For the last 12 days, I’ve been with my wife, son, and sister-in-law attending Cassini workshops in Paris and London. We tried to go to the Catacombs in Paris but arrived too late. In London I got a second chance to contemplate mortality, because the Wellcome Trust, which funds biomedical research in the UK, currently has 27 skeletons on display, selected from the 17,000 that the Museum of London has in storage. The skeletons on view range in age from Roman times to the 19th century, and were found during routine construction projects. Not being a fan of forensics shows on TV, I had naively thought that skeletons were reasonably impervious to the insults of life, but even I could see the holes in the bones of the man from Roman times with multiple myeloma and the horribly disfigured skull of an 11-year-old boy, ca. 15th century, born with syphilis. I was moved by the skeleton of a young woman with the bones of her 24-weeks’-gestation child still in her pelvis.
Yesterday I saw the Hadrian exhibit at the British Museum, which has gotten a lot of hype. Hadrian is considered one of the greatest emperors of Rome, although I’m not sure why. He quickly abandoned the eastern provinces conquered by Trajan and crushed a Jewish revolt. He did love Greek culture, and one Greek in particular. For a while, the cult of Antinous competed successfully with Christianity, a fact I don’t recall Mr. Babel mentioning in 9th grade Ancient History class. Of course, the Wall was built during Hadrian’s reign to keep those pesky Picts out of Britannia. Mostly what I learned was that even for so famous a figure, much of what has come down to us was written at least two centuries later, and its veracity is disputed. Hadrian wrote an autobiography, but it is lost. Just last year an impressive statue of Hadrian was unearthed in Turkey, and is part of the display in London. Also on display were five Roman funerary portraits from Egypt, which are very moving. Many were used by their finders to build fires, but fortunately some 1,000 survive. They look amazingly fresh.
On an unrelated note, Christine and I saw West Side Story tonight, our last night in London. The idea of seeing an iconic American musical in England first seemed absurd to me, but the play was spectacular, better than even the terrific performance of Cabaret starring Anna Maxwell Martin that we saw two years ago. West Side Story has as much of a happy ending as one can hope for these days.
Tuesday, 5 August 2008 at 23:43
Well, this put me in mind of an ossuary we visited in Bulgaria as part of our XVII IMO tour. IIRC, it contained the remains of combatants from a Bulgarian-Turkish conflict from the nineteenth century. I think the ossuary was in a cathedral in Sofia, but my recall is fuzzy on this point.
And as far as West Side Story is concerned, I can see the connection with ossuaries. The only musicals I’ve ever enjoyed were the ones with Joan Solomon in them….