History doesn’t repeat itself, but the rhetoric sure does.
Antigonus, when the Spartans were thus reduced, pitying the distress of so famous a city, prohibited his soldiers from plundering it, and granted pardon to all who survived, observing that “he had engaged in war, not with the Spartans, but with Cleomenes, with whose flight all his resentment was terminated; nor would it be less glory to him, if Sparta should be recorded to have been saved by him by whom alone it had been taken. – Justin 28.4
Our only enemy is Saddam and his brutal regime — and that regime is your enemy as well. – Bush on Iraq War
Our enemy is Saddam and his regime, not the Iraqi people. Our forces are friends and liberators of the Iraqi people, not your conquerors. – Blair on The Iraq War
From: Miles, R. (2011). Hannibal and Propaganda. In Dexter Hoyos (Eds.), A Companion to the Punic Wars, (pp. 260-279). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
This passage above suggests that it is a ‘fact’ that one of Pyrrhus’ advisors made such a comparison. The story is known from Cassius Dio (9.40.27):
The same man, when, upon his retreat, he beheld the army of Laevinus much larger than it had been before, declared that the Roman legions when cut to pieces grew whole again, hydra-fashion. This did not, however, cause him to lose courage, but he in turn arrayed his forces, though he did not join battle.
It is said, too, that Cineas, while he was on this mission, made it his earnest business at the same time to observe the life and manners of the Romans, and to understand the excellences of their form of government; he also conversed with their best men, and had many things to tell Pyrrhus, among which was the declaration that the senate impressed him as a council of many kings, and that, as for the people, he was afraid it might prove to be a Lernaean hydra for them to fight against, since the consul already had twice as many soldiers collected as those who faced their enemies before, and there were many times as many Romans still who were capable of bearing arms.
The Senate made answer to Cineas as Appius advised. They decreed the levying of two new legions for Laevinus, and made proclamation that whoever would volunteer in place of those who had been lost should put their names on the army roll. Cineas, who was still present and saw the multitude hastening to be enrolled, is reported to have said to Pyrrhus on his return: “We are waging war against a hydra.” Others say that not Cineas, but even Pyrrhus himself said this when he saw the new Roman army larger than the former one; for the other consul, Coruncanius, came from Etruria and joined his forces with those of Laevinus.
Appian makes clear that bon mot was not a fixed point in the received tradition. He knew it from at least two different sources with different variations. We can’t be sure if Appian’s sources were riffing on Silenus’ motif or faithfully recording an actual piece of rhetoric from the time or if the metaphor is just so pervasive that it provides a nice plausible exclamation in any history.
All that said, this Florus passage (going back to a lost bit of Livy?) might be the best evidence that some lost historian made something of the Pyrrhus = Hercules, Rome = Hydra symbolism on a more meaningful level that a simple metaphor.
For Pyrrhus said, “I plainly see that I am sprung of the seed of Hercules, when I see all these heads of foes cut off springing up again from their blood as they sprang from the Lernaean hydra.”
The use of metaphor in relationship to Pyrrhus is not irrelevant to a discussion of Silenus, but I’d hesitate to move it from a conversation about the historiographical tradition and into one about propaganda.
Note also how the hydra in Pyrrhus tradition is not a negative characterization of Rome, not emphasizing her monstrosity or destructive capacity, but instead resilience and depth of martial resources, especially her manpower base. It’s a complement.
In the Fall semester, when we can hope this adventure in my head continues post-sabbatical, I’m running a graduate seminar on Commentaries. I want at least one meeting to be on digital commentaries. So I was just delighted, to find this new project with a really creative and functional interface. Texts run a wide gamut, but look particularly appropriate for 3rd or 4th semester Latin undergraduates. Maybe the next time I teach one of those I’ll have to try out an online textbook as it were. I’m all for open access.
It’s a teaching and language oriented version of something like this site which is more historical in its explication, or the Vergil project which seems aimed at a more advanced student. But the real leap forward is that DCC is crafting new commentaries specially for the web instead of building interfaces to existing print texts.
So I was reading Pere Pau Ripollès’ fascinating ‘The X4 Hoard (Spain): Unveiling the Presence of Greek Coinages during the Second Punic War’ (2008) this morning. I fervently wish I’d read it before now. The problem with real publication, rather than this blogging non-sense, is its not easy after the fact to rethink and amend and correct your former ideas. Also real publication takes a very long time, so by the time it is out there for the world one’s intellectual engagement with the content has already moved on to something else or ‘evolved’ as Mr. Obama’s position has done on some issues. I’m thinking about my piece in this book. I’ll put a clean copy up on academia.edu one of these days.
