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MINERVA
I
n 1480, a young Roman tumbled through an opening in the side of the city’s Oppian Hill,
and emerged, wide-eyed, amid the remains of Nero’s 1st-century AD Domus Aurea.
ARCHAEOLOGY & ANCIENT ART
Before long, artists of renown from all over Italy were being lowered on ropes into the dark
VOLUME 31 • Number 4 subterranean cavities of the palace, holding flaming torches to view the ruins. What they saw
EDITORIAL amazed them: the extraordinary vivid colours of paintings made 1,500 years earlier, preserved
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Editor & Publisher: Maria Earle from the ravages of time and daylight. The astonished artists realised that the painted world
Associate Editor: Lucia Marchini of their ancient forebears was wholly different to the strict order of their architecture and the
Features Editor: Neil Faulkner
Art Editor: Mark Edwards restrained elegance of their sculpture, which had been stripped of its colour over the centuries.
Designer: Chloe Payne
Sub Editor: Simon Coppock Here, instead, they found a playful world of lively scenes, fantastical creatures, and fanciful
Managing Director: Robert Selkirk designs taken from nature. Dalu Jones describes the discovery’s electrifying effect on the painters
Thanks to Laurence Earle and Dalu Jones
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CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID STUTTARD OLIVER GILKES NEIL FAULKNER

is a writer, lecturer, dramatist, and Fellow of
Goodenough College, London. His books include
travellers’ guides to Greek and Roman mythology
and a biography of the Athenian roué Alcibiades.
His book on Athens and the Persian Wars will be
published next year by Harvard University Press.
is an archaeologist with wide-ranging interests. From
UK museums and rescue archaeology, he moved to
work for the British School at Rome, running projects
in Rome and in central-southern Italy, then spent
20 years with the Butrint Foundation. He is currently
Senior Archaeologist for Andante Travels.
is an academic archaeologist who lectures
widely, at home and abroad, on Greek and Roman
civilisation. He is the author of Rome: empire
of the eagles (Routledge), A Visitor’s Guide to the
Ancient Olympics (Yale University Press), and
A Radical History of the World (Pluto Press).

issue 184 MINERVA 3


12
features
12 ANCIENT CITIES OF ILLYRIA
In one of Europe’s smallest countries,
a treasure trove of archaeology awaits.
Oliver Gilkes guides us through the cities of
ancient Illyria, now in modern-day Albania.
20 THE GOLDEN
AND THE GROTESQUE
Nero’s spectacular Roman palace, the
Domus Aurea, was richly decorated.
Dalu Jones describes how its ruins were
rediscovered in the 15th century and how
4 MINERVA
CONTENTS
ONTENTS
GUST 2020 • ISSUE 184
JULY/AUGUST
artists of the Renaissance were inspired
by its extraordinary painted interiors.
32 CIVILISATION BEGINS
The first cities grew up 4,000 years
ago in Mesopotamia, complex states
requiring administration and bureaucracy.
Neil Faulkner explores the huge cultural
contribution of the world’s oldest civilisation.
40 EVER-CHANGING EPHESUS
The ancient Ephesus that we visit today
is the new city, David Stuttard explains,
32
20
built on the site of an equally impressive
earlier settlement. But the stories that
surround the founding and development
of both great cities are equally rich in
myth and imagination.
48 PROPERTY, POWER,
AND THE BRITISH BAROQUE
A new type of art was required for
a new order. The Baroque style in
Britain, writes Neil Faulkner, was ideal
for the Restoration monarchy, which
was trying to reassert its power.
july/august 2020
in the news
Stories from the world of archaeology, art, and museums
PAVING THE WAY
ABOVE The sinkhole in front of the Pantheon (RIGHT) the almost pristine mosaic floor outside Verona.
T
he dramatic opening up of a
sinkhole outside the Pantheon –
the 2nd century AD ‘temple of all
the gods’ (now a Catholic church)
on Rome’s Piazza della Rotunda – has offered
a tantalising glimpse of the imperial Roman
paving beneath the present-day city streets.
Since the appearance of the sinkhole –
which measures three metres across and
more than two metres deep – on 27 April,
archaeologists have uncovered seven travertine
blocks, believed to be part of the original
paving scheme laid down there between 27
and 25 BC, during the construction of the first
temple to stand on the site.
Construction of the temple and its
surrounding paving was overseen by Marcus
Agrippa (64/62-12 BC), the Roman statesman
and general who was a confidant of Augustus
(63 BC-AD 14), the first emperor of the Roman
Empire. In AD 80, however, that building was
destroyed by fire – as was its successor, built
under Domitian (AD 51-96), after it was struck
by lightning in AD 110. The well-preserved
building we see today – famed for its vast
coffered dome and oculus (opening) to the
sky – was finally completed in about AD 125,
6 MINERVA
discovered a perfectly preserved ancient
Roman mosaic floor buried beneath a
vineyard near the northern Italian town
of Negrar di Valpolicella. The mosaic is
part of the remains of a 3rd century AD
villa, discovered by scholars in 1922 but
never fully excavated before a team began
digging last summer. So far, narrow trenches
have revealed a pristine mosaic made up
of repeating patterns of burnt red, green,
and black formed into geometric shapes.
According to a statement posted on the
town’s website on 26 May, the team will now
liaise with the vineyard’s owners to ‘identify
the most appropriate ways to make this
archaeological treasure hidden under our
feet available and accessible’.
under Hadrian (AD 117-138), who also raised
the floor level of the piazza, burying the
original paving below it.
Almost two thousand years later,
according to Daniela Porro, Rome’s
Superintendent of Archaeology, Fine Arts,
and Landscape, ‘the slabs of the ancient
floor of the square in front of the Pantheon
emerged intact, protected by a layer of fine
pozzolan [cement]’. Their preservation,
she added, is ‘unequivocal proof of the
importance of archaeological protection,
particularly in a city such as Rome.’
It is not, however, the first time the slabs
have been uncovered: the city authorities
IMAGES: Rex Features (Pantheon); Comune di Negrar di Valpolicella (mosaics)
actually unearthed them 20 years ago, during
municipal works in the piazza, but decided
to leave them underground, where they
have remained ever since. The appearance
of sinkholes is relatively common in Rome,
with as many as 100 reported last year alone.
Earlier this year, streets were closed when
a sinkhole was reported to have opened up
near the Colosseum.
Meanwhile, archaeologists from the
office of the Superintendent of Archaeology,
Fine Arts, and Landscape of Verona have
JULY/AUGUST 2020

MUSES RETURN TO STOWE
A
n important lost group of statues of the nine Muses –
inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the
arts – has been reinstated to the grounds of Stowe, one
of Britain’s great country houses. The figures – along with a tenth,
representing the god Apollo – were created by the London-based
Flemish sculptor John van Nost (died 1729) for Stowe’s owners,
the Temple family, and were originally placed in the gardens of
their vast Buckinghamshire estate in 1682.
In the years that followed, Stowe was
redeveloped on a grand scale – largely
according to architect Robert Adam’s
Neoclassical designs – while its landscaped
gardens, remodelled by Lancelot
‘Capability’ Brown and including dozens
of Classical-inspired statues, would become
famous throughout England.
The family’s changing fortunes eventually
saw them crippled by debt, however. Many
of the original statues were sold off in
auctions held in 1848 (when the auction
catalogue stated: ‘The statues of Apollo and
the Muses formerly stood near this spot,
but they were of lead, and have long since
been melted’), 1921, and 1922. Since 1923,
the Grade 1-listed mansion has been the
home of Stowe School, while the National
Trust now owns the gardens, which are
also Grade 1-listed.
Of the original group of statues of
Apollo and the nine Muses, only one
survived the family’s decline at Stowe –
IMAGES: National Trust/Hugh Mothersole
issue 184
news
the figure of Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, which was
placed on top of a tall column. Two further statues from a wider
group, representing ‘Painting’ and ‘Sculpture’, were traced to a
collection at another National Trust property, Anglesey Abbey,
near Cambridge, but the figures of Apollo and the other Muses
are believed to be lost.
After years of historical and archaeological research,
composite-stone recreations of all nine Muses have now
been made by sculptors from the Cliveden
Conservation Workshop, a firm specialising
in the preservation of National Trust buildings
and statuary. Following careful excavation of
the site, the statues were finally returned in
February to their historic position in front of
the Doric Arch that marks the entrance to
Stowe’s Classically-inspired Elysian Fields –
a celebrated 40-acre section of garden
designed by William Kent.
With the Muses now in place, space has
been left for the final figure in the group –
that of Apollo, one of the 12 gods of Olympus
and the patron of poetry, music, and the arts.
But as Richard Wheeler, garden historian with
the National Trust, explained recently to The
Daily Telegraph, not just any Apollo will do.
‘We don’t want a bog-standard Belvedere
Apollo,’ he said. ‘We are looking for a Lyric
Apollo [where the god is holding a lyre], like
the one at Versailles.’ According to Wheeler,
a potential model has been identified in a
British garden – but negotiations to copy it
have yet to be completed.
For curator Gillian Mason,
Apollo and the nine Muses
were the ‘most significant
statue group at Stowe.
Reintroducing these
lost elements will bring
meaning, significance and
coherence back into this
remarkable landscape.’
‘The historic sale of
the statues eroded the
richness of the garden,’ she
adds, ‘but by restoring or
recreating elements such as
Apollo and the nine Muses,
we are bringing these lost
narratives back to life.’
The gardens at Stowe have
reopened to visitors, check
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stowe
for more details.
MINERVA 7
 EARTHQUAKE
HITS ZAGREB

IMAGE: Boris Bošković

ABOVE The cathedral showing damage to one of its spires.
According to Dr Ivan Mirnik, an archaeologist and numismatic

I
n recent months, museums and other institutions around the specialist who has worked at the museum for many years, ‘total havoc’
world have been struggling to deal with the unprecedented could be seen after the earthquake in the Egyptian galleries, where
economic and logistical fallout of COVID-19. In the Croatian sarcophagi, canopic urns, and funerary figurines were damaged and
capital of Zagreb, however, an already difficult situation has some stone stelae collapsed. He also described as ‘most tragic’ the
been made considerably worse by the powerful earthquake that sight of shelves of smashed Ancient Greek vases from the museum’s
hit the city on the morning of 22 March. extensive collection – including a 70cm volute krater (a bowl used
The earthquake, whose epicentre was four miles north of the city, for diluting wine with water) that had broken into 26 pieces.
was the most powerful to hit Zagreb since 1880. With a magnitude Following the earthquake, the museum’s director Sanjin Mihelic
of 5.3, it caused widespread damage – including to the cathedral, and his team have been taking stock of the damage, and preparing for
parts of whose belfry collapsed, and other historic buildings. the daunting task of restoration – though their efforts have inevitably
Zagreb’s Archaeological Museum – within the landmark 19th- been hampered by restrictions arising from the pandemic.
century Vranyczany-Dobrinović Palace and home to more than At the Archaeological Museum, as at other institutions across
450,000 objects – was among several institutions to suffer extensive the city, a huge amount of work now lies ahead – but one thing is
damage, with numerous cracks appearing in the exterior and interior guaranteed: putting right the destruction will be a long, difficult and
walls of the building. expensive job. Already, several institutions and many individuals have
Fortunately, many of the museum’s most-celebrated exhibits come forward with offers of help and money. For details of how to
were unharmed – including the 4,500-year-old ritual vessel known contribute, see www.croatianmonuments.org.
as the ‘Vučedol Dove’; the 3rd-century BC Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis
BELOW Smashed pottery in the Zagreb Archaeological Museum.
(the ‘Linen Book of Zagreb’), which is the longest-known Etruscan
text, written on a linen sheet; and the ‘Lumbarda Psephisma’, a
unique stone inscription telling of the founding of the Ancient Greek
settlement on the island of Korčula in the 4th or 3rd century BC.
However, photographs posted on the museum’s website
(www.amz.hr) reveal the extent of the destruction to the permanent
collections of prehistoric, Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and
medieval artefacts. Among the many broken and damaged objects
are a pair of 7th century BC ceramic askoi (oil jars) with handles in
the shape of rams, and two cups with bird-shaped handles; a unique
amber pendant in the shape of a female head, produced by the
Iapodes, one of the ancient peoples of Illyria, whose territory formed
IMAGE: Igor Krajcar

part of modern-day Croatia; and a 1st century AD marble sculpture

of a naked young man, which was thrown from its pedestal,
shattering into several pieces.

8 MINERVA july/august 2020


A Roman toy mouse?
W
ith archaeological fieldwork on
hold due to the current pandemic,
curatorial staff at the Roman fort
Vindolanda, one mile south of Hadrian’s Wall,
have turned their attention to bags of scraps
and offcuts of leather in the museum’s reserve
collection. Among the hundreds of pieces of
leather, they found one intriguing small scrap
that appears to have been cut into the shape
of a mouse with a long tail and markings that
resemble fur and eyes, offering a glimpse of
the lighter side of life at the fort.
Measuring 12.2cm long and 2.6cm wide, the
mouse-like scrap was in a bag that contained
leather found in the commanding officer’s
do it yourself
co-workers curate
With the coronavirus pandemic forcing
museums to close their doors to visitors, one
American institution has found a novel way to
connect with audiences.The Cleveland Museum
of Art (CMA) has launched what it claims is
the world’s first ‘rapid-response art exhibition
app’, designed for remote workplaces that
use the collaborative messaging-service Slack.
ArtLens for Slack provides access to the CMA’s
vast collection of 61,000 works – everything
issue 184
NEWS
at Vindolanda, we have very few toys, it would
be wonderful if this little mouse had been a toy
and a source of entertainment for a child here
on the northern frontier.’
Thanks to anaerobic conditions in the deep
layers at Vindolanda, organic material like leather
has survived remarkably well. Over the years,
archaeologists have uncovered a large collection
of leather shoes, leather tent panels, and a
significant body of wooden writing tablets that
give details of fort life. These include a note about
a care package of socks, sandals, and underpants,
and an invitation to a birthday party, which, dating
to around AD 100, is the earliest known example
of Latin writing in a woman’s hand.
Mice were present in large numbers at
IMAGES: The Vindolanda Trust
Vindolanda. Excavations of the granaries in 2008
found bones of thousands of mice beneath the
building’s floors. As well as being a common
grain-devouring pest, mice were also associated
with the god Apollo, who could bring plague, and
residence during excavations in 1993. The they appear frequently on Roman oil lamps – a
find dates from c. AD 105-130, and it has been reminder that the creatures were ever-present
suggested that it may have been a child’s toy in homes, and a playful reference to their habit
or perhaps used for practical jokes. Curator of drinking vegetable oil from lamps.
Barbara Birley said, ‘Although we have a The little leather mouse will go on permanent
signifi
sig ficant amount off evidence
d off children
h ld display
d pl y in the
h museum at V Vindolanda.
d l d.
AB
ABOVE T museum’s’
The
res
reserve ll i contains
collection i
off
offcuts off leather. The mouse
(RI
(RIGHT) ) was found hiding
withi these
within h i
pieces..
from ancient sculpture and medieval armour a worldwide response with its online
to paintings by Picasso, Monet, and Turner challenge – which it acknowledges was
– allowing co-workers to curate their own inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s ‘Between
digital exhibitions using thematic prompts, and Art and Quarantine’ Instagram account
to comment on the choices of others. ‘You’ll – encouraging participants to recreate
discover new artworks, and possibly learn a favourite artworks using just three everyday
little more about your colleagues too,’ says objects found in their own homes.Within
a CMA spokesperson. See www.clevelandart.org/ weeks, thousands of entries had been
artlens-for-slack for details. uploaded via social media – including
homemade versions of everything from
in the frame van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding to more recent
One institution that has certainly gained works by the likes of Banksy and Jeff Koons.
attention during the lockdown is the Getty Dozens of other museums around the
Museum in Los Angeles. It has attracted world have now issued their own challenges.
MINERVA 9
from the archive
picturing a
royal tour,
1862
I
n February 1862, a group of gentlemen set off from
Windsor on a four-month tour of the Middle East.
The trip had been arranged as an educational voyage
for the somewhat wayward (in the eyes of his father)
Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, known as ‘Bertie’. The
20-year-old prince – later to be crowned King Edward
VII – was joined by a group of suitable companions, and
the travelling party took along an official photographer,
Francis Bedford, making this the first royal tour to be
documented in the medium.
The photographs taken during the 1862 tour include
pictures from Egypt, the Holy Land, Syria, Lebanon,
Turkey, and Greece, taking in some of the Ancient
Wonders of the World: the intention was to photograph
scenes ‘fraught with historic and sacred association’, as
the Photographic News put it. Here are the temples and
pyramids of Egypt, the biblical sites of the Holy Land,
but also the remains of villages on the Syrian border
with Lebanon, destroyed in 1860 as the result of unrest
between Druzes and Maronites. The portfolio of 190
albumen prints is a collection of exquisitely detailed and
varied views, which display with suitable solemnity and
beauty some of the region’s greatest treasures.
A sizeable amount of cumbersome equipment would
have been needed to accomplish Bedford’s work, which
was also time-consuming and demanding. His white
developing tent can be spotted between two pillars in his
picture (reproduced here) of the temple of Horus at Edfu,
in Egypt. People appearing in the photographs would have
had to remain immobile for between 10 and 12 seconds
in order for the correct exposure to be accomplished.
Many of the visual compositions feature human figures,
including that of the Prince of Wales, who were clearly
well versed in staying still for the camera, though some of
the camels seem not to
have been so compliant.
The resultant charming
blurry blemishes amid
the grandeur and
enduring beauty of the
monuments only serve
to remind us that there
PHOTO: © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020

were always living,

breathing creatures
cohabiting with the
timeless stones.

