Today's “Rich” Athletes: Paupers by Roman Standards

 

Today's “Rich” Athletes:  Paupers by Roman Standards

 

With the World Cup going on, and with all of the recent attempts by politicians and most of the news media to work the populace into a frenzy of envy with their blather about “taxing the wealthy,” I was reminded of another successful group that is often the target of organized envy-- professional athletes.

 

Most people think that those huge athletes’ salaries are a modern development, probably beginning with Babe Ruth.

 

At his peak in 1930, the Babe was pulling down $80,000 a year, when the median income in the USA was under $2,000, and a brand-new Cadillac cost less than $3000.  He made big money because he drew big paying crowds.

 

But he wasn't the first wealthy sports figure-- not by a VERY long shot.

 

More than 2000 years before F1 or NASCAR, the Romans had made chariot racing into a big-time sport, with thousands of spectators cheering on their favorites in huge “speedways” such as the Circus Maximus.

 

And, as with any big-time sport, the athletes made big bucks.  And they had an extra handicap-- most of them started out as slaves!  But in ancient Rome, slaves could often keep any outside money they earned.  Racers could keep their prize money, and eventually buy their freedom.

 

The best of all these was Gaius Appuleius Diocles (“Guy” to his pals, I don't doubt.)  

 

He started out at the age of 18, as a slave racing driver, and eventually bought his freedom.  He continued to race until he retired at 42.    During his career, according to Mark Golden's Sport in the Ancient World from A to Z, he won 1,462 of his 4,257 races, and placed second 861 times.  They didn't have anything like a “NASCAR Hall of Fame” back then, but his fans did erect a monument to him.  (The Romans were very big on monuments.)  This was in 146 AD.   The plaque from that monument is still around today.  Ya think the “NASCAR Hall of Fame” will still be around 2000 years from now?

 

So how rich was old “Guy?”  Well, according to Golden's book, Diocles made more than 35 million sesterces in total prize money – worth about FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS in today's purchasing power!!!  And that was without doing a single commercial for athletic sandals or Acme Chariot Wheels.

 

This makes old Guy the richest athlete in the history of the world.  Not bad for a boy from the slave pens!

Dread Pirate Roberts

 

The REAL “Dread Pirate Roberts”

Forget Blackbeard!  He was a dilettante next to Roberts!

 

“The Princess Bride” is one of my all-time favorite movies.  It’s one of the few movies that’s as good as the book it‘s based on.  My hat’s off to director Rob Reiner, who also brought us another comedy classic, “This is Spinal Tap.”

One of “Bride’s” central characters is “The Dread Pirate Roberts.”  Although the movie is a fantasy, I was surprised to learn, a couple of years ago, that there really was a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” and he was probably the most “successful” pirate of all time!

John Roberts started out as an honest sailor, eventually working his way up to third mate of a merchant ship.  In 1719 his ship, Princess of London, was captured by two pirate ships off the coast of Africa. The pirates had suffered some losses in the fight, especially their navigator, so they “recruited” crewmen from the Princess.  Roberts very reluctantly became the new navigator.

Gradually, he became less and less reluctant, as he found that he really liked the life of a pirate.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten the day in 10^th grade World History class when the teacher talked about The War of Spanish Succession.  At the time, though, it was a Very Big Deal.  Most of the major nations in the world were involved, and it was also a Very Expensive Deal.  Then, as now, it cost a fortune to build a warship and train a crew, so a few monarchs found a cost-free way to expand their fleets--the Letter of Marque.  This was literally a License to Steal.  With a Letter of Marque, a private ship-owner was authorized by his king to arm his vessel, and rob & pillage any enemy vessel he came upon--all he had to do was cut the king in on a piece of the action.  These licensed pirates were called “privateers.”

The war came to an end in 1714, and suddenly thousands of privateers found there was no market for their skills.  So, with nothing else going for them, they decided to go freelance.  Thus began the period that many historians (hopefully with a touch of irony) call “The Golden Age of Piracy.”

