Huh? I thought she looked like Robert Smith from The Cure, or am I mixed up???
A slight hijack here.
I agree with you 100%, and will go further, I’m sick of seeing and hearing alleged historians who ascribe modern morality and standards to ancient (and later) peoples.
I saw an examination on Masada a few months ago that had me burning - a professor of Roman History was talking about how the rebels were likely overreacting to the threat posed by the Roman army. After all, they’d won the battle, so why stir up hard feelings with atrocities? :eek: :smack: :rolleyes:
What a maroon! Didn’t this bozo even look at things, like, say, the real, documented games taking place in the city of Rome at the time? (wanders off muttering)
So, we’ve got a couple of coins and one bust? Were they done as portraits, in her presence, or were they just fairly generic pictures?
I mean, they made a lot of coins with pictures of Julius Caesar and the depictions vary widely. Most seem to show him with hair, though I understand he was bald. This could be another factor mitigating against the likelihood of accurate paintings - you don’t want to depict a powerful person looking bad, right?
Well, Julius Caesar wasn’t always bald. I am far from an expert; almost all my knowledge on the subject is derived from Colleen McCullough novels.
You uncultured swine, don’t you know the only reliable records of the early Roman empire are the novels of Robert Graves? The ignorance!
Oink, I say.
Exhibit A: Hans Holbein the Younger travels to the court of the Duke of Cleves to paint a nice portrait of his sister Anne to take back to Henry VIII.
As lambchops accurately argues, no royal and imperial portraiture can be taken at, er, face value. To go back to Holbein–contemporaries of Henry VIII depicted him (not to his face, mind) in his later years as somewhat of an overweight slob; Holbein, however, continued to portray him as an older version of the great athlete he once was. And why not? After all, King Hal greatly enriched Holbein for his “accurate” work. If Holbein had decided to picture the King warts and all, his head would have been on a stake outside of the Tower.
Even the bad portraits of royalty can’t be taken as accurate, though. A ham-handed engraver at the Royal Mint depicted George III as an overstuffed Roman emperor type; the king was lampooned throughout his reign as a Caesar-wannabe. If 18th-century engravers could err in depicting their ruler as regal, how much better could their first-century counterparts have done in making Cleopatra look good on a coin?
LOL, Elizabeth !st had the practice of having ‘index’ portrais of her face and hands, and when an artist was going to do a portrait f her, a maid would get into the clothing and pose, and then the artist would look at the index portrait and fill in the face and hands…=) very similar in a warped sort of way to the american traveling portraitists, where they would have portraits of people with no heads, and they would paint the heads on when the customer sat for them=)
It is a sort of common joke at the time about how artists painting her portrait never had her sitting for her…apparently she trusted very few artists to portray her as she felt she should be portrayed=)
The statements about noneuro/nonchristian religious structures bothers me - they always babble on about how dedicated they must have been to spend x years building this pyramid temple, mound, religious pile of rocks with this condescending look and smarmy voice that makes them seem to be meaning ‘dedicated to this false bogus god that they all knew was bogus, but they didnt know Jayzus, so they just didnt believe in anything…’
Sheesh, cant Huitzilopcatlhuatltltltl , peasant of Tinochtitlan believe in quetzlecoatl with the same depth of feeling and belief that Jehan, stonemason in Chartres felt towards Jayzus, and want to do his best stonework for his god as a personal offering? Just because the person in question isnt christian doesnt make them any less religious that the average christian [or jew, or muslim, or hindu yatatatata]
major hijack
Do you say that or spray that? 
Ahhh… That makes much more sense. At first I was afraid that it was just a bunch of neo-feminist claptrap about white men afraid of a strong woman of color.
Pterry fan, I can start spelling lots of words, but dont know how to stop…
Now here’s the part where I backpaddle.
I haven’t seen the documentary. I concede that the above interpreation may have been what the documentarians were going for, and a natural one to draw from the given quote coming from a Black woman. It wouldn’t be the first time that such a film twisted a more reasonable statement from an expert to support its more radical (and thus exciting) preconcieved notions.
Shelly is a feminist, and a few of her courses (not the one I took with her) do focus on women in antiquity and classical Africa, so I know she knows a thing or two about Cleopatra. It’s possible that she’s fallen into the trap of thinking Cleo was Black, I don’t know (my course with her focused on grammar and Horace’s satires). , but she’s smart, so I doubt it. I know she did specifically warn the class against viewing Roman views on race, gender, and sexuality through a modern lens.
We are, of course, looking at attractiveness through a modern lens here.
So Cleopatra didn’t actually look like Elizabeth Taylor?
Next you’ll tell me it would be a wast of time slogging through the Anabasis looking for someone clinking together Miller shorties and calling “Warriors, come out to play-ay!”