Anyway. Pere Pau Ripollès goes along way towards illuminating circulation of Greek coinage in the Western Mediterranean. He tentatively still supports Crawford’s 1985 thesis that any Greek coins arrived with the Romans, although saying ‘this may be too categorical’. I’m inclined to see the evidence he collects as requiring this hypothesis to be seriously re evaluated. As he himself says in his conclusion the Greek coinage found in the hoards of Sicily are more similar to those in Spain than either is to Italy where there is a greater dearth of such Eastern coinages in the hoards.
One of the coins in Hoard X4 that he publishes is of the same type as that illustrated above.
This coin type, Crawford suggests, is the inspiration for the prows on Roman bronze series (See RRC p. 42 esp. n. 5; earlier post). It’s nice then to see that some specimens did in fact reach the Western Mediterranean relatively swiftly after its production.
I also note the rendering of the ram on this type (red circle above) is not unlike that found on the Athlit Ram.
And, while were talking about things I said in print I no longer believe, I can’t stand by a 260s date for the Heracles and Wolf and Twins didrachm after all the reading I’ve done for this new book. It fits better at the end of the First Punic War. I’m not sure how much that messes with my use of it as comparative evidence in the chapter linked above, but it does have some impact…
The Family Resemblance of Obama and his Grandfather. Links to excellent blog post by Gwen Sharp.
It is often suggested that the Barcid coinage of Spain could be portraits of members of the dynasty in the guise of Melkart/Heracles. The idea has fallen mostly out of favor, or is usually qualified by a strong ‘might‘. The idea never gained that much traction in serious academic circles. Crawford rejects it. Scullard is most cautious in the CAH, but toys with the idea more in his general histories. Hoyos in a more recent popular history tosses the idea out.
The idea goes back to E.G. S. Robinson and his 1956 article on the Punic coins of Spain in Essays Mattingly (p. 39):
The idea however holds on in many popular works, for example, in places where it would be visually convenient to have a picture of Hannibal:
My issue is that the assumption that these are portraits goes back to Robinson’s perception of race, as he himself says.
And, race is a social construct. [Can’t quite believe this? Click on the top image of this post.]
I’ve been wrestling somewhat with perceptions of race on a personal level with my time in Turkey. We’ve had a large number of dear friends and family as visitors, all of whom have found Turkey and the different culture groups who live here to be a warm, loving society. However, some of our white American visitors have made clear in casual comments that they perceive Turks as non-white, a different race from themselves. I found this pretty surprising. Until I open my mouth, I get mistaken for a Turk fairly regularly (or when I’m not with my red-headed life partner that is). It never occurred to me to think of myself as living with a different race, even if it is certainly a different culture and predominant religious orientation from my own.
Or, am I the one unwittingly just passing as ‘white’? I don’t know my biological father, but he may well have been Ashkenazi. On one truly awful blind date in my college days, I was told by a nice Jewish boy over cake and coffee that I could be certain that “when they come for us, they’re coming for you too”.
In the 1950s it was exceptionally common to think of Semitic peoples as a distinctive race. If you dare, go ahead and Google “Are Jews White”. The results aren’t pretty. If you want something safer to read on the subject you could start with this Princeton University Press publication:
Robinson’s certitude that the Barcid coinage were portraits is dependent on his ability to “know” what a “African Semite” looked like.
Robinson was part of the same milieu as Mattingly and Altheim. Altheim’s work from the mid-1930s onward was funded by Himmler’s Ahnernerbe, the scientific institute tasked with demonstrating the hypothesized historical predominance of the Aryan race. Altheim solicited and received funds for research aimed at demonstrating the Aryan origins of Rome. His subsequent publications are clearly marked by this most unfortunate bias (Momigliano 1945: 130). Mattingly translated Altheim’s still influential History of Roman Religion into English. I don’t claim to know how Robinson felt about race politics, but he certainly worked in a milieu that was comfortable using ancient history as a means of justifying a particular Euro-centric world view.
This approach was not an invention of his peers or even his generation. I’ve been ‘enjoying’ Bury’s History of Greece to the Death of Alexander (1900)before bed of late. It is rife with comments disparaging Semitic and Persian societies and directly connecting the Greco-Roman world to the ‘success’ of Modern Europe.
If Classics today is going to go forward as a academic pursuit with any integrity at all we need to own the demons of our past. It is not enough to say it’s not likely to be a Barcid portrait we need to own that that interpretation has its origins in a worldview that wanted to see the Punic as “Other”. Not Other in relation to Rome alone, but Other in relationship to Western, Aryan, Europe.
