I’ve spent much of the past month hiding down a rabbit hole, learning about the Roman Empire and Ancient Rome. And of course I took notes when beer and pubs were mentioned.
I’m not a historian and, unlike Jess, didn’t even study history at university. So, I find I quite easily get lost when trying to understand ancient history.
After visiting Roman ruins in Colchester and the City of London in early August I found myself frustrated at my lack of solid knowledge about Rome. So, I decided to do my homework.
Fortunately, Mary Beard’s 2015 book SPQR offers a relatively concise, extremely clearly-expressed history of Ancient Rome that even I could follow. The Kingdom, the Republic and the Empire made sense, and I understood for the first time which emperor followed which.
With my beer blogging hat on, though, the section that really grabbed me was about the decor of a bar in the port of Ostia in the 2nd century CE (formerly AD):
The main theme of the painting is the standard ancient line-up of Greek philosophers and gurus traditionally grouped under the title of ‘The Seven Sages’: they include Thales of Miletus, the sixth-century BCE thinker famous for claiming that water was the origin of the universe, and his rough contemporaries Solon of Athens, an almost legendary lawgiver, and Chilon of Sparta… But there was a surprise. For each of them was accompanied by a slogan not on their specialist subjects of politics, science, law or ethics – but on defecation… There are many ways to imagine the life in this bar: the rowdy guffawing at the lavatorial humour, the occasional discussion about what exactly Chilon’s claim to fame was, the bantering with the landlord, the flirtation with the waiting staff. The customers would have come for all kinds of reasons: to get a good, hot meal, to enjoy an evening in jollier and warmer surroundings than they had at home or simply to get drunk.
This made me think of those modern pubs where the publican’s personal taste and sense of humour manifests in the pictures on the walls, silly brass signs, and joke books on the shelves.
She also describes the many bars of Pompeii which, at her conservative estimate, numbered at least a hundred:
They were built to a fairly standard plan: a counter facing the pavement, for the ‘takeaway’ service; an inner room with tables and chairs for the eat-in, waiter service; and usually a display stand for food and drink, as well as a brazier or oven for preparing hot dishes and drinks. In a couple of cases at Pompeii… their decoration includes a series of paintings depicting scenes – part fantasy, part real – of life in the bar itself… One image shows the wine supplies being delivered in a large vat, another some snacks being consumed underneath sausages and other delicacies strung from the ceiling. The ‘worst’ signs are one full-on image of sex (hard to make out now because some modern moralist has defaced it), a number of graffiti along the lines of ‘I fucked the landlady’…
Elsewhere, in a discussion of the Romanisation of northern Europe, Beard writes about changing drinking habits:
[As] early as the beginning of the first century BCE, the same Greek visitor to Gaul who had been shocked to find enemy heads pinned up outside huts also spotted that – despite what Caesar had to say about local distaste for the grape – the richer locals had started to quaff imported wine, leaving traditional Gallic beer to the less well off. By the beginning of the second century CE, there were rather fewer beer gardens and rather more wine bars in Roman Colchester; or that, at least, is what the surviving fragments of the jars used to transport the wine suggest.
Keen to learn more, I followed the thread of the Vindolanda tablets – a trove of documents written on thin sheets of wood recovered from a site near Hadrian’s Wall in 1973. That led me to this episode of a BBC radio documentary from about 20 years ago where, yes, beer was mentioned again, at 25 minutes.
If you’d rather read about it, though, an article by Patricia Gillespie on the website of the Vindolanda Charitable Trust sets out the story nicely:
Early garrisons at Vindolanda, the Tungrians and Batavians, were from the northern provinces of the Roman Empire and clearly had a taste for beer. There are several references in the writing tablets to Celtic beer and in writing tablet 628 the Decurion Masclus, from the 9th cohort of Batavians, out-stationed with a vexillation, group, of soldiers is asking for orders on what to do next and ends his letter with ‘my men have no beer – please order some to be sent’.
On two occasions shortly before the New Year and again in February, a metretes of cervesa (beer) is listed in writing tablets. This was a measure containing 100 sextarii, about 50 pints, and the cost was only eight asses. (An as is a very low value bronze coin). The Batavians and the Tungrians clearly consumed beer in large quantities and had their own regimental brewer.
Also, in August, the BBC ran a story about brewing as a “mega industry” in Roman Britain.
Archaeologist Edward Biddulph is quoted as saying that “actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses”.
So much of Roman life and history seems impossible to know. But other aspects seem to telescope history and put us on the bench, in the boozer, next to some lairy lads, wondering what to have for the next round.
Main image: wall decoration at a bar in Pompeii via Nick Fewings at Unsplash.com
