No Such Thing As Julius Caesar's Plan B

22:16Apparently he would pray before having a glass of water or before opening an envelope or before writing a... I mean, prayer was his constant thing. And anyway, so he's never been reunited with his arm and it's there to this day with a tombstone above it.

22:28James Harkin:And he's got, yeah, it's got the writing on it that says... What does it say? It says he earned more than any other Confederate general. General ever. It just says Arm of Stonewall Jackson and that's been moved around a couple of times so it might be directly above his arm now. It might not, but the arm was moved a bit. Interesting. Didn't he draw attention to himself, rather? I mean, if you're kind of going into battle and you're the lead general, if you've got your hand up... Yeah, I mean, they literally shot through me. It's just completely stupid. You don't want to be shot in your head. No, you're right.

23:01No, it's better. You're right. In fact, what you would probably do is put a hat on it

23:04James Harkin:to seem like you're really tall. And a little suit around your arm. I think if you've got a reputation as an eccentric already, lean in. Just go for it. Go for it. Actually, speaking of clothing, he was well known amongst his other generals for not wearing flamboyant clothing. Okay. Because in the war, the officers had to pay for their own clothes. You didn't get a uniform. And you had to kind of wear things that are about similar to the other guys, like a similar colour and stuff. But the richer people in there, and often the officers were rich, they would just buy the most flamboyant thing they could get away with.

23:38but he didn't do that and people thought it was a bit sus really i think it was very poor wasn't he as a young man he grew up extremely poor and and scrabbled his way up through so how did he become a general i think talent i think he was a sheer talent oh yeah and a funny arm

23:56James Harkin:who wants to be a general yeah i can see you over there yeah he was i mean apparently he was you know the like the politics of the civil war aside he was a brilliant tactician you know and i think after he died, not long after that came the Battle of Gettysburg, which obviously he missed having just died. And that is one of the, certainly the huge military turning points of the war was the Battle of Gettysburg. And his absence from it was cited by a couple of other generals at the time. So it could have changed. How did you become a general in like the Roman army or the Greek army? Very rich. Was it rich?

24:30Yes. I mean, there's kind of two strands. One is the career soldier, right? And you can go up the ladder, a career soldier, you know, squaddy, and then you become a centurion and you might kind of go up to the sort of what we call the commissioned wrecks, right? But the guys who were leading it, they bypassed all that. Right. And God knows if they're any good or not. Yeah. Or, you know, I kind of, you know, you guys have been talking about, you know, all this brilliant tactician stuff. you sort of wonder what it is to be a brilliantly tactical general. I mean, I've spent a long time looking at Julius Caesar's campaigns because Caesar is always, in America, he's on the syllabus at military academies, because of his brilliance as a general, like old Stonewall.

25:26But I started looking, he only had one tactic, which is he went round the back. You get face to face with the army, the opposing army. And what you do is you then pen them in from the back. That's what he does all the time.

25:41James Harkin:You must have felt like such an idiot when you're going, he won't do it this time. He won't do it this time. He wants us to think he's going to do it, but he's not. And in fact, it seemed to me, and I've got terrible kind of attacks on social media for saying this, because there's an awful lot of people very, very invested in Roman military tactics. I think it's all like that. It's all kind of pen them in from the back. Was he also helped by being in charge of the Roman army as well, which was presumably the biggest and best at the time? In his rise to power? Are you sure? Yeah. I think they're only the biggest and the best because there's more of them.

26:16Yeah. I mean, you can't defeat the Romans in a war. You can defeat them in a battle. They lose battles all over the place. They're hopeless at some things. They're a laughing stock when it comes to navies. But they've always got more men. Yeah. So they can't lose a war. They can lose a battle. Interesting. So is there not kind of tactical brilliance? Well, you know, when this goes out, I shall no doubt get more of it. You know, I've been to war you fucking moron. You don't understand Mary B. It doesn't give any credence to the brilliance. How many legions do you have Mary B. That's right. But if you ask me, it's their one-trick ponies, really.

