Listening to a stunningly good paper by Abigail Straub (UMich) on her work on Pompeii Bakeries and their religious protections. (Well worth making it to this 8am session and even skipping a coin session — I feel guilty about the latter!)

The points I want remember are the representations of Vesta with donkeys, the Vestalia, but most importantly the placing images of phalloi at the hearth/oven mouth. This made me think immediately of one of the narratives of Servius Tullius’ conception:

They say that from the hearth in the palace, on which the Romans offer various other sacrifices and also consecrate the first portion of their meals, there rose up above the fire a man’s privy member, and that Ocrisia was the first to see it as she was carrying the customary cakes to the fire, and immediately informed the king and queen of it. Tarquinius, they add, upon hearing this and left beholding the prodigy, was astonished; but Tanaquil, who was not only wise in other matters but also inferior to none of the Tyrrhenians in her knowledge of divination, told him it was ordained by fate that from the royal hearth should issue a scion superior to the race of mortals, to be born of the woman who should conceive by that phantom. (Dion. Hal. RA 4.2.1-2)

Can’t wait to see Straub’s final dissertation. A real shame this paper was scheduled at exactly the same time as Sinead Brennan-McMahon (Stanford), “Queer Spaces in Pompeii? Phallic Aesthetics and Shared Communities”. I’d have loved to seen both and be able to think about how the two papers might be in dialogue with each other.

Let me start by saying this was the best class I’ve ever taught and the students were extra ordinarily dedicated. Many are education majors destined to teach in NYC public schools. I’m deeply impress with them all and I’m also realizing that teaching Roman art (material culture) gives me even more joy than teaching history courses (and let me tell you I love teaching Roman history!!).

As an educator, I’m deeply committed to treating my students fairly and sticking to my word, especially about something so meaningful as grades. This semester was a new prep and thus I had to imagine a new grading structure appropriate to goals of the course and its content. I decided on 54% examination (proof of learning, command of information), and 46% participatory assignment (low and high stakes activities that took meaningful effort and were graded on degree of engagement). I also have a policy of accepting a wide variety of activities and assignments submissions as means of earning additional points or making up missed work. No late penalties.

Yes I’m a big softy. BUT are these policies distorting student grades. I was worried perhaps I’d shifted too far away from grades being a meaningful reflection of learning. So….

As a proxy for ‘what if’ I calculated each student’s grades based on exams alone and then compared that with the real grades they earned according the rules set out in the syllabus.

For exactly 50% of the students the participation gave them no advantage or disadvantage over the grade they would have gotten if I’d just awarded grades based on exams. 95% of these students who experienced no GPA change would have gotten an A or A+ in the course on exams alone. 32% of that 50% (so 16% of the class) did shift from A to A+, an honorary distinction with no effect on GPA. Two students who did A+ work on the exams only earned A- grades because their scores on (lack of engagement with) participation assignments, but I can live with that.

My takeaway is that perhaps for the needs of the top half of the class I may need to refine my exam writing to better differentiate levels of learning.

What my policy did do is shift weaker test-takers into a higher grade position. The average change was .7 GPA points. (when there was a change) That’s a B to an A- for instance. If you take the class average, my policies overall averaged about a .3 GPA point increase, that’s a B to a B+.

estimated GPA “increase”	% of Students
.3	11%
.4	3%
.7	11%
1	16%
1.3	3%
1.7	3%

Generally speaking, I feel good about rewarding students for active learning be it in class activities or museum visits. They teach how to look at images, how to take notes, and that it is not enough to ‘know’ — one also has to engage with the material.

So yeah. I gave a LOT of As and may refine my points structure slightly, esp. on exams, but I think I’ll keep my approach to open ended points. Why close the door on learning when it is helping lift up the students who struggle most?

I’m teaching Dura Europos today. I went looking for some material I knew I had written and thought it would be here. It was not. It was in the height of twitter. (I miss those days.) Anyway. I’m not there much any more and who knows how long it will be searchable so here is what should have been a blog post in the first place.

Real link to book mentioned in screenshots.

The prize crowns and palms on a table will be familiar to numismatists familiar with Roman provincial coinage (relevant results from RPC Online).

The bags of money are less common. Even more tantalizing is the writing on the bags. The line above multiplies the number by 1000. X with a horizontal line is regularly used as the symbol for the denarius on Diocletian’s price edict in both Latin and Greek versions and comes before the numeral. The edict is roughly the same date as the mosaics.

