Migrating from tumblr...

I've decided to move Nescio Quid from tumblr to blogger. The main reason for the switch is that I find I have more to say and greater formatting needs than tumblr provides. Luckily for me, I haven't posted that many things on tumblr so I will migrate all my posts over here in the near future.

PDFs of the Loeb Classical Library...for FREE!

The hot news this weekend among classicists in the Twittersphere and on Facebook is  that all out of copyright editions of the Loeb Classical Library texts are available for free at Loebolus. You can download individual texts or a zip file of them all.

For those who don't know, the Loeb Classical Library is a series of translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts. Harvard University Press (HUP) has been publishing Loebs since 1911 and they have a nice account of their history here. The series includes texts ranging in date from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in the 8th century B.C. to the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in the 8th century A.D. Each volume includes an authoritative edition of the original text on the left page and an English translation on the facing page. They are easily recognizable by their green and red covers.

Since 1990, HUP has been updating their translations. The older translations, which are available at Loebolus, often seem rather out of date and some of the texts were bowdlerized to remove potentially offensive material. This is especially obvious in authors like Aristophanes and Catullus who often used sexually explicit language.

Still the older versions of Loebs are a great resource for anyone wanting to read an ancient Greek or Latin text in translation or the original.

Planning a Trip to See the Wonders of the Ancient World with Orbis

Stanford has new geospatial networking tool, Orbis, that lets you calculate travel times, distances and costs in theRoman Empire based on data for the early 3rd century A.D. Think of it like Google Maps and Travelocity rolled into one.Prices and routes vary according to time of year and mode of travel, all of which can be selected in the Orbis dashboard.

I played around with it a little and decided to see what it would be like to plan a summer vacation travelling fromRometo see all seven of the wonders of the ancient world. I used the traditional list of wonders (see below), but our first extant list of wonders by Antipater of Sidon (late 2nd century B.C.E.) mentions the walls of Babylon instead of the light house of Alexandria:

"I have seen the Walls of rock-like Babylon that chariots can run upon, and seen Zeus on the Alpheus, and the Hanging Gardens, and the great statue of the Sun, and the huge labour of the steep Pyramids, and the mighty Tomb of Mausolus; but when I looked at the house of Artemis soaring to the clouds, those others were dimmed, <  > apart from Olympus, the sun never yet looked upon its like." (The Greek Anthology, 9.58; translated by A.S.F. Gow & D.L. Page, 1968)

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World:

• The colossal gold and ivory statue of Zeus in theTemple of Zeus at Olympia(5th century B.C.E.)
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (6th/4th century B.C.E.)
• The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, burial place of Mausolus, King of Caria (4th century B.C.E.)
• The Colossus of Rhodes (3rd century B.C.E.)
• The Lighthouse at Alexandria (3rd century B.C.E.)
• The Pyramids at Giza (ca. 2500's B.C.E.)
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (6th century B.C.E.)

[Image via Wikipedia]

Since one almost surely would have passed through Alexandriato get to the pyramids at Giza, and the walls were in Babylon with the Hanging Gardens, using Antipater's list wouldn't make much of a change to the route. Not all of these places are available in Orbis, so I selected the closest point possible. In particular, for Olympia I chose the mouth of the Alpheus River, for Giza I chose Memphis, and Dura for Babylon. I also chose what seemed like the most logical route to me: starting with Olympia, jumping over to Asia Minor for Ephesus and Halicarnassus, then down to Rhodes, before crossing the Mediterranean to Egypt and finally heading east toward Babylon.

[Screen shot from Orbis]

When planning these routes I chose to use the price list for travel by donkey. Under speed options I selected the slower means of sea travel for the cheapest route, but for the shortest and fastest routes I went wild and selected the private transport speed option!

Distance and time are pretty self-explanatory. But how much is a denarius worth in modern terms? Conversions from ancient to modern currencies are fraught with difficulties and most scholars will warn you away from such attempts. It is possible, however, to get a sense of how much one of these travel options would have cost by comparing known prices for common goods and salaries. The denarius was the Romans' most common silver coin. When the denarius was first introduced in the 3rd century B.C.E. it was the equivalent of 10 asses, small denomination copper coins, but in the 2nd century B.C.E. the denarius was valued at 16 asses, which remained the standard throughout much of the Imperial Period. At the beginning of the 3rd century A.D., contemporary with the data used by Orbis, a Roman legionary earned about 400 denarii per year. Living in Romean individual would have spent about 60-90 denarii per year on grain/bread which was the staple of the Roman diet (see an example of wages and prices here).  So a trip to see the wonders of the world would have been quite an expense for most people inRome.

