Month: July 2010

Latest Arthurian Round Table with a Roman Connection?

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table...
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An item  in the Daily Mail (hyping a television program, as often)  seems to be causing some excitement:

His is among the most enduring ­legends in our island’s history.

King Arthur, the gallant warrior who gathered his knights around the Round Table at Camelot and rallied Christian Britons against the invading pagan Saxons, has always been an enigma.

But now historians believe they have uncovered the precise location of Arthur’s stronghold, finally solving the riddle of whether the Round Table really existed.

And far from pinpointing a piece of furniture, they claim the ‘table’ was in fact the circular space inside a former Roman amphitheatre.

The experts believe that Camelot could in fact have been Chester Amphitheatre, a huge stone-and-wood structure capable of holding up to 10,000 people.

They say that Arthur would have reinforced the building’s 40ft walls to create an imposing and well fortified base.

The king’s regional noblemen would have sat in the central arena’s front row, with lower-ranked subjects in the outer stone benches.

Arthur has been the subject of much historical debate, but many scholars believe him to have been a 5th or 6th Century leader.

The legend links him to 12 major battles fought over 40 years from the Scottish Borders to the West Country. One of the principal victories was said to have been at Chester.

Rather than create a purpose-built Camelot, historian Chris Gidlow says Arthur would have logically chosen a structure left by the Romans.

‘The first accounts of the Round Table show that it was nothing like a dining table but was a venue for upwards of 1,000 people at a time,’ he said.

‘And we know that one of Arthur’s two main battles was fought at a town referred to as the City of the Legions. There were only two places with this title. One was St Albans, but the location of the other has remained a mystery.’

Researchers, who will reveal their evidence in a television documentary this month, say the recent discovery at the amphitheatre of an execution stone and a wooden memorial to Christian martyrs suggests the missing city is Chester.

Mr Gidlow said: ‘In the 6th Century, a monk named Gildas, who wrote the earliest account of Arthur’s life, referred both to the City of the Legions and to a martyr’s shrine within it.

‘That is the clincher. The discovery of the shrine within the amphitheatre means that Chester was the site of Arthur’s court – and his legendary Round Table.’

An interesting idea, but not exactly ‘new’. We recall that the Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon has long been similarly claimed to be the prototype for this ’round table’ of the Arthur King. Indeed, the National Museum of Wales seems to take it as a fact (if this page is associated with them).  And before we get too excited, back in 2000 someone was suggesting a round building in Scotland. And a decade before that, the same round building location (Stenhouse) in Scotland was being cited by no less than Burke’s Peerage (and connected, sort of, to the Kennedy clan).

That said, if we think an ‘amphitheatre’ can be taken as a ‘table’ (I guess “knights of the amphitheatre” gives the wrong impression?),  we can look at  a list of amphitheater remains in the UK (besides Caerleon and Chester) we see there’s one at Cirencester … Arthur was supposedly crowned there (at Cirencester; not necessarily the amphitheatre); that seems to have a potential claim too. There’s one at Colchester, and Colchester is a Camelot candidate; that seems to have a potential claim too. There’s one at Wroxeter, and Arthur may have had a ‘base’ there; that seems to have a potential claim too. There’s probably more, but you get the picture … plenty o’ places are connected with Arthur (who may or may not have been an historical figure, of course … I won’t get into that here) and plenty o’ those places have remains of an amphitheatre of some sort. At best, though, I think we can charitably put this in the ‘imaginative suggestion’ category.

More coverage:

CONF: Lutheranism and the Classics

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment
Philipp-Melanchthon-1537
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(please send any responses to the people/institution mentioned in the post, not to rogueclassicism!)

Lutheranism & the Classics, 1 and 2 October, 2010, Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

The Age of the Reformation was also the Age of the Renaissance, a period to which the birth of the modern discipline of classics may be traced. The classics provided a rich source for the thought, intellectual undergirding, and polemic of the era. Classics thus became part of the cultural DNA, as it were, of the Reformation and post-Reformation Church in the West. Of particular interest to this conference is the reception of the classics in the Wittenberg (Lutheran) Reformation. There, the darling of the Northern European Renaissance, Philipp Melanchthon, appropriated the classics in the service of the Gospel and drew them to the fore as an integral part of the reformational program in Saxony and much of Northern Europe. Papers at “Lutheranism & the Classics” explore this watershed period in the history of classics reception and its ongoing impact on the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

For more information, visit www.ctsfw.edu/classics. Inquiries may be addressed to one of the three organizers: John Nordling (john.nordling AT ctsfw.edu); Carl Springer (casprin AT siue.edu); Jon Bruss (jonbruss AT yahoo.com).

