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From Rome to Hermione Gingold via The Borgias
Many of the Greek deities found their way into the ancient
Roman world via the old Greek colonies of southern Italy.
The Romans were a very superstitious people who believed
themselves to be at the mercy of a multitude of gods, spirits
and omens who needed constant appeasing and they
welcomed new gods and goddesses with open arms.
It was a complex and confusing system and sometimes the
people completely forgot who was who. The festival to the
goddess Furrina was held every year on 25 July. By the
middle of the first century BC no one could remember what
she was actually goddess of but they soldiered on with the
festival for centuries. Kings of ritual, the Romans loved a
festival, feast or ceremony so it isn’t surprising that they
made a big thing of opening days. The highly ostentatious
opening ceremony for the Colosseum in 80 AD lasted for
one hundred days during which 5000 animals were
sacrificed. The arena was even filled with water for the
naumachias
– full scale recreations of historic sea battles.
The Roman Empire was eventually sacked by the Goths &
the Visigoths but little survives about their views on
opening ceremonies. I don’t hold out much hope for their
most famous leader Atilla the Hun - apparently a man who
drank from a wooden cup but gave his guests wine in
goblets of gold. Possibly not a man to stand on ceremony
then. Legend has it that Atilla was persuaded against
invading Rome by Pope Leo I. Ah the Popes. One thousand
years after Leo the Great the Sistine Chapel was opened in
1483 with a Mass conducted by Pope Sixtus IV whose time
in office was rife with scheming and manoeuvring by Italy’s
first crime family - The Borgias. I can’t ever think of that
dread family, famed for incest and all sorts, without
thinking of the wonderful Hermione Gingold and her
WW2 revue rendition of The Borgias Are Having an Orgy.
I’m planning on playing it at my ukulele club. The lyrics
of this macabre little ditty are irresistible:
The Borgias are having an orgy;
There’s a Borgia orgy tonight,
And isn’t it sickening
We’ve run out of Strychnine;
The gravy will have to have ground glass for thickening.
The poison Chianti is terribly scanty
But everything else is all right.
There’s ars’nic mixed in the mock turtle soup.
I’ve hidden an asp in the iced cantaloupe,
And straight Benzedrine in the apricot coupe
At the Borgia orgy tonight.
The magnificent Hermione Gingold who said in her
autobiography
How to Grow Old Disgracefully
"It would
appear that I have tried everything except incest and
folk dancing", La Gingold was, of course, no stranger to the
theatrical opening night. The theatre, where so much can go
wrong, is rife with superstitious tradition. You should never
wish an actor good luck, only break a leg – possibly to
confer good fortune that the actor will soon be breaking the
straight line of his leg to bow to an appreciative audience
at the end of a successful show. He also shouldn’t use a
new set of grease paints on opening night and should he
be in the building on the day a new theatre is opened he
should throw a piece of coal from the stage into the gallery.
In the Beginning - Big Dinners in Babylon
Across the globe and throughout the ages, to mark the
opening or the start of something, mankind has sought
to deter bad luck and bring good luck by harnessing
superstitious beliefs or religious powers. Or sometimes
just by sitting down to a great big dinner. The big dinner
is as old as civilisation itself with possibly the earliest
recorded example from 3000 years ago when the
Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II, 300 years earlier and
a few Babylonian miles away from the more famous
Nebuchadnezzar of Hanging Gardens fame, built his new
capital at Nimrud. The opening party at the palace, just
north of today’s Baghdad, for nearly 70,000 people lasted
for 10 days with a banquet of 1,000 fattened head of
cattle, 1000 calves, 10,000 sheep, 15,000 lamb, 10,000
doves, 500 stags, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks and 500
geese, (knocking Danny Boyle’s nine into a cocked hat).
“I did them due honours and sent them back, healthy and
happy to their own countries” said Ashurnasirpal. He was
a ruthless ruler but boy could he throw a party. You can
see reliefs from the palace at Nimrud and a statue of the
King (pictured below) in the British Museum.
The Ancient Olympics
The Ancient Olympic Games which began a century
or so after the time of Ashurnasirpal, was essentially
a religious festival dedicated to Zeus. The athletic
events were themselves a form of worship.
The Olympic torch journeyed far and wide announcing
a truce between the often warring city states to allow
both athletes and spectators to make their way to the
sacred site at Olympia. When the time was due the
athletes marched for a day and a night from the training
camp at Elis to Olympia where, witnessed by massive
crowds, they swore an oath to the statue of Zeus - one
of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Animal
sacrifices were made throughout the evening with the
pragmatic Greeks eating the offerings thus continuing
the theme of marking an opening with a big dinner.