The ancient Roman festival with games (ludi) honouring the god of the seas was held on this day as a propitious act in the middle of the hot summer and drought to coax back the waters and escape the oppressive heat of the city by repairing to the countryside and sheltering under umbrรฆ for a shaded repast. At first not enjoying the universal acclaim of his Greek counterpart Poseidon, Neptune was not broadly regarded as the patron and protector of maritime affairs but rather as a guarantor of personal agricultural success, though was later held in more esteem as Rome developed as a naval power and the holiday came to be marked with the flooding of the Pantheon to return and tame the waters.
Friday 23 July 2021
Saturday 3 July 2021
ฮตฯฮผฮฑฯฯฯฮดฮนฯฮฟฯ
Though the term is outdated and can be confusing and offensive if applied to an intersex individual, it had never occurred to us question where the construction hermaphrodite came from. It is rooted in Greek mythology as illustrated uncharitably anachronistically in this 1460 woodblock tableau from Guillaume Vrelant of the encounter between the naiad Salmacis and the youth Hermaphroditus, the son of the Olympian gods Hermes and Aphrodite, a portmanteau of the parental names. Sexual predation and objectification of course abounds in the classical but Salmacis is uniquely the only female perpetrator—subject of course to double-standards, being roundly shamed for it, the cougar nymph encountering, a popular theme for early Renaissance paintings as well, the fifteen-year-old bathing in the pristine pond (sacred to her and where she was wont to gaze at her reflection like Narcissus) and lusting after him grabbed him tightly, praying to the heavens that they never be parted as Hermaphroditus struggled to get away. For reasons not explained—especially given the teen-ager’s high birth—Salmacis’ wish was granted and their bodies were fused into one. Further unaccounted for was Hermaphroditus’ request to his parents that anyone else bathing in the pool would also be transformed, unclear whether their son was capable of thinking just as himself any longer or whether he thought this new nature to be a curse or a blessing.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐, myth and monsters
phaistos disc
Discovered on this day in 1908 by archaeologist Luigi Pernier whilst excavating the eponymous Minoan palace on Crete, the purpose and provenance of this Bronze Age artefact remain a matter of mystery and dispute among scholars. Comprising forty-five distinct glyphs, some two-hundred forty impressed signs on the obverse and reverse of the circular tablet, the script defies attempts at deciphering. Typographically significant, the characters (ideograms) are not inscribed—whatever they may signify—and rather are stamped from seals into a clay medium, subsequently fired at high temperatures and represent a sort of movable type with reusable letters. By frequency, the highest count for the representational glyphs are the plumed head ๐ , the bell-shaped Helmet ๐ and the Shield ๐ Whilst other corroborating artefacts have emerged, there is not enough context to properly decode this syllabary.
Thursday 1 July 2021
lectori benevolo
Writing for Public Domain Review, Alex Tadel imparts some insight on classical literary culture through the lens of the brilliantly illustrated rarity Vergilius Vaticanus, a fourth century anthology containing Virgil’s Georgics and The รneid—itself one of the oldest sources of the text (see also), though we would still have that material without this deluxe, prestige bound folio crafted and bound at a time when most reading was circulated on papyrus scrolls but be denied the privilege of enjoying this one of a kind commission, acquired by the Vatican Library in 1600 and hence the latter part of the name. Much more on being well-read in Antiquity and the bookish set of the times at the link up top.
Sunday 27 June 2021
our lady of perpetual help
The Marian aspect as represented in a fifteenth-century Byzantine icon, the Cretan artefact held in a Roman monastery since, is venerated with devotionals on this day as patron-protector of Haiti, parts of Valencia, the Philippines and the diocese of Leeds. Against a gold background representing the Kingdom of God and that there was no place not filled with the holy spirit, the Hodegetria (Greek for ‘She who points the Way’) presents her child, frightened (symbolised by his losing one sandal) and buffeted by tiny archangels that are bearing instruments of the Passion, on the left the lance and sponge of the Crucifixion and on the right, a cross and nails. All figures are captioned: MP-ฮฮฅ, Mother of God; ฮฮฮ and ฮฮฮ Michael and Gabriel (with hortative modifiers) and the christogram IC-XC for Jesus Christ. The ritual novena prayers recited before an image of the icon include thanksgiving, petitions, prayers for the sick and divine praise.
catagories: ☦️, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐น, ✝️, the Caribbean
Saturday 12 June 2021
so many women. he invents so many disguises to seduce them. sometimes a swan or a bull, sometimes a shower of gold. why, he once tried to ravish me as a cuttlefish.
