Greek and Roman Galleries rank no.3

Number 3 in Newsday.com list of artistic events of 2007 was:

3. NEW GREEK AND ROMAN GALLERIES AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM. With the opening of the gleaming new galleries for ancient Greek and Roman art, the Met has definitively established itself as a wonder of the modern world. This is the contemporary museum at its best: a place for scholarship that doesn't stint on pleasure.

Romances set in ancient Greece or Rome

Someone on the Barnes and Noble forum on 'Romantic Reads' asked yesterday:

Any one have any good recommendations for some good stories that take place in Ancient Rome or Greece? I love historical romance and I have read almost every medieval book out there. I'd appreciate any responses. Thanks.

What would you advise this correspondent (tina1201)?

If she had wanted detective stories, or high adventure, or political or military fictionalised biography, the field is wide. But romance? The two attempts at romance set in the Roman world that I have read were both failures. One was about Hadrian falling for a local British girl – Mills and Boon editors would not have let it get anywhere near publication – and the other was about Pompey, with the heroine going upstairs for a bath ….

There is (are?) Daphnis and Chloe, of course. But, as C.S. Lewis showed us, romantic love was invented in the middle ages, so perhaps any romance set in the ancient world is an anachronism.

Or have I missed some wonderful stories? What about Colleen Mccullough – whom I haven't read?

Wall Street Journal on the Aeneid

The Wall Street Journal has an enthusiastic article on the enduring importance of the Aeneid.

MASTERPIECE

An Epic Undertaking
The influence and resonance of Virgil's 'Aeneid' still echo
By WILLARD SPIEGELMAN
December 29, 2007; Page W12

Alan Bennett said that a classic is “a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.” Better still: It's the book you want to have read but don't want to suffer through again or even for the first time. You want points for sophistication, education and possession of cultural capital as compensation for long-ago pain and boredom.

The “Aeneid” is Europe's most important written epic. Schoolboys have cursed it for more than two millennia. Thomas Jefferson's copy was the most scanned, indeed dog-eared, book in Monticello's library. Robert Lowell entitled a poem “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid.” Many readers have known similar somnolence. But no one has denied its importance.

Translators, dramatists and opera composers have adapted it. Poets in many languages have imitated it. Dante took Virgil for his guide through two-thirds of “The Divine Comedy.” Lowell, a summa cum laude classics major, and a man of soaring ambition from adolescence on, knew what he was doing: Virgil represented for him — and every other Western writer of epics — the model of The Poet. Virgil's predecessor Homer is much easier to absorb, especially in the “Odyssey,” but Homer, whoever he was (we know nothing about him), sang his poems. Virgil wrote a book. The Book. It is not boring. Although everyone also acknowledges the longueurs of part two, the first half — what many of us read in school — is gripping, and even the second contains plenty to admire.

Much of the epic's enduring importance resulted from a famous misreading of the fourth of Virgil's “Eclogues” (37 B.C.). The author, writing about the newborn son of the Consul Pollio, said that the child would initiate a new golden age in which lion would lie down with lamb and peace and plenty come again. Bravo! Early Christians got a look and found a prediction of Christ. They took Virgil for a Christian in all but name, a magic prophet, all of whose works deserved close attention. And that's why Dante could use him as a guide, the repository of classical, pagan wisdom whose rationality suffices to get Dante through Hell and then up to the top of the mountain of Purgatory where reason must be succeeded by Christian faith. Dante turns around and finds that Virgil has vanished, replaced by Beatrice, the embodiment of love. It is one of world literature's saddest moments.

On its own, even without our sense of its cultural heritage or literary primacy, the “Aeneid” continues to astonish; it is as much a book for our millennium as it was for Dante's and for Virgil's contemporaries. Ezra Pound called his own epic “Cantos” “a poem containing history,” and Virgil's epic is, as every Latin student remembers, the roll call of Roman, especially Augustan, glory. Following decades of civil war, after the death of Julius Caesar and the takeover by his great-nephew Octavius, whom the Roman Senate subsequently rechristened the August One, Rome began to develop and solidify its empire and also to establish peace at home. Home, of course, came to include most of the known world, which Rome had conquered.

The “Aeneid” is patriotic propaganda, written at the request and for the pleasure of the emperor, but it's also much more. It acknowledges the price and sadness of empire as well as the glory. Its characters have free will, but they also operate under the will of the gods. People are both accountable for their actions and exonerated. Destiny controls everything, except when it doesn't.

“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” — “Here are the tears of things, and the facts of mortality touch our minds”: The famous line distills Virgilian sorrow. The first book of the poem begins, as an epic is supposed to, in the middle of things. Aeneas and his tempest-tossed ragtag band of survivors from Troy have washed up on the shores of Carthage in North Africa. The remnants of one empire are looking for the land they have been fated to settle, where their new kingdom, the second Troy, will arise.

