An archaeological dig in the City of London that has unearthed thousands of Roman artefacts was hailed as “the most important excavation ever held in London” today.
Just yards from the Thames, in what is now the capital’s financial district, Museum of London archaeologists have found coins, pottery, shoes, lucky charms and an amber gladiator amulet which date back almost 2,000 years.
Experts excavating the site, which lies alongside a huge building project for new offices on Queen Victoria Street, have also uncovered wooden structures from about 40 AD around 40ft (12m) beneath the ground.
“While Ms Beard is a supremely intelligent woman…the plain truth is that Ms Beard is too ugly for TV,” she wrote in an article for the Daily Mail.
Do Ms Brick or her co-thinkers ever ask whether men on TV, intelligent or not so intelligent, are good-looking or not?
Ms Brick then argued that “savvy” presenters would realise their looks is key to success and consider undergoing complete makeovers, including cosmetic surgery.
But NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet slammed Ms Brick’s inflammatory comments.
She said: “Women working in the media continue to face double standards, yet we know the public want to see, hear and read contributions from a diverse range of presenters, journalists and actors, not just – thankfully – the beautiful.”
Historian Mary Beard, who has been branded “too ugly for TV” by self-proclaimed “beautiful journalist” Samantha Brick, has said she will not lose any sleep over a “silly fuss”: here.
What We Look Like: A Comic About Women in Media. Anne Elizabeth Moore and Robyn Chapman, Truthout in the USA: “‘What We Look Like,’ with Anne Elizabeth Moore and Robyn Chapman, is a follow-up to Ladydrawers’ look at women’s participation in the labor force. This time, we look at why the diminished economic status of women isn’t popularly considered, even beyond media’s gendered hiring practices. The representations of women that do result are a far cry from the reality – compare for yourself!” Here.
Think sexist advertising isn’t a big deal? Think again: here.
Why It Sucks to Be a Woman in the Video Game Industry; here.
Women of ancient Rome prompted a similar system of microcredits to overcome legal exclusion
26 April 2012
Some women in ancient Rome already implemented the concept of microcredit as a loan of small amounts of money that enables people without resources to develop work projects on their own. The study conducted by the professor of Roman Law at the Universitat Jaume I Carmen Lázaro shows how women managed to evade the legal rules that excluded them from activities related with the bank and exchange through credit contracts of small amounts of money made by and among women and guaranteed by pledge agreements in which they gave as collateral personal property of small value.
The existence of this microcredit system is known through various sources, mainly epigraphic, such as the inscriptions found in Roman Granio House in Pompeii, which reflect legal transactions as the ones carried out among the moneylender Faustilla and other women with an interest at 6.25%, remaining as collateral for reimbursement by way of endorsement (through pignus-pawns) personal items such as earrings or coats.
Today, microcredit interest for women, often poorer than the Roman ladies which the new research is about, is often more than 6.25%. 20 percent or higher.
The National Gallery once put on an exhibition about the influence of the New Testament on western art. Seeing Salvation argued that if you don’t know the biblical story of Christ, you can’t comprehend such paintings as Titian’s Noli Me Tangere. But this summer the same gallery showcases another, very different book that has also exerted a vast influence on European art – Ovid‘s Metamorphoses.
Written in Latin in the reign of the ancient Roman emperor Augustus, who exiled Ovid for naughtiness, this epic poem retells the myths of ancient Greece for a sophisticated Roman audience. Ovid’s audience worshipped these same gods, giving the Greek pantheon Latin names (Zeus became Jupiter or Jove, Aphrodite became Venus, and so on) but found the antics of their deities by turns salacious, shocking, hilarious and tragic.
Ovid tells stories in verse about the crazed love life of Jupiter, driven by his lusts for various nymphs to take the forms of a bull, or a cloud, or a shower of gold in order to trick or seduce them. He tells of the courage of Perseus, who killed Medusa, and the folly of Phaethon, who tried to drive the sun’s chariot. He was the favourite source of classical myth for artists in the 16th and 17th centuries, and reading his book is like flicking through a series of descriptions of famous paintings, so copiously has he been illustrated.
The exhibition Metamorphosis, an Olympic special tied in with new opera productions, involves works by contemporary British artists – including Chris Ofili and Mark Wallinger – that respond to Ovid’s myths. The gallery is also publishing newly commissioned poems after Ovid by writers who include Seamus Heaney.
