Henry P. Colburn

Last night I received the sad news that Professor Matthew Trundle of the University of Auckland died a few days ago from leukemia. I first encountered his scholarship on Greek mercenaries when I was writing my ANS Summer Seminar paper. One of the topics I dealt with was whether or not imitation Athenian tetradrachms were struck in order to pay Greek mercenaries, which is the standard. In his handy and concise Greek Mercenaries, Matt makes a key point, namely that mercenaries were generally in no position to make demands of their paymasters, and were thus grateful to receive payment in any form. (Incidentally, this question has been given a definitive treatment by Peter van Alfen in the Revue belge de numismatique 2011.)

Armed with this crucial tidbit I made my argument about the role of coinage in the political economy of Late Period Egypt, and in the fall of 2011 I presented it at my first specialized international conference, which took place at Macquarie University. And that’s when I met Matthew in person.  He was very friendly and supportive, and we had some interesting conversations about coinage and social history in the ancient world.

Several years later I received an email advertising a talk he was giving at the Classical Studies department at Michigan. When I turned up for the talk he immediately greeted me warmly, as if it had only been a few weeks since the Macquarie conference, not years. Over the few weeks that he spent in Ann Arbor (I don’t even remember why he was there) we went to the bar several times (where he picked up many tabs), and we had wonderful wide-ranging discussions, and not only on academic topics. He really liked American football, for example. And I wasn’t the only one — he befriended several other Michigan students during his brief stay there. He was good at making people feel welcome, even though he was far from home.

I can’t claim to have known him especially well. But I enjoyed his company and his intellect a great deal, and I very much appreciated the way he treated me and my fellow grad students like colleagues. I am very sad that I won’t run into him again at another conference or on another university campus. The field has lost one of the people who helped to make it human, and not solely academic.

I highly recommend Nathanael Andrade’s recent piece in Eidolon entitled “Voices In The Margins: Classics’ Suppression of Ancient Roman Writers of Color.” Although I am broadly sympathetic to its goals and standpoint I am not a frequent reader of Eidolon (I don’t have time to read anything that isn’t scholarship or science fiction), but Andrade’s essay, which I encountered quite by accident, eloquently expresses concerns that I share, using the racial identity of Lucian as his case study.

Frankly I have always imagined Lucian as a white guy, because, well, he quacks like a duck, so to speak. Andrade effectively demonstrates a few things. First, historically Lucian has been regarded not as ‘white’ but as ‘Oriental.’ Second, my unconscious perception of Lucian as white has nothing to do with what I know of his upbringing or what I read in his work, and everything to do with the nature of Classics as a discipline. I only ever read Lucian in the company of white people, and since the topic of race was never raised in any of my classes or in Lucian’s own work I simply defaulted to an image of whiteness.

I heartily agree with Andrade’s call to normalize diversity in Classics. I’m not really sure how to do it, but I think that recognizing my own unconscious assumptions about race is a good place to start.

My book is now on the Edinburgh University Press website! Here’s the cover:

It’s very exciting, but it will be even more exciting once I’ve checked the proofs and compiled the index.

Having a crappy day? I have just the thing: J. M. Rogers’ review of Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, edited by Jay Gluck, Noël Silver and Sumi Hiramoto Gluck (Ashiya: SoPA, 1996). As Rogers puts it:

“What did they do to deserve this volume, which at 680 pages is a severe test of one’s patience? Despite the inordinate length and the obtrusive egos of their self-obsessed informants, the repetitiveness, and the leaden, and often irrelevant interpolations by Jay Gluck they manage to present an unrelievedly disagreeable picture.”

He goes on to say:

“The scale on which Pope dealt — he claimed in 1932 (p. 167) to have purchased, i.e. sold, more than three quarters of a million dollars’ worth — suggests, however, that ‘Purveyors of Persian Art’ would also have been an apposite title for this volume.”

And:

“Though Phyllis Ackerman’s papers are for the moment inaccessible in Shiraz she emerges as more awful than Pope. The marriage, which she appears to have engineered, may have been less fulfilling than she hoped, which may explain her almost comical obsession with sexual symbolism in middle age.”

Finally:

“With friends like this enemies are superfluous, and Jay Gluck’s admission (p. 573) that everyone connected with the couple had a love-hate relationship with them almost suggests that it is unconscious revenge. As a work of reference, moreover, the volume suffers severely from an absence of explanatory notes and relevant bibliography. Few will need to peruse it, but for the present reviewer it has been a lowering experience.”

