Dear Sir Aurel Stein
Lansdown Park
Bath
June 26th 1929
Dear Sir Aurel Stein,
I have just finished “On Alexander’s Track Of The Indus”. It has recalled many pleasant memories of days on the Frontier & many of the people you mention. My husband built the new British Legation in Kabul & was up there for five years.
I enclose a few photographs he took at Bamian. I thought you might care to see them. If you would like copies I will have enlargements properly done for you, there are a few more I will look up, but none giving the faithful detail of Monsieur Hackin’s in the Guimet Musée Paris. He very kindly showed me his collections last year.
I have never been lucky enough to get up to Bamian British ladies were not encouraged to travel in Afghanistan & quite rightly but I regret Bamian & the Moving Sands. I met you at Government House Peshawar just before you left for Swat with the Metcalfes.
We hope to be at the dinner of the Central Asian Society next Wednesday, (my husband gave a lecture a semi-private one to the Cen. As: Soc: last year on his return from Kabul) & we are hoping to have the great pleasure of meeting you there.
May I say with what pleasure I have read your books though my scientific knowledge is lamentably small.
Yours v. truly,
Mary Amps
I am approaching my 100th blog on this site, an alarming thought, but this one takes me back to two of my very first.
Back in 2013 Dilek Taş, a Turkish researcher I was helping, had been investigating the Aurel Stein archival material in the Bodleian Library. There she came across some photos of Bamiyan that had been sent to Stein, and Dilek thoughtfully shared them with me. The late 1920s were an interesting time in Afghanistan, radical reforms by the modernising king Amanullah followed by a rebellion by Habibullah Kalakani–known less respectfully as Bacha-ye Saqao, “Son of a Water-carrier”, and more respectfully as King Habibullah II–and Amanullah’s overthrow. I wrote two blogs about the photos as I learned more about them. You can read here about life in the British Legation in Kabul as a civil war raged around it, and the first humanitarian airlift (and see some film of all that, too); and here about Mary Amps’ successful later career as a breeder of (appropriately) Afghan Hounds.
The Legation party in a 1926 Wolseley tourer, with the larger of the Buddhas of Bamiyan behind them.
Things would’ve been a whole lot easier in 2013, and a bit less fun, if I’d known about the letter I’ve transcribed at the top, sent by Mary Amps in 1929 along with the photographs. I didn’t find it then partly because the Special Collections of the Bodleian were at that time in the process of being rehoused (hence among other things Dilek being allowed to access the original photos, which seems pretty tricky now), but mainly because I’m a Classicist who doesn’t have the faintest clue how archives work.
What does Mary Amps’ letter tell us, though? It confirms that the Ampses, Mary and Major Leon Williamson, left Afghanistan in 1928, thus were not caught up in the airlift. It also squarely contradicts a suspicion I had had that Mary Amps herself was the figure third from the left in this photo:
In actual fact, as Mary explains, she didn’t have any opportunity to travel around Afghanistan while based in Kabul. The male residents of the Legation certainly did: I’ve had the good luck of seeing two albums of photos of Afghanistan taken by the head of the Legation, Sir Francis Humphrys, and now in the possession of his grandson. I know who the central figure is in this image, Sheikh Mahbub Ali Khan, Oriental Secretary at the Legation, and talk about his later life here, but I now have very little idea who else is in the photo aside from the Buddha himself.
Something else the letter confirms, if it needs confirming, is that in the 1920s Bamiyan was the place every foreigner in Afghanistan wanted to visit. Monsieur Hackin, who showed Mary Amps his photographs of Bamiyan in the Musée Guimet in Paris, is Joseph Hackin, later the director of the French archaeological mission in Afghanistan (DAFA), who, with his wife Ria Hackin (French women evidently were allowed to travel), knew Bamiyan well. Here’s one of Hackin’s photos from a later visit, an excellent one: Jean Carl (a friend and colleague of the Hackins) abseiling down the larger Buddha.
The other site Mary regrets not visiting, “the Moving Sands” or Reg-e Rawan (ریگ روان), wasn’t familiar to me, but it was vividly described, and its celebrity explained, by Alexander Burnes in the 1830s (and by Babur before him), and here is contemporary film of the place.
To me personally what the letter revealed was that interests of mine that I had thought were separate were in fact intertwined. The motivation for Mary Amps’ letter to Aurel Stein, and the photos enclosed, turns out to have been Stein’s On Alexander’s Track to the Indus, Stein’s account of his travels in Swat in 1926, the book that took me to Swat last summer. Her letter in fact intersects with the early part of the book, where Stein meets Sir Francis Humphrys in Peshawar before motoring up the “once blood-soaked heights of the Malakand” and into independent Swat with Herbert Metcalfe, Political Officer for the British territories in this section of the Frontier. Well, the Ampses were also at Government House when Stein was staying there. Mary Amps’s letter to Stein is a piece of fan mail, then, but it’s also clear that this cadre of Frontier operatives was small, and its members knew each other pretty well.
I belatedly discovered this letter pursuing a request from a graduate student for the photos Dilek had found (and it was an opportunity to give myself a break from Ovid, it is true), but it’s all jolly serendipitous, because I think Mary Amps’s letter will be where I start my Gandhara Connections lecture in a month’s time.
A photograph I missed in 2013 (from microfilm, hence the poor quality), featuring Mahbub Ali, A. N. Other, and the smaller Buddha.
Graveyard Greek
…was the heading The Times gave the letter Armand D’Angour and I wrote to them, a response to their article on a “puzzling” Greek inscription on the tombstone of Cecil Headlam, a successful author and cricketer, in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Hothfield, Kent. Since Greek script is incompatible with The Times’ computers, our answer to the “mystery” is lacking some detail, so I’ll set it out properly here. You’ll have to work out what in it is Armand’s and what mine, and I’ll kid myself that you’ll find that difficult.
Here is a good image of the inscription from Kent Online, where the story seems to have started:
As we said in the letter, a couple of observations are necessary before one can set about interpreting the text. Patrick Kidd, quoted in The Times article, spotted the misspelling in the second line, ΣΓΝΕΙΧΕΝ for ΣΥΝΕΙΧΕΝ, and Armand and I (and no doubt countless others) realised that the L in what looks like ΚLΙΝΗΝ in the third line cannot be right as L is not a Greek letter. It’s Ε, and the word is ΚΕΙΝΗΝ, “that woman” or “her”. It’s hard to be sure from the photo how Ε has become L, but it may be erosion of the stone, lichen concealing the upper arms of E, or another mistake in the carving like the Γ in ΣΓΝΕΙΧΕΝ.
A final piece of useful information is that Cecil Headlam’s wife was named Mary May.
This leaves us with the following text:
ΖΕΥΓΟΣ ΕΡΩΣ ΕΥΜΟΡΦΟΝ ΑΕΙ
ΤΑ ΜΑΛΙΣΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΙΧΕΝ
ΩΣ ΕΦΙΛΕΙ ΚΕΙΝΗΝ
ΩΣ ΤΟΤΕ ΜΑΙΑ ΦΙΛΕΙ
Set out as
ΖΕΥΓΟΣ ΕΡΩΣ ΕΥΜΟΡΦΟΝ ΑΕΙ ΤΑ ΜΑΛΙΣΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΙΧΕΝ
ΩΣ ΕΦΙΛΕΙ ΚΕΙΝΗΝ ΩΣ ΤΟΤΕ ΜΑΙΑ ΦΙΛΕΙ
this is more obviously a piece of verse, an elegiac couplet standard for an inscription of this kind.
