71 out of 410 days: What’s in a Name?

August 27, 2013August 28, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

This coin of Pompey is probably a small issue struck as a commemorative piece and/or gift on the occasion of his second triumph. The choice of legends are particularly revealing about both the date of issue and also the impression Pompey wished to convey. Three passages are needed for context. First, Granius Licinianus 36.2.4:

And Pompeius, when he was 25 years old and still a Roman knight – something which no-one had previously done – celebrated a triumph as pro-praetor from Africa, on the fourth day before the Ides of March. Some writers say that on this occasion the Roman people were shown elephants in the triumph. But when he came to enter the city, the triumphal arch was too small for the four elephants yoked to his chariot, although they tried it twice.

I include this for how it emphasizes his having served with Praetorian imperium as a private citizen and because it shows the close connection between Elephants and Africa in the Roman mind. Next up is Plutarch, Life of Pompey 13.4-5.

[When Sulla] perceived that everybody was sallying forth to welcome Pompey and accompany him home with marks of goodwill, he was eager to outdo them. So he went out and met him, and after giving him the warmest welcome, saluted him in a loud voice as “Magnus,” or The Great, and ordered those who were by to give him this surname. Others, however, say that this title was first given him in Africa by the whole army, but received authority and weight when thus confirmed by Sulla. Pompey himself, however, was last of all to use it, and it was only after a long time, when he was sent as pro-consul to Spain against Sertorius, that he began to subscribe himself in his letters and ordinances “Pompeius Magnus”; for the name had become familiar and was no longer invidious.

Here we get some accounts of how Pompey came to be called ‘the Great’, its connection to his African campaign, and when he himself embraced the name. What’s missing from this passage are the associations with Alexander which were well known in antiquity and today. Finally, Cicero, For the Manilian Law 62.6-7 (cf. Cicero, Phillipics, 11.18-19):

What was ever so unusual, as, when there were two most gallant and most illustrious consuls, for a Roman knight to be sent as proconsul to a most important and formidable war? He was so sent—on which occasion, indeed, when someone in the senate said that a private individual ought not to be sent as proconsul, Lucius Philippus is reported to have answered, that if he had his will he should be sent not pro consule, but proconsulibus.

The final statement puns on the double meaning of pro consule: it can be translated either ‘not instead of one consul, but instead of both’ or ‘not with the rank of proconsul, but instead of both consuls’. Its this controversial appointment, again as a private citizen, that the reverse legend celebrates and associates with the triumphal figure.

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Today was the long slog through typing in the text I wrote long hand yesterday and adding citations and edits as appropriate. Lots of progress just not inspiring. I have between three and six more coin types I want to incorporate into the chapter all of which I’ve written about here on the blog at one time or another. Tomorrow, fresh, longhand, I could have something like a full rough draft.

69, 70 out of 410 days: Out and About

August 26, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was gorgeous. I spent nearly the whole day on the bike. A good battery recharge. As SDA and I were coming out of Prospect Park and waiting at the traffic light [Yes, some cyclists really do obey rules of the road.], I saw the triumphal arch at grand army plaza again-for-the-first time. Check out the spandrels! The left Victory has a palm branch and a little victory on a globe, but the right Victory has fasces with axes AND the constitution.

She’s holding it like Moses holds the 10 commandments and its clearly inscribed as the constitution to make sure there is no question. The juxtaposition very nicely contextualizes the symbolism of the fasces in the late 1800s as a law-an-order motif.

The arch itself is dedicated to the “Defenders of the Union” and designing began 1888 and was unveiled 1892. All this just further informs how we read the fasces in an early 1900s context for our Liberty Dime digression.

Today’s plan is to do some more long hand drafting out at a coffee shop away from the distractions of technology.

Unpleasant Reminders

August 24, 2013August 24, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

It would be tedious to mention all the different men who have spent the whole of their life over chess or ball or the practice of baking their bodies in the sun. They are not unoccupied whose pleasures are made a busy occupation. For instance, no one will have any doubt that those are laborious triflers who spend their time on useless literary problems, of whom even among the Romans there is now a great number. It was once a foible confined to the Greeks to inquire into what number of rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, whether moreover they belong to the same author, and various other matters of this stamp, which, if you keep them to yourself, in no way pleasure your secret soul, and, if you publish them, make you seem more of a bore than a scholar. But now this vain passion for learning useless things has assailed the Romans also. – Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, XIII

I abhor the sound of a ticking clock. My great grandparents often babysat me. If my mother was to come after my bedtime I’d be put to rest on a stiff rattan ottoman under a woolen afghan at the far end of the living room next to the fireplace. I would lay there listening to the mantel piece clock tick away the seconds of my life. Each chime would tell me exactly how long I’d been lying there failing to sleep. SDA’s grandfather collected clocks. We have a great number of them around our home and would enjoy having many more. All of them are stopped. I don’t want any such reminders, thank you very much.

