266: SIC(K) TRANSIT
“I will spue thee out of my mouth” – Revelations 3.16 Not the most attractive topic, so I’ll try not to go on ad nauseam.
Prompted by newspaper/website reports over the last few years of British women suffering from perpetual vomiting: Rebecca Griffiths, Stephanie Horner, Jayde Pitt, Christina Smith – see (e.g.) BBC News, 25 Jan 2018.
Doctors have a name for it – Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome – but not a cure, only desperate palliatives.
Various tomb paintings show ancient Egyptians copiously vomiting; cf. Dean Martindale’s (aka Jimmy Dunn) website illustrated essay. Some consider this ritualistic, others satirical, still others as mere realism, the result of “one too many”, Egyptians being ridiculed for beer-addiction by Æschylus ( Suppliant Women, vv952-3).
Likewise, various similar depictions on ancient Greek pottery: same scenes, same diverse explanations; cf. Michael Vickers, Greek Symposia (1978, 20-1). Symposium in Greek connotes a drinking-party, a meaning lost in modern usage. You’d think these would produce a lot of spewing-up. However, in the most famous one, Plato’s (cf. Jonathan Miller’s TV re-creation), most guests go quietly home (straight to work, in Socrates’s case) the most bibulous (including Aristophanes) simply falling asleep. Lucian’s satirical Banquet ends with fisticuffs, room-trashing, sexual high-jinks, passings-out – but no vomiting. A fragment from Eubulus’s comic play Semele, or Dionysus has the god lay out the various consequences of overindulgence, much the same as in Lucian.
Another comic fragment, quoted by Athenæus ( Learned Men at Dinner, bk14 ch616 paraE), rebukes “You are causing trouble by bringing this vomiting woman to dinner,” the nauseous lady being Queen Arsinoe (Ptolemaic wife of Macedonian King Lysimachus).
There are at least a dozen words for various vomiting styles in ancient Greek. One, kopriemetos, indicates throwing up excrement. Hippocrates ( Epidemics, bk2 ch19) reports a patient called Pittacus who experienced this. So does Scribonius Largus (one of emperor Claudius’s doctors), Remedies, no.118; cf. my piece on him in Rheinisches Museum 135 (2004), 74-82. Medical term for this condition is ileus, a condition caused by blocked or twisted bowel – classicist Walter Headlam died from it) Largus’s patient was the slave of a perfume-seller. His prescription – fenugreek blown up the anus – sounds very Gwyneth Paltrow.
Aldous Huxley ( Antic Hay, 1923), referring to “the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter,” is usually discredited as the first writer to perpetuate the still widespread mumpsimus that Vomitorium
denotes a special room for spewing up in, before returning to re-gorge. In fact, he had been simultaneously (1871) anticipated by English author Augustus Hare and French writer Felix Pyat.
The word, of course, designates the passageways through which Roman arena/ theatregoers gained access to their seats. This is made clear by Macrobius, Saturnalia 6. 4. 4: vomitoria unde homines glomeratim ingredientes in sedilia se fundunt. Macrobius seems the first and only author to use this word, though this rarity may well be accidental. Hard to believe such a piece of slang was not in previous common use.
Huxley read English, not Classics, at Oxford. Perhaps surprising, then, that he was unaware of the correct use of the term by H Rider Haggard in Pearl Maiden (1903): “Beyond lay the broad passage of the vomitorium. They gained it, and in an instant were mixed with the thousands who sought to escape the panic.”
Surprisingly or not, this is not something that happens at Trimalchio’s dinner party, given a host who invites anyone with his kind of bowel problems to relieve themselves right there in the room. The only emesis happens off-stage, when Habinnas reports that wife Scintilla had “almost puked up her insides” after tasting some bear-meat at a previous feast – he himself ate a pound without adverse effect.
Morbid Petronian footnote: one of his best modern commentators, Kenneth Rose, choked on his own vomit at 29. The same fate has also befallen many a rock star, notably Jon Bonham and Jimi Hendrix; cf. the catalogue of this and other bizarre demises in Jeff Pike’s The Death of Rock ’N Roll (1993). Plus, of course, the drummer in This is Spinal Tap who choked on someone else’s vomit.
One of Rome’s most notable spewers was Mark Antony, as befits a man who wrote a book On His Own Drunkenness. Cicero ( Second Philippic, ch63) describes how he once, while transacting public business, vomited up wine and orts all over himself and the speaker’s platform.
Obvious modern (1992) parallel here is President George HW Bush vomiting into the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa.
Celsus (1st century AD, On Medicine, bk1 ch13) advises against self-induced vomiting to mitigate a debauched lifestyle, a warning echoed by imperial tutor Fronto ( On Eloquence, ch4). Seneca (Moral Letters, no.47; On Consolation: Letter to Helvia, ch10 para2) is witness to neglect of this advice: “When we sit down at table, one person wipes away the spew, another bends down under the dining-room couch and collects what the drunks have left.” And “They eat that they may vomit; they vomit that they may eat.”
Suetonius (ch53) says Julius Cæsar was indifferent to food, abstemious in drink. Cicero ( Letters to Atticus, bk13 ch52 para2) says he was on a diet of emetics, to allow him to eat and drink without worry – Nero (Suetonius, ch20) would induce vomiting as part of his pre-concert preparations. Cæsar’s decorum once saved his life. Cicero ( Speech in Defence of King Deiotarus, ch21) describes how assassins waited for him in the loo, but he foiled them by preferring to vomit privately in his bedroom.
A relatively modern parallel is provided by an 1882 American Congressional Report (online) describing the trial of Captain CH Campbell (Sixth Cavalry) for various offences, including drunken vomiting in his own tent. After five days of hearings, an inconclusive verdict was returned.
Claudius (Suetonius, ch33) used to induce vomiting by tickling his throat with a feather. This almost saved him when fetching up the mushrooms poisoned (probably by his wife Agrippina, Nero’s mum), had not his doctor Xenophon tickled his palate with a toxic one.
Given his daily four colossal meals, plus stealing sacrificial meats from altars and (depending which source you read) consuming 100 or 1,000 oysters at one go, no surprise thatVitellius was the fattest of all emperors. Suetonius (ch13) says he accomplished this gargantuan intake by daily emetics.
I’m starting to feel sick. Those who want more should view the spectacular spewings in such films as: Bridesmaids; I LoveYou, Man; Spaceballs; Stand By Me; The Exorcist; The Sixth Sense (and not forgetting Monty Python’s Mr Creosote)
“By Pollux, I wish too much that you’d puke up your lungs” – Plautus, The Rope, Act 2 sc. 6 v26.