This morning, I was reading through all the goodies that ILL has delivered electronically during the post-Passover flood of activity back in Brooklyn and was just dead impressed (again) by the types of connections Michael Crawford can make. This paragraph above is from a relatively hard to find conference volume:
M. H. Crawford, ‘The Oscan inscriptions of Messana’ in Guerra e pace in Sicilia e nel Medlterraneo antico, VIII-III sec. a.C.; arte, prassi e teoria della pace e della guerra (2006), 521-525, at p. 525.
The rest of the article will be of interest to numismatists for his comments about the choice to use Greek on the coinage being a reflection of coinage as a ‘Greek phenomenon’. He also has some good comments on the choice of types by the Marmertini.
I’d love to have a photo of the front of the altar in the passage quoted above. I’ve put the Rix on ILL order. In case you’re unfamiliar with the awesome Pompeii inscription here are my comments on it in print:
Here’s an old pic I took when writing that article:
The one point I’m a little fuzzy on is did anyone actually record seeing a Latin inscription on the plaster over the Oscan one in Pompeii? Or are we just assuming it must have had one? Also could some high tec imaging process allow us to see under the Mamertine stucco inscription to let us read what if anything it is covering up?
Update 9-April-2026:
Another remarkably intact Oscan inscription from Pompeii in a semi-public context?!
Machine translation:
Dr. Hermann Degering has identified an Oscan inscription painted on a tuff pillar—one that had hitherto escaped the notice of scholars, as it was largely obscured by a layer of adhering soil. Once the pillar was cleaned, a significant Oscan inscription came to light; it differs considerably from other similar inscriptions known to date (cf. Conway, The Italic Dialects, Cambridge 1897, nos. 60–63). The inscription is executed in red paint upon a tuff block located on the Via dell’Abbondanza—specifically, on the pillar separating the entrances at nos. 19 and 20 in Insula V–VI of Regio VIII. The average height of the letters is 0.13 meters in the first line and 0.09 meters in the remaining two lines. We present here a facsimile derived from a photograph, which was itself produced from a precise tracing that I have personally verified against the original on several occasions.
Ex Slg. Sir Arthur Evans (= Katalog Burlington Exhibition 1903) Tf. 101, 82, Slg. Jameson 449 und Slg. Walter Niggeler (=Auktion Leu + M&M Basel 1965) 82. Cf. SNG ANS 531. 7.15 g.
So I read this bit of Polybius (below) and landed right back at this coin (above):
For Hiero and Gelo not only gave seventy-five silver talents, partly at once and the rest very shortly afterwards, to supply oil in the gymnasium, but dedicated silver cauldrons with their bases and a certain number of water-pitchers, and in addition to this granted ten talents for sacrifices and ten more to qualify new men for citizenship, so as to bring the whole gift up to a hundred talents. They also relieved Rhodian ships trading to their ports from the payment of customs, and presented the city with fifty catapults three cubits long. And finally, after bestowing so many gifts, they erected, just as if they were still under an obligation, in the Deigma or Mart at Rhodes a group representing the People of Rhodes being crowned by the People of Syracuse. (5.88.5-8)
The context is c.226BC and Rhodes’ use of its recent earthquake to solicit diplomatically expedient gifts. [Link to some relevant scholarship]
A) It’s good context for the above coin on the personification of political bodies in honorific art forms in 3rd Century BC.
B) It might suggest that the coin type imitates a statue group or potential statue group or the known style of a type of statue group. This isn’t crazy lots of coin types derive from statues of one sort or another.
C) It made me think about who crowns whom in Hellenistic art in what context. Under the Empire cities shake hands rather than crown one another. Nike crowns everybody. She’s kind of a whore that way. It’s kind of her M.O. Ditto Eros (Cupid). Then this came to mind:
Nice Picture, but don’t believe the Flickr caption.
The crowning obviously honors and emphasizes the status of the crowned, but what about the crowner? Does it diminish the status of Syracuse to bestow the crown? Or in fact is it a statement of inherent superiority if one can crown another? We need only think of Napolean’s anxiety about being crowned by the Pope and thus his decision to crown himself and his queen.
