The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the culture of ancient Rome beginning about 1000 BCE and ending with the so-called "Fall of Rome". We will look at some of the key people who played a role in Rome, from the time of the kings through the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. We will also focus on the city of Rome itself, as well as Rome's expansion through Italy, the Mediterranean, and beyond.
2. "Forgotten Lives: The Ancient City of Troy"
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Roman Art and Archaeology
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Augustus and the Early Roman Empire (31 BCE - 1st century CE)
Augustus - formerly known as Octavian - set the tone for the next major phase of Rome: the Roman empire. His family-related successors, the Julio-Claudians, would continue his rule. Yet none of his successors had the charisma or vision of Augustus himself, and some such as Caligula and Nero have become synonymous with profligacy and decadence of an extreme nature. By the year 69 CE. Rome was in chaos. But the emperor Vespasian restored order and dignity - not to mention humility - to the office, and instituted his own dynasty, the Flavians. Unfortunately, Vespasian's second son, Domitian, brought his Flavian dynasty to an end through dreadful administration. Domitian was murdered in 96 CE.
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David SorenRegents Professor of Classics and Anthropology
Classics and Anthropology
We know about a lot of famous people today.
Some of them are so famous that just knowing their initials is enough to know
all about them, FDR, JFK, J Lo.
But there are a lot of people who were once famous, and very important, for
what they contributed to the history of civilization.
And I'd like for my students to know all about them, too.
Our second story deals with the discovery of the ancient city of Troy.
And we've asked graduate student Rob Bullard to investigate.
There have been many movies, old and new, celebrating the saga of Troy and
its rivalries with the Greeks of Mycenae.
Some of these movies were pretty good
[MUSIC]
And some of them were not so good.
[MUSIC]
[NOISE] These old movies were fun, but
they don't tell the real story of Troy,
and that's why we need Rob Bullard.
Rob is a classics major, which means he studies ancient Greek, and Latin.
Rob is finishing a master's degree before pursuing
a career as a prosecuting attorney back in North Carolina.
Then here's Rob's unique assignment.
Troy was really an ancient city-state in what is now northwestern Turkey.
Troy came into contact, and then battle, with the city-states of ancient Greece.
Troy was destroyed and forgotten by the Middle Ages, and
no one if it ever existed.
And yet, in these days of struggles and tension between the US and
Iraq, Iran, Russia, North Korea and China.
The Trojan War stands out as the first great conflict between east and west.
And it was the first site where archaeology solved ancient puzzles and
the first site to produce an archaeological superstar.
But who discovered these long lost ruins?
That's what we've asked Rob to investigate.
>> I found out it is not an easy question to answer.
The poet Homer told the story of two great empires, one was Troy, and
the other was the land of the Mycenaeans in Greece.
>> Mycenae had a warrior aristocracy and an alliance of independent city-states.
In Greece, lived the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen,
ho was taken to Troy by Paris, the son of the Trojan king.
Thus starting a great Trojan war.
[MUSIC]
The war, if it really happened, occurred around 1200 BC.
Homer's tale was perhaps composed in the eighth century BC.
And the story was finally written down later to become the great
epic poems of Homer known as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
[MUSIC]
Troy flourished perhaps around 1300 BC,
controlling the Dardanelles at the fringe of the Hittites Empire.
It had a royal palace, and massive city walls, and
was a center for international trade.
The Mycenaean, Greeks under their King Agamemnon, sailed to Troy and
besieged the city with their great warrior, Achilles.
Eventually, the Greeks pretended to leave,
an offered a parting gift, a huge Trojan horse.
Hiding inside the Mycenean soldiers crept out, opened the gates and
let in their troops, who burned and sacked the city.
But was the Trojan War just poet Homer's adventures
or was it actual history, or, a bit of both?
Scholars searched for Troy for years, and the man who became famous for
finding it was, Heinrich Schliemann, in 1868.
He claimed he'd been obsessed since boyhood
with discovering the lost city of Troy, and proving that it exists.
But he had a shady past and a history of lying, swindling and stealing.
How could our own Rob Bullard find out if Schliemann really
had discovered historical Troy?
>> I used my $1000 from Forgot and Lost to go to Chicago.
My reason for visiting was not to go sight-seeing,
which of course I spent some university money doing.
[MUSIC]
Chicago was where the greatest archeologists, from all over the world,
were having their annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.
There I tried to talk with experts of Troy, including
Brian Rose, AIA President, and the latest excavator of Troy.
