I discovered my affinity for dead languages in grade school already, so by high school I had inevitably bloomed into a full-fledged Classics Nerd and of course an active participant in my school's Latin Club. At the end of every year all of the international clubs would come together for an evening of edibles and performances from our chosen cultures, which meant there was usually a can-can from the French Club and Monty Python sketches from us Junior Classical Leaguers. Ancient Roman cuisine being questionable at best, my mom came up with the brilliant idea of making faux dormice out of radishes and toothpicks, and they always proved a huge hit at the Latin Club booth. They also winked at the so-called "dormouse test", a term coined by classicist Mary Beard, basically the idea that the sooner a story set in ancient Rome mentions that most stereotypical of Roman delicacies the more likely the rest of it has very little basis in actual historical fact. I think HBO's Rome made it to the second episode before referring to dormice, which seems about right given its overall respect for history and detail but still allowing a salacious diversion here and there. Tom Holland says that Beard's new book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town similarly dispels commonly-held misbeliefs about the doomed city while filling in many fascinating details:
Yet if Beard's book is a vivid demonstration that sceptical scholarship
can provide as gripping a read as sensationalism, that does not mean
that the author shrinks from providing her own exploration of what life
might actually have been like. In many ways, it is an extraordinarily
vivid one. Her Pompeii is a city in which dogs howl, late-night drunks
carouse, and everyone has bad breath. It is a city in which, as Beard
points out with some glee, a household of perhaps some 30 people had
only a single lavatory between them, and the crowds at the amphitheatre
not even that: "20,000 people and nowhere but the stairs and corridors
to take a piss." Above all, it is a city that is infinitely messier and
less systematised than the guide books ever allow: where the presence
of sexually explicit graffiti on a wall does not necessarily suggest a
brothel, and where the baths, as well as providing a bather with "a
place of wonder, pleasure and beauty", were so polluted that "they
might also have killed him".
And no mention of dormice until three-quarters of the way through, apparently.