In Carthage another new kingdom is rising, that of Dido of Sidon, another refugee. The Trojans look at the pictures on the walls of her city and they find . . . themselves! Their story, the whole tragedy of Troy, has preceded them, has entered the realm of history and myth. They are looking at their past, the source of their tears. Virgil's epigrammatic concision — “lacrimae rerum” — neatly, dispassionately embodies a stoic wisdom about history and human life. Mortality and its touches get to us all.

Ever since St. Augustine said that he wasted too many tears as a young man crying over Dido, readers have been most drawn to Book 4, the love story of two national leaders, each widowed, each resistant to and finally succumbing to the force of Eros. Venus and Juno concoct a trick to make them fall in love, but we know that Virgil's gods are merely part of his epic machinery; the love affair can be understood perfectly in human terms alone. It's the heart of Virgil's tragic vision, and it still leaves us wondering: Is the hero a dutiful, perhaps priggish man who must go off to Italy? “Italiam non sponte sequor,” he says to Dido when commanded by Mercury to lift anchor and raise sails. “I'm not seeking Italy out of my own choice.” Both falling in love, and then relinquishing it, the motto is the same: Don't blame me.

Or is he just like any other fellow, taking his caddish pleasure and then heading into the sunrise? Enjoying a roll in the Carthaginian hay before sailing off to the as-yet-undiscovered land where the gods have guaranteed him a new bride and a new legacy. What's a guy to do?

And what's a woman to do? Unlike that other spurned heroine, Medea, Dido has no children to kill. She can't get back at her man in that way. As an early desperate housewife — a raging queen, rather — she has but one choice, the classic one. Seduced and abandoned, Dido places a curse on Aeneas, asks for eternal enmity between their two nations, mounts her funeral pyre and kills herself as the Trojans sail away.

She asks for an avenger to arise. Roman readers would know him: Hannibal, who tried to cross the Alps hundreds of years after Dido's demise and would suffer defeat as well. The same first readers would have also been alert to a more contemporary parallel. A noble leader seduced and detained by an African (read: foreign, untrustworthy) woman? They would remember Cleopatra, the serpent of the Nile who led a noble Roman named Anthony off course and destroyed his manhood. Such struggles — between love and duty, commitment to self and to nation — have echoed down history's, and literature's, corridors ever since.

Virgil had an impossible task, which he succeeded in performing. He wrote a great political and historical poem that transcends propaganda and remains new and fresh because of its humanity. Also because of its style: Virgil took Homer's fluid hexameter lines and hammered them into Latin, an uncongenial language. In so doing he set the standard for any artist who tries to do the impossible.

Like his hero, Virgil was fated to establish a new empire, in this case a literary one. His excellent modern translators, from John Dryden, at the end of the 17th century, to Robert Fagles, two years ago, have all tried to “English” the original Latin, to represent their poet in a way that does justice to both the past and the present, to the original and to contemporary audiences. Every generation retranslates the masterpieces of the ancient world. Such efforts prove that a classic is something that is perennially young.

Mr. Spiegelman first read Virgil at Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pa.

Chris Haynes of Ermine Street Guard gets MBE

Congratulations to Chris Haynes on his MBE in the Birthday Honours.

The Gloucestershire Echo makes the announcement:

Chris Haines has been granted the royal seal of approval for his commitment to researching the Roman era.The 63-year-old from Bentham has been made an MBE for his services to Roman history.

He has been at the helm of historical group the Ermine Street Guard for the past 35 years, re-enacting military displays and striving to recreate period armour and equipment as accurately as possible.

The father-of-two said: “I was absolutely flabbergasted when I got the letter. I had to give it to my son half way through reading it and ask him if what it was saying was true.”

He is looking forward to meeting the Queen again. Mr Haines said: “I've met her with the Ermine Street Guard in the past but not under these circumstances.”

The retired farmer was a founder member of the historical society, which was set up in 1972 after being asked to take part in a pageant in St Mary's Church Witcombe.

He said: “The group formed just to do a one-off historical event. But as we had spent so much time on it we decided to carry on afterwards and focus on the Roman era.”

The group now has 60 members from all over the country. They research and reconstruct the armour of their chosen era and are regularly called upon to help bring history to life in schools and take part in public exhibitions.

Their realistic reenactments, which involve using artillery pieces, have also seen members appear on documentaries and historical programmes, such as the Channel Four show Time Team.

Mr Haines said: “There is a sociable and fun side to what we do but there is also a serious educational side too. I have pride in the group and a high sense of achievement. I feel I'm accepting the MBE on behalf of the group.”

The Ermine Street Guard have also taken part in several reenactments from Chedworth Roman Villa, near the ancient Roman town of Cirencester. To find out more about the group go to www.erminestreetguard.co.uk

More about the International Festival of Latin and Greek

I've added more details about this fun-looking festival to the post of 21st December.

A link to their main website gives access to costs (which seem very reasonable) and booking proceedure.

Book reviews

Links to recent popular books on the Classics can be found here.

50 minute video on letters from Vindolanda

Here you can see the video.

