Moving Livius.Org (4)

Mosaic from the Villa Nile

As I already announced, I am moving several pages of my website. The following pages have received their new URLs: the Achaemenid tomb of Kupan, the river Eulaeus, the island of Megiste, the Battle of Sardes, the splendid Villa of the Nile Mosaics, the Villa Orpheus, and Choara, the place where king Darius III Codomannus was overtaken by Alexander the Great and murdered – see header of this blog.

Still 267 pages to go…

Bosphorus

The Bosphorus, seen from the Topkapi Palace

The Bosphorus is the narrow strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. The ortigin of the name is not known, but the Greeks interpreted it as “the cow’s ford”. According to an old Greek legend, it was the place where Io, who had been changed into a cow by her lover Zeus to hide her from the supreme god’s jealeous wife Hero, crossed from Europe to Asia.

Because the north-south current is extremely fast and the winds are predominantly from the north, it is very difficult to move from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea. This is why Byzantium, situated on the southern entrance, became an important town: sailors had to go ashore and rest before they could start rowing up north.

Segesta

The unfinished temple

Segesta (or Egesta) was a town on ancient Sicily, and is well-known for the Unfinished Temple that attracts thousands of visitors every year. Its history is dominated by a conflict with the nearby Greek city of Selinus, which forced the Segestans to ally themselves to Carthage, to Athens, to Pyrrhus, and to anyone who could offer support against the Selinuntians. Rome became Segesta’s protector during the First Punic War; after this conflict, Segesta’s countryside was exploited through villas with many slaves, and the town itself went into decline. I put online a brief history and some photos of the Unfinished Temple and the Theater.

Plutarch, Keeping Well & Other New Articles at LacusCurtius

Mommsen

A new text by Plutarch of Chaeronea: Advice about Keeping Well (De tuenda sanitate), which Bill Thayer (who puts online the moral treatises of Plutarch) calls his “favorite item so far”. Plutarch is giving common-sense advice on rational living, and much that he has to say in regard to rest, exercise, and diet is in accord with the best medical practice of the present day.

But that’s not all. Several useful items from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica: Iconoclasts, Idrisi (whose Book of Roger was already available), Illyricum, and the great German Altertumswissenschaftler Theodor Mommsen, who may be called the founder of ancient history as a well-organized discipline (picture).

I continue to move (and rewrite) pages on Livius.Org: Salamis, Sentinum, Kneblinghausen.

Suetonius, On Famous Men

Portrait of a Roman official, first quarter of the second century (Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussel)

Suetonius is best known for the Lives of the Twelve Caesars, but that is just a part of his oeuvre, which also included such titles as Physical Defects of Men, Greek Children’s Games, Lives of Famous Prostitutes, and a dictionary that contained only terms of abuse. The twenty books of the Playground of Names and Languages culminated in a series of biographies of

• Latin poets like Horace, Lucan, Persius, Terence, Tibullus, Virgil (book 15),
• playwrights (book 16),
• orators (book 17),
• grammarians and rhetoricians (book 18),
• historians (Pliny the Elder) and philosophers (book 19).

Fragments survive, most of them rather short (like Passienus Crispus) but some of them still pretty long. They are now available at LacusCurtius: go here, or use one of the links above. You can find both the Latin texts and the Loeb translation.

Let’s Abandon Achaemenid Studies

Faravahar, the visual aspect of Ahuramazda. Relief from Persepolis.

Three books dealing with the Achaemenid Empire, all trying to show the results of Iranology to the general audience. A sympathetic aim. However…

1. Kaveh Farrokh’s Shadows in the Desert is one of the worst books I have ever read;
2. Tom Holland’s Persian Fire is unnecessary;
3. Bruce Lincoln’s Religion, Empire, and Torture, although a very good book by an excellent scholar, understates its own case.

Of these books, the first one is probably the most dangerous for Iranology, as it contains hundreds of errors and even quotes political propaganda. I was shocked to discover that Farrokh holds a PhD and is working for a university. The book by Holland also contains numerous mistakes, but at least the author does not claim to be a historian.

Iranology has grown in the 1980s and 1990s. Publications are now of a higher quality than they used to be. If the discipline wants to continue to prosper, we need better books. Books that are meticulously checked – writing for a general audience is not, as Farrokh and Holland seem to think, an excuse for sloppiness. Books that say something new, and do not -as Religion, Empire, and Torture does- confirm what the general reader already knows.

I have written a long review, which you can find here.

Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae

Imperial eagle, on a small arch in the Theodosian Wall, directly north of the Golden Gate.

The Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae belongs to the ancient genre of “regionaries”: a list of monuments and civil servants in the regions of a city. The text was published by the great German scholar Otto Seeck, as an appendix to his edition of the Notitia Dignitatum (1876). The Notitia Urbis was written during the reign of the emperor Theodosius II (probably in 447-450) and goes back to official sources. Although the simple lists are not always easy to understand, the Notitia Urbis helps to know what the city must have looked like before Justinian‘s building program.

Plutarch, On Superstition

Plutarch, bust from the museum of Delphi.

Again a treatise by Plutarch online at LacusCurtius: this time, the Sage of Chaeronea tackles superstition, trying to prove that it is worse than atheism. The full Greek text of his sermon is here; the English translation is here. I think it is the treatise with the most quotations from older sources in classical Greek literature.

Also available: brief items on the Judicati Actio (from Smith’s Dictionary) and the Boeotian town Abae.

