My son was a bit obsessed with the Colosseum for a long time before we went to Italy. Last Christmas my sister bought him this book with its huge pop-up of the Colosseum and a pack of trading cards that depict the various kinds of gladiators who fought there. He really loved it, and would sit in his bed thumbing through the pictures and cards before falling asleep. He really focused on the gladiator and Colosseum stuff in the books I picked up to get the kids excited about Italy (particularly the heavily-illustrated Eyewitness book). In Rome we spent a Sunday morning in the Capitoline museums and then headed down to the Via dei Fori Imperiali to find it closed to traffic. We walked down the middle of the usually-chaotic road right past all the statues of the various Caesars and I was behind him when he first looked to the end of the road and saw the actual Colosseum. He started jumping up and down with excitement and I was ready to retire from parenthood because I didn't think I could get any prouder.

For many years now groups of filthy, grizzled criminals have dressed as Roman soldiers who stand around the Colosseum extorting euros out of unsuspecting Euros who pose for pictures with them. A few years ago the police went undercover and busted a bunch of them for fighting each other in pitched battles over territory, which is possibly the most awesome thing ever. When my son saw these guys his jaw dropped, and I surprised him by opening my bag to reveal that I'd been lugging most of his beloved Roman soldier costume around all day. We buckled him in and he went right up to the "real" Romans and stared them down with his toughest look.

The legionaries were too busy mugging for the camera with a busload of Chinese tourists and talking on the phone to notice my son, much to his disappointment. "I don't think they were real Romans," he said a few minutes later. "Romans don't have phones." So we marched around the entire Colosseum and he just stared up at it and I wondered what he was thinking.

I had never been inside the building before (I was always too cheap and too annoyed with the idea of the crowds I could see puttering about inside). But how could I not bring him in? While my wife and daughter cooled off in a cafe, we waited in the line and all the Italian ladies working the crowd cooed at him and called him "Gladiatore!" (which is how he still pronounces it). Inside he was a tiny spectacle but loved every minute of it. Here he is, I believe, shouting, "Those who are about to die salute you!" I just shrugged as if I had no idea where he picked up such things.

I had to drag him out of there. I'm pretty sure he thought he was going to get to go down in the pits and meet the real gladiators. I couldn't tell him that they had all been gone for more than a thousand years. I might as well have told him I was Santa Claus, too. So I just told him they were all in an important meeting with the lions.

* * * * *

A handful of plastic gladiators we picked up at a tourist shop and this amazing book kept him entertained for most of the the flight home. He learned the names for all of the different styles of gladiators and it wasn't long before he told me he wanted to be a gladiator for Halloween and I warned him that gladiators never wear shirts and Halloween is always cold so he just reasoned that I could just make him a gladiator costume before Halloween and I agreed that it sounded like something I might do.

Yeah, I should just go ahead and change the name of this blog to Nurturing Strange Obsessions. Back home, I bought three board feet of walnut and set to making my son a little amphitheater for his mini gladiator battles. Fighting on that fold-down airplane tray was rather sad and I felt they needed a fancier place to die for glory. Instead of a full Colosseum I just made half so he could actually play with his guys inside it. I cut the wood into six equal pieces and then did the cutouts for the archways on the scroll saw. Then I cut the edges at an angle so they would curve when fit together.

I sanded it for several days and added some embellishments while the kids played at the playground then finished it with linseed oil that really brought out the beauty of the walnut, which I chose because I thought that particular wood would be kind of reminiscent of the grimy patina on the actual Colosseum.

He always throws sand onto the plywood base. I like how he puts Caesar up on the walls so that all the gladiators can do their customary salute before butchering each other, and so he can give a thumbs up or thumbs down when they're done. There are few feelings as good as your kid telling you how much he loves something you've made for him.

The plastic lions and tigers sometimes like to get in on the action. I'd like to say I took this opportunity to teach my children about the horrific history of slavery in the ancient world, or the cruelty of Roman class structure, or even suggest that the Roman arena was like the historical precedent for the squared circle of the World Wrestling Federation, with what Roland Barthes called the same "the spectacle of excess." But, you know, I just jump in with my own gladiator dude and groan a glorious death to the cheering of the crowd.

