Peter Kruschwitz (Reading)
A Reading Lamp
The Lamp
Our Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology owns an inscribed Roman terracotta lamp that comes with the inventory number 79.1.14. To the best of my knowledge, it is still unpublished. There are several problems with its history, as neither its discovery nor its way into the Ure collection seem to have been recorded and documented satisfactorily.
• The piece, as the inventory number indicates, was first catalogued in 1979, but this does not carry any meaning as regards its actual discovery.
• The hand-written museum catalogue, composed by Annie Ure, merely states for this entry: ‘[l]amps, not previously inventoried. Some from Barry collection.’ The Barry collection, however, is a collection of Cypriote ceramics, and it is very unlikely that the above lamp ever formed part of this. • The museum’s online database gives ‘Ratisbon’, i. e. the German (Bavarian)
city of Regensburg, as the lamp’s provenance, yet the fabric is said to be ‘North Italian’, dating it ‘150 AD’.
In short: all of this may be guesswork, pure and simple, easily based on information available for similar pieces that were found. On the other hand, it may be that somebody knew something about this lamp and committed it to our records, without leaving any actual documentation. As things stand, I have yet to find in the museum archive the corroborating evidence for any of these claims.
What I do know for certain about this object, however, is what we all can see with our bare eyes:
This is a orange-to-reddish terracotta lamp. It is of simple design and of Roman origin. The lamp is made of mould-made pottery, and in its style it conforms to the common Loeschcke type XK of Roman clay lamps. It has a circular, bowl-shaped body, a rounded shoulder, a small flat discus on the top, lacking any decoration, with a raised rim and a nozzle which is connected to the discus with a channel. There are three lugs on the lamp’s shoulder, none of which is pierced (which implies that these served merely decorative purposes).
The nozzle originally received a wick, to draw the fuel from the vessel’s body, and traces of soot at the nozzle prove that this lamp was indeed in use. A hole in the discus exists to receive the fuel – typically oil, but a raunchy scene in Petronius’
Satyrica for example suggests that other substances were used as well, e. g. to spread certain scents:
(Petr. sat. 70.9)
Another, rather smaller drill-hole exists in our lamp, situated closer to the nozzle. Presumably it was supposed to support the flow of oxygen. That smaller hole, however, is blocked solid, and I have reason to believe that this blockage is in fact not an actual blockage, but a production flaw of this lamp.
An element that mystifies me are two parallel, reasonably deep scratches in the surface of the discus – I hope someone will eventually be able to fill me in about those.
Finally, our lamp stands on a multiple rings on its base, within which there is an inscription that gives the name VIBIANI in relief – and this is in fact how I first encountered it, as this is how it is on display in the Ure Museum, in a case that illustrates writing and literacy.
Some Musings
At first glance, there appears to be absolutely nothing special about this lamp: it is an everyday object, functionally designed to provide light during the hours of darkness, without any noteworthy decoration. The Roman polymath and satirist Varro is right on the money when he, in one of his Menippean satires, dwells on the mere functionality of lamps, of the lucerna, as the Romans called this object – quite obviously an utterly unspectacular item, mostly just designed for practical use:
lecto strato matellam, lucernam, ceteras res esui usuique prae se portant.
(Varro, Menippeae 262)
Can such a seemingly insignificant everyday object can yield a host of fascinating insights into the ancient world, the needs, desires, and concerns of its people? Would one find lightbulbs of present times in the museums of the future? Will future historians try and interpret our realities on the basis of those objects? Hard to tell. But what we can try to do today is this: we can consider a number of aspects related to this object, and to similar objects, and see what emerges. Here is what I propose to do:
i) I would like to begin with a few words exploring the connotations of lamps in Latin literature, largely based on literary texts from the Roman empire;
ii) I would like to offer a rough-and-ready analysis of the object itself, based on its inscription, and explore what this could mean to an Ancient Historian; and finally,
iii) I would like to share with you, as an end point to my presentation today, what I consider to be one of the finest texts ever written about lamps in the ancient world, and I will offer you a challenging interpretation of said text.
Let me now begin with a few observations on lamps mentioned in literature, Roman literature in particular, to provide a cultural backdrop for the object that I have just introduced to you.