Decapitalising, we have:
ζεῦγος ἔρως εὔμορφον ἀεὶ τὰ μάλιστα συνεῖχεν
ὡς ἐφίλει κείνην, ὣς τότε Μαῖα φιλεῖ.
We translate this as “Love always bound together the lovely union to the utmost:/ as he loved her, so in turn May loves him.”
The most difficult part of the text is the τότε, “then”, “next”, as discussed on Twitter here. But the gist of the inscription remains perfectly clear, and it’s a touching expression of love, not a puzzle or code.
I’m not at all sure what follows will cast any light on τότε or any other aspect of the inscription, but I discovered a bit more about Mary May and Cecil Headlam while pondering this epigram, and it makes for some interesting social history.
Mary May Headlam, née Fraser (on 16th July 1874, I think, in Inverness), was first married, to Edmund Hardie Elles, on 30th November 1897 at St John’s Church in Peshawar, on the North-West Frontier (a building I tried and failed to visit last summer). They lived thereafter in Peshawar, Kolkata and various places in southern England. On the death certificate of one of her daughters (from as recently as 2004) Mary May is described as a book indexer and Edmund as a stockbroker.
But The Times has been concerned with Cecil and Mary May before. On 19th November 1912 it reported on Edmund Elles’ petition for divorce:
The co-respondent [Cecil Headlam] first met the parties in 1904 and became an intimate friend. In 1911 the petitioner [Edmund Elles] became suspicious of the co-respondent’s relations with the respondent [Mary May], who admitted affection for him and promised not to see or correspond with him. The petitioner left shortly after on a business visit to India. On his return to England he discovered that the respondent had left their children and was living with the co-respondent at the Grand Hotel Cosmopolite du Golfe at Wimereux, in France… Mr Justice Bargrave Deane pronounced a decree nisi, with costs against the co-respondent, and gave the petitioner the custody of the children of the marriage.
Divorce in 1912 (the decree nisi was granted on 18th November) was a very big deal indeed. There is an account of “Le Divorce, Edwardian Style” here, and the divorce of Edmund and Mary May Elles exemplifies what Evangeline Holland describes. Cecil and Mary May’s adultery was a scandal. As it happens, the census of 1911 seems to capture Mary May Elles at home with her two daughters, 9 and 5, Edmund Elles absent and presumably in India, shortly before her departure for the Pas de Calais. One wonders if she ever saw her daughters again.
Mary May and Cecil were married in 1913 (Edmund remarried in 1915). Cecil died at Hothfield on 12th August 1934, after which Mary May becomes quite hard to trace. Cecil’s elder brother Horace was married to another Mary whose dates are exactly the same as Mary May, which doesn’t help. But I think she dies at Worthing in 1959.
Does that further information have any bearing on our interpretation of a Greek epigram? It gives it some kind of context, I think, and that’s probably where I should leave it: this “lovely union” would not have seemed so to many of the Headlams’ contemporaries. But I’ve an impulse to see in the τότε, and the peculiar expression of the second line, some reflection of the experience of a married woman loved but unable to return that love until marital breakdown meant she could.
Maybe someone else can do better.
Pick, pluck or even savour the day
Enjoy the promotional video for this fantastic new exhibition in the Ashmolean, running until January 12. There’s a wonderful collection of artefacts on display, from Pompeii and elsewhere, and you can find me raving about it here, all thanks to a freebie from Sophie Hay. This piece, for example, combines at least three of my favourite things, Latin, Hercules, and piglets.
I have just one bone to pick, and it’s with the encouragement to “seize the day” at the end of the video. Not that you shouldn’t be prepared to commandeer a train if that’s what it takes to get to this show — my problem is simply with “seize the day” as an English translation of Horace’s motto carpe diem, which in the Latin is a much richer turn of phrase. As Tom Holland (another beneficiary of Sophie’s generosity) pointed out to me, furthermore, once properly appreciated the full meaning of carpe diem would serve well an exhibition largely concerned with Roman foodstuffs and sensory pleasures.
Carpe diem originates in one of Horace’s lyric poems, Odes 1.11, and it expresses a characteristically lyric sentiment: live for the moment. “Seize the day” captures that well enough, but “seize” does a poor job, really, of conveying the Latin carpe. To get a better sense of it, Nisbet & Hubbard cite approvingly (it is not always so) the ancient commentator Porphyrio: “the metaphor”, Porphyrio writes, “is from fruit, which … we pick (carpimus) in order to enjoy.”
Now, you might use carpere of picking or plucking a flower, too, and whether the day is a fruit or a flower it works well enough for Horace’s poem, where the instruction, addressed to a woman named Leuconoe, also carries an erotic charge. But I think conceiving of the day as a metaphorical apple or plum (or quince, if you prefer) works best. What an apple on a tree represents is something needing to be exploited in a very narrow window of time, when the fruit is ripe but before it spoils. Life is to be enjoyed now, Horace insists, because who knows what will happen tomorrow.
Needless to say, the notion that life is an apple, and there’s no time to waste before you sink your teeth into it, applies especially well to the unfortunate inhabitants of Pompeii in AD 79.
Joy in numbers
I do like a chronogram, an inscription (preferably Latin, for me) that encodes a date. In fact so big a fan am I that my one regret, should the proposal to remove the memorial to Cecil Rhodes on the High St facade of Oriel College in Oxford be realised, is that it would also obliterate a rather nice chronogram.
This example at Oriel can illustrate the principle of the exercise. The inscription, E LARGA MVNIFICENTIA CAECILII RHODES, “Out of the bountiful munificence of Cecil Rhodes”, is in perfectly natural Latin, but if one adds up all letters which could also be Roman numerals (highlighted here: E LARGA MVNIFICENTIA CAECILII RHODES), one gets 50 + 1,000 + 5 + 1 + 1 + 100 + 1 + 100 + 100 + 1 + 50 + 1 + 1 + 500 = 1,911, or 1911, the date when the Rhodes Building, on the facade of which this memorial is set, was completed.
But it’s another, less controversial, Oxford chronogram I’m concerned with today. Frewin Hall is a grand house in the centre of Oxford now incorporated into an annexe of undergraduate accommodation for Brasenose College. From 1887 to 1907 it was rented from Brasenose by Charles Shadwell, friend of Walter Pater and future Provost of Oriel. Over the main entrance to the house is written FREWINI CAROLVS LAETAT SHADWELLIVS AVLAM, with the numerically-meaningful letters, as I hope you can see at the top, highlighted. 5 + 5 + 1 + 1 + 100 + 50 + 5 + 50 + 500 + 5 + 5 + 50 +50 + 1 + 5 + 5 + 50 + 1,000 = 1888.
This strikes me as a particularly sophisticated example of the genre. The reading of an upper-case double-u as two Vs is witty, and the line is both metrical, a dactylic hexameter, and perfectly symmetrical in the disposition of the Latin words.
Which makes odder the things that have been (and are still) said about it.
