• Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 748. Second volume of Blaeu's atlas featuring 89 maps of the Americas and Asia (1642) Est. $12,000 - $15,000
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 12. A world map with popular cartographic myths and unique embellishments (1788) Est. $3,000 - $3,750
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 30. One of the most sought-after charts from Cellarius' work (1708) Est. $1,200 - $1,500
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 38. Anti-Vietnam War persuasive cartography on a velvet poster (1971) Est. $350 - $425
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 43. Ortelius' influential map of the New World - second plate (1584) Est. $4,750 - $6,000
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 95. Scarce German map illustrating the French & Indian War (1755) Est. $8,000 - $9,500
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 149. Bachmann's dramatic view of the Mid-Atlantic region (1864) Est. $1,200 - $1,500
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 373. De Jode's very rare map of Europe with costumed figures (1593) Est. $6,000 - $7,500
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 674. De Bry's Petits Voyages, Part VII with all plates and map of Sri Lanka (1606) Est. $1,400 - $1,700
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 704. The first printed map devoted to the Pacific in full contemporary color (1589) Est. $7,500 - $9,000
    Old World Auctions (April 23):
    Lot 734. Superb hand-colored image of the Tree of Jesse (1502) Est. $700 - $850
  • University Archives
    Rare Autographs, Books & Photos; Abraham Lincoln Collection
    April 23, 2025
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Best Image of Abraham Lincoln: "Closest… to ‘seeing' Lincoln… A National Treasure" Original Hesler/Ayres Interpositive. $800,000 to $1,000,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Einstein, 3pp of Unified Field Theory Equations: “I want to try to show that a truly natural choice for field equations exists.” Formalizing His Final Approach, Association to Theory of Relativity. $80,000 to $120,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Marilyn Monroe's Best Personally Owned & Annotated Script for Unfinished Last Film, "Something's Got to Give" (1962). $75,000 to $100,000.
    University Archives
    Rare Autographs, Books & Photos; Abraham Lincoln Collection
    April 23, 2025
    University Archives, Apr. 23: David Ben-Gurion ALS: "The Jewish people have attained the epitome...the State of Israel is born," 1 Day After Signing Israeli Declaration of Independence, Best Ben-Gurion Ever! $80,000 to $100,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Lincoln ALS to Youth: "A young man, before the enemy has learned to watch him...votes... shall redeem the county" Evocative of Famous "Work" Letter. $70,000 to $100,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Lincoln Appointment for Cabinet Member With Largest, Boldest, Full Signature! Important Content: Detente with England. $10,000 to $15,000.
    University Archives
    Rare Autographs, Books & Photos; Abraham Lincoln Collection
    April 23, 2025
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Abraham Lincoln Rare Signed Check To Law Partner W.H. Herndon, Perhaps Unique as Such! $20,000 to $25,000
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Tokyo War Crimes Files of Prosecuting Attorney For POW Camp Atrocities, 500+ Pages, Unpublished Court Documents, Photos and More. $25,000 to $35,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: 1698 South Carolina Slavery Archive Huguenot Planters Earliest Rare Plat Maps for Plantations 41 Docs 107 pp. Most Colonial. $25,000 to $35,000.
    University Archives
    Rare Autographs, Books & Photos; Abraham Lincoln Collection
    April 23, 2025
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Adam Smith ALS While Revising “The Wealth of Nations” - A New Discovery Documenting Meeting with Influential Editor. $18,000 to $24,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Margaret Mitchell Rare ALS to Her Editor as Epic Film "Gone With the Wind" Gains Heat "Forgive this scrawl. I haven't written a letter in long hand in years and I've almost forgotten how it's done." $3,000 to $4,000.
    University Archives, Apr. 23: Einstein 1935 TLS, Hopes to Warn Non-Jews of "The true nature of the Hitler regime.” $8,500 to $10,000.
  • Jeschke Jádi
    Rare Book Auction 155
    Saturday April 26, 2025
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 962. Baird. United States Exploring Expedition. Philadelphia 1858.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 772. Edith Holland Norton. Brazilian Flowers. Coombe Croft 1893.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 49. Petrarca. Das Gluecksbuch, Augsburg 1536.
    Jeschke Jádi
    Rare Book Auction 155
    Saturday April 26, 2025
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 1496. Jacob / Picasso. Chronique des Temps, 1956.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 8. Augustinus. De moribus ecclesie. Cologne 1480.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 17. Heures a lusaige de Noyon. Paris 1504.
    Jeschke Jádi
    Rare Book Auction 155
    Saturday April 26, 2025
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 13. Schedel. Buch der Chronicken. Nürnberg 1493.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 957. Donovan. Insects of China. London 1798.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 123. A holy martyr. Tuscany, Florence, mid-14th century.
    Jeschke Jádi
    Rare Book Auction 155
    Saturday April 26, 2025
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 438. Dante. La Divine Comédie. Paris 1963.
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 602. Firdausi. Histoire de Minoutchehr. Paris 1919
    Jeschke Jádi, Apr. 26: Lot 994. Westwood. Oriental Entomology. London 1848.
  • Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 124: Henri Courvoisier-Voisin, et alia, [Recueil de Vues de Paris et ses Environs], depicting precursors of the modern roller coaster, Paris, [1814-1819?]. $2,000 to $3,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 148: Pablo Picasso & Fernando de Rojas, La Célestine, First Edition, Paris, 1971. $30,000 to $40,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 201: Omar Khayyam & Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat, William Bell Scott's copy of the First Edition, London, 1859. $20,000 to $30,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 223: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, First Edition, extra-illustrated with hand-colored plates by Palinthorpe, London, 1861. $7,000 to $9,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 248: L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, First Edition, inscribed by the illustrator, Chicago & New York, 1900. $20,000 to $30,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 305: Tycho Brahe & Pierre Gassendi, Tychonis Brahei Vita, Paris, 1654. From the Collection of Owen Gingerich. $8,000 to $12,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 338: Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum Novum, two folio volumes, Bologna, 1651. From the Collection of Owen Gingerich. $8,000 to $10,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 350: Tobias Cohn, Ma'aseh Toviyyah, first edition, Venice, 1707-8. $3,000 to $5,000.
    Swann, Apr. 22: Lot 359: Alan Turing, Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence, first edition, Edinburgh, 1950. $3,000 to $5,000.

Rare Book Monthly

Articles - February - 2023 Issue

Martial In Rome, the Power And The Glory

The Colosseum: Not fun and games, games and slaughter.

The Colosseum: Not fun and games, games and slaughter.

I went to Rome, Italy, and I took a picture of a 1671 edition of Martial’s epigrams inside the dreadful Colosseum. This place was once the showcase of the most powerful city on Earth; as you enter it in 2023, you’re almost deafened by the mute cries of 80,000 raging spectators. They were screaming with joy as people were murdered, raped or torn by wild beasts in front of their eyes. These circus games inspired several epigrams to Martial (40-104)—known as “the book of the circus games”. They are not recommended for soft readers.

 

Visiting the Colosseum is like visiting St Peter’s church in the Vatican. Those places are nothing but unapologetic displays of power. Everything there was designed to make you feel miserable. The cold breath of power blows on your neck as soon as you enter, as if to remind you how insignificant you are. Two thousands years or so later, notwithstanding technological or medical progress, or our travelling to the moon, the impact is still the same. It is a debauchery of means and money with a unique goal: showing who’s the master. “Let barbarian Memphis keep silence concerning the wonders of her pyramids,” Martial writes, “and let not Assyrian toil vaunt its Babylon. Let not the effeminate Ionians claim praise for their temple of the Trivian goddess (...). Every work of toil yields to Caesar's amphitheatre.1” It is the most visited site in Italy today. “What race is so distant from us, what race so barbarous, Caesar, as that from it no spectator is present in thy city? The cultivator of Rhodope is here (...): the Sarmatian nourished by the blood drawn from his steed, is here. (…) The Arabian has hastened hither, the Sabaeans have hastened (...). Though different the speech of the various races, there is but one utterance, when thou art hailed as the true father of thy country.” A pagan Tower of Babel, so to speak.

 

I had an “arena access” ticket, so I was permitted to step into the arena with a restricted amount of tourists. Here I was, walking in the footsteps of Carpophorus. He was Domitian’s protégé2, and a fearless hunter. “That which was the utmost glory of thy renown, Meleager, a boar put to flight, what is it? a mere portion of that of Carpophorus. He, in addition, planted his hunting-spear in a fierce rushing bear (...); he also laid low a lion (...); and with a wound from a distance, stretched lifeless a fleet leopard.” One day, a lion escaped its master’s grip and created panic among the patrons. Everybody ran away but Carpophorus, who jumped on it instead, and put it to death. What a spectacle indeed! I looked at the nearby seats behind me. They seem so close! The spectators could almost touch the many gladiators who died at their feet.

 

The circus games had a political dimension. Binging lions, rhinoceros (how powerful was that tusk to whom a bull was a mere ball!) or elephants from the ends of the empire was a way to display Caesar’s power. Even the wild beasts came to die for his glory. The floor of the arena is now gone, and we can see corridors underneath—the belly of the beast. Elevators would send the gladiators, the animals or their victims right in the middle of the battlefield. Representation was the key word of the games. “The pagan and cruel Romans,” our French translator warns before offering the poem entitled Pasiphae, “would often give inhuman and lewd spectacles in the Colosseum, to re-enact the Greek fables.” Pasiphae was Minos’ wife, and when the latter refused to sacrifice a white bull to Poseidon, the God retaliated. He made Minos’ wife fall in love with a bull. So passionate was Pasiphae that she hid inside a wooden cow covered with a cow skin. “The bull approached and started to copulate with it as if with a real cow,” Apollodorus writes. “The young woman then gave birth to the Minotaur.” Many questioned the truth of these fables, and re-enacting them in the Colosseum was a serious matter. “Believe that Pasiphae was enamoured of a Cretan bull: we have seen it,” Martial rejoices, “The old story has been confirmed,” meaning they had a woman publicly raped by a bull. Another wretch had the honour to re-enact the myth of Prometheus: “so has Laureolus, suspended on no feigned cross, offered his defenceless entrails to a Caledonian bear. His mangled limbs quivered, every part dripping with gore, and in his whole body no shape was to be round.” This Laureolus, Martial presumes, had “murdered his father, or assassinated his master, or maybe raped his mother.” Serves you right, you savage!