Another irony: your typical pirate ship was one of the most democratic institutions in the world at that time!    Even the captain was elected by the crew, and served only as long as he found rich prizes for them.  Except for living off the spoils of armed robbery, each pirate ship was like a miniature sovereign nation.  (Although, come to think of it, quite a few officially-recognized nations depend on armed robbery, too.)

As navigator, Roberts was a respected member of the crew, and he found that the freedom and the adventure suited him just fine.  

Just six weeks after he was “recruited,” the captain of his ship was killed, and the crew elected Roberts as new captain of the “Royal Rover.”

Eventually, Roberts changed his first name to Bartholomew (evidently he thought “John” wasn’t a cool enough name for a pirate), and began terrorizing the Caribbean, sometimes capturing as many as 22 ships at a time, catching them with their anchors down in various harbors around the islands.  

Contrary to what you may have seen in the movies, there were few pitched battles between pirate and merchant ships.  The common practice among pirates was to spare the lives of those who surrendered, and deal ruthlessly with those who resisted.  Quite a few captains decided to surrender, and let the insurance companies like Lloyds of London deal with the cargo losses.

Over time, Roberts’s single vessel was expanded to a small squadron of three, and was thought by many to be invincible.

Blackbeard, arguably the most famous of all the pirates, captured about two dozen ships in his career.  Roberts captured almost FIVE HUNDRED!  

In “the Princess Bride,” Roberts secretly retired.  In the real world, his ships were captured by the British Royal Navy ship “HMS Swallow,” a formidable warship of 50 guns. However, Roberts was supposedly killed in the battle, and his crew claimed to have buried him at sea.  His body was never recovered.  Maybe he did secretly retire, after all!

 The crews were captured, and only about a quarter of the white members were hanged.  The black members were all sold into slavery (another example of how the official governments of the world were less democratic than pirate ships.)

 The Dread Pirate Roberts lives on, in the type of immortality only available in the 21^st century – he has his own page on Wikipedia:

 wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Roberts  

 

Heinlein’s “Stealth” Black Character

Sneaking past fearful publishers

Robert A. Heinlein was America’s most influential science fiction writer.

A committed 1930s liberal and ardent New Dealer, Heinlein purposely populated his works with a diverse set of strong characters:

-- Jews (Morrie Abrams, Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947)

-- Asians (Lieutenant Wong, Space Cadet, 1948)

-- Muslims (Doctor Mahmoud, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961)

-- women (Podkayne Fries, Podkayne of Mars, 1962), and so on.

But fearful publishers shied away from black characters, worried that it would have an adverse effect on book sales. So Heinlein decided to create a “stealth” black main character, Rod Walker, in his 1955 novel, Tunnel in the Sky.

(Another giant of science fiction, Englishman Arthur C. Clarke, had already created the black character Jan Rodricks in his 1953 novel, Childhood’s End, but the British have always had fewer foam-at-the-mouth racists than the USA, probably because they never permitted slavery within the country (their colonies were a different matter altogether, of course.))

Heinlein’s trick worked. Although he sprinkled clues throughout the novel, hardly anyone twigged to it for decades. I certainly didn’t when I read it around 1959 or so, but I grew up in deeply segregated Florida, and didn’t even have a conversation with a black person until my junior year of college. (I’m not going to tell you what those clues are—you’ll have to read the book yourself.)

That Heinlein created Rod Walker as black was never in doubt; Heinlein scholar Robert James, Ph.D. says ”The evidence is slim but definite. First and foremost, outside of the text, there is a letter in which RAH firmly states that Rod is black… RAH often played games with the skin color of his characters, in what I see as a disarming tactic against racists who may come to identify with the hero, then realize later on that they have identified with somebody they supposedly hate.”

Today, publishers make sure that everyone knows that Rod is black, and the cover art shows it. It makes the publishers look “progressive.”