In general release in US theatres (2 July for the UK) on this day in 1981, Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans is loosely based on the myth of Perseus (see previously) and features creature effects from Ray Harryhausen with an all-star ensemble cast including Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Siรขn Phillips, Neil McCarthy and Pat Roach. To punish the Argon king after banishing Danaรซ and her infant son (see above), Zeus orders Poseidon to release the last of the Titans, the Kraken, to destroy Argos. On a quest to rescue Princess Andromeda, betrothed to the monstrous Calibos, Perseus is given a series of divine-crafted gifts to gain standing as a legitimate suitor to break the bond.
Unable to exact revenge directly on Perseus as a demigod and favourite of Zeus, the maritime contingent of the Olympians plan to send the Kraken after Andromeda’s land, Joppa—to which the princess offers herself as sacrifice to save the city. Perseus embarks on a journey to save his fiancรฉe, aided by more gifts from the gods including the mechanical owl Bubo that Athena commissioned from Hephaestus rather than give up her own favoured owl (which some considered a knock-off of R2D2 though the creators insist that the concept predated Star Wars), by deducing how to defeat the sea monster with the severed head of the gorgon Medusa.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฌ, ๐ฆ, 1981, myth and monsters
Thursday 6 May 2021
flash crash
Triggered by a combination of human error—so called fat-finger trades that if not invalidated within thirty minutes after execution are considered legitimate—automated trading protocols set on edge by the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, over the course of thirty-six minutes of the trading on this day in 2010, US stock indices collapsed, loosing over a trillion dollars in wealth. The markets for the most part recovered quickly and additional regulatory safeguards were put in place to prevent the same thing from happening again. It held the record for the most volatile day for American stocks with the largest intraday change in valuation until August of 2015 when global markets faltered over concerns about the viability of the Chinese economy, but both events were pushed way down in the rankings by the crashes of 2020 caused by the pandemic.
Tuesday 6 April 2021
ioc
Courtesy of our faithful chronicler, we are reminded how on this day in 1896, Charles Pierre de Frรฉdy, Baron of Coubertin revived the Olympic Games, held for the first time since they were banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I upon his decree that pagan practises be eliminated.&Held every four years at the sanctuary of Zeus in Olympia, the festival (แฝฮปฯ ฮผฯฮนฮฑฮบฮฟฮฏ แผฮณแฟถฮฝฮตฯ, agony—that is, contest) was a religious and athletic event imbued with a mythological origin and significance held among all Greek city states. While untrue that there was a general secession in fighting whilst the Games were held, there was a truce and pilgrims were allowed free-passage through belligerent lands to attend. Legendarily, a race of ten spirit males called the Dactyls or Daktyloi were spontaneously generated when the Great Mother Rhea dug her fingers into the earth as she prepared to give birth to Zeus. These lesser gods who taught the arts of metal smithing and healing were also happy to help entertain the infant Olympian with sports competitions. Different traditions exist with multiples thereof but the hand of the Idaean Dactyls (see also) pitted Herakles, the thumb, against his brothers Aeonius (forefinger), Epimedes (middle finger), Iasus (ring finger) and Idas (little finger).
