The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in ItalyMacKendrick, Paul Lachlan
History
The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Italy
MacKendrick, Paul Lachlan
Italy -- Antiquities
One had been used as a marble roof-tile of Hadrian’s Pantheon; it was
in the Vatican collection. Another was found in a vineyard near Rome’s
north gate, the Porta del Popolo. The former immortalized one Lucius
Albinius, who took the Vestal Virgins in his wagon to Caere for safety
when the Gauls were threatening Rome in 390 B.C. The latter was of
Sulla’s great rival Marius, the friend of the people. The dimensions,
letter-heights, and letter-styles of both made their origin in
Augustus’ Forum extremely likely. A set of seven more had been known
since the seventeenth century or earlier as coming from the site of the
Forum of Arezzo, ancient Arretium, in Tuscany. The texts of some of
these turned out to be copies of _elogia_ from the Forum of Augustus.
This justified the inference that in this matter of a Hall of Fame,
provincial cities imitated the metropolis. Thus those _elogia_ from
Arezzo for which no Roman prototype had been found might yet give a
clue to what the Roman collection had once contained. This inference
enriches the list by the names of Manius Valerius Maximus, conciliator
of class struggles, and Rome’s first dictator (494 B.C.); Lucius
Aemilius Paullus, one of the greatest _triumphatores_ of them all, who
beat the Macedonians at Pydna in 168 B.C., and symbolized the union of
Roman traditions with Hellenism, as Augustus aspired to do; Tiberius
Sempronius Gracchus, father of the reforming Gracchi; and Sulla’s
lieutenant Lucius Licinius Lucullus, whose brother was responsible for
the terraces and hemicycles at Palestrina.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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