I’ve been sort of thinking aloud on Twitter and/or Facebook on this one and am thinking this whole Caligula tomb thing needs some sort of followup post. At some point yesterday I tweeted

http://twitter.com/#!/rogueclassicist/status/27708743550500864

… although it was somewhat heartening to start seeing headlines like:

• Caligula’s Tomb Found? Maybe Not | CBS
• No, You Have Not Found Caligula’s Tomb | The Atlantic
• Caligula’s tomb discovered? Probably not | Gadling

… all of which had sensibly paid attention to Mary Beard’s post on the matter. Later in the day, however, I found myself tweeting:

http://twitter.com/#!/rogueclassicist/status/28475733575733249

… in response to headlines coming from sources further down the journalistic pantheon:

• Tomb robber finds ‘final resting place of Caligula’ | One India
• Tomb of Caligula discovered | Unexplained Mysteries
• Tomb robber finds ‘final resting place of Caligula’ | New Kerala

… and several others which clearly are already indexed in Google. But clearly I — along with plenty of folks (like you!) who know better — wasn’t the only one who was perplexed by the way this story had spun out of control. Tip o’ the pileus to Francesca Tronchin for sending along the coverage from the Italian version of National Geographic. They too, could not understand how the story had gone from ‘statue discovery’ to ‘tomb discovery’ and suggested quite plausibly:

Ma cosa c’è di vero negli articoli circolati fino ad ora? Difficilmente la tomba di Caligola, generata forse dalla fantasia di qualche cronista straniero che ha mal interpretato il termine “tombarolo”, nato quando gli scavatori abusivi violavano usualmente tombe, ma esteso oggi a indicare chi saccheggia ogni sorta di sito archeologico. Di certo c’è solo il salvataggio, dalle mani di uno scavatore clandestino, di una porzione di statua di epoca romana. Mancano invece del tutto immagini e attribuzioni ufficiali della stessa, così come elementi certi sulla sua provenienza.

… for those of you who don’t read Italian, they suggest that some foreign journalist has mistranslated the term ‘tombarolo’, which, once upon a time did apply strictly to folks who dug up ancient tombs and sold things illegally, but now applies to any purveyors of illicit antiquities. This is surely correct.

The same article, however, raises a point which is often brought up in relation to Caligula but which didn’t actually happen. Ecce:

Caligola, odiato per la sua dissolutezza e la feroce crudeltà, non solo venne ucciso da una congiura, ma fu poi sottoposto a quella che i latini chiamavano damnatio memoriae, una vera a propria cancellazione civile e morale. Essa comportava la distruzione di tutto ciò che poteva ricordarlo, rimuovendo la traccia storica di quel che egli aveva fatto, delle sue proprietà, della sua immagine pubblica, delle sue gesta; venivano distrutte le iscrizioni che lo citavano e i monumenti che lo raffiguravano, ed era proibito tramandare in famiglia il suo praenomen.

… that is, they are suggesting that Caligula underwent damnatio memoriae and, as defined by them, involved the complete removal of anything associated with him, his public images, deeds, and inscriptions which pertained to him. It was also supposedly forbidden to transmit his praenomen in his family. Not sure where that latter bit comes from, but this is a somewhat ‘standard’ definition of what damnatio memoriae involved. Interestingly, however, our ancient sources are somewhat clear that it didn’t happen. The account of the aftermath of Caligula’s assassination is somewhat problematical in one of our sources — Cassius Dio — because the relevant section is greatly reconstructed (for lack of a better term) from Byzantine epitomes. From the fifth-century account of John of Antioch, e.g., comes a bit which is usually appended to the end of Dio’s 59th book (translation here via Lacus Curtius):

Now he was spat upon by those who had been accustomed to do him reverence even when he was absent; and he became a sacrificial victim at the hands of those who were wont to speak and write of him as “Jupiter” and “god.” His statues and his images were dragged from their pedestals, for the people in particular remembered the distress they had endured.

This statement seems to be the source of claims that Caligula did undergo damnatio memoriae. But compare a couple of more excerpts: the first from Suetonius at the end of his Life of Caligula (ch. 60 via Lacus Curtius):

One may form an idea of the state of those times by what followed. Not even after the murder was made known was it at once believed that he was dead, but it was suspected that Gaius himself had made up and circulated the report, to find out by that means how men felt towards him. The conspirators too had not agreed on a successor, and the senate was so unanimously in favour of re-establishing the republic that the consuls called the first meeting, not in the senate house, because it had the name Julia, but in the Capitol; while some in expressing their views proposed that the memory of the Caesars be done away with and their temples destroyed. Men further observed and commented on the fact that all the Caesars whose forename was Gaius perished by the sword, beginning with the one who was slain in the times of Cinna.