We are used to inhabiting a world that is full of light, both natural and artificial. Complete and utter darkness is a rare experience nowadays, and a powerful one to encounter, as some, if not all, of you will know. It is almost as precious as complete silence – a powerful and overwhelming thing to encounter. Moreover, the illumination of the world we inhabit is largely provided by means that do not directly expose us to the smell of fuel and open fire – it is a safe, almost sterile world, remote from an encounter with the natural and spiritual. With that, our world is fundamentally different from that of the peoples and cultures we study in Classics, a world that may well have understood certain basic principles of electricity, but did not exploit it for the same purposes that we do today. We must bear that in mind, before we approach the ancient evidence – let us visualise a world where night essentially means darkness, unless open fire – in a hearth, a torch, a candle, or a lamp – provided light (and warmth), both inside and outside one’s home.
This almost immediately makes one thing abundantly clear: lamps, light provided by lamps, are a fundamentally sensual experience, inextricably linked to themes such as home, intimacy, even sexuality. This is a theme that clearly emerges already in Greek poetry – lamps are personified witnesses of love affairs, for example in Greek Hellenistic epigram. Similar things happen in Roman love poetry, and they happen with significant frequency. The following passage is one of my favourite examples, a passage from Ovid, making the lamp a focal point of sa ensual experience, yet with great ambivalence:
Illic saepe animos iuuenum rapuere puellae, Et Venus in uinis ignis in igne fuit.
Hic tu fallaci nimium ne crede lucernae: 245
Iudicio formae noxque merumque nocent.
(Ov. ars 1.243–246)
Wine, alcohol, is the fuel, the lubricant – but the sensual experience of the very flame provides the passion, the fire in the fire, as Ovid puts it – yet strangely enough the light does not seem to be making anyone seeing anything clearer: the view is being described as blurred, distorting one’s judgement just as much as wine would do: the lamp is a treacherous agent, and the lamp must not be trusted.
The sensual, erotic connotations are not particularly surprising, and you may well know that many ancient lamps display highly erotic, or in fact downright pornographic scenes as part of their decoration, thus adding to the tension of the experience in real life, beyond the artifice of romantic poetry.
et sane iam lucernae mihi plures uidebantur ardere totumque triclinium esse mutatum
(Petr. sat. 64.2)
How has the room changed, one may ask? Petronius does not tell us, but the way in which lamps managed to change one’s perception – whether in a blurring or rather in a more contrastive manner entirely depends on an author’s narrative purposes – is described by Varro in his work on the Latin language. In a passage which is to give an explanation as to why the nominative of Latin nouns is not always a good indicator of its inflection, Varro adduces the following simile:
qui errant, quod non ab eo<rum> obliquis casibus fit, ut recti simili facie ostendantur, sed propter eos facilius perspici similitudo potest eorum quam uim habea[n]t, ut lucerna in tenebris allata non facit quae ibi sunt posita similia sint, sed ut uideantur, quae sunt quoius <mo>di[s] sint.
(Varro, ling. 9.43)
Just as a lamp in the dark would provide a contrast-enhancing, yet distorting grazing light, a sidelight, that increases the levels of nuances between prominent and less prominent features, Varro argues, inflected forms of Latin nouns bring out the actual differences between them in their potentially homogeneous nominatives.
The amount of passages that describe the ways in which the light of lamps impacts on one’s perception could be multiplied with significant ease, including for example a reference to Lucretius’ fourth book, in which he describes how a combination of staring at a flame and exercising pressure on one’s eyeballs results in the most remarkable visual effects (Lucr. 4.447 ff.).
Lamps, senses, perception, eroticism, charged atmosphere – all of these are recurring themes in the ancient Latin literary discourse involving lamps. These motives seems to be present as well in the following passage , a passage written by the Greek satirical writer Lucian, a passage to be read in his wonderfully entertaining work True Histories – yet this passage has a lot more to offer still:
and tell why they came late. There I recognised our own lamp: I spoke to him and enquired how things were at home, and he told me all about them
(Lucian, True Histories 1.29, transl. A. M. Harmon)
Here Lucian visits a place called Lamp-town, Lychnopolis in the original Greek. Earlier interpretors have offered readings according to which the lamps arguably symbolise human souls – a craftsmanlike exegesis of a fantastic passage: lights, burning, yet in the danger of being put out, in the skies – surely those have to stand for human souls? But do they really? A more recent approach has offered a rather different perspective. The next sight on Lucian’s whistle-stop tour from the sky to the Ocean is Cloudcuckootown, a reference to Aristophanes no less – an escapist’s vision of a bizarrely detached ideal polis, yet as a polis gone wrong.
