Ancient Roman soldier carved a phallus with a personal insult in this stone | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Roman soldier carved a phallus with a personal insult in this stone

arstechnica.com

117 pointsdiodorus92 comments

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Centurion: What is this then? Romanes eunt domus, "People called Romanes they go the house"?

Brian: It..it says, "Romans, go home"!

Centurion: No, it doesn't! What's Latin for "Roman"? [grabs Brian's ear] Come on, come on!

Brian: Romanus!

Centurion: Goes like?

Brian: Annus!

Centurion: Vocative plural of annus is...?

Brian: Anni?

Centurion: [writes] Romani. And eunt? What is eunt?

Brian: "Go"! Let-

Centurion: Conjugate the verb "to go".

Brian: Ire; eo, is, it, imus, itis, eunt!

Centurion: So eunt is...?

Brian: Third person plural, present indicative. "They go!"

Centurion: But "Romans, go home" is an order, so you must use the...?

Brian: The... imperative!

Centurion: Which is...?

Brian: I!

Centurion: [twisting Brian's ear] How many Romans?

Brian: [yelling] I.. Plural, plural! Ite, ite!

Centurion: [writing] Ite. Domus? Nominative? But "go home", it is motion towards, isn't it, boy?

Brian: Dative, sir! [The centurion promptly draws his swords and presses it against Brian's throat.

Brian yells:] No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! The... accusative, accusative! Domum, sir, ad domum!

Centurion: Except that domus takes the...?

Brian: The locative, sir!

Centurion: Which is?

Brian: Domum!

Centurion: [writing] Domum... -um [sheathing his sword] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times!

Brian: Yes, sir, thank you, sir! Hail Caesar!

Centurion: Hail Caesar. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off!

Brian: Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar and everything, sir!

The secondary school I went to taught Latin as the first language, and someone had - before my time - written "Romanes eunt domus" on the school wall next to the main entrance. I did not get the joke until I watched Life of Brian, but when I did, I absolutely loved it. To my knowledge, nobody has removed the graffiti to this day.

I love this scene because it captures the crazy dissonance between Latin as it was taught for generations (basically a highly structured linguistic hazing ritual) and the fact that it really was a lively living language once.

It was funny when I saw the movie because I never expected a movie to wittily touch on such schoolboy Latin troubles. But since the internet became a thing and this scene gets regurgitated at the slightest provocation, a damnatio memoriae wold be a kindness.

Are they sure it was definitely the same author? Maybe Secundinus saw the insult and carved a big dick in response.

Classically, a phallic representation can disrupt a curse or evil eye. After all, how can you maintain an evil eye when you see a big honking cock in your field of view? It’s like a bad vibe disrupter.

Read more about the “fascinating” magic of big fake dicks in antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascinus

>Are they sure it was definitely the same author?

Perhaps there is a better analysis available, but the lines of the phallus appear to me to have been cut by the same author of the letters in the words.

Besides that, having dated an archeology student who left their interesting books around, I seem to remember there being a standard for identifying the cut of these objects. Perhaps it was more easily verified than we might think.

What we can be sure of is that, whatever happened, it played out in wood thousands of times.

Somebody had to be really hard-core to do it in stone.

(Apologies for the doubles-entendres! Really, they write themselves.)

It takes nothing to get a can of spray paint and deface a wall with an insult or any crude depiction. Imagine the commitment required to carve an insult on stone. This man was truly angry.

The execution could be "delegated" to someone lower on the social ladder.

This is your rebuttal for "This man was truly angry"? That he might have hired it out to a sculptor (doesn't really look like it, frankly) and _therefore_ wasn't truly angry?

Your surmise depends on whether some random provincial soldier at the shit-end of the empire would really be socially superior to a skilled craftsman, that this was the work of a skilled craftsman, that the soldier could afford the sculptor's commission, that this sort of act really was delegated sometimes, and finally, that he wasn't truly angry because he could afford to hire out the curse?

