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NZ Herald
18 hours ago
- General
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Two takes - one fact, one fiction - on life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia
Demonised: Roman woman Fulvia is remembered in this 1819 drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli of her piercing the tongue of Cicero's severed head. Photo / Getty Images Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Book of the day: Two takes - one fact, one fiction - on life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia Demonised: Roman woman Fulvia is remembered in this 1819 drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli of her piercing the tongue of Cicero's severed head. Photo / Getty Images In a forthright introduction to her excellent biography of Fulvia, British classicist Jane Draycott points out that 'we have more literary, documentary and archaeological evidence' for her than for 'almost any other Roman woman during the Late Republic'. These were the chaotic decades leading up to Octavian being installed as Emperor Augustus in 27 BCE. Draycott writes that much of the evidence for Fulvia is negative in the extreme. 'Nearly all of the authors writing during her life or immediately after her death were enormously hostile towards her … Later authors took those portrayals and doubled down on them, adding spicy details that may be true or may simply be exaggerated falsehoods, designed to infuriate as well as titillate.' The cover of Fulvia: The woman who broke all the rules in Ancient Rome shows a shocking scene imagined by a 19th-century Italian painter. That's not a lover in bed with Fulvia – it's the severed head of her and her husband Mark Antony's sworn enemy, the proscribed orator Cicero, with her hairpins piercing his tongue. She is recorded as having done this (though definitely not in her bed) after his assassination, when his hands and head were cut off and publicly displayed in Rome. His ceaseless, lurid attacks had included calling her 'a thoroughly rapacious female' and 'a woman as cruel as she is greedy'. Many others, particularly Octavian, joined in. She was 'repeatedly publicly pilloried in front of the entire Roman Senate and wider Roman society for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere'. This 'deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation ensured that the allegations made against her have survived for two millennia, while most attempts at defence have faded from view'. Portrayals of her were also 'heavily influenced by the author's feelings about her husband' at the time. The Late Republic featured incessant battles of every kind, from elections and trials to gang clashes and outright war, between constantly shifting sets of rival candidates for the most powerful positions in the ruling Roman hierarchy. Elite Roman women were not supposed to play any part in these contests, despite being drastically affected by them. As soon as they started menstruating, they were expected to marry men chosen by their male elders, in a market dominated by considerations of status, wealth and alliance. They were then to suffer dutifully through the exile or death of husbands or their frequent divorces and remarriages, often to far younger women, prompted by perceived political or material advantage, when ex-wives might lose all access to their children. Yet Draycott shows a surprising number of elite women are known to have become politically involved, exerting their influence to improve the fortunes of their husbands and relatives. They included Fulvia's aunt and her future sister-in-law. Fulvia's first marriage, probably when she was 15 or 16, was unusual: her husband, Publius Clodius Pulcher, was not markedly older than her, and his acquired last name meant 'beautiful' (with golden curly hair). His family, the Claudii, was far more prestigious than hers, but he had a dodgy reputation and high debts. As an only child, Fulvia had an enormous inheritance from both sides of her family. During roughly 12 years they had a son and daughter and spent a remarkable amount of time together, in public as well as in private. After she helped Clodius fight an election, he was murdered by the henchmen of his plebeian rival Milo. Instead of holding his funeral with all due ceremony, Fulvia ensured that mobs of rioting supporters carried his bloody corpse to the Forum, where they built his funeral pyre. Two takes on the life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia. Photos / Supplied New Zealand author Kaarina Parker's stunning first novel, Fulvia: Power. At any cost, with its elegant classical cover, culminates in this scene, but she shows Fulvia herself leading the procession. As Parker frankly explains, she has deliberately varied some known details for the sake of the story: Fulvia is 18 when she meets Clodius, has sex with him before the wedding, and gives birth to her daughter before her son. Clodius's murder takes place close to Rome; after Milo is found guilty, Fulvia permits her devoted servants to slaughter him, too. Parker's writing deftly avoids the distracting pitfalls