[Review:] Pompeii in Color (ISAW-NYU)

Comprising two small(ish) rooms, Pompeii in Color offers audiences in New York access to a remarkable number of frescoes from the many residences around the bay of Naples, rarely seen outside of the walls of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples (aka MANN). Accompanied by a slick website, which reiterates its major themes, and handy (but not entirely unheard of) digital walkthroughs of the Roman house on screens within the rooms, the exhibition is notable not only for the very fact that the curators have managed to bring such frescoes to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW – part of NYU; on show, free to the public, until May 29, 2022)––a small coup in and of itself––but that they have drawn attention to a number of overlooked aspects in the lives of these frescoes.

To begin with, we are offered explanations and examples of the drafting process, the pigments and tools used, in the creation of these frescoes. At the other end of their life, we are also helpfully informed about the destructive treasure hunting (mostly under the Bourbon kings) that saw these frescoes cut from their walls, sometimes being reassembled into artificial compositions (e.g. still life groups). At the same time, the exhibit has assembled a number of frescoes on the same mythological theme, in this way establishing the existence of shared models, but also the differences between different artists and their execution of the same mythological scene, primarily represented by the story of Hercules and Omphale, as well as the discovery of Achilles at Scyros. All of this is very welcome.

But like its puzzling choice in title, Pompeii in Color does not exactly offer any one coherent message to its viewers—why wouldn’t we experience Pompeii in “color”!? That is partly what it is so famous for: the technicolor archaeological site! Faced with an eclectic embarrassment of riches, the curator(s) seem to have tried to make sense of a large, diverse range of frescoes under the umbrella of “color” and auxiliary, nebulous sub-themes, such as “the fantastic and the familiar”.

But how is “color” actually dealt with, beyond its technical application (yes, we are shown the actual pigments found in Pompeii), in the content of the frescoes themselves? Here, there were many missed opportunities and, I would hazard, some real tip-toeing around current scholarly moves to revise our understanding of polychromy, skin color in the ancient world and how racial difference was constructed in the colorful, diverse world of the Roman empire.

On the one hand, in numerous panels, we are told that skin tone denotes gendered differences—lighter skin for women, darker skin for men—which is not new nor controversial, that is, except when you are dealing with subject matter like Achilles on Scyros. In two frescoes (below) depicting the same scene of Achilles’ discovery, we cannot ignore the stark difference in the skin tone of Achilles versus the men around him, especially Odysseus—and yet this goes unremarked upon; neither the gendered elements (Achilles’ liminality on Scyros; his feminization and concealment as a “girl”) nor the Roman reception of them, such as Statius’ Achilleid, receive any attention here.

On the other hand, the curator(s) do recognize that skin tone could also denote race and ethnicity when dealing with the fresco from the House of Meleager depicting Dido abandoned by Aeneas. Acknowledging previous interpretations of the dark-skinned woman on the left as an allegorical representation of “Africa”, the curator(s) explain that:

“while variations in complexion can relate to gendered pictorial conventions, skin color can also denote race and ethnicity in ancient painting. Although the dark-skinned woman at left likely represents Carthage, scholars still speculate about her identity. Her presence reminds us today that the Roman world was diverse.”

Fresco from the House of Meleager, showing (left) a dark-skinned woman, sometimes identified as “Africa” or “Carthage”.

While this is a step in the right direction, for an exhibition about “color”, it is curiously non-committal (note the allusive “scholars still speculate”) in its assessment of skin color and what it could signify to viewers, not least because the field sits at a critical juncture in terms of reckoning with its own whiteness—a whiteness no less shared by the discipline of art history—and how we might tackle the question of race before race, as we know it, in its more recent and familiar instantiations (see, for example, the RaceB4Race conferences).

The exhibition’s weakness on this point is also on show when it explains the famous fresco from the House of the Triclinium (below), which depicts enslaved boys attending to guests at a banquet. The explanatory panel at first usefully dissects the scene, noting the formal hierarchy established by the difference in size between the enslaved attendants and free diners. And, yet, no attempt is made to explain the veiled light-skinned figure who extends an arm around a dark-skinned, dark-haired boy—even as they are noted as being in the scene. Are we not to think that this boy might be an enslaved puer, perhaps one of the deliciae, or “play things” that many a Pompeian household owned and who was often subjected to sexual abuse? Moreover, does the evidently darker skin of this boy denote his race, compared to the lighter skinned enslaved attendants at the bottom of the scene, as well as the veiled figure and other guests? All of these questions are, unfortunately, left unstated and unexplored.

“....does the evidently darker skin of this boy denote his race, compared to the lighter skinned enslaved attendants at the bottom of the scene, as well as the veiled figure and other guests? All of these questions are, unfortunately, left unstated and unexplored.”

Now, we might excuse this ambivalence, these silences, as simply the result of curatorial uncertainty—uncertainty about many things, but not least, how to situate such material within the present, shifting moment in the field. But to activate “race and ethnicity” in one fresco—and only the most obvious example of it—and not another, or to talk about gendered conventions only when it applies to heteronormative scenes and the gender binary of man/woman, but not in a very queer scene, speaks to me of the conservatism of this show.

This conservatism is felt in a number of other, quite startling ways. At one level, given the attention paid to the life of frescoes and the scratched-in words in the above banquet scene of the House of Triclinium (e.g. “BIBO”, “I Drink” is etched into the space above the figure holding the cup, to the right of the dark skinned boy—details helpfully provided in one explanatory panel), in another fresco, depicting the myth of Polyphemus and Galatea (immediately below: graffitied section is from the far right of the panel), no comment is offered as to why there are multiple graffiti etched, quite respectfully, into the red framing panel of the fresco (not transgressing onto the space of the scene itself). Given the burgeoning work on the relationship between art and text, frescoes and graffiti, this would have been a fascinating case study in the actual life of the frescoes and the material traces left behind from interactions with past viewers.

Finally, I was overjoyed to see the exhibition graced by the presence of the fresco of a female painter from the House of the Surgeon—an absolute rarity and one which deserves more attention (alongside the few accounts we have of women artists in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History 35.40). But the explanatory panel seemed not to care at all about the gendered implications of this fresco; there is no mention of the rarity of this scene nor whether women worked in this profession—instead, the curatorial label prefers to harp on the meta element of a painting going on within a painting. The label “Painter at work” says it all. A nearby, larger panel also mentions this fresco, but only offers up this opaque platitude:

“In one fresco we see an anonymous female painter dramatically framed by a window opening to the sky. Its message about the world-expanding potential of the arts would have been especially resonant in the fresco’s original, small interior room.”

Fresco from the House of the Surgeon, showing a woman painter at work, painting—labelled in the exhibition as “Painter at work”.

What is this “world-expanding potential”, you might ask? Well, it certainly doesn’t seem to be about the fact that a woman is here engaged in painting in her own right, nor that she might be one of the few women artists mentioned in Pliny’s account, nor that it might speak to a broader interest and practice of painting among women. No such possibilities are countenanced. This erasure by omission, for me, was just unacceptable. And more worryingly, the exceptionality of this fresco will remain unknown to the lay viewer who encounters this exhibition.