Or -- said soldier had status to compel some aliquis to inscribe an insult and therefore wasn't really angry? Your idea sounds like an aborted Plautus plot.

To paraphrase a Brian (not the one mentioned in the top comment), I hope you stood up before pulling this out of your ass. Pardon me while I scrape something into the nearest concrete.

No. Assigned it to a slave. Yes, soldiers could have slaves, and did. Often enough, claiming slaves was the point. Slaves were very frequently much more literate than their keepers.

An enormous amount of what is attributed to famous authors was written or compiled by their slaves.

I take the serifs as evidence for the surmise. Even a slave can have pride.

Do you have any attested sources that suggest soldiers farmed out their curses to slaves? Did it ever occur to you that certain things in the classical world had to be transacted in person? Do you somehow have reason to believe that curses, magic, religion rites were farmed out?

The sort of literate slave you are suggesting, BTW, would be fit for a patrician and command a price beyond what a provincial soldier could afford. Of what use would such a slave be to such a soldier anyway?

You're really stretching it to preserve this fantasy of yours.

Literate slaves were literally for the taking. One didn't inquire about education when taking them. They might be sold to a patrician, later. Anyway, any soldier might be son to a patrician, and be sent out with a slave retainer. Slaves by definition had to do as they were told. Even if it was carving in stone, grammatically, serifs or no.

Curses, especially, were routinely farmed out. Executing curses oneself was considered dangerous, like practicing law today. Priests were consulted. Like today.

Very, very often -- indeed, absolutely conventionally -- literate slaves were kept as teachers. Any soldier with aspirations to advancement would need education.

You are really stretching to avoid trivially obvious inferences. Read some history? Maybe a literate slave could help you out.

Advancement could be yours!

Oh, tell me about all the literate and latin-speaking people available for enslavement by Roman soldiers garrisoned to stop cattle-thieving at the literal end of empire!

Take a step back and look at the claim and counter-claim: guy must have been mad to carve that in stone; nu-uh, could have been delegated. I've given many reasons to doubt this is likely. Now you've got "priests" in the mix (this is suddenly a state function, I guess) to hold up this house of cards? The chain of contingencies your "remarkably obvious inference" depends upon is remarkable. And you are inferring all this from a single piece of epigraphic evidence? Good grief.

You really could read up on some historical facts. They are not jealously guarded anymore, and can in fact be found via simple automated search services. You might even know of one such.

Ignorance, today, is a choice. You may dispense with it anytime you like. Or not; "nescio id quod sciam," as it were.

What you are calling their ignorance is their careful rebuttal. And what is so obvious and true to you is just an unbelievably liberal interpretation of history, and then going, for little to no reason, “I think it happened this way.”

Why is it so unlikely that the aggrieved person carved this himself?

It is not unlikely at all.

Carving it himself -- or herself, we don't have any indication who, or that it was even a soldier who was aggrieved -- is one of many possibilities.

What is ignorant is to insist only the one alternative, among many, is possible, and that slaves were never ordered to do tedious chores, and that a soldier (or whoever) could not have had a slave, and that said slave could not be literate. All officious BS: what we have is a rock. What we know is, exactly, that somebody carved it.

Any specific reason you believe that a soldier was involved?

There is of course no such indication. All we know is that somebody was aggrieved enough about somebody they knew as Secundinus to have committed substantial resource to recording the fact.

Keep in mind that our expectations of how much effort we should put into things have changed throughout history.

Yes indeed, and let us not forget that the Romans had slaves.

No no, you get the slaves to serve you the wine and grapes while you carve the phallus.

A necessary evil in a world lacking technology.

It would take about 1 minute to carve the phallus, with a chisel and a hammer. Sandstone is very easy to chisel - try it!

Given the amount of modern day graffiti carved into benches and tables in parks and scratched onto bus windows, probably not that angry?

> Secundinus cacator, which translates into (ahem) “Secundinus, the shitter."

In Brazil we have the expression "cagão" which can translated as "big shitter" to refer to someone who encourages or announces a firm, dangerous or exemplar behavior but recedes back when need to assume it arrives.

