We’re finishing up our rollicking interview with Stephen Moorbath, gadabout geochemist, irrepressible punster, world-class archaeological grunt, and—as we discover—a connoiseur of volcanoes worldwide.
Welcome, Stephen!

Q: I’m a big armchair fan of the showier aspects of geology, eg volcanic activity. My family used to take us trout-fishing at Spirit Lake, a pristine body of water which sat below Mount St. Helens before the major eruption in 1980.  Ever visited St. Helens or any of the Cascades?
A: I’ve worked a lot with volcanoes, which are my second major geological interest. And in fact, I visited Mount St. Helens not long after it erupted! Volcanoes are the bowels of the Earth, and they emit its waste products (which is why some people refer to them as lava-tories).

Mt. St. Helens, erupting 1980

Spirit Lake, after St Helens eruption

Spirit Lake, in 1982

Q: Stephen, have you done any investigation on the vulcanology of the Mediterranean, especially active sites like Mount Etna?  I am very taken with Etna. Until I flew around it last fall, I had no idea it was such a tall (11,000 feet) handsome  chocolate-colored cone. And that snow around the top, with a bit of cherry-red lava! Reminded me of my favorite icecream dish—with marshmallow topping and a cherry on top.  Until I saw what a wretched climb it would be, I had fantasies (armchair, of course) about doing a farewell dive into its crater, as the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles was said to have done.

Mt. Etna on Sicily

A: I have worked mainly on the volcanoes of Iceland and Chile. I’m particularly interested in the chemical compositions of the lavas and what they can tell us about the nature and composition of the depths of the Earth.  In Iceland I witnessed at close quarters an eruption on the island of Surtsey. Truly awe-inspiring. The heavens were on fire, the Earth trembled continuously, and the sea emitted vast columns of steam. Surtsey sits on the present-day mid-Atlantic ridge, which is the suture of the split between Europe and America. That occurred about 55 million years ago; since then, Europe and America have drifted apart at about 2 centimeters per year.  (Maybe it was better that way!)
Q: Stephen, you are a man of many interests. What are your favorite leisure activities? Are you busy traveling to places you’ve not yet seen, natural wonders you’ve not yet ogled?
A: My favorite pastimes are classical music, photography, archaeology, palaeoanthropology (human evolution), philately (love of stamps, not television!) and cycling.  I love travel. Scenically, the most beautiful countries I’ve visited are Chile, Norway, Yemen, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, and Greenland. As for towns and cities, too many to mention!
• My best scenic memory is our honeymoon; Pauline and myself, touring round the western USA in 1962 with a small car and a tent. We went to Bryce Canyon, Arches Monument, Goblin Valley,  the Arizona desert, the Rockies, etc—you lucky people! The Grand Canyon was a real favorite—but I would never want to experience again the agony of heat cramp in my legs at 120 degrees F. at the bottom of the canyon!

Bryce Canyon

Q: You’re also a linguistics buff, aren’t you? And some while ago, you had the kindness to correct a linguistic misstep of mine, having to do with the ancient Etruscans. Tell us more about them. Mystery folks, weren’t they?
A: Yes, I’ve studied them a bit. They lived side by side with the ancient Romans for hundreds of years BC, but they had their own culture and language, unrelated to any other. Eventually they merged with the Romans.
Q: Or were conquered or assimilated by the Romans.
A: True.
Q: Can you teach us a deathless phrase or two in ancient Etruscan?
A: Judging by the amount of Spanish wine you took on board at the dig in Spain, you’re fond of the grape. Here’s an Etruscan phrase you’ll like. This sentence dates to about 400 BC, and refers to Fufluns, the Etruscan god of wine.
“Mi Fuflunusram, mi mathcva.”
Q; Which means?
A: “I am of Flufluns, and I am full of inebriating drink.”
Q: Well, cheers! Or bottoms up, as you must say in jolly old Oxford.
Thanks, Stephen, for a fascinating globe-spanning ride!

Geologist, field researcher, and rockhound Stephen Moorbath cannot get enough of grubbing in the dirt, apparently, as we’ll learn from his backbreaking experiences on the dig of his friend and fellow scientist Bill Waldren.