So, to keep it short: come for the frescoes—indeed marvel at them; but I wouldn’t necessarily stay to read and rely on the guidance provided by the curatorial panels. In the year 2022, I was astonished by some of the glaring omissions, the ambivalence on real questions of color vis-a-vis the history of colorism, and the general lack of a coherent message from the show. I’m sorry to say, but beyond the wow factor of a critical mass of frescoes in one space, and beyond some of the technical and thematic didacticism mentioned above, the opportunity to do more than merely expose the public to such an array of Roman wall painting has been squandered here.

“ This erasure by omission, for me, was just unacceptable. And more worryingly, the exceptionality of this fresco will remain unknown to the lay viewer who encounters this exhibition.

So, to keep it short: come for the frescoes—indeed marvel at them; but I wouldn’t necessarily stay to read and rely on the guidance provided by the curatorial panels.”

Note: all photos were taken by the author, with a phone. Photos were permitted at the time. If the curators wish for me to take down my photos, I will be very happy to do so.

Questions I was asked on the job market: The Post-Classics Future (a sequel)

About a month ago I published a piece with the Perspectives Daily blog of the American Historical Association about what I call the increasingly common prospect of a “Post-Classics Future” on university campuses across America (and beyond) and my own experience as an ancient historian working on one of these campuses, within a History department.

Robert Aitken’s (1945) statue Future, depicting the Muse of History, Clio, in front of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. Inscribed beneath Clio is the slogan, “What is Past is Prologue”. Photo: Carol Highsmith, (2009): https://lccn.loc.gov/2010630511

The response to the piece has been overwhelmingly positive and many current and retired ancient historians have written to me about how they have experienced or are experiencing the same phenomenon on their campuses. Some, like Professor Emeritus M.C. Alexander (who made the deliberate choice to move from Classics to History), have written about the disciplinary aspects of ancient history in its different homes in US universities and internationally: How is ancient history practiced as “history” or as “classics”?

Others, like Professor Emeritus Stanley Burstein (who worked in a History department), have noted how many ancient historians, within History departments, were fairly well protected (due to the sheer size of History departments) when cuts last hit Classics departments in a major way during the late 1980s (not that they haven’t stopped since then!). In one piece from 2007, Burstein also explores another issue: ancient historians are not being trained to teach the large “World History” or “Big History” classes in History departments, and in many cases, non-ancient historians are determining the place of ancient history in these large survey classes. As he noted then, there hasn’t really been any response to this in terms of how graduate programs train ancient historians, and as I’ll point out below, this is still the case.

 Now, the conversation—at times a rather heated debate—over the future of Classics has continued to bubble away, and I don’t have much more to add in terms of the problems that have been diagnosed and the solutions proposed. I think I made it clear where I stand from my Perspectives piece. But I do want to add one thought sequel to the Post-Classics Future I previously described: for the few jobs that do remain, ancient historians and archaeologists, but also philologists, will increasingly find themselves having to become far more interdisciplinary on the non-Classics job market, and may also find themselves teaching well beyond their core of expertise.

 When I went on the job market, like many others, I turned to Professor Joy Connolly’s “Job Market Handbook” (now President of the ACLS—she adapted it from another guide by Jacqui Sadashige of UPenn) for some basic guidance, and it served as a lifeline within a somewhat (but not always) typical graduate school context: very little advice was dispensed, and if it was, it was never committed to writing, let alone published for all to read. Joy did so many job seekers a basic service in writing that guide—not least, demystification—and recently, by updating it somewhat. Indeed, she and one of my own professors at Columbia, Prof. Joe Howley, recently engaged in a very productive two-part discussion, with Prof. Nandini Pandey moderating, about the job market at the height of the pandemic, as job after job was cancelled and many an offer was rescinded.

 But I would say that my experience as an ancient historian sometimes differed quite a bit from what Joy’s handbook described, not least in terms of typical interview and campus visit questions. Yet what these interview questions do reveal, to some extent, is how the divide between History and Classics—and one of the other homes of Classics: World Languages and Literatures or Comparative Literature—is manifested in academic hiring.

Yet what these interview questions do reveal, to some extent, is how the divide between History and Classics—and the other homes of Classics: World Languages and Literatures or Comparative Literature—is manifested in academic hiring.  

It goes without saying that many classical archaeologists, as well as ancient historians trained in History departments, are often excluded from jobs in Classics departments because the price of admission to basic consideration is all too often one around perceived competencies or mastery of skills not essential to their research: Have you taught Latin and/or Greek at college level? Even for graduates whose programs required them to take Latin and Greek surveys, prose composition, and exams in these languages, many will be discounted, not because they don’t necessarily speak the same “language” which Prof. Dimitri Nakassis has so adeptly pointed out—but because they will never be seen as potentially competent enough to teach a language class they probably won’t ever have to teach, unless they’re in a very small Classics department (sidebar: this is a real concern for that kind of search committee—but also a concern that is born out of the very existence of such a department with needs dictated by its own strict disciplinary boundaries, rather than say having the philologists in a world/romance languages department, and the classical archaeologist in anthropology, art history or history).

 As a product of an interdepartmental PhD program in “Classical Studies”, and probably due to the nature of my own interests and dissertation, I ended up becoming something of an ancient historian of all trades: (ancient) history is my core discipline, but I also practice real philology and art history (each of which I have published on), and I have also excavated (and now I’m in the process of collaborating on a new dig). I also draw on critical theory quite a bit for my book project. The net result: I interviewed at some very different departments and universities before I ended up where I am now (a History department on a campus without a Classics department or program).

Now, my experience isn’t likely all that typical, but it might be more in line with others who straddle these sub-disciplinary divides in Classics and disciplinary distinctions in universities more generally. Whatever the case, it did mean that I had to face some very different search committees with very different questions, which I think reflects how different disciplines and departments think about themselves, “classicists”, “ancient historians” and “historians”. So, even though it may be taboo (and I really don’t think it should be!) to do so, I’m going to list the questions I was asked according to department/discipline, and also provide some information about the universities involved, without identifying them.

 Some qualifications:

• I did not interview at any place that might be considered a (Small) Liberal Arts College ([S]LAC)—not that there were actually (m)any jobs in Roman history at those types of schools when I was on the market in the 2018/19 and 2019/2020 cycles (and not that I would’ve necessarily been interviewed there, if there were jobs at such places in those years, of course!).  

• Most of my interviews went for 45-50 minutes, with the longest two at a whopping 75 and 90 minutes respectively.

• How do I have all of these questions in writing, you ask? After each interview I would write down all of the questions the committee had asked me (and I asked them)—if I could remember them—so as to help me remember what we had covered should I actually be asked to go on to the next stage.

 Hopefully this might shed a little bit of light on the disciplinary and departmental divides I and others have been discussing, but also just offer a supplement to Joy’s helpful—but incomplete—advice to grads on the market. Perhaps it will inspire others to share their experiences and knowledge, too—my experience is only the sum of two years on the job market, 11 tenure-track interviews and 3 campus visits (as well as one VAP interview). It’s a tiny slice of experience at best, and very particular to me at worst.

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 Classics Departments (5 departments)—looking for a Latinist/Roman Historian (sometimes with material culture):

These were all major R1 public and private universities.

* unusually progressive department which also had a grad student on the committee—kudos to them! Compare this to one department which did not ask me about teaching at all and only asked about my research, writing sample, and random authors (like an oral exam).

• How would you teach a graduate seminar in Roman topography?

• How would you teach Latin in our distance learning program? (this was asked pre-Covid)

• How do you introduce your students to theories of performativity? What are some specific class activities where you do this?