The brutality of the Roman Empire led ordinary people to fight back. Neil Faulkner looks at how resistance to the empire shaped Hadrian’s rule
Insurrection in the cities of Iraq. Mass resistance across Palestine. Foreign troops bogged down and facing defeat. A crisis for western imperialism in the Middle East.
This may sound like a description of the world today. But the date was 117 AD and the policies of bull-headed Roman emperor Trajan (98-117 AD) had set the region alight.
Trajan had first brought carnage and chaos to Dacia (ancient Romania), when he crushed the independent kingdom on Rome’s northern border, plundered its bullion reserves, took half a million slaves and replaced native farmers with colonial settlers.
Romania is “the land of the Romans” and Romanian is a form of Latin because Trajan’s policy of ethnic cleansing 2,000 years ago was so thorough.
Dizzy with success, he then went for Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq), which was the main tax base of the sprawling Parthian Empire at the time. Mesopotamia was among the oldest, richest and most heavily populated centres of civilisation in the world.
But the Parthians were stunned by the Roman blitzkrieg and melted away. Within three years Trajan’s 130,000 strong army had reached the Persian Gulf and he appeared to be a world-conquering colossus – a new Alexander the Great.
Then the Middle East exploded. The people of the occupied cities turned on their Roman garrisons and massacred them. The Parthian Army swept down from the eastern uplands and cut the long Roman supply line to Syria.
Deep in the rear – in Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine – the Jewish peasantry rose in revolt against Greek landlords, Roman tax-collectors, and local puppet-rulers.
As news of the debacle spread, the European heartlands of the empire came under attack and Trajan hurried home. He died en route and the succession passed to his second in command – Hadrian.
Hadrian was a highly intelligent and far-sighted member of the Roman ruling class. The revolt in Iraq taught him three lessons that he never forgot.
First, the Roman army could be defeated. Second, the empire was over-extended and risked further defeats if it failed to retrench. Third, such defeats could spark a tidal wave of resistance that might bring down the entire system.
It is surely not a coincidence that the British Museum has chosen Hadrian as the subject of its major exhibition this year. His achievement was to manage the greatest U-turn in Roman history and end a centuries-old policy of aggressive, predatory, expansionary imperialism. And defeat in Iraq was the catalyst.
Citizens To Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity To The Middle Ages by Helen Meiksins Wood: here.
Persian king Cambyses’ lost army in Egypt: here. And here. And here.
The antiquities museum says about one of its present non permanent exhibitions, Models of beauty. Masterpieces in plaster:
13 June through 16 November 2008
This exhibition shows beautiful 17th, 18th and 19th century plaster casts of the finest sculptures of Antiquity. The timeless beauty of classical sculpture is the focal point of this exhibition. Further attention is paid to the role played by plaster casts in science, art criticism and art education in the past four hundred years.
He started with talking about Rome, as in that city, in the sixteenth century, were the origins of copying sculptures from antiquity. When, early in that century, visitors came to Rome, they might know from writings that during antiquity, there had been many sculptures in public places. However, when they visited the city, they saw only a few sculptures said to have survived from the Roman empire or earlier: the she-wolf of Capitol hill; the Marcus Aurelius statue; Trajan’s Column.
When, while building churches or other buildings in medieval Rome, sculptures or parts of them from antiquity had been found, they had been recycled as building material. After 1500, however, people found out that discoveries like these might add to knowledge about antique art. In this way, new sculptures which became famous, were found, like the Laocoön group and the Apollo of the Belvedere. They attracted many artists and other visitors from many European countries to Rome.
The popes and other élite people from the papal state sometimes, as a favour, started giving plaster copies of antique sculptures to princes in other countries. One example was Trajan’s column, a copy of which was given to King Louis XIV of France. In 1824, these plaster copies were found in a windmill in Leiden. the Netherlands. It is not known how they had ended up there. As, since the seventeenth century, in the open air of Rome, the original Trajan’s column has suffered much from pollution, these plaster copies are today valuable, as they show details which are no longer clear in the original.
In the exhibition are also cork models of ancient Roman buildings, which used to be sold to tourists. And reproductions of idealized paintings of ancient Roman remains, by the neo-classicist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1692 – 1765).