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐, myth and monsters, sport and games
Tuesday 23 March 2021
release the kraken
Though popular culture dictates that the head of Medusa was retrieved for one specific purpose, another variant myth has Perseus going through the ordeal as a sort of fool’s errand, with King Polydectes of the island of Seriphos wanting to rid himself of an over-protective son after he became enamoured with Danaรซ after she and Perseus were salvaged by the king’s brother the fisherman Dictys (this aprotonym means Mister Net), the king of Argos Acrisius having cast his daughter and the infant Perseus to sea in a wooden chest to avoid the prophesy that he would be killed by his grandson. Polydectes announced his betrothal to a certain Hippodamia and ordered everyone in his kingdom to supply him with suitable wedding gifts, mostly on the registry were horses but Perseus came late and was assigned by his presumptive step-dad the head of the gorgon after bragging he was fit for a task so demanding. Perseus departed on his quest and Polydectes proceded to woo Danaรซ who tried her best to reject his advances. Using his shield as a mirror to avoid the gorgon’s gaze, Perseus slew Medusa and returned to Seriphos. Disbelieving that Perseus accomplished this trial, Polydectes demanded to be shown the head, which Perseus produced at court, turning the king and his nobles into stone and rescuing his mother. As for Acrisius who banished mother and son and exiling them to the elements, the old king did eventually die at Perseus hand albeit an accident when he was hit in the head by a stray discus that Perseus threw during a tournament.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ, ๐ฆ, myth and monsters
Monday 15 March 2021
bewarned the ides of march
Though speculation and debate has continued for centuries, shifting from one camp to another with the present academic consensus rejecting the Shakespearian conceit that an unmitigated reaction to being assassinated would have been in Latin, scholarship has Julius Caesar (previously here and here) speaking Greek ฮบฮฑแฝถ ฯฯ, ฯฮญฮบฮฝฮฟฮฝ; (And you child?) with a somewhat different landing than Et tu Brute? The latter is only attested to in the Middle Ages and in accordance with Roman custom, it would have been more honourable, in the case of the former with Caesar being a long-time romantic companion of Servilia—mother of Marcus Junius Brutus—to have him die silently as a soldier. Some academics say it was misheard and more likely Caesar said “Tu quoque, fili mi?”—which is closer to the Greek—or “Quรฆso te, non!” –Stop it, please! and even the playwright seems to acknowledge the debate or unknowable nature of it with the earlier idiom in the tragedy, It’s all Greek to me, said by Casca to Cassius on Cicero and the co-conspirators, “…but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part it was Greek to me.” It is perhaps doubtful that even a great orator could summon the wherewithal to deliver some famous last words after being stabbed twenty-three times by a mob of mutinous senators. Despite the line’s purchase on popular culture, even within the framework of the play itself, the last utterance before expiring is “Then fall, Caesar.”
Monday 1 February 2021
greenglish
Fully cognizant and acknowledging that language changes and that linguistics are descriptive rather than prescriptive, the erosion of Greek, with a cultural continuum spanning some forty centuries is being exacerbated and accelerated by the jargon of the pandemic (naturally a Greek word) and the forms of transmission that lockdown (ฮบฮปฮตฮฏฮดฯฮผฮฑ ฮฑฯฯ ) privileges. All of these terms would be receptive to translation, if not in an awkward fashion that’s possibly less expedient once these borrowings and neologisms take root but Greek has weathered diglossia (see here and here), plague and tumult before. One wonders what role that outbreaks have had on language and culture, assimilation and isolation in the past, and one can take solace in those new native equivalencies, like diadiktyo (ฮฮนฮฑฮดฮฏฮบฯฯ ฮฟ) for internet that do take hold and endure.
Friday 29 January 2021
demophรถon
Brought to the stage in Mรผnchen in operatic form on this date in 1811 as the premiรจre work of Peter Josef von Lindpainter (*1791 – †1856) the figure associated with Demeter was a popular subject of the prior decades. Seeking her abducted daughter Persephone in the guise of an old woman, calling herself Doso, Demeter wanted to repay the hospitality she received from the by making the titular young prince into an immortal and being nursemaid to Demophรถon (given the tough name, meaning “killer of men”), the king’s son by Metanira. To realise her plan to turn him into a god, Demeter anointed the infant with ambrosia and nightly placed him into the palace hearth to burn away his mortal spirit. His mother walked in one evening to witness this ritual and reacted like any mother would to the sight of her baby in the fireplace among the burning logs—which annoyed Demeter who had to abort the immortalisation process over the interruption. Though unscathed but still subject to decrepitude and death, Demophรถon acquired immortality of a sorts through a hero cult and enduring fame. As a consolation to the family—having failed in her first act of kindness, Demeter taught his older brother Triptolemus (threefold-warrior) the art of agriculture, which he spread across the Greek world. Lindpainter’s most successful opera, Der Vampyr, was also another popular theme and debuted in Stuttgart two decades later.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ญ, ๐ถ, myth and monsters
Monday 25 January 2021
collezionare capolavori
Though in stasis and awaiting visitors, the storied and seldom seen Torlonia Marbles from a private collection are gathered together for public viewing for the first time, resulting from an agreement four decades in negotiation and agreed upon four years before the exhibition was scheduled to open. Not only was the loan to Rome’s Capitoline Museum controversial and fraught with compromise and conciliation, there’s some intrigue associated with its collectors as well—the family once the bankers and economic advisors to the Vatican and master and model for the attainment of prestige and status through art collecting.