26:58Wow. So Caesar, just to go back to chariots, he described in his, not his diaries, his account of commentaries on the British invasion. It's one of the only references we have contemporary to British tribes using military chariots. And they'd gone out of fashion in Rome for centuries by then, but we were still using them. And they were like an Uber across the battlefield. And one really important myth to bust is they didn't have scythes coming out of the wheels.

27:30James Harkin:Oh, okay. If you go to look at Boudicca on Thames Embankment, her statue, she's got a great set of scythes. But I am told by my archaeological friends that this is a myth. Okay. I'm absolutely gussed. I am a bit gussed about that. That's my chariot myth busted. There we go. And I've been sending that in to other podcasts for ages. Jumping back to the modern just very quickly. So he was responsible for winning a lot of battles. Who's Stonewall Jackson? Stonewall Jackson. Modern day. Certainly more modern than the time of Caesar. But one of the places that he won was Fredericksburg in Virginia. And he beat the federal general who was Ambrose E.

28:14James Harkin:Burnside, friend of the podcast. We've spoken about him before. Inventor of sideburns. Inventor of sideburns. At some point, Burnside, people went, I love it and I love the name, but not quite. And they changed it round. But yeah, too. Because he had a real set, didn't he? Yeah. I think I linked up to his moustache. I went really sideburns. It's interesting. He was an innovator of the form, but he hadn't perfected it. You know what? On this subject, I was reading about hypochondria. And modern day hypochondria was invented, kind of, or defined by an American neurologist called George Beard, who didn't have a beard.

28:48And no relation. No relation. Oh, what about Frank Beard of ZZ Top? Sorry, you must get that all the time. I have no relations. On the tactical side of things, and sort of like does the skill exist or not, or did Jackson have a gift for it? Because he was a military instructor at Virginia Military Institute for a while, and his students did not like him at all. And the reason they didn't like him was that he was an unbelievably dull lecturer. So he would compose a lecture, he would recite it from memory, he wouldn't deviate at all, and if anyone asked him a question, he would simply spool back in his head to the bit of his pre-remembered lecture that he thought answered the question and just recite that again verbatim.

29:35James Harkin:While suddenly just reaching out his massive long arms and slapping him across the head. What did he do with the arm at this point? In 1856, a group of his own alumni tried to have him sacked for poor teaching. and they must have felt so stupid just five years later when he is the pride of the confederate army you know one of the greatest blah blah blah there were a lot of rumors that were about him i think this is one of the things where people would say stuff about him and then if they were if other sources were asked they would say no he never did that we never saw that one of the things was that he was constantly chewing on lemons eating lemons just absolutely love lemons and that was written in a biography and then everyone who read that went i never saw him with a lemon i have no idea where that comes from.

30:14I know where it comes from. It's based on a single account of him eating a lemon on the 27th of June, 1862. That's bad. But three separate people saw him eat it and they all wrote it up in their memoirs. And so you've now got three sources saying, oh, he loved a lemon, did old Stonewall. That's like when I went to my ex's family for the first time and they offered me dessert and I didn't really want any and they had some strawberries. I'm like, oh, I love strawberries. So I had a couple of strawberries in every dessert. The strawberries came out.

30:41James Harkin:Like a t-shirt with strawberries on it. Yeah. Trips to strawberry fields. Is it true that he didn't eat pepper because he thought it weakened his legs? Well, that was another thing that was said about him. Andy, pass. Don't know. I mean. Is it true that he wouldn't let his back touch the back of a chair because it jumbled his organs up? This man is sounding more and more completely barking. The more you talk about him. I have not done. I have not done my research. like you clearly am on the Stonewall Jackson. But frankly, I'm quite glad I haven't. But he believed a lot of stuff. And he has become...

31:16He was a definite hypochondriac. Definitely. And he's become, because he was tactically skilled, he's become an emblem of the kind of lost cause of the Civil War and people saying, you know, we could have won it and we were in the right actually and all this.

31:28James Harkin:They said he was a champion sleeper as well. He could sleep so brilliantly that he could even, as he was eating a meal, fall asleep with the food in his mouth just straight away because he could just get into it that easy. And that's tough with a lemon because they're quite tarts as well, aren't they? I read about a hypochondriac with, I don't know if you know about this person, Mary, called Aristides. Helios Aristides. Sorry, I'm not as learned as David. Can't all be. A great friend of mine. And he writes book after book after book on his hypochondriac symptoms. This is in the second century AD.

