Face to face – with Pompey

It’s a few weeks ago now that I visited the Glyptotek in Copenhagen for the first time and but I’ve only now found time to write the first of my promised blog posts about some of the things I saw there.

The bust of Pompey the Great in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

One of the highlights of the visit was coming face to face with the famous bust of Pompey (or Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus to give him his full name), one of Rome’s leading generals in the declining years of the Republic and the arch enemy of Julius Caesar. I later found out (through Twitter) that without knowing it I’d chosen a very appropriate day to see the bust because it was the anniversary of the Battle of Pharsalos (in 48 BC, in Thessaly, Greece) when Caesar definitively defeated Pompey and he fled to Egypt where he was murdered by an Egyptian faction seeking to curry favour with Caesar. That led to Caesar becoming sole ruler of Rome only to end up being brutally murdered himself a few years later by group of senatorial conspirators seeking to defend the Republic. Caesar received his fatal wounds at a meeting of the Senate in the theatre that Pompey had built. Ironically, so the sources tell us, he died beneath a statue of Pompey, perhaps the very one that served as the model for the bust in the Glyptotek.

Photos of the bust are widely reproduced and I’ve seen them countless times over the years in textbooks and lectures; I once had a job where there was a full-sized copy of the bust on the shelf in my office. There was then some peculiar satisfaction in seeing it up close for real. The most striking thing about seeing the sculpture in the museum was the way that it is displayed together with twelve other busts of men and women said to have been found in the so-called Tomb of the Licinii, an aristocratic Roman family.

The tomb (if it really existed – see below!) was in use for many generations and the family decorated the tomb with representations of themselves and their illustrious ancestors. Pompey was one of the most famous of these. Seen in isolation, as it is typically shown in books, it is easy to forget the context in which the bust was originally displayed. Assuming the bust has been identified correctly (again, see below!) it is interesting to think about how ancestry was so important to noble Roman dynasties living under the Empire and how sculpture was used to advertise dynastic links. It is particularly striking to think of how this family could draw such pride from their familial links to Pompey, a man who once been the figurehead for Republican resistance to tyranny, when they lived at a time when the system of one-man-rule had become firmly established in Rome. On grounds of carving technique the bust has been dated to between 30-50 AD, so a good century or so after Pompey died and sometime in the reign of the emperors Tiberius, Caligula or Claudius.

The bust of Pompey in among the others found in the Licinian Tomb

The thing that’s prompted me to choose this item as the first of my Glyptotek blog posts, however, is not simply that it made an impression but because the week after seeing it I was sitting in the meeting room of my department at Aarhus University, scanning the bookshelves when I caught sight of a book with the title “The Licinian Tomb: Fact or Fiction”.* It seemed that perhaps all was not as it seemed with the Licinian Tomb. Intrigued, I took the book down and began to browse….

The bust ended up in Denmark in the late 19th century when it was acquired, together with the other twelve, for the Danish collector Carl Jacobsen by a German archaeologist Wolfgang Helbig, who was based in Rome. Seven sarcophagi from the tomb ended up at the same time in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Carl Jacobsen’s father had founded the Carlsberg brewery and Jacobsen’s collection forms the heart of the collection of the museum that still bears the name of the beer. It turns out, however, that a cloud of doubt hangs over whether the busts all came from the tomb at all. There is no concrete documentation to prove where the sculpture came from and Helbig is known to have not always acted scrupulously in acquiring objects for collectors. The puzzle of the sculptures’ origins was the mystery that a group of Danish scholars set out to explore in the book I had in my hands.

I only had time to browse the book and have now added it to my ever-growing and increasingly unachievable list of things I’d like to read properly but the authors seemed to conclude that there is nothing to securely tie the sculptures to the tomb after all. There’s a good review of the book in the online journal Bryn Mawr Classical Review in which the reviewer argues that the evidence is such that it the matter cannot be settled decisively but that there’s still every possibility that the sculpture’s reported findspot is genuine after all. The controversy will no doubt continue and may never be resolved.