• How would you run our MAT Latin program and run outreach efforts to Latin teachers?

• How would you teach elementary Latin? Techniques for reaching students who don’t usually take languages? (x2)

• How would you teach Roman civ/history? Further upper level classes on Roman history?

• What would you teach as a “blockbuster” first year civ course to help ramp up our enrollments (100-400 students)? (x2)

• How would you teach the Latin Literature survey for grads/undergrads?

• What grad survey would you teach for our Comp Lit grads who don’t have Greek and Latin? (from the Comp Lit & Classics department)

• How would you grow our majors? (x2)

• Your research – how does it make interventions in both Classics and other fields?*

• How much material culture is involved in your research?*

• How would your next project relate to a graduate seminar?*

• How would you collaborate on conferences and co-teach courses with other faculty? With which faculty?*

• Classics “in transition” (relates to debates about race, representation, social justice, decolonizing Classics) – how would you help the department and graduate students with this transition?*

• What is one question you wanted us to ask you, but we didn’t?*

  Note: despite the above questions, the majority of the interview time in all of the above interviews was devoted to questions about my research, my dissertation/book project and, in some cases, my “second project” was discussed more than my actual dissertation/book project.

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History* Departments (6 departments)—looking for an Ancient Historian:

These ranged from major R1 public and private universities to mid-sized private universities to rural and urban satellite campuses of R1 public university systems.

 *two of these were combined History and Art History departments.

• What digital initiatives would you use in your teaching and research? How would the digital mapping contribute to your research projects in a meaningful way?

• What kinds of comparative aspects of youth have you looked at, i.e. across different cultures?

• How would you teach comparative history (ancient / more recent; or different ancient cultures)?

• What would I do to attract more History majors?

• How would you teach a survey on ancient Greece or Rome?

• What’s hot right now in your field? How does your work fit into it?

• How would you teach our “World to 1500 CE” course? And how would you engage students within that course? (x2)

• How do/would you teach historical thinking / historical methodology course for majors? (x3)

• How would you teach our “Craft of History” graduate seminar on historiography (mostly non-ancient)? (x2)

• How would you engage our diverse students and promote diversity initiatives in the university? How would you address diversity in the classroom? (x3)

• Is your dissertation/book project cultural or social history? How does it make interventions within the historiography?

• What are the major trends in Roman studies / ancient history right now?

• How you would teach upper-level Roman history?

• How would you teach our broad “Ancient Mediterranean” course?

• Dream course? (everywhere basically asked this)

• How would you make connections to other parts/centers of the university?

• Tell us about your educational journey [as in from high school to today!]

• What is the nature of propaganda in the ancient world?

• How did masculinity work in ancient Rome?

• How does material culture figure in your work?

• Could you teach a class on ancient Egypt? [My answer: No—not unless it’s Ptolemaic and Roman-era Egypt]

  Note: in nearly all of the above interviews, my research was asked about for far less of the interview time than in Classics interviews, or if it was asked about, it was from a genuine place of curiosity and/or ignorance. My “second project” was never asked about. The majority of interviewers had little or no expertise in ancient history; at most, I had one Egyptologist and one late antique historian in the room (and they were in different interviews).

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Taking stock of the raw questions above, it seems like many of them are predictable. Classics asks about teaching Latin, then Roman history, but rarely about historiography (outside of one’s own narrow topic) or DEI efforts (only one department asked about diversity—and not in the same way that History departments asked about it, as though it were par for the course). History asks about teaching methodological/historiography courses for Majors, as well as broad, large survey classes—World History—which are their bread and butter, but which also means covering an enormous time span, from pre-history to the medieval period. (Some of the questions were specific to my research and I have omitted others that were even more specific to my dissertation/book project.)

Classics asks about teaching Latin, then Roman history, but rarely about historiography (outside of one’s own narrow topic) or DEI efforts (only one department asked about diversity—and not in the same way that History departments asked about it, as though it were par for the course). History asks about teaching methodological/historiography courses for Majors, as well as broad, large survey classes—World History—which are their bread and butter, but which also means covering an enormous time span, from pre-history to the medieval period.

As I then went onto a few campus visits, the distinctions laid out above, between History, Classics and Comparative Literature, came to the fore even more so, as I had to engage with faculty in conversation all day, for multiple days—in some cases from breakfast at 8am until dinner/drinks until 10pm or so. This did in one case often follow the reliable contours of ancient history or Classics, but in other visits my conversations also spanned everything from critical theory or Cervantes to broader histories of race, immigration and slavery. There were definitely times when I felt out of my comfort zone.

 There were definitely times when I felt out of my comfort zone.

But there were also times when I realized that the one historiography proseminar I had taken with all of the non-ancient historians (mostly historians of early/modern USA, but also some of East Asia or the Ottoman empire) in the History department at Columbia (co-taught by Pamela Smith and Gregory Mann), and the friends I had made there, and the informal conversations we then subsequently had years later—all of this had actually really helped me understand how “History” worked in US History departments and it gave me a grammar and something of a foundation to communicate with them. And this was more than just learning how their “archive” is different from our own. But my own PhD program had to petition the History department to get me into that proseminar, and had they not, then I might be a very different type of “ancient historian” today.

 So, if ancient historians are not being trained in a History department (increasingly the case!), then their DGS would do well to make sure that they get some exposure to the methodology or historiography seminars taken by non-ancient historians. By the same token, philologists would probably (and some already do this!) do well to take some seminars in Comparative Literature or critical theory—as common as that might sound, I don’t think many philologists always do this, simply because their PhD coursework requirements and exams don’t allow for it. Of course, this exhortation can and should be expanded to other fields, not least Africana/ African American / Black Studies or MESAS. While changes need to be made to undergraduate curricula in Classics, they should also be made at the graduate level.

 In terms of ancient history, since most of the PhD granting institutions which produce ancient history PhDs do not usually even offer broad “World History” or “Western Civ” classes, and so these graduate programs should start to re-think how they train their ancient historians to branch out beyond their narrow stretch of expertise. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Yet perhaps this is one area where the borders of “ancient” history (within “Classics”) might need to be exploded, or at the bare minimum, reconfigured and expanded.

Reflections on a Year (and some) of Pandemic Teaching

It’s been more than a year since I last posted on here about teaching and which pedagogical strategies and activities I’ve found most useful and well received by my students. After a year of teaching from our homes and staring into the sometimes very dark abyss of black Zoom squares, I think we’ve all learned some valuable lessons, but there are also many things we will be glad to leave behind. After decompressing a bit from the Spring semester and looking at my student evaluations (as problematic as these are—I do value the comments), I thought it might be worthwhile to reflect on what I found could work in the future, back-to-campus semester. I’ve also taught at two different institutions during this time—going from teaching as a contingent faculty member in a Classics Department (at Georgetown) to a tenure-track faculty member in a History Department and on a campus which has no Classics Department (or program). Where I am now, there is no Latin or Greek outside of independent studies. So this is a campus which represents in many ways the inevitable “Post-Classics Future” (as I call it) that many campuses may encounter in the years and decades to come (more on that in another post, coming soon!).