32:05This is an ancient hypochondriac. He's an old friend. An old friend. He just goes on and on and on. But loads of posh Romans were terribly hypochondriac. Marcus Aurelius, famous Stoic emperor. When he is a kid, a teenager, he's always writing to his tutor about his symptoms. You get letter after letter between these two guys saying, I do hope your tummy's feeling a bit better this morning because my neck, I thought it was getting better in the night but now I wake up, I appear to have a jabbing pain going through the shoulder blade. Later, Marcus Aurelius, he employs a doctor who is very keen on getting the proper sort of pessaries, anal pessaries.

33:00What are they? He particularly likes things you put up your bum. Oh, suppositories. Okay. Yeah, suppositories. Pesseries is a different... Oh, God, am I giving it a different hot one? I am learning in some ways, Mary. Suppositories. I want to see you in boots, Mary. Oh, shit. Where are the anal... I think they'd know what I meant. Yes, I think so. I don't think I'd have any trouble getting... Anyway, there's old Marcus Aurelius. I thought Marcus Aurelius is all about... Oh, I want a suppository. I thought he was all about disregarding the pain and discomfort of the world. I mean, I've read the, what is it, the meditations?

33:36Yeah, well, don't believe all you read in the meditation. It gives you only one side of how he might like to be seen. Because I have quite a bad shoulder and I put it down to like looking at my phone on my screen all the time. But that can't be true for him. He'd have had a tablet. Very good. Thank you. Can I just talk about Aristides? Elias Aristides. Aristides again. So he was basically an orator And he got nasal congestion A sore throat And then couldn't really do his oratory anymore And so he went to see the priests And they told him to lie down And allow Asclepius, the god of medicine To appear in his dreams And then whatever happened in his dreams He had to do them to make him feel better So one of them was like Smear mud on his body And run around the temple three times The suppository trick as well The suppository trick I'm sure Yeah, an enema of honey and to swallow a goose liver sausage.

34:32Oh. That's a bad dream, isn't it? That's interesting. And there are books and books and books of this rubbish. Right. Let's go.

34:46James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is, in 1845, there was an exhibition in London where for a shilling, you could pull a lever on a giant machine which would produce a brand new line of poetry for you. in Latin. Wow. Yeah. Popular? So popular. I think it was popular, actually. I think the inventor supposedly retired on the proceeds of this amazing machine. And it is, I have to add, making a line of Latin poetry is really complicated. Oh, right. Because it's not just like, you know, what you can get out of ChatGPT if you say, write me a poem on the spring, you know and it comes out um because latin poetry is done to a very very fixed format of meter so you have to have the right stress and rhythm through the line so it's damn difficult i mean i've enough i can't write a word of latin verse so this machine it's did better than i can i can sort of see how it's done but i can't write a word that's stunning that makes it all the more impressive because apparently there were 26 million permutations of line that you could get so it's six it's six feet latin hexameter so six different feet in the line what's a feet a foot is like it's an individual unit so uh pentameter is a is iambic pentameter is the sort of famous shakespearean meter which is so it's like a beat is it yeah but a foot will have different numbers of syllables.

36:22It's got different numbers of syllables and it's not actually by stress like others is. It's by the length of the syllable. So it's long, short, short, kind of, ah, ah, ah. Got it. So it's really difficult. I mean, it's what, in the 19th century, they kind of crucify little boys on doing, you know, to write Latin hexameters with the absolute echelons of of posh education, but also a complete nightmare.

36:51James Harkin:Right. Interesting. So this machine, bloody amazing. It's stunning. It was created by a print shop worker called John Clark, and he was an inventor, obviously, and I think this took him about 13 years. Sources vary, but it took a long, obviously, And do you know how it worked? It had six cylinders, and when you pull the lever... Wow, like a fruit machine. It was exactly like a fruit machine, except instead of some boring old cherries, you got a beautiful line of Latin verse, and he had arranged it so that it was adjective, noun, adverb. So it would make sense. So it actually meant something. It actually meant something.

