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Commemorating Augustus

Commemorating Augustus

Category Archives: Leeds

Conference booking open

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Leeds, Public talks

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The main event of the Commemorating Augustus project this year will be its conference. In line with the project as a whole, the conference deals with receptions of Augustus across the 2000 years between his death and the present day, and it takes place in Leeds right over the very date of Augustus’ bimillennium, from Monday 18th to Wednesday 20th August 2014. We have a great line-up of speakers from across the globe, offering papers which cover the full span of the 2000 years at stake, so it promises to be a very exciting event.

On other parts of the project website, you can find full details of the conference programme, including speakers, titles and abstracts, and details of how to register, including the various different packages and options available.

But the main purpose of this post is to make sure that followers of this blog know that booking is open, and also that a late fee of £25 will apply to any bookings made from 17th July onwards. This means that there is just under a month remaining to make a booking without incurring the fee. Booking closes entirely on 1st August.

Meanwhile, this is also a good time to mention that I am giving a free talk for the general public entitled ‘2000 years of Augustus: the world view’ next Thursday, 26th June, at Leeds City Museum. The talk runs from 13:15-13:45, and is part of the popular Classics in our Lunchtimes series. Full details are available here.

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Commemorating Augustus colloquium report

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Colloquium, Leeds, Research

≈ 3 Comments

SAM_0990Last Friday saw the official public launch of the Commemorating Augustus project, in the form of a half-day colloquium in the department of Classics at Leeds. The aim of the event was to bring together some of the confirmed speakers from the main conference next year, some of those considering proposing a paper for it, and anyone else interested in the project. That way, we could all see how our own work fits into the project as a whole, and get started on the collective conversations about Augustus and his receptions which will culminate in the conference itself. I’m glad to say that the event worked really well on both fronts, attracting plenty of attendees (especially given that it is exam season!) and sparking off some really interesting discussions which we will certainly want to continue at the conference next year.

Our afternoon started in the first century Mary HarlowBC, with two papers centring around the event which next year’s bimillennium will commemorate: Augustus’ death. Mary Harlow (Leicester) began the event by presenting a paper which she had co-authored with Ray Laurence (Kent) on ‘Augustus and Old Age‘. Mary and Ray have been working together on ageing and life courses in the Roman world for over a decade now, putting them in an excellent position to explore the ways in which Augustus presented himself as a continuing centre of political authority even as he became old and decrepit.

Famously, of course, Augustus chose not to acknowledge his physical ageing in his portraits, so Mary started off by sharing a very clever photo-manipulation of the Prima Porta statue with its features artificially aged – a great way to shake us out of seeing Augustus as perpetually youthful and get us to think instead about him as an old man! She went on to talk us through Roman conceptual models for the various stages of life, and the behavioural expectations which go with them, before focusing in on perceptions of the elderly as expressed in art and literature.

Augustus himself, as Mary showed, conforms to and confirms some parts of the typical trajectory for the ageing Roman elite male – for example in his role as a grandfather and his relief at passing his ‘grand climacteric’ (the 63rd year of life). But unlike other elderly men there was no possibility of him retiring from public life. Instead, he found ways of managing his advancing age which I felt had considerable resonances with the tactics now being deployed by the Queen – foregrounding younger family members and limiting his appearances in the senate, but still exerting an active and forceful control over public affairs.

Valerie HopeValerie Hope (Open University) then carried us forward to the aftermath of Augustus’ death in her paper, ‘Grieving for Augustus: emotion and control in Roman imperial mourning ritual.’ Valerie has published extensively on Roman funerary monuments and commemorative practices, and is currently working in particular on traditions of Roman mourning. Taking George Osborne’s recent tears at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher as a starting-point, she asked us to consider social expectations regarding appropriate expression of mourning behaviour, both ancient and modern. In the ancient world, of course, these expectations were heavily gendered, with men permitted to show moderate, but not excessive, grief, while women were expected to be far more openly expressive, especially for close family members. Drawing on the literary models of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors, Valerie was able to outline the expectations of a ‘good’ male mourner through the example of Augustus himself, who supposedly bore his losses with bravery and resignation, though not without any emotional response at all.

Moving to Augustus’ funeral, Valerie observed that although it was visually splendid, surviving descriptions report very little in the way of noise or clamour. Only Tiberius groaned out loud in the senate (Suet, Tib. 23) – a response which Valerie felt has been unfairly labelled as insincere. For other senators the appropriate response was perhaps muddied by the fact that Augustus’ death also meant his deification and Tiberius’ accession to power. Meanwhile, the ordinary people’s desire to mourn their Pater Patriae was left rather unfulfilled in the old-fashioned funeral proceedings overseen by Tiberius and Livia.