So while there’s so much I could write about, like last time, I’m going to limit myself to four takeaways from this past year of pandemic teaching:

Road Testing a New Course:

Migration and Mobility in the Roman Empire

For Spring 2020, and as part of a grant I received for diversity enhancement of the curriculum from the Doyle Seminar Program, I created a new course from scratch on migration and mobility—and many associated issues—in the Roman Empire. The Doyle Seminar allowed me to take students on one (of two, planned) trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, along with my colleague Professor Jennifer Boum Make’s French class on Caribbean Xings 20-21st Centuries. You can find an annotated version of the syllabus here. By annotated, I mean a version in which I’ve commented on what worked and crossed out things I didn’t end up getting my students to do or read (or wouldn’t get them to read again), or what I changed due to the pandemic. I’ve also tried to add links to as many of the readings as possible. I think this is something we should all be willing to do and is helpful for colleagues, since no class is perfect and nor is any syllabus (eventually I’ll get around to doing this for my other courses). There are always elements that didn’t work, readings that fell flat or were received in odd ways. So I hope this is of some use to you, dear reader.

Due to the pandemic, some elements of the class went online: Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta was scheduled to come visit the last class of the semester in person, but of course, this became a virtual visit—no less powerful. This virtual format also allowed me to invite, last minute, to my class a friend and my co-editor in a volume on Displacement and the Humanities, and arguably one of the leading experts on migration and mobility in the Roman world: Professor Elena Isayev—indeed parts of her class on a similar topic informed my own (see below). This proved to be very fruitful too, as we were able to have a dialogue with her about her work on Livy’s speech of Camillus. I hope that we can keep these virtual “guest” visits in years to come.

At the core of the class were two key components which I think “made” the class what it is—in addition to an overarching dialogue in the weekly readings between the “ancient” phenomenon and a more modern or contemporary, possible instantiation of that phenomenon (echoing what we are trying to achieve in the Displacement volume mentioned above):

1)    The Collective Dictionary Project:

Here I adapted an assignment designed by Professor Elena Isayev. She had her class work with Campus in Camps to produce a “collective dictionary” entry on the word Xenia. My class, through a brainstorming and discussion session, decided on a their own topic which they would produce entries for in groups of 3-4 students: the “Roman Dream”, where they essentially asked: Did an idea similar to the “American Dream”, sometimes sought after or envisioned by (im)migrants to the USA, exist in the ancient Roman world?

How did this go? Well, due to the pandemic, we weren’t able to produce one cohesive collection of entries, and I expanded the medium to allow for videos, timelines and slideshows. One group, which looked at the connection between colonization (Roman and American settler colonization) and the “Roman Dream”, produced a visual and textual timeline using Sutori.

Another group created a YouTube video, including reflections on their own family’s immigrant stories. While I must stress that none of these are “perfect”, I was really impressed by the different directions and media my students chose—and that they managed to do so when the world in a state of huge upheaval. (Note: this was only half of the project, the other half involved each student writing a critical essay on the “Roman Dream”). I imagine that when I next teach a version of this class (expanded to Immigration in the Ancient World for Spring 2022) I will find very different (but also, similar) perspectives among my Rutgers students.

2)    Reading Vergil’s Aeneid alongside Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented

I took a real risk and decided to pair two books alongside each other, the Aeneid, and Padilla Peralta’s autobiographical account of his own immigration odyssey, Undocumented. My hope was that by reading them together, that Undocumented might throw into stark contrast the so-called “refugee narrative” of Aeneas and the problems inherent with that type of analysis. This couldn’t have been a better choice. My students had to read these texts throughout the semester and write four blog posts comparing them at different pit-stops along the way (we would also discuss different books/chapters from the two texts in class too). This approach threw up new questions, points of similarity and divergence, every time a blog post was due and made me re-think the way I read the Aeneid too. In the final class meetings of the semester, all students had to read each other’s blog posts and we focused first on the Aeneid and then Undocumented and how the experience of one was informed by the reading of the other/Other, and vice versa. We also had the real treat of having Dan-el visit us in our final class where my students got a preview of his work on epistemicide and how the Aeneid is implicated in that Roman project. Thanks, again, Dan-el!

One thing I want to improve in this class: finding accessible, less jargon laden, readings about contemporary displacement and immigration issues. You’ll see in the syllabus that I crossed out a few of these—they were just not that accessible in the end.

Rise of Rome: Podcasting Roman Deaths!

Augustus’ death by Matthew Sawyer, Alison Stabeno, Daniel Rothamel, Oliver Sapon and Giordan Stafford.

Antinous’ death by Marcia Baker, Cassius Blankenship and Stephanie Emmerson.

Inspired by a friend in English (former Prof. Andy Crow at Boston College), who created a podcast assignment for their American Crime Stories class, I decided to adapt their creative task for my Rutgers Rise of Rome class. Similar to a “whodunnit?” premise, I asked my students to create a podcast episode investigating the death of a famous or lesser-known person from Roman history, focusing especially on the source problems surrounding the death and related events, the legacy of their death and its wider historical significance. They had to submit a draft script, complete with footnotes/citations and bibliography, and then a few weeks later, after incorporating my feedback, they presented their final product in our last class for the semester. Some of them took the humorous route (Tarpeia and Augustus), others were more serious (Antinous and Nero), but all in all, again, I was impressed by the high standard of the presentations and the level of research that went into them. I have been given permission by my students below to show case some of the podcasts on the following Roman deaths: Antinous, Augustus, Nero and Tarpeia. (Other deaths covered included Hannibal, the Gracchi brothers, and Cleopatra). I hope you enjoy listening!

Of course, even amidst the amazing fruits of this assignment, there were some lessons learned. While I did encourage my students to interview outside, academic experts for their podcasts—none did end up doing this—I should send out a warning to fellow teachers who might try this assignment out: beware of podcasters who might “volunteer” their services as, say, a narrator. I encountered this unfortunately with one group, whose podcast was dominated by the voice of Spencer Klavan, the host of a right-wing political podcast which offers inaccurate takes on ancient history and antiquity more generally, called Young Heretics. On top of this, as an Oxford educated classicist, he should have known better than to interfere in the class of a colleague—and to advertise his own podcast through a student project (he added his own plug at the end of the podcast).

Things which worked again–and again

If you look back to my teaching roundup from Fall 2019, I can say that certain activities and assignments have been successfully used again, including digital mapping tasks (now a regular part of my take-home exams), using the Georgetown Slavery Archive in a comparative history of slavery exercise (and now I plan on using the Rutgers Scarlet and Black project for which my colleague Prof. Kendra Boyd is a co-editor), and last but not least, the Roman persona semester-long assignment.

What my students told me worked–and what didn’t

I don’t always think student evaluations are a bad thing, at least in terms of the comments section—even though research shows that they are heavily biased against women, LGBTQ+ folk (so, myself included) and people of color. I do walk my students through what a good evaluation is and encourage them to be honest, but constructive—and that’s what I usually receive (but I’m also a white cis man, so that likely shields me from the type of discriminatory criticisms many others receive). The most frequent suggestion for improvement is always: less reading. I did scale back my readings: note I modified the readings here somewhat from the schedule listed and hope to post an annotated version soon to reflect that; visual material was presented in the class lectures), and I will continue to do this next year.