I did manage to read a short section on the bust of Pompey, which caught my attention for two reasons. Firstly, it turns out- surprisingly since it is hard to find a book or website that talks about Pompey without a picture of the sculpture as an illustration – that the grounds for identifying it as him are rather more flimsy that I would have thought. There are basically three reasons: (i) it bears a striking resemblance to his portrait on coins, (ii) the fringe of the sculpture is brushed back in a manner that resembles portraits of Alexander the Great; Plutarch, who wrote in the late first century AD and had seen statues of Pompey, tells us that Pompey wore his hair like Alexander. Pompey’s nickname, Magnus, “the Great”, was also taken in emulation of his hero and (iii) the known familial connection with the Licinii. Point three, of course, cannot be taken as conclusive since we don’t know for sure where the bust came from; and as for point two I’ve always thought that the fringe of the Pompey bust looks distinctly unimpressive compared to the lion’s mane effect of Alexander’s portraits (see the picture below). As for point one I’m no numismatist and I don’t know the coin portraits of Pompey but I’m not sure I’m completely convinced that matching rather crude relief images in profile on the backs of coins to much more detailed sculpture in the round can ever be a fool proof way of identifying statues. Still, since no expert has ever challenged the identification let us accept that it really is Pompey.

Portrait of Alexander the Great. Said to be the inspiration for Pompey’s hairstyle

Something that I found even more striking in the book chapter was a truly bizarre assessment of the sculpture by Helbig that it quoted in full. It is impossible to imagine anyone writing something like this today:

Normally good portraits supplement the idea we have formed of famous persons from the historical tradition. For the memory of Pompey it would certainly have been preferable that his portrait had remained unknown, because it confirms and completes in an evident way the unfavourable judgement of him pronounced by modern critics. Even the condemnation thrown upon him by Mommsen seems too mild before this head.

The broad but low forehead indicates a mediocre intelligence. His weakness in character is not only revealed by the softness of the face, but also in the small eyes which look out in an insecure and, in fact, nearly embarrassed way. It is easy to understand from this look that Pompey, in civil life, was very shy and blushed when he was faced with a crowd. The skin of his forehead raised together with the eyelids and crossed by three deep furrows is especially significant. May people move the skin of the forehead in this way, when they think, If this movement is fixated in marble we may suppose that this, in the face of Pompey, was something usual, and deduct that he pondered and reflected a lot and therefore had difficulty reaching a decision…the head presents a true philistine, not particularly good, and not particularly bad, of mediocre intelligence, weak character and whose most conspicuous quality is vanity.

Helbig was clearly not a man who held any store by the King Duncan’s famous maxim in Macbeth: “There’s no art to find the man’s construction in the face”. For Helbig Pompey’s face was an open book in which it was easy to read weakness of character, stupidity, insecurity, embarrassment, indecision, a lack of culture, and vanity! And this single image of Pompey was enough to count against all the literary evidence we have of Pompey’s vast achievements – tremendous military victories, ridding the eastern Mediterranean of pirates, giving Caesar a good run for his money. Just imagine a defendant in a criminal trial faced with a juror like Helbig!

But even if our real faces were as reliable a guide to our character as Helbig believed it is even stranger that he talks as if he had actually seen Pompey’s face and not merely a stone likeness of it. Nowadays scholars of sculpture are well attuned to the nuanced  choices that Roman patrons faced in deciding what their statues should look like. They could draw on a history of Greek portraiture stretching back half a millennium and which included styles ranging from Classical idealism to psychological realism to baroque emotional intensity.

A prime example of verism in Roman portraiture

Even the, to our eyes, grotesquely realistic portraits, which were popular among the Romans from around the middle of the second century BC represents a choice to accentuate particular qualities of the individual. The art historical name for this style is ‘veristic’ after the Latin word ‘verus’ which means ‘true’ (think of the English words ‘verity’ or ‘verily’). Yet we have no way of knowing just how true to life such portraits really were. We might think that these sculptures must show their patrons as they really looked simply because they are so unflattering, and it certainly is possible that there was an aspect of vanity to the style with Roman patrons wanting their statues to be accurate likenesses, but at the same time we can never rule out that the features we assume to have been taken from life, even if we find them ugly, might not have been deliberate distortions introduced by patrons or artists to create a desired effect.

Deeply wrinkled brows, unshapely noses and squinting eyes served to advertise age, experience and a rugged militarism, thereby emphasising that the men portrayed in this way had accrued a certain authority, influence and gravitas. Pompey’s bust with its podgy cheeks, squinting eyes and bulbous nose has more than a few hints of the veristic style about it. So, strange as it might seem to us, the features that Helbig so despised in Pompey’s portrait might have been deliberately insisted on by Pompey to convey a particular effect.

Nowadays nobody would try to use the statue as evidence for Pompey’s character. Rather we would take it as evidence for how Pompey wished to be portrayed, think about the choices he could have made and discuss why he wanted to look like this. From a historical point of view these are surely far more interesting questions.

