30 out of 410 days: Proof of Vocation

July 16, 2013July 16, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 1 Comment

I’m a practicing Christian. One of the most powerful parts of the Christian tradition is the idea of vocation, or ‘calling’. I always think I hear a strong call, but spiritual leadership isn’t the only Vocation with a capital ‘V’. Some traditions talk about marriage as a vocation. And the metaphor has been widely borrowed. For me I know I’m on the path of my vocation when I’m at peace on a hard road, when there is joy in the labor itself. I often tell students to volunteer to help them find a career: if they’re willing to do something ‘for free’, there is a good chance they won’t mind getting paid for it later on.

I came home from my speaking engagement and subsequent lunch with great contentment. After a mostly sleepless night, the talk came off just fine. The major points were well received. I was able to hear and accept the feedback regarding certain logical inconsistencies in my presentation from more senior scholars. I was pointed towards new fascinating evidence; I have an appointment to view some great specimens this Thursday. The lunch was borrowed time with a mentor whose cancer is in remission and a host of other senior scholars — sometimes a cantankerous group, but peace reigned, maybe due to a general sense of gratitude our host was still with us.

The lack of sleep made me think maybe a nap was in order, but I was so excited I instead just sat leafing through some beautiful full color catalogs I was given today looking for a coin to write about here. So I sat for an hour or so with some very happy cats. I was getting up to check something when a check fell out of my bag. A speaking honorarium. I’d been handed it first thing this morning. Some eight hours ago. My ‘wages’. In my happiness I’d completely forgotten to even peek to see what I’d earned. I’m really grateful. Not only that I love my work so much, but that I have the luxury of not living meal to meal or check to check.

27, 28, and 29 out of 410 Days: Keeping Count

July 15, 2013July 16, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 1 Comment

Maybe I should been counting down instead of counting up my days. I could then focus on how much time was left instead of how much has passed. Not that I suppose it matters. Since I started this blog it turns out I was using a faulty pedometer that was under representing the distances I ran and thus telling me my average speed was very slow indeed. I discovered this after my run on day 27 on a course of a known distance. It shouldn’t matter. I’ve been running what I’ve been running, regardless of what number(s) it is a assigned. And yet, I still feel as if the inaccuracy makes it for naught. This can work the other way in my faulty logic as well: if I don’t weigh myself there is no number so there is nothing to worry about.

I finished a full draft of the book review. Its 1,200 words too long. Or 150% more than they wanted in the first place. I think I know some cranky bits I’ll cut out, but I’m going to sleep on it. I waited until today to write up my notes because I wanted a weekend of distance to see the forest for the trees. I see a forest now, but I have a hunch a couple of my points are out of step with how others in the discipline see things. A conversation or two will help. I’m noticing is as a pattern in my writing process. It should stop surprising me.

The review will still be too long after my cuts. I’ll send it in regardless.

26 out of 410 Days: Academic Nesting

July 12, 2013July 12, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday felt dreadfully chaotic. My mind was pulled in 1,000 directions. I kept chasing ideas and evidence down rabbit holes. Some wanted to go into the talk for next Tuesday, some into a few different chapters of the book. That should have felt like progress, like productivity. Instead, each competed with each other I couldn’t get my notes organized or the idea slotted in. Some new kernel of a thought kept pulling me away and demanding my attention. My body was tired. My mind was tired, but curious and driven, just completely unfocused. Even yesterday’s blog post felt half baked. AND, I felt guilty because Day 24 had a coin, but not a coin for the BOOK. I woke up at 4 am thinking about all of this.

I deduced two problems.

1) SDA asked me last weekend if what I had created in the back bedroom AKA my home office was an academic nest. Stakes of books on stakes of books. Random cups and mugs. Sticky notes and iDevices and wires, wires everywhere. Why, yes, that’s what precisely it is. Just like my office at work. SO, this morning before writing this I put my toys away like a good little girl. Sometimes the chaos is inspiring, but the chaos also creates some of the noise in my head.

2) I didn’t define a specific goal off the mirror. Playing with Roman republican coins and reading scholarship felt like goofing off because I didn’t know what the specific goal was, even though I still made progress towards things on the board. So, I decided today, no coins until I and Polybius have spent some quality time together. My failure to pick a goal was because I had the unreasonable expectation the editor to whom I returned proofs the day before might get back to me and I might need to respond. I left myself in limbo. [As I said some 20 days ago, being an academic often feels way too much like being on the dating scene.] And, I left myself in a position that I didn’t feel productive, even when making progress.