Fellow diggers Moorbath and Leon

Q: Stephen, you and I met in September 1998, at the archaeological dig run by Bill and Jackie Waldren on the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Balearics. You were hunkered down in an uncomfortable little pit, going through untold shovels full of reddish Mallorcan soil, just as I was.
How did you first get interested in Bill’s work—via geology and/or archaeology? You were his mentor and path-smoother at Oxford, weren’t you?

Bill Waldren and his excavation

A: I first met Bill in 1975. At the age of 50, he presented himself for admission to Linacre, my Oxford college, to carry out research for a doctoral thesis (which we call a D. Phil.) on his pioneering archaeological work on the island of Mallorca. Bill had no previous academic experience at all—but he so impressed the Admissions Committee (of which I was a member) with his striking, macho personality and with his past, present, and future research, that he was unanimously accepted as a research student, against all the normal academic rules.
• Bill had always been a “do-er” rather than a “thinker.” Nevertheless, his eventual doctoral thesis turned out to be one of the biggest, heaviest, longest, most beautifully illustrated, not to say illustrious, thesis of this type anyone could recall. It certainly showed that Bill could “think” with the best of them!

Jackie Waldren

Q: Was Jackie whipping up those amazing, succulent meals back then? The memory of those lunches and dinners from the Waldren clan, supplemented by astonishing quantities of good red wine, remains fresh in my mind.
A: Bill’s wife Jackie always provided immense and essential support for Bill throughout his archaeological career in Mallorca. She ran their impressive, jointly designed house and the Museum in the village of Deia. Later, Jackie’s professional interests turned to Social Anthropology.
Q: She wrote a book on the cultural anthropology of Mallorca, didn’t she?
A: Yes. And in between, she also managed the numerous 2-week parties of Earthwatch-supported pioneers who came every year to the Waldren’s home, mainly from the USA, to take part in Bill’s extensive and ongoing excavations.
Q: The dig was quite close to Valdemosa, as I recall.
A: Yes, the neighboring village. Just a short walk from where Frederic Chopin and his mistress Georges Sand spent a lamentally cold and dank winter in 1838.  She wrote a book about it. Chopin was supposed to recover from his lung complaint in the predicted Mediterranean sunshine, which didn’t materialize that year. Instead of composing, poor Chopin was decomposing! Anyway, after three months of suffering, they returned to Paris, where Chopin gradually recovered.

Q: Stephen, in your estimation, what is the lasting legacy of Bill’s work?  Did the two of you ever collaborate on any project?  (Besides drinking good Spanish wine and eating their wondrous cooking, that is…)
A: Bill’s work was of major importance in clarifying the pre-history of Mallorca from the time that human beings arrived there from the mainland, some 6000 years ago. He also worked on the fossils of antelopes called Myotragus, which survived on Mallorca island long after they had died out on the mainland of Spain. They evolved in unusual ways in that island environment.

Bill with Myotragus skull

Q: How did Bill discover the Myotragus bones?
A: When he arrived in Mallorca from Paris in the 1960’s, he had no special knowledge of archaeology. But he soon started exploring the many large limestone caves in which, almost single-handedly, he made the most exciting and important discoveries which formed the starting point for all his later research. The antelope bones had been thrown down into the caves, you see. That laid the foundation for his academic reputation. Bill’s work is of lasting importance in Mediterranean studies.
Q: What about your personal relationship with the Waldrens?
A: My wife, Pauline, and I quickly became close friends with Bill and Jackie soon after they arrived in Oxford in the mid-1970’s. We have visited them nearly every year in Mallorca since then. We took part in the ongoing excavations together with the Earthwatch volunteers (including our illustrious and muscular author Vicki). Our contributions were brawny rather than brainy, but we followed all of Bill’s scientific achievements with the greatest interest, year by year. His death a few years ago was a major loss to everyone, both from a personal and scientific viewpoint.
By the way, my own geological research is not at all related to Bill’s activities—but Bill had the ability to inspire everyone with his achievements. I have to admit that archaeology can be just as inspiring as geology!