37:23Actually, each line is not word salad. It might be an eccentric meaning. You might not be able to get a huge amount of sense. It's not profound. Like a lot of Latin poetry. And he was just a really interesting guy. So he was born in 1785, died in 1853. The machine still exists today, which is very exciting. I thought you might have been to see it. I've never been to see it, but I've read about it even before I saw that you were going to talk about it. Oh, great. It's down in Somerset now And it's in a collection of items That used to be the Clark's Shoe Museum Because John Clark Of Clark's His relatives were the shoe empire people

38:00James Harkin:While he was working in feet In poetry They were working to put feet in shoes That's amazing And yeah they held it for a while And it still exists I think it was going to be zhuzhed up and renovated a bit recently But it apparently played God Save the Queen while it was working this collection who own it the alfred uh gillette trust they own in their collection this machine 25 000 shoes and a significant collection of somerset ichthyosaur fossils wow i mean what a collection whereabouts is it in somerset do you know it's i think it's literally there yesterday it's a village called street i think oh i know that yeah right it's not far from glastonbury that's right that's where it is yeah yeah can i ask about the machine just jumping back to the Latin machine.

38:44James Harkin:So it would give you this line of poetry, but it wouldn't print it on, say, a little ticket, right? So you would just see it on the screen, as it were. I don't know. You could take a photo of it with your phone. You could take a photo of it. So my question is, is how good was everyone's Latin back then? And did someone permanently stand translating your line of poetry for you? I think we imagine that they were all terribly Latinate back then. Okay. But actually, there have been no period of British history after the Romans left when more than a relatively small section of the elite had known Latin.

39:19They've known a lot about classical culture, but a Latin, and more particularly Greek, but even a Latin education was still largely for boys and largely for the rich ones. So, I mean, there were some clever autodidacts who taught themselves Latin. but who this machine was for, why would anybody who didn't know how difficult it was to compose Latin poetry be remotely impressed? Some people have thought that it was actually a kind of piss take, a rather expensive, very long-term piss take. 13 years of my life. 13 years of my life on a joke, right? This is going to be great. I don't think this is correct but some people have argued that in the 1840s, this is when these little boys, private schools, were spending hour after hour after hour learning how to compose this Latin poetry.

40:18And what this bloke is saying, what Mr. Clarke is saying, is look, aren't you a machine to do it? Yeah, I see. It's actually undercutting some of that. But then that's still true. Like now, like my school, we had one Latin teacher for the entire school of 1 ,000 kids, right? Well, that's a lot more than many have. Yeah, exactly. And it's like there was a report in 2021 that said that staff in the British Civil Service are routinely telling jokes in Latin to exclude lower class colleagues. So it is quite an elitist thing still, isn't it? Learning Latin or Greek. And is that a problem? And should we be teaching everyone it or shouldn't we be teaching anyone it?

40:56I think that you should be giving everyone the opportunity to learn it. And Latin's always in crisis. I mean, in the early 20th century, they were saying Latin was about to die. Well, you know, it's taken a very long time to do so, if that was the case. But I was talking quite recently to a teacher at an ordinary state comprehensive school where she had reintroduced some Latin for the kids. And she said, well, it was great about it. It was two things. First of all, you didn't have to speak it. right so you could it wasn't that it it was it helped you with necessarily with other languages or whatever that it might it was that you didn't have to spend all your time learning you know how to ask for a pizza in it or whatever so you were just looking at the language you also said it's not like when you start introducing french or german whatever you suddenly discover that you misprivileged year is going off for a week weekend at half term to get her french better at mum and dad's french chateau no one's going off to the vatican no one is going off to the vatican for the week and she said it was really leveling that's a really good point because anybody could be good at it and nobody had that kind of built-in advantage you know what everyone in my school was equally good at it because there would be like a quiz at the end of each lesson and there'd be 10 questions and then you'd have to shout out your score and everyone got six out of 10 because the latin word for six is sex and so literally we all deliberately got six out of 10 so he just went around the class never went sex sex sex wow you know what's great about latin though is everybody remembers their latin lessons and their latin teacher and people tend not to remember their geography teacher you know but latin it has you know it really really kind of gets to you and you remember how you took the piss out of the teacher or whatever but you'd never forget it i learned it until i was 18 did you yeah and so how is it my latin you're still doing it on tuolingo aren't you that's right yeah that's only because so i can tease my civil service colleagues it was yeah we had to go to lunch times like instead of playing you can either play football or do latin and you chose did you choose latin i was it was chosen for me i see i see and do

