Goodness knows there has been a lot to do lately, and I will explain some of it in a couple of posts—one of the things I have been doing is making more opportunities to write, which will shortly begin to arrive, I hope and trust—but a few weeks ago, before the maelstrom truly swallowed me, I found myself wandering back here and looking at my stubbed draft posts. I tell you, I don’t remember what all of them are about, or even what I was thinking, but this old one still has legs, and is quite like what I think I would mostly do if I did in fact move off WordPress and onto Substack as I have considered doing. That Substack would probably be called I Found a Thing, and this is one of the sorts of thing I would have found. I found this one while tracking uses of the monetary term follis through papryus databases for my 2022 article "Follis or Follaron"a>, in a paper by one Richard Alston.1 (The answer to my question, by the way, is follaron until at least the seventh century.) But first, before I tell you what I found, you need to see or remember this!
Roman soldiers searching the meeting place of the People's Front of Judæa, in Terry Jones (dir.), Monty Python's Life of Brian (Handmade Films 1979)
Now, you might easily think that this creative bunch of comics were, you know, making stuff up when they got to the bathos of the spoon. But that would be to forget that half this stuff, they started coming up with when they were Oxford students, and that the late Terry Jones, in particular, the director, also had a lot of fun in his career using what he’d learned then to upset medievalists and, presumably, also Classicists.2 Because hey, thanks to Dr Alston I found the source. Alston, while talking about the Roman enforcement of authority in Alexandria, invokes a story from the work of the first-century Egyptian Jewish historian Philo, which Alston reports as follows:
"Philo was complaining about the actions of the prefect Flaccus who had searched the Jewish area, using troops, in a most tactless way, breaking into the women’s quarters and causing a great deal of disturbance. All Flaccus obtained from his search was kitchen utensils. This failure is in contrast to his earlier disarmament of the Egyptians which had filled so many boats that the Nile had been congested."3
"We found this spoon, sir!" Now, it could just be art imitating life unconsciously, of course. But if we could only ask Terry Jones, I’d wager he read Philo, or about this story in Philo, somewhere in his education, perhaps at Guildford Grammar rather than St Edmund Hall but who knows, and then, fifteen or so years later when scripting, remembered and went, "oh yes! I know where that goes!" And presumably anyone else watching the film since then who also knows Philo’s work has also spotted it and gone, "aha!" as I did. But on the odds that you, dear reader, were same as me not one of their number, here you are! I found it for you.
1. That paper being Richard Alston, "Violence and Social Control in Roman Egypt" in A. Bülow-Jacobsen (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Papyrologists, Copenhagen, 23-29 August, 1992 (Copenhagen 1994), pp. 517–521. My piece was Jonathan Jarrett, "Follis or follaron? The name of the Byzantine coin of 40-nummi" in Acta numismàtica Vol. 52 (Barcelona 2022), pp. 225–248.
2. When I was first teaching, the TV series which lay behind A. Ereira, Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives (London 2005), was new and my students were all over it as the ‘real’ medieval history their teachers hadn’t wanted to tell them, which is to say, of course, the muddy tropes of both the Victorian era and of Monty Python itself, which was of course taught to them at school by people themselves taught from Victorian-era scholarship… But much older, and much more evident a cat thrown among academic pigeons, is Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London 1980, 4th edn. 2017), which has, self-evidently, done pretty well, but whose research basis has, well, been questioned, and it has even been suggested that he was being deliberately misleading. The man who gave us Dennis the Socialist Peasant? Surely not!
3. Alston, "Violence and Social Control", p. 517 n. 4, citing Philo, In Flaccum, 86-94 & 109-115, and of course because he is or was a Classicist he provides no idea what edition he was using.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 