A: What a gratifying friendship. And what a gratifying Earthwatch dig that was—getting to meet you and the Waldrens was a peak experience for me. Please stay tuned for my next blogpost, where we’ll cajole Stephen into revealing all about his volcano fascination, his philately, and his Etruscan fixation.

This week, “A Fresh Eye” welcomes one of Oxford University’s well-loved figures, geologist Stephen Moorbath. A lifelong geochemist and field researcher, he spent three decades of summers on Greenland. He played a pivotal role in the discovery and analysis of the very oldest rocks on earth. He’s also well-known (some might say notorious) for his deft and daft way with words, as you’ll soon discover.

Vicki with Stephen Moorbath at dig in Spain

Q: Welcome, Stephen. As a young boy in England, what adventurous thing did you dream of doing or becoming?
A: As a small boy, I wanted to be a tram-driver. I used to stand next to them for years in my daily travels. It built my character; and it was there that I learned how to read between the lines!
Q: Did you achieve your goal?
A: I never became a trolley-car operator; but some years later at school, I fell in love with the science of chemistry, producing some nasty little fires and explosions in our kitchen. Although I was actively discouraged from this activity, I later enrolled at Oxford U. to study chemistry. With chemistry, I really felt in my element (or all 92 of them). However, during my first year, I underwent a sudden conversion to geology—the best thing I ever did. In any case, geology involves a lot of chemistry; in fact, the distribution of the chemical elements in nature is called “geochemistry.” I’m actually a fully paid-up “geochemist.”
Q: What won you over to geology?
A: The main reason I wanted to study it?  The geological sciences provide such a wonderful and truthful picture of the origin, evolution, and structure of our planet throughout the whole of geological history—and of the evolution of all living creatures inhabiting the planet. All this is so much more realistic and intellectually satisfying than the picturesque but totally inaccurate creation myths of religious texts.

Q: Who have you principally worked for, in this field?
A: After years of study I became a university academic, involved mainly in teaching and scientific research. I’ve spent most of my professional life at Oxford University, which happens to be one of the places where modern science began some 400 to 500 years ago. And shows no sign of ending yet!
Q: Stephen, what’s the most important find you’ve ever made?
A: I’ve found many interesting geological and archaeological objects, but the most important may have been my close connection with the 1971 discovery of the oldest known rocks on the earth’s surface—and actually holding them in my hands.
Q: Wow. Tell us more about this.
A: I first visited Greenland in 1957, as a geological field assistant to an expedition. My own research work there started in 1971. I worked closely with Vic McGregor (now deceased) in the discovery of the oldest known rocks and the measurements of their actual age—close to 3.8 billion years. This is still quite a bit younger than the age of the earth itself (and of the solar system), which is close to 4.5 billion years. I spent 15 summers on Greenland (1971 – 2001), collecting rock samples, which were then transported to Oxford for geological and chemical research. The Greenland rocks proved that water was already plentiful on earth some 3.8 billion years ago. Some workers have suggested that these ancient rocks already contain evidence for the presence of primitive life at this time, but I think that the evidence is still inadequate.

West Greenland, site of oldest rocks in the world

Q: Other findings that have come out of your work?
A: Numerous workers in many laboratories have studied these ancient Greenland rocks since 1971. Their work has helped to give a detailed picture of what the earth was like in its early stages; they’ve now compared and contrasted this with today’s terrestrial environment and found surprising similarities but also many important differences.
Q: Such as Greenland itself?
A: It looks exactly as it did in 1957. However, detailed measurements by meteorologists and glaciologists show that global warming is beginning to cause an increased rate of melting of the Greenland ice cap.
Q: Stephen, in the American Museum of Natural History in New York city, there is a boulder-sized display of a banded iron formation. It is said to occur almost exclusively in very ancient rocks. Is this similar to what you and your colleagues uncovered in Greenland?
A: Banded iron-formation (we call it BIF) is a major component of the oldest (3.8 billion years) rocks in the Isua region of West Greenland. It is a sedimentary rock deposited under water, composed of magnetite (iron oxide) and quartz (silicon oxide). I think that the BIF boulder in New York’s museum comes from Isua—and I think I helped to collect it!
Q: What a thrill that must have been!
A: The excitement and expectation of finding something often exceeds the thrill of what you actually find.
Q: What about stromatolites? I love the way they look. Any of those in Greenland?

