ARTS et HISTOIRE -RAFFINEMENT FRANCAIS-

PLACES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD: Glanum (France) 

GLANUM, located near St-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France, was a Greek and then Roman town which prospered due to its location on trading routes between Italy and the Rhodanus (Rhone River). 

The town benefitted from a large building project in the Hellenistic period and another spree during the reign of Augustus which furnished Glanum with temples, a theatre, basilica, monumental arch, and Roman baths, amongst other amenities. The town was abandoned in the 3rd century CE but today offers the modern visitor an impressive array of Greco-Roman ruins.    

Glanum was first settled by the Celts, specifically the Salyans (Salluvii), from the 7th to 6th century BCE. Indeed, the town’s name derives from Glan, a Celtic spring deity who continued to be worshipped at the site into the Roman period. 

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Gaston La Touche (Gaston de La Touche) (1854-1913, France)

Paintings 2

Lutetia, asteroid and ancient French tribe image

The asteroid Lutetia lies almost directly in the plane of the ecliptic approximately 230 million miles from the sun, on average. It was discovered in 1852 by the German-French painter, astronomer and polymath Hermann Goldschmidt, who discovered it not long after purchasing a telescope he financed by selling paintings of Galileo produced on a recent trip to Florence. Although he originally believed that he had discovered a new planet, he soon confirmed that it was indeed an asteroid and named it after the Roman name for the city that eventually became Paris: Lutetia Parisiorum, named for the Gallic tribe the Parisii who first inhabited the island later known as Île de la Cité. In July of 2010 the French spacecraft the Rosetta passed approximately 1800 miles away from Lutetia and took several hundred high resolution photographs, mostly of the north pole of the asteroid. Lutetia is a medium sized asteroid, somewhat egg shaped, 100 kilometers in diameter and 120 kilometers in diameter along its longest axis, with a fairly eccentric orbit.

In March 2011 the International Astronomical Union agreed to a naming system for Lutetia’s features, allowing them to be named for regions, cities and rivers in Roman Gaul, as in the map above: Baetica, Achaia, Etruria, Narbonensis, Noricum, Pannonia, and Raetia. Like most students of Latin, one of the first ‘real’ texts I read was Caesar’s Gallic wars, ’Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres….’, and one of the first early maps I studied was pre-Roman Gaul. It’s all coming back to me! Expect to see more Latin than Greek words in the next couple of weeks!