a.d. V Id. Sept.
September 9 in Ancient Rome
Birth of Honorius
birthAD 384
Julian date · ≈ Sep 10 on our calendar
Theodosius I's second son Honorius, later Western emperor, was born.
Theodosius I · Honorius
Background
Honorius was the younger son of Theodosius I and his first wife, Aelia Flaccilla. Socrates records that he was born on 9 September 384, in the consulship of Richomer and Clearchus per Socrates, probably in Constantinople. His elder brother Arcadius was already Augustus.
Theodosius took the boy to Rome in 389 and made him Augustus in 393. When Theodosius died in January 395, the empire was divided between the brothers: Arcadius, about 17, in the East, and Honorius, aged 10, in the West, under the guardianship of the general Stilicho, who married him to his daughter Maria.
Honorius reigned for 28 years, mostly from Ravenna, which became the western court in 402 because it was easy to defend behind marshes. His reign saw Stilicho's execution in 408, Alaric's sieges of Rome and its sack in 410, and the loss of control over Britain and much of Gaul and Spain. Famine during the sieges hit Rome's poor hardest per Zosimus and Olympiodorus, later sources. Procopius tells a story that Honorius, told "Rome has perished", feared for his pet chicken named Roma per Procopius, writing over a century later; likely a joke. He died in 423.
Ancient source: Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 5.12 · Reference
Sources
☁ Rome today (1991–2020 avg): 27°/17°C (81°/63°F) · rain 23% of days
Rome in SeptemberThe vintage needed extra hands; Cato explains how to contract out the harvest…
Fields & crops
Vintage season: grapes picked, trodden and pressed, must boiled down, and jars sealed. Columella details preparing vats and keeping workers fed per Columella 11.2, 12. Varro notes that the vintage falls between the autumn equinox and the setting of the Pleiades, when apples are also picked per Varro, Rust. 1.34.
Courts & law
The long Ludi Romani (5–19 Sept. in the late Republic) suspended much public business late Republic.
Senate & politics
Augustus' birthday (23 Sept.) became a public festival; under the emperors the date was marked across the empire imperial era. Under Augustus, the 23 September birthday saw games and banquets; in the province of Asia, the new year was even moved to start on that date per the Priene calendar inscription, 9 BC.
Military
Late campaigns before autumn; triumphs were sometimes held in September at the end of a war. The Ludi Romani opened with a grand procession through the Circus in which young men of military age marched on horse and on foot per Dionysius of Halicarnassus 7.72.
Festivals & religion
Ludi Romani, Rome's oldest games, for Jupiter, with the Epulum Iovis on the Ides (13 Sept.) and the consul driving a nail into the temple wall on the Ides in early times per Livy 7.3.
Daily life
The vintage needed extra hands; Cato explains how to contract out the harvest and pressing per Cato, Agr. 144–47. Workers drank lora, a thin wine from re-soaked grape skins. For tenants, the harvest decided whether rent could be paid; Pliny the Younger complains of tenants falling into arrears after bad years per Pliny, Letters 9.37.
Sources: Cato, De Agri Cultura 144–47 · Pliny the Younger, Letters 9.37
All days in September →
LATIN LINE OF THE DAY
Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura quae legis hic.
“Some are good, some middling, more are bad, of what you read here.”
Martial, Epigrams 1.16 · translation ours (literal)
