![]() ![]() Hints for my Christmas Stocking – Michelle Lovric.'Just click your heels together three times.' by.The Hierarchy of Hats and other scavengings: by.'War and the Spirit of Christmas' by A L Berridge.PLAING, DANSINK & SINGIN OFF FYLTHY KARRELLS by El.Postcards from the Threshold – Dianne Hofmeyr.Where the Dickens is my Club Card, by K.Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport.OLIVER CROMWELL.a historical character I can't w.Martial composes epigrams for a gold statue of Victory, various figures in Corinthian bronze, paintings of different mythological characters, a clay theatrical mask, Minerva in silver, Homer in parchment notebooks, Virgil, Livy or Cicero on parchment, works by poets such as Propertius, Ovid, Lucan and Catullus – (scrolls were luxury items in those days) - a hawk, dwarf mules, a Gallic lapdog, a greyhound, a monkey, a wrestler, a dancing girl, a scribe, an idiot, a cook, a confectioner, and a dwarf! ![]() LUXURY GOODS - If you were really rich, you could give opulent gifts of silver, gold, jewels, animals and - in an age of slavery - even people. SIGILLUM of a HUNCHBACK – I think Prometheus was drunk when he made hunchbacks from the earth, he was fooling around with Saturnalian clay. THINGS FOR BOYS and GIRLS - a hunting knife, hunting spears, a belt and sword, a dagger, a small shield, a small hatchet, a feather-stuffed ball, a ball for trigon, dumbbells, a leather wrestling cap, a rattle, a parrot that says ‘Ave Caesar’, a ‘talking’ crow, a nightingale, an ivory cage, a lyre, a plectrum, a hoop, jewellery and of course SIGILLA: little clay or wooden figures. Martial mentions wax tablets, ivory tablets, three leaved wax tablets, parchment tablets, small Vitellian tablets for love letters, ivory cashbox, dice, dice box, nuts (for gambling), gaming board, gaming pieces, case for writing materials, stylus case, bookcase, bundle of reed pens, oil lamp for the bedroom, candle, multi wicked lamp, wax taper, candelabrum, horn lantern, lantern made of a bladder, incense, smokeless wood, peacock-feather fly whisk, ox-tail fly-swat, place-keeper for scroll (like a bookmark), palm leaf broom, peacock couch, semicircular couch, citrus wood table, maple table, tablecloth, feather stuffing for a mattress, marsh reed stuffing for a mattress and hay for a mattress, if you are really strapped for sesterces. STATIONERY and FURNITURE were also popular gifts. Luxury tableware included antique cups, golden bowls, jewelled cups, arretine ware, glass cups, crystal cups and murrhine cups (a semi precious stone that gives flavour to wine). Other utensils mentioned by Martial are a strainer for snow, a flagon for snow, a drinking flask, small table jugs, an earthenware jug, silver spoons, snail spoons, baskets and mushroom pots. Garum (fish sauce), honey, mulsum (honeyed wine), raisin wine, retsina, Falernian wine, Surrentine wine and vinegar. Tota mihi dormitur hiems et pinguior illoĬONDIMENTS and CUTLERY People also gave each other condiments and wine, cutlery and cups. It is Martial who tells us that Romans ate stuffed dormice, a popular trope of all historical fiction set in ancient Rome. Here is the fifty-ninth epigram in book 13, which also show the format of these Saturnalia couplets: a title and two lines. This is the kind of detail about ancient Rome that I adore. ![]() From them we know exactly what kinds of gifts people gave each other from the humblest (handful of nuts) to the most extravagant (a slave). Some have literary or mythical allusions. These poetic "gift tags" are often written from the point of view of the gift, almost like a riddle. Leary's commentaries on the Xenia and the Apophoreta are full of information, but if you don't have a Classics library nearby or can't afford the scholarly price tags, you can access the Loeb version of Martial's epigrams free on the internet at sites such as this one.) Although you could give gifts any time during the Saturnalia, a particular custom was to give your dinner guest a present to take away, hence the titles of those books. Martial wrote a batch of these and published them in two papyrus scrolls which are numbered books 13 and 14 in his corpus and are given the names the Xenia (Greek for "guest gifts") and the Apophoreta, (Greek for "things to be taken away"). One of the customs of the Roman midwinter festival called Saturnalia was to compose an epigram to accompany a Saturnalia gift. An epigram is a short poem, in Martial's case usually a poetic couplet, i.e. He uses the f-word and the c-word plenty and warns his readers that they might be shocked. His acerbic, gossipy, sometimes shocking poems were a kind of ancient Sex in the City for the Flavian period in late first century Rome. Marcus Valerius Martialis (AKA Martial) is one of my favourite Roman poets. ![]()
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