The Pipers' Strike of 311

Lately I've been reading a lot of Livy. I'm enjoying his level-headedness: for instance, his scepticism that Romulus and Remus were looked after by a she-wolf, preferring the version in which they were brought up by a prostitute, who was known locally as "The She-Wolf". The early history of Rome is not so different from modern history: a running theme is of people complaining that politicians exaggerate threats of war in order to keep themselves looking good, and the people distracted from sorting out their own rights.

As the Republic matures (I'm talking c300 BC here) I get the sense that Livy doesn't know what to make of the continued superstition, having few comments to add to his narratives of Valerius Corvus (who fought a duel against a Gaul while a raven sat on his head); or the importance accorded to the Keepers of the Sacred Chickens; or the Romans' willingness, in time of plage, to suspend their sophisticated democratic system so that they can appoint a dictator to bang a nail into a temple wall.

Mainly, it's one battle after another, but there is sometimes light relief. Here's Livy's account of the pipe-player's strike of 311 BC:

I should have passed over a little thing that happened in the same year, except that it appeared to be a religious matter. The last Censors had banned the pipers from dining in the Temple of Jupiter. Taking it badly, they went out en masse to Tibur, so there was nobody left in town who could pipe in the sacrifices. The Senate took the matter reverently, and sent envoys to Tibur to make sure they would be restored to Rome.

The people of Tibur dutufilly gave their word, and first gathered the pipers into their assembly, and urged them to go back to Rome; but then, when they couldn't make them, they approached them with a strategy that would not offend their inclination. Some of them invited the pipers to a festival, apparently to celebrate their feasts with music, and got them heavily drunk with wine: on which their sort is very keen.

In this state, helpless in their sleep, they were tossed into wagons and taken them off to Rome, and they didn't notice until the wagons had been left in the marketplace and the sun beat down on them and their hangovers. Then the people gathered round, and prevailed upon them to remain, granting them three days a year on which to dress up and sing, and roam the city with the license that is now a firm custom, and the temple dining rights of those who piped in the sacrifices were restored. This happened while two very large wars were in progress.


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Cobras Fumantes

Lots of languages have briliant ways of saying "never". We have "when pigs fly". Other European languages, stretching a point, are more likely to have "when a cow flies". Latvian has "when the owl's tail blossoms", Turkish has "when fish climb poplar trees", and  Portuguese, charmingly, has "on the afternoon of St Never's Day".
    In Brazil, they used to say "when snakes smoke". "When will Brazil join the war?", President Getúlio Vargas was often asked during World War II. "When snakes smoke!" he would reply. But eventually, Brazil did send a contingent to assist in the Allied invasion of Italy, and it adopted the nickname Cobras Fumantes.
And so, it is for this succession of entirely unremarkable reasons that the emblem of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force is a snake enjoying a puff on a pipe.

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Daniel Farson and James Wentworth Day

I spent the Easter weekend in a holiday cottage, in whose library, next to the memoirs of Lord Hailsham, was The Dog In Sport. This blue-blooded compendium of the country canine included how to rate a terrier (25 points for colour), an anecdote about an aristocrat whose carriage was pulled by stags instead of horses, and a new use for a Dachshund.
When I got back to town, and the Internet I looked up its author, James Wentworth day. Amongst his writings, there's an interesting account of an awful-sounding ratting cellar in Cambridge Circus. His Wikipedia article includes in his main accomplishments "unrelenting racist".
An example of his unrelenting racism is in this episode of People in Trouble on mixed marriages. He does not come out of it looking very good at all, and I do wonder, when people do go on television and express their views in the role of token oddball, how earnestly they can really have held them.

Although finding out that its author was rude and unpleasant has tempered my enjoyment of The Dog In Sport, I am glad that it has introduced me to Daniel Farson, presenter of People in Trouble, Out of Step and other social documentaries. There's a tiny exhibition of his photographs in the National Portrait Gallery until September this year, and if you have a spare 20 minutes near Trafalgar Square it's worth popping in to see (ask for room 31).

Farson began his career with Picture Post, as did Ken Tynan. If Farson and Wentworth Day had one thing in common, it's the ease with which they produced books: in Farson's case, a two-week trip to Russia with Gilbert and George turns into a moderately sized volume. So I don't think I'll be reading their complete works, but both men have been interesting discoveries.

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