Dam , here in Turkey "kaka" [caca] literally means "poop" or "to poop". How odd.

Similar root words somewhere in the past. Caca in Spanish means the same thing.

But the oddity is that Turkish isn't related to the Romance languages.

No, but several of the earlier languages in Anatolia did have Into-European roots as did some of the surrounding languages, such as Persian. It could easily be a loan word.

*kakka- also kaka-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to defecate." According to Watkins, "imitative of glottal closure during defecation."

"Secundinus der Kacker" in German

Kaka means poop in many unrelated languages. It's baby talk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk

Another example is "to eat" or "tasty": English yum, Russian nyam etc.

Lots of baby words are shared amongst languages even if they're not related. The most obvious one I see are the variations of baba, papa, dada, etc for dad.

My iraqi friends say baba and arabic is certainly not originated from latin.

There are certainly some Latin loan words in Arabic; that part of the world was well within the Roman sphere of influence for a long time. For instance: the Arabic ṣirāṭ and English street both come from the Latin word strata.

Oh, I'm sure that. I just meant as a root language I don't believe they share a common ancestor

So my knowledge of Spanish is pretty limited but being in South Texas I do run into it, and I've always thought the word "caca" was more analogous to "poop" rather than "shit"; ie they mean they same thing but one is more offensive. I never know how close Portugese is to Spanish though; it's a language I have next to no exposure to.

Interestingly, in American English, we would refer to someone who lies a lot as a "bullshitter" or "full of shit", but someone who is cowardly is a "chickenshit". It sounds like "cagão" is a bit of a combination. Either way it seems like one of those universal human cultural tendencies.

My favorite insult: "He thinks he's hot shit, but he's not even a cold fart."

I don't know if it is the same word but it reminds me of a joke a Brazilian friend told me when we were discussing how it can be hard to translate jokes. He mentioned that someone who shits a lot is a common insult in Brazil.

The joke goes: A young man visits the family of his girlfriend for the first time. At one point the father of the girl pulls him aside and tells him that he is no good for his daughter. The father wants a rich man for his daughter. He tells the young man "you can't buy my daughter a nice house, you can't buy her a nice car, you can't buy her nice clothes, I bet you can't even afford to buy her toilet paper". Later, as the young man and girl drive home she notices he is upset. She asks if her dad maybe said something to him. He said, yes, he told me you are a big shitter.

In the real world, it is common to see cultural and intellectual discussion degrade to shit talking. In Hacker News, talking about shit evolves to a cultural and intellectual discussion. I love this!

I feel like nobody should be surprised about crude insults and rome going together.

After all, these are the people that brought us cattulus 16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

Sounds like an early rapper lyric :)

I wonder if the insult carried then the same meaning as in modern Spanish, i.e. «coward». It would make sense that the carver thought that trait to be a grave issue in a military garrison context.

Could be, it carries the same meaning in modern Greek.

Secundinus can sec un di nuts

Came for this comment - was not disappointed

Instead of “I love you” Romans said “pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” and I think it’s really beautiful

For those wondering, Google translates this as "fuck you and fuck you."

It’s the opening line from Catullus 16, actual humans have translated it as “I will sodomize and face-fuck you”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

Ahh, the language of love.

One of my favorite slam poets of antiquity.

And also, he who gave us “hail, brother, and farewell”.

Man had range

That's so much better. It was clear Google wasn't translating it literally.

DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator, had no idea how to translate it.

> "Among the many other interesting finds: [...]; the remains of a female child between 8 and 10, found in a shallow pit in a barrack room in 2010;"

This small phrase give us clear view that this girl's death was probably in a terrible situation... Poor child.

I thought the Romans used that symbol for good luck and fertility? It seems at odds with the message. Doesn't seem so much a 'clever subversion' as confusing.

The article mentions this at the end!

In this case, the author wasn’t sending Secundus good luck :)

Also apotropaic. My fav is a fascinus cumming on the evil eye from Leptis magna

In a couple millenia, they'll say that's what we mean by it too, if any of our writing is left.