Other pieces of feedback are clearly more down to student preference for more lecture-based classroom (less breakout groups!), or an even more participatory, active-classroom (I love breakout groups!). I try to strike a balance between the two. Anyway, none of these comments were really that new. But students did appreciate a few new things:

• Guest virtual lectures (in class or outside of class for extra credit). For instance, I had Professor Kathryn Welch from Sydney and Tyla Cascaes (PhD candidate at University of Queensland) come in to talk to my Cleopatra class on topics such as Shakespeare and his sources, or Caesar and Cleopatra in films from the 1940s-60s. I allowed my Rise of Rome students to attend, too, for extra credit and many showed up and reported how special it felt to have that opportunity to hear from experts—and ones in Australia at that.

• Students clearly appreciated the array of assignments and the potential to express their creativity. Multi-modal assessment is something I’ve done for a while and I’m definitely sticking with it.

Course evaluation comment from HIST 380, Rise of Rome, Spring 2021

• Students, above all else, appreciated the fact that I got rid of late penalties, and although I had an extension policy, if they asked for further extensions, so long as I had enough time to grade their work and provide real feedback before the submission of grades deadline, then I would grant them that. And it really didn’t become a problem: the students who weren’t ever going to submit the work never did, but for those who really needed it, it made all the difference. Ultimately, it meant that my students were less stressed (and so had better mental health in an already trying time), and so was I.

Course evaluation comment from HIST 380, Rise of Rome, Spring 2021

I’m also going to keep Zoom office hours (held at the same time or a different time to in-person, I haven’t decided)—especially since most of my students commute to campus and work full time jobs, they need that flexibility.

Teaching Roundup: Georgetown, Fall 2019

As anyone who has suddenly started teaching three classes a semester will know, it is a big adjustment—a baptism of fire—but also an exciting time. Exciting, because it is a chance to experiment with new teaching methods and activities, a new syllabus, or a whole new course. Pedagogy is something that I also think is integral to being an excellent scholar—how many times have your students inspired a new approach to an old question? A new reading? It’s already happened to me—and has rightly become an increasing part of our scholarly community, especially in spaces such as this (a blog) and academic Twitter. So, with a view to sharing some of the success stories from the semester that you might want to adopt or adapt to your own courses, here is a rundown of what seems to have worked best– my top four:

Roman Persona —an identity-empathy challenge

Inspired by Amy Richlin’s (2013) article on role-playing in her Roman civilization classes, I adopted her template and made an individual “persona” for each student. Most of these descriptions were only a few lines long, but provided enough information for students to build on throughout the semester. Their persona came into play for a pre-circulated questionnaire they had to fill out for the Midterm exam, along with the construction of their own Roman name. In class, I often called upon students with specific identities to illustrate certain aspects of Roman society (such as having them sit in seats that reflect the stratified nature of seating in the Roman theater), or to role-play specific historical events from the perspective of their identity. In one part of the Final, they had to write about a major historical development (e.g. Caracalla’s citizenship edict in 212 CE) and how it would have impacted them, as well as composing an epitaph for their persona—thus bringing the class to an end! Since the personas were assigned at random in the first class–a great icebreaker is to have students read out their persona blurb to the class–they were often assigned a persona that resembled nothing like their own contemporary selves (especially in terms of gender, socio-economic status, etc.). My students reported that they really enjoyed this aspect of the class—they had never encountered anything like it before and it gave them something to invest in within the course that was individual to them; they had to truly think in another’s shoes (or sandals).

Digital Mapping of the Roman Empire

The map task is a mainstay of every Roman history exam. “Know your geography!”, we tell our students. To be sure, I did use one of these hard-copy map tasks in the Midterm, but then I came across Dr. Hannah Čulík-Baird’s (Boston University) Digital Tools page and saw how she had used a digital mapping task in her Cicero class. I decided to road-test this in a class day on Roman travel and trade, and assign the completion of the task for homework: they mapped trade and travel itineraries ranging from St. Paul’s journey to Rome to the pepper trade route from Alexandria to Muziris, India—also using the Stanford ORBIS project to calculate the cost of that travel, where possible. The students liked it so much and did such a great job that I integrated it into their take-home final exam, where they had to research some of the places from Hadrian’s travels around the empire and plot them on a Google Map, using coordinates and references gained from Pleiades and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire, including information about what evidence we have for Hadrian’s presence in their chosen town or city.

You can see some of the results below!

One student’s digital map. Note that the connecting lines do not indicate the route of Hadrian’s itinerary. Students had to find two facts about each place they chose (they chose seven places) and find references in either ancient sources or modern scholarship to evidence these facts. None of these were absolutely perfect, but I was impressed by the research my students did and especially those that tried to find specific evidence for Hadrian’s presence at a place, e.g. the speech Hadrian have at Lambaesis.

Breaking out of the Essay Paradigm

We love our essays in Classics and Ancient History. They’re our bread and butter. But they also privilege certain students and, sometimes, stifle creative historical thought. Some of the best analyses of the Roman world that I saw this semester came out of unconventional media or genres of writing. For one week’s source analysis task, my students were asked to recreate 24 hours in the life of the prefect Flavius Cerialis and his wife Sulpicia Lepidina at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall, but to do so by writing in a dialogue form (between husband and wife at dinner) or as a letter (e.g. Lepidina to one of her friends), all the while referencing each part of the text with footnotes that anchored the text in the Vindolanda letters, which continue to be such a great digital resource, thanks to Oxford. In the Final, some students opted to write their Roman persona essay in the genre of a letter, for example a senator to his enslaved secretary, explaining the effect of the Augustan manumission laws. Freed of the boundaries imposed by the topic sentence and other (sometimes dull) hallmarks of the essay genre, my students engaged with the question in novel and much more meaningful ways.

In another class (Age of Augustus), I gave students the option of creating their final project in non-essay form. Only one decided to do this and he did so by creating a 3D model and tour of an Augustan colony in Minecraft, as well as writing a “manual” that explained his choices—as well as the limitations of using the program. He also walked me through the model in person (it is like a first person RPG computer game) and explained every single building, acknowledging issues, too (e.g. the need to allow for more room in plotting a grid plan, or allowing for a more expansive Forum). You can view a tour of his colony below—it’s pretty neat! I especially thought the sacrificial bull and altar were a nice touch! (All credit to my student Christopher Ziac for agreeing to share this here).

Connecting to the History of the Campus

For the class on slavery and emancipation in my Roman history survey, I decided to have my students compare select documents from the Georgetown Slavery Archive to documents they had already read for that class about Roman slavery and manumission. The exercise allowed them to think about the experience, institution, and legacy of slavery on their own campus in a new way, as they tried to connect or disconnect the experiences of Roman enslaved persons with those who had helped build and run Georgetown University. It was a sobering exercise and one that elicited much surprise from some students when they saw the similarities between the notices for runaway slaves side by side (see below).

BONUS: An extra credit task that had me feeling a beat and a lyric

For my Age of Augustus class, my students also had the option of representing Octavian’s network, or key players in his circle, for the years 44-29 BCE for extra credit. One student, Ciara O’Neill (permission granted to post this here), took this to a creative height by putting together a mixtape with songs chosen—and lyrics singled out—for each person. Check out the Spotify playlist here and the playlist here with lyrics. In addition to finding very suitable songs, she has great taste in music and advised me that, in choosing the songs, she tried to find middle ground between our different generations. Thanks, Ciara!