As I stood before the bust in the gallery of the Glytpotek I will admit, however, that, just for a moment, I did allow myself to indulge the fantasy that I really was standing face-to-face, not with a lump of cold marble but with Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus himself. Unlike when Helbig had held the bust over a century ago Pompey stared vacantly back at me, giving not the slightest twitch of expression to hint at what kind of man he really was.

 

 

* Kragelund, P., Moltesen, M., & Østergaard, J. S. (2003). The Licinian tomb: fact or fiction? (No. 5). Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

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Is new scholarship always better?

Some old books on Greek archaeology

This is something I’ve been asking myself for a few weeks now, ever since I read something someone I am following on Twitter – a university lecturer – had posted about the instructions they give their students concerning searching for reading for assignments: is new scholarship always (to be fair to the tweeter I should probably say ‘usually’ but that would make a less punchy title) better than old?

I’ve lost the original tweet so I am paraphrasing but it was something along the lines of: students are allowed to use only one title from before I (the lecturer) was born, one from between the year I was born and the year they were born and everything else must have been published more recently. The idea, of course, is to encourage students not to dredge up old work that has now become redundant. That certainly sounds like a good thing and, sure enough, the post had received lots of approving replies, retweets and “likes”.

In my own work, however, I’ve often felt that the very opposite problem exists – that we are far too often inclined to assume that the most recent opinion on any given subject must be the best and that anything written decades ago might as well be left on the shelf to gather dust. Or worse. I recently saw another tweet in which an archaeologist was defending his decision not to take the repeated advice of his colleagues and throw out all his old theory books.

In my own research I’ve encountered countless instances where negative assumptions about old research were definitely misplaced but let me give a concrete example:

My PhD was about changes in the uses of Greek agoras (public squares) in Hellenistic and Roman times – roughly the 500 years or so after the heyday of Greek culture in the Classical period. A lot of the literature I read was about how the buildings that have been excavated on the agoras of various cities had been interpreted. Because the evidence is often so patchy questions of interpretation are often highly contentious: was building X a theatre or a council house? was such and such a temple dedicated to Apollo or Poseidon? And so on…….

Often the debate revolves around trying to match references to particular buildings in surviving literary sources or inscriptions to the remains unearthed by archaeologists. This is especially true for the city of Athens where a relative abundance of literary sources survive even if for the post-Classical periods this evidence is still in truth rather limited. Athenian topography – working out how the city fitted together and where different monuments were to be found – has produced so much scholarship it might almost be thought of as a subdiscipline of Classical studies. It’s certainly an issue that plenty of people have any opinion on.

An excellent reconstruction of the mid 2nd Century BC “South Square” from the north, facing southeast – by www.ancientathens3d.com

A particular controversy relating to my own work is the interpretation of the so-called South Square on the Agora. Around the middle of the 2^nd Century BC a large stoa that lined the south of the square since the late 5^th century BC (called South Stoa I because we don’t know its ancient name) was demolished and replaced with an (almost – see the picture) enclosed square created by the new South Stoa II, the East Building and the Middle Stoa (the names again are an indication of how uncertain we are about many public buildings even for one of the most well-known ancient Greek cities).

Since it was excavated in the first half of the twentieth century various theories have been proposed as to what the function of the “South Square” might have been: a gymnasium (the 2^nd century travel writer Pausanias mentions a gymnasium near the agora – might he have been talking about this complex?), a commercial marketplace (lots of cities by this time had two agoras, one for politics, one for commerce, was this an attempt to bring the centre of Athens up to date?) or an administrative complex housing, among other things, the city’s law courts (an older building on the north of the agora thought to have housed the courts was demolished around the same time the South Square was built and the way access to the complex was tightly controlled would have suited that function).

This is probably not an issue ever can be resolved conclusively. However recent opinion has tended toward the ‘commercial market’ interpretation. This is the view of the current director of the Agora excavations Professor John Camp. From my reading and from talking to other scholars this view now seems to have become something of a consensus. If anybody needs a citation to back it up they can always refer to Camp’s fairly recent and excellent book The Archaeology of Athens published in 2004. It would be easy to think that there’s little point in considering anything written about the subject before that time. However, although Professor Camp has put that opinion in print he’s never systematically set out a case for that interpretation of the square and neither has anybody else. So even if his interpretation is right there isn’t really much to explain why this interpretation has now become the preferred one except that it’s probably the most recent thing that most people have read on the subject or heard about from colleagues.

In my research I went back and read the various older theories that had been put proposed and decided on balance that I feel that the interpretation that the complex housed the law courts was the most convincing one. The case that had been set out by Richard Earnest Wycherley and Homer Thompson (a former director of the excavations) in a publication of 1972 consisted of an intricately detailed argument which I found consistent with the impression I’d gained from various other pieces of evidence that in the second century BC the main agora remained a heart of politics and administration while commerce, or at least trade in foodstuffs, was concentrated about 80m to the east where the so-called Roman Agora would later be built.

