Roman villas by the seaside? That's what I call living!

An exhibition in Arkansas of artifacts from Stabiae calls forth a long review
including the following, which might come in handy when teaching about the life of the Roman upper crust.

Democratically elected Roman officials owned these expansive pleasure palaces of ancient Stabia. The villas weren’t tiny time-share condos on a beach, but compounds with multiple bedrooms, dining rooms and pools that would dwarf the outsize mansions and outsize ambitions of even Jennings Osborne. “Some of these villas are over 120,000 square feet,” says Buckley. “We know [one villa] has a peristyle garden that is estimated to be the length of a football field.”

Naturally, it took oceans of money to build and maintain these vacation homes. Yet, much of the “In Stabiano” exhibit is devoted to the walls, ceilings and floors of the villas. There’s a reason that, outside of a few pots and lamps, day-to-day implements weren’t found in the hundreds in Stabia digs. “In Stabia, when the eruption occurred, they basically had a day to vacate their villas,” notes Buckley. “So they took the most precious objects that they could. And that’s why the excavation so far has not uncovered a lot of jewelry and those beautiful artifacts that you found in Pompeii because they [the Pompeians] had no time.”

But the frescoes, rich in detail and color, didn’t come cheap. “The wealth of the people is evident because they painted every square inch of these villas,” says Buckley. “The other indication is the quality of frescoes themselves.”

The starring attraction of “In Stabiano” is a reconstructed triclinium, or dining room. Patrons of the exhibit can walk in the room, which has three rich red walls adorned with intricate drawings of simple things such as ducks and various gods including Bacchus and Neptune. Young finds the triclinium an especially powerful piece. “I think it’s seeing two-dimensional art in a three-dimensional setting that makes it special,” he notes.

BUSINESS AND PLEASURE It wasn’t only art and living the good life that dominated life in the villas. These well-appointed seaside addresses were used by the owners as places for business, much as a Rolexwearing chief executive officer might wow a potential client with a wellstocked private jet today. The entourage that followed a well-connected villa owner was not small. “The power base [of the owners] came from the clientele that they had,” notes Buckley. “Some were known to travel with clientele in the thousands.”

Even in a place of relaxation, the strict hierarchical order of Roman society was preserved. Villas were constructed so as not to disturb the system of rank. “Villa Arianna had several dining rooms, and some were more important than others,” says Buckley. “Everybody knew their status. Everybody had a certain room.”

Movement through these vast villas was limited by where you stood on the societal ladder. The owner traveled freely throughout the house. However, the Roman version of bouncers guarded entrances to make sure a lower-class citizen did not enter an upper class room.

Oddly enough, the size of the rooms did not equal status. “The private spaces were not terribly large,” Buckley notes with amusement. “Their bedrooms looked like monk cells. Apparently, they didn’t spend much time in private.”

There were too many distractions in these Roman retreats to waste it all alone. Business might have been conducted, but the atmosphere was hardly frenetic or stressful. Philosopher Cicero said the days and nights at the resorts were filled with “lust, romance, adultery, dolce vita, banquets, song, music, boat rides.”

Another interesting aspect of “In Stabiano” is that it represents only a tiny portion of what yet might be unearthed. While the exhibit has work from four villas, it is known there are at least 40 more sitting under decades of dirt waiting to be discovered by archaeologists. Pompeii and Herculaneum, the other sites of archaeological importance in the Bay of Naples, have been picked through. “[Stabia] is the freshest site discovered and least polluted,” Buckley says.

Along those lines, the Italians hope that “In Stabiano” is just the beginning. It was only in 2002 that a new treaty for long-term loans of ancient Italian artifacts allowed the remains of the villas to travel to the United States. There is hope the display will goad tourists to maybe even board a plane and see the ruins up close.

But there’s the question: Can the jaded 21 st-century owners of flatscreen TVs and pocket computers care about ancient, pockmarked walls, even if the surfaces are brightened by gamboling gods and winged figures? “In many respects the culture of luxury villas is the same,” says Buckley. “It hasn’t changed much.”

There’s the hope: Looking at these artifacts, the gap between languages and the enormous gulf of time doesn’t seem that hard to leap. “I had a joke with one of the Italian gentlemen who was here,” Young says. “I speak a little Italian and he spoke even less English, but we were laughing when we pulled out the pan for the exhibit. It’s 2,000 years, and the pan is unchanged. It’s a frying pan. It’s exactly the same as you would buy in Home Depot.”

The leading black classicist of his generation

This could inspire some students, perhaps.

