BBC4 In Our Time: Marcus Aurelius

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the man who, according to Machiavelli, was the last of the Five Good Emperors. Marcus Aurelius, 121 to 180 AD, has long been known as a model of the philosopher king, a Stoic who, while on military campaigns, compiled ideas on how best to live his life, and how best to rule. These ideas became known as his Meditations, and they have been treasured by many as an insight into the mind of a Roman emperor, and an example of how to avoid the corruption of power in turbulent times.

listen to the podcast

Byzantium & Friends: How can historians use new media to disseminate ideas?, with Merle Eisenberg

 A wide-ranging conversation with Merle Eisenberg (National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland) on the opportunities created for historians by media, old and new, to disseminate our ideas to the public. Among other things, I learned what a "press release" is and how it works, as well as how historians and scientists work differently with the press. Should we bring scholarly debates to the broader public? What do we lose when we craft a good story in order to do so successfully? We also talk about our pet peeves in films that tell a good story but get the facts so infuriatingly wrong.

listen to the podcast

Eidolon: Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World

Bond’s article aimed to inform the broader public on aspects of Classical antiquity that relate to race and ethnicity (to use contemporary language). Similar was Professor Mary Beard’s response to anger at the representation of some Romans with dark skin in a BBC educational cartoon on Roman Britain, for which she received copious amounts of abuse. Articles like these frequently seem to receive hostile responses, mostly attempts to dismiss the validity of studying race/ethnicity in antiquity at all. Why? In some cases, readers assert that the ancient Greeks and Romans had no concepts like our modern race (which is itself a social construct — genetic testing only confirms the categories we are looking for) and/or ethnicity. At other times, they protest that any talk of 19th century racism in the field of Classics is intended to arouse “white guilt” in those who enjoy Classics today. It seems to be the case that people are more comfortable with antiquity being racist (and sexist and classist) than they are with it being diverse. [...]

Reading the responses to Bond and other similar articles has made me think about the importance of teaching ancient Greek and Roman ideas about race and ethnicity. Something has gone wrong in the classroom when even those people who have taken courses on the Classical world view discussions of race and ethnicity in Classics as part of a politicized liberal agenda rather than as scholarship designed to understand the ancient world and the history of its study. Some may even argue that we should only teach and discuss with the general public aspects of the ancient world that will not offend anyone. But when that goal of inoffensive appeal runs against the goal of scholarly honesty, we do our field no favors. [...]

Even the most casual reader of ancient texts will find discussion of what we today call race and ethnicity in a wide range of ancient authors — from Homer and Hesiod to Herodotus and Hippocrates, from Aeschylus to Ctesias, Caesar, Tacitus, Plutarch, Pliny, Livy, Sallust, Horace, Ovid and more. Further, any trip to a museum yields ample images that further display the Greek and Roman interest in and engagement with human diversity. And yet, we still hear the refrain that wanting to study or teach race and ethnicity is a part of a “social justice” political agenda because the ancient Greeks and Romans had no words that are exactly equivalent to our modern concepts of race or ethnicity — which is not, in fact, true. [...]

The Athenians elevated the issue of heritability and gene pool above other factors in trying to preserve their indigenous, environmentally determined character through restrictive laws on immigration and citizen purity. But the Athenians were unusual in classical antiquity in their privileging of indigenous status. Other peoples — such as the Thebans, Argives, and Romans — inscribed their histories with narratives of immigration, ethnic/racial blending, and inclusion — an interesting notion if physical environment really was thought to determine identity.

read the article

The Telegraph: Archaeologists find secret chamber decorated with centaurs and a sphinx inside Nero's palace in Rome

The room, which was part of the huge Domus Aurea palace built by the emperor in the first century AD, had remained hidden for nearly 2,000 years.

It was discovered by accident during restoration of an adjacent area of the palatial complex, which was built on by subsequent emperors, including Trajan, and now lies interred beneath a hill next to the Colosseum in the historic heart of Rome.

The colours of the frescoes, which depict mythical water creatures as well as a crouching sphinx, a panther leaping at a man armed with a sword, the god Pan and a centaur, are remarkably bright given their age. [...]

Much of the 15ft-high chamber is still filled with dirt, which will be excavated in the next few months. That could bring to light further discoveries.

read the article and see the photos

Quartzy: An ancient fresco discovered in Pompei isn’t “racy”—it depicts a rape

In initial headlines telling of the discovery, several outlets omitted a fundamental aspect of the mythological scene: that the sex it depicts is a rape. The fresco is described as an “erotic scene” by the BBC, a “sensual fresco” by the Associated Press, and “sensual bedroom art” by The Guardian. “Racy” and “Swan sex scene” were among the other phrases used in headlines.