that can beset historical novels. She brings Fulvia and those closest to her vividly to life, as she convincingly invents a sequence of significant scenes that are known to have taken place but left no recorded details – especially when only women were present. Though Parker was able to consult a wide range of scholarship, Draycott's book came out too late for her novel. But it's likely to prove useful for her sequel, due next year, covering the later part of Fulvia's life from her marriage to Mark Antony around 48 BCE to her death less than a decade later. As Draycott notes, Antony's 'presence and prominence' ensured Fulvia was much more visible in contemporary sources during this period – but again, mainly through ongoing attacks because, for example, she toured the legions with him and watched rebellious soldiers being beaten to death. When Antony was declared a public enemy in 43 BCE, Fulvia and his mother Julia successfully lobbied on his behalf. In his absence, she helped build and lead an army to support his faltering cause. The year it was defeated, Antony met Cleopatra in Egypt. Fulvia, who had fled to Greece, became ill and died there alone. Draycott's account of these dramatic years is brilliantly assembled. She concludes that Fulvia's 'most serious transgression, and the one used against her again and again by her enemies, was her desire to provide for herself and her family'. All the determined attempts to 'demonise and marginalise her ultimately succeeded in transforming her into one of the most enigmatic and fascinating women of the Roman Republic'. The best way to encounter and understand Fulvia is to read both these books. And Parker's sequel is likely to be eagerly awaited. Fulvia: The woman who broke all the rules in Ancient Rome, by Jane Draycott (Atlantic, $37.99), and Fulvia: Power. At any cost, by Kaarina Parker (Echo Publishing, $36.99), are out now.
Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Confessions of obsessive collectors — the history of a mania
In the spirit of writing a good, honest review: Beanie Babies, striped stones and exhibition postcards. These are a few of the things I've collected since I was a child. What, if anything, do they say about me? That I was born in the Nineties. That I've probably seen the carefully positioned pebbles at Kettle's Yard. That I fancy myself as an amateur curator maybe — several of the postcards are tacked on a pinboard in my office. So I have an eye for beauty and a desire for order. But am I mad? In his book the historian James Delbourgo wonders whether collecting is a sign of madness — it's an idea, he writes, that 'has exercised an enduring hold on the imagination'. Is there something unsettling, something creepy, about people who love things more than … well, people? A Noble Madness, as richly detailed as it is researched, charts the changing image of the collector from antiquity to the present. Across centuries and continents, it presents a 'grand portrait gallery' of writers, artists, naturalists, neurologists, bibliomaniacs and hoarders, as well as pop culture's best obsessives and bogeymen (often one and the same). People who love things too much have been around since the start of recorded history. In the 1st century BC Cicero prosecuted the Sicilian magistrate Gaius Verres for plundering art and sculpture from Greek temples, denouncing him for having not only a 'singular and furious madness' but also 'perverted desires'. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with a statue, a woman he had carved out of ivory. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the emperor Caligula, besotted with art and sculpture, commanded Greek statues to be decapitated and their heads replaced with models of his own head. Supposedly he also ordered his troops to gather up seashells — 'spoils of the ocean' –— and fill their helmets and the folds of their dresses with them. From ancient Rome to medieval Europe, coveting physical objects has, Delbourgo writes, 'raised the spectre of sacrilege'. Collecting relics was a way for the Church to control their use and meaning as part of a regulated system of worship until the Reformation erupted. Swinging like a pendulum between different places and perspectives, Delbourgo whisks us to Ming China, where collecting was seen as 'a desirable form of personal sophistication', and Choson Korea, where it was a means of obtaining social status. A comprehensive exploration of Renaissance Europe tracks the rise of collecting alongside global trade and colonisation and the contrast between those gathering goods for aesthetic pleasure and scientific knowledge. 'The figure of Eve continued to bedevil the image of the female collector with her aura of carnal seductiveness and lusting after forbidden fruit,' Delbourgo says before turning his attention to Marie Antoinette, who collected clothes, jewels, snuffboxes, porcelain, furnishings, books and, reportedly, 348,000 earrings. In the eyes of her enemies the 'trinket queen' came to epitomise 'frivolity, greed and indifference to the suffering of the French people'. After her execution her clothes were donated anonymously to a hospital except for the shoe that slipped off when she was ascending the gallows and can now be seen in a museum in Caen. 