The relaxing Caracalla spa

Hot tip for the Archaeopop-minded traveller: the Caracalla Spa in Baden-Baden. Looks like quite a nice spot.

 

Why anyone would name their spa after Antoninus Caracalla (Emperor from AD 188-217) confuses me a little. Of course, he's known for sponsoring the construction of these enormous baths in Rome:

Beyond bathing, Caracalla (son of Septimius Severus) was known as "one of the most notorious and unpleasant of emperors": he had his brother and cousin killed, forcibly married his stepmother, devalued the currency, put perhaps 20,000 of his enemies to death and was assassinated by his own bodyguard. If you believe the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, during his reign "men were condemned to death for having urinated in places where there were statues or busts of the Emperor." One of the nicer things said about him is that "in spite of his cruelty, immorality, avarice and treachery Caracalla was a brave soldier."

Looks like a mean bugger, doesn't he?

One thing he esepecially was good at was killing Germans in the Agri Decumates, the area between the Danube and the Rhine that includes Baden-Baden. So there's your connection. (German self-hatred?) And I guess there are some actual Roman bath ruins nearby, so there's that also.

Nothing goes with incest and fratricide like bathrobes and a nice juice.

The Caracalla spa does get great reviews on TripAdvisor (4.5 stars!). Strangely, there are also Caracalla Spas in Dubai (offering an 'exotic frangipani body nourish wrap') and in Little Rock, Arkansas ('state of the art manicure and pedicure rooms').

Centurions Occupy Colosseum, Fight With Cops

If you've been to the Colosseum in Rome, you've seen the guys in Roman centurion uniforms dunning the tourists for a couple lire or euro in exchange for some photos.  It's cheesy but I never minded - only wished they had a little bit more authentic armor.

This week the routine got exciting: a group of angry centurions occupied the Colosseum before Easter in protest at new rules removing them from archaeological areas, as part of the Soprintendenza Archeologica's initiative to 'clean up' the area from illegal vendors. Yesterday they escalated: centurions climbed up to the second level of the Colosseum and hung banners, demanding legalization of their work. Passing tourists cheered them on as a scuffle broke out between the cops and the reenactors.

"Hey hey, ho ho, our tax free income's got to go!"

This must have been the only profession in Italy that doesn't require at least five official permits. The protesters' demands are kind of bizarre: according to AFP, they want to be regulated!

"Rome city hall has agreed to give a work permit to historical impersonators like centurions. But these are just promises. The last negotiation was yesterday. We still haven't received anything concrete," Sonnino said.

"We want rules, we want to pay taxes!" he added.

It's apparently a competitive job: an article in Time last year  described cops who went undercover as gladiators but got beat down by the reenactor mafia:

Officers strapped on togas and sandals themselves to investigate the costumed combatants. When the disguised gladiator officers attempted to take pictures with tourists, the rival gladiators allegedly attacked them. That’s when other undercover police, dressed as tourists and garbage collectors, swooped in to arrest the aggressors. According to the BBC, the domineering gladiators were working with five tourist agencies to control the market.

Italy is such an alternate reality sometimes.

Video of the brief cop-centurion smackdown below.

Read on for more archaeo-protests from Egypt, Libya, Mexico, Greece, and, yes, Rome!


Corriere della Sera has video:

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More Ancient Map Madness: Omnes Viae

Following on last week's post, more fun with old maps. Today, the amazing work of René Voorberg, who's created a mashup of an ancient Roman road map - the Tabula Peutingerana - and the Google Maps API. It works as a route planner: you put in your point of origin and your destination, and it gives you the shortest route on the Roman road network. Here's the results for an itinerum from London to Bologna.

741 miles (DCCXLI milia passuum) and 50 days (L dies) of travel. Whoa. Makes me appreciate Ryanair.

As you can see, the interface has some cute features, like being in Latin (iter vestrum means 'your route', iter brevissimum means 'the shortest route'). The icons for towns, rivers, and mountains used on the Peutinger Map are reproduced in the left sidebar and on the map itself. The author spent a ton of time geolocating over 2000 ancient place names on the modern map, so you can use either ancient or modern names (Londinium or London, say). Here's how Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara look.

The Peutinger map is an amazing artifact. It's the only road map to survive from the Roman Empire, as a medieval copy of an original map prepared somewhere around 400 AD but incorporating older information (Pompeii, for example, is still on the map). It's the last survivor of a sophisticated 500-year tradition of Roman surveying and mapping, and shows the system of Roman public roads, with mileage and natural features. 

