Feb 21 2010
St. Peter and a Precocious Prepubescent Poet
Rome is the home of a large number of international scholarly academies. In my first month here I have attended lectures at the American, British, and French academies, and met and interacted with scholars from the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish institutes. These organizations have libraries open to visiting scholars, offer public lectures and seminars, give tours of historical sites, and often run archaeological projects in Rome and the surrounding areas. So while “sabbatical” has the root meaning of “rest,” there are so many activities going on in Rome that rest is usually not part of the weekly agenda. The past week I have fit two especially interesting events into my calendar.
The first was a four-day conference put on by the Görres Institut, a German scholarly group located inside the Vatican. The conference was entitled “Petrus in Rom” – Peter in Rome. Except for one local Italian archaeologist, all the speakers were Germans, and all spoke about various aspects of the question as to whether St. Peter ever visited Rome, died here and was buried here. Excavations carried out under the Vatican during the 1940s discovered what appears to be his tomb, but questions remain – even for Catholic scholars. Interestingly, two of the papers were given by German evangelicals, one a Lutheran. If that surprised me, it surprised them even more to find a conservative American Lutheran in the audience. One, Rainer Riesner, wrote an outstanding book on the early life of Paul that has been translated into English and which I can recommend to everyone.
After four days of lectures in German, it was nice to move across the Janiculum Hill to the American Academy for a series of 5 lectures in English. Prof. Kathleen Coleman of Harvard is giving the annual Jerome Lectures, and her topic is the funerary monument of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, discovered in Rome in 1871. Q.S.M. died when just 11, but his impressive monument declares he had already made his mark as a poet, competing successfully in a public competition composing extemporaneous Greek poetry! In fact the monument has 43 lines of one of his poems on the subject “What words Zeus might use when reproving Helios” (for allowing his son Phaethon to drive his sun-chariot which ends up crashing into the sea, killing Phaethon).
The tomb as it would have looked in its original setting
In addition the tombstone has two shorter poetic epigrams as well. In the lectures, Prof. Coleman is discussing the educational system that can produce a prodigy like Q.S.M., ancient poetic contests, why the parents would erect a monument like this, the pressures of ancient childhood, etc. On Saturday she led an outing to visit the spot where the monument was found (and where a reproduction now stands), and to see the monument itself in the Museum Montemartini, an old power plant that now provides a unique setting for several hundred ancient sculptures that formerly sat in storage at the Capitoline Museum.
In one of his epigrams, Maximus laments that “illness and exhaustion destroyed me; for neither morning or night did I turn my heart away from the Muses,” i.e. studying the liberal arts. It sounded just like my WLC students. So let me end by sending you all greetings and warning you, as I so often do, not to study too hard, at least not until midterms!
The youthful poet surrounded by his poems