Stromatolites: very ancient life forms

A: We have yet to find any stromatolites there. But such creatures still survive today. The best known ancient stromatolites come from Australia and South Africa.  They’re widely recognized as demonstrating the existence of primitive life on earth by somewhere around 3.5 billion years ago.

Vicki Leon: Fascinating to learn this, Stephen. We’ve got lots more to quiz Stephen Moorbath about, so please join us on my next blogpost for Part 2 of “A Fresh Eye.”

Q: Queen Cleopatra once made a very wild bet with Marc Antony: that she could spend more money on a single dinner than he could. At the meal, she had a single drink put in front of her; in it was a large pearl worth 10 million sesterces, which she swallowed. She won the bet!

Another woman, however, received a black pearl worth six million sesterces—also from a famous man. This was no tipsy giftover dinner, either. Who was the mystery woamn? And who was her generous boyfriend?

A: Although Julius Caesar had 3 wives and many lovers, the gal he most ardently loved was Servilia Caeponis, from one of Rome’s noblest families. They became lovers in 63 BC. Four years later, he paid a cool six million sesterces for a huge, lustrous black pearl for Servilia. (That’s the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of gold.)

Today, black pearls are back in fashion. Harvested mainly off the Tahitian islands, they can cost up to $22,000.

Coming in November!

• A no-holds-barred interview series with geologist, Greenland researcher, and raconteur Stephen Moorbath…talk about going “way back when”—this man rocks!

• For your Christmas wish-list, including that hard-to-shop-for teen or husband, read the  quirky “Vic recommends” roundup of recent release books for young AND old that will tickle lovers of Greek and Roman fiction and nonfiction

• another tricky teaser from the 1-minute Mystery from History, this time about long-ago bling

In case you missed them—
October posts included: philosopher dates vampire; creepy stories of the Roman opening to the underworld; Periander the necrophiliac tells all; and the two Vics explore the deathless art of Queen Cleopatra: poignancy or porn?

•   In Part 2 of our Cleopatra’s Choice blogpost, authors Vicki León and Vicky Alvear Shecter join forces as “Team Viper”  to argue the merits, historical and artistic, of the Queen of the Nile’s portrayal through the centuries. We’ve chosen seven portraits of the famed death scene to comment on—and argue over! Welcome to Queen Cleopatra as Rorschach blot.

Jean Andre Rixens, circa 1874.

VL: Although Plutarch describes Cleopatra as “set out in all her royal ornaments,” later artists like Jean Rixens (circa 1874) often chose to sensationalize her death. I call this one Cleo’s “most tasteful nudie deathbed scene.” The wicker shape on the floor, a discreet reminder of Plutarch’s comment about the killer asp hidden in a basket of figs.  Her personal attendants servants are masterfully portrayed; a snaky object appears to
have fatally struck the woman on the left.

VAS: I like that the artist chose to illustrate this melodramatic moment. Plutarch says it happened like this: Cleopatra’s handmaiden Charmion looks “offstage” because a Roman soldier has just burst in to stop Cleo. He asks if the queen is really dead and Charmion answers, “Yes, a death befitting the descendant of so many kings.” Then she drops dead. I love that the artist assumes we know this bit from Plutarch. However, the nudity is distracting, even though it’s displayed with some dignity as compared to some of these other works.

Sir Frank Dicksee

VL: An English painter of the pre-Raphaelite school, best known for his passionate painting of Romeo and Juliet, Frank Dicksee’s Cleopatra is languidly beautiful but frozen, considering the emotion of that moment.
Her blouse is suggestively slipped off one shoulder as though the snake
had already had its lunch. In one hand, she holds a rather pathetic wormy creature. As do other artists, Dicksee is fixated on the look of silky garments.