The map itself, though, looks awfully funny to the modern eye:

That's Europe all right: but it's stretched east to west and smooshed north to south, so that the whole continent fits into the height of a parchment scroll. This is not so much a bug as a feature: the map is meant to show a series of linear itineraries along well-built roads. A close-up:

http://www.tabula-peutingeriana.de/

That's Noricum (Croatia and Bosnia) on top, central Italy in the middle, and Tunisia down at the bottom. The red lines are different routes, with a slight jog marking minor place names. Once you get over the tyranny of our own cartographic conventions it's actually quite practical. (Though I still find the Google Maps API a little easier to use.

The literal book on the map was written by Richard Talbert, whose data is the main source for Voorberg's Omnes Viae. Talbert has his own scholarly treatment of the map up online, with GIS layers you can use to highlight different features.  (It's a companion to his book, Rome's World.) Another online version of the map can be found here (nicer to look at).

Ruins of the 1%: Inequality Worse in 21st Century America than 2nd Century Rome?

New research by Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen suggest that income inequality in the United States today is slightly worse than in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE. Their article in Journal of Roman Studies is a good overview of debates on how to measure ancient Rome's GDP, wages, and income distribution. It's also a bit dizzying, but this is not easy stuff to calculate, given the absence of regular economic data.

By their calculations, 10% of the population went hungry, 74% had income 1-1.5 times basic subsistence, and 14% had a 'respectable' income between 1.7 and 10 times basic subsistence. The top 1.5% controlled 15-25% of total income, the next 10% another 15-25%, while the bottom 90% split the remaining half or so of all income. This works out to a Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality, with 1 being perfect inequality and 0 being perfect equality) of 0.42-0.44. By this measure the Roman Empire was actually less unequal than some other pre-modern societies, like 18th-century Britain or France (0.52-0.59) - but only because these societies were richer overall. (You need larger surpluses to foster larger inequality.)

Tim de Chant at Per Square Mile (a fantastic geography blog) places this research in context, noting that the Gini coefficient of the United States is now 0.45 and rising: more unequal than a pre-modern empire famous for its oligarchs and mass enslavement. He concludes on a sobering note:

Schiedel and Friesen aren’t passing judgement on the ancient Romans, nor are they on modern day Americans. Theirs is an academic study, one used to further scholarship on one of the great ancient civilizations. But buried at the end, they make a point that’s difficult to parse, yet provocative. They point out that the majority of extant Roman ruins resulted from the economic activities of the top 10 percent. “Yet the disproportionate visibility of this ‘fortunate decile’ must not let us forget the vast but—to us—inconspicuous majority that failed even to begin to share in the moderate amount of economic growth associated with large-scale formation in the ancient Mediterranean and its hinterlands.” 

Let us never forget: most ruins are ruins of the 1%. An Occupy Archaeology movement would have to include field survey and rural settlement studies in its call to arms.

Not so newsy newsflash

Il Messaggero newspaper reports the assassination of Julius Caesar. ("Suetonius' Shock: 'It was a stab in the back'".) Part of their ad campaign to convince you that it's Rome's 'traditional' newspaper. I wonder where Alitalia was flying in 44 BC?


Photo: me. Spotted in the Coliseo subway station, Rome.

Campy Roman Moments with Soft Cell

Marc Almond as a spoiled Roman aristocrat. He does it amazingly well.



I like the extremely non-PC Nubian slave.


Just to be extra crazy, here's the Chipmunks version!

Nero’s Dining Room?

Last week news of a curious discovery on Rome’s Palatine hill was in the news. French and Italian archaeologists have found a unique circular room that they speculate may have been Nero’s "rotating dining room”. The press is accepting this speculation as fact. But was it really?

Discovery reports:

Known as "coenatio rotunda", the circular room was found by French archaeologist Francoise Villedieu in the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), the emperor’s sumptuous residence on the Palatine Hill.

Dating to the 1st century AD, the room has a diameter of over 50 feet (16 meters) and is 33 foot (10 meter) high.

It was supported by a 13 foot (4 meter) wide pillar, which was connected to the perimetral walls by a series of arches.

