to sheltering transients and strangers maintained bar-rooms and restaurants as well; it is therefore probable that the bulk of their patronage came from the natives who forgathered here to drink and gossip, amuse themselves with singing girls or flower girls, and drive away dull care generally. The caupona were at least partly furnished, and this was certainly true of the stabulum, in proof of which we quote Petronius, Chapter 97:
“Eumolpus was speaking privately with Bargates, when a crier attended by a public slave entered the inn (stabulum), accompanied by a medium sized crowd of outsiders. Waving a torch that gave off more smoke than light, he announced: ‘Strayed from the baths, a short time ago, a boy, about sixteen years of age, curly headed, a minion, handsome, answers to the name of Giton. One thousand sesterces reward will be paid to anyone bringing him back or giving information as to his whereabouts.’ Ascyltos, dressed in a tunic of many colors, stood not far from the crier, holding out a silver tray upon which was piled the reward, as evidence of good faith. I ordered Giton to get under the bed immediately, telling him to stick his hands and feet through the rope netting which supported the mattress, and, just as Ulysses of old had clung to the ram, so he, stretched out beneath the mattress, would evade the hands of the hunters.”
A traveller of the better class would have found only a mediocre standard of comfort here, however, as we shall see from a further scrutiny of Petronius and Horace, 132 to say nothing of Hadrian’s biting criticism of such places, and the numerous tenantry who lived at public expense but paid no rent.
“The public servant, however,” again the Arbiter is speaking, “was not derelict in the performance of his duty, for, snatching a cane from the innkeeper, he poked underneath the bed, ransacking every corner, even to the cracks in the wall. Twisting his body out of reach, and cautiously drawing a full breath, Giton pressed his mouth against the very bugs themselves.”
Innkeepers were necessarily privy to all the disorders originating in their neighborhood. If they happened to be old, as was the case with the hostess in Apuleius, they were go-betweens as subtle as they were shameless. An excellent example of such a character is seen in that mime of Herondas in which the old woman whose guile has long since taken the place of beauty and charm, is brought to bear in favor of the rich young suppliant who desires certain little favors at the hands of the young wife of a soldier away in the wars.
The younger members of the sorority of coparum did not place insuperable difficulties in the path of a mutual understanding, and money or other valuable considerations rarely failed in making easier the path of conquest. The deversorium and the caupona were sometimes denoted by another term, ganea, a word which old Calepin renders in his archaic manner — taverne bourdeliere — a pimp’s pot-house.
If, on the other hand, we adopt the etymology pointed out by Festus, the term ganea should mean a subterranean tavern, hidden away in the rocks and woods, such as bordered the banks of the Tiber almost to Ostia, and the coastline of the Gulf of Baiae. The Roman women, who, in obedience to Nero’s orders, changed the austere stola for the vestments of tavern singing girls, were compelled 133 to establish themselves in these grottos of revelry, and comport themselves in a manner natural to their new calling. Suetonius has pictured them, standing at the thresholds, hailing all the passing boats with their cries, and inviting sailors and passengers alike to land and partake of their hospitality.
It was guttlers (helluones) such as these that Cicero flayed so savagely because of their social habits, their everlasting readiness for an orgy; and when one of them answered an appeal such as this, and entered the low and narrow door of the ganeum, the comessatio began, and, after having been prolonged for days on end, resulted in a horrible mess of broken cups, upturned tables, sodden serving-boys sleeping off the effects of their wine, drunken flute girls, and Gaditanian dancers exhausted with drunkenness and with the voluptuous contortions of their native dances.
The ganea, then, were generally the abodes of clandestine dabauchery where License veiled itself in impenetrable mystery and shadow. Sometimes they were known as lustra (a den of some animal, sometimes a stew) because of the secrecy in entering them, even as an animal will not betray its den; and those forgathering in such places took the greatest precautions against being seen and recognized. Swaggering roisterers pursuing new sensations entered the ganea with covered heads, as did Antonius the tavern at Red Rocks, and their exit was as well screened as their entrance. The law required that women of the town be registered on the rolls of the aedile, but the number of clandestine evaders probably equalled, if it did not exceed, the number actually registered, and a large percentage of these evaders were in some way associated with the ganea.