“The outline of William Sanders Scarborough's autobiography sounds like the plot to an improbable novel:

“Born a slave in Macon, he broke the law by learning to read. As a young man he witnessed the end of the Civil War, then excelled in school and went on to college. He became a professor of Greek and Latin – perhaps the leading black classicist of his generation – and served 12 years as president of an Ohio university. … Read on.

There could be 60 TV episodes on ancient Rome!

From the New York Posy

'ROME' TO PERDITION

By DON KAPLAN

February 7, 2005 — BEN-Hur” meet “The Sopranos.”

“Rome,” HBO's new sweeping, multimillion-dollar, sword-and-sandal epic series, is poised to give viewers a down-and-dirty version of history, heralded by producers as the most authentic interpretation of life in the ancient city ever put on film.

“Very simply, the idea is to give the audience a look at Rome that has never before been done in either films or on television,” says the show's executive producer, Frank Doelger. “Our plan is to take Rome out of the museum.”

To do this, producers spent more than $11 million on lavish sets at Italy's fabled Cinecitta studio to re-create Rome as it is believed to have truly been – loud, grimy, smoky, covered in Latin graffiti, teeming with throngs of people, with rich and poor living cheek to cheek.

It is believed that the sum is the most ever spent to build a set for a television show.

The story – slated to debut next fall – unfolds in 54 B.C. and will track characters from different sides of Roman life.

“Rome” follows Julius Caesar (Ciar n Hinds) and his inner circle, while also focusing on the everyday lives of two soldiers and their families, a First Centurion named Lucius Vorenus and a Roman Legionary named Titus Pullo, played by relatively unknown British actors Kevin McKidd and Ray Stevenson.

In modern terms, Vorenus is a non-commissioned officer, considered something like a captain, and Pullo is a common soldier.

“They're a very unlikely twosome,” says Doelger. “They have very different personalities and different world views, and their relationship develops and changes over the course of the series.”

In the first episode, the audience meets Caesar, Vorenus and Pullo on the battlefield during Rome's final clash with the army of Gaul (France).

The time period was a tumultuous one that included civil wars, conquests, and a brutal class struggle between the wealthy and the poor, which could prove a rich backdrop for the epic. Although only 12 episodes have been filmed for the first season, Doelger says Bruno Heller, the show's chief writer and executive producer, has mapped out at least 60 episodes – enough to last for five years.

“Rome” will feature more sex and possibly disturbing ritualistic scenes than fans of period films are used to, while common wisdom about historical figures is likely to be shattered. Cleopatra is portrayed as a dinner party bore instead of the vampy siren fans are used to.

“They say that Caesar's nephew, Augustus, found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble,” says Josh Stein, a history professor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., who is not associated with the production. “It suggests that during the time of Caesar, Rome wasn't the magnificent thing you tend to see in most movies.”

In HBO's version of Rome, it's noisy and international. There is mud everywhere, thanks to frequent flooding of the Tiber river, while wooden buildings frequently burn down to the ground.

Doelger describes it as a cross between New York and Calcutta, a place where the mundane and the spiritual overlap on every corner, and says the details of “Rome” have been painstakingly researched by a legion of scholars employed by producers.

“I think that the world that we are presenting is a great deal more authentic than any world that has ever been presented with some intelligence of ancient Rome,” says Doelger.

Thanks to David Meadows and 'Explorator' for the lead.

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O! O! O! Odyssey?

Robert Bowman, the actor playing Odysseus in the Bristol Old Vic's forthcoming production was interviewed by IC Wales.

I was intending to book for this play, but now I'm not so sure.

“In this production Odysseus is found on the beach by interrogation officers patrolling for asylum seekers,” reveals Bowman. “They assume he's a shipwrecked asylum seeker and incarcerate him.

“It's while he's imprisoned that his tale unfolds and it becomes clear that the soldier's position is at odds with the other prisoners. They're seeking asylum but all Odysseus wants is to go home to his wife.”

Since Nausicaa is my favourite Odyssey character, I take it hard that she is being replaced by 'interrogation officers'.

Following hard on the 'version' of Bacchae at the main theatre, this play in the studio theatre seems to be following the same philosophy, that you can't present the Classics straight. I think you can – or at any rate a lot straighter than this.

Thanks to David Meadows and 'Explorator' for putting me on to this.

Good news for Herculaneum – the cavalry are coming!

The Sunday Times today gives the news that “David W Packard, whose family helped to found the Hewlett-Packard computer company, is concerned that the site may be poorly conserved or that excavation of the library may not continue unless he underwrites the work.”

David Packard is a former Classical scholar, apparently, and runs the Packard Humanities Institute, which supports archeological work.