Guest blog: Mice in Antiquity by Greg M.

Roman mouse lamp in Manchester Museum collection (accession number 40647)

Regular readers of this Blog will no doubt recall that mice have sometimes featured in the posts. It is a great pleasure to host a guest contribution by student Greg M. who recently studied a Roman lamp with a depiction of a mouse in Manchester Museum’s collection. He kindly agreed to write this up as a  post for the Ancient Worlds Blog:-

I was given the opportunity by my Sixth form College to undertake an Extended Project, or EPQ, on any topic I liked. Naturally I turned to the Manchester Museum for inspiration.
Having contacted the Museum’s Curator of Archaeology, Bryan Sitch, I was pointed towards a small, intriguing object. Nestled within the museum’s vast array of ancient artefacts, lies an ancient oil lamp with a small mouse design appearing on its surface. This lamp entered the Museum in the early 1900s, having been collected by a Victorian architect and antiquarian named William Sharp Ogden (1844-1926). The lamp arrived with little associated information card, offering little precise evidence of its history, provenance or age.

The Curator, Bryan Sitch, suggested I research both the lamp itself, so as to contribute to the Museum’s records, and also the cultural significance of mice in antiquity. While I anticipated the occasional source of mouse-related information, I found myself increasingly confronted by a complex and fascinating cultural assemblage, including Egyptian comics, satirical literature and Roman Republican anti-decadence legislation!

I sought to learn more about the role of oil lamps in the ancient world, when and where the lamp was made and the role of mice in ancient culture.

For thousands of years, oil lamps provided a key source of light for those who wished to extend the hours of daylight. Oil lamps provided a compact, portable and customisable light source that was to be found in homes, tombs and businesses across the ancient world. With the arrival of mould production in 3/4^th Century BC Greece, factories around the Mediterranean began to churn out a massive range of lamp designs. The cost of using these lamps, however, limited their use. According to Diocletian’s Edict of 301 AD, an anti-inflationary fixing of prices, a litre of oil was the equivalent of 20 pence, compared to 14 pence for a teacher’s monthly wage. Therefore lamps were a luxurious, but widespread part of Ancient life.

Having ordered the hefty Royal Ontario Catalogue of Ancient Lamps through the public library system, I discovered that the Manchester lamp closely resembles those produced in Northern Africa. The Manchester lamp’s form closely mirrors those produced at ancient Tunisian lamp manufacturing sites. Furthermore, the chronological development of lamp design, with the emergence and development of the ‘fat type’, suggests the Manchester lamp dates from the 3^rd Century AD.

Detail of mouse on lamp. The curl behind the mouse is the handle of the lamp.

While many lamps are often designed with standard ancient images, such as a posing Hercules, I found that flexible production created a huge variety of designs. The small mouse, pictured drinking oil, on the Manchester lamp initially seemed a strange choice of image for decoration. However, I found mice to be a key part of ancient culture.

The 2^nd Century AD Roman ‘Messy floor mosaic’, now held by the Vatican, contains an extensive scene of gluttony, with scattered food and a mouse nibbling the remains. This image suggests the Manchester lamp may be a similar satirical reflection on Roman voracity, or perhaps it’s just to be regarded as a cute image, or an ironic prediction of might happen to the oil in the lamp.

Messy floor mosaic in the Vatican

In addition to consuming food, mice could be food themselves. While Mary Beard’s ‘dormouse test’ suggests that the longer you wait for edible dormouse to appear in a banquet re-enactment, the greater its accuracy, they were certainly part of the elite diet. Greedy Roman nobles would fatten up prized specimens in a ‘Glirarium’, before serving them glazed with honey. The aristocratic taste for dormice led to Imperial censors banning their consumption in 117 AD.

Vessel for raising doormice

When you think of Ancient Greek epics, Homer’s noble and fearsome warriors spring to mind. In the 3^rd Century BC epic, the ‘Batrachomyomachia’, however, the warriors are mice attacking a hoard of frogs. In this parody, ‘Crumb snatcher’ is killed by ‘puff jaw’ and war ensues. This epic, which was apparently painted on tavern walls, strikes at a surprisingly common theme in literature, mice warriors. On an Egyptian papyrus from 1150 BC, an army of mice launch an offensive against a citadel of cats. This suggests that the parodying of generally austere war imagery enabled a cultural exploration of war, and it also suggests that mice were a seen in a sympathetic light. Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egyptology at Manchester Museum, commented that this image was a fairly common ‘inversion’ of the real world that is sometimes shown on playful or Satirical ostraca, on which the powerful cat is made to be subservient to the mouse.

Mice storming the city of the cats on an Egyptian papyrus

In the story of the ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’, Horace extends one of Aesop’s fables, exploring the relative merits of rural and urban living. Again mice are used as a harmless and charming tool to make a point, with the traditional rugged values of the countryside triumphing over urban sophistication.