43:19James Harkin:regret it no i loved it i really loved it it was mega fun we never did it but i was in hong kong so i don't think it was an option um it's useful in weird ways i do think it's useful for other languages as in it's genuinely you sort of see how things fit together but the thing i can't get is this time where it was so common like law was all in latin so people in ordinary ordinary people in courtrooms couldn't really understand what was going on because courtroom business was all conducted in latin until 1362 lots of church services were in lots of church look at the whole catholic church existed on latin until relatively recently yeah grammar schools were founded to teach latin to members of the clergy because it was important to have good latin in In Grammy school, we would have to sing Latin hymns.

44:01Would you? Yeah, yeah.

44:02James Harkin:Wow. I remember the journalist who got the scoop that the Pope was stepping down because he delivered it in Latin and she was the only one there. Who could understand it? Who could understand it? Yes, yes, yes. There's also such good stuff written in it. You're actually there with what someone wrote 2 ,000 years ago and it's still bloody amazing. It transports you, I guess, right? It is. It's about time travel. I mean, something like Virgil's Aeneid, his first century BC poem on the foundation of Rome. What I'm going to say is it's a bit of an exaggeration, or at least I couldn't prove it, but I'm pretty certain it's true that there hasn't been a day since 19 BC when Virgil popped his clogs when someone in the world hasn't been reading the Aeneid.

44:48It's been read and recited and studied without a gap for 2 ,000 years. So I think it's just great Okay, sold As long as you don't make it Just posh boys only You mean you never did Latin? One person who didn't agree with you Was a guy called William Barnes Who was a linguist Who taught himself Greek and Latin Because he didn't want any Greek or Latin words In the English language And so he started coining new words To do away with the Latin So like for instance Instead of the word grammar, he called it speech craft. Instead of ornithology, he called it bird law. I quite like bird law. Bird law's quite like that.

45:33These are all quite good. Instead of flexible, he wanted people to say Benson. And he was basically saying that people should speak English as an Anglo-Saxon language, not as a Greek slash. Right. Which I think even he thought it was just a bit of fun, to be honest. When was he around? He was around in the 19th century. But at the same time as your Latin machine. Oh, yeah. But there's only one thing that's still in the OED, which the definition says W-B-A-M's term for. And that word is push-wailing. So W-A-I-L-I-N-G, push-wailing. Do you know what that is? Push-wailing. Force crying. So faking emotion.

46:14Faking emotion, no. That sounds like labour, giving birth. Good guess. You're pushing and you're wailing? No. So you're pretty much close, but it was the definition in the OED is W. Barnes term for a pram.

46:29Oh, and that's still in the OED today. That's amazing. As preparation for today, I'd listened to a bit of Cuomo D 'Odicata, which is the Latin podcast. And it's a few, it's really fun. Like it's a few very nerdy people who've well versed in it and made a study of it. And they do it at a kind of slow enough speed that you can just about sort of cling on to it. And it's fun. It's really interesting because you never hear it spoken normally. Well, thank God. I mean, I think there used to be a set of, you know, slightly eccentric people in Finland who did the news in Latin. You know, each week, I think it was.

47:06And you think, what's the point? You know, what is the point? Oh, it was fun. Quoimodo Dicator is fun. It's good. But I want to read things that the Romans wrote. but I don't want to see it listening to the news read by some batty fins in Latin. Is your podcast about the modern day but in Latin, Andy, the one you're talking about? Yeah, they start with what have you been up to. This is not difficult because there isn't a Latin word for telephone, for instance. Yes, I think they have had to find a lot of work around here. They haven't started living like Romans to make it more effective. The effort-reward ratio does not seem to me.