When I arrived at the convention, I began asking people about Troy.
>> I can tell you a little bit about the ancient city of Troy.
>> Sure, fire away.
>> [LAUGH] That it was the home of the Trojans,
who fought the Greeks for Helen, and that it's located in Turkey.
>> I'm a publisher, >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] Don't ask me about Troy,
you want a classicist.
>> What do I know about Troy?
>> That Brad Pitt was the worst Achilles, ever.
>> The movie or the site?
>> The site.
>> The site, I don't know anything about the site.
>> I've never been there.
>> [LAUGH] >> Love to go someday.
>> Wait, isn't there a team, a football team, called the Trojans?
>> [LAUGH] I think there a million of them out there.
>> Oh, yeah, okay.
>> And a few soccer teams, and a few other-
>> A baseball team.
>> [LAUGH] >> Heinrich Schliemann went out with his
copy of Homer, and basically dug a huge trench.
And managed to find the city, but destroyed a lot in the process.
>> In 1822 a Scottish newspaper writer, and topographer named
Charles Maclaren, wrote a book, The Plain Of Troy Described:.
Claiming Troy existed, and was located under a mound known as Hissarlik.
But Maclaren was an armchair archaeologist and never really excavated.
In 1847, young Frank Calvert, a British teenager whose
family owned land in the Hissarlik area, dug in the mound.
And became convinced that the Mound of Hissarlik was really ancient Troy.
But the family had little money to dig on a large scale.
Enter onto the scene, wealthy German embezzler, self-made business tycoon
in the Russian indigo trade, and wheeler-dealer, Heinrich Schliemann.
[MUSIC]
After partaking in the California gold rush,
he had to flee America under threat of being lynched for bank fraud.
[MUSIC]
Arriving in Turkey, he met Calvert.
Forming a partnership in which Schliemann agreed to pay for and
dig up the area that Calvert owned and thought was the side of Troy.
There were numerous layers of occupations of the site, and Schliemann reasoned,
irrationally, that the most important settlement,
Homeric Troy, would be at the bottom.
And so he dug away the hill, removing the more recent settlements,
until he came to Troy II, deep in the mound, and pronounced this Homeric Troy.
And there, he claimed he found great treasure, which his wife, Sophia, modeled.
Unfortunately as Schliemann was to learn only years later, he had dug down too far.
And in his haste,
dug through the levels of the famous Troy and destroyed them forever.
[MUSIC]
But was Schliemann's discovery the result of an obsession he
claimed to have since he was a boy?
Or did he steal Calvert and McLaren's ideas and
claim all the credit for himself?
In Chicago, I was roaming about among the crowds of experts and
interested visitors at the AIA.
When all of a sudden I stumbled- Excuse me- Right onto the actual- Are you the-
Current- Brian Rose?
Excavator of Troy, Brian Rose- >> You're just saying that for
the camera, right?
>> No! The object of my visit. >> There is no the Brian Rose.
>> [LAUGH] This guy is like >> It's a skinny kid from Ohio.
>> It's like the American Idol of the whole field of archaeology.
>> How is that?
No one told me this.
>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, well-
>> Dr Rose very graciously agreed to sit
down with me and tell me about the Troy excavations.
By 1300 BCE, Troy VI had reached a high level
of civilization, but it was struck by a massive earthquake.
[NOISE] Giving rise to the famous Troy VIIA, the rebuilt city,
which may have been the community that inspired Homer's poetry.
[MUSIC]
Was Troy VIIA Homeric Troy?
>> When one asks if Schliemann found Homer's Troy in his excavations,
one assumes that there's one settlement that could be linked to
the Trojan war as told by Homer.
And that's just not correct, There are elements of the Bronze Age settlements
of Troy, Troy VI, and Troy VII that one can find reflections of in the Iliad.
The Iliad was first written down in the late eighth century, and
there are elements of iron age Troy.
Troy in ninth and eighth centuries, that one can also find reflected in the Iliad.
But there's no one settlement that one should link,
that one can link, concretely with Homer's Trojan War.
>> What had the new archeology revealed
about Troy VI in 1300 BCE?
The sixth city on the site of the mount of Hissarlik,
that Brian Rose spoke about, had a lower and an upper city.
The lower featuring a huge ditch to prevent any chariots from attacking.
[MUSIC]
It had huge stone defensive walls and houses with flat roofs for
drying fruits and nuts.
[MUSIC]
There was a main street leading to a fabulous palace.
