Roman History Books and More

another review in the same periodical: thoughts on franz kafka

Again courtesy The New York Review of Books, in the same issue as below, intriguing thoughts on Franz Kafka, the man:  Zadie Smith, F. Kafka, Everyman

How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:

It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.

A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.

A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.

Franz was a saint.

book review by mary beard: "isn't it funny?"

Courtesy The New York Review of Books, here is a (free) review by Mary Beard of two recent books:

Isn't It Funny?
By Mary Beard
Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific.

Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, by Jim Holt, Norton, 141 pp., $15.95

Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 by John R. Clarke, University of California Press, 322 pp., $55.00

   

sunday cello music in the woods

This morning we went to the local Arboretum to listen to chamber music in the woods (well, not quite the woods but on a patio surrounded by lawn and trees). It was a bit warm, but there was a lovely breeze …

Cellist Laura Usiskin, a graduate student at Yale School of Music and studying with the venerable Aldo Parisot, treated us to a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

another review of "medicus" by ruth downie

Ruth Downie's Medicus by Gillyfleur

Quote: "Good mystery fiction throws in clues along the way, but doesn't give it all away before the climax – at least to mystery readers like me who enjoy being kept in suspense until the last minute. But mystery fiction that is re-readable has to offer more, especially since lots of people try to out-detect the sleuth.  Good historical fiction pays close attention to the details of the setting, striving to make it historically plausible.  It should also present sympathetic characters and wind up the reader's emotions.

"I can't predict whether Ruso will turn out to be another Falco or Ruth Downie another Lindsey Davis, but with all of the Roman Empire under the second century Good Emperors to explore, I'm looking forward to seeing lots more of Ruso and the Daughter of Lugh tackling medical issues and murders from their opposed, but sometimes complementary perspectives."

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Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie, 400 pages, Bloomsbury USA (March 6, 2007)

asklepios, god of medicine

Asklepios (latin: Asclepius), the god of healing, was an important deity to our medicus Gaius Petreius Ruso (Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire, by Ruth Downie).  A statue of the god was kept at the entrance of the base hospital, and Ruso paid his respect daily.

An excellent discourse can be found on Asklepois at theoi.com.

The image, at Wikimedia Commons, represents a Colossal head of Asclepios wearing a metal crown (now lost), from a cult statue. Marble, Hellenistic artwork, 325-300 BC. from Melos.  At the Blacas Collection.

ancient medicine from a modern physician's perspective

The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World by Guido Majno, M.D., is an oversize, lavishly illustrated guide through ancient medicine, from the West and Near East to India and China, written from a physician's perspective.  Harvard University Press, 1975, paperback 1991, 600 pages.

Product description: "This journey to the beginnings of the physician's art brings to life the civilizations of the ancient world – Egypt of the Pharaohs, Greece at the time of Hippocrates, Rome under the Caesars, the India of Ashoka, and China as Mencius knew it.

what did a roman army medicus know and do?

… c.117 CE, that is.  Ruth Downie, in Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire, creates a vivid and imaginative picture about what the book's protagonist, the army doctor Gaius Petreius Ruso, and his collegue Valens do and how a military camp hospital is run, orderlies, patients, and all.  But what was their actual medical knowledge?

The University of Virginia's Health Sciences Library has a section Antiqua Medicina, From Homer to Vesalius.  The credits say, "This electronic display was generated from materials assembled for a print exhibit of the same name created in fall 1996 for Historical Collections in the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library." Included is a brief section, Military Medicos, with an image from Trajan's Column, and of interest is also Surgery and Surgical Instruments.

trajan and the earthquake of antioch

In Ruth Downie's novel, Medicus, it's hero, Gaius Petreius Ruso, had a special relationship with the emperor Trajan (Wikipedia, as usual handle with care): He was the mysterious stranger who rescued the emperor during the earthquake in Antioch, the current Antykaya, in 115 CE.  Not that it did him any good, no one can compete with a super-human being, such as Cassius Dio (via LacusCurtius), Epitome of Book LXVIII, 24 ff., describes:

"Trajan made his way out through a window of the room in which he was staying. Some being, of greater than human stature, had come to him and led him forth, so that he escaped with only a few slight injuries; and as the shocks extended over several days, he lived out of doors in the hippodrome."

The full and lurid description of the earthquake:

ruso and his world

Our next read is variously known as "Medicus", "Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls", and "Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls", and the author is known as R. S. Downie and Ruth Downie. Despite knowing this I still managed to buy the book twice, so do keep your wits about you in bookshops. The author has her own blog, on one page of which she explains how this curious situation came about.

The novel tells the story of a murky affair involving the death of prostitutes which Gaius Petreius Ruso reluctantly gets involved in after being posted as doctor to the XX Legion at Deva in Britannia as the empire passes to Hadrian on Trajan's death.

Deva is now called Chester, and you can see its location on this map.

next book: medicus, a novel of the roman empire

On July 2, we will discuss Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie, a mystery set in Roman Britain during the time of the transition from Trajan to Hadrian.  The hero of the novel is a much tried army doctor, stationed at the end of the world …

My review of the novel.
An NPR interview with the author.

As to background on Roman Britain, Wikipedia has an extensive page with lots of good information.