An Oxford Childhood by Carola Oman describes the very privileged existence of the daughter of a Fellow of All Souls before the First World War. From 1908 the Oman family rented Frewin Hall from C. B. Heberden, the Principal of Brasenose who preferred to live on the main site. (Heberden was a Classicist, and before becoming Principal my predecessor-but-three.) At a remove of nearly seventy years (An Oxford Childhood was published in 1976), Oman slightly misremembers the details as she describes the inscription (p. 106):
There was never any chance of us buying Frewin Hall. It had belonged to Brasenose College since 1580. By New Year 1908 it had stood empty for seven years. Dr Heberdon, who had taken a lease from Dr Shadwell, who had gone off to become Provost of Oriel, had at last decided against retiring there. Shadwell had been an Oxford eccentric. He had rebuilt the west wing and added a sundial with what was called a chronogram to his facade. This read–
FREVVINI CAROLVS LAETAT SHADVVELLIVS AVLAM
People who knew said he had not got it quite right. Instead of saying that Frewin Hall delighted Charles Shadwell, it was saying that he delighted Frewin Hall. There was no doubt he had loved the house, and particularly his spacious lawn. If he detected a weed he would drop a massive bunch of keys as an order that it be instantly removed.
My question is, did Shadwell, as Oman suggests, really get it wrong? It would certainly be odd if such a perfectionist (the keys), who delighted in the eccentric precision required to compose a chronogram, even making perfectly symmetrical hexameters out of them (it’s hard enough in prose, experto credite), admitted an elementary mistake in Latin.
Let’s look at that Latin. What it certainly means is “Charles Shadwell brings joy to the Hall of Frewin”, and this has not seemed an appropriate sentiment to attach to the front door of a beloved house. Here is someone else, claiming a close acquaintance with Shadwell even (and being spectacularly patronised by the author James Hilton FSA), interpreting it in a way that the Latin won’t admit, but seems more natural: “Charles Shadwell rejoices in Frewen’s Hall.” But that would require the deponent laetor with an ablative, not the active laeto governing a direct object that we have.
I am here to rescue Shadwell’s reputation, in respect of his Latin at least. And I think the key to understanding that laetat lies in Shadwell’s activities at Frewin.
The Hall dates back to about 1600, although its main cellar is much older, circa 1100, a remarkable survival of a wealthy Norman house that stood on the site. (There’s a fascinating analysis of the building here.) The name Frewin comes from Richard Frewin, who in the eighteenth century somehow managed to combine being a physician and Camden Professor of Ancient History, and gave the building a whole new wing. But Shadwell made his own significant additions to the building, bringing in the leading architect of nineteenth-century Oxford, Thomas Jackson, to add a full upper storey, in place of an attic, to the west wing above the main entrance. In November 1887 Shadwell informed the Bursar of Brasenose that he had “now settled with Jackson on the plans for the new storey at Frewen Hall” (details from Elizabeth Boardman’s research here.)
Jackson’s work at Frewin presumably kicked in after Christmas, and thus was carried out in 1888, as indeed the Arabic-numeral date under the sundial on the new facade indicates. (The sundial with its initials of Shadwell and his coat-of-arms is evidence also of his singular self-importance…) Our other witness reads the date in the chronogram as marking the year in which Shadwell took up residence at Frewin, but surely it’s rather to this work of renovation that it refers. The natural way to read Frewini Carolus laetat Shadwellius aulam, “Charles Shadwell brings gladness to Frewin Hall”, seems to me a reasonable expression of what architectural renovation achieves, at least given the constraints of the chronogram form. In other words Shadwell is telling us that he is bringing joy to Frewin, not Frewin to him, but what he’s talking about is how he turned the building into a much happier example of domestic architecture. I agree, as it happens, but you can decide for yourselves if he (and Jackson) succeeded, from images before the intervention (the main entrance is to the left),
Royal Collection Trust https://www.rct.uk/collection/2922954/frewen-hall-oxford
and after:
The more attentive among you, incidentally, will have noted that the college containing the chronogram of Caecilius Rhodes and the college of which Shadwell became Provost are one and the same: Oriel. Shadwell was Provost of Oriel from 1905 to 1914, and we can safely assume he was responsible also for E LARGA MUNIFICENTIA CAECILII RHODES, and I would hazard for many other of these monumental brainteasers there may be scattered around Oxford.
Ll. (aged 51)
Some more images:
Frewin Hall pre-renovation, from the Illustrated London News (1859)
A drawing by Thomas Jackson of his proposed alterations
Unconscionable misinformation on the wall of the present-day Frewin Hall
Carola Oman and her dog Patch in front of Shadwell’s chronogram
Sands
This is probably just silly. If so, all I can say is that it’s the last desperate days of summer term, I’ve just shared my pitiful lack of acting ability with a bunch of colleagues and students, and my grip on reality is tenuous.
What I’m thinking about a lot at the moment is Hercules and his role as a culture hero, one aspect of which is the way that his name was commonly associated with landmarks. Mountains, islands, geological peculiarities, roads and hot springs all might have Herculean stories attached to them, often to the effect that he had brought them into being by means of his superhuman strength.
The mythical travels of Hercules, in the course of which he overcame various monstrous antagonists and left these marks in the ancient landscape, extended from Spain to the Black Sea, from Pakistan to Morocco. In North Africa the opponent he most often faced in folklore was Antaeus, a gigantic (see below) son of Earth who challenged all comers to wrestle him and drew constant strength from contact with his mother; Hercules defeated him by lifting him up off the ground.
I’m in the very early stages of researching Hercules and Antaeus, with the aid especially of Irad Malkin’s Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (CUP, 1994), but the thought behind this blog (certainly daft, as I’ve indicated) occurred to me while preparing a poem of Propertius, 3.22, for teaching. In this poem Propertius encourages Tullus to return to his native country, hymning the praises of Italy even as compared with the manifold wonders of the wider world. In the latter category he mentions some remarkable locations in southern Spain and North Africa (3.22.7-10):
tu licet aspicias caelum omne Atlanta gerentem,
sectaque Persea Phorcidos ora manu,
Geryonis stabula et luctantum in pulvere signa
Herculis Antaeique, Hesperidumque choros…
Though you might look upon Atlas who bears the whole sky,
or Medusa’s head severed by Perseus’ hand,
Geryon’s stables, and the marks in the dust of wrestling
Hercules and Antaeus, and the dancing places of the Hesperides…
…there’s no place like home.
All these locations look to me like landmarks that Propertius considers identifiable. Travellers could visit, I interpret this as saying, not just the Atlas Mountains, but also places identified by tradition as Medusa’s head (maybe somewhere in the Gorgades Islands), the dancing circles of the Hesperides, goddesses of evening, the stalls where Geryon kept his cattle (before Hercules killed this monster too and made off with them)–and “the marks in the dust of Hercules and Antaeus as they wrestled”. In the case of Antaeus, the location of his bout with Hercules, as Malkin explains, shifts westward with Greek colonization, Hercules’ victory functioning as a template for Greek settlement in strange places, and continuing to do so as Greeks colonized more and more of the coast. No doubt the other places mentioned were equally mobile over time, even if Propertius seems to be thinking of precise locations in his day.
