Chapter V: XVI
Regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday updates this week, new comics posting at midnight 🙂
kit the brave asked: What would little Roman kids call their fathers? Papa for “pater”?
In addition to pater, I know of the use of tata, tetta, and dada. Possibly papa, though “papa,” “pappa,” and “papae” had other meanings in Latin lingo—”feed me” in baby talk, “eating baby pap,” and “wow!”
Here’s an example of “tata” for “dad” in Martial:
Mammas atque tatas habet Afra, sed ipsa tatarum
Dici et mammarum maxima mamma potest
Loosely translated: “Afra is so old, she talks about her mom this and dad that, but she could be everybody’s grandma.”
If Iusta knew who Felix’s barber is, I don’t think she’d be so eager for him to go back regularly!
And I wonder what’s up with Felix and Damon. In the middle of the night, too.
Oh, you know. Father-son bonding. In the darkest hour of the night. Secretly. Totally normal.
A good barber in Ancient Rome is worth his weight in gold–Iusta should appreciate how hard it is to find one who can reliably produce smooth, nick-free cheeks and trim one’s hair to something other than a quick high and tight. Of course, most barbers wouldn’t personally offer pre-shave rompy-pompy as part of the package. Iusta might not appreciate that part.
This is good with Damon as he struggles to figure out what he should call the stranger who is his father.
Looking forward to the next installment.
The next one will be on time! I hope! I think so!
Look at you, all timely and prompt and stuff like that! We’ll get spoiled, mucho pronto.
October is going to be a busy month (a couple of comic conventions) but I’ll try to keep up the timely and the prompt and the pronto 🙂
So Iusta is keeping her promise to keep Felix busy so he does not need the services of the girls at the house of Genia.
She’s a woman of her word.
And also in the first enthusiasm of new luv. Something like that.
Still…after all they’ve been through, it’s lovely to see Iusta’s happy face. Felix…well, he still seems to have a lot on his mind, unsurprisingly. Hopefully Iusta’s affection (and, um, keeping-him-business…) will help.
“We should build one indoors.”
Here we see that Iusta is not just a woman in love, but a visionary on the issues of sanitation. From the Wiki entry “Sanitation in ancient Rome”:
“Around AD 100, direct connections of homes to sewers began, and the Romans completed most of the sewer system infrastructure. Sewers were laid throughout the city, serving public and some private latrines, and also served as dumping grounds for homes not directly connected to a sewer. It was mostly the wealthy whose homes were connected to the sewers, through outlets that ran under an extension of the latrine.”
So here she is more than twenty years ahead of the aediles with the notion of putting a bogs in the house.
Not just a pretty face…
Maybe she gets her visionary sanitary tendencies from her father. Her father had some sort of indoor loo in the house at Herculaneum. Perhaps he paid someone off to connect the outdoor privy in Rome to the street drains the atrium runs into and where the locals dump their slops. But it really would be a shame to lose all that social networking time one gets on the public toilets.
True. Nothing brings one closer together to one’s neighbors than used garum.
That said, I had the…umm…instructive experience of living in the old WW2 style barracks with the unpartitioned toilets. There really is very little personal space involved. I suspect that even the least-fussy of us moderns would have a hard time getting the lack of boundaries involved in pre-industrial urban living…
I feel like Felix should be getting a little fat from this lifestyle.
Maybe Titus and Domitian will put him to strenuous work skulking around.