It brings a smile to my face every time I read it. The review is published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series 7 (1997), 455-8. Enjoy!

I am pleased to report that The Herodotus Encyclopedia, edited by Christopher Baron, is now in production, and is expected to be published in 2020. It will undoubtedly be an invaluable resource for anyone working on any aspect of Herodotus. If you really have nothing better to do you can see what articles I wrote for the encyclopedia on my publications page.

The Getty Research Institute has released its call for applications for the 2020-21 fellowship cycle, with the themes ‘The Fragment’ and ‘Phoenicians, Philistines, and Canaanites: The Levant and the Classical World.’ I was a postdoctoral fellow at the GRI in 2015-16, and I can recommend these fellowships very highly for the opportunities and connections they provide, the geniality of the GRI and Getty Villa staff, the excellent accommodations, and the weather in Los Angeles.

These fellowships can be a little confusing (I was definitely confused when I applied), so here is some explanation which may help future applicants. First, there are two kinds of fellows, Predocs/Postdocs and Scholars. Predocs/Postdocs have fellowships lasting nine months (late September to June), whereas Scholars, who normally have permanent jobs and are at least a few years out of grad school, have fellowships lasting three months (late September to December, January to March, or April to June).

Second, all of these fellowships are managed by the Getty Research Institute, one of the branches of the Getty Trust, which is separate from the J. Paul Getty Museum (another branch of the Getty Trust). Yet the ancient theme (‘Phoenicians, Philistines, and Canaanites’) is selected by the Antiquities department of the Getty Museum, which is housed at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades (near Malibu). All fellows working under either theme who deal with ancient art get offices at the Villa rather than the Getty Center in Brentwood (where the GRI and the rest of the Getty Museum are located). For example, during my fellowship the Villa theme was ‘Egypt,’ but one of my colleagues, also housed at the Villa, was a Roman art historian working on the ‘Materiality’ theme.

Confused yet? That’s understandable. I am happy to try to answer questions about the fellowship program, so please ask if you’re considering applying.

I finally got around to updating my research page to reflect what I’ve been up to lately, or more accurately what I’ve promised to get up to.

Ever been confused about the difference between provenience and provenance? I still am. As I understand it, provenience refers to the specific location where an object was unearthed, whereas provenance refers either to an object’s ownership history, or to its geographic origins more generally (that is, roughly where it entered the archaeological record, not where it was made).

But I recently came across an article by Rosemary Joyce that adds some very welcome nuance to my understanding of these words. She makes several interesting points, which I summarize here in no particular order. 1.) Despite the commonly held view that ‘provenience’ is an Americanism for provenance, its use in an archaeological context is first attested in Britain. 2.) Although provenance seems to be more common term, based on searches in JSTOR both are used more or less equally. 3.) For geologists, provenance refers to where the materials that comprise a sample originated, whereas provenience simply refers to where the sample was collected. 4.) In Joyce’s view, provenience refers to a specific point within an object’s provenance, and it is not always the most interesting or important point.

I have always eschewed the term provenience in favor of provenance, which I use in its most general sense. Joyce’s paper seems to justify this usage. She suggests dispensing with both terms in favor of such things as ‘object itineraries,’ but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

The article, which I highly recommend, is R. Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology,” in G. Feigenbaum and I. Reist (ed.), Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Getty Research Institute, 2012), 48-60.

I highly recommend Ellen Muehlberger’s review of Donna Zuckerberg’s book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. I haven’t read Zuckerberg’s book yet — I don’t know when I’ll have the time — but the review does an excellent job of explaining why, even if the book has some shortcomings, it sheds light on an essential topic.

I have just read Guy Hedreen’s review of Robin Osborne’s recent book The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press, 2018). I’ve always had a soft spot for Athenian painted pottery, as it is such a large and rich corpus of evidence, waiting to be interrogated by scholars interested in more than, for example, the chronological development of the Amasis Painter’s elbow dimples. Similarly, I also have a significant appreciation for Michael Baxandall, whose work (especially Art and Experience and Patterns of Intention) has been fundamental to my own attempts to write social history from art. According to the review, in this book Osborne combines these two enthusiasms of mine. Hedreen’s view is that the attempt is not altogether successful, which is too bad. I haven’t read the book myself (and may not for some time, given how much is on my plate right now), but the review is stimulating and brought me back to material I haven’t thought about for some time.