Perhaps I should post this both here and at the Political arena, I enjoyed it very much and thought I should share.
Shamelessly stolen from the mostly Cajun website @ http://www.mostlycajun.com/wordpress/:
Things change, things stay the same…
Filed under: General — mostly cajun @ 5:59 pm
Archaeologists in Britain uncovered a stash of original letters from the force of Romans occupying the country. Seriously!
An archaeologist’s life is often a pretty grim one, or so Robin Birley thought as he rooted through a pile of Roman sewage on a windswept fort in the wilds of Northumberland.Sifting through the mixture of ancient sewage, rotten bracken and the contents of several decades’ worth of Roman rubbish bins, Dr Birley didn’t think much at first when he came across a handful of half-burnt, sodden slices of oak, each about the size of a postcard.
Then, suddenly, he spotted a few faded vertical and horizontal marks in ink - Roman ink, made out of gum arabic - and water.
He had found it! The Holy Grail - the elusive detail experts on Roman Britain had been in search of for centuries: letters to and from the Roman soldiers who had garrisoned Britain from AD43 to 410.
Now known as the Vindolanda Tablets - after the fort where they were found - the more than 1,000 pieces of birch, alder and oak give an unparalleled, moving and often very funny insight into the life of the Roman soldier stuck miles from home at the end of the first century AD.
Having been the twentieth century equivalent of those Romans, I can vouch for this: We wrote letters. In the days before email, and when an overseas phone call was a very significant chunk of change to a young soldier balancing the budget to feed wife and kids, old-fashioned pen and paper was the communications medium of choice.
The letters reveal how the soldiers miss their family and friends back in Gaul - that’s where most of them came from.
How they long for fine Italian wine. How they dread the attacks of the vicious Picts - the woad-encrusted savages from the north whose raids were to be held off by the new wall of turf and stone stretching across the neck of England.
But most of all, how cold they are in the frozen north, a few miles from modern Hexham.
This sounds quite familiar to some of the subject matter of many of my letters. Korea: They didn’t call it “Frozen Chosen†for nothing. We didn’t have hordes of wild Picts with their arses painted blue, we had the minions of the goofy-a**sed fanatic Kim Il Sung.
Miss home and family and the food? My mom mailed me a “care package†with a bottle of roux, a bag of dried shrimp, some dried onions and a box of rice so I could make my own gumbo. But the hills of Korea were NOT the coastal prairies and marshes of south Louisiana.
The funniest letter is a simple list of the clothes sent from the warm south to a poor frozen Roman: “Paria udonum ab Sattua solearum duo et subligariorum duo.†Or - socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.
Two pairs of underpants! We tend to forget that the Roman Empire, the greatest the world has ever seen, stretching from Wales to Spain, from Tunisia to Turkey, had to be patrolled by thousands of soldiers, and soldiers, like all of us, are humans. And humans need underpants.
Just like the Romans, I wrote for the underwear and socks. GI issue winter long johns of that day were woolen, and itched like the dickens. I asked for, and got, the civilian cotton version, then wore them UNDER the GI stuff. More warmth AND less itch. GI woolen socks weren’t quite up to the Korean winter, especially out on the line, so I asked for, and got, thermal socks and relished slightly less frozen feet.
. . .
Among the things we learn from these delicate little documents are military reports of the strength and activities of the Vindolanda garrison. Also revealed are details of the domestic administration of this remote little outpost.
Sifting through them, we learn of the diet of the Roman expat, so reminiscent of home: Massic wine (a fine Italian vintage), garlic, fish, semolina, lentils, olives and olive oil.
They also ate a lot of the local Pictish fare: pork fat, cereal, spices, roe-deer and venison.
There are many mentions, too, of “cervesa†and “callum†- that is, lager and pork scratchings, and all 1,000 years before the great British pub had been invented.
Cervesa and callum sounds like my years in Germany and the many evenings of sitting around the local gasthaus enjoying beer and bratwurst, and many other local dishes. And somewhere along in there wife #1 learned to cook gumbo, so I felt less isolated. Yep, another letter to Louisiana and we got the gumbo file’ we needed. Past that, the army commissary and the German economy provided what we needed to turn government quarters into a little corner of Cajun country.
The demand for fine food hits a peak at the festival of the Roman goddess of chance, Fors Fortuna, when they have a hog roast, washed down with great quantities of wine, which they claim is “ad sacrum divae†- “for religious use†- an early version of the old “I only drink for medicinal purposes†ploy.
Feasts we shared. I was married, with a family. Most of my friends, young soldiers in my company, were single, and I usually invited a couple of them to join us for meals, be that traditional Thanksgiving or Christmas feasts, or just a “we’re having roast on Friday…†And German wine… for “medicinal purposesâ€, natch.
A man writing to his brother - “Vittius Adiutor eagle-bearer of the Second Augustan Legion to Cassius Saecularis, his little brother, very many greetings.â€
Solemnis, in another letter, wrote to his brother Paris: “Hello there. Hope all’s well. I’m in top form - and I hope you are, even though you’ve been so bloody lazy and haven’t sent me a single letter.
“I’m so much more considerate than you are, my brother, my messmate. Say hello to Diligens and Cogitatus and Corinthus. Goodbye, my dear brother.â€
And so we see that a soldier’s lot stays the same: longing for home and family, even though centuries separate…
And some replies:
1.] Having sent many such missives from various parts of the world (also term papers, reports, and final exams for that matter), all I can say is some things never change.
2.] It’s always so much better when you realize it’s a person who did this, not some generic “society in the past.â€
3.] I’ll bet the mail was a little more timely then.
4.] Fascinating. There was nothing quite like a letter from home.
5.] My nephew (a Louisiana boy) is now serving in the Army in Korea; his last email home was to report he was freezing!! *L* He’s not quite used to the cold weather but he does have Army issue warm clothing. His Mom made him some deer jerky and sent to him for Christmas; he was tickled to death to get that!