imagines

Here are a couple of interesting statues. The one on the left is of course Hercules (note the club and lion skin), from the National Archaelogical Museum of Naples. It's huge and very impressive, conveying his size and strength, but at the same time it's quite a peaceful, reflective work. Behind his back he's carrying the Apples of the Hesperides, the retrieval of which was the eleventh of his twelve tasks. He seems weary, and is perhaps summoning up the strength for one last labour.

The statue on the left by contrast is tiny.It's a bit hard to tell without anything to compare it to, but from memory it's only about 10cm tall. I remember nothing about about this figure, except that it caught my attention. I'm not sure who it is (perhaps Venus? perhaps an anonymous prostitute?), nor if it has any special significance. From looking at it, I would guess that it's made out of terracotta (rather than carved out of marble), and that it's substantially older than the statue of Hercules (which is probably from the 3rd Century A.D.).

superbus

Superbus is an odd Latin word. It’s obviously the root of ‘superb’, but the meaning of the Latin word is quite different to that of its English derivative, which generally has only positive connotations. Superbus has the basic meaning of ‘proud’, but can be used in a positive or a negative sense. For example in Book VIII of the Aeneid (where the word occurs seven times), it can be used to describe Hercules, the heroic slayer of the monster Cacus (and 'type' of Augustus):

nam maximus ultor
tergemini nece Geryonae spoliisque superbus
Alcides aderat…
For our great avenger, the son of Alceus [Hercules] was at hand, exalting in the death and spoils of three-bodied Geryon…

Virgil, Aeneid VIII.201-2

Rome, the past and future

As my year 12 class has studied Aeneid VIII this year, we've been looking at how Virgil represents Rome's past and future (ie the future from Aeneas' point of view. For Virgil it was the present, for us it's the past.). It's easy to spot references to the Rome of Virgil's day as you read Aeneid VIII, but it's more difficult to explain Virgil's purpose in doing so. I recently read an article which, I thought, expressed it well. Talking about the "interweaving of present, past and future" it says:

‘One of the themes of the book is the union of different peoples. The Trojans, the past inhabitants of Italy, fuse with her present inhabitants into a future people, the Italians. The fact that Evander anticipates this development and thus speaks of “we Italians” (VIII, 331 f.) is not one of Virgil’s “inconsistencies”, but serves to underscore this theme explicitly. A last example of this interplay of the various time levels may be taken from the Hercules-Cacus episode itself. Evander speaks of Hercules’ adventure as if he and his men had been present (200-1):

attulit et nobis aliquando optantibus aetas
auxilium adventumque dei.
It would seem, then, that Evander, Hercules and Aeneas were contemporaries. This was chronologically untenable, and thus the event, represented first as contemporary, is later projected into the mythical past (268-9):

ex illo celebratus honos laetique minores
servavere diem.
On a different level, the et nobis may well refer to Vergil’s contemporaries, the god whose advent is being celebrated being Augustus. Thus the line between past and present is again blurred, and the “Augustan future” is superimposed on the original time level.’

[Karl Galinsky, "The Hercules-Cacus Episode in Aeneid VIII," AJP 87 (1966) 22 f. Thanks to James for recommending this article.]

Ovid's Umbrella

I’ve just finished reading a book called Milton’s Teeth and Ovid’s Umbrella, a history of everyday artefacts, and what they can tell us about life in times past. It’s really easy to read, full of quirky facts and interesting insights, including chapters on taxes, toothbrushes, football, chess, tools and lawns. Here’s an extract from his chapter on umbrellas:

“Umbrella comes from the Latin umbra, meaning shadow, and the diminutive suffix –ulum, meaning little. The resulting umbraculum or “little shadow” signified a sunshade or parasol.

Ovid said that Hercules held a golden umbraculum to keep the sun off his beloved Omphale, the princess of Lydia. And the epigrammatist Martial elevated the umbrella to a work of art in one of his bright two-liners. He saw the umbraculum as Everyman’s personal awning, even when the wind was up. Which only goes to show that Martial never tried to manoeuvre one through a city downpour...

In Egyptian art the pharaoh’s umbrella is common, and both Assyrian and Persian bas-relief sculptures from Ninevah and Persepolis show the monarch protected by an umbrella. Again the common sunlight that falls on us all must not descend on royalty as well.

So umbrellas had to do with power. No wonder they came to be the essential accoutrement of the British power broker, the businessman. And even as his empire waned, his symbols- brolly and bowler- remained.

But this was nothing new, even for earlier empires. The Roman emperor Heliogabalus adopted the umbrella as the symbol of his reign (A.D. 218-222). Indeed there is plenty of evidence that he identified himself with the sun god, hence the helios in his name. On his coins and in his art, the point of umbrella was that he too radiated power.”

equi notissimi

Here are 5 famous horses from antiquity:

Incitatus was the horse of the emperor Caligula. Caligula loved his horse so much that he fed it oats mixed with gold. It lived in a stable made of marble, ate from an ivory manger, slept under purple blankets (purple dye was very expensive at the time), and wore a collar of precious gems. Caligula also tried to make his horse consul (the highest political office)- though this was possibly only because it seemed like a better option than the rest of the Roman aristocracy around at the time.

Bucephalus was the horse of Alexander the Great. Alexander succeeded in taming this fearsome horse when he was only 10 (or possibly 12) years old. Bucephalus served Alexander well in battle, but was eventually fatally wounded at the battle of Hydaspes, where Alexander established a city, called Bucephala (in modern day Pakistan) in honour of his faithful horse.

Pegasus was a mythical winged horse, which sprang from the neck of the monster Medusa when the Greek hero Perseus chopped off her head. Pegasus helped another Greek hero Bellerephon in his fights against the Chimera and the Amazons.

The Mares of Diomedes were four uncontrollable, fire-breathing, person-eating horses belonging to the giant king of Thrace, which Hercules had to steal as one of his 12 labours. Eating made the horses somewhat calmer, so Hercules killed Diomedes and fed him to his own horses. Bucephalus is said to have been descended from these (mythical) horses.

The Trojan Horse was, of course, not a real horse, but a wooden one. It was built by the Greeks after they had tried unsuccessfully for ten years to capture the city of Troy. The Greeks sailed away from Troy leaving it on the shore, and when the Trojans found the horse they assumed that the Greeks had built it as an offering to the gods and took it inside their city. Unfortunately for the Trojans it was filled with armed soldiers, who snuck out at night, killed the guards and opened up the city to the Greeks who had sailed back under cover of darkness.

[This post is dedicated to Madeline in my year 8 class, the biggest hippophile I know.]