Category: Our travel

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Etruscans

The great thing about ancient history is that what is so old can become new. I have to become reacquainted with the Etruscans. I met them back in the 1960s and my knowledge of them stopped growing in the 1970s. However, lots of new information has come to light in the 1980s anon.

I learned that the Etruscans were a mysterious people. Most of this mystery was related to their language, which nobody could read. What we knew of the Etruscans came from what Greeks, Romans and Phoneticians wrote about them and none of these people really liked the Etruscans.

Scholars can now read Etruscan to some extent. Disappointingly, there is not much there. The language seems to be non-Indo-European, related only to minor languages nearby. It is strange to find an island of non-Indo-European language in surrounded by Indo-European ones. For a while, this lent some credence to the Etruscan claim that they migrated from somewhere else. Where? Modern DNA studies indicate that they were indigenous to Italy, or at least developed there.

The Etruscans disappeared by about the first century BC. They did not go out with a bang; rather they just faded away, melted into the general population of Roman Italy. I knew that Etruscan kings controlled Rome until the Romans threw out the last one, Tarquin the Proud in 509 BC and established the Roman Republic. After that, you don’t hear much about them. The Romans just kind of moved in. But the Etruscans did not disappear. DNA evidence indicates that modern Tuscan population are related to ancient Etruscans.
I guess they still are mysterious. Their culture was different from the Greeks, but they took a lot from their Greek neighbors. They had a kind of city state system, but their precise government institutions are unknown.

We went to the Villa Julia today. This is where lots of the Etruscan artifacts are now housed. It is a nice place to visit, very quiet, uncrowded and with interesting exhibits that I have seen in many books.

My first photo is a reconstructed tomb in the basement of the museum, lots of interesting paintings. The couple in the next couple of pictures is the iconic Etruscan image. If you see a book about them, you see this photo. The speculation is that the Etruscans were generally more open and joyful than most other ancient people. This is based on not much beyond that people look content in pictures and sculpture. The last photo shows a collection of pottery. It looks a lot like Greek pottery. This is not a coincidence. They copied Corinthian and Attic styles. But the Etruscan pots have more fanciful designs.
The good thing about being a mysterious ancient people is that modern people can project values onto them.

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Chasing Roman rainbows

We had significant afternoon rain in Rome, but it cleared up nicely before the sun went down, leaving very clear air, a shinning sky and a few rainbows.
 

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Metro transport in Rome

The metro in Rome is not as pretty as our Washington Metro, but it works better. The trains are only a few minutes apart. I wish they were not so full of graffiti, but if they take us where we need to go, I am okay with that.
Romans traffic is not well disciplined, although it is much better than in Naples, which is the worst that I have experienced except in Cairo. There are a fair number of these really small cars on the road. As I said about the metro above, if they take people where they want to go, I am okay with that.
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Baths of Caracalla

Something worth seeing is the Baths of Caracalla. Baths in the Roman Empire were like health clubs, malls, gardens and convention centers all rolled up into one. This one is particularly massive.
They were built in the early 3rd Century and remained in use until the 6th Century when the Goths wrecked the aqueduct that supplied water. Barbarians. At one time, they had marble walls and all sorts of statues and other works of art. Over time, people stole the art, marble and anything else valuable and reasonably portable. Much of the art can still be seen in Italian museums. We saw some when we were down in Naples.

You can see the size in the photos. Floors originally were covered in mosaics. You can see volunteers restoring some of the mosaics. It takes a lot of time and attention to detail.
The Romans has a more communal civic culture than we do. They tended not to have things like baths or even kitchens in their homes, so they took care of these needs in public. When I was growing up in Milwaukee we had public natatoriums, local version of baths. We used to go to swim in the pool, but some people came to use the showers, since their houses did not have them.
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Sic transit gloria mundi

Another thing worth seeing but maybe not worth going to see is the Circus Maximus. This was Rome’s racetrack and carnival grounds where famously the authorities bribed the mob with bread and circuses. It was a big deal back then, a field now.
My old colleague Bogdan in Poland gave me insights into the bread and circuses thing. He explained that under communism the authorities would create artificial shortages of things people wanted, like sausage. Then they would hold a big event where these things would be available, ensuring a big crowd to support whatever they were sponsoring.

Bogdan was a man I greatly respected. He was my driver in Krakow. That is not a status job, but he took it so seriously. He was the best driver he could be and you have to respect a man who respects what he does. The only drawback is that I probably talked to Bogdan more than anyone else in Poland, since we were often on the road. My better educated colleagues sometimes complained that my Polish has a sort of peasant quality, not doubt from Bogdan. But people – usually – knew what I meant.
On second thought, the Circus Maximus is worth going to see if only to see how things important in the past can sink, sort of the Ozymandias quality. Or maybe – still in the poetic mind-set – the Sandburg poem “Grass.” Consider all the blood, sweat and tears shed at this place, now just a grassy field.