He decided that his favorite kind of gladiator was the Thracian, with his elaborate griffin-topped helmet and bent sword. I had to admit that was the best one. After all, Spartacus was a Thracian. So I got to tell him the story of Spartacus and his army of gladiators and slaves beating back the Romans. I would have shown him clips from the Kirk Douglas movie but I was afraid he'd yell at the computer like Ralphie in The Sopranos: "They didn't have flattops in ancient Rome!" Here's a real Thracian helmet they found in Pompeii on display at the Louvre:

How cool is that helmet? Now imagine how cool it is to a 4-year-old boy. There's evidence to suggest that this helmet was decorated even further with huge feather plumes. I had to see if I could make one. Shut up. My wife was in Texas for work and there was no one around to tell me not to. So first I made a pattern out of cardboard and duct tape:

Then I cut it out of leather and sewed all the pieces together and he tried it on.

The face mask didn't look quite right, so I redid it with a piece of softer leather. We dyed it with a coat of black and then a coat of silver and then one more really light coat of black.

Then we added the pheasant feathers. When it was done, he didn't take that thing off for two full hours. My neighbors must think we're nuts. I also made him a bent wooden sword, of course, but that only took a few minutes.

So now all we need is a net man. Anybody out there have a four-year-old net man?

I.     Children have no sense of romance

Three thousand years of history and when you ask them their favorite thing about Italy my children will tell you swimming and the lizards, maybe ice cream if pressed on matters of gastronomy. "They eat horse there," my daughter might add with more than a hint of scandal and disgust. It's true in Puglia, where we recently spent a relaxing week out among the vineyards, olive groves and piles of burning garbage. When their mother and I sat down for our ninth anniversary meal in Ceglie Messapica a man at the next table over ordered horseflesh, served thicker and bloodier than any beef I've ever seen. I almost told my daughter about our meal the next morning and how I wished I'd ordered that horse instead of the delicious rabbit. Then I stopped myself: this is precisely how you cook up a little vegetarian.

Horse butcher, Oria

On our first day, jet-lagged and jittery from extra espressos and erratic Italian drivers, we dipped just south of Naples for a forced march through the empty streets of ancient Herculaneum. My daughter kept one wary eye on the humpbacked caldera of Vesuvius (having read some book about Pompeii that convinced her we might end our afternoon covered in ash) and endured all my tedious talk while my son marched down the ancient cobblestones in his Roman helmet, bursting from pot shops and roofless villas with his tough-guy scowl. One of the half dozen other tourists there saluted him: Ave Cesare! He is still talking about that.

In Puglia, we found most of the towns to be as empty as that ancient one dug out of dirt and ash. Between noon and six o'clock all the Italians vanished and we had entire towns to ourselves. You might hear some dishes clanking behind a covered window, or an opera playing soft on a radio, but the heat was so unbearable we were the only ones foolish enough to be out in it. At night, of course, they all emerged as if from air-raid shelters, rested and readied for the serious business of eating, drinking and shopping all night.

By day gravity pulled us towards shadows: we sat under towering Romanesque churches set between us and the sun and explored countless shaded alleys, but it was clear the kids preferred being back at the lovely villa where we were staying with friends (with its irresistible draw of playmates and a swimming pool). Think of the history! Look at the architecture! How old do you think this wall is? I'd say to disinterested shrugs. Where is your sense of romance?

Nine years before we'd spent those same late August days on our honeymoon in Italy. Nine years later, in those shaded streets and alleys when my wife slipped her fingers between mine and rested her ear on my shoulder with a soft sigh, I'm quite certain our sweaty kids had no idea why. On our anniversary itself we left them with friends and rushed weightless through empty white streets, and when she turned and smiled in the twilight all of the Italians broke open their shutters and rubbed their eyes, blinded by the unexpected radiance of her.

II. The plural of penis is penises, even on the peninsula that gave us third declension Latin nouns

We were staying in the country not too far from Brindisi, the port on the Adriatic Sea where Romans embarked for battles in Greece and points beyond and where modern Italians still leave to work on their tans in economies even more depressed than their own. A few miles north of town there was a nature preserve with a beach and a castle that looked pretty cool in the guidebook: murder holes and a picturesque location on a rocky outcropping. The fact that this was a protected nature area suggested that it would be a little more rustic than most Italian beaches, with their umbrellas for rent and ocean-side espresso service. Still, this was southern Italy in August, and in southern Italy in August I think all you need are a few grains of sand to rub between your fingers and the faint whiff of briny water to open a discotheque filled with a hundred half-naked orange people fist pumping to the worst music you have ever heard. I think the entire day we spent at the beach I saw one other non-orange person. How can a people who seem so fearful of the midday sun also be so giddy to strip down ten feet from the sea to baste themselves and roast in it? When the gods created beachgoing Italians they only had the orange range of a 96-crayon Crayola box: Look, there's an atomic tangerine among all those burnt siennas; Oh wow, mango tango at 3 o'clock. Is that lady totally neon carrot? Dear Italy: your sun is wonderful for olive trees and Malvasian grapes, but it might also explain why your people turn forty and suddenly transform from nubile young pomodori into prunish pensioners staring disapprovingly at anyone not dressed appropriately for confession. That's not fair, Italy: I admit not all your beachgoers look like stretched-out Oompa Loompahs in knuckle huggers, just the vast majority of those temporarily blinded in a recent international incident where a pale American family disrobed and went for a dip in your lovely, warm, cerulean sea.

