Take That!
On the Abiding Fantasy of Shit-Talking
A battle rages on a wintry plain; something whistles across the sky; a man falls dead. If this were a Zack Snyder movie, we would see the cause of death twisting in extreme slo-mo across the screen: a lead bullet, about the size and shape of a Roma tomato, spiraling like a football. One side of the bullet, displaying the stamped image of an erect dick, twists away, revealing writing on the other side — SEDE LAXE OCTAVI: sit on this, you reamed-out bitch. And then at full speed the bullet slams into a skull. Poor buddy, he never got a chance to read it.
If this scene ever took place, it took place at Perusia, in central Italy, in 41 B.C., where Octavian and Mark Antony finally came to blows. There, the Caesarians, under Octavian, Agrippa, and Quintus Salvidienus, besieged the Antonians, under Mark’s brother Lucius and his wife Fulvia (ostensibly, but more on that later). It’s a little-known conflict that’s remarkably well attested, for one reason in particular: the discovery around the battlefield of dozens of glandes — lead sling ammunition — inscribed, like the one above, with some very rude shit.
Here are some of the messages the slingers at Perusia sent — mittere, as Latin says of both letters and missiles — to their opponents:
spread them cheeks (L. Antoni calve, Fulvia,/culum pandite)
take this, Octavius you bitch (Octavia accipe)
I’m aiming for Fulvia’s clit (peto landicam Fulviae)
Lucius Antonius you baldy, and Fulvia,
spread them cheeks (L. Antoni calve, Fulvia,/culum pandite)
Maledictory graphomania went beyond the rank and file. Martial, approvingly citing the future emperor’s Romana simplicitas, quotes a six-line epigram written by Octavian on the occasion of the same war (all translations my own):
Because Antony fucked Glaphyra, Fulvia decreed
this punishment for me: to fuck her.
Me fuck Fulvia? If Manius asked me to
rail him, would I do it? Not if I’m smart.
“Fuck or let’s fight” she says. But what of my dick
dearer to me than life itself? Sound the trumpets!
Fulvia — Mark Antony’s wife, the proximate cause (perhaps) of Cicero’s execution, the first Roman woman to have her likeness stamped on coins, a person Velleius Paterculus describes as having “nothing female about her besides her body” — is the object of a substantial proportion of the insults inscribed on the glandes from the Caesarian side; she is obviously the target of Octavian’s own elegaic go. You could write a book (there might be one) on the neurotic — even for a Roman — sexual pretzel Octavian ties himself into in his poem, trying to make masculinity his pride and her disgrace.
The anti-Fulvia bullets are evidence, too, that the valence of the propaganda against her — her manliness — hadn’t worked on just the elites. The threats — one to rape her and Lucius anally, the other to strike her not in her breasts or uterus but clitoris — are both suggestive of a masculine figure. And here’s something else interesting: there is no way Fulvia could have read these bullets, not if they had been plucked off the battlements and conveyed into the Perusine citadel, any more than she could have been party to the plainly ludicrous conversation Octavius invents in his poem. This is because Fulvia was nowhere near Perusia during the Perusine war. She was in Praeneste, thirty miles to the south, and had no military role in the war.
The mouth, Mary Beard reminds us, not the penis, is what made the Roman man. (This is why irrumation rather than anal rape was the most proverbially humiliating act: it shut you up). But it wasn’t just the Romans who believed this. The warrior of our dreams and fantasies is a puncher and a talker, a fighter with iron hands and a bone-dry tongue. The Spartans, manliest of the Greeks, were equally famous for their military prowess and their ice-cold apophthegmata; the stilted quippiness of action heroes has long since passed into parody (McBain, on the Simpsons, bursting out of an ice sculpture and slaughtering a roomful of baddies: “Ahce to zee yoo.”) There’s Ali’s trash-talk, McGregor’s gab: professional fighters talk up to the fight, talk during the fight, keep talking after the fight; the fight itself is simply the pretext for all the talk.
But fighters’ words have rarely swung the outcome of a fight as dramatically as they did for McGregor v. Nurmagomedov, the MMA debacle from last October. During the months of pre-fight hype, Conor McGregor overwhelmed Khabib Nurmagomedov with a barrage of utterly shameless racist shit-talk (including calling his Muslim opponent’s manager a “fucking snitch terrorist rat”). Nurmagomedov reluctantly played along, throwing the occasional verbal jab (our language about language is full of pugilistic metaphors: jab, spar, land a hit) but failing to connect. McGregor shut Nurmagomedov up.
And then they fought. There is a video, which was uploaded about a week after the fight’s chaotic aftermath, that shows Nurmagomedov sitting almost calmly between McGregor’s hips and dropping heavy punches on McGregor’s head every few seconds, as the pinned man fidgets in vain for any sort of leverage. Nurmagomedov speaks: “We’re talking. Let’s talk now. Let’s talk. Let’s talk now.” The Russian has put himself firmly on the Achillean side of the words or deeds? question. McGregor, struggling for air, has nothing to say; Nurmagomedov has shut him up.
