Wait a minute.
Episode what!? Hey! Stupid Mr. Roman History Man! You got that WRONG!. It’s not ‘IIX’, it’s ‘VIII’. Everyone knows that, right? That’s not how you write ‘8’ in Roman numerals!
Well, is it? There may be a way of writing Roman numerals that you were taught in school, but in the ancient world, things weren’t quite so clear cut. There never was and never has been any accepted standard for how Roman numerals are expressed.
In simple terms, Roman numerals use a combination of Latin alphabet letters allied to a tally system and, like all tally systems, it’s simply a matter of counting how many strokes are made to read the number expressed. In the same way you can count how long a prisoner has been in a jail cell, should you ever be arrested of course, by counting the strokes carved into a wall, you can count in Roman numerals too.
Roman numerals use an additive form, where another tally is added to the previous one to form a new number; I, II, III, IIII. Various letters are then used to signify powers of 5 and ten; V, X, L, C, D and M. A subtractive system can then be used where a tally is subtracted from the larger number for no other reason than it looks quite nice; IV, IX, XC, CD and so on.
So, which one did the Romans use?
All of them. Any of them. Sometimes all at once. And the beauty and simplicity of the system is that as long as you understand the basics, you can read the numbers no matter how you use them. So ‘IIX’ might make some people upset, because they expect to see ‘VIII’, but not only is it perfectly acceptable, the Romans themselves used IIX to mean 8.
Below is the tombstone of the senior Centurion (primus pilus) of the 18th Legion, Marcus Caelius. The 18th Legion were one of the ones lost in the famous defeat in the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD.
It reads:
M[ARCO] CAELIO T[ITI] F[ILIO] LEM[ONIA TRIBV] BON[ONIA]
P[RIMVS] O[RDO] LEG[IONIS] XIIX ANN[ORVM] LIII S[EMISSIS]
[CE]CIDIT BELLO VARIANO OSSA
[HVC] INFERRE LICEBIT P[UBLIVS] CAELIVS T[ITI] F[ILIVS]
LEM[ONIA TRIBV] FRATER FECIT
In English:
”To Marcus Caelius, son of Titus, of the Lemonian district, from Bologna
First Centurion of the Eighteenth Legion, 53 and a half years old.
He fell in the Varian War
His freedman’s bones may be interred here. Publius Caelius, son of Titus,
of the Lemonian district, his brother, erected [this]”
Here you can clearly see ‘XIIX’ being used for 18 rather than XVIII.
It might suggest that the 18th Legion preferred to use this form of notation for their name, or that such a system was the all the rage in fashionable 9AD. However, if we look at the funerary inscription for another soldier of the 18th Legion, Gaius Pompeius Proculus, we see something different:
This one reads:
C[AIUS] POMPEIVS C[AIUS] F[ILIO] TER[TIUS]
PROCVLVS
TRIB[UNUS] MIL[ILITUM] LEG[IO] XVIII
PRAEFECTVS FABRUM
SEVIR CENTVR[IAE] EQUIT[ES]
HIC SEPVLTVS EST
In English:
”To Gaius Pompeius Proculus, third son of Gaius,
Military Tribune of the Eighteenth Legion,
Praefectus Fabrum [a prefect in charge of craftsmen]
Sevir [an honorary title] of the Equestrian Units
Is Buried Here”
The 18th Legion is destroyed in the Varian disaster of 9AD alongside the 17th and the 19th and those numbers are never used for legions again. So, these two were serving in the same legion, at the same time, yet they are both using different numbering notations.
It really is just a matter of personal choice, it seems.
Elsewhere we see the seemingly haphazard approach applied to architecture. Around the outside of the Colosseum are a series of numbered entry gates. Here is Number 52, LII, as you’d expect:
And here is Number 54. Rather than the expected LIV, they have used LIIII.
Life is full of a certain type of person who, despite seeming to have no demonstrable knowledge, or qualifications related to the matter at hand, will brazenly insist that everything they are saying is right.
I get it. They’re annoying. But they’ve always existed and seem to exist more openly in the Information Age.
What the internet has done is not only provide people with all sorts of knowledge, some of it wonderful and some of it absolute bollocks, but also embolden some people with the idea that because they have been exposed to knowledge, that this grants them authority to dictate things to others as if they are somehow now authorities.
All these people have to do is watch a few documentaries about the Romans on the History Channel in order for them to feel like this proximity to knowledge has somehow allowed the smarts to rub off on them like shit on a blanket.
And you will meet a lot of these men (there, I said it) online who will absolutely 100% insist that Roman numerals must take certain forms or YOU’RE WRONG. The truth is that there is no defined way of expressing Roman numerals. Even the Romans themselves didn’t have one. And you can use the epigraphical record to demonstrate this.
Like most forms of communication, the important thing is getting one’s message across and as long as one can be understood by the recipient of the message, feel free to use whatever system you like.
The Romans did.
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