The wisecracking emperor

Kenneth Williams as Caesar in "Carry On Cleo"

There’s a joke that the emperor Augustus is supposed to have made one day at the expense of one of his slaves. This particular slave was a nomenculator. His job was to remember the names of all the noteworthy citizens that Augustus might come across when out and about in the Forum or other public areas of the city, and prompt his memory if necessary, ensuring that everyone left an encounter with the emperor feeling not only that they had made a real connection, but that the emperor knew them – and they knew him – personally. This nomenculator, however, had been giving Augustus grief. He could never remember any of the names. So, one morning, when he asked the emperor if there was anything he needed to take down to the Forum for the day’s business, Augustus replied, ‘You’d better take some letters of introduction with you – as you don’t know anyone there.’

Weird and Wonderful Classics: Sheep

The great thing about Classics is that even the most boring of animals (which, let’s face it, sheep generally are) can turn out to be quite weird and wonderful after all. As a philologist, I’ve always been rather fond of Greek sheep, for two reasons:

One: they provide important evidence for pronunciation changes in the Greek language. If anyone ever asks you to prove that Ancient Greek was pronounced differently from Modern Greek, by far the easiest way to do it is to point out that Ancient Greek sheep go βῆ βῆ [bē bē]:

ὁ δ’ ἠλίθιος ὥσπερ πρόβατον βῆ βῆ λέγων βαδίζει

“The silly man goes around going baa baa like a sheep” (Cratinus, fragment 43)

Unless your interlocutor can find a breed of sheep that makes a noise like vee vee, you can at this point be regarded as having won the argument.

(The wonderfully onomatopoeic but sadly uncommon term βληχητά, “bleaters” [blēk^hēta], will also do the trick.)

Etymology-Man

To abridge a couple of short posts that I recently made on my own blog elsewhere…  xkcd has given us the gift of Etymology-Man!  The kind of superhero who would bound off a gratte-ciel, while explaining that it’s a calque from English skyscraper and all the while forgetting to either fly or pull his parachute while getting distracted by the minutia in the face of imminent doom.  Thus on the origins of English tidal wave…

Women and the History of Classical Archaeology #2: Elizabeth Cavendish

Here’s the second in my series on women in the history of classical archaeology:

A Duchess and Her Column: Elizabeth Cavendish (1759-1824).

I’ve spent many happy hours reading Victorian guidebooks to Rome. They formed the core evidence for a big chunk of my master’s thesis. If you need to know the correct protocol for paying a visit to Pope Pius IX, and to King Victor Emmanuel II and Queen Margherita (namesake, by the way, of the margherita pizza…) , at a time when the new monarchy of Italy and the papacy were at loggerheads, look no further than Murray’s Guide to Rome and its Environs. Similarly, if you want to know where the British expats’ Hunt set out from, or the best places to find antiquities dealers…. In particular I have been most interested in how these travel writers describe the ongoing excavations of the Roman Forum, which really began in earnest after the government of united Italy took possession of Rome in 1870. An intriguing figure recurs in the writers’ accounts of the site: the Duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth Cavendish, second wife of the 5^th Duke to be precise.

Classics on TV and Visualising Reading

By the power of a friend with an invite, I found myself at the Newnham event ‘Classics on Camera’ last Friday, where the fac’s own Mary Beard was talking with her director and producer about the Pompeii TV programme they made for BBC2 and their new series on Roman life (coming soon!). They covered various aspects of making a television programme like this – including financing issues and dealing with the Italian museum authorities – but the part I was most interested in was the discussion of how they construct their narrative.

The Cambridge-Munich Exchange

Just before Christmas a group of Classicists spent a week in Munich as the first part of the annual Faculty exchange with the Institute of Classical Archaeology in Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. As the exchange’s official Res Gerendae reporter, I’m writing a bit about what the week was like, in the hopes of convincing everyone who hasn’t yet been on one to sign up for next year’s. Which I reckon should be pretty easy to do when I say that most of the time that wasn’t spent in Christmas markets drinking Glühwein (or beer) was spent in beer halls drinking beer (or Glühwein).

Women and the History of Classical Archaeology #1: Caroline Bonaparte

Recently I’ve been reading about the history of classical archaeology. We’re all pretty familiar (or at least we become very quickly familiar) with the names of the most famous archaeologists – Schliemann, Fiorelli, Evans, Boni, Lanciani, and going back further art historians and antiquarians like Winckelmann, Piranesi, Hamilton. But these are all men, and we very rarely hear about the impact that women antiquarians had on the development of our subject. To this end I present the first in (I hope) a series of Women and the History of Classical Archaeology.

Digging for France: Caroline Bonaparte (Queen of Naples, 1808-1818)

Caroline was the sixth of the seven Bonaparte siblings, born in 1782. In her lifetime she witnessed the French Revolution, her brother’s transmogrification from First Consul to Emperor of the French, his conquest of Europe, his fall (which she and her husband survived with their lands intact), return, second fall (when her husband was executed), and survived herself in exile in Florence until 1839. She married Joachim Murat, one of Napoleon’s closest generals, when only seventeen, and with him ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from Naples after its conquest by Napoleon.

A pretty impressive life story by anyone’s standards. But why should twenty-first century classicists care about this nineteenth-century queen, other than general interest? Well, Caroline played an important role in the excavations of Pompeii. We should not of course imagine her wielding a shovel in anything other than a symbolic fashion. But the interest and funds she diverted into the excavations allowed a significant part of the town’s public areas to be opened up for the first time.