Gluing together the Roman Empire for Christmas
I don’t decorate. I have enough trouble keeping up with essentials. Right now, in a feeble attempt to decorate for Christmas, half a red garland hangs on our house, in lopsided mockery of décor. No tree this year. You can’t imagine the time saved by not putting up a tree! Decoration, I figure, is for people of leisure or taste. Once, when visiting a home goods store on vacation, I admired the dainty, orderly and splashy looking items and saw what I was missing: a whole array of things to dust. But among the vases, pots, table linens and candles stood something different: a bust of Caesar Augustus. What, I wondered, was this doing here? But there it was and at a very reasonable price, too. Imagine owning an emperor for thirty bucks! Since my husband Art teaches Roman history, what could be a better accessory than the head of a Roman emperor? I mailed it home, carefully wrapped, and it made it without b...