Saturday 16 January 2021
ัััััะธ
First articulated out the Cyrillic script (see previously) in the Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century following a long established Greek, Ionian convention to differentiate numerals from letters when context was not exactly clear with spacers, dots and a diacritic over the glyphs called a titlo ҃ or as a prefix signalling a long string of numbers to follow ҂, like a tilde or macron. Still sometimes seen in Slavonic Church publications and in old monuments and coinage, the system was in use until the civil reforms (see also) of Peter the Great in the early seventeen hundreds when Hindu-Arabic representations were introduced and because of this centuries-long custom continued well into the early modern era, elaborate signs were developed to express powers of magnitude and in terms of both a long and short scale (lesser and greater count multiplier) for accounting and scientific purposes. Align with the Greek (rather than alphabetically), one through ten, correspond with the Cyrillic letters: ะ, ะ, ะ, ะ, ะ, ะ , ะ, ะ, ัฒ and ะ. The pictured powers of ten using the older alpha form, with the Myriad (ะขัะผะฐ) encircled ⃝ either ten-thousand or a million and Many Myriad ꙲ either one billion or 10⁵⁰.
Monday 28 December 2020
thermopolium
Monday 7 December 2020
8x8
ัะฐัะฐ́ัะพะฒ-2:some urban spelunking leads to a Soviet computer graveyard (previously) with some early machines thought lost to the ages
indented writing: this case of an invisible will recalls some more recent forensic intervention to retrieve the words of a blind novelist
parallel dimensions: one-hundred twenty-five artists render different computer-generated environments on one basic template of a character walking towards a mountain
starfleet bold extended: the typography created for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (see previously, premiering on this day in 1979)
♚: the real-life Queen’s Gambit in Georgian chess champion Nona Gaprindashvili
the panoply of digital phrenology: the coming subprime attention crisis and the bursting of the ad-serving bubble
petroglyphs: more on the amazing expanse of pre-Columbian art discovered in the Amazon
ฮบฮฟฯ ฮผฯฯฮผฮญฮฝฮฟ ฮผฮต ฮบฮฟฯ ฮผฯฮนฮฌ: exploring an abandoned factory in Patisia Greece
Monday 23 November 2020
thespians
First historically documented in a competition to find the best tragedy (ฯฯฮฑฮณแฟณฮดฮฏฮฑ, literally goat song, suggesting that that was the top prize)—that is stagecraft with an actor portraying a character rather than themselves singly and distinct from the chorus, on this day in 534 BC performer and playwright, according to Aristotle, Thespis is credited in Western traditions with the invention of acting, performing short dithyrambs—that is, stories about gods and heroes with choric refrains, ฮดฮนฮธฯฯฮฑฮผฮฒฮฟฯ or hymns to Dionysus and a way to frame enthusiastic speech—playing all the roles himself and differentiating each part by donning a different mask (persona).
Building on his successful showing at the contest, Thespis then went on, according to Horace, to invent theatrical touring, transporting his masks and costumes in a horse-drawn carriage, Thespis’ wagon (ฮฯฮผฮฑ ฮฮญฯฯฮนฮดฮฟฯ, Carro di Tespi) being a popular theme for the visual arts.
Sunday 22 November 2020
alfabeti shqip
Wednesday 18 November 2020
twinkle, twinkle
We are treated to an albeit abridged but nonetheless thoroughgoing history of the asterisk from Keith Houston’s Shady Characters, beginning with a frustrated librarian of Alexandria called Zenodotus who was determined to make a version of the epics of Homer as close to their original form as possible before centuries of editing, commentary and poetic license had turned the text into the unruly document that Zenodotus and colleagues were now heir to. In order to pare down the Iliad and the Odyssey, Zenodotus devised tracked-changes and version control, first introducing a range of proofreading or editor’s marks, to begin with a dash (—) in the margins to indicate a line to be excised, later named the obelos—that is, a roasting-spit.
Monday 16 November 2020
goรปt grec
We rather enjoyed looking through these fantastical masquerade outfits informed by neoclassical Greek columns and other architectural elements from the imagination of Ennemond Alexandre Petitot—himself the court architect and influencer (railing against this particular style) of the Bourbon Dukes in Parma, printed in 1771, not as sketches for buildings nor actual fancy dress but rather gentle derision on the obsession for “Greek taste” that dominated French fashion and decorative arts with Ionic scrolls, key and fret work and similar patterns—sort of like the tiki aesthetic of its day. Much more to explore at Public Domain Review at the link up top.
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐, antiques, architecture