The lower case d with a line a the top is another figure I don’t immediately recognize. A puzzle for tomorrow, but one I feel sure will make me slap my forehead as soon as see the answer.

The unit of account for Diocletian’s Price Edict was the denarius, not the ‘denarius communis’ a fiction (not unlike the so-called aes signatum). See Jones 2017 who demonstrates the term was created by Lépaulle in 1888. In fact even the name of the Edict is a 19th century creation:

I find myself again wanting to read more MHC:

Michael Crawford, Diocletian’s edict of maximum prices at the Civil Basilica in Aphrodisias. Aphrodisias, 13. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2023. Pp. 260. ISBN 9783752006858. (BMCR review)

On ILL order:

Burnett, Charles, ‘The Palaeography of Numerals’, in Frank T. Coulson, and Robert G. Babcock (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography (2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 10 Nov. 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336948.013.96,

Now, I really should put in some pictures of coins.

In both the coins above we see the motif of five circles usually described as apples but I do wonder if that if a firm attestation or if they might be coins. We also see in the second of the two, the one with only one crown, a small purse on the table next to the crown. Or so it is traditionally identified. On the specimen below you can see two purses looking more like purses under the table flanking the prize vase.

Why does teaching prep have to be so distracting?!

The RBW conference from 2021 is out in REVUE BELGE DE NUMISMATIQUE
ET DE SIGILLOGRAPHIE vol. 170, (2024)! The articles will be open access two years from today.

If you would like a private copy of my own article please do email me.

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It is giving Tuesday. You might be the giving sort. You might not.

Link to Give.

Here’s my plea. I set down a sabbatical to finish book three and picked up the chairship of my department in large part because I believe in the LGI and the right of everyone regardless of family background or economic means to learn Latin and Greek. (an earlier essay on the value of studying ancient languages)

The LGI is older than I am and has trained the best philologists in our field and enabled hundreds of others who came late to the field to pursue their dreams of studying the Greek and Roman World. There are a hundred more medievalists, and political scientists, and religious scholars, art historians and philosophers who used and continue to use the LGI to access more directly and accurately the texts relevant to their research.

It has no permanent faculty. We count on our long term PT faculty giving up their summers (and good deal of their springs in preparation) year after year to make this possible. They do. The LGI engenders deep commitment from all its faculty and staff. It is a grueling intensive program that gets results. Our students wouldn’t succeed without this dedicated faculty.

Enrollments are high. We could admit more if we could support more to study in NYC. We could admit more if we could recruit and train more faculty. If we had staff to support the back end.

This campaign is our first giving Tuesday ask. The LGI needs an endowment to protect it from the winds of fortune at a public institution of higher ed.

And, once it is more secure, I can more comfortably go back to writing books (and more blog posts along the way).

So if you are giving sort and like this blog, please chip in a little something. Each donor shows that we have supporters. Give 100. Give 10. Give 1000! Give 10,000?

Anyway. I had to ask.

Link to Give.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I’m just archiving a Blue Sky conversation and ensuring I can find the topic of erotes (cupides) and child labor and slavery when my brain wants to return to it. I put the bibliography at the end because I wasn’t sure how ‘original’ my thinking was on this. Sometimes I say stuff so much I come to believe it without remembers to check in with my colleagues. Sloppy intellectual thinking.

Just a little possibly relevant bibliography

This deck contains slides used in all four talks but is not the precise deck used in anyone version.

If you follow me on social media you know that I had quite the odyssey to get to McMaster because while I am something of a Diva, I can’t compete with the Diva queen who performed in Toronto last night clogging every airport, rental car counter, and highway between NYC and points north. I made it by re-routing through Buffalo and renting a electric Kia Niro (strongly recommend) in a lovely shade of green. Yesterday’s heart-pounding stream of rebookings were made up for by the gorgeous venue, mouthwatering dinner, lively conversation and falling into a truly lux hotel bed.

So after minor struggles with chargers in the rain (gas stations sorted this back in the 1950s or earlier clearly we can do better!), I’m in a great mood at the Buffalo airport and thinking about the future of this paper over a plate of wings and a bloody maria (tequila, because vodka is boring).

I said as I presented this talk that this was its last outing. 4 times feels like the end of the road for any research topic. I’ve in the past resisted any repeats for research talks. But, in this model where I don’t script, just talk, the multiple instantiations have helped me figure out what the hell I’m talking about. Is there a there there?

I think in the end the answer is yes. It’s just in answering my research questions and returning to old projects, I find I can finally articulate why this material interests me and what the real gut level question has been all along.

DOES MONEY MATTER?

