R. H. Rodgers | |
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| Born | Robert Howard Rodgers 1944 (age 79–80) |
| Occupation | Professor of classics |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of California at Berkeley |
| Thesis | "Petri Diaconi Ortus et vita iustorum Cenobii Casinensis" |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Classics |
| Institutions | University of Vermont |
| Notable works |
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Robert Howard Rodgers (born 1944) is an American philologist who is emeritus professor of classics at the University of Vermont. His edition of Frontinus's De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae on Roman aqueducts was the first detailed commentary on the work for almost 300 years. He has also produced notable editions of works on ancient agriculture by Palladius and Columella.
Reviewers have appreciated the thoroughness of his work,which he has combined with many bold emendations and conjectures in order to make texts with difficult and contested histories more coherent and readable. Some,however,have wished that he had done more to acknowledge alternative perspectives on Roman technical literature which would have added an extra layer of interest to his work.
Robert Rodgers was born in 1944. [1] He completed his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley with an edited edition of Petri Diaconi (Peter the Deacon)'s Ortus et vita iustorum Cenobii Casinensis which was subsequently published by the University of California Press in 1972. [2] Rodgers's work was welcomed by Braxton Ross of the University of Chicago as turning what had previously been seen as a "collection of pious stories" into a "cultural document". [3]
Rodgers has spent his career at the University of Vermont where he is now emeritus professor of classics. [4] He was a Guggenheim fellow in classics in 1986. [5]
His first major work,after the publication of his dissertation,was An introduction to Palladius which was published as a supplement to the University of London's Institute of Classical Studies Bulletin (BICS) in 1975. In the same year,he published an edition of Palladius's Opus Agriculturae in the Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana series. Reviewing both for L'AntiquitéClassique ,Raoul Verdière saw the Introduction as the essential companion to the edited edition of Opus Agriculturae and wished the former could have served as the preface to the latter. He noted the extensive textual choices that Rodgers had made to make his edition coherent which had produced an edition of the highest importance. He did not agree with all of Rodgers's decisions,however,particularly over the dating of the work,and felt that the source material was so contested that other editions with different conclusions remained possible. [6]
In 2004,Rodgers published his edition of Frontinus's De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae,the first detailed commentary on the work for almost 300 years. [7] Reviewed by Alice König in the Journal of Roman Studies along with a related work by Michael Peachin,König began by reflecting on the ongoing reevaluation of a work that had once been seen simply as a factual guide to Rome's aqueducts,or,as Frontinus had described it,an administrative handbook for his work. The more scholars investigated the text,however,the more baffled they were as to its true purpose and meaning,seeing elements of political propaganda and auto-encomium (self praise) in it but reaching no firm conclusions. [7] König noted that Rodgers had given his own interpretation,balanced between the various competing theories,but wished that he had explored them in more depth which would have added extra interest to his already exhaustive commentary and notes. [7]
Marco Formisano noted in The Classical Review that due to the complex textual history of the De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae,it had received four editions in the twentieth century alone,but Rodgers's comprehensive commentary was the first since the Italian engineer Giovanni Poleni's edition of 1722. Combined with the very competent re-editing,this made Rodgers's version the likely future reference edition of the work. Formisano wished,however,that Rodgers had done more to put the text in the context of the debate about the position of Roman technical literature that had been taking place in scholarly circles in the twentieth century. [8] Ari Saastamoinen in Classics Ireland also noted the bold emendations and impressive commentary. [9] [10]
In 2010,Rodgers published his edition of Columella's Res Rustica in the Oxford Classical Texts series along with the associated Liber de Arboribus but with the latter marked as incerti auctoris (by an unknown hand). Reviewing the text for Gnomon ,David Butterfield appreciated the boldness with which Rodgers had crafted his "radical" version with over 350 new conjectures including more than 200 emendations of the Res Rustica. [11] But he also noted that Rodgers had been more conservative with the Liber de Arboribus by adopting the view of Will Richter [12] that the work is of uncertain authorship,rather than a juvenile work of Columella. [11]
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Sextus Julius Frontinus was a prominent Roman civil engineer, author, soldier and senator of the late 1st century AD. He was a successful general under Domitian, commanding forces in Roman Britain, and on the Rhine and Danube frontiers. A novus homo, he was consul three times. Frontinus ably discharged several important administrative duties for Nerva and Trajan. However, he is best known to the post-Classical world as an author of technical treatises, especially De aquaeductu, dealing with the aqueducts of Rome.
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella was a prominent Roman writer on agriculture in the Roman Empire.
Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus Palladius, also known as Palladius Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus or most often just as Palladius, was an ancient writer who wrote in Latin, and is dated variously to the later 4th century or first half of the 5th century AD. He is principally known for his book on agriculture, Opus agriculturae, sometimes known as De re rustica.
D. Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca was a Portuguese Roman Catholic humanist bishop, historian and polemicist. An extensive notice of his life and thought (Vita) was written by his nephew, a canon of Évora also named Jerónimo Osório, to introduce his edition of his uncle's Complete Works published in 1592.