The travels and conquests of Hercules around the Mediterranean are typically understood by the Greeks and Romans as exploits imposing civilization on the wild or barbarian, and Diodorus Siculus (4.17.4-5) interprets the struggle with Antaeus in exactly these terms:
Setting sail, then, from Crete, Heracles put in to Libya, and first he challenged to a fight Antaeus, renowned for his physical strength and skill in wrestling, who put to death all strangers that he had defeated in wrestling; and Heracles grappled with him and killed him. Following this he conquered Libya, which was full of wild animals, and much of the desert (πολλὰ τῶν κατὰ τὴν ἔρημον χώραν), and tamed them (ἐξημέρωσεν), so that they were filled with farmland and all such other plantations as produce fruit, much of the land being vine-growing, and much olive-bearing. In general Libya, before that time uninhabitable because of the number of wild beasts throughout the land, he tamed and made second to no other country in its prosperity. Likewise by killing criminals and overbearing rulers he made the cities prosperous.
Libya, for Diodorus, is essentially North Africa west of the Nile valley. Hercules tames the land, renders it civilized, making it amenable to human habitation and sustenance. The dominant image of wildness is a prevalence of wild animals, but there is also a suggestion of land that is entirely deserted–something like our sense of desert–that Hercules restores to humanity and agriculture. The most pressing ecological issue in ancient as in modern North Africa was the desert to the south of the inhabitable coastal strip. I think we can understand what Diodorus had in mind when he describes a land that is fertile but needing protection from, so to speak, desertification: Hercules took the desert and made it bloom.
So what were Propertius’ “marks of Hercules and Antaeus in the dust as they wrestled”? Most likely some specific location pointed out to well-heeled Greco-Roman visitors, and Ross McPherson points out below that Pliny the Elder (5.1.3) records about Lixos in Mauretania (modern Larache in Morocco) that there, according to fable, were located regia Antaei certamenque cum Hercule et Hesperidum horti, “the palace of Antaeus, the contest with Hercules, and the Gardens of the Hesperides”, the latter on an island surrounded by an inlet from the sea (the serpentine character of the inlet explaining the serpent that guarded the Apples of the Hesperides). Pliny also records a tradition (5.5.31) that placed the Garden of the Hesperides at Berenice (Benghazi in Libya, formerly Euhesperides), which illustrates Malkin’s point that the scenes of Hercules’ exploits shifted as the Greeks travelled: Pliny writes grumpily about the “wandering tales of Greece”, and the conflict with Antaeus was progressively sited (Malkin p. 181) near Cyrene in eastern Libya, at Barca a little further west, Benghazi, and Tingis (Tangiers), where Sertorius dug up his supposed bones (Plutatch, Sert. 9.3-4, with Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters (2000), 121-6), as well as Larache (where the historian Gabinius, cited at Strabo 17.3.8, placed Antaeus’ sixty-cubit-long bones, possibly a mammoth but maybe a prehistoric whale…). But a location either at Tangier or Larache would suit Propertius’ purposes pretty well, in the far far West of the Known World.
All of which makes the theory I came up with even less compelling, but I’m committed now, so here goes: ancient wrestlers might fight on sand: the Latin word “(h)arena” means “sand”, “a sandy desert” and “an arena”, and the word for the surface on which Greek wrestlers fought might interchangeably be ἡ κόνις, “dust” (cf. Propertius’ puluis) or ἡ ψάμμος, “sand”, while Herodotus uses ἡ ψάμμος to denote the desert of Libya, 3.25, 4.173.* I found myself wondering, and I’ve explained the time of the academic year and my fragile psychological state, whether the marks in the dust left by the epic struggle of the giant wrestler Antaeus and the godlike hero Hercules, a location an intrepid ancient traveller might look upon, at least, were actually the dunes of the Sahara Desert.
Desert scene in modern Libya, from Wikipedia
* R. Katzoff, “Where did the Greeks of the Roman Period Practice Wrestling?”, AJA 90 (1986), 437-40.
Ibant obscuri
A fond memory of tutoring, back when Chris Tudor, a.k.a. Massolit, was still an undergraduate, so one or two years ago. We were discussing a passage from Aeneid VI, the terrifying initial entry into the Underworld by Aeneas and the Sibyl of Cumae (6.268-81; David West’s translation, lightly versified):
ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,
perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna:
quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.
vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus Orci
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
pallentes habitant Morbi tristisque Senectus,
et Metus et malesuada Fames ac turpis Egestas,
terribiles visu formae, Letumque Labosque.
tum consanguineus Leti Sopor, et mala mentis
Gaudia, mortiferumque adverso in limine Bellum,
ferreique Eumenidum thalami et Discordia demens
vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruentis.They walked in the darkness of that lonely night with shadows all about them,
through the empty halls of Dis and his desolate kingdom,
as men walk in a wood by the sinister light of a fitful moon
when Jupiter has buried the sky in shade
and black night has robbed all things of their colour.
Before the entrance hall of Orcus, in the very throat of hell,
Grief and Revenge have made their beds
and Old Age lives there in despair, with white-faced Diseases
and Fear and Hunger, corrupter of men, and squalid Poverty,
things dreadful to look upon, and Death and Drudgery besides.
Then there are Sleep, Death’s sister, perverted
Pleasures, murderous War astride the threshold,
the iron chambers of the Furies and raving Discord
with blood-soaked ribbons binding her viperous hair.
Here you can listen to Matthew Hargreaves reading this passage in the original Latin.
Chris, characteristically forthright even in his youth, offered a searching critique of Virgil’s simile at 270-2. It wasn’t much of a simile, he remarked, if it explicated a walk in darkness by analogy with a walk in darkness. A very good point. Similes are by definition comparisons of different things. A simile is in some respect like the thing it illustrates, of course, the clue’s in the name, but must also, for it to be something different from a literal comparison and do some metaphorical work, be essentially different, too. In “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, it is obviously essential to the impact of the figure of speech both that Wordsworth is not literally a cloud and also that he has in certain (unanticipated) respects behaved like one.
In Virgil’s example, by contrast, the simile seems to be all similarity and no difference, not so much “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as “I wandered lonely as someone wandering lonely.”
My answer to Chris back when–and some might consider this a desperate defence of Virgil–was that maybe this striking lack of figurative colour was actually the point. One of Virgil’s achievements in this book of the Aeneid is to conjure up for the Underworld the eerie character of a place both animate and dead, a space full of shades of former humans who can interact with Aeneas, but whose existence is nevertheless of a fundamentally lesser kind. Aeneas, a live human moving through the Underworld, stands out from its inhabitants by possessing physical characteristics of the living such as weight (as when Charon’s ferryboat, designed for insubstantial shades, ships water when he steps into it, 412-14), colour and even a voice (489-3, Aeneas’ vivid encounter with his insubstantial former enemies at Troy, including the gorgeous image of Aeneas’ fulgentiaque arma per umbras, “weaponry blazing through/amid the shadows”). The difference between the dead and the living for Virgil is light, definition and colour.
