Apuleius

Apuleius, the 2nd century AD author of The Golden Ass, the next book in the calendar for the Roman History Reading Group, came from Madaurus in what is now Algeria ( photos).


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After he married a wealthy widow, he was accused by her family of having persuaded her to marry him by using black magic and his "Apology" or speech in his own defence against the charges still exists. Nowadays he is most famous for his novel "The Metamorphoses", better known by the title St. Augustine uses for it, "The Golden Ass".

James O'Donnell has a site devoted to Apuleius's Apology. It is a very old site (1996!), so most of the external links are long broken, but the site itself is well worth exploring. Vincent Hunink is another scholar who has studied the Apology and others of Apuleius's works.

More specifically related to "The Golden Ass" is this page. Apuleius's novel was loosely based on a story also used by someone who may or may not have been Lucian of Samosata (French translation here).

There is a house in Ostia, which belonged to someone called Apuleius, who it has been argued was the same person as our author. Information about the house and the related buildings can be seen in the ostia-antica website, while the YouTube video below takes us on a guided tour.

Cadmus and Hermione

Ovid now resumes the story of Cadmus, which was the first story in Book III. Cadmus and his wife Harmonia (aka Hermione) are turned into snakes. (public domain picture of Candice Marie Johnson right taken from wikicommons)

Faenza's Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche has a decorated dish painted around 1565 from the workshop of Virgiliotto Calamelli. It is not on their website but can be seen on the Iconos website. In the next century Lully wrote the first tragédie lyrique in 1673 and took as his subject Cadmus and Hermione. The prologue below comes from YouTube where other extracts can also be seen.



The story of Cadmus and Hermione forms part of Matthew Arnold's 1852 dramatic poem Empedocles on Etna. Evelyn de Morgan painted the picture below of Cadmus and Hermione in 1877. It is now in London's De Morgan Centre. (public domain picture from museumsyndicate)

Public Libraries in Ancient Rome

Although Julius Caesar had planned to build a public library in Rome, he was assassinated before he could put his plan into operation. It fell to one of his adherents, Asinius Pollio, to build a public library in the Atrium Libertatis financed from the spoils of his 39 BC war against an Illyrian tribe, the Parthini. His library contained both Greek and Latin works, possibly in separate wings. Augustus, Octavia, and Tiberius also founded public libraries.

Unfortunately, we don't know precisely how the libraries worked: whether people were allowed to borrow books or only read them in the library, who was allowed to use the libraries and many other details. We do know that an east facing room was recommended to take advantage of the light, so presumably opening hours were in the morning rather than the late afternoon or evening.

Two general articles on libraries in the ancient world, one in French and one in English. An article on the location of the public libraries in Rome.

Cuthbert and Aidan To Be Amalgamated

Donna Farley of Haliwerfolc draws our attention to a post by Michelle of Heavenfield on her other blog, Selah.

The USA's Episcopal Church is considering amalgamating its celebration of the two Lindisfarne saints, Cuthbert (currently on 20 March) and Aidan (currently on 31 August) with a joint celebration on 31 August.

Patrick Hunt's Hannibal Lectures -- a review

I've now finished listening to Patrick Hunt's series of lectures on Hannibal I referred to in my post on the Punic Wars. I thought the first few lectures in the series, on the history and cultural background to Carthage and on the first Punic War were the best, full of interesting information with insights from many different fields of study. The lectures on Hannibal's great battles and strategy in Italy were competently done and interesting, with close textual attention to Polybius', Livy's, and Appian's accounts. (picture of Carthaginian double shekel from wikicommons)

As we all know, Hannibal's most famous exploit was crossing the Alps to attack Italy from the north. However, I did feel that the amount of time given over to the discussion of this pass vs that pass as Hannibal's route was excessive (though the account of the 1950s British expedition taking an elephant over the Alps was fun).

No doubt it's a personal quirk on the part of the speaker and shouldn't really matter in the larger scheme of things, but something I did find very grating was his curious pronunciation for horse-borne troops. There were times I felt I would scream if I heard one more mention of Hannibal's (or the Romans') Calvary.

The Vespasian Psalter

The Vespasian Psalter dates back to the first quarter of the 8th century and is now in the British Library. It is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, surviving manuscript with historiated initials. It also contains an Anglo-Saxon gloss on the Latin text and again is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, surviving examples of translation of part of the Bible into English. The Medieval Writing site has more information about Psalters (click the links in the text to go to the very useful glossary of terms), while Fathom's Introduction to Medieval Manuscripts sets t the Vespasian Psalter in a wider context.

