Sometimes it is no problem to tell which side has priority or should be considered “heads”. Prows and wheels etc… are clearly ‘tails’ so the other side must be ‘heads’. The knucklebone, not the dot. The acorn, not the sigma. No clue with the thunderbolt vs dolphin. You get the idea.
Crawford for RRC 18 prioritized facing right and had the facing left heads as ‘tails’. This never bothered me until today. I’m thinking about early Apollo imagery for this book chapter now.
The other Apollo that is closest in date is facing left. Should we assume RRC 18 parallels this and give facing left priority for that series? We’d then go back to facing right priority for the aes grave of RRC 26. I’m delighted to note a number of collections have their photographs labeled this way, even if inadvertently:
Now the sacred buildings which they constructed, and especially the temple of Zeus, bear witness to the grand manner of the men of that day. Of the other sacred buildings some have been burned and others completely destroyed because of the many times the city has been taken in war, but the completion of the temple of Zeus, which was ready to receive its roof, was prevented by the war; and after the war, since the city had been completely destroyed, never in the subsequent years did the Acragantini find themselves able to finish their buildings. [2] The temple has a length of three hundred and forty feet, a width of sixty, and a height of one hundred and twenty not including the foundation.1 And being as it is the largest temple in Sicily, it may not unreasonably be compared, so far as the magnitude of its substructure is concerned, with the temples outside of Sicily; for even though, as it turned out, the design could not be carried out, the scale of the undertaking at any rate is clear. [3] And though all other men build their temples either with walls forming the sides or with rows of columns, thus enclosing their sanctuaries, this temple combines both these plans; for the columns were built in with the walls, the part extending outside the temple being rounded and that within square; and the circumference of the outer part of the column which extends from the wall is twenty feet and the body of a man may be contained in the fluting, while that of the inner part is twelve feet. [4] The porticoes were of enormous size and height, and in the east pediment they portrayed The Battle between the Gods and the Giants in sculptures which excelled in size and beauty, and in the west The Capture of Troy, in which each one of the heroes may be seen portrayed in a manner appropriate to his role. [5] There was at that time also an artificial pool outside the city, seven stades in circumference and twenty cubits deep; into this they brought water and ingeniously contrived to produce a multitude of fish of every variety for their public feastings, and with the fish swans spent their time and a vast multitude of every other kind of bird, so that the pool was an object of great delight to gaze upon. [6] And witness to the luxury of the inhabitants is also the extravagant cost of the monuments which they erected, some adorned with sculptured race-horses and others with the pet birds kept by girls and boys in their homes, monuments which Timaeus says he had seen extant even in his own lifetime.
The note on this bit of ekphrasis from Naevius book 1, fr. 4 in Loeb suggests that it describes the pediment at Agrigentum in Sicily and thus suggesting it relates to events of the 1st Punic War, i.e. the historical portion of this book rather than the mythical. Ekphrasis is a favorite of Vergil of course (I love teaching Dido’s temple and the Daedalus’ doors!). BUT the Loeb didn’t justify the connection with Agrigentum and the sculptures don’t exist today. Hence, I found myself reading Diodorus and then wondering if even Diodorus had seen the sculptures or rather if he is just borrowing heavily from Timeaus… A problem for another day.
In my heart of hearts I hope Naevius is creating his own symbolic ekphrasis rather than just admiring something the Romans saw in Sicily, but that is deeply unknowable.
I’m reading Naevius and it is SO DISTRACTING from my writing, if necessary and relevant.
