The Odeon of Lugdunum

Because the sites of Roman Gaul are in large measure active, vibrant cities there is a tendency for the visible remains to be the substantial public buildings.  An enormous amount of more conventional archeology also exists, but continuous habitation tends to cover up a lot of it, and to over time destroy some.

In visiting the civic edifices of Roman Gaul we shall start out small and work our way up.

This is the Odeon of Lugdunum, modern day Lyon.

An Odeon is a smaller version of the classic Greek or Roman theater, this one held about 3,000 spectators.  It would typically be used for more intimate productions such as musical performances or lectures. They are Greek in origin, and more common in the eastern half of the empire.  I had visited one previously in Alexandria, and Ephesus is said to have a nice specimen.  The Lugdunum Odeon dates to Hadrianic times, and was really only uncovered to view in recent decades.  It is still in use for performances.

It is in great shape, some solid conservation work has been done here.  It has a magnificent view overlooking Lyon, which would not have been the case in Roman times, as there was a wooden backdrop and partial roof to aid acoustics.

This is a surviving bit of the decorated wall that seperated the stage from the front row of seats.

Check out the marble flooring of the stage.  So far as I could tell, this is original.  The different colors of stone were imported from all around the Mediterranean world.  At this point my digging pals from the wilds of Brittania are starting to turn green with envy.  Perservere my friends, you will face sterner challenges in the days ahead!

I can't really call this the view from the cheap seats because the entire second tier of the Odeon was robbed out in ancient/medieval times.

Spend a few quiet minutes here.  You get a very palpable sense of the past being close at hand. 

It is quite possible that several emperors took a seat right in front of where I am standing.  For instance the usurper Clodius Albinus had his headquarters in Lugdunum when he led the legions from Britain over to support his bid for the purple.  That is until Septimus Severus marched north...defeating Clodius at the Battle of Lugdunum in 197 AD.  Clodius' head got sent to Rome, the fate of his other quarters being unremarked upon by history.

For a nice graphic overview of Roman Theaters this The Theaters has been compiled by Whitman college.

Practical tips for a visit. 

This is on a hill magnificently overlooking Lyon and the Rhone valley.  It is a very steep climb, so take the funicular from the metro station below.  You will definitely want to allow time for a visit to the Gallo-Roman museum nearby.  This involves yet more climbing, as the museum has only one entry/exit point way up at the top of things.  Practical shoes are a must.

Next up:  sights to put a tear in the eye of a hard working archeological drudge.

Where Rome never Fell

If you studied the subject at all back in school your concept of how the Roman Empire fell probably runs something like this:

Too many civil wars.  Emperors who were ninnies or sadists, sometimes both.  An economy ruined by bad farming techniques, lead in the pipes and assorted cheap metal in the coins.  Finally in the cold winter of 406 AD the Rhine river freezes over and a shaggy collection of barbaric Vandals, Suebi, and Alans charge across.  With nothing to stop them they march through Germany, France, Spain and into North Africa.

Roman authority, which had been pretty shaky anyway, simply collapses.  The last Roman troops bailed out of Britain in 410 AD. The pathetic plea for help from the Britons to the Emperor Honorius was returned saying pretty much Adios, you're on your own. And in a couple of generations nobody there could read, or make pottery, or take a hot bath, or obtain any goods except by barter or by conking their neighbors on the head.

Eeeshh, all pretty bleak stuff.  But maybe not so true.  Our impressions of the times rest on too few surviving texts, all liberally interpreted by the like of Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was probably in part written as a cautionary tale for Imperial England.

And in at least one area, Rome never actually fell.  It just sort of glided to a soft landing.

Welcome to Provence.

The name literally means "The Province" and indeed it was among the first real estate outside of Italy that Rome acquired (circa 120 BC).  It was also one of the last places to remain under control of Rome, gradually slipping away in the mid 450s.

The barbarian Visigoths who took over you see, were fairly Romanized by that point.  It was just a matter of swapping a Governor for a Rex.  And the barbarians were no fools, they knew what all travelers to Provence know, folks there have an excellent thing going.  Who wants to pillage?  Just sit back, enjoy the balmy climate, great food and lots of wine.