The room, whose structure is unprecedented, matches a description by the ancient historian Suetonius, who described Nero’s dining room as a circular, rotating, wooden-floored platform.

There’s a nice slide show with the Discovery article, and the BBC has video here complete with hyperbolic narration about archaeologists “dropping their trowels with amazement”. Readers of Italian readers can find a bit more sober coverage here.

The Soprintendenza’s website (Italian) provides more archaeological details, with a refreshing lack of hyperbole.

It’s certainly a weird room – 16 meters wide, with eight arched ribs, and a huge central pillar with small niches. The Soprintendenza suggests that it’s the right date, sometime between the fire of 64 and Nero’s damnatio memoriae at the beginning of the Flavian era. But let's look at the actual description that the find "matches".

Suetonius, in his Life of Nero, says that

There were dining-rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens.

That last sentence is the key one, and is the source of the press' breathless excitement. But that's really all the evidence they have to go on. We're still waiting on answers to other questions, like:
Where is the wall decoration that one would expect? How is this room connected to other parts of the palace? How did the rotation mechanism work? If it was really water-powered, as the archaeologists speculate, where are the channels?

And, if I may be so bold, should we rely so much on one vague sentence in Suetonius? Suetonius’ Lives are full of gossip and rumor, animated by anti-imperial sentiment, and written over 50 years after Nero’s death. (Not to mention that the palace itself was buried by Suetonius’ time, so he never could have seen it.) It's an extremely fun book to read, but has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Mary Beard (whose blog is always worth a read) puts her finger on the problem, pointing out that our knowledge of Nero’s Golden House is still spotty and based largely on literary evidence:

does a big pillar really prove that we have got a rotating dining room... and what exactly rotated anyway?

I half suspect that no such thing as a rotating dining room existed. But even if it did, I still don't see why these remains really do reveal whatever it was that Suetonius was talking about.

It was once pointed out that digging is a pathology of archaeology. But this instance illustrates a much deeper and more destructive problem of the field: the frantic desire for ancient texts to be physically true. This leads to sloppy habits of interpretation, where huge, complex architectural features like this are “interpreted” by hanging them on one sentence in a sensationalist writer who never saw the building he was writing about.

Classical archaeology in particular has this vice, reflecting its roots as a discipline that started as the study of literature and took centuries to turn its attention toward excavation. For many Classical archaeologists the ancient texts, and the world they evoke, still remain “more real” than the archaeological evidence of Greek and Roman civilization. (I’m looking for postdocs so I can write a book on this very subject, so stay tuned for more on this.)

So, in short: I would love to know what this strange and interesting room was, and I will be thrilled if it turns out to have been a rotating room of any kind! But I’d like to see those conclusions drawn from archaeological evidence, and a little less breathless speculation from the Fourth Estate.

Building Rome in a Day: an Interview with Liz Glynn

‘Building Rome in a Day’ was part of the New Museum's ‘The Generational: Younger than Jesus’ exhibition in spring 2009. The exhibit, conceived and organized by LA-based artist Liz Glynn, had groups of volunteers constructing and destroy the city of Rome, tracing its architectural history from its founding by Romulus in 753 BC to Alaric’s conquest of the city in 410 CE. NYT has the time-lapse video here. Liz was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about the project back in April. (That’s forever in blog time, but no time at all in archaeology, so it averages out!)

Dan: For starters: how did the 'Building Rome in a Day' project come about?

Liz: I was making a lot of works based on language at the time, and I tend to have a lot of fragmentary but iconic bits of text bouncing around in my head at any given time. I was also working with ideas of utopia. But whenever I was working directly with utopia, all anyone wanted to talk about was futility. but I wanted to talk about possibility, and what can be done. So I decided "building Rome in a day" was a good way to refute the idea of the insurmountable challenge.

Dan: I love puns and contradictions, so the idea of refuting a proverb (“Rome was not built in a day”) tickles me. It's wonderfully contrarian.

Liz: Yes. I like things that are little blunt, verging on stupid. But so stupid, you've got to try them.

Dan: It’s interesting that you mention optimism. the project has a very modernist feel to it somehow – that technological optimist attitude - the sense of 'we can do it!', no matter how absurd or ambitious the project.

Liz: hmmm... there's a sense of that, but then there's also the destructive aspects of the closing [of the exhibit, where the city is destroyed], which I think people in the high modern era were in denial about. I think the rise of modern technology was a little blind perhaps.