The Greek myth in which the Spartan queen Leda is seduced and raped by the Greek god Zeus (Jupiter in Roman mythology) while he is in swan form has been a frequent subject of artistic and literary interpretation. It was referenced by the likes of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, in versions that vary in their details. In some versions, Leda is raped by Zeus: W.B. Yeats’ famous poetic retelling of the myth tells the story from Leda’s perspective, as a violent and forceful assault. But many well-known artistic depictions, like the Pompeian fresco, portray the assault as a romantic conquest or consensual act. [...]

Even if artists depict the story as one of assault, the rape is not always understood as an ignoble act. Mythologies from around the world are rife with examples of assaults framed as amorous conquests, and in cases when the rapist is a god, as an honor for the victim. Leda, for instance, is canonized for conceiving several legendary mythological figures following her coupling with Zeus, including Helen, whose own abduction brought about the Trojan War.

read the article

The Guardian: Evidence in the bones reveals rickets in Roman times

Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.

Rickets is caused by vitamin D deficiency, often because of a lack of exposure to sunshine. It was a particular problem in the crowded, polluted towns and cities of 19th-century Britain and is often assumed to be a Victorian disease. [...]

“The big surprise to me was how young most of the sufferers were,” said Mays. “Some were suffering even in the first few months of life. The inescapable conclusion was that people were keeping their infants indoors too much.”

Quite why mothers might have been staying inside with their children is open for debate. “One tends to assume most women would have gone out and worked in agriculture: this throws open the possibility that that did not happen.”

read the article

The Washington Post: Long-lost Roman library reemerges in Germany after 2,000 years in darkness

But Germany posed a particular challenge. In the year 9 of our modern calendar system, the Romans suffered an embarrassing defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest near the modern day city of Hanover. They never recovered from it and were permanently pushed back to the western side of the Rhine river, which separates Germany from south to north, 50 miles from Teutoburg. Centuries later, marauders from Germany finally brought an end to the western half of the Roman empire. [...]

Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently reemerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral. At first, when the walls were discovered last year, researchers assumed they had come across a community hall dating to the Roman era. But this summer, a more extensive analysis found the building was most likely used to store up to 20,000 scrolls of parchment. (The estimate would put the Cologne library in the same category as the vast Library of Celsus, which was built in Turkey at about the same time.) [...]

So far, Roman libraries have mostly been found in Egypt or Italy. The Cologne find may be the first such discovery in the Roman Empire’s northwestern regions, which at its peak spanned France, Britain and western Germany.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: Roman Holidays

Alto and Lauro were hardly the first to profit from selling mass-produced prints to tourists: in the 1530s, a Rome-based Spanish publisher and bookseller, Antonio Salamanca, had already begun to publish folio engravings of Roman monuments, both ancient and modern. Copyright as we know it was still an unknown luxury, so when a French publisher, Antoine Lafréry, moved to Rome and started to produce pirate versions of Salamanca’s prints in the 1540s, the Spaniard responded not with a lawsuit but an offer of collaboration. The two men officially joined forces in 1553. Salamanca would not regret his decision; Lafréry may have been a pirate, but he was also an excellent businessman. [...]

The Norwegian art historian Victor Plahte Tschudi began investigating Giacomo Lauro’s devious career when he was a graduate student on a fellowship in Rome. He discovered how cleverly the printmaker had pirated engravings of Roman monuments, altering a few details to avoid breaking the letter, not to mention the spirit, of emerging copyright laws. Strictly speaking, Lauro could argue that his slightly and deliberately altered copies were not really copies—never mind that the alterations he made to his images also turned them into less accurate, or flat-out inaccurate, representations of the monuments they depicted. Most of Lauro’s customers would never have noticed in any case, nor, for that matter, would most Romans; what counted above all to the collectors of these engravings was the suggestive idea, or the memory, of sights like the Colosseum or the temples of the Roman Forum. Lauro was no Piranesi, tormented by magnificent visions. He scratched out his engravings to make a living, not to court immortality. [...]

The earliest surviving guidebooks to Rome—twelfth-century pilgrim handbooks like Record of the Golden City of Rome (Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae, circa 1130) and the best-selling Wonders of the City of Rome (Mirabilia Urbis Romae, circa 1143)—served up generous doses of fiction to compensate for their lack of concrete information about the ruins of the ancient city. Noah had settled in Rome just after the Flood, long before a pair of baby boys named Romulus and Remus were ever suckled by a kindly she-wolf in a swamp that would one day become the Circus Maximus. A dragon lived in the Forum, not far from the place called “Inferno” because there the fires of Hell had once burst forth from the center of the earth. [...]