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Worth seeing, but maybe not worth going to see

The Pyramid of Cestius in Rome is worth seeing, but maybe not worth going to see. Cestius was an ordinary rich guy back who was caught up in the rage for things Egyptian that evidently gripped Rome in the late first century BC, so he built this tomb for himself, around 12 BC (of course he was unaware that he was BC.) I guess it worked. We are still today reading about Gaius Cestius, an otherwise unremarkable Roman official who died more than 2000 years ago. I guess the guy had some class. A pyramid is a good structure for the ages. It is an easy form to build and it is very stable.
My other pictures are fragments of the old Roman wall. There was no wall when Cestius built his tomb. They built the wall around it later.
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Roaming Rome

Roaming in Rome. Today we went to the Vatican Museums, Saint Peters, Sistine Chapel and the Roman Botanical Gardens. I don’t have any deep thoughts about these things. They are just great. I do have an observation, however. It cost us 8 Euro each to get into the gardens and each museum costs money to view. It is funny that such things are more often free in the U.S., where we supposedly get less stuff for free.
My first two photos are Chrissy, who is sort of a work of art. Next is from the gardens. The arch is Tiber bridge. They have a nice walk along the river and last is a changing of Swiss guards.
 
 
 
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Civilization and "my people" – the barbarians

It is foolish to take sides in history. After events pass from living memory, they become the common heritage of humanity – good and bad. We are all descended from conquerors and conquered, from slaves and slave owners, from scholars and fools. We can all benefit from all their experience.
History favors those who write history
That said, it is hard not to take sides, even in conflicts from thousands of years ago. And history has its own biases. The old dictum that history favors the victors is generally true but there are a lot more complications. History is biased in favor victors who are around to write it;  it also favors those who write.  Illiterate cultures technically have no history at all in many senses. Their stories are always told by others, if they are told at all
We remember better those who build and especially of those who build in stone. The Egyptians have a bigger place in the minds of modern people than do the people of ancient Mesopotamia because Egyptians build in stone, while they people of Mesopotamia build with mud brick that long since has disappeared.  Spending massive resources to the glory of powerful dead is dead stupid, but the pyramids are impressive to see even thousands of years later.
There is also bias in favor of those whose languages survive, or have evolved into something similar and it is bias in favor of those whose traditions survive.  In language and culture, the Romans Empire never fell; it simply evolved into modern languages and cultures in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania, and later to much of the world.
“My people”: the Barbarians
Roman civilization has all that going for it. When we talk about civilization versus barbarism, we are often thinking of the fall of the Roman Empire as our model. There is a funny thing about this. I generally take the Roman side, but “my” people are the barbarians. People of central and northern European ancestry, like me, like most Americans even today and certainly most of the founding generations, appropriated the culture of the ancient Mediterranean, or if we want to speak the language of victimization, should we say that it was imposed on us. But my ancestors didn’t write until they learned how to do it from the Romans. We know about them from Romans sources, most notably from Tacitus’ “Germania.” But then, culture trumps DNA and the Romans had more to offer. I feel more the heir to the Romans than to the northern barbarians who vandalized the buildings and couldn’t figure out how to keep the aqueducts running.
Common heritage of humanity lets us choose our “ancestors”
All that said, we do have the common heritage of humanity working here. There were a lot of pluses for the Romans, but also lots of negatives. The Romans gave us many of our concepts of law, but it was a top-down type of idea. The barbarians brought in something more like common law that allows for a more organic evolution of justice. So our modern western American culture benefits from both strands of this. The Roman part is maybe easier to document because we literally have written documents. But we all understand that culture does not run on documents alone.
Historians do not only report history; they create it
We don’t really study history; we study historians. History just kind of happens. It needs to be put into context and order. How much historians do or should do to this is a subject of strong disagreement among the few who care about it and the fewer who deeply think about it. It is important, however. All of us have a concept of history, whether we think about it or not. This concept is not based on THE truth. It is based on some sort of structure or narrative that we picked up from historians whose names we have forgotten or never knew. I wrote about Gibbon yesterday and how his interpretation has affected how we think about the Romans and about ourselves. IMO, he was fundamentally wrong in the way he interpreted the fall of the Empire. It really was not a one-way decline and it was less a fall than a wasting and an evolution. But Gibbon’s better story line precludes, or at least makes difficult, this alternative explanation. It is instructive also that I think of it as an alternative, implying that the other is the normal one.
How you tell the story makes the story. We are off to see more of Rome today and get more of the visual.
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The domes dominate

Romans were master builders, especially adept at using domes and arches. Both are effective because they transfer the compression. The Pantheon in Rome was completed in AD 126 and it is still standing strong nearly 1900 years later. The dome is still the world’s largest un-reinforced concrete dome, and that is not reinforced is probably why it is still standing.
Concrete can lasts a thousands of years when it does not have steel inside. Steel eventually rusts. When it rusts it expands and cracks the concrete. We see that in bridges and buildings built only decades ago. So we have the Pantheon lasting 1900 years and our modern ones lasting maybe 19.

The Pantheon was also well designed, with lighter and thinner concrete nearer the top. The sunken panels (coffers) also reduce the weight as well as add to the beauty.
When the Florentine engineer Filippo Brunelleschi wanted to build a dome for the Duomo in Florence (see earlier posts,) he first studied the Pantheon. But the Duomo is different. The Duomo is actually a set of ellipses, built with brick assembled in herringbone patters. The Duomo is actually two domes with a space in between. It is not as interesting, IMO, looking inside for that reason, but it looks better from the outside.
My pictures show the Pantheon. The first I took today. The second is from 2002, when I visited with Alex. The sun was lower in the sky because that was in February. Next is Filippo Brunelleschi. There is a statue of him in Florence looking up at his Duomo. Next is the Duomo in Florence.
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Pictures of us in Rome

Chrissy is so impressed by the wonders of the Vatican that I think she will converting to the Church of Rome. I, on the other hand, am considering going even further back to the old Roman deities. The Forum is also impressive. Filling out our photos in front of famous stuff, I don’t know what to think of a an elephant balancing an obelisk.