The replica gods of Roman Messene

As well as preparing for the upcoming conference on Public Statues Across Time and Cultures – 28-29 September, do check out the programme! – I’ve been working recently on an article about the different settings where statues were set up in the city of Messene. If you’ve never been there Messene is an incredible site in the southwest Peloponnese in the region that was liberated from Spartan control in the late Classical period – I’ve blogged about it here. This isn’t the follow-up I promised a while ago to my piece on the statues of the Messenian Artemision (I will get round to that soon) but something else about the statues of gods that are known to have stood in various places around the city.

Hermes of the Andros type, found in the gymnasium at Messene

Anyone who’s visited a museum gallery displaying statues from antiquity will, I’m sure, have seen the label “Roman copy of Greek original”. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. At the time of the Roman Empire certain well-known statue types in crop up everywhere, many of them thought to be replicas in marble of much older pieces of sculpture by Greek artists that have long since disappeared and which were probably made of bronze. Seeing all those near identical Venuses and Herculeses it’s easy to imagine them decorating Roman villas and bathhouses – which they surely did – and to find them somehow reassuringly familiar. As pieces for decoration, designed to advertise the culture and learning of their owners, the Roman way of displaying and relating to these statues seems little different to the way in which English gentry displayed ancient statues in their 18th century mansions, a subject explored in a fascinating and beautifully illustrated book that I read recently and highly recommend – “Owning the Past” by Ruth Guilding.

Now, one of the puzzling things about this Roman habit of copying Greek statues is just what it meant to the Greeks whose ancestors had made the statues that were being copied. In Greek culture in Classical and Hellenistic times statues of gods don’t generally seem to have been made just to serve as pieces of art but, more often were set up as objects of religious devotion, whether to physically embody the power of the god or as a votive honour. So how did the Greeks respond to new Roman ideas about sculpture once they became part of the Empire?

Of course there are sculptures of gods from Roman Greece that do seem to be largely decorative, such as the Tritons and Giants from the 2nd century AD rebuilding of the Odeion in the Athenian Agora (though even here I’ve argued that something more meaningful might be going on) but the thing that makes Messene so intriguing is that statues have been found that are recognizable copies of well-known types but which seem to have stood in decidedly religious settings.

First, from the gymnasium a Heracles and a Hermes, both of types known from other Roman copies have been found. There’s a photo of the Hermes at the top of this post – all that survives of the Herakles are fragments. A gymnasium, like a bathhouse, is admittedly just the kind of place where we might expect purely decorative sculpture in the Roman period and Herakles and Hermes are gods that are often seen in such settings and generally interpreted in what we might call purely secular terms – as images of the brawn and brains that young men exercising and studying in the gymnasium were meant to be cultivating. The gymnasium at Messene, however was uniquely, home to a number of public burials from the period, which suggests it was thought of as, in some sense, a religious space. The statue of Hermes may even have stood atop one of these grave monuments as statues of this type are known to have done elsewhere in the Roman world in cemeteries.

A third statue found in the gymnasium is an example of one of the most copied of all in antiquity – Polycleitus’ Doryphoros or spear bearer. Nobody knows for sure who this famous statue was meant to represent when the original was made in the 5th century BC but Petros Themelis, the excavator of Messene has argued that here it may have been used to represent Theseus, the Athenian hero who killed the minotaur, whose statue Pausanias also saw in the gymnasium.

The Doryphoros (from, left: Pompeii; right: Messene)

Perhaps even more intriguing is a piece of a statue of Aphrodite found on the agora. It is just a bit of a thigh but that is enough to allow it to be recognised as belonging to the famous “Crouching Venus” type known from countless examples. Some of you may have seen the one displayed in last year’s “Defining Beauty” exhibition at the British Museum.

Crouching Venus with Messene thigh fragment overlain*

Pausanias tells us that Aphrodite had a temple on the agora at Messene and while we can’t be sure that this statue came from the temple the coincidence of location least raises that possibility and suggests that at Messene this statue too was thought of as having some deeper religious meaning than we might normally be inclined to ascribe to the work.

Statue of Isis Pelagia found at Messene

Statue of Isis Pelagia found at Messene

There seem to be other examples of copies of statues at Messene in religious settings too though not of such well-known types. Two fantastic statues of Isis, one found in the sanctuary of that goddess, the other found in the theatre but surely also originating in the Iseion, Professor Themelis has argued to be copies of older Hellenistic models. The first can be seen in the site museum and is of Isis Pelagia, goddess of the sea, striding forth on the prow of a ship.