Sights of Wonder: Photographs from the 1862 Royal Tour is

online from 12 June 2020. Visit www.barber.org.uk.
 ALBANIA

Viola: What country, friends, is this?

Captain: This is Illyria, lady.
Viola: And what should I do in Illyria?
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

V
iola’s question was perfectly sensible: what is this land
of Illyria? Ancient authors used the terms ‘Illyria’ and
MONTENEGRO KOSOVO
‘Illyrian’ in the way we use the word ‘Celt’: to give
meaning to an otherwise amorphous idea of people and
place. We can say that ‘Illyrian’-style cultures of the Late
Iron Age stretch from Albania to the Danube and from the Adriatic
to the plains and mountains of Thrace (in modern Bulgaria). All the ALBANIA
NORTH
places and peoples within this wide region were seen as linked, even MACEDONIA
though their cultural unity was vague and their political cohesiveness
almost non-existent, little more than a series of loose clan-based
Durrës
alliances, at least until the Romans arrived and began setting
boundaries and nomenclature in stone. Tirana

Adriatic Sea
So where will we find Illyria and its cities today? This is
uncertain. An ‘Illyrian’ political movement lay behind the
independence bids of a number of 19th-century peoples in the Apollonia
region, many having distinctly un-Illyrian, Slavic roots. Following
the First World War, the newly created Kingdom of the Serbs Byllis
and Croats (Yugoslavia) was initially proposed as the ‘Kingdom of
Gjirokastra GREECE
Illyria’ – an idea that horrified the local Orthodox churches. The
term ‘Illyria’ was eventually rescued by the least-considered people Antigonea
of the region – the Albanians – who achieved independence in
Butrint
the final noisy collapse of the ancient Ottoman Turkish Sultanate
after 1912. In their search for ‘origins’ from the mid 19th century
onwards, when agitation for an independent state began, the
Albanians relied on their unique language, quite possibly descended
from an Illyrian dialect, as a link to the ancient Illyrians.
Albania was a land of mystery as would have satisfied
Shakespeare. Edward Gibbon wrote that it was ‘a land in sight of
Italy which is less well known than the interior of America’. Even
a century later, the situation was much the same. Scott Keltie,
the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, in a survey of
the geography of the modern world written at the advent of
the shiny, new, and thoroughly modern 20th century would
declare that ‘certain portions of the Balkan peninsula, especially
in Albania, are still imperfectly known’.
Early explorers and visitors merely added to the sense of
obscurity and otherness. Napoleonic spies and archaeologists
at the Ioannina court of the Ottoman governor Ali Pasha of
Tepelena – an Albanian – emphasised the remoteness of the land
in their secret despatches. Napoleon’s revolutionary French envoy,
François Pouqueville, and ‘our’ man in Ioannina, the stiff-upper-
lip colonel of artillery William Martin Leake, both took advantage
of the literally cut-throat circumstances to travel and report on
fortresses, harbours, and antiquities. Their exciting 007-style 

OPPOSITE Butrint: the 5th-century baptistery and its mosaic. Like many
of the ancient cities of Albania, Butrint lingered on in much-reduced form
past the end of the Classical world.
RIGHT Ali Pasha of Tepelena, the Ottoman governor and semi-independent
strongman who dominated Albania in the early 19th century.

issue 184 MINERVA 13

ABOVE Lithograph depicting Durrës by Edward Lear, one
of many views made by him during his journey in 1848.
activities were given a Romantic gloss that ensured an enduring
Albanian mythos following the visit to Ali’s court in 1809 of a
young English poet, Lord Byron, with his more down-to-earth
friend, Cam Hobhouse. Byron devoted an entire canto of Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage to this excursion, exclaiming on the oriental
majesty of place and people. Hobhouse, by contrast, recorded
troubles with servants, and the filth and inconvenience of the
local travel arrangements.
This polarised approach was maintained by the many who came
afterwards, entranced by the distant glow of adventure: Benjamin
Disraeli, Lady Elizabeth Kavanagh, and, most famously, Edward
Lear. The necessity of a diversion through the Balkans led the soft
and gentle Lear on a grand tour of what passed for highways in
Albania, as he followed the ancient course of the old Roman Via
Egnatia from Thessalonika to the Ionian Sea in 1848. The sketches
he made – in some personal danger, given local superstitions about
being ‘written down’ – are the earliest visual record of Albania and
the Albanians. His accompanying diary, published as a book in
1851, is perhaps the greatest description of the trials, tribulations,
and wonders of such a journey. As his friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
wrote, ‘I read, and felt that I was there’.
All these pioneers noted the antiquities as they passed by. Some,
like Leake, seem to have had their minds on publication of their
researches as much as their primary mission. Leake produced a
series of books in which his feud with Pouqueville continued as
a terse Victorian debate on ancient cities and topography. But
14 MINERVA
the first real steps in rediscovering Albania’s Illyrian cities
had to wait until the tumult of Ottoman collapse and world
war ended in the early 1920s. Even then, the lesson of history –
the bitter consequences of national rivalries – remained unlearnt
and two missions, one led by an honest and reliable Frenchman,
Léon Rey, the other by an ambitious, capable, and far more
ruthless Italian, Luigi Maria Ugolini, set up shop at the time of
King Zog, each embarking on a separate scientific investigation
of Albania’s ancient past.
In today’s Albania, the sense of being the heirs of Illyrian
kings and queens like Gentius and Teuta is strong. Of course,
you are who you think you are, but political ideology has muddied
the waters. The post-war Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha was a
torchbearer for this growing Albanian nationalism. ‘What is Greek
and Roman is Greek and Roman, what is Illyrian is Illyrian,’ Hoxha
announced. In other words, to be Albanian was to be Illyrian.
This state orthodoxy became a tricky problem for historians and
archaeologists, the heirs of Rey and Ugolini, compounded by the
fact that, in antiquity, there had been multiple political entities
occupying the space of the modern country’s borders. South of
the mighty River Vjosa – the Aoös of the ancient world – lay the
Kingdom of Epirus. Along the coastlands lay the great Greek
foundations, colonial enterprises that existed in synergy with
the tribes of the interior.
Ancient Epirus was an odd conglomeration of tribal groups.
Governed almost as a federal state, similar in many respects to
july/august 2020

neighbouring Macedonia, it was at first a monarchy. Its greatest
king was Pyrrhus, who led an inconclusive invasion of Italy to fight
the fledgling Roman Republic. It later became a federal republic,
which ended up on the losing side in Rome’s Macedonian Wars.
Devastated by the victorious Romans after 169 BC in a vicious
campaign of terror and ethnic-cleansing, hundreds of thousands
were enslaved and the land was ruined for centuries.
Nevertheless, some wily citizens steered their way clear of
destruction, and Epirus became popular in the 1st century BC with
Graecophile Romans as a halfway house between Italy and Greece.
Substantial property portfolios were built up by absentee landlords
in mainland Epirus and on the island of Corfu. Others came to
trade and settle. Butrint, on the Ionian coast, is the best-known
issue 184
ALBANIA
site associated with this new Graeco-Roman presence. Created as
a small port and religious sanctuary in the Bronze Age, it was for
centuries overshadowed by the city of Phoenice, which lay at the
head of the lake that cuts into the country at this point. The silting
of the lake and the planting of a Roman colony at the strategic
location of Butrint following the Battle of Actium changed matters.
The ‘new city’ of Butrint has been the object of an Anglo-
Albanian project over the last 20 years, which has clarified
the development of the site until its medieval abandonment.
Excavations in the forum have reached into archaeological levels of
the Hellenistic era, and a series of other monuments are now being
published. A significant advance was the realisation that the city
also extended to the south of the Vivari Channel, the waterway 
“Albania was a land of mystery as
would have satisfied Shakespeare.
Edward Gibbon wrote that it was
‘a land in sight of Italy which is less well
known than the interior of America’.”
LEFT The so-called ‘Goddess of Butrint’ – the
most renowned find at the site – is in fact a
version of the Sorrentine Apollo, with his feminine
characteristics emphasised. It was found in pre-war
excavations by Luigi Ugolini in the Theatre.
MINERVA 15
 ABOVE An aerial view of Butrint by Alket Islami. The sea lies beyond
the bottom of the picture, where we see the Vivari Channel. The Lake
of Butrint is at the top. It is just possible to make out the theatre amid
the complex of excavated buildings in the middle.
LEFT The focus of the recent Anglo-Albanian excavations was on the
Vrina Plain, east of the Vivari Channel, where part of a later Roman and
Byzantine settlement was excavated.

that connects the remains of the lake with the Ionian Sea. Set
in a landscape created deliberately for incoming colonists, town
houses and cemeteries were flanked by farms and wine presses,
supplementing the marine resources of fish and shellfish, evidence
of which came from environmental sampling.
Butrint would evolve into a sleepy coastal town under the
Roman emperors. But it had its celebrity moment first. Across
Lake Butrint, the Roman villa of Diaporit offers a stunning
panorama. Its ownership is intriguing, as a fragmentary brickstamp
might just spell out the word ‘Graecinus’ (‘little Greek’), the
nickname of at least one member of a Butrint family whose rise to
prominence at the time of Julius Caesar was down to the patronage
of the fabulously rich Roman senator called Titus Pomponius
Atticus. As well as being the great friend and correspondent of
Cicero, he is known to have owned property at Butrint.
But Butrint was a coastal town, with links into the wider
world. What of more typical Epirote settlements inland?
Over the hills and far away in the high valley of the River Drino
lies Antigonea. Today, the valley is known for the wonderful
Ottoman town of Gjirokastra, its castle looming over steep cobbled
streets. Antigonea lies across the valley, where, in the 3rd century

16 MINERVA july/august 2020


ABOVE Gjirokastra Castle, the huge Ottoman fortress that
dominates the medieval city that looks across the valley of
the River Drino to the site of ancient Antigonea.
BC, King Pyrrhus founded a city on a long flat-topped hill with
wonderful views, guarding this northern access into his realm.
He named it for his wife Antigone, the step-daughter of King
Ptolemy I of Egypt. Antigonea is almost a catalogue-order
creation, a model Hellenistic city with a street grid, impressive
masonry walls, an agora with a bronze equestrian sculpture of
the king, temples, houses, and workshops. It brought together
the population from a surrounding landscape otherwise
dominated by open villages and small forts.
Albanian and international archaeological teams have produced
dramatic results at Antigonea. The city achieved a certain rustic
grandeur and had its own magistrates. Unlike Butrint, however,
it was unable to reach an accommodation with the Roman Consul
Aemilius Paullus following the defeat of the Macedonians and was
comprehensively sacked. The evidence from Antigonea shows
how systematically this would have been done: first the herding
out of the enslaved population, then the soldiers moving from
house to house firing the roofs, mostly thatch, and the timber-
laced walls of the buildings. An extensive carbonised level contains
abundant domestic objects, rows of loom weights, and broken
pots. The substantial stone defensive walls were slighted and,
issue 184
ALBANIA
except for the building of a small chapel in late antiquity, the
site was abandoned.
Only in the 2nd century AD did the Emperor Hadrian, passing
through the still-desolate countryside, decree the building of a
new city, predictably named Hadrianopolis, from which the valley
now takes its name. It was never a large place, but it had a small
forum complex and a substantial theatre. An Italian team has been
at work here since the 1990s and has been able to reconstruct a
remarkable story of the later demographic and environmental
history of the valley, leading to the present grand but bleak aspect
of bare hillsides and flat, silted valley bottom.
Not only are these Classical remains of Albania the continuing focus
of local and international research: they are now being discovered by
growing numbers of cultural tourists, following in the footsteps of
Pouqueville, Leake, Byron, Disraeli, Kavanagh, and Lear. Two further
sites bear detailed mention – each a dramatic display of archaeological
riches, each a microcosm of Graeco-Roman history.
Two Greek coastal foundations of exceptional importance north
of the rugged ‘Mountains of Thunder’ were Apollonia (founded
588 BC) and Epidamnos/Dyrrachium (founded 627 BC). Both grew
to become major players in the wider politics of the Grecian world. 
MINERVA 17
 ABOVE The Bouleuterion (Greek council chamber) in the main agora at Apollonia.
Its impressive form was the result of a rebuild of the Roman ‘civic centre’ in the 2nd century AD.

