Kenneth Lapatin

Kenneth Lapatin (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. His research focuses on ancient Mediterranean art, the history of collections, and forgery. He is the author of Luxus: The Sumptuous Arts of Greece and Rome (Getty Publications, 2015). 

The Getty Museum is one of the finest collections of classical art in the world. What is something about working there that most people would be surprised to hear? 

Perhaps that my days are full of surprises. Each day I come to work, I think I am going to do one set of specific tasks, but those plans are frequently sidelined by something else, such as an email with an intriguing query from a scholar, or a bright young student writing a blog, or a discovery by one of my colleagues in our Conservation department that requires further research, or an eye-opening question from our graduate intern .... In short, what is so exciting to me about studying the ancient world is that, somewhat paradoxically, although it may seem over and done with, being some 2000 years old (plus or minus), there is still so much to learn. Our view of the past is constantly changing as we make new discoveries and ask new questions.

If, God forbid, you were at the Getty Museum when a fire or earthquake hit and you could make it out with only one piece from your collection, what would it be?  

The Getty has very advanced fire and seismic mitigation systems, so I have some confidence that the collection will survive anything but the gravest of disasters. But your real question might be what are my favorite objects. Well, I have many favorites, but I could not carry a large, heavy marble statue like the Hercules. Even the much lighter, hollow-cast bronze statue of a Victorious Youth, one of our most important objects, would be difficult to heft.

One of my other favorites, which I can easily carry, but could not so quickly remove from its very secure display case in event of emergency, is a small amethyst engraved gem, which is signed by Dioskourides, who also carved the  seal of the Emperor Augustus:

I am interested in the Kouros statue that is either from the 6th century or is a modern forgery. It is fascinating that scholars are still undecided about it. How many people would have the skill to create such a forgery, if that's what it is?

The Kouros remains a very interesting problem. Shortly before I came to the Getty, I wrote an article about it and its problems. How many people might have the skill to produce it? One very interesting thing about forgeries in general is that quality is no proof of authenticity. People often think they can identify forgeries because they are "bad." But in antiquity there were skilled artists and not so skilled ones, just as there are skilled modern artists and not so skilled ones. The sculptor Peter Rockwell has pointed out that forgeries are sometimes actually better (in a technical sense) than original works because the forgers apply extra effort: there is real money at stake. For example, if you look at ancient Roman portraits, the back is often less carefully worked than the front--simply because they were designed to be placed in a niche or against a wall. But in the Renaissance, when artists emulated and competed with antiquity, sculptors often very carefully finished each and every lock of hair, something ancient carvers usually did not bother to do. As for our Kouros, a skilled modern carver (or team) might have produced it. Some people believe the necessary skill could readily be found in Italy today.

Bryan Ward-Perkins

Bryan Ward-Perkins (Ph.D., Oxford University) is a fellow and tutor in history at Trinity College, Oxford. He is the author of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (OUP, 2005) and co-editor of The Last Statues of Antiquity (OUP, 2016) and volume XIV of The Cambridge Ancient History (CUP, 2001).

Can you think of a particularly intriguing work of art that illustrates something important about the fall of Rome?

The work of art I have chosen is an ivory diptych (two small ivory plaques hinged so they can be folded shut). It was probably made in Italy in around AD 395 for Stilicho, the commander of the Roman army in the West, and represents him, his wife Serena, and their son Eucherius.  Stilicho was a 'barbarian', in other words a man from outside the Roman empire, and we would therefore expect him to be an enemy of Rome. But, as this diptych shows, the situation towards the end of the empire was complicated: many 'barbarians' fought in Roman service, appreciating the pay and status this gave them, and some, like Stilicho, rose very high in that service. Serena, his wife, was the niece of an emperor - by marrying her Stilicho became part of the imperial family. The fall of the Roman empire in the West was not a straightforward war between 'Romans' on one side, and 'barbarians' on the other. Here we see the 'barbarian' Stilicho proudly depicted as Rome's main defender against other barbarians.

Diptych of Stilicho from Monza

 What is the most unusual relic you have read about in your research on the “cult of the saints”?

This is probably the skull of a very obscure saint called Theodota, which a pilgrim saw and described in Jerusalem at the end of the sixth century. The pilgrim wrote that it was decorated with gold and gems and that people drank from it to gain a blessing!

 

Who is the best teacher you’ve ever had, and what did you learn from them?

The best teacher I had was at school. He was called Mark Stephenson. Mr Stephenson immediately saw through one if one wasn't well prepared, and he did not tolerate badly written work. He was therefore scary! But he worked extremely hard to improve us, and he gained every pupil's respect. He taught me to love well-written history, to argue a case concisely, and to write good clear English.

Kyle Harper

Kyle Harper (Ph.D., Harvard University) is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent books are The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Can you think of a particular work of art that illustrates or is somehow relevant to your area of research? 

We don’t have very much visual art that represents plagues or epidemics in the Roman period. However, we do have a lot of literary evidence. In fact the very first scene of the earliest “classical” text- Homer’s Iliad – is a plague scene! And it just keeps on going, through Sophocles and Thucydides to Lucretius and Vergil, right down to the end of antiquity.

Who is the best teacher you’ve ever had? 

Easily my ancient history professor at the University of Oklahoma, Rufus Fears. He was a legendary teacher – truly a gifted lecturer with a lot of charisma who made history come to life and seem urgently relevant. I took all of his courses and it quite literally changed my life, since I would never have become a Roman historian without his influence.

