Author: Liv Yarrow

40 and 41 out of 410 days: The Dangers of Reading Roman History on the Subway

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I took Rosenstein with me on my way to apply for the Turkish Visas yesterday. This drew more attention than reading porn in public.   Apparently in the age of private Kindle reading selections having a real book with a few pictures in it is an open invitation to conversation.  On my way there a nice man decided he must give me a section of the NY Times with an article about Egyptian Cats at Brooklyn Museum.  He was nervous to break the code of subway silence but couldn’t repress his desire to engage about culture.  He explained he tried to take an art history course or similar every summer.  I said I wished more people did that.  He responded fervently that the world would be a better, more humane place if they did.

On the way back, it was standing room only and I was smashed in next to a police officer, Officer O’Reilly his badge said.   He wanted to know if I was an avid reader and how he should go about becoming a reader himself.   He was bored with video games and the like.  He wanted substance.  I asked him what subjects interested him, history? science? Definitely science.  What kind of shows did he watch on television?  Did he need plot resolution?  a narrative arc?  mystery?  intensity?  I settled on recommending The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  One wasn’t good enough.  So I moved on to describing the writing style of Erik Larson.  Apparently my narration of the Devil in the White City was so gripping that a nearby junky (I know making such assumptions is less than PC, but if he wasn’t a junky, he certainly had adopted a similar aesthetic for his self-presentation.) interrupted and demand to know if I was describing the book in my hand.  I said, no, another book.  He needed all the details straight away.

I love New York.  I adore public transportation.

The visa application process was nerve wrecking I had to fill out by hand my CV including publications.  Four to eight weeks for any answers.  On the bright side, I met a nice girl going on Fulbright to paint Seljuk carpets with whom we might connect in Istanbul.  This morning I identified a coin set into jewelry for a friend of a friend.  A fun little test.  Now onto coins. SDA is away and as today is 10% of my sabbatical complete I hope to make it a good one…

And I almost forgot, my beloved is on the radio on our favorite show, Splendid Table.  Start listening at minute 36.30, if you want to skip to the good part.

39 out of 410 days: Progress not Perfection

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The weather was cool.  This helped.   It helped many things.  I averaged under a 10 minute mile for 3.4 miles.  I’ve never ran that fast anywhere but a tread mill.  That is something.  

I spoke to the Turkish consulate. 6-8 weeks for the visa. Yikes.  Tomorrow will not be a coinfest, but a bureaucratic love-in.  SDA wants me to renew my driver’s license too.  

Today while trying to learn about coins and the Decii, I instead ended up back deep in the literature on the oath scene coins.  No bad thing really.  A false start on writing a narrative but a start.  I worked until after 8 pm and then made whole wheat pasta from scratch.  Just sayin’.  A pretty nice day all in all.  Oh and banking.  I spent a chunk of the morning on the phone with my bank.  I hate talking to humans.  Good thing they were nice ones.

Where in the world is Decius Mus?

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Trade specimen, RIC Trajan 766

To get inspiration for writing the book today I opened up Rosenstein’s latest, very readable, introduction to the Imperial Republic. He starts at Sentinium and how P. Decius Mus’ self-sacrifice provided a turning point in Rome’s conquest of Italy.  He and his father and his son, all bearing the same name, became a standard exempla of dedication unto death to the fatherland; Cicero mentions them thirty times in his extant works (cf. Van der Blom, p. 101).  And yet unlike so many exempla with wide communal resonance, they appear no where on the republican series that we can see.  Noteworthy by their absence.  Crawford thinks the line died out and without ancestors numismatic commemoration was unlikely.  Interestingly the lack of commemoration was so keenly felt that the Emperor Trajan made up a type to ‘restore’ in his name (see image above).  The image he chose to augment with Decius’ name is this type:

Specimen in Trade, RRC 128/1

The carnyx and shield clearly link the otherwise completely standard type with Celtic victories.  And, the Decii did engage with the Celts as well as the Samnites, but it is unlikely that Trajan has any ‘inside’ knowledge 300 years later about who made the original type.  Instead it is filling a void in the numismatic record.  The Decii deserved a coin type so the must have had one.  Did Trajan do the same for other republican heroes?   There are some modern copies for Cocles.  I’ve not see an authentic specimen yet, but two are listed in RIC so perhaps they do exist:

 

Capture

Images and their links updated 18 Dec 2024. Text and information left the same.