Scholars believed a massive earthquake destroyed Troy VI,
[MUSIC]
And Troy VIIA was a quick rebuild with smaller houses.
[MUSIC]
But Troy VIIA had a few new wrinkles, too.
[MUSIC]
There were merlons, or mini-crenellations,
built atop the massive walls, and stone fetish idols called baetles,
to show the city had special divine protection.
But who discovered Troy, Charles Maclaren, Frank Calvert, or Heinrich Schliemann?
I was able to talk to Brian Rose’s protegee at Troy, Dr. William Aylward.
>> Troy was beyond doubt, Calvert’s discovery.
How do we know this?
We know it because the documents, the diaries, the correspondence
between Calvert and Schliemann and others tells us this was the case.
And we know it in three ways.
We know that Calvert had been working at Hissarlik, as many as five years.
Prior to Schliemann's arrival on the site in August of 1868.
We know that Calvert had unrivaled knowledge of the region, and
Hissarlik and the secret of Hissarlik.
And that he shared that knowledge openly, perhaps naively, with Heinrich Schliemann.
And we know that Schliemann, in his publications, and
in his diary, inflated his own insights about Hissarlik,
and minimized Calvert's contribution.
>> I met other experts at AIA who have written important books about Troy and
who were eager to weigh in on the controversy.
>> Frank Calvert, in his correspondence with Schliemann,
mentioned the fact that he had been looking for
Homeric Troy and he owned the land of Troy.
He'd bought it with the intent of excavating it and
proving that Homer's Troy lay on the spot of Hissarlik.
>> Oh, I think Frank Calvert was very trustworthy, in fact,
if anything, he was a very cautious person who didn't want to make claims
that he couldn't absolutely document.
So that made him drag his feet about proclaiming himself as the discoverer
of Troy, he should have done it earlier, but he didn't.
He held back, and
that meant that Schliemann could kind of push him out on the side.
So, he was very, very trustworthy, his defect was also his virtue.
[LAUGH] >> Would anyone defend Schliemann?
>> Schliemann was important because he the first archaeologist to popularize
archaeology.
And he's successful in popularizing it because Troy was
known to every child who'd gone to school, because everybody read the classics.
>> It's important not to condemn Heinrich Schliemann.
As with everything in life, there were extenuating circumstances,
on Frank Calvert's side and on Heinrich Schliemann's side.
He was a businessman, he had made his fortune in cutthroat exchanges and
interactions in the California Gold Rush, in the Russian fur trade.
These were winner-take-all transactions, so for Hissarlik, and for the fame
regarding the discovery of Hissarlik, were there going to be winners and losers?
You bet there were!
>> The excavations have continued after Schliemann and
Calvert, but their legacy is a great one.
>> Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann have made monumental contributions
to the discipline of archaeology which was in its infancy in the 1870s, if that.
Heinrich Schliemann's use test trenches for probing archaeological sites.
The weight that he gave to pottery for
dating archaeological sites and his multidisciplinary approach.
His publications are replete with information about botany, geography,
geology, ethnology.
All of these surrounding the archaeological minutia and
the finds themselves.
Heinrich Schliemann was a foundational force in crafting this methodology for
archeologists.
>> People often ask me what I think of when I'm digging at Troy and
do the events of the past ever intrude on the events of the present?
If you can look at the wars that occurred at Troy and antiquity, so
often its a war between east and west.
So if you look at Troy on the west coast of Asia Minor in the Bronze Age, you find
conflict between the Greeks in mainland Greece and the Hittites in central Turkey.
If you will, a conflict between east and west.
If you look at Troy during the late sixth and fifth centuries BC,
you can find a war between the Greeks and the Persians.
Again, a war between east and west.
What do I think of when I’m digging at Troy?
I think of the current warfare between east and
west, the military intervention in Iraq.
And I think about the extent to which the events of the present are really not so
different from those of the past.
[MUSIC]
>> I learned a lot about the archaeology and the importance of Troy.
But I'd have to say that Frank Calvert was the man who truly discovered Troy.
>> Thanks Rob for finding answers to our question, but
I have to tell you that I really don't care for Heinrich Schliemann.
So often in our world, the visionaries who do the actual work,
are pushed aside and people steal their work.
In this case Schliemann, a treacherous but brilliant businessman,
could have shared his discoveries and his fame with the shy Mr. Calvert.
Instead, Schliemann stole Calvert's dream, and kept the power and glory for himself.
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