Roman History Books and More

reminder: january 3 gibbon chat

Our continuing chat on Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire resumes on January 3, a postponed event from November 15.

Chapters XVII to XXI:  Constantine and his family down to Julian's  time in Gaul (359);  religious controversies.  Some  people might want to skip Chapter XXI, as suggested by Bingley:  “The section on Julian is mainly a summary of Ammianus, whom we read, through the Julian novel, quite recently, so [people who participated in that chat] might want to do some judicious skipping here.”

As a refresher, below are blogs by Bingley and myself on the subject:

next gibbon book chat: november 15
from naissus to eboracum, 1700 years on
some resources on constantine
more constantine background for the gibbon chat
gibbon on constantinople and more
a review of “constantine and the christian empire”
the arch of Constantine

A Happy New Year to All!

a book of roman portraits

Via Adrian Murdoch and The Toynbee convector, a book on Roman portraits.  Sounds very enticing!

Roman Portraits, by Ludwig Goldscheider and Ilse Schneider-Lengyel,  Photographer.

David Derrick writes:

Roman Portraits has been reprinted, but get it in its original 1940 edition.  The printing of black and white photographs of artworks – and perhaps the photography itself – was much finer in the 1940s and ’50s than it is now.  Especially for murals and stone.

So if you want to try your luck with the 1940 edition, go to ABE Books or Alibris.

nine heroes tapestries and julius caesar / the unicorn tapestries (met museum)

Still from our Saturday visit to The Cloisters:  There is a gallery that houses the late 14th / early 15th century Nine Heroes Tapestries, depicting Pagan heroes Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar;  Christian heroes Charlemagne, King Arthur and Godfrey of Boullion;  and Hebrew heroes Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus.  I was quite taken with good old Julius Caesar, with his handle-bar mustache  and a divided, curly beard, and his crown!

caelius sedulius, fifth century christian poet

On Saturday before Christmas, we went to The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park, NY, which houses the bulk of the Medieval collection of the Met Museum.  We went there mainly to listen to a concert by the Pomerium, an a cappella group which sings Gregorian chants and Renaissance music.  Samples of their work.

The concert was mostly Gregorian chants and their Renaissance elaborations.  One was “A solis ortus cardine,” the text by the early fifth century Christian poet Caelius Sedulius, best known for his Carmen paschale.

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

SEDULIUS, COELIUS or Caelius (a praenomen of doubtful authenticity), a Christian poet of the first half of the 5th century, is termed a presbyter by Isidore of Seville and in the Gelasian decree.

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).

the met in december

Sunday we went into the big city, trains packed, incredible crowds on Fifth Avenue … and on to the Metropolitan Museum and its great annual Christmas tree and Baroque Neapolitan nativity scene.  It’s impossible to describe the elaborate crèche!  Pastoral and town scenes, Wise Men on camel and elephant, and much more.

There is also Judaica on View, from the Nuremberg Chronicle.

The main exhibit this and next month is Americans in Paris, an extensive overview of American painters in 19th century Paris, and those who did not live in Paris – short-term or long – but nonetheless exhibited at the salons and expositions…

constantine at the dnb

As a bonus, the DNB also has a Christmas competition, where you have to guess the connection between various people from their DNB biographies. One of these people, whose biography will presumably be available till the end of this month, is Constantine, who plays a large part in the Gibbon section we are reading for 3 January 2007.

looking ahead to magnus maximus

Even a subscription to the online version of the Dictionary of National Biography is beyond the means of most of us, let alone buying the book version. Those with access to a good public library service may find that it has an institutional subscription.

However, the DNB does put up daily specimen articles, which you can view for free for a week at a time, and today's article, which will be up until Saturday, is on Magnus Maximus. See also the DIR article, possibly written by a Mel Gibson fan.

Magnus Maximus features in Gibbon's chapter XXVII, which we will be discussing on 11 July 2007.

robert fagles’ aeneid translation

I treated myself to a Christmas present, and Robert Fagles’ Aeneid translation arrived in the mail today.

In his lengthy “Translator’s Postscript,” Fagles writes – comparing this Aeneid translation to his recent ones of The Iliad and The Odyssey:

Yet my versions of all three poems, different as those versions may be, share a common impulse.  Again I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no-man’s-land, if I can help it) between the features of an ancient author and the expectations of a contemporary reader.  Not a line-by-line translation, my version of the Aeneid is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Virgil’s language as to cramp and distort my own – though I want to convey as much of what he writes as possible — nor so “literary,”  in the stilted, bookish sense, as to brake his forward motion once too often.  For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more “literary,”  too little Latin.  I have tried to find a cross between the two: a modern English Virgil.