If you could decree that all students of the classics read one book or article, what would it be?

Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall, of course! After more than two centuries, it is still a monument of historical narrative, as beautiful as it is insightful.

 

François Perrier, La Peste d’Athènes (ca. 1640)

Victor Saenz

Victor Saenz (Ph.D., Rice University) is Executive Director of the Houston Institute and Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University. 

What do you specialize in?

I specialize in classical philosophy, in particular the ethics of Aristotle. More broadly, I'm interested in the Aristotelian tradition as seen, for example, in Aquinas and contemporary Aristotelian philosophers. I also like thinking about contemporary ethics, the history of ethics, and the philosophy of religion.

What is a work of art that would be very helpful in understanding something about Aristotle?

This feels like exactly the kind of answer you’d expect….but I’ll give it anyway. Raphael’s The School of Athens. At the center you have Plato and Aristotle, the first pointing to the heavens, the second holding his hand open, facing the earth. This is meant to illustrate a key difference between the way Plato and Aristotle understood reality. For Plato, ultimate reality was transcendent, immaterial, beautiful, and good. In contrast, the material world was constantly changing and, ultimately, something that the philosopher ought to escape and help others to escape.

On the (literal) other hand, for Aristotle ordinary things, especially living things, like humans, dogs and oak trees, were a basic aspect of reality. Not only this, but in his view we can and ought to reason well about what is good for a living thing, given its nature. For humans, this means living according to our highest capacity: reason. This entails living virtues like prudence (reasoning well about action), self-control (following reason and not mere pleasure), courage (not being deterred by things like fear and pain), and justice (giving to others their due, recognizing our social nature).

Importantly, that’s not to say that Aristotle denied a transcendent reality. For him, "God" (ho theos), the unmoved mover, was at the absolutely perfect, ultimate source of explanation of everything.  But, importantly, to the extent that anything acts according to its nature–as humans do when they follow reason–it is approximating the perfection of the Prime Mover insofar as it is possible for it (De Anima II.4 415a25-b7). Indeed, this approximation is a form of love: the Prime Mover “produces motion by being loved” (Metaphysics Λ.7 1072b3-4). This might seem cryptic. But a not unfamiliar kind of love idolizes the beloved, seeing her as perfect, as someone we desire to make our own as deeply as we can. Or as Plato puts it, “love is wanting to possess the good forever” (Symposium, 206a). It is not within the power of mere organisms to possess the Prime Mover forever, in Aristotle's view. But the imitation of God—by acting according to our natures—is the closest we can come.

So, for Aristotle, we’re not looking to escape, as Plato might have it. Rather, there’s a sense in which we participate in transcendent reality here and now, to the extent that we live virtuously. Hence his hand pointing down.

Were you interested in classical Greece before you became a philosopher, or are you a philosopher who happens to be interested in classical Greece?

That’s a hard question! I think I was certainly interested in classics (both the Greek and the Roman side) early on in college. My entry point to that were the languages. That said, I was also aware that the idea of virtue played a prominent role in ancient Greek intellectual circles. But that’s already to flirt with philosophy! As it happened, I began to study philosophy seriously just a little before I began taking Latin and later Greek.

A Hellenistic bust of Aristotle
 by the 4th century B.C. sculptor
Lysippus from a bronze original
(Palazzo Altemps, Rome)

Molly Pasco-Pranger

Molly Pasco-Pranger (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Founding the Year: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar (Brill, 2006)

What is your area of specialization?

I work mostly on Latin literature and social history, with some emphasis on women and gender. While my research is mostly word-centered, art, archaeology, and especially the places and spaces of the city of Rome have been key to lots of the interpretive arguments I have made over the years.

What work of art is the most important or interesting for understanding your research, what’s interesting about it, and how did you discover it?

I have a couple of different recent and current projects that are in part inspired by art. One came out a couple of years ago in the journal Classical Antiquity and has to do with women’s public nudity in the early Roman empire. The topic partly came to me because of  a set of weird grave statues that begin to appear in the late 1st century AD where elite Roman women are depicted naked—usually in Venus poses, so maybe they (or their families who put up the tombs) didn’t think of the bodies depicted as theirs. But whatever the case, the statues are strange, with the portrait heads (often of mature women and with “modern” Flavian period hair-dos) very mismatched to the bodies. I’d seen them in museums over the years and always been both amused and a little disturbed by them. These pieces got me thinking about how women thought about their own bodies and nudity in this period, and I turned back to literature to think more about it.

 

A similar head-and-body mismatch is part of my thinking for a long-term project about how Roman men think about (and write about) themselves as men when they begin to age out of many aspects of public life and when their bodies begin to be softened by age. Here’s that piece, the Tivoli General: 

Again, a portrait bust, this time of a distinctly aging man, is paired with an idealized (and much younger) body. The statue is a good 150-200 years earlier than the women’s statues, and I think the reasons for this mismatch are very different, but it’s a similarly unsettling experience to view.

 If you could recommend one book or essay for all students of the classics to read, what would it be?

Your last question is hard for me—I hate naming “favorites” of anything! If you mean a book from antiquity, I can’t not say Vergil’s Aeneid. If you mean a modern book or essay, there are just so many things that Classics can be that it’s very hard for me to point “all students of the classics” in one direction. I do think Mary Beard is very good at showing the ways Classics is alive and part of the modern world. Her little collection of essays, Confronting the Classics (2013) opens a lot of windows into the variety of things the Classics can and does do in the world.