The passage we’re looking at here offers the first glimpse of this gloomy, achromatic world. But Virgil calculates, I think, that introducing metaphor to this scene, in other words a simile doing the work a simile should do, will contradict the picture he’s painting of a place lacking something essential to the world of the living; or to put that positively, seeking to convey the dreariness of the Underworld, he lets that lifelessness penetrate deep into his poetry. Virgil introduces a simile, a figure of literary embellishment (metaphor is readily described in ancient literary criticism as a matter of brightening a piece of writing, bringing light to it, e.g. Quintilian 12.10.36), but a simile that itself loses its life and colour as the poem accompanies Aeneas on his journey down to Hell.
I don’t think Chris bought that all those years ago, and there’s no reason why anyone else should.
I gave you Matthew Hargreaves’ beautiful reading of these crepuscular verses earlier. He’ll be reading them again, alongside many more, equally lovely, at King’s College, London on March 28, alongside Dame Emma Kirkby, Lizzie Donnelly, George Sharpley, and the author—and tickets are available here.
Hercules Inc.; or, Ovid and the bovids
A few weeks ago my colleague Ed Bispham, after a visit to the archaeological museum at Chieti, alerted me to a piece of Ovidiana that was entirely new to me. It was a column excavated from the site of a sanctuary of Hercules Curinus on the slopes of Monte Morrone in Abruzzo, Italy, and among other graffiti scribbled on it were twelve hexameter lines of Latin poetry, with Ovid’s name NASONIS written in another hand above them.
The lines are very hard to read, and what can be read doesn’t correspond to any surviving works of Ovid, so it’s assumed that they are being attributed to him rather than actually by him. Here is what is legible, anyhow, from M. Buonocore, L’Abruzzo e il Molise in età romana (L’Aquila, 2002), p. 178:
What keeps it all quite intriguing, though, is where we are. Monte Morrone is just a few miles from Ovid’s hometown of Sulmo (modern Sulmona). The site of the sanctuary, largely covered by a landslip in antiquity, was in fact popularly regarded in the Middle Ages as Ovid’s villa, and the excavations that uncovered this column (and other items such as this very pretty statue of Hercules, also in the museum at Chieti) were commenced there in 1957, the 2,000th anniversary of Ovid’s birth. So it’s perfectly understandable that people have wanted to make something of the graffiti, even if it’s just, in its way, a modern version of the medieval impulse to believe that Ovid lived here.
A striking fact, though, is that Ovid, who has a lot to say about Hercules and a lot to say about his birthplace at Sulmo among the Paeligni, never makes any reference to Hercules Curinus, the most important religious foundation in the district.
What’s a blog for, though, if not to flog a dead horse? I’m going to suggest that we can still find the Hercules worshipped at Monte Morrone in Ovid’s work. This will involve a rapid survey of the Hercules cult in central Italy, and then some close reading of a moment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The most important role that Hercules seems to have fulfilled in central Italy, surprising as it may seem, was as patron of pastoral activity and commerce more generally, in particular the herding of cattle between highlands and lowlands, and the trade in the critical commodity of salt which seems to have shadowed the movement of cattle. The sanctuary at Monte Morrone stood adjacent to the calles or drove roads along which these cattle were herded, and the networks were extensive: it’s no coincidence that the great sanctuary of Hercules in Rome, the Ara Maxima, stood in the “Cattle Market”, the Forum Boarium, nor that elsewhere in the Forum Boarium there was a place called the Salinae or Salt-pans: the Forum Boarium marked the termination of the Via Salaria, the “Salt Road” by which (Pliny the Elder informs us, 31.89) salt from the mouth of the Tiber was transported into the interior. At Alba Fucens, a Roman colony lying between Rome and Sulmo, there stood a major shrine of Hercules Salarius, Hercules in his aspect as patron of the salt trade.
Hercules’ patronage of this traffic could even turn him, a mediator through trade between the diverse peoples of Italy, into a god of Italy itself. In the Aeneid Virgil draws out the myth of Hercules’ tenth labour that underlies this connection with cattle, his killing of Geryon in Spain and herding of the monstrous herdsman’s cattle all around the north-Mediterranean littoral to Greece. In Aeneid 8, a book (in a poem) deeply concerned with Italy’s unity and divisions, Hercules, in reference to his violent suppression of the malefactor Cacus, who had attempted to steal Geryon’s cattle, is given a very suggestive epithet, the communis deus, “the god who is god for all” (8.275), a force for Italian unity. Aeneas will also unify this geographical space, but do it, as paradoxically as Hercules, by fighting a most divisive war within Italy.
As anticipated, a whistlestop tour of Herculean Italy there, but Filippo Coarelli can sum up the relevant bit: “in the great markets [Hercules] is always present as guarantor and intermediary. The cult of Hercules is thus closely connected with mercantile activity, especially in the Sabellic zone (i.e. central to southern Italy), where the divinity fulfilled the function of protector of herds and shepherds” (F. Coarelli and A. La Regina, Abruzzo-Molise. Guide archeologiche Laterza 9 (Bari and Rome, 1984), 87).
How can we drag this back to Ovid, though?
Well, Book 9 of the Metamorphoses (my favourite, as it happens) has a lot to say about Hercules, with Ovid having his characteristic fun at the expense of the greatest hero of them all. A key episode is the attempt by the centaur Nessus to carry off Hercules’ wife Deianira, under the pretext of carrying her safely across the river Euenus. Hercules shoots Nessus dead, but as he dies Nessus persuades Deianira that his cloak, soaked with his blood, will restore Hercules’ love to her should his affections ever wander. In fact, when Hercules does bring another woman home to Trachis, and Deianira sends to him “the shirt of Nessus” to win him back, Nessus’ blood (contaminated, as the centaur well knew, by the poisonous blood of the hydra with which Hercules’ arrows were tipped) causes Hercules a prolonged and agonizing death.
What interests me, though, is Hercules’ angry speech to Nessus (and Ovid’s account of its motivation) as the centaur attempts to make off with Deianira (9.118-28):
iamque tenens ripam, missos cum tolleret arcus,
coniugis agnouit uocem Nessoque paranti
fallere depositum ‘quo te fiducia‘ clamat
‘uana pedum, uiolente, rapit? tibi, Nesse biformis,
dicimus. exaudi, nec res intercipe nostras.
si te nulla mei reuerentia mouit, at orbes
concubitus uetitos poterant inhibere paterni.
haud tamen effugies, quamuis ope fidis equina;
uulnere, non pedibus te consequar.’ ultima dicta
re probat, et missa fugientia terga sagitta
traicit. exstabat ferrum de pectore aduncum.
And now he had reached the bank, and was picking up the bow he had thrown over,
when he heard his wife’s voice, and shouted at Nessus, who was preparing
to fail to honour the deposit: ‘Where is the empty security of your
feet carrying you, impetuous man? It is to you, two-formed Nessus,
that I speak. Listen to me, and do not steal my property.
If no respect moves you, the wheel
to which your father [Ixion] is attached might dissuade you from this forbidden union.
But you will not escape, however much you trust in your horsy advantage:
With a wound, not my feet, I will pursue you.’ Those last words
he makes good with action, and firing an arrow at Nessus’ fleeing back
he pierced it. The barbed tip jutted out of his chest.