As we walked down this unspoiled beach towards the castle in the distance, the kids collected shells and coaxed hermit crabs out into the blazing heat. They played hide-and-go seek around sandstone pillars and dipped their toes in cool streams that emptied into the warm water. Families played and picnicked, teenagers sunbathed, a few fat old guys walked by in speedos and here and there we spied an exposed pair of orange boobs. No big deal, right? We're not your typical prudish Americans, we said. There was a time, when she was nineteen and at a similar beach on the Adriatic that their mother did the same thing. When in Rome, right? Keep walking kids, don't stare at the boobs, please. They're perfectly natural. Well, all but those ones over there.

The castle we were pursuing grew tantalizingly close, and once we crossed this weird threshold on the beach the crowd really started to thin out:

"Hey where are all the families?" my wife asked. She was right, there weren't any of the kids that had been stomping around in the water or pushing sand into piles. And then we noticed a lot more boobs. Even the kids sensed the change. Then my wife gripped my hand tightly and whispered through clenched teeth: "PENISES."

After seeing the first one, in a burst of perceptual vigilance they were suddenly everywhere: behind us, in front of us, all around us, big ones, little ones, hairy ones, bald ones. "It's like seeing one fruit fly in your kitchen and then realizing they are everywhere," my wife whispered. And it wasn't just fruit flies. My daughter asked why a group of women passing each other a beach ball in knee-deep water, weren't "wearing anything on their bottoms."

"Well, would you look at that!" my wife whispered as we passed a sunbathing lady with immaculately-sculpted pubic hair.

"I believe that's what the kids these days call a 'landing strip.'"

"You mean like that restaurant out by the airport?"

"That's not a restaurant---at least not one that serves anything you want to eat. Don't you think we should turn around?"

"I don't want to look like prudes. We're almost to the castle."

Out in the water, three naked women jousted with each other from the shoulders of three naked men while others frolicked like neon carrot nymphs with burnt sienna satyrs in shallower water. Walking towards us was the sort of guy who lives for public nudity. You know what I'm talking about: old, wiry, more-than-a-little creepy, and hung like a framed Mapplethorpe. When I saw that pendulous marvel drooping towards us I grabbed the kids by the shoulders and spun them around. I had no intention of answering questions about that thing for the rest of our trip.

"Relax," my wife hissed. "Now all the naked orange people are looking at us."

"Yeah, man, they want us to leave. They don't want our children in their naked fun place. They came down here to get away from kids."

"They don't care."

"Really? I feel like we're being disrespectful of their nude romping."

"Okay, let's go."

The pale American prudes never made it to that castle. And the only question I had to answer about penises that whole trip was why the naked statues in Rome didn't have any.

III. Our first encounter with a real ancient Roman

It was a six hour drive back to Rome from Puglia. At the end of that drive we had to drop the rental car off at Fiumicino airport---a chaotic and foul-smelling place that frightens children---and then go back into Rome with all our stuff. It was here that my ridiculously-cheap inner Dutchman relented and agreed to pay for a cab that would drop us off at our B&B rather than take the train and then trek through the Trastevere with two kids and all our luggage. I think it may have actually been my idea. Forgive me, revered Dutch ancestors: I was exhausted. After six hours of dealing with Fiat Pandas going 50KPH in the right lane while Maseratis flew by at 160 on the left, I just wanted someone else to drive.

I was suspicious of this particular cab when it first pulled up, and suggested we wait for one of the minivans, but my wife insisted it was fine. She piled into the back with both kids, leaving me to awkwardly ask if I could sit in the front passenger seat next to the driver who appeared to have been born during the early reign of Marcus Aurelius. He was far too frail to help with the luggage, so I did it myself. His windshield was obscured by a motley collection of stuffed Disney characters hanging from the rear view mirror by their necks and the whole car smelled like salami because he kept letting go of the wheel to pull pieces of the meat from a plastic package while the cab drifted into the adjacent lane. When we left the airport roads and merged onto the highway, I was dumbfounded when he never accelerated beyond 40KPH while cars angrily whizzed past on both sides.

