In a previous post, I claimed there were only two falcata’s represented on the republican coin series.  I’m not positive of about this identification here, but I will say that I think it highly likely that the representation of two different sword types on the trophy is intended to identify for the viewer what ethnicity has been defeated.

I’ve started to wonder if anyone has written anything on the representation of the captive’s gaze in Roman Art.  Usually prisoners of war are shown mourning their own fate like the woman to the left of the trophy, but on occasion the prisoner is shown contemplating the symbols of the Roman victory.  A powerful construction of the audience of the spectacle and the spectacle as a means of making imperium manifest.  Must check Ida’s work…

CRRO 468/2

 

The (statue of?) the emperor (Commodus) crowns a trophy with (statue of?) a captive beneath.  Notice the care taken to render the base on which each statue rests and the care to ensure the emperor dominates the scene through hierarchy of scale.

The figure in the foreground is about to sacrifice the bull/heifer?  with a double axe.   Notice the emphasis on the detail of the chain holding the animal’s head in place.

RPC 4 3255 (temp)

The only place I remember seeing the archaeological remains of anchors for such chains is the sanctuary of Apollo Claros in Turkey.  At that site the anchors number sufficient for hecatomb.  It is unlikely that such large sacrifices were a regular component of worship and thus the anchors by there permanence serve as a memorial to past hecatombs and serve as a promise of more on the same scale.

Before I can push the  “Tree and Sunset” article out the door I have to find an image of this metal (and some others) which have no copyright issues or minimal illustration fees.  I do not want to pay the British Museum’s hefty rates to be able to have the above image appear in print.   This nice copy from an enthusiast’s website was promising, and he was kind enough to tell me he just got his image of some long gone ebay  sale.  No luck there.  So I turned to old out of copyright catalogues which brought me to the sales catalogue for Isaac Wood’s collection from 1884, digitized by the ANS.  I was at once disheartened and elated to see how many anti-slavery types were listed, and just how many seem directly relevant to this article and which I’ve not come across before:

If you are intrigued by this post, you may also be interested in this conference I’m organizing in May 2017.

It’s the first real work day of a new period of research leave.  I’m not wholly free from university and college commitments, but mostly so, from now through next February and then I am only teaching a graduate seminar “History from/in the Arts” – An investigation into how and why we today use literary and visual media when reconstructing the past and how this intersects with context and function of ancient artistic and literary production.  I design it to let me bring in as much of my work on coins and historiography as possible and to allow as many different types of student projects as possible.

[Why you ask to I get this time you ask… Well I worked over contract for two years, never took my whole maternity leave, and never took the research leave given for having served as chair.]

I’ve cleared up over do emails and have set up a lovely office in one wing of a friend’s home so I can go out to work rather than work from our cottage.  I’ve fixed childcare schedule to give my self six uninterrupted hours five days a week for our whole time in England.  And frankly I just don’t want to work harder than that this summer.  (See my last post.)

What then are the goals for this period of work?

1. Keep on top of  conference preparations for next May!  (And delegate what can be delegated!)
2. Triage my unpublished writings.  One of the greatest gifts of my sabbatical and this blog is a sense now that I can write freely and easily as I need to.  If I have one great overarching goal for this period of time, it is to feel just as confident taking a preliminary piece of writing, often something constructed for a conference or invited lecture, and deciding how I want to publish it and pushing it through the publication process.  I’m so over the edited volume thing.  (Unless I’m the editor. 😉 )  I’m good a writing.  Not so good at editing and publishing.  This can be fixed.
3. The goal is to get as much out the door and in press this year as possible.  It feels like I need to clear the decks in another way.  To let go all my darling little projects that I’ve hoarded up.  I never want one of my former students to (have to) footnote an unpublished paper when building on my ideas ever again. To this end, I will be resisting the appeal of the new and try to discipline myself to stay with in the limit of sufficiency.   This will mean thinking about the intersection of thoroughness and sufficiency within my discipline(s).  I had some terrible role models that insisted on a level of completeness and exploration of alternative possibilities that can stymie all progress.  The goal is to use this blog not so much to develop new ideas, but use it as a resource to inform the revision of existing works.
4. This brings us to a confession of the unpublished, drafted docket:
   • a book on roman republican coins (70,000 w0rds), perhaps a new proposal to better reflect how the project has evolved.
   • A note on quantification using literary testimony and a die study of RRC 330.
   • A note on the interpretation Lepidus’ coin series (RRC 419) in light of Hersh and Walker’s redating (might be good to have this come out before the Kings at Rome piece mentioned below as then I can footnote myself.)
   • “Minucii, Modii and Priestly Implements:  A Case Study in Mid-Republican Political Iconography” another short coin piece.  (Actually have some grant funding for following up on this one this year…)
   • “The Tree and Sunset Motif: The Long Shadow of Roman Imperialism on Representations of Africa” 99.5% ready for submission to a journal, even formatted to house style. (7,817 words)
   • “Civil War as Foreign Conflict” (3,782 words)  Not a piece I want to publish in anything like how it stands, but in my research for it I spent huge amount of time documenting and taking notes on the historiographical tradition of the Colline gate and its aftermath.   I’d like to come back to that and morph the paper into something I would like to publish.
   • “Rome’s Past in the Present Tense The very contemporary, ancient history of Dionysius of Halicarnassus” (11,837 words)  in good shape!  I really like this piece and would like to get it out the door while it still feels fresh.  It uses maps and coins as a nice contextualization of the historiography.  I think it may go over 15,000 when polished for publication.  My hesitation to put this high on the goal list is I feel that I’d need to grapple with Dionysius corpus of rhetorical writings which sounds the opposite of fun.
   • A number of scripts and drafts and thematically related pieces on  the rhetoric of concordia, Memories of Opimius and Marius in 60s onwards.  More than 10,000 words but of greatly varying quality.  Like the Historiography of the Colline Gate piece, it would probably need a new frame work.
   • A long piece on Faustus’ use of Sulla’s memory  (~6,000 words) that is lost on an old hard drive.  I think my thinking has moved on and I should probably only re read it to remind myself what I used to think.  Some of the good stuff in this may have already been wrapped into the Kingship in the Late Republic piece below.
   • “A Prolegomenon to the Study of Glass Pastes in the Roman Republic” (~4,300)  Probably one of the direction my research wants to head towards in future.  Fun but I’ve not yet convinced myself I’m right in all I claim.
   • “Conceptions of Kingship in the Late Republic”  (8,100 words)  – I really love this piece.  It feels like how I want to write.  I suspect it will need to grow by 2-4,000 words for final publication but it feels like I have something meaningful and creative to say.  Bonus I’m talking about one aspect of this topic at CAMWS in October.
   • And then there are some of the blog posts here that have ideas that should be properly written up for publication.