The manuscript came to the British Library from Sir Robert Cotton's library. Each bookcase contained the bust of a Roman emperor and this particular Psalter was in the case which had the bust of Vespasian, hence its name.



The above picture shows King David as the author of the Psalms (public domain image from wikicommons). The British Library's Introduction to Illuminated Manuscripts (scroll down) shows the same page in its context opposite a historiated initial for Psalm 26 (27 in the usual numbering for English Bibles) showing David and Jonathan.

The Vulgate text of the Psalm:

1. David Dominus lux mea et salutare meum quem timebo Dominus fortitudo vitae meae quem formidabo
2. cum adpropinquarent mihi maligni ut comederent carnem meam hostes mei et inimici mei ipsi inpigerunt et ceciderunt
3. si steterint adversus me castra non timebit cor meum si surrexerit contra me bellum in hoc ego confidam
4. unum petivi a Domino hoc requiram ut habitem in domo Domini omnibus diebus vitae meae ut videam pulchritudinem Domini et adtendam templum eius
5. abscondet enim me in umbra sua in die pessima abscondet me in secreto tabernaculi sui
6. in petra exaltabit me nunc quoque exaltabit caput meum super inimicos meos qui sunt in circuitu meo et immolabo in tabernaculo eius hostias iubili cantabo et psallam Domino
7. audi Domine vocem meam invocantis miserere mei et exaudi me
8. tibi dixit cor meum quaesivit vultus meus faciem tuam Domine et requiram
9. ne abscondas faciem tuam a me ne declines in furore tuo a servo tuo auxilium meum fuisti ne derelinquas me et ne dimittas me Deus salvator meus
10. pater enim meus et mater mea dereliquerunt me Dominus autem collegit me
11. ostende mihi Domine viam tuam et deduc me in semita recta propter insidiatores meos
12. ne tradas me Domine animae tribulantium me quoniam surrexerunt contra me testes falsi et apertum mendacium
13. ego autem credo quod videam bona Domini in terra viventium
14. expecta Dominum confortare et roboretur cor tuum et sustine Dominum

Juno in the Underworld 2

In my previous post I started looking at Juno's trip to the Underworld. In addition to the male villains we looked at last time, she also saw the Danaides.

Salieri's opera Les Danaïdes was first staged in 1784. The YouTube extract below has the Danaides's entry after murdering their husbands.



Liverpool's Walker Gallery has Rodin's Danaid, with extensive commentary and a downloadable gallery talk on the piece. Perhaps the most famous picture of the Danaides is the 1903 painting by Waterhouse shown below (now in a private collection). (public domain image from wiki commons)



Sargent's 1922-1925 picture of the Danaides is in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. (public domain image from museum syndicate)



Juno's purpose in going down to the Underworld was to recruit Tisiphone, one of the Furies, to drive Athamas, Ino's husband, into a state of madness in which he would cause the death of his family. Muziamo's 1548 picture of Athamas is in Tivoli's Villa d'Este.

Two reviews of Telemann's 1765 dramatic cantata, Ino, are reviewed here.

The 1801 picture of Athamas below is by Migliarini and is now in Rome's Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, but is not on their website. (public domain image from wikicommons)

Juno in the Underworld 1

In Ovid's next story, Juno gets angry with Ino, Semele's sister, and decides to punish her. This involves a trip down to the underworld, where she comes across some people being punished for their crimes on Earth. In this post we'll be looking at the punishments suffered by four of these people:Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion. (all of the images below are in the public domain and taken from wikicommons)




Both Titian and de Ribera painted sets of four paintings, one for each of the four. The two paintings by Titian above show Tityus (top) and Sisyphus (bottom). Dating from 1548-1549, they are now in Madrid's Prado ( here and here). The other two paintings in the set, Tantalus and Ixion, were unfortunately lost in a fire in 1734. Two of de Ribera's 1632 paintings are also in the Prado: Tityus and Ixion (below).



Michelangelo's 1532 drawing of Tityus is in the Royal Collection, and was used by Bernardi as the design for the intaglio shown below, which was cut around 1530 and is now in London's British Museum.



A drawing of Tantalus by Hans Holbein the Younger dating from between 1535 and 1540 can be seen in Washington's National Gallery of Art. Assereto's picture of Tantalus is from the first half of the 17th century and is now in Graz's Landesmuseum Joanneum (scroll down). Eric Henry has an animated version of Tantalus's torments called Sometimes I Feel Like This on his Moving Pictures site.

