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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32667 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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There are so many plums to pluck out of it, like the following:

It may also be notable that the dove was a symbol of Venus, and plays a prominent role in Christian symbolism.

Sparrows were also symbols of Venus, more so than doves. And didn't Jesus say something about sparrows?

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Caesar had an infamous love affair with Cleopatra, widely regarded by Romans as a whorish seductress; Jesus had an affair with the prostitute Mary Magdalene.

Our boy is clearly not up on scholarship which denies that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, how un-feminist of him! 😁

He also contradicts his own point, where he says something, adds a quote to demonstrate it, and doesn't see that the quote doesn't say what he just said:

His funeral, however, was rather interesting. Mark Antony had a wax effigy of Caesar created, in the pose in which Caesar had been found dead, wounds and all, which for the purposes of display was affixed to a cross together with his bloody robes. The effigy was raised in front of the crowd so that the plebs could see for themselves what had been done to their champion. Antony was a showman that way. From Appian (amusingly, at the link, it says the translation was done by none other than John Carter):

When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar - the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face. This sight seemed so pitiful to the people that they could bear it no longer. Howling and lamenting, they surrounded the senate-house, where Caesar had been killed, and burnt it down, and hurried about hunting for the murderers, who had slipped away some time previously.

There's nothing there about bloody robes or the effigy being affixed to a cross (certainly not, the cross was a shameful method of execution for slaves and the worst criminals, you're not going to put your murdered hero on a cross) but "a mechanical device" used to raise it up because it couldn't be seen as it lay on the bier.

He covers himself by saying it was a tropaeum and then illustrates it by a really dumb picture (famously balding and vain about it Caesar with long hair in the wax effigy?) which is a repurposed version of a crucifix:

The mechanical device in question was a tropaeum, a cruciform device on which things were hung for display. Caesar was known for showing off his various war trophies on tropaea, and often placed the device on his coinage, to the degree that tropaea became symbolically associated with him

Wikipedia has a handy article on this, and depictions of historical tropaions. While they might (and I emphasise might) have hung Caesar's bloody garments on such, they wouldn't have done the same with an effigy. Because tropaions were trophies, indicating the conquest and vanquishing of an enemy. Putting up the clothing, much less the funeral effigy, would have been annoucing "Caesar has been beaten by his victorious enemies". It would be like using images of George Floyd for BLM marches depicting him sitting on the toilet: not the associations you want to invoke in the outraged onlookers.

"But wouldn't Caesar's bloody garments be like the photos of Floyd with Chauvin kneeling on him? Wouldn't that show the same 'he was murdered unjustly' imagery to get the mob up in arms?" Perhaps, but the associations of trophies is probably too strong - it would be showing 'Caesar was killed rightly as a just punishment and is a loser', which is not what Antony wanted.

Anyway, see for yourself: compare John Carter's alleged "Reconstruction of Caesar’s wax effigy, hanging on a tropaeum, as it would have appeared at his funeral" with what genuine ancient Roman depictions of tropaeum look like, and judge for yourself. That's not even getting into the history of depictions of the crucifixion, which would have come much later.

(God damn it, anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and five feckin' minutes on Google can do the work, this is why I rant and rave about historical illiteracy).

EDIT: We have Suetonius' account, where he says that the robe was hung on a pillar:

When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near the tomb of Julia1, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix; within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain.

There's the account by Appian, which John Carter quotes for the wax effigy, which again tells us about the bloody robe, this time it is Mark Antony who puts in on a pole and waves it about:

Then, swept very easily on to passionate emotion, he stripped the clothes from Caesar's body, raised them on a pole and waved them about, rent as they were by the stabs and befouled with the dictator's blood.

Appian then goes on to the part about the wax effigy and the mechanical device, but as I said, I'm not convinced this was a tropaeum or anything that looked like a body on a cross.

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