New at LacusCurtius and Livius.Org

[Jona Lendering]

I've put online a very brief piece on the Aeolian Islands. Nothing terribly fascinating, unlike the next item, that RATs will appreciate more.

[Jona Lendering]

A piece on the Greek painter Protogenes, Plutarch's Demetrius Poliorcetes (cf. picture), and the Comparison of Demetrius and Marc Antony are now online at LacusCurtius.

[Jona Lendering]

And to prove that Bill is not the only one who is working hard, here are four pages with photos of the Arch of Septimius Severus in Leptis Magna. A strange monument, but quite interesting. There will be more stuff on Leptis soon.

[Jona Lendering]

I spent my Whitsun holiday putting online some photos and writing several pieces. First of all, there's more Lepcis Magna: a small piece on the Arch of Tiberius, an equally brief piece on the Arch of Trajan, both monuments along Lepcis' Cardo Maximus.

The last-mentioned piece contains two inscriptions: one is a dedication to "Augusta Salutaris", and I have no idea what kind of cult that may have been. I think it's something like Salus Augusti, but I would not be surprised if it were something like Jupiter Salutaris (=Zeus Soter), in which only the honorific title is used, and combined with a title that would have reminded everyone of the emperor. But why is it a nominative, not -as one would've expected in a dedication- a dative? The other inscription is to Lucius Verus and can be dated in the two months before he became emperor, when he was already consul II but still had his old name, Lucius Aelius. It took an hour before I understood what it was.

Then, some photos from an old holiday to Andalusia, where I paid a brief visit to Carmo (modern Carmona). I was actually interested in the ancient production of olive oil, but also visited the ancient tombs.

Finally, a little piece on the Ephesian Artemis - you know, that weird girl with that strange outfit.

There will be more Lepcis soon, but now, it's 6.30 in the morning, I've seen the spectacle of the rising sun, and now I'm off to bed for a brief nap. As always, you are invited to improve what I've written.

[Bill Thayer]

That you should only be going to bed at 6am serves you right, Jona, for being such a slave-driver with other people as well. I for my part work at the opposite end of the day; it's 4:40 here and I got up about two hours ago, to finish putting up Plutarch's Lives of Agis and Cleomenes and the Comparison with the Gracchi. I've decided I've had enough of the Lives, and am not going to do any more....

B

[Jona Lendering]

That you should only be going to bed at 6am serves you right, Jona, for being such a slave-driver with other people as well.

:lol: :wink: It's great to have all lives by Plutarch online.

Continuing to slave-drive myself: the Amphitheater, the Circus, Byzantine Gate, and Decumanus of Lepcis Magna.

[D B Campbell]

I've decided I've had enough of the Lives, and am not going to do any more....

I thought for a minute that you had omitted Demetrius Poliorcetes.
(Not listed at penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/home.html.) But I see he's there after all!
Thanks for your hard work, Bill -- much appreciated.

[Dan Diffendale]

Jona --
"cplendid" should be "splendid" at the foot of the Artemis at Ephesus page...

[Bill Thayer]

The Lives were an afterthought Duncan, so they had no orientation page of their own. That's now been remedied, here it is (with, yes, Demetrius included).

B

[Jona Lendering]

"cplendid" should be "splendid"

Thanks, fixed. And continuing with Lepcis Magna, there's now a small Byzantine Church. Nothing special.

Bill has put online an article on the consequences of Alexander's visit to Egypt for his Antiquaries' Shoebox, which now contains -if I have counted correctly- seventy-three articles. And there's a piece on the Constellation of Taurus, which includes stories about the Pleiades.

[D B Campbell]

... orientation page ...

I'm probably being really dull-witted and will regret asking this, Bill, but ... what are the numbers preceding each Life in the orientation table? (e.g., 1-17 Theseus; 17-37 Romulus; etc.)

[Bill Thayer]

Prolly, yes. The page numbers of the 1624 Paris edition (Stephanus' textus receptus), by which passages of Plutarch are so often, irritatingly, referred. The Loeb edition provides the subsections (A-F) only for the Moralia; for the Lives, just the page numbers. In my transcription, they're indicated in the left margin in green. The information is, unfortunately, useful to have in the Table of Contents — else I'da dispensed with it — since often all one has with a Plutarch citation is that number ("203D", "489F", etc.); including them in the Contents makes the passage easy to locate.

And that answers that question of mine; in setting up the page, hoping to avoid unwieldiness, I omitted mention of what those numbers stood for, yet I did wonder whether this might throw anyone for a loop. Less than 24 hours later, I have my answer: I've added the explication in the orientation page.

Bill

[Bill Thayer]

Back to Roman stuff, or at least somewhat more Roman, after that orgy of Plutarch. Actually, as will be seen, I'm cleaning my desk:

• The Church of SS. Cosma e Damiano in Rome: which couldn't be more misleadingly titled; in fact the article is about ancient Roman topography, and the identification of the ancient building out of the débris of which that church was carved. The author doesn't know what it is, but he says none of the common names for it are right, and it wasn't a temple; he believes it to have been part of the enclosure of the Temple of the Penates.
  The Birth-Place of Propertius and A review of Urbini's La Patria di Properzio, a pair of related items providing us with an entertaining moral: before you savage somebody, you'd better be right.
  Platner's review of Töbelmann's Bogen von Malborghetto: much more polite; a minor piece, but called for by a note in a major article on the Via Flaminia that I'm still working on. The Flaminia is something of a dada of mine, since I've walked a fair amount of it, sort of. Hey, it's both Roman and in Umbria.
  Gemini: Allen's Star Names, continued.
  A review of Brown's Researches into the Origin of the Primitive Constellations of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Babylonians: that too called by a note elsewhere.

[Jona Lendering]

A little piece on the port of Lepcis Magna.

[Jona Lendering]

... the constellation of Cancer.