Roman Youth and the Fascist Youth of Mussolini's Italy

When I was living in Rome this past academic year (finishing my dissertation—which meant I haven’t posted on here as much as I would have liked!), I’d often walk past a striking fascist era building on the Via di Porta Portese. Along the flank of the graffitied building I’d often find myself waiting for one of those Roman ATAC buses that may or may not ever come (or catch on fire!). I’d noticed the building years ago, but only this year did I venture inside (they had a photo exhibition documenting the murder of Pasolini to boot!). Now called WEGIL, a multi-purpose community arts center, the building was once known as the Casa della Gioventù Italiana del Litorio (GIL). Inaugurated in 1937 and designed by the architect Luigi Moretti, the building is a modernist aesthetic feast for the architectural nerds out there (including myself), who are attracted to the strong geometrical lines, the rich use of materials (marbles inside, as well as the tell tale travertine), and what is just a prime example of Italian rationalist, fascist architecture.

But, wait, “you’re a fan of fascist architecture?!”, you say? Yes, the modernist aesthetics do appeal to me. Clean lines, geometric shapes, spiral staircases—I can’t help but like that. Fascist architecture in many ways adopted broader currents in modernist architecture emerging in the early 20th century. Yet I am entirely aware of the mixed feelings a building like this evokes in myself and many others—“why do I like this type of architecture, of all that’s out there?”. It’s a debate that is going on in Italy, too: Should these buildings be preserved at all? Torn down? The responses have been varying. This uneasy feeling of being torn about a building and its purpose hits home even more so in terms of the WEGIL building in Trastevere, which is directly relevant to my own research, since it housed the fascist youth organization, originally known as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (from 1926), which then became home to the next (and final) incarnation of that group, the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio in 1937. Membership in the group was a prerequisite for any future in the Fascist party and all other youth groups were outlawed (e.g. the Catholic one).

I was also drawn to this building, and others like it, because my own research on Roman youth has forced me to come to grips with the legacy of Italian fascism even more so because of the imprint it has left on some of the scholarship written on ancient Roman youth.

More on that in a moment.

***

A few months ago, walking and talking with an Italian friend, I was intrigued to learn that his grandmother had also experienced a far more direct version of this guilt provoked by an aesthetic appreciation of fascism’s clever orchestration of not only architecture, but mass political pageantry. As a girl she had participated as one of the 20,000 from the GIL (the youth organization) in the elaborate spectacle put on for Mussolini’s state visit to Verona in December 1938. One part of this visit culminated in a spectacle at the Roman arena, now used to stage operas and the like over the summer. The youth were arranged and dressed in black and white so as to spell the word DUX in the arena’s seating (Mussolini was known by this, or the Italian “Il Duce”). At the time, my friend’s grandmother remembered being swept up in the moment of communal fervour and that visual feat, not knowing what she was actually participating in. Years later, having become a staunch socialist, she would tell my friend, her grandson, of her mixed feelings about that happy memory—how it was (not too much later) soured by the knowledge that it had all been in the service of a sinister man and ideology. This is the experiential legacy of the fascist youth organization—something that my aesthetic dilemma can never approach.

The official state visit of Mussolini to Verona in December 1938. The Roman arena. Photo: Wikicommons.

Unlike my friend’s grandmother, however, I have to acknowledge how I am unburdened by those experiences of the 20th century in many ways—though by no means entirely free of them. (I don’t think anyone is). I can much more readily separate my aesthetic appreciation of fascist architecture from the ideological work it did at that time with the benefit of hindsight, as well as a measure of generational and geographical distance. So while living in Rome, I came to notice, and slowly compile, some of the ways that the Italian fascist ideology drew upon the exempla of ancient Rome in relation to the propagation of its ideology among “the youth”, but also how this fed back into our historical understanding of ancient Rome and its own youth (iuventus).

***

In 1924, Matteo Della Corte, one of the foundational scholars who worked on Pompeii and recorded much of its epigraphic material for posterity, published a brief, yet influential monograph, Iuventus. The book brought together a lot of different evidence—painted electoral advertisements (programmata), statues, graffiti, formal inscriptions, buildings and spaces purportedly used by the youth and more—all with a view to arguing that Pompeii had the earliest example of a collegium or sodalicium iuventutis—a professional association for youths. Firmly attested evidence for such groups really doesn’t come onto the scene until the late 1st century CE (at best), and really only takes off at the beginning of the 2nd century CE. This is not the place for me to go through the problems with his argument and evidence in depth (I’ll save that for an article I’m working on), but suffice to say that Della Corte was very liberal in his reading of much of the evidence, especially the painted electoral programmata and some inscriptions. He regularly drew upon the programmata in particular to make his case, like the one below, in which a group known as the Veneriosi (worshippers of Venus) support a Ceius Secundus iuvenis (“young man”) in his candidacy for the local office of duovir iure dicundo.

Bottom left corner, CIL IV.7791: Ceium Secundum IIv(irum) i(ure) d(icundo) / Veneriosi rog(ant) iuvenem. Photo: Clauss / Slaby.

Where electoral advertisements like the one above would acclaim certain candidates standing for the aedileship as a iuvenis or adulescens (often with a positive attribute tacked on in adjectival form—another thing for another time!), Della Corte saw any reference in them to a candidate as a “youth” as a reference to his membership in a so-called youth association. The singular stood for an envisaged whole. In one case, Della Corte interpreted an honorific inscription for Marcellus (CIL X.832), the nephew of Augustus, which clearly names him as the patron (patronus) of Pompeii, and argued that it might actually refer to Marcellus as the patronus of the youth (patronus iuventutis) because the inscription does not specify who or what he was the patron of (most rightly assume the colony of Pompeii: patronus coloniae) and because it was found near both a gymnasium and a statue of the Doryphorus (pictured on the book cover, above)—the oft-cited physical ideal of male youth (though we should remember that Pliny the Elder assigns the statue the ambiguous quality of being viriliter puer: a manly boy). There is more to the argument, but it rapidly becomes circular—buttressing his book’s overall claim about the existence of such a youth association almost a century before we have any hard evidence for one.

But, why does Della Corte matter? You might reasonably ask—haven’t we moved on from work done in 1924? Yes, in some ways, we have. More recent editors of our go-to corpus of epigraphic material for Pompeii (CIL IV) have curtly and correctly dismissed his claims, even if his interpretation of some spaces, such as the Triangular Forum, as youth-related spaces, still holds sway among some scholars of Pompeii today. Even more than this, Della Corte’s book has a bearing on our understanding of Pompeii and its historiography as a key site in the fascist state’s ideological education (or interpellation to borrow Althusser’s framework) of the Italian “youth” under Mussolini. Although his book was published two years before the first fascist youth group would be created in 1926, Iuventus soon became influential among his fellow scholars, such as Amedeo Maiuri, and Della Corte himself was a fascist fanatic who was keen to report his colleagues to the fascist authorities.

Ray Laurence has shown how Della Corte’s work on the iuventus and especially the discovery of the Grand Palaestra fuelled the fascist obsession with the revival of the Roman past and its heritage in the present—romanità—and the drawing of parallels between the youth of the day and the ancient Roman youth, even down to their exercise spaces. Pamphlets about the Opera Balilla, the early youth organization, showcase this building of equivalences between ancient Rome and fascist Italy. In a 1937 pamphlet, Edmondo Raspa looked to both ancient Greece and Rome for educational antecedents to the Balilla, focusing on the militaristic aspects of training for the youth (even claiming that Sulla invented one such festival involving horseback riding, perhaps alluding to the lusus Troiae). Even more interesting is another pamphlet, written in English and clearly intended for audiences beyond Italy, which explains (or rather, celebrates) the various activities that the Opera Balilla undertake at their “colonies”, from sailing to sunbathing. Photos (below) show the youths at work in woodworking and moulding—noticeably, however, the models they are copying are pieces of classical architecture.