Until now, I have had my problems with reading Aeneid translations, but this one, oh my God! It's wonderful!

For anyone needing a last minute present for a classically minded person, this is it!

adrian goldsworthy interview on c-span2, december 16

Adrian Goldsworthy's recent talk about his Caesar: Life of a Colossus at the University of Virginia Book Store is going to air this weekend on C-SPAN2 Book TV. 

It's featured in their “Public Lives” series, airing
Saturday, December 16, at 12:00 pm and at 8:05 pm.

You'll probably be able to watch it online after it has been aired.

a postscript on the clark museum

Last summer, I blogged the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, better known as The Clark, and mentioned my favorite piano.

Mary Beard was visiting there, in her typical irreverent way, on the weekend.  (Not that she isn't right on the money…)  And lo and behold, she found an image of the Alma-Tadema piano!  It wasn't online when I blogged it.   I wish though they would show a frontal view, it's much more interesting.

Enjoy Mary's blog and the piano!

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

tyrian purple

In Gillian Bradshaw's Imperial Purple, our heroine Demetrias has to weave a purple cloak, a paludamentum, purported to be for the emperor Theodosius, but she soon smells a rat.  So does her equally heroic husband Symeon, a purple-fisher, meaning he fishes for murex brandaris, a marine snail and provider of the famous purple dye.  They live in the city of Tyre, the most famous place for purple dye making.  And so starts a scary adventure.

Wikipedia (handle with care), has an article, Tyrian Purple.  Pliny the Elder has a lot on the subject in his BOOK IX. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF FISHES, CHAP. 60-65. (when will Perseus finally fix its pages?)

books in the pipeline – and some revisited

They are coming hard and fast.  Reviews will follow in due course, but I thought you’d be interested to see what’s new.

Fate seems to have decreed that I concentrate on the Late Antiquity or thereabouts.  Aside from the novels (reigns of Theodosius II and Justinian & Theodora) which my group is discussing this month, another Gibbon session is coming up, and I recently reviewed the novel Belisarius: The First Shall Be Last.

On my dining table, there now sit three new books for review.

j. b. bury, historian

John Bagnell Bury (1861 – 1927), Irish historian, classical scholar, Byzantinist and philologist.

Wikipedia writes:  “[his writings] are at once scholarly and accessible to the layman.  His two works on the philosophy of history elucidated the Victorian ideals of progress and rationality which undergirded his more specific histories.  He also led a revival of Byzantine history, which English-speaking historians, following Edward Gibbon, had largely neglected.  He contributed to, and was himself the subject of an article in, the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.”

I included Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. I Chap. VII (at Lacus Curtius) in my list of background readings for next week's read Imperial Purple by Gillian Bradshaw, which is set in the reign of Theodosius II.  For those who like to download pdf files, the History is available here: Volume One, Volume Two.

If you are a lover of  ‘historical’ obituaries, as I am – and have access to JSTOR – there is this wonderful piece of writing:

Notes and Communications:  The Late Professor J. B. Bury J. P. Whitney; J. B. Bury, Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2. (1927), pp. 191-197.

proskynesis in the late roman empire

proskynesis προσκύνησις, prostrating oneself before a person of higher social rank.

In last night's chat, we discussed proskynesis under Roman emperors and wondered where Diocletian and the other tetrarchs got the idea.

It originated with the Persians, as Jona Lendering points out in Proskynesis: Greek name of the ritual greeting at the eastern courts. 

The tetrarchs, in the course of their extensive reforms, became living gods (dii geneti et deorum creatores) and thus began practicing an elaborate court ritual to to emphasize their distance from the ordinary mortals.

belisarius in the 19th century: lord mahon & donizetti

Paolo Belzoni, author of the novel Belisarius: The First Shall Be Last, reviewed here, told me that one of the secondary sources he used was

The Life of Belisarius by Lord Mahon

Lord Mahon (wiki, handle with care), Fifth Earl of Stanhope, 1805–1875, member of parliament, was a trustee of the British Museum, proposed the foundation of a National Portrait Gallery, and facilitated the Historical Manuscripts Commission.  From 1846 on he was president of the Society of Antiquaries.

He published the Belisarius biography in 1829, at the age of 25, and it was reissued in 1848, but with hardly any changes.

The work has been reprinted this year with an excellent introduction by Jon Coulston, who corrects the relative few errors in the work.  The Life of Belisarius was the only excursion into ancient history by Lord Mahon, all his other writings are on modern history.