25 out of 410 Days: Lares Praestites

July 11, 2013April 3, 2018 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 5 Comments

The reverse of this coin (RRC 298/1) represents the Lares Praestites based on the description of their cult image in Ovid (see also Plutarch). Earlier in Ovid’s same work he gives a pretty horrible account of their conception. Lara or Lala warns Juturna of Jupiter’s amorous advances and is punished by having her tongue ripped out and then, while be lead to the underworld, she is raped by Mercury and conceives divine twins. Wiseman and Coarelli have connected this narrative with a famous mid-forth century mirror:

Obviously, the Bolsena mirror looks A LOT like what what we think the Romulus and Remus narrative should look like, BUT with many strange surrounding figures who our Romulus and Remus narrative can’t explain. Wiseman used the mirror to show that iconography of the wolf and twins wasn’t exclusively linked to Romulus and Remus. Coarelli took Wiseman’s argument further and suggests that these guardian Lares were originally founders of Rome themselves before being supplanted in traditional narratives by Romulus and Remus. Wiseman is confident that this early didrachm (RRC 20/1; ~~c.269~~ see Burnett 2006 for redating) is a representation of Romulus and Remus:

And so is pretty much everyone else in the world. But Coarelli has a fairly interesting point about borrowing of the iconography of one myth to create a new one. That sort of shift isn’t instantaneous. So if the Lares Praestites were originally the twins beneath the wolf, when would audiences have stopped seeing them as such? Could the didrachm be ‘misread’? Could the coin up top from 112-11 BC be taken to depict Rome’s founders? Ovid’s poem suggests their cult was neglected in his day, but this moneyer certainly thought they were worthy of commemoration. Farney sees the representation as a claim to divine ancestry explaining the little head of Vulcan as an allusion to the paternity of Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste. Caeculus’ uncles could be understood to be these Lares. But, Lott wants to see the Vulcan image to mean that these Lares protect the city from fire…

On Bolsena Mirror:

24 out of 410 Days: Proofing Problems

July 10, 2013July 10, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

The worst thing that can happen when reviewing proofs is to find a mistake made not by the publishing house — those you can demand they fix — but instead by you, especially if that error is substantial and thus might change page layout or numbers. Then again, one can’t very well leave historical inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies right there on the page. Maybe it is a good thing for the publishing process to take a while, as it lets one read one’s own work as if it was the work of a stranger. So my challenge today was to cut the offending statement and replace them with something accurate while using the exact correct number of characters including spaces. I chopped 1,203 characters and replaced them with 1,198 characters. Five characters under seemed a reasonable margin. Hopefully my editor thinks so!

The point I’d failed to articulate was how the testimony of Livy and Strabo relates to the change in coin types at Heraclea Lucania. The type of above borrows its obverse from Thurium and its reverse from Tarentum, the two cities that jointly founded Heraclea. Livy and Strabo tell us that Alexander the Molossian who originally came across the Adriatic to aid the Tarantines turned on them and seized Heraclea and tried to move a large festival with a general assembly of the Greeks living Italy from Heraclea to Thurian territory. The coins show first the Heracleans letting go the Tarentine design:

And then letting go the Thurian obverse as well:

The general subject matter (Athena/Heracles) stays the same but the direct iconographic parallels are removed. Anyway, the literary testimony seems rather important to explain why Heraclea might have been distancing itself from each of its mother-cities in turn. I’m glad I caught my lapse. I just wish I’d caught it earlier.

23 out of 410 Days: Standing on Stones

July 9, 2013July 9, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

So I got orthopedic inserts today. I feel taller and straighter and like I can’t believe how expensive it is to have some one put big pebbles in your shoes. This is to make running less dangerous in theory. The running is still happening even if I’m not writing about it.

Most of yesterday was given over to trying to be a good mentor, friend, and colleague. Some of it felt great; some of it was heartbreaking. All of it was distracting from my own work. There is something deeply selfish about writing.

In the midst of those conversations I got some good opportunities to reflect on what I call vertical living. It’s the idea that one defines oneself by the radical present. [I am a human drinking really good ice coffee with soy milk and blogging while standing in a back bedroom in central Brooklyn.] This is in contrast to horizontal living in which one reads one’s life as narrative. [My mommy issues are making me at once seek out problems and at the same time remain disgustingly optimistic, etc.etc.] I’m told the first approach is kind of zen or living in the moment and someone even suggested in might relate to some bit of ancient philosophy. Frankly, I like it because it takes less emotional energy to deduce my present state of being and adjust, rather than trying to analyze all the interconnections.

Of course as an academic in the humanities raising in the age of self help, the analysis come super easy. Second Nature. But it is still exhausting. And it feels fatalistic.

Right now, I’m okay with just being a coffee drinking blogger in deeply uncomfortable shoe inserts.