I will be wandering about Provence in upcoming posts, showing what remains from Roman and even Greek times.  There is a lot.  Take a quick look at the persistence of place names from Roman to modern times, generally a good indication that places had continuity of occupation and a semblance of literacy:

Carcasso becomes Carcassone
Colonia Nemausa shortens to Nimes
The Greek colony of Massala goes Roman to Masilla and then goes mod to Marseilles
In like fashion Nikea to Nicea to Nice
It takes a little more to get from Arausio to Orange.

And some names have come down to us from antiquity with more than a few scratches and dents, like classical statues with parts knocked off.

The great Roman city of Lugdunum ends up as Lyon
and does Aquae Sextiae only get to keep a few letters in its evolution to Aix-en-Provence?

The Plague of Frogs. French version.

	This is what the great LORD says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs. The frogs will go up on you and your people and all your officials.
	— Exodus 8:1–4

So reads the account in Exodus of the Second Plague, the Plague of Frogs.  But I guess Pharaoh had it coming in a sense.  It is harder to see just what the French have done to deserve a similar problem.

Supposedly some forty years ago a few American bull frogs (Rana Catesbeiana) were released as a joke in a private pond near Liborne.  Since that time these frisky amphibians have discovered what all prior and subsequent American ex-pats know, that life in France is great.  In particular the dining is superb. 

It turns out that American bull frogs thrive in France, supposedly growing to weights nearing 4 pounds, and lengths-legs extended we assume-of almost two feet long.  Some serious frogs in Frogland in other words.

They eat everything in their path.  Other frogs, even their own kin.  Fish, lizards, small aquatic birds.  Fancy sauces are not mentioned in any of the material I read, but can't be dismissed out of hand.

In addition to being known for superb cuisine, France is of course also the land of amore.  And these lusty American imports- "over sized, over sexed and over here" as one reporter put it-have been amorous indeed.  A breeding pair can produce 25,000 tadpoles in one season. From their initial foothold they have spread through a large portion of south west France.

The obvious solution would be to eat them.  But French gourmands sneer at frog legs that would make a back woods red neck in Alabama smack his lips. 

Control efforts have been of limited impact.  Application of electric shock to a pond full of the intruding hoppers for a full two hours resulted in exactly one fatality.  Netting, draining ponds and so forth have also failed.

Recent reports are sketchy, but apparently the best tactic has been to send out teams of snipers with spot lights and small caliber rifles.  By taking pot shots at the reflective eyes of the frogs some modest reduction in numbers of reproducing adults can be accomplished.  How many ricochets and terminated local frogs is not mentioned.

Croak, darn you!

Badger Liniment

For a change of pace lets drop in on some rather more recent archeology.

You may, or may not, have wondered why the revered mascot of the University of Wisconsin happens to be the mighty "Bucky Badger".  Well, in the early days of Wisconsin Territory "Badger" was a nickname for the settlers of this rugged frontier.  Here is how it came to pass.

The first real wave of settlement in these parts came in the 1840s when lead mining became a major "boom" in the southwest corner of the state.  There is still a miner on the Wisconsin state flag.  The miners were generally sorted into two groups.  Those who came up the river in the spring and went back down in the fall were called "Suckers" as their behaviour was reminiscent of the fish of that same name.  Most of these folk were commuting from Illinois, and the tradition of slightly impolite sounding nicknames for Illinois tourists is regrettably very much alive.

Those who decided to tough out the cold weather months often did so by simply digging a burrow into the hillside, or just using a played out mine pit as a primitive shelter.  They were by virtue of this dubbed "Badgers".

Once the nickname was widely accepted it was borrowed by many commercial enterprises.

Take for instance, Rork’s Badger Liniment.  This was a  minuscule rural medicine company that oddly had a very attractive embossed bottle with the titular Badger depicted on it.

James Rork was an early settler near Eau Claire.  I find first mention of him in association with the brief, comical “Indian Scare” that gripped Eau Claire in 1862 while the more serious Sioux Uprising was happening over in neighboring Minnesota.  I am afraid that Rork added to the panic a bit, riding in from his place north of town with news that he had seen smoke, perhaps from marauders setting fire to farmsteads.

Of his later years I have found little.  He was said to be a miller and farmer, and to be popular with his fellow rustics.  I have no idea why he decided in the early 1890s to get into patent medicines.

I have a copy of his United States patent, dated October 3, 1893, for a product called RORK’S Badger Liniment.  The application itself is a rather dry read, but does show a depiction of his trade mark.