The (anonymous) author of the English pamphlet also explains how the structure of the Balilla is “framed according to the classic ternary formation of the armies of ancient Rome…”, that is, squadrons, maniples, centuries, cohorts and legions. A distinct contrast is even drawn with ancient Sparta: “education which in Sparta was merely crude, severe and cold, becomes on the contrary strong, orderly and graceful in Italy.” That Rome is the example par excellence is further driven home when the author describes a trip that 1000 Italian youths took to Libya in 1925 to inspect the territory and “learned how on the African coast Fascist Italy closely follows the track of the Roman eagles”. It is no coincidence that the WEGIL building in Trastevere (see photos above) sports a giant map of the fascist empire in Africa, but here we see some of the beginnings of that.

Looking back to that building in Trastevere, it is also revealing how some remnants of romanità, designed specifically for the youth, remain to tell a specific story about what parts of ancient Rome were appropriate for the youth. Six busts in relief adorn the walls inside the main hall—clearly chosen with the intent to represent the most positively evaluated emperors (or rather, more correctly, imperatores): Julius Caesar, Augustus, Vespasian (as Flavio), Marcus Aurelius, Claudius (odd order!), and Trajan. These were the models for the fascist youth.

Musket ceremony for new conscripts. From the English pamphlet.

Much of my own research looks at coming of age rites in ancient Rome, especially for young men, and so I was also intrigued to find that the author of the English pamphlet even made an equivalence between the young man’s exchange of the toga praetexta for the toga virilis with the young fascist’s receipt of their first musket: “The youthful conscripts of the Fascist Revolution receive the musket in the same spirit with which the youths of ancient Rome for the first time donned the toga of virility.”

One day I also paid a visit to the infamous Foro Italico, which is filled with an array of visual instantiations of romanità, not least its monochromatic mosaics which recall those found at Ostia and many other archaeological sites (such as the Villa Adriana where I’ve excavated in the past). One mosaic, on the way to the stadium, announces to Mussolini, “Duce, we dedicate our youth to you!”, featuring a youth with a horse, and nearby two athletic youths seemingly engaged in shot-put and the pole vault.

Foro Italico mosaic.

But what really caught my eye were the statues of athletic young men, cast as different types of athletes, which surround the stadium and represent the different towns in Italy. Viterbo’s statue of a boxer (from 1931) stood out in particular for the sculpted sideburns that the sculptor decided to include on the portrait—sideburns that very closely resemble those found on the portraiture of young male members of the Julio-Claudian family, likely to commemorate the performance of their first ritual shave (depositio barbae) and so signal their maturation and virility. The hairstyle and square, severe, facial features especially resemble the portraits of Germanicus and his sons. Now the sculptor, Silvio Canevari, may not have consciously chosen to imitate these features of Roman portraiture, but he may well have inadvertently done so.

Statue of a boxer, representing Viterbo. Silvio Canevari (1931). Foro Italico.

In 1937, the Mostra Augustea della Romanità, which celebrated the bimillenary of Augustus’ birth, symbolized the pinnacle of the fascist appropriation of ancient Rome. The exhibition and its catalogue has been well studied, but in terms of Roman youth, here too we find that equivalences were made that go back to Della Corte’s Iuventus. In a short book designed to accompany the exhibition, Le Associazioni Giovanili, Salvatore Puglisi unabashedly went through the history of Roman youth groups (even up to the emperor Constantine as princeps iuventutis!) and drew connections between ancient and fascist youth groups. In his preface, the connection is made explicit, but in a less than expected way:

In the study of antiquity and of Roman institutions, [the youth orgnaization] was generally considered, until now, a curiosity, a particular and isolated custom, without an apparent or direct relationship to the spirit of the civilization of Rome. But today, now that Fascism has placed the political and military education of the young generations at the heart of the power and continuity of the state, the ancient Roman institution of the Iuventus is illuminated in a new light, [and] it fits in with the much greater evidence in the life and history of the Roman Empire.

In Puglisi’s telling, then, only the contemporary triumph of fascist ideology and its interest in youth organizations made the ancient equivalent intelligible, rather than vice versa. By 1937, it seems, the fascist ideology had developed in such a way that the Roman past was not simply appropriated as an exemplum for that ideology, but rather, one of its claims now asserted that this exemplarity could have only been discovered, realised and articulated precisely because of that fascist ideology. Fascism had made the study of ancient Roman youth “relevant” again—lifted out of the academic shadows—just as that study serviced the needs of its new ideological champion.

Puglisi’s main source for his bold thesis? Among older works: Della Corte’s Iuventus. So while we are reliant on much of Della Corte’s work as an epigrapher for our understanding of Pompeii and its houses (his Case ed abitanti di Pompei is still important), we would do well to remember—in our scholarship and, perhaps even more so in our teaching—how Pompeii and its iuvenes were pushed into the service of fascist ideology and to justify the performances that many a youth was required to participate in—like my friend’s grandmother’s experience at the Roman arena of Verona in 1938.

Ovidio at the Scuderie del Quirinale [Review]

After a long hiatus, and with a backlog of posts—necessarily suspended since the dissertation reigns supreme—I’m starting to get back to this, beginning with what is most fresh in my mind. Yesterday I got out of the house and made my way up to the fantastic exhibition space that is the Scuderie del Quirinale (being the former papal stables, it has retained some of those features —especially the lovely, if dangerous, travertine sloping staircase up to the first floor). The arrival of a friend from New York, who will be spending several years here as a postdoc, and the impending closing date of the exhibition (January 20!) all gave me a good reason to go. And, well, it’s Ovid! Having seen a fantastic Frida Kahlo exhibition here a few years ago, I also had some expectations, in terms of curatorship and the quality of the show overall. Since most of these expectations were not met, I’ve decided to attempt something of a review (compare this one)…

You enter the show, up those sloping, slippery steps and encounter a small round room within a larger square room. The small round room contains illuminated manuscripts and the surrounding square has quotations from Ovid (the Metamorphoses) on the walls in neon lights by the artist Joseph Kosuth (entitled Maxima Proposito (Ovidio)). The manuscripts were interesting, but the explanations were minimal—why start with these (beyond the stated aim: we need to thank the monks for copying down Ovid)? And what relation do they have to the neon quotes? To be sure, Kosuth wants us to think about the text in a very different way than the manuscript tradition would; and to the curator’s credit, that’s an interesting proposition. For Kosuth has created one line aphorisms out of lines of the text that largely were not aphorisms in the first place; he has made something new out of the text. Many of the quotes are from the middle of a longer passage or sentence, yet the decision to excise them ignores that entirely—stripping them of their contextual meaning—and the translations ignore linguistic clues to their original context, such as conjunctions, and as translations go (if they are meant to be that?), many are plainly wrong. Take for instance this half-line quotation from Met. 15.255: Sed variat faciemque novat reads as “All have changed appearance”. This quotation comes from a much longer section on natural philosophy, but the way it’s rendered gives us an entirely different impression—something about the unreliable nature of the people we know? Our lovers? Read into it what you will. (The majority of the quotes seem to relate to the notion of change/metamorphosis, but also love). The translation gives an “all” (implying people) when originally the third person singular refers back to a negated quicquam in the previous line—“nothing”; the “but” of sed is also omitted and somehow we’ve moved from the present to the pure perfect. Now, to be fair, we might approach these neon quotes and their inaccurate translations as an adaptation of Ovid, but the thing is—many of the other quotes, maybe half, have perfectly fine translations.

