The Classical World
Page 77
52.Portrait of a boy, surrounded by the original mummy-wrappings which held his picture onto the mummy-case. From the Fayyum, Egypt. Reign of Trajan, ad 98-117 (British Museum, London)
53.Portrait of a woman, with fashionable pearl and red-stone earrings and unusual highlighting, suggesting a tear-drop in her left eye. Found at Anti-noopolis, Hadrian's new city for his dead male lover. She will have been one of the first batch of settlers, keen to show her social status. ad 130s (Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University)
54.Silver denarius from Rome, 113 or 112 bc, showing voting scenes. On the left, a supervisor (the custos) gives a voting tablet to a voter who will mark it, walk up to a wooden 'bridge' and follow the man (right) who is putting his tablet into an urn. Both voters wear the required toga and above, the letter 'P' signifies a tribe. This voting one by one is at an assembly to pass laws for which a 'secret' ballot was relatively recent, and special to Rome. In 119 bc, the 'bridges' had been narrowed, as proposed by Marius when tribune, so as to stop intimidation of individual voters. The moneyer who issued this coin, Licinius Nerva, may be a partisan of Marius, celebrating the reform (Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
55.Silver denarius from Rome, 82 bc, showing Sulla on the reverse triumphing in a four-horse chariot. Significantly, the coin was issued before Sulla actually celebrated a triumph for his victory over Mithridates in Asia. In 82 bc, he invaded Italy and marched on Rome in open civil war. The triumph began only on January 27, 81 bc (Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
56.Silver denarius, Rome, 44 bc. On obverse, a portrait of Julius Caesar, dictator, in the year of his murder. On reverse, his 'ancestor', the goddess Venus (Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
57.Gold coin showing Nero and his mother Agrippina, face to face on the obverse. A unique placing for an imperial woman, but in December 54 (the coin's date), Agrippina was a unique 'queen mother'. Her titles are on this side of the coin, whereas Nero's are only on the reverse. In the next year (55) the portraits are shown side by side and the titles swap sides, no doubt by order of Nero (British Museum, London)
58.Relief frieze from upper storey of the portico leading to the shrine of the Roman emperors, the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias in modern Turkey, showing Augustus with symbolic representations of land and sea, symbolizing his world-wide power, c. 60 ad (Photo: M. Ali Dugenci, courtesy of Professor R. R. R. Smith)
59.Relief frieze from same location, showing the Emperor Claudius conquering Britannia, as his army partly did in his presence in ad 43 (Photo: M. Ali Dugenci, courtesy of Professor R. R. R. Smith)
60.Gold aureus from Judaea, ad 70, found at Finstock, West Oxfordshire,
UK in the 1850s and only recently recognized. Obverse, Vespasian, the new Emperor. Reverse, a personification of Justice, the first known. She expresses the Roman view of their 'just' sack of Jerusalem and its Temple. Struck under Titus, Vespasian's son and the commander in Judaea (Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
61.Brass sestertius from Rome, ad 96, with a portrait of the 'good' Emperor Nerva on the obverse. The reverse shows elapsed hands symbolising, optimistically, the 'concord' of the armies (Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
62.Gold aureus from Rome, ad 13 4-8; obverse, a portrait of Hadrian; reverse, a personification of Egypt (Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
63.Modern reconstruction of the south-westerly of the two chambers which made up the Library of Trajan in his Forum at Rome, dedicated in ad 112-3. Between these two facing chambers stood his Column in its portico: on one side, able to be closed by grilles, each chamber opened out on to it. Two storeys high, this chamber was about 30 yards by 20 yards, a stairway leading to the upper gallery. Each side-wall had seven upper and seven lower niches for scrolls in 'bookcases', set away from the wall to avoid damp. The floor was paved in grey granite from Egypt with strips of yellow marble from north Africa. The walls of brick-faced concrete were covered with a layer of multicoloured marble from western Asia. The white marble statue at the far end was surely of Trajan. Perhaps the historian Tacitus worked here among the 10,000 rolls which each chamber held (Reconstruction by G. Gorski)
