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THE ROMAN FORUM &
BATHS OF CARACALLA:
BRINGING THE RUINS BACK TO LIFE
SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO BE THERE. “TELLING” ABOUT A “SHOW AND TELL” JUST DOESN’T CUT IT—PARTICULARLY WHEN THE “TELL” WAS COMPLETELY ANIMATED BY THE “SHOW.” THIS IS CLEARLY THE CASE WITH THE PRESENTATION BY PROFESSOR
BERNARD FRISCHER ABOUT THE ROMAN BATHS OF CARACALLA.
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JOURNAL
Attendees at the Annual Meeting in Rome were look- ing forward to dinner on Saturday evening at the iconic Baths of Caracalla. Many remembered being one of the more than 800 million people who watched the tele- vised performance by the Three Tenors at the Baths in July 1990 as a prelude to the World Cup Final. Some had visited the ruins in person and had wondered about their history and what they had looked like in their day.
Professor Frischer showed us.
Bernard Frischer is a classical humanist. He speaks Latin and Greek and at least three other languages. He is widely pub- lished and has taught at leading universities in the United States and in Europe. But unlike a classical classicist, he is not anchored in the past. Bernie (as he insisted we call him) is a new age classicist, a high-tech classicist. Beginning in the ‘70s, as personal computers were first coming to be, he had an idea how he might use computer technology to show people what ancient Rome and ancient Greece looked like during their glory days.
So this classicist became an architectural historian and a mas- ter of cutting age technology. He and his colleagues have dig-
itized not only the Baths of Caracalla but much of ancient Rome and Greece. As described by lifelong friend, Fellow Rob Schlacter, Bernie has melded the classics with modern technology and made it available and fun for everybody.
Professor Frischer showed us how he and the various teams he leads have digitally reconstructed the ancient monu- ments of Rome and many other places around the world. His efforts began in the 1970s when he was writing a book about the ancient philosophical School of Epicurus and was looking for evidence that the school had used portraits of Epicurus to recruit new students. The problem was that the original portrait of Epicurus, dating to the 3rd century, BCE, was lost. All that was available were thirty Roman copies of his head and half a dozen or so headless tor- sos. Reconstructing the original portrait was, theoretical- ly, not too difficult. In principle, one just had to put the most accurate copy of his head onto one of the torsos. Unfortunately, there remained one critical final gap in the available evidence. None of the torsos showed the right arm. The consensus of scholars for centuries had been that the arm was bent backward toward the chin, putting Ep- icurus into a thinker pose. But Bernie thought that if the