Brennus & His Share Of The Spoils

That’s the title of this painting by Paul Jamin from 1893:

A digression: I’m running this blog now and you should know that I’m a bit of a history nut. My co-blogger Sherman McCoy isn’t so current with what happened in the past. In fact, Sherman seems to think that “ancient history” is the archive section at ATK Galleria. But Sherman is dead now. He himself is part of the wind of the history, blowing blowing away in gusts of Tomorrow.

The best history topic of all is Ancient Rome. Gawd, you’ve gotta love the Romans… they were ruthless, bureaucratic, and highly sexual just like everyone was in the Ancient world, and they were the bosses of bosses for a very long time. Most importantly, they documented all their adventures in writing more than anyone else did, with the possible exception of the Greeks. But the Greeks didn’t really do much after the Macedonian Wars except for obediently paying their taxes to Rome. The Greeks just spent their time pondering philosophy, eating olives, and fucking.

If you are interested in learning more about Ancient Rome, the finest presentation that I’ve ever seen– or heard– is going on right now. It’s a podcast called The History of Rome. A dude named Mike does the podcast. He’s more laid back than the hardcore historian Dan Carlin, but he is also dealing with a story that is so action-packed that he doesn’t need to inject additional excitement of his own.

Anyway, back to the image…

That’s Brennus on the left. He just sacked the impenetrable city of Rome in 390 BC.

The Romans would remember the sacking of their city with a grudge for the next eight or nine centuries. They would go all neocon on the whole world to try to ensure that it never happened again, eventually dominating everyone from Britain to Egypt. Veni, vidi, vici became the Roman attitude. Of course, the overrun of Rome did end up happening again, but that’s a different story…

You need to understand what “sacking” a city meant. It meant that the city is completely conquered; there are no limits to what happens next.

Brennus and his cohorts are entitled to take everything. Gold. Women. More gold. More women. They can go and kill all the men they want. And then take their women. Those that they don’t kill can be made into slaves, and an important aspect of slavery in the ancient world was the sexual servitude it entailed.

Actually, there were a few traditional limits on the taking and the killing that would come into play if the occupants surrendered immediately without fighting, but even these limits were sometimes ignored, resulting in the total slaughter of whole cities that never raised any arms in defense. Nontheless, the Romans were fighting back in self-defense here, and they lost.

So Brennus, as leader of the conquerors, arrives to gather his spoils. Does he want gold? Well, there’s very little gold in the painting. Women, though… now that’s another story! The four naked women, two of whom are already bound, as well as the extra half-naked one, are all his spoils… probably about to become his slaves… his sexual slaves… for the rest of their lives.

If that’s not B.D.S.M. then I don’t know what is!

The remaining Roman survivors, holed up on the Capitoline Hill for an eventual period of seven months, negotiated for Brennus to leave them alone. Their city was devastated and all they wanted was for the sacker and his thugs to depart. So they offered to pay him. They offered to pay him one thousand pounds of gold.

The offer accepted, Brennus and his men packed up their new-found slaves and gathered their new possessions and watched as the defeated Romans piled up even more gold in front of them. There was a dispute about the weights; the Romans, ever bureaucratic sticklers, objected that Brennus had brought his own weights for measuring, and those weights were heavier than the usual Roman pound.

Brennus brushed off their complaints.

Then he took his heavy sword and threw it on the scale, thus demanding that additional gold be provided.

“Vae victis!”, he exclaimed.

Woe to the vanquished!