Small Talk and Potatoes

Did Romans standing in the queue at the thermopolium complain about the weather? Did they think that was a boring, cliché subject, the way we do? Did Persians at the bazaar ask vendors how the wife and kids were doing?

We have answers to all of this. Or rather, we have answers that come at us from between the lines, because the nature of small talk is that nobody important thinks it’s worth writing down.

But someone in Pompeii scratched a couplet into the wall complaining about how tedious all the other graffiti was. And a Greek philosopher wrote what amounts to a clinical description of the man who sits next to you uninvited and starts listing what he had for dinner. And Horace tried every polite exit strategy known to civilised society when cornered by a boor who won’t shut up and failed at all of them.