The politics of Epidamnos, for example, were the spark that ignited
the powder keg of the Peloponnesian War, and later, as Roman
Dyrrachium, this strategic port would be the focus of a famous Civil
War confrontation between Caesar and Pompey, and subsequently
the recipient of much imperial largesse. It is now the Albanian
seaport of Durrës. Its name underscores its diverse origins,
Epidamnos being an Illyrian personal name indicating that the
colony was a joint effort of Greeks and locals. A remarkable series
of tombstones proves this, stone cippi with both Greek and Illyrian
BELOW Most of the remains of ancient Dyrrachium lie beneath the
personal names indicating close family relationships. The modern
modern town of Durrës, but this pebble mosaic – probably a Roman
city of Durrës prevents almost all but rescue archaeology, though copy of a Greek original – is indicative of the wealth of the city.
that can be dramatic. A notable post-war find was a deposit of some
18,000 votive figurines, probably from a sanctuary of Minerva.
Apollonia, by contrast, remains much as Lear saw it in the
1840s: a place of bald, desolate hills and wandering goats, with
an ancient walled monastery. The little nearby village of Pojan
or Pollina is named for the now dead city. Apollonia relied on a
riverine port, and when the course of the Vjosa shifted, so did the
wealth and the people, though the metropolis lingered in some
form until the 6th century AD, and a monastery of 13th-century
date represented a last gasp.
This was once the greatest Classical city in Albania. The original
Greek settlement joined an already existing community with
a pedigree back to the 9th century BC and the Aegean Bronze
Age; recent excavations in its Hellenic cemeteries have revealed
this early material stratified below graves of the Classical era.
Control of the river route along the wide Vjosa valley brought
inland contacts and an extensive trade in slaves. Civic institutions
followed the wealth – an extensive agora, a theatre, baths. The
city’s 81 walled hectares might have housed as many as 60,000
inhabitants. But, beyond these, five kilometres of suburbs and ports

18 MINERVA july/august 2020


ABOVE The Hellenistic-era theatre at the dramatic site of Byllis,
its seating robbed in Late Antiquity.
stretched along the river to the coast, punctuated by a number
of sanctuaries, including the sanctuary on Shtyllas Hill, the
northernmost known Doric peripteral-style temple in the Greek
world, and quite likely the sanctuary of Apollo himself.
Power followed wealth: Apollonia dominated other local
cities and had close links with Illyrian kings. Ultimately,
these connections persuaded Rome to include Apollonia in
a protectorate it established in the 2nd century BC, which reached
far into Illyria; while in theory a free Greek city, from this point
Apollonia’s fate was linked to Rome’s. It was here that the young
Octavian was studying, or hiding, in the city’s well-known
schools of rhetoric when he was advised of his adoptive father
Julius Caesar’s assassination. As important was its role as the
first terminus of the great trans-Balkan Via Egnatia, a role that
Epidamnos/Dyrrachium later usurped.
Finally, mention must be made of the ‘Machu Picchu’ of Albania.
The Vjosa route taken by soldiers and slavers ran along the ancient
Illyrian/Epirote frontier. Perched on a steep northern bluff is one
of Apollonia’s far more typical Illyrian trading partners, Byllis, the
capital of the Bylliones tribe, which formed a miniature league with
the nearby town of Nikea. It scowled across the river towards its
rival Epirote city, Amantia, site of a famous sanctuary of Aphrodite.
Dizzying views from Byllis swept over the southern mountains as
far as the Drino Valley to the south, the Adriatic and mighty snow-
capped Mount Tomor to the east. This city was truly lost – entirely
absent from tourist guidebooks until a few years ago – and has only
really been studied even by archaeologists since the 1980s.
Like Antigonea, Byllis was Hellenised and bilingual, though
rustic, with some impressive stone buildings which it gained in the
centuries following its foundation in the 6th century BC. These –
a theatre, piazzas, a substantial stadium, and shrines – formed the
issue 184
ALBANIA
ritual and political sanctuary of the tribe. This was set into a street
grid, the avenues lined with the houses of wealthy citizens. Despite
this, the population was small, the city acting mainly as a central
place and refuge in war. Hellenic ideas were backed up with the
status of Roman colony under Augustus. One of its citizens under
Emperor Trajan, Marcus Valerius Lollinus, left an inscription
recording his command of substantial elements of the Roman
army during campaigns in Mesopotamia.
Byllis was a model city almost to the end, its great years passing
along with the rest of the ancient world. The establishment of a
bishopric ensured significance in Late Antiquity, but the gradual
overrunning of the Balkans by the Slavs changed its character. A
new smaller wall circuit was built by an imperial trouble-shooter
named Victorinus, the interior filled with a mixture of shacks
alongside impressive churches founded by the nobility, but all built
from the robbed fragments of the Classical world. An impressive lime
kiln in the ruined lower agora shows where the ancient world
was turned into cement to serve the new. Thereafter, Byllis
was abandoned and forgotten, the bishop shifting ultimately
to marvellous medieval Berat, below Mount Tomor, where some
of the cathedral treasures survive. Ephemeral, almost ghost-like,
the life and death of Byllis embodies the character of so many
of the lost cities of Illyria.
Oliver Gilkes excavated at Butrint and has been heavily involved
in the archaeology of Albania for 20 years. He now works as an
archaeologist for Andante Travels.
His book Albania: an archaeological guide, the first full guide to
the country’s ancient sites, was published by I B Tauris in 2013.
MINERVA 19
 the golden
and the
GROTESQUE
Nero’s spectacular palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea or
‘Golden House’, was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Dalu Jones
describes how the opulent designs of its ancient halls inspired
some of the most celebrated artists of the 15th and 16th centuries.
IMAGE: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen/DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Florence

RIGHT Georges Chedanne,

The Laocoön in the Domus Aurea,
1880-1890.

20 MINERVA july/august 2020


ABOVE Nero’s Domus Aurea, from an engraving
by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, 1725.
In no other matter did he act more wastefully than in building
a house that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill,
which he originally named ‘Transitoria’ [House of Passages],
but when soon afterwards it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt
he called it ‘Aurea’ [Golden House]. It was a house whose
size and elegance these details should be sufficient to relate:
its courtyard was so large that a 120-foot colossal statue of the
emperor himself stood there; it was so spacious that it had a
mile-long triple portico; also there was a pool of water like a sea,
that was surrounded by buildings which gave it the appearance
of cities; and besides that, various rural tracts of land with
vineyards, cornfields, pastures, and forests, teeming with every
kind of animal both wild and domesticated. In other parts of
the house, everything was covered in gold and adorned with
jewels and mother-of-pearl; dining rooms with fretted ceilings
whose ivory panels could be turned so that flowers or perfumes
from pipes were sprinkled down from above; the main hall
of the dining rooms was round, and it would turn constantly
day and night like the Heavens; there were baths, flowing with
seawater and with the sulphur springs of the Albula; when he
dedicated this house, that had been completed in this manner,
he approved of it only so much as to say that he could finally
begin to live like a human being.
Suetonius,
The Lives of the Caesars: Nero 31
22 MINERVA
IMAGE: AKG-images
V
isitors to Rome taking selfies next to the Colosseum
are often unaware they are standing where once there
was a large man-made lake and a marvellous garden,
overlooked by a magnificent pillared pavilion, whose
gilded decoration shone in the sunlight. This was the
sumptuous private retreat of Emperor Nero (r. AD 54-68): the fabled
Domus Aurea, the ‘Golden House’, sprawling over the Oppian Hill.
A huge bronze statue of the emperor towered over the site: the
very name of the Colosseum derives from this amazing landmark.
The statue later disappeared, but the palace did not. It was, however,
forgotten: regarded by Nero’s successors as a symbol of the emperor’s
decadence, it was intentionally buried under a huge mound of earth.
Within a decade of Nero’s death, in AD 68, it had been stripped of
its luxurious marble furnishings and of all of its moveable treasures.
The 1st century AD structures were then filled with layers of soil and
levelled to serve as the substructure for the grand baths of Emperor
Titus (r. AD 79-81) and those of Emperor Trajan (r. AD 98-117) in
a deliberate attempt to obliterate not only the former emperor’s
memory, but also all traces of the Domus Aurea, and to return to
public use land that Nero had claimed as his own.
Thus it was that Emperor Vespasian (r. AD 69-79) drained the
artificial lake and began the construction of the Colosseum. In later
centuries, these great monuments were also stripped bare and were
surrounded by vineyards, leaving the Domus Aurea lying hidden
beneath them, undisturbed for nearly 1,500 years. In the late 15th
century, however, a young boy fell through an opening in the side of
the Oppian Hill, where he dimly perceived a stuccoed and painted
‘grotto’, or cave – the fabled ruins of the Domus Aurea. He was soon
followed by a host of artists and adventurers, including Raphael
(1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1475-1564), who were lowered by ropes
july/august 2020

‘Rome the receptacle
of all shining genius,
From whose grottoes
where the sun
never shines,
Now such great
light and such
fine art returns.’
(Anonymous poet, c.1530)
eager to dig up antiquities and explore the beautifully decorated
spaces, which were to prove such an influence on the art and
architecture of the Renaissance.
Back on the original site of the Domus Aurea, a large public park
was created in 1871, incorporating the ruins of the ancient baths built
by Emperors Titus and Trajan. In later years, the park was enlarged,
serving as a backdrop for the celebrations held on 21 April 1936 to
mark the legendary founding of Rome on the same date in 753 BC.
These developments were disastrous for the ruins, however, and
for the gloriously painted and stuccoed rooms surviving beneath.
In their search for the minerals that abound in ancient mortar, the
roots of plants had cracked the remaining floors of Trajan’s Baths,
infiltrating the opus signinum (pieces of pottery or brick mixed with
lime and sand used as mortar) that held them together.
In recent years, a vast programme of reclamation by the
Archaeological Superintendency of Rome was set up at the Domus
Aurea and is currently under way. Archaeologists are clearing an
increasing number of underground spaces, and tackling the problems
of conservation and public access; removing salts, mineral deposits,
fungal growths, and pollutants that are destroying the wall paintings;
and trying to reattach the topmost painted layers of the frescoes to
the underlying surfaces from which they have become separated. It
is painstaking work – and, for it to be successful, it is also necessary
physically to decrease the sheer volume of the park, whose weight
increases by up to 30% in the rain, by more than half. ‘We are
far from any effective solution,’ says Fedora Filippi, the retired
archaeologist formerly responsible for the excavations. ‘We have had
to map and then remove existing trees that are causing the most
damage, while documenting the entire excavation phase in detail…
We can’t just dismantle the garden without taking precautions or we
issue 184
domus aurea
LEFT This poem served as an
introduction for a group of etchings
with grotesques, attributed to the
Master of the Die (fl. 1525-1560).
will destroy the palace’s frescoed walls, which have managed to adapt
and stay standing over the centuries.’
The archaeologists are working to replace the existing gardens at
a level more than 10 feet above where they are now, with a
subsurface infrastructure designed to seal off the underground
architecture from moisture and to regulate temperature and
humidity. With straight avenues crossed at right angles by little
paths, the new garden will also echo ancient Roman gardens as they
were described by Latin writers Columella (AD 4-c.70) and Pliny the
Elder (AD 23/24-79). The overall idea is to evoke the concept of rus in
urbe (or ‘countryside in the city’) that underlies the Domus Aurea’s
original design – that of a vast country villa made up of separate but
linked porticoed pavilions with inner courtyards, exedrae, nymphaea,
pools, and fountains, complete with groves of trees, vineyards, an
artificial lake, and even pastures with grazing animals, right in the
densely populated urban heart of the empire. The historian Tacitus
(c.AD 55-120) wrote of the Domus Aurea that what was even more
marvellous than the spectacular interiors were ‘the fields and lakes
and the air of solitude given by wooden ground alternating with
clear tracts and open landscapes’. To be able to recover some of
the lost relationship between the green of the Oppian Hill and the
architecture within is therefore a tremendous challenge.
The Domus Aurea was not designed for everyday use, but for the
private entertainment of the emperor and to display his collections
of works of art. It covered a huge area – hundreds of acres – over the
Oppian Hill between the Palatine and Esquiline Hills. Nothing in the
entire 1st century AD Roman empire could compare to its beauty and
magnificence. No building was as gloriously splendid and imposing. It
had hundreds of rooms, their walls sheathed in polychrome marble,
while the stuccoed vaults and high ceilings were covered in wall 
MINERVA 23
BOTH PAGES The hall of Achilles at Skyros: the central ceiling panel depicts Achilles with shield and spear in hand, surrounded
by the daughters of Lycomedes, ruler of Skyros. In this scene, Achilles – who had been in hiding, disguised as a girl – has just
revealed his true identity to Odysseus. At the north face of the room, the remnants of a tile arch can still be seen. Below the
arch is ‘the conch’, so named for its resemblance to a shell. Decorative frames and details abound.
paintings inset with semi-precious stones, real gems, iridescent
seashells, and, of course, gold. The use of gold leaf was ubiquitous,
inside and out, and Nero even had mosaics, previously restricted to
floors, set for the first time in vaulted ceilings. The house and gardens
were filled with sculptures the emperor had taken from Greece and
Asia Minor. Among the most celebrated of all ancient sculptures,
the Laocoön group – rediscovered in 1506 on the Oppian Hill and
standing more than two metres high – might have been one of them,
though archaeologists now argue it was found under the nearby Bath of
Titus, rather than on the site of the Domus Aurea, as first believed.
The construction of the Golden House began in AD 64 and was

IMAGE: Parco Archeologico del Colosseo

completed four years later, in AD 68, just six months before Nero’s
death. The emperor oversaw every detail of the grandiose project,
which he had masterminded as a showcase for his own god-like
persona. The iconography of the surviving wall paintings makes
this clear, with a sequence of themes in each major group of rooms
linking the emperor to his mythical ancestry. 

26 MINERVA july/august 2020

 domus aurea
IMAGES: © Dotdotdot. All rights reserved

FAR LEFT The Octagonal Hall today.

BELOW & LEFT Digital renderings from the exhibition: the Octagonal
Hall in the Domus Aurea, with a map of the night sky showing astrological
signs, and the second lateral room opening on to the Octagonal Hall.

issue 184 MINERVA 27

 The reclamation plan to conserve and stabilise the surviving
parts of the Domus Aurea has also provided the opportunity for
archaeologists to excavate an increasing number of halls and
passageways within the buried palace. Among them is an octagonal
court, surmounted by a dome with a giant central oculus six metres
in diameter to let the daylight in: a feat of architectural engineering
and a brilliant early example of the Roman mastery of concrete
building techniques. Some archaeologists believe they have identified
here the famous cenatio rotunda, or revolving banqueting hall,
described by Suetonius. To create the effect, the palace architects –
Celer and Severus – would have designed an ingenious mechanism
that made the ceiling underneath the dome revolve like the heavens;
special light-effects at specific times would evoke an astronomical
cosmology, while perfume would have been sprayed and rose petals
dropped on the assembled diners. What is astonishing is the clever
use everywhere of devices to increase daylight in the palace’s inner
quarters. An extraordinary luminosity must have pervaded all the
spaces, now dank and dark, with white or brightly coloured walls

ABOVE & RIGHT Grotesque decoration

in the Carafa chapel, Santa Maria sopra
Minerva, Rome, 1489-1493.
LEFT Grotesques and an ancient philosopher,
c.1503-1504, by Luca Signorelli in the
cathedral at Orvieto.

and many pools and fountains concentrating

or dispersing light from specially positioned
slanted openings.
When visitors are finally allowed
once again to enter the Domus Aurea, they
will be surprised by a new lighting system
designed to highlight such masterpieces of
Roman painting as the recently restored
composition showing Achilles at Skyros.
Virtual renderings of the original spaces
and special effects will alternate between
full daylight and flickering torchlight.
This year, before the coronavirus
pandemic took hold, a major exhibition was
due to open inside the Domus Aurea to mark
the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death
in 1520. Entitled Raphael and the Domus
Aurea: the invention of the grotesque, the
exhibition focuses on the discovery inside
the Domus Aurea of a famous series of
painted ‘grotesques’ – mysterious stylised
figures that were to become a subject of
fascination to Renaissance artists.
From the 1480s, leading Italian artists –
including Pinturicchio (1454-1513), Filippino
Lippi (c.1457-1504), and Luca Signorelli
(c.1445-1523) – visited the ‘grottoes’,
reinterpreting in their own work the bizarre
motifs inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses
IMAGES: Alamy

they saw there. Raphael is believed to have


visited the grottoes in 1514, together with

28 MINERVA july/august 2020


TOP Raphael’s pupils decorated several Vatican rooms, including
the Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, after his designs inspired by
ancient painting. They show fanciful grotesque designs, as well as
scenes from the life of Apollo.
ABOVE Fresco decoration painted in 1516-1517, by Giovanni
da Udine, one of Raphael’s pupils, in the Loggetta.
30 MINERVA
his assistant Giovanni da Udine (1487-1564). An antiquarian in his own
right, Raphael correctly identified the long-buried halls of the Domus
Aurea. Together with his pupils, he made careful copies of the Roman
motifs, using them in his own work as luxuriant framing devices to
enhance mythological paintings in an ‘after the antique’ style. This is
most evident in the Vatican loggias, or corridor spaces, decorated by
Raphael under Pope Leo X (1475-1521), and in the private bathroom
known as the Stufetta del cardinal Bibbiena, also in the Vatican.
Henceforth, designs involving ‘grotesques’ became a widespread
fashion for painted and stuccoed interior decorations in Italy and
elsewhere. These designs were the same ones the great Roman
architectural theoretician Vitruvius (c.80-after 15 BC) had disliked
when they became fashionable in his own time. He wrote in De
architectura (c.25 BC) that they were illogical and perverse:
monsters are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images
of definite things. Reeds are set up in place of columns, … several
tender shoots, sprouting in coils from roots, have little statues
nestled in them for no reason, or shoots split in half, some holding
little statues with human heads, some with the heads of beasts.
Now these things do not exist nor can they exist nor have they
ever existed… How, pray tell, can a reed really sustain a roof,
or a candelabrum the decorations of a pediment, or an acanthus
shoot, so soft and slender, loft a tiny statue perched upon it, or
can flowers be produced from roots and shoots on the one hand
and figurines on the other? … Minds beclouded by feeble standards
of judgement are unable to recognise what exists in accordance
with authority and the principles of correctness.
Despite Vitruvius’ sharp judgement, Renaissance artists took
to the novelty and playfulness of grotesques’ imagery – in which
july/august 2020
RIGHT Statue of Prince Gudea,
City-Governor of Lagash, wearing the
flat hat of a priest, and holding a vase
of flowing water, which associates
him with irrigation works and the
Sumerian water-god Enki.
Neo-Sumerian period, c.2120 BC.
Dolerite.