During the eighteenth century, drawing academies, based on neo-classicist views, arose in many countries. First, the students had to learn to draw skeletons and muscles for human anatomy. Then, they had to make drawings of Greek and Roman sculptures, considered as models of perfect human bodies. Only after that did they draw nude human models, with bodies not as perfect as antique sculptures.
Among the plaster copies often found in drawing academies were the Venus of Arles. And the “Borghese gladiator” which does not really depicts a gladiator, as gladiators did not fight while naked. The nude statue probably depicts a hero.
The Venus of Arles was considered the ideal female form, until 1820, when the Venus de Milo was discovered in Greece.
One of the drawings, depicting a statue of the Greek god Apollo, at the exhibition, is by nineteenth century drawing academy student, later famous painter, George Hendrik Breitner.
When female students had to draw plaster copies of statues, fig leaves were attached to prevent the women from seeing male genitalia.
Certainly since the 1960s in the Netherlands, neo-classicist ideas in art education became weaker. For the plaster copies, that often meant they were hidden away or even destroyed.
In the sixteenth century, mainly Roman sculpture and Roman copies of Greek sculpture had become known in western Europe. In the early nineteenth century, for the first time, classical Greek sculpture became widely known. Eg, after the Parthenon marbles arrived in London. People had difficulty in getting used to them. The poet John Keats was one of not very many people admiring the Marbles right from the start. While fellow poet Lord Byron attacked Lord Elgin for taking the sculpture from Athens. More about Byron: here.
When sculpture from the Aegina temple, still older than the Parthenon, became first known in Germany, famous author Goethe did not like it, as it did not conform to his preconceived ideas of what Greek art should be.
Bronze Horse Head Hints at Roman Ambitions in Germany: here.
MSU art professor’s theory about ancient decorating choices casts new light on Roman paintings: here.
Archaeologists have discovered two gold coins in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula dating to the era of Eastern Roman Emperor Valens.
The coins are the first of their kind to be found in Egypt, the country’s antiquities council said.
The Supreme Council for Antiquities said excavations at a site west of St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai unearthed two coins containing images of Valens, who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from 364 to 378 AD.
Valens attacked the Visigoths in 378 AD near Adrianople in a battle often viewed as marking the start of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
The Gothic cavalry routed the Romans, killing over 20,000 people, including Valens.
The big hall was crowded, showing the public interest in this lecture.
Fik Meijer is the best known author about ancient history in the Netherlands. Over 85,000 copies of his books have been sold. Which is many, considering that on a world scale, not that many people read Dutch. And history of very long ago is often said to be not as ‘sexy’ in attracting attention as, eg, Paris Hilton. Some of Meijer’s books have been translated into other languages, like English and Turkish.
Fik Meijer started the lecture, which included slides, saying that he had been asking himself for a long time which would be the theme of this his last lecture at the university. Finally, he had decided that the title would be De nieuwe Romeinen; The new Romans. It was about politicians, long after the fall of the Roman empire in 476 AD. Yet, politicians modeling themselves on Roman emperors; or compared by others to those emperors, and their good and bad sides.
The clearest example, Meijer said, of a twentieth century politician modeling himself on an emperor of two thousand years earlier, was the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini.
To Mussolini, an emperor like Augustus, the first ‘Princeps’ of the Roman empire, was not just an inspiration, but an identification.
Like Augustus, Mussolini claimed to bring order after chaos, and to restore moral values. Like Augustus, Mussolini ordered a lot of building activity in the city of Rome as propaganda for the new ruler. Augustus’ saying: “I found Rome as a city of bricks; and I left it as a city of marble”, was the inspiration here [photos of Augustus' palace are here. Rome's Temple of Apollo, built by Augustus: here]. Mussolini had a big road built, Via del Impero, Empire Road. After the defeat of Mussolini’s ‘new Roman empire’ in 1945, the name of the road changed to Via dei Fori Imperiali, Emperors’ forums’ road. Mussolini glorified war, which was also a tendency in ancient Roman state ideology. Mussolini’s favourite statue was the Prima Porta statue, showing Augustus as victorious military commander.
However, the second world war brought Mussolini (like his ally Hitler) defeat, not victory. That defeat made it a lot more difficult for politicians to openly model themselves on ancient Roman emperors. Here, I might add something: that Hitler’s Third Reich also modeled itself partly on the Roman empire, for lack of a Germanic empire in antiquity. Examples of this are “neo classicist” nazi architecture; and the standards with eagles of Hitler’s SA and SS paramilitary forces, modeled on Roman legion standards.