I had been speaking terrible Italian for over a week at that point, but I did a fairly good job of telling him where we wanted to go. "Via Luigi Santini, Trastevere," I said. I even got the accent right on Trastevere. He acted like he had never heard of any of it. I wrote it down for him, and he peered at my writing from behind his thick glasses like a mole staring out into the wide world beyond his hole. Meanwhile the cab drifted into the mercifully empty next lane.

"Luigi?" he said.

"Yes! Loo-WEE-gee!" I said.

"Loo-WEE-gee?" he asked. At this point I didn't know whether I should shave all my facial hair but the mustache, don a green hat and overalls while jumping on an angry portobello mushroom or simply insist that he pull over to the side of the highway so we could hitchhike from Ostia to Rome.

The driver began entering the street name into his GPS, while the car accelerated maybe to 60KPH as the traffic around us was going at least a hundred. He tried and tried, but couldn't get it right. He kept spelling it "Lvigi," and the GPS couldn't find it. I don't know if he confused my perfectly-written "u" for a "v" or simply couldn't see the tiny GPS screen or if he really had been born during the early reign of Marcus Aurelius back when they chiseled "v" instead of "u" whenever they wrote anything. That was it! I thought. He's some shriveled ancient Roman vampire who's going to drive us into some catacomb and drink my children's blood to transform himself into an unwrinkled orange-skinned lothario. I grabbed the GPS and entered the address myself. "Ah, Loo-WEEE-gee!" he said when the voice in the box started talking proper Italian to him.

After that, everything was golden as the sun set on the eternal city. A few amazing days later, I stuck my head into a different cab and made sure damn sure the driver knew his way to the airport.

We had so much fun. And now we're back.

More soon. [follow up to The Littlest Centurion]

 

 

 

 

 Make sure you get to one before they're gone.

 Previously: County Fair: Seen (2011); County Fair Seen: (2010)

So there was this guy in ancient Rome called Germanicus. He had a bunch of other names too but if we get into that we'll have to try to wrap our head around how nearly every potential successor to Augustus was somehow the nephew of the adopted first son of his third wife and also the grandson of his sister and Marc Antony or something plus a dozen other connections and by then you're so grossed out and confused you don't care about any of them anymore. He was called Germanicus because his family was all about going to Germany and kicking ass. If I remember my Tacitus, the tribes of Germania at this time were a disgusting lot whose menfolk (when not fighting each other) sat around wearing nothing but cloaks held together with thorns while their wives brewed the beer and cleaned the hovels and worked the fields, and when they were fighting each other they took their wives with them to bare their breasts on the sidelines so the men would be reminded of how their wives would be hauled off somewhere if they lost. These jerks had been doing a pretty amazing job of keeping the Romans south of Rhine until Germanicus' dad Drusus came along and mopped up Germans everywhere he went until he fell off his horse and died. Germanicus grew up to lead his dad's legions on many successful campaigns against those half-naked, misogynistic hornhats. Everyone in Rome loved Germanicus, which is why everyone suspected the emperor and his creepy friend Sejanus had him poisoned while he was off in Asia. Germanicus' son Gaius would accompany him on military campaigns in Germania where the little boy was beloved by all his father's soldiers. According to the historian Suetonius, whenever the troops would get all drunk and angry over their cracker rations or something, "the mere sight of [the child] Gaius unquestionably calmed them." It was said that Germanicus had a full Roman military kit made for the boy so he looked just like a common soldier, including a pair of the common soldier's hob-nailed military boots, called caliga. The soldiers called him Caligula, meaning "Little Boots." Maybe you've heard of him? I think the guy who started Penthouse Magazine made a movie about him once.

That is one of my wife's favorite stories from her days of high school Latin. Her other favorite Latin memory is that our word scruple comes from the Latin word scrupulus, (which literally meant "a small sharp stone,") and was used figuratively by Cicero to mean "a feeling of doubt or reluctance to do something that one thinks may be wrong." A nagging feeling, like a small annoying stone trapped in your little boots.

I am not wholly without scruples. There were times, while sitting down at the playground working on a full, authentic Roman soldier's kit for my own son when I wondered if maybe I was taking things a bit too far. After all, look how it worked out for young Gaius. But apparently that didn't stop me. The only part of this costume that I did not make myself from scratch were the sandals. I added leather straps to some sandals we already owned, and although I certainly wanted to craft a pair of hobnailed little soldier caliga, I couldn't. Going that far just seemed unscrupulous.

