EGGS, BASKETS, CLAWS, LAURELS

On the lovely Jana Vandergoot's counsel, reading George Hersey's The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, and now much better equipped to see the melee encased in so-called classical building conventions: eggs and doveclaws in moldings, in Doric columns marches of nude warriors, or in colossal figures, columns; in Ionic volutes locks of hair, below their bases convex sandals of maidens, whose terminology's yoked to effeminacy and soft metrical feet; in Kor-inthian capitals, acanthus tendrils sprouting & squashed out of baskets filled with libation-laden goblets for a girl Vitruvius recalls as dead too soon, dead persons themselves metamorphosing by tradition into plants, and that's not all: in names, like Artemis, butchery. (Bloodbath in the bats cladding the midriff of Diana of Ephesus now in the Capitoline galleries.)

Now returning to those summer-into-fall images from the Forum before we have the chance to trawl the whole city again: I'd asked Andrew why the wild boar in the reliefs of the Basilica Giulia was wearing a meander belt and crown of laurel.

"He was having a bad day."

Ornament, Hersey argues in conclusion, is that which has been equipped.