Moving Livius.Org (3)

Plataea and the battlefield, seen from the south

As I already announced, I am moving several pages of my website. Here are three pages that have new URLs:

1. the battle of Plataea (photo)
   
2. Caesar at the Rubico
3. Vienna (modern Vienne)

Still 283 pages to go…

New at LacusCurtius (7)

Two small items have been added to LacusCurtius:

1. The Image of Moloch, an article from 1897 in which George F. Moore proves that the authors of the rabbinical sources based their descriptions of the god not on the Bible, but on Greek sources;
2. A brief biography of the Italian historian Pasquale Villari, who is best known for Le invasioni barbariche in Italia (1907).

Istanbul, Arkeoloji Müzesi (Archaeological Museum)

Gezer Calendar

What did I expect when I decided to visit the Istanbul Archaeological Museum? I only had some vague notions about the collection, but nothing more. I knew that the famous Alexander sarcophagus and a well-known bust of Diocletian were there; the oldest Jewish calendar, from Gezer, belonged to the collection, and a lot of finds from Troy. And of course there was the head of one of the serpents of a column from the ancient Constantinople hippodrome – a column that once stood in Delphi to commemorate the Greek victory in the Persian War (below).

Jerusalem Temple Inscription

What I really wanted to photograph was an inscription found on the Temple Mount, which says that pagans were to be killed when they came within a sacred court (photo to the left). It proves that the Jewish Temple was indeed on the temple mount, something that no one who is compos mentis will deny, but has been challenged by the former great-mufti of Jerusalem, Ekrima Sa’id Sabri. Unfortunately, this insane idea -which does not deserve to be dignified by a refutation- is gaining currency, and I have already encountered it in a book by a serious ancient historian (if someone who is unable to recognize Intifada propaganda can be called a serious historian).

One of my travel compagnons had told that the museum was bigger than the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, but I had not expected that a visit to the Istanbul museum takes at least six hours. You can visit the oriental department (among the finds is the Kadesh treaty), which is in a separate building next to the entrance. In the main building, you will find on the ground floor a very large collection of Anatolian sarcophagi, the royal cemetery of Sidon (includes the Alexander sarcophagus), and a department of Greek art. Behind this is a three-storey building that contains Thracian and Bithynian art, a collection of finds from Constantinople (which includes the chain that once was in the Golden Horn), artifacts from Troy, and a collection of art from Cyprus and Palestine.

The department of Greek art, where you can see the splendid bust of Diocletian on the photo to the left, has reasonable dimensions – the other parts are immodestly big, and I wondered which museum had the largest archaeological collection: Istanbul or the Paris Louvre. I had not expected a museum of these dimensions, and was exhausted after visiting it three times in three days. And every object is splendid. It is, to paraphrase Truman Capote, like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Most departments of the museum close at five o’ clock, but the main building closes at seven. In the garden, between the ancient columns, tombstones, and sarcophagi, you can buy coffee, tea, and soft drinks. You will probably need them to survive this big, beautiful museum.

Teutoburg Forest Museums (Kalkriese and Haltern)

Face, made of bone, found at Haltern (Westfälisches Römermuseum)

Last week, I made a trip along several splendid German museums:

• the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn,
• the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne,
• the small Clemens Sels Museum in Neuss,
• the Archäologische Park in Xanten.

They are all nice places; you will not regret visiting them, as I have already written before. I also visited two museums that illustrate Rome’s presence on the East Bank of the river Rhine: Park Kalkriese (on the site of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest) and the Westfälisches Römermuseum at Haltern, where you can see the little wooden face. A first remark must be that the governments of Germany, Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Niedersachsen deserve the highest praise for creating, in the 1990′s, two beautiful museums.

The Kalkriese narrows, reconstructed.

Yet, it must be admitted that the Kalkriese museum can be a bit disappointing. The battle site itself has been changed into an interesting place and there is nothing wrong with that; the problem is the museum. In our fortunate age, in which a visit to a museum is within reach of nearly everyone, any museum faces the choice between offering information to specialists and presenting objects in such a way that non-specialists can appreciate the interest of something they would otherwise have ignored. Archaeological museums are no longer repositories of dull and usually broken objects, but have changed into seducers.

The Kalkriese museum tries to explain the joy of archaeology and ancient history by presenting a puzzle and using the person of Mr. Clunn, the man with the metal detector who first discovered the site, as the visitor’s alter ego. The visitor can easily identify him- or herself with the researchers. Yet, on more than one occasion, information has been subordinated to this “experience of research”. One example will illustrate this: the coins are shown as a fascinating, intriguing treasury, very impressive indeed, but you can hardly see the design of the coins themselves.

Model of the "Hauptlager" (Westfälisches Römermuseum)

I am not saying that this is wrong; yet, the museum can be a bit disappointing if you already know the puzzle and simply want to study the objects. Then, Haltern is your museum, especially now that its real collection -which includes the splendid model to the right- is being shown again. Last year, the entire museum was evacuated to host an unnecessary exposition on Luxury and Decadence. But now, the Haltern museum is again worth a detour.

Rhetorica ad Herennium

The Rhetorica ad Herennium, which is now online at LacusCurtius, is traditionally attributed to Cicero, although there is strong evidence that it was written by an earlier author. Whoever the writer may be, it is an important text: it is the oldest surviving treatise on rhetorics in Latin, and focuses less on the philosophical side of oratory (as Aristotle had done in his Rhetorics) than on the practical side. This made it, in the Middle Ages, one of the most influential classical Latin texts.