FAR RIGHT Libation goblet of Prince

Gudea. The object was for ritual use,
the scene depicted is mythological,
and the inscription reads ‘To the god
Ningishzida, his god, Gudea, Ensi of
Lagash, for the prolongation of his
life, has dedicated this.’

CIVILISATION
BEGINS
Neil Faulkner reports on a new Getty Villa exhibition
focused on the huge cultural contribution of the
world’s oldest civilisation – Mesopotamia.
H
e lived more than 4,000 years ago, at the dawn of
civilisation. He was war leader, high priest, hydraulic
IMAGES: Musée du Louvre/RMN-Grand Palais/Raphaël Chipault/Art Resource, NY; RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo by Mathieu Rabeau
engineer, and first minister – all rolled into one – of
the Sumerian city-state of Lagash from 2144 to 2124
BC. His name was Gudea, and, because we know a
surprising amount about him, he looms large in the new Getty Villa
Museum exhibition Mesopotamia: civilisation begins.
Gudea adopted the title ensi, which might be translated ‘city-king’
or ‘city-governor’. He had married into the royal house of Lagash,
and in due course succeeded to the supreme position. But Sumerian
city-state rulers cannot be equated with the kings and princes of
later ages. What chiefly characterised a man like Gudea was the
extraordinary combination of roles combined in one person.
Let us set him in context. Ancient Sumer – the biblical land of
Shinar – lay astride the Tigris and Euphrates river system of Lower
Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). In the Early Copper Age (or Chalcolithic),
the mid 4th millennium BC, it was a region of vast swamps, of slow,
sluggish, muddy rivers and streams, of towering reeds and date
palms; it teemed with fish, fowl, and other wild game. Compared
with the desert wastes on either side, this watery jungle was a
paradise for hunters. But let it once be tamed, let the waters be
canalised and the swamps drained, and the result would be fields
of alluvial soil of such exceptional richness that Sumer might
become a veritable Garden of Eden.
This was the transition carried out in the final centuries of
the 4th millennium. It required massed labour to achieve – to
issue 184
mesopotamia
straighten and deepen channels, to build protective banks, to
divert and manage the waters. It required continuing massed labour
to maintain – to dredge channels, restore banks, repair flood damage.
But the result was unprecedented agricultural wealth. Documents
from 2500 BC record that the average yield on a field of barley
was 86 times the sowing. Such bounty – such great surpluses of
produce – allowed a further transition to be made: from the Copper
Age villages of the 4th millennium BC to the Bronze Age cities of
the 3rd millennium.
By later standards, Sumerian civilisation was small in scale.
Sumer as a whole was about the size of modern Denmark, and
even the larger cities might extend across only one or two square
miles. Records for Lagash – city and countryside – imply a population
of about 36,000 adult males, so perhaps 100,000 people in total.
But by comparison with everything that had gone before, this
was nothing short of an ‘urban revolution’, a massive qualitative
leap in the scale and complexity of human social organisation.
And it provided the basis for a cultural explosion. ‘The achievements
of this culture,’ explains Getty curator Tim Potts, ‘influenced
not just life in Mesopotamia, but are with us still today.’ Among
these achievements are writing, measurement, arithmetic, geometry,
timekeeping, and money.
Much of what we know about this civilisation is down to the
invention of writing and the keeping of records – that is, to the
existence of bureaucracy – for the Sumerians not only created official
documents, but also filed them in the form of baked clay tablets. g
MINERVA 33

ABOVE The cylinder seal of the royal scribe Ibni-Sharrum shows
the relationship between people, water, fertility, and the gods.
Akkadian period, 2217-2193 BC. Black marble.
But this, of course, came long after the original schemes of
drainage and reclamation. The Sumerians had no records of their
own origins. Indeed, Gudea of Lagash ruled more than a thousand
years after the earliest efforts at large-scale hydraulic engineering.
The yawning gaps in historical knowledge were filled by the myths
of Mesopotamian religion.
Some two dozen statues of Gudea are known. Several are
featured in the Getty exhibition. One shows the city-governor
holding a vase from which water flows down either side of his
gown into two vessels at his feet. Fish can be seen swimming
upstream towards the vase in his hands. What does this mean?
This and other images of Gudea show him wearing the flat
hat of a priest. The Sumerians imagined the life-giving waters
of their rivers and the fertility of their fields to be gifts of the
gods. Their greatest urban monuments were large temples and
artificial mounds known as ziggurats. An early ziggurat at Erech,
for example, was ten metres high, built of sun-dried bricks, faced
with thousands of pottery goblets, and topped by an asphalt
platform. The temples, and estates in the surrounding countryside
that supported them, belonged to the gods. The territory of
Lagash was divided between some 20 deities. The goddess Baü
owned 44 square kilometres.
In the absence of Baü herself, this property was managed on
her behalf by temple priests. They were well rewarded for their
efforts. While many of Baü’s people – tenant farmers on her estate
– held only one hectare, sometimes only a third of a hectare, one
senior-ranking temple official is known to have held more than
14 hectares. As for the city-governor – who was also the high priest –
. he held no fewer than 246 hectares.
.
. 34 MINERVA
IMAGE: Musée du Louvre RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo by Franck Raux
Thanks to the meticulous record-keeping of the Sumerian
bureaucracy, we can say more. The tenant-farmers on Baü’s estate
paid a seventh or an eighth of their produce to the temple in rent.
These rents enabled the priests to employ 21 bakers, assisted by
27 female slaves; 25 brewers, with 6 slaves; and 40 female textile-
workers. We even learn something of the social tensions in this
obviously class-based society. An official decree setting out to restore
the old order of Lagash ‘as it had existed from the beginning’ lists
various abuses of power: priests who were stealing from the poor,
practising sundry kinds of extortion, and treating temple land, cattle,
equipment, and servants as their private property.
The priests derived their legitimacy from the belief that the fertility
and prosperity of the land were in the gift of the gods, and that they
were chosen by the gods to represent them. A cylinder seal in the
exhibition – that of the royal scribe Ibni-Sharrum – is one object
among many that shows this relationship. As well as having a very
practical use – ‘like a modern signature’ – these ubiquitous objects
were ‘miniature canvases’, their finely worked depictions rich in
symbolic meaning. That of Ibni-Sharrum shows two water buffaloes
and two figures with vases, from which water flows into a channel
running beneath.
In this scene, surely, we bear witness to Enki, the Sumerian
god of water. For Tim Potts this image is ‘a representation of
the relationship between man, nature, and the gods’. Sumerian
rulers saw themselves as primary agents in the articulation of this
relationship. ‘The fact that Gudea is in the role of holding this
vase’, says Potts of the statue in question, ‘is associating him
with that underworld, reinforcing his role in the fertility and
renewal of life in Mesopotamia.’ Gudea rules by divine right. g
july/august 2020
 mesopotamia
t a
IMAGES: Musée du Louvre/RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Ollivier/Art Resource, NY; RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo by Franck Raux

ABOVE Head of Prince Gudea, City-Governor of Lagash,

wearing the flat hat of a priest – just one of his many roles.
Neo-Sumerian period, c.2120 BC. Gabbro.

LEFT Statue of Prince Gudea in the guise of an architect

– that is, a high priest whose responsibilities included the
building of temples and ziggurats in honour of the gods.
Neo-Sumerian period, c.2120 BC. Gabbro.

issue 184 MINERVA 35


‘The Mesopotamians did think about kingship as something
that was in the gift of the gods. The gods are the ones who select
the worthy person who can become king.’
A central obligation on the ruler, therefore, was the building
and maintenance of temples and ziggurats, and the regular
performance of appropriate holy rites. Unsurprisingly, then,
another of the many statues of Gudea shows him in the guise of
architect, seated with a tablet on his lap, presumably giving design
specifications. This involved further duties: accessing the many
raw materials necessary for temple-construction and ritual that
Mesopotamia, for all its agricultural fertility, could not supply –
timber, metals, stone for tools, precious stones for decoration, and
also gold and silver. The wood may have come from Iran or Syria,
copper from Oman, tin from Iran, Syria, Asia Minor, even Europe,
lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, and mother-of-pearl from the Persian
Gulf. These are long-distance connections, and we must imagine the
implications – the caravans and desert trading-posts, the merchant
ships and ports, the diplomatic arrangements and payments of
protection money to local tribal leaders.
So Sumer’s vast surpluses did not only sustain an urban
civilisation and a ruling elite: they gave rise to a merchant class
36 MINERVA
LEFT A fragment of a victory stele.
Ancient Sumer was a violent world, and
leadership in war was among the many
roles of men like Gudea.
Akkadian period, 2278-2270 BC. Limestone.
IMAGE: Musée du Louvre/RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Ollivier/Art Resource, NY
and a web of trade lines extending for thousands of miles.
As well as giant grain-stores, there must have been warehouses
full of precious commodities. This great wealth had to be
defended – against ‘barbarians’ in the wilderness all around,
against rival city-states in a fragmented polity, and, not least perhaps,
against the mass of peasants, labourers, and slaves who formed
a potential ‘enemy within’. So Gudea was also a war-leader, the
commander of the army of Lagash – which might have comprised
four-wheeled chariots pulled by asses and a phalanx of armoured
spearmen, if the evidence of the famous ‘Standard of Ur’ (to be seen
in the British Museum) is any guide.
It was this extraordinary and unprecedented social complexity
that made men like Gudea into the world’s first bureaucrats, standing
at the head of cohorts of clerks and accountants working in the
offices of the state. The life of a Copper Age village of a few dozen
people required no records: memory and oral communication
sufficed for all the requirements of everyday life. But here were
city-states of 100,000 people, ranked in a social hierarchy, arranged
in a division of labour, each person with obligations, duties,
entitlements. Who owed what to whom? How many bushels of
barley or pots of honey? How many fleeces or hides? What was
july/august 2020

RIGHT The invention of writing by the Sumerian
bureaucracy was one of many great contributions
to world civilisation. This ceramic cone is inscribed
in cuneiform with the reforms of King Urukagina.
Early Dynastic period, c.2350 BC. Terracotta.
IMAGE: Musée du Louvre/RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo by Franck Raux
held in store, and what
w disbursements were due? And what
of those great construction projects? How much wood, brick,
ceramic, and precious stone were required to build a temple
or a ziggurat? Then there was the army. The chariots, the
horses, the armour, the arms: how many, in what condition,
what replenishment was necessary?
So the Mesopotamians not only created bureaucracy, but also
invented its essential tools: writing, measurement, arithmetic. They
carried out an information revolution as transformative as the later
invention of paper, printing, the computer, or the World Wide Web.
Writing is an agreed set of representative symbols that allows
information to be recorded and transmitted over time, it being fully
comprehensible to a wide range of others. Such is the quality of the
Mesopotamian archaeological record that we can see the evolution
of writing from its most basic form around 3400 BC. The symbols
on the oldest tablets were ‘pictograms’ – simplified but recognisable
drawings of an object, concerning which some record was required.
Over time, presumably to speed the process of recording, the
pictograms became increasingly stylised, sometimes ceasing to be
universally recognisable, but of course remaining so to the literate
clerks of the state administration.
issue 184
mesopotamia
t mia
B not everything
But y h g lent
l itself l to direct
d pictographic
p g ph representation.
p on.
A concept like tribute or debt, or the name of a particular tributary
or a debtor, could not be rendered by a pictogram. To record such
things required a further leap, to ‘ideograms’, which were arbitrary
but agreed symbols for the expression of a concept or a name in
writing. A further possibility then arose. Many everyday things were
known in Ancient Sumerian by single-syllable words. The word for
mouth, for example, was ka. This was represented by a human head,
but in fact two things were thereby written: not only the object ‘mouth’,
but also the sound ‘ka’. So writing was now capable of becoming
‘phonetic’ – a record of sounds which, in combination, could be made
to represent multi-syllable words.
Writing developed rapidly in the first century or two of Sumerian
civilisation, and by 2500 BC at the latest the phonetic system was
being used to transcribe the names of city-state rulers. Moreover,
what had begun as a device for creating state records was being used
to transform a tradition of orally transmitted myths into literature.
‘For the Mesopotamians, writing was a key bureaucratic invention,
recording transactions, agricultural activity, and so on,’ says Potts,
‘but within a few hundred years it began also to be used for writing
literature, myths about the gods and the heroes of earlier times.’ g
MINERVA 37

