8x8

deuterocanonical: ranking depictions of Judith beheading Holofernes, via Things Magazine

miami vice: a look inside the Mutiny Hotel where Scarface was filmed

stylite: an investigation into the doctored photograph of an ancient ruin reveals an ascetic tradition

knight industries two thousand: a banjo version of the Knight Rider theme

second skin: special membrane that transforms inanimate objects into multifunctional robots

plosive fricative: in English, counting from zero upwards, one’s lips won’t touch before one million, via Kottke’s Quick Links

biggs is right, i’m never getting out of here: animator Dmitry Grozov creates a brilliant anime trailer for Star Wars: A New Hope

pigpen: researchers isolate the chemical, microbial shadow that accompanies all of us

philhellene

At the sole initiative—though the effort took a high personal toll—of the attested hellenophile couple Eva and Angelos Sikelianos the first Delphic Festival took place in May of 1927, as Messy Nessy Chic informs, with the aim of promoting universal respect and understanding, hoping that the amphictyonic nature of the site—that is, a cooperative oracle shared among the city states of Greece, could be a harmonising focal point for peace. Activities included tours of the archaeological site, traditional Greek music performed by locals, lectures, athletic games and stage plays. The elaborate affair was funded exclusively by the Sikelianos and they managed another iteration three years later with the backing of the Greek government with costs defrayed with a national lottery.
The Sikelianos however did not see festivals and tourism as an end in themselves and hoped that the attention garnered would transfer to support for the establishment of an education centre based on Delphic ideals. A victim of their own success, backing for anything other than the fêtes was not forthcoming and deflated, Eva decided to return to America to try to renew her theatrical productions there, parting with Angelos on amiable terms. Invited to head the Federal Theatre Project in New York to help out unemployed actors, writers and directors during the Great Depression, Sikelianos produced many Greek tragedies and went on to form a dance company. Learn more and find a whole gallery of images from the Delphic Festivals at the links up top.

lanx satura

Though in classical myth without philosophical interpretation, the god Momus—son of virgin Nyx—is portrayed as the personification of reproach (Μῶμος) and is credited with the agitating presence that provoked the other Olympians to take sides in the Trojan War, the expelled minor deity is somewhat rehabilitated and appreciated in later traditions as the embodiment of satire and candour for his open criticism of the gods and their follies.
According to Æsop, Momus was banished for mocking the gods’ handiwork after being invited to judge them: decrying Hephaestus’ latest creation man as poorly designed as he’d failed to install a door in their chest so as to see their true nature in their hearts. Momus was equally harsh on Athena’s architecture for not being mobile to escape bad neighbours. Lastly, he pointed out that Poseidon’s bull was not as formidable as it could be because its horns got it the way of its eyes. Momus also had some choice insults for the other gods and goddesses. His cult saw a revival in the seventeenth century as a way to lampoon contemporary politics as an allegorical way to reform the Star Chamber—camera stellata, a court of parliamentary privilege that became synonymous with arbitrary judgment—of Heaven, the establishment pining for someone unafraid to challenge the hierarchy.

’αλωάδαι

A recent episode of the always engrossing and thoroughly researched History of Ancient Greece podcast told the tale of two belligerents of the Gigantomachy who had some unique and potentially all-conquering attributes. Queen Iphimedia, wife of Aloeus, somehow managed to get herself pregnant with twins by wading out into the surf by her father-in-law the god Poseidon and bore the prodigies Otus and Ephialtes who were possessed of superhuman strength and size, growing at an accelerated rate that made them towering individuals, impervious to attack by the age of nine—which reminded me of Tex Avery’s “King-Sized Canary” where an ensemble of predatory animals discover and fight over a growth-elixir. Had they been allowed to mature into adolescence, they could have reached the Heavens without a step ladder, but for now to act on their plan to storm Olympus and take respectively Artemis and Hera for their wives, the piled three mountains on top of one another and were clever enough to first capture and imprison Ares, the god of war, so the Olympians might not have the appetite for battle. The brothers began their incursion and cornered Artemis who out of cunning desperation offered herself to Otus, immediately transforming herself into a fawn. Dashing between the two Aloadae (sons of the husband of Aleous even though he was not the father) Iphimedia, they both took aim to with their spears to down their quarry and ended up hitting each other as Artemis escaped.