VAS: I call his treatment ‘respectful’ (again, compared to the others). In addition, I like that she’s on a throne, the only one of this group that places her in a seat of power. The animal rug—something we’ll see again and again—however, is as much a call to her “exotic” kingdom as it is a symbol of her supposed animalistic (i.e., sexual) nature.

Reginald Arthur

VL: Now we’re entering real melodrama country. This Cleopatra by late 1800s English painter Reginald Arthur clamps a viper firmly to her breast and vamps us with a campy Hollywood pose, while her servant appears to
be practicing a diving maneuvre.

VAS: Okay, here we go—our first painting to show the queen in a moment of…um, sexual ecstasy while dying (because all women do that, don’t they?) Look, even her toes are curling! (Waiter, I’ll have what she’s having!) But let’s be real, not even Cleopatra can pull off an O-face with dignity. Which is, of course, the point. Remember, we’re supposed to be witnessing the moment a human being commits suicide in the face of devastating loss—the murder of her firstborn, the death of her husband, and the loss of her kingdom. By turning the viewer into a voyeur, we lose her humanity completely and only see the highly sexualized side of her supposed wanton nature (Augustus wins again).

Artemisia Gentileschi

VL: This lumpy, bored, anatomically impossible Cleopatra executed by famed Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi is doubly disappointing because it’s a half-hearted cliché and because Artemisia was capable of so much more—as artist and as a woman. Gentileschi was herself the victim of a sexual predator as a teen; at the ensuing trial, she became the scandalous spotlight instead of the defendant.

VAS: I’m very curious as to why Artemisia painted her in this insipid and unoriginal way. Look at what she’s capable of: the masterpiece of “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” for instance!
(http://www.artemisia-gentileschi.com/judith1.html) That work is shocking in its violence and power. Look at the women’s faces—the concentration, the determination! I wish she’d given Cleo the same ferocity. For all we know, this could have been a commissioned work in which some old fart told her to paint that “Egyptian hussy” in the buff….

Massimo Stanzion

VL: Italian painter Massimo Stanzion in the 1630s produced this compelling yet odd rendering of Cleopatra, sweatily nude in a setting that has a birthing chamber feel to it. The villain of the piece resembles a long ungainly piece of rubber tubing more than a living creature.

VAS: At one art website, this painting is classified as mythology. Good call. Because it’s purely mythical that she was blond and that she was nude when she offed herself. Most likely, Queen Cleopatra wore ceremonial or religious robes, as Isis. Worse, it looks as though she’s preparing herself for a gynecological exam—I almost expect to see stirrups in the corner! All joking aside, this is yet another example of how Cleo’s image as a “sexy beast” got expanded and reinforced over the centuries, obscuring the more complex politics and realities of her story.

Claude Vignon

VL: In this work, 1640s era French painter Claude Vignon reveals more of his own phobias than anything else, with his ghastly, drooling, phallic snake “conquering” an eyes-rolled-back-into-her-head Cleopatra.

VAS: My initial response to this painting was, “Holy mother of god, what IS that thing??” That snake is SO disturbing. Looks like it has a wolf’s head! Because of the peculiar head of this serpent-cum-snake/monster, I’m guessing that Cleopatra here is a stand-in for Eve (because, you know, she was blond too). I like the fur mantle on her lap; necessary of course because it gets so darn cold in Egypt.

Gyula Benczur

VL: Although Hungarian Gyula Benczur is technically a better painter than Vignon, he manages to convey even more leering cheesiness in his 1911 portrait of a ghostly-pale and raddled Cleopatra, bosoms in the spotlight, the better to be bitten. He did manage to show a reasonably authentic Egyptian headdress, complete with a one-uraeus crown.

VAS: The snake is at breast level, which screams: “Look here!” This despite the fact that Plutarch tells us Cleopatra had small puncture wounds on the inside of the arm. The great queen is again reduced to nothing more than a pair of boobs. The face, however, is interesting. Here she’s not her real age of 39—nor is she beautiful. She looks tired and defeated, the only glimmer of authenticity that shines through for me. The real Cleopatra was likely in great emotional pain. But once again, the bared breasts distract us from her humanity, focusing solely on her body and sexuality.