37 out of 410 days: Drowning in Paper

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Today I had to clean out my work space on campus.  Or part of my workspace.  I had to clear off a 3.5 x 6 foot bookcase that had random stacks of paper on it and the top of my filing cabinet and empty four desk drawers.  Partly because we’re getting some new (to us) glass fronted shelves instead of institutional gray and partly to make room for my substitute.  I told myself it would be a few hours.  Its been all day and most depressingly I’m not done.  I’ll be back here tomorrow.  Found some good scholarship in the stacks related to the book, but mostly it was the detritus of older projects, published or not as may be the case.  Thank goodness for the digital age and search functions.  I feel I’m working over a major transition in practical methodology.  

I also had a Skype tour of our house in Istanbul.  Very exciting. 

Philip VI Andriscus Overstrike

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Image

I don’t want to reiterate what appears in the Triton catalogue on this specimen, as you can read it yourself by clicking on the image.  In the article I linked to earlier today, Callataÿ mentioned the phenomenon of these coins of a “pretender” to the Macedonian throne being overstruck on denarii.

The one above is apparently using this type as its flan:

The Crawford type is re-dated by the overstrike, just pushed down a couple of years.  It’s striking [always my favorite numismatic pun] that two of the known specimens of Andriscus are known to have been overstruck on the this same type.   Here’s the link to the other one.  The obverse dies are linked but the reverses are unique.  Another un-die-linked specimen is overstruck on a Thesalian League type.  Of course, Callataÿ is right that it shows use of the denarius in the East, at least sufficient to allow Andriscus to produce a (small?) series.

The other minor mystery is whatever is Andriscus wearing on his head.  Macedonian head gear is always a wee bit baffling, but more on that some other time:

EETIA?

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UPDATE 2/4/22: see now, Sánchez 2021 (related blog post).

This is the coin type that occupied me much of last Thursday.  The interest comes from it being a potentially non-Italian instance of an oath-taking scene.  Such scenes appear during the Hannibalic War on both Roman coinage and that of certain Campanian cities which sided with the Punic forces.

And was resurrected by the Romans probably about 137 BC:

But was then famously the iconography was taken over by the Italian allies during the Social War in the 80s BC when they broke with Rome.

The swearing of an oath on a pig to seal a treaty is well attested as part of Italic culture, perhaps most famously at the Caudine Forks incident.  The legend of the type had previously been read on less clear specimens as FETIA and thought to refer to the fetiales, the priests associated with religious declarations of war and solemnizing the peace.  All these ‘oath scene’ coins have been associated with the fetiales in the past.  That’s somewhat problematic as such an oath could be sworn by the generals without such priests (again, see Cicero on the Caudine Forks oath).

Anyway, the new specimen above clearly reads EETI- and all the other reverse die specimens I’ve seen could be read the same way.  EETIA must be Latin as the letter combination is unattested in Greek.  It’s none too common in Latin.  If the word begins EETI- one thinks of the various legendary kings and heros named Eëtion.   They are associated with the Greek mainland or Asia Minor.  Leypold said he bought his specimen in Amisus and because small bronzes don’t tend to travel far its usually attributed to that location or the general region.   No other specimens find spots are known.   The lack of a diadem or garland on the obverse head has lead to the assumption it was a portrait of a Roman commander.  Speculation then commences about possible Roman commanders active in Asia Minor.  The Roman certainly experimented with coinage in the region.

As we puzzle out the legend we might recall that “Accian” Vowels, i.e. the reduplication of vowels to indicate their long vowel length, do appear on Republican coins.  [This type of vowel is discussed by Lucilius.]

And, even on provincial issues from Macedonia:

For the type of the last see BM catalogue.

One other clue might be visable on this rather awful specimen:

On this specimen one can see what I think might be a Q under the obverse head.   Q or PRO Q is a relativelycommon addition special issues and military coinage of this period.  We’ve seen two examples already above.  Here are two more from the Crawford sequence:

I grabbed this last example because of the placement under the bust.  If there wasn’t the assumption that it was from Asia Minor, I would have speculated Italic or at least Western Mediterranean origins.  The type is closer to the Campanian imagery of two figures holding a pig above the ground than any of the Roman or Marsic scenes.

But finally, given that there only seems to be one obverse die and maybe about four reverse dies amongst all the specimens, not to mention the scarcity of the type, this must be a very low volume production.  Why put all this energy into its manufacture?!  Who benefited?  Is it purely an ideological statement?  If so, towards whom is it aimed?