Hercules is a character in an epic poem, and speaks like one. He’s a character in an epic poem, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that doesn’t take itself at all seriously, mind you, so he’s rather too blustering as he shouts at Nessus, tipping over into parody. But it seems to me that Ovid is using other ways of puncturing the pomposity of this epic hero, and it takes us back to the quite mundane associations we’ve considered that Hercules at Monte Morrone carried, especially in the eyes of a Roman elite that looked down on trade. What I mean is that Hercules’ and Ovid’s language here, particularly the phrases I’ve underlined (and struggled to translate satisfactorily), are strikingly commercial in character, nec res intercipe nostras especially (I wouldn’t go to the cross for any of the others, but cumulatively they amount to something, I think): Hercules describes his wife as if she is a commodity, and Nessus as some kind of commercial rival trying to defraud him, their relationship a commercial deal that has gone sour. If so, it’s classic Metamorphoses: the most heroic of heroes transformed into a businessman with his eye on the bottom line.
The business-savvy god was a familiar notion in this part of Italy, as much to a reader in Rome as anyone who had visited the Hercules Curinus, which any native of Sulmo surely had. So maybe we can see a faint connection between the shrine at Monte Morrone and Sulmo’s most celebrated son, after all.
Ovid in Sulmona, from https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Statua_di_Ovidio,_Sulmona.jpg
While you’re here, and if you live in or close to Oxford, on June 15, 2019 there is one-off performance of George Sharpley’s dramatisation of selected scenes from the Aeneid, The Song of Arms and a Man. Performers, including Dame Emma Kirkby, will read Virgil’s original Latin, drawing out the beauty of his Latin verse. It will be a fantastic evening, and the tickets, which are absurdly cheap, are available here.
F. van Wonterghem, “Le culte d’Hercule chez les Paeligni. Documents anciens et
nouveaux”, L’antiquité classique 42 (1973), 36-48;
M. Torelli, “Gli aromi e il sale. Afrodite ed Eracle nell’emporia arcaica dell’ Italia”, in A. Mastrocinque (ed.), Ercole in Occidente. Atti del Colloquio Internazionale, Trento, 7 Marzo 1990 (Trento, 1993), 91-117;
Ll. Morgan, “A Yoke Connecting Baskets: Odes 3.14, Hercules, and Italian Unity”, CQ 55 (2005), 190-203;
T. D. Stek, Cult Places and Cultural Change in Republican Italy (Amsterdam, 2009).
Jaw jaw
There’s a moment in Aeneid 11 when the politics of Virgil’s own time feel unusually close to the surface.
A council of the Latins has been called by King Latinus, and there’s a hostile exchange of speeches between Turnus, Aeneas’ great rival, and the troublemaker Drances. Despite the principle of my enemy’s enemy, Drances is not drawn by Virgil as an appealing character.
Two hundred lines are devoted to this council in the Latin city. But when Turnus ends his impassioned refutal of Drances, the focus turns to what Aeneas has been up to all this time (445-6):
Illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant
certantes: castra Aeneas aciemque movebat.
Thus the Latins debated among themselves on matters they could not decide,
in competition: meanwhile Aeneas was advancing his camp and his battle line.
Aeneas’ action, so sharply contrasted with Latin debate, is expressed in less than a line, and yet what is described in those four words is a decisive step toward his conquest of the Latins. Virgil’s implication is clear, communicated by form as much as sense: Aeneas is the no-nonsense man of action; Turnus and the Latins just a bunch of ineffectual wafflers.
The resonances with Virgil’s own day here are strong. The indecisive exchange of speeches among the Latins suggests (a jaundiced view of) the political culture of the Republic, which could be dismissed as a time of unfettered expression and polarised political dispute, giving rise in turn to the conflict between citizens that had blighted Rome until Augustus put a stop to it. In Drances, particularly the way he is introduced at 336-42 (cf. Plut. Cic. 1.1), there seems to be a more specific allusion to the most celebrated practitioner of this old politics, the orator Cicero, and thus in his rhetorical conflict with Turnus a hint of Cicero’s famous (and fatal) series of attacks on Mark Antony, the Philippics. Aeneas’ military pragmatism, in contrast, is a model of the new, Augustan way of doing politics in Rome: decisive action by an individual, wasting no words and respecting no judgement but his own–autocracy, in a word.
Virgil may have expected his Roman readers to endorse this preference for deeds over words. But when the Latin council breaks up in panic as Aeneas’ advance is announced, what I see is civil society collapsing before military force, and it’s a moment I’ve been thinking about a lot during the parliamentary debates about Brexit. Many people are despairing of the “chaos” in the House of Commons, the MPs addicted to debate, incapable of reaching a consensus.
I’m not.
There’s plenty I’m unhappy about right now in UK politics, don’t get me wrong, but the sight of parliamentarians wrestling with their consciences in the most difficult political circumstances of recent times isn’t one of them. It would be stretching it to call the Roman Republic a democracy, but democracy is most definitely what we’re looking at in these indecisive parliamentary debates.
Yes, illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant/ certantes, and all’s (still, essentially) right with the world.
Calling time
Time is whatever it is.
But what a culture does with time, how it gets organised, can be one of the most revealing things about a culture. The books listed at the bottom of this post have lots of interesting things to say on the topic, but this is a blog about how the Romans organised time, and ultimately how the ordering of time became, like pretty much everything else that the Roman elite concerned themselves with, a means for political assertion and self-promotion.
(Quite a lot of what the Romans did with time is still with us, as it happens, too.)
I’m currently writing about the Fasti, Ovid’s poetic account of the Roman calendar (fasti is the closest Latin word to “calendar”). One book devoted to each month, the Fasti should have extended to twelve of them, but Ovid’s exile to the Black Sea in AD 8 did for that. As Ovid left it, the end of the poem arrives prematurely on the last day of June (the conclusion of the sixth book, in other words), exactly halfway through the year–a marked and meaningful place to end a poem that should have lasted the full twelve months. Ovid is doing his best to underline how unsatisfactory an ending it is, how much better a poem this would be if he could just be allowed home to finish it…
In one respect at least, though, the Fasti finds an appropriate place to wrap things up. June 30 was the foundation date for the Temple of Hercules of the Muses (aedes Herculis Musarum). Such cult birthdays were important material for Roman calendars, and the Temple of Hercules of the Muses, as well as boasting an impressively odd name, was one of the most culturally significant locations in the city of Rome, as we shall shortly see.
This final notice in Ovid’s Fasti celebrates the cult of Hercules of the Muses, focusing on the recent renovation of the temple by the emperor Augustus’ stepbrother, L. Marcius Philippus, in 29 BC, and on Philippus’ daughter, Marcia, who had connections both to the royal family and to Ovid’s wife–potentially useful to an exile. But as Ovid and his Roman readers were well aware, this temple had a rich history before 29 BC, and particular relevance for Ovid’s poem about time since it was intimately associated both with Roman poetry and with Roman timekeeping.
The temple of Hercules of the Muses had originally been dedicated in 184 BC or thereabouts by M. Fulvius Nobilior. He may in fact have simply added a portico for the Muses to an existing temple of Hercules (the details are contested), but at any rate Nobilior decorated this new foundation with statues of the Muses that he had looted on campaign in Aetolia, Greece, from a palace that had once belonged to Pyrrhus of Epirus, one of Rome’s most daunting enemies from a century earlier. Nobilior was thus a ruthless and successful Roman general, and at the same time a sensitive devotee of Greek high culture. Nobilior’s temple with its statues of the Greek goddesses of the creative arts encapsulates the paradox of Rome’s cultural conquest by the Greece it had conquered (to paraphrase Horace). Along with the nine Muses, furthermore, came a statue of Hercules realised as Musagetes, “Leader of the Muses”, strumming a lyre.