'Every wave of iconoclasm produces its own relics,' Delbourgo says. • How to collect rare books — a beginner's guide In the 19th century the line between collecting and personal identity became tracing-paper thin. Romanticism, according to Delbourgo, changed everything 'by shifting the meaning of collecting from convention to compulsion'. Romantic artists, philosophers and poets led a 'bold new journey of individual self-discovery' and collectors joined them, crystallising the notion that their treasures were 'expressions of an essential inner identity'. Charles Darwin, who started accumulating specimens, shells and coins at the age of eight, became one of the first scientists to reflect on the damage collecting can do to the self. Sorting information, he believed, had produced a 'curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes'. • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next Enter Sigmund Freud. By the end of the century the founder of psychoanalysis (himself an antiquities collector) had arrived at the question that has preoccupied us ever since: why do people do it? Post Freud, Delbourgo writes, 'the act of collecting was always about something else and never entirely about the thing collected'. Hans Sloane was the subject of Delbourgo's previous book, Collecting the World, and his vast collection of specimens, artefacts and oddities formed the backbone of the world's first national public museum, the British Museum. Sloane claimed that the purpose of natural history collecting was 'to figure out what species were good for, what they cost, and how to make money off them'. Between 1850 and 1914 the number of museums in the US ballooned from 50 to 2,500 as American industrialists, financiers and heiresses used their new fortunes to collect art from round the world in what became known as 'the great art drain'. Chief among the 'picture pirates' was the New York banker JP Morgan, who became a great collector of art and books, creating the Morgan Library and acting as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some saw him as a hero, others a villain (one cartoon shows him seizing the Colosseum). 'It's because collectors seek to turn a chaotic world into an ordered one that they make for particularly unsettling figures,' Delbourgo says. 'Madness is never so disconcerting as when it appears in the guise of reason.' Chief among his fictional players is Norman Bates, the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's horror film Psycho. He is shy, polite, a bit of a loner and also a taxidermy enthusiast and serial killer. Plus, Oscar Wilde's character Dorian Gray hops from one kind of collecting to another in a desperate attempt to escape grief and guilt, while Orhan Pamuk's protagonist in his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, compulsively amasses objects that chronicle his romantic pursuit of a shop girl. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List If that all sounds like a lot to pack into one book, it is, but Delbourgo has a deft touch, interweaving heavy passages on Nazi collecting and the dilemma of the private collector under communism with light bursts of cinematic and literary criticism. The collector-creep factor increases with the page numbers: a gruesome tangent into trophism and cannibalism features the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who between 1978 and 1991 killed 17 boys and men, stored parts of their bodies in a freezer and sketched out plans to curate them in what he called a temple. The story comes to a close by suggesting that the question one might ask in the 2020s isn't 'Why do people do it?' but rather: 'How much is their stuff worth?' 'Today's collectors aren't crazy,' Delbourgo says, 'they're savvy.' If I look up my 1996 Peace Bear in the Beanie Baby database I find out that it's now worth several thousand pounds (with the Ty tag intact, that is). Too bad I ripped the tags off to make the cuddly critters look more lifelike. A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo (Riverrun £25 pp320). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘We're tired of this': Cicero residents demand action from town president after Latina aunt stopped by federal agents
Vanessa Mendoza, an early childhood educator in Cicero, was gathering materials for her classroom in late June when she paused to look at Facebook. What she saw shocked her. Posted on the social media site was a video of her aunt, Rocío, being pulled over by unidentified agents driving black vehicles who questioned her citizenship — despite her legal status to be in the United States. The agents did not specify why they pulled Rocío over or which agency they were affiliated with, Mendoza, 32, who grew up in Cicero, said at a news conference outside the town hall Thursday morning. After Rocío showed identification, she was not arrested or detained, her niece added. 