Thumbs Up for Stampex

As the great and the good of the philatelic world converge on Islington for Spring Stampex we remember the Classical origins of the show.

Just as today's Olympic Games owe their inspiration to the Ancient Greeks so too are the stamp exhibitions of today part of a tradition that goes all the way back to Ancient Rome.  The Festivus Pollex or 'Festival of Thumbs', held twice yearly in Rome's Forum, was a regular bourse for the buying and selling of thumbs and a few similar body parts. In earlier times these had been taken from their unfortunate owners by Roman soldiers as trophies of war. However, always in search of new forms of pleasure, decadent Roman civilians had subsequently turned these grisly objects into a popular collectable.

Regular bourses for the sale of trinkets had taken place over many generations in Ancient Rome but came to a peak of popularity in the 1st Century BC. By that time most collectors had come to specialise in either the thumbs of Roman citizens alone, thumbs of the tribes of the growing Empire or thumbs from distant peoples beyond the extent of the known world.  This last subject was particularly difficult as it encouraged sharp practice among unscrupulous dealers who would for instance attempt to sell digits from apes and monkeys as the thumbs of "Africans of the far South".

The Festivus Pollex was filled with dealers stalls offering rare items purchased from returning legionaries as well as from a growing number of specialist travelling merchants.  Among the noted magistrates appointed to supervise the festival was one Gramus Parvuli, known as Graecus, for he had spent many years in Greece among their noted philosophers, studying Stoic thought and hair reduction.

The bourse was normally arranged in a horseshoe pattern with small additional stalls for the selling of beverages and croci, an unappetising but cheap snack of bread topped with melted cheese. This is known today as a croque-monsieur and it still tastes like a rubber sandal.  Being a religious people, at the end of the day some dealers would visit the shrine of Olivius, god of avarice (then a virtue rather than a vice) and sit upon the steps counting their takings. Others would rush to the temple of Stella, goddess of thirst, and drink beer in her honour.

Children would be given slave fingers to play with as an entry into the hobby but adults would preserve more valuable specimen thumbs in glass bottles of roughly human shape, suspended in a preserving liquid made from olive oil and white wine vinegar. These bottles would then be 'dressed' in doll-sized costumes that approximated that of the tribe in question, whether it be Parthian, Gaul, Briton or similar.  It was said that the accidental breaking of one of these bottles on a plate of lettuce and radishes at a poorly controlled orgy was to lead directly to the modern salad.

Provenance of the rarer thumbs became an increasingly problematic matter and so a small group of experts came together to pronounce on contentious examples. One such, Junius Talorius, retained a collection of complete corpses from the scarcer tribes, against which comparisons could be made and authenticity decided. These were the first expertising bodies.

For reasons unknown these experts would only accept recompense in wine. In honour of that tradition it is still considered acceptable for wine to be given to expert committees in payment of invoices.

In the last days of the Republic the leading collector of his day was Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was rumoured to possess the most valuable thumb then known, that of Alexander the Great. It was rumoured to have been stolen from the general's tomb in Alexandria and smuggled back to Rome by a method still favoured by drugs mules today. We cannot be sure, but suspect that Cicero would have appreciated the later irony of his own thumb being surreptitiously removed by a collector in the dead of night when his hand was nailed to the door of the Senate as an act of retribution by his enemies.

Julius Caesar himself was known to dabble and at the Spring Festivus in March 44 BC was seen to purchase a particularly large Nubian thumb in spite of warnings that this was a dark omen. A recently discovered Roman history now indicates that, rather than "Et tu Brute?", Caesar's last words were in fact, "Wait a minute. Everyone stand still, I've dropped my thumb."

This week we look forward to meeting clients old and new at the Grosvenor stand at Festivus Stampex. Fingers and thumbs will be crossed for a successful show.

JG