By exploring, at great depth, such a seemingly small but highly specific object, I have gained an enormous amount. In addition to my understanding of the Manchester lamp’s cultural and historical role, my eyes have been opened to the possibilities of ancient history. By scratching the surface of this tiny strand of inquiry, I uncovered a host of possible questions and answers and had a lot of fun in the process.

Thanks to Greg for writing about this charming object in the archaeology collection.

 It’s a pleasure to report that Greg has now published an article about his research on Roman mice in an archaeology magazine released in time for New Year 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

Roman Mice at Manchester Museum

Visitor Assistants inspecting mouse bones from Roman Manchester

The gallery talk for Manchester Museum Visitor Services Assistants earlier today seems to have passed off successfully. It is hard not to register an impact  when your talking point is second only to panda cubs in the cuteness stakes. This being an archaeology gallery tour I hasten to say that we weren’t looking at any live animals only their archaeological remains. They came from a particular context from excavations on a Roman site in the centre of Manchester.

Examining the mouse bones

The mouse bones are incredibly small but the late Derek Yaldon identified them as those of the Yellow-necked mouse (Apodemus flavicollis). It transpires that this mouse has an unusual distribution in south-east England and in the Severn valley northwards into Shropshire. Zoologists have argued that this distribution relates to the presence of deciduous woodland. The Yellow-necked mouse is associated with this environment even more than the Wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus). So we appear to have a good indication from these tiny bones that lots of trees were growing in and around Manchester during Roman times.  There is a record for Salford Hundred (which included Manchester)  in the Domesday Survey of 1086 to say that woodland extended  9.5 leagues by 5 leagues (about 23 km x 12 km) so there was a good habitat for the Yellow-necked mouse into the Middle Ages in Manchester.

Close up of mouse bones (scale in millimetres)

The reason why Manchester Museum has these bones is somewhat upsetting and any small children or those of a sensitive nature should look away now. The mouse bones came from the sediment in the bottom of a Roman amphora that was found during Prof. Barri Jones’ excavations in Manchester. The neck and handles of the amphora or storage vessel had been broken off and it’s been suggested that this was done deliberately to make it easier to bury the amphora in the ground, where it served as a horribly effective mouse trap. Once the poor mice fell in they couldn’t climb back out because the sides of the vessel curved inwards at the top. The mice drowned in water that collected in the bottom of the amphora and their bones were in the silt when the archaeologists excavated some 2000 years later.

The Roman army must have had a lot of experience of dealing with pests of various kinds because the food stuffs needed to feed the soldiers was stored in the capacious granaries that are a feature of Roman fort sites. In my VSA presentation we discussed the provision of cat flaps and even owl chutes to enable predators to enter granaries and keep down the mouse population. Babak asked if poisoned bait was used and referred to Chaldean rodent control measures. I’m not aware that the Romans used poisons but perhaps someone out there can enlighten us.

Roman mosaic with trompe l’oeil effect food debris and mouse

Despite their ruthlessness in this regard the Romans seem to have liked mice. There is a famous line in Plautus: ‘A mouse never entrusts its life to only one hole’ – for which quotation I am endebted to an article in The Telegraph by Victoria Lambert about celebrity pieds-a-terre, featuring a photo of actress Stephanie Beecham. If the Romans didn’t like the creatures, why have bronze figurines of mice nibbling food in a rather endearing way, or show them on those wonderful Roman mosaics depicting waste food on the floor? Sadly we don’t have a bronze mouse in Manchester Museum’s collection but I saw a fine example in a private metal-detected collection years ago in East Yorkshire.

Roman bronze mouse from East Yorkshire

We do however, have a lamp with an image of a mouse as decoration (below). It is a charming representation of a mouse sipping olive oil from the hole in the top of a lamp. Unfortunately it’s slightly damaged but the curl on the left on the photo below is the handle of the lamp, on which the mouse is sitting to get at the olive oil.

Roman mouse lamp at Manchester Museum (accession number 40647).

In an email one of our Visitor Services Assistants, Olga, had said she was really looking forward to this morning’s talk because she keeps Degu, small furry rodents from Chile, as pets. I somehow think it was perhaps just as well she didn’t come because she might have found it upsetting. By the time I’d finished speaking there were tears in the eyes of more than a few people in the group. If I give this talk in future I must remember to take along a box of tissues…

If you are of a sensitive disposition and can’t bear to attend the talk about mice in Roman Manchester you can find out more by reading:-

D.W.Yalden (1984?) ‘The Yellow-necked mouse, Apodemus flavicollis, in Roman Manchester’, Notes from the Mammal Society – No.48, pp.285-8.

This is a copy of the writer’s section which was published in S.Bryant, M. Morris & J.S.F.Walker (1986) Roman Manchester A Frontier Settlement The Archaeology of Greater Manchester, pp.81-2.

Readers may care to know that the same writer published a note on ‘Yellow-necked mice in archaeological contexts’ in Bulletin of the Peakland Archaeological Society (vol.33 for 1983, pp.24-9).

And see Greg Morton’s guest blog about Roman mice