brooding and blissful halcyon days

Thanks to our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari we not only learn that the period of time seven days on either side of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, are referred to as halcyon days for a time when the seas are calmed but also the term’s etymology: from the Latin form of Alcyone, the hapless daughter of Æolus, the god of the winds, and his wife Enarete. Alcyone met and fell in love with a sailor called Ceyx—who also had divine parentage as a son of Phosphorus, the Morning Star. Husband and wife were very happy together but the king and queen of the gods took umbrage at the fact that their pet-names for each other were Zeus and Hera. I could imagine better terms of endearment than evoking a philandering, incestuous relationship but couples can be peculiar, and this sacrilege earned the scorn of Zeus, who wielded a thunderbolt at Ceyx’ ship. Alcyone was of course inconsolable and the other gods (their parents and in-laws presumably) took pity on them both by transforming them to kingfishers (taxonomically speaking, Halcyon) who migrate from Africa to Greece at this time of year to roost and the weather is fair so that they can nest in peace.

6x6

la collina dei conigli: rescued veteran laboratory rats experience the outdoors for the first time

synchronicity: Krista and Tatiana Hogan are twins joined at the head and share a unique brain configuration that allows each to experience the other’s perceptions and possibly thoughts
animoji sounds: a Finnish comedian and voice-actor named Rudi Rok gives the animated menagerie their roar

pylos combat agate: a tiny decorative seal from a Mycenaean tomb is changing conceptions about ancient artistic skills

se possible: Card Against Humanity has purchased land abutting the US-Mexico border and hired a law firm specialising in eminent do
main to make building that wall as difficult as possible

sonata primeval: the sound poetry of avant-garde exile Kurt Schwitters that Brian Eno sampled from for his 1977 album Before and After Science

procrustean bed

Reading about how medical research and treatment can at times be prone to assigning arbitrary standards and causation to particular diagnoses and projected outcomes that risks spoiling the investigation by latching itself to the serviceable led us to learn about a mutilating, rather gruesome classical metaphor: a Procrustean bed. A son of the sea god Poseidon, Procrustes was a highway man and demented blacksmith who ran a hostel on the trail between Athens and Eleusis. Inviting pilgrims to stop and rest, the demigod would show his guests to their accommodations, a bed that was inevitable too big or small for the hapless traveller. Procrustes would then proceed to adjust his guests to fit, stretching them tortuously or whittling them down to size. The hero Theseus finally dispatched this menace as his sixth and final labour by putting the monster to his own rack. Despite its horror-story roots, the reference is invoked quite a bit and in addition to the above criticism levied against medical science, the European Union in its relations to its member states is sometimes described as the same sort of arrangement. The notion of one size fitting all or reverse-tailoring also occurs in geometry and statistical analysis where data is chosen selectively in order to prove a proposition. Television editors also call on Procrustes when they are faced with the sore task of having to cut for time.

girl interruptus or from here to paternity

The introduction to a particularly brilliant crossover episode that profiled the intersection of the history of Ancient Greece with that of witchcraft was a nice reminder of the bizarre and complicated origin story behind the liminal figure of Tiresias of Thebes, the blind seer who tried to keep Oedipus from investigating too far into the murder of the former king and posthumously advised Odysseus how to return home and avoid the traps in store for him and his crew. For disturbing a pair of copulating snakes whilst hiking up Mount Kyllini, he garnered the displeasure of Hera who punished him (I guess) for his transgression by transforming him into a woman.
Seeing this baffled individual, Apollo came and offered a measure of explanation, saying that Tiresias would be made his former gender should he encounter mating serpents a second time. Legends vary but some accounts hold that female Tiresias was a prostitute of great fame, and giving birth to and rising a daughter, sired by none other than Hercules (though some dispute paternity), called Manto, who was also gifted with the curse of prophesy and was the namesake of the city of Mantua (Mantova). Seven years later, Tiresias came across another pair of snakes entwined in the act and either did or didn’t interrupt their activity (accounts vary) and his manhood was restored. At some point afterwards, Zeus and Hera were having a heated debate as to which gender derived more pleasure from sexual congress (though they didn’t specify what sort of intercourse) and at an impasse decided to bring in Tiresias who had experienced it from both sides as arbiter. When Tiresias sided against Hera once again by saying that ninety percent of the pleasure was the woman’s share, the goddess was so enraged that she gouged out Tiresias’ eyes. Out of pity and unable to countermand the punishment of his sister-wife, Zeus tried to compensate by granting Tiresias the ability to see into the future and a number of other superhuman talents plus a life extension that crossed seven generations and he became a prophet of Apollo.