'It was either a legal stop or maybe, I don't want to say, they were targeting her for being Latina,' she said. On Thursday, local officials and community members condemned 20-year Town President Larry Dominick for remarks he previously made about the immigrant community, especially as federal enforcement actions intensify under President Donald Trump. About 90% of Cicero's residents are Latino, a group that has been repeatedly targeted by the Trump administration. Rocío's interaction with the unidentified agents comes at a time of increased news and social media reports of citizens of Latino descent being stopped or detained. After a U.S. Army veteran was arrested during an immigration raid at a Southern California marijuana farm last week, representatives in Congress introduced legislation on Wednesday that would stop U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement from detaining and deporting U.S. citizens. Law-abiding residents aren't supposed to be arrested or detained, and there was no probable cause for Rocío to be pulled over, Mendoza said Thursday. She said her aunt is still shaken and won't go anywhere without her identification. Cicero has a complicated political history toward immigrants, said former U.S. Rep. Luis Guitiérrez, who used to represent the state's 4th Congressional District. Guitiérrez spoke strongly against Dominick, who he said has in recent years publicly spoken in a 'mean, nasty and violent' manner about immigrants. 'Stop destroying families that love each other,' he said. 'We're outraged. We're tired of this. Estamos indignados. Ya estamos cansado.' At Thursday's news conference, lifelong Cicero resident Diana Garcia played a recording of Dominick allegedly speaking at public town meetings. In the clip, Dominick can be heard lamenting former President Joe Biden's border policies and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's approach to welcoming new migrants. 'You can't go anywhere without people selling candy, soda or water. And they don't even want to sell. Some of them just want money. The Venezuelans are robbing everybody. And what do we do to them? Nothing. It's disgusting,' Dominick was heard saying in the audio, which was also reported by the local newspaper Cicero Independiente from a Feb. 27, 2024, meeting. In a statement released late Thursday night, Cicero officials dismissed the accusations as complaints from Dominick's political opponents. The statement didn't address the comments Dominick allegedly made. Garcia asserted that Dominick has chosen to remain silent on the issue of immigration at a time when ICE has been 'tearing families apart.' 'Cicero deserves a leader right now. And we don't have one,' she said. At one point during the news conference, a woman passing by with a grocery bag stopped to stand in the back to listen to the speakers. She nodded her head in agreement. In late February, ahead of the town's municipal elections, Dominick was criticized by opposition candidate Esteban Rodriguez for his failure to advocate for the town to adopt sanctuary status. Dominick maintained Cicero's policy is to treat everyone, documented or in the country without legal permission, the same. He referred to a 'Safe Space Resolution' passed in 2008, which formalized a commitment not to use local law enforcement for immigration matters, preventing Cicero police from asking about immigration status or enforcing federal immigration laws. Meanwhile, Illinois is a 'sanctuary state' under the 2017 Illinois Trust Act, meaning it has rules prohibiting arresting or detaining someone solely due to immigration status. The tension escalated several weeks before the election, when Rodriguez had a rock thrown through his home windows in what he described as a scare tactic. He believed his windows were shattered in retaliation for his public probing of Dominick's immigration stance. Dominick's Cicero Voters Alliance, however, brushed off the incident as a 'political stunt' by Rodriguez to 'get attention and stir controversy.' Rodriguez — who received 43% of the vote for town president over the winter — was at the news conference Thursday, where those in attendance hand-delivered a letter to Dominick's office that requested 'immediate action' to declare Cicero a sanctuary city and stop any cooperation between local law enforcement officers and ICE. The group took an elevator to the town hall's third floor, where Dominick's office is located. The town president's office was closed and locked. 'It's because he's never here,' Rodriguez grumbled under his breath. They knocked and waited several minutes before deciding to slip the letter underneath the door. A Tribune reporter was able to enter the office later in the day and spoke to a receptionist, who directed all media inquiries to Dominick's email. The group also delivered a printed-out Freedom of Information Act request to the town of Cicero for all emails, text messages, letters, memos and notes between top town leaders and trustees including Dominick with several defamatory words and phrases. The request sought all communication from Jan. 20, when Trump was sworn into office, to the present. The goal, the group said Thursday, was to uncover the type of communication about immigration that might happen behind closed doors under Dominick's leadership. Mendoza, who wore a polka-dot dress and earrings in the shape of crayons, said that as an educator in Cicero, she is constantly answering questions from worried families who ask her what to do if ICE pulls them over. She tells them to not talk to anyone who they don't know and to keep their windows up. Ultimately, she said she isn't trying to work against Dominick, but to make sure everyone feels protected leaving their homes and driving through their own neighborhoods. 'Just make this a loving and safe place for everybody,' she urged the town leader. Solve the daily Crossword