The picture of Sisyphus below was painted in 1920 by Franz von Stuck and is now in a private collection. The contemporary artist Michael Egbert took the theme of Sisyphus Sleeping for a 1993 painting.



To finish off this post with, here is Jankovics Marcell's short animated film called Sisyphus, which was nominated for a 1976 Oscar.

Bladud

In his "History of the Kings of Britain", Geoffrey of Monmouth briefly tells the story of King Bladud, the founder of Bath:

Next succeeded Bladud his son, in whose hands the kingdom remained for twenty years. He builded the city of Kaerbadon, that is now called Bath, and fashioned hot baths therein, meet for the needs of men, the which he placed under the guardianship of the deity Minerva, in whose temple he set fires that could not be quenched, that never turned into ashes, but as they began to fail became as it were round balls of stone. At that time did Elijah pray that it might not rain upon the earth, and it rained not for the space of three years and six months. Bladud was a right cunning craftsman, and did teach nigromancy throughout the realm of Britain, nor did he stint of his subtle sleights until he had fashioned him wings and tried to go upon the top of the air, when he fell upon the temple of Apollo in the city of Trinovantum, and was dashed into many pieces.
(public domain 1904 translation by Sebastian Evans from sacred-texts.com)

Geoffrey's version is discussed on this Bath site. Charles Dickens tells a later version of the story in Chapter XXXVI of The Pickwick Papers, and then lets us in on the secret of what really happened.

The illustration at the top shows a statue of King Bladud in the King's Bath at Bath, and Laurence Tindall explains the conservation work he did on it in 1982 (photo by Andrew Dunn from wikicommons under a creative commons licence).

The Royal Academy has Benjamin West's 1807 picture Bladud in Exile.

Lindisfarne

The island of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island as it is also known, is a tidal island on the East coast of England near the Scottish-English border.


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A Youtube slideshow of photos from Lindisfarne, with Era's Avemano as soundtrack:



At the invitation of King Oswald of Northumbria, St. Aidan came from Iona to build a monastery at Lindisfarne to serve as a basis for the evangelisation of Oswald's pagan subjects. Bede's account of Aidan's work in Lindisfarne and Northumbria can be seen in Book III of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Chapter III describes Lindisfarne and tells how Aidan came there, Chapters V and VI tell us about Aidan's way of life and his relationship with King Oswald. Chapters XIV - XVII give some more anecdotes about Aidan and tell us about his death on 31 August 651.

You can read the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on St. Aidan, an Anglican account, and how he is remembered on Lindisfarne itself.



Another saint closely linked to Lindisfarne is St. Cuthbert. As a young man at the time of Aidan's death, Cuthbert is said to have seen a vision of Aidan's soul being taken up to heaven by angels and decided to enter a monastery, first at Melrose Abbey, and then at Lindisfarne. Cuthbert died in 687. Eleven years after his death his grave was opened and his body was found to be still undecayed. This led Bede to write a Life of Cuthbert.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has an article on Cuthbert, an Anglican view can be read here, and the view from Lindisfarne here. A triptych by Ernest Duez showing episodes from Cuthbert's life is now in the Musee d'Orsay. Haliwerfolc is a blog devoted to St. Cuthbert.


Bede's "Life of Cuthbert" is dedicated to Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, who was the scribe and illustrator for Lindisfarne's most famous product, the Lindisfarne Gospels -- or so a note at the end of the gospels says, though not everyone believes it. The Lindisfarne gospels are now in the British Library, which has information on them online with links to more detailed information and highlights from the book. For more information see this course on the Lindisfarne Gospels. Much later, in 970, Aldred wrote an interlinear translation of the Gospels into Old English. This article discusses Aldred's translation.

The Lindisfarne Gospels' current location in the British Library in London has been a source of some controversy, and a deal has now been worked out whereby the Gospels will now spend some time in their homeland of Northumbria. Here are reports on this issue from the BBC and The Independent.

It was in 793 that the Lindisfarne suffered the first in a series of Viking raids. Eventually, the monks decided their situation on Lindisfarne was untenable and they moved to the mainland, taking the body of St. Cuthbert with them. Eventually his body ended up in Durham cathedral, where it it still is today. (all illustrations in the public domain from wiki commons, unless otherwise noted)