mediterranean diet

Marginal Revolution correspondent Alex Tabarrok clues us in to the mysterious and probably lost herb favoured by the ancient Greeks and Romans called silphium, which was so renowned as a flavour-multiplier and for its pharmacological merits was worth its weight in gold—or salt.
Despite their best efforts to cultivate the plant in their own lands, however (and there are surprisingly many familiar staples that still defy cultivation), silphium, fantastically also known as laserwort, would only thrive in a narrow band of terrain in Libya and was the essential export item of the city of Cyrene—critical to its trade and economy—and while remembered in coinage and heraldry, no one seems quite sure of its actual appearance and properties or whether the valued herb went extinct or survives in undisclosed pockets in northern Africa. The plant’s reputation as a means to allay the maladies of those struck with love and as a mediator for one’s germinative functions may also have given rise to the ♥ symbol (as well as having been accorded its own special glyph for the flowering plant) and its connection to romance and shared affections on the speculation that supposedly related species have heart-shaped fruits. Maybe this spice being extolled as a super-food is a bit of an embellishment but the world may never know what culinary and medicinal treasures might be absent from our dining experience.  I wonder what other secret ingredients out there that have remained unknown, lost to history, over-consumption or lost of habitat. 

cross-over episode or malleus maleficarum

I’ve been enjoying listening to the History of Ancient Greece podcast researched and presented by Ryan Stitt that reminds me very much of the History of Rome series that got me back into the genre in the first place.
Recently, one of Stitt’s presentations on classical tragedians ended with a short introduction from fellow-blogger Samuel Hume on his project The History of Witchcraft: A Podcast History of Magic, Sorcery and Spells. I’ve been enjoying the first few episodes and look forward to progressing through the catalogue for this series as well. Listeners will get their share of bewitching, possession, curses and rites, but only a witch-hunt can uncover witches and the anecdotes and institutions portrayed are a fascinating, sorrowful look at how societies can punish those who don’t know their place and how the chauvinistic male psychic is particularly affronted by strong women.

liturgy

The Ancient Greeks had a nominal system of taxes and tithes that helped promote trade and kept the polis able to operate on a day-to-day basis (compare to Rome whose wealthiest oligarch, Pompey the Great, accumulated all that treasure by owning the city’s fire department and extorting), but the financing of extraordinary expenditures—like emergency repairs to roadworks or bridges, a new amphitheatre, public festivals or even defensive actions fell exclusively to the super-rich to shoulder as their public duty and social obligation.
Not only were the wealthy eager to pay a progressive tax that needed no enforcement, theirs was also the oversight and execution of the liturgical (λῃτουργία, meaning public-service) tasks that they took responsibility for. The best technical counsel and artisans would be employed to make sure that their benefaction and charity optimised the welfare for all, since those whom delivered inferior public-works were as roundly condemned as those who were perceived to be tight with their money and horded wealth for its own sake. If one donor was feeling particularly put upon and suspected his fellow associates were poor-mouthing and shirking their duties, the former could issue a challenge: the later either take up the liturgy or submit to a tribute to determine who was richer—failing to answer that summons would result in the two parties exchanging estates. What do you think? The received representative democracy is certainly very different from the politics of the agora but maybe technology has advanced sufficiently to manage all the voices crying out to be heard without falling into mob-rule and disorder. I suspect, however, that we still need saving from ourselves. Such a voluntary taxation regimen seems appealing, but I do wonder if the same template could be applied without the engagement and participation of every single citizen and whether we’ve not—considering the mutual levels of distrust and distaste for politicians (professional or otherwise)—already to a person been designated denizens and guest-workers for the ruling-class.

