OCW: In one of the course assignments, you ask students to identify an item in a museum that’s relevant to the period of Augustus or Nero and to produce a short video explaining what the object is, where and when it was made, and how it sheds light on the early imperial period of Roman history. Can you describe a few of the more interesting objects students have documented over the years?
William Broadhead: The Museum Artifact Video assignment is an innovation of the last two iterations of this class. I like the project as a way to remind the students of the importance of the archaeological record and to encourage them to explore the online collections of major museums like the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, the British Museum in London, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In the two iterations of the class with the artifact project, lots of students have chosen coins from the period, which survive in great numbers and are often packed with visual and epigraphic details. One student presented a gold coin of Nero that was found in India and donated to the British Museum by Raja Martanda Tondaiman in 1898. Another presented a coin whose bronze was struck in such a way as to create the shape of a pig’s leg protruding from the side of the coin, a strong suggestion that the object was likely a votive offering.
One student produced a very engaging video about a silver cup from Meroe in Nubia, now in the MFA, that has been interpreted as depicting Augustus sitting on a tribunal and overseeing a court proceeding, which in turn has been taken as a representation of Augustus’s dominion over Egypt. The student did an excellent job demonstrating that this imagery, found in a funerary context in one of the most remote parts of the empire, showed the effective spread of imperial images of Augustus out from the center in Italy to all parts of the Mediterranean world.
Another student produced a fascinating video about an object that he acknowledged might actually be a fake! The object is a marble cinerary urn now in the British Museum whose inscription claims that one Pompeius Locusto, his wife Attilia Clodia, and their son Pompeius all died on the same day by means of poison. Collectors over the years have pointed excitedly to the similarity between Pompeius’s family name and the name of the famous imperial poisoner, Locusta, whose alleged poisoning of Claudius led to the accession of Nero. Epigraphic and artistic experts have more soberly suggested that the urn might be a modern forgery. The student who presented the urn did an excellent job talking through the problem of artifact forgery and what we could glean from the popularity of this object whether it is an ancient original or a modern fake.