32, 33, 34, 35 & 36 out of 410 Days: Framing

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I started looking for an image of someone fallen down face first to top this post. And, then I stopped.  I might feel like I fell on my face but that’s hardly an accurate descriptor and it’s good be ruthlessly honest about one’s behaviors.  Thursday was all about coins.  Amongst other things I was given a list of all the scholarship that variously re-dates republican coins post Crawford as well as annotated copies of much of the concordance tables.  Very useful.  I tracked down the die study of Malaca and started plowing through the Spanish (not as bad as German but still not my strongest academic language).  Look for an update on the previous post.  And I spend time studying a very mysterious provincial type that will be my next post.  Friday was a disgustingly hot (115 heat index) and I took a mental health day.  I talked with a colleague through my thought processes and behaviors regarding my work, personal issues, and travel. Decent insights emerged. I got a colleague to send a reference to our Turkish hosts and another to draft documentation for the visa application.   I also sorted lots of personal paperwork and generally tidied.  And then SDA and I fled the head for the AC and garden in PA.  The weekend was cooking and pruning and weeding and cycling.  This morning was a routine doctors visit.  All of it was important self care.    I’ve not completely digested the draft book proposal I was asked to read but my first impression is that it is much more thematic than mine. At 4.30 am (sleep is not my strong suit) it dawned on me that the brilliance of thematic organization for this type of work is that one may stop obsessing about completeness and aim at just the best illustrative examples.  I need to borrow some of that mentality for my own approach.

Visual Parallels, Debunking Historical Allusions

~ Liv Yarrow ~ 2 Comments

Crawford in RRC says of this coin: “The obverse type recalls the standard obverse type of the coinage of Lipara, captured by C. Aurelius Cotta, Cos. 252; the reverse type alludes to the triumph celebrated in consequence.”  He echoes Broughton in the MRR: “On coins of L. Cotta, perhaps celebrating the taking of Lipara, see Gueber CRRBM 1.200f.; Cesano, Stud. Num. 1 (1942) 158.”   Looking at the coins of Lipara doesn’t instill confidence in this claim:

I have a hard time believing I’m the first to see this, but the parallel with Malaka in Spain is nearly perfect, right down to the wreath and the placement of the tongs behind the head:

The mint of Malaka is well studied, but I’ll need to read up a bit on the dating of the obverse proto-type.  I think we can be sure the Spanish coin is the prototype, and not visa versa, as the Malakan bronze has Punic lettering.

So if the Lipara connection is a red herring, why this type?  So far I’m hard pressed to find a Cotta with a Spanish connection.  The poor L. Aurelius Cotta, cos. 144, was denied the opportunity to go to Spain (Val. Max. 6.4.2).

Perhaps the Malaca connection is also a red herring.  Maybe there is no attempt to recall a spanish Familial connection, only that it provided an attractive model for representing Hephaistos, the smith god, for some other reason…  One to think about.

[The ANS does list specimens in its collections for all these types, but they are just not imaged yet, hence the reliance on non-academic sources.  There are also academic images here but they do not allow direct links and the image quality is pour.]

31 out of 410 Days: Avoidance

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Ostriches do not stick their heads in the sand to avoid danger.  They do appear to have the good sense to runaway from charging baby rhinos.   I spent five hours revising the substance of the book review today, even after SDA gave me copy edits (bless him!). That’s work.  I sent it off and the proceeded to update the mirror lists:  

  • Article Due End of September
  • The Coin Book
  • New Review
  • Funding for Next Project

That’s rather different and much shorter than where we started exactly a month ago.  There is also another list with mess details about getting ready for Turkey out on the living room mirror.  I have a huge urge to avoid anything related to both Turkey and the Coin Book.  Case in point: another author in the series (an exceptionally clever guy) sent me his proposal and some chapter drafts which he knocked out in like three weeks.  He wants my feedback.  That’s nice, even flattering, possibly inspiring and helpful for my own writing, but part of me is so intimidated that I don’t even what to open the damn file.  I could research how to fill out our Visa applications for Turkey but that seems equally terrifying.  Although, I tell myself that I don’t want to do that because it will take time away from my research and writing.  So here I am talking about ostriches.  Which is also why I have a blog: to keep me accountable and honest about my work habits.  I suspect that I might need to chunk out the book project into discreet steps and make a list of those AND I’m going need to schedule time to make Turkey happen.