Roman History Books and More

a don's life: the face of julius caesar? come off it!

And right Mary Beard is!

The face of Julius Caesar? Come off it!

What do you do if you are an archaeologist and you find a nice Roman portrait bust in the bottom of a river?

The answer is simple. You go through every book of Roman portraits and coins until you find some famous figure in Roman history who looks vaguely likely your man. It is laborious and time-consuming. But the principles are simple – it’s like a game of snap.  read on

the death of peregrinus proteus, olympics a.d. 165

Thanks to Peter Stothard for finding this.

Peregrinus Proteus immolated himself at the Olympics, AD 165.  Here is Lucian of Samasota's satire:

The Death of Peregrinus

xkcd - a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

I'm sick and can't get up the energy to create a post, so I was fooling around on the net:

Duty Calls

assassination at asculum and other theatre assassinations

via David Derrick's Toynbee Convector:

Assassination at Asculum

An evening in 91 BC.

The theatre at Asculum, what is now Ascoli Piceno, in the Marche. Roman citizens and the confederate inhabitants of the town gather for a performance.

read on

autumn crocuses and more

For someone like me, who is botanically challenged, I said “Crocuses?,” when we strolled through the Rock Garden in the New York Botanical Garden on Sunday.

And indeed, there is is the Autumn Crocus, Colchicum autumnale, also known as “meadow saffron” or “naked ladies” (tsk, tsk).

    

Then there were the “animals” in the Children's Garden.  We were a bit late in the season for the Rose Garden, but some blooms were still fresh, and oh, what fragrances!'

View all my photos or go to the Photo Albums on the right-hand column.

breaking news of a broken statue

The BBC reports on a giant statue of Hadrian found in  pieces by archaelogists excavating the Roman baths in Sagalossos in modern-day Turkey. The sidebar links to the excavation's website .

three for the price of one

Mary Beard meets Lindsey Davis at a conference about Pompeii. (Not really about the book, though it probably got a mention.)

a perseus lament

This is one of my occasional laments, such as my earlier one on footnotes/endnotes.

This time, it's Perseus Digital Library.

Since they have switched to Version 4.0, things have gotten worse rather than better.  Some texts haven't moved to 4.0 yet, so one still may have to search the old site, and of the mirror sites, only Berlin is still working.  And of course, as usual, most of the time the little thingy on my browser keeps churning and churning and churning, despite a new fast laptop…

(Chicago mirror has switched to 4.0, but at this writing won't load.)

When do they ever get their act together?

The reason for what is more of a rant than a lament?  Cicero's letters in English.  I've given up for now as I don't have unlimited time. <VBS>

julius who?

The February issue of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography magazine has a feature Six Degrees of Julius Caesar (scroll down to the bottom half of the page), linking two people called Julius Caesar, one we've all heard of and one most of us probably haven't heard of before (well, I certainly hadn't anyway). The links in the chain will all be open for free reading during February.

asterix – the official website

Thanks to Mary Beard, again, here is the Asterix website for interested parties.

Lot's of interactive stuff for Asterix fans.  A bit confusing for this little old lady …

mary beard on learning latin

I came across this commentary by Mary Beard in The Guardian today:

Tacitus was no elitist
It is the sheer difficulty of learning the Latin language that makes it a great social leveller.

Mary Beard
Tuesday January 16, 2007
The Guardian

Imagine an evening at the theatre listening to words like this.  “Thine arms were gyved!  Nay, no gyve, no touch, was laid on me.  ‘Twas there I mocked him, in his gyves…”  It’s hardly a thrilling prospect.  But if the study of Greek and Latin in this country had been quietly stopped after the first world war (as nearly happened), this is how we would now all be experiencing Greek tragedy, for that was a quote from Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides’s Bacchae, published in 1904. It’s the leader of the chorus talking to the god Dionysus, who’s just escaped from prison – a “gyve” is apparently an old-fashioned word for a chain.  In a Greek-less world, that would be about as close to Euripides as we could get.

a postcard of ephesus (and toynbee on ephesus)

David Derrick, in his Toynbee convector, writes about Toynbee and Ephesus:

“He could lose himself in a reverie at a historical site, as if he had known it centuries before.  He gives many other examples.”

This is indeed a wonderful description!  It reminded me that I have an old postcard of  another section of Ephesus, Hadrian’s Temple, Ephesus, Curetes Way.

google books and juvenal satires

In connection with Bingley's Johnson/Juvenal post of today, I found several Juvenal Satires entries in Google Books, including the Oxford World's Classics edition.

