Wherein There Is Too Much of a Good Thing

Namely, Latin inscriptions. Because unless you're an epigrapher (someone who studies inscriptions), spending a few hours staring at a chunk of engraved marble trying to understand the words gets frustrating really quickly.

I should start from the beginning--our half-day trip today was at the Terme Museum in the Baths of Diocletian. There's really not that much of the Baths remaining, so it's more like the museum is built in and around the ruins, but they do have a few exhibits actually inside one of the more complete buildings.

As you can see, the baths were incredibly large--the Romans really were masters of concrete and brickwork. The guy standing near the middle, in the large box-like structure, is my friend Elliot, who is rather on the tall side, so there's your scale.

The museum has a fairly wide range of exhibits, but the majority of them (and what we were specifically there to see) were Latin and Greek inscriptions. However, since I have a ton of pictures of those, I'll start with all of the other stuff I saw in the museum (that I was interested in enough to take pictures of):

This is a cippus, which is basically a marker, possibly for a shrine or grave--we learned about it when we were at the Roman Forum, where it was found beneath a large span of black stone. It's particularly significant as one of the earliest Latin inscriptions that we have--it's from the 6th century BCE! Unfortunately, at dinner tonight my friends cruelly murdered my glee by informing me that this is not the original cippus, which I suppose should have been obvious by the fact that it wasn't in a case--but I was so excited!

Here are some more miniature bronze figures--they're apparently votive offerings. I really enjoy miniatures, so these are some of my favorite votive offerings to see.

This is another votive offering, very unlike any of the others I've seen on this trip--it's a votive crown, carved out of what appears to be marble. You can see that there's an inscription on it, and I do have a picture of the inscription itself, but I was far more fascinated by the fact that all the sides appear to be carved.

Roman glass! They're just bottles--but I love the idea of glass surviving to modern times, especially intact like these. And they certainly are pretty.

These are standardized weights used to settle disputes in the marketplace. These are made of (I believe) basalt, and they would have been crafted to match the official set in Rome.

This is a sarcophagus--they're excellent examples of the incredible detail that can be done in marble. It's unfortunately been a little washed out by the camera flash, but without the flash everything is too blurry to really see.

I had to take a picture of this one because while the halo-like imagery is probably pretty familiar to everyone, the subject isn't--this is not a Christian image! The crowned figure is Mithras, an Eastern god whose cult had a fairly large following in Rome. One of his cult titles was Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun--hence the crown of light. The cult of Mithras was a particular target for stamping out when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, partially because so much of the imagery is similar. I love studying religion, and the intersection of religion and politics is always particularly interesting!

These are domesticated cat bones--apparently pets were occasionally buried as well. I was mostly surprised to find something like this in the museum, it's a little out of place with all of the statuary and inscriptions.

This is less out of place than it may seem--there was a lot of pottery in the museum, but it's generally not a major interest of mine. This stuff, however, I've fallen in love with. It's called bucchero pottery--the clay goes through a very specific firing process to create that vitreous black finish, intended to imitate metal. It is not a gloss--plenty of shards of bucchero have been found, and that beautiful black color goes all the way through.

This is a statue of Ganymede, the cupbearer of the gods, along with an eagle (probably Jupiter's). I'm a big fan of mythology--and the feathers on the eagle are another example of wonderful craftsmanship.

This is a relief of a griffin. Yay, mythological creatures!

The museum wraps around a beautiful central courtyard--this is a picture of said courtyard from the museum's third floor.

Here's one of the arched hallways wrapping around the courtyard, where you can see plenty of the statues and inscriptions set out in the courtyard. This museum was really big!

Each of the four paths to the center fountain in the courtyard had two animal head statues on them--most of them were the same animal, like two horse heads, but one pathway had these, an elephant and a rhino. And don't worry, I won't bore you all with that silly joke. Even if it fits perfectly.

KITTIES! I was, as ever, excited to see these inhabitants of the courtyard. They were friendly but a little on the skittish side.

 

Some more examples of marble work. The Romans liked their statues colorful--most of the statues we see today look fairly impressive even just in marble, but in ancient times they would have been painted in plenty of bright colors. When they didn't paint them, they would occasionally just make the statue out of different colors of marble, as you can see here--it's a neat effect. The second photo is yet another example of the incredible levels of detail--there's a lot of folds in that fabric! The third photo is not the daily example of a column--these are just pillars (no capitals) :P I just like the color of the marble.

Finally, we get to the inscriptions--there were a lot of them there! I've tried to pick out some of the best examples:

WALL O' TEXT! Literally! It's pretty big, and just about the entire surface is covered in inscriptions. This was the best shot I could get to show the size of the wall while still being able to see the text.

This is probably going to be the easiest for you all to read--obviously these inscriptions are easier to read in real life than in pictures! The Romans would often paint inside the letters to make the inscription stand out even more. On occasion, we're even lucky enough to see the paint survive to modern times.

This is essentially a practice slab filled with various inscriptions. There's some lines from the Illiad, the alphabet, basically a bunch of scribbles! It's interesting to see the difference from the more polished inscriptions--most of these letters are either Greek letters or Roman "cursive", which is really difficult to read!

This inscription was mostly notable because of the little picture in the middle--I've been told it's an apple, but I remain skeptical.

Finally, the academic portion of this "school" field trip--we were told to find an inscription that didn't have an explanation written for it, and analyze it. This naturally included the expansion and translation of the inscription. The translation was bad enough, but I think the expansion was the really ugly part. This is what the inscription looked like (click to enlarge):

Obviously, those are not full sentences. So to translate it, first you have to "expand" the text, which basically comes down to hoping you've chosen the correct word from the possibilities of each acronym. Expanded, this is what the inscription says (the capital letters are the original inscription, the lowercase letters in parentheses are the expansions):

IMP(erator) CAESARI D(omini) N(ostri) / FL(avii) VALENTI MAX(imi) P(ia) F(idelis) VICTORI AC (atque) / TRIVMFATORI SEMPER AUG(usti)/ S(enatus) P(opulus) Q(ue) R(omani) / OB PROVIDENTIAM QUAE ILLI SEMPER / CUM INCLYTO FRATRE COMMVNIS EST / INSTITVTI EX VTILITATE VRBIS AETERNAE / VALENTINIANI PONTIS ATQ(ue) PERFECTI / DEDICADI OPERIS HONORE DELATO IVDICIO PRINCIP(i) MAXIMO P(hosphorius) / L(ucii) AVR(elio) AVIANIO SYMMACHO V(ir) C(larissimus) EX PRAEFECTIS VRBIS

The names required a little bit of help from Wikipedia--we managed to pick a really difficult (and entirely too long) inscription. And no, you can't read our translation--it was (in the words of my friend and partner for this project, Christine) hell on square wheels to do, and I'm not at all confident in its accuracy. So, that's the sort of schoolwork I'm doing!

I think anyone visiting Rome is pretty much obligated to have at least one of these kinds of photos--so here you go. I'm a little too short for it to really work, but it's still fun.

My first purely silly souvenir! Okay, not really--Maggie found a penny-squishing machine for me (thank you Maggie!), but that's too small to count. This is the real column of the day--my own mini Corinthian capital!