Lychnopolis has gone wrong, too – we see an almost totalitarian regime exercising control and surveillance, and we see the narrator scared, afraid to close an eye as it were, as well as the lamps themselves being full of potentially threatening knowledge. One may think of the lamps as a metaphor for household slaves (as someone recently proposed) – but what makes this passage so striking and powerful is its use of the lamp as all-knowing conspirators: these lamps (very much like slaves, of course) may have seen things – things of the sort that Ovid has been imagining in the passage that I introduced earlier. I wish we could ask our lamp in the Ure Museum a bit, and find out what it witnessed during its lifetime.
The Lamp as an Object
Another, fascinating aspect about the passage from Lucian is the indication of the sheer spectrum of lamps that existed, from the simple and unsophisticated to the lavish and ornate. Also, it highlights lamps as mass-produced goods, cheap and readily available to those who need a simple solution, and those who need this quickly. And on that notion I will now move on to my second major point today, moving away from the lucerna as literary imaginations, closer to the reality of this object as an object, as merchandise, and as a valuable object for historical research – if only we had a rather better documentation for own item, I hasten to add.
Roman terracotta lamps have been researched abundantly over the last couple of decades, and there is no point in attempting a new interpretation here, based on a single piece, even more so as this piece of evidence blends in so nicely with the remainder of evidence. Lamps such as ours were indeed produced en masse – chances are that, when you go to any other collection of antiquities, you will not only discover lamps that are a bit like ours, but in fact lamps that are precisely like ours. How do we know? Well, we do know not only from the very shape of the object, but rather more precisely from its inscription – VIBIANI, a household name on the Roman lamp market of the 2nd century A. D.
referred to with a German term, even in English publications, Firmalampen, factory lamps, i. e. lamps produced by proto-industrial factories and workshops for a mass market.
We have only very little knowledge of who this Vibianus was whose name is on all those very many lamps that were found across the empire, including Britain (e. g. in Colchester). What we do seem to know is that he started his business in the second century A. D., during the Hadrianic-Antonine period, originally presumably in Northern Italy, and that his business expanded rapidly, with branch offices on the market at the Danube, perhaps pushing competitors, such as Fortis and Cresces out of their businesses by the end of the 2nd century A. D.
Considering the huge amount of lamps that were discovered with Vibianus’ name on it, clearly from different workshops, sometimes from rather different parts of the empire, and sometimes with misspelled versions of the name, it cannot surprise that there has been a lot of discussion going on about the question: was Vibianus’ trademark so successful that others were producing unauthorised versions of the same product, to cash in on the successful brand established by Vibianus? This may well be the case, but William Harris has – and I believe convincingly – shown that a more likely explanation in most cases is in fact the existence of branch offices across the empire. (Which raises some interesting questions as regards the relevance of, and the financial viability of, long-distance trade for relatively inexpensive goods such as lamps – it is obviously more expedient to run a branch office than to have these objects shipped from overseas.)
The very presence of the name Vibianus on these lamps, on our lamp, requires a short word as well. One may of course see it as a trademark, as a seal guaranteeing a certain quality, a certain standard – just as we would have on, say, fine china. And in fact, we do have evidence for such: a great amount of lamps have been discovered, again all over the Roman empire, that come with forms of the following type of inscription:
Emite lucernas colatas ab Asse [or: de officina Asseni]
‘Buy fine lamps from (…).
Here, however, we typically find this inscription – and advertisement – on the surface of the lamp that is visible when the lamp is operational, not at the bottom, where you would ruin your toga from the fuel upon turning it over to inspect it.
I am not ruling out that the VIBIANI inscription served a certain trademark-type function. A rather more plausible explanation, however, is to see it as an inscription that serves a rather more unspectacular need: the need to identify one’s lot in a kiln that produces lamps for more than workshop (a common phenomenon for example in the case of Samian ware), and the need to organise the logistics of commerce when feeding these lamps into the market.