 

Statue of Isis suckling the baby Horus, from Messene

The other shows the her suckling the baby Horus, a well-known image from antiquity that may well have influenced later representations of the Virgin Mary. It was found more recently and so is not yet on display. Neither type has exact parallels elsewhere in the Empire but the iconography of both is known from other media such as reliefs and coins which makes it likely that they too were what we would call copies. A 3rd century Artemis, found in what seems to have been some kind of public hall bears a close resemblance – thought it is far from identical (look at the clothes, hairstyle and stance) – to one that I saw earlier this year at Blenheim palace. While there’s no reason to think that this building had any particular religious significance the other examples mean that we can’t rule out that the statue did.

Statues of Artemis (from, left: Messene; right: Blenheim Palace)

What this all comes down to is that thinking spatially about the setting in which statues were set up can help defamiliarise them and open our minds to new ways of looking at them. It’s easy to think of Roman period statues as largely decorative or allegorical because that’s how we’ve been looking at statues for the past few hundred years but there’s every reason to think that the Roman period Greeks saw them very differently.

And thinking spatially about the meaning of statues isn’t just worth doing for antiquity. The different ways that cultures throughout history have used and responded to public statues is a subject that I don’t think has received anywhere near the attention it deserves which is the reason why I’ve organised a conference around that very theme. So, to end as I began – with a plug – it’s an exciting programme with papers on Roman Palmyra, Hellenistic Athens, Ancient China, the Renaissance and lots more. And the event isn’t just meant for stuffy academics so do check it out. Registration closes on 21st September.

Hopefully I’ll see you there……

 

 

*The image of Venus is taken from Professor Themelis’ excellent guide to the site:

Themelis, P. (2003). Ancient Messene. Athens, Hellenic Ministry of Culture – Archaeological Receipts Fund.

 

Public Statues Across Time and Cultures

It is a pleasure to be able to announce that registration is now open for conference that I have been organising on “Public Statues across Time and Cultures” which will take place at Lincoln College, Oxford on 28th and 29th September. Over two days leading historians, art historians and archaeologists from the U.S., Europe and the UK will present papers exploring the role played by public statues in historical cultures ranging from ancient China to Renaissance Italy, from Palmyra to Georgian England. I am extremely pleased with the final line up (although there is one slot still to fill due to somebody having to pull out) and am really looking forward to what is going to be a fascinating and fun event.

Throughout history and across cultures people have set up statues in public spaces – to honour rulers, to reward benefactors, to worship gods and goddesses or simply to admire. There’s been a lot of fascinating research into the role of public statues in particular societies but, in my opinion, not enough consideration given to the bigger picture of differences and similarities in the ways in which different cultures have used and responded to their statues.It is hoped that bringing together experts working on similar issues but for different times and places will suggest new perspectives for thinking about the ways that statues have been used around the world throughout history.

The event is open to anybody with an interest in sculpture, public space or comparative history and will be taking place in Lincoln College’s wonderful new conference centre, which only opened last year.

You can register for the event by following this link to the online store. There is a charge of £7.50 per day to cover the cost of the room and refreshments. You are also more than welcome to pay and sign up for the optional lunch (£13.50 per day).

Please not that registration will close on 21st September.

For any questions please send me an email or leave a comment below.

Here is the full programme:

Public statues across Time and Cultures

 A two-day international conference

Lincoln College, Oxford

28^th-29^th September 2016

This event is generously supported by the Marie Curie Fellowship, John Fell Fund, the Zilkha Fund and the Craven Committee.

Programme

Day one – Wednesday 28^th September

10:00 Opening – Dr. Christopher Dickenson (Oxford)

10.30 Dr. Matthew Craske (Oxford Brookes) “The erection of public monuments to historical figures and the politics of nostalgia in early Hanoverian England”

11:30 Tea and coffee

12:00 Prof. Sheila Dillon (Duke University) “Public Sacred Space, Private Portrait Statues: the case of the City Eleusinion in Athens”

13:00 Lunch for speakers and chairs, optional for delegates

14:00 Dr. Peter Dent (University of Bristol) “Looking up in Public: Subordinating the Viewer in the Squares of Medieval and Renaissance Italy”