Tschudi suggests that, in addition to these time-honored sources of information about Rome—the literary legacy of ancient authors and the physical legacy of the monuments—sixteenth-century printmakers relied to an even greater extent on a third source: other prints. By examining (or simply copying) the work of his predecessors, Giacomo Lauro could concoct his own reconstruction of an ancient building without ever having to step outside his studio. In effect, he and his colleagues created what Baroque Antiquity terms an “archaeology of prints,” and indeed the word “archaeology,” with a meaning roughly equivalent to “ancient history,” appears for the first time in 1607, precisely when Giacomo Lauro was perfecting his Splendor of the Ancient City.

read the article

The Conversation: Friday essay: the erotic art of Ancient Greece and Rome

Simply put, sex is everywhere in Greek and Roman art. Explicit sexual representations were common on Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. They are often eye-openingly confronting in nature.

The Romans too were surrounded by sex. The phallus, sculpted in bronze as tintinnabula (wind chimes), were commonly found in the gardens of the houses of Pompeii, and sculpted in relief on wall panels, such as the famous one from a Roman bakery telling us hic habitat felicitas (“here dwells happiness”). [...]

The secret cabinet was founded in 1819, when Francis I, King of Naples, visited the museum with his wife and young daughter. Shocked by the explicit imagery, he ordered all items of a sexual nature be removed from view and locked in the cabinet. Access would be restricted to scholars, of “mature age and respected morals”. That was, male scholars only. [...]

The intention of the ithyphallic (erect) satyrs is clear in their appearance on vases (even if they rarely caught the maenads they were chasing); at the same time their massive erect penises are indicative of the “beastliness” and grotesque ugliness of a large penis as opposed to the classical ideal of male beauty represented by a smaller one.

read the article

The Guardian: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

This spirit permeates Catherine Nixey’s book. In her view, the standard modern picture of the Roman empire’s conversion remains, even 200 years after Gibbon, glossed by Christian triumphalism. History, she believes, has given the Church an undeservedly easy ride. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel, arbitrary and punitive; it is thought to be, in her fine phrase, “a chilly, nihilistic world”. Christianity, conversely, is painted as brave, principled, kind, inclusive and optimistic. The task she sets herself – her own melancholy duty – is to rip away this veneer and expose the error and corruption of the early Church.

This is also, however, a book for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash between faith and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her cover displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its forehead. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyra in the late fourth century, when some of the oasis city’s magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her choice to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by “bearded, black-robed zealots”, the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. “There have been,” she writes, and “there still are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends.” What is revealing about that last sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic State but the phrase “monotheism and its weapons”. Many modern commentators like to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger. [...]

Even more than the physical violence, it is the cultural devastation that draws Nixey’s eye. Early in the book, she describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased.

read the article

The Atlantic: Solving the Mystery of an Ancient Roman Plague

The Plague of Cyprian, named after the man who by AD 248 found himself Bishop of Carthage, struck in a period of history when basic facts are sometimes known barely or not at all. Yet the one fact that virtually all of our sources do agree upon is that a great pestilence defined the age between AD 249 and AD 262.  [...]

What is starkly lacking, however, is a Galen. The previous century’s dumb luck of having a great and prolific doctor to guide us has run out. But, now, for the first time, we have Christian testimony. The church experienced a growth spurt during the generation of the plague, and the mortality left a deep impression in Christian memory. The pagan and Christian sources not only confirm one another. Their different tone and timbre give us a richer sense of the plague than we would otherwise possess. [...]

The Plague of Cyprian was not just another turn through the periodic cycle of epidemic mortality. It was something qualitatively new—and the evocation of its “bloody” destruction may not be empty rhetoric, if hemorrhagic symptoms are implied.

The disease was of exotic origin and moved from southeast to northwest. It spread, over the course of two or three years, from Alexandria to other major coastal centers. The pandemic struck far and wide, in settlements large and small, deep into the interior of empire. It seemed “unusually relentless.” It reversed the ordinary seasonality of death in the Roman Empire, starting in the autumn and abating in the following summer. The pestilence was indiscriminate; it struck regardless of age, sex, or station. The disease invaded “every house.” [...]

The reckoning implies that the city’s population had declined by about 62 percent (from something like 500,000 to 190,000). Not all of these need be dead of plague. Some may have fled in the chaos. And we can always suspect overheated rhetoric. But the number of citizens on the public grain dole is a tantalizingly credible detail, and all other witnesses agreed on the scale of the mortality. An Athenian historian claimed that 5,000 died each day. Witness after witness—dramatically if imprecisely—testified that depopulation was invariably the sequel of the pestilence. “The human race is wasted by the desolation of pestilence.” [...]

