rogueclassicism

This Day in Ancient History: ante diem viii idus decembres

ante diem viii idus decembres

• 346 A.D. — a bit out of our period, but today is the feast day of St. Nicholas of Myra (yes, ‘the’ Saint Nick) …

Yet Another Collapse at Pompeii!!!

The incipit of a piece from ANSA:

Pompeii on Friday saw its fourth wall collapse this week, the cultural heritage branch of the UIL trade union reported in Rome.

UIL said it had already warned of dangers to the wall before the 2,000-year-old site’s famed Gladiators’ School caved in and spurred an international outcry on November 6.

The wall that came down Friday was “some 20 metres from the school,” UIL said.

It was about three metres long, three metres high and supported part of the House of Trebius Valens.

“There is an emergency, horrifying the world, that is not being tackled,” UIL said.

The latest collapse took place as UNESCO inspectors began the second day of their tour of the world heritage site to report back on its maintenance and conservation.

Some international experts suggested taking Pompeii’s care out of Italy’s hands after the school collapse which President Giorgio Napolitano called “a national disgrace”.

• via: Fresh wall collapse in Pompeii | ANSA

… it goes on with the sort of handwringing we’ve already heard about, for the most part. What’s REALLY INTERESTING about all this, though, is the collapse is at the House of Trebius Valens. In our post pondering the collapses from the other day, we referenced a webpage which presented a first person account of the damage incurred at Pompeii during WWII. We also suggested that the buildings restored after WWII might be the ones which were having this collapsing issue. Well guess what … the House of Trebius Valens was one of the houses damaged during WWII and subsequently fixed. Is anyone (besides me) making the connection that perhaps the materials used in the post-WWII repairs are contributing to this problem? Just for those of you who want to keep score, these are the buildings mentioned in the account:

• Gladiator’s Training School
• House Rex Tiburtinus
• House of Trebius Valens
• House of Epidius Rufus
• Temple of Jupiter
• Temple of Apollo
• House of Triptolemus
• Temple of Hercules
• House of Sallust
• House of Pansa

UPDATE: Dr Tronchin informs us that the so-called House of Rex Tiburtinus mentioned above is now generally referred to as the House of Loreius Tiburtinus or Octavius Quartio … folks also will want to see Martin Conde’s links to photos of the WWII damage (and other items) which are appended in the comments to our previous post on this.

From Explorator 13.33

As many of my readers know, in addition to rogueclassicism I put out a weekly newsletter called Explorator in which I hubristicly try to cover the whole world of archaeology in the popular press. As might be imagined, much of what gets posted to rogueclassicism appears there (including additional links to similar stories), but items also appear in Explorator which are of Classical interest which don’t make it to rogueclassicism for various reasons (e.g. lack of time, editorial letheia, etc.).  Whatever the case, at one time I used to post excerpts therefrom at rc and had stopped doing it for some reason (can’t remember why … it was something ‘technical’) but now I resume … hopefully you’ll find something of interest:
========================++++++++++++++++++======

Thanks to Arthur Shippee, Dave Sowdon,Diana Wright, Patrick Swann,
Edward Rockstein, Joan Griffith,Rick Heli,Hernan Astudillo, Feral Boy,
John Hall, Kurt Theis, Keely Lake,John McMahon, Barnea Selavan,
Joseph Lauer, Mike Ruggeri, Richard Campbell,Richard C. Griffiths,
Bob Heuman, Rochelle Altman,and Ross W. Sargent for headses upses
this week (as always hoping I have left no one out).

Roman Imperial Horses?

Potentially interesting item from the Telegraph:

The Maremmano horses of Lazio, the region around Rome, are believed to be the descendants of steeds ridden by emperors such as Marcus Aurelius 2,000 years ago.

Their distinctive characteristics include a strong build, a broad chest, thick manes and tails, and robust legs.

The archetype of the breed can be seen in many of Rome’s bronze and marble equestrian statues, most notably one of Marcus Aurelius which stands in front of the city’s town hall, in a piazza designed by Michelangelo in the 1530s for Pope Paul III.

Genetic studies have shown that the breed is unique to the Maremma, a marshy region which straddles the border between Lazio and Tuscany.

They are different even to a breed of horses in the Tuscan part of the Maremma, which is famous in Italy for its home-grown cowboys, known as “butteri”, skilled horsemen who manage the region’s herds of sheep and huge white bulls.