munakata or men’s spaces

Similar to the monastic Greek island of Mount Athos, the Shinto maintain a remote and isolated brotherhood on an island in the East China Sea between Fukuoka and Busan, South Korea—which is strictly off-limits to women.
Since the fourth century, the waters where the group of islands which includes the sacred Okinoshima are found have been vital trade routes and the tradition of prayer for safe passage, invoking the three Munkata sea goddesses (the Virgin Mary is the only female that can be in the monks’ company on Mount Athos), and economic prosperity has continued unbroken since. Women are banned from the island at all times and under all conditions (though there’s no word if they have the same strictures for female farm animals, like Mount Athos), but even male outsiders are just barely tolerated, allowed to visit on one day in the year in remembrance of a tragic 1905 naval battle that took place nearby, and not allowed to talk of their experience. Since 2009, there has been discussion of inscribing Okinoshima into the UNESCO World Heritage registry and perhaps the island, with its ancient temples and vast collection of offerings ferried from passing ships on to its shores for a millennia and a half, will be so honoured but not without detractors for the place’s practises of exclusion, which some consider not in keeping with the principles of the United Nations. What do you think? Maybe boys should be allowed their clubs, but such traditions can also be used as leverage for institutionalising and justifying misogyny in other contexts.

moisture farmers ou puit aerien

Around 1900, a Russian engineer by the name of Friedrich Zibold made the conjecture that ancient structures found on Greek outposts on the Crimean Peninsula were a sort of air-well, designed to harvest enough moisture from the atmosphere to sustain a small settlement. Despite initial successes with models based on the Greek buildings, Zibold was unable to sustain the condensation and collection of water for very long.  Later archaeological studies determined that the mysterious structures were actually burial mounds (this being around the time when interests were captivated by the idea of the Ark of the Covenant as a battery and the death ray of Archimedes), but that did not dissuade others from trying to build their own air-wells after Zibold’s calculations.
One such hive-like well (puit aerien) was erected in Trans-en-Provence in the 1930s (reportedly, a UFO scorched the fields of this community in 1981) in the département of the Var by Belgian inventor Achille Knapen. The site was abandoned when it also failed to collect water in the expected volumes, but this early experiment helped engineers build better and functional condensing units that help supplement the rains in places all around the world today.

true colours or sensus communis

Via Dark Roasted Blend, we’ve known for some time that instead of the gleaming white marble beauty that frames the highest æsthetics of the Renaissance that formed modern taste and sensibility and that all lovely ruins prior to the neo-classical relaunch must have gone through a period when the gawking public would have dismissed prestige projects as tacky and ostentatious, but it’s always a shock to be reminded how the statues of ancient Greece and Rome were painted like gaudy mannequins.
It’s a bit of a let-down, on the order of trying to reconcile the fact that dinosaurs had feathers. Like with having to imagine the twitterpation of the velociraptor, one almost wishes that museum curators had not been able to tease out the traces of pigment that adorned their otherwise sedate and solemn figures to tell us that the Ancients wanted to see their gods and heroes with flesh tones, hair colour and leggings. What do you think? Do you find this equally incongruous?

'merica and mobile vulgus

Given the over-abundance of shrillness and inanity that we’ve been subjected to already, one could be excused for forgetting that the US presidential campaigned season has not officially kicked off yet until today.
It is a little inexcusable that I didn’t read this excellent primer from VICE—dismissing it as more strident boilerplate rather than anything with civic-value—and am certainly glad that I did, in order to better appreciate the travesty and hopefully the opportunity. The antiquated ceremony and vetting process are really highlighted in the first state caucus’ rather monolithic demographics and relative isolation—which are arguably the biggest head-start any bloc of voters is afforded for dashing away from the “real America.” The baffling complexity and the buoying media sentiment are the sleight of hand and window-dressing of democracy—rather ochlocracy (the marching protesters in Athens with their OX! signs are not identifying themselves as members of an angry mob but rather saying no to further austerity measures), pandering to the majority and dispensing with minority protection.