… and then from the beginning of book 60 of Dio, outlining the events as Claudius took power (section 5 via Lacus Curtius):

He destroyed the poisons which were found in abundance in the residence of Gaius; and the books of Protogenes (who was put to death), together with the papers which Gaius pretended he had burned, he first showed to the senators and then gave them to the very men they most concerned, both those who had written them and those against whom they had been written, to be read by them, after which he burned them up. And yet, when the senate desired to dishonour Gaius, he personally prevented the passage of the measure, but on his own responsibility caused all his predecessor’s images to disappear by night. 6 Hence the name of Gaius does not occur in the list of emperors whom we mention in our oaths and prayers any more than does that of Tiberius; and yet neither one of them suffered disgraced by official decree.

… unless the two passages from Dio (or more correctly Dio and John of Antioch) are taken together with the passage from Suetonius, one really can’t see the big picture of what was going on during this brief revolution. Clearly Gaius was assassinated and shortly thereafter, unspecified folks were dragging his statues down. There was talk of restoring the Republic and all sorts of anti-imperial sentiment being bruited about. When Claudius comes to the purple, he is put in the somewhat difficult position of bringing all sorts of disparate groups together to agree to let him rule. He couldn’t really dishonour his nephew by damnatio memoriae because that was unprecedented in an imperial context and the familial connection probably would have created a situation where his own ‘legitimacy’ to rule was questioned (as if he didn’t have enough baggage in that area). So that’s out as an option. At the same time, he can’t allow the remaining images of Gaius in the city to remain on view and become a rallying point for those ‘Republic-restorers’ and similar groups. So he has those images removed under cover of darkness. We do know that some statues of Gaius survived, of course (pretty much every article on the purported tomb find has one) and we also know that some were worked into images of other emperors (see, e.g., chapter two of Eric Varner’s Mutilation and transformation: damnatio memoriae and Roman imperial portraiture, which is partially available via Google Books; he looks at the evidence in detail and seems to suggest an ‘unofficial’ damnatio memoriae).  We also have plenty of coins bearing the likeness of Caligula (even if the bronze ones were recalled) as well as inscriptions.

Speaking of coins, however, we probably should gloss  — in the interest of ‘full disclosure’ — the other bit of ‘evidence’ which is often mentioned in regards to Caligulan damnatio, namely, that his bronze coins were melted down (Dio 60.22.3):

These were the honours the senate bestowed upon the reigning family; but they hated the memory of Gaius so much that they decreed that all the bronze coinage which had his likeness stamped upon it should be melted down. And yet, though this was done, the bronze was converted to no better user, for Messalina made statues of Mnester, the actor, out of it

Whatever the case, it is clear that there was no official decree of damnatio memoriae successfully levelled against Caligula.

That said, another thought that occurred to me as this story unfolded this week was that the whole ‘Caligula’ thing might be getting big play in assorted European newspapers as the ‘epithet’ seems to be increasingly applied to Silvio Berlusconi in his latest bit of bunga bunga -ery. We’ll see how that plays out …

Robert Eisenman says “I told you so” in the Huffington Post:

• Robert Eisenman: ‘The James Ossuary’ and Its Authenticity.

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism):

SYMPOTIC POETRY. A COLLOQUIUM

Christ Church, Oxford

Thursday March 31st – Saturday April 2nd 2011

http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/sympoticpoetry/

The symposiast’s couch is a key vantage-point from which to survey Greek poetry. Poetry was performed at the symposium from the beginnings of Greek literature (judging from the sympotic traces in Homer) down to the fourth century and probably into Hellenistic times. Even later, echoes of the sympotic setting are exploited in literary games of generic appropriation. This conference proposes to examine the symposium both as a setting for the performance of poetry and as a ‘mental space’ rich in aesthetic, social, and political implications. What does it mean in practice to speak of ‘sympotic poetry’? How does the symposium as a performance context shape and cut across generic conventions? Are there conventions of sympotic song and, if so, what are they? How should we disentangle the symposium as the setting for poetry from the symposium as the imaginary place which is the product, rather than the precondition, of this poetry? How does the historical symposium in its various aspects (a politically defined group of people, a means of socialization derived from Near Eastern cultures, a carefully regulated set of customs, etc.) relate to the symposium as a setting for the competitive display of artistic competence, where something akin to literary criticism first begins? What is the role of the symposion in the early institution of corpora and canonisation of texts? How did sympotic performance affect transmission?

With the support of the Classics Faculty Board, the John Fell OUP Fund, the Craven Committee, the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and the Classical Association.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Thursday 31st March

Session 1 Chair: tbc

14.00 – 15.00 Dr. Felix Budelmann (Magdalen College, Oxford) and Prof. Timothy Power (Rutgers University): ‘Song and Speech in the Symposium’

15.00 – 16.00 Dr. Dirk Obbink (Christ Church, Oxford): ‘Writing and the Symposium’

Session 2 Chair: Enrico Prodi16.30 – 17.30 Prof. Ewen Bowie (Corpus Christi College, Oxford): ‘Quo usque tandem…? Reflections on the Length of Sympotic Poems’

17.30 – 18.30 Prof. Gauthier Liberman (Institut Ausonius, Université Bordeaux 3): ‘Some Thoughts on the Symposiastic Catena’

