adventures in my head
When thinking about the subsellium (quaestor or tribune’s bench) and sella curulis (curule chair) on Roman coins in future, I want to remember these coins from Tarentum (HN Italy 854-6, latter two illustrated below, first is illustrated by Rutter). The stool is commonly called a diphros.
I was scrolling through some search results (as ya do) and the facing Athenas on some bronzes from Southern Italy from the later 3rd cent BCE (Lucania, Bruttium, Heraclea, Metapontum) all reminded me of RRC 37/1.
Link to discussion in Newman archive.
From the African Repository:
(why were ducks more valuable than chickens?!)
Liberia, Bank Notes
Images of whole series in 1883 reprint.
So the moneyer of RRC 434 was the brother of the Julius Caesar’s ex-wife. The one he divorced because Clodius was caught dressed like a woman in his house during the women-only Bona Dea festival. The same scandal that was at the root Clodius’ hatred for Cicero and the latter’s eventual exile.
This adds a new layer to this coin for me. It’s imagery is not just pushing against Pompey’s growing autocratic tendencies (like that of Brutus’ in the same year, RRC 433), but against the so called first-triumvirate.
Rufus has good reason to side with the senate conservatives (Cicero’s boni or optimates).
How long is three market days? I had a great Twitter conversation on this maybe a year ago I need to dig up and archive it had a wide range of opinions and serious scholars chiming in.
I was reminder of the question upon seeing Shackleton Bailey’s certitude its 24
The book these are from are in Italian and I have scanned all the relevant bit and will grapple with the academic relevance another day. Today I just want you to appreciate someone making a effort:
Neither when in command of armies nor as a magistrate at Rome did he show a scrupulous integrity; for as certain men have declared in their memoirs, when he was proconsul in Spain, he not only begged money from the allies, to help pay his debts, but also attacked and sacked some towns of the Lusitanians although they did not refuse his terms and opened their gates to him on his arrival.
2 In Gaul he pillaged shrines and temples of the gods filled with offerings, and oftener sacked towns for the sake of plunder than for any fault. In consequence he had more gold than he knew what to do with, and offered it for sale throughout Italy and the provinces at the rate of three thousand sesterces the pound.
3 In his first consulship he stole three thousand pounds of gold from the Capitol, replacing it with the same weight of gilded bronze. He made alliances and thrones a matter of barter, for he extorted from Ptolemy alone in his own name and that of Pompey nearly six thousand talents, while later on he met the heavy expenses of the civil wars and of his triumphs and entertainments by the most bare-faced pillage and sacrilege.
[Please accept this] a mark of my devotion.
[I sent this] token of my love.
That sort of thing… How cliché was that cliché?!
quae fuerunt omnes, ut rhetorum pueri loquuntur, cum humanitatis sparsae sale tum insignes amoris notis.
“As boys at school might say, all [your letters] were as sprinkled with the salt of learning as they were distinguished by marks of your devotion.” (Cic. Att. 1.13.1)
Pretty cliché?
Liv Mariah Yarrow 