adventures in my head
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!
I’m just trying to close tabs and I wanted to save a record of this for later.
This head is from a tomb in Bulgaria (enjoy a happy wiki spiral here). And likely dates to very end of 4th cent.
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.
It appears in:
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).
There is also this other Civil Wars coin type, but I’ve not been able to track down an image to confirm descriptor:
Over the weekend I let myself explore the BM collection of European Iron Age coins. the following caught my eye:
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.
Update 22-Jun-23:
From:
Update 27 June 2023
It VERY closely parallels a composition group known from Tyrian coins starting with Elagabalus–52 coin types total in RPC.
The coins clearly show us that the image was the cult image at Tyre.
Sometimes Marsyas is worked into the composition along with other local symbols like the myrex shell (source of purple die) and the date palm (a chanting pun for Phoenicia and also a local product).
Under Philip I the scene is expanded to contain worshipers or perhaps Tychai (RPC examples).
The last issue with this group is under Trebonianus Gallus (RPC 9.2039).
This is from the masterful article on Ptolemaic portraiture in the below conference volume by Catharine C. Lorber. There are 3 more examples of this same seal impression (bullae) in the Toronto collection of such material from Edfu, and two more in Amsterdam. On this particular sealing Lorber has little to say in this chapter, only using it as a counter point for other material: “the one emphatically military royal portrait, the famous helmeted facing bust… appears clean shaven… .” Famous to whom?! And where can I read more. The footnote doesn’t help. BUT turns out the Royal Ontario Museum has a great database.
There is nothing in the entries about other publications of the portrait, but the high res images make it clear that the helmet likely has an Egyptianizing design, even if its exact character isn’t quite clear to my eye yet:
The real kicker though is how ROMAN that phrygian helmet with two side wings is.
RRC 380/1 is the first example that comes to mind but there are many more:
I have more to say but gotta go pick up kids from school.
I got a quick look at the cast coin drawers at the Ashmolean ahead of Fleur Kemmers great CNG lecture.
My goal here is just to get the snapshots up for future reference. They are not yet up online in the Oxford collection database (harder to photograph than struck coins). This gallery should have one side of each specimen in no particular order, exclude some on display. The (so-called) aes signatum is just a teaching cast of the BM currency bar of this type. That tray with the bar is of teaching specimens so correspond to some of “E” tickets in the trays.
Below is one of the professional photographs already done of one specimen on display. Rather lovely!
It will be glorious once they are all so photographed! I’m very grateful to Chris Howgego for his spontaneous willingness to let me grab these images and share them.
This sealing from Zeugma published by Mehmet Önal likely has no connection to Roman republican coinage, but …
I cannot help think about the much disputed trampling on Caesar’s famous elephant coin (RRC 443/1)
file this under passing fancy…
Liv Mariah Yarrow 