trivium and hoi polloi

I’ve really been enthralled with my latest podcast discovery in Doctor William Webb’s Heritage Podcast project (thanks to a hale and hearty recommendation by Sharyn Eastaugh, creator and hostess of The History of the Crusades, to get on board with the syllabus before the ambitious project gets too expansive to catch up on back episodes) and had a welcome reminder on the virtue of a Liberal Arts degree—not just one in name but one that’s true to original core curricula as it was expounded in ancient times.
With participatory democracy burgeoning and society becoming more hierarchical but also urban, leaders of the Polis recognised the need for a basic civics education requirement to attract and retain individuals with the ability to distinguish philosophy from sophistry and developed a three-pronged prospectus called the trivia—grammar (the basic rules of communication—stringing together λογος), rhetoric (the art of persuasion and articulacy and perhaps the training to wield it for one’s own ends) and logic (the faculty to soberly judge the validity and truth of argument and perhaps keenly peer beyond grandiloquence). Once the tradition of active and engaged citizens started to be supplanted by feudalism and the fealty of labourers and the political man became a subject, his affairs rarefied and to be managed by hereditary kings, as the Classical World came to an end, basic education was something seditious and there was no demand for an informed and potentially rebellious under-class. Of course, the institution of the Church—with its own vested interests in sustaining a community of inquisitive and engaged members—was the mainstay of continuing-education—augmenting the trivium with four additional disciplines: mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.
Perhaps these subjects smack of something a bent a bit toward the practical and vocational, their coursework—as with the unfolding of word, language—however, can be expressed as the germination of number, leading to number in space, number in time and then with astronomy, number in time and space. Perhaps we’ve again entered a time when a liberal education (the motto of my alma mater—which evolved out of a preparatory school and is rather a singular beast in higher-education is a Latin malapropism “facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque”—I make free men from children by means of books and a balance) is something to be disdained as a superfluous luxury or even a liability when the plebiscite is expected to keep its collective head down and not stint the ceremony of elections with engagement and activism that goes beyond party-membership and reinforced believes. Being schooled in a little bit of logic seems especially vital now for countering the techniques in the media and politics that present the fallacious and specious as something incontrovertible, and something (regardless whether one becomes a charismatic or not—I think one can’t truly start believing his or her own deceits if discovered through honest means) for disabusing ourselves of our own biases. Despite the tenor of the age, there’s no excuse for letting one’s faculties atrophy. Don’t let it rest on the President’s desk. Q.E.D.

marginalia or many pleasant facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Having taken more than three hundred fifty years to prove since the claim was first coyly presented and in fiction and popular culture, the final, mysterious conjecture by poly-math and number theorist Pierre de Fermat probably did not strike the mathematician himself nor its originally prompter as particularly significant. Fermat’s Last Theorem, as it has come to be known, was inspired by a book of lemmas by an ancient Greek mathematician called Diophantus of Alexandria. For this scholar, considered the father of algebra (not a terror-organisation and ought not to be intimidating to the public like one) for inventing variable notation and despite his monumentally new paradigm of recognising fractions as legitimate numbers, Diophantus (at least in his surviving books) did not break with the traditional penchant for finding whole number solutions for problems.
Finding a nice round solution is much more satisfying and resonates far more—I think, even given computational power that masks the ugly, irrational bits. The book of Diophantus that Fermat was reading, the Arithmetica, was rather a conversational, speculative investigation that proffered that right angled triangles (following the Pythagorean Theorem, a² + b² = c²) exist where the sides of the triangle work out to be whole numbers: 3² + 4² = 5² or 9 + 16 = 25. There seemed to exist as many solutions, however, where the answers were not so tidy. Seeing this, Fermat wondered if the application could be expounded to higher exponents (and thus dimensions—something squared is a flat surface as opposed to a three-dimensional cube) and running with it, asserted that no whole number solutions can exist for a³ + b³ = c³ or higher powers up to infinity. This assertion was scribbled, coyly, in the margin of Diophantus’ ponderings with the aside that there’s a nifty proof for this necessity but not enough room to write it here. Perhaps Fermat felt that the problem was not so pressing and never again returned to that particular problem, leaving generations to wrestle with it after his notes were discovered. There’s a whole cosmos of unsolved equations that might pose more appreciable and immediate significance if explained, and while there’s no obvious application in understanding why what Fermat declared is ultimately true, the insight and techniques developed in trying to find the answer have propelled mathematics forward and have enabled all sorts of progress in understanding and has shaped the modern world. I can’t claim any understanding of the famous proof and my brain starts to hurt from it, but I wonder if it also shows, for this celebrated and veteran conundrum, why it’s the case—that whole numbers are not transcendent.