It seems that the project is coming along nicely.

Presumably, one has to create a free Google account – which I do have already – to be able to read the book.  There are a lot of navigational links which are quite helpful once one gets the hang of it.  Since this is the beta version, we may expect improvements.

Print edition: The Satires (Oxford World's Classics)

historians’ 21st century prose

Bryan Ward Perkins, in his The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, discusses A.M.H. Jones and comments on the latter’s  “measured twentieth-century prose.”

That got me thinking about twenty-first-century prose.  In his BMCR review of the above book and Peter Heather’s  The Fall of Rome: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians,  James J. O'Donnell bemoans  “…the flippant lecture-platform style.  Many pages read as if they were taken from the lectures at Oxford on ancient history by Colonel Blimp’s great-grandson addressing the grandchildren of Bertie Wooster.”  (on Peter Heather)

Although his comment is rather over the top and “uppity,” to use his own phrase, I'm with Professor O'Donnell here.  I wonder whether later generations will have to rush to the dictionary when they read, in Heather’s book, lepcisgate, or ‘of the straightforward yah-boo-sucks variety’ (on St. Augustine).

for j. b. bury fans

Irene quoted wikipedia in her blog post on J. B. Bury as saying that J. B. Bury wrote articles for the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

According to the list of contributors from the wikisource article on the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (scroll down for the link to the list of contributors -- it seems to be impossible to link to it directly), Bury contributed the following articles (all linked to the 'Love To Know' version -- note that many articles have scanning errors, but they're not as bad as they used to be):

Alexius I
Alexius II
Alexius III
Baldwin I
Baldwin II
Basil I
Basil II
Belisarius
Edward Gibbon
The Later Roman Empire

for latin speakers: vicipædia – libera encyclopædia

While googling something Roman history related, I came across this Wiki site in Latin: http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagina_prima.

Latin Speakers, rejoice!

210 reasons for the decline of the roman empire

In his excellent and accessible book The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins displays a table (3.1 – in German)  with "A list of 210 reasons, from A-Z, that have been suggested, at one time or another, to explain the decline and fall of the Roman empire."  It begins with Aberglaube (superstition) and ends with Zweifrontenkrieg (two-front war). As you can imagine, some of it is hilarious!

The list was compiled by Alexander Demandt, a German Professor of Ancient History at the Free University Berlin, in his book "Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt". Some of you may be familiar with him as editor of Theodor Mommsen's lecture transcriptions, A History of Rome Under the Emperors.

I did some googling and found an English translation:

210 Reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire

Unfortunately, the German list seems not to be available online; it reads even funnier in the original, there is a lot of "Über...". In the translation, it begins with Abolition of gods and ends with Vulgarization. #203 is Tristesse . . .

Enjoy!

more on Gibbon & a note on blogging

For the next three or four weeks I'm tied up with work on an exhibit that opens towards the end of May, which seriously cuts into my blogging time. And I'm reading Gibbon for the chats, of course, which takes more time than usual too, as you all know.

Luckily for us, Bingley, who is way ahead of us in his reading, has responded to an SOS and kindly agreed to help out with Gibbon related blogs, including suggested discussion points. I still will have to post these myself, as the pricing level of this blog does not permit multiple authors. 

Today, Bingley suggests two links with more information about the emperors discussed by Gibbon:

In DIR, De Imperatoribus Romanis, can be found The Imperial Index: The Rulers of the Roman Empire From Augustus to Constantine XI Palaeologus.

livius.org, under Roman Empire, has articles on some of the emperors and brief sketches of key background information for others.

lament on the demise of footnotes

This I my lament…I do bemoan the end of footnotes.

Pages may have looked more cluttered, and there have been instances where there are more footnotes than text space on any given page – the worst example in my library is Joachim Marquardt's Das Privatleben der Römer, 1886 (reprography by Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1990); in the olden days, I guess, publishers did do anything a learned author wanted.

However, I resent having to go to the back of a book for endnotes all the time, the more so when there are no page number references on top of the endnote pages. The latter should not be difficult in today's age of electronic type-setting. One pays enough for university press books and such anyway…

Sulla in opera

Syllecta Classica at the Classics Department of the University of Iowa is a journal for interdisciplinary approaches to classics and its related disciplines. In a 1997 conference transcribed in Syllecta Classica vol. 10, two opera libretti with the subject of Sulla are discussed, with an abstract, Seneca and the "Sulla" Operas of Handel and Mozart, available. Sulla is called "the tyrannical and nearly irredeemable figure."