VL: These painters must not have gotten out much; their snakes are the lamest renderings of an essentially tubular creature that I’ve ever seen. Would you agree, Vicky?

VAS: And how. Still, what shocked me the most—seeing all seven paintings at one go—was how unoriginal and predictable they were. Naked Cleo? Check. Phallus-like snake in a suggestive position? Check. Cleo having an o—oh, well, you know what I mean. But seriously, none could come up with anything else? Where was the defiance? The “I won after all” look of triumph after tricking Augustus, her conqueror? The grief of a woman who’d just lost her son, her kingdom, and her dreams? Instead we get pervy pseudo-porn. I was really hoping for something more than just tit-ilation, you know?

• One of the continuing fascinations of the Queen Cleopatra VII story is the endgame: her death by suicide, supposedly abetted by one snake (or two),  an asp (or a cobra), dressed in her royal best (or naked as a jaybird).

Author Vicky Alvear Shecter

book cover, Cleopatra Rules!

• I thought it might be interesting and fruitful to do an interview with Vicky Alvear Shecter on the topic, since she’s written several much-praised nonfiction works for older kids, including one published in 2010 called Cleopatra Rules! Vicky also works as a docent at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta and is a superb researcher on Cleopatra and the Ptolemaic period. Thirdly, she’s an word prankster after my own heart, as you’ll soon see.
• So, Vicki to Vicky, welcome! And let’s get down to it. First, do you believe that Cleopatra took her own life, and did she do it with a serpent’s help? And if so, why serpents?
VAS: I’d like to start by saying I’m a big fang of the snake theory… I absolutely believe Cleopatra did herself in, and with snakes too. Remember, no one actually knows; we’re all guessing. Here’s why I vote snakes:
• Plutarch (circa 46 – 120 AD) says so: although Mr. P. worked extra hard to make Antony and Cleopatra look bad for political purposes, his Life of Antony is as close as we get to a primary source.
• The heroic ideal: in the ancient world, it was considered honorable to kill yourself rather than be taken by your enemies. In fact, this was the only action taken by Cleopatra that the Romans respected and thought heroic. Horace, in his so-called Cleopatra Ode (1.37) calls the queen “proud” and “serene” in her self-inflicted death—a huge contrast to the insults he’d hissed in previous stanzas.

Queen Cleopatra VII

• Octavian/Augustus may have killed her:  A viable alternative;
I believe he was certainly capable of it, but Augustus was a smart guy. No matter how much the Romans hated Cleopatra, he knew that killing a woman who’d already surrendered was just bad form. Imagine the PR headaches!
• Plutarch takes the trouble to describe the actual method/s: He wrote that the snakes arrived in a basket of figs. Or in a jar of water. And then, being a man who covered all bases, he also said she may have died from pricking herself with a poisoned pin. By the way, he also claimed he got the scoop from the Mauritanian King, Juba II, who married Cleo’s daughter, Cleopatra Selene, in 25 BC.
• Octavian believe she died by the snake: According to Plutarch, in his triumph (victory parade) Ocatvian Augustus had Cleopatra depicted in her death throes with a snake attached. So the first emperor of Rome believed in her serpenticide.
• Snakes had great symbolic power: The uraeus or snake crown was associated with Egypt and royalty. Image-savvy Cleopatra VII often upped the ante and wore a crown with three snakes on her brow.
• In earlier dynasties, pharoahs had ritually killed themselves with snakes when they were no longer capable of ruling: Death by snake conferred eternal life for the pharoah. Cleopatra understood the ancient power of snakes and would have likely appropriated the symbol for herself.