Dan: So is it more a rejection of that postmodern cynicism that you're aiming for? A post-postmodernism?

Liz: I don't know if I’d classify it relative to the modern/postmodern dichotomy; it's more of a reaction against the post-60s-apathy. I think a lot of people in our generation are bewildered by the complexity of the problems facing them. Part of the Rome piece is reducing the scale to make an enormous, complex thing accessible in a hands-on way.

Dan: On that note, I want to detour into some of the practical stuff for a moment. My readers are going to want to know some of the nerdy details, like, what did you do about the hills? Is everything in scale? What were your sources? Did you really make it from Romulus to Alaric in 24 hours?

Liz: We started with the 7 hills stenciled (just their names) on the cardboard. We don't have much in the way of topography, however, simply as a practical matter. The scale is relative to the buildings already built. We began with the hut of Romulus, and I think the last building is St. John Lateran. But very little is built near the end. And yes, we covered 753BC to 410AD, about 1.238 years per minute.

The Hut of Romulus (Zack Sultan, via Archaeology Magazine)

Dan: You used cardboard and plastic – not your usual archaeological materials. I love the aesthetic contradiction of representing these 'eternal' monuments in ephemeral, disposable, very modern media.

Liz: Ah, all of the materials are recycled from the museum's waste stream - nothing comes from nothing. We use cardboard as an analog for brick, and wood for marble (we switch when we hit the era of Augustus).

Dan: Nice!

Liz: Yes, even marble was "recycled" or at least refashioned in ancient Rome. There's a great bust in the Getty Villa that used to be one emperor, and now is another carved from his unpopular predecessor’s head!

Dan: It's true - the great irony of archaeological conservation was that the ancient practice was to recycle building materials.

Liz: Yes. Our idea of the eternal monument is very much a modern construct. In the case of Rome, there was a point in the nineteenth century when they decided what ruins were iconic enough to preserve, and leveled everything else to build apartments.

Dan: How literally did you reenact things like fires and invasions?

Liz: The big invasions - the Gauls and the Visigoths - are musical. Dan Friel, of the band Parts and Labor, played the Gauls, and those present acted out a vicious battle scene. Shahzad Ismaily played an accompaniment to the Visigoth destruction. As for the fires... for the version I did in LA, we used small fireworks and matches, with lots of water handy. For the New York version, at one point we brought a building outside and burnt it on the Bowery (which was not necessarily sanctioned). But otherwise, we dumped red paint on it, improvised, stomped, and then, restored! We used lots of white paint.

Dan: Got a favorite moment from the day?

Liz: The morning was lovely, when Joshua Beckman was reading from Catullus and Edgar Saltus around the era of Caesar, and a number of people were getting into some great buildings - including Nero's Golden House, my personal favorite. Also, it was nice gathering with everyone who had been working on the piece and deciding to become the Visigoths. There were all these people swarming outside for the opening, but we huddled together, tried to decide how it would work, then took to the perimeter, and went for it.

Dan: Roman history is usually taught in such a lopsided way, so it must have been interesting to have all centuries get equal time. Any unexpected results from that?

Liz: I think it's interesting to see how little gets built during the Republican era. In fact, most of the buildings that are instantly recognizable came out of periods that were less democratic than those that we idealize the Romans for. It was, in fact, the overly ambitious and somewhat corrupt emperors who produced great buildings. (Perhaps Trajan is an exception, but anyhow…)

Dan: Did you find Augustus' conceit about 'finding brick and leaving marble' to be true?

Liz: Well, yes. The era of Augustus is CRAZY, because so much is meant to be built, and we really can't keep up. But I wonder if he was just better at documenting, or prominently dedicating, all of the buildings. We also have the Res Gestae to thank.

Dan: I was meaning to ask about that. How did you deal with the unevenness in the archaeological record? Is this a picture of Rome as it was, or Rome as it was recorded?

Liz: Well, we work from what is documented, or at least, what is left. So, with the archaic material, there is a lot of improvisation – as in "there are 27 sacrificial altars, but we don't know what they looked like". Or in some cases, we have images, like the early drawings of the temple of Jupiter, which are merely a few lines on paper. In other cases, we don't have a drawing, just a mention in the topographical dictionary. One starts to think differently about the authority of these drawings after trying to recreate them in three dimensions.