Agrippa is seen on many early Augustan coins with very funny head gear:
Naevius helps us see how this symbolism (absent from the republican series) fits with Augustan habit of reviving older traditions as a means of legitimating the new regime:
Link to relevant coins in OCRE (more than illustrated here including v unusual use of Agrippa under Caligula, Flavians, and then a restoration type under Trajan…)
This is just a note to myself. I’ve been interested in the culture of quotation in antiquity. See my piece on Diodorus Fragments (PDF link). In a forthcoming piece on Dionysius I think about his relationship to Polybius. This bit of Cicero on Ennius and Naevius reminds me a great deal of that relationship. I want to come back to this…
And so in a short time the Roman people will neither have a king of the sacrifices, nor flamines, nor Salii, nor one half of the rest of the priests, nor any one who has a right to open the comitia centuriata, or curiata; and the auspices of the Roman people must come to an end if no patrician magistrates are created, as there will be no interrex, for he must be a patrician, and must be nominated by a patrician. I said before the priests, that that adoption had not been approved by any decree of this college; that it had been executed contrary to every provision of the sacerdotal law; that it ought to be considered as no adoption at all; and if there is an end to that, you see at once that there is an end likewise of the whole of your tribuneship.
Cic. Dom. 38
Cicero here has come back from exile and wants his house back, but this passage is just a lovely round up of jobs that could only be done by patricians at the end of the Roman republic. He is looking for reasons why it is bad that Clodius was adopted from the small number of patricians into the plebeian ranks so he could become tribune, and the argument turns on a shortage of patricians. Not great logic, but pretty fun historical evidence.
There is a much misattributed quote: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” The earliest verified attestation is the French thinker, Blaise Pascal, but my favorite use of it is from John Locke’s introduction to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690): “I will not deny, but possibly it might be reduced to a narrower Compass than it is; … But to confess the Truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy to make it shorter.” I’m glad Andrew Meadows pushed me to take all the time I needed to write a short book. It wasn’t easy but it was worth it.
Now back to writing book three with all the stuff I couldn’t put in book two!
There is plenty written on the coinage of the various Seuthes, all kings of Trace, including specifically on his remarkable portrait.
Here’s a bronze from Paris collection from specifically Seuthes III; the BnF holds 8 more examples; 4 in BM; 5 in ANS; AND 9 more in IKMK (but it won’t let me share search results with a stable URL so you’ll have to search yourself):
Anyway a good teaching example for Hellenistic portraiture, and verism/veristic traditions outside Rome.
Sometimes the hardest part of being a numismatic scholar is just knowing what has been published. Anyway, I was pulling bibliography on the quinarius for a footnote this AM and found out Meadows had put out this study in an edited volume relatively recently.
Ashton Richard and Nathan Badoud. 2021. Graecia Capta? : Rome Et Les Monnayages Du Monde Égéen (Iie-Ier S. Av. J.-C.). Basel Schweiz: Schwabe Verlag. (Full Table of Contexts via DONUM)
I very much like his use of hoard weight data for the denarii (reminds me of Duncan-Jones on gold minus the fanciful attempt to reconstruct wear and circulation):
And his stacked histograms for the quinarii where he uses weights from published collections are very visually satisfying even in grayscale.
The rise in underweight quinarii is particularly interesting here.
One potential for RRDP is to refine this type of weight data. In a future version of CRRO I’d love to see both histograms and box and whiskers auto-generated from the weight data of each issue. Averages are a poor means of conceptualizing this type of data, even misleading at times.
Ok back to my current book project. Time is precious.
The inspiration for this post was this book and it’s yummy drawn plates:
I’ve been interested in boar standards since the sestertius imitation with one turned up on the market; I think it likely to be a fantasy piece from some past modern century, not ancient, but some feel differently. Regardless of who made it in whatever century for what ever purpose, the maker clearly knew the common occurrence of boars and boar standards on Celtic coinage (including in Britain).
Sheers 1991 has done great work on this type and many more. Her identification of the Mensor as the obverse inspiration is spot on!
Lest the reader is left with the impression that all Celtic coinages derive from Roman many have other inspirations (Massilian, Sicilian, Macedonian, esp. Philippoi coins, Thasos, to name a few mints), AND in some cases are very much their own creation.
Colonna, Giovanni. “Gli scudi bilobati dell’Italia centrale e l’ancile dei Salii.” Archeologia classica 43 (1991): 55-122. It is gloriously illustrated. JSTOR link
Liv Mariah Yarrow 