Herculanean Studies: The Next Generation

The many discoveries in Herculaneum included papyrus scrolls with Philodemus’s On Rhetoric, which is the only known copy of a treatise by the prolific scholar. The importance of this find was marred by the sorrowful state of a text that survives as many disconnected fragments. Siegfried Sudhaus’s restoration and ordering of those fragments (1892-2896) have been questioned in the publication of On Rhetoric by Chandler (2006) and in Nicolardi’s recent edition of the first book (2018).

One of the ways in which Roman artists commonly visualized Africans (i.e., Sub-Saharan peoples) is as athletes, a visual tradition that carries over from the Hellenistic era and includes their depiction as acrobats, pugilists, and gladiators. By contrast, there is only one known Roman representation of an African as a charioteer: a fragmentary marble relief now in Naples that is conventionally dated to the first century C.E. and commonly said to be from Herculaneum. Niccolini and Niccolini (1896, vol. 4, Suppl., pl.

Recently, scholarship on the aesthetics of sculpture in Campanian town houses has been playing catch-up with the volume of work being done on other decorative media. While important studies of diverse sculptural ensembles (Dwyer 1982) or the principles guiding their display (Bartman 1991) have enhanced our understanding of the appeal of statuary for the Campanian homeowner, one aspect of domestic statuary worth further exploration is the role of sculptural multiples, whether identical or mirror reversed, as meaning-making elements within larger ensembles of sculpture.

According to Roman consensus, pre-Polykleitan sculpture appeared “hard” (dura), “too stiff” (rigidiora), and the embodiment of “rude antiquity” (rudis antiquitas) (Cic. Brut. 70; Quint. Inst. 12.10.7-9; Pliny H.N. 34.58). The material record nevertheless reveals that there was a Roman market for statues exhibiting precisely these qualities, which followed the conventions of Archaic and Early Classical sculpture. Roman archaistic statuary is therefore something of a paradox, which this paper seeks to address.

My paper will examine the “Player King” (MANN 9019), one of the excised fresco panels found leaning against a wall in the vicinity of the Palaestra at Herculaneum in 1761 (Borriello et al. 1989: 138-139, n. 103; Parslow 1995: 148-149; Jones 2019: 11-12). In particular, it will argue that this painting responds to and reworks traditional artistic modes of representing dramatic authors. Presumably in transit and awaiting remounting when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the “Player King” is a square composition that depicts three figures.

The wax tablets of Herculaneum, produced by a diversity of ancient hands and uniquely preserved, have given us an unprecedented insight into the daily lives of the residents of the town. One of the more remarkable collections is the archive of L. Venidius Ennychus, found on the upper floor of the Casa del Salone Nero. A series of tablets from this group document what must have been a momentous and life-changing event for him: his successful efforts to have his status as a Junian Latin raised to that of full Roman citizen after his daughter had reached the age of one.