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Interesting story – police stopped a man as he was loading a statue onto some type of vehicle. The man brought the police to the site where he got it from – allegedly the tomb of Caligula!Caligula's tomb found after police arrest man trying to smuggle statueI'd be interested in hearing how the looters were able to stumble across a tomb such as this after all these years. I should also point out that not everyone is convinced this is Caligula's tomb:
However, Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge warns that ?the details are pretty murky,? and that it ?is almost inconceivable that this assassinated symbol of imperial monstrosity would have been given a grand monument.?
I don't know if Mary Beard is good or not, but she's cited often. I would listen to what that lady has to say.So Emperors who were assassinated didn't have a monument? Is this true for all of them? By the way, how many were assassinated?
Yeah I think I've heard of Mary Beard before as well. Can't exactly place her, though.I think the point was that emperors who were despised at death would not be glorified later on, unless some other emperor came along to rehabilitate him. I can't really think of any funerary monuments of emperors offhand aside from the Masoleum of Augustus and the Mausoleum of Hadrian. It seems like quite a number of emperors were assassinated, especially after 180 A.D., and this may explain why we don't have many memorable imperial tombs.
Ah, Mary Beard. When you say that you might have heard of Mary Beard, you're probably thinking of Mary Ritter Beard. She was a noted historian and women's suffragist in the early 20th Century. If you haven't exactly heard of Mary Ritter Beard, you've probably heard of her husband, the Columbia University historian Charles Beard. Charles Beard was one of the most prominent American historians of the first half of the 20th Century, re-interpreting many of the accounts of the founding of America with an economic / populist eye.But seeing how both Mary Ritter Beard and Charles Beard are both dead, and have been for 50+ years, the article is probably referring the noted British / Cambridge classicist Mary Beard (very much alive).The first two surfaced in my Historiography course a while back, and the latter was recently noted in one of my wife's humanities courses.
Going off topic here, but time for a children's game. Which of the following (maybe two of them) don't “belong”? 😉Pompeii: the life of a Roman Town (London and Cambridge, MA., 2008)The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, Ma., 2007)The Colosseum (with Keith Hopkins) (London and Cambridge, Ma, 2004)The Parthenon (London and Cambridge, Ma., 2002)Classical Art: from Greece to Rome (with John Henderson) (Oxford, 2001)The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Ma., 2000)Religions of Rome (with John North and Simon Price), (Cambridge, 1998)Classics: a very short introduction (with John Henderson) (Oxford, 1995)Pagan Priests (ed. with John North) (London, 1990)The Good Working Mother's Guide (London, 1989)Rome in the Late Republic (with Michael Crawford) (London, 1985, 2nd ed. 1999)
A little more information on this: it was not Caligula's tomb (apparently) but instead one of his palaces. And it seems to be located outside the city. One wonders how many more artifacts like thish are in “tiny villages” surrounding Rome.
The location where the statue was found, a tiny village in the Alban Hills which in Roman times was the center of the Diana cult, would be another strong indication for the existence of the emperor?s villa.It is known that Caligula, who ruled from 37 to 41 as Rome?s third emperor, had two enormous ?love boats? floating on the volcanic lake at Nemi.
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/caligula-statue-hints-at-lavish-villa.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