author Vicki Leon hanging with Cleo at Egyptian temple

VL: These are pretty awesome points you’ve made.
VAS: Well, some still ‘re-coil’ at the thought of her death-by-snake. This summer, in fact, one scientist claimed that Cleopatra offed herself with a cocktail of hemlock, opium, and aconite (he was  bold enough to make this claim despite the fact that we lack her body to do toxicological testing).
VL: Vicky with a “Y,” you’ve explored most of the whys about Cleo’s demise. I’d like to add a few thoughts.  As you know, it wasn’t just the Egyptians who had positive feelings about snakes. So did the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks saw them as wisdom, as resurrection. Both cultures viewed snakes as totemic animals–even as sidekicks to various gods and goddesses. The way that snakes annually shed their skins made them a common symbol for eternal rebirth—and of renewed health. That’s why serpents were encouraged to roam freely in various temples, including the famous Greek healing centers of Asclepius and the Roman precinct of the Bona Dea goddess. Even your average Greek or Roman housewife welcomed snakes inside the home.
• On the other hand, when Christianity took hold, adherents were more apt to see serpents as evil tempters than as beneficial creatures or symbols of good.
VAS: It seems we never tire of making asps of ourselves over this question. I consider myself “Team Snake.” After all, that kind of death has way more poison-ality!
VL: I’m with you! Please join us next blogpost for a delicious postmortem of Cleopatran portraiture.

So much for a tranquil afterlife. First necrophilia, now this!

• Ghosts and other apparitions in Greco-Roman times tended to be a cranky bunch. It wasn’t just the ectoplasm of loony old uncle Claudius, either.  As a result, the supernaturally troubled often relied on the “science” of necromancy, which back then meant divination by calling up the dead.
• Take the case of Periander, ruler of the ancient Greek city of Corinth. A nasty piece of work, the man was inexplicably included
on historian Herodotus’ “seven hottest wise men to watch” list.
• Periander’s city, the Las Vegas of the ancient world from 600 BC on,  was famous for its sexy fillies who served the goddess as priestesses of porn.  When he wasn’t tyranting or spot-checking the female merchandise, Periander ran his city-state with a sharp eye on profits.
• Since Corinth, a shipping hub, sat on a narrow isthmus between the northern and southern halves of what we now call Greece, he saw a nifty way to increase ship traffic (and thus income) on both sides of it. How? By inventing the diolkos, the world’s first railway sans trains. This 4-mile-long dual track of parallel grooves allowed ships and heavy shipments to be transported overland across the Isthmus of Corinth, and made Periander very rich.

The trouble is, I’m too sensitive to be a murderous tyrant.

• Periander had greater ambitions, however. He had a nasty temper. And a jealous streak, which his mellower spouse Melissa put up with somehow. Being a Greek tyrant, Periander naturally kept a stable of concubines, who at some point started gossiping about his wife. Being an ultra-sensitive despot, Periander couldn’t bear even the idea of Melissa stepping out on him, and thus he was forced to kick his pregnant wife to death.
• He threw her a splendid funeral, everyone said—but stumbled badly in the aftermath. In a foolishly tender moment, he decided to subject his long-suffering wife to a bit of necrophilia while no one was looking. Nevertheless, word got around.
• It wasn’t longe before Periander needed Melissa’s help, even though she was now dead. He’d misplaced a household treasure and couldn’t find it anywhere. In desperation, off he went to northern Greece, to the Oracle of the Dead. The place was famous for having a direct line to the spirit world; in no time, necrophiliac Periander was able to summon Melissa via necromancy.
• Oddly enough, Melissa’s ghost was happy to help—but she did demand a little quid pro quo. She refused to tell him where the treasure was, saying that she was cold and naked and could make no use of the clothes that had been buried with her. Melissa also brought up the little matter of the indignity he’d committed on her cadaver. Anxious to make amends, Periander returned to Corinth, ordering the local women to get dolled up and report to a certain place, after which he had his henchmen strip them. Gathering up the female finery, Periander placed it in a pit and burned it.
• That was clearly the correct course of action, since wifely ghosts appeared to be mollified by the cremation of other females’ fashionable garments. Periander went for a second consult with Melissa’s ghost, who now told him where the treasure he sought was. Despite this and other outrages, Periander lived a long and prosperous life.
(Excerpted in part from entries on science and superstition in How to Mellify a Corpse.)