I don't have it in me to be a homeschooler, but this summer I've been teaching the kids all about ancient Rome. We've been reading tons of books and playing with Roman soldier toys and even watching old Asterix cartoons. My boy has taken to it as enthusiastically as any other subject involving heroes with armor and edged weapons (plus giant communal toilets with "sponges on a  stick" instead of toilet paper). He really loved my description of Roman fermented fish gut sauce. Sometimes I nerd out a bit too much. We'll be talking about Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed to death by his friends and my son will call him "the Roman king" and I roll my eyes and remind them that Romans hated kings, that his friends killed him because he started acting like a king and that Romans were like us in that they did not believe in giving one person too much power, and then I'm ranting about how ultimately the Romans did create something way worse than a king, a man so powerful that kings and Pharaohs and satraps and chieftains all bowed before him. Sometimes emperors even believed that they themselves were gods." And then he's like, Whatever dad. When can I throw my spear again? And then I'm all, "When you've learned the Latin words for all your weapons." And then he's like, "Here's a pilum in your gut, Cicero."

I majored in Latin because I loved all this stuff. Even after the tedium of conjugating a thousand irregular verbs you knew you were still learning about some untouchably Romantic time in Western history, full of conquering generals and political intrigue and feasts of peacock and honey-dipped dormice and stones and stories that would hold together for thousands of years. I've had so much fun talking about the history I loved as a kid with my own kids, and I've loved bringing it to life for them. It all started with a trip to the art museum. By now we know every piece in the museum's classical collection, and this armored torso has always been one of our favorites:

Common Roman soldiers didn't wear armor like this---it would have been mostly decorative and worn by generals and patrician officers. But I really wanted to carve those two griffins eye-to-eye with that gorgon's head in the middle of a cuirass. I drew the griffins freehand on tracing paper and folded it in half so they would be mirror images, then I traced it with a ballpoint pen over a piece of leather cut to the shape of the armor.

With the design on the leather, I began carving and stamping it so it would stand out.

After that, it was just a matter of wetting and shaping the leather over a mold and letting it dry to the proper shape.

Then I dyed it reddish-brown, applying several more coats over the designs to make them stand out even more. The skirt I did the same way. I considered making it all one piece but they like to mix and match their costumes so I thought I'd give them that option with this one too.

If I had been truly historically accurate, I probably would have made the helmet in the Attic style with a forward-facing crest, but he really liked the centurion's helmet so I sewed together a helmet in the Gallic style and added the crest which came from the bristles of an old broom. I had never made a leather helmet before so I looked at how a baseball hat was made and just copied it without the brim, then sewed the extra pieces on where I needed them. This was great fun, probably because my wife didn't think I would ever be able to do it.

Seeing him in that helmet with that crest makes me so happy.

 His throwing spear (pilum) is a leather tip attached to a dowel driven into a shaft of scrap walnut.

The sword (or gladius) I modeled on some surviving examples and used walnut for the blade and tang, then glued-on pieces of cherry for the handle.

I also made him a soldier's dagger (or pugio) from the same walnut with a handle made from some scraps of zebra wood.

The scabbards were really fun---both were based on designs from actual archaeological discoveries. The sword's sheath gave me a chance to learn how to do some metal engraving. I did not dye these sheaths---the leather turned that color after multiple coats of molten beeswax, which also hardened them to the point where they're no longer flexible.

So many of the parts of this project came together because I simply wanted to learn how to do something new. Roman shields (scutum) were rounded to give the soldier more protection, and I've always wanted to learn how to create bent plywood so bought some extremely thin sheets of wood and bent them around a frame, gluing and clamping them in place before leaving them to dry overnight.

The design I painted on the front of the shield includes several motifs from shields in relief sculptures, like Trajan's column. The shield boss is a plastic bowl epoxied to a sheet of steel and painted.

 

We have been marching around the neighborhood for a few weeks now. Most of these pictures here were taken at Old Fort Wayne, an excellent place to practice martial skills. The Roman Empire was built by the soldiers of the Roman army, I tell him. Even when they weren't fighting, they were building the roads and the bridges, the canals and walls that made the empire great. They carried shovels along with their swords. But their most important weapon wasn't the gladius or the pilum: it was discipline, I tell him. They marched all day. They fought shield-to-shield alongside their friends and brothers. That was true discipline. They always worked together. They never whined or complained to their superior officers. They cleaned their plates and cleaned their tents. And they always did as they were told.

See previously: Epic Fun