So just 10+ projects, not counting the conference I’m organizing.  Hmm.  Clearing the deck indeed.

What order to tackle all this?  I’d best do some consultation….

Why does it feel like I don’t have anytime for research as a CUNY full-time faculty member?

We’re contractually obligated for 21 teaching hours.

According to our contract 8 weeks of parental leave is the equivalent of 6 hours reassigned time.

8 x 40 (assuming a standard 40-hour work week) = 320 work hours

This means 21 teaching hours = 1120 actual hours or 28 weeks of a 40-hour work week.

Our semesters have 14 teaching weeks and 1 exam week.

This means there is just 40 hours a semester left over for service and research within each 15 week semester.

There are 52 weeks in a year.  We are contractually only 9 month employees.  Three-quarters of 52 is 39 weeks.

This means that CUNY is paying us for 11 weeks of research and service each academic year.

Our contract explicitly expects us to spend only 28% of our time on non-teaching duties.  Or to average about 11 hours per week during our 9 months of employment.

Really?!

Yes.  Let’s do the numbers another way to figure how much of this time is intended to be research, rather than service.

Lecturers are full time faculty with no research commitments, but service commitments.  Their contractual obligation is 27 teaching hours.  This strongly implies that 6 teaching hours is equivalent to the amount of research a full-time faculty in a professorial title is expected to produce each year.

We already saw that 6 teaching hours = 8 weeks of work.

That leave 3 weeks of work or 120 hours an academic year for service to the institution.

SO, if you spent 8% of your time on institutional service, 21% of your time doing research, and 72% of your time on teaching related activities this past academic year, congratulations!  You worked to contract and fulfilled all your professional duties.  Please feel free to include this as an addendum to your annual evaluation or tenure file.

It should have felt something like this:

 

Just wanted to be sure I could find this specimen from c.215-214 again.

So I got lost in a single coin when I should have been working on my paper.  Rats.  These things happen.  Here’s my brain dump on the subject.

So I got here through this bit of Rawson and her affirmation of a similarity between this type and that of Crepereius which will be in my type.  Of course, there are lots of Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Chimera intaglios.  Here’s just one example:

It’s much rarer to find even a mention of an intaglio with Bellerophon and without the Chimera.  I think I may have located just two, but neither are photographed so it could just be a cataloguing oversight not to mention the Chimera (example 1, example 2).

Then I noticed that Bellerophon is wearing a Phrygian Cap.  Very strange indeed.  In literary sources Bellerophon is from Corinth even if the battle with the Chimera is set in Lycia, like his other adventures (Amazons etc…).

The dude with the Phrygian hat associated with Medusa is Perseus, especially in Roman art.

 

Literature on these coins.

And in modern reception:

CRRO 458/2a

Yes.  There is certainly a link between glass paste iconography and the Roman republican coin series.  Just had share this particular link.

BM 1814,0704.2680 – The rendering of this ship shares much with the coinage of Fronteius c. 114-113 BCE (290/1) and the ship on Lutatius’ coin of c. 109-8 BCC (305/1).  Earlier posts (1 and 2).  The style of the aplustre is key.  The major different is the raised deck behind the prow stem.  On the republican coins it tends to have a triangular top instead of being a flat (pi-like) structure.

Most of the other BM glass pastes with ships show either later military ships (see below) or mercantile ships or ships symbolic of fortune.

BM 1814,0704.2261: Cataloguing of Glass Pastes is often in exact, but I giggled out loud when I read this identified as “two oared ships with a bird and an incense-burner on board.”  Hello, Legionary Standards.  More people really need to study numismatics.

BM 1814,0704.2251 – Ditto above.