the fabulists or animal farm

As a freshman I can recall, in anticipation of reading the Platonic dialogues, that young, new students were warned off early on from drawing parallels of the trial and execution of Socrates and the judgement and crucifixion of Jesus—the comparison disdained as something obvious and sophomoric and rather a dangerous path to pursue. I of course was immediately drawn to the forbidden subject—completely new to me and probably nothing that I would have formulated on my own, but—wisely, I suppose, I kept that to myself.
Academics have come to recognize countless other messianic proceedings, both popularly and privately, and does tend to discourage reading too much into these dockets. One rather indulgent biography, with legendary portions and a lot of embellished and contradictory details of exploits and called a romance, addresses the life and career of a slave in Samos called Æsop, whose fables with personified foxes, lambs, donkeys and other characters are so ingrained and indoctrinating that one would be pressed to fail at making the allusion. The talking animals explore power-relationships and this allegorical device is the only way a slave could possibly mock his social betters in a highly hierarchical society and hope to keep his head—though the allegory is a thinly-veiled thing and I always wondered about listeners not getting the subtext. No tyrant, however flattered and deluded, would exclaim, I think, “what do you I’m not the innocent little rabbit?” The life and times of Æsop outside what is revealed in the fables is not really considered a reliably scholastic piece of work, there being too many versions and it’s mostly just lurid and with a lot of crude humour and misogyny, but the life of Æsop is surprising similar to the two exemplars above—Socrates (also considered endearingly ugly) even composing fables in the style of Æsop (many others have continued this tradition of the past three thousand years) as he’s awaiting his punishment, perhaps thinking that the direct-approach was the wrong way to go about things.
Most versions of the romance agree that Æsop was born into slavery and sold to a wealthy sophist on the Ægean island of Samos and was an extremely physically repulsive individual. Mute and without the power of speech at first, after showing kindness to a temple priestess, despite her being terrified of this ugly man offering help, the goddess Isis (figuring large in Greek culture also at the time) granted him not only the power of speech but also of eloquence. Glossing over the lewd episodes, Æsop’s parables saved him in many situations and allowed him to show up the professors at the philosophical schools. The slave who was never allowed to purchase his freedom in the traditional sense but nevertheless enjoyed much respect and autonomy was himself put to death—on trumped up charges of slander, by being made to walk off a cliff in Delphi after having supposedly slandered Apollo. The gods, echoed by Socrates, have a tendency to mete out their own punishment without human help, and a slighted Apollo did not let offending mortals off that easily.

