Lucretius' Appearance - Research into What He Looked Like

There was another Lucretius who was a "moneyer", a private individual permitted to mint coins. His name was Gneius Lucretius Trio, and its all over his coins. But in his case it was "CN LVCR".

I think I'll post my slides now, but I can still go through them later. The critical source was one I stumbled on by complete accident or really good googling, I'll let others be the judge

You can download the file from Swisstransfer here:

Edit to add: Cassius has informed of errors, see the new link in post #28 below.

This link will expire in 30 days.

"His time" meaning Lucretius' from everything I've read.

Quote from Cassius

Also, re-reading that footnote, how are you people interpreting the "inscribed LVCR in the lettering of his own time"?

"His" meaning Lucretius, or "his" meaning Dr. Nott?

Lucretius's, I'd say.

Yes, I've already started preliminary work on the article. I would hesitate to put the slide show on any kind of permanent display since it's lacking all of the relevant citations.

Cassius has helped me correct a few errors, so here is the new link: I'll delete the old one.

https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/b12fae33-82cb-4265-895e-ae5a4517dcab

More random stuff on the Munro ring--which I should probably start calling the Nott ring.

A book published in 2020 called Engraved Gems and Propaganda in the Roman Republic and under Augustus includes this under an index of ancient gems, reports it as 'whereabouts unknown', but sites a previous German work for details.

The German work is Die antiken Gemmen in two volumes by Adolf Furtwängler, published in 1900.

The first volume has a plate displaying the gem:

And the second volume has this brief description:

Which I gather means something like:

Quote

4. Convex black Sard, formerly of the Nott collection. [Erw. Bull. d. Inst. 1831, 112, 78]

Head with short beard. Marginal note LVCR

Sard, like agate, is a form of Chalcedony. I have no idea what "Erw. Bull. etc" means--it looks like a reference to an earlier work? A museum bulletin or catalogue?

Quote

There is another version of a cameo that resembles this but which is in much more detail and more attractive and I have long wondered if they were meant to be the same person. Maybe it's the one Joshua mentioned. Maybe it's this one from Herculaneum:

That is certainly a remarkably close match!

Quote from Joshua

I have no idea what "Erw. Bull. etc" means--it looks like a reference to an earlier work? A museum bulletin or catalogue?

Probably won't be too helpful, but I can add that "Erw." is probably an abbreviation of "Erwähnt", "Mentioned".

So, "Mentioned in Bulletin of Institute..."

Found it!!!

Bull. D. Inst. is the Bullettino dell'Instituto di correspondenza archeologica from 1831

Page 112, no. 78 on a list...

So, not any additional information but at least we know what that @#$& cryptic citation was referring to!

Don, you're a wizard! Thank you very much for looking for that, I'll add it to my source collection.

I also want to add two passages from The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, regarding the motives of Italian humanists like Petrarch, Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolo Niccoli, and Poggio Bracciolini.

Quote

They saw themselves as adventurous explorers both in the physical world—the

mountains they crossed, the monastic libraries they investigated, the ruins they

dug up—and in their inner world of desire. The urgency of the enterprise reflects

their underlying recognition that there was nothing obvious or inevitable about

the attempt to recover or imitate the language, material objects, and cultural

achievements of the very distant past. It was a strange thing to do, far stranger

than continuing to live the ordinary, familiar life that men and women had lived

for centuries, making themselves more or less comfortable in the midst of the

crumbling, mute remains of antiquity.

Those remains were everywhere visible in Italy and throughout Europe:

bridges and roads still in use after more than a millennium, the broken walls and

arches of ruined baths and markets, temple columns incorporated into churches,

old inscribed stones used as building materials in new constructions, fractured

statues and broken vases. But the great civilization that left these traces had been

destroyed. The remnants could serve as walls to incorporate into new houses, as

reminders that all things pass and are forgotten, as mute testimony to the triumph

of Christianity over paganism, as literal quarries to be mined for precious stones

and metals. Generations of men and women, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe,

had developed effective techniques for the recycling of classical fragments, in

their writing as well as their building. The techniques bypassed any anxiety

about meddling with the leftovers of a pagan culture: as broken shards whether

of stone or of language, these leftovers were at once useful and unthreatening.

