Dawn of Rome

If you just want to read the Roman stuff skip down to the next heading in bold. This post is to get me writing and I have to unburden a good deal before I get to a place where that is possible.

The Warm Up

I’m feeling exhausted and stuck. As hard as I work burning the candle at both ends it seems like I never choose the right task on which to focus my energies. I feel so incredibly grateful for my job and career and yet today I keep asking where am I going?! Why am I here? This radical mood shift from last week’s joy does have a bunch of exacerbating factors both family stuff (everyone is alive and will heal, thank god, but always a shock when the unexpected happens), and work stuff (frustration with my inability to effectively advocate for what I believe best for students).

Even in this mood shift there are wonderful things. A trip to Dublin with SUN in JANUARY and the sheer joy of the coast line and the botanical gardens and time with my beloved (Instagram, if you want visuals). Monday I got to be on stage with T. P. Wiseman, Christopher Smith, and Kathryn Tempest. We wanted an event that brought out the best of all of us and was accessible to the audience. It took a great deal of planning to chose topics that would resonate and spark conversation even disagreement without spilling over into something more adversarial in tone. It went really well: Wiseman felt honored and the tone was jovial with no fireworks. Wiseman and Smith are personal heroes of mine. Individuals whose scholarship was essential in the making of my own conception of Roman history and exposure to the range of evidence a historian may use. Being on that stage felt affirming of my career. There is a video as it was recorded but not live streamed, so I’ll post at some point as I get the link.

Last night I was even grateful for the delays on my train journey to Cambridge. I had a seat at a table and got time and space to communicate and house keep. I was then welcomed by dear old friends. Catching up felt like coming home. And yet I slept terribly tossing and turning and wishing desperately to change my flights to be in the bosom of family. The mental exhaustion is real and I know I’m watching the news too closely and giving too much energy to imagining how these global events will next intrude on the lives of those I love.

So how did I get out from under the duvet and to the point where I’m putting my thoughts in linear order and have even done a bit of bureaucratic housekeeping? I stopped doom scrolling and put on a podcast. Then I made a cup of coffee. Then I shifted rooms and podcasts. Then I made tea. Then I got dressed. Then I started asking for help.

I thought I was emotionally flat, but no! As soon as my beloved called tears started run down my face. I’m full of feelings and that itself feels like something to apologize for. And yet, that is ridiculous. I think, if I’ve learned anything from my sleepless night last night (and rough morning) is that what feels like depression can just be me spending all my energy to pretend to myself I don’t care as much as I do. So here I am on my blog giving a vaguely sanitized tell-all account because writing is the one sure way I know to control and structure my own thinking.

All words are good words.

If you’ve not read my post on tears, you might enjoy it. It is better and more engaging that this more functional exercise. Rereading that earlier post helping me welcome today’s tears and connect them to the roller coaster story of this academic year. Much of that roller coaster has been created by reactions to the events of May 8, a blog post also worth reading. Again, Rereading today that other post let me see the consistency of my own reaction and my abhorrence of any capitulation to fascism and the fear it engenders. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Silence will not produce safety for ourselves or our students. It will perpetuate the cycle of violence for the most vulnerable and I will not participate. There is a weight upon us all and it breaks my heart to learn who is willing to be complicit, or even just be silent.

The ACTUAL Post

A raw reading of part of Affresco con le Origini di Roma, da Pompei dalla Casa di Marcus Fabius Secundus (V, 4, 13), oggi al Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (inv. S.N.). Raw here means with an attempt to look with my own eyes with minimal influence from the interpretations of other scholars. This post may (or may not) become a series working through systematically the analyses of other details.

Upper left corner of the composition. Horses bodies and velificatio indicate flight as does the position of the group above the ground line on a field of dazzling blue. The figure seems to me more female than male. The body is slender the clothing perhaps plausibly read as a chiton. The hair seems to be gathered up in a bun. No car is visible and the figure seems almost be between the team of two horses who turn to look at each other wearing golden bridals. Her gaze is downward. It seems most closely related to personifications of sky phenomenon. Luna often has a biga and often velaficatio but the atmosphere seems like bright day light and there is no crescent on her forehead.

At this point my beloved called to check on me. Incredibly sweet. He also reported a conversation with the children in which they were wishing I could come home but when they learned that I was having lunch with Michael Crawford on Friday became adamant that such a meeting with such a famous scholar must take precedence. I (and my beloved) were a little surprised that they recognized the name and had been paying attention when I talked shop enough to conceptualize something about why that lunch might matter to me.

Sol seems ruled out by the lack of a radiate crown and only two horses not the standard four (quadriga) he normals drives. Also gender but I grant this is less readily confirmed. Typically, Sol is heroically nude in his chariot with a billowing drapery behind (not the arc of velaficatio), at least in the imperial period,yet on the republican coin series he is dressed. His hair typically echoes the radiate crown being almost crown like itself.

What other options are there? The first that springs to mind is Aurora. Goddess of the Dawn. Rosy-fingered in her pervasive Homeric epithet. Does she have a defined iconography?

At abour this point I decided I needed day light and food to cope. I left the flat. Huge accomplishment. A colleague called and offered moral support and did the emotional labor I needed to keep going. I then got swept up in college business, but with a sense of community and personal agency (with all its limits and fallibility). Now it after 5 pm and I’ve left the cafe where I was gently working and gone to the pub having turned off my work email for the evening. I should put my phone on do not disturb but not quite ready to let my other channels of connection go.

The British Museum has decided to label figures in bigas with either wings or velaficatio as Aurora/Eos OR Victoria/Nike. But using this to support my working hypothesis might be circular logic.

In the below Attic red figure pot Eos is clearly labelled and her horses have wings but she does not neither does she is velaficans.

The Etruscans seem happy for the dawn goddess (Thesan?) to be in the a quadriga, but note that while other figures are labelled the top figure is not. The identification is only interpretive even if probable.

Oh no! I just broke down and opened LIMC. They accepted that Augustan coin above as Aurora. Just no! There are clearly representations of Eos winged and unwinged and with her car drawn by both bigas and quadrigas and with horses both winged and unwinged.

I”m going to say that I lean toward the Aurora interpretation of the fresco detail based on eliminating other major sky gods (Sol, Luna) and because the representation is with in the scope of common Aurora iconography which itself fluxuates. Moreover her rosy garments feel fitting as does the presence of the dawn at the Dawn of Rome.

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