Looking at the results, if you only wanted to be able to say you saw all seven of the wonders, the fastest route seems to be the best choice.  Not only is it faster, but probably much more cost efficient in the end. It is more than double the price of the cheapest route, but by cutting out an extra month and a half of travel time one could save on other travel expenses. Nowadays those expenses would be food and lodging, but in antiquity travelers frequently stayed as guests in private homes. Networks of friends, family, friends of friends/family provided room and board, but these often times included exchanges of gifts. There would undoubtedly still be times, on a trip such as this, when travelers would be compelled to rent accommodations and buy food, not to mention souvenirs.

Orbis is a great tool and lots of fun to play around with. It will be interesting to see how it develops and how people make use of it. I can also say from my own experience that they are extremely prompt and helpful when responding to questions.

If the Colosseum had been built on the University of Utah campus...

The BBC has a cool tool that puts the size of the Colosseum in perspective by letting you plop down the amphitheater's footprint in your own neighborhood. (They also offer comparisons of the pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge, the leg span of the Colossus of Rhodes and more.)

The Colosseum compared to Rice-Eccles Stadium and the Huntsman Center, via the BBC

 I dropped the Colosseum on the middle of the University of Utah campus and it's interesting to see how it compares to the modern sports arenas. There are two arenas on campus: Rice-Eccles Stadium, where the Utes' football team plays and where the 2002 Winter Olympic ceremonies took place, and the Jon M. Hunstman Center, where the Utes' basketball teams and women's gymnastics compete. While it is roughly similar in size to Rice-Eccles Stadium, the Colosseum would probably have dwarfed Rice-Eccles in appearance due to the difference in building techniques.

The Colosseum vs. Rice-Eccles Stadium (photos by author)

The stats:

The Colosseum
First Game(s): 80 A.D.
Cost: Unknown
Seating: 54,760, estimates vary from ca. 50,000 to 80,000[1]
Overall Square footage: 258,334
Arena Dimensions in feet: 282.15 x 177.17[2]

Rice-Eccles Stadium
First Game(s): 12 September, 1998
Cost: ca. $50 million ($71.3 million in 2012 according to Wikipedia)
Seating: 46,179
Overall Square footage: 234,350
Arena Dimensions in feet: 360 x 160 (NCAA regulation)

Jon M. Huntsman Center
First Game(s): 30 November, 1969
Cost: $10,392,00 in 1969 ($65.9 million in 2012 according to Wikipedia)
Seating: 15,115
Overall Square footage: Unknown
Arena Dimensions in feet: 94 x 50 (NCAA Men's Basketball regulation)

It's interesting to compare the seating arrangments of the three arenas. In the Colosseum, the best seats were front row seats. Bomgardner has calculated some numbers: for the tribunal, where the emperor and his guests sat, ca. 60 seats and ca. 2,190 seats for the podium, where senators and various priests and priestesses, like the Vestal Virgins, sat. These VIP's sat in portable folding chairs that they would have brought with them, while the rest of the audience sat in bleacher-style seating, packed in like sardines, if we extrapolate from Ovid's comments (Ars Amatoria I.139-142) about being compelled to sit glued to the side of one's neighbor in the Circus Maximus. (Of course, Ovid doesn't mind this as he thinks it's a great way to pick up girls!) 

Seating arrangments in the Colosseum (excerpted from A. Claridge (1998) Rome, p. 279)

It is debatable which are the best seats at Rice-Eccles. There are the front line seats, closest to the action, or the "luxury suites" (953 seats) up in the skyboxes. There are generally better seats at Rice-Eccles than in the Colosseum, because it has 15,015 "chair seats," but the other ca. 30,000 seats in the bleachers aren't much better than what the Roman enjoyed! The Huntsman Center has better overall seating, everyone gets a "chair seat", but there are only 194 front row seats.

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[1] Bomgardner, D.L. (2000) The Story of the Roman Amphitheater, p. 20.

[2] Richardson, L. (1992) A New Topographical Dictionary, p. 10.