15:00 Tea and coffee

15:30 Dr. Kathleen Christian (Open University) “‘Statues in Renaissance Rome and the Possesso of Leo X, 1513”

16:30 Prof. Lukas Nickel (University of Vienna): “Public Sculpture in Early Imperial China, 3^rd to 2^nd century BC”

17:30 Reception

Day Two – Thursday 29^th September

9:30 Prof. Rubina Raja (Aarhus University) “Public display of statuary in Palmyra – between tradition and innovation”

10:30 Dr. Paroma Chatterjee (University of Michigan) “Ancient statues as markers of time in the Parastaseis and Theophanes Continuatus”

11:30 Tea and coffee

12:00 Dr. Campbell Price (Manchester Museum) “How accessible was elite temple sculpture in Pharaonic Egypt?”

13:00 Lunch for speakers and chairs, optional for delegates

14: 00 Dr. Stijn Bussels (Leiden University) “Shiver and Admire in the Dutch Golden Age. Artus Quellinus’ Statues in the Amsterdam Tribunal”

15:00 Tea and coffee

15:30 Dr Faik Gür (Özyeğin University)  “High Modernism and the Politics of Public Statuary in Turkey”

16:30 Summing up and general discussion

 

 

Putting monuments in boxes – or the trials and tribulations of setting up a research database

I’m pleased to be say that of last week my “Monuments of Roman Greece” project has its own website (http://romangreece.classics.ox.ac.uk). The main feature of the website is that it gives access to a searchable database of public monuments in Greek cities. Both the website and the database are works-in-progress. A more user-friendly search platform is still being developed and I’m still busy expanding the catalogue of monuments. But I wanted to get it online as soon as possible both so that people could start using it and so that, hopefully, I can get some feedback on it. I’ve been meaning to write a blog piece about the database for some time now and now seems an opportune moment.

Screenshot of one of my database entries

The intention behind the database is to bring together things that were once found together but which have become separated, both through the chance survival of different types of evidence and the practices of modern scholarship. I’m talking, of course, about the statues, tombs, carved reliefs and other monuments that filled the public spaces of Greek cities under the Roman Empire. Few of these monuments survive intact but evidence for hundreds of them does survive in the form of (broken) pieces of sculpture, inscribed statue bases or mentions by ancient authors. The basic premise behind my project is that not enough attention has been paid to the extent to which spatial setting contributed to the meaning of ancient public monuments. I’m interested in questions such as how setting up different types monument in the same space – for example statues of benefactors and gods in a city’s agora – might have had an effect on how such monuments were read and experienced, how different spaces were frequented by different groups of people who would have been the audience for these monuments.

Probably the biggest challenge in putting the database together was deciding on the different categories of monument and public space that I want to be able to distinguish especially because one of the key aims of my research is to test the usefulness of the distinctions we usually tend to draw between ancient monuments, and statues in particular. Labelling is reassuring because it gives us a feeling that we understand whatever subject we’re studying but that feeling can be misleading. In the case of ancient monument, I’m not so sure that the distinctions we draw between, say, portraits statues set up as political honours and those set up as votive offerings to the gods, or even between portrait statues and statues of emperors, heroes, and gods were anywhere near as clear-cut in the ancient world as in they are in academic books and articles.

All of these different statues spoke a similar visual language and, crucially, stood side-by-side in the same areas of public space. This created potential for ambiguity so that a statue of a muscular nude athlete could be mistaken on first glance for a hero or a long-dead Hellenistic king. It also meant that anybody who was granted a permanent likeness of themselves in stone or bronze had something in common with the gods that their fellow mortals did not. Thinking spatially, about just how different configurations of different types of monument were created in different settings is a useful way of exploring the overlapping meaning between these different types of statue.

To create a database that would allow me to do that it soon became clear that it wouldn’t be very useful to work with the standard categories like “honorific portrait”, “votive portrait”, “Imperial portait”. However, it was equally clear that in finding new ways to classify monuments there was a danger of simply creating the pattern that I was expecting to be. And of course, a further problem, is that I want the database to be useful to other people which it wouldn’t be if I strayed too far from conventional classifications.