I haven't watched it all through, but it looks worth investigation. What I've seen is a mix of battle scenes, and video of excavation going on. Anthony Birley speaks.

It looks as though you can download it, too.

You can choose to watch on Google Video of Guba. Guba is better quality.

A very Merry Christmas to all my readers

That's it, really. Perhaps I'll just say it a little bigger:

A Very Merry Christmas

Financial Times reviews Ad Infinitum

A few years ago the study of Latin appeared to be in terminal decline, owing perhaps to its negative association with rod-backed private education. But there are signs that it is reviving, and as Nicholas Ostler remarks in the preface to Ad Infinitum, “now is the time for a book about Latin”. Indeed, his is the second study to appear this year, hard on the heels of Wilfried Stroh’s Latein ist tot, es leben Latein! (Latin is dead, long live Latin!) – a book that followed recent studies by Francoise Waquet in Paris and Bo Lindberg in Lund.

Read the rest.

More on the villas in Rome

ROME — Buried for many centuries, two patrician villas unearthed here recently have been brought to life through an on-site multimedia reconstruction that plunges the spectator into the heart of ancient Roman life.

A video tour of patrician villas unearthed by archaeologists in Rome.
Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press

A glass catwalk over a thermal bath.

Experiencing the archaeological site, which opens to the public on Saturday, is a bit like passing through a classically themed amusement park. Lasting roughly a half-hour, the computer-generated sound-and-light show offers plenty of opportunities to ooh and aah as the villas take physical form.

At one point a virtual wall dissolves to show what the residents of one villa might have seen when they strolled out from their door in the fourth century A.D.: a bustling city, the busiest in the ancient world, with more than a million residents vying for space, a narrating voice recounts.

The multimedia tour, overseen by officials of Rome Province, was conceived by Piero Angela, a prominent journalist and the host of popular television programs about science on the state broadcasting network RAI. It is the first multimedia initiative of this kind at an archaeological site in Italy.

The narrator explains that congested traffic on the capital’s narrow streets was an issue then, just as it is in today’s Rome , and prime downtown real estate was every bit as sought after as it is now.

“That’s why Romans built up, creating multistory homes,” said Antonella Lumacone, an archaeologist who worked on the excavation of the ancient site under the 16th-century Palazzo Valentini, the seat of Rome’s Provincial Administration.

Beyond envisioning what the world might have looked like “700,000 moon rises and moon sets ago,” as the tour’s narrator says, the discovery of the homes has yielded deeper insight into the topography of ancient Rome.

“We knew a lot about the important monuments but much less about their connective tissue to the city,” said Eugenio La Rocca, who oversaw the dig as cultural heritage curator for the Rome Council.

The video portions of the reconstruction — cheering crowd scenes of victorious centurions, a glimpse of a chaotic food market, a mugging in a dimly lighted back alley — were provided by Lux Vide, a production company based in Rome that specializes in historical mini-series for television. It has produced several programs set in the ancient world, including a 2003 mini-series about the Emperor Augustus.

The archaeological exploration began in 2005, after builders stumbled onto the ruins during repair work in the underground areas of the Palazzo Valentini.

“The fact is, gold flows under our feet in Rome,” said Enrico Gasbarra, the president of the Provincial Administration. “Our economy thrives because of this.”

The two villas, which measured some 20,000 square feet overall, were next to Trajan’s Forum. In one virtual reconstruction, a second-story window opens onto a view of Trajan’s Column, the 125-foot-tall testament to that emperor’s victories in the Dacian Wars in the second century. At the tour’s end, visitors spill out into Trajan’s Forum after passing through a series of tunnels and air-raid shelters dating from 1939.

Archaeologists surmise that because of the villas’ location, as well as the wealth of the mosaics and marble decorations that have been unearthed, their owners were probably high-ranking members of Roman society, perhaps senators or magistrates.

“They were living off the memory of their glorious past,” Mr. La Rocca said. (By the fourth century the center of power had shifted to Constantinople.)

Along with monumental rooms in the two villas, the archaeologists found the remains of a private thermal bath dating from the third century, now visible under an immense glass floor. Other remains, including statues of a senator and a young man, date from the second century A.D.

Yet because the villas are largely fragmentary, officials said, the multimedia reconstruction is basically a composite of fourth-century villas in Rome.

“It’s hypothetical, based on the general layout of what was found,” said Fabrizio Oppedisano, a historian who collaborated on the project. The red walls in the reconstruction, for example, were based on “ a few centimeters” of red fresco found on one of the walls, he said, adding, “The operative word is ostensible.”

Free tours are given daily in various languages, but must be booked in advance.

“Archaeologists are satisfied with what they see with their eyes,” Mr. Oppedisano said. “But for people who are not experts, this can be a valuable experience.”

Digging continues in the area, and a patch of modern road is being demolished around Trajan’s Column to expand the excavations.

Palazzo Valentini is at 119 A via IV Novembre, near Piazza Venezia, Rome; www. provincia.roma.it.

See the original article with pictures