And yet he lost for winning. After pummeling and finally getting a submission out of McGregor, Nurmagomedov exploded out of the octagon and attacked McGregor’s cornerman, while two of his own cornermen took swings at McGregor inside the cage. As punishment, Nurmagomedov’s purse was temporarily withheld, and he was fined half a million dollars and suspended from fighting for nine months. This was the exact intended effect of McGregor’s words: to cause his opponent to lose confidence, in one direction, or control, in another; to make him wilt or explode. In the end Nurmagomedov, for all the discipline he possessed during the fight, exploded.
This is the abiding fantasy of talking shit. (Think of all those videos of John Oliver or Ben Shapiro or whoever DESTROYING or EVISCERATING or OWNING their enemies). It very rarely succeeds. No one has ever evinced more confidence in the might and power of words than Cicero — the dux togatus et imperator — but they didn’t amount to much in the end. The Republic collapsed completely, and his head became a bauble for the Antonians. But there is the sneaking sense that Cicero won out in the end, that the survival of the Philippics has made Marc Antony a laughingstock down through the ages.
This same sense creeps into the famous exchange between Tiberius and Clemens, a slave who pretended to be the late Agrippa Postumus. Clemens, whose ruse attracted enormous crowds, desperate for a glimpse of another reality, was in short order betrayed, captured, and presented to the emperor. “How did you become Agrippa?” Tiberius asked. “The same way you became Caesar,” Clemens replied.
The exchange, probably spurious, is too good not to have been quoted by absolutely everyone, and this is because the riposte seems to stab right to the heart of the Principate’s bullshit. There is no law, no constitution, no just order of succession: Augustus was a tyrant, and so is Tiberius, as will be whoever comes next. Clemens, in half a sentence (quomodo tu Caesar), seems to have almost unraveled the whole curtain of Augustan propaganda, the veil of legal-seeming but meaningless phrases — princeps senatus, primus inter pares, maius imperium proconsulare, tribunicia potestas — or rather, phrases meaning only one thing: I alone am now in charge.
Almost — but of course he didn’t. Clemens was disappeared, and the bullshit prevailed.
A ranged weapon is a curious tool: the greater the range, the less it feels like a weapon. And, commensurately, so much less a warrior the one who wields it. Whom do we admire more: Hector, leading the charge with spear and sword, or Paris, hanging back on the battlements with his bow and arrow? The Parthian of Horace’s nightmares is versis animosus equis, fierce in flight, firing off arrows while falling back. Look at these memes about the Air Force, honing in on the supposedly incompetent marksmanship of airmen — whose only job, after all, is to take joyrides thousands of feet above the real fighting — and then watch the scene near the end of Jarhead, where our hero, a sniper, is robbed of his kill by an airstrike by planes we can’t even see. Or just read these profiles of drone pilots, who “dismiss the notion that they are playing a video game,” while “acknowledg[ing] the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from [a] padded seat in American suburbia.”
And yet. Military “progress” is characterized, principally, by a gradual but persistent backing away from the enemy. When a warrior has backed so far away from the enemy that he can’t even see him, what kind of shit is he supposed to talk? His hands are stronger than they have ever been in human history; his voice is silent. He’s been shut up.
Perhaps in response to this gagging, there exists a productive, if minor, genre of writing menacingly on one’s guns. Louis XIV famously had his cannon stamped with the phrase ultima ratio regum; today you can find guns with teensy Second Amendments inscribed on the frame or grip, or a MOLON LABE on the slide; there are more than a few pistols out there, apparently, with SMILE, WAIT FOR FLASH or DANGER, LEAD POISONING curling around the muzzle.
I find bombic epigrams to have more pop, personally. Bomber crews, going back at least to World War II, have produced a healthy body of work in the “this letter will explode and kill you” vein, with many subgenres.
The Special Delivery
Dear Saddam + Osama Special Delivery Rest in Hell Love Trumm
A Churchill; AL Buckingham Palace; Per L’home Fleet
The Bank Statement
The Holiday Card
The Lover’s Reply
Assorted Miscellany
Tojo Eats Spam; Have You Heard This? It’ll Kill Ya!!
This Is For Making Me Miss Game of Thrones
And one recentish example — insipid, misspelled, scandal-making — that would not have been at all out of place on a bullet from Perusia:
The ranged warrior, devastating but unbloodied, who kills but doesn’t fight, can still reclaim his pugilist’s voice: he must make his weapon speak. That the words will never reach his opponent — that the very delivery of the weapon will destroy the words, or the reader — is beside the point. As in a curse, or a prayer, the speech is ritual, the writer imbuing with the charge of his words the weapon that will relay them to the enemy. The fighter can again, even if only in the instant of the blow, have words with his enemy.
Jamie Lawrence is a Latin teacher in New Hampshire.
