The History Blog

What the hell kind of Roman summer will this be?

City Hall is banning all those enjoying a Roman holiday this summer from snacking near the sights in Rome’s historical center with fines up to $80.

Officials say they want to preserve artistic treasures and decorum in a city that has millions of visitors every year.

The ordinance also bans the homeless from setting up makeshift beds and cracks down on drunks, litterbugs and nighttime revelers loitering in central areas.

It says unless the situation is “kept under control” misbehaving visitors will “irreparably damage the preservation of historical and art areas and monuments and the possibility to enjoy them.”

The ban, passed on July 10, began this weekend and stays in effect until the end of October.

Police are actually making people throw out their drinks and snacks when they’re perched on the Spanish steps or hanging out after throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain.

Jesus, what’s next? Fingerprinting and registering all the gypsies? Oh wait.

Historical society Vadis Al Maximo wants to bring chariot racing back to the Circus Maximus.

It’s not as insane as it sounds, actually. Quadriga races have been held in Jordan and France over the past couple of years, with more to come this year in Germany and Bulgaria.

The thing is, the way these guys are going about it seems overly ambitious, to put it mildly. I really don’t see them pulling this off in a year. I don’t see the city of Rome pulling something like this off, and it doesn’t have to beg, borrow and steal the necessary permits like a private organization does.

”All the main squares of the capital would be transformed into scenes from Ancient Rome, using props on loan from the Cinecitta film studios,” said Calo. But the effort involved in staging such an event would be enormous. ”According to our calculations, the Circus Maximus area could hold up to 35,000 people,” he said. ”Various maxi-screens would therefore need to be installed at various points outside the course so that people could watch the races”. Restoring Rome’s Circus Maximus would include setting up platforms, security exits, a sidewalk, a stage at the centre of the course, a ditch and outdoor stables. It would also require the assistance of other organizations, including the sports department of Cinecitta for costumes and scenery, municipal authorities for public parking and security, and riding groups for the horses and race training.

Yeeeah, see, that’s a little on the grandiose side. I vote they ditch the crazy movie stuff and just stick with making the Circus Maximus usable for its original hippodromic purposes.

The city is considering the proposal, though, so who knows? It might just it happen.

It’s a rostrum. The Romans used to affix them to the prow of their ship to batter the sides of enemy vessels.

This particular rostrum was found off the coast of Sicily and seems to have been used in the last naval battle of the First Punic War against Carthage. (The first one was the one without Hannibal and his elephants.)

The ram was attached to the bow of a ship that was used in a 241 B.C. skirmish called the Battle of the Egadi Islands, off a body of water that has been a shipping pathway dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. The Romans traveled the waterway on their way to and from North Africa, Royal said.

The Battle of Egadi Islands pitted 200 Roman ships against 100 Carthaginian ships. The battle was one of the last of the first Punic War and led to the Carthaginian’s surrender, Royal said.

I don’t know how the archaeologists made this determination, but it’s a majorly big deal to find a rostrum in the first place (only 4 others are known) and completely unique that it can be traced to a specific battle.

I pictured them shaped like rams heads, thanks to excessive consumption of Hollywood sword-and-sandal cinemascope epics, but instead they’re rather pointy and scary and eminently well-adapted to their function.

The Italian government has declared Pompeii, the Roman town destroyed once by the eruption of Vesuvius and now again by 250 years of crappy excavation/looting/tourist hoards, in a state of emergency.

Archaeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of Pompeii, dogged by lack of investment, mismanagement, litter and looting. Bogus tour guides, illegal parking attendants and stray dogs also plague visitors. […]

The “state of emergency”, which the government said would last for a year, allows for extra funds and special measures to be taken to protect the site.

“Every year at least 150 square metres of fresco and plaster work are lost for lack of maintenance,” Antonio Irlando, a regional councillor responsible for artistic heritage, told the newspaper.

“The same goes for stones: at least 3,000 pieces every year end up disintegrating,” he said.

A third of the town is still underground, lucky bugger. Had it been excavated it would be as hosed as the rest of the site, and it can’t be excavated because it is currently covered by garbage from Naples, currently mired in a refuse crisis.

I’ve been reading a book about Pompeii over the past week, a lovely glossy book with all the latest finds and gorgeous pictures. It’s amazing how often they describe something that was excavated years ago and now only exists in some Grand Tour watercolors and journals, or described in 100-year-old books.

Here’s an example to chill your bones. To the left is a painting of a wall fresco of Venus from when it was found in the House of the Vestal Virgins in the 18th century. On the right is what is left of that wall fresco today.

Like a kick in the groin, ain’t it?

Don’t even get me started on that bastard Charles III, Bourbon king of Naples and Spain, who brutally mined the site for his personal collection after its rediscovery in 1748, even going so far as to knock down frescoed walls that were not deemed good enough to steal for his personal museum.

Pompeii has been looted pretty much non-stop since that day, and earlier by locals who knew where it was. Even as I type someone is tunneling in with a chisel and stripping entire walls of frescoes off to sell to art dealer pieces of shit like Giacomo Medici and Bob Hecht, may they rot in jail for seculum seculorum amen.

Here’s hoping the extra money this state of emergency declaration brings with it will help stem the tide of destruction. I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic at this point.

(For more on the neato photomontage above, visit Pompeii - A Different Perspective.)

The authorities found it because looters starting digging it up hoping to score fancy funerary artifacts, but it’s not that kind of necropolis.

In fact, the very reason looters would find this burial ground useless is what makes it so special a find: it’s full of labourers who bear the marks of a lifetime of hard work on their bones, not the rich people one usually finds in Roman necropolises.

Not that the deceased weren’t buried with stuff for the afterlife because they were. The children’s tombs held necklaces of figurines and amber chunks (want!), bronze rings, gold earrings. They’re just not the big ticket items the antiquities trade craves.