So, post 1945 politicians were usually less open about modeling themselves on Romans. Here, in his lecture (not in the printed version in his book De oudheid is nog niet voorbij), Meijer gave as an example Silvio Berlusconi. He compared Berlusconi to Julius Caesar. Caesar, though he was not yet an emperor, is widely seen as the dictatorial gravedigger of the Roman republic which preceded the empire. Both, he said, were vain. Both had balding heads. Caesar tried to hide that with his way of combing his hair. While Berlusconi had an operation, though he officially denied that. Also, before becoming the most powerful politicians, both tried to become popular by organizing games. Gladiator games in Caesar’s case. And the soccer club AC Milan (and games on Berlusconi’s TV stations, one might add) in Berlusconi’s case.
After this Berlusconi comparison, Meijer continued his lecture with the United States and its foreign and military policy, especially under George W. Bush.
Meijer quoted Cullen Murphy’s Are we Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. In that book, Murphy described the arrival of George W. Bush at Shannon airport in Ireland. It reminded Murphy of ‘a Roman emperor traveling around his empire. Special officials had prepared his journey. While traveling, he was permanently guarded by his special bodyguards and legion soldiers’.
Meijer contrasted this with the Founding Fathers of the USA in the eighteenth century. The leaders of the American revolution then abhorred the Roman empire; and much prefered the Roman republic preceding it. One of their Roman Republican heroes was Cincinnatus. According to tradition, Cincinnatus was a farmer. When things went badly in a war with Italian enemies, Cincinnatus was made dictator of Rome. Soon, he managed to beat the enemies. Then, he immediately went back to his farm, much preferring it to being a soldier, a commander, let alone a dictator (by the way, right into the nineteenth century, the word “dictatorship” was primarily supposed to denote a temporary situation during an emergency; also the sense in which Karl Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”). United States Founding Father George Washington was compared to Cincinnatus; and also depicted as him, giving back the sword of war.
As Meijer said, the US Founding Fathers knew that the Roman republic, which they glorified, had also its weak sides. They had not missed the point that in the third and second centuries BCE, the countries around the Meditteranean had mostly fallen in Roman hands; and that the vanquished nations had been massacred by Roman armies, or had been oppressed by governors, and had been exploited by high taxes. Whatever the cost, the founders of the USA wanted to prevent their country from becoming imperialist. However, they did not think that the chances of that happening were big, as the USA as a former British Empire colony had felt itself what oppression was, and they would not soon make others suffer from that oppression.
“However, times have changed in America”, Meijer added. “Presidents of this powerful country do not seem to care anymore for the ideals, once admired so strongly, which made the Roman republic great. They prefer to model themselves on the way in which the Roman emperors related to the people and the armed forces”.
Meijer added that there are differences, like the United States constitutional tradition and the United Nations, which exist now, but not in Roman times. Still, the basic ideas of both forms of expansion of power are not essentially different. Not by accident, in the west wing of the White House, there is a plaque with the words of President Theodore Roosevelt [not to be confused with later President Franklin Delano Roosevelt]: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords”.
Meijer added that both with the Roman emperors and in the USA of George W. Bush, religion played an important role in justifying government policy. “In the fight between “good and evil”, as George W. Bush and his neo-conservative supporters call the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, God is not neutral, but is on their side.”
The Romans, according to Meijer, “always kept up the appearances that their wars were just wars; though, in their hearts, they must have known that the truth was often different … US presidents have often acted with the same tactics. … The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in a long tradition of armed US American interventions, dating from the early twentieth century; both close to home in Haiti, Mexico, Cuba, and Grenada and far away in Vietnam”.
“Defeated opponents often had to hear from the Romans that they should be happy that they were subjected … Without the [Roman] presence, there would only be chaos, disorder and civil war. The subjected often had different views about this and started resistance … Those in power in the USA have a similar line of thought”. Meijer continued to quote a speech by George W. Bush on 21 May 2003 to soldiers of the Coast Guard Academy:
we are the nation that closed the torture chambers of Iraq. (Applause.)
