On a soggy London day last September, a professional pastry chef and amateur archeologist named Regis Cursan uncovered a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman brothel token from the banks of the Thames.
Cursan later told a reporter for London’s The Daily Mail that he found the token while walking the banks of the river with his metal detector during very low tide.
Cursin said, “When I rubbed the sand off the artefact (sic) the first thing I saw was the number on one side and what I thought was a goddess on the other. Little did I know at the time it was actually a rare Roman brothel token.”
It was the first of its kind to be found in England. Tokens such as these often depicted specific sexual acts, which historians think was necessary to convey to the sex worker what the client wanted, since many did not speak Latin, according to The Daily Times story. Check out the story and pictures of the token here.
I mention this story because back in 2001, there was a skinny American kid who had a similar experience.
Pella is hot in June. Like nearly everywhere our stuffy buses took us in Greece that summer, the sun over Pella (Helios?) seemed to have made a pact long ago with Erebus, a primordial deity of darkness, to keep the shadows to a minimum.
I was taking a class in archeology as part of a study abroad program with my university. Roughly three weeks into the course, I decided archeology was not for me. Just the thought of spending one more minute discerning Ionic from Corinthian columns, triglyphs from metopes, and I could feel the glaze descend over my open eyeballs.
But then Pella happened.
We stepped off the bus and into the dusty, dry heat of the Greek summer to find a group of graduate students digging into an embankment. Each section was marked with red rope, and the ground had been dug into a kind of precise step-like pattern. Behind the diggers were a line of wood and chicken wire sifters. The diggers would dump the dirt from the embankment onto the sifters, and using small spades and brushes, the others would attempt to cull gold, jewels, statues or any other piece of living history from the antediluvian soil.
At first I was a digger, loading soil onto the chicken wire baskets for my classmates to sift. We found human bones and lots of pottery shards. One person found a small pot, nearly intact.
After digging for a while, it was my turn to sift. I sat on an overturned plastic crate and began to separate soil and rock from pottery, nature from ancient man. Then, just minutes into my career as a true archeologist, a glimmer of purple caught my eye. Amongst the dirty brown and dusty grey of the Grecian soil was a sight no one had seen in thousands of years.
A token. A trinket. A woman, squatting with her hands on her vulva.
Part of me thought it was a joke. Another part was ecstatic.
At the suggestion of one of the grad students, I took a quick photo of the token before someone from the museum snatched it from my grasp.
There were handshakes, “attaboys,” and a few scowls and Greek curses from jealous grad students. I had found something that would go in the museum, I was told.
Later, my professor said the woman on my token was Baubo, an old crone made famous for a revealing encounter she supposedly had with the Goddess Demeter.
From Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
"Baubo, having received Demeter as a guest, offers her a draught of wine and meal. She declines to take it, being unwilling to drink on account of her mourning. Baubo is deeply hurt, thinking she has been slighted, and thereupon uncovers her secret parts and exhibits them to the goddess. Demeter is pleased at the sight, and now at least receives the draught, – delighted by the spectacle! These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians! These are also the subjects of Orpheus’ poems. I will quote you the very lines of Orpheus, in order that you may have the originator of the mysteries as witness of their shamelessness:"
"This said, she drew aside her robes, and showed a sight of shame; child Iacchus was there, and laughing, plunged his hand below her breasts. Then smiled the goddess, in her heart she smiled, and drank the draught from out the glancing cup."
I never became an archeologist. Ironically, it was a paper I wrote for this class about the city of Vergina that convinced me to seriously consider writing as a career. Lacking a computer, I wrote it by hand at the last minute. I was forced to miss my classmates’ trip to climb Mt. Olympus, but managed to rescue my grade from a low C and convert it into a mid-range B.
I don’t know what became of Baubo. I hope she is in the museum. Upon reading about Cursan’s find this week, I emailed a professor at the newly constructed Archeological Museum of Pella in the hopes of tracking down my find.
Even if I never hear back, it’s okay. I have a blurry picture and a memory that is irreplaceable.