The extreme caution which was exercised in regard to these establishments was due then to two causes: the 134 desire of the frequenters to escape the obloquy which would certainly have followed detection and publicity, and the necessity which drove the entertainers to avoid the aedile’s register and the exile which would have resulted from the discovery of their actual profession. No noisy arguments or drunken laugher were loud enough to be heard on the outside and attract unwelcome attention and curiosity, nor were brawls permitted to menace the sanctuaries frequented by the wealthy and influential classes. The Roman police were not the dupes of these deceptions, they kept a tolerant watch more for effect than anything else, although it is highly probable that the question of refined blackmail often came up for settlement. The real difficulty lay in the fact that the classes frequenting the more sumptuous of the ganea were beyond the reach of police regulations by reason of their wealth and influence.
In the taverns and inns, however, no such caution was necessary, as the very calling which tavern girls followed absolved them from the penalties imposed by laws against adultery and prostitution. When edicts were issued the authorities generally granted absolution to such entertainers of this class as had come into their net.
“Such persons,” it is the formal language of the code of Theodosius, “such persons shall be held as being immune against the judicial proceedings of the law against adultery and prostitution, as the very indignity of their life is an insult to the laws they should observe.”
Nor were the innkeepers dealt with severely by the law makers. It is true that they were responsible to guests for belongings and property stolen or misappropriated, unless they could prove that due care and diligence had been exercised to preserve the property and protect the owner. But in those cases which we, with a well developed genius for evading responsibility, lay at 135 the door of the Almighty, no ancient landlord was responsible. He had no such blanket alibi. It was due to the calling they followed, their penchant for prostitution, their professional hospitality, their substitution and adulteration of wines, that they were denied the free enjoyment of their goods. They could not act as guardians for children, they were deprived of the right of taking oath, and, except in special cases, they were not permitted the right of accusation in justice. Let us contrast the situation of these Roman innkeepers and procurers with that marvelous Pornodidascalos in Herondas. Here indeed is hardihood untrammeled by the slightest scruple.
Unfortunately, laws had their loop-holes then as now, and were generally ineffective in restraining rascally innkeepers because the latter, by their very birth and calling, were below the law and, as Gibbon says, “beneath contempt.” The only punishment which could legally have been inflicted upon gentry such as these was to expel them from Rome and its environs, and thus striking at the very root of their calling. Such a proceeding was, of course, entirely out of the question because of the great inconvenience, not to say actual hardship, which would have beset a multitude of innocent bystanders in a center of population as great as Rome.
Under Domitian, another method of dealing with the liquor situation was briefly tried out. It is interesting as constituting what is probably the earliest chapter in the history of what the late B. L. Taylor loved to call “The League For Making Virtue Odious,” and is related by that amiable old pagan Suetonius, in his life of that odious tyrant. Imperial Caesar dropped his fly swatter long enough to sign an edict forbidding the planting of any more vines in Italy, and decreeing that half the vineyards in the provinces must be uprooted (Chap. 7).
136In chapter 14, we learn the sequel, we are informed that, due to the subtle propaganda contained in a clever Greek verse which was scattered broadcast, Domitian was led to moderate his aquanacreontic ardor and set aside his decree. We append a translation of this little verse: a translation freely made which is still as literal as it is exact.
Though you devour me to the root
Sufficient wine I’ll still produce
For every sacrificial use
When Regal Caesar is the goat!