Clearly Seneca thinks I’m wasting my time. No, my knowledge doesn’t make any one better off particularly, but the process of acquiring it is certainly immensely pleasurable, certainly more than catching a tan.

68 out of 410 days: Boundary Rituals

August 24, 2013August 24, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

I was reading this description of the pomerium. And all of a sudden I couldn’t help but think about the ritual of beating the bounds still used in many English (and Irish?) parishes today. Clicking on the picture above will give you a basic history with images. There is a good scholarly reflection on the revival/restoration of the historic practices here. I like how this modern take accepts that each deployment of the ritual must be meaningful in the contemporary context and thus evolves overtime.

This was because I was hemming and hawing over how to talk about this coin of 81 BC, if at all:

Is it just about generalized ideas of bounty and stability in the aftermath of the Civil Wars? Or is there some specific reference to Sulla’s extension of the pomerium or the establishment of his colonies throughout Italy? Should we see the reverse as a peaceful genre scene or the illustration of a religious ritual? The latter seems more likely given themes on the Roman Republican coin series generally, but on the other hand a more generalized symbolism would be more typical than the documentation of a very specific contemporary event or series of events.

I’m leaning toward a more general symbolism because the figure is clearly in a tunic, not a toga or other ritual garb. And especially as it seems to be a direct echo of this earlier issue (100BC by Mattingly’s reckoning), with the exception of the addition of the driver:

Ryan 2009 has a good take on this issue, calling it a «aktualitätsbedingte Familienthematik » = “a family type of contemporary significance” linking it both to historical agrarian legislation by the family AND current events.

Victory Redux

August 23, 2013April 21, 2014 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 1 Comment

I came across the answer to my question some weeks ago about the origins of the Victory inscribing a shield motif. There is a nice summary of the evolution in Hölscher (p. 61-2 with references to his earlier work on Victoria). He sees its origins in three different elements: 1) 4th century representations of Nike’s inscribing inscriptions like the one above from Heracleia Pontica or this one from Mallos:

2) The practice of dedicating inscribed shields to record victories at major sanctuaries. Here’s a relatively recent piece of scholarship with examples and references to relevant literature And 3) the adaption of the Venus of Capua who is looking at herself in the reflection of Mars’ shield:

He then much to my delight mentions lots of gem and glass paste examples that located the fusion of these three elements in the second century BC. All of which very nicely contextualizes its first appearance as a variation of the standard quinarius reverse design (RRC 333/1).

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Part of me feels guilty for not knowing this already. Hölscher has been on my bookshelves for donkey’s years. I swear I’ve read this portion a number of times. My mind just didn’t make the connection while I was writing the earlier post. That had to wait until I read it again. Perhaps that’s why I”m so interested in re-reading (see today’s earlier post). To see information again for first time. For pleasure, for work. The repetition seems the only way to build the paths in my mind that lead to the connections that build the ideas that make the endeavor of learning seem worthwhile.

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Update 4/21/2014: Key bibliography also includes:

R. Kousser, “The Desirability of Roman Victory: Victoria on Imperial and Provincial Monuments.” in Representations of War in Ancient Rome, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

And

R. Kousser, Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical, Cambridge University Press, 2008. BMCR review here.

67 out of 410 days: Poetry and other Evidence

August 23, 2013August 23, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

Reading for leisure is complicated when one reads as a primary professional obligation. As early as my undergraduate days I rationed novel reading by imposing strict rules: 1) only on weekends or school breaks, 2) never, ever start a book after 4 pm [to avoid being up all night]. Now, I read fewer novels, and usually old “friends”, sometimes from childhood, who’ve been read many times before. When I read something new, I like a guarantee of plot resolution. Somewhere in grad school I picked up poetry as a means of leisure reading that stands repetition and is low on time commitment. My tastes run highly rhythmic: Fenton, Auden and honest: Sexton, Addonizio.

What I haven’t read enough of is Greek or Latin poetry. Somewhere the ‘historian’ label interfered with my perception of such literature as particularly useful or engaging. A old well-grooved prejudice. One that protects poetry as a modern pleasure thoroughly divorced from my professional concerns. This is ridiculous. Ovid, Martial, Propertius and their friends tell us far more about the landscape of Rome itself and the attitudes and preoccupations of the people who inhabited it than Cicero. Or, if not more, than differently, with nuance and layers of meaning. Rich depths for the historian to plumb. With playful and pleasurable language to boot. Heck, Cicero in the pro Archia even tells us the value of the poetic perspective on history. I even like such literature, as literature.