The Lazio horses are about to be officially recognised as a separate breed by the Association of Italian Breeders.

The genetic make-up of more than 130 of the horses was studied by Donato Matassino, from the agriculture department of a university in Naples.

He is preparing to publish the results in an American science periodical.

“We’re establishing a regional register for the protection of the genome, which is unique to Lazio,” he told Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Breeders hope that the historic link with Rome’s emperors will increase the value of the horses and help to preserve the breed.

via Roman emperors’ horses to be recognised as distinct breed – Telegraph.

… only ‘potentially interesting’ because most sites on the Marremmano horses will tell you that it is a mixed breed (Spanish, Barb, Arabian with some Thoroughbred added for good measure) and that the breed didn’t become ‘fixed’ until the late nineteenth century. See, e.g., the Breeds Guide and, of course, Wikipedia, among others.

Wallace-Hadrill on Pompeii’s Problems

Via Blogging Pompeii and Adrian Murdoch comes an audio interview with Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on Vatican Radio:

• Vatican Radio – Preserving Pompeii.

Inter alia, Wallace-Hadrill says “The whole site is at risk” … “What’s missing is a proper system of maintenance and monitoring …” He also notes that  Pompeii is relatively well-off financially compared to other sites in Italy, but the money could be spent better.

Searching for Agrigento’s Theatre and Hippodrome

Interesting item from the Telegraph:

Alexander Hardcastle spent a decade searching for the fabled theatre, which is said to be buried beneath the remains of Akragas, a city established by Greek colonists six centuries before Christ on the southern coast of Sicily.

The World Heritage site is best known for the Valley of the Temples, a cluster of five Doric temples which draws tens of thousands of tourists each year.

Hardcastle, a former soldier who had served with the Royal Engineers in the Boer War, believed that remains of the stone-built theatre had survived, despite Akragas being shaken by earthquakes, sacked by the Carthaginians and plundered for its stone.

The Harrow-educated gentleman scholar, who was born in Belgravia, spent a fortune on the quest between 1920 and 1930, but lost all his money when his family’s bank collapsed in the wake of the financial crash of 1929.

He died in poverty in a mental asylum in the town of Agrigento, which overlooks the ancient site, in 1933.

He had achieved a restoration of the city, partly rebuilding temples, uncovering perimeter walls and clearing ancient roads, but found no trace of the legendary theatre.

Now a team of archaeologists is to resume the hunt, embarking in the next few months on a dig that will be funded by a two million euro grant from the European Union.

The team will be led by Giuseppe Castellana, 64, the director of the Valley of the Temples Archeological Park.

“We want to resume the research started by Alexander Hardcastle in the coming months. It will be a way of honouring his memory,” Prof Castellana, who has been involved in more than 80 digs over the last 30 years, told La Stampa newspaper.

“The discovery would go down in history and it would also benefit the modern city of Agrigento, which needs to survive on archaeological tourism but hasn’t managed to make the most of its enormous potential,” he added.

Akragas was described by the ancient Greek poet Pindar as “the most beautiful city in the world inhabited by mortals” and scholars think it highly likely that it would have boasted a theatre.

The archaeologists also hope to unearth evidence of a hippodrome, a stadium for horse and chariot racing.

Excavations were carried out at the site in the 1970s and 1980s but archaeologists found no evidence of the theatre or hippodrome

via: Archaeologists to embark on quest for 2,500-year-old lost Greek theatre – Telegraph.

One of the books I’ve been keeping my eye open for (but still haven’t seen) is Alexandra Richardson, Passionate Patron: The Life of Alexander Hardcastle … Hardcastle is one of those names that you ‘hear once’ while wandering around the sites of Agrigento, making a note to ‘look him up’ when you return home, only to find very little info about him generally available. He is on Facebook (of course, along with a myriad other dead scholars like Franz Cumont and William Warde Fowler), but I’m waiting for him to accept my friend request  …

Classics and Wikileaks

Image via Wikipedia

Excerpt from the end of an opEd piece in the Guardian:

We could be entering a period of history as in the ancient world where people relied on the oral tradition and eventually wrote down some time later what they thought people might have said or thought. Did Thucydides actually hear Pericles’ funeral oration or was he repeating what others had told him about it? Through a process of Chinese whispers messages can be transmogrified beyond recognition …

via WikiLeaks could kill the goose that laid the golden egg | Guardian.