Enjoy the read.

albius tibullus, roman poet

Albius Tibullus (c. 54–19 BCE) was a Roman poet and almost-contemporary of Ovid.  Not much is known of him.  Nonetheless, the preceding link from Britannica and this Wikipedia page (as usual handle with care) do tell us quite a bit.  Tibullus shared with Ovid their patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (also on Wikipedia).  Tibullus' genre was the Elegy (see Latin literature).  His extant works can be found online:

The Elegies of Tibullus at The Latin Library
Works by Tibullus at Project Gutenberg
English translation only: Selections from Tibullus

Tibullus in print.  In the visual arts, the British painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, one of the foremost painters depicting classical antiquity of his age, painted

Tibullus at Delia's

1866 Oil on Wood, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
from the Wikimedia Commons

pan and syrinx

The story Mercury tells to lull Argus to sleep is the story of Pan and Syrinx. It is your basic "unwilling nymph transformed into vegetation" story, so there isn't a lot of variety in artistic portrayals. The main source of variety lies in how few garments the nymph is wearing and how much trouble she is having with them. Nymphs seem to have heard of clothes, but they haven't really grasped the idea and are very prone to what I believe is known as wardrobe malfunction.

The 1759 picture by Boucher (below left), now in London's National Gallery, shows the beginning of the story with Pan spying on Syrinx and another nymph. The painting by Jean François de Troy (1722-4) and now in Los Angeles's Getty Center (below right) is similar to the two paintings further below.

   

it seems nothing much has changed in about 2000 years . . .

But you’ll no more number the acorns on oak branches,
or bees on Hybla, wild beasts on Alpine mountains,
than I can possibly count so many fashions:
every new day adds another new style.
And tangled hair suits many girls: often you’d think
it’s been hanging loose since yesterday: it’s just combed.

Ovid, The Art of Love, Book Three

ovid's 'amores' as translated by christopher marlowe

P. Ovidius Naso, Amores (ed. Christopher Marlowe)

Click on the Marlowe link at top and enjoy!

enjoy another queen zenobia tale from judith weingarten's blog

The Zenobia Romance

The Persian historian and commentator on the Koran , al-Tabari (839-923 CE), seen left among his disciples, wrote a History of Prophets and Kings, ten thick volumes in Arabic recounting the history of the world from the Creation up to the events of his own day. When he reached the time of Zenobia, he told about the queen -- but it was an entirely different story from the one given in the Historiae Augustae -- or in any other Greek or Roman source -- and at least as fabulous.

Blood Revenge, Deceit, and Royal Murder!

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io and argus

Ovid's next story is about Jupiter's pursuit of Io, and Juno's attempt to foil it with the help of Argus. (Thumbnail of peacock feathers under Creative Commons Attribution 1.0, photographed by Aaron Logan via wikipedia).

This 1532 picture (right) by Corregio, now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, starts off the story with Io being seduced by Jupiter in the form of a cloud. The seduction is also portrayed by Sir John Hoppner in his 1785 painting. Hoppner's sitter for Io is believed to be the famous Lady Hamilton, mistress of Nelson and wife of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples and collector of antiquities from Pompeii.

Lambert Sustris shows Jupiter and Io (still in human form) but Juno has seen them while in Lastman's 1681 painting in London's National Gallery Io is now in the form of a heifer, not that that stops Juno from asking for her. Juno then entrusts Io to Argus, a scene painted by Aert Schouman in this 1738 painting from the Dordrechts Museum.  Unusually Victor Honoré Janssens took as his subject Inachus's recognition of Io in her new form.

is britannica feeling the heat from wikipedia?

Britannica's New Site

"Encyclopaedia Britannica is about to launch a new initiative that we’re very enthusiastic about. The main thrust of this initiative is to promote greater participation by both our expert contributors and readers. Both groups will be invited to play a larger role in expanding, improving, and maintaining the information we publish on the Web under the Encyclopaedia Britannica name as well as in sharing content they create with other Britannica visitors. A complete redesign, editing tools, and incentive programs will give expert contributors and users the means to take part in the further improvement of Encyclopaedia Britannica and in the creation and publication of their own work.

we start'm early

Leila, our latest reading group member, in deep concentration …

click on the image to enlarge

ovid in exile as art

Ovid in his Poems of Exile (The Tristia, Ex Ponto, and Ibis with a hyper-linked in-depth index – A.S. Kline's Poetry In Translation) describes his domicile of exile as bleak and desolate.  In fact, Tomi at the Black Sea (Wikipdia, handle with care) was a Greek colony dating back to 500 BCE, with amphitheatre and all.  But he also writes about the Scythians in an ethnographic way.  I found two paintings online associated with Ovid in his exile, today's Romanian Constanţa, covering both aspects:

Ovid Banished from Rome (painting - oil on canvas) by William Turner, 1838, (in a private collection), on Wikimedia Commons, shows a Greek city.

ovid's 'fasti'

The Fasti by Ovid, the poem on the Roman Calendar, can be easily viewed  and read online on A.S. Kline's Poetry In Translation site, with a handy hyper-linked in depth index.

I'm still reading off and on The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, see also its Bryn Mawr Classical Review, but it's tough to follow, as the opinions of the various essayists on the meanings of the Fasti are often divergent.  What did Ovid want to accomplish? Is it Augustan, Augustan propaganda, or what?  Or even satire?  What do the internal contradictions mean?   Are the last six months lost, or were they never written?  And so on …