Let’s narrow that down a bit. Is money a factor in political shifts? And if so, how and why? Can we separate out economic factors from politic and can we disentangle which drives which? This was the first time presenting this paper post election (no I don’t want to go there, but I insist on being radically honest about influences on my thinking past and present).

[I’ve switched to a virgin mary, no I don’t really write while drinking even this kind of mind dump research journalling.]

So I started from a desire to ask: are economics or social factors driving politics?

Then I moved to wondering more if the right question was between economics driving politics or politics driving economics or at least economic anxieties. For a while I wanted to know if this was even a question like the dichotomy of the first question. Can’t we just throw our hands up like good Episco-peeps disputing the nature of communion and declare a both/and paradox where we must seek to trace the via media, the middle way.

[ten minutes until boarding]

And yet I don’t think any of this is really the issue. I don’t believe a significant economic or monetary crisis contributed in the slightest to the conditions that allowed Caesar to cross the Rubicon and change Rome forever ever more.

Yes, property was overvalued in the city of Rome in the 20 years before.

Yes, Rome had a sophisticated system of credit and interest rates were determined by the relationships of borrower and creditor, meaning that interest and payment schedules fluctuated in an unpredictable manner.

Yes, Rome was deeply committed to extracting wealth from the wider Mediterranean and yes there was the a deep entanglement of taxation of and private lending to communities and individuals.

Yes, war and social unrest created widespread economic anxiety and true hardships for some.

Yes, the Roman mint was not striking sufficient small change for the general population and ridiculously curtailed mint out put of silver in the four years before Caesar’s crossing. This is best explained by a surplus of struck coin and plenty of silver reserves in the state treasury.

No one voted Pompey or Crassus or Caesar in because of the cost of milk, bread, and gas.

So does money matter? Yes, I think it does, but I THINK it matters because of the economic differential between the state and the wealthiest individuals.

Rome was and remained wealthier than any one of the ultra wealthy, but private individuals could and did spend money of public affairs to rival the state. This ability to spend, this wealth hoarding, could and did destabilize the Roman state.

And, with some relief I can tell you that at present our own modern day ultra wealthy cannot spend anywhere near the spending of the major world governments. And therein is the difference between my modern contemporary anxieties and my cool headed reading of the ancient evidence. There is no one on this planet who is as rich as Crassus at least in comparison of spending power to the government.

Crassus shows that money was not enough. Leadership mattered. Talent and acumen count for a great deal. And, yet I think I might be able to defend a position that argues the economic crisis of the 50s (if we can call it such) was the demonstration that individuals could and would spend more on public affairs than the state itself, thus usurping state prerogatives and eventually destabilizing the very constitution.

I need to go board, but this is a first stab at expressing some of the ideas that evidence of this paper might reasonable support in a fuller formal version.

link to object in trade

Ever since getting back from Buffalo and the Lockwood collection I’ve had so-called peace medals on the brain.

This isn’t a totally new interest for me, but came up as I was preparing my 2018 article:

Liv Mariah Yarrow, The tree and sunset motif: the long shadow of Roman imperialism on representations of Africa, Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 10, Issue 3, July 2018, Pages 275–311.  (link without paywall).

The key portion is below.  When I published this I had not yet thought more about the Lewis’s speech and its rhetorical antecedents.  (a blog post).

Above is a pretty standard design. The ANS has arguably the largest collection in the world (link to all photographed specimens in their collection).

My interest started from the reception of classical iconography of the clasped hands. This blog post is inspired by the image of the native leader wearing a medal. This is a key feature of the Morro Velho medals used as a form of slave control. Again discussed briefly in my 2018 article. I did go the UTAustin and read all the mine’s archival records looking for details of the production of this medal and have my own scans. It was a book plate engraver in London who made them not one of the major token/medal producers. I need to circle back to that project and get that published. Maybe the connection to early peace medals will get me more motivated to do that.

Early Post. ANS link.

For the prevalence of these medals in the Lewis and Clarke expedition don’t just use key word medal but also meadal a common spelling variation. A theme of these journal entries is that size matters to recipients.

The other thought I want to write about down the road is the occasional cuff on the indigenous hand on the clasped hand medals. The white wrist is a military cuff, the eagle seems to be a fictive(?) medal bracelet with a design at once patriotic and tied to the distinctive fauna of the land.

Is the axe a weapon of war ‘tomahawk’ or is it meant to represent the felling and clearing of trees to make way for agriculture? Notice it is on the ground in the design of the top medal.

ANS link.