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Another image of old St Peters in Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Old St Peters in Rome was not demolished until the end of the 16th century, so there ought to be quite a number of engravings and artists’ depictions of it.  I confess, tho, that I know little about early engravers, and so don’t know where to look.

The following item, from 1575, is by Giovanni Battista De’Cavalieri, and shows the drum of the new basilica rising behind the old portico.  Thankfully the British Museum make it available online here, with the explanation “The ceremony of the opening of the Porta Santa for the Jubilee of 1575, with crowds of pilgrims standing in the Piazza San Pietro with the new cathedral rising behind the old one.”

old_st_peters_portico_1575What I don’t know is how this engraving was originally issued.  Was it really a free-standing item?  Or part of a book?

It’s very interesting to see, all the same.  That portico at the front is conspicuous in all the engravings.

UPDATE: Joseph Yarbrough has sent me a link to De Cavalieri’s book Urbis Romae aedificorum illustriumque on Archive.org here.  This has marvellous images of the Roman monuments in his day (although not this print).

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An evening in Cambridge, a strange phrase in a book, and a man who ran away

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Staying in a hotel with nothing to read is not a pleasant experience.  So I decided to drive into Cambridge town centre after work today.

Those familiar with the city will know that such a decision is not idly taken.  The hopeless congestion, caused by two decades of mingled spite and negligence on the part of the city council, means that a traveller risks being stuck in gridlock for an hour.  However I was more fortunate, and 20 minutes later managed to park in the Park Street car park.

It seems that Cambridge does not stop in the evening.  My first port of call was Heffers bookshop, which I was gratified to learn was open until 6pm.  Surely they could sell me a book?

A look in the detective fiction aisle produced nothing.  John Maddox Roberts appears to have ceased producing his “SPQR” novels – the only series on my shelves where I have thrown away the first two volumes but bought all the rest.  Lindsay Davis may still produce her “Falco” novels, but sadly she forgot how to write some years ago now, so they aren’t worth reading.  Stephen Saylor’s “Gordianus the Finder” are too low-life for my taste.

The sci-fi/fantasy aisle was no more productive.  What happened to the books full of vision and aspiration, of struggles that were not wholly vain?  The category has merged with horror, and I have no desire to read the results.

Perhaps something classical will do?  A search in the basement led me to the Loebs, and on display next to them was a curious volume: Robert Knapp’s Invisible Romans, about the lives of ordinary people in ancient Rome.

On the face of it, this was interesting, so I opened the book at random and found myself – inevitably – reading about the woes of a slave’s life.  My eye fell on a familiar quotation, given slightly differently from how I recall it:

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Unchastity is a disgrace for the freeborn, a necessity in a slave, and a duty for the freedman.

This was presented as evidence of normal practice; but of course it isn’t.  Seneca (properly referenced, thankfully) gives it as an example of exaggeration, of over-statement to the point of producing mirth among the hearer.

Well, it’s a minor point, and I carried on.  But then (p.137) I read a paragraph describing the routine rape of slaves by their owners which contained the extraordinary sentence:

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Nothing in the New Testament speaks out against this sexual abuse.

My first thought was that it must be some time since Mr Knapp has read the New Testament.   But on closer examination I realised that this was awfully like a lawyer’s phrase: something that leaves the reader with the idea that the NT endorses such evil, while providing deniability, to any accusation that this is a lie, by carefully using the words “speak out” instead of “endorse”.   I’d rather not read books that engage in that sort of thing, and so back on the shelf it went.

But while I was attempting to look at the book, another chap wandered up into the same little bay.  After a little while, getting silently in each others’ way, in that embarassed way you do, I murmured apologetically, “Rather small, these bays.”

“Yes they are.  Right, got my three books,” he snapped, and almost ran away, so quickly did he leave!  Poor chap.  Perhaps it isn’t done to speak to strangers in Heffers.

Anyway, I left Heffers empty-handed.   In Waterstones I was https://www.snyderchildcare.com/xanax-alprazolam/ luckier – a magazine and a volume of verse fit the bill.  Indeed Waterstones seemed to have better stock, while their unobtrusive air-conditioning was very welcome on what was becoming a very warm evening indeed.  A sandwich from a Subway and I was all set.

But I shall always wonder what that poor chap in Heffers thought I wanted!

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Some early engravings of the Septizonium

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have blogged before about the Septizonium, a monumental facade constructed by Septimus Severus at the foot of the Palatine where it faced the end of the Appian Way.  It seems to have had no function other than to impress the visitor.  The last remains of it were demolished to provide materials for new St. Peters.

Here are three early 17th c. engravings of the monument, prior to demolition, which I found today on Flickr; by Du Perac, Sadeler, and Schenk.
septizonium_schenk_1676septizonium_duperac_1606septizonium_sadeler_1606

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Greek and Latin Epigraphy – an absolute beginners’ guide

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A marvellous resource has appeared online here.  It’s by Onno van Nijf, and is named the “The Absolute Beginners’ Guide to Greek and Roman Epigraphy”.