Most of the 300 skeletons unearthed were male, and many of them showed signs of years of heavy work: joint and tendon inflammation, compressed vertebrae, hernias and spinal problems, archaeologists said. Sandy sediment helped preserve the remains well.

Judging by the condition of the skeletons, archaeologists concluded that the men likely carried loads on their backs at a nearby port during the early years of Imperial Rome, said Gabriella Gatto, a spokeswoman for the archaeology office.

Many ailments “seem to hark back to work as laborers, in transport and carrying of heavy loads, in an especially humid environment, circumstances that makes one think of the burial of individuals who worked in port areas of the city,” the office said in a statement.

One of the skeletons was of a 30-year-old man whose upper and lower jaw bones were fused together. Apparently his family cared for him for 30 years feeding him a liquid diet via a hole in his teeth.

That’s a major find. Romans were not keen on birth defects. It would have been perfectly acceptable, even expected, for the infant to have been thrown off the Tarpeian rock.

Divers in France have found a marble bust of Julius Caesar tentatively dated 46 B.C. in the Rhone river. If the date pains out, that would make this the oldest surviving portrait of Caesar.

It’s no idealized representation, either. His age shows, and it only ads to his hotness.

There were some other marvels nestled in the murky depths of the Rhone.

Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects is a 5.9 foot marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after Christ.

Two smaller statues, both in bronze and measuring 27.5 inches each also were found, one of them, a satyr with his hands tied behind his back, “doubtless” originated in Hellenic Greece, the ministry said.

“Some (of the discoveries) are unique in Europe,” Culture Minister Christine Albanel said. The bust of Caesar is in a class by itself.

They’re not done diving, so there may be more treasures to be found.

More yuge loot news out of Spain, only this time it’s not massive quantities but just plain massive.

Italian police from the stolen artwork squad were in Barcelona on business when they happened past an antiques store. In the store, they noticed a solid marble oval bathtub that looked suspiciously familiar.

It was billed as a reproduction of a Roman bathtub and priced at €6000 ($9230). Only it isn’t a reproduction, and it’s actually worth €300,000 ($461,500). It was made in the second century A.D. under Hadrian’s reign and was stolen from the garden of an Italian villa in 2005.

The store owner had bought it a couple of years ago from some total idiots for €3000. Here’s the thing that really gets me, though: this tub weighs half a ton. How in God’s name did the thieves get it out of that garden? It can’t have been any kind of stealth operation. I mean, cranes and vehicles that make loud beeping sounds must have been involved.

Then to go through the trouble of shipping their half-ton of ill-gotten gains across the Mediterranean for a pittance …. It’s like a Mack Sennett short: The Keystone Bathtub Thieves.

The London and Provincial Antique Dealer’s Association called their fair this year “Objects of Desire” and they weren’t lying.

A beautiful Roman double-headed bust of Bacchus and Ariadne sold for approximately $470,000, far above estimate but far below its artistic and historical value in my eyes.

Especially since it actually has a provenance, and a rather romantic one at that. It was purchase by a British army officer in Jerusalem during World War II.

The officer, Somerset de Chair, spotted it in an antique shop opposite the King David Hotel and placed a deposit on it, arranging payment terms in case he did not return from battle.

De Chair, who served as an intelligence officer during the siege of Baghdad, subsequently returned after sustaining an injury, arranged an export licence, and shipped it to the family home at Chilham Castle in Kent as “wounded officer’s kit”.

After he died in 1995, it was inherited by his elder son, Rodney de Chair, who was the seller last week.

Elder son = crazy. (Or seriously hard up.)

One of my favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin, has written a book about my favorite subject: Ancient Rome.

It’s called “Lavinia”, and the eponymous heroine is the legendary daughter of Latinus, King of the Latins, and the wife of Aeneas, hero of Troy, son of Venus and progenitor of the Julian clan. (For a quick and dirty rundown of the period, check out the remaining fragments of Appian’s History of Early Rome.)

It’s no garden variety historical novel, though. For one thing, Lavinia has some understanding that she might actually be fiction, a creation of the poet Virgil whose shade she encounters in a sacred grove.

For another thing:

Lavinia makes for an unlikely heroine, which is just what Le Guin likes about her. From Mulan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sassy, kick-ass girls are preferred nowadays to circumspect homebodies like Virgil’s Latin princess. There may even be a touch of self-reproach in Le Guin’s choice of Lavinia as her main character, since the heroine of her 1971 novel, “The Tombs of Atuan,” is a priestess named Tenar who rebels against a life entirely devoted to serving a pantheon of nameless, implacable gods. Lavinia, by contrast, embraces the ritual aspect of her designated role, all the humble and solemn daily sacrifices, the scattering of sacred salt, the tending of clan totems, and even her own fate, as a woman destined to have little choice in who her husband will be.

To be fair, the Tombs of Atuan aren’t anywhere near as appealing a childhood home as the bucolic hills of central Italy, and Lavinia wasn’t snatched from her parents as a wee sprog to be raised by servile eunuchs and cold priestesses.

Amazon tells me I’ll have “Lavinia” by Tuesday. A book report will ensue.

The area is Derbyshire, England, and the coins are so rare that one of them is entirely unclassified and the other kind hasn’t been seen since 1975. Rare Roman gold coins unearthed in Derbyshire.

The museum’s Sam Moorhead, an expert in Roman antiquities, said: “These are the two most stunning coins I have ever seen and I have looked at over 30,000.

“Ethically, I am not allowed to put a valuation on them but I reckon they are priceless.”

This is the best picture I could find, I’m sad to say:

I want to see them in all their golden glory, but the Derbyshire paper must have a dial-up readership or something, ’cause their pictures are loooow res.