ABOVE The cylinder seal of Prince Ishma-Ilum. At once a form of signature
and a miniature canvas to convey messages about identity, status, and
affiliations, these prestige objects were used to validate official documents.
Early Dynastic period, c.2450 BC. Lapis lazuli.
As important as the invention of symbols was the creation of
a technique for using them. This was cuneiform (‘wedge-shaped’).
By 2600 BC, the Sumerian pictograms and ideograms became
highly simplified to the point where they could be rendered in the
form of impressions in clay made by a wedge-headed stylus.
And of course, official documents must be authenticated,
must they not? Included in the Getty exhibition is a collection
of cylinder seals. These were functional, in that each senior
official had his own and would roll his unique mark across
the soft clay of a document to validate it, but they were also
prestige objects, bearing intricate designs, the quality of which
was a measure of the standing of its owner, the choice of images
a reflection of his role, status, and identity. The scenes depicted
ranged from everyday activities like banqueting, ploughing, and
making pottery, to mythology, ritual, and warfare, such that
these small but intricately worked objects become the largest
and most important surviving body of Mesopotamian
iconography and artistry.
In addition to a script, the Sumerians needed a system of
notation. Simple societies working with small numbers could
manage with notches on a tally-stick, one bushel or sheep or
whatever being rendered by one notch. But how were the vast
flocks of Baü or the city grain-stores of Lagash to be recorded?
The Sumerians devised two systems of notation: a decimal
system used for addition and a sexagesimal one (based on 60)
for measuring volume. In the former, for example, numbers from
one to nine were rendered by the semi-circular impressions of a
reed pen, but ten was rendered by a circle, 20 by two such circles,
and so on. Eventually, the decimal system disappeared, and all
Mesopotamian numerical notation became sexagesimal – perhaps
an early example of bureaucratic rationalisation.
Other innovations included fixed units of measurement (useful
in laying out fields and designing temples), standardised weights
and measures (essential in levying tribute, making disbursements,
38 MINERVA
IMAGE: Musee de Louvre/RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo by Christian Larrieu
and market exchanges), and the invention of the first clocks
(sundials and water clocks operating on the hour-glass principle).
Most of the great advances – setting in place many of the
foundation-blocks of human culture – took place at the very
beginning of Mesopotamian civilisation. The heavily top-down
society that was created, tightly controlled by an elite of governors,
priests, and bureaucrats with a vested interest in the status quo,
became conservative and resistant to further change. This no
doubt included Gudea, the arch-Sumerian-bureaucratic ruler
who looms so large in the surviving record. But the sophistication
he and his kind represent is astonishing.
‘The ancient land of Mesopotamia’, says Tim Potts, ‘occupies a
unique place in the history of human culture. It was there, around
3400-3000 BC, that the first major cities arose, boasting massive
city walls, temples, and palaces; the first known writing on clay
tablets, used by priestly bureaucracies to record agricultural
activities; sculptures of gods, worshippers, and rulers; and many
other remarkable cultural and scientific achievements.’
further reading
The book of the exhibition, Mesopotamia – Civilization Begins
by Ariane Thomas and Timothy Potts (ISBN 978-81606066492),
is available from Getty Publications/Yale University Press, price £50.
Mesopotamia – Civilization Begins was
scheduled to run at the Getty Villa until 27 July 2020, but is
currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic; a decision
is pending on future opening. However, information about the
exhibition, including a 45-minute virtual tour in the company of
curator Tim Potts, can be found on the museum’s website at
http://getty.edu/art/exhibitions/mesopotamia/.
july/august 2020
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EVER-CHANGING
EPHESUS
40 MINERVA july/august 2020
 EPHESUS

It is one of the most popular

archaeological sites in the
Mediterranean, but how many
visitors know that the ruins they see
are those of a new city, not the old?
And how many know the rich myth-
history of the ancient Ephesians?
David Stuttard is our guide.

T
he philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived
at the turn of the 5th century BC, is famed for many
observations. Visiting the ruins of his home city today,
two seem particularly apposite: ‘the cool becomes
hot, the hot becomes cool; the wet becomes dry, the
dry becomes wet’; and ‘nothing stays the same’. For what was then
a thriving port, its lanes fanned by sea breezes, is now landlocked.
Its once-glittering Artemision, the Sanctuary of Artemis, whose
early temple had been built with funds from Lydia’s King Croesus,
lies half submerged in swampy marshland, its foundations home
to frogs and basking turtles, one single reconstructed column
colonised by nesting storks. Even the city’s location has changed:
the marble streets that are today thronged with slow-moving,
polyglot processions of jostling tourists who stop only to gaze at the
Theatre or the Library of Celsus are not those of Heraclitus’ Ephesus,
but of the later Hellenistic and Roman settlement. How right he was
that ‘everything is in a state of flux’. Yet, while Heraclitus was honing
his philosophy, many of his fellow citizens were turning elsewhere
– to religion and mythology – not least to seek out certainties about
their civic history and the temple at the heart of their community.
Archaeologists have shown that the hills of Ephesus were
first settled in the early 6th millennium, but, while some Greeks
maintained that local heroes founded both the city and its sanctuary,
others told how Androclus, a prince of Athens, banished in the 10th
century BC, first berthed his ship on the Ephesian shore. Before
he sailed, Androclus visited the oracle at Delphi, which bade him
make his home wherever he should see a leaping fish and a running
boar. Nowhere on his voyage had these prodigies been found, but
fate then intervened. As his comrades were preparing supper, one
IMAGE: Dreamstime

ABOVE The streets of Ephesus, familiar to countless tourists, belong not
to the Classical Greek period but to the later Hellenistic and Roman city.
issue 184
brushed against the frying pan. The fish that they were cooking flew
through the air; the fire collapsed; the undergrowth caught light;
and an indignant boar, awakened from its nap, rushed off, with
the Athenians in hot pursuit. When Androcles caught up with it,
he slew the beast – and, in obedience to the oracle, instructed his
companions to clear the land to build a city.
Still others told a different story – though it too had links to
Athens. When the legendary King Theseus abducted an Amazonian
princess from the Crimea, her sisters swept west to rescue her, but,
defeated in battle in the shadow of the Acropolis, they limped home
to lick their wounds. On their way, they came to Ephesus, where in
a hollow by the shore they built a shrine to Artemis, goddess of the
wild and of the moon, who some said had been born there. 
MINERVA 41

ABOVE The home to nesting storks, the single reconstructed column of the
Artemesion (the Sanctuary of Artemis) now stands in swampland.
Addressing Artemis herself, the 3rd century BC Alexandrian poet
Callimachus describes the moment:
The Amazons, whose hearts are set on battle, set up a wooden image
to you beside the sea at Ephesus beneath an oak tree, and Hippo
[their queen] performed the sacrament. The Amazons danced a
war dance round the statue first with shields and armour, then in a
circle with the dancers widely spaced. And pipes played loud, a shrill
accompaniment… Feet beat; quivers rattled. And afterwards a mighty
temple was erected round the wooden statue, richer and more sacred
than any other that the dawn might see. It easily surpasses Delphi.
Sexless Amazons
There were good reasons for linking Amazons with rites of Artemis.
Fearsome warriors, like her they rejected sex – except (in their case)
when it was unavoidable for reproduction – and, though women,
they were essentially androgynous. This was why at the Artemision
not only were the priestesses required to be virgins, but, unusually
for a Greek sanctuary, the priests (the Megabyzi) had to be eunuchs.
This was why, according to the 2nd century AD Ephesian dream-
interpreter Artemidorus, laywomen were forbidden entry to the
temple on pain of death.
As for the wooden image that the Amazons were said to have
set up, it differed radically from statues of the goddess found
elsewhere. Believed by some to have fallen from the skies, a gift
42 MINERVA
PHOTO: David Stuttard
from Zeus, it showed Artemis not as a demure young maiden or
virgin huntress (her usual incarnations) but transformed into the
essence of fecundity. Surviving copies show her standing tall, her
arms outstretched, her full lips sensuous, her almond eyes and
features oriental. She is wearing a tall crown, adorned sometimes
with winged beasts, sometimes with a model of the city or its temple.
A garland of fruits is draped round her neck and her short cape is
adorned with zodiacal signs, while, sewn into her long dress, animals
stand out in sharp relief: goats, lions, and leopards; griffins, bees,
and bulls. And covering her from chest to waist is a cornucopia of
egg-like spheres, whose identity remains the subject of debate. Are
they gourds? Or nipple-less breasts? Are they perhaps bulls’ testicles?
One thing seems certain: they proclaim fertility. They show, too, that
here in Ephesus Artemis herself is in a state of flux, caught in the
moment as she morphs between the goddess so familiar to Greeks
– the virgin goddess of the wild – and her Asiatic counterpart, the
primeval mother-goddess Cybele, the ‘lady of the animals’, who had
been worshipped here since time immemorial.
For centuries, the silversmiths of Ephesus made tiny reproductions
of this oriental Artemis to sell to pilgrims when they visited the
Artemision. For the temple was considered to have powerful
properties. Herodotus records how, in 550 BC, besieged by Croesus,
‘the Ephesians dedicated their city to Artemis and stretched a rope
between the temple and the city walls’, believing that by transmitting
divine energy it would protect them. It did not.
july/august 2020

ABOVE The goddess Artemis from Ephesus, a spectacular combination
of Greek and Asiatic features and symbols, differs radically from other
more familiar representations.
“At the Artemision, the priestesses
had to be virgins and the priests eunuchs.”
issue 184
EPHESUS
But the victorious Croesus was benign. Thanks to his patronage,
the temple (already rebuilt a century before, after migrating Black
Sea tribes had destroyed its predecessor) was furnished with a double
colonnade and columns, whose carved drums showed a procession
of pious worshippers. Yet, as Heraclitus might have told his fellow
citizens, even this, the most breathtaking temple of its age, could
not remain forever. In 356 BC, it was engulfed in flames, the work
of a crazed arsonist. Under torture, he declared his motive, that his
fame should live forever; and, despite an edict aimed at thwarting
his ambition by forbidding any mention of his name, it has come
down to us: Herostratus. In the ensuing years, the reason why the
goddess had allowed her sanctuary to burn became apparent: the fire
occurred on the same night as, far off in Macedonia, Alexander the
Great was born; Artemis, whose portfolio included helping out at
childbirth, had been too preoccupied to intervene to save her temple.
A new temple
Meanwhile, the distraught Ephesians resolved to build an even more
magnificent new Artemision, protected if not from fire then at least
from earthquakes by setting its foundations atop layers of fleeces
interspersed with layers of well-packed charcoal. To fund it, they 
MINERVA 43
engaged in what today would be called ‘crowdfunding’. According
to the Greek geographer Strabo, they ‘collected their womenfolk’s
jewellery and their own belongings, and sold the columns of the
former temple’.
By the time that the then 22-year-old Alexander (who was
as obsessed as Herostratus had been with his own immortality)
visited the site, it was still sufficiently incomplete for him to offer
funds to finish it; but the Ephesians refused. It would not be right,
they said with calculated sycophancy, for one god to make offerings
to another. Even without Alexander’s largesse, the completed temple
shone with awe-inspiring majesty, one of the Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World. Pliny the Elder considered it the greatest Greek
temple of them all, while the 2nd century BC Antipater, a poet from
Sidon, gushed:
I have gazed on the high walls of Babylon, atop which
chariots can drive, and on the statue of Zeus at Olympia.
I have seen the hanging gardens, Rhodes’ colossus of the sun, the
great works of the mighty pyramids and the towering Mausoleum.
But when I looked at Artemis’ temple rising to the clouds, these
other wonders failed and I said: ‘Except for Mount Olympus,
there is no other sight beneath the sun that can compare.’
Yet no sooner was the temple built than change came once more
to Ephesus. Its people were used to political upheaval. Conquered by
Croesus, when Lydia in turn was overrun, their city was subsumed by
Persia. Fought over briefly by Athenians and Spartans, it was returned
to Persian rule, before being later ‘liberated’ by Alexander. But there
was another kind of problem: mud from the River Cayster was already
silting up the harbour, making it unsuitable for the merchant ships on
which much of its economy depended. For its new ruler, Lysimachus,
one of Alexander’s successors, there was only one solution: a new
44 MINERVA
port and a new city had to be built a few miles to the west, and the
inhabitants of old Ephesus would have to move. Not unsurprisingly,
they refused: they had no wish to leave their much-loved homes
and neighbourhoods, no matter how attractive the alternative
accommodation. Faced with such intransigence, Lysimachus or
his advisors devised a fail-safe plan: they blocked the sewers and
waited for the rain. As the drains backed up and houses flooded,
it did not take long for traumatised Ephesians to fall into line.
A new city
There were many more upheavals still to come. Bequeathed to
Rome in 133 BC, Ephesians at first made what in retrospect were
ill-judged choices, initially joining the rebellious King Mithridates
of Pontus in massacring resident Roman citizens and sympathisers
(for which they suffered dire reprisals at the hands of Rome’s ruthless
general, Sulla), then idolising Mark Antony and turning a blind eye
when his assassins knifed Cleopatra’s disobliging sister, Arsinoë, to
death on the steps of the Artemision, where she had been serving
as a priestess.
Luckily for the Ephesians, Antony’s nemesis, Augustus, bore them no
ill will. Under his rule and that of his successors, their city blossomed
as never before, becoming richer and more populous by the day,
the busiest commercial hub in Asia Minor. A theatre capable of
seating 25,000 spectators was built, and a library, home to 12,000
manuscripts, was donated by the wealthy consul Gaius Julius Aquila 
BELOW LEFT Column relief from the 4th century BC Temple of Artemis
at Ephesus, c.330 BC.
BELOW The theatre, which was capable of holding 25,000 spectators, built
under the rule of Augustus.
OPPOSITE The Library of Celsus, home to 12,000 manuscripts and funded
by the wealth of Roman consul Gaius Julius Aquila.
july/august 2020
 LEFT Gold statuette of a goddess from Ephesus, c.580 BC.

in memory of his father, Celsus, its façade adorned with statues that
proclaimed his many virtues. Soon after the library’s completion, a
monument on the Street of the Curetes that faced it was dedicated
to both Artemis and the philhellenic Roman emperor Hadrian.
Already, further change was in the air – a change that not even the
might of Rome could reverse. In AD 55, Paul of Tarsus, a Christian
evangelist, had taken residence in Ephesus, where he preached
the Gospel with such passion that he provoked his enemies to riot
and his followers to acts of zealous vandalism – they burned books
apparently worth ‘50,000 pieces of silver’. Yet it was the silversmiths
who had most reason to be worried. If Christianity should triumph,
the market for their souvenirs would dry up, and they would go
out of business. The Acts of the Apostles (where, in the King James
translation, Artemis is called by her Roman name, Diana) takes
up the story:

A certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made

silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen;
Whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation,
and said, ‘Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.
Moreover ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost
throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away
much people, saying that they can be no gods, which are made
with hands: So that not only this our craft is in danger to be
set at naught; but also that the temple of the great goddess be
destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.’ And the
whole city was filled with confusion.

Finding two of Paul’s followers, the Ephesians dragged them into

the theatre, where a hostile crowd was gathered. With threats and
insults ricocheting round the auditorium, one man called for calm.

But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about
the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.
And when the town clerk had appeased the people, he said,
‘Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth not how
that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess
Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter?’

