Things of Historical Significance

New Post: For the Love of Mikhail Bakhtin!

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:31:12 +0100

Plugging away, plugging away. Shamelessness on overdrive…

New Post: ‘For the Love of Mikhail Bakhtin!’…perhaps he’ll make his way onto your pile of master-debatory material?

http://thingsofhistoricalsignificance.wordpress.com/

NEW POST! NEW POST! Finally geez. Catullus, penetration and banter :)...

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:34:08 +0100

NEW POST! NEW POST! Finally geez. Catullus, penetration and banter :) thingsofhistoricalsignificance.wordpress.com

New Home

Thu, 24 May 2012 16:54:49 +0100

Hello, well after my degree got in the way of this blog I decided to have another crack at it and have moved it on over to wordpress.com. However I still love Tumblr and all the AMAZING blogs on here - so I will be posting my update links here!

So I can now be found at: http://thingsofhistoricalsignificance.wordpress.com (STREUTH that’s a long web address). I have my Junius Bassus post over there and a few others and I will be updating more historical content shortly as I only have my dissertation to do now (super yay).

So if you have the time (or the inclination) please have a mosey on over and take a look.

Thank you!

Helen

"‎”No one dances sober, unless he is insane.” In original Latin (for those who do not..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:06:00 +0000

“

‎”No one dances sober, unless he is insane.”

In original Latin (for those who do not like to look at a text through the veil of a translation)
“Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit”

”

- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Murena (An Oration in Defence of Lucius Murena)

Stolen from a friend (who clearly stole it from Cicero in the first place…) Thought I’d close today with a quote which sums up the entire opposite of my philosophy on life.

Helen.

Money Matters!

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:40:00 +0000

Money Matters!:

Having just completed my first seminar on numismatics I thought I would take this opportunity to shamelessly plug a current exhibit running at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (Birmingham, UK). Larger Than Life: Colossal Coins offers visitors the chance to not only experience the evolution of money over the last 2000 years but also to understand the complex political, religious and gendered importance of money and ‘monetary art’ from a collection covering the Roman, Byzantine and Medieval periods. Select coins from the collection (the vast majority of which are rarely on display to the general public) will be magnified and projected in the gallery, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to interact with the ‘Barber Hoard’ and experience the details and depths to a single coin not easily accessible to the human eye.

Now we all know why money is important today, it gives value to materials and expresses worth, and it allows us to sophisticatedly barter for necessary or desirable items (lets not forget that the price of something is set just as much by human interest as it is by inherent value). But many forget that physical money, coinage, is also used to express authority, heritage and ideology. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the coinage of Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Medieval world. The image of an Emperor on a coin, for example, not only imbues that coin with the authority to be used in monetary transactions, but also imbues the Emperor with the authority granted by a populace accepting his personal stamp of approval as legitimate. The exhibition explores these themes and how they changed from Augustus to the Middle Ages.

The exhibition runs from today (10th November 2011) till 18th January 2012 and is free entrance, so if you are in the vicinity or interested enough to travel (which I hope you are!) then why not come and visit this exhibit? (And I swear I am not simply plugging this as my lecturer has organised it…)

Helen.

A very pagan Christian? - The Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus c. 359 CE

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:37:00 +0000

(Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, front, c. 359 CE)

Junius Bassus (317 CE - 359) was a Roman politician who gained the illustrious titles of vir clarissimus (a senatorial title indicating status), Vicarius (the Urban Prefect’s deputy) and Urban Prefect of Rome (praefectus urbi) during his career. He can be placed within the highest circles of aristocracy; his father had held the position of Praetorian Prefect (318 - 331) the highest civil office which gave him control of the administration of Italy. He died during his urban prefecture of Rome and was interred in the sarcophagus above, in the old basilica of St. Peter which was rediscovered in the 1600s.

The sarcophagus is wonderful to the Late Antique historian (as any Late Antique artefact is…or any artefact for that matter!) not only because it is of such high quality and beautifully detailed but also because it shows the interplay of Christian biblical iconography and traditional pagan imagery.

So a brief description of what you’re looking at! The front side of the sarcophagus (shown in the image above) shows 10 panels, each depicting a biblical scene.

From l-r: (top) the sacrifice of Isaac; St Peter being arrested; Christ enthroned over Caelus (the roman god of the sky) between Peter and Paul; Christ being arrested and judged by Pontius Pilate.

From l-r: (bottom) the distress of Job; Adam and Eve; Christ’s triumphal entrance in Jerusalem; Daniel in the lion’s den; St Paul being arrested.

The inscription above these images translates to:

Junius Bassus, a man of Senatorial rank, who lived 42 years and 2 months, went to God newly baptized, while he was Prefect of the City, on the 8^th day from the kalends of September, when Eusebius and Hypatius were consuls (25 August 359)[1]

(As I couldn’t get a close up image of the inscription, for those interested the inscription reads verbatim:

IVN BASSVS V. C. QVI VIXIT ANNIS XLII MEN. II IN IPSA PRAEFECTURA VRBI NEOFITVS IIT AD DEVM VIII KAL. SEPT. EUSEBIO ET YPATIO COSS.)

