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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gavin Richardson, post: 2597592, member: 83956&quot;]One further word about the hut. Below are images of huts from the Roman Vergil manuscript. They don’t illustrate the <i>Aeneid</i> but illustrate either the Georgics or <i>Eclogues</i> (I don’t have my text at hand). These were Vergil’s earlier poems praising the simple, pastoral life. The manuscript huts have much in common with the coin huts, including an occasional overhanging tree that fills the frame. The ms. huts seem to be gathered at the top with some rope or reed loop, which is also featured on the coin by a horizontal line near the top of the hut. So here is another Vergilian connection, though not to the <i>Aeneid</i>. But Vergil’s <i>Eclogues</i> do testify to an idealized pastoral past that might be evoked by these coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>And even here we might be reminded that there was an association between Ascanius and the shepherding life. Paul Zanker in his commentary on the Pompeii wall painting of the Flight from Troy, itself inspired by a sculptural group which once stood in the Forum Augustum, writes: “[Aeneas], barely out of Troy, is depicted as a future Roman, wearing not only Roman armor, but, as ancestor of the Julian clan, even patrician footwear. By contrast, the little Ascanius is represented like a Phrygian shepherd, in long-sleeved garment and pointed cap, and curiously, he carries a stick of the sort used in hunting rabbit. This is evidently an allusion to the tradition that the Trojan youth were shepherds on Mount Ida.” (Zanker, Paul. 1990.&nbsp; <i>The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus</i>. Trans. Alan Shapiro. Ann Arbor. 202).</p><p><br /></p><p>I don’t mean to suggest that we should start calling these coins “Aeneas and Ascanius” coins, but I do think we should retire the bellicose rhetoric of a soldier “dragging” a barbarian from his hut. Everything about these coins—especially their Vergilian resonances—suggest a more positive view of this reverse type, in contrast to, say, the soldier spearing a barbarian on other FEL TEMP coinage. [ATTACH=full]566479[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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