On a more serious note, Walbank as always is full of goodness:
it be resolved by the People of Byzantium and Perinthus to grant to the Athenians rights of intermarriage, citizenship, tenure of land and houses, the seat of honor at the games, access to the Council and the people immediately after the sacrifices, and immunity from all public services for those who wish to settle in our city; also to erect three statues, sixteen cubits in height, in the Bosporeum, representing the People of Athens being crowned by the Peoples of Byzantium and Perinthus; also to send deputations to the Panhellenic gatherings, the Isthmian, Nemean, Olympian, and Pythian games, and there to proclaim the crown wherewith the Athenian People has been crowned by us, that the Greeks may know the merits of the Athenians and the gratitude of the Byzantines and the Perinthians.
Update 1/5/2016: My thoughts on this are maturing. I think there must have been a very typical statue group that was developed for such a representation and the Nero/Agrippina is a late example of the general type. This informs how I am thinking about types like RRC 419/2 and other crowning scenes on coins. Cf. Also the Corinth Crowning Ptolemy group attested by Athenaeus drawing on Kallixeinos and discussed by Pollitt (here and here).
Update 5/1/14: This isn’t precisely related to the rest of this post, but I wanted to be able to find this passage again when thinking about the Locrian coin (Pliny, NH 34.32):
This demonstrates Romans receiving honors from S. Italian Cities for their role as protector a decade before Locri’s coin. I also like the sentence about this being a means of establishing foreign clients. I doubt the Thurians saw it that way!
1/20/16: Constantine and the Tyche of Constantinople
In view of the fact that the Boii and rest of the Gauls were offering for sale various articles and an especially large number of captives, the Romans became afraid that they might some day use the money against them, and accordingly forbade anybody to give to a Gaul either silver or gold. (Zon. 8.19)
I came across this odd little quote in the fragments of Cassius Dio in the midst of the narrative of events preceding the Second Punic War. This got me thinking about the monetization of the region and led me back to this passage in R. Haeussler, Becoming Roman? Diverging identities and experiences in ancient northwest Italy (2013), p. 98:
The chapter from which this is pulled is a nice example of a historian integrating numismatic evidence into the narrative. Anyway this further led me to discover that all of Ermanno A. Arslan’s publications are online. A very exciting resource. And, I also got to read some of the work of Giovanni Gorini who also seems to have put much of his publications online.
So in some regions, like Turdetania in Further Spain [the most unfortunate place name ever!], it has been suggested that the issuing of bronze coinage is a reaction to Roman regional engagement, a vehicle to help with the collection of taxes, etc. So, S J Keay, “The Romanisation of Turdetania” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 11.3 (1992), 275-315, esp. 288ff. By contrast, the current suggestion seems to be that the peoples of Northern Italy were already engaged in the use and production of silver coinage before their engagement with the Romans.
The passage from the epitome of Dio (above) is interesting because of how it sees a connection between the acquisition of silver and gold and military readiness. It ties trade and commerce directly to war resources. The trade doesn’t give the Gauls more resources–they already have a good deal of material wealth–instead it gives them a type of resource, gold and silver (coins?!) which make it easier to engage in warfare.
And, here’s a nice pic of a padane drachma just so this post has one:
Poor drawing from Millingen of BM specimen. Image links to catalogue entry without image. Note: Millingen describes this coin as AE in his text and that agrees with our knowledge of the type, but on the plate he identifies it as AR.
HN Italy 609 transcribes the pesky reverse legend of this type: r[e]gvinumra/valanum. The online BM catalogue concurs. The old BMC reads as follows:
This raises some questions in my mind about the readings of the first and penultimate letters on the first line. The old catalog reads them as R (Oscan for /d/) and D (Oscan for /r/). Rs and Ds cause no amount of confusion in their Oscan reversal, notably in antiquity at Larinum. The new catalogues (HN Italy and BM online) both read the same letter in both positions… r … by which I assume they mean an Oscan D … you see how the confusion can creep in!
I thank Dan Diffendale for reminding me of Crawford’s Imagines Italicae, vol. 2, p. 906 and sharing images via Twitter (7/30/2018).
His argument is complex and he quickly shifts into aligning the Dioscuri as the Penates, an issue we’ve discussed before. His resolution doesn’t seem immediately obvious to me, as it seems to require us to believe the name of the gods was broken in the middle and written on two lines and does not explain the full text. It comes down to the two inscriptions sharing at most a three letter sequence in common.
I’d really like to see a publication of the coin type with high quality images of the specimens and some discussion detailed reasoning by an Oscan expert, something I am most certainly not!
This is from Plutarch’s Flamininus 16.4. After yesterday’s post I couldn’t help but share this gem. I like how both passages are topped and tailed by the word pistis, using word placement to frame and contextualize the rest of the content. Posts on Pistis and Fides.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 