Since I don’t know anything about this myself, it’s wonderful to find an orientation guide.

Recommended.

Via AWOL.

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Struck by the Lightning Source … right in the Origen … ouch!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Origen book – a text and translation of his works on Ezekiel, including masses of catena material – is complete!  This afternoon, after a mighty struggle with the crummy online interface that Lightning Source Inc provide their hapless customers, I managed to upload the files and order the full proofs, complete with covers and dust-jackets.  Yay!

Less pleasing was my opinion of the following screen, displayed by their system, which showed what percentage of the cover price I would receive, after allowing Amazon (etc) 20%, and deducting LSI’s own fees to manufacture the book.

bloodsucking

Yes, that’s right: of a $45 cover price I get $25.   It doesn’t pay, this game.

Never mind.  We’ll sell a few copies of the thing, and then get it online.  But it should look very impressive in printed form.  Really I think it will!

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A time to hold and a time to give – when to pass on old books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I made a decision to do something necessary, yet it was a wrench.  I decided to give away my copy of the 1608 Commelin edition of Tertullian’s works.

I bought it over the internet, years ago.  In those days we had no PDFs online.  The only way to get hold of the detailed apparatus, found in early editions, of the works of Tertullian was to venture onto the market and buy copies.

Indeed most Tertullian scholars have little collections of early editions; the 1539 of Rhenanus, the 1545 Paris edition, the 1550 of Gelenius – if they could find one – and the 1583 Pamelius edition, high-point of the counter-reformation scholarship.

My Commelin is a reprint of the Pamelius.  It is still bound in the original ornate white leather binding, a bit battered after the centuries but perfectly sound.  The book itself has clearly seen little use.

I got it from a German book dealer.  It arrived in a big yellow Deutsche Post box – for it is a folio volume, and some two inches thick.  And in that box it has remained; for, like most people, I live in a little house and I have no bookshelves suitable for folio-sized volumes.  There seemed no point in taking it out, merely to expose it to dust.

Also it would need to rest on its side.  I knew better than to stand it on end, thereby placing the whole weight of this heavy volume on its ancient stitching.  Where to put it?

This has been the question for many years.  I have seldom opened it.  Once it sat in a cupboard, inside its box.  For the last couple of years, or maybe more — how quickly the years pass these days, without my being aware of them — it has sat, big and obtrusive, atop a set of bookshelves that I constructed myself in younger days.

No more.  Today I decided that it was time for us to part.  I can’t sell it.  I don’t know the rare books market, and I don’t live near any dealers.  I could post it, and get it back, and do all that; but I do not care to, and I should certainly be taken advantage of.

Instead I have agreed with a fellow Tertullian scholar to donate it to him.  He will treasure it, I am sure.  Tomorrow I shall take it to the post office and send it on its way.

It has long been my policy not to keep a book unless I believe that I will read it again, or, in the case of reference books, have use of it in future.  This is particularly essential for novels, for which most of us have a tyrannous appetite.  Unless you have some similar policy, you will quickly find your book cases, and then your house, filled with books which you have no appetite to read.  I have a pile in the corner of one room, to which I assign books that I believe I will not read again; and, if after a suitable period, a book is still there then I dispose of it.  I took two bags full of books to a charity shop yesterday, in fact.

It is harder to know what to do with scholarly books that we no longer need.  Some have donated their books to libraries; yet I know too much about libraries and their practices to suppose that any such donation would be more than temporary.

Let us accept the fact that one day they must go on, and let us donate them freely to our fellow workers.  They will value them; and we need not grieve at their departure, knowing that they go to serve another as they have served us.

For one day all of our books will pass into the hands of others.  Rough hands will pull at our shelves and throw our treasures into boxes, most of which will perhaps end up in some second-hand shop.  The little paperbacks we bought at college, once fresh and bright as we ourselves then were, now foxed and yellowed, and which have accompanied us through life, and are almost friends to us, will end up in some second-hand shop.  If they are lucky they will pass into the hands of one whom we might have been pleased to call friend.

Sic transit gloria.  For the world and all that is in it are always passing away.

But the Christian has hopes of more than this from life!  He can thank God for Good Friday.  And so can all of us, if we sign up with them.

NOTE: Annoyingly WordPress deleted a large section of this post when I posted it.  I will try to recover it from memory.

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Rufinus’ account of the fall of the temple of Serapis in Alexandria

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I  happened across some files on my hard disk containing an English translation of the Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus.  The following account is given of the fall of the Serapeum in Alexandria:[1]

11.23. I suppose that everyone has heard of the temple of Serapis in Alexandria, and that many are also familiar with it. The site was elevated, not naturally but artificially, to a height of a hundred or more steps, its enormous rectangular premises extending in every direction.

All the rooms up to the floor on top were vaulted, and being furnished with ceiling lights and concealed inner chambers separate from one  another, were used for various services and secret functions.

On the upper level, furthermore, the outermost structures in the whole circumference provided space for halls and shrines and for lofty apartments which normally housed either the temple staff or those called hagneuontes, meaning those who keep themselves pure.