64.The huge aqueduct at Segovia in Spain, on which an inscription refers to 'restoration' by Trajan's orders in ad 98, undertaken by local magistrates. So, an aqueduct existed earlier and was then improved (Photo: J. L. Lightfoot)
65.A reconstruction of Pliny's Villa at Laurentum, one of many, based on Pliny's own Letter, a major text in the history of landscape gardening. Louis-Pierre Haudebourt prided himself on his Latin and classical allusions; he visited Pompeii in 1815-16, was a respected architect in Paris and in 1838, published plans, imagined interior and exterior views and this general impression of Pliny's villa, with a learned commentary between himself and an imaginary architect used by Pliny, one Mustius. From L. P. Haudebourt, Le Laurentin, Maison de Campagne de Pline Le Jeune (Paris, 1838)
66.Roman theatre at Emerita (now Merida) in Spain, founded by Augustus as a colony-city for his retired soldiers (emeriti). Dateable to 16/15 BC> with the patronage of his general Agrippa, and subsequently further decorated. Emerita quickly became a showpiece, with loads of marble, including a Forum (later decorated to imitate Augustus' own at Rome), big temples and an amphitheatre for blood-sports (Photo: J. L. Lightfoot)
67. Scenes from the Column of Trajan in his Forum at Rome, dedicated
in ad 112/3 to commemorate his campaigns against the Dacians (modern
Romania)
a)Dacian prisoners are brought before the emperor Trajan outside a Roman camp
b)Roman soldiers lock their shields together in the 'tortoise' (testudo) formation as they attack a Dacian fortress
c)The Dacian's leader, Decebalus, kills himself near a tree as the Roman cavalry attacks him
d)Victory inscribes a shield, recording Trajan's successes for posterity (Photos: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Rome)
68.Tondo, originally from a Hadrianic monument commemorating great hunting moments in his reign, set at Rome. Moved under the later Emperor Constantine, after ad 312, to adorn the Arch of Constantine in Rome. The lion killed here was in the Western Desert in Egypt in September ad 130. A verbose poem by a contemporary poet describes it as terrorizing the area and, when hunted, attacking Antinous on his horse but being killed by Hadrian himself and then stamped on by Antinous' steed. Here, Hadrian is second left (later, recut to resemble Constantine) and many believe, others dispute, that Antinous is at the far left, with his foot on the lion's head. If so, he looks unlike his boyish 'divine' portraits, spread after his death soon after the hunt (Arch of Constantine, Rome: author's photograph)
69.Replica statue from the grounds of Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, representing a classical Greek warrior whose bronze original has not survived. The warrior is beardless, and therefore unlikely to represent the war god Ares. He is probably a semi-divine hero: his pose and weaponry have suggested that he may represent one of the Athenians' ten tribal heroes, sculpted by the great Pheidias and dedicated at Delphi c. 460 bc. A similar origin has been upheld for the fine 'Riace Bronze' warrior, (our number 10), who held a shield and also a spear (now lost). But unlike the Roman who stole an original from Greece, and then lost it off Riace at sea, Hadrian patronized a replica by a contemporary sculptor, thus respecting the 'classical' original. His replica stands by the long canal in his garden, known as 'Canopus' after the celebrated canal by Alexandria in Egypt, well known for its luxury. So, Hadrian combined 'luxury' and respect for the classical world, a fitting climax to our illustrations. Hadrian's villa, Tivoli c. ad 135 (Photo: © Macduff Everton/ CORBIS)
70.Bronze portrait head of Hadrian, second quarter of second century ad (Museo Nazionale, Rome)
71.Marble relief of the deified Antinous from near Lanuvium, Italy, rep
resented in the style of the nature-god Silvanus. Signed by Antonianos from Aphrodisias, now in Turkey and a great seat of marble sculpture (from Isti
tuto dei Fondi Rustici, now Banco Nazionale, Rome)