Mint
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Rahul Matthan: Technology and law are joined at the hip as they evolve together
There is a long-standing view that law is part of the natural order of society. Thinkers like Aristotle and Cicero believed human laws mirrored the laws of nature. Hobbes claimed that society itself was made possible by law, while Locke argued that legal norms arose from a moral order preceding them. Yet, in practice, much of what governs us today has not evolved from timeless principles, but in continual response to technology and the disruptions it introduces. The Industrial Revolution led the first major transformation of society on the whole. It replaced human power with mechanical and spawned a number of 'macro-inventions' that changed how society operated. As machines replaced human labour, the accidents and injuries they caused forced common law courts to re-evaluate doctrines that had worked so far in a pre-industrial agrarian context. Also Read: Generative vs. Creative: A court verdict on AI training has exposed an Anthropic-shaped chink in US copyright law Nowhere is this more visible than in common law, which has repeatedly evolved in response to technological upheaval. Where it used to impose near-automatic liability for harm caused by a person's actions, after industrialization it adopted the principle of fault-based negligence, requiring plaintiffs to prove a breach of 'duty of care' to hold defendants liable. In time, the 'duty of care' principle was extended to protect individuals holding manufacturers liable for injuries caused to consumers, even if they had no direct contract with them. Technological advancements in transport and telecommunications made it possible for business to be conducted at a distance. This forced courts to change the way they thought about contract law, giving rise to the 'mailbox rule,' which held that acceptance of a contract was effective once posted, even if the letter was delayed or lost in transit. Further evolutions in communication technology tested this idea, and while it was extended to contracts concluded over the telegraph, it was denied to the more-instantaneous telephone technology. Mass production transformed the nature of contracting itself, making standard-form agreements and boilerplate terms the norm. As courts came to appreciate that large industries had an unequal bargaining power, they began to temper the egregious excesses of these contracts through the doctrine of unconscionability and laws of consumer protection. Also Read: Rahul Matthan: AI models aren't copycats but learners just like us But no law has been more directly influenced by changes in technology than intellectual property, which came into being because of it. The Statute of Anne, widely recognized as the world's first copyright law, was enacted to offer authors (and their publishers) exclusive rights over their works because the printing press had made it relatively trivial for anyone to generate multiple copies of it. When engravings on metal plates made it easy to mass-produce art, this right was extended to images and to music when the descendants of Johann Sebastian Bach asserted copyright over the sheet music of his compositions. Each subsequent creative technology forced society to revisit the ways in which intellectual property law was being applied, incrementally shifting the scope and extent of regulation in response to what technology made possible. Also Read: Pay thy muse: Yes, AI does owe royalties for stolen inspiration We stand today on the verge of another technological shift. Just as the Industrial Revolution rewrote the legal framework as it then existed, artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to upend much of the legal system as we know it today. This will present itself in many different ways. Autonomous vehicles and robotic tools are already testing the boundaries of existing liability doctrines. When a self-driving car causes an accident or an AI-powered medical tool results in harm to patients, traditional doctrines of foreseeability and proximate cause may no longer be useful. AI behaves in unpredictable and emergent ways, and companies may try to escape liability by claiming that it is impossible to reasonably foresee what AI-powered devices will do. At the same time, the integration of AI into professional workflows could redefine what is considered 'reasonable care.' When that happens, doctors who fail to consult AI for a second opinion, or lawyers who omit to run their advice through AI for a