• For hundreds of years, every October 5, August 25, and November 8, a truly creepy event took place on Palatine Hill in the ancient city of Rome. At this sacred spot, there was an opening, a pit that descended into the earth like a crude root cellar. They called it Mundus Cereris—the pit of Ceres (goddess of harvest). On this gloomy trio of days, the stone that hid the opening was slid aside.

• With that ceremonious and deliberate act,  Rome’s priests and Vestal Virgins opened the gates of the underworld to the ghostly realm.  Like smoke, the spirits of the dead, now freed, could rise  upward and began to rub ethereal elbows with flesh-and-blood Romans, most of whom were petrified with fear.
• Why did they do this?
• It was but one of various spirit-placating, ghost-busting activities that long-ago Romans (and others in the neighborhood, including the ancient Greeks) performed, believing “better safe than sorry” when it came to malign phantoms and restless dear departeds.
• That is our simplistic modern view of things.
• In times more ancient than Roman, people had honored each year’s harvest and protected the most precious part of it—the seeds for the following year—with ceremonies hiding the communal treasure beneath the earth. As time went on, Rome lost much of its agriculture-based religion, and along with it, the meaning of the old traditions.

• At the same time, Rome gradually crushed or drove out the Etruscans who’d first lived on this terrain. Without realizing it, the conquerers soaked up certain Etruscan ways and customs, such as the shedding of blood at funeral games (which led to Roman gladiators and slaughter spectacles). They also absorbed Etruscan beliefs in a hellish underworld, ruled by harsh gods.

• Today’s historians and archaeologists are still unspooling the threads of this cross-mingling. The stone covering the mundus, for example, was originally a “rain stone,” a holy object carried about the city in drought times by priests. By the Imperial centuries, that notion was likewise forgotten.
• On the three days of mundus patet, no business could be carried out. No marriages performed, no battles fought. It’s likely that priests carried out solemn sacrifices of various animals to the gods below. Underworld deities had exacting requirements: animal victims had to be consumed by flames. No tasty bits saved out for the priests, no free barbecue for the masses. Believe it or not, such sacrifices were called “holocausts,” back then meaning completely burnt. Coincidence? An eerie foretelling of history? Who can say.

• Greek pottery came in all sizes—from pinky finger petite to double-wide.  The Greeks (and other eastern Med cultures) first came up with the truly colossal pots, called pithos (pithoi in the plural), followed by their Latin cousins, whose supersized earthenware was called dolium (dolia in the plural).

• Capable of holding up to 340 gallons, with dimensions bigger than a grown man, these wide-mouthed clay giants made  international sea-trade possible. They also made highly useful storage units on land, holding liquids from wine to olive oil, and solids from grains to seeds. To access the contents, pithoi were sometimes buried neck-deep in the ground, as you see here.

• How did long-ago potters make such monsters? Men built a
wooden framework over which they molded clay, then fired it, perhaps by building a rough kiln around each pithos.
• Expensive to produce yet sturdy, the pithoi lasted for decades. Even damaged pithoi found ready use.  In places where wood was scarce, locals found that clay containers made dandy, vermin-proof coffins.

Diogenes, pithos dweller, philosopher and dog-lover, fed his friends raw octopus—and may have died from a dog bite.

• On occasion, Greeks not yet ready for the graveyard used them
as shelter. Diogenes of Sinope, Athens’ most freewheeling cynic philosopher, found a pithos sitting idle in the agora marketplace.
It became his weatherized albeit claustrophobic home. Ancient accounts relate that Diogenes had celeb visitors like Alexander the Great drop by—and even sleepovers! (Alex? Probably not, but at least one female regular we know of.)
• To me it’s interesting that Diogenes’ earthenware home has frequently been described or translated by later writers as a cask, barrel, jar, or a tub. It wasn’t clear until archaeological efforts around the Mediterranean turned up pieces of the real McCoy just how spacious a pithos was. An apt abode for a philosopher who shunned material things—and gained fame for his, ahem, pithy sayings.