We next paused for coffee, beforePenny Goodman shifting our focus to Augustus’ posthumous legacy. This will be the major focus of next year’s conference, and was represented at the colloquium by two papers on receptions of Augustus in the mid-twentieth century. The first was my own, and dealt with the commemorations held for the bimillennium of Augustus’ birth on September 23rd 1938. Under the title ‘Peace for our time? Commemorating Augustus in 1938,’ I first set out the range of events held worldwide at this time. The commemorations held in fascist Italy have been thoroughly studied, but using newspaper archives, bibliographical databases and contemporary periodicals I have uncovered at least forty more events held across western Europe, north America and Australasia which are currently largely unrecognised. These are important examples of Augustan receptions in their own right, and can also help us to place the Italian events in a more meaningful context.

Working through the non-Italian commemorations, I showed how most expressed a very idealised view of Augustus as a bringer of peace and a cultural unifier. This would soon be swept away by Syme’s delineation of his ruthless rise to power in The Roman Revolution. But in a world recovering from one World War and hoping to prevent a second it is not surprising to find that people looked to Augustus as an icon of peace and harmony. Meanwhile, one German expatriate journalist used the occasion of the bimillennium to compare Augustus with Hitler, casting the tyranny of the former as a dire warning against the latter. Arguably, this is just as distorted a perspective on Augustus as the more common tendency to view him an icon of peace and stability – but grounds for both can be found in the ancient sources. I closed by suggesting that Augustus’ real attraction in 1938 was his capacity to serve almost any contemporary political agenda via the language of a shared Classical heritage.

Martin LindnerFinally, Martin Lindner (Göttingen) focused directly on mid-twentieth-century Germany with a close study of interpretations and re-interpretations of Augustus across three re-writes of a single novel. Martin has published the only systematic book-length study of Roman emperors in film, as well as an impressive series of articles exploring issues of national identity in receptions of the ancient world. His paper applied this interest to Augustus under the title ‘In search of a German Princeps: Günther Birkenfeld and his Augustus novels (1934-1962)‘.

Birkenfeld is not well known today, even within Germany, so Martin first outlined his background as a Classical historian and the beginnings of his career as a writer. It was his Augustus novel, though, which really brought him fame. Published initially in 1934, but significantly rewritten and re-released under different titles in both 1943 and 1962, Martin pointed out how the various editions coincide with and reflect three watershed moments in German history: the establishment of the Third Reich, the Second World War and the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Birkenfeld’s Augustus was never simply a cipher for Hitler, even in 1934. Instead, as Martin showed, Birkenfeld’s prevailing interest lay in the Augustan principate as the ideal context for the birth of Christianity. Nonetheless, his characterisation of Augustus as youthful, ambitious and purposeful in the first edition matched contemporary German ideals of leadership, while the later versions reflect the crumbling of that ideal. The 1943 edition made much greater play of Augustus’ self-doubts, while the 1962 version directly acknowledged his responsibility for cruel actions, even while maintaining that the ends justified the means. Yet a posthumous reprint of 1984 returned to the text of the original edition, complete with language and concepts which were no longer considered appropriate in the post-war era. As Martin explained, the novel itself had now become a historical artefact, bringing a new generation of Germans face to face with their own history through the story of Augustus.

All four papers prompted interesting and stimulating discussions, and I will certainly find some of the questions raised after my own paper helpful in developing my ideas and arguments further. But we also closed the afternoon with a more general discussion designed to articulate the shared approaches and concepts which lay behind our papers. In light of the funding awarded to the colloquium by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute Cultural Exchange research theme, I put the over-arching questions posed by the theme to the room, and invited discussion in particular around the one addressed most directly by our papers: ‘How do we conceive of and talk about the relationship between past and present?’

This turned out to be a very fruitful question to ask about the study of Augustus. He is comparatively well served by the historical sources, yet as we agreed, much of what we think we know about him proves insubstantial or ambiguous when examined closely. This can mean that although it is tempting to imagine that we can enter into a straightforward dialogue with him, in reality that conversation is one-sided. As a result, we are free to fashion Augustus in our own image – and yet as Ulrike Roth put it, even as we do so, in some ways he is still controlling us. He cultivated the very ambiguity which makes him a tabula rasa today by striving to maximise his appeal in his own lifetime, leaving us no better able to see him as a coherent human being than his contemporaries. Meanwhile, the study of his receptions highlights the ambiguity of the historical Augustus by demonstrating his capacity to generate so many very different responses. In terms of the LHRI Cultural Exchange questions, thinking about Augustus reminds us that while any relationship between the past and the present must inherently serve the interests of the present, its parameters are still defined by the interests of the past – even, and perhaps especially, when we think that they are not.

