What's a vomitorium for?
Its Londons least successful tourist destination, its right next to the Planetarium...... Just kidding
Vomitorium, despite being derived from the Latin vomere, meaning ‘to spew forth’ isn’t the place where the Romans threw up after their meals. It was the name for the entrance or exit from an amphitheatre and is still used in that sense today in some sports stadiums.
The vomitoria of the Colosseum in Rome were so well designed that it’s said the venue, which seated at least 50,000, could fill in fifteen minutes. (There were eighty entrances at ground level, seventy-six for ordinary spectators and four for the imperial family.)
The confusion of the exit with a specialised vomit chamber appears to be a recent error. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary finds Aldous Huxley using the term in his 1923 comic novel, Antic Hay, but notes that the usage is ‘erron[eous]’. Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) compounded the confusion by saying the exits were named after the chambers where gluttons threw up ‘in order to return to their couches empty enough to enjoy the pleasures of still more food’.
The problem with this theory is that no Roman writer ever refers to them, nor have any purpose-built rooms that fit the bill been found. Romans certainly threw up on purpose. Indeed, in ancient times vomiting seems to have been a standard part of the fine-dining experience. The orator Cicero says in Pro Rege Deiotaro (45 BC) that Julius Caesar ‘expressed a desire to vomit after dinner’ and elsewhere suggests that the dictator took emetics for this purpose.
But where did they do it, if there was no special room? Some sources suggest the street or garden; others are adamant it was at the table. In his Moral Epistles the Roman philosopher Seneca writes: ‘When we recline at a banquet, one slave wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath the table, collects the leavings of the drunks.’
In another passage, in a letter to his mother Helvia he links this to the decadent pursuit of the new and the exotic: ‘They vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit, and they do not deign even to digest the feasts for which they ransack the whole world.’
How did Roman Emperors order the death of a gladiator?
Thumbs up.
Neither Roman spectators calling for the death of a gladiator, nor Roman Emperors authorising one, ever gave a thumbs down. In fact, the Romans didn’t use a ‘thumbs down’ sign at all.
If death was desired, the thumb was stuck up – like a drawn sword. For a loser’s life to be spared, the thumb was tucked away inside the closed fist – as with a sheathed weapon. This is expressed in Latin as pollice compresso favor iudicabatur, ‘goodwill is decided by the thumb being kept in’.
What was interesting about the birth of Julius Cesar?
Almost nothing is known about the birth of Julius Caesar, except that, contrary to the assertion in countless reference books, it did not take place by Caesarean section.
Such operations did occur at the time, but they always involved the death of the mother, and Caesar’s mother Aurelia is known to have survived into his adulthood. The suggestion that he was born by C-section does not appear in any of the contemporary sources, and is first mentioned in medieval times. It was not used in a medical context in English before 1615.