Behind these in turn were porticoes arranged in rectangles which ran around the whole circumference on the inside.

In the middle of the entire area rose the sanctuary with priceless columns, the exterior fashioned of marble, spacious and magnificent to behold.

In it there was a statue of Serapis so large that its right hand touched one wall and its left the other; this monster is said to have been made of every kind of metal and wood. The interior walls of the shrine were believed to have been covered with plates of gold overlaid with silver and then bronze, the last as a protection for the more precious metals.

There were also some things cunningly devised to excite the amazement and wonder of those who saw them.

There was a tiny window so orientated toward the direction of sunrise that on the day appointed for the statue of the sun to be carried in to greet Serapis, careful observation of the seasons had ensured that as the statue was entering, a ray of sunlight coming through this window would light up the mouth and lips of Serapis, so that to the people looking on it would seem as though the sun was greeting Serapis with a kiss.[2]

There was another like trick. Magnets, it is said, have the power to pull and draw iron to themselves. The image of the sun had been made by its artisan of the finest sort of iron with this in view: that a magnet, which, as we said, naturally attracts iron, and which was set in the ceiling panels, might by natural force draw the iron to itself when the statue was placed just so directly beneath it, the statue appearing to the people to rise and hang in the air. And lest it unexpectedly fall and betray the trick, the servants of the deception would say, ”The sun has arisen so that, bidding Serapis farewell, it may depart for its own place.”

There were many other things as well built on the site by those of old for the purpose of deception which it would take too long to detail.[3]

Now as we started to say, when the letter had been read our people were ready to overthrow the author of [the] error, but a rumor had been spread by the pagans that if a human hand touched the statue, the earth would split open on the spot and crumble into the abyss, while the sky would crash down at once.[4]

This gave the people pause for a moment, until one of the soldiers, armed with faith rather than weapons, seized a double-headed axe, drew himself up, and struck the old fraud on the jaw with all his might. A roar went up from both sides, but the sky did not fall, nor did the earth collapse. Thus with repeated strokes he felled the smoke-grimed deity of rotten wood, which upon being thrown down burned as easily as dry wood when it was kindled.

After this the head was wrenched from the neck, the bushel[5] having been taken down, and dragged off; then the feet and other members were chopped off with axes and dragged apart with ropes attached, and piece by piece, each in a different place, the decrepit dotard was burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshiped him.

Last of all the torso which was left was put to the torch in the amphitheater, and that was the end of the vain superstition and ancient error of Serapis.

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  1. [1]Book 11, ch. 23.  Tr. Philip R. Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia, Oxford, 1997. p.80-82.  I’m afraid some of the numeral references are corrupt in my copy.↩
  2. [2]The existence of the window is confirmed by Alexandrian coinage, and the same arrangement for sun and window is found in other Egyptian temples. The Egyptians thought of the sun as reviving the statues of gods by shining on them and thus recharging them with vital force. The image of the sun kissing Serapis is found on coins and lamps of the period; cf. Thelamon PC 183184, 195197.↩
  3. [3]The use of magnets in temple ceilings for the purpose Rufinus describes is well attested; cf. Claudian Magnes 22.39; Pliny Natural History 34.42 (a magnet in the ceiling of an Alexandrian temple); Ausonius Mosella 315317; Augustine City of God 21.6.; Thelamon PC 182, 184.↩
  4. [4]The Egyptians feared the world would collapse in chaos if the customary rites were not performed; cf. Thelamon PC 200, note 19 (papyrological evidence); Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius 2:4; Ps. Iamblicus, De mysteriis 6.7; Epiphanius, Panarion 18.3.12.↩
  5. [5]Serapis was depicted with a modiusjug on his head.↩

A marvellous collection of photographs – Following Hadrian, by Carole Raddato

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Over the last couple of months, I have become aware of another individual who, quietly, and without any fanfare, is making a real difference to ancient history online.  Her name is Carole Raddato, and she writes the Following Hadrian blog.

What she is doing is travelling all over the Roman Empire, and photographing its material remains.  The results appear on Flickr here.

She’s going into museums, and photographing exhibits, and placing them online.  In quantity:  there are over 14,000 photographs in that Flickr collection.  And at very high quality: far, far better than anything we see in published literature.

I became aware of her work, while working on the Mithras site.  Again and again I found that a striking, clear, good quality image would be … by Carole Raddato.  It might be in Wikimedia Commons (a site that takes a pretty casual attitude to copyrights of others); more usually on her own Flickr feed.

Again and again I would look for some artefact in some museum and then find … Miss Raddato had visited that museum and made a collection of photographs, all now freely online.

The path she is following – that of the Emperor Hadrian in his travels about the empire – is taking her to the major sites and repositories of the ancient and modern world.  The result is this marvellous collection of material.

A lot of people put holiday photos online.  They are of variable quality.  But I don’t know of anybody else who is undertaking such a herculean task, and doing so in a way that is of permanent value.

We are all in your debt, Madam.  May your camera flash never grow dim!

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