Geoponici, or Scriptores rei rusticae, is a collective term for the Greek and Latin writers on husbandry and agriculture. In classical times this topic was regarded as a branch of economics.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori, also known as Giovan Pietro Bellori or Gian Pietro Bellori, was an Italian art theorist, painter and antiquarian, who is best known for his work Lives of the Artists, considered the seventeenth-century equivalent to Vasari's Vite. His Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni, published in 1672, was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art. As an art historical biographer, he favoured classicising artists rather than Baroque artists to the extent of omitting some of the key artistic figures of 17th-century art altogether.
Andreas Schott was an academic, linguist, translator, editor and a Jesuit priest from Antwerp in the Habsburg Netherlands. He was mainly known for his editions of Latin and Greek classical literature.
Pietro de' Crescenzi, Latin: 'Petrus de Crescentiis', was a Bolognese jurist, now remembered for his writings on horticulture and agriculture, the Ruralia commoda. There are many variant spellings of his name.
Pierre Grimal was a French historian, classicist and Latinist. Fascinated by the Greek and Roman civilizations, he did much to promote the cultural inheritance of the classical world, both among specialists and the general public.
De aquaeductu is a two-book official report given to the emperor Nerva or Trajan on the state of the aqueducts of Rome, and was written by Sextus Julius Frontinus at the end of the 1st century AD. It is also known as De Aquis or De Aqueductibus Urbis Romae. It is the earliest official report of an investigation made by a distinguished citizen on Roman engineering works to have survived. Frontinus had been appointed Water Commissioner by the emperor Nerva in AD 96.
Theatrum Chemicum is a compendium of early alchemical writings published in six volumes over the course of six decades. The first three volumes were published in 1602, while the final sixth volume was published in its entirety in 1661. Theatrum Chemicum remains the most comprehensive collective work on the subject of alchemy ever published in the Western world.
De mirabilibus urbis Romae, preserved in a single manuscript in Cambridge, England, is a medieval guide in Latin to the splendours of Rome, which was written in the mid-twelfth century by a certain Magister Gregorius of Oxford. The outlook here is even more secular than the Mirabilia urbis Romae, Roberto Weiss noted. Gregorius spent much of his time describing and even measuring the Roman ruins, and, according to Erwin Panofsky "had yielded so thoroughly to the 'magic spell' of a beautiful Venus statue that he felt compelled to visit it time and again in spite of its considerable distance from his lodgings". Magister Gregorius is the first to take notice of the Roman bronze called the "Spinario", then among ancient bronzes at the Lateran. Panofsky included Magister Gregorius's little book among examples of the reawakening of interest in classical antiquities evinced by a handful of connoisseurs in twelfth-century Rome. Still, like most of his contemporaries raised in familiarity with the Gothic hand, the unfamiliar Roman letters in inscriptions sometimes eluded his translation.
The Aqua Marcia is one of the longest of the eleven aqueducts that supplied the city of Rome. The aqueduct was built between 144–140 BC, during the Roman Republic. The still-functioning Acqua Felice from 1586 runs on long stretches along the route of the Aqua Marcia.
The Galenic corpus is the collection of writings of Galen, a prominent Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire during the second century CE. Several of the works were written between 165–175 CE.
Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai is an eighth- to ninth-century Byzantine text that concentrates on brief commentary connected to the topography of Constantinople and its monuments, notably its Classical Greek sculpture, for which it has been mined by art historians.
Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli or Johannes Sulpitius Verulanus or Verolensis was an Italian Renaissance humanist and rhetorician. Known to Erasmus, he was the author of a work on epistolary art, the proper composition and ornamentation of letters, De componendis et ornandis epistoli.
The topography of ancient Rome is the description of the built environment of the city of ancient Rome. It is a multidisciplinary field of study that draws on archaeology, epigraphy, cartography and philology. The word 'topography' here has its older sense of a description of a place, now often considered to be local history, rather than its usual modern meaning, the study of landforms.
Aqueducts are bridges constructed to convey watercourses across gaps such as valleys or ravines. The term aqueduct may also be used to refer to the entire watercourse, as well as the bridge. Large navigable aqueducts are used as transport links for boats or ships. Aqueducts must span a crossing at the same level as the watercourses on each end. The word is derived from the Latin aqua ("water") and ducere, therefore meaning "to lead water". A modern version of an aqueduct is a pipeline bridge. They may take the form of tunnels, networks of surface channels and canals, covered clay pipes or monumental bridges.
John Gordon Fitch is a classical scholar. He works chiefly on Roman poetry, especially Lucretius and the dramas of Seneca, and his interests also include Greek and Roman texts on agriculture and medicine. He is a professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria.
The Curator Aquarum was a Roman official responsible for managing Rome's water supply and distributing free grain. Curators were appointed by the emperor. The first curator was Agrippa. Another notable Curator Aquarum was Frontinus, a Roman engineer.
