Based on hitherto unpublished archival material, this paper offers a brief biographical account of Charles Louis William Merlin, who served on Her Britannic Majesty’s consular service in Greece for almost 50 years (1839-1887). His extensive correspondence (1864-1892) with the British Museum, offers the opportunity to reconstruct Merlin’s role in the… Read more
Based on hitherto unpublished archival material, this paper offers a brief biographical account of Charles Louis William Merlin, who served on Her Britannic Majesty’s consular service in Greece for almost 50 years (1839-1887). His extensive correspondence (1864-1892) with the British Museum, offers the opportunity to reconstruct Merlin’s role in the sourcing and trafficking of ancient objects directly from Athens to London. The study of this material, which is currently ongoing,… Read more
On 15 December 1864, a sub-committee on antiquities at the British Museum (BM) approved a text containing instructions for the consuls in Her Britannic Majesty’s service. Instigated by the BM’s Trustees and drafted by Charles Newton, former consul and Keeper of the museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities (1861-1885), the directive was… Read more
Scholarship has in the past few years dealt more systematically with networks of interaction in the Greek world, especially within the framework of coastalness and inlandness. According to Polybius (30.9.16.), the inhabitants of the Lycian city of Kybira were not able to send Polyaratus of Rhodes to Rome because they… Read more
In the previous post I argued that some Archaic and Classical dedicatory epigrams deliberately selected non standard and non formulaic features to communicate with their audience. Those features concerned the material and immaterial elements of the dedicatory epigrams, that can be described by the three semantic systems of art and… Read more