… and the incipit of an item in the Huffington Post:

Aeschylus wrote nearly 2,500 years ago that in war, “truth is the first casualty.” His words are no doubt known to another wise man, whose strategic “maneuvers within a changing information environment” would not be an utterly foreign concept to the Greeks in the Peloponnesian War. Aeschylus and Thucydides would no doubt wonder at the capacity of the Information Age to spread truth and disinformation alike. In November 2010, it’s clear that legitimate concerns about national security must be balanced with the spirit of open government expressed by the Obama administration.

via What Wikileaks and Cablegate Mean for Open Government | Huffington Post

Secret Inspection at Pompeii?

As news filters out of an impending ‘official inspection’ of the condition of Pompeii, La Stampa includes an interesting detail:

L’ispezione è coperta da stretto riserbo. Nessun contatto con la stampa, anzi l’annuncio, fatto filtrare, che non ci saranno dichiarazioni prima dell’invio della relazione all’Unesco. Alle 14 la Soprintendente ha dato disposizione di bloccare l’accesso al sito per operatori televisivi e fotografi a caccia di immagini del gruppo di ispettori, che si sono dissimulati tra i circa sei mila visitatori quotidiani del sito archeologico, dove oggi è tornato a splendere il sole dopo una pioggia quasi ininterrotta di 15 giorni. Gli ispettori dell’Unesco visiteranno anche i siti archeologici di Ercolano, in parte della giornata di domani, e di Stabiae, e resteranno in Campania fino a sabato. Il ministro Bondi – la cui mozione di sfiducia ad personam è stata bloccata dalla decisione di fermare l’attività della Camera fino al 14 dicembre quando si voterà la mozione di sfiducia al governo – ha spiegato che nell’ambito delle decisioni di oggi c’è anche quella di continuare a lavorare al progetto di una Fondazione per il sito archeologico di Pompei sul modello di quanto già fatto con il Museo Egizio di Torino.

via “In arrivo una task force per Pompei”- LASTAMPA.it.

Why the ‘strict secrecy’? Why don’t they want the press (even just one select crew) present? They’re not helping their cause …

Video of the Moment: Gladiator Academy

I’ve never seen this series before (it seems to come from Spain, but it’s in English) … you may or may not enjoy it (the names are fun if nothing else):

Some Thoughts on Recent Pompeiian Collapses

There’s been another collapse at Pompeii … today’s seems ‘minor’ and the story seems to be the same as the others. An excerpt from the Reuters coverage:

A small chunk of a side room in the “House of the Small Lupanar,” which was not open to the public, also fell, the statement said, adding both collapses were probably due to the heavy rains of the last few days.

On Tuesday a section of a modern retaining wall in the “House of the Moralist” crumbled and on November 6 the “House of the Gladiators” collapsed, shining a spotlight on the decay of the ancient city buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

• Two more walls collapse at crumbling Pompeii | Reuters

The AFP coverage puts a slightly different spin on the cause … here’s the incipit:

Two more ancient Roman walls fell down in the archaeological site of Pompeii on Wednesday following the collapse of one on Tuesday and the ruin of a frescoed house last month.

Experts blamed persistently heavy rains which have lashed the site in recent weeks, wearing away the ancient mortar between the stones. [...]

• Two Roman walls collapse as bad weather hits Pompeii | AFP

… which I find to be interesting, given that the wall at the House of the Moralist was, as yesterday’s coverage said, reconstructed after bomb damage in WWII. Similarly, the coverage of the collapse of the House of the Gladiators a while ago also stressed that the building had been damaged during WWII and restored. There is on the web a brief eyewitness report of the damage from the bombings during WWII, including such well-known items as the House of Sallust. Just a hunch, but it’s looking to me that the structures most in danger are the ones which were restored in the wake of the WWII bombings. Or perhaps we should just include recent restorations in general if we want to include the House of the Chaste Lovers in the mix as well. Whatever the case,  if the specific concerns for ‘mortar’ mentioned above (as opposed to the more general “heavy rains” which always seems to be the reason for collapses of monuments in Italy)  have any validity, maybe the powers-that-should-be  ought to  be checking the integrity of the mortar of some of these ‘recent’ restorations?? Just sayin’ …

Video of the Moment: Minoan Civilization

Alas … this seems to be the last one in our period … hope you’ve enjoyed them:

… if you want to check out some of the other (i.e. later in history) pieces, ecce …