reference check, may be deemed to have failed to do what was expected of them as professionals. As AI agents proliferate, the offer and acceptance framework that defines to this day how contracts are concluded may no longer apply. Future workflows will call for multiple agents to interact in numerous ways that simply cannot be anticipated in advance, making each agreement a combination of hundreds of micro-arrangements concluded between autonomous AI systems to achieve a larger task. Also Read: Technobabble: We need a whole new vocabulary to keep up with the evolution of AI But it is in the area of intellectual property that we are likely to see the most dramatic change. AI is increasingly being used in the creative process, giving rise to entirely new forms of expression and novel methods of production. While creators may take time to adapt, adapt they will, and the law will have no option but to keep pace. The purpose of intellectual property law has always been to incentivize the act of creation. But AI will challenge distinctions between human authorship and machine-generated content, forcing courts and policymakers to grapple with how and if legal personhood should attach to algorithmic creativity. Just as steam and steel reshaped the legal system, AI will as well. It is not a question of whether the law will change, but when. The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of 'The Third Way: India's Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance'. His X handle is @matthan.
Telegraph
14-07-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
China's air pollution clean-up ‘sped up global warming'
The speeding up of global warming has been largely driven by cuts to air pollution in China and wider East Asia, scientists believe. Experts say that more sunlight is now reaching Earth because of fewer aerosols in the atmosphere since countries began tackling polluted air. Scientists had expected about 0.23C of warming since 2010, but the rise has been around 0.33C. Using new modelling, researchers at the University of Reading and the Cicero Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo, found that the majority of the difference – around 0.07C – could be accounted for by East Asian clean-ups. The cutting of marine emissions may also have played a smaller role in increasing global warming, experts believe. Bjørn Samset, the lead author and senior researcher at Cicero, said: 'Our main result is that the East Asian aerosol clean-up has likely driven much of the recent global warming acceleration 'Our overall number is around a tenth of a degree Celsius, 0.07C. This is small compared to the overall rate of global warming, driven by greenhouse gases, which has been at around 0.2 degrees celsius per decade since the 1970s. 'It can, however, explain a good portion of the increase in warming rate that we've measured since around 2010.' A temporary effect Since 2010, China has worked hard to cut air pollution, which was responsible for around one million deaths a year, implementing stringent emissions standards and promoting clean energy. Although air pollution is bad for public health it also helps cool the planet, as sulfate aerosols produced by burning fossil fuels shade the Earth's surface from sunlight. Scientists say that pollution has been inadvertently holding global warming 'in check', which is encouraging because there were fears that the climate was more sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Experts think that the acceleration in temperature increases will start to slow down once air pollution measures reach their maximum impact. Prof Laura Wilcox, the contributing author and professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the University of Reading, said: 'The important thing about the East Asian air pollution clean-up causing an acceleration of global warming over the last couple of decades is that it is likely to be a temporary effect. 'As the rate of clean-up slows, so too will the effect on global warming. 'That we are able to account for so much of the recent acceleration in global warming with the East Asian air quality clean-up is reassuring, as it makes it less likely that the acceleration is due to the climate being more sensitive to greenhouse gases than we thought, which has been another suggested cause of the observed trend.' However researchers say the large effect of air pollution shows that it would be tricky to attempt to geo-engineer the climate to help control climate change. In May, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, the UK Government's funding body, announced more than £50 million for 21 geo-engineering projects, including five outdoor field trials such as cloud brightening experiments. Mr Samset added: 'Many suggested geoengineering approaches envision cooling the globe as uniformly as possible. 'However, the actual, regional effects of such an approach are still very challenging to foresee. 'It's not a surprise that aerosol clean-up leads to more global warming, but the connection to geoengineering approaches is mostly a reminder of how challenging it is to untangle the aerosol effects on the climate.'