A new goddess?
Wisely (or cravenly, depending on one’s point of view) Paul made a
hasty exit from the city. But the silversmiths’ days were numbered.
Another apostle, John, followed Paul to Ephesus, where his tomb on
Ayasuluk Hill, a stone’s throw from the Artemision, became itself a
place of pilgrimage. In time, it had a fine basilica raised over it.
Accompanying John is said to have been Jesus’ mother, Mary,
whom he installed in a house high in the fragrant folds of nearby
Mount Coressus. For many, including some of the growing
community of Christians, it must have seemed as if she was the
latest incarnation of the mother-goddess who had once been
PHOTO: David Stuttard

known as Artemis and Cybele, a reassuring symbol of protective

continuity in times of bewildering change. At the Third Ecumenical
Council (held at Ephesus in AD 431), Mary’s divinity was, if not
recognised, then at least implied when she was officially designated

46 MINERVA july/august 2020


ABOVE A now-weathered image of Artemis of Ephesus flanked by two columns
and two animals is carved into this panel near the Street of the Curetes.
the Mother of God. Mary’s transformation was not the only one
to have occurred at Ephesus. For centuries, mythology had told
how, close by on Mount Latmus, Endymion, a handsome shepherd,
had been the first man to observe the phases of the moon. As he
turned his face towards the skies, the moon-goddess Selene saw
him gazing up at her, and over time she fell in love with him.
However, human beings must die, and wishing to be with
Endymion forever, she asked Zeus to grant him everlasting youth.
He did, but at the same time he condemned the shepherd to eternal
sleep. While Endymion could not be woken, he could still be roused,
so each day Selene visited his cave and over time he fathered 50
daughters – which made Selene, too, a fertile mother figure, a
sister (or perhaps an alter ego) of Cybele and Ephesian Artemis.
At Ephesus, Endymion had alter egos of his own. In the mid
3rd century AD, amid bitter persecutions, seven young Christian
zealots were walled up in a cave near the Sanctuary of Cybele.
Praying for salvation, they fell asleep, and it was only the noise
of stones being torn out from the cave’s mouth that awoke them.
Hungry and thirsty, they sent one of their number out to buy
provisions, but he returned both empty-handed and bewildered.
The city streets and buildings seemed familiar yet different; signs
of the cross were everywhere; and shopkeepers refused to serve
him, complaining that his money was long obsolete.
issue 184
EPHESUS
Only with further questioning had he learned the astonishing
truth: he and his companions had been asleep for 200 years. A
Christian emperor now ruled, and Christianity had been adopted as
the imperial religion; the Artemision was closed. As the news swept
through Ephesus, the seven were presented to the bishop, but no
sooner had they told their tale than they lay down and died.
Had the seven slept for a further 200 years, on awakening they would
found their city even more unrecognisable. For by the 7th century, silt
from the Cayster River had made even Lysimachus’ port unusable. The
wharves and warehouses were empty. The ships were going elsewhere.
Yet still the Cayster flowed, and every year the coastline and the sea
began to fade a little farther into the summer haze. Today, the site of
Ephesus lies three miles inland, and the once sparkling bay is home
to fields and roads, salt marshes – and an airstrip. There is, however,
talk of digging a canal so tourist boats can sail into the harbour, from
where their passengers might stroll up the broad boulevard towards the
theatre. To drain the marshes at the Artemision would pose a greater
problem. For now, at least, the frogs and turtles are safe.
Surely Heraclitus would have viewed this blend of change and
continuity with wry satisfaction. Writing not just of the Cayster but
of life itself, he famously remarked: ‘It disperses and returns again;
it converges and departs; it ebbs and flows… It is impossible to step
into the same river twice.’
MINERVA 47
 LEFT The Sea Triumph of Charles II by Antonio Verrio, BELOW Charles II by
c.1674. Oil on canvas Honoré Pelle, 1684.
The painting probably celebrates the signing of the Treaty Marble
of Westminster in February 1674, ending the Third Anglo-
Dutch War. It was hung in Whitehall by Charles II.

Tate Britain’s recent exhibition British Baroque: Power and

Illusion was an opportunity to explore the way in which art gave
expression to the transition from revolutionary Commonwealth
to a new stability and confidence in Late Stuart England.

I
n the centre is the King, who is dressed like a Roman emperor
but unmistakably Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’ whose
accession in 1660 had marked the end of the revolutionary era.
Matters could hardly be more over the top. Antonio Verrio, an
Italian artist who had been painting aristocratic interiors since
his arrival in England in 1672, was eager to secure a position at
Court. His Sea Triumph of Charles II (c.1674) seems to have been
a trial piece, so he was especially eager to win the approval of his
prospective patron. The image probably commemorates the Treaty
of Westminster, which had ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War in
February 1674. The English claimed this as a victory, which must
have surprised the Dutch, who had won all the battles under the
inspired leadership of Admiral de Ruyter and thereby prevented
a French invasion of their country. Charles II had participated
in the war under the terms of a secret treaty with Louis XIV
of France – an ignominious arrangement whereby
the English had ganged up against their Dutch
co-religionists in alliance with the absolutist Catholic
bully who dominated Europe at the time: a late
17th-century version of ‘appeasement’. The English
Court, it should be said, wanted vengeance for the
Battle of the Medway, in 1667, during a previous Anglo-
Dutch War, when de Ruyter had sailed up the river to
IMAGES: Royal Collection/HM Queen Elizabeth II;Victoria and Albert Museum, donated by Mr Henry Durlacher

Chatham and burned the English fleet at anchor.

Restoration England did not ‘rule the waves’:
the Dutch did. Never mind. Undeterred by awkward
historical details, Antonio set out to please the man by
rendering in paint what had not been achieved in battle.
Here was the Merry Monarch – a womanising hedonist of
modest intellect, low attention-span, and thoroughly reactionary
attitudes – portrayed as the all-conquering military hero. He is
carried through the water by Neptune in a shell-backed chariot,
accompanied by female personifications of his three kingdoms
(England, Scotland, and Ireland). Above his head, Fame holds a scroll
inscribed ‘Let the boundary of his empire be the ocean and the limits
of his fame be the stars’, and Time prepares to crown him with the
laurel wreath of victory. Other floating figures carry the royal arms.
In the background is the (imaginary) naval victory. On the left, Envy
(lest there be any) gets zapped by lightning.
It was a great success. The King had the painting hung at Whitehall
and Antonio got the job. He went on to decorate the new state 
issue 184
 IMAGE: The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth
ABOVE View of Chatsworth by Jan Siberechts, 1699-1700. Oil on canvas
Scores of Elizabethan and Jacobean mansions were torn down in the late 17th and early 18th century by a Restoration elite determined
to rebuild in the new Baroque style. Chatsworth was one of the greatest of the new generation of grand country houses.

apartments at Windsor, and ended up entitled ‘Chief First Painter’
on a salary of £200 a year (around ten times the average wage).
This was the Baroque. Grandiose, overblown, exaggerated to
the point of self-caricature, a mix of fantasy and power-freakery
that seems to dare the viewer to snigger. It had its roots in the
16th-century Counter-Reformation in Italy, where the Renaissance
tradition had evolved into forms of monumentalism and artistic
elaboration designed – so it seems – to put established power
beyond critique. In reaction to the jibes of turbulent priests like
Martin Luther and John Calvin, it had helped elevate the authority
of State and Church halfway to heaven. If the Inquisition was the
secret police of Catholic reaction, the Baroque was its design and
décor: both, in very different ways, communicated the message
that questioning was not to be tolerated. In sociological terms, the
Baroque triumphed where the middle class – ‘the middling sort’ –
were weak, where the old feudal aristocracy continued unchallenged.
In the storm centres of the Reformation – in England, Holland,
the Baltic cities, the north German towns – the Baroque was long
delayed, for men and women were more intent on gutting churches
than building new ones.
It had been a long drawn-out process in the British Isles. It really
got going with Thomas Cromwell’s Dissolution of the Monasteries
in the 1530s, but it had culminated in more than two decades of
revolutionary upheaval. From the moment, on 23 July 1637, when
Jenny Geddes hurled her stool at the Dean of St Giles in Edinburgh
for daring to conduct a service in the manner of a Mass to the
moment, on 29 May 1660, when Charles II returned from exile to
London, ready to ascend the throne, Britain had been convulsed
by the conflict between Court and Country, Army and Parliament,
Grandees and Levellers. The ‘Good Old Cause’ had splintered into
factions, men of substance and position recoiling in fear of the ‘many-
headed hydra’ of social revolution, while popular radicals advocated
political and religious democracy. Conservatives across Europe were
appalled when the English executed their King and proclaimed
a Republic: the world, it seemed, had been turned upside down.
But the new Republic found no stability: it morphed into the military
dictatorship of a ‘Lord Protector’ (Oliver Cromwell) and his Major-
Generals. By the end, virtually all men of property, whatever their
previous affiliations, rallied in support of the Restoration.
This was the context for the great flowering of the British Baroque
celebrated in a recent Tate Britain exhibition (unfortunately curtailed
by the coronavirus lockdown). It captured a distinct Restoration
spirit. Looking back, the Republicans of the Commonwealth
appeared not only dangerously subversive of social order, but also, in
popular caricature at least, sombre, judgemental, and humourless. The
Good Old Cause had involved too much praying and not enough fun

50 MINERVA july/august 2020


IMAGES: Tate; National Galleries of Scotland, purchased in 1922
ABOVE Equestrian Portrait of a Lord Mayor of London by John Closterman,
c.1700. Oil on canvas
In this classic male portrait of the Baroque era, the Lord Mayor exudes a
sense of entitlement. This is power without question.
RIGHT Queen Anne, when Princess of Denmark by Willem Wissing, c.1685.
Oil on canvas
By all accounts, even in her youth, Anne was far from the Court ‘beauty’
depicted here.
– at least for those at the top, with the ample means to live the good
life should they be permitted to do so. That included not only old
Royalists – now restored to favour – but former Parliamentarians, the
men who had led the revolution against absolutism and feudalism,
but who now, as gentry, merchants, bankers, and the like, wanted
to enjoy their wealth. The English elite, fractured by civil war, re-
congealed under the later Stuarts – Charles II (1660-1685), James II
(1685-1688), William and Mary (1689-1702), and Anne (1702-1714).
Tensions remained. King James, a Catholic wannabe-absolute
king, had to be dispatched in an internal military coup (‘the Glorious
Revolution’ of 1688); he and his successors then sustained an ultra-
Royalist (‘Jacobite’) resistance that occasionally flared into full-scale
war all the way down to 1745. The Parliamentary mainstream split
into factions – pro-Court Tories, anti-Court Whigs – and a form of
party politics was well established by the time of Queen Anne. But
Late Stuart Britain was stable enough by comparison with events
before 1660, and the Baroque style became the cultural expression of a
strong, united, and increasingly confident, prosperous, and outward-
looking ruling class that took its lead from the Court. Property and
power underpinned the British Baroque, as they did the Baroque more
widely; because of its preoccupation with order and grandeur, the art
and architecture of the Catholic Counter-Reformation thus became
that of the successful Protestant Revolution also.
issue 184
british baroque
Wealth was no longer a matter of discretion, its existence
subsumed in displays of Puritan piety and Republican duty. Now it
could be celebrated in its own right as a mark of rank, status, even –
however implausibly – virtue. So Baroque architects were recruited
not only to construct great public edifices like St Paul’s Cathedral,
Hampton Court Palace, and Greenwich Hospital; they were hired
to build private palaces, of which Chatworth House and Blenheim
Palace are perhaps the grandest. Jan Siberechts’ view of Chatsworth,
painted in 1699-1700, shows it in all its original Baroque glory,
a single arrangement of grand house and gardens, regimented in
straight lines and sharp angles, a monument to the new order and
stability that now reigned in the English countryside.
The demand was also for portraits. These were imperatives of
the cult of power. Courtiers, politicians, generals, and estate-owners
competed for the services of the greatest artists, a fine portrait
becoming a mark of position. The faces would be recognisably theirs,
but blemishes were photoshopped; the Republicans may have
favoured ‘warts and all’ honesty, but not their Restoration successors.
Equally important was the sumptuousness of costume and regalia.
Artists were expected to show the fold of velvet, the sheen of silk, the
glitter of gold and jewel with as much attention to naturalistic detail
as they lavished on the portrait – for the richness of these gave the
full measure of Restoration Man. 
MINERVA 51
 IMAGE: Private collection

ABOVE Young Man Reading in a Courtyard by Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1662-1666. Oil on canvas
The painting is a masterpiece of perspective and chiaroscuro to represent grandiose architecture.
52 MINERVA july/august 2020
 british baroque

The male cult of power found its counterpart in the female cult The Favourite is probably closer to the truth than contemporary
of beauty. If aristocratic men assumed a right to rule, aristocratic portraits. By all accounts, the Queen was not blessed with good
women assumed a right to be beautiful; or perhaps it would be more looks, and well before middle age she was obese, gouty, and sickly.
true to say that aristocratic men required women to be beautiful, It is unlikely we would recognise her from any of her contemporary
in what was a profoundly patriarchal society. Sexual morals were portraits. In fact, surveying the grandees of the British Baroque, men
loose. Princes, courtiers, politicians were expected to have mistresses. and women both, one is struck by recurring similarities of facial form
Peter Lely, the King’s painter, was famous for his portraits of ‘Court and expression. It seems there was an idealisation of the male and
beauties’. Queen Mary later commissioned a set of eight full-length the female: the former square, rigid, looking straight at us, the latter
portraits of the most-beautiful women at Court in her time, the soft, round, demure, often avoiding our glance, much like in Greek
Hampton Court Beauties; these were hung in the Water Gallery and Hellenistic statues. Roman portraits made gravitas a universal
overlooking the River Thames. The Duke and Duchess of Somerset attribute. Every charlatan and shyster would be given the austere,
were so taken with the idea that they in turn commissioned their sober, cares-of-the-world-on-my-ample-shoulders look that was
own Petworth Beauties for the decoration of Petworth House, the de rigueur in the Roman Empire at the time. Hellenistic busts made
country seat they were converting into a Baroque palace. These every Greek king look like Alexander the Great; and his portraits
were displayed with mirrors between them, allowing the visitor the had been fakes in the first place, representing him as the idealised
possibly unfortunate experience of seeing themselves, by way of male youth, the ephebe, of 5th-century city-state tradition. As for the
comparison, as they passed between each ‘beauty’; the Baroque women, in both Classical and Baroque art, they are obvious victims
was not without its sense of humour. of the patriarchy, arranged on the canvas as so much eye candy, with
We need not doubt that art often lied. Portraits of Queen Anne nothing to indicate their lives had any purpose beyond marriage and
are a case in point. The depiction in the recent Hollywood film breeding. No wonder they look so bored. 
BELOW The Whig Junto by John James Baker, 1710. Oil on canvas
The Whigs, one of two ‘parties’ that emerged in the late 17th century, tended to be anti-Court and to represent
the mercantile and colonial interest of the City of London. The term ‘Junto’ was used to describe the party leaders.
IMAGE: Private collection