What more would anyone want with the rubble over which the living had

clambered for more than a thousand years?

Display More

Quote

Niccoli was one of the first Europeans to collect antiquities as works of

art, prized possessions with which he surrounded himself in his Florentine

apartments. Such collecting is by now such a familiar practice among the very

rich that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it was once a novel idea. Pilgrims

to Rome in the Middle Ages had long been accustomed to gawking at the

Colosseum and other “marvels” of paganism on their way to worshipping at the

places that actually mattered, the revered Christian shrines of saints and martyrs.

Niccoli’s collection in Florence represented a very different impulse: not the

accumulation of trophies but the loving appreciation of aesthetic objects.

As word got round that an eccentric man was willing to pay handsomely

for ancient heads and torsos, farmers who might in the past have burned any

marble fragments that they ploughed up for the lime they could extract from

them or used the old carved stones for the foundations of a pigsty began instead

to offer them for sale. On display in Niccoli’s elegant rooms, along with antique

Roman goblets, pieces of ancient glassware, medals, cameos, and other

treasures, the sculptures inspired in others the impulse to collect.

Display More

Quote from Joshua

Don, you're a wizard! Thank you very much for looking for that, I'll add it to my source collection.

I was happy to do it... even though it drove me mad trying to dig it up I did this at work today so the above is a photo from my phone of my work computer screen!

Here is the link to Internet Archive:

Bullettino dell'Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica = Bulletin de l'Institut de correspondance archéologique : Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The years 1854-55 were not published separately, but were included in the first two of the three volumes in-folio entitled: Monumenti, annali e bullettini...

archive.org

Onenski made a very good point in our conversation this evening, when he mentioned that urbane Romans of the republic period did not customarily wear beards. This page from Lacus Curtius is an excellent summary of the situation; it outlines several conditions under which Roman men would cease shaving, a trend that started with Scipio Africanus who Pliny records as the first Roman to shave daily.

Roman men might not shave if:

• They are in mourning. Like wearing black, an unshaved beard in the Roman republic might mean that someone has died or something tragic has happened.
• They are of the lower classes. Not every Roman man could afford the time or money spent on a daily shave.
• They lived outside of the Capital city of Rome. These trends are seldom universal, and people who lived away from the main city might shave less often, or whenever they traveled to the city.
• They are boys who have not yet legally come of age. The ritual 'first shave' was part of the ceremony for assuming the Toga virilis.
• They are young men at the very end of the late republic period, and wear their beards short and well-trimmed. Cicero describes a certain class of Catiline conspirators this way;

Quote

There is a last class, last not only in number but in the sort of men and in their way of life; the especial body-guard of Catiline, of his levying; yes, the friends of his embraces and of his bosom; whom you see with carefully combed hair, glossy, beardless, or with well-trimmed beards; with tunics with sleeves, or reaching to the ankles; clothed with veils, not with robes; all the industry of whose life, all the labour of whose watchfulness, is expended in suppers lasting till daybreak. [23]

In these bands are all the gamblers, all the adulterers, all the unclean and shameless citizens. These boys, so witty and delicate, have learnt not only to love and to be loved, not only to sing and to dance, but also to brandish daggers and to administer poisons; and unless they are driven out, unless they die, even should Catiline die, I warn you that the school of Catiline would exist in the republic. But what do those wretches want? Are they going to take their wives with them to the camp? how can they do without them, especially in these nights? and how will they endure the Apennines, and these frosts, and this snow? unless they think that they will bear the winter more easily because they have been in the habit of dancing naked at their feasts. O war much to be dreaded, when Catiline is going to have his bodyguard of prostitutes!

I've noticed that the bust of Lucretius in the Villa Borghese is the only one that doesn't have Lucretius sporting a Roman aquiline nose. What does that mean? Perhaps nothing.