It appears that this temple became a meeting place for Roman poets under the gaze of their patron deities; and Cicero, in his defence of the poet Archias in 62 BC, cites Fulvius’ act of “dedicating the spoils of Mars to the Muses” as an instance of the inseparability of military heroics and poetry, part of his argument that martial achievement might as well not happen if there weren’t poets like Archias around to celebrate it. What drove the association of this temple with poetic activity most of all, though, was what a poet who had actually accompanied Nobilior on his campaigns in Greece did with it all. Q. Ennius was the national poet of Rome before Virgil came along, his epic poem Annales a history of Rome from the fall of Troy to his own day. But within this poem Ennius seems to have given special prominence to Nobilior’s temple. According to an influential reconstruction, Ennius’ account of Nobilior’s victory in Greece and the foundation of the cult of Hercules of the Muses rounded off the fifteenth and last book of the first edition of his epic.
But the connection between Ennius’ Annales and his patron’s temple goes even deeper. Ennius was the first Roman poet to actually call his Muses “Muses”, Musae, rather than using the Latin equivalent Camenae, and he opened the Annales with a line, Musae quae pedibus magnam pulsatis Olympum, “You Muses, who stamp great Olympus with your feet”, which simultaneously flaunted the Greek name he was using for the goddesses of song, and also the Greek form he was adopting for his poem: the Annales were the first Roman epic to be composed in what henceforth became the standard metre for this kind of poetry, dactylic hexameters. As for the Muses, the strong suspicion is that Ennius was drawing a parallel between himself and his patron Nobilior, implying a symbiosis of the military and poetic such as Cicero had identified: both of them, after all, Nobilior and Ennius, had brought the Muses back to Rome.
So much for Nobilior’s temple and poetry, but what about time, which I did after all claim was my main topic here?
Well, one of the most celebrated things about Nobilior’s establishment was a calendar that it housed, presumably painted on the wall somewhere, to all appearances an influential attempt to bring order to Roman time–Ovid’s Fasti was a distant descendant. It’s a safe bet that Ennius helped his patron in this project, since the poet displayed a special affinity for matters temporal: the very name of his epic, Annals, indicated the importance to the poem of the passage of years, anni. (There is an appealing theory that the dedication of Nobilior’s temple, according to Ennius’ calculation, fell exactly 1,000 years after the fall of Troy in 1184 BC.) Ovid’s Fasti, which plays extensively on a rivalry between Ovid and his predecessor Ennius, reflects this association of Ennius with time, and elsewhere the poet’s name lent itself to chronological puns like perennis used (indirectly) of Ennius at Lucretius 1.118, perennis meaning “through the years”, “everlasting”.
There may also have been in Nobilior’s temple an example of another thing, beside the calendar, for which the Romans used the word fasti, the only other thing, in fact: a list of consuls stretching back to the beginning of the Roman Republic in 509 BC which, since the Romans identified years by the names of that year’s consuls, was also a timeline complementing the calendrical fasti, a chronological thread connecting with the calendrical loop. (For the year as a circle, see here.) These two kinds of fasti were commonly combined on later monuments, for example in the earliest Roman calendar that survives, the so-called Fasti Antiates from Anzio. If, as seems likely, the calendar and consular list were first found combined in Nobilior’s temple, it follows that it’s probably to Nobilior that the convention of calling both of them fasti (a word that attaches more naturally to a calendar) can also be traced.
All of this, needless to say, makes the topic with which the Fasti prematurely ends, with its associations of poetry, time and the intersection of the two, an exceptionally apt place for a poem about time to, well, call time.
But a subsequent development, one that strikes me as an intensely satisfying moment, involves another patron of Ennius called Nobilior. Because there was still a piece missing in the story of the fasti, calendrical and consular. The year 153 BC was to a Roman Q. Fuluio Nobiliore T. Annio Lusco consulibus, “[The year] when Q. Fulvius Nobilior and T. Annius Luscus were consuls.” Quintus Fulvius Nobilior, the first-elected consul, and thus the first named in the dating formula, was the son of the Marcus Fulvius Nobilior who had established the temple of Hercules of the Muses, but Quintus was also in his own right a patron of Ennius, since on the evidence of Cicero (Brutus 79) he bestowed Roman citizenship on the poet by enrolling him in a colony he was establishing at Pisaurum on the east coast of Italy. That colony was founded in 184BC, so Q. Ennius achieved Roman citizenship, by his own reckoning, 1,000 years after the fall of Troy.
Time, and orderly patterns in time, as you may be gathering, mattered quite a lot to the Romans.
But the date of Q. Fulvius Nobilior’s consulship, 153 BC, has its own special significance, since this was the year when consuls first began to enter office on the date that would thenceforth become standard, the 1st of January. Hitherto consuls, reflecting their essentially military character, had been inaugurated on March 15, the beginning of the campaign season, or before that at more or less any time of the year.
The main impact of this shift to January 1 in terms of chronology (and this was surely actually the fundamental point of the reform) was to reconcile the two kinds of fasti, the yearly calendar and the list of consuls: both the year and the consulate now started on January 1, and that meant that historical time and calendrical time intersected. It had the further effect, incidentally, of enhancing the status of Janus, god of the year and of time and frankly the best god of the lot (you can find him at the bottom), on whose day the consuls now carried out their inaugural sacrifices. Janus came to be understood as the god of the consulate, and presided not only over the calendar that started in his month of January, but also over that historical timeline constituted by the consuls’ names.
It has been suggested that this move to January 1 was actually motivated by the influential combination of fasti in Nobilior’s temple, and that seems obviously true to me. But what I haven’t seen noted, though I can’t believe it hasn’t been pointed out by someone somewhere, is that it’s no coincidence that the first consul to enter office on January 1 was none other than the son of the founder of the aedes Herculis Musarum. Nobilior junior looks very much like he is putting into practice an implication of his father’s monument, applying the coordination of the two kinds of fasti to the real-time workings of the Roman res publica.
This all makes the management of Roman time look something like the family business of the Fulvii Nobiliores. Nobilior senior, aided by Mr Eternity himself, Ennius, formalizes the Roman year, and puts it up for all to see on the wall of his spanking new temple. His son Quintus then pursues the project of setting Roman time on a stable basis, and in an important sense properly realizes it, by synchronizing the beginning of the year with the entry to power of the eponymous consuls, in the process associating the arrangement with his own name in 153 BC.
Caesar’s radical reform of the Roman calendar tends to eclipse anything that went before it, but what a powerful piece of political theatre this must have been! At Q. Fulvius Nobilior’s inauguration, Rome experienced nothing less than time clicking into sync. What we seem to be looking at in the Nobiliores is a family of the Roman elite asserting its status and significance in Roman public life in a range of interesting ways, by military conquest, promotion of poetry and art of a Greek complexion–and by this responsibility they assume for the management of the city’s time. A later Roman family, the Julii, would achieve a similar familial status as timekeepers, alongside a couple of other things. Julius Caesar’s reform (still the basis of our calendar today, after some fine-tuning of leap years by Pope Gregory), which came into use in 45BC, was picked up by his adopted son Augustus, who corrected a misapplication of Caesar’s original mechanism and also renamed the months of Quintilis and Sextilis July (after his father) and August (after himself). Was Augustus’ model Q. Fulvius Nobilior?
