It’s one of those inescapable ‘facts’ about the Romans, like Gaius Caligula making his horse a consul (guaranteed to make me scream with irrational rage) or Nero fiddling while Rome burnt (acceptable only because it spawned a cracking joke in the late 1990s when a German company called Nero made CD burning software and called it Nero Burning Rom, which made me chuckle every time I made a mix CD as a teenager).
