As the Romans Did

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Notes

Notes

1. And has explored for many years: this volume's ten chapters, though updated and revised for new publication together, originate in articles and chapters first published beginning in 1991. Professor Elsner's Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformations of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) was reviewed in The European Legacy 3.4 (1998), 133f.

2. Virgil's epic shows a double structuring, one that distinguishes fundamentally “Odyssean” Books I–VI from an “Iliadic” half in VII–XII, the other that roughly demarcates “Old World” Books I–IV (Dido dies), “New World” IX–XII (Turnus dies), and between them “Roman” V–VIII (Antony and Cleopatra die). Aeneas does not understand much that his descendants are doing on the great shield, but he does look closely in wonderment at every event (VIII.729–31).

3. His reference to the Platonist element in Virgil's eclectic eschatology is tendentiously selective. Reed finds the “own sun, own stars” in the Elysium of the Aeneid “disturbing, not comforting,” referring to the Cave of Plato's Republic. But there is no alternative, false sun in the Cave, only a fire and the shadows it casts. The joyous sight to which the Sibyl guides Aeneas in the Underworld far more closely resembles the true vision in those parts of the world that the Phaedo describes, where the happy denizens see the heavens more clearly than we mortals can do, and perceive colors that we cannot imagine. R. D. Williams's commentary (1972) rightly compares the luminous atmosphere of the Virgilian Elysium with the Homeric Olympus (Aen. VI.640f. ≈ Od. 6.44f.).

4. We follow a third avenue of approach, examining art, its production and consumption as economic enterprise in one chapter (Chap. 9 “Viewing the Gods”), where Elsner treats spectacular cultic headquarters, destinations of pilgrimage, that were money-makers for those who operated them, those who provided visitor services, even those who made and sold souvenirs. A prime example was the colossal Temple of Artemis/Diana at Ephesus and its mass-copied cult statue.

5. More commonly, albeit mistakenly, known as Satyricon.

6. Christian hagiography is replete with instances of Christian women whose pagan fathers or husbands rejected the True Faith, sometimes violently, other times tolerantly—like St Augustine's father Patricius. On the other hand, it is a commonplace of cultural history that early Christian art routinely appropriates pagan imagery.