« Why We Blog | Main | Have I ever mentioned that I sometimes hate it that I'm an American? »
August 21, 2008
Gigantic Empresses
More archaelogical bigness, from the same site that brought Londoners the gigantic Hadrian (on show now), a gigantic empress! Perhaps she's Faustina, the wife of Antoninus Pius (Hadrian's successor)? Here's the BBC story, with pictures.
Here's a link to the website for the excavation at Sagalassos.
One sentence in the story jars my cup of morning coffee. I didn't actually spew all over the screen, but that's because I was raised right.
At first, exacavators thought they had found a statue belonging to Hadrian's wife, Vibia Sabina, who was forced into a marriage with the homosexual emperor at the age of 14.
Oh puh-leeze. Here I thought the current commonplace was social constructivism, in which journalists assume that homosexuality as we know it and term it didn't exist before, say, the early 19th Century and that Hadrian was a typical example of a Roman who didn't give a name to what he did so long as he was doing to others rather than being done to?* And "forced into a marriage"? What an oddly contemporary notion of companionate love as the basis for partnership to push back on a member of the imperial family. If any Roman women felt they were free to conduct their own marital affairs, certainly women of the Vibia Sabina's station wouldn't have. It was a dynastic marriage.
Oh, well - interesting picture, anyway. Those monumental Roman statues were really monumental.
via Cronaca.
*Not that I'm in favor of that position by the way. There's interesting evidence for people who were exclusively one way or another way, complete with special terminology.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 21, 2008 7:48 AM