issue 184 MINERVA 53

“Baroque artists were so infused with the spirit of their age that they
gave expression to it without even realising they were doing so.”
A lot of people think Baroque dull; but it can come to life if
you read the messages it conveys. I do not mean the intentional
ones – in female portraits, for example, the spaniel symbolising
fidelity, the flowers referencing fertility, the mimicking of Madonna-
and-Child, and so on. I am thinking of the way in which, without
conscious intent, Baroque artists were so infused with the spirit
of their age that they gave expression to it without even realising
they were doing it. Some aspects of
this I have mentioned already, but
there is more to be said.
The Tate exhibition drew attention
to the obsession with symmetry and
naturalism. Wren is, of course, the
prime example, because his work
still dominates some of London’s
greatest monumental spaces. ‘Wren’s
architectural design,’ explain the Tate
curators, ‘was guided by the principles
of mathematics and geometry. He
looked to Classical architecture and
was also familiar with contemporary
French architecture… He recognised
that architecture was a public art,
with a political use. Wren’s impressive
buildings expressed magnificence,
strength, and beauty, and were
symbols of the nation.’ Contemporary
French architecture – one immediately
thinks of Versailles and the Tuileries
– was itself inspired by the Classical
model of ‘mathematics and geometry’.
Why? What is it about perfect
ABOVE A Vase of Flowers by Simon Verelst, c.1669-1675.
symmetry and proportion? Why
should it matter?
The oscillation between Nature and Order – Nature with its
flowing lines, its loops and tangles, its profusion of irregularities:
Order with is straight lines, its right-angles, its half-circles, its
balanced arrangements – is one of the central dichotomies in
the history of art. Can there be any real doubt that the Counter-
Reformation gave rise to the Baroque because the Party of Order
was building cultural defences against the anarchy of ideas
unleashed by the Protestant Reformation and the Dutch and
English Revolutions in northern Europe? And can it be any surprise
that the Baroque style was found attractive and suitable by a
Restoration elite yearning for stability and security after the turmoil
of the years 1637-1660? Take a look at Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s
Young Man Reading in a Courtyard. The young man is neither here
nor there, and nor is his dog. The real subject of this canvas is the
architecture. It is a stunning use of perspective and chiaroscuro to
convey a sense of pedantically ordered, endlessly receding space.
I mean stunning, not just in the synonym of ‘very impressive’
54 MINERVA
sense, but literally, in that one feels mesmerised, as if one might
be suddenly sucked forwards into and through that extraordinary
space. Big, solid, grand: that is one thing, saying ‘permanent’. But
also mathematically precise, symmetrically perfect: that is another
thing, saying ‘ordered’. Permanent and ordered: these were leitmotifs
of England’s post-war Restoration ruling class, embodied in the
stone, fresco, and oils of Baroque art.
Drilling down to the inner core
of the Baroque tradition, there is
at least one more thing to be said.
It concerns another of art’s eternal
oscillations: that between Naturalism
and Abstraction. The decision to
depict the world as the eye perceives
it – human form, natural form,
architectural form, all form – is a
IMAGE: The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, 1939
decision to prioritise appearance over
essence. The artist says, in effect,
that what we see is all there is. There
is nothing more to be discovered at a
deeper level; no hidden truth needing
to be revealed. If the job of art is to
hold up a mirror to the world, the
naturalism of Baroque art is an assertion
that the existing social order corresponds
to its own self-image, that it conforms
to a rational ideal, that it should be
cherished. Baroque naturalism exudes
confidence and certainty; it is the art of
a new, confident, expansive bourgeoisie
that is set to transform the world over
the next century. In John James Baker’s
Oil on canvas
The Whig Junto we meet them face to
face: the men setting out to create a
world empire based on commerce and colonies. Well-dressed, too-
well-fed, exuding the self-assurance of a brash new class of coffee-shop
dealers, they seem to be plotting the next 250 years of British imperial
power – note the black servant arranging the drapes, the globe in the
foreground, and the classical texts and ancient coins that reference the
Roman model of empire. Not for them the unsettling questions posed
by abstraction in art. For what is abstraction if not an attempt to shatter
the glittering façade and reveal a rotten core? The British Baroque has
banished doubt in the interests of a new world order.
further information
British Baroque: Power and Illusion ran at Tate Britain from
4 February to 19 April 2020. More information about the
artworks displayed can be found at www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/
tate-britain/exhibition/british-baroque
july/august 2020
on show
Exhibitions from around the world
As part of the measures to contain the spread of COVID-19, many museums around
the world have temporarily closed, and exhibition openings have been postponed and
cancelled. As a result of the ongoing uncertainty, the dates listed below may have changed
since we went to print. Some museums have reopened with safety measures in place.
Check the websites and social media accounts of the institutions for the most up-to-date
information, and in many cases a chance to explore their collections online.

Romans along
the Rhine
Leiden, Netherlands
The Roman frontier was occupied by soldiers,
of course, but families lived with the armed
forces along the borders, among them women,
children, and slaves. In the Netherlands, the
River Rhine marked the boundary of the
Roman Empire, and finds from South Holland,
Utrecht, and Gelderland shed light on the lives
of the different people who resided in the
forts and villages along its banks, including the
traders and artisans who supplied the army.
Cooking, construction, conviviality and
quarrels, and religion are all explored through
the more than 300 artefacts on display,
building a full picture of life in the area.

IMAGES: National Museum of Antiquities, inv. ELo 2001-500, long-term loan from Heritage Leiden and Surroundings; © Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, inv. h 1991/9.LV v; h 1991/9.2338
Wooden toys, bottles for feeding infants,
and leather children’s shoes give a glimpse
of family life. Swords, weapons, and a stunning
bronze cavalry helmet featuring an eagle’s
head highlight the work of the soldiers. In
some cases, we even know their names, which
have been scratched into plates.
Inscriptions give further details about
the people who lived here. An altar found in
Vechten, in the province of Utrecht, informs
us that one Roman commander came from
Algeria,
Ag on the other side of the empire,
p while
a gravestone
g tells us about Salvia Fledimella,,
A
ABOVE A bronze face-mask from a
a freedwoman who was commemorated byy cavalry helmet (AD 75-125), discovered
her
e former
o e master aste Sextus
Se tus Salvius.
Sa v us. i 1996 near Leiden..
in

BELOW A wooden toy sword and horse

RIJKSMUSEUM
S S VAN from the 1st-2nd century AD, found at
OUDHEDEN
O P
Praetorium Agrippinae on the Oude Rijn..
Until 28 February 2021
U
www.rmo.nl
. o. l

56 MINERVA july/august 2020

 on show

UNITED KINGDOM

The Galloway Hoard:

Viking age Treasure
In September 2014, a metal-detectorist made the spectacular discovery
of a large Viking Age hoard in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, where
it had lain undisturbed since it was buried in the 10th century. With
more than 100 objects in gold, silver, and other materials (including
textiles, leather, and wood, which do not always survive), the Galloway
Hoard is one of the richest assemblages of Viking Age objects found

IMAGE: Maritime Museum Alexandria. Image © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

in Britain or Ireland. Among the varied collection of artefacts are gold
ingots, Anglo-Saxon disc brooches of a type previously unattested in
Scotland, a unique gold pin in the shape of a bird, and a rock crystal
flask. The wide array of items on show hints at far-reaching connections
across Europe and beyond.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND, EDINBURGH

Postponed (originally scheduled for 29 May
to 18 October 2020)
www.nms.ac.uk

UNITED STATES
Treasures of Ancient Egypt:
Paul Manship: Ancient Made Modern Sunken Cities
In his sculpture, American artist Paul Manship (1885-1966) made Astonishing finds from the submerged Egyptian cities of Thonis-
frequent use of subjects from ancient mythology, as can be seen Heracleion and Canopus make the last stop on their tour at Virginia,
most notably in his major public commission Prometheus at the before returning to Egypt. Nearly 300 remarkably well-preserved
Rockefeller Center in New York. During his time at the American objects, recovered from beneath the waves of Aboukir Bay by Frank
Academy in Rome as a student, Manship became well acquainted Goddio and his team, offer an extraordinary insight into these two
with ancient works, which had a profound impact on his ideas and once-thriving port cities on the Egyptian Delta, lost to the sea. The
methods throughout his long career. This exhibition brings together exhibition uses ritual objects, coins, jewellery, coffins, stelae, and colossal
some exemplary bronze sculptures by Mansfield (including his 1916 statues (like Thonis-Heracleion’s 5.4m-high, red-granite statue of the
Flight of Night), related sketches, and ancient artworks to highlight how fertility god Hapy, dating from the 4th or 3rd century BC; shown above),
he developed his Art Deco take on ancient subjects. to shed light on religion in the cities, power in the Ptolemaic kingdoms,
and
a the blending of Egyptian and Greek cultures.
WADSWORTH ATHENEUM
MUSEUM O
OF ART,, HARTFORD,, VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS,
CONNECTICUT
C RICHMOND,
ICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Postponed until winter 2020 to
P o 4 July 2020 to 18 January 2021
Atheneum Museum of Art, Gift of Philip L Goodwin, 1934.568 © Estate of Paul Manship

spring
i g 2021
202 (originally
( scheduled www.vmfa.museum
f 27
for 2 June to 6 September)
S )
www.thewadsworth.org
h d h
HerStory:
erStory: Stories of Ancient
Heroines and Everyday Women
FFor Tampa Museum of Art’s programme celebrating the 100th
anniversary
a iversary of women’s suffrage in the USA, this exhibition examines
the role of women in the Classical world through their depictions
in statues and on vases, and through everyday objects. As well as
tthe lives of mortal women, the works on show look at the place
o of goddesses like Aphrodite and Athena and of mythical heroines
iin the ancient world.

TAMPA MUSEUM OF ART, FLORIDA

IMAGE: Wadsworth

9 July 2020 to 29 January 2022

W

https://tampamuseum.org

issue 184 MINERVA 57
 CANADA

Instruments of Exchange:
Coins from Antiquity to Today
The powerful iconography of coins, which both represents the
political authority who issued them and conveys their value, has

IMAGE: © Städel Museum

roots that reach all the way into the 7th century BC. The importance
of the recognisability of coins, and their grounding in long-established
traditions, means they have remained a rather consistent medium
over long stretches of time. This exhibition explores the economic,
political, and artistic aspects of coins, charting the development of their
visual language from antiquity and their role in exchange. GERMANY

Städel’s Legacy: Master drawings

MCMASTER MUSEUM OF ART, HAMILTON from the founder’s collection
Until 23 August 2020
Prints, paintings, and more than 4,600 drawings made up the private
https://museum.mcmaster.ca
collection of businessman and banker Johann Friedrich Städel (1728-
1816), which he made the founding bequest of the public Städel
Museum in Frankfurt. When his bequest was made, no inventory had
FRANCE been compiled, so for many years it was unclear which drawings in the
museum’s collection came from this founding collection, particularly as
From Alésia to Rome: many were sold off in the 1860s. Through recent research, the museum
the Archaeological Adventure has been able work out much of the content of the original collection,
of Napoleon III identifying some 3,000 drawings that were owned by Städel and are still
On 17 July 1858, Napoleon III launched the Commission de Topographie in the museum today. A selection of 95 highlights have gone on display
des Gaules to identify archaeological sites in an attempt to follow the to give an overall impression of Städel’s collection and how it was
footsteps of Julius Caesar. Over the next 20 years, the CTG studied sites organised, and address the broader subject of collecting drawings in
and collected objects through the efforts of teachers, military personnel, the 18th century. Several of the works depict subjects on Classical
archivists, clergymen, and others.The commission made use of emerging themes, such as Raphael’s graceful Caryatid (c.1520) and Giulio Romano’s
techniques, such as photography, to record sites and artefacts. This pen-on-paper Cephalus Grieves for Procris (c.1530, shown above).
approach was also employed in the excavations of the Farnese Gardens
on the Palatine Hill in Rome, which was acquired by Napoleon III in 1861. STÄDEL MUSEUM, FRANKFURT
Archival material, photographs, objects excavated from Alise-Sainte-Reine Until 13 August 2020
and the Farnese Gardens (including the AD 70-100 marble portrait of www.staedelmuseum.de
a woman pictured below), and paintings by Joseph-Fortuné-Séraphin
Layraud all tell the tale of a monarch’s archaeological ambitions, and the
political motivations behind them. De Chirico: Magical Reality
Arcaded squares, columns, and marble sculptures appear in
MUSÉE D’ARCHÉOLOGIE NATIONALE, the most familiar paintings of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico
(1888-1978), founder of the pittura metafisica art movement. He used
SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE
these components, and unexpected juxtapositions of objects, to create
Postponed (originally scheduled for 29 March to 13 July)
dreamlike scenes frozen in time.This exhibition examines de Chirico’s
http //
https://en.musee-archeologienationale.fr/
h l i ti l f / output in 1909 to 1919, highlighting the influence of German Late
Romantic artists like Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger, but the influence
IMAGE: Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités grecques, étrusques et romaines

of the ancient world, including Greek mythology, is also evident,

particularly in works like The Dying Centaur (1909).

HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE, HAMBURG

28 August to 13 December 2020
www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de

Hercules – Immortal Hero

Endowed with superhuman strength, Herakles – the mythical son of
Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene – was a popular hero in ancient
Greece and Rome, and his legacy has endured through art, literature,
and film up to the present day. The Twelve Labours he undertook have
been represented many times, and even appear on the Cathedra Petri

5 MINERV
58 M A july/august 2020
 on show

at the Vatican, a reconstruction of which is on view in this exhibition.

Greek vases, Roman bronze statuettes, paintings, and more chart

IMAGE: Gallerie Nazionali d’Arte Antica – Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History/Enrico Fontolan
people’s fascination with this figure over time.

KURPFÄLZISCHES MUSEUM, HEIDELBERG

Until 12 July 2020
www.museum-heidelberg.de

ITALY

Giambattista Piranesi:
Timeless architect
To mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of architect and
draughtsman Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778), this exhibition
presents some of his celebrated engravings of Rome. Vedute di Roma
(‘Views of Rome’) and Le Antichità Romane (‘Roman Antiquities’)
demonstrate Piranesi’s endless fascination with the remains of the
ancient city (like the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius, shown below), while
the impossible spaces of his Carceri d’invenzione (‘Imaginary Prisons’)
bear witness to his highly inventive mind. A film by Factum Arte, in and Bernini are among the highlights, such as Bernini’s striking bust of
which some of the Prisons are virtually reconstructed, further explores Medusa and Caravaggio’s brooding Narcissus (c.1600), which lends an
the complexity of these compositions. intense naturalism to a mythical subject. As well as this naturalism, the
exhibition examines key concepts in the art of the time, like vivacity,
PALAZZO STURM, BASSANO DEL GRAPPA motion, jest, horror, and wonderment.
21 June to 19 October 2020
www.museibassano.it RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
Until 13 September 2020
www.rijksmuseum.nl
IMAGE: Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico, Gabinetto disegni e stampe, Inc. bass. 3542

SPAIN

Luxury: From the Assyrians

to Alexander the Great
Highly prized materials like ivory, jewels, gold, and other precious
metals played an important part in trade and power relations in
the ancient world. This touring exhibition (drawn from the British
Museum’s collection) presents a range of exquisitely crafted luxury
objects from the ancient Near East to delve into the production and
value of such objects, their trade over long distances, and how they
conveyed power and status in different cultures from 900 to 300 BC.