What shall we say of the citizenship of these innkeepers, these pestilential pot-house peelers? Ordinarily, they were freedmen who had emancipated themselves by one method or another and refused thenceforth to place themselves under communal law, but more frequently still, they were strangers, of a servile race which had been conquered by the Romans in the Levant. They had emigrated to the city and came, at last, to infest the whole of Italy. These are the wages of conquest: the women of a more sophisticated but less virile race will play no unimportant part in avenging the infamies of their country upon its conquerors by expert instruction in new and more demoralizing lessons in social manners and morals, and new sensations. So it was with the Vandals in Africa. In like manner the men of the subject races play into the hands of their female allies, and the final result is a civilization literally bled white financially and physically. Horace had much of this in mind when he wrote his Hymn to the Romans; that grand and stately lamentation which, viewed in the light of what later came to pass, seems to have been of the very stuff of which true prophecy is made — prophecy indeed, requiring centuries for its fulfilment:
137How time doth in its flight debase
Whate’er it finds! Our fathers’ race
More deeply versed in ill
Than were their sires, hath borne us yet
More wicked, duly to beget
A race more vicious still.
Martin’s Translation.
The Syrians and other Levantines, “nations born for slavery,” as Cicero cuttingly says of them, were especially numerous at Rome, and preyed upon her vitals by the exercise of the vilest professions. They bound themselves to the service of the overseers of the games, sprinkled the sand of the arena, watered the horses, had the care of the great awning which shielded the spectators from the rays of the summer sun. They competed with the untutored labor of the city and introduced problems which California understands better than the Eastern portions of our own country. They even entered the service of rich patricians and matrons; they delivered notes and letters, in a word, they supplied the needs of the most infamous callings, and frequently at some little peril to their own skins. In the fragments of Menander (The Arbitrants) we have a Syriscus (Syrian), a charcoal burner and tenant slave; and, strange to relate, he is one of the finest characters in the play; he is good through and through. In the Adelphoi and the Self Tormentor of Terentius, we have a Syrus.
Levantine women likewise entered service, even as did the designing Syrian in the Mercator of Plautus; but when circumstances permitted them to follow their inclinations and choose freely, they revered to that condition to which their oriental surroundings and habits of life had accustomed them, debauched adventuresses, worshipping their figures, lascivious dancers like the Gaditanian gypsies of the present day, players of lyres, 138 singers of obscene odes and Fescennine verses at the cross-roads and taverns; in a word, ambuniae, as Horace calls them, in one of his Satires which is never translated; flute players whose lack of morals and restrained decency were compensated for by physical beauty and an insatiable desire to please in any way that might yield a handsome profit.
Even at Rome the name they bore had a popular significance closely allied to that which is the heritage of the gypsy of the present time, and the ambuniae came to be associated with that class of sinuous and supple Syrians, adepts, doctae puellae, if you will, in every phase of the finer and more sensuous varieties of such entertainments.
The greater part of them, and they had a gild, or, as Horace calls it, a college, the greater part of them to lend an air of refinement, worthy of their calling (call it an artistic background if you will), had opened, either in Rome itself, or in the immediate limits and suburbs, inns and taverns in which music and dancing were usual and a part of the entertainment; the ancestor of the nautch girl of Algeciras or Cairo or Bassora. Her exquisite discernment prompts her naturally to choose the raiment which will add most to the advantages with which a benevolent nature has endowed her: if she be of exceeding loveliness, her strophium will be Grecian in simplicity; if her beauty has reached its acme and begun to wane she will adorn herself with colors of Syrian gorgeousness, a confession that she can no longer afford the simplicity that scorns adornment and relies solely upon its own excellence. In her are combined all the attributes of all the courtesans, all their arts of pleasing and entertainment, yet the strophium is always there because it is an integral part of Syrian cultus, an emblem sacred to Dionysus. On the occasion of orgies and dances 139 they are unwound by the expert fortune tellers, imported along with other superstitions from the Levant. If, at times, they drop their clacking castanets, whose sexy clucking punctuates their dancing and makes their audience more pliant to their demands, it is but to take up the sceptre of the seeress, to roll the threads of a thousand colors around the magic rhombus, or, better yet, with herbs of secret virtues, to compound philtres to restore lost love and virility, philtres such as have cost many a husband or flagging lover sick of an old passion, his life. One of the herbs of which they made continuous use took its name from their cult: ambujea; and, if Horace, in his second satire has classed them with the pharmacopoliae or poisoners, it is surely because he was well informed as to their empiric practices. Lysistrata was not a name common among them.
