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portrait was designed to do the work of publicizing the school, then the arm needed to be either outstretched in a gesture of greeting or perhaps raised slightly in a gesture of teaching.
Bernie’s view was criticized by some. It was admittedly speculative, but no more so than the consensus that it would replace. But several years after Bernie published his book, another artifact was discovered in an excavation of a Roman site in France, a mo- saic illustrating a statue of Epicurus that showed the right arm in the teaching position, attesting that Bernie’s theory was correct.
Bernie purchased his first computer in the early 1980s and began thinking about the possibilities of digital reconstruction of ancient ruins. In 1986 he proposed a project to digitally recreate the entire city of Ancient Rome. His work continued over the next three decades. Bernie showed us the latest version, finished in 2018. He noted: “Digi- tal Rome also wasn’t built in a day.”
The way we did this reconstruction is something that I dare say everyone here could quickly figure out, at least if you ponder for a moment how you would approach an equivalent real-world problem. For example, if God forbid you had to rebuild your house exactly as it had been before it was destroyed by a fire, the first thing you would probably do is see if the architect still had the blueprints. If she did, this would get your rebuilding project off to a strong start. Similarly, in our case, although we cannot turn to the ancient architect for help, we can investigate if there’s a modern scholarly monograph devoted to surveying the remains and integrating on paper the fragments that survived in the form of what we call a hypothesis of restoration. Luckily, there are
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Bernie then turned to the subject of his presentation—the Baths of Caracalla. He showed us photos, videos and computer graphics of the ruins and their reconstruction, explaining: