Saturday Links
Rome’s libraries, dubious transparency, the two Waughs, the art of conversation, and more.
Good morning! It is sometimes said that there are two kind of Evelyn Waugh books: the good and the bad. “There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s,” Seamus Perry writes in the London Review of Books, “and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited.” But it is more accurate to say, he continues, that the two kind of Waugh books are the sardonic and the romantic and that two are one: “No doubt one side of his writerly nature, the devout and romantic, exerted itself more completely as he aged – so that what Brophy took to be the authentic Waugh, the brilliantly sardonic farceur, was ‘conclusively eaten by his successor, Mr Evelyn Waugh, English novelist, officer (ret.) and gentleman’. But the co-existence of startlingly different elements was there from the off.”
Rome’s library wars:
Julius Caesar had already intended ‘to make as large a collection as possible of works in the Greek and Latin languages, for the public use,’ as the Roman historian Suetonius wrote. Caesar was ultimately beaten to the task by a soldier and politician named Gaius Asinius Pollio, who, by 28 BCE – just a year before Octavian became the Emperor Augustus – used his war plunder to fund Rome’s very first ‘public’ library in the Atrium Libertatis, Rome’s census record building.
We can be sure that Pollio was watching then-Octavian closely as his power intensified; indeed, right after becoming Augustus, the first emperor opened his own public library within the Temple of Apollo on Palatine Hill in Rome. This cannot be a coincidence. Pollio, a member of the Republican senatorial order, had snatched credit for gifting the Roman public the first public collection of books.
From then on, Augustus had no reason to be diplomatic. He probably populated his growing collections with the books confiscated from the heirs of the generals he defeated in the late Republican wars. If the emperor sought submission, he had to subjugate minds and ideas.
An imperial tradition had begun. When Augustus opened his first library, he was, in effect, usurping the role of a Republican patronus (patron) of culture and knowledge, except on a much larger scale. Opening his large libraries to an ever-wider public, he was a vir magnus writ large.
The things Renaissance women did to be beautiful: Sarah Dunant reviews Jill Burke’s How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity: Burke “introduces us to a cornucopia of suitably disgusting lotions and potions. ‘Snails, goat fat, veal marrow’: it seems that mixing one’s favourite animal fat and entrails provided the basis of most skin creams of the period. Then there were alternative therapies designed to balance the humours, which were the foundation of Renaissance medicine and, many thought, affected how one looked. The rule of thumb here seems to have been the need to purge most orifices every morning. Some defects demanded direct remedies. An ointment containing quick lime and arsenic got rid of unwanted body hair, not to mention a fair portion of your skin if you weren’t careful. (Timing here was everything: ‘it should be left on for the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer twice,’ advised the formidable 15th-century Italian ruler Caterina Sforza.) Those who needed to emphasise their breasts could try an early form of bra – indeed the book offers an illustration of one such prototype, discovered as recently as 2008. As for hair, that most symbolic feature of female power, it could be conditioned, crimped, curled, rinsed or dyed, with the handy back-up of extensions to make it look fuller.”
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