8==D

I deeply respect this.

Actually, point of fact - this is one of humanity's most honest historical tomes.

Which ones aren’t honest?

The ones with more than two words?

In previous times you really had to make an effort to insult someone - engraving this probably took some time.

The internet would be a better place if posting something would take serious effort.

Perhaps this would be a nice starting point for a new version of Twitter or any forum.

I don't think you'll get effort. But you might get quality by limiting the posting rate. Something like 1/day. That's not enough, so you also need to encourage the community to highly regard quality posts, rather than just evocative ones. Imagine Twitter where only moderating, calming tweets are liked. It would be a different place!

It would be a brave, new world. :)

It just means that we would have Dickcarving-as-a-Service by tomorrow afternoon.

Yes, the internet would be a better place if posting spam costs money.

you were not distracting yourself in HN.

tbh, if you want your insult to be likely to survive for nearly 2000 years, it takes a bit of dedication even now.

probably Secundinus had insulted him by shouting at him, making a hand gesture or spilling his beer. But whilst such low effort insults can drive people crazy, they're unlikely to achieve results quite as impressive as worldwide media coverage in future millennia, or historians musing on why Secundinus was considered to be a shitter as they figure out a caption for the centrepiece for a new museum.

> whilst such low effort insults can drive people crazy, they're unlikely to achieve results quite as impressive as worldwide media coverage in future millennia

That result might impress you, but I think everyone involved would have considered the insult a bigger success if, say, Secundinus' engagement fell through and no one in the future ever heard about the dispute.

The infelicitous image caption should go down in history: "Retired biochemist Dylan Herbert was volunteering at the excavation site when he came across the carved stone."

Secundinus should be happy he didn't get the full ostrakon treatment, which involved carving a person's name on a pottery shard and using it for post-toilet scraping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracon

Does anyone know why the second word doesn't exactly match "cacator"? The first letter looks like an "E" but there is an "E" in the first word so the horizontal line might be a later damage. However, the second "A" looks like an "O". Could it be a typo?

If you click through to the original article, it says the stone actually says "SECVNDINVS CACOR", which is an abbreviated form of secundinus cacator. Words are often abbreviated on stone inscriptions.

https://www.vindolanda.com/News/ancient-graffiti

I wonder why...

Abbreviations on paper just save on paper. In stone, you can count hammer blows saved.

Guessing "Secundinus" is an insulting diminutive of "Secundus". Extra work for a serious purpose!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrcbCW4y9Dw : all the bits of Biggus Dickus from MP’s Life of Brian

Imagine people 2k years from now excavating gas station restroom stalls.

If they have ability to perform archeology on hard drives by that point, that will be an "interesting" job that I would not want to have.

The Romans used phallus imagery in multiple ways.

See Fascinus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascinus

Funny how "cacator" sounds like the Portuguese word "cagador". I thought the verb "cagar" was recent, turns out we've been saying it for thousands of years.

These romance languages are called thus because of Rome: they are variations of Latin. Look up the etymology of most words in Spanish or French and you’ll find the Latin origins. Even the naughty bits. Spanish pedo ← Latin pedere.

Yeah, I know. It's just that specifically "cagar" sounds so informal and slang-like, those words tend to vary a lot through generations.

In French we have an equivalent verb, "caguer", but it's not used that much, "chier" is more common in this register and is the one used in most expressions.

"Cacogen" was Latin for people who spoke a foreign language.

And this is what happens when you refuse to pay your engraver

The ancient version of defacing a clients website.

“Romani ite domum”

Was intended to Secundinus Biggus Dickus.

Wow, he even used serifs on the letters.

graffiti was a big deal in Ancient Rome. I remember the opening sequence of HBO short lived and much missed Rome series and the depiction of graffiti. Ancient Rome had a rich history of expressing opinions via graffiti.

Love how this trolling is HN appropriate.

It's a fat one too, nice.

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