Retrospective diagnosis from anguished reports of nonmedical personnel across nearly 2,000 years is never going to offer great confidence. But the hemorrhagic symptoms, the shocked sensibilities, and the insistence on the novelty of the disease all fit a filovirus. An agent like Ebola virus could diffuse as quickly as the Plague of Cyprian, but because of its reliance on body fluids for transmission, it could exhibit the slow-burning, “unusually relentless” dynamics that so struck contemporary observers. The obsession with deadly corpses in the third-century pandemic strikes a profound chord, given the recent experience of the Ebola virus. The uncertainty lies in our profound ignorance about the deep history of pathogens like Ebola that never became endemic in human populations.

read the article

BBC: The mystery of the lost Roman herb

Indeed, the Romans loved it so much, they referenced their darling herb in poems and songs, and wrote it into great works of literature. For centuries, local kings held a monopoly on the plant, which made the city of Cyrene, at modern Shahhat, Libya, the richest in Africa. Before they gave it away to the Romans, the Greek inhabitants even put it on their money. Julius Caesar went so far as to store a cache (1,500lbs or 680kg) in the official treasury.

But today, silphium has vanished – possibly just from the region, possibly from our planet altogether. Pliny wrote that within his lifetime, only a single stalk was discovered. It was plucked and sent to the emperor Nero as a curiosity sometime around 54-68AD. [...]

The herb stumped even the most enthusiastic plant geek of the day, Theophrastus. Widely known as the father of botany, this Greek author was best friends with another giant – Aristotle, the father of biology – and wrote extensively about the characteristics of plants. Though he didn’t understand why it couldn’t be cultivated either, he observed that they tended to grow best on land which had been dug up the previous year. [...]

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people descend on America’s National Parks, from the Pacific Northwest to the mountains of Montana and Idaho. Instead of hiking gear, they’re armed with baskets, pots and pans, ready to brave grizzly bears and territorial gunfights in pursuit of one of the most coveted fruits on the planet: the huckleberry. The tart red berries are added to jams, sauces, pies, ice creams, snow cones, daiquiris, and even curries – and every year, demand exceeds supply. But there isn’t a single commercial huckleberry farm on the continent. [...]

So could silphium make a comeback? According to Rowan, even if the herb isn’t extinct, it probably wouldn’t be to modern tastes – in the Western world at least. “There’s a whole bunch of seasonings that the Romans used to use, like lovage, that today most people haven’t even heard of,” says Rowan. Back in the day, lovage was a staple of the Roman dinner table. Today it’s virtually impossible to buy, consigned to niche online shops and obscure corners of garden centres.

read the article

Vox: This video shows what ancient Rome actually looked like

The video was created by Rome Reborn, an academic research project whose central mission is to create a full model of Rome at its greatest heights, working in conjunction with the Khan Academy and Smarthistory. The goal is to take historical depictions of the city and create a true-to-life model of every period of Roman development, ranging from 1000 BC to 552 AD. This isn't just a cool pastime; it's useful for everyone from historians to filmmakers looking to capture what the city actually looked like.

In the video, Indiana University professor Bernard Frischer (who leads the Rome Reborn project) explains that they chose to use 320 AD for this visualization because it was "the peak of Rome's urban development." Ten years later, the emperor, Constantine, moved the capital to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and the city of Rome began to decline. (The Roman Empire itself went on to survive, in various forms, until roughly 476.)

read the article and see the video

BBC: How Western civilisation could collapse

The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we’d eventually face total societal collapse. [...]

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.

That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his colleagues. Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day.  

read the article 

Land of Maps: Mapping the Empires of History

see the map

BBC4 In Our Time: Seneca the Younger

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Seneca the Younger, who was one of the first great writers to live his entire life in the world of the new Roman empire, after the fall of the Republic. He was a Stoic philosopher, he wrote blood-soaked tragedies, he was an orator, and he navigated his way through the reigns of Caligula, Claudius and Nero, sometimes exercising power at the highest level and at others spending years in exile. Agrippina the Younger was the one who called for him to tutor Nero, and it is thought Seneca helped curb some of Nero's excesses. He was later revered within the Christian church, partly for what he did and partly for what he was said to have done in forged letters to St Paul. His tragedies, with their ghosts and high body count, influenced Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. 

read the article 

BBC: Mussolini message to future revealed under Rome obelisk

Bettina Reitz-Joosse and Han Lamers are the first to translate and study in detail the Codex Fori Mussolini, which, despite being buried at the base of the 300-tonne monument to the power of fascism when it was erected in 1932, has largely been forgotten in the intervening decades. [...]

"The text wasn't meant for contemporaries at the time," Dr Reitz-Joosse, who works at the University of Groningen, told the BBC. "The obelisk was a major spectacle but the existence of the text wasn't reported at all. It was meant for an audience in the remote future. [...]

Dr Reitz-Joosse suggests the author chose to use a language of the past to draw a link between the Roman empire and the rise of fascism.

In addition, she says the fascists were also trying to re-establish Latin as the international language of fascism: "part of an attempt to establish a Fascist International akin to the Communist International" organisation, which advocated world communism. [...]

The irony of this text is that its discovery is predicated on the fall of the obelisk, and therefore the fall of fascism. The fascists were imagining their own decline and fall, says Dr Reitz-Joosse.

read the article