 

Man versus lions, leopards versus elephants, women versus beasts, or short-people fighting each other—it goes on and on. I was reading the epigram about those young men who were attacked by a loose lion. They were sweeping away the sand made thick with blood during an interlude. Then I noticed a modern Venus on my right. She was posing in the arena, holding her phone with a selfie-stick—looking for the best view on her body curves, the best pout. Not as much as a bull raping a woman, but this was a dreadful spectacle to behold. Unfortunately, there were thousands of Venuses in the Colosseum that day. Guess that when they post their best shots on social media, 80,000 spectators applauded. The ancient tyrants are gone, but the circus games go on, and the spectators are always asking for more.

 

Thibault Ehrengardt

 

1. The English translations are from a 1897 edition available online (www.tertullian.org).

2. The translator of our 1671 edition indicates that Martial is referring to the circus games given by Domitian. Yet, in his article Domitien, spectacles, supplices et cruauté, Cinzia Vismara writes (persee.fr): “The chronology of Martial’s Book of the Circus Games has only been confirmed recently (...). And these poems exclusively depict the games given by Titus to inaugurate the Colosseum.”


Posted On: 2023-02-02 12:41
User Name: chr.edwards

This all seems to me a bit oversensitive: it's getting on for 2000 years since people and animals were slaughtered in the Colosseum (not the Coliseum, by the way). And to compare it with St Peter's in the Vatican, which is certainly not intended to make the visitor miserable, is ridiculous. I suggest you save your indignation for modern atrocities, about which something can be done.


Posted On: 2023-02-02 20:41
User Name: ehrengardt

You're right. A woman raped by a bull in front of a delighted audience? Come on, man! A man ripped by a fierce beast while chained on a rock? Don't be a sissy. That was long ago, this is inaccurate, just like old dusty books I guess.

If you can't see the link between the Colosseum (pardon my English, will ask the editor to correct it) and St Peter's Church, never mind - they do. That's why they did all they could to put their name all over the place. And if I remember correctly, they tried to erect a church inside the place at one point.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts. Means a lot to me, you now how sensitive I can be. :D


Posted On: 2023-02-06 23:52
User Name: bukowski

The Colosseum is not terrible. It is majestic and magnificent, regardless of how and for what it was used. Woke poseur!


Posted On: 2023-02-09 17:58
User Name: ehrengardt

"Regardless?" Guess, I'll have to keep on thinking without you that 2+2=4.
Have a majestic and magnificent day. ;)


Rare Book Monthly

  • Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: BELLEFOREST (François de). La cosmographie universelle de tout le monde. €12,000 to €15,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: DESNOS (Louis Charles). Mappe-monde, ou Carte Generale de la Terre. €5,000 to €6,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: BLAEU (Willem Janszoon & Joan). Theatrum Sabaudiae. €18,000 to €20,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: LINASSI. Ferdinando Ie Maria Anna Carolina nel Litorale in Settembre 1844. €4,000 to €5,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: AMBROSOLI (Francesco). Monumento a Francesco Primo in Vienna. €3,000 to €4,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: Plano de la plaza de Mesina y de su ciudadel y castiglios. €5,000 to €6,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: ROCKSTUHL (Alois Gustav), GILLE (Florent A.). 78 Lithographies du Musée de Tzarskoe-Selo. €1,000 to €1,500.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: Chtchedrovski, Ignatiy Stepanovitch. €2,000 to €3,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: DE BRUYN (Cornelis). Voyage au Levant. €3,000 to €5,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: ABI ISHAQ AHMAD B. IBRAHIM AL-THAʿLABI (M. 1035) : TROISIÈME VOLUME DU KASHF WA-L-BAYAN ʻAN TAFSIRI AL-QURʼAN. €3,000 to €5,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: DESNOS (Louis Charles). L’Afrique. €3,000 to €4,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: DE BRUYN (Cornelis). Voyages de Corneille Le Brun par la Moscovie, en Perse, et aux Indes orientales. €1,500 to €2,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: DESNOS. (Louis Charles). Amérique septentrionale et Méridionale. €4,000 to €5,000.
    Gros & Delettrez, Apr. 23: ÉLIOT (J.B.) ; MONDHARE (Louis Joseph). Carte du théatre de la guerre actuel entre les anglais et les treize Colonies Unies de l'Amérique Septentrionale. €5,000 to €6,000.
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    Sotheby’s: Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura, ca. 1639, a very fine pre-publication manuscript. Sold: 381,000 GBP
    Sotheby’s: Henri Matisse | Jazz, Paris 1947, the complete portfolio. Sold: 312,000 EUR
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