I think, perhaps, a graduate seminar ‘Latin Poetry for Historians’ would be a fabulous course to develop post sabbatical. Something that honors the genre as an art form, while also exploring the diversity of the evidence it offers, and the complications of deploying such evidence.

66 out of 410 days: Hairy Goats and My Notes

August 22, 2013December 31, 2019 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 1 Comment

The last time I was in Oxford some 14 months ago, I think, I snapped this image with my camera phone in the Sackler Library. I was so happy to find an example of the iconography of this coin in a published excavation report of site finds. [Update 8/24/13: The image above looks more like a sheep to me than a goat the longer I look at it here on the blog. It’s the curly horns. I think rest below are really goats.] Something I stumbled upon on the new arrivals shelf. An Italian publication I seem to recall. What I can’t seem to find is any record at all of what the book was or from what site.

If I knew where it was I could say something about the context of the image, perhaps even a divinity associated with the area of the find. Alas, what we have here is a failure of the information pack rat system. What I’m very happy to say is that its a popular motif… you guessed it! … on SEAL rings.

A. Furtwängler, Beschreibung der geschnittenen Steine im Antiquarium, Königliche Museen Berlin (1896) Cat. no. 6811; no. 7525; BM 1917,0501.513; Gold finger-ring with an engraved sard: Eros riding a goat.; BM 1923,0401.1121; Edinburgh Tassie 2258

It is also popular on Lamps:

And the also this figurine from Cyprus:

Crawford thinks its likely to be Dionysiac. Perhaps. Erotes are floating around with goats on many a Dionysiac sarcophagus, or Seasons sarcophagus. But this might actually have more to do with the cult of Venus/Aphrodite:

Pausanias tells us that this is Aphrodite Pandemos, All Encompassing Aphrodite, usually translated Common or Vulgar Aphrodite:

Behind the portico built from the spoils of Corcyra is a temple of Aphrodite, the precinct being in the open, not far from the temple. The goddess in the temple they call Heavenly; she is of ivory and gold, the work of Pheidias, and she stands with one foot upon a tortoise. The precinct of the other Aphrodite is surrounded by a wall, and within the precinct has been made a basement, upon which sits a bronze image of Aphrodite upon a bronze he-goat. It is a work of Scopas, and the Aphrodite is named Common. The meaning of the tortoise and of the he-goat I leave to those who care to guess.

What kind of connotations would “Pandemos” in the mids 80 BC? If that is, in fact, the reference. Certainly populist ones…

Update 8/23/13: Here’s a great study about what Pandemos might mean in a different community. Those working on Cyprus have connected the Eros on Goat terracottas with the cult of Aphrodite/Astarte. Muller took a different approach and associated this the ‘sport of Eros’ i.e. the motif of erotes playing with the attributes of other gods and other activities. Thus he sees the coin as referring to the infancy of Zeus. This is usually dismissed because the goat is male and Zeus’s goat was a nanny-goat.

Liberty Dime Excursus

August 21, 2013August 24, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ 3 Comments

This, this is a distraction, but an enjoyable one. I was asked in the comments what I thought about this product of the US mint from 1916 to 1945, specifically the reverse.

The image of fasces with and without axes has a LONG tradition in the official sanctioned art of the United States certainly going back to portraits of Washington. Houdon portrays Washington as a sort of second Cinncinnatus:

and the representation became highly influential, see esp. Ward’s Washington:

These are without axes. The Civil War memorials tend to juxtapose axed and axeless fasces in near proximity. Lincoln in his temple rests his hand on axeless fasces, but the tripods flanking the steps sit atop axed fasces:

Here in Brooklyn, Grand Army Plaza’s inner columns have fasces with axes, the outer without:

GAP columns 7-22

I read the dime as a ‘Liberty must be Defended’ ideology inspired by the memorialization of the War between the states and the new experiences of the Great War.

Many of the drafters of the constitution thought of the US as a (even the) new Republic. We’ve been left with a very Roman legacy. Each generation, in its own way, must come to terms with what that symbolic language means in a new age.

Update 8/24/13: The more I think about the more I want to emphasize the olive branch in relation to the fasces, this seems to me as very similar to the caduceus as a symbol of peace juxtaposed against the fasces on republican coins. Peace and Law and Order beget Liberty? Augustus rather dramatically connected the idea of Liberty and Peace on this issue:

The obverse legend resolves: “Imperator Caesar, Son of a God, Consul for the Fourth Time, Defender of Liberty”.

65 out of 410 days: Countermarks

August 21, 2013September 12, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

It makes me really irritated I couldn’t get MS Word to make the whole table into a picture only a half at a time.

