Tag: Architecture

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Welcome to a new year and the festival of Janus

Dr. Birgitta Hoffmann

A Nero Coin in the American Academy in Rome (RIC I ,2/ Nero #306; BMC 227) show the temple has a small rectangular building with a large door and little architectural decoration. No columns, no pediment.

The reverse of a Bronze coin of Nero showing the temple of Janus with its gate shut. A Row of small windows is visible on the side. The temple may have been flat-roofed. (foto: American Academy of Rome)

Ianus as a good of beginnings and endings (and thus of doorways – Ianua in Latin) was on of the oldest temples in Rome. According to Livy (book 1,19,2) the temple at the bottom of the Argiletum had been established by Numa the legendary ‘good king or Rome and creator of most of the religious traditions within the city.

Identifying the Ianus temple on the ground is fraught with difficulties. We know it was situated along the Argiletum (the main road that left the Forum Romanum heading north and into the Subura), but at least from the reign of Domitian onwards, much of this space was taken up with the Forum Transitorium.  Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Ianus Temple was to be found at its southern end, but the recent excavations failed to identify a temple structure similar to the temple of Minerva on the North end, so the temple of Janus Geminus (Janus with the two heads) remains elusive. We know from Procopius (BG (1)25 (2f) and Pliny the Elder (NH34,33) that the statue was one of the oldest in Rome and apart from the double head carried a staff and a key (the attributes of a doorkeeper in Rome). We know it was an archaic bronze statue that was nearly 2 meters tall, and dated to before the 2nd c. BCE.

The lower end of the Argiletum with Senate House on the Left and the excavation of the Southern end of the Forum Transitorium in the centre to the North of the Basilica Aemilia. (source: Google Maps 2024)

So why would such a small temple be so important? Mainly because of its age and of the associated rites.
At a time when more people were studying Latin, Ovid’s ‘interview with Janus’ at the beginning of Book I of the Fasti was something that a lot of Classics/Roman Archaeology students would remember from school. Here Janus defines himself as a god of Chaos and Order and thus of the natural rhythm in nature, but also as a guardian of Rome in peace and war.

As a god of beginnings, his is the first sacrifice of the new year and Ovid also tells us about the gifts that are given as part of the celebrations after the sacrifice people exchange dates, figs and honey, and most importantly, small coins.  After that, you made a (token) start at your work to ensure good luck for the year. Just a ‘token start’, the Kalends of January are a day off in Rome same as for us. But these rites appear to have taken part in the Roman home, rather than at his temple. And the only other public impression he would have made to the people of Rome was at the Nones of January (the 7 January) when the first ludi (Games) were dedicated to him.

There are very few private dedications to Janus, he was not a god that inspired a large following outside the New Year.

Beyond being the glorified gatekeeper of the year – and remember, the gatekeeper is one of the lowliest jobs available in a Roman household, Ianus is also the guardian of war and peace, with the doors open as long as Rome remained at war.

When you look for public commemoration of this God in Rome, there is a dedication to him on the Janiculum (where he is believed to have originally lived as the first king of Latium, before even the God Saturn arrived) and two old temples, one on the Forum Holitorium (near the circus of Marcellus), which was promised and dedicated after the Battle of Mylae (260BCE) and the small temple at the Argiletum.

The doors of this temple did not move very much, Rome remained at War for much of its War and our (admittedly incomplete records) show that the temple was closed in 235 BCE by T Manlius and by Augustus. The third time was under Nero in 64 or 66AD i.e. after the conclusion of the war with Parthia and the conclusion of the peace deal, regulating the situation of Armenia vis-à-vis both Rome and Parthia.

Ianus remains one of these gods we would like to know more about – did the doors really not close after Nero? Where was the temple exactly and how big was it? But like with much of Roman religion our records are far from complete and we are reconstructing as best as we can.

If you want to know more about Roman Religion or the results of the excavations of the last 25 years in Rome, please check out my online courses on Thursday night (Rome) and Friday afternoon (Temples). I look forward to continuing the discussion with you there.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Roman villas in Gaul and Germany: the homes of the invaders and fashion victims?

Birgitta Hoffmann

After spending a year looking at the amazing estate centres in the Mediterranean, 10 weeks talking about the villas in Gaul and Germany might seem somewhat of a letdown. So why do it? For starters,  they are by far the most common Roman site type in the area and the closest parallels to the villas we find in Roman Britain. The rural farm with its yard and little bath house is for much of Gaul the definition of what it means to be living in the Roman NW provinces.
And like the farms in the American Midwest, there is at times a certain repetitiveness in their design and aspirations. But they also document, how Rome transformed and frankly reconstructed the Iron Age landscapes after the wars of Julius Caesar and later the Civil War of the 69/70 CE. The result are thriving landscapes in the hinterland of Gall0-Roman Towns and later Roman forts.