I think that the categories I’ve come up with are suitably broad to allow monuments that might have had something in common to end up in the same category, while still allowing others to distinguish between the types well-known to modern scholarship. Statues of emperors, honorific monuments to politicians and portraits of family members set up as dedications to gods can all be found under portrait statues but, where we have that information I’ve also included fields to show who they were set up by and who they were set up for. Statues of gods, personifications and heroes are separate categories, as are votive offerings (of non-human subjects), public graves and paintings.

In entering the data I’ve come across quite a few problem cases which it was hard to know how to categorise. Should a statue of a real man, set up to honour him for political service to his city, but which names him as a “hero” on the base be put in the same category as a statue of a mythical hero like Theseus? To which category do statues of Herakles, the hero who became a god, belong? And, if it’s straightforward to categorise statues of “The Demos” (the People) as personifications to distinguish them from “real” gods and goddesses like Zeus, Athena and Aphrodite, what about statues of Eirene (Peace), Ploutos (Wealth) and Hygeia (Health)? In many cases I’ve had to make snap judgements that simply cannot be completely satisfactory but which I hope makes enough sense to allow me to use the catalogue to investigate the kind of issues I’m interested in, while still allowing others to find the kinds of information they might want to draw from the database.

Making the database has been an education and I suppose the main lesson I’ve drawn is this: databases are useful for investigating the past because they let you order reality and put it into neat little boxes but you need to think hard about the shape and size of those boxes, especially when it is the messiness of historical reality itself that you are trying to examine.

****

Postscript: as I stressed at the beginning the database is a work in progress so I’d be glad of any feedback on either how I’ve set it up or on the individual entries. Please do leave comments here or use the feedback form on the website.

A dark depressing vision of the future of the academic library

Last week I had a rather disturbing glimpse of the future when I had to go to the Bodleian to read a chapter in an e-book that the library didn’t have in printed form and which could only be read on one of the computers there. “Yes, this is something new”, the librarian explained to me, “Just like with a printed book these new e-books can only be read here and only by one person at a time”. So I went to the reading room, logged in, accessed the chapter I needed through the library catalogue and spent half an hour in the glare of the screen, trying to force myself to reach a level of concentration that would have come easily if I’d had an actual book in my hands.

 Like most people working in academia I make a great deal of use of e-scholarship and am extremely grateful for its existence. Countless academic books and articles are now available online, at least if you are a member of a library with access to services like JSTOR. These resources save a lot of time and have a number of advantages over printed books and journals: you can follow up references without leaving your desk if you are working in an office or at home, you can do keyword searches to quickly see if an author has anything to say about a particular subject, you can quickly compile a bibliography on whatever it is you’re working on and you never have to worry that the book or article you need has been borrowed or has gone missing.

There are, however, also a number of disadvantages to scholarship in electronic form. Most importantly, studies have shown that I’m not alone in finding it harder to absorb on-screen text. Perhaps it’s to do with the fixed angle of the screen that forces you into a rigid upright posture, or the way the text is back-lit, or the way that you can’t hold the text in your hands and adjust the distance between your eyes and the printed word or the way that your progress through the text is no longer tangibly measured by how many pages you’re holding in each hand. Whatever the reason, reading on-screen seems to be much better for skimming and browsing than for thoroughly digesting a complex piece of prose. Wordpress lets me see statistics for how many people have ‘read’ my blog every day or week but it would probably be fairer to say that the numbers indicate how many people have skimmed through which, to be realistic, is probably what you are doing right now.

I have found that using my iPad as an e-reader compensates a bit for some of these problems and it has certainly helped reduce the ridiculous amount of waste I was producing by printing out articles, but even an e-reader is no substitute for a real book. And frustratingly, as I already mentioned, the only way to access the book I wanted was on one of the library’s own computers and through a rather cumbersome user interface that didn’t even reproduce the pages as they would have looked in the book. The book was about Roman art and for one thing the photos of the objects being discussed were irritatingly shown on separate pages from the text surrounded by unnecessary white areas when I know that they would have been integrated in the text in the hard copy.

The Bodleian reading rooms are an inspiring setting to work in as I’m sure anybody who’s been there knows and anybody who hasn’t can imagine. Surrounded by shelves stacked with weighty tomes and with distinguished university benefactors and scholars past looking down austerely from their portraits on the walls it’s hard not to feel that, in some small way at least, you are part of an unbroken chain of scholarship that reaches back into the Middle Ages. Yet sitting there struggling to get through the chapter of that e-book I couldn’t help wondering: is this the future of the academic library?

