An excerpt from a piece about gossip in the Oxford Press:
Hollywood producer Aaron Spelling summed it up nicely: "Gossip is about rich people having problems money can't solve." We may be poor. We may be nobodies. We may be utter flops; but we can still gloat.
There are bits of gossip in ancient authors; not many but some. Plutarch is not above dropping a peppercorn here and there: How Pericles, the ruler of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, always wore his helmet in public because he was ashamed of the shape of his head; how Lucius Aemilius Paulus, the Roman general who conquered Greece, divorced his wife over the objections of his friends.
"She's a perfectly good woman," they said.
Paulus took off his sandal and held it up. "This is a perfectly good sandal. Can any of you tell me where it pinches me?"
For real Tabasco, read Suetonius' "Lives of the Twelve Caesars." The episodes about Tiberius on the island of Capri, with a band of dissolute boys known as Spintrians, are so obscene that in the old bilingual Loeb texts they weren't translated, even though the whole purpose of the Loebs was to provide English and Latin on facing pages.
The great Roman poet, Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, to give his full name) was actually exiled for gossip. He apparently was privy to some sexual misconduct on the part of Julia, the daughter of the emperor Augustus, and couldn't keep his mouth shut. For this, he was sent to end his days in a hellhole called Tomyris on the shores of the Black Sea. He never saw Rome again.
Hollywood producer Aaron Spelling summed it up nicely: "Gossip is about rich people having problems money can't solve." We may be poor. We may be nobodies. We may be utter flops; but we can still gloat.
There are bits of gossip in ancient authors; not many but some. Plutarch is not above dropping a peppercorn here and there: How Pericles, the ruler of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, always wore his helmet in public because he was ashamed of the shape of his head; how Lucius Aemilius Paulus, the Roman general who conquered Greece, divorced his wife over the objections of his friends.
"She's a perfectly good woman," they said.
Paulus took off his sandal and held it up. "This is a perfectly good sandal. Can any of you tell me where it pinches me?"
For real Tabasco, read Suetonius' "Lives of the Twelve Caesars." The episodes about Tiberius on the island of Capri, with a band of dissolute boys known as Spintrians, are so obscene that in the old bilingual Loeb texts they weren't translated, even though the whole purpose of the Loebs was to provide English and Latin on facing pages.
The great Roman poet, Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, to give his full name) was actually exiled for gossip. He apparently was privy to some sexual misconduct on the part of Julia, the daughter of the emperor Augustus, and couldn't keep his mouth shut. For this, he was sent to end his days in a hellhole called Tomyris on the shores of the Black Sea. He never saw Rome again.