I don’t want to go into any more depth here but the point is that in this case far from being redundant I found this piece of scholarship, published near half a century ago to be extremely useful. Anybody wanting to decide on the function of the square now should at least take account of Thompson and Wycherley’s arguments and cannot afford to assume that they must have got things wrong just because somebody else has argued something different more recently.

So where does this idea that the most recent scholarship is the only thing worth reading come from? On the one hand I suspect it is an assumption that has filtered through to the humanities from the hard sciences where new discoveries really can make old knowledge redundant. At the same time it surely has to do with the exponential increase in the number of people working in the humanities. I’ve written elsewhere about the impossibility of staying-up-to date with everything published to do with the ancient world. With thousands of people publishing on relevant subjects we’re forced to take it on trust that the most recent research has got something right that older works got wrong.

At the same time it is probably also has to do with our modern culture’s impossible race to keep up with everything that’s new – whether it’s people constantly upgrading perfectly functioning smartphones, social media awash with uncontrolled excitement at the release of the latest Marvel superheroes film or those infuriating “best of the year” lists of films, books, TV-series that appear in the national newspapers every December. For the record I bought my first and only smartphone last year, haven’t yet made it past Iron Man 2 and feel woefully unqualified to say which books etc. of 2017 were best because at most I must have watched/read two or three that came out then. I console myself with the sneaking suspicion that the same is true for most of the people contributing to the lists.

But what’s wrong with thinking that the newest scholarship must be superior to the old? Well, for one thing, as my example was meant to illustrate, it means that valid and useful contributions to particularly thorny scholarly problems can end up unfairly brushed aside. For another it creates the very real risk that as each scholarly generation succeeds the next we are going to lose sight of where some of the ideas that we all take for granted originate. It is now all to easy – particularly with resources like Google Scholar permanently at our finger tips, particularly for students who’ve never known a world without superfast internet – to cite the very latest article on, for example, how hoplite warfare might have been laid the foundations for the development of Greek democracy without even asking who it was who first came up with the idea many decades ago. As generations of scholars pass if each one only cites the work of the preceding one there’s a very real danger of thinking that we’re continually reinventing the wheel actually all we’re really doing is just spinning it around.

I’m curious now how other people working in the humanities, whether in Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology or unrelated disciplines feel about this. The limited amount of evidence we have to work with in Ancient History and Classical Archaeology is both a curse and a blessing – on the negative side it means there are things about the ancient world we sadly will never know but on the positive side it also means we have the luxury of being able to debate and reconsider every piece of that evidence and every interpretation of it in minute detail. The tweet that sparked off my thoughts on all this was by a historian of the 19^th C and I can well imagine that in that field literature may well age faster than it does in mine. I still wonder, however, whether even for more recent subjects it might not be just as big a problem that people are ignoring older literature than that they’re reading too much of it.

But whether you agree or disagree with me or are able to offer another perspective from a different field I would be really keen to hear how other people think about this. To return to the question “Is new scholarship always better?” I’d love to hear your answer…

 

 

The Roman Agora at Athens and the problem of public space

Most of us, I’m sure, if we were asked to conjure up an image of life in a Roman town would think first of public spaces like the forum, the amphitheatre, or bathhouses, possibly lined with marble columns and statues. Anybody who has visited an ancient Roman city whether in the eastern Mediterranean, in Italy, North Africa or Britain will have seen the remains of such  buildings that have been unearthed by archaeologists.

Public spaces  have been excavated at hundreds of sites for well over a century and a half so it would be a reasonable assumption that we by now understand almost as much as we possibly can about what they were used for and what public life in Roman towns was like. You might then be surprised to hear that I think that the nature of Roman public space is actually something that is very poorly understood and that my new research project is all about trying to find ways of using archaeology to understand it better.

Inside the Roman Agora at Athens

To illustrate some of the things that I think we have got wrong both in thinking about  ancient public spaces I’d like to talk a bit here about one of the better known Roman period public buildings to have survived at Athens  – the so-called Roman agora. To put in a shameless plug, this is a much condensed version of an argument I’ve made in my book about the changing use of Greek agoras in Hellenistic and Roman times that was published last year.