The atmosphere of mysticism which surrounded them, their fortune telling, the utter lack of knowledge prevalent in those times, caused the common people to regard them as witches, and popular imagination endowed them with strange and horrible attributes. Fingers were placed softly upon lips when they were passing by; their dances were regarded with secret terror, and the more timid and superstitious dared not go near the places where they lived, or take a guest and dine in an inn conducted by one of them. It was said and believed that they served travellers with a kind of cheese which immediately changed those who had eaten it into beasts of burden. St. Augustine has an interesting passage in which he satirizes popular ignorance on such a subject, and the terror with which the ignorant regarded the witches of the inns.
The sensible man, however, saw in such gossip a sure protection, and permitted it to go unchallenged; although he would never have permitted himself to be caught in 140 such company, any more than he would have dreamed of associating with the common lot. Such patricians as Piso and Antonius furnish illustrations as to what is meant; then, too, there was a fraternity, if such I may venture to call the unsexed of Cybele, who were fully alive to the possibilities of advantage and profit which were to be extracted from miracles and sorcery; they stood in no awe of the ambuniae. The poets also frequented the rustic taverns kept by such charming hostesses; the strange charm of these women, so subtle, so beautiful, and finally, so mentally able, attracted the bards, and drunkenness forged the chains that held them captive.
Lucilius made a famous journey from Rome to Capua, and from Capua through the Straits of Messina, a long and charming voyage. Horace, in his trip to Brindisium, followed as closely as possible in the footsteps of his predecessor, and his account of his own trip was probably based upon that of Lucilius.
Lucilius made one of his happier halts at an inn kept by one of these Syrian hostesses: who or what she may have been, we do not know. Was she the counterpart of the toothless old crone whom Apuleius describes, or was she a lithe and lissome ambunia? The unique hemistich which preserves that little episode in the poet’s excursion tells us nothing of this except by inference.
“However, she was a Syrian tavern-keeper.” That is all the fragment tells us, a mutilate remnant of what was the third book of the Satires of Lucilius. If only he had informed us of the place and manner in which he met that Syrian! But no; the word “she,” cannot explain or amplify what followed the meeting, and one may only infer, from the place which the fragment occupies, that Lucilius was almost at the end of his journey when he met her. The word “however,” might cause 141 the reader to believe that inns were not numerous at the place, and, though the inn may have been sadly lacking in comforts, he saw possibilities in the nationality and person of his hostess which might, in a measure, annul the other disadvantages, although he had for some time sought for a resting place to his tastes, and that his arrival was in the nature of that of a providential guest. Was he well entertained? Did he find there a crackling fire and a cosy hearth? Some authors would have the reader see, in that Syrian’s tavern, a wretched establishment like that of which another fragment makes mention, and which, on a par with the inn in which Horace was so well smoked at Beneventum, could supply Lucilius neither faggots, oil, nor asparagus, “nothing which he wanted,” but, as far as we are concerned, knowing what we do of the inns kept by the ambuniae, we will give the preference to that exquisite little pastel of the ancient poet which delineates a Syrian; a pretty house with a well filled larder of which he speaks in yet another fragment of the same book. She it is whom we prefer to see at the head of a table loaded with food well cooked and tastefully served: “an exclamation of starvation,” as Labitte remarks, “we will open our jaws and devour the profit.” And, if, on that trip, more famous for fasting than feasting, he might well make the most of such an opportunity for an orgy as is indicated in still another fragment, and write, in its honor, that verse of lively jubilation, “the jugs are standing on their heads, and our sober senses with them,” which surely ought to be the case during that same dalliance at the shrine of the Syrian hostess.
Such an hypothesis would be utterly without meaning in a tavern which was sordid, a dirty and smoky lodging, and I find myself in full accord with what the poets have told us of these oriental inns.
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