47:41James Harkin:Is your Latin good enough that if you went to Vatican City, you could use their ATM machines. Oh! They give you a Latin option. You can use ATM machines in most languages. You don't need to be able to speak a language. Yeah, I'll jab until numbers come up and then I'll select a media. And then what you do is you look at all the numbers and you don't understand the currency and you choose the second smallest number and you go for that because that's probably about 10 quid. Because that's probably doable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you pull the big handle and then a line of poetry comes out. That's great.

48:14Hear that? That's now Crispy and McCrispy Strips meeting creamy Caesar sauce. Sounds extra crispy. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time.

48:31James Harkin:Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the biographer of 7th century French king Dagobert I didn't include a list of his lovers because, they said, it would make the book too long to read. Same. Same. I was waiting. I was staring at Andy. Waiting. There's not a gravestone big enough. Oh, dear. Just a bedpost, your tombstone, full of notches. Oh, my God. Sorry. No. It's very funny. Is that the biographer trying to praise Dagger Bear by saying how marvellous he was? No, not really. I don't think so. I don't think it was a very positive thing.

49:16So I read this in BBC History magazine. Well, it must be true then. And I have subsequently checked it. I love you, Mary. We're going to get letters from geography teachers. BBC History. If you are going to send a letter in about this episode, if it's not in Latin, we're not going to read it. That's right. And so it's part of their Q &A section where they answer questions that someone might ask about history. And the question was, how responsible was King Dagobert I for the decline of the Merovingians? Which I think is a question we're always asking ourselves, aren't we? And it turns out these Merovingians, they were a group that came after the Romans.

49:55Right, Mary? So maybe you don't like them so much. I know nothing about them. I was delighted that you were going to take us into the Merovingians. because, you know, I've always been busting to know a bit more about them. Well, they were very big around the 5th century AD. They ruled in what's now France, Germany, Belgium. And Dagobert came along and he was a bit of a black sheep and he was dogged by scandal. He moved the court to Paris because he was a bit of a playboy and there was lots of fun happening in Paris. He lived in loads of luxury, tried to get as much gold as possible. And he'd previously married his stepsister to cement the monarchy, as was quite common in those days.

50:34But he divorced her as soon as his father died because his father was the one who was kind of organising it all. He got in charge, divorced his wife, and then just went through loads and loads of affairs. And basically all this debauchery was the beginning of the end for the Merovingians. So it's a moral tale, really. It really is. Yeah, it seems like that, doesn't it? And it's the biographer links his sort of personal lust with his lust for ecclesiastical lands. You know, it always starts and eventually you're on the ecclesiastical lands. That's what you lust after eventually. And this all comes, I should say, from the Chronicle of Fredegar, which was the 7th century Frankish chronicle written about the Merovingian kings.

51:20As we all know that anyway. I have never come across the Merovingians before. It's kind of a word you hear, like the guy in the Matrix. Yeah, but they were the ruling family, weren't they, of the Frankish kingdom. And they were the ones who came before like Charlemagne. Yeah, we've heard of them. The Romans are fine, the Carolingians are fine, but it's the Merovingians.

51:42James Harkin:The Merovingians, when you look them up, there's one thing that comes up on a lot of pages and it separates them from the Romans and the Carolingians, which is long hair was seen as power in their society. rulers had long hair and there's a um i'd be all right then yeah there's a professor called james palmer who said that basically if there was someone who was an heir to the throne that they thought it's not gonna be quite good enough they would shave their head pop them into a monastery like a monk yeah but have them on standby because they haven't gone bold they can grow back right and if the person then who's been put in power was seen as bad they can knock that person out and bring back the monk.

52:20Can I say, if you're like the next in line for the Merovingians and you start going bald, is that you done? Well, yeah. There was no hair transplants in those days. No, exactly.

