Juvenal or Juvenile

 The last week or so, my bedtime reading has been Lindsey Davis's 'Murder in Purple and Gold' which takes place against the background of the Roman Floralia festival.

I must confess to a weakness for Lindsey Davis's Roman mysteries, and despite being complete fantasy, they are impeccably researched and the background is accurate.

Now, despite my deep fascination with Roman history, I didn't know much about Floralia. 

This isn't unusual, there's not that much known other than the festival is said to have been implemented around 238BCE during the early, not quite mythical, period of the republic and was in response to a series of very wet cold springs.

In an agrarian society, dependent on what they could grow locally, which was the case in the early republic, a series of wet cold springs when the crops didn't start to grow properly meant hunger, and possibly starvation. It's possible that this was due to volcanic activity, but no one really knows.

Anyway Floralia started as a festival of fertility and new growth. What form it took at the beginning  is not known, or even whether there had been some earlier agrarian festivals that were formalised into Floralia.

Fast forward to the end of the first century CE.

Floralia was still going strong. Unlike many Roman religious festivals it was light on austere ceremony and had evolved into a raunchy raucous celebration of life including naked acrobats of both sexes, nude dancing  and naked prostitutes dressed up as gladiators (basically minimal pretend armour and not a lot else) engaging in mock gladiator fights.

Well that's what we think anyway. Actual written sources are fairly sparse. There's a reference to Cato going into a tent where a naked comedy was being performed, and walking out in disgust, some prim later writers expressing po-faced disapproval, and the satirist Juvenal, who provides some fairly ambiguous descriptions of what went on in satire#6.

Basically, it seems to be the case that everyone knew what went on, the Roman fun police disapproved, and not many people wrote about it, or if they did, what they wrote didn't survive.

And this is my cautionary tale.

Being a geek, I thought I'd see what various historians had written about Juvenal's descriptions of Floralia and the associated events by searching for

'juvenal naked dancers floralia'

which while it might not be the sort of thing you would do at work, is eminently justifiable as a search.

Unfortunately Google didn't think so, decided I couldn't spell juvenile, and cautioned me about searching for abusive material.

Perhaps I should have capitalised juvenal, or omitted his name entirely from the search string, but there you go, what's done is done.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time I've had problems with the word juvenile. 

While documenting the contents of Lake View, I came across a number of children's books produced by a company called Juvenile Productions in the 1930s that seems to have little or no trace of itself. Most of the books are reprints of earlier children's stories, and had titles that included words like 'fairy'.

At the time of publication there was probably no hint of nastiness linked to the title, but now, we live in a different world...