Vomitorium: Another One Gets it Right

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

In my never-ending quest to ensure journalists ‘get it right’, from an ABC piece about eating disorders, inter alia:

Contrary to popular belief, vomitoriums were not used by the Roman elite to get rid of their stomach contents. The vomitorium is an architectural structure within the Roman amphitheatre, designed to alleviate crowds by allowing the audience to “spew out” after the show.”

While there have been some historical reports of Romans deliberately vomiting, this was certainly not part of a regular binge-purge cycle and there is no evidence that it was accompanied by a sense of loss of control, cognitive distortions, body shame, or feelings of low self-worth, as seen in those suffering from bulimia.

Kudos to Lydia Jade Turner! Clearly she did some research!

d.m. Herbert H. Huxley

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University of Victoria
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From the Canadian Classical Bulletin, with the kind permission of John G. Fitch:

Herbert Henry Huxley, Professor of Latin at the University of Victoria from 1968 to 1979, died on 5 May in Cambridge, England at the age of 93. Educated at Manchester Grammar School and St John’s College, Cambridge, he held positions successively at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester before coming to Canada.

HHH had a wide-ranging interest in Latin verse of all periods, contributing, for example, a useful article on the Latin poems of George Herbert (1593-1633). In 1961 he published a school edition of Books 1 and 4 of Vergil’s Georgics. His real talent, however, lay in writing Latin verses (both translations and original compositions), in a variety of metres, quantitative and accentual. Though his verse is characterised chiefly by its elegance and wit, it takes on real poetic power on those occasions when it deals with love and loss, with mortality and with religious themes. His version of Landor’s “Well I remember how you smiled” is at least as good as the original. Guy Lee identified correctly the “inspired simplicity” of Huxley’s style in a poem like his “Eucharistic Hymn”. “If one can write like that,” commented Lee, “one has not lived in vain.”

Huxley’s mind turned unerringly to the quaint and recherché, perhaps as an antidote to a certain melancholy. Characteristic titles of his publications are “Two Sanskrit Epigrams & Epitaph on an Unknown Female Corpse (Kipling)” and “Sir Winston Churchill, Aeneid VII and the Vocative Case”. He claimed that his paper “It” had the shortest title of any learned article in Classics. Wit was characteristic of his conversation as of his writing. On one occasion a colleague who rejoiced in the surname Currie happened to be late for a faculty meeting. As we waited, “Currie a non currendo” murmured Herbert — a mot that survives though the topic of the meeting is long forgotten.

In relations with colleagues, alas, he could be fierce and even destructive. But he could be charming in company, and was amazingly patient and entertaining with children. He was particularly interested in “town and gown” relations, offering many non-credit courses for mature students and even co-leading a group to Greece. Shortly after coming to Victoria he co-founded the Classical Association of Vancouver Island, which has grown and thrived to this day and is his best Canadian memorial.

d.m. Michel Janon

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment
Crest of the University of Ottawa
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From the Canadian Classical Bulletin, with the kind permission of Daniel M. Millette:

Michel Janon, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Ottawa from 1986 to 1995, died on May 31st, in Marseilles, France, at the age of 72.  He was educated in Algiers (History and Archaeology, 1964) and earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne (History, 1970).  He held positions within the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) from 1965 to 1970 in Algiers, and from 1970 to 2010 in Aix-en-Provence.  From 1995, he was a member of the Institut de Recherche sur l’Architecture Antique (IRAA), within the CNRS.

Janon was highly specialized in Latin epigraphy and architectural decor, particularly of Narbonensis.  He published two seminal volumes: the first on the Latin Inscriptions of Narbonensis (Fréjus), with J. Gascou, in 1985, and the second on architectonic elements of Narbonne, in 1986.  His other published work followed these research themes.  A second principal area of interest was archaeology, first practicing in Algeria at Cherchell, Tiddis and Lambaesis, and eventually in France, at Fréjus, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, Gaujac and Orange.  He was an authority on the urban plan and archaeology of Lambaesis, producing an innovative book, with J.-M. Gassend, in 2005.

Michel’s intellect was of the extremely independent kind.  He defended his ideas fiercely, often remaining misunderstood and at times fuelling intense debate.  He expected brilliant work from his students, resulting in high quality research.  For his students and selected colleagues, he could be charming, displaying a joie de vivre that could only be matched by his love of debate.  In his final years, he found happiness through his grandchildren, spending time with his wife Nancy, and painting from his homes in France and Spain.