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chapter 11 -Dependent: Spending the Night in a in the Roman World

Jane Sancinito

1 Introduction

In his defense of Milo, Cicero poses two questions to the judges: why did Clodius set off on a journey for , and why did he by night?1 To Cicero’s mind, this was suspicious behavior, of the kind that he could imme- diately liken to robbers preparing an ambush.2 Ignoring the fact that Clodius was just as likely to be prey as predator and that this particular journey cost him his life, Cicero was fundamentally right: it was a dangerous business being out on the roads of the Roman world after dark, and, as twilight fell, honest travelers hastened to find a safe place to spend the night. For most in the ancient world, this meant finding a room at an inn or a hostel,3 the staple institutions for the merchant or businessman away from home. provided for the basic needs of travelers: room and board, as well as entertainment and stabling for animals.4 These institutions were as com-

1 Cic. Mil. 49: Cur Romam properaret, cur in noctem se coniceret? 2 Cic. Mil. 50. For further consideration of Cicero’s approach to the night and nocturnal activi- ties, see Pieper’s chapter in this volume. 3 In English, the difference between an inn and a hostel is generally one of duration, with the hostel generally providing options for longer stays than an inn. Modern may also be attached to institutions of some kind, whereas inns or their large counterparts, , are privately run. For the purposes of this paper, an inn remains a small, independently run busi- ness, solely dedicated to providing , while a hostel is understood to cover situations where a traveler might find a room for a night at an establishment that was primarily another business, such as a tavern or . 4 Inns and hostels were not a common topic of research in the twentieth century, and many of the major works still trace their origin back to the work of Michel and Fournier 1851. The history of this field is complicated by the fact that the first major anglophone work on this subject, Firebaugh 1928, is an uncredited translation of Michel and Fournier 1851, and it is a translation marked with inaccuracies and redundancies. This case of plagiarism was first discovered by Susan Rhodes, M.D., and Bill Thayer, who traced the matter to its source through a reference to a non-existent figure in Plutarch. Details of this discovery

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004436367_013 inn-dependent 235 mon as they were necessary.5 Inns and hostels, at least in the Latin-speaking world, were identified by the same terminology that covered the numerous tav- erns, bars, and even brothels found in the empire’s urban spaces and spreading out along its major roadways.6 They are referred to as, alternately, cauponae or tabernae, eliding those businesses that provided rooms for travelers, or even semi-permanent lodgers, and those that sold only food and . Linguisti- cally, the differences are opaque,7 and it is probable that, from the perspective of the traveler, it was often uncertain whether a room was available until one was offered by the host, generally known as a caupo or copo.8 In the Greek world, the inn or hostel was often the kapêleion, a term also used for a more generic tavern. These of rest were also called pandocheia, places with a welcome for all, or at least all who could afford it. The pandocheion was more clearly a place to rent a room than a kapêleion, but it provided a similar array of services for travelers.9 In both the literary and the epigraphic record, the rooms, food, and com- pany available at inns and hostels are consistently regarded as poor in quality. Roman authors of all kinds display disdain for inns and the shoddy services they offered. Horace, in his Satires and Epistles, comments on the smoky rooms and foolish hosts that ran these establishments and asserts that one would not wish to live at an inn.10 Petronius talks about hostels as dirty, bug-infested

are recorded at http://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Firebaugh‑TheInnsOfGreeceAndRo me/MyIntro.html.The most comprehensive survey of specifically Roman inns comes from Kleberg 1957, while the most recent work on inns and hostels in the ancient world has come from scholars of Jewish Studies, e.g., Rosenfeld 1998, and historians of Late Antiq- uity, most notably Constable 2003. 5 Evidence of inns in the archaeological record has grown dramatically over the course of the last century. See an early collection of this evidence in Kleberg 1957, and more recently in Kruschwitz 2006. Women as innkeepers have been confirmed in excavations at Vin- donissa; see Allison 2013, 28 for discussion. It should be noted that the ‘must haves’ for an inn are minimal, and many spaces, used for other purposes during the day, could have served as hostels by night with only one additional room beyond the public space where the host lived and worked. 6 By and large, these were private establishments, as the regular way-stations of the cur- sus publicus were unavailable to most travelers, who lacked the official documents that opened those doors. See: Lemcke 2016, 20; Di Paola 1999, 61–73. 7 Pace Kleberg 1957, ch. 1, who argues for strong divisions among those words referring to only an eatery and those which also had rooms. Unfortunately, these categories seem to break down upon closer scrutiny, especially later in the Roman period, which is beyond the chronological boundaries of Kleberg’s investigation. 8 As in the Appendix Vergiliana, Copa 1. 9 See Kleberg 1957, ch. 1, for a full array of possible referents. 10 Hor. S. 1.5.71–74 and Ep. 1.11.12.