Posts by Joshua

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;

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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!

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.

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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?

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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.

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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!

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:

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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?

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

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.

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

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.

The one I showed above was an Italian souvenir made for travelers on a Grand Tour.

Grand Tour - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The Munro ring was thought by three experts in the 19th century to be a genuine ring from the late Roman republic. I don't know anything about the busts.

Here's another cameo in plaster that is supposed to be Lucretius.

c. 1820, Pietro Paoletti

As for Munro's ring, I have now traced its history for a period of more than 50 years. I will present my findings tomorrow evening

Curious And Unusual - The Busts in the Pincian Gardens

This webpage suggests that there were 52 such busts. An interesting read!

I'm coming up with a date range of 1859-1861 for the statue.

Edit to add;

Pincian Hill - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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In the gardens of the Pincian, it was Giuseppe Mazzini's (1805-1872) urging that lined the viali with busts of notable Italians.

Though the Villa Ludovisi was built over at the turn of the 20th century, several villas and their gardens still occupy the hill, including the Villa Borghese gardens, linked to the Pincio by a pedestrian bridge that crosses the via del Muro Torto in the narrow cleft below; the Muro Torto is the winding stretch of the Aurelian Wall, pierced by the Porta Pinciana.

The bust is evidently not ancient. The inscription has the Italian (rather than Latin) spelling of his name. I can't find much about it, though.

Here's another way to look at it:

-John Harvard

One thing that is nearly always missing from film and television portrayals of ancient city life is advertising. Fortunately the lost city of Pompeii furnishes many examples:

"AD CVCVMAS"..."This way to the wine jars!"

Goat's milk dairy. Send me a pot of cheese!

...or maybe I'll get some milk for the puppy.

Metalworker's shop

"Salve, citizen! Which way to the---oh, I see it's this way..."

In light of this, we can imagine a prominent statue of Epicurus in Athens with perhaps some useful directions. "The Garden School, Dipylon road, etc." And then at the turning that leads to the garden, a corresponding statue to let them know they found the right place.

Quote from Me

Cicero's letter to his brother does not mention any emending of Lucretius, and he doesn't indicate that he was in any way acquainted with Lucretius as a person.

One thing I should say for the record is that Cicero did write to Memmius, so there could have been some connection between Cicero and Lucretius. But if anyone is emending the text it ought to have been an Epicurean like Atticus, or a sympathetic poet like Virgil, Ovid, etc. Now we're firmly in the realm of conjecture!

Quote from Cassius

Very good question but if so I am not aware of anything to establish that. Isn't one of the only ancient comments someone (a church father?) making the comment about Cicero "emending" it?

This comes from St. Jerome (died 420 AD) perhaps quoting Eusebius (died 339 AD), reporting on Lucretius (died c. 55 BC). So we're dealing with a gap of 450 years.

That would be akin to a hostile source making a claim about Shakespeare yesterday with no corroborating evidence, and in contravention of known circumstantial evidence. Cicero's letter to his brother does not mention any emending of Lucretius, and he doesn't indicate that he was in any way acquainted with Lucretius as a person.

That passage from Virgil is clearly in reference to Lucretius, as most commentators agree, and is important for another reason; if Lucretius really had killed himself, do we think his greatest admirer would have written those lines In Memoriam? It would have been rather callous to write about his "happiness" in that case. That quote is one of two main lines of argument against the suicide claim.

Yeah, it's not so much about bringing the gods into the equation, it's more about expecting that Lucretius would live up to the paradigm that he sets up in the beginning of the poem. To really understand what the Hymn to Venus represents, we need to know what the poet was reading. Lucretius had three principal influences in writing On the Nature of Things. The main influence was of course Epicurus, who provides all of the main content of the poem, which Lucretius translates into Latin, fleshes out, and then casts into verse. Epicurus is always going to be the focus of his loyalty in interpretation.

But Epicurus wrote in Greek and in prose. Poetry, and particularly epic poetry, has its own stylistic, artistic, and literary demands. Homer is always in the background, but Lucretius' two principal poetic influences were the Greek poet-philosopher Empedocles, and Ennius, an epic poet and the "father of Roman poetry".

Empedocles wrote two long-form philosophical poems, On Nature and Purifications, together totalling some 5000 lines. On Nature is for our purposes the more important of the two. In this poem, Empedocles puts forward a cosmology based on the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. In addition to these two, he proposes two cosmic forces in conflict with one another--Love and Strife--which cause the elements to combine (Love) and separate (Strife). These four elements and the two forces that drive them can neither be created nor destroyed--like Lucretius, Empedocles writes that "nothing comes from nothing".

One thing that separates Lucretius from Epicurus is the metaphor in DRN which views Nature as operating with a restless, erotic energy. Epicurus writes of atoms joining to form compounds and compounds dissolving back into atoms, literally "un-cut-ables". Lucretius is not so technical--for him, atoms are semina rerum, 'the seeds of things', with the connotation of a sexually generative power. This is pure Empedocles. But Lucretius takes the Empedoclean approach more figuratively by using the images of Venus and Mars as stand-ins for Love and Strife. In the hymn to Venus, he presents the "nurturing mother" as metaphorically coming with the Spring, sowing flowers and crops, and filling every animal with an intense procreative lust.

One of the scribes who copied the poem evidently thought that Lucretius was very confused--he (the scribe) copied into the margin a later passage describing the gods living in deepest peace, with no role in creation. Why this appeal to Venus? But Lucretius wasn't confused. He was sticking diligently to a layered and textured metaphor dating back to the 5th century in Greece.

So the quite surprising thing is that Lucretius doesn't complete the analogy--the poem opened with Venus/Love/combination/sexual generation. What Santayana expects is that Lucretius ought to have ended the poem more explicitly with Mars/Strife/dissolution/death, and thereby consummating in his poem a metaphor that was already four centuries old.

Happy Birthday, Onenski!