Antiquities Exhibits

I've been catching up on my reading and thoroughly enjoyed the article "Roman Fleet Personnel" by Duncan Campbell in Volume XIV, Issue 2 of Ancient Warfare Magazine. So today's featured "Antiquities Alive" artwork are the frescos of Roman galleys found in the porticus of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii. Campbell points out that the Roman navy was crewed by fleet soldiers/marines termed "milites classiarii", sailors known as "nautae" and oarsmen called remiges.  However, on funerary monuments these men referred to themselves as just milites.  They were commanded by a centurion just as they would have been if a regular member of the legions.  The main distinction found on recovered gravestones is the mention of the name of the ship on which they served, although some men just recognized the name of their centurionate, such as "member of the centuria of Antonius Priscus." Two uniquely naval officers were the trierarchus, captain of t...

Only a handful of these funerary colonettes, referred to as cippi, decorated with portrait busts, have been recovered from Roman Cyprus.  The Museum of Cycladic Art points out that this type of grave marker was used commonly from the Late Hellenistic to the Late Roman period in several parts of Cyprus, such as Limmasol (Amathous), Larnaca (Kition), Famagusta (Ammochostos) and Kyrenia but the majority are simply inscribed with the deceased name, sometimes the name of the father or spouse, and expressions of condolence such as "no one is immortal."  The Metropolitan Museum of Art compares their appearance during this period to the development of personalized Egyptian painted portraits around the same time. I couldn't help but see the resemblence of these grave markers to chess pieces, though.There may be absolutely no connection at all but I found it interesting that the game of chess is thought to have originated around the same time (or possibly earlier) in the Gupta Empi...

This morning while searching for additional information about rare Roman funerary cippi recovered on Cyprus, I stumbled across this little figurine of "emerging" Aphrodite in the collections of the Museum of Cycladic Art. The reason it caught my attention is the pose is strikingly similar to the fresco of Venus in the triclinium of the House of the Prince of Naples that I studied earlier this year.  At the time, I was  wondering why the fresco was identified as Venus (Aphrodite) when the other main fresco in the room was identified as Bacchus (Dionysus), since Ariadne was the consort of Dionysus, not Venus.  Dr. Wallace-Hadrill had patiently explained to me that the goddess in the triclinium was identified as Venus because she is depicted wringing the sea water from her hair as described in Greek mythology (Hesiod's "Theogony" to be exact) but up until now I had never seen other ancient artwork with Venus in that particular pose. According to the museum, the eme...

In his book, The Armour of Imperial Rome, published in 1975, British classicist H. R. Robinson identified 30 different types of cheek guards. However, Robinson's typology has been heavily criticized by other scholars as too rigid and closed to adapt to new discoveries. Thomas Fischer, author of "Army of the Roman Emperors, Archaeology and History," points to the systematic identification of every elaborate ornate cavalry helmet as parade armor that resulted in hardly any of the recovered helmets from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE as regular cavalry helmets. He observes that on the basis of finds made at Ostrov and Tell Oum Hauran, ornamentation alone was not enough to assign a helmet to parade armor.   "...these assemblages contained two ornate helmets: one with a face-mask and one without a mask.  It seems logical that the latter was the piece for everyday use and combat." The oldest recovered Roman helmet dates to the 3rd century BCE.  It was recovered from Piz...

Traditional stucco was made of lime, sand, and water. Animal or plant fibers were often added for additional strength. Stucco was easily molded or modeled into relief decoration for walls, ceilings, and floors and was traditionally used as both an interior and exterior finish applied in one or two thin layers directly over a solid masonry, brick, or stone surface. The finish coat often contained an integral color and was typically textured for appearance. Stucco relief was used in the architectural decoration schemes of many ancient cultures. Examples of Egyptian, Minoan, and Etruscan stucco reliefs remain extant. In the art of Mesopotamia and ancient Persian art there was a widespread tradition of figurative and ornamental internal stucco reliefs. In Roman art of the late Republic and early Empire, stucco was used extensively for the decoration of vaults. Though marble was the preferred sculptural medium in most regards, stucco was better for use in vaults because it was lighter and b...

A number of polyhedra made in various materials are known from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. They may have been used in conjunction with an oracle inscribed on a pillar set up in a public place. The polyhedron was thrown in order to choose a letter at random. One consulted the inscription to find the matching letter and read the oracle's response. There would be twenty oracular messages, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet that corresponded to one side of the dice. - Metropolitan Museum of Art This polyhedron has 20 sides, each inscribed  with a letter of the Greek alphabet from A (alpha) to Y (upsilon).  Only the last four letters (phi, chi, psi, and omega) are missing.  A table of the 20 Oracles originally from an inscription found in Olympos, a city in ancient Lycia, is available here: http://opsopaus.com/OM/BA/GAO.html It includes four more Oracles for the last four letters of the Greek alphabet if you have a 24-sided die.  It also explains the valu...

This elegant and unusual eating implement doubles as both a spoon and a fork, the latter intended more for picking up food from a serving dish than for eating with from one's own plate. The handle is decorated with a spotted panther, an animal often associated with the god Dionysus. - Metropolitan Museum of Art While researching this item further, I was surprised to discover that Romans wore special "dinner clothes" called the synthesis or cenatoria and not togas or clothing normally worn in public (except during Saturnalia). The garment was worn by both men and women and described by Martial as characteristically colorful except for members of the Arval brothers priesthood who wore a pure white version at their ceremonial banquets. Without further description or confident identification in ancient art, though,  scholars have only been able to speculate that it could have been worn over a tunic as an ensemble or suit such as a tunic-mantle combination or was some sort of ...