Returning at length to Ovid’s Fasti, though. Its premature conclusion, I’ve suggested (like many before me), is in its way highly appropriate. But most apt of all to Ovid’s poem, a playful take on the Roman year that always resists the inherent seriousness of the topic, is the Hercules of the aedes Herculis Musarum himself.
This Hercules is the image with which we leave the poem: sic cecinit Clio, doctae adsensere sorores;/ adnuit Alcides increpuitque lyram, “So sang Clio, and her learned sisters assented;/ Hercules nodded his agreement and struck the lyre.” We are lucky enough to have a series of coins minted by Q. Pomponius Musa, who, apparently by way of a pun on his own name, reproduced the statues of the nine Muses from Nobilior’s temple, and Hercules himself. He wears the skin of the Nemean Lion, and has his club by his side, but he strums the lyre and with his sinuous physique is as unheroic a realisation of the god as one could imagine.
As such, though, this Hercules is very true to the poetics of Ovid’s Fasti, as well as to the poem’s preoccupation with time.
Everything here apart from Q. Fulvius Nobilior’s role in things and Hercules Musarum’s elegiac sinuousness (?) is filched from one or other of the following scholars:
A. Barchiesi, “Endgames : Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6“, in D. H. Roberts, F. Dunn & D.P. Fowler (eds.), Classical closure: reading the end in Greek and Latin literature (1997), 181-208;
J. Elliott, Ennius and the architecture of the Annales (2013);
D.C. Feeney, Caesar’s calendar (2007);
I. Gildenhard, “The ‘Annalist’ before the Annalists: Ennius and his Annales“, in U. Eigler, U. Gotter, N. Luraghi and U. Walter (eds.), Formen römischer Geschichtsschreibung von den Anfängen bis Livius (2003), 93-114;
R.J. Littlewood, A commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, Book 6 (2006);
J. Rüpke, The Roman calendar from Numa to Constantine (2011);
O. Skutsch, Studia Enniana (1968).
Non passibus aequis
A minor thought, even by my standards, which struck me between preparing a tutorial and rehearsing this, but to catch such random ideas was one of my original points in blogging, so…
An archetypal image from the Aeneid is Aeneas’ escape from Troy in the dead of night, bearing his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and holding his son by the hand, while his wife Creusa follows at a fateful distance behind the group of men (Aen. 2.721-6):
haec fatus latos umeros subiectaque colla
ueste super fuluique insternor pelle leonis,
succedoque oneri; dextrae se paruus Iulus
implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis; 725
pone subit coniunx.
With these words I spread over my broad shoulders
and bowed neck the covering of a tawny lion’s skin
and take up my burden; little Iulus entwined
his own hand in mine and follows his father with unequal steps. 725
Behind trails my wife.
The scene was already celebrated in antiquity, recreated in sculptural form in the Forum of Augustus at Rome among other Roman heroes like Romulus, from which derive depictions in images and visual parodies from Pompeii.
Specifically, it was 724-5, describing Aeneas’ son, known alternately as Ascanius or Iulus, that caught my attention. Non passibus aequis, “with unequal steps”, now a proverbial expression, is in context a vivid and poignant reminder of the boy’s age and vulnerability as his family flees the captured city. Meanwhile Ascanius’ alternate name Iulus is, here as elsewhere, a means for Virgil to link Aeneas and the Julii family to which Augustus belonged (for his importance in Julian family lore, there’s a bit more here). It appears that Virgil gives the boy special emphasis in his account. At the top of this post there is a coin of Julius Caesar, Augustus’ adoptive father, depicting Aeneas’ escape, and it includes his father on his shoulders, but no son, even though that son was crucial to Julius Caesar’s ancestral claim. In Caesar’s image Aeneas’ spare hand is holding the palladium, the talismanic statue of Athena/Minerva that, housed in the Temple of Vesta, would protect the future city of Rome.
Well, what struck me about Virgil’s description of Iulus on this, the umpteenth, occasion of reading it is a subtle shift in perspective in line 725, and perhaps another way of lending the boy the slightest boost in status. This is all within Aeneas’ narrative of the fall of Troy to Queen Dido in Carthage, and Aeneas describes the physical process of picking up his father from his own viewpoint, similarly introducing his son in 724 taking hold of his hand. Then in 726 Aeneas describes his wife’s position at the rear, again as if viewing her himself. But in 725 we seem to catch just a glimpse of a different perspective and consciousness, that of little Iulus himself. It all hinges on the word patrem. The only person properly capable of seeing Aeneas as “father”, after all, is Iulus, and the word thus momentarily gives us access to Iulus’ subjectivity.
A very subtle effect, for sure, and I’m here obviously indebted to Don Fowler’s classic article “Deviant focalisation in Vergil’s Aeneid” (PCPhS 36, 1990, 42-63), in which he investigates moments when Virgil implicitly conveys a point of view at variance with that of the narrator (hence “deviant”). In Book 2 Aeneas is the narrator, but here, with patrem, his son’s viewpoint intrudes itself, for a second, into Aeneas’ account.
Just for a second, though? It might be worth wondering if non passibus aequis is also the boy’s perception, and it would be nice: not just a vivid image of a small child, if so, but that child’s own viewpoint, Iulus himself aware that his legs are not as long as Aeneas’s, Iulus who by implication is striving to keep pace with his father.
Whether we see that as the boy’s point of view or not (and we certainly don’t have to), this scene deftly characterises the male characters of Aeneas’ family, critical in this poem as the ancestors of Augustus and of the Romans. Anchises is authoritative (in Virgil’s version he carries with him the gods of Troy) but physically weak, while Aeneas is by implication as impressive a warrior as Hercules (the lion skin he drapes over his shoulders, and the burden he assumes, point strongly to the Greek hero, for which see more here). As for Ascanius, we can see a boy as far removed from Aeneas’ heroism by youth as Anchises is by age, in any case completing a powerful tableau of past, present and future (from which, again, the mother is pointedly excluded). At the very least the word patrem establishes Aeneas’ claim to an important status marker in this poem and in Roman life more generally. A theme of Books 1 and 2 of the Aeneid is Aeneas’ growth into the role as pater, leader of the family, initially overshadowed by his father Anchises. Here patrem reminds us of Aeneas’ own potential to be the pater familias, head of the family and by extension of the Trojan people as they turn into Romans, a national hero fully realised.
Maybe that’s all this momentary shift to Iulus’ point of view is designed to achieve, identifying Aeneas as a father in his own right as his carries his father. But I do like the possibility that we also catch here just a glimpse of Iulus’ own nascent heroism, a third generation consciously measuring himself against his father, aspiring to match his manly pace, the boy who will build on Aeneas’ victory in Italy and ensure not only the foundation of Rome, but the preeminence within it of Augustus, father of the nation, pater patriae.