I don’t know about you, but I love the TV programme, Q.I.
The main reason for loving it is that it’s presented by Stephen Fry who is dead funny, hugely urbane, unfailingly polite and very (not Quite as the programme title would have it) Interesting, with the amounts of facts, knowledge and quirky little bits of information at his fingertips. An ideal dinner guest? You bet. I’d even bring the wine. And the food. And my full attention. And bore everyone stupid about it for the rest of my life. He’s worth watching whatever he does, but sometimes he’s gets it wrong.
Last night, for example, he threw into the conversation (it was about the weirder ways of collecting tax, of all things) that there was no evidence at all – none whatsoever – for the famous census which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. By the time he’d finished, the whole of idea of the Romans having a census, with everyone trooping back obediently to their place of origin, seemed downright dorky.
Now, it’s perfectly true that we don’t have the census record for Bethlehem in BC/AD whatever, but the Romans certainly did take censuses (or should that be censii?). They were a bureaucracy, after all and, like all bureaucracies, loved records. In Roman Egypt census returns were made every fourteen years from about A.D. 20 till the time of Constantine. Many of these census papers have been discovered (they were called apographai, the name used by St. Luke.) In the Venice Archaeological Museum, there’s the tombstone of a Roman Knight, one Q. Aemilius Secundus, who was decorated for his service in Syria under Augustus and who also conducted a census of 117,000 citizens. In the British Museum there’s a papyrus from Roman Egypt AD 104 which orders people to return to their homes for a census.
So although we haven’t got the actual census, to say that the idea is inherently silly seems – well, silly.
Incidentally, years ago, when things were a bit more settled in the Middle East, I heard a spokesman for the Bethlehem Tourist Board on the radio asking, in a rather despairing kind of way, that if people wanted to visit Bethlehem, could they do so at another time of year than Christmas. “You can’t,” he said, “get a bed for love or money in Bethlehem at Christmas.”
Some things never change!
How timely, since we're with our daughter and her English husband right now who love Q.I. We've seen it with them once or twice and will probably watch this program later this week--they get English televison in Canada-
ReplyDeleteAnd I shall be able to impress everyone with my up-to-date knowledge.
Well, a knowledge of how the Romans took censuses(ii?) is hardly up to date! But yeah - having those sort of facts at your fingertips is really cool. I had a vague notion of where to look, but I had to do some hunting round to get the facts. I hope your new addition is thriving!
ReplyDeleteI love Q.I. too, and it's rare to catch Stephen Fry out, but he doesn't always get it right. Census-taking in Roman times is a fairly compoicated subject, because like so many things concerning the Roman Empire, it varied from one province to another, depending on what bureaucracy was in place when the Romans took over. There don't seem to have been any big censuses in Britain - I think (from memory) there's evidence for two, but they were only small-scale regional affairs. On the other hand, it's true that Egypt and Judaea and other hot dry countries do have an advantage when it comes to preservation of Roman paperwork - there must have been far more of it in northern Europe but it hasn't survived two millennia of damp!
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