The Roman Agora was constructed about 80m to the east of the old Classical agora, which had served as the heart of Athenian public life since at least the fifth century BC. We know that the Roman Agora was paid for by funds given to the city by Julius Caesar and then, presumably because the money had run out, by the first Roman emperor Augustus, because an inscription on the still standing western gateway tells us so. This was a period in which Rome was consolidating its hold on the Greek world and was itself undergoing a political crisis as the Republic came to an end and one man took up a position of supreme power. Bestowing benefactions on a city like Athens, which was famous for its illustrious and rich cultural heritage, was one way of assuring Greek loyalty to the new regime.

The western propylon of the Roman Agora – the inscription is hard to make out on the photo but it is there on the plain row of blocks above the top of the columns

The Roman agora consisted of a fully-enclosed courtyard surrounded on all four sides by Ionic columns, with rows of shops and a second entrance on the eastern side. We can be fairly confident that the building served as a food market for various reasons: a decree inscribed just inside the east entrance from the time of Hadrian (2nd Century AD) had to do with the sale of olive oil, weights and measures for ensuring fair trade were found within the building, a number of inscriptions set up by “agoranomoi” (market inspectors) were found nearby. Graffiti has also been found scratched into parts of the colonnade which have been interpreted as ancient traders staking a claim to particular spots where they were allowed to ply their wares. Part of the complex lies underneath modern buildings but substantial areas have been excavated in the course of various campaigns since the late 19th century.

When it comes to interpretations about the building’s impact on the public life of the city some large leaps of reasoning have been made. It has been widely accepted that the creation of the Roman Agora meant that the old Classical agora now lost its commercial function. The development has been linked to a supposed infilling of the old square by various new buildings at around the same time and has been presented as evidence of the civic decline of Athens under the Roman Empire. Calling the building the ‘Roman Agora’ reinforces the idea that this new building in some way took over something of the function of the old agora. Indeed I’ve often heard people – visitors to Athens, but also historians and archaeologists –  talk as though the agora in Roman times had moved to a new location.

I see some serious problems with this way of looking at things.

For a start we don’t know at all what the Roman Agora was called in antiquity. I think it probably was thought of as an agora but it is highly unlikely anybody called it the ‘ROMAN agora’. Both squares continued in use so there is no reason to think that the Roman period Athenians thought of it as taking over as the main public square of the city. It was quite common by this time for cities to have more than one agora and although one usually had a more political, the other a more commercial function, the distinction between the two was rarely absolute.

There is also actually very little evidence that the Roman Agora took away any trading activity from the old square let alone that it took away all commerce. There was still plenty of room on the Classical Agora, in among the new buildings, for a crowd of tens of thousands of people to have gathered so there’s no reason to think that temporary market stalls couldn’t have been erected there. The magnificent Stoa of Attalos constructed to line the eastern side of that square in the mid 2nd century BC was most likely a grand shopping arcade and it carried on being used in Roman times. Admittedly it probably wasn’t where lowly goods like grain, meat and vegetables were sold – it was more likely for luxury products that needed to be stored behind lock and key within its shops – but it was a commercial premises nonetheless.

 

The Stoa of Attalos at Athens, lining the eastern edge of the Classical Agora. This Hellenistic building was reconstructed in modern times to house to museum of the excavations

Even more importantly there are some very good reasons for thinking that the place where the Roman Agora was built was already the location for a commercial market before that time. A row of butcher’s shops, or taverns that predated the Roman agora were found just to the west of it. In addition, the famous Tower of the Winds, like the Stoa of Attalos constructed in the mid 2nd Century BC, stood just to the east of where the Roman Agora was built, was a public clock and weather station. The obvious place to have set up such a building would have been in a public market space. So, far from taking commerce away from the old Classical agora it seems rather more likely that what the construction of the Roman Agora actually did was to provide grander premises for a function that was taking place on exactly the same spot, for at least the preceding century, perhaps for much, much longer.

The Tower of the Winds – a Hellenistic clock/weather station that stands just outside the Roman Agora

The consensus view of the impact of the Roman Agora on Athenian life turns out then to depend on some rather bold assumptions that don’t stand up to closer scrutiny. It is certainly far too simplistic to see the building as evidence of civic decline.

For cities throughout the Roman Empire conclusions about the nature of public space often rest on similar ‘common sense’ assumptions and archaeological evidence is often used in a similar way to reinforce preconceived ideas about social and cultural life. The Roman Agora at Athens is just the tip of a very large iceberg of things about Roman public space that we don’t understand as well as we think we do.

I some upcoming posts I’m planning to pursue this subject further, to cast more darkness over things we thought we already knew and, hopefully, to offer some light in the form of suggestions for new directions might take in investigating the subject.

In the meantime if you have any comments on what you’ve read here I’d be glad to hear them.