Surely that would be the worst of all possible worlds – all of the disadvantages of electronic scholarship with none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages of actually visiting the library with none of the advantages. I can see that placing restrictions on where these e-books can be read and by how many people at a time must be a way of saving money through the licensing arrangement that the library has with the publisher and e-books are of course, in any case, cheaper than proper books because there are no printing costs. Still, its a pretty depressing prospect that in a few years one of the key reasons for visiting a library as wonderful as the Bodleian might be to sit amid the books, staring at a screen skimming through articles, half absorbing the content and remembering that for a few short years this was something we were able to do from the comfort of our own armchairs, in the bus or on a park bench. Or worse, sitting there waiting to access an article that somebody else is struggling to read because of an artificial limitation that only lets one person see the file at a time.

 

 

Too much scholarship?

Like most people working in Ancient History, Classics or Classical Archaeology I subscribe to a free internet journal that publishes reviews of academic books to do with Greek and Roman culture, the BMCR (Bryn Mawr Classical Review). The journal sends regular emails with reviews and once a month a list of the new books received from publishers and available for review. The list is always a sobering reminder of just how much research is currently being carried out in the field and of the sheer impossibility of staying up to date with it all. This month there were 102 new titles on the list. (I counted them for the purpose of writing this blog – I don’t usually, don’t worry). If we take this number to be fairly typical, which it is, that means there are well over a thousand new books in the field each year. If you bear in mind that in addition to these monographs, conference proceedings and other collections of articles there are countless academic journals dedicated to Classical studies it is probably no exaggeration to say that there is more scholarship published in a single year than anyone could read and digest properly in a whole academic career.

Now of course, this situation is in many ways a good thing. It shows that interest in the ancient world is booming and much of this research is exciting and cutting edge and is leading to new and important insights into Greek and Roman culture and society. It also shows that large numbers of people are managing to have successful careers carrying out research into the ancient world. There also isn’t, of course, any need to read absolutely everything. The books on offer this month range from Roman wall painting to the reception of antiquity in 15^th century Bohemia, from religion at the time of the Peloponnesian War to Roman girlhood. It’s enough to read those works that in some way or other directly connect to one’s own research interests. And reviews are, of course, a good way of staying abreast of recent trends and deciding which books might be worth at least a browse, which is the whole point of journals like the BMCR. Still, the sheer wealth of scholarship out there can seem overwhelming – particularly, when you realize that it has been growing exponentially for the last few decades – and I can’t help wondering if this explosion of scholarship on the ancient world for all its plus-points doesn’t also have a downside.

Borges’ “Library of Babel” as visualised by Erik Desmazieres

As the forest of modern scholarship becomes increasingly overgrown is there not a chance of our becoming lost in it and losing sight of what we originally went there for? To extend the metaphor, there are certainly days now when writing about my research can feel like hacking away at thick undergrowth with a blunt machete. Days when every ancient source I want to cite, every monument I want to discuss, turns out to have been considered in some connection by somebody who’s trod that path before. Days when my life in academia feels like being lost in Jorge Louis Borges’ Library of Babel, an infinite series of rooms extending forever in ever direction and filled with books containing every possible combination of words and letters that ever have been or ever could be written.

Don’t get me wrong, reading past scholarship is rarely a chore. Some articles can be heavy going but for the most part I greatly enjoy reading about the ancient world. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this work. I daily discover wonderful new articles that display impressive depths of erudition and insight and which teach me something new. There is, however, a part of me that curses inwardly when I discover yet another article on Kimon’s repatriation of the bones of Theseus from Skyros that I really have to read so that I can refer to it in footnote 37 of the paper I’m working on or a discussion of the theme of drunkenness in Plutarch’s lives which I know will have bearing on my interpretation of a particular passage in his biography of Alexander. And now that the vast majority of academic journals and large numbers of books have been digitized and are fully searchable online there is absolutely no excuse for missing any potentially relevant references. But lest this seem like nothing more than laziness on my part there are I believe serious drawbacks to having to deal with so much secondary literature.

In the first place, all this scholarship clamours for our attention and takes up time that might otherwise be spent engaging directly with our primary sources, be they surviving literary works from the ancient world, inscriptions or archaeological remains. Of course, Classical scholars, still have to be deeply familiar with this primary evidence but the fact that we now have to read so much about what other people have thought about it can get in the way of approaching it with an open mind and arriving at new ways of seeing things. “Knowing” too much about a given subject can be constricting. Furthermore, time spent reading what someone else has written about Pausanias’ description of Argos or about the Philopappos Monument at Athens is time that could otherwise have been spent re-reading Pausanias or looking at the monument itself.

