Not Alone

Without going into uncomfortable and painful details, the circumstances of my upbringing were something significantly less than rosy. Mistreatment caused me to either develop substantial mental and emotional problems or aggravated pre-existing ones—or maybe did both—so I have an awful lot of issues with which I have to deal and accommodate on a daily basis. As a result, I’ve developed a whole laundry list of coping mechanisms for my various states of mental instability, all ranging from reasonably effective to completely-fuck-all-useless. A lot of them are pretty straightforward and natural and make a lot of sense—like looking up pictures of kittens and puppies and baby bunnies to pull myself out of a state of depression, or reading or watching something funny to calm myself down when I’m angry and frustrated. Others, however, seem a little sideways.

One of my rather more unusual strategies is also ultimately one of the more effective ones. When feeling very lonely and completely isolated and cut off from the world, the most obvious solution would be to spend time with friends, but that doesn’t work for me—for one thing, I’m almost completely socially retarded, and for another I have very few friends. Instead, I do something a little weird. I look up and read the personal missives from the distant past.

By and large, the diaries and journals, essays, and letters of people living hundreds or even thousands of years ago do generally depict a world almost totally foreign from mine, even when they originate from my country or culture. Often even the very words on the page, even in a language I know, have changed so immeasurably and drastically over time so as to essentially be another language all together now.

So how does this help me?

Because even as the world has changed and language has evolved, the sentiments behind the words—whether in Latin or Old English or ancient Greek—have hardly changed at all. For all that the past is far removed from us, we are still much more like our ancestors than we realize and our minds work almost entirely the same.

And I think that’s marvelous.

I always choose personal writings over scholarly ones for one simple reason: personal writings are much more true-to-life, more candid, and ultimately offer a more accurate view of the past than do the pomp words of intellectuals in ivory towers. That’s not to say I see no value in their work—quite to the contrary—but in the end the best way to feel connected to the past is through people who lived and worked and played just like everybody else. Conventional knowledge and entertainment have changed, but our thoughts have not.

The Romans had a practice of utilizing—for lack of a better term—‘cursing wells’. It was a bit like a modern wishing well, except that the Romans would scratch a ‘curse’ onto a small lead tablet and throw them into the water. Because the words were carved into metal, a good many of them survive to this day and offer a rare and tantalizing glimpse into the daily life of average Roman citizens. In the 1980s near Bath, England, the remains of a cursing well some 1600 years old were found and the words etched into them are surprising.

One tablet says, ‘Docimedes has lost two gloves and asks that the person who has stolen them lose his mind and his eyes.’ Another similar one by a woman named Saturnia demands that, ‘…he who has stolen it [a linen cloth] not know rest until he returns the property to the temple.’ Yet another expresses the desire for, ‘…he who has taken my Beatrice from me should turn into ice and melt.’

Sound familiar? It seems that even the people in Roman Briton were just as troubled by petty thefts and personal vendettas as we are today.

Even more telling—and much more amusing—is a seldom-mentioned aspect of the famously preserved city of Pompeii at the base of Mount Vesuvius. Everybody knows that people in their homes and animals in the street and even food on tables were covered in ash and preserved, but not many people know of something a bit more interesting that was preserved. Graffiti. And lots of it. Not only have people been defacing public property with writing for millennia, but the words have not changed much in three thousand years.

‘Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera,’ and ‘Saturna was here September 3^rd’ and numerous other similar statements appear all over the city. Others are declarations of love—‘Secundus says hello to his Prima, wherever she is. I ask, my mistress, that you love me’, ‘Marcus loves Spendusa,’ and ‘I don’t want to sell my husband, not for all the gold in the world’ sound very much like the sorts of things that you might find written on the cubicle walls in the bathrooms of high schools.

More scribblings still are of a rather more raunchy subject matter and a perennial favourite: sex. ‘Phileros is a eunuch!’ appears in one doorway. ‘I screwed a lot of girls here’ and ‘I screwed the barmaid’ appear in two inns. Another states, ‘Secundus likes to screw boys’. ‘Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog.’ (One wonders what, exactly, the dogs and girls of Pompeii were getting up to.)

A good amount of Pompeii’s graffiti is just plain funny—‘Epaphra, you are bald!’, ‘The man I am having dinner with is a barbarian’ (this sounds rather like something a woman might write in the ladies room of a restaurant if she’s on a particularly apocalyptic date), ‘One who buggers a fire burns his penis,’ and ‘We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done wrong. If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot’ all induce a hearty giggle. As do the surprising number of references to poop. ‘Apollinarus, doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here’ is written against the side of a house; ‘Anyone who wishes to defecate in this place is advised to move along. If you act contrary to this warning, you must pay a fine. Children must pay silver; slaves will be beaten on their behinds’ is found in a water tower, and one man apparently had such a, ahem, ‘moving’ experience that he wrote ‘Secundus defecated here’ three times in a public latrine. (But in favour of Secundus, at least he wasn’t doing it outside a stranger’s house.)

There is even a bar tab preserved for posterity, showing that someone owes money for, ‘Some nuts, 13 coins; drinks, 14 coins; lard, 2 coins; bread, 3 coins; three meat cutlets, 12 coins; four sausages, 8 coins; total, 51 coins.’ (Does being roasted in volcanic ash excuse him from paying his tab?)

It’s all good fun to have a laugh over, but except that the names are all quite obviously Latin and Greek in origin and occasionally make reference to gods no longer worshiped, without exception they sound very much like the kind of graffiti found today. Perhaps in the restrooms at a truck stop, or in alleys between buildings, or on desks in schools. It hasn’t changed.

We haven’t changed.

Some people might be rather offended by the insinuation that they think very much like people who lived long ago thought. But I don’t see it that way. Knowing that, for all the drastic changes in the last few hundred years, for the rise and fall of empires, for the evolution of language and government and technology and science… we are still fundamentally the same people. More than that, we have more in common with everyone else in the world—whether separated by a thousand miles or a thousand years—than we might ever have known.

And I find that a comforting thought.

The world becomes smaller—and a little less lonely.