Flying Buttresses, the Pantheon and Catching Up

It is the 9th and I have not written since the 6th. Wow! This Colloquium is busy. They are joking about it being like an army march and it is not far off. The blisters on my feet make me think they might be right. We spent two days with Karl Galinski in Rome that I told you about and then one day in Ostia with both Karl Galinski and another brilliant professor, L. Michael White who has an archaeological dig in Ostia. Ostia is the port city near Rome and there is lots of evidence there about the different trades that people had and ordinary life. Since the area was silted by the ocean, (modern Ostia is now on the ocean) many of the structures were preserved and so you can actually walk through what looks like houses and even go up to the second floor in some of them. I am going to go backwards now and try to catch up on a few really important things that I haven’t written about yet.

THE PANTHEON
Right in the middle of a piazza all of a sudden you see a huge building with the name AGRIPPA on the front. It is now a church with statues and pictures of saints and an altar, but it was built originally by Agrippa to honor gods. It was called the Pantheon because it honored many gods (pan=many, theo=god). The most interesting thing about this building is some of the architecture. It has a HUGE dome over the top of it with a circle at the top that is open to the sky. When it rains there is a puddle in the middle! Every day the sun comes in and shines on different parts of the building inside highlighting them. The Romans were known for making cement. That is why many of their buildings are bricks and cement mortar covered by plaster. It was a very strong way to build. The whole dome of the Pantheon is made of cement. You can imagine how heavy that is! In order to make it lighter they created a sort of honeycomb pattern of squares so that the center of each square was thinner than the outside. The outside structure made it strong enough to hold together, but the carved out centers made it light enough to be held up by the rest of the building. I have been told that we are going to talk to someone who is an expert on building structure when we are in Naples, so I may come back to this.

FLYING BUTTRESSES
I ACTUALLY saw buttresses, but it turns out that they were not flying buttresses. It is a word that I remember learning in elementary school, but didn’t have much understanding of until I actually saw one. A buttress is a structure added on to the outside of the building to hold up a wall. There are lots of them here and so I am including a picture. I looked up flying buttress in Wikipedia and it explained that a flying buttress is a buttress that actually connects one part of a building to another and so it is up in the air and looks like it is flying. There is a good picture of one in Wikipedia if you are interested.

ARS PACIS
This is a picture of Dill sitting by the model of Ars Pacis, which is a huge monument to peace that Augustus Caesar constructed as a sign that he had created peace in the Roman Empire. There really was relative peace, but it was based on imperialism (conquering and ruling other countries). Rome had conquered lots of other countries and since Rome was so strong the other countries could not fight back, so there was peace. What Rome often did was to conquer a country and then import some of the parts of it that they were most interested in (food, decorations, gods etc…) This obelisk held up by an elephant that Dill is pointing out from his motorcycle is a good example. There was a large temple to Isis who is an Egyptian God at this location and that is where the elephant came from. Egyptian things were very popular in Rome and many people decorated in that style. I know that Cleopatra fits into the story here somewhere, but I am not totally clear on it, so ask if you are curious and I will find out more.


Well, that is enough for this post except for this one more picture. I am sure you will e happy to know that almost no matter where you are you can find a McDonalds (I did not see one in either Selcuk or Bethlehem though). Today is a day off, so I am writing a few to catch up a bit. The next day we go on to Pompeii and Naples, so I may not write every day again. WIKIPEDIA
"A flying buttress, or arc-boutant, is a specific type of buttress usually found on a religious building such as a cathedral. They are used to transmit the horizontal thrust of a vaulted ceiling through the walls and across an intervening space (which might be used for an aisle, chapel or cloister), to a counterweight outside the building. As a result, the buttress seemingly flies through the air, and hence is known as a "flying" buttress."
"A buttress is an architectural structure built against (a counterfort) or projecting from a wall which serves to support or reinforce the wall. Buttresses are fairly common on more ancient buildings, especially in Germany, as a means of providing support to act against the lateral (sideways) forces arising out of the roof structures that lack adequate bracing."
"The word buttress, in a more general sense, means to support; one might buttress another person's arguments, for instance. By visual analogy, that which looks like a buttress may be called so; a projecting tree root at the base of the trunk, for example, may be referred to as a buttress."