The Monument, or, Christopher Wren's Roman Accent
To commemorate the Great Fire, the Corporation of London commissioned Christopher Wren to design the Monument. This article identifies its formal sources in ancient Roman triumphal columns and in a sixteenth-century fluted Tuscan Doric column in Paris, in the inscription on the Column of Trajan, and in a passage from Ammianus Marcellinus. Textual models for the Latin inscriptions on the pedestal include Suetonius's Augustus, Seneca the Younger's Epistle no. 91, and Tacitus's Annals. The political situation in Restoration England cast references to Tacitus into oblivion, yet this commission demonstrates how Wren's knowledge of Latin had a determining effect on his architectural practice.
Stuart Absolutism and the 'Utility' of Tacitus
"The Criticks say he had a new, concise and sententious way of Writing, but as to the use and utility of his History they vary, or it may be rather fight against each other."1 When he wrote that sentence about Tacitus, Degory Wheare newly appointed as the first incumbent of the Camden Readership in History at Oxford was trying to incapsulate, for the benefit of his students, the critical consensus on each of the historians in the curriculum. The result would be a sort of Jacobean Reader's Guide to the great historians which would serve generations of young Englishmen: De ratione et methodo legendi historias (1623). But in the case of Tacitus consensus gave way to polarization, and Wheare was forced to alter his scheme accordingly by presenting the conflicting viewpoints. His observation that Renaissance critics "fight against each other" over the "utility" that is, the contemporary relevance and applicability of a long dead historian, suggests what a curious phenomenon Tacitus' reputation had become. About Tacitus' controversial style his "new, concise and sententious way of Writing" and its influence on the development of "Attic prose" Morris W. Croll and others have taught us much.2 The controversy with which I shall be concerned here is the one over his "utility": the debate about whether, why, how, and by whom his works (especially the Annals) ought to be read. At the risk of oversimplifying the issues in the interest of clarity, we might designate the polarities of opinion as the Tacitean revival and the anti-Tacitean reaction. Because the former especially with reference to its continental background is well documented elsewhere,3 I shall address myself primarily to the latter in these pages. Specifically, my topic is the way the anti-Tacitean reaction became enmeshed in the political dialectics of Stuart England. First, however, some account of the revival in its English manifestation, with a glance at its European origin, is in order. The widely ranging controversy over the value and utility of the Annals brought into opposition two members of the "intellectual triumvirate" of the late Renaissance: the Belgian humanist Justus Lipsius and the Huguenot theologian and classicist Isaac Casaubon.' The Tacitean revival, as a European phenomenon, began with Lipsius' great 1575 edition of Tacitus; thereafter, the editor was an indefatigable propagandist in behalf of his author. Tacitean apologists, in England as elsewhere, invariably derived
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.