52:29James Harkin:It's wigs though. Ah, okay. There we go. But it was a tool of state power. One of the queens was called Clotilde and she was a 6th century queen, widow of King Clovis. And Clovis, by the way, is where we get Louis from. Clovis, knock off the sea, you got Lovis. That's why so many French kings are called Louis. it was all from Clovis anyway her grandsons were meant to be crowned they were slated, next up all of this and then some plotters in the family abducted them and dispatched a henchman to Queen Clotilde saying we've got a pair of scissors here and a sword here, which do you want for your grandsons and the idea was either we can execute them as royals or we can cut their hair which means their life won't be worth living they'll be living as non-royals and she said sword please, sword please for my grandsons I'd rather that than a haircut which means a non-royal life big decision big decision that's hard and the Carolingians when they came in had to separate themselves from the whole long hair thing so they went for the mustache yeah that was their big thing yeah Charlemagne picture his long mustache lovely yeah I couldn't tell you what Charlemagne looked like I must say what's weird is I'm not actually sure I've seen a picture of him I just conjured that in my head very evocative here's one thing I found about Dagobert which I'd never heard before he was the first French king to be crowned on a folding chair, like a fishing chair.

53:52And I was reading about these folding chairs, and apparently it was one of the best things you could have for quite a lot, like in ancient Rome. What I mean, it's like an X-shape legs, and then almost like a cloth belt, but it was actually made of... Sort of like a director's chair. Yeah, but without a back. But without a back, yeah. And they were made of one, and they were huge in ancient Egypt. There was one in the British Museum. Tutankhamun was buried with two of them. And now it's mostly people watching golf. The kings of our age. The Emperor Augustus took one to the opening of a rather posh theatre and he fell off his very bad, bad sign.

54:30He fell off his full teacher. I bet no one laughed at that. Well, only it was a bit of a risk. Wow.

54:36James Harkin:There is a quite famous ruler of this period, Dagobart II. Oh, yeah. Don't get me started on him. Oh boy. Here we go again. Dan's on his hobby horse. Well, you never know how history is going to replace you and your story into new light. And that's what happened with Dagobah II because he disappeared and no one quite knows, was he murdered? What was the end of his story? Cut to many, many years later, this hoax is set up, this thing called the Priory of Sion, where the idea is that they are looking after the bloodline of the Merovingians. and then that gets picked up by the writers of a book which is all about the bloodline of christ and bought into that so the merovingians are the descendants of christ exactly the da vinci code is largely you want to retract your very learned comment from earlier it's not my theory and i made sure this fact was last at the show so if mary walked out we'd have enough in the tank do you want to know the truth about the merovingians dan this is the truth this was a claim made at the time, not by the kings themselves but I think by people around them, that they were descended from a sea monster.

55:46Not from a god, but a specific... Have you heard of a... I think you're cabs here, Mary. Have you heard of a quinator? Like a minotaur, but not. Exactly. But with quince, so with five horns. Horns. The quinator is the most ridiculous looking animal you'll ever see. It's a half bull, half fish, but it's got five horns up front. It's because the word merovech, where we get mervingian it means sea bull. Oh, of course. I forgot. So the Kwaimator supposedly is the ancestor of the tree. Is his head like one of those, you know, those ring toss things that kids have? It's exactly like that. It's exactly like that.

56:21Yeah, and they're different colours for different prizes. Oh, wow.

56:23James Harkin:Must have been so embarrassing when he was trying to give a good talk and just a hoop would land on his... Guys, come on. Five minutes. Got a big speech. So this fact was about biographers and stuff. And I want to know, what I read is that it was quite dangerous to be a biographer in ancient times because you basically had to say really nice things about the person you're biographising, but you couldn't go over the top because it would seem like you were being too obsequious. But then on the other hand, if you said anything bad, you could basically be put to death. There was an obvious answer to this.

56:57You wait till they're dead before you write the biography. Okay. That's good. Your publishers are going to be on you. Nero's really looking forward to seeing a proof. Yeah, me. And you're half the advance. Yeah, it's not. I'm sorry, the last chapter's taken me a bit longer than I thought he was going to. I'm working on it. Interesting. You just, you know, one thing you never want to do is to talk about the emperor while he's alive. Yeah. The other thing about the biographers is how much of it was true, right? You see, probably very little. Yeah. Particularly if you're dealing with the concubines of Dacobar, I suspect.

57:37But when I was a student a long time ago, we were always taught, now you've got to go through all these biographies and you've got to get your blue pencil out and you've got to put a line through all the bits that can't possibly be true. So you do that and then you come to some bits and you think, could it be true? Well, maybe it could be put a question mark. And I spent years of my life doing that, really. It's only in the last few years I've realised it's not the point. The point is that people believe this stuff, you know. It's taking you a bit into the kind of way we think about monarchs and celebs, etc.