LA CAIXA FORUM, ZARAGOZA

Until 25 October 2020
NETHERLANDS
https://caixaforum.es/es/zaragoza/exposiciones
Caravaggio–Bernini:
Baroque in Rome
IMAGE: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Two great artists of the 17th century – the painter Caravaggio and
the sculptor Bernini – left their mark on Baroque Rome.Their powerful
works also prompted something of an artistic revolution elsewhere
in Europe, as this exhibition explores through its displays of paintings
by Guido Reni, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Nicolas Poussin,
and Simon Vouet, and sculptures by Alessandro Algardi, François du
Quesnoy, and Francesco Mochi. Celebrated works by both Caravaggio 
issue 184 MINERVA 59
on show online
While museums and galleries are closed, there are many ways that you
can still explore them from the comfort and safety of your own home.
A History of Writing
This online exhibition by the British Library explores the origins
of writing and charts its evolution. It features fascinating texts and
artefacts, such as a Babylonian tablet recording temple offerings around
2350-1794 BC, a Chinese oracle bone dating to 1300-1050 BC, and
some schoolwork from the 2nd century AD.
www.bl.uk/history-of-writing
Louvre
Take a virtual tour of some of the past exhibitions at the Louvre’s
Petite Galerie, including Founding Myths: from Hercules to Darth Vader
and Power Plays, which examines the relationship between art and
political power from antiquity to the present day. Also available for
virtual visiting is some of the Louvre’s ancient Egyptian collection, the
remains of its medieval moat, and the Galerie d’Apollon, whose painted
ceiling has a central panel depicting Apollo slaying the Python.
www.louvre.fr/en/visites-en-ligne
IMAGE: Flickr/simo0082 [CC by 2.0]
Painted Hall
Last year, a major project to restore Sir James Thornhill’s 18th-century
Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College London was completed.
The spectacular paintings celebrate the Protestant monarchs
William III and Mary II, and feature a number of Graeco-Roman
deities, in particular Poseidon, lord of the seas. The Painted Hall
can now be visited on a virtual tour.
https://virtualtour.ornc.org/
Pitt Rivers Museum
Founded in 1884, when General Pitt-Rivers gave his collection to
the University of Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum houses a wide range
of archaeological and ethnographic objects, arranged typologically.
You can wander the cases of jewellery, tools, boats, masks, musical
instruments, weapons, and more online.
www.prm.ox.ac.uk
60 MINERVA
Rubens House
The Antwerp home of Baroque artist Rubens has reopened to
visitors, but it is still possible to look around the house with a guided
walkthrough video by the museum’s director Ben Van Beneden.
As well as Rubens’ studio, the tour takes in his garden, which features
a homage to the Roman triumphal arch.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=59xZOy-1H5E
Sir John Soane’s Museum
The splendid rooms at the house-museum of architect Sir John
Soane are filled with models of buildings, paintings, and ancient
Greek, Roman, and Egyptian artefacts he collected. One highlight
is the Sarcophagus of Seti I, which can be explored online, along
with Soane’s Model Room.
www.soane.org/explore
University of Aberdeen Museums
Online offerings from the University of Aberdeen Museums include
a chance to explore the university’s Egyptian archaeology holdings
within the setting of a virtual tomb.
www.abdn.ac.uk/museums/exhibitions/online-exhibitions.php
Vatican Museums
Several of the art-filled spaces of the Vatican Museums can be seen
online. As well as the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Rooms, there
are the papal collections of antiquities displayed in the Chiaramonti
Museum and the Pio Clementino Museum, which features a marvellous
marble menagerie.
www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/
musei/tour-virtuali-elenco.html
IMAGE: Flickr/Sergey Sosnovskiy [CC by SA 2.0]
Vikings in the East Midlands
This online museum, set up by the Centre for the Study of the Viking
Age at the University of Nottingham, brings together objects, talks, and
more to tell the story of England’s East Midlands in the Viking Age, and
of the Viking legacy in the area.
https://emidsvikings.ac.uk/
july/august 2020
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First published in 1967, Current Archaeology has long been Britain's favourite
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BOOK REVIEWS
THE LIFE AND DEATH
OF ANCIENT CITIES:
A NATURAL HISTORY
Greg Woolf
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, £25
HARDBACK
ISBN 978-0199664733
G
reg Woolf is an incisive
scholar with an ambition
to write grand syntheses.
This is to be welcomed.
Though he has contributed
some very important specialist monographs
– like his Becoming Roman: the origins of
provincial civilisation in Gaul, a detailed
empirical study of the Romanisation process
in the Late Republic and Early Empire – he
is also interested in general overviews. This
latest example is exceptionally ambitious.
Generalism is itself a specialism, and
it is as necessary as it has ever been. Many
(perhaps most) scholars are reluctant to
attempt it, fearful that stepping outside
their immediate specialism, their comfort
zone, they may trip and fall.
What Greg Woolf, a Classicist,
ancient historian, and archaeologist
who specialises in the Greek and Roman
worlds, offers here is an overview of
3,500 years of ancient urbanism. His
focus is the Mediterranean Classical
world we know well, but he delves back in
time to explore the Bronze Age civilisations
of the Ancient Near East, which perhaps
provided models for the subsequent
development of urbanism. So the Greeks
and Romans are foregrounded, but we
learn too about Sumerian, Egyptian,
62 MINERVA
Phoenician, Cretan, Persian, and other
urban traditions.
The implication is that urbanism is a
good idea that is taken up and spread by
others, eventually becoming the essential
basis of both Hellenic and Roman
civilisation, where cities were dominant –
centres of politics, justice, religion,
culture, and good living, where a significant
proportion of the population (though never
a majority) would be living.
Woolf’s survey is nuanced, and he seeks
to draw out the distinctiveness of different
urban traditions, to trace the relative success
of cities at one time and place, and to explain
their failure at another.
The systematic drawing together of a wide
range of sources makes this a valuable book,
but I am not sure that the overall result could
be described as visionary. Grand narratives
are out of fashion, and even scholars drawn
to the synthetic overview have a tendency to
deprecate broad generalisation, partly on the
basis that there is too much data to assimilate,
partly on the grounds that the data implies
diversity rather than uniformity of experience.
‘The great mass of new information
gathered by archaeologists and historians…
is too much for any one person to master,’
Woolf tells us. ‘Since the time when [Max]
Weber and [Gordon] Childe wrote, we
have all become much more aware
of how different early urban traditions
were from each other,’ he says.
Both of these statements are true, but
the implication is not that generalisation
is any less possible, merely that it should
be better informed. For instance, while it
is true that some ancient ‘cities’ were not
cities at all – I immediately think of places
like Knossos, Mycenae, and Troy, all of
which were palace complexes – even these
places have something in common with real
cities, in that they represent accumulations
of social surplus invested in monumental
construction by a powerful elite.
When we look at the remains of any
of the ancient sites discussed by Woolf in
this book – for all their great variety – we
bear witness to a single economic and social
process: control over the land and labour of
the ancient countryside, and the extraction
from it of surplus – in the form of tribute,
rent, tithes, interest, corvée labour – such
that some form of urban-type agglomeration
became possible.
This book is a stimulating read
and can be highly recommended. My
feeling is that it offers a richness of
data, but not necessarily a new framework
of understanding.
Neil Faulkner
JULY/AUGUST 2020

AN ELEPHANT IN ROME
Loyd Grossman
PALLAS ATHENE, £19.99, HARDBACK
ISBN 978-1843681939
I
n a piazza near the Pantheon in Rome, a charming elephant
carries an obelisk on its back. While the elephant was sculpted
in the 17th century, the obelisk has much older origins. Ancient
obelisks appear at several locations across the Italian city. They were
either existing monuments seized from Egypt or commissioned by
the Roman emperor. And many, like this obelisk-on-elephant outside
the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, were re-erected
by popes, often in prominent religious locations. One was moved to
the front of St Peter’s Basilica, and there are others outside the papal
basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano.
This engaging book by writer, broadcaster, and heritage campaigner
Loyd Grossman tells the story of the curious monument outside
Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the relationship between the Baroque
sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pope Alexander VII that brought
it into being. Santa Maria sopra Minerva was so called as it stood
on the site of an ancient Roman temple thought to be devoted to
Minerva. In fact, it was a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis, and in
CREATORS,
CONQUERORS AND
CITIZENS: A HISTORY
OF ANCIENT GREECE
Robin Waterfield
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, £14.99
PAPERBACK
ISBN 978-0198853121
A
t the height of the Persian Wars in the winter of 480/479
BC, with their Acropolis in ruins and their backs to the
wall, Athenians refused to surrender or betray their fellow
Greeks, proclaiming effusively that they all shared ties of ‘blood and
language, temples to the gods, religious rites and a common way
of life’. Yet their words were chosen not simply to defy their enemy,
but to inspire and shame their Spartan allies, who had already shown
their unreliability, and what made the statement so remarkable was
that in normal circumstances harmony among Greeks was rare. At
the height of the Classical period there were more than a thousand
discrete city-states (or poleis) scattered across the Mediterranean and
east to the Black Sea, and, as Plato would observe, every one of them
was ‘inevitably engaged in undeclared warfare with every other’.
Following brief, introductory chapters on Greece’s environmental,
social, and historical background, Waterfield embarks on a fast-
moving, gripping analysis that teases out how tensions between
cultural unity and political disunity unfolded over seven and a
issue 184
REVIEWS
the mid 1660s monks found an ancient Egyptian obelisk – originally
erected by the 6th century BC pharaoh Apries at Sais in the Nile Delta –
in the garden next to the church. Pope Alexander quickly called on his
trusted sculptor Bernini to set it up in the piazza outside.
Grossman introduces us to key people involved in the project,
such as the intriguing figure of Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar
who believed he had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and attempted
to translate the obelisk’s inscriptions, the Dominican friar Giuseppe
Paglia, and Bernini’s assistant Ercole Ferrata, who likely sculpted the
elephant. He also presents some of the fascinating rejected designs
for the monument. One drawing shows a figure of Herakles grappling
with the obelisk, which is held askew, at a slight but daring angle
rather than the normal strict verticality of obelisks. In another,
instead of an elephant, a dog is incorporated into the obelisk’s
plinth, an idea that perhaps came from Paglia (who worked on his
own schemes for the monument) and that refers to the Dominicans’
nickname, Domini canes (‘the dogs of the Lord’).
Much of the book deals with Bernini’s relationship with successive
popes, and there are some lively moments of Baroque high drama
and intrigue, including an artistic ambush at a dinner attended by
Innocent X, which won Bernini the commission for the fountain
at the Piazza Navona. There, the spectacular sculptures of the four
rivers support an obelisk made during the reign of Domitian.
For armchair travellers and future visitors to Rome who are
currently stuck indoors, Grossman includes an obelisk walk
through the city, pointing out some that are easy to pass by on
the way to more notable sites.
Lucia Marchini
half centuries from the first Olympic Games in 776 to the defeat
of Cleopatra, a Greek queen descended from one of Alexander the
Great’s generals, in 30 BC. As befits such a drama, the material is
divided into three ‘Acts’ (the Archaic Period, the Classical Period,
and the Hellenistic Period) with a final short coda considering how
Greece only truly became unified as a ‘proper nation-state’ in 1832.
Within this structure, Waterfield proceeds both linearly and laterally,
interspersing the pacy historical narrative with sections on Greek
culture – from religion, politics, and philosophy to art, sexuality,
and family life, and from warfare and economics to considerations
of individual poleis, such as Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse, and
Hellenistic cities, such as Alexandria.
The discussion is at all times firmly rooted in hard evidence,
be it literature (Waterfield is well known as a prolific translator),
inscriptions, or the most recent archaeology. Given such a vast canvas,
brushstrokes must at times be broad, and readers might lament the
telescoping of certain iconic moments – just four and a half pages for
the Second Persian War (including Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea).
Sometimes, however, this proves to be no bad thing, as Waterfield’s
unerring momentum lets him slice through the minutiae to shed
rare clarity on events that can otherwise seem almost impenetrable,
not least the labyrinthine manoeuvrings of Alexander’s quarrelsome
Successors. With numerous illustrations and excellent maps, a glossary,
a comprehensive timeline, lists of rulers, and suggestions for further
reading, this splendid account comes highly recommended, both to
those unfamiliar with the subject and to the more experienced. It is
a book that really does contain something for everyone.
David Stuttard
MINERVA 63
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CLASSICAL CONUNDRUMS
Adam Jacot de Boinod is the author of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinar y Words
(published by Penguin Books). Below, he poses a vocabulary quiz from Latin and Ancient Greek.
Can you guess the correct definition from the following three options for:
(1) picus (Latin)
(a) a woodpecker
(b) a mulberry tree
(c) the second swarm
of bees in the same season
(2) morimon
(Homeric Greek)
(a) someone who feasts
or lives on the industry
of others
(b) a booming roar
(c) decreed by fate
(3) karpoma
(Ancient Greek)
(a) a rhetorical device of
damning with faint praise
(b) fruit, produce, profit
(c) the crackling and popping
of burning wood
(4) lama (Latin)
(a) the youngest of a litter
of pigs
(b) a slough, bog or fen
(c) a mole
IN THE NEXT ISSUE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020
The Scythians: New insights on
the fabled goldworking nomads
of the Eurasian Steppes
The Beginning of the World in China:
dragons, phoenix, and other chimera
(5) hupaitha (Homeric Greek)
(a) unluckily
(b) out from under, sideways
(c) a vague unwell feeling
(6) lecticula (Latin)
(a) fair words without sincere
intention; flattery
(b) a small number of items
(c) a small litter, a sedan chair
(7) orchema (Ancient Greek)
(a) a dance, dancing
(b) empty, void
(c) a speech disorder characterised
by the repetition of words, phrases
or sentences
(8) kuneos (Homeric Greek)
(a) impulsively; without deliberation
(b) high-spirited, proud
(c) shameless
(9) perfacete (Latin)
(a) very wittily
(b) in an affected manner
(c) with ease
(10) muroma (Ancient Greek)
(a) of a pale green passing
into greyish blue
(b) plaster
(c) wool taken from a dead sheep
(11) picaria (Latin)
(a) a place where pitch is made
(b) a hiccough
(c) a stomach ache
(12) proboao (Ancient Greek)
(a) to offer up to the Gods
(b) to drink
(c) to shout before, to cry out
shout before, to cry out.
where pitch is made. 12(c) to
wittily. 10(b) plaster. 11(a) a place
dancing. 8(c) shameless. 9(a) very
litter, a sedan chair. 7(a) a dance,
from under, sideways. 6(c) a small
4(b) a slough, bog or fen. 5(b) out
by fate. 3(b) fruit, produce, profit.
1(a) a woodpecker. 2(c) decreed
ANSWERS
THE ANTIQUARIAN

Lady
Hester
Stanhope 1776-1839

I
t is unusual to feature in a magazine like ours a woman who
ordered an ancient statue ‘broken in a thousand pieces’. In
April 1815, Lady Hester Stanhope was in Israel, at a site called

“Nothing daunted, she dressed Ashkelon. She had been given a medieval Italian manuscript
that seemed to pinpoint buried Christian treasure, not least a

as an Ottoman gentleman, vast hoard under Ashkelon’s ancient mosque. But finding only the
marble statue, nearly seven feet tall without its head, Lady Hester

donning a turban and sabre ordered it smashed to see, it is said, if there was gold inside.
This version cannot be true. Any treasure had been promised in

rather than the veil.”
ABOVE A lithograph of Lady Hester Stanhope,
dating to the 19th century.
BELOW Men sitting to smoke with a panoramic view
of the coast by Ashkelon, Israel, coloured lithograph
by L Haghe, c.1843.
This is based on a painting made the Scottish artist
David Roberts around the time of Lady Hester’s death.
advance to the Ottomans – in return for the Sultan’s permission to
dig, permission granted to no previous Westerner. When Lady Hester
arrived, the site had already been robbed out, yet even amid the
surface chaos her excavators identified the mihrab (prayer niche) of
the lost mosque. When excavation began, it teased out successive
historic layers – mosque, church, and then, beneath them, a temple –
in a painstaking manner recognisable to modern-day archaeologists.
So why destroy the statue at all? In light of the contemporaneous
Elgin Marbles controversy, Lady Hester was anxious to prove she
could be trusted – ‘malicious people might say I came to look for
statues for my countrymen,’ she argued, ‘not treasures for the Sultan’.
That this was among the least extraordinary of her escapades
is testament to a life wildly lived. At the age of 27, Lady Hester
became de facto wife of her notoriously asocial uncle, William
Pitt the Younger, arranging a social life appropriate for the British

TEXT: Simon Coppock IMAGES: Alamy; Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
prime minister. Granted a generous pension on his death in 1806,
she suffered the death of her lover and her soldier brother, which
provoked her to leave England – forever. In Athens, she met Lord
Byron: she was ‘that dangerous thing,’ he wrote, ‘a female wit’;
‘a strange character’, she responded, and entertained acquaintances
with impressions of the poet. Then, on her way to Egypt, Lady Hester
was shipwrecked, losing her entire wardrobe. Nothing daunted, she
dressed as an Ottoman gentleman, donning a turban and sabre rather
than the veil. Having led a camel train to Palmyra through dangerous
Bedouin territory, she began to be called ‘Queen Hester’.
Indeed, when she finally gave up her travels and, in the 1830s,
retired to a hilltop monastery in the Lebanon near Sidon, she took
effective control of the surrounding lands – by little more than force
of personality and a reputation for prophecy. Heavily indebted and
increasingly eccentric (she would treat her horse to cooling fruit
juices), the first archaeological excavator in the Holy Land became
a recluse, but she never stopped wearing her turban.

66 MINERVA july/august 2020