The operas are Silla by Giacomo Rossi with music by Händel, and Lucio Silla by Giovanni de Gamerra with music by Mozart.

The conference as such is reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.06.30: John Porter, Eric Csapo, C.W. Marshall, Robert C. Ketterer, Crossing the Stages: The Production, Performance and Reception of Ancient Theater. Syllecta Classica, Volume 10, 1999.   Pp. xii + 282.

  Mozart Libretto in English. Synopis. 

Johann Christian Bach, at about the same time as Mozart, composed an opera also called Lucio Silla, with the same plot that Mozart used.

Hadrian Coins

Bingley wrote in a comment in this blog: "Something that the Birley book has brought home to me is the amount of communication between Hadrian and the people via coins. It was something I was vaguely aware of, that the government did use coins as a propaganda vehicle, but I hadn't realised there was quite so much of it going on. It seems almost everything Hadrian did meant a commemorative issue of coins."

Coins frequently provide missing pieces in Roman history. I have put up some links showing images of Hadrian coins.

Here are several denarii and dupondii courtesy Doug Smith, who has given me permission to show a number of his coins on my website. This includes the  above coin, depicting the traveling emperor.

In his early travels through the empire, Hadrian was greatly concerned with the training and fitness of the army in the provinces. This generated a number of Exercitus coins, which can be seen here. The coins usually show Hadrian addressing soldiers.

The next two pages give a general overview of Hadrian coins: From the Museum of Antiquities at the University of Saskatchewan and from WildWinds.

Then there is the Alexandrian series from a commercial page. This page concerns itself also with Sabina, Antinous and Aelius.

Finally, in a dark chapter, seen from the other side, the Bar Kokhba War Coins from Jerusalem Through Coins, including the Bar Kochba Sela, a Bar Kochba Denarius, and a Bar Kochba Middle Bronze, all from 134-135 CE.

"Imperial Cults within Local Cultural Life: Associations in Roman Asia"

I came across this excellent blog, Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, by Philip A. Harland of Concordia University, Montreal. It is linked to his website, which contains the full text of several of his published articles.

Imperial Cults within Local Cultural Life: Associations in Roman Asia, Ancient History Bulletin / Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 17 (2003) 85-107, fits neatly into our current subject and has several references to Hadrian and Antinous. (also as PDF)

Hadrian as administrator

In his Imperial Biography Hadrian : The Restless Emperor (Roman Imperial Biographies) (Roman Imperial Biographies (Paperback), Anthony Birley reconstructs the travels of the emperor from ancient historians, inscriptions and other archaeological evidence, fasti, and similar sources. Theodor Mommsen, in his lectures on the Roman Empire, talks about Hadrian's administrative actions mostly together with those of other emperors. The only personal comment I could find is also quoted in Andrew Hill's Historians and their Craft: The Evolution of the Historical Hadrian: While Mommsen dismisses Hadrian as a person, "By and large, Hadrian was not a pleasant character; he possessed a repellant manner and a venomous, envious, and malicious nature which cruelly avenged itself on him", he also calls him a "great reformer".

Hadrian, it seems to me, peripatetic though he was, planned his tours minutely, and he revealed himself an avid micro-manager to whom, when the occasion arose, no detail was to small. This ranged from personally training troops and reinforcing borders to re-organizing cities, founding new ones, creating games, etc.

The Official Rules for Writing Historical Fiction

Have a good giggle about this from another blogger:

The Official Rules for Writing Historical Fiction: Rules for Classical-Set Fiction

Popillius and the line in the sand

There are plenty of sources for Gaius Popillius Laenas's famous confrontation with Antiochus near Alexandria, drawing a circle in the sand around the king and thus causing him to withdraw from Egypt:

Polybius, Fragments of Book 29

Livy, Book 45.12

Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, Book 31

Appian's History of Rome: The Syrian Wars (§§66-70)

JSTOR has the afore-mentioned paper by Fergus Millar: The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200-151 B.C., Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 74, 1984 (1984) , pp. 1-19
Check with your university or public library for JSTOR access.

The story also has made its way into the more esoteric bible studies as well as modern political writings: History and the Hyperpower by Eliot A. Cohen (PDF), Foreign Affairs Magazine, July/August 2004.