58:13We tell these stories about their excesses, which are not true, but they certainly tell us about how we envisage. You know, it goes right down to the kind of innocent King Charles, doesn't it? Do you know he has someone who puts toothpaste on his toothbrush for him? The story about King Charles is that he had like 12 different eggs made every morning of different hardness and he would choose which one to eat. And do you know that goes right back to the ancient world? No. Because there's a story about the kitchens of Antony and Cleopatra and a kind of next to eyewitness visits the kitchens and there's eight boars roasting.

58:55Right. and the guy says to the cook, God, you must be expecting a large party to dinner tonight. And the cook says, no, it's just we don't quite know when they're going to sit down to eat. So we put them all on at different times so that one will be ready when they want it. And that's just like the boiled egg store. It's so funny. I have 12 microwaves in my house and I've got one frozen lasagna in each one. But I was brought up with the idea that the Queen's Corgis, the late Queen's Corgis, ate out of silver dishes. And I once went to do some filming in Windsor Castle with a film crew and we had to go quite near the sort of more domestic apartments.

59:41And as we passed the door to the pets area, we all looked at each other because lined up by the door were a load of very nasty plastic bowls. Wow. They were for the staff. Everybody said, so it's not true then. But the point where you're saying is the fact that we think that about the royal family tells us a lot more about life today than whether it's true or not. And sort of what we want to believe as well. About how we imagine power, how we imagine wealth. What would we do if we had unlimited wealth? Well, my dog would eat out of silver bowls. I feel a bit sorry for Dagobert I, though.

1:00:25James Harkin:Oh, yeah? Because if you're a monarch, one thing they always get you for is too much sex, isn't it? It's always, we couldn't possibly fit the names of all the concubines in. One of the definitions of a monarch is that they have more sex than everybody else. And that's partly about power, but then it gets used against them as they're absolutely lurid bastards who you can't trust. And in Rome, of course, the wives are having too much sex as well. Is that the slander or the reputation? That is always a reputation, that the Emperor Claudius' wife, Messalina, one story about her cannot possibly be true but it's a real revelation, is that she's supposed to have challenged the prostitutes of Rome to a competition of who could sleep with most men in one night.

1:01:18Okay. And she won, of course. She fell off halfway through, but the judges... But the judges decided that she had won. And you think, you can't win with your sex life if you're a ruler. When the truth is they were all having it once a year like the rest of us. That's right. In a very boring way.

1:01:40Dagobert's reputation has recovered because now in France, there's a phrase, Le Bon Roi d 'Agobert, the good King D 'Agobert. And it's basically the ultra-basic nursery rhyme that French children learn and are sung by their parents. Like old King Cole is a merry old song. It's exactly like that. And it's all, there's a French revolutionary song, Le Bon Roi d 'Agobert, because that was a way of making fun of kings and monarchy without actually making fun of King Louis XVI. It was two years before the revolution this song was written as a way of satirizing the monarchy. but now that's survived and it's one of the absolute root one lullabies they don't tell them about his sex life though that's a later verse that's when he calls for his fiddlers three that's what that's all about

1:02:33James Harkin:okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast We can all be found on social media accounts. So I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram. James. I'm on TikTok. No such thing as James Harkin. Andy. I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter-Ebb. Mary, are you online? Look up Instant Classics Podcast. Yes. And you'll find me. Yeah, nice. Yeah, they can't speak back to you, but they can listen to you. There's some socials all listed there so they can speak back to you. Great.

1:03:06James Harkin:Awesome. Okay. And if you want to write into us, go to podcasts at qi.com. That's an email address where you can send all your stuff and Andy will read it. Send in your facts, send in anything that you want to say to us. And we might use some of those as part of our bonus episode, which is called Drop Us a Line. But that's in a very special place called Club Fish, which is our secret members club. If you want to get access to that, just go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. You'll also see links to live tickets, bits of merch, all that stuff. Otherwise, just come back here next week after you've listened to Mary's new podcast.

1:03:38James Harkin:and then check out our next episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.