From above one thinks of the “O” in Ovid… maybe that was intentional.

This inconsistency creates a jarring effect, so much so that we were left wondering if this was deliberate: Is he playing with multiple audiences, and playing with those who know the Latin and the text? You’d expect Classicists to be drawn to an exhibition on Ovid, and knowing them, they’d nit-pick the translations, too. As an interview with another exhibitor of Kosuth’s Ovid piece explained, “For Kosuth, the viewer completes the work: this way, the viewer connects with the creative conceptualizing process of the artist, rather than experience an artwork as a fragment of history or a retinal form of entertainment … The viewer is invited to approach Ovid’s writings in this setting, through a different lens, ultimately working through the ‘new’ meaning created by both artist and audience.” Perhaps this is what is at work; the “new” translations and the creation of “new” aphorisms that did not exist in the original text. Maybe this was supposed to rub me the wrong way. Or maybe I’m giving Kosuth too much credit. Ultimately, it felt gimmicky—a great way to get traction on Instagram for an exhibition that needs to sell 15 euro tickets—and more importantly, empty of what Ovid was trying to communicate and empty of any real meaning that might resonate today. Does “dulce / sweet” —a one word red neon light, say much to you? Maybe it does.

But on a broader level, it wasn’t clear what the manuscript room had to do with the neon room—at least not explicitly (and then, only loosely in an implicit way if I’m being kind)—beyond serving as a clever visual/spatial pun on the first letter of his name. This first disconnection, or lack of direction (from the curator) is symptomatic of a larger problem I (and my friend—who works on 18th c. art) had with the whole show: the unexplained juxtaposition of ancient representations of the Ovidian text (or less directly, the myths he represented) with the reception of Ovid in later periods. Rarely does the show attempt to ask what reception is, or how it works specifically in the case of Ovid; why certain works are placed next to each other, or why some works were included at all. Frequently many of the pieces included—and many are stunning!—only had a tangential connection to Ovid: they depicted (roughly) the same mythological episode he had dealt with, or they represented some of the key players in his biography (e.g. portraits of Marcus Agrippa, the Juliae, Augustus… you get the picture). For example, the famous altar from the vicus sandaliarius is part of the exhibition, but beyond the fact that it depicts Augustus and other debated members of the family, there is no real reason why it should be here (and if you’re going to show it—let us see the back side and put some light on! It’s backed up against a wall and in the dark). Again, the stunning garden fresco from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii is worth a visit to the exhibition simply to see it up close—but in the exhibition it only seems to form a lovely background for the statues of Aphrodite Callipyge and Eros that sit, clumped in front of it. There is also a stunning, smaller statue of Aphrodite from Pompeii with a lot of surviving polychromy . Many frescoes from the Naples Archaeological Museum also offer a rare visual feast, especially since so many of them are not usually on show in the museum itself.

Most of these pieces are mustered, however, in the service of a simplistic roll call of the most famous stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Very little is said about his other works (e.g. Tristia, Ibis) and by the time you get to the second floor you begin to feel as though the show has become a free-for-all exposition of ancient myth and some of its later renditions. We encounter the Niobids, Actaeon, Narcissus, Icarus and Dedalus, Hermaphroditus, Daphne and Apollo, Marsyas, Zeus and Ganymede… and so forth. Each story gets at least one ancient representation, a short retelling of the myth, and often more than one medieval, renaissance, or later representation. Ostensibly the idea behind putting ancient and later pieces side by side was to create a dialogue between them. But without any real direction from the didactic panels (but for a few exceptions, e.g. how Narcissus was received in the medieval French poem, Le Roman de la rose—but even there we aren’t told why Narcissus was popular!), the viewer is left to figure that out for themselves. That task is hard—since very little information is given about the works themselves and many of the non-ancient works are from artists whose background is less known, such as a spectacular cycle of paintings in oils on copper plate from the artist Carlo Saraceni (1580-1620). Who was this guy? Why did he create such interesting compositions? Nada—you’ll have to look him up after the exhibition. But if you show five or six paintings by a single artist throughout a show, you’d expect to learn something about him and why he was engaging with Ovid. Beyond this type of explanatory content though, the main bone I have to pick with this approach of showing without telling is what it doesn’t achieve: We can see the “how” of Ovid’s reception (often very obvious), but the more important “why” is left unanswered in almost every case.

One particularly striking piece got me thinking about another, darker aspect of Ovid and Ovidio. The show features a statue in pentelic marble of Leda and the swan from the Venice archaeological museum. It’s an Hadrianic copy of a late 1st c. BCE statue (apparently—I need to look into this). The composition is particularly powerful and really communicates (the potential for its reception as) a moment of struggle, violation, desire, and fear—the outstretched arm of Leda on his neck, the talons of the swan on her skin. I was struck by how this composition might be received by viewers right now, especially women. Putting aside the technical aspects of the work, one might ask, what is the other arm/hand of Leda doing? Is she resisting? Is she experiencing trauma, pain, or pleasure? Are her eyes wide stricken with fear and shock, or pleasure? If this exhibition were shown in the US, it would need an entire overhaul.

Considering how fraught teaching Ovid has become in the trigger-warning / #metoo classroom (for a great treatment of rape in Ovid with links to more scholarship, see A. Everett Beek’s article and more specifically on Leda and the swan, see this Harvard student’s piece), this piece and many others open up issues that don’t seem to be considered at all in this show (or, perhaps, Italy). To begin with, the didactic panels (I can’t speak for the audio guide) don’t seem to deal with the issue of rape and consent in the ancient world and they merely describe Ovid’s women as “desired, raped, betrayed, abandoned, and finally, transformed into goddesses”. Nor is the reception of Ovid’s rape scenes in the art of later periods interrogated or analyzed (though none of the art ventures beyond the 18th century—a conscious choice?). Because museums and exhibitions perform a didactic role in society, much like the classical classroom, if you’re going to show Ovid’s many rape scenes and stories, then for the 21st century you really should begin to address that elephant in a thoughtful and engaged way. Instead, in this exhibition we are left with silence, a panoply of images of rape (and their continuous re-depiction and redeployment by [mostly] male artists for male patrons), and the possibility that these rapes could/should be just seen as “loves”. As my companion for the exhibition remarked on encountering a renaissance bedhead depicting all of the many rape scenes (and a few other stories) from Ovid, with Ganymede’s abduction in the central panel: “What on earth is this doing here without any explanation?”. A piece that may have functioned as a sinister source of ekphrasis for its owner (who knows?) or merely pillow-talk? Nonetheless, a critically aware version of ekphrasis is what this show so often lacked.

In short, if you have the chance, “go for the art, not the message”. I probably expected too much from this show—and too much from an Italian celebration of Ovid. Because that’s what it is in many ways. Ovidio is not Ovid for the 21st century we want to see (or should), but rather sadly, frustratingly and predictably, it is just another sign that the Ovid of previous centuries still survives today—unexplained, and, unquestioned.