Maps of the Roman Empire

There are a number ancient maps online. The ones I found and personally consider helpful are:

Some Maps of the Roman Empire  (Lacus Curtius)

Table of Maps
Cross-referenced Index of Place Names, ancient and modern.

There is also the Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd 1911, 1923-26

Reference Map of Ancient Italy, Northern Part
Reference Map of Ancient Italy, Southern Part
Reference Map of Ancient Greece, Northern Part
Reference Map of Ancient Greece, Southern Part
Clicking on the maps anywhere enlarges the sections to readable size.

Unfortunately, I didn't discover the maps of Greece until today, a little late for Livy…

Appian on the Macedonian Wars

Appian of Alexandria's Roman History has come down to us in fragments only − with the exception of the Roman Civil Wars and a few others, including the Preface.  (The page Appian of Alexandria lists all chapters of this work)

www.livius.org/ has made an attempt to reconstruct The Macedonian Wars from various fragments.

Appian lived c.95-c.165. The above site calls him "one of the most underestimated of all Greek historians."

More on Appian: The Origins, Program, and Composition of Appian’s Roman History
Gregory S. Bucher, Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.)
Transactions of the American Philological Association 130 (2000) 411–458

Literary Frauds: the books of Numa Pompilius

Numa Pompilius was one of the legendary kings of Rome. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 relates:  "… Livy (xl. 29) tells a curious story of two stone chests, bearing inscriptions in Greek and Latin, which were found at the foot of the Janiculum (181 B.C.), one purporting to contain the body of Numa and the other his books. The first when opened was found to be empty, but the second contained fourteen books relating to philosophy and pontifical law, which were publicly burned as tending to undermine the established religion."

Livy Text (Vol. VI)

On JSTOR, there can be found Literary Frauds among the Romans by Alfred Gudeman, Transactions of the American Philological Association (1869-1896), Vol. 25. (1894), pp. 140-164.

According to this, Livy traced the story back to Piso, and it is also mentioned by Pliny, who follows the annalist Cassius Hemina.  Gudeman points out the obvious fabrication (pp.3-5), including the anachronism of Numa supposedly having been a pupil of Pythagoras, but suggests that the books were burned not for their spuriousness but because they were "detrimental to the stability of the commonwealth and subversive of civic morality."

Check with your university or public library for JSTOR access.

Plutarch:  Numa Pompilius

The Style of Polybius

Here are two items which address, among other things, the writing style of Polybius in his Histories

Introduction to Polybius by Col. H. J. Edwards, C.B., c.1927

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.11.27:
Cultural Politics in Polybius's Histories (Hellenistic Culture and Society)
by Craige Brian Champion
Apparently a book worthwhile reading.

Polybius background on Wikipedia

The Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, 186 BCE

There was a discussion in the last chat as to what prompted the suppression of the Bacchic Cult in 186 BCE in Rome, as described by Livy in Book XXXIX.8.ff. I list some related links in the comments below.

I browsed through my library and found Eric Gruen's Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. In the chapter "The Appeal of Hellas" on Page 258 he briefly addresses the issue. In Gruen's opinion, it was a manipulation by the Senate  'to reaffirm and entrench public control over religion.' He emphasizes the fact that it was 'high drama,' but that thereafter the cult was not totally forbidden: exceptions were allowed as long as permission by the authorities was sought.

Further comments are greatly appreciated.

Livy's Sources

At the last chat we talked about historians whom Livy refers to. I promised to do some checking in my trusty Geschichte der Römischen Literatur by Michael von Albrecht.

Claudius is the annalist Claudius Quadrigarius. He wrote at least 23 books. He loosened the annalistic format through letters, speeches, and anecdotes. "He pleases through brevity and preciseness." It is not known whether he began ab urbe condita or with the Gallic Sack of Rome. He wrote through Sulla's time.

The annalist Valerius Antias wrote 75 books ab urbe condita through at least 91 B.C., maybe through the death of Sulla.  He is known for his embellishments, especially of the importance of his Valerian gens and his exaggerations of battle casualties. He follows the Hellenistic writers in his narrative style.  "[His] flights of fancy are compensated by rationalistic explanations and by interspersing official reports, which may well be not imaginary."

Velleius Paterculus refers to both in Book II.9 of his Roman History: "[At this time] Sisenna, the author of the Histories, was still a young man. His works on the Civil Wars and the Wars of Sulla were published several years later, when he was a relatively old man. Caelius was earlier than Sisenna, while Rutilius, Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antias were his contemporaries."