Yesterday I wanted to add something to chapter 6 about the coins of the mid 80s, that irritating in-between-time where the coins are full of strange gods we can’t quite identify. As I looked at them, I realized that I just did’t have a big picture regarding countermarks on coinage in my head. [That’s not for lack of opportunity. I’ve supervised a masters thesis die study of a countermarked issue and chaired academic panels with papers on the subject.] Taking a no-time-like-the-present approach, I did a down and dirty survey of RRC, taking notes as I went. The picture above is the result of those notes. There are much better charts and analyses in many publications, but if I didn’t do one myself no matter how crude I’d never get the material stuck in my head properly. I’m sure there are inaccuracies and missing elements, but I hope it captures the overall trends. Pink are were Crawford thought countermarks were die specific. Blue where they are not. Light pink is for apparent attempts to be die specific with known inaccuracies. Hashed pink is where some sub types are die specific, but others are not. Dark pink is where countermarks indicate die pairs. Dark blue are for where die pairs are present, but the pairs are represented by multiple dies. Grey is for too little information. The dates defer to Mattingly and Hollstein’s adjustment of Crawford’s chronology.

The use does not perfectly map onto the use of serrated edges BUT it does follow the same trend. Early isolated experimentation in Sicily. A little recurrence in the mid/late 2nd century, and then a much more serious adoption around 104/103 BC. The difference is that countermarks stay in use almost continuously. They taper off a bit in the mid 90s, are steady in 80s with a HUGE effort to use them right over the 83-79 period, and then they tale off in the 70s with a revival at the very end of the 60s early 50s.

Serrating each flan is a huge amount of effort and is likely to have drastically slowed production. Countermarks, especially per die or coordinated applications, also require significant efforts, but are more logistically challenging, rather than man-power challenging. What the chart above doesn’t capture are trends in types of systems: letters, numbers, symbols, combinations thereof, variations with dots and Greek letters, or double letters, or consonants with vowels. No one system is dominant. The hope has been that die studies of countermarked issues can tell us more about the operations of the Roman mint. Many such studies have producing tantalizing insights and likely hypotheses. All the different systems mean that countermarks can’t have served a single administrative function. Like the serrati their popularity and also the experimentation with new systems and revivals of old systems may be about inspiring confidence in the money supply — to be seen to be producing GOOD coin. 45 out of 66 issuers who used them managed some degree of die-countermark coordination.

As a historian I’m most interested in what caused the 104/103 adoption. The intensity during the time of the Sullan return and dicatorship is not unexpected, if it is about creating confidence in the money supply, but certainly not worth that such systems are applied even to camp coinages presumably made in less than ideal conditions under serious pressure. Similarly the tail end. Why the revivals? Why the complete cessation? More of a whimper than a bang…

I am also curious about its application to some quinarii. The quinarii is never serrate. And it is usually associated with particular applications and especially associated with Cisalpine Gaul…

64 out of 410 days: Reducing Stimuli

August 20, 2013August 20, 2013 ~ Liv Yarrow ~ Leave a comment

I saw this on a social media site which I frequent. I thought it was dreadfully pretentious. “Oh poor me! I am a creative. No one understands me. Life is soooo difficult.” *

And then I looked at my browser tabs. On average I have about 16+ web pages open, 7+ pdf documents, 4+ word documents, at least one spreadsheet, a few sticky notes, 3+ powerpoint files [I use powerpoint slides like the index cards of old for sorting notes, images, references etc.], the snipping tool, my dropbox file folder, skype, and then did I mention my problem with stacks of books:

That is the “surface” of my desk this morning. I’m not sure there really is a surface under there.

[The pillow in the window is normally for the cats (when Mary Beard isn’t using it, of course); this reduces their attempts to climb the book stacks or stand behind me poking me with their paws for attention.]

Is this because I’m a creative mind? Maybe. Maybe, I just have a hard time focusing on one thing. What if I need it later? What if I lose the reference? What if forget to come back to it? OH MY G-D! I’m a data HOARDER. Some people hoard bits of string. Or tins of food. Or boxes of garage sale finds. Even some people to whom I’m related… Nope, not me. All information, all the time. A veritable pack rat of details.

The last couple days I’ve been trying to restrict my pdfs and browser tabs to a single one of each. To open another, I must close the last. It seems to help.

Now that I think about it a few colleagues have periodically said “Wow, you have a lot of windows open.” when they stop my office at work. Maybe I should have picked up on that feedback a little sooner.

* – If you’re the friend who posted the e-card above. I’m really sorry for being so horribly judgmental. And, thank you for helping me come to a useful little self realization.