The joy of these is, however, the diversity and the variety of research that has been conducted on them. Every region has their own idea of what a villa estate should look like, which might reflect the type of agriculture that was practised and perhaps even more interesting is the question how fast you see the development of different levels of wealth. The picture is the reconstruction of the Roman villa of Borg in Germany. It is without a doubt the villa of a member of the financial elite, but it comes from the area of the Treveri, where you see these large villas quite early, so where does the money come from? And who are the owners? In the territory of the Helvetii (in modern Switzerland), you have a landscape that was evacuated in the late Iron Age and then resettled leading to some villas that are best described as palaces or the centre of a small town, rather than a rural site, but there are plenty of pointers that suggest that in many cases these large villas were in the hands of the local elite and increasingly we find that these sites continue  Iron Age settlements.

But we also find areas like Cologne where many of the villas may have been in the hands of retired Roman soldiers (who at this point are likely to have been born in Northern Italy and the South of France). How does this differ from the ‘Romanised villas’ in Switzerland? And are there local people who refuse to live with underfloor heating and mosaics and why?

It is not surprising that these 200-year-long traditions of rural living come in many areas to an abrupt halt during the third century. The surviving sites change, but how do you continue to farm in the face of an unpredictable military and political situation and if you are one of the lucky rich ones, who may be working closely with the court at Trier, how do you adapt your villa to document this in the face of your neighbours?

As you can see, a lot of material and questions to cover and as to mosaics and the art – let’s just say, it is amazing what can survive a long way from Rome.

If you are interested, you can find further details about the course here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What has a German writer to do with the Grand Tour

Birgitta Hoffmann

On Saturday, 18th of July, I will be offering a dayschool on Goethe and the Grand Tour.
Isn’t that a contradiction? The Grand Tour is in origin a deeply English and later British Institution. Established in the mid 17th century as a way for nobility to extricate itself from political problems in England, it became in the 18th century a finishing school for the young men/late teenagers of the British nobility who were sent with their ‘bear-keepers’/teachers to familiarise themselves with the cultural highlights and high society in Europe, especially in Italy and return laden with statues,  architectural plans and paintings 3 years later.

So how does a successful German writer and court official in his early forties fit into this? The answer lies in his age and in the time of the publication of his memoirs. When he travelled in 1786-1788 the grand tour was at the height of fashion. The idea had spread to all over Europe, The King of Sweden was travelling, so was the Tsar of Russia and everybody who could afford it. There were travel guides, there were picture books, there were diary, it was the ‘in’ thing to do.  Hardly, surprising to find Goethe joining in.

However, Goethe decided to give this tour his very own flair. He set out alone with a backpack on the post chaises –  the first backpacker in Europe and stayed not in fashionable hotels but with artist friends and wayside inns, always accompanied by his book box. Well read he reflects on what it means to look at art (ancient and otherwise) and thus joining the discussion started by Winkelmann, what it means to travel and what it does to you. In between, visits and discussions he falls out with his girlfriend and tries to get back into her good graces. A forty year old in the grips of a midlife crisis, a very literate man in a mid-life crisis and the first one to describe it in all its glory.

But I am not a literature critic or a philosopher/psychologist, so why is this so interesting for an archaeologist and historian? The answer lies in the publication date. Goethe returned from Italy in June 1788, France was already in turmoil, a year later the French Revolution would start and until June 1815 Europe was increasingly a theatre of war, making travel more and more hazardous until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815.

25 years is a long time, time enough for a fashion of the nobility to die.  But this is, where Goethe comes in. He published his memoirs of his time in Italy in 1815, twenty five years after the event. He was now an arbiter of taste in Europe, a polymath, a writer, a thinker. And his memoirs restarted the Grand Tour as a European phenomenon, not just for the nobility but also for the middle classes. Not just as an educational chore/opportunity, but very much as an emotional experience in the age of the Romantics. Thanks to him, travelling to Italy became the romantic dream of half a continent: off to the country where the oranges and lemons blossom to become more human, to experience the Italian way of life as well as the cultures of the past.

Without him, Thomas Cook and his tourists would have felt more than a little bit lost.

If you want to know more, there are still places on the course, you can find all the details here.  

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.