20, 21, and 22 out of 410 Days: Prow Stems

July 8, 2013November 21, 2019 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 4 Comments

If you you look carefully at the prow stem of this coin of ~151 BC, you will see the head of a woman. One way of reading this coin is to see the head as Venus and given that moneyer is probably an ancestor of Sulla (I’m skipping the prosopography today), it could then be taken over early proof of the family’s special affection for this divinity. The denarius of this moneyer has Victory in a biga (two horse chariot) on the reverse; note the wings:

A similar prow stem decoration is seen on the coinage of a Memmius c. 106 BC:

But in this case the die engraver has added a little figure of cupid crowning the prow stem to ensure the identification as Venus goes unmistaken. More over the reverse of the denarius also shows Venus:

Here it seems clear that we have a reference to the Memmii being of Trojan origin. Erskine says a little about the family connection (p. 21, 34, & 145) and provides context.

I don’t think the Sulla coin is nearly as clear. If we train our eye to other Roman monuments we quickly see that ship prows, or more properly the acrostolium, are traditionally so decorated. Take for instance the Tomb of C Vartilus Poplicola from Ostia:

Or the warship relief from Praeneste:

I grant you that this last one is harder to see. I include it mostly to demonstrate that different female deities occupied this spot and that on reliefs in larger context they are simply part of the decorative program. Some times identifiable, sometimes not, but not usually read as significant to the overall monument. See Holliday, p. 97-104.

So the Sulla coin could be Venus but there is nothing in the program of the moneyer to necessitate such a reading. Heck it could be the head of Victoria! And if one wanted to go down that route it would be a good idea to read some Clark.

Update 2/11/14: See also this post.

18 and 19 out of 410 Days: W/O A/C

July 5, 2013July 5, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

Finished up a script and slides for my talk on the 15th at the end of Wednesday and suggested to SDA that we take the Tandem to PA for a little overnight visit with his parents before doing fireworks with his brother in NJ. The family is a wee bit concerned about our decamping to Turkey for 10 months and we want to spend as much time with them as possible before we go.

Arriving back in the state of grace otherwise known as Brooklyn, I find that 36 hours in A/C has made me much less eager to get on with working with just a fan. We’ve been doing summer without our window units, partly to save the pennies, partly to be green, partly because we haven’t yet hit that “can’t stand it a second longer” point.

I keep considering linking this blog to my FB, but it feels very academically naked. Which it would be. Which would be the point. To take the pride out of the process. The posts here aren’t finished products: just little reflections of my imperfect thinking along the way. Public practice.

Today’s goal is try to put to bed the overdue book review. And, write back to a couple of very nice numismatists who I asked to help me source an image of a rare coin type, the only specimen of which might be in Paris. I love how happy coin geeks are to share what they know with one another. The enthusiasm is palpable. Makes it easier to ask for help.

update a few hours later: I broke down and plugged in the little A/C next to me in hopes of it raising general levels of productivity. The cats seem happily intrigued by the change.

17 out 410 Days: Moving Money

July 3, 2013July 8, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

~~I started wasting time trying to figure out where this image of a Roman banker came from. I stopped. It’s one of those wiki images floating around the internet without proper attribution.~~

Update June 8: A colleague solved the mystery for me! I love that. AND she introduced me to another great database I’m ashamed to say I did not yet know about! Click on the image to be enlightened.

I find it a little ironic that I spend a good chunk of time worrying how to pay rent in Turkey with money earned in the US. Moving money internationally isn’t hard, just expensive. There seems to be no way to avoid paying high transaction fees or trying to operate in cash, though even cash comes with exchange rate difficulties. All these problems existed in the Roman world. They had to find ways of shift large sums over large distances. Maybe I should just bring gold…

Subletter is arranged and our Turkish Landlords are in touch. All very reassuring. Now I just have to worry about the money. Modern and ancient.

16 out of 410 Days: Planning Rollercoaster

July 2, 2013July 5, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 2 Comments

This is a pre-run post. I want to give the phone like five minutes on the charger so I get a full dose of mind numbing music while I pound the pavement.

The potential Istanbul house for 10 months had begun to terrify me. Luckily, SDA’s enthusiasm is unwavering. So, it was something of a relief that the owners hadn’t written back since last Thursday. Maybe it would fall through and not be my fault. But! Then a close colleague/friend wrote to me this morning interested in subletting and cat-sitting for us. I hadn’t realized how much of my anxiety was about leaving my home to strangers and moving the kitties out of their familiar territory. Now that we might have that solved I want to put the money down on the Turkish home lickety-split! I am sure to change my mind a dozen more times about how I feel about the whole thing.