The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Photo Litdrift)

Dan: To return to some of the conceptual aspects: I thought it was interesting that you bill yourself as the ‘organizer’ rather than the ‘artist’.

Liz: I’m an instigator, but the piece doesn't exist without a lot of helping hands. The funny thing is, a lot of work is like that, but it's not usually acknowledged. I’m sort of at the mercy of the participants in a sense.... I couldn't do it without them. At any given point in the room, if someone asks a question, it's likely I can answer it, but usually someone else can answer it better. The span of knowledge tends to be striking. Some volunteers are great builders, others have lots of history, some have favorite emperors, and some are just super creative and crafty.

Dan: How many people showed up? And how well did they work together?

Liz: I think about 100. They were great; some made new friends, other kept to themselves. I have an old friend who is very charming, and she was there in the middle of the night and really kept the energy up.

Dan: So you had a few lictors, as it were.

Liz: Of course! And a delicious feast around noon. A roast, lots of fruit and grapes, and slightly anachronistic champagne gelatin.

Dan: ‘Coalition of the willing’is my favorite phrase to come out of the Bush years, so I love that you describe your assistants/volunteers that way.

Liz: Ah yes, going to Bush. I had this huge frustration after the flood in New Orleans (another inspiration for the piece), where I felt like everyone wanted to help so much. If they had organized all Americans taking a week off work and volunteering to build or clean up - instead of subcontracting it all - we would be much better off.

Dan: Part of the tragedy there was the squandering of good will, which could have been productive.

Liz: I never discount willingness. I’m kind of creature of faith, not in the religious sense, but as a believer in human good will.

Dan: For your volunteers, what was behind their willingness? did they get the experience they expected?

Liz: I can't speak to everyone's motivation, and I do think they vary a bit.
Generally, people seemed to enjoy it, and I think once people are building, they get pretty wrapped in. A number of those from the middle of the night returned to check in the next day.

Dan: It's a nice change from a lot of people's experience of archaeology, which is very passive - watching television, reading interpretative signs. I see people craving a more immersive experience of the past.

Liz: Yes, a lot of the participants who have been involved with academia, including a woman who has a comparative literature PhD on the Sabines, said similar things. It comes much more out of the pleasure of getting one’s hands dirty, and figuring things out in a hands-on way.

Dan: I’m struck by how the view of Rome that you created is something that would have been impossible for the ancients themselves to perceive or construct. how does that affect the meaning of the project?

Liz: I’m not sure if affects the meaning, but I do think it's interesting; hindsight is 20/20, and we can never really get a birds eye view on anything while we're in medias res, so to speak.

Dan: So how much of this project is about ancient Rome itself, and how much of it is about how we see Rome today?

Liz: I think it's more about Rome, actually, but as a metaphor for our contemporary empire. The parallels only become apparent after digging in and looking at the historical trajectory through the built environment. These parallels, by the way, are quite eerie.

Dan: Which ones were most striking to you?

Liz: The proximity of the flowering of the empire to the decline. How long it took for the empire rise, and how quickly, and precipitously it fell... I mean, look at Italy today. Their attitude about art is very telling: "all of the great work has already been made". But for me, there is so much left to do.

Dan: now I have to ask you what 'great work' means to you! Or what the great tasks are.

Liz: There's a Thomas Hirschorn quote I like, which is "Down with quality - only energy counts." It's not true across the board, but I think it's a good place to start.

For more, check out Archaeology Magazine's coverage. And don't miss Liz' amazing 'Replica Replica' project at LACMA!


(Photo Litdrift)

Music to Dig By: This Heat, ‘SPQR’

This Heat are/were an experimental music group from Brixton. Formed in 1975, they bridge the gap between progressive rock, punk, and post-punk. I love their angular, confrontational industrial sound.

Download: This Heat, 'SPQR'

‘SPQR’* uses Rome and its icons (straight roads, slavery, and Romulus’ betrayal of his brother) as metaphors for our own modern imperial obsessions. The whole album brims with anger and fear of Cold War nuclear annihilation. In 3.5 minutes, the song exposes the cruelty and deceit underlying Rome’s empire more honestly than anything I got in years of Classics courses.

From the Youtubes: a cool fan video for the song, using footage from a 1930s attempt to film 'I Claudius', starring Charles Laughton.



*SPQR, for ‘The Senate and People of Rome’ is the official motto of the city of Rome, then and now.