Records old and new

From time to time I notice my record keeping past, for example at reference 1. I also remember hearing a short speech in Catalan from the mayor of Barcelona, in the ancient covered dock there, about how the spirit of one's country is kept alive by the keeping of records, in that case in Catalan.

Last night, tiring for once of Simeon, having just finished my first pass of the cochons noticed at reference 3, my hand lighted upon a book about Roman emperors (reference 3). And immediately got sucked into the shadowy world of emperors and the way in which they conducted business, governed their empires. And from there into the various ways in which they expressed their will and in which those expressions were recorded.

As far as the first was concerned, certainly up to the time of Constantine, it was important that an emperor could speak well and write well. The upper classes were not impressed by emperors who had their speeches written for them, although it was OK to write them in Latin and have someone translate them into Greek for delivery. Nor were they impressed by emperors who resorted to fancy or foreign words; emperors were expected to keep things manly and straightforward, like a trumpet rather than like a flute. And as far as the second was concerned, when the emperor sent a letter to a city, passing judgement on some important matter or other, the city fathers often arranged to have the letter copied - or rather cut - onto a block of marble for erection in some suitable public place, perhaps in the main square or in the principal temple.

And rather like Ministers of my day scribbling their thoughts in the margins of memoranda in green ink (today, I dare say, green felt tip rather than special green ink in the special Ministerial fountain pen), emperors spent a lot of their time writing their answers to petitions (a libellus) at the bottom (a subscriptio). I have yet to find out how the answer was transmitted to the petitioner and whether some record was kept in a central archive. Or, indeed, how the emperors actually did their writing.

As a former civil servant, I find the whole business of the transmission of power up and down the lines of command, through the relatively simple structures then available, fascinating. Not for the first time it strikes me that studying the classics - or at least classical history - still has something to teach us near two thousand years later. But then, how much do those chaps from Eton, which one might presume to be strong in such matters, Messrs Johnson and Rees-Mogg, know about it? What good did it do them - or us?

Hopefully I will be able to report in more detail in due course.

PS: I have also been reminded that our word 'palace' comes the Palatine Hill in Rome, where the great and the good of the Republic, and after them the Emperors, had their houses. A fact which I am pleased to be able to report is corroborated by OED. Of less immediate import, I have also learned that these palaces sometimes contained the-not-before-heard-of nettle trees (celtis australis). Trees which, in the warm Italian climate, might grow to more than 20m high.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/bug-report.html.

Reference 3: The Emperor in the Roman World - Fergus Millar - 1977. A book which once belonged to the Bolland Library of the University of the West of England, which I now know is proud to be a member of something called the University Alliance. No idea how it came to be in my possession, but possibly via the large Oxfam bookshop in South Street, Exeter.