In a part of his lecture which is not in the version which had been printed earlier, Meijer noted that US rulers should have studied what had happened to Roman leaders who had waged military aggression in what was then called Mesopotamia, today Iraq. Crassus, the richest man in the late Roman republic, aiming at a position of dictatorship by himself, wanted military glory. So, he attacked the Parthians in Mesopotamia. However, the Parthians’ guerilla tactics gave Crassus’ legions much trouble. The Romans were defeated, and Crassus was beheaded in 53 BCE.
Centuries later, Emperor Valerian again tried a military invasion of Mesopotamia, then ruled by the Sassanid Persian empire. Valerian was defeated and taken prisoner of war. According to tradition, the Persian victors humiliated Valerian by using him as a human footstool for their king Shapur.
Meijer continued his lecture with a quote from a United States diplomat [John Brady Kiesling]. When he resigned in protest against Bush’s policies, that diplomat wrote in his resignation letter to Colin Powell, then Secretary of State:
Has oderint dum metuant really become our motto?
Oderint dum metuant; Let them hate us, as long as they fear us, is a saying of the insane Roman emperor Caligula (37-41 AD). The letter did not literally call Bush a second Caligula. However, Meijer noted in his lecture (not in the printed version) that cartoonists and others went further in their conclusions than Kiesling in his letter.
This video is called Bush Caligula. It says about itself:
A short slideshow with audio (the title should be a hint of what that is) about Bush and the Iraq war (let’s be honest it was an invasion with many layers of revisionist history being used to distract the public…remember those WMD’s?) and the carnage unleashed because of his actions. Has a few graphic pictures.
“I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of Gaius Caligula, I am all men as I am no man and therefore I am…..a God.”
Bush and his mission from god complex are, to say the least, highly disturbing.
Here is this beauty:
“According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”
Now that Bush is apparently going to “surge” the troops in Iraq even though the public doesn’t want it, it appears he really does think he is emperor.
Fik Meijer continued to note that George W. Bush had inherited a big treasury surplus from his predecessor. However, his wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan have converted that into a very big deficit.
Like Emperor Augustus’ aggressive wars had also caused a big deficit in Roman government finances. Maybe Bush’s future successor should look at the example of Augustus’ successor, Tiberius. Tiberius withdrew the armies from across the river Rhine and stopped with aggressive military policies. This way, he converted Augustus’ deficit into a surplus. This policy change, Meijer said, showed real courage in Tiberius.
However, later emperors started again with aggressive policies. That finally led to the fall of the empire, also through economic problems. In the United States today, “corruption is still much bigger than ever in the Roman empire. The financial debts are incomparably high, if one compares them to the financial deficits which vexed the Romans. … The growing inequality in the USA between the big ”working class”, whose income has hardly risen at all, and a small, extremely rich group at the top, paying few taxes, is very worrying.”
Meijer continued to note that fewer and fewer young US Americans want to serve in the armed forces. In 1956, 450 out of over 700 recent graduates of Princeton University joined the armed forces; in 2004, that was just eight out of 1100. Because of this, more and more, the US forces are becoming dependent on foreign nationals; like the Roman empire in its later stages.
Meijer concluded that the United States would not necessarily go the way of the Roman empire. “If future government leaders will be conscious of the fact that they are not Romans, but Americans, and will look open mindedly at their own society and at the world outside, then it will be certain that their country will not have the same fate as Rome. However, if they will forget the lesson of Rome and will over-estimate themselves, then strange things might happen.”
After the farewell lecture, and after speeches by an ancient history colleague, Meijer’s publisher, and Meijer’s daughter Karlijn, there was a reception at the Allard Pierson museum.
Shards of Roman ceramics found in ancient graves in western Sweden suggest there was more contact between the Romans and Swedes than thought.
Archaeologists at the site in Stenungsund, around 30 miles north of Gothenburg, found the ceramic pieces along with some charred bones from two people, which were dated between the years 1 and 300 AD, said Bengt Nordqvist, who is leading the dig for Sweden’s National Heritage Board.
However, the second world war brought Mussolini (like his ally Hitler) defeat, not victory. That defeat made it a lot more difficult for politicians to openly model themselves on ancient Roman emperors. Here, I might add something: that Hitler’s Third Reich also modeled itself partly on the Roman empire, for lack of a Germanic empire in antiquity. Examples of this are “neo classicist” nazi architecture; and 
Meijer contrasted this with the Founding Fathers of the USA in the eighteenth century. The leaders of the American revolution then abhorred the Roman empire; and much prefered the 
