The Caudine Forks
Take a look at the article sent to me by Prof. Daniele Rossi …
Raise your hand if you don't know and don't use, every now and then, the expression "che c * lo!", not at all refined, but effective to the point of having become all too recurrent in everyday jargon.
Well, since everything has an origin, even what seems the most obvious and banal, this saying, which indicates an unexpected and welcome stroke of luck, is no exception.
I did not imagine that the birth of the saying dates back to the famous episode of the Forche Caudine , so, in thanking the professor once again for his contribution, I invite you to read his interesting and entertaining post.
The episode of the Caudine Forks in a drawing
The historian from Padua Tito Livio , lived at the turn of the first century. B.C. and the first century. A.D., in the ninth book of his monumental work Ab urbe seasoned CXLII books documents the following:
“(…) First the consuls were sent under the yoke semi-naked; then, as each was next in rank, so was he made an object of infamy; then, one after the other, the individual legions. Armed enemies stood around them, insulting and mocking.
Many were threatened with the sword, some even wounded and killed, if their faces, too harsh due to the impropriety of the facts, had offended the victor. Thus they were made to pass under the yoke and, which is even more painful, under the eyes of the enemies ".
The historical context is that of the so-called Second Samnite War , or the set of clashes, which saw the conquering Roman army as protagonists on the one hand and the people who then inhabited present-day Campania on the other, between 326 and 305 BC
The episode narrated, in particular, refers to the fate of the invaders, following the surrender, in the fight known as "Battle of the Caudine Forks ”, Which took place in the narrow gorges of Caudium (near Benevento).
Here the Caudini Samnites, famous for their pride, wanted to make their opponents, who had presented themselves in their territories with arrogance and far more numerous, pay the contemptuous gesture of rejecting the proposed agreement without a fight.
Therefore, when it was the Roman ambassadors, after the serious and unforeseen defeat on the strategic plan, to implore the suspension of hostilities, the hosts declared themselves available as long as the unilateral imposition of their conditions of peace was preliminarily accepted:and so it was.
Although the aforementioned source describes the facts in a fairly allusive way, as could be expected from those who were not an eyewitness and moreover a "partisan" writer, from the crossing of philological data on the lexicon of the time and testimonies on behavioral codes of armies on battlefields, modern historians are almost unequivocally in agreement in interpreting the situation more or less in these terms: the victors wanted to enjoy, almost sadistically, not only the spectacle of the moral humiliation of the powerful enemies , forced to plead, but also the administration of a harsh physical punishment .
In fact, the yoke Livio talks about was none other than the intersection of three spears held up, under which, in turn, first the highest ranking officers and then all the other soldiers were forced to pass, a sort of public and clear acceptance of the total defeat (a bit like today, clearly in the playful and much more goliardic context of play ping-pong among friends, when those who have lost "by coat" are asked to bend over and go under the game table).
Furthermore, the historian's use of terms such as "half-naked" and "indignitate" does not seem to leave room for many doubts about the penetration suffered by each of those who carried out that sad path, leaning forward.
From later comic sources, certainly not as authoritative but much more sarcastically explicit on the subject, it seems that the ironic custom of measuring the degree of good luck of a person in direct proportion to the size of her butt, as if to say:if you happen to be sodomized, the bigger your butt, the less pain you will feel! (Article written by Prof. Daniele Rossi ).