The lid and the ends of the sarcophagus have images depicting traditional Roman funerary themes such as a funerary meal, images of Putti (chubby winged infants similar to cherubs) harvesting wheat and grapes and personifications of the seasons. The lid also has an epitaph detailing all the traditional funerary themes of people weeping and the city going into mourning upon hearing of J. B’s death (though the lid is now in a very fragmented condition)

(one end of the sarcophagus showing harvesting Putti)

The imagery on the sarcophagus can be interpreted in two ways that are both historically significant. The first is to interpret the ‘pagan’ imagery as just that, overtly pagan imagery. Then it could be claimed that the sarcophagus of J. B. represents the merging of these two religious iconographies into a mismatched but still unified iconographic whole. This needs to be put into context as it doesn’t necessarily mean that J. B. held any form of syncretistic beliefs. Christianity was granted official toleration by Constantine in 314 with the Edict of Milan, but with this toleration (and arguably, and importantly, imperial promotion) does not mean that the entire circle of elites simply renounced their old views and converted (that would have been too simplistic…and, lets be fair, very boring to the Late Antique historian). Rather this period should be considered as one where the traditional beliefs, championed by the aristocracy as they were so integral to their identity, gradually came to stand on an equal footing with new Christian beliefs that were promoted by the Constantinian imperial family. What the sarcophagus of J. B. could show is how the aristocracy dealt with these two seemingly irreconcilable beliefs…by visually and materially reconciling them. Or, as Jaś Elsner puts it far better than I ever could:

“They represent what might be called the elite pagan convert’s educated and antiquarian response to the problem of Christianising Rome”[2]

In this way J. B. could remain loyal to the Roman traditions whilst accepting that he should respond positively and pro-actively to a society that was becoming increasingly Christian.

But wait, what about that inscription regarding J. B’s. death-bed baptism? And if he was only paying lip-service to Christianity then surely Christ would not be depicted as seated above Caelus (a clear reference to Christ’s cosmic dominion above the pagan gods[3])? This brings me onto the second interpretation regarding the visual presence of these two conflicting ideologies. If we are to accept that J. B. did convert to Christianity at the end of his life (and why would he lie? J. B. died twenty years before the Altar of Victory dispute, Christianity was not yet so securely established amongst the aristocracy – or the empire - to necessitate a physical conversion where belief was lacking) then we should view the Biblical representations as J. B. physically and visually promoting his personal faith. The pagan imagery should instead be recast as secular imagery, tied into notions of Roman traditions and heritage, of which the aristocracy were a strong bastion. This secular imagery was necessarily pagan but not exclusively so. This is also important when we consider the craft involved in making J. B’s sarcophagus. Roman craftsmanship was a long established practice. Craftsmen would have been trained to replicate the classical images as the ideal and these classical images would have been based around traditional pagan stories. Subsequently we get Christ (is the central top panel) depicted curiously akin to Apollo with his youthful, unbearded visage and long curly hair (specifically juxtaposed between Peter and Pauls’ more mature bearded faces)[4]. Therefore J. B. used his sarcophagus to promote his personal faith whilst still conforming to traditional aristocratic notions of romanitas and the accepted norm of secular patronage and promotion.

J. B’s sarcophagus highlights how a populace were able to reconcile the old and new by secularising ‘pagan’ elements of roman traditions so that they were compatible with a growing Christian aristocratic following, though the J. B. sarcophagus should be considered in the early stages of this process. It also shows one of the methods by which Christianity began to offer a viable alternative to aristocrats. By assimilating itself visually and materially into ‘pagan’ or ‘secular’ iconography it presented a vision of Christianity that was not incompatible with the traditions and history the aristocracy viewed themselves as honour bound to protect. Assimilation rather than antagonism enabled Christianity to spread more easily amongst the upper echelons of Roman society, making the spread of Christianity throughout the empire a much quicker and smoother process.

The sarcophagus is now below the modern basilica in the Museo Storico del Tesoro della Basilica di San Pietro in the Vatican. It seems like only a plaster cast of the sarcophagus is viewable to the public but don’t quote me on this as I’ve ripped this straight from Wikipedia – being the highly qualified and professional Roman historian that I am, I have never actually made it to Rome yet (ah the woes of funding for the humanities!)

Helen.

Bibliography and Further Reading:

Jaś Elsner, ‘The role of early Christian art’ in Catherine Edwards and Greg Woolf, Rome the Cosmopolis (Oxford, 2006), pp. 71 -99

Felicity Harley, ‘Christianity and the Transformation of Classical Art’ in Phillip Rousseau, A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2009), pp. 306 - 326

I also highly recommend the Companion in its entirety, it has many excellent chapters from leading Late Antique scholars such as Conrad Leyser, Kate Cooper, Simon Loseby, Éric Rebillard, Guy Halsall, Jan Drijvers to name but a few.

Elizabeth Malbon, The Iconography of the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (Princeton, 1990)

[1] This translation was taken directly from Elsner, J., ‘The role of early Christian art’ in Edwards, C., and Woolf, G., (eds.) Rome the Cosmopolis (Cambridge, 2003), p. 83.

[2] Elsner, ‘Christian Art’, p. 79.

[3] Harley, F., ‘Christianity and the Transformation of Classical Art’ in Rousseau, P., (ed.) A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2009), p. 312.

[4] Again Harley discusses Christ’s Greco-Roman portrayal in this instance in her chapter in Rousseau’s A Companion to Late Antiquity, pp. 308-309.