Remarkably he spent the money to have this blown into his bottles.

These are rare.  I am aware three specimens, one of them badly chipped. They turn up infrequently in excavations of privvies and dump sites.

Rork passed away in 1900, which would seem to set an end date to this bottle.  I suspect that it was a small time product, probably put up on his farm and marketed with the assistance of one of the Eau Claire druggists.



To Boldly Go....now where was I going?

 The other day I spotted this:



This was overlooking a road house tavern that might require a little boldness to wander into....

 I did a little looking about and discovered that it was part of an ad campaign that had been going on for a while. 

Here are Patty Duke-she of Patty Duke Show fame-and George Takei encouraging Baby Boomers to sign up for Social Security.  By the way, kudos to Ms. Duke, it is really hard to do that Vulcan thing with your left hand.  Or is she left handed?

Takei, for you non-Trekkies-was of course Mr. Sulu in the original series.  I immediately thought of the episode "The Deadly Years" in which the crew of the Enterprise contracts an alien virus that makes them all prematurely age.  Hah! lets just see how ol' George has held up compared to movie make up geezer Sulu!

Alas, I could not find a picture of him.  Fact is, the original series was characterized by William Shatner hogging the camera to the extent that minor and even sometimes major characters fumed in the background, off camera for an entire show.  But, can we find modern day Shatner and Kirk in special effect wrinkles?  Well, yes. 

Shatner, 2011

Imagined Geezer Shatner.  Probably with less makeup.

If Shatner is perhaps the least likeable of the hopelessly typecast Trek alumni, the popular and ever cheerful Takei is the one who seems to have had the most fun with his inescapeable celebrity.  You can read more about him at:
http://www.georgetakei.com/

Takei has been a good sport about appearing in all sorts of spoofs of his former self on the Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Futurama and so forth.  He is also openly gay, which would have been unthinkable back in the 1960s, but now is no big deal.  In some ways we as a society actually have moved forward in recent years.

Huh.  I am not actually sure how I got from a thought on baby boomers retiring to a conclusion that we have become a more tolerant society across the political spectrum.  But you must remember that my amount of grey hair is somewhere between 2011 Shatner and Geezer Kirk, so on occasion I do find it necessary to ask myself: "now, where was I going?"

Fuel and Ice

It's probably the archeologist in me, but I am fascinated by how quickly the works of man start to fade from view.

A local mom and pop gas station closed last fall.  No surprise there really, it had been in business since the 1930's, and the main road went elsewhere long ago.  They made a go of it anyway, what with home fuel sales, auto repairs and somewhat atypically an ice business.  They used to cut it on a local lake in the winter and store it in an ice house.

So it went out of business, and almost immediately their signs just began to vanish.

This boat used to have two happy fishermen in it.  Now all that is left is the blue pants of the guy in front, and of the guy steering the boat...

This was once a nice piece of folk art signage, certainly done by the owner or a family member.  A couple of small touches...

And a hat tip to the annonymous artist, whose last name was perhaps Wiltrout based on the family associated with the business.

9...certainly not 2009.  But was it '99, '89, '79?

On the more protected side of the building a vaguely alarming image...is it Blue Man Group on tour?  The Smurfville Grand Prix?  Or just a guy who has been breathing too many exhaust fumes?

Maybe it is Ozymandius....."look upon my works, oh ye mighty..."

Axman Surplus II

I hope you have a nearby surplus store.  It is guy shopping at its best.  But I don't think they would have quite the sense of humor of Axman.  A few examples:

Oh, this last one does require a little explanation.  I think that is Stephen King on the sign, but even the master of schlock horror would be squeamish about lending his name to this concept.  But actually what is being sold are surplus "Baby Think it Over" dolls.  These are kind of creepy life like dolls that are issued to 8th graders to tote around for a few days.  If you do not attend to their needs, well, attentively they scream, fuss and electronically record your sloth for the grading displeasure of the Health class teacher.  Lets just peek in that basket, Mr. King....

Over on the right side of the picture is a rubber chicken that got tossed in by accident.  So, where are the heads?  Right inside the front door of the store I guess..

Sort of a nightmare version of the Knights who say "Neeee!".  At least they were stationary, at one of the other Axman locations they have hooked one of these creepy babies up to a motion sensor and when you pass him on the aisle his eyes light up glowing red and he starts to cry!