ulysses or hocus-porcus

By its nature, mythology does not admit to definitive versions, although the fables and folklore of the Greeks, once committed to paper by Homer and Hesiod and countless others took on an air authority that was not a uniting theme in the tradition of story-telling. Although different accounts circulated long afterwards and inheritor traditions continue to build on that unstaid corpus still, lore, variation and invention is sourced to the Heroic Age—those who fought in the Trojan War, and abruptly ended with that diasporic, lost generation afterwards.
Maybe it was because those stories were written down and the winningest narratives became the prevailing ones—competition continued among poets, championing their own character-analyses, morals and retribution and it’s now hard to imagine as the readership that there were opposing legends presented to audiences, amok-time scenarios where Electra and Œdipus had normal families and lost their place in the popular imagination to the racier, received versions. One of the very last myths constructed, a lost epic that seems groundless morose but somewhat reconstituted, by the Greeks is called the Telegony and dealt again with re-deploying veterans and the homecoming of Odysseus, but told from the perspective of the seductress and enchantress Circe. During Odysseus’ captivity on the exile-island of Aeaea—Lošinj, Croatia—(Circe was banished to this remote location to keep her out of trouble), Circe became pregnant and bore Odysseus a son after his departure, the eponymous Telegonus, whose name meant born far away due to his father’s distant home. Athena urges Circe to reveal to her young adult son—juxtaposed with the massacre and funeral service for opportunist suitors of his wife, Penelope, whose advances she solemnly rebuffed for the two decades’ absence of her husband that open the story—who his father is. Telegonus resolves journey to Ithaca to find Odyssey.
Why Athena, as Odysseus’ constant champion and protector, encouraged this reunion seems impenetrable and without the entire story—that’s just been teased out of a few lines and other myths referencing the Telegony—the goddess’ motivation will remain a mystery, I suppose. Before going on this long and dangerous voyage, Circe asks the blacksmith of the gods to craft her son a supernatural spear with the poison tip of a string-ray to defend himself. Just as Telegonus arrives in the Ionian Sea, he is visited by a terrible storm and disoriented, does not realise that he has already arrived at his destination. Though the trope seems rather predictable to us thanks to the tragedies of Sophocles, Telegonus poached one of his father’s cows and was ambushed by Odysseus and his men. As he deftly defends himself, Telegonus strikes down Odysseus, fulfilling a prophesy that the wily hero who satisfied his charge with burying an oar in a land where they never had heard of the ocean that stated he would meet his demise from the sea, and recognizes, too late, that he is his father. Beside himself with remorse, Telegonus takes Odysseus’ body, widow and half-brother, Telemachus (meaning “far from the battle-field” also unborn when Odysseus went off to war) back to Aeaea in the Adriatic. Circe’s magic was unable to restore Odysseus to life but is able to make the landing party immortal. Telegonus marries his step-mother, Penelope, and Circe, Odysseus’ lover, marries Telemachus. I wish we had the whole story in order to make this outcome seem plausible—the classic myths were hinged together in such a way where one could always suspend ones disbelief and accept that a character was fated to be transformed into a tree or flower or would be forced to experiment with the lesser-evils and impossible choices. I wonder if this outline could be expanded.

attica or cultural studies

Though best remembered international for stellar performances of roles that were not able to contain her energy and talent, stock-characters in good but less acclaimed films like the happy hooker in Never on a Sunday, the good-time girl-type, naughty nun, or gal Friday in Topkapı, Greek singer and actress of the stage and screen, Melina Mercouri, had another equally impassioned calling as a politician. Finding herself exiled, stateless—her passport having been revoked for outspoken socialist sentiments against the junta government of a cadre of conservative colonels who overthrew the liberal government in 1967, while away on performing on Broadway, Mercouri—along with other prominent members of the Greek diaspora focused attention and shame on the military coup d’état.
Despite tepid support in Greece and an overall laughable platform that no one took seriously, the junta lingered on and on for seven unbearable years—not ousted until their adventures with a one-Greece-policy by invading the Cyprus that was so poorly executed and resulted in the partition of the island nation rather than its annexation. Once Mercouri could return to Athens, this “last Greek goddess,” as she was nicknamed, decided to focus her energies on rebuilding her homeland—which had suffered considerably in the intervening years with dismantling of cultural capital and censorship. When questioned on her credentials for entering politics as an actress, Mercouri retorted by questioning what qualified lawyers to represent the people. Mercouri went on to become the Minister of Culture, and lamenting that it was always just the chiefs of finance that met and that money was not certainly everything—a pretty bold truth to speak, especially in the present atmosphere where Greek financial ministers are characters people might actually recognise by name—and called together, for the first time, all the European ministers of culture and the arts. The legacy of this summit survives today in the rotating European Cultural Capital and the open dialogue it invites with a less rarefied form of diplomacy that everyone can appreciate. Mercouri was also the first voice in a growing choir of protests and calls of vandalism to have the so-called Elgin marbles returned to the Acropolis and for the protection, stopping trafficking and the repatriation of other national treasures.