“Roman Biro”, complete with joke, found at London building site | Hacker News Reader

“Roman Biro”, complete with joke, found at London building site

theguardian.com

100 pointssorokod44 comments

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/27/joke-on-roman-souvenir-bloomberg-building-site-city-of-london

If you enjoy this sort of thing and you’re ever passing through the city of London I would highly recommend stopping the Bloomberg offices and visiting the Temple of Mithras. A Roman historian friend of mine took me on a tour of the temple with the British Roman Society when it first opened. He was very impressed and told me it was one of the most faithful and high quality sites that he’s visited anywhere; including Italy. Pity they threw the original temple columns into the Thames when they first found it after the Blitz.

Entrance is free and right next to Bank tube station. Though I think you need to book in advance (unless you have friends working in the Bloomberg building).

_edit: a word_

I have read about this place and it is sad that they decided to move a 1700 year old temple for a temporary building that had been demolished later.

Thank you, I'm there in September with a couple of days free and my liver will appreciate the temporary reprieve from way too many real ales. This sounds right up my alley.

A bunch of us from my work got taken by our Bloomberg rep. It's not a massive museum, but it is very interesting and they do their best to make it atmospheric. Definitely recommended.

Link for info and to book: https://www.londonmithraeum.com/

"Biro" is British Isles (and elsewhere?, but not US) slang for a ballpoint pen, from László Bíró, the inventor of the modern ballpoint pen.

Huh, thanks, as 30 something Brit, I didn't know why we called it a Biro, and I never thought to ask why!

Similar to Hoover <=> Vacuum Cleaner

And Crapper, supposedly. But that's disputed.

That's not disputed, that's just straight-up false. The earliest record of the word "crap" -- and that's counting just "crap", not the earlier words it's derived from -- is in 1846, when Thomas Crapper would have been just 9 years old.

A case of nominative determinism?

Italian too

It’s Biro in New Zealand too.

Somehow I expected a story of a modern biro faked up as a Roman find, rather than the quite remarkable stylus.

Charles Dawson (of Pitdown Man fakery fame) also did some Roman artifact faking - a fake cast iron figurine and a fake brick. The brick is apparently still in the British Museum collection:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/col...

I didn't know that the shape of the hexagonal pencil has ancient roots.

Neither did I - but evidently, even the Romans were already fed up with pencils rolling away on tables. Pencils with a square cross-section are uncomfortable in the hand, and I suspect a pentagonal pencil to be hard to manufacture because it has no parallel sides. So a hexagon seems like the perfect compromise!

Some kind of compromise indeed. Because the ideal shape is triangular (like some of the best modern ballpoint pens are).

An actual literal triangular cross-section would be unpleasant to hold because of the sharp edges, I think. So you need to get rid of those somehow. If planar surfaces are the easiest things to make, then the best you can do is to cut off the corners with straight lines, at which point you have a hexagon.

Not necessarily a regular hexagon, though. You might have long sides alternating with short ones. But a regular-hexagon writing tool behaves sufficiently like a rounded-off-triangular one for many purposes.

And a triangular section stylus would need custom tooling, but a hexagonal section stylus has parallel faces so it can be made with a standard hammer and anvil.

Such a stylus was featured in a short story set in Cicero's time (he even shows up at the end).

[spoilers]

It's "Mightier than the Sword", by John Maddox Roberts, a historical mystery tale. The triangular shape of the criminal's stylus is key, and he's caught when the investigator asks to borrow it:

"Actually, I didn't really forget my own stylus today." I took it out. "You see, the common styli are round or quadrangular. Mine, for instance, is slightly oval in cross-section." Cicero and his friends drew out their own implements and showed them. All were as I had described. Cicero's was made of ivory, with a silver scraper.

(Part of the writer's SPQR series - I find them well researched and not leaking too much of the modern mindset into classical times.)

At the Roman baths in Bath, one of the objects you can see is a pair of gambling dice found on site. The plaque charmingly notes that they are loaded.

But also interestingly, they are wooden cubes marked with exactly the same pip pattern we still use today.

It's amazing - and yet unsurprising, the more I think of it - to think of how little has changed atl least locally.

Pick a random sentence from something written by Thucydides, 2.5 millennia ago, and (barring the nouns) it's probably a completely usual scenario involving people and/or groups of people.

edit: usual not unusual d'oh

Usual, I suspect.

My ability to think one thing and write down another knows no bounds

There is a surviving letter from s famous Roman writer ( sorry forgot the name) to his son studying in Athens, complaining how he is wasting money and not going to classes, yet to finish his studies.

Nabonidus in the 6th century BC sponsored archaeological excavations to learn more about his hero, Sargon of Akkad.

This makes sense, since Sargon probably reigned more than 1500 years before Nabonidus. But it feels unusual to see archaeology in the past. To us, what's the difference between one ancient Mesopotamian king and another?

There are Sumerian dices identical to those we use from 3000 BC. Romans are closer to us than those dices.

dice = plural

die = singular

At an ancient Egyptian exhibit some years back what most fascinated me were small personal items: hand mirrors, tweezers, make-up kits, dice, and other entertainments.

Fun article that I've seen posted around:

http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...

Great but where are the Latin originals?

Where's the Latin original in this piece? There's a pretty nice photo, but it's not easy to read, even magnified. And the photo cuts off before the end of the stylus.

I was able to recognise familiar words like FORTUNA, LONGA VIA, MEMORIUM, SACCULUS (sack).

Yeah,

    AB URBE ..... ...US TIBI .R.TUM .../
    .......UM .UI H.B..S M.MOR..M NOST/
    .... SI FORTUNA . ... ....... POSSEM /
    ....... UT.. LONGA VIA ..N SACCULUS EST .ACU/

isn't exactly my idea of legible Latin text, and much of that is still guessing. I wouldn't have read LONGA without your prompting it.

And since the noun is memoria, I'd bet the inscription says MEMORIAM, not MEMORIUM. Not that the picture shows it; those two letters appear to have been totally lost.

A bit of a tangent, I went to the Pompeii exhibition in the British museum and having seen the goat statue thought that Romans were not "just like us"

Question now is - what did they use to write upon this iron stylus?

I was wondering precisely the same thing. Looking closely at the inscription, it appears to have been made by using a pointed instrument with green color at its tip, applied one dot at a time.

They did not use ink. It is actually a stylus used to write on wax tablets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet). Later in the article it says ... Other finds included more than 400 waxed writing tablets, which offer insights into the first decades of Roman rule in Britain.

OP is referring to the styluses themselves - they have green writing, and are not made of wax.

Not sure if the green is original or added now to make the writings visible. To survive 2000 years that green, whatever it is, must be super-durable.

But in general, if you hit an iron rod with another pointy iron rod, you'll probably leave a mark. Do it many times, and you have an inscription. Probably took a lot of work though, so the guy who owned it probably was quite busy for some time... Maybe a long road from Rome to London :)

> The inscription was exceptionally difficult to read, partly due to corrosion, and is only legible now following work by conservators.

The article says it is made out of iron, but wrought iron is much more likely. The Romans would have been able to make a punch out of hardened wrought iron to mark this stylus.

> Not sure if the green is original or added now to make the writings visible.

I'd bet on the "added now", possibly by 'shopping the image ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547540

Looks alot like the modern stylus that you might use on a tablet today

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