I am five feet, eleven inches tall, a height that I like to say is the tallest a short man can be. Men in my mother’s family are uniformly six footers or better, but my paternal line is much more modestly proportioned. The Italians are not exactly a towering people. We’ve done well in the sports of this country that do not rely primarily on an impressive frame—baseball, boxing (in the lower weight classes, at least), yes, hoops, the gridiron, not so much.
Indeed, the first short joke in written history is, I think, reported in Caesar, who reports some jibes from an ill-fated Celtic force under siege who were incredulous at the engines the Romans were building at a distance.
Ubi vineis actis aggere exstructo turrim procul constitui viderunt, primum inridere ex muro atque increpitare vocibus, quod tanta machinatio a tanto spatio instrueretur: quibusnam manibus aut quibus viribus praesertim homines tantulae staturae—nam plerumque omnibus Gallis prae magnitudine corporum suorum brevitas nostra contemptui est—tanti oneris turrim in muro posse conlocare confiderent?
When they espied in the distance, after the protective pens had been set up and the trenchworks laid out, that a tower was being constructed, they at first began to laugh at us from the wall and to shout aloud, because such an engine was being set up at such a great distance: To what hands or what strengths will people of such little stature—for to among all the Gauls, on account of their own bodies’ size, our shortness is a matter of mockery—would they believe they could move a tower of such weight upon the wall?
With understated satisfaction, Caesar reports that the garrison had another thing coming.
Ubi vero moveri et adpropinquare moenibus viderunt, nova atque inusitata specie commoti legatos ad Caesarem de pace miserunt, qui ad hunc modum locuti: non se existimare Romanos sine ope divina bellum gerere, qui tantae altitudinis machinationes tanta celeritate promovere et ex propinquitate pugnare possent, se suaque omnia eorum potestati permittere dixerunt.
When indeed they saw it being moved and approaching the walls, disturbed by this novel and unaccustomed sight, they sent legates to Caesar about making peace. They spoke after this fashion—they said that they did not think the Romans, who could move engines of such height with such speed and so fight in close quarters, were waging war without divine assistance, and that they would hand over themselves and all their goods to the Romans’ power.
Perhaps “towering” is the right word, after all.
Nor were the discomfited Gauls the only group that attributed the Romans with more than human powers. Saxo Grammaticus, writing in the thirteenth century, accepted the existence of giants as a matter of empirical fact: What else could explain the great, moldering ramparts that dot the hills and fields of Northern Europe? It would not be quite right to say that the good Dane was wrong; we might just add that the giants who built those ramparts rarely cracked the six-foot mark.
I myself have little experience with siege engines, or really any devices of war more sophisticated than a shotgun, so I tend to live down to my own unaided height. Much as I’d like to bring a touch of physical menace to the lives of my writers, verbal brutality is the limit. At five-eleven, one-fifty—not to mention being visibly myopic and usually somewhat rumpled—I don’t think it’s very effective. Nor do my vaguely simian face and disproportionately long arms diminish the ridiculousness. It’s like getting berated by a gibbon in a necktie.
It’s a shame. The tall and the handsome always seem to have an easier time of it. For everyone else, though, I do have one gold-plated piece of advice: Get an even shorter wife. Irrespective of my travails in the world at large, I will always be taller than my children.