18.30 Drinks receptionFriday 1st April

Session 3 Chair: Dr. Penelope Murray9.30 – 10.30 Prof. Ralph Rosen (University of Pennsylvania): ‘Satire, Symposia, and the Formation of Poetic Genre’

11.00 – 12.00 Dr. Renaud Gagné (Pembroke College, Cambridge): ‘Metasympotics: Embedding Context in Elegiac and Iambic Poetry’

12.00 – 13.00 Prof. Guy Hedreen (Williams College): ‘Portrait of the Artist in a Sympotic Context’

Session 4 Chair: Vanessa Cazzato
14.30 – 15.30 Prof. Deborah Steiner (Columbia University): ‘Swallow this: Reading the Bird in Sympotic Visual Culture’

15.30 – 16.30 Prof. Hans Bernsdorff (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main): ‘A Use of Myth in Sympotic Poetry’

17.00 – 18.00 Prof. Simon Hornblower (All Souls College, Oxford):‘Menedemos or Kassandra? The two Poets called Lykophron and Sympotic versus other Hellenistic Types of Performance’

19.30 Conference dinner – Symposiarch: Oswyn Murray

Saturday 2nd April

Session 5 Chair: Dr. Bruno Currie9.30 – 10.30 Prof. Ettore Cingano (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia): ‘Exploring Sympotic Settings: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides’

11.00 – 12.00 Prof. Lucia Athanassaki (Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης): ‘Pindaric Symposium’

12.00 – 13.00 Prof. Giambattista D’Alessio (King’s College, London): ‘Bacchylides’ Sympotic Songs’

Session 6 Chair: Dr. Dirk Obbink14.30 – 15.30 Prof. Ian Rutherford (University of Reading): ‘Comparative Symposiastics’

15.30 – 16.30 Prof. Richard Hunter (Trinity College, Cambridge): ‘Imagining the Symposium: Homer, Theognis, Plutarch’

17.00 – 18.00 Prof. Gregory Hutchinson (Exeter College, Oxford): ‘Hierarchies and Symposiastic Poetry, Greek and Latin’

REGISTRATION

Registration is now open online here.

Full rate: £50Reduced rate: £35 (for students/unwaged)

One-day full rate: £20

One-day reduced rate: £15

The deadline for registering is February 28th.

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism):

Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient drama from late antiquity to 1550

The University of Melbourne: 13th to 15th July 2011

Convenors: Andrew Turner, Giulia Torello Hill

In 2011 the University of Melbourne, in association with the University of Queensland, will host an international conference with the title Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient drama from late antiquity to 1550. Illustrated manuscripts of classical authors often transmitted an insight for much later readers into how ancient illustrators (and thus audiences) visualized these works, but also provided current reinterpretations of the texts. Both tendencies are best exemplified in a cycle of illustrations to the plays of Terence, which provides an almost unbroken continuum from the Carolingian era through to the dawn of the age of printing. But despite the fact that these illustrations represented the action on stage, even down to details of masks and props, there is no evidence at all that the plays were performed in the mediaeval period—they were simply literary texts, to be studied and at the most recited by a lector. Rather, revivals of the Classics on stage began in the Italian Renaissance, and the theoretical knowledge which critics gleaned from writers like Vitruvius were poured back into the illustrated tradition, providing an extraordinary amalgam of ancient and ‘modern’. This conference will explore the connections between text, illustration, and revival.

Confirmed speakers so far include Gianni Guastella (University of Siena), who has written several seminal publications on the reception of Roman comedy in the Italian Renaissance, Dorota Dutsch (University of California, Santa Barbara), author of Feminine Discourses in Roman Comedy (Oxford 2008), who has most recently been investigating the semiotics of gesture in the illustrated Terence manuscripts; and Bernard Muir (University of Melbourne), a world authority on the digitization of manuscripts, who has published extensively on Latin palaeography and on the mediaeval transmission of texts, and who most recently, with Andrew Turner, is the editor of a digital facsimile of a 12th-century manuscript of Terence from Oxford (Terence’s Comedies, Bodleian Digital Texts 2, Oxford 2010). We are hopeful that selected proceedings will eventually be published following the conference.

You are now invited to submit proposals for papers (lasting 30 minutes). We are particularly interested in submissions on the following topics, although we will look at other submissions on the broad area of classical drama between Late Antiquity and 1550 sympathetically.

• The manuscript traditions of the classical dramatists;

• Mediaeval scholia and commentary traditions;

• Illustrations of drama in the manuscript and early printed traditions;

• The physical environment of performances of ancient drama;

• Reception and translation of Greek dramatists in the West before 1550.

The deadline for submission of a title and an abstract of 100 words is 25th February 2011. We intend establishing a web site early next year which will progressively include information on the conference, registration, and accommodation. For the meantime, please direct any enquiries (including proposals for papers), to:

Andrew Turner

Classics and Archaeology Programme

Old Quadrangle Building

The University of Melbourne, 3010, AUSTRALIA

or email to: ajturner AT unimelb.edu.au