A Horrible Year!
The Owl
Vol. 2,
Issue 35
September 4, 2008
Baltimore,
Maryland
Dear Inquiring Traveler,
What do the British monarchy, conqueror Julius Caesar, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a certain pair of twin baby boys all have in common? Keep reading to discover this intriguing story.
Regards,
Editor,
The Owl
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A Horrible Year! (part 1)
by Catherine Lapp
The year 2008 may one day be remembered as an annus horribilis—a horrible year, as Queen Elizabeth II called 1992 in a speech for the 40th anniversary of her coronation. That was the year that the queen’s daughter divorced and one of her sons, the Duke of York, announced his separation from his wife Sarah (who appeared topless kissing her boyfriend in British tabloids). It was also the year that her eldest son and heir, Prince Charles, was about to divorce his wife Diana, and that a fire ravaged the royal residence of Windsor Castle. The last straw was probably that the good British people refused to pay the bill.
Thus far the year 2008 has been insignificant to the British royal family, but it has been disastrous to some other great symbols of times past. A few weeks ago I wrote about a much-heralded life-portrait of Caesar that turned out to be the bust of a nobody. And now news comes that another icon has had its symbolic status shattered.
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A Story of Two Twin Boys
If you don’t quite remember the details of Western Civilization 101 you took sometime ago and the legendary tale of the founding of Rome, allow me to refresh your memory. At the instigation of their ambitious uncle, the twin baby boys Romulus and Remus were abandoned in a basket on the Tiber river, just like Moses left on the Nile. They were rescued by a she-wolf who suckled them until a shepherd discovered and raised them.
Reaching adulthood, the brothers decided to found a city where they would be kings. As they couldn’t agree on a location, they sought guidance from the gods, and it was decided that whoever spotted vultures in the sky would select the site of the future town. Remus saw six vultures, Romulus 12. Remus deemed himself the victor, having seen the birds first, but Romulus claimed victory for seeing more birds. To cut to the chase, Romulus killed Remus in a fit of rage and became the first king of Rome. The city would expand to become the heart of a worldwide empire. (You can read the whole story of the founding of Rome in our book, The Essential Classics, pp. 454-464.)
A Wolf Cast in Bronze
With such a founding legend, it’s hardly surprising that Rome chose the she-wolf as the city emblem and that there are statues of her throughout the city. Most famously, there was one such statue, made of bronze, on the Capitoline hill. During Cicero’s lifetime it was struck by lightning, damaging the little Romulus suckling the wolf.
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What is of interest to us here, is that today there is still such a bronze statue on the Capitoline Hill. It’s been on display in the Sala della Lupa (“The room of the she-wolf”) of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, a branch of the Capitoline Museums, since the 16th century. The wolf in the statue has a damaged paw that could have resulted from a lightning bolt. And the twin boys are missing (the infants you see today were added in the Renaissance), quite natural if they’d been hit by that lightening 2,000 years ago and separated from the wolf.
The Etruscans in Rome
The statue is widely believed to be an ancient bronze original crafted by an Etruscan artist around 500 BC, and to have been as admired in ancient Rome as it is today. If you're wondering why an Etruscan rather a Roman artisan would have been commissioned to produce such a work of art, don’t wonder any further.
The Etruscans developed a flourishing civilization in Italy before Rome even existed. They first settled in northern Italy, in what is now Tuscany, and spread as far south as Naples. When Rome was founded in 753 BC, it was actually in Etruscan territory. And the last three kings of Rome were all of Etruscan birth.
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No one knows for sure where the Etruscans originated before settling in Italy. Most likely, they came from the Near East. This was already the opinion of the Greek historian Herodotus, and, indeed, DNA analyses of ancient Etruscan corpses and cattle found in tombs seem to confirm the hypothesis. What’s clear is that the Etruscans had a refined taste for the arts. They produced frescoes, large-size terracotta figures, gold jewelry, and bronze artifacts that they exported around the Mediterranean. What’s also clear is that their art shows oriental influences. One of their most famous bronzes, a Chimera found in Arezzo, looks more like something you would expect to find in the Levant than in classical Greece or Italy.
Take a closer look at the Capitoline wolf and you’ll get a similar feeling of exoticism. It’s even a little bit disturbing that the emblem of Rome looks so little like a “classical” masterpiece. And it’s becoming even more disturbing by the day. More on this next week.
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