SAM_0965

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The Roman emperors survey: talk at Leeds City Museum

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Julius Caesar, Leeds, Public talks, Roman emperors survey, Students

≈ 2 Comments

My last post explained how, in January 2012, I conducted a survey on Roman emperors in Leeds city centre with the help of my students. A year later, in January 2013, I gave a public talk on what we found out from the survey as part of the monthly Classics in our Lunchtimes series at Leeds City Museum. This post covers a few of the main findings.

Our survey consisted of eight questions altogether, but the most important of them all was really the first one, which went as follows:

We would like to find out which Roman emperors people are most familiar with. If I ask you to name a Roman emperor, what is the first name that comes to mind?

Above all, of course, we wanted to find out people’s views on Augustus. But we deliberately didn’t mention him at the start of the survey, in order not to influence people’s answers. Our aim was to find out who was really at the forefront of people’s minds – to know what they would say spontaneously when asked to think of Roman emperor.

The results were fascinating. 20% of people said they couldn’t think of an answer, and another 5% gave names such as Zeus, Napoleon or Hercules – none of whom were ever emperors of Rome! But that means 75% of the people whom we bounced up to in the streets of Leeds were able to answer our question and name a famous Roman – and I think this says a lot about the profile and importance of Roman history in 21st-century Britain. A famous cliché has it that if you ask someone to name a famous Belgian, they can never think of an answer (although of course there are plenty of good answers in reality). Our survey found that the ancient Romans are in a happier position.

Headline results for question 1.

In fact, the most popular answer by far was ‘Julius Caesar’, clocking in at nearly 50%. But most Roman historians would say that this isn’t really an accurate answer to our question either, since we had asked people to name a Roman emperor, and Julius Caesar was not an emperor. He held absolute power over the Roman empire for a short time as a dictator, but in his day this was an emergency office, only intended to be held temporarily. The regular political system was still government by elected magistrates, so there was no accepted role of emperor for him to hold – and his contemporaries soon expressed their displeasure at his attempt to create one by assassinating him.

In a way, Caesar’s popularity in our survey is rather sad for Augustus. A generation after Caesar, Augustus (at that time called Octavian) was the person who did succeed in creating a stable system of rule by emperor, and in persuading the people around him to accept it as a long-term political solution. It says a lot about how low his public profile currently is that in spite of that achievement, when the people of Leeds are asked to name a Roman emperor, they don’t think of the man who invented the entire system of rule by emperor in Rome. They think of Julius Caesar instead.

Our findings also helped to show why that was, though. The answers to question 1 generated a sort of ‘Roman emperors top ten’, showing which of them stood highest in the local public consciousness and which of those were better known than others. The ordering in which they occur on this list actually matches up pretty closely with how often they appear in films and on television, and whether they are shown as strong central characters or secondary players in the stories of others. Later questions also uncovered that although the most common source which people gave for their knowledge about Augustus was ‘school’, the second most common was ‘TV’ – a clear sign of how important this medium is for people’s engagement with the ancient world.

If you would like to listen to the whole talk, a full audio recording complete with my Powerpoint slides are available now on the Classics Talks at Leeds blog. There, I say a little bit more about how both Julius Caesar and Augustus are portrayed on screen, and the relationship between the qualities which Augustus wanted to be remembered for and how the people of Leeds actually see him. I also answer a few audience questions on how Augustus has been seen in different historical contexts since his death at the end. Eventually, the full results from both this survey and a second survey conducted after 2014 will be published as one of the outcomes of my current research into Augustus’ bimillennium. But until then, I hope this little taster shows something of the interesting insights which an afternoon’s work on the streets of Leeds can reveal.

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Running the 2012 Roman emperors survey

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Leeds, Roman emperors survey, Students

≈ 1 Comment

The Commemorating Augustus project began in earnest on 27th January 2012, when I took 45 students from my Augustus and his Legacy module down into Leeds city centre to question members of the public about their views on Roman emperors. For the students, this was a chance to set what they had been learning in the classroom about posthumous responses to Augustus into an immediate modern context, to learn how survey data is collected and analysed, and share their enthusiasm for their studies with the wider public. For me, it was an opportunity to gather some solid numerical data on public perceptions of both Augustus specifically and Roman emperors more generally – something which Classicists don’t normally have available to play with.

We had done a training session in the classroom beforehand, in which I explained the ‘battle-plan’ for the day itself, talked my students through the survey questions which they would be using, and let them have a go at role-playing the survey on each other. I would love to say that the day of the survey itself dawned sunny in bright, but in fact it was cold, overcast, and increasingly drizzly as the afternoon wore on. That didn’t dampen my students’ spirits, though. They threw themselves into the exercise with great cheerfulness and professionalism, and were soon distributed all over the city centre, administering questionnaires and giving out stickers and information sheets as a ‘thank you’ to those who had taken part.

Augustus survey

I sent out 23 pairs of students in total, each primed to conduct about ten interviews in a two-hour period, and got 221 sets of questionnaires back – some of them rather damp! – at the end of the afternoon. It wasn’t a nationwide survey, of course. We could only hope to reach people who happened to be out and about in Leeds city centre on that particular Friday afternoon, and can’t assume that the results would apply any more widely than that. But we certainly collected enough data to see some very interesting trends. We also collected demographic information at the end of each questionnaire to make sure that we were at least reaching a cross-section of the different age, gender and ethnic groups represented in the Leeds population – and post-survey analysis shows that we did that very effectively.

After the survey was completed, we re-gathered in the classroom to share our experiences of the day, and start thinking about how to analyse the data. For the students, this part of the exercise was optional. They could choose to write up a report on the survey and its findings as part of their assessment for the module if they wanted to, or they could write a more traditional essay instead. I’m glad to say, though, that a quarter of them chose to take up the survey report option. For those students, this was an opportunity to develop skills which Classics students don’t always get the chance to try out, such as scientific writing and numerical analysis. And they clearly enjoyed the experience very much, as these quotations from their reports show:

As a Classical Civilisation student, I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in this survey as I feel I have gained a better understanding of conducting a survey and I was able to learn about the public’s ideas concerning Rome’s first emperor. I was also able to communicate and educate people about my course.

Before I started collecting the data, I was apprehensive and unsure on what statistics I would find, if any at all. However, I was exceptionally pleased with how the afternoon went and with the data I collected, as well as being surprised in many ways with what I found, in reference to the questions asked, the responses given, as well as on another, more personal level.

I will keep you in suspense about the results for now, saving those for a separate post. But they were certainly fascinating, and revealed a great deal about how Augustus himself, and Roman emperors more generally, are seen by the people of Leeds. In the longer term, my aim is to run the same survey a second time after the bimillennium in 2014, in the hope of finding out whether there has been any noticeable change in public views of Augustus as a result. I hope my students on the second survey get as much out of it as those who took part in the first one.

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Countdown to the BimillenniumAugust 19, 2014
Suetonius, Augustus 100.1: "He died in the same room as his father Octavius, in the consulship of two Sextuses, Pompeius and Appuleius, on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of September at the ninth hour, just thirty-five days before his seventy-sixth birthday."

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On This Day Two Thousand Years Ago

No upcoming events

2012 anniversaries

  • Charles Dickens bicentenary (birth)
  • Gaius Caligula bimillennium (birth)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau tercentenary (birth)
  • The Queen's Diamond Jubilee
  • Titanic centenary

2013 anniversaries

  • Beatle's first album 50th anniversary
  • Benjamin Britten centenary (birth)
  • C.S. Lewis 50th anniversary (death)
  • David Lloyd George 150th anniversary (birth)
  • Diderot tricentenary (birth)
  • Doctor Who 50th anniversary
  • Emily Davison, suffragette, centenary (death)
  • First Bollywood film centenary
  • Football Association 150th anniversary
  • Giuseppe Verdi bicentenary (birth)
  • John F Kennedy assassination 50th annivesary
  • John Snow bicentenary (birth)
  • London Underground 150th anniversary
  • Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech 50th anniversary
  • Munich agreement 75th anniversary
  • Orson Welles radio adaptation of 'War of the Worlds' 75th anniversary
  • Peter Cushing centenary (birth)
  • Pride and Prejudice bicentenary
  • Richard Wagner bicentenary (birth)
  • Sir Thomas Bodley 400th anniversary (death)

2014 anniversaries

  • Battle of Bannockburn 700th anniversary
  • Battle of Bouvines 800th anniversary
  • Charlemagne 1200th anniversary (death)
  • Christoph Willbard Gluck tercentenary (birth)
  • D-Day 1944 70th anniversary
  • Dylan Thomas centenary (birth)
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall 25th anniversary
  • First World War centenary
  • Forth Road Bridge 50th anniversary
  • George I tercentenary (coronation)
  • Jean-Philippe Rameau 250th anniversary (death)
  • Louis IX of France (St. Louis) 800th anniversary (birth)
  • Michelangelo 450th anniversary (death)
  • Star Spangled Banner bicentenary
  • William Shakespeare 450th anniversary (birth)

2015 anniversaries

  • Battle of Agincourt 600th anniversary
  • Battle of Waterloo bicentenary
  • De Montfort Parliament 750th anniversary
  • Signing of the Magna Carta 800th anniversary
  • Women's Institute centenary

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