I would like to conclude my lecture with an emphatic step back away again from the cruelties of the to Roman literature, and will now introduce you to a text that, I think, has been under-appreciated and in fact been dismissed for far too long, as a result of influential thinkers’ disapproval of its qualities – thinkers that include such big names as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
One of the most intriguing, elusive authors of Roman antiquity is the fabulist Phaedrus. He lived and wrote his poems, based on the fables of the Greek story teller Aesop, during the first half of the first century A. D., making him a contemporary of the Julio-Claudian dynasty – yet a contemporary who remarkably frequently gets neglected. The poet introduces his poetic I in book three of his collection of fables, where he claims to be born on Mt Pieros in Katerini, Greece, or Ancient Macedon, to be more precise. This is questionable, to say the least, for the Pierian spring obviously is the very spring that was sacred to the Muses, rendering this place rather appropriate a birthplace for any respectable self-professed poet of some standing – as he himself points out on one occasion. What this author is best known for nowadays, is his rendering of the Aesopic fables from Greek prose into Latin verse, iambic senarii to be precise, with added material of his own design
The eleventh poem of the fourth book of Phaedrus is called Fur et lucerna, ‘The Thief and the Lamp’, and I would like to introduce this poem to you now:
Lucernam fur accendit ex ara Iouis Ipsumque compilauit ad lumen suum. Onustus qui sacrilegio cum discederet, Repente uocem sancta misit Religio:
‘Malorum quamuis ista fuerint munera 5
Mihique inuisa, ut non offendar surripi, Tamen, sceleste, spiritu culpam lues, Olim cum ascriptus uenerit poenae dies. Sed ne ignis noster facinori praeluceat,
Per quem uerendos excolit pietas deos, 10
Veto esse tale luminis commercium’.
Itaque hodie nec lucernam de flamma deum Nec de lucerna fas est accendi sacrum.
Quot res contineat hoc argumentum utiles, Non explicabit alius quam qui repperit. 15
Significat primo saepe quos ipse alueris, Tibi inueniri maxime contrarios;
Secundum ostendit scelera non ira deum, Fatorum dicto sed puniri tempore;
Nouissime interdicit ne cum malefico 20
Vsum bonus consociet ullius rei.
with thy life, when hereafter, the day of punishment, appointed by fate, arrives. But, that our fire, by means of which piety worships the awful Gods, may not afford its light to crime, I forbid that henceforth there shall be any such interchange of light.’ Accordingly, to this day, it is neither lawful for a lamp to be lighted at the fire of the Gods, nor yet a sacrifice kindled from a lamp.
‘No other than he who invented this Fable, could explain how many useful lessons it affords. In the first place, it teaches that those whom you yourself have brought up, may often be found the most hostile to you: then again, it shows that crimes are punished not through the wrath of the Gods, but at the time appointed by the Fates: lastly, it warns the good to use nothing in common with the wicked.’
(transl. Smart)
What scholars and thinkers alike felt hard to come to terms with here, is the absence of a personification – no foxes, no hares, no nothing: Lessing dismissed it as one of the worst fables ever, especially as the poet himself had to add an explanation to it.
But should we be silly enough to fall for the trap laid out by a poet? By a poet, I would like to add, who explains in the preface of his third book of fables that fables were invented by slaves who, being prevented from speaking openly, had to camouflage their messages? Slaves who, as Phaedrus puts it, would conceal their attitude in similes, as to criticise the deplorable state of the world in made-up imagery? Why would we want to believe him when he says that he offers us an explanation of his own fable then?
Certainly, the poet seems to provide us with an aition, a myth-history of why one must not desecrate sacred fire by lighting profane lamps on them, and that one must not light sacred fires by using such worldly objects. Certainly, we may take away the lesson that an offering – such as sacred fire – could be abused when taken away with a lamp, then be held against the original provider of illumination. Certainly, we can be amazed by this seemingly almost proto-Christian idea of a judgement day (rather than immediate divine wrath). But is this what this poem is about? Certainly, we can be amused by the idea that a deity would have a depressingly realistic view of the value of tokens of sacrifice and of the motives of those who gave them – taking little interest in them at all.
The motive of ‘theft of fire’ is a common one, often utilised as a civilisatory narrative: we find it in the Rig Veda, we find it in the myth of Prometheus. We find it in the Christian bible, in the book of Enoch, we find it in civilisation outside the Indo-European sphere, including the Far East and the Americas. But this story, as told by Phaedrus, is different: this is not fire used for the benefit of humankind, it is fire used for personal benefit, and snatched away from its sacred origins with a depressing everyday object.
What if this is what Phaedrus meant to tell us, then? What if an act, that can be seen as quintessential for enlightenment, civilisation, liberation from dependence of superstitions, gets corrupted, embodied in a depressing narrative of someone who starts as Prometheus, but ends up to be a petty thief? A pretty bold reading, you may say. But let us look just once again at the final interpretation that Phaedrus offers: ‘lastly, it warns the good to use nothing in common with the wicked’.