Secondly, the sheer volume of past scholarship, means that it is becoming increasingly difficult within the confines of an academic article or book chapter to really do justice to what has already been written on a particular subject. I constantly find myself struggling to find a good balance in how much attention I give to previous publications – ranging from a mere mention to detailed and critical discussion. Of course, too much attention to the work of others can lead to one’s own work becoming rather unwieldy, full of meanderings down side paths instead of driving forward with a clear and concise argument. On the other hand there’s something particularly unsatisfying about including superficial references to past scholarship, which do little to actually add to one’s own argument. I can’t help feeling just a slight twinge of annoyance when I see some obligatory reference to a key monograph in the footnote of someone else which, regardless of whether they have actually read the work or not, could have been made purely having read the blurb on the back of the book. But, here I’ll hold my hands up and admit I’m as guilty of including such references as the next person. The expectations of scholarship are such that it’s surely impossible not to.

A particular pet hate of mine – and something that I do at least try my best to avoid doing myself – is when I find scholars ascribing far more certainty to the arguments of their predecessors than is actually warranted in order to bolster up their own arguments. Often I see sentences like “As X has demonstrated….” or footnotes of the “See X” type to support pretty sweeping claims. If you happen to be familiar with said article by X, or actually bother to consult it, then you often find that X’s actual arguments were presented rather cautiously or were perhaps made merely as suggestions and, as such, don’t quite do what the person citing them has implied that they do.

Here I’m reminded in particular of an excellent short article by Benjamin Millis in the journal Hesperia in which he considers the actual evidence for the so-called “miserable huts” which had supposedly been discovered at Corinth and which were taken to be have been places where impoverished Corinthians lived following the city’s destruction by the Romans in 146 BC.* Through quite shrewd detective work Millis demonstrates (and here I do mean demonstrates) that even though these “miserable huts” had been referred to repeatedly in modern scholarship there is actually no concrete evidence for their existence whatsoever. They had been mentioned once decades ago in an unpublished lecture by a Corinthian scholar, had crept into some publication or other, which then became cited by multiple scholars who also in turn all cited each other. What seemed to be a solid edifice of proof thus, on closer inspection, vanished like a puff of smoke. This is an extreme example but one that well illustrates how if we aren’t careful “facts” about the ancient world can easily creep into modern scholarship, take root through constant repetition and require considerable energy and time to be weeded out. Perhaps I’m just a naturally suspicious person but this means that I tend to spend a lot of time chasing up references in other people’s footnotes so that each article I read leads to a handful of others that I feel I have to read ad infinitum – or at least that’s how it sometimes feels.

Having got all of this off my chest I must now come clean and concede that for all these frustrations I’m all too aware that I could not have actually have carried out my current research if I’d been working fifty years ago. It is true what they say about standing on the shoulders of giants and my own research, of course, my work builds upon what has been done before. I couldn’t have carried out my research in to the public monuments of Roman Greece if I’d lived at a time when historians assumed, as they largely did in the early twentieth century, that our best way of understanding the ancient world was through literary sources and that archaeology was merely a way of filling in background detail and providing illustrations for text books. I wouldn’t have been researching Roman Greece at all if my recent predecessors hadn’t realized and demonstrated how exciting and vibrant Greek culture continued to be even after the country had been conquered by a foreign empire. I do however wonder where the scholarship of the ancient world is headed and whether it can continue to grow exponentially into the foreseeable future. Can we really go on producing over a thousand new books on the ancient world for hundreds of years to come? And if we do, can that really continue to advance our understanding of the ancient world indefinitely? Or will we reach a limit at which all we’re doing is rehashing old ideas and thrashing out debates about points of increasingly miniscule detail with colleagues past and present? Perhaps above all I wonder if at some point late in this century, some young scholar will be cursing as her plans to meet some self-imposed writing deadline are thwarted by the discovery of some hitherto overlooked article by a certain C.P. Dickenson that she now has to trawl through. I certainly